Ambiguous bowdlerization

Last Friday I reviewed Game Without Rules, a great collection of spy stories by Michael Gilbert. Some spoilers ahead for the last story in the book, “A Prince of Abyssinia,” but also an important and vexing question.

Though appearing in most of the eleven stories in the book, Mr Calder’s beloved and intelligent Persian deerhound Rasselas has the spotlight in this story, as evidenced by the title: Rasselas being named after the title character in Dr Johnson’s novella The History of Rasselas: A Prince of Abyssinia.

The plot of this story concerns the return of a former Nazi agent who, captured and tortured by Mr Calder during World War II, wants revenge. In the climax, this agent captures and traps Mr Behrens to prevent him from intervening, then appears disguised at Mr Calder’s cottage. Rasselas senses his intentions and attacks but is killed, and the agent is killed in turn. After a moment in which Mr Calder and Mr Behrens grieve, here’s how the story ends:

Between them they dug a deep grave behind the woodpile, and laid the dog in it and filled it in, and patted the earth into a mound. It was a fine resting place, looking out southward over the feathery tops of the trees, across the Weald of Kent. A resting place for a prince.

Colonel Weinleben they buried later, with a good deal more haste and less ceremony, in the wood.

At least, that’s how my Herald Classics copy from Union Square & Co concluded. But in looking later at Mr Calder and Mr Behrens’s hodgepodge of a Wikipedia article—haphazardly put together even by Wikipedia’s standards—I saw that last paragraph quoted at greater length. I checked the passage on Wikipedia against the recent Penguin paperback published as part of their Modern Classics Crime and Espionage series. Here’s the original last paragraph:

Colonel Weinleben they buried later, with a good deal more haste and less ceremony, in the wood. He was the illegitimate son of a cobbler from Mainz and greatly inferior to the dog, both in birth and breeding.

Odd—not only that the American edition from Union Square omits the concluding sentence of the story—and the entire book!—but that it omits such a thematically important one, explicitly juxtaposing the noble dog with the duplicitous agent, a worthy animal against a scummy, murderous man.

I’m not sure how or why this happened. A copyediting mistake? Carelessness? Or censorship? If the latter, why this sentence? I call this “bowdlerization” in the title of this post but I can’t be sure preventing Gilbert from being mean about a fictional Nazi spy’s parentage is the reason the sentence disappeared. There is no note on the copyright page about changes to the text, no butt-covering editor’s note, nothing in Alex Segura’s introduction or on Union Square’s website—no notice whatsoever that the text is different from what Gilbert originally wrote.

If this is intentional, it would not be the first case of stealth editing, a problem that has already afflicted e-books, often without the knowledge or permission of even living authors.

It also bothers me that I cannot be sure that the cutting of the final sentence is the only such instance in the book. It will take a while to look through and find others, though there is, in fact, at least one other omission at the very beginning. The Union Square edition cuts Gilbert’s dedication:

To Jacques Barzun, of Columbia University, an amateur of detection

Is it significant that a tribute to a famously conservative-leaning historian was deleted? Without any kind of acknowledgment from the publisher that anything at all has been cut, who can know? But whether this was simply editorial sloppiness or intentional cutting—and whether there are more such cuts to the texts of the stories—it is a troubling incident. And here I was daring to be hopeful about publishers rejecting censorship.

I hope I’m wrong. The Penguin Modern Classics edition appears to be unexpurgated, at any rate, and this gives me an excuse to reread these excellent stories soon.

Jones on Scott on the Middle Ages

For the anniversary of Agincourt over the weekend I started reading Dan Jones’s Henry V, a biography released late last year. I’m enjoying it so far, though I am still skeptical of the stylistic decision to write the story in present tense. I may have thoughts about here if and when I review it.

I began reading with some wariness but I came around quickly when, in the introduction, Jones strongly, straightforwardly argued for Henry’s greatness, something he aims to prove in his book, and several chapters in, when Jones dropped this footnote about a high-profile incident of trial-by-combat in France just before Henry’s time:

This case was the basis for the 2021 film The Last Duel, which made the 1386 battle between Carrouges and Le Gris a vehicle for a ponderous meditation on the politics and ethics of twenty-first-century sexual abuse.

The Last Duel was a Ridley Scott movie, of course, which means that it was only ostensibly, superficially historical. And “ponderous” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Don’t take my word for it.

I love many of Scott’s movies but this presentism afflicts every one of his historical stories except, perhaps, his first feature, The Duellists, where the point is very much the look and technical perfection of the visuals. Style over substance may be Scott’s other besetting sin, but when he caves into that temptation there at least he’s not indulging in middlebrow navelgazing. I first wrote about this here with regard to Kingdom of Heaven way back in 2019 and—more recently and specifically on Scott’s cavalier disregard for history—before the release of the disastrous Napoleon. And of course I wrote about The Last Duel here. In the years since I saw it, my positive impressions have faded a great deal but my misgivings remain.

It’s just nice to see such succinct confirmation of the problem. Jones knows how to use a footnote.

Young Washington trailer reaction

“COLD DEAD HANDS!” William Franklyn-Mille in Young Washington (2026)

Let me start with a favorite passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing in 1858, less than sixty years after George Washington’s death:

“Did anybody ever see Washington nude? It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but I imagine he was born with his clothes on, and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.”

This is not only funny—and I love the reactions it gets from students—it succinctly gets at a problem with iconic historical figures. Some are so important, so mythic, that a version of them with ordinary human qualities stripped, planed, and sanded away supplants them in our historical imaginations. In American history this may be more true of George Washington than anyone else. Tellingly, even in commenting on this phenomenon Hawthorne gets something wrong: Washington didn’t wear powdered wigs.

Last week a new trailer for an Angel Studios release called Young Washington came to my attention—fortuitously as I was pulling up a video for my US History I class. The film appears to cover George Washington’s experiences during the first couple years of the French and Indian War, from the ill-fated patrol in which, as the 21-year old commander of a small force of Virginia militia, he accidentally precipitated a global war, through the Battle of the Monongahela, in which a British force was cut apart and nearly annihilated and where, as a volunteer aide-de-camp to the fatally wounded British General Edward Braddock, Washington helped save what was left of the army.

Here are Variety and The Hollywood Reporter with more details.

As it happens, this is one of my favorite stories to tell in class, and I’ve long thought it would make a great movie. So discovering a trailer for Young Washington has gotten me both excited and anxious.

If you want to get at the person beneath the mythology and iconography—especially of great and consequential leaders like Washington—it requires deep interest and long, purposeful study. Most people can manage perhaps one of these, more often neither. For them, a good historical movie can untangle the bundle of traits and props that make up the imaginary versions of historical figures, presenting them with a real human being perhaps for the first time. But the movie has to be good. The damage of a false movie portrait can be permanent.

What follows are rough impressions and questions based on this early trailer for Young Washington:

• This teaser is heavy on battle scenes—not that I’m complaining. I’m pleased to see throughout the representation of regulars (paid, uniformed professionals), militia in a wide variety of clothing, and allied Indians on both sides. I doubt Young Washington will nail this the way The Last of the Mohicans did but that this complexity is so clearly visible even in this trailer is heartening.

• Ben Kingsley plays Lieutenant Governor of Virginia Robert Dinwiddie. Dinwiddie was Scottish and twenty years younger than Kingsley when the French and Indian War broke out.

• The Angel logo appears over what looks like Braddock’s expedition, which set out into the wilderness of western Pennsylvania with a long wagon train and no road. Great atmosphere in this shot.

• Washington’s leather-looking coat at approx. 0:20 is a good spot to talk about uniforms and costumes. I’m not a mid-18th century guy but beyond the basic red-for-British/white-for-French the uniforms don’t look right to me. The leather coat is of a piece with modern Hollywood’s tendency to give the star slightly more contemporary-looking costumes, e.g. Orlando Bloom’s boot-cut hose in Kingdom of Heaven. The Revolutionary War spy series “Turn” gave Abraham Woodhull similar modern takes on 18th-century clothing: leather when everyone else is in wool, hipster toboggan, bad boy scowl. At least our young Washington isn’t constantly glowering.

• Scenes of Washington surveying the Virginia wilderness: A+ for effort. Can’t comment on 18th-century surveying equipment but the outdoor clothing looks better than the uniforms and the landscape looks exactly right. People tend to forget Washington’s work as a surveyor (and his chance to get a look at what’s out there right before it became available to speculators) so it’s good to see him working his day job.

• The film provides Jane Austen fans with a ball. Washington is accurately shown not wearing a wig but inaccurately—unless this is an accident of low light and color grading—as a brunette. Washington had red hair. He was also 6’2” at a time when that placed him head and shoulders above most other men, something you don’t really get here (but that HBO’s “John Adams” miniseries nailed). Even as a young man he was striking and physically imposing.

• A French officer goads Washington with “You are not British yet they send you to speak for them. So that when you fail they’ll have someone to blame.” This introduces some sketchy interpretation. Washington and all the other colonials absolutely considered themselves British at this time. It’s a later nationalist myth that we strapping Americans had already discovered ourselves to be a new, independent species and were just waiting for the right time to buck off the shackles of the Old World. (Even the great Last of the Mohicans tacks into these waters a bit.) See Fred Anderson’s books below for more on that.

• The wagon train in the woods features in few quick shots, presumably of Braddock’s defeat at the Monongahela. Can’t comment at this point how accurately the film will portray the battle overall, but these shots capture the chaos well.

• After the Battle of Jumonville Glen and his surrender at Fort Necessity (and I can’t be sure that anything in this trailer relates to that event), Washington left the Virginia militia to volunteer as a gentleman aide-de-camp to General Braddock, played by Andy Serkis. As with Kingsley’s Dinwiddie, we don’t get much to judge by here, but Braddock comes across as rather hostile to Washington—a bit of lordly British stereotype. Washington actually liked Braddock, wrote positively of him, and learned a lot during his month under his command.

• Scenes of combat in the forest look appropriately messy, panicked, and dirty, with a mix of men fleeing and courageously holding their positions. It’s also atmospheric as heck. Points for that. The one thing we miss is the massive primeval trees of the colonial American woodlands, something no movie would probably be able to recreate now.

• We also get Washington taking unofficial charge of part of the battle. Washington was not only physically large and powerful, he was ridiculously brave. You might know that he found multiple bulletholes in his coat following the Battle of the Monongahela (which Kingsley’s Dinwiddie seems to allude to at the beginning of the trailer) but he also had two horses shot out from under him. Braddock, before he was mortally wounded, also demonstrated immense courage and had several more horses killed beneath him. I’ll be curious to see how the film treats his relationship with Washington and how they’re depicted in battle. A lot of movies about heroic figures downplay the courage others to make their subjects look better—a trap I hope they avoid.

• Some other famous names associated with Braddock’s expedition: Daniel Morgan, Horatio Gates, Benjamin Franklin. Curious to know if any of these will show up in the film. It would make sense to include Franklin, as he later told stories—including in his Autobiography—of having tried to warn Braddock about his plan of attack.

• A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot at 1:27 seems to show the moment Washington’s patrol started a global war: allied Iroquois leader Tanaghrisson “The Half-King” killing French officer Joseph Coulon de Jumonville in cold blood. Describing this moment never fails to startle students.

• A final name-drop shot gives us an appropriately young-looking Young Washington. He doesn’t seem to have much human personality in this teaser but, well, it’s a teaser.

Lots to dig into here, and for what it’s worth I enjoyed the trailer—and picking it apart for historical clues. For now I’m curious but not particularly optimistic. I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

In the meantime, if you want make an effort to get at the real young Washington and his time—whether you end up seeing the movie or not—let me recommend the following:

• For a good shorter biography that pays attention to Washington’s early experiences in the French and Indian War as well as his pre-Revolution life of surveying and land speculation: Washington’s Revolution: The Making of America’s First Leader, by Robert Middlekauff.

• For the fascinating, underappreciated story of the French and Indian War, I’d recommend either of two books by Fred Anderson: The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War or, for a much more detailed version, his mammoth Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766.

• For Braddock’s expedition against Fort Duquesne specifically there’s Braddock’s Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution, by David Preston.

Young Washington just started shooting in Ireland last month and won’t be out until next July 4th, so who knows what the final product will be like? We certainly don’t need, per Hawthorne, Washington nude—even HBO didn’t give us that, shockingly—but if we can get past the stately bows and powdered wigs to the real young man who fought for king and crown in the French and Indian War, who struggled to master his temper, who trooped through the forest bearing chains and compass and later rifle and sword, and who wrote to his brother describing how “charming” the sound of whizzing bullets was, I’ll be glad.

Artistic appreciation comes first

I was revisiting Chesterton’s Everlasting Man over the weekend and was struck by this passage in the opening paragraph of Chapter V, “Man and Mythologies”:

It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticize it. There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is proved by the popular origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never heard explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are allowed to write critical studies of these popular poems. We do not submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a song to a calculating boy; but we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be treated as a science. Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all.

That last line is gold.

What I found striking was that Chesterton is essentially making the same point about understanding and interpreting mythology in general that Tolkien was in his lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Crtiics.”

“Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are not appreciated at all.”

— GK Chesterton

Early on Tolkien asks “why should we approach this, or indeed any other poem, mainly as an historical document?” And after summarizing the many prevailing angles of scholarship—and sometimes mere prejudice—from which Victorian and early 20th century scholars dismissed Beowulf as worthy of study, he argues: “[I]t is plainly only in consideration of Beowulf as a poem, with an inherent poetic significance, that any view of conviction can be reached or steadily held.”

And he makes his point about the misunderstood—or simply missed—artistic purpose of the poet in a famous allegory:

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

This is not to deny the value of doing the historical, cultural, and linguistic spadework to gain better understanding of mythology and its place in a given culture. That would be an overcorrection, as Tom Shippey has argued, in Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings, that Tolkien’s lecture unintentionally swung the pendulum too far away from studying Beowulf for its history, so that Beowulf and Hrothgar are assumed to have the historicity of Leda and the swan.

These things require balance, but the artistic and imaginative—what Chesterton elsewhere in the same book called “the inside of history”—must come before historical parsing and sociological datamining. Once the artistic purpose is understood, what the myth-makers were hoping to see or show us from the top of their construction, the rest will fall more clearly into place.

The epistolary and the gothic

Speaking of letters, here’s a second epistolary topic I came across last week but didn’t have time to write about when I briefly returned to Emma on Friday:

One of the items I included in Quid, my Substack digest, over the weekend was this handy short guide to the gothic by literary historian Rebecca Marks. She opens by quoting the note at the beginning of The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole’s ur-gothic novel from 1764, and highlights the role of framing devices in gothic literature. She returns to this topic about halfway through:

Gothic novels are filled with letters, diary entries, found manuscripts, dreams, and reported speech, and Gothic paintings are full of so-called ‘liminal’ or negative spaces (windows, graveyards, ruins, dungeons, corridors, shadows). The idea is that we, as consumers of the Gothic, can never be sure about the truth because it’s always shrouded in degrees of separation.

Having just picked up Dracula to read for the first time (minus an abortive attempt in college) as well as being a fan of MR James and especially Poe—one of whose earliest stories was literally titled “MS. [manuscript] Found in a Bottle”—this rings true. Marks compares the way the gothic uses such framing devices to modern found footage horror like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity and credits their prevalence in the gothic to “the sense of uncertainty” they create.

No argument here. What I’d add is that these forms come with a not insignificant sense of discovery built in. This creates not only the “sense of uncertainty” Marks describes, but enhances it with a sense of chronological distance. That means getting the story will require assembling it bit by bit, slowly revealing the shocking truth. If one finds an epistolary horror novel scary because of the uncertainty created by the form, one keeps reading because of the tingling sense that one is slowly uncovering what’s really going on, a feeling we usually ascribe to whodunnits.

Not all gothic stories are mysteries, but I’d say all gothic stories have an element of mystery. In both, the construction of the real story in the reader’s mind is an important part of the storytelling process. In mysteries this involves clues; in the gothic it involves atmosphere and suggestion.

And to return to a pet theory: this fits well with my sense that UFO and alien stories are the modern replacement for the gothic. The same thrill offered by the pretense that The Castle of Otranto or one of MR James’s stories are old manuscripts dug up in dark archives is to be had from the grainy photographs, blurry film footage, photocopies of redacted Air Force files, or an especially juicy eyewitness interview many years after the fact. Any good UFO story is going to involve forgotten secrets revealed by carefully reconstructing the truth from old files.

Letter-writing in Emma revisited

Back in July I shared some observations on the moral significance of letter-writing in the early chapters of Emma. In short: the way characters communicate in writing and interpret others’ writing reveals significant aspects of their virtue—or the lack thereof. I’ve been thinking about that ever since, and as my wife and I near the end of the book I find that Austen, great writer that she is, has bookended the story with a few more letters and reflections on language.

After the revelation that the dandyish Frank Churchill and the shy, tortured Jane Fairfax have been secretly engaged the entire time, Frank writes a letter to explain himself. Notably, he writes to his stepmother, who is the most unreasonably receptive audience possible, and not to the father he spent years ignoring or neglecting or the girls he led on in order to conceal the engagement. As for the letter itself, it is unusually long* (Austen specifically notes how thick the envelope is), and, like Frank himself, smooth, plausible, self-congratulatory, and deftly spun to exonerate himself.

It works—at least temporarily. Mrs Weston, the recipient of Frank’s letter, is satisfied by his explanations, and Emma herself finds most of his excuses convincing. It’s Mr Knightley who sees through it, and offers an entertaining commentary during his reading. He can find only one point of agreement with Frank:

He has had great faults, faults of inconsideration and thoughtlessness; and I am very much of his opinion in thinking him likely to be happier than he deserves: but still as he is, beyond a doubt, really attached to Miss Fairfax, and will soon, it may be hoped, have the advantage of being constantly with her, I am very ready to believe his character will improve, and acquire from hers the steadiness and delicacy of principle that it wants. And now, let me talk to you of something else.

This is the transition to Mr Knightley’s proposal to Emma, an occasion Austen uses to contrast the character of these two men as seen through the character of their communication. Austen summarizes his speech thus:

The subject followed; it was in plain, unaffected, gentlemanlike English, such as Mr. Knightley used even to the woman he was in love with, how to be able to ask her to marry him, without attacking the happiness of her father. Emma’s answer was ready at the first word.

And rightly so. Where Frank is evasive, Mr Knightley is direct. Where Frank’s letter reveals self-absorption, Mr Knightley’s proposal shows consideration—both for the woman he hopes to marry and her needy, hypochondriac father. But note as well the way he speaks: “plain, unaffected, gentlemanlike English.” This description is a chiastic echo of Mr Martin’s letter to Harriet near the beginning, which Austen describes with the same three laudable qualities:

[A]s a composition it would not have disgraced a gentleman; the language, though plain, was strong and unaffected, and the sentiments it conveyed very much to the credit of the writer. It was short, but expressed good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling.

That Austen bookends her story with these reflections on virtue and communication is significant, I think, and brilliantly done. There’s a reason we go back to her work.

As I noted in that original post, one’s writing may not be an infallible guide to the content of one’s character, especially if we get stuck on the nuts and bolts: grammar and spelling, both of which are poorly taught now. But what one writes—and how, stylistically—are revealing. Something worth considering in an age of casual, instantaneous, unceasing, and almost universally unvirtuous communication.

*Years ago I read through and transcribed boxes full of mid-19th century letters for the antique auction where I worked. I still remember noting that most of them were confined to a single sheet, perhaps but not always filled on both sides.

Erzberger

After recent events I decided it was time I finally read up specifically on Weimar Germany. I started Frank McDonough’s recent year-by-year history The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918-1933. It’s good so far. Night before last I read through McDonough’s account of 1921, one of the most famous and disturbing events of which was the murder of Matthias Erzberger.

Erzberger was a politician of the Catholic party Zentrum and had the dubious distinction, following revolution on the homefront and the abdication of the Kaiser in November 1918, of signing the armistice with France. This was a thankless and humiliating role that earned him the hatred of German nationalists, militarists, and anyone else upset by the outcome of the war. Erzberger soldiered on, embracing the new Republic and taking an active role in trying to help it survive. For this—and for being the man who signed the armistice—he was targeted by the Organisation Consul, a group of former military officers dedicated to avenging their defeat by killing off the men they held responsible.

On August 26, 1921, two members of the OC approached Erzberger while he was on a walk with a colleague. They “fired two shots at Erzberger’s head and back. He fell down an embankment, and the assassins followed him, finishing him off with two head shots.” They afterward fled to Hungary.

McDonough turns to the response to the murder with a damningly succinct introduction:

“Such was the toxic nature of Weimar politics that the brutal assassination of Erzberger produced a mixed reaction.”

As if assassination is not enough, the response itself is proof of the rot in the body politic. Read McDonough’s summary of the “mixed reaction” and see if it is not reminiscent of recent events:

On the centre left, there was a tremendous outcry. Numerous protest rallies were organised by the Social Democrats, the USPD and the Communists. In Berlin, 100,000 people turned out to express their outrage. Among the other mainstream parties, the murder was also unambiguously condemned. On the Right, however, a substantial minority greeted the murder with shameless glee. Hitler gave a tasteless speech in Munich in September which, identifying Erzberger as a November Criminal, essentially saying he got what he deserved. The Magdeburgische Zeitung (Magdeburg News) expressed ‘abhorrence’ for the murder, but added that Erzberger had been a ‘political racketeer and gambler’ who had made numerous political enemies.

Outcry on one side, glee on the other, and, in between, a certain amount of mealy-mouthed hemming and hawing about politically-motivated murder.

Weimar Germany is not 2025 America and 2025 America is not Weimar Germany. One could point to a thousand specific differences. But human nature, being unchanging at its core and bent toward evil, falls into familiar ruts whenever it finds sufficient excuse or opportunity to do so. According to the old saw, variously attributed but which I repeat often in class: history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Erzberger wasn’t the first and was by no means the last victim of such political violence in the Weimar era. (Less than a year later, the OC would assassinate Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, an event you can read about from inside the conspiracy in Ernst von Salomon’s novel/memoir The Outlaws.) It’s worth considering, for all the people rightly shocked and grieved by such acts, what it will take to break the rhyme scheme.

Notes on Christopher Nolan’s best movie

Alley (Andy Serkis), Nikola Tesla (David Bowie), and Angier (Hugh Jackman) in Tesla’s Colorado laboratory in The Prestige (2006)

A few days ago I started rereading The Prestige, by Christopher Priest, a World Fantasy Award winner about Victorian magicians locked in a mutually destructive rivalry. I last read it as a senior in college almost twenty years ago. It’s very good—much richer and more absorbing than I remembered—and rereading the book has also got me thinking about Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation.

The book and the film are quite different (Priest was, it’s worth noting, in awe of the movie) but I don’t intend to examine those differences here. The movie has been one of my favorites since it came out and has rewarded years of viewing. But what I’ve realized now, to my surprise, is that after almost two decades and seven more films, The Prestige remains Nolan’s best movie.

I write this as a fan of Nolan—not a fanboy, but a fan, someone who likes and appreciates what he does and looks forward to each new Nolan project. I don’t intend to disparage his more recent movies, most of which I’ve liked. I just think that, with hindsight, The Prestige stands out as a work produced 1) at the height of Nolan’s powers and 2) before he became distracted by some of the qualities that have defined—and occasionally weakened—his subsequent movies.

Some notes toward refining my argument:

• Technically The Prestige is pretty much perfect. Wally Pfister’s anamorphic cinematography is beautiful and atmospheric and incorporates handheld work for a subtle contemporary feel without succumbing to the Bourne-style chaos of the mid-2000s. It also, like Barry Lyndon and Amadeus, allowed for shooting by candlelight. (Read American Cinematographer’s article on The Prestige; I ate this up when the movie came out.) The film feels real and authentic, a mood enhanced by the costume and set design, which establish the easily-caricatured Victorian London as a real place.

• Also on the technical side: the editing (by Lee Smith, who has cut several other Nolan movies) is excellent, probably the best of Nolan’s career. It’s really the editing that makes this movie. Though The Prestige tells its story along multiple chronological timelines, jumping forward and backward in time with occasional flashes forward or backward as characters remember or reflect, it does so effortlessly. Despite its complexity it is easy to follow and requires almost no internal explanation.

• The music by David Julyan is, as so often with Nolan’s films, there to enhance atmosphere and mood rather than to soar on memorable leitmotifs. It does its job perfectly, without distraction or—as in the last few Nolan films—drowning out dialogue.

• The performances are also excellent, the standouts being Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, both of whom play two roles. This is where rewatching The Prestige most pays off—once you know what’s going on with Alfred Borden it’s easy to see, through Bale’s performance, that he’s two people with distinct, conflicting personalities: one cautious and softspoken, one aggressive and brash. This has the unique effect of making the ending more powerful after the twist has been revealed.

• Of course, all of this technical and artistic craft is in the service of a good story, which is the best reason to watch any movie. There are plenty of technically admirable movies that are not interesting, entertaining, or meaningful. The Prestige is all of these.

Why The Prestige stands out so much in retrospect: it has, on paper, a lot of Nolan’s tics and preoccupations—multiple identities, family tragedy, crime, deception, the nature of reality, and memory—but allows them to arise naturally from the story. By contrast:

• Music: I enjoy some Nolan movie soundtracks (Interstellar is perhaps the last great one), but since Inception they have gotten more bombastic and intrusive. This is, perhaps, emblematic of the rest of my complaints below.

• The Prestige was the last of Nolan’s movies to be shot before he began his ongoing experiment with large-format filmmaking, especially IMAX. He has used this as more than a gimmick—like 3D, which he rightly avoided—but it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the form has started to overwhelm the story. The frequent switching between formats and aspect ratios in his more recent movies is also just distracting. I find myself wishing more and more for a film with a single consistent visual technique, especially one as wonderful as what Nolan and Pfister created in The Prestige.

• More seriously, even if we disregard form or technique, the structure of Nolan’s movies since has become a more and more overt, obvious part of the story. Where The Prestige smoothly moves the audience back and forth through several different timelines, both trusting the audience enough to understand and expertly editing the film to make its structure intuitive and invisible, his movies since Inception call attention to their structure and require frequent, heavy-handed exposition. (Despite these efforts, the “[Nolan movie] ending explained” genre on YouTube continues to thrive.)

• Related: The Prestige uses, like many of Nolan’s movies before and since, non-linear storytelling. Again, it does so effortlessly and without calling attention to itself. More recent movies like Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, and most obviously and incomprehensibly Tenet use it as a flourish. When some critics wonder whether this kind of chronological tossed salad is necessary for these stories, they’re not being unreasonable.

• I wouldn’t call The Prestige a special effects movie, but several sequences rely heavily on effects—Tesla’s lab, Angier’s transporter machine, and subtle shots of the Borden twins working together. They’re seamlessly integrated, even the digital effects Nolan now has a reputation for shunning. Nolan’s insistence on practical stuntwork and in-camera effects is laudable, but it sometimes feels—like the large format film—like a gimmick that is taking over his movies. Witness all the jokes online about Nolan finding real cyclopes or having his actors throw real thunderbolts for his Odyssey project.

• Finally, The Prestige is rich, dense, intricately plotted, but tight, running just over two hours. With the exception of Dunkirk, which Nolan said he wanted to feel like the third act of a much larger story, every movie from The Dark Knight on has been two and a half hours long or longer. I like or love several of these, but the feeling of sprawl and self-indulgence is palpable, especially when the increasingly showy plots require multiple scenes of people talking about what’s going on for the audience’s benefit.

In short, The Prestige perfectly unites story and form. Nolan continues to make good movies, but with their increasing emphasis on spectacle, teasing structure, and technical gimmickry, he has never quite struck the same balance he did in The Prestige.

Again, these are note and observations. Perhaps more thoughts later, especially once I’ve finished rereading the novel and watched the movie again.

I’ll end by noting that Nolan and his brother Jonathan, with whom he co-wrote the screenplay, did an excellent job adapting Priest’s novel. This second reading impresses upon me more than the first just how difficult this story would be to construct for the screen. I’m glad they took the effort—and over several years, which I think may be yet another factor distinguishing The Prestige from the films since—because the story is brilliant, surprising, suspenseful, and moving, and deserved to be told well.

Casting Chesterton

Last week on his microblog, Alan Jacobs shared the news that the BBC has ordered a new series called “The Detection Club.” Per the BBC’s press release, the show will follow Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, and GK Chesterton as they team up to solve mysteries in 1930s London. The show is set to shoot next year.

Jacobs briefly considers the cast, which is as yet unknown. I have little or no opinion on who would make a good Sayers or Christie, but the idea of someone playing Chesterton in a drama immediately caught my interest. A few informal thoughts if I were the one casting Chesterton:

Prerequisites: Chesterton was unusually tall (6’4”), fat (fluctuating but often near 300 lbs), and had a mustache. These, plus a small pince-nez spectacles, a crumpled hat, and a cape and walking stick should factor into a bare-minimum visual impression. (Cf my old Churchill-in-a-box post.)

Chesterton late in life, c. 1931

Jacobs notes with regret that, with the death of Richard Griffiths a few years ago, “the ideal for GKC” is lost. I’m not sure I agree. My perception may be skewed by having only ever seen Griffiths as Uncle Vernon in Harry Potter, but though matching some of the superficial particulars for Chesterton—tall, fat, wild-haired, mustachioed—he had a sinister air that I’d find insurmountable. The attitude or air or even vibe of an actor playing a real person is as important as appearance, I think.

Someone adept at capturing a historical figure’s vibe without looking much like him is Timothy Spall. He came to mind on the strength of his performances as Churchill (in The King’s Speech) and David Irving (in Denial). It’s a commonplace to call a gifted character actor a chameleon, but Spall is the real deal. He’d have a lot to work against—he’s too short and, at least in the last few films I saw him in, too thin for Chesterton—but I think he could convey the strange combination of puckishness and intelligence that a Chesterton should have. He may also be too old but, if the series is set in the 1930s, that may be appropriate for the end of Chesterton’s life.

Similar: Eddie Marsan, another favorite of mine. Marsan is a smidge taller than Spall and looks a smidge more like the actual Chesterton. (He’s also a London native, like Chesterton.) That said, he tends to play either intense or petulant men, which wouldn’t work, as a Chesterton needs generosity of spirit and literally enormous bonhomie to be believable.

A somewhat obvious choice—who would probably resist the potential typecasting—is Mark Williams, who has played Father Brown since 2013. Williams is taller than either Spall or Marsan, heavyset (sometimes, anyway), and can do friendly absentmindedness better than just about anybody. Playing Chesterton would be a natural extension of his Father Brown, not least since he has always played Father Brown more like Chesterton than the Father Brown of the short stories, anyway.

An unusual possibility that occurred to me almost immediately: Nick Frost. Frost is about the same height as Spall but I wouldn’t have guessed it—he looks bigger onscreen. With a mustache and pince-nez I think he could very well look the part, and I think he’d sell Chesterton’s good humor.

A final serious suggestion: Mark Addy, who is tall, heavyset, looks more like Chesterton in the face, and can do both comedy and drama well. That said, he tends to be more restrained—or at least less manic—than some of these other options, though that might work well for an aging Chesterton.

All of this is predicated on the BBC treating the project seriously, of course. The presence of Christie as a character gives me pause, as I just recently noted the habitual malice toward her work among those adapting it for TV and film. Christie, Sayers, and Chesterton were all serious Christians and one hopes the show doesn’t avoid, downplay, or simply ignore that fact in favor of whatever the progressive posture du jour is when the series goes into production. The casting will show the BBC’s hand.

What I most hope they avoid is obvious Funny Fat Man stunt casting: James Corden or whoever. A fun mystery centered on affectionate, respectful portraits of three great writers sounds immensely appealing to me right now. One more farce sending up the dead and their vanished world does not.

On “not sucking”

Two things I saw early last week that I thought a lot about even at the time, but that not long afterward took on much greater weight:

First, after a social media algorithm served up an amusing comedy routine about Christian rock, I explored the comedian’s other work. His brand is explicitly “exvangelical,” and in addition to the usual contemptible rants, complaints, and progressive exhibitionism of that demographic, he has an ongoing series of videos called “Christians Who Don’t Suck.” The most recent video at the time profiled Nat Turner.

Turner was a slave preacher in Southampton County, Virginia. Inspired by visions he claimed to have received from God, in the late summer of 1831 he led a slave revolt that killed around sixty people. In his master’s house, where he began the uprising during the night, his men killed a baby sleeping in a crib. At another house they killed a bedridden old woman. At another a three-year old boy recognized the slaves riding into the yard and ran to greet them; they decapitated him. At a farm where a schoolhouse had been built for local children, his men arrived just as the children were being told to flee. Turner’s men—by this time riotously drunk on hard cider—rode them down and dismembered ten of them with axes.

This, apparently, is “not sucking.”

Second, a history account that I follow on Instagram shared something related to abolitionist terrorist John Brown. In the comments, when someone mentioned Brown’s Pottawatomie massacre, in which Brown, his sons, and some accomplices hacked five men to death with custom-made broadswords, someone who thought himself very clever indeed replied: “Thus always to slaveholders.”

Here’s the thing: none of Brown’s victims owned slaves. They were family farmers who had a mere difference of opinion with Brown, who settled on them as suitable targets for retaliation following what he perceived to be recent pro-slavery victories in the news. For this, they were roused from bed in the middle of the night, led away from their farms over the wailing and pleading of wives and mothers, and hacked to pieces, with Brown personally administering coups de grâce with his revolver. He would go on to plot a rebellion that, had it been successful, would have killed tens of thousands. It failed, but not before sixteen had been killed.

This is, presumably, also “not sucking.” Indeed, to go by that commenter’s words, it’s apparently a standard to be striven for.

I don’t remember the order in which I saw these two posts, but I ran across them on Monday and Tuesday of last week. I found the gloating tone, the posturing and virtue signaling, and especially the moral blindness of both annoying but not especially surprising. The self-congratulatory upright can talk a lot of smack about the long dead, especially when they’re ignorant of the details.

Then Wednesday happened.

I don’t have anything new to say about last week’s public political murder, but the gloating, posturing, and moral blindness of the responses following the event brought these posts about Brown and Turner back to mind, albeit more sharply and painfully defined.

One of my favorite history professors in college mentioned, as an offhand comment during class one day, that one should always beware of those willing to murder on principle. (He may even have been talking specifically about John Brown.) It took me a long time to grasp fully what he meant. One should also beware of those willing to excuse murder on principle.

This is why one’s perception and interpretation of history matter. One’s understanding of the past inevitably informs the present, and excusing the violence of a Turner or a Brown because they had the correct opinions creates the same incentive structure in the present. The person who can celebrate the long-ago slaughter of ordinary people in the name of high-minded political principle can also—it is abundantly clear—celebrate and excuse murder today. They even get the added joy of revisiting the moment over and over on video.

If only there were a way to describe these people.

I teach both of these events—Nat Turner’s revolt and John Brown’s career of bloodshed in both Kansas and Virginia—in detail as part of US History I. Both stories are well enough documented and complicated enough to rubbish easy celebration. Students will all agree that slavery was bad, but they almost always recoil from what Turner and Brown did about it—a salutary moral challenge offering a moment of genuine openness. I’ve linked to decent online articles about both above, but the books I routinely recommend to students on these topics are The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen Oates, which is sympathetic to Turner’s plight as a slave but doesn’t soften or excuse the violence at all, and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz. I’ve written about both here.

Crucially, while both books are about the evil men at the center of these stories, they also offer small points of hope, of people who actually “don’t suck.” During Turner’s revolt, a slave named Nelson saved the life of Lavinia Francis and her unborn child by hiding her from Turner’s men, and on the night of Brown’s Pottawatomie Creek massacre, Mahala Doyle’s stalwart defense of her sixteen-year old son John spared him from Brown and his men’s swords.

May we have more Nelsons and Mahala Doyles, people saving lives amidst slaughter, and fewer self-righteous, self-proclaimed heroes embracing it.