Reflections on two years of blogging

John turturro explores the lIfe of the mind In Barton Fink

Yesterday marked the second anniversary of the launch of my author website, which I still think of as new. When I was first setting the website up through Squarespace I almost deleted its blog function but decided to keep it. I’m glad I did. It’s far and away the most visited part of the site and—the reason I kept it at all—it’s become a great outlet for quotations, reflections, reviews, and other small writing projects. It’s helped me stay limber as a writer, kept the gears greased and the engine warm. 

I’ve also learned a lot from it, especially as I’ve tried to use the website to promote my books and tried to figure out the whole independent author thing. Here are a handful of lessons learned from the first two years of writing this blog: 

You can’t always predict what readers will respond to

Some of the posts I’ve put a lot of effort into have gone over like lead balloons. I work on one, sweat over it, post and share it and—crickets. It’s hard not to find that disheartening. I’ve learned to respond to this in two different but sometimes overlapping ways: 

First, drop what’s not working. I ran across this piece of advice in a book on social media for authors. Don’t spend effort on work that gets no result. This is the reason—or at least a reason—I dropped my Historical Movie Monday series. I didn’t have the time or the energy for the paltry response they got and decided to use my limited energies elsewhere.

Second, just keep doing your thing. I mostly write this blog for me—more public but less open than a diary, but serving much the same function. Alan Jacobs has called his blog a “commonplace book,” and I’ve certainly used this one as such. So even when something I’ve worked on and polished to a shine fails, the point has been the doing of it. I’ve gotten practice, I’ve grown at least a little bit. That alone makes it worthwhile. 

What readers do respond to will surprise you

Of the top fifteen most popularly visited posts on this blog, I might have predicted two or three of them. Those are ones I really spent time on and tried to make worthwhile to whomever might read them. Some others are notes or reflections I rattled off and posted and didn’t look back at. The rest are somewhere in between. The point is that there’s no telling what will find a readership and what won’t.

But if the results are as unpredictable as my first point suggests, you need to do your best on everything you put out there. You don’t want the post that finally finds a big audience—because of Google or a share in a newsletter or on Facebook or whatever—to be the post where you were neglecting the craft of writing. Not everything has to be as profound as Shakespeare, as rich as Dante, as insightful as Jane Austen, as polished as Evelyn Waugh, or even as funny as Dave Barry, but everything should be best of its kind that you can make it.

Sometimes it just takes time

I mentioned how I stopped putting together Historical Movie Monday posts because they didn’t get a response commensurate with the effort I had put into them. Well, guess what have proven the most popular posts on this blog in the last two years? 

Since first posting them almost two years ago, my critiques of Kingdom of Heaven, Hacksaw Ridge, The Winter War, and The Alamo have, via Google and other search engines, become the most popular things on this website, and it’s not even close. It just took some time.

That’s a good reminder of the value of patience and endurance. We live in a world of instantaneous results; if we can’t see the benefit immediately, it has no value to us, and nowhere is this more true than online. But patience is the key. No good thing is gotten without effort, and effort requires the patience and tenacity to outlast those who give up. This is a lesson any writer needs to learn—especially if you’re self-publishing—and the reminder has been good for me. 

Humility

So if your best efforts don’t get the readership you want, you can’t predict what will, and you just have to give it time while you put your back into it and slave away, the result should be humility—humility before the tradition and craft you practice first and foremost, but also a humility before the people who may (or may not) read your stuff and the forces that (fairly or not) bring your stuff to those readers.

Railing against failure is a failure of humility. It’s entitlement, perhaps the besetting sin of our world. (Cf the comments on instant gratification above.) And when you reject this kind of humility, refuse to adopt it as part of the necessary discipline of writing, the result isn’t just pride, it’s resentment.

Gratitude 

I don’t think we live in an age of wrath or fear so much as an age of resentment. What we desperately lack is gratitude, which is the best antidote for resentment. It’s something I’ve been working on personally for a long time, and I hope it informs my writing—both here and in my novels. Because if grateful people are also the most generous—as seems to be the case—a grateful writer is going to be most generous to his readers.

So for all the surprises, both good and bad, successes and disappointments, I’m thankful that I have this website and this blog and that I have readers. Y’all mean a lot to me.

It’s been a great two years. I look forward, gratefully, to many more.

Butterfield on faith in humanity

The internet is loaded with clickbait offering to “restore your faith in humanity.” Usually what these stories mean is “Here are some photos that will give you a temporary feeling of blind positivity.” While the clickbait is silly enough, otherwise serious people actually talk this way. But the unasked question—the first that occurs to me—is Why would anyone have faith in humanity in the first place?

Herbert Butterfield (1900-79) is one of the great minds in the historiography of the last hundred years. His most famous book, The Whig Interpretation of History, was an enormously influential critique of theories of constant historical improvement, a book that is still relevant. The following comes from his book Christianity and History, originally a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge in the fall of 1948, on the radio in the spring of 1949, and published in book form later that year.

This passage concludes chapter two, “Human Nature in History,” in which Butterfield examines how an historian’s basic assumptions about human nature fundamentally alter how they perceive, study, and present the past. Unless an historian begins with “individual personalities, possessing self-consciousness, intellect and freedom,” it will become “difficult to write historical narrative at all.” He therefore sets out to examine and defend the centrality of the study of individual human persons to the historical discipline and to push back against mechanistic or reductionist conceptions of history, explicitly naming Marxism a number of times though his critique, lo these seventy years later, is very broadly applicable.

Butterfield concludes by anticipating a criticism that his conception stems from religious belief (he was a devout Methodist), asserting first that the anthropological idea he has sketched is open to anyone, religious or not (in medieval terms, the view he has outlined is not dependent on revealed truth but can be arrived at through unaided reason, meaning anyone can—and should—grasp its truth.) Second, and more importantly, he contends with the idea that stripping out religious belief immediately moves a scholar into the broad, sunlit uplands of pure objectivity. Finally, he puts his finger on one particularly dearly held but unquestioned anthropological assumption perhaps even more common in our own day than his, an assumption that lies behind many of the catastrophes of the modern era—as well as a lot of insufferable feel-good pap, from Oprah to memes to the clickbait I started this post with.

It is necessary for me to emphasize the fact that what I have been outlining in this lecture is not merely a Christian idea—it is not dependent on the truth of any super-natural religion. We are concerned not with theology but rather with anthropology, with our ordinary doctrine concerning man. . . . [I]t is a mistake for writers of history and other teachers to imagine that if they are not Christian they are refraining from committing themselves, or working without any doctrine at all, discussing history without any presuppositions. Amongst historians, as in other fields, the blindest of all the blind are those who are unable to examine their own presuppositions, and blithely imagine therefore that they do not possess any. It must be emphasized that we create tragedy after tragedy for ourselves by a lazy unexamined doctrine of man which is current amongst us and which the study of history does not support. And now, as in Old Testament days, there are false prophets who flourish by flattering and bribing human nature, telling it to be comfortable about itself in general, and playing up to its self-righteousness in times of crisis. When it suits us we may set out to advertise the sins of one nation or another, but we bring in the moral issue here and there as it serves our purposes. While we are crying out against the crimes of an enemy we may be putting the soft pedal on the similar terrible large-scale atrocities that are being committed by an ally. Our own doctrine of human nature leads us into inconsistencies.

“ It is essential not to have faith in human nature. Such faith is a recent heresy and a very disastrous one.”

— Herbert Butterfield

During the war it was put to a British ambassador that after the destruction of Germany Russia would become a similar menace to Europe if she found herself in a position to behave over a large area with impunity. The answer given on behalf of this country was that such apprehensions were unjustified, Russia would not disappoint us, for we believed that her intentions were friendly and good. Such an attitude to morality—such a neglect of a whole tradition of maxims in regard to this question—was not Christian in any sense of the word but belongs to a heresy as black as the old Manichaean heresy. It is like the Bishop who said that if we totally disarmed he had too high an opinion of human nature to think that anybody would attack us. There might be great virtue in disarming and consenting to be made martyrs for the sake of a good cause; but to promise that we should not have to endure martyrdom in that situation, or to rely on such a supposition, is against both theology and history. It is essential not to have faith in human nature. Such faith is a recent heresy and a very disastrous one.

Again, Butterfield is writing during the Berlin Airlift, as the Russians—Britain and the US’s erstwhile ally—sought to starve the western half of the city into submission. One need not dig too deeply to find the self-delusion and self-righteousness Butterfield describes in the Allied conduct of the war a few years earlier; read FDR’s hopelessly optimistic correspondence with Stalin sometime. We could multiply examples.

A decade before Butterfield’s book, about a week after the beginning of the Blitz, CS Lewis wrote in one of his finest essays that chivalry “offers the only possible escape from a world divided between wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things which make life desirable.” Lewis’s thoughts on chivalry are excellent and I want to write on them at length some other time; what brought his essay to mind in this context was his conclusion, which strikes a note similar to Butterfield’s, but with an even darker note of British understatement: “There was, to be sure, a rumour in the last century that wolves would gradually become extinct by some natural process; but that seems to have been an exaggeration.”

1917

Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) cross no-man’s-land in 1917

One of the books I read in my grad school World War I class was called Eye-Deep in Hell. The book was a break from our reading about strategy and troop movements and the cultural and political substructure of the war and took us instead into the experience of combat. It answers, in enormous and thoroughly documented detail, the question I’ve mentioned on this blog many, many times before in regard to war and the past—What was it like? The horrors of the Western Front as described in that book piled up line by line, paragraph by paragraph, first shocking, then paining or nauseating, and finally numbing the reader.

1917 is the best realization of that experience that I’ve ever seen on film.

The short version

The film begins with two young English lance corporals, Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), at rest behind the lines. Their rest proves short-lived. When Blake’s sergeant tells him to pick a man and follow him, Blake chooses his pal Schofield. Rather than being assigned light duty or sent on some other errand, Blake and Schofield meet their commanding officer, General Erinmore (Colin Firth). The general personally briefs them for a special mission—a British battalion on the other side of a German salient is scheduled to make an attack across no-man’s-land at dawn the following morning, an attempt to exploit a German withdrawal and force them to continue retreating. Aerial reconnaissance has revealed that the Germans have fallen back to an impregnable new line of defense, meaning that unless the British attack is called off the men going over the top will be annihilated. But the Germans have cut all telegraph and telephone lines to the doomed unit and so the message must be delivered on foot—as soon as possible.

Why send Blake? His elder brother is a lieutenant in the battalion. Fail to deliver the message calling off the attack and he and 1,600 others will be killed. They have about eight hours.

With this simple setup and these high stakes—both military and personal—Blake and Schofield set off. They move up through the labyrinthine lines of trenches and, when they reach the front line, strike out into what used to be no-man’s-land. From there they must work their way through the abandoned German trenches (which are depressingly better designed and built than their own), the emptied countryside beyond, a bombed out village, and finally into the freshly dug trenches of the battalion as it prepares to attack. Much goes wrong.

I don’t want to say much more about it because I want everyone who can to go see it, and to see with the uncertainty that the characters live with moment by moment.

In which I gush over technical matters

1917 is technically brilliant—the most well-made movie I’ve seen all year, a masterpiece of what cinema is capable of. The director, Sam Mendes, and the cinematographer, the great Roger Deakins, have used all their visual and dramatic skills to craft a magnificent, overwhelmingly powerful movie. It’s breathtaking, one of the very few films which I’d describe with the overused word “immersive.” The film is awash in the kind of detail you find in books like Eye-Deep in Hell—the sucking mud, the stagnant water in the craters, the banks of sandbags and miles of telephone wire, the omnipresent rats boldly feeding on corpses. The men wear bulky, filthy uniforms and stagger under heavy packs, often needing to help each other up, and when they lose their breath and pant we understand why.

The film’s depiction of no-man’s-land is particularly harrowing. It’s a barren waste pocked by shell-holes and strewn with dense tangles of barbed wire, dotted all over with the rotting corpses of both men and animals. Blake and Schofield slip and stumble through the muck and up and down the artillery-scarred terrain. 1917 doesn’t just show you what it was like, it makes you feel what it was like. It’s all there but the smell.

In addition to the exceptional production design, Deakins’s camerawork helps create this sense of immersion. It’s well known by now that the film is a single continuous shot lasting its almost two-hour running time. There is, in fact, one cut—blackness as a character is knocked unconscious—and the film is not really a single shot but multiple long takes stitched together digitally. But thanks to meticulous planning and seamless editing, for most of the film the impression is of a continuous, unbroken shot. I’ve never seen it done better.

I wanted to laud this in a little detail because I usually dislike gimmicks like this. In other films that are either “one shot” or simply include lots of long shots—“oners”—I find the result off-putting, especially as the “hidden” cuts are usually plainly obvious and the camera continuously glides and shifts and pivots to mimic the effect of traditional shot-reverse shot editing. Here, the camera lingers even as it and the characters move, and Deakins and Mendes often allow the characters themselves to change the composition rather than whipping the camera around. (Compare “the Spielberg oner.”) The style is always under tight control.

The greatest virtue of Mendes’s direction and Deakins’s cinematography in 1917 is their willingness to embrace stillness. Many times throughout the film the camera reaches a carefully composed point and settles, allowing important scenes to pass with our observation unbroken. It’s a painterly or theatrical effect, and is most powerfully used in a scene featuring a surprising—and agonizingly slow—death. It’s brilliantly done.

I’ve already emphasized the detailed recreation of the trenches and the sensory effect it has, but the visual splendor of 1917 shouldn’t be overlooked. Deakins’s work, especially in the austere landscapes through the middle of the film, as Blake and Schofield walk through the empty countryside behind the former German lines, reminds me not a little of Dunkirk, but employed to even better effect. The visuals throughout—from the muddy, cluttered trenches at the beginning through the wreck of no-man’s-land and the darkness of the German lines, to the vast emptiness behind, the nightmare world of flare-lit rubble in a French village, and finally the shallow new trenches dug into chalky ground facing the German lines—are striking, both in their detail and their spareness, and are perfectly calculated to support the mood of the characters as they leave the established, busy, and familiar behind for unknown danger.

Writing, cast, and characters

That points as well to the writing. 1917 is thematically rich despite being so straightforward, and everything in the film is carefully set up. It’s easy to miss because of the film’s amazing technical achievements, but the story is well crafted and brilliantly structured.

The best evidence of this care is how much Mendes and his co-writer, Krysty Wilson-Cairns, are able to make us care about two men we get to know in real time. We learn very little about them—at first. Blake is chipper, talkative, blithe. We intuit that he’s younger, or at least less experienced, than Schofield, and talks freely about home and family in a way Schofield pointedly does not. Schofield has been previously decorated—we never find out why—but is more taciturn and bitter. He says early on that it would be easier simply not to go home on leave since coming back to the trenches is so painful. He is more clearly haunted by what he’s been through, and George MacKay’s expressive, hollowed out face conveys more of the war than any dialogue could. The two men’s fear as they approach and then enter no-man’s-land is palpable, and things only get worse from there.

Other, more recognizable actors pop up in one-scene roles—Colin Firth as the general who sends Blake and Schofield on their mission, Andrew Scott as an officer who has given up on everything, Mark Strong as another, more gentlemanly sort who helps them along the way, Benedict Cumberbatch as the haughty colonel meant to receive the general’s message, Richard Madden as Blake’s brother—but Blake and Schofield are the stars and Chapman and MacKay are excellent. You can feel their camaraderie, even when they bicker, and you see it in a simple but moving image repeated several times—Blake bending wordlessly to give Schofield a hand, helping him to his feet, and the pair moving on.

Neither man—particularly Schofield—would think of themselves as heroes, but they do undeniably heroic things in the course of their mission. They do so because of the situation they’ve been thrust into, a situation they didn’t ask for—as Schofield makes plain after one near miss—but also because of their love for one another, their families, and the men like them who could be killed if they fail.

The reality of war

The two stars are also, crucially, very young looking, a good reminder than wars tend to be fought by men in their teens or early twenties. This boyish looking pair and thousands of their fellows live through conditions most of us could never imagine, and 1917’s invitation to see, to consider, and to live through those things with this pair—to feel compassion, literally “suffering with”—is one of its greatest strengths.

I’ve already talked about all the detail that went into 1917—the impeccable recreations of the trenches, the attention to clothing and gear—and how that helps us feel what it was like, but the thing that really sells the film’s vision of what it was like is the actors—both the stars and the hundreds of extras. The overwhelming impression of the soldiers of the Great War that one takes away from 1917 is one of unutterable weariness. The film begins and ends with characters stopping for some much-needed rest, Blake complains constantly of being hungry and even rifles through abandoned German supplies for food, and Schofield is so tired that at one point he drifts to sleep in a river. And any time the camera takes us through the trenches, anyone who is not actively at work—marching forward or to the rear, bringing in the wounded, shoring up the walls of the trench—is sitting, either asleep or staring blankly at the curiosity Blake and Schofield present as they pass through. We see men sleeping, smoking, eating, all haggard, all slouched into the most relaxed position available to them. The world of 1917 is a world of endless movement and exhaustion, which may make it one of the most realistic war films ever made.

The film also does not shy away from the sheer waste of World War I. The bodies in no-man’s-land—some of which have been there so long that the living have given them jocular nicknames—are the most obvious example, but the wastage accumulates in other ways. As the dreaded assault on the new German line approaches we see a communications trench lined with dozens of stretchers, ready for the inevitable, and even the civilians suffer. In the concluding scene of a nightmarish sequence beginning at night and stretching into the dawn, one of our protagonists literally swims through the bloated corpses of civilians that have washed up in an eddy in a river.

It’s harrowing, and the camera never looks away. Blake and Schofield can’t escape it and neither can we.

Conclusion

1917 is an excellent example of what cinema can do when all its component parts are worked by masters. Its writing, acting, and camerawork are all perfectly integrated, with each supporting the others. It’s a masterpiece. See it on the big screen if you can.

But more importantly, the story and experience the filmmakers have used their skill and craft to tell is unforgettable. 1917 takes us into a lost world and makes us see and feel and remember it in the way it deserves—as an unspeakably wasteful, frustrating, tragic, wearying horror, but a horror in which good, ordinary men like Blake and Schofield showed the greatest kind of love for their friends, which is also the greatest kind of heroism.

Praise for Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville

Back in the spring I submitted my two most recent novels, Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville, to competition in the 27th annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. Neither won, but both scored very high in every category of assessment and I appreciated the brief feedback I got from the books’ judges earlier this month. I’ve quoted a few substantial excerpts below.

Praise for Griswoldville

“The close bond Georgie has with his grandfather, Fate, is endearing, and the reader is rooting for their strength and survival (as well as that of Georgie’s father) throughout the novel.”

— Judge, 27th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards

Griswoldville is an in-depth look at what a young boy fighting in a war of the past was really like. The author clearly did his research on the time period and the inner workings of the Georgia militia, and the prose is thoughtful and polished. We learn what it really took for farming families to survive during the Civil War era, particularly when men from the family were away from the farms for years at a time. The close bond Georgie has with his grandfather, Fate, is endearing, and the reader is rooting for their strength and survival (as well as that of Georgie’s father) throughout the novel.

Praise for Dark Full of Enemies

Dark Full of Enemies zeroes in on a seemingly small mission to the Arctic with laser-sharp focus and precision. The narrative structure, much like McKay himself, is clean, crisp, and precise, and reflects the bitter cold and stark darkness of the world around him.

“Dark Full of Enemies expertly captures the cold, dark dangers of Nazi-occupied Norway, and a Special operative team’s desperate race to complete their mission—and make it out of enemy territory alive.”

— Judge, 27th Annual WD Self-Published Book Awards

The characters, particularly the soldiers on the mission, each had their own personality, which was cleverly portrayed to the reader through minimal, yet colorful details. This was especially true of Stallings, whose troubled past guided his decisions in the present narrative, and was a character that readers could empathize with. . . .

The use of setting is clear and effective--never once is the reader unsure of where the story is taking place, or how brutally cold and inhospitable the environment is. And as the mission drags on, and the soldiers become weary from the lack of sunlight, the reader too can really sense how draining the mission is—and appreciate its completion that much more.

Dark Full of Enemies expertly captures the cold, dark dangers of Nazi-occupied Norway, and a Special operative team’s desperate race to complete their mission—and make it out of enemy territory alive.

Heading into the holidays

I appreciate Writer’s Digest taking the extra trouble to send some feedback to the entrants in the contest, and I’ve been gratified and heartened by what I read.

Finally, if you’re looking for something to give the reader in your life this Christmas, please consider Dark Full of Enemies and Griswoldville—or my other two books! They’re available through Amazon—where both have five stars—in both paperback and Kindle formats. If you’re still not quite sold and would like to read more feedback or some excerpts from the books, visit each book’s page on my website here (Dark Full of Enemies) or here (Griswoldville).

Thanks as always for reading! And I hope y’all have a good holiday season and a merry Christmas.

Midway

American bombers begin their dive toward the Japanese fleet in Midway

A few months ago I wrote up a few of my thoughts and worries after watching the trailer for Roland Emmerich’s Midway. That blog post was mostly worries. It also got a ton of traffic compared to my usual fare, so it seems right to follow that up with a review now that I’ve seen the film.

I’m happy to say that Midway was a very pleasant surprise. 

Midway tells, in broad but surprisingly detailed outline, the story of the US Pacific carrier fleet from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to the titular battle in June of 1942. The film brings us into the story via a handful of major characters at various levels of and with varying perspectives on the conflict—Navy aviator Dick Best (Ed Skrein) and several other pilots and enlisted men of their carrier, the USS Enterprise; Naval Intelligence officer Edwin Layton (Patrick Wilson); Admirals Bull Halsey (Dennis Quaid) and Chester Nimitz (Woody Harrelson); and a handful of civilians on the home front, especially Best’s wife (Mandy Moore). Along the way we learn a little about intelligence gathering and the fog of war (some of the best stuff in the movie), how the United States began its recovery from Pearl Harbor, the incredible efforts to keep the ships afloat and the planes in the air long enough to hold back the Japanese, how difficult naval warfare is, and—with especially chilling detail—the dangerous life of carrier pilots, in which even minor training accidents take lives. 

The film also offers a Japanese perspective, Tora! Tora! Tora!-style, which allows us to see some of the internal tensions on that side. We get a little bit of the violent army-versus-navy conflict that divided the Japanese high command, differences of opinion about strategy in the lower echelons of the navy’s command structure, and even cameos by Hideki Tojo and Emperor Hirohito. This gives the film a laudable sense of balance and humanity—I was surprised by the sympathy I felt for Admiral Yamaguchi, who chooses to go down with his defeated fleet at the end. Fortunately, though, the film doesn’t fall into the moral equivalence trap—the Japanese are clearly the aggressors and we get mentions, and even a few glimpses, of their often forgotten brutality in China.

This pairing of American and Japanese perspectives also helps tackle one of the most difficult problems a historical film has to confront—historian’s bias, the fact that we know what happened. By showing us people living through these events and making choices between multiple options based on limited information, Midway gives us a sense of the potential for things to turn out other than they eventually did. That brings the viewer into the uncertainty of the historical experience, something I’ve seen done effectively by very few historical films. It’s an accomplishment.

The film also does an excellent job of dramatizing what to me is one of the most astonishing aspects of naval warfare—not only sailing out onto a vast, almost featureless, and implacably hostile plane but searching for, feeling out, finding, and attacking enemies. Despite its narrative omniscience, Midway makes the fog of war feel real.

A few other things I liked: 

• Following the Pearl Harbor sequence we get a few scenes that almost never make it into war films. Dick Best visits a warehouse where the Navy is collecting the bodies and parts of bodies they have retrieved from the harbor. Best is there to identify an old friend from Annapolis so he can take the news to the man’s widow. This scene makes the phrase “burned beyond recognition,” a phrase Tom Wolfe made visceral in the opening chapter of The Right Stuff, horribly real. It’s also subdued and tastefully restrained, and all the more moving as a result. We also see the ongoing military funerals in the attack’s aftermath. 

• In my trailer reaction I wondered about the inclusion of the Doolittle raid. It’s handled very quickly but doesn’t feel artificial or out of place, but rather a milemarker on the US military’s journey toward effective retaliation.

• The flight scenes, the main attraction for me and my dad (who took me to see it despite my hesitations), were very well done. We get a good sense of the vast distances involved and the difficulty of both finding and attacking targets. And the divebombing sequences make us feel the danger and the trickiness of targeting something even as huge as an aircraft carrier.

• I also appreciated the attention paid to the dangers of aviation. More than one crew is lost to accident, and equipment failure undermines even successful attacks. The dramatization of these difficulties only underlines the sheer guts it took to do what these men did.

• The mechanics of running an aircraft carrier get a little attention too, with a variety of crewmen omnipresent any time we’re on the deck and, in the aftermath of a crash, a line of them walking across to police any debris left behind. Details like this make the locations feel real despite all the green screen.

• I liked most of the performances as well, but as with any ensemble historical epic these aren’t the main draw. Patrick Wilson as Layton and a subdued Woody Harrelson as a Nimitz struggling under the weight of his new command were particularly good. The pilots were mostly good, but Ed Skrein as Best and Luke Evans as Wade McClusky were the only real standouts. Skrein in particular struggles with a hokey accent (see below) and some awkward dialogue, but you remember him and hope he survives, and that’s an accomplishment in a film with such a large cast.

The film isn’t perfect. The internet is already full of the minor details that it got wrong, that bedevil any military movie—paint schemes for the planes, breaches of military protocol, men wearing the wrong rank, enlisted men in an officers’ club, and so forth. Those are real issues but don’t sink the movie. There is a great deal of CGI, and while some of it is excellent, effectively blending the real and the special effect, there’s also a lot of dodgy green screen work and some outright cartoony explosion sequences. In a few places, Emmerich gives in to some of his disaster movie impulses and we get some lapses of the uncharacteristic restraint that he brings to most of the movie. I’m thinking particularly of the Pearl Harbor sequence and the destruction of the Arizona, which had some over-the-top moments. A few subplots, such as Best’s relationship with his wife, feel underdeveloped and at least one of them—Hollywood filmmaker John Ford, risking his life to shoot footage of the Japanese attacks on Midway Island—disappears from the movie.

More critically, the script, while it does a good job outlining the events between December 1941 and June 1942 and is stuffed with information, often has its characters talking like exposition machines. It’s to the credit of the actors that most of them sell the dialogue as well as they do. That said, there is some overacting (Nick Jonas as a sinewy tough from 1940s central casting, Dennis Quaid as a scenery chewing Halsey), and Ed Skrein’s much commented upon New Joisey accent is phony, but the film’s strengths overwhelmed all these problems—for me, anyway—and I came away appreciating it.

A few critics have dinged Midway for its perceived schmaltz—“Men like Dick Best are the reason we’re going to win this war,” McClusky intones at the end, a line I’ve seen as the object of snickering or harrumphing elsewhere—but I think that has more to do with the receptivity of those viewers than any fault in the performers or the film’s sentiments. Midway is not a subtle movie. It’s also not a cynical movie. The things that matter to these men are their families and friends and it’s these concrete goods that move them to their incredible actions and sacrifices. The film ably captures the spirit of a time defined by shock, strain, and especially loss and the struggle to survive, a time in which cynicism, with its suspicion and moral muddle, is the real naïveté, and a time in which the man who can, in the unforgiving minute, decide and act and give up a part or all of himself for his friends will win the day. 

Unknown Soldier

Lieutenant Kariluoto (Johannes holopainen) leads an attack early in Tuntematon Sotilas (Uknown Soldier)

This is a review I’ve been trying to write since March. Back in the spring I learned that Unknown Soldiers, a new film version of Väino Linna’s great war novel, which I reviewed here last year, had just become available in the US. I immediately ordered a copy. Since then I’ve watched it five or six times. The 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Winter War finally got me to finish this review.

A little background

Eighty years ago tomorrow, Soviet Russia invaded Finland, an unprovoked act of aggression meant to subjugate Russia’s northwestern neighbor as it already had other smaller, weaker countries like Estonia. That war, the Talvisota or Winter War, lasted just over one hundred days. The Finns fought the Russians to a standstill, killing over 200,000 and wounding many more, and forced Stalin to the bargaining table. In exchange for peace, Stalin forced the Finns to concede border territories that the Russians had long coveted, including the Karelian isthmus, from which thousands of civilians fled before the Soviet takeover.

The Winter War is the stuff of legend. It was also only the first of three wars the Finns would fight between 1939 and 1945.

The second and longest of these wars is known as the Continuation War, which began in June 1941, about a year and a half after the end of the Winter War. This time the Finns went on the offensive. They partnered with the Germans and, with the Wehrmacht, planned and coordinated their attack to coincide with the Germans’ Operation Barbarossa. The Finns quickly recaptured former Finnish territory and pressed onward, capturing Russian territory and holding it tenaciously for several years. But in the end the Russians turned them back and, through overwhelming numbers and vast superiority in armor, air, and logistical power (helped indirectly by the United States, our Lend-Lease program propping up an ungrateful Stalin for a long stretch of the war), the Russians forced the Finns to conclude a second peace agreement with Stalin in September 1944. They regained none of the territory lost in the Winter War, and lost yet more.

Little of this matters very much to the characters of Unknown Soldier—at least, not on the grand geopolitical scale. Their concerns are simpler, more concrete—life and death; food, warm clothing, dry shelter, and good cover in a bombardment; and, in some cases, quite literally hearth and home.

The company of soldiers

Jussi Vatanen as Lieutenant Koskela in Tuntematon Sotilas

Unknown Soldier (Finnish title: Tuntematon sotilas), based on the novel of the same name by Väino Linna, a veteran of the Continuation War, tells the story of a company of machine gunners in the Finnish army through the whole course of the war. Linna’s novel is a classic of Finnish literature and of the war genre—it’s one of the best I’ve ever read—and has been adapted for film twice previously. I haven’t had a chance to see those versions, but this new one, based on the novel’s unedited manuscript version and co-written and directed by Aku Louhimies, is excellent.

The film introduces its main characters as they muster in for the invasion of Russia. The film narrows the novel’s large cast down to a core group with whom we’ll spend the majority of the three hour story. Young Hietanen and his giggly buddy Vanhala are two major characters introduced at the start, along with some of their buddies: Lehto, a tough, ill-tempered plug of a man who embraces hard duty; Lahtinen, a stalwart leftist who doesn’t believe in the war; Rahikainen, a ne’er-do-well who always has an angle, and others. We also meet several officers who will offer widely varying examples of leadership: young, idealistic, naïve Kariluoto; the stiff disciplinarian Lammio; and Koskela, the ideal combination of guts, good sense, and endurance.

The men join the attack and days, then weeks of the endless forests of Karelia pass by. Casualties mount—first the unit’s original commander, an old White from the days of the Finnish Civil War, then men killed in attacks on the Russians or ambushed on patrol. One patrol ends particularly badly, with a good man left behind—when they find him later, he has not been killed by the Russians as first reported, but has killed himself rather than be captured.

Reinforcements in the form of reservists arrive, including young, inexperienced men, eccentrics like Honkajoki, who carries a longbow and experiments with perpetual motion machines in his spare time, and perhaps the best character in both the book and the film, Antti Rokka. Rokka is a Karelian farmer and for him the war is personal—he lost his farm in the settlement from the Winter War, and hopes to get it back for himself, his wife, and their growing family. For Hietanen too the war becomes personal, as he strikes up a romance with a Russian girl he befriends in Petroskoi, a Russian city on Lake Onega that the Finns capture as a bargaining chip.

As the first winter of this war arrives and the Russians recover from their surprise at the onslaught, the men repel repeated Russian counterattacks and settle into elaborate networks of trenches. Koskela proves himself a caring and capable leader, courageous, unfussy, and popular with his men, and Rokka proves himself a tough and uncompromising warrior, singlehandedly wiping out a Russian platoon sent to flank them in one instance and escaping capture during a trench raid only to turn the tables and wipe out his attackers in another. Nevertheless both men come in for criticism by their superiors—the injustice of it is bewildering in the face of what we’ve seen.

The war drags on. Two Christmases pass. Rokka’s family grows. The weight of the accumulated boredom and separation from family piles onto these men. If a sense of melancholy hangs over the film it is not only because of the grind of modern warfare, but because of its almost Homeric sense of dramatic irony—we all know how this war must end. The drama comes in worrying about which characters will make it.

The final hour of the film covers the Finnish retreat. It’s harrowing. The line repeatedly crumbles and acts of desperate courage and self-sacrifice are all that keep the Russians from overwhelming and completely destroying the Finnish troops. We see incredible bravery—men counterattack in ones and twos to save their retreating comrades—and not a little stupidity, and the highs of individual courage are sometimes immediately smothered by the wasting of blood by the soldier’s commanders. It’s a mess.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but a great number of characters we have come to know and love die, sometimes with cruel pointlessness. The film ends with wordless images of the war’s cost—a grieving mother, photographs of young soldiers with black ribbons across their frames, civilians fleeing the Russians, a pregnant widow.

On the attack

Eero Aho as Antti Rokka in Tuntematon Sotilas

Unknown Soldier is one of the most beautiful war films I’ve seen. Shot digitally using almost all natural light, it’s magnificent to look at and the naturalism of its imagery helps sell the combat as real. Other scenes, especially those on the homefront—a perspective missing from the book and presented in poetic, often wordless vignettes here—echo the composition and lighting of the masters of the northern renaissance. The scenes back home at Rokka’s farm are especially beautiful and moving.

The battle scenes, always excellent in Finnish movies, are intense and carefully staged, with exacting attention to period equipment and detail. I especially appreciated the care taken to put the viewer in the perspective of the troops themselves—the camera mostly stays at their level and the enemy is almost always seen from a great distance, if they’re seen at all. It almost comes as a shock when Rokka captures a Russian officer and we see that the Russians are just men, not malevolent spirits that strike pitilessly from the woods. The sense of danger the viewer gets from this presentation is intense and sometimes uncomfortable—you really can’t see what’s out there in the woods, and sometimes it gets the jump on you. While not exceptionally gory, the combat really feels violent, and the guts of the men who stand up and face death in the moment they’re needed is all the more awe-inspiring as a result.

The performances are also excellent, particularly those of Eero Aho as Rokka, Jussi Vatanen as Koskela, Aku Hirviniemi as Hietanen, and Hannes Suominen as the cheerful jokester Vanhala—who reaches the end of the film, true to his counterpart in the book, greatly sobered. Vatanen’s Koskela in particular wears a heavy foreboding in his otherwise warm and down-to-earth expression that only underlines his bravery. He knows what the war is eventually going to demand of him, and marches to meet it anyway. You can see why his men follow him, especially as he holds the disintegrating unit together in the face of the Red Army’s onslaught at the end of the war.

In conclusion

I’ve written before, in my essay on the Finnish film The Winter War, about the different perspectives a war film can take—God’s eye, worm’s eye, and so forth. For over twenty years now, since Saving Private Ryan reinvigorated the genre, the worm’s eye view has been predominant, and rightly so—that perspective, which so carefully limits knowledge and so heavily emphasizes the grit, discomfort, and terror of war, is perhaps the best for conveying what a war is like. Unknown Soldier is an outstanding example of the technique.

But the war film Unknown Soldier reminds me of most is The Thin Red Line. Both are thoughtful, poetic, and sometimes mournful in tone, both feature wide casts of characters battling both the enemy and the environment, and both give attention to the look and feel of that environment. Its beautifully moody score by Lass Enersen also reminds me tonally of Hans Zimmer’s work on that film. But Unknown Soldier never drifts into the meandering abstraction of The Thin Red Line and, while tragic, the narrative never feels aimless. Where The Thin Red Line is almost a philosophical allegory, Unknown Soldier is an invitation to reflect on what war means and what it costs, using concrete examples, soldiers who feel like living and breathing men, from a truly brutal conflict.

Again—it’s excellent, and well worth seeking out.

What I found in my glove box

A week ago today I was in a seemingly minor car accident, a fender bender in which I narrowly avoided T-boning a car that pulled out in front of me. I was found not at fault and was grateful that the other drivers’ insurance would take care of the damage, and dropped the car off at a body shop a few days ago for an estimate and repairs. The damage proved greater than it seemed. Yesterday the insurance company called to tell me they were treating the car as a total loss.

I’ve never been sentimental about cars. I can regard them only as tools, as mere machines. I’ve never thought of them as having personalities, just mechanical quirks to tolerate or have fixed, and I’ve almost never given them names—at least, no names beyond nicknames meant to transmute irritation into humor. When I was in grad school I drove a 1985 Camry that had belonged to my great-grandmother, and where my best friend and his brother named their cars Dapple and Rocinante, the perfect blend of fun and well-read names, my car, when I called it anything at all, was “the Punishment Hut,” after the place where Alec Guinness is locked up for the first half of The Bridge on the River Kwai—a tiny metal box built by the Japanese to torture people with heat. That’s about my speed.

So when the insurance company told me I should go clean out this car and hand over the keys, the pang I felt surprised me.

It was a 2011 Ford Fiesta. It technically belonged to my wife. We were dating when she bought it, but when we got married it became ours. We left on our honeymoon in it, shared it on our morning and afternoon commutes every day for over four years, and brought two of our children home in it. When I went to clean it out I felt, for the first time, that I was losing a little something in losing this hunk of steel. As I dug through the glovebox and trunk and the cupholders I realized that if time is a river, this car was a whirling eddy where flotsam gathered and, saturated, sank, gathering in sediment at the bottom. Now, having dug the sediment out, I’ve left that eddy behind, never to go back.

Near the beginning of his great essay “A Piece of Chalk,” Chesterton wrote that he “once . . . planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.” I don’t intend to shape an epic out of the things I found in the car, but I did want to catalog a few of them. (And Chesterton may not have composed his epic, but he did write an essay about the things he found in his pockets.) I have the kind of memory that fixes on and is most rapidly stirred by particular things. Take virtually any book from my library and I will remember when and where I got it and at least one of the times and places where I read it. All of that is imprinted in me with the object itself, and as I cleaned out the car I found myself reliving many years in tiny snapshot moments.

Here’s some of what I found:

• At least a hundred napkins and assorted plastic cutlery and straws gathered from probably a half-dozen different Chick-fil-As.

• Some favorite CDs, including O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I’ve owned since high school, and a two-disc set of Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf, a set I bought in college. I remember listening through this Beowulf several times as I worked a temp job in a tiny cubicle to earn the money to buy Sarah a ring.

• Two copies of the Georgia Mountain Laurel’s annual wedding issue in which our wedding was featured.

• A fabric “eyewear retainer” in desert MARPAT, purchased on my first trip to Texas a few months after our wedding.

• Several years’ of visitor ID badges for my wife’s school, and one small staff hangtag for the year I tutored a German student there. That was the year our daughter was born, when I was working four jobs.

• The roll-up sunshades for the back windows, which we bought somewhere between Newnan, Georgia and St. Simons Island the day after my brother’s wedding. The low, sharply angled sunlight, already hot in the central Georgia morning, had been making our infant daughter cry.

• A tiny clip-on hairbow, the kind we used to put in our daughter’s hair when she didn’t have enough for real bows. She’s almost five now.

• A CD of Sunday school songs in earworm kids’ choir styles, a great favorite among younger passengers on our trips around town a few years ago.

• A small green envelope with my name written on it in my late grandfather’s handwriting. It held the money he gave me for Christmas a few days before he died.

And perhaps the greatest surprise of all:

• The keys to the Punishment Hut.

Then there were the things I couldn’t take with me—a bumper sticker for my brother’s company; the parking decal for my first teaching job, an oval sticker now bleached white by the sun; and most especially the flecks of yellow paint from where our friends decorated our car during the wedding reception, baked onto the rubber windowseals and hanging on for almost seven years.

What struck me is that none of these objects, in an of themselves, have value or really matter. Certainly not to anyone else. But taken together, as bits and pieces of life built up like silt that machine, which I so often took for granted, they mean so much more than whatever matter they are made of. They are pointers, not just showing the way but bringing us into the presence of immaterial things—memories, times and places and people. Everything I noted above came back as I fished these odds and ends out of the car, and when I was finished I found I had a hard time closing the doors and leaving the Fiesta behind for the last time.

As I have come to understand and appreciate more and more the sacramental vision of the world offered by the oldest forms of the faith, I see that God gave us his good physical world precisely to point to the things not just beyond the matter they are made of, but that are embedded, imprinted into the things we see and touch and feel every day. The whole world is an eddy silted up with meaning, a car full of the bits and pieces of everything you’ve lived. And that’s a blessing—you reach into the glovebox and touch little reminders of eternity.

“You have never talked to a mere mortal,” CS Lewis wrote. And I have never driven a mere machine.

The Iliad XXIII-XXIV on Core Curriculum

Giovanni Maria Benzoni, Hector Lying on his Funeral Pyre

This is a melancholy day—the final episode of the Core Curriculum series on the Iliad dropped this morning. In this episode, host Michial Farmer talks with Coyle Neal and me about the two final books of the poem, XXIII and XXIV.

In this episode we cover the funeral games for Patroclus and the incredibly moving penultimate episode of the poem, Priam’s trip to Achilles to beg for the return of Hector’s body. Along the way we discuss mercy and its role—or absence—in the Iliad and ancient pagan society; the “breather episode” of Patroclus’s funeral games, in which things that would ordinarily seem to call for violent retribution are given a pass; and we spend a lot of time talking about Priam and Achilles and what their encounter at the end of the poem tells us.

We conclude by reflecting on the rather small question of what the Iliad means and what it can teach us today. This was perhaps my favorite part of any of the episodes I got to participate in. We reflect on things like the fleeting glory of victory, the inevitability of death, and especially the appreciation the Iliad can give us for the loser’s side in human conflicts. A quotation I didn’t think of at the time, but wish I had, is this from Richard Weaver, which I actually used as an epigraph to Griswoldville:

“It is good for everyone to ally himself at one time with the defeated and to look at the ‘progress’ of history through the eyes of those who were left behind.”

— Richard Weaver

You can access this episode’s exceptionally thorough and detailed shownotes here. The shownotes include a lot of the allusions we make as well as full blockquotes of some of the passages from other writers that we talk about, including those from CS Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost and Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. In the episode I also mention writing a blog post about one of Chesterton’s reflections on the Iliad. You can read that post here.

You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting services, or via the embedded player in this post.

I was honored to participate in this series and have enjoyed this deep read back through Homer’s masterpiece. The Core Curriculum will return with a second series on Plato’s Republic, a series I’m looking forward to listening to. Thanks as always for listening! I hope y’all have enjoyed this as much as I have.

The King

Timothée Chalamet as King Henry V in Netflix’s The King

At the beginning of the month, Netflix released The King, their second action drama—after Outlaw King—based on the reign of a medieval British king to be released in November. I hope this becomes an annual event. I also hope the movies get better.

The King, directed by David Michôd and written by Michôd and actor Joel Edgerton, tells the story of England’s King Henry V. All retellings of Henry’s reign move in the shadow of Shakespeare’s play, so there are a couple of ways a new film about him can go. One is simply to adapt the play, which has been done plenty of times before—by Sir Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, and most recently as an episode of The Hollow Crown. I had hoped The King would go the other route and give us a straight historical film about Henry. Michôd and Edgerton split the difference—the film is not precisely historical but more a reimagining or updating of Shakespeare. It doesn’t quite work.

A kingdom for a stage

The film begins with material from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, in which the Percys—erstwhile supporters of Henry IV in his seizure of power from his cousin Richard II—rebel against the king. (Here’s more about that, courtesy of Netflix.) Henry or Hal (Timothée Chalamet), the wastrel Prince of Wales, learns that his younger brother Thomas (Dean-Charles Chapman) has been given command of his father’s army. He leaves his slumming and wenching in a snit, rides to the battle, seizes control of the army from Thomas, and defeats the rebels by killing their leader, Harry “Hotspur” Percy (Tom Glynn-Carney), in single combat. Hotspur’s death ends the rebellion and Henry’s risking of his own life spares those of the soldiers on both sides.

The film sets up a number of rivalries in this opening act—Henry IV vs Hotspur, Hal vs his younger brother Thomas, Hal vs his ailing and distrustful father. But shortly thereafter the king (Ben Mendelsohn) dies and the prince, now King Henry V, ascends the throne. Thus one more rivalry ends. Then Henry receives word that his brother has died subduing rebels elsewhere in the kingdom. There goes another.

So by the time we reach the thirty-minute mark, Henry rules in reasonable and uncontested comfort and has already begun carrying himself like a king. Already the narrative begins to sag, and Falstaff (co-writer Joel Edgerton) occasionally appears to give the film the appearance of some kind of throughline, but has little to do but mutter and banter with his landlady.

The bulk of the movie, beginning with the tennis ball incident, is spent on Henry’s first campaign in northern France, renewing the English claim to the French throne that had begun the Hundred Years’ War under Edward III. Henry is presented as motivated by retribution—first for slights to his person by the French, then because of an assassination attempt that is foiled by his adviser William Gascoigne (Sean Harris), and a French-sponsored conspiracy to remove him from the throne. From this point the film follows the historical record and Shakespeare reasonably closely, first with the siege of Harfleur and then the Battle of Agincourt. Neither is presented particularly accurately, but they are dramatic and visually stunning, and Henry emerges bloodied and muddied but victorious.

Even if the film was a bit dramatically inert, I enjoyed it up to this point and especially liked the scene the screenwriters give to Henry and his ultimate rival, Charles VI, King of France (Thibault de Montalembert), in which Charles tenderly reflects on the sources of their conflict and the role of family. But then we reach the final scenes of the film. Henry meets his betrothed, Charles’s daughter Catherine (Lily-Rose Depp), and she gives him a woke show of force, refusing to submit to her new husband—“You must earn my respect”—and throwing shade at the entire structure of medieval life: “All monarchy is illegitimate.” Okay then.

Regardless, Catherine rattles Henry enough that he seeks a private audience with his adviser William Gascoigne, who has skulked in the background through much of the movie without really being fleshed out. William reveals that he was behind the assassination attempt and he helped construct the attempted coup in order to give Henry an enemy to prove himself against. It’s Henry’s court as the Bush White House, complete with Cheney. The Hundred Years’ War was an inside job.

Henry then kills William in a fit of rage, just to seal the stupid in for added flavor.

Princes to act

Robert Pattinson as the Dauphin in The King

It’s probably clear what I disliked about the movie, but I did like a great deal of it. It is technically brilliant, with beautifully lit and composed cinematography that, especially in the cool, moody interiors of the opening act, evokes the great Roger Deakins. The cinematographer and editor, Adam Arkapaw and Peter Sciberras respectively, also resist overreliance on handheld (so-called “shaky cam”) and fast cuts and give us battle scenes that are both impressionistic and comprehensible, which was refreshing. Everything from the cinematography to the costuming to the droning string score is austere and moody to a fault. It’s heightened and operatic and I really liked the look and feel of it.

The film’s greatest strength—and weakness, as I’ll discuss below—is its performances. The supporting players are all excellent. Ben Mendelsohn, everyone’s favorite lip-smacking baddie, stands out in a short appearance as Henry IV and Tom Glynn-Carney, who played Mark Rylance’s son in Dunkirk, was so good as Hotspur that I wish he’d had more screentime. I’ve already mentioned Thibault de Montalembert as the King of France, who makes a strong impression as a fragile and weary monarch in his one scene, and Sean Harris as Gascoigne. Harris, who was great in the two most recent Mission: Impossible movies and as Macduff in the 2015 Macbeth, is very good in a severely underwritten part, using a stoop and a serpent-like hissing voice to suggest wisdom and insight as he steps up to mentor the young king. The twist with his character at the end would have worked well if Harris had had more to work with, if it had been more carefully set up from the beginning, and if it weren’t so stupid. Harris acquits himself admirably, though, and until that final scene I enjoyed him every moment he was onscreen.

But the standout member of the cast, to my surprise, was Robert Pattinson as the Dauphin. Despite his misuse in the Twilight films, Pattinson has talent and indulges in his part, speaking in a mincing Inspector Clouseau accent that suggests he is mocking Henry every time they interact. He also, as the internet was quick to appreciate, gets in some sick burns before dying at Agincourt. He steals every scene he’s in.

Unfortunately, the biggest problem with The King is the king himself. Timothée Chalamet, alumnus of Oscar-bait films Call Me By Your Name and Beautiful Boy, plays Prince Hal as an emo kid, slouching around in black clothes and a stringy haircut and hating on his stupid dad. I’ve had this kid in the back row of many classrooms over the years. If you’ve ever tired of Shakespeare’s “warlike Harry” and wanted something more punchable, your ship has come in. Chalamet shows more life and intensity at the beginning of the second act, after he has assumed the throne and has steeled himself to take charge of the kingdom. But this energy flags and by the time his army has reached Harfleur he is mooning around his tent soliciting advice from Falstaff. If Pattinson and the others consistently steal the scene, it’s because Chalamet lets them.

Piece out our imperfections

Posthumous portrait of Henry V

Before I say anything about The King’s “accuracy”—which I’ve already been asked about—a quick note about that. Accuracy per se does not make or break a movie. I love and adore Braveheart, perhaps the worst historical film ever made, precisely because it is a good story, well told. (For more on all those points, see here.) So even as I realized the film was going to be more fiction than historical, I was still ready to enjoy it.

As I said above, The King reimagines or repurposes Shakespeare, following the Bard more often than the historical record but frequently departing from both. Its borrowings from Shakespeare include Hal’s wastrel youth—for which we have no contemporary evidence but which had become a staple of folklore by the Tudor era—his friendship with the fictional Falstaff, his triumph over Hotspur in single combat at the Battle of Shrewsbury, the French sponsorship of the Southhampton plot (which was really a move by English nobles to place a cousin of Henry on the throne), the presence of the Dauphin at Agincourt, and quite a lot more.

Its departures from Shakespeare include killing off Henry’s brother Thomas before the invasion of France and killing the Dauphin during the Battle of Agincourt, giving Falstaff a longer life and an active role in the leadership and fighting in France, as well as a battlefield death—the meaning or purpose of which eludes me—and, especially, having the plots against Henry turn out to be the work of a devious underling.

The real Henry V did lead his father’s army—at age sixteen—against the Percys at Shrewsbury, but there was no single combat. Henry was, in fact, shot in the face by a crossbow and his surgeon saved his life with a remarkable piece of medieval surgery. (A small scar on one cheekbone appears to be the filmmakers’ concession to this real-life event, but nothing is made of it and Henry emerges from Shrewsbury unscathed.) The timeline is compressed quite a bit, moving from Shrewsbury in 1403 to Henry’s accession in 1413 without so much as a speedbump. The real Thomas lived almost as long as his brother and was present throughout the campaign in northern France. The dauphin was not present—much less killed—at Agincourt, but did die shortly afterward in an unrelated incident.

I could go on, but that would become tedious—and that’s not even getting into nitpicking the reenactment of the Battle of Agincourt or other issues of authenticity. (Here’s one pet peeve: longbowmen shooting coordinated unaimed volleys high into the air rather than aiming.) That’s not what this movie is about. What’s here is fine, nicely realized and beautifully shot and orchestrated, but in the end it’s not enough.

Unworthy scaffold

When I had finished the film I was left wondering who The King is for. It is not and apparently was never intended to be a historical film, and its loose grasp on the real events and its otherwise forgiveable interest in atmosphere over authenticity work continuously against that kind of enjoyment. But The King doesn’t really work as an adaptation of Shakespeare either. In altering the plays it loses the Bard’s grasp on character and plot and, perhaps most grievously, his magnificent poetry. Whatever Michôd and Edgerton can come up with for the speech before Agincourt could never eclipse the words of Shakespeare’s Henry, and it doesn’t.

The King, like the title character himself, is handsomely mounted but lifeless, which is a shame considering the legendary stuff the filmmakers had to work with.

The Iliad XVIII-XX on Core Curriculum

Thetis commissions new armor for her son Achilles from Hephaistos

Episode nine of Core Curriculum’s ongoing deep read of Homer’s Iliad dropped this morning! In this episode, Michial Farmer, David Grubbs, and I talk through books XVIII, XIX, and XX of Homer’s great war epic.

In this section, Achilles, mad with rage at the death of his friend Patroclus at the hands of the Trojan prince Hector, vows revenge; his mother Thetis orders him a magnificent new suit of armor from the blacksmith god Hephaistos, including a remarkably detailed shield; Achilles has a short chat with his horses, who have definite opinions on what is about to happen; Agamemnon tries too late to make amends; and, with the gods agreeing among themselves not to interfere with whatever may happen next, Achilles returns to battle.

You can listen to Core Curriculum on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting apps, or via the embedded Stitcher player in this post. The shownotes, with pertinent links and glosses on our discussion including which translations we’re working from, are available at the Christian Humanist Radio Network website here.

I had a great time discussing Homer with Michial and David and, as always, I hope y’all enjoy our chat, too. Sad to say there are only two more episodes to go after this one. Thanks for listening!

The Iliad XVI-XVII on Core Curriculum

Episode eight of Core Curriculum’s series on the Iliad has arrived! I’m honored to appear as a guest along with host David Grubbs and fellow guest Carla Godwin. In this episode we discuss the drama, action, and tragedy of books XVI and XVII of Homer’s epic.

A lot happens in this chunk of the story, from Achilles’s concession to Patroclus that he lead the Myrmidons out to battle disguised in Achilles’s armor, the awe inspiring slaughter wrought by Patroclus, Hector’s intervention and Patroclus’s, the fight over Patroclus’s armor and corpse, and an amazing amount of ancient trashtalk. It’s brutal and thrilling and tragic and represents Homer at the height of his art. We discuss all this—and more—in this episode.

I had a great time recording this conversation and hope you enjoy listening to it, too. You can listen in via iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting apps, or via the Stitcher player embedded in this post. You can read the shownotes, including which translations we’re consulting as we read and talk, here. Thanks for listening!

The Shining on Book of Nature Podcast

Current mood

I’m excited to participate in the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s Halloween crossover event again this year. Last year, we did a series of episodes on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and I was a guest on the Christian Humanist Podcast to talk about The 39 Steps. This year, the network is focusing on the novels of Stephen King.

I was honored to be a guest on the Book of Nature Podcast along with Jay Eldred and regular host Charles Hackney, and together we discuss The Shining, one of King’s great early works and a classic of the horror genre. Along the way we talk about Stephen King’s personal history, the inspirations for the story (all hail Edgar Allan Poe!), the novel’s dramatization of the psychology of alcoholism and abuse, the real hero of the novel, and the relative merits of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation, including Jack Nicholson’s evil face.

If you’d like to catch the other episodes of the crossover, last week The Christian Feminist Podcast talked about Carrie, Monday my old haunt The City of Man Podcast dropped an episode on Revival, yesterday the flagship show talked about Misery, and tomorrow, Halloween proper, Danny Anderson’s Sectarian Review will talk about Pet Sematary.

Tune in and enjoy! You can listen in on the embedded Stitcher player above or via iTunes or other fine podcasting apps. And as always, thanks for listening! I’m blessed and honored to be involved with a network of such fun and intelligent people. Hope y’all enjoy listening as much as I did participating.