The Northman

Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth in The Northman

Every once in a while I leave the theatre after a movie and, as I cross the parking lot, realize that I’m… not groggy, exactly, but disoriented. A little out of it. Like the real world has become strange to me, like I’ve been gone a long time. The nearest thing I can compare this sensation to is waking up from a deep sleep and a very convincing and involving dream.

The Northman is the first time I’ve had that sensation in many years.

As I’ve written here before, calling a movie “immersive” is a marketing cliché but in this case it’s true, and not far into the story it swallowed me up utterly.

Amleth, Prince of Denmark

The Northman tells the story of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), the only son of the Danish king Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke). At the beginning of the film, Amleth eagerly awaits his father’s return from the raiding season. Aurvandil sails back with a fleet laden with loot and slaves and celebrates uproariously with his son, queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), kinsmen, and hearth-companions, but he broods as well over the need to prepare young Amleth for the responsibilities of manhood—chiefly defending his family and people or, as another character puts it later, “kindness to your kin [and] hatred to your enemies.”

The king takes Amleth through an arcane nightlong rite of passage and rewards him at the end with a neckring and pendant, a sign of his new status. But as they leave the temple where they had passed the night, the king’s bastard half-brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang) ambushes and kills the king. Amleth, witness to his father’s murder and the depredations of the warriors loyal to Fjölnir, sees his mother being borne off by his uncle before he takes a boat into the open sea, vowing revenge.

“Years later,” as the film tells us, Amleth lives among a band of raiders plundering their way up and down the rivers of the Rus, modern-day western Russia and Ukraine. After a bloody raid on a Slavic village, Amleth overhears a group of slavers divvying up their wares for shipment to distant markets and customers—Uppsala, Kiev, and an exiled king named Fjölnir. Amleth probes for information. Fjölnir was one of several petty kings unseated and driven out by King Harald Fairhair of Norway and lives in Iceland now. “He killed his brother for nothing,” Amleth’s fellow raider tells him. “Now he’s a sheepfarmer.”

Amleth, driven on by the prophecy of a seeress (Björk) he meets in the ruins of the Slavic village he just helped destroy, seizes this opportunity to embrace his fate and seek revenge. He steals Slavic clothing from a corpse, cuts off his hair, and joins the cargo of the slave ship heading for Iceland.

Along the way Amleth meets a prophetess named Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy) who is not fooled by his disguise and, upon arriving in Iceland, he insinuates himself into the slave population of his uncle’s farm. There, he observes his uncle Fjölnir, who is not just any sheepherder but a goði or chieftain and priest of the god Freyr, his mother Gudrún, and her two sons by Fjölnir, and bides his time, working his way up and searching steadfastly for the right moment to avenge his father and rescue his mother. And it soon proves he will need supernatural help.

If any of that sounded familiar, it should. “The Northman is Hamlet,” as James Berardinelli puts it in his review. Both stories originate with the medieval chronicler Saxo Grammaticus, who told the story of Amleth and his quest for revenge in his Gesta Danorum or History of the Danes. Shakespeare did his own thing with the story. What The Northman’s writers and director have done is set it in a hazy part of the Viking Age (the film begins in 895) where a fictional family could fit in and fashion the story into a “lost saga.” And all of the best elements of the Icelandic sagas are here: murder and revenge, seasons of raiding in the Baltic, dueling, outlawry, mountaintop swordfights, violent contact sports, as well as magic, cursed weapons, and ghosts worked without blinking into the workaday life of an Icelandic farm.

Eerie, involving, and exciting, not to mention brilliantly acted and staged with plenty of grim surprises throughout—it’s great.

Kindness to your kin

The Northman is so dramatic and involving and so loaded with nice details that I could easily turn this into a trivia section or bullet list of things I liked or simply noticed. But to keep this review manageable, I’m going to focus on three fairly broad things that I liked about the film.

First, the film is technically excellent. This is no surprise for a film from Robert Eggers, but it bears mentioning. The cinematography, sound, music, and sets are all outstanding, as are most of the costumes (about which more below). It’s also clear that a scrupulous attention to historical detail went into the design and construction of everything shown onscreen, and while it’s not perfect (no historical film will ever be), it’s the best the Viking Age has ever looked in a movie. I especially liked the cinematography, which has a pervasive gothic atmosphere and is dark and moody where appropriate—especially a scene in which Amleth has to visit a, shall we say, hostile location in order to obtain a sword—but also lets some sunshine and green pastures in. The film has a texture that sells everything in it as real, even the most hallucinatory parts.

Second, I appreciated the film’s heavy emphasis on religion. You might get the impression from other modern Viking stories, like Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred novels or that Kirk Douglas movie that I can’t help but enjoy, that the Vikings were essentially boisterous frat boys or laddish soccer hooligans with a tendency to kill people and occasionally mention Oðinn. Not so here. Religion is, realistically, central. The ulfheðnar with whom we first find the adult Amleth raiding in the east stage elaborate rituals ahead of their attacks; Fjölnir becomes, as I mentioned, a priest of the grotesque phallic god Freyr, and we see several rituals underway in the temple that is his responsibility; and we see parts of Norse funerals and other rites.

The Northman also presents us with a religiously diverse Norse world. Slavic slaves engage in hedonistic nature worship and Fjölnir’s farm has a number of Christian slaves—a realistic detail made all the more powerful by its subtlety. And there are both cultural gaps (one Icelander’s attempt to explain the Christian god underscores how little the Norse understand it) and cross-pollination, not to mention rivalry within even Norse heathenism. The chief deity in Aurvandil’s temple is Oðinn, while Fjölnir honors Freyr. This gives us an unusually realistic picture of unsystematic and ritual-oriented worship.

Much of the scenes of Norse religious ritual are, of necessity, speculative reconstructions. As Jackson Crawford has noted, the Christians who eventually wrote many of the stories from the Viking Age down apparently didn’t have much of a problem with mythology but weren’t going to include a how-to on sacrificing slaves to Oðinn. But Eggers and his team’s speculations seem reasonable to me, and unabashedly present the Vikings as weird. To us.

And that’s the third and final aspect of The Northman that I want to praise: Eggers refuses to soft-peddle the Vikings. Right from the beginning we see the key role slave-trading played in the Norse world, the extremes to which raiders would go to bring home a haul of good cargo, and the human cost of this much-romanticized lifestyle. (Watch a Slavic family try to slip their children out the backdoor of their hut when the Vikings arrive and see if your breath doesn’t catch just a little bit.) The film depicts horrific violence bluntly but not gratuitously, with some of the worst violence left to the imagination. This, too, captures the spirit of the sagas, which report shocking murders and mutilations with an almost journalistic blank face. And the principles guiding the characters—kindness to kin, hatred for enemies, honor, and, above all, fate—are their principles, not ours, and are not softened or adjusted for a modern audience.

What The Northman presents is a world in which violence and ruthlessness exist alongside admirable qualities, a juxtaposition anyone who has read any of the sagas will recognize. Even our heroes behave in ways modern people would find off-putting if not deplorable. And that’s a good thing. The Northman takes us entirely outside ourselves, into a world that doesn’t affirm us. In addition to entertaining, thrilling, and chilling us, it should also disturb and challenge us—as any good-faith encounter with the past should.

Hatred for your enemies

As I mentioned, the movie isn’t perfect, but I can dispense with most of my complaints briefly. For one, there’s probably too much yelling. If you watch it you’ll see what I mean. For another, while Eggers wisely dials the perverse ambiguity of The Lighthouse way down, there’s still perhaps a pinch too much of it, but most scenes in which this plays a role work just fine. And there are the inevitable lapses in historical accuracy or intrusions of anachronism. Most of these are minor or easy to miss—such as a shaman wearing the Ægishjálmur, a symbol popular among neopagans but most likely originating hundreds of years after the Viking Age, inscribed on a piece of birchbark on his head—but they’re there.

My biggest complaint was one I anticipated with the release of the first trailer back before Christmas: I’d still like a little less dirt on everybody, a little more hair care, and a little more color in the clothing. The costuming shows us a sharp distinction between different groups—slaves, warriors like the ulfheiðnar in the Kievan Rus, and nobility like Fjölnir—but the contrast may be a little too sharp. The Northman doesn’t reach Monty Python levels of gloom, filth, and matted hair, but it dabbles in all of those things. In a film that otherwise evinces such care in presenting historical people on their own terms, this seemed like too much of a concession to the Game of Thrones aesthetic.

But if that’s my biggest complaint, count me happy.

Conclusion

Throughout this review I’ve been more concerned with how The Northman brings us into its at simultaneously familiar and strange world, and what I appreciated about the filmmakers’ approach. But let me here, at the end, acknowledge again the outstanding performances by the cast and the surehandedness of Eggers as a director. Forceful, moody, well-acted, and completely involving, The Northman is an artistic masterpiece.

Cormac McCarthy and hope

Despair of or longing for hope? Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men

This spring I finally reread the very first novel by Cormac McCarthy I ever read—Blood Meridian. This is the worst possible place to begin in McCarthy’s body of work, but it was the one I had heard of and I slugged away at it over several months one summer in 2005 or 2006. I finished it as befuddled as I was impressed, but it stayed with me, and it only grew in my estimation over the years as I read more and more of his work and figured out who McCarthy was and what he was doing in that most baroque and bleak of his novels.

Rereading it was a revelation. I had intended to write a long review and appreciation here, but this has been the busiest and most difficult semester I’ve worked through in a while and that project never came to fruition.

But as I was reading about Blood Meridian I came across an admiring but not uncritical piece on McCarthy from Chilton Williamson Jr at the Spectator. After summarizing a few of McCarthy’s most nightmarish novels, giving special attention to Child of God, which has turned off more than one of my friends to McCarthy’s work, Williamson makes this striking argument in his conclusion:

I do not think it farfetched to imagine that McCarthy means to suggest the ability of art to conquer insanity and evil by raising them to a higher level, or power. If that is not indeed his intent, the sole plausible alternative is that McCarthy is a nihilist, which I do not believe. Nihilists are without hope. Yet, ‘People without hope,’ Flannery O’Connor thought, ‘do not write novels.’

Bringing Flannery O’Connor into it only set the hook deeper, of course.

This passage, delivered almost as a throwaway observation in the wake of Williamson’s summary of the most disturbing highlights in Child of God, caught my attention because as long as I’ve been reading McCarthy’s work I have heard and seen him called a nihilist, and just as long it has been my intuition that McCarthy is not.

What is more, I feel like this should be rather obvious, especially so in his two most recently published novels: No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006). Both are violent picaresques in which men flee evils that implacably pursue them across barren and desolate lands, and both end in the heroes’ deaths. Each has more than its share of the bleak and disturbing, not least The Road, which features, among other things in a landscape marked by some kind of apocalypse, cannibalism.

But the entire point of The Road is also hope. That’s precisely because it concerns preserving life into the next generation. The bleakness only emphasizes how important this remote and unlikely hope is and makes it shine all the brighter. Indeed, the most important and often-repeated metaphor at the heart of the book is that the unnamed father and son are “carrying the fire,” saving what they can—not least each other.*

And it is striking to me that the image of “carrying the fire” also appears in the conclusion of No Country for Old Men. Here’s Sheriff Bell’s concluding reflection on his father, which comes at the end of a novel marked throughout by greed and lethal, merciless violence:

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

Making a fire “somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold,” a spot of light and warmth built from the preserved remains of the past despite the dark and cold—if that’s not an image of hope I don’t know what is.

But the final piece of evidence is the very bleakness and violence in McCarthy’s novels. Evil in McCarthy’s work always is evil, and while it is often random and casual it is never presented indifferently. Indeed, the characters most indifferent to and animalistic in the violence they inflict, as in Glanton’s crew of scalphunters in Blood Meridian or the various cartel thugs in No Country, are the most clearly and purely evil. Everyone else is mixed, whether Judge Holden, a titan of both intellect and perversity and the most clearly Satanic figure in any of McCarthy’s books; or the Kid, in whom “broods already a taste for mindless violence” on page one but who learns nonetheless what good and evil are; or Llewelyn Moss, a seemingly straightforward working man protagonist who sets the plot of No Country for Old Men in motion by stealing and running and only keeps it going by refusing to give up his loot.

None of this would matter to a nihilist, and as O’Connor put it in the line quoted by Williamson above, “People without hope do not write novels.”

What I think McCarthy might be more interested in is guilt and sin, and it is only true to life that everyone and everything is tainted with it. And only when one is indisputably, bluntly, violently confronted with one’s need for hope can hope be made clearest and most enticing.** Per Sheriff Bell, you’ll love the fire more if you know how dark and cold the night is.

There’s certainly more to consider here, and I don’t pretend to have reached the bottom of this. But I think Williamson is right to contend with those who characterize McCarthy as a prophet of meaninglessness and despair, and to suggest, even in passing, some of where McCarthy may hide those elusive and flickering embers of hope.

You can read Williamson’s entire piece on McCarthy at the Spectator here. I was pushed to finally reread Blood Meridian by an appreciative but in many ways wrongheaded essay on the novel at the LA Review of Books, which you can read here.

*I read The Road as a single college senior when it was first published. I reread it a few years ago as the father of three. If you’re a father and take your duties at all seriously, read and reread The Road. Here are some thoughts from when I reread it a few years ago.

**Here’s Flannery O’Connor again: “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Mound-dweller sighting in The Northman’s new trailer

Ian Whyte as the Mound-Dweller in The Northman

Update: You can read my full review of The Northman here. While I don’t directly address the mound-dweller scene in my review, let me endorse it and say it was one of the film’s highlights.

Yesterday a second official trailer for The Northman appeared on YouTube. As with the original teaser released before Christmas, which I wrote about here, this new trailer doesn’t provide a lot of plot specifics but does offer an abundance of intriguing snippets mostly conveying the same impression as the teaser—murder, revenge, and plenty of bloodletting along the way. It also offered something new, something not seen in the teaser: a mound-dweller.

At the 0:55 mark in the trailer we get three shots in two seconds. First, in a match cut from a deranged-looking Willem Dafoe, the corpse of a helmeted man enthroned in deep shadow. His eyes open. Next, presumably the same figure hunkering down behind a shield and raising a sword, a typical early medieval attack stance. Finally, an over-the-shoulder of the helmeted figure bearing down on the hero, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) as they fight in a tight, gloomy space surrounded by barrels, jars, and at least one shield, all within what looks like the gunwales of a ship.

It’s not much, but oh, how much it suggests. These two seconds show an instantly recognizable encounter with a mound-dweller—the ghost of Old Norse literature.

Caveats and corpses

I use the word ghost advisedly, since ghosts as the Norse conceived of and described them in the sagas are wildly different from the floating, translucent spooks you can simulate with a bedsheet. First, and most importantly, they are corporeal. These ghosts have bodies and can—and sometimes must—be killed a second time. In this respect they are more like zombies, undead revenants that can be killed. Unlike zombies, they are often swollen or grown to enormous size: “big as a bull” is a common description.

Second, it’s not typically hard to locate a mound-dweller. Just look for the mound or barrow where the undead was buried; this will usually be a local landmark. (Old Norse ghost-hunting shows would end after one episode, but probably be much more entertaining.) The mound-dweller, true to its name, could in a sense be said to “live” in its barrow.

Finally, mound-dwellers are almost always hostile. The bedsheet ghost or poltergeist might content itself with moaning at night or trashing a room. Mound-dwellers can be devastatingly destructive, killing cattle and any people it can catch.

Beyond that, there’s some variety in how these ghosts are described and how they behave, something reflected in the terminology. A commonly applied word is draugr, a general term for an undead revenant. I want to avoid implying that there’s a precise taxonomy to these creatures, but two other words for draugar are suggestive of different kinds:

After-walkers

The first, the aptrganga (literally the “after-walker,” i.e. walking around after he’s dead), roams around, usually at night, causing trouble and killing people or damaging property before returning to its barrow. These are the most fearful and destructive ghosts.

A famous is Víga-Hrappr or Killer Hrapp, a man who appears in Laxdæla saga or The Saga of the People of Laxardal. A pushy neighbor and household tyrant, Hrapp actually drives his neighbors to combine against him for mutual support. He finally dies—in bed, weakened but still malicious, and asking to be buried sitting upright so he can watch the house. These are all bad signs. The saga writer goes on:

But if it had been difficult to deal with him when he was alive, he was much worse dead, for he haunted the area relentlessly. It is said that in his haunting he killed most of his servants. To most of the people living in the vicinity he caused no end of difficulty and the farm at Hrappstadir became deserted.

One of the saga’s heroes, Hoskuld, disinters Hrapp and reburies him farther from everyone’s farms. “Hrapp’s haunting,” the saga writer tells us, “decreased considerably after this.” That’s not enough assurance for a lot of people, including Hrapp’s widow, who refuses to move back, so Hoskuld himself moves into the area. It’s Hoskuld’s son, Olaf the Peacock, who finally rids Laxardal of Killer Hrapp.

One evening the farmhand in charge of the non-milking cattle came to Olaf and asked him to assign the task to someone else and ‘give me other duties’.

Olaf answered, ‘I want you to look after your own duties.’

The man replied he would rather leave the farm.

‘Then you must think something is seriously wrong,’ Olaf said. ‘I’ll accompany you tonight when you tie the animals in their stalls, and if you’ve any cause for complaint, I won’t blame you. Otherwise you’ll pay for causing trouble.’

Olaf then took the spear known as the King’s Gift in his hand and went out, the servant following him. Quite a lot of snow had fallen.

They reached the cowshed, which stood open, and Olaf told the servant to go inside, saying. ‘I’ll herd the animals inside for you and you tie them in their places.’

The servant went towards the door of the cowshed but suddenly came running back into Olaf’s arms.

When Olaf asked what had frightened him so, the servant answered, ‘Hrapp is standing there in the doorway, reaching out for me, and I’ve had my fill of wrestling with him.’

Olaf approached the door and prodded with his spear in Hrapp’s direction. Hrapp gripped the spear just above the blade in both hands and gave it a wrench, breaking the shaft. Olaf made a run at him, but Hrapp let himself sink back down to where he had come from, putting an end to their struggle.

Hrapp having cheated by sinking into the ground and ending the fight, Olaf goes to the place where Hoskuld had reburied Hrapp and opens the grave, in which he finds eerie confirmation of the previous night’s struggle: “Hrapp’s body was perfectly preserved and Olaf found his spear blade there.” Olaf has the body burned and the ashes scattered at sea, ending the haunting.

The outlaw Grettir the Strong fights and kills two draugar in the saga named after him. The second, a shepherd named Glam, freezes to death and returns as a ghost to terrify the farm where he died. When Glam enters the farmer’s hall at night, Grettir confronts him, cuts off his head, and stuffs it between the corpse’s legs against the buttocks.

The mound-dweller proper

But the first of the two draugar that Grettir fights in his saga belongs to the other subset: it’s a haugbúi, a mound-dweller devoted to protecting its mound and grave goods. Told of Kar the Old’s haunting and terrorization of the countryside, Grettir resolves to kill the ghost—not by waiting to encounter it in the wild, by accident, but by entering the mound and confronting it:

The night passed; Grettir appeared early the next morning, and the [farmer], who had got all the tools for digging ready, went with Grettir to the howe [barrow or grave mound]. Grettir broke open the grave, and worked with all his might, never stopping until he came to wood, by which time the day was already spent. He tore away the woodwork; Audun implored him not to go down, but Grettir bade him attend to the rope, saying that he meant to find out what it was that dwelt there. Then he descended into the howe. It was very dark and the odour was not pleasant. He began to explore how it was arranged, and found the bones of a horse. Then he knocked against a sort of throne in which he was aware of a man seated. There was much treasure of gold and silver collected together, and a casket under his feet, full of silver. Grettir took all the treasure and went back towards the rope, but on his way he felt himself seized by a strong hand. He left the treasure to close with his aggressor and the two engaged in a merciless struggle. Everything about them was smashed. The howedweller made a ferocious onslaught. Grettir for some time gave way, but found that no holding back was possible. They did not spare each other. Soon they came to the place where the horse's bones were lying, and here they struggled for long, each in turn being brought to his knees. At last it ended in the howedweller falling backwards with a horrible crash, whereupon Audun above bolted from the rope, thinking that Grettir was killed. Grettir then drew his sword Jokulsnaut, cut off the head of the howedweller and laid it between his thighs.

Most prized of the treasures Grettir recovers from Kar’s mound is a sword, and many of the stories in which heroes break open mounds do so either with the result of or, as with the shieldmaiden Hervor in The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek, for the express purpose of getting a sword.

Conclusion

Again, I want to emphasize that Norse literature doesn’t present a Linnaean taxonomy of supernatural creatures, and you should have noticed some overlap and sloppiness in how the passages quoted here describe these creatures. Kar the Old, though explicitly a mound-dweller, apparently also leaves the mound sometimes, driving people out of the area just like Killer Hrapp. And Killer Hrapp, a clear case of the after-walker, is dispatched like any mound-dweller—disinterred and destroyed.

The three terms I’ve unpacked are not apparently completely interchangeable, but there is enough overlap to allow for using them loosely. What mattered more to the saga writers and the generations of Icelanders who handed these stories down was the stories themselves. And those stories have inspired generations of storytellers and writers since, including myself.

The ghosts in The Saga of Grettir the Strong and other sagas directly inspired my first published novel, No Snakes in Iceland. In that story, set on a farm in late 10th-century Iceland, the brother of a prosperous farmer drowns in a frozen river and, following his hurried burial in a mound, returns to terrorize his brother’s farmstead and those of the surrounding valley. He rides the house like a horse, kills cattle and men, and, in his bloodiest attack, breaks into the farmstead’s hall itself. The novel’s narrator, Edgar, an Anglo-Saxon nobleman and poet living in self-imposed exile, reluctantly accepts the task of killing the ghost. This proves harder than even Edgar anticipates, and also reveals that there is much more going on among these farmsteads than the attacks of a ghost.

But rather than the roving, cattle-throttling variety, The Northman’s ghost seems pretty clearly to be the mound-dweller proper—and not just any mound-dweller, but one buried enthroned, in fine armor, aboard a ship loaded with goods. What we get in those two seconds of the trailer is strikingly reminiscent of Grettir’s battle with Kar the Old in his mound. Further, the actor playing the mound-dweller, Ian Whyte, a stuntman and former basketball player, stands over seven feet tall, so the filmmakers have clearly also gone for the “big as a bull” characteristic for this mound-dweller. It’s hard to tell from what we get in the trailer, but it should be fantastically intimidating.

I don’t know at what point in the film Amleth’s raid on the mound will take place, or what he will seek there or why (though I’d be surprised if a famous sword doesn’t come out of it), but I’m most looking forward to encountering this ghost.

More if you’re interested

One of the sagas I mentioned here, The Saga of the People of Laxardal, is collected with other goods ones in the excellent Penguin volume The Sagas of Icelanders. It’s Keneva Kunz’s translation in that volume that I quoted from above. It and The Saga of Grettir the Strong are also available in individual volumes from Penguin Classics, as is Eyrbyggja Saga, another saga with a detailed ghost story. And Jackson Crawford’s recent translation of The Saga of Hervor and Heiðrek in Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes includes the strikingly different encounter with a mound-dweller that I allude to above. You can also read most of these for free online at the Icelandic Saga Database, whose translation of Grettir I quote above.

On YouTube, Jackson Crawford offers a concise but detailed breakdown of Old Norse ghosts using the story in Eyrbyggja Saga, with his usual careful attention to the sources, here. If that’s only whetted your appetite for this stuff, he also has an excellent hourlong interview on mound-dwellers, trolls, and other such creatures with University of Iceland Professor Ármann Jakobsson here.

The Northman arrives in theatres next week. Check out the new trailer either embedded above or on YouTube here. And if you can’t get wait or simply want more mound-dweller in your diet, please give my novel No Snakes in Iceland a read.

Robert Eggers and the art of constraint

The New Yorker published a very interesting long profile of filmmaker Robert Eggers last week. Eggers is the writer and director of three films, including The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, which is due out in less than three weeks. While I found the artsy ambiguity of The Lighthouse too self-reverential and pretentious, I’ve deeply admired both of his previous movies for their attention to historical detail, dialect, setting, and atmosphere. I look forward to The Northman for those reasons, especially since this film will tell a story in my personal wheelhouse.

The whole profile is worth reading, but I wanted to draw attention to two things about Eggers’s craft that I particularly appreciate.

Against Scooby-Doo materialism

First, a point made obliquely, not by Eggers himself but by director Alfonso Cuarón:

Alfonso Cuarón, the director of Gravity and Roma, read Eggers’s screenplay of The Witch in 2013, when the movie was still in development. “I was just in awe of it,” [Cuarón] told me. “I was, like, more than anything, curious.” Cuarón observed that, unlike other filmmakers, who treat the magical or the symbolic as breaks from normality, Eggers makes no such distinction. “It’s as if those elements are as natural as the weather. And people coexist with those elements as a matter of existence,” Cuarón said. “There’s no question about the existence of witches. There’s no ulterior explanation. . . . It was just witches.”

This, indeed, is one of my favorite things about The Witch as well. There’s no ambiguity, no explaining away, and no revelation of fakery at the end (what I call “Scooby-Doo materialism”), just the grim reality that this evil is real, and a real threat. Eggers presents all of this on the characters’ own terms, as people of their time and place and background understood them. I wish more historical films could nail this the way The Witch does.

In addition to selflessly getting modern assumptions out of the way and presenting an alien world as it understood itself, this storytelling technique or philosophy can also have dramatic power. Presenting the supernatural as frankly and doubtlessly real was my plan going into my novel No Snakes in Iceland, in which a 10th-century Christian Anglo-Saxon living in heathen Iceland is recruited to kill a draugr or aptrganga—a corporeal ghost. Unlike The Witch, however, it takes a while for the supernatural to show up, so that it is a surprise when the ghost does appear and does wreak havoc in inimitable Icelandic fashion. More than one reader has told me that the ghost being real, as described by the parade of characters assuring the narrator that it is, was like a plot twist in and of itself.

For artistic constraint

I also appreciate the profile’s attention to Eggers’s artistic restraint and constraint. This theme runs through the entire piece but is especially clear in a few places, as when Eggers’s Northman co-writer Sjón, an Icelandic poet and novelist, talks about situation their film’s story in the middle of a real time and place:

Writing The Northman with Eggers, Sjón imagined the script as a missing saga. Most of the story takes place in the year 914, during the early settlement of Iceland but before the founding of the Althing, the parliament, in 930. “There is still a certain kind of lawlessness,” Sjón said. “I realized that we could slip in a family there, that settled early and then just disappeared from the face of the earth.”

Working within rather than against the history, finding gaps where you can “slip in” a story that will mesh with known history—this is exactly right, and is the approach I worked through for the novel I’m still revising, which is set in the hazy borderlands between the Anglo-Saxons of the Migration Era and the British kingdoms of what is now Wales in a period without a lot of firm documentation.

As I hinted above, Eggers also constrains himself to the viewpoint, beliefs, priorities, and practices of his historical subjects. Eggers is not apparently a religious man, but he presented the bleak Calvinism of The Witch’s Puritan characters fairly. In The Northman he apparently presents the Vikings with uncomfortable accuracy, refusing to step in and editorialize on behalf of modern sensibilities or to (more insidiously) soften their attitudes:

On a bad day, you’re in the tenth month of the edit and you’re trying to deal with notes from a test screening in Texas, where the audience was befuddled by the Nordic accents, character names like Leifr Seal’s Testicle, and the unsettling moral outlook of tenth-century Iceland. “None of those things are changing,” Eggers said, while Ford was processing footage of the young Amleth, hiding in a forest. He started to laugh. “Like, those things can’t change. And those are kind of the biggest obstacles.”

Again, an audience unsettled by contact with an alien world is probably a good sign. Or so I hope, since this is something else I’m dealing with in my current manuscript.

That’s story and setting. Here’s another passage on Eggers’s filmmaking technique. After describing the precise and minutely planned storyboards and utterly minimal camera movement, the essay’s author turns to The Northman’s stars, Alexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy:

During the first two weeks, in which Amleth [the protagonist] mostly labored on a farm, Skarsgård felt conflicted by the filming process. “I’m not used to working in that way,” he said. “There was a moment where I was, like, I could either freak the fuck out . . . because you feel like: Well, there’s no space for me to explore my character. I’m a robot.” But Skarsgård chose to submit: “You play around with it, and then small details will then open up, like a flood of inspiration, and suddenly you’re in it.”

Taylor-Joy, who was working with Eggers for the first time in six years, realized how much of her conduct on set derives from their work together. “Who I am, or how I identify as a performer and a collaborator, really does come from ‘The Witch,’ ” she told me. “If you come onto a movie that’s already been storyboarded . . . and you know that’s the way the film’s going to look, I actually find that incredibly liberating,” she said. “I can do my own version of this dance within the parameters that have been set. And I’ll end up with something more interesting[.]”

Modern artists, be they poets or novelists or painters or sculptors or architects or composers or filmmakers, bridle at constraint and are skilled at developing ideological schema to justify casting it off: formal poetry, representational art, realistic sculpture, classical architecture—these are all inauthentic, clichéd, bourgeois, repressive, eurocentric, racist, et cetera et cetera ad nauseam world without end. These are all excuses for ill discipline and chaos. They also obscure bad art. A cynical man would say that’s the whole point.

But real art, like real love, embraces limitation and constraint—even purely artificial, arbitrary ones. Perhaps especially the essentially arbitrary ones. Why fourteen lines for a sonnet, or common meter for a ballad, or rhyme at all? (In two novels now I’ve intentionally limited my vocabulary based purely on etymological considerations no one may even notice. But it matters to me and to the story.) Eggers is an object lesson in the value of rules, order, and form. He doesn’t have to shoot his movies the way he does, but he and his actors all benefit from his willing submission to constraints, even finding themselves, as Taylor-Joy puts it, liberated, freed to explore creatively with a space that wouldn’t exist without those constraints.

Or as a wise man once put it, rules and order “give room for good things to run wild.” That was Chesterton on Christianity, of course, but even more to the point is this on art itself: “Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

This is wisdom Eggers clearly and rightly intuits, and I’m grateful that he’s let it shape his artistic sensibilities so profoundly. I hope he uses his powers for good.

Conclusion

I’ve written on self-imposed artistic constraints before in reference to historian John Lukacs and, of all people, Jerry Seinfeld. You can read all of The New Yorker’s excellent profile of Eggers here.

John Buchan's nightmare

John Buchan (1875-1940), 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, during his time as Governor General of Canada, c. 1935

I’ve been reading a lesser-known early novel by John Buchan called A Lost Lady of Old Years. Buchan is most famous for his “shockers”—what we would now call thrillers—especially the espionage adventure The Thirty-Nine Steps and its first sequel, a World War I thriller set in the Ottoman Middle East, Greenmantle. The novel I’m reading is clearly an early work (he published at the age of 24, having written it during his last years at Oxford), but it’s highly enjoyable and got me interested in Buchan the man again. That led me to “‘Realism colored by poetry,’ rereading John Buchan,” a marvelous essay at The New Criterion. This is an insightful appreciation of Buchan’s work as well as an examination of the man himself. Just the ticket.

But a passage in that essay, quoted from Buchan’s memoir Memory Hold-the-Door, which was published posthumously in 1940 after Buchan’s death in Canada earlier that year, really caught my eye in an unexpected way.

In a chapter near the end, where Buchan reflects on the meaning of civilization in the context of an era of world wars and mass slaughter, he pauses over the idea of “a return to the Dark Ages.” Buchan doesn’t let the snide shorthand of this medieval stereotype go, pointing out the “many points of light” that glowed fervently through the most dislocated and chaotic phases of the period, and concludes that such fears were unfounded.

But—

While Buchan “did not dread a return of the Dark Ages,” he did have profound civilizational worries in another direction:

My nightmare, when I was afflicted by nightmares, was of something very different. My fear was not barbarism, which is civilisation submerged or not yet born, but de-civilisation, which is civilisation gone rotten.

He then describes his nightmare—a world of globalist technocratic mastery combined with soullessness and dissipation—which I quote in toto:

But suppose that science has gained all its major victories, and that there remain only little polishings and adjustments. It has wrested from nature a full provision for human life, so that there is no longer need for long spells of monotonous toil and a bitter struggle for bread. Victory having been won, the impulse to construct has gone. The world has become a huge, dapper, smooth-running mechanism. Would that be the perfecting of civilisation? Would it not rather mean de-civilisation, a loss of the supreme values of life?

In my nightmare I could picture such a world. I assumed—no doubt an impossible assumption—that mankind was as amply provided for as the inmates of a well-managed orphanage. New inventions and a perfecting of transport had caused the whole earth to huddle together. There was no corner of the globe left unexplored and unexploited, no geographical mysteries to fire the imagination. Broad highways crowded with automobiles threaded the remotest lands, and overhead great air-liners carried week-end tourists to the wilds of Africa and Asia. Everywhere there were guest-houses and luxury hotels and wayside camps and filling-stations. What once were the savage tribes of Equatoria and Polynesia were now in reserves as an attraction to trippers, who bought from them curios and holiday mementoes. The globe, too, was full of pleasure-cities where people could escape the rigour of their own climate and enjoy perpetual holiday.

In such a world everyone would have leisure. But everyone would be restless, for there would be no spiritual discipline in life. Some kind of mechanical philosophy of politics would have triumphed, and everybody would have his neat little part in the state machine. Everybody would be comfortable, but since there could be no great demand for intellectual exertion everybody would be also slightly idiotic. Their shallow minds would be easily bored, and therefore unstable. Their life would be largely a quest for amusement. The raffish existence led to-day by certain groups would have become the normal existence of large sections of society.

Some kind of intellectual life no doubt would remain, though the old political disputes would have cancelled each other out, and the world would not have the stimulus of a contest of political ideals, which is, after all, a spiritual thing. Scientists and philosophers would still spin theories about the universe. Art would be in the hands of coteries, and literature dominated by petites chapelles. There would be religion, too, of a kind, in glossy upholstered churches with elaborate music. It would be a feverish, bustling world, self-satisfied and yet malcontent, and under the mask of a riotous life there would be death at the heart. The soil of human nature, which in the Dark Ages lay fallow, would now be worked out. Men would go everywhere and live nowhere; know everything and understand nothing. In the perpetual hurry of life there would be no chance of quiet for the soul. In the tumult of a jazz existence what hope would there be for the still small voices of the prophets and the philosophers and poets? A world which claimed to be a triumph of the human personality, would in truth have killed that personality. In such a bagman’s paradise, where life would be rationalised and added with every material comfort, there would be little satisfaction for the immortal part of man. It would be a new Vanity Fair with Mr. Talkative as the chief figure on the town council. The essence of civilisation lies in man’s defiance of an impersonal universe. It makes no difference that a mechanised universe may be his own creation if he allows his handiwork to enslave him. Not for the first time in history have the idols that humanity has shaped for its own ends become its master.

As pure and prophetic a dystopian vision as anything in Huxley’s Brave New World, and one that I think has mostly come true. Compare Buchan’s description here of the kind of people produced by this nightmare world—comfortable but idiotic, cosmopolitan but deracinated, knowledgeable but unwise, busy but fruitless—with those described by Ernst Jünger in The Forest Passage, which I blogged about here earlier this year.

More if you’re interested

The novel I’m reading, A Lost Lady of Old Years, is set during the Jacobite Rising of 1745 and a fun read so far. You can read the essay that directed me to Buchan’s memoirs at The New Criterion here. And Buchan’s Memory Hold-the-Door is available in its entirety here. And to go slightly further afield, some friends and I talked about Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps on a podcast a few years ago. You can find that here.

When Muggeridge met Chesterton

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-90) at work; GK Chesterton (1874-36) reading in Brighton, 1935

Yesterday at our local used book store I snagged a one-volume copy of Malcolm Muggeridge’s Chronicles of Wasted Time: An Autobiography. It’s rare to find any Muggeridge books—at least at the bookstores I most often visit—so I was excited to run across this one. And in leafing through it I found this marvelous anecdote near the very beginning, in which Muggeridge describes his childhood encounter with GK Chesterton:

Chesterton, complete with pince-nez, about the time of the scene described by Muggeridge

[A]s a child, a writer was in my eyes a kind of god; any writer, no matter how obscure, or even bogus, he might be. To compare a writer with some famous soldier or administrator or scientist or politician or actor was, in my estimation, quite ludicrous. There was no basis for comparison; any more than between, say, Francis of Assisi and Dr Spock. Perhaps more aware of this passion than I realised, when I was still a schoolboy my father [Labour politician HT Muggeridge] took me to a dinner at a Soho restaurant at which G. K. Chesterton was being entertained. I remember that the proprietor of the restaurant presented me with a box of crystallised fruits which turned out to be bad. As far as I was concerned, it was an occasion of inconceivable glory. I observed with fascination the enormous bulk of the guest of honour, his great stomach and plump hands; how his pince-nez on a black ribbon were almost lost in the vast expanse of his face, and how when he delivered himself of what he considered to be a good remark he had a way of blowing into his moustache with a sound like an expiring balloon. His speech, if he made one, was lost on me, but I vividly recall how I persuaded my father to wait outside the restaurant while we watched the great man make his way down the street in a billowing black cloak and old-style bohemian hat with a large brim.

This child’s perspective is wonderfully evocative. And it also reminds me of a passage from Chesterton’s own work—The Man Who was Thursday, when undercover policeman Gabriel Syme reaches the meeting of the highest anarchist council and encounters the terrible and mysterious Friday:

Then, as Syme continued to stare at them, he saw something that he had not seen before. He had not seen it literally because it was too large to see. At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of the perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme had seen him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break down the balcony of stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact that he was abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved deliberately as colossal. His head, crowned with white hair, as seen from behind looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that stood out from it looked larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to scale; and this sense of size was so staggering, that when Syme saw him all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle and become dwarfish. They were still sitting there as before with their flowers and frock-coats, but now it looked as if the big man was entertaining five children to tea.

As Syme and the guide approached the side door of the hotel, a waiter came out smiling with every tooth in his head.

“The gentlemen are up there, sare,” he said. “They do talk and they do laugh at what they talk. They do say they will throw bombs at ze king.”

And the waiter hurried away with a napkin over his arm, much pleased with the singular frivolity of the gentlemen upstairs.

The two men mounted the stairs in silence.

Syme had never thought of asking whether the monstrous man who almost filled and broke the balcony was the great President of whom the others stood in awe. He knew it was so, with an unaccountable but instantaneous certainty. Syme, indeed, was one of those men who are open to all the more nameless psychological influences in a degree a little dangerous to mental health. Utterly devoid of fear in physical dangers, he was a great deal too sensitive to the smell of spiritual evil. Twice already that night little unmeaning things had peeped out at him almost pruriently, and given him a sense of drawing nearer and nearer to the head-quarters of hell. And this sense became overpowering as he drew nearer to the great President.

The form it took was a childish and yet hateful fancy. As he walked across the inner room towards the balcony, the large face of Sunday grew larger and larger; and Syme was gripped with a fear that when he was quite close the face would be too big to be possible, and that he would scream aloud. He remembered that as a child he would not look at the mask of Memnon in the British Museum, because it was a face, and so large.

There is a great deal of wink-wink self-parody in Chesterton’s work (cf. Innocent Smith in Manalive), but it had never occurred to me that those parodies might include the gargantuan—and ultimately quite surprising—Friday. Something I’m going to consider next time I read it.

Muggeridge concludes his anecdote on a note of nostalgia tinged, as all real nostalgia is, with melancholy:

I only saw him once again. That was years later, shortly before he died, when on a windy afternoon he was sitting outside the Ship Hotel at Brighton, and clutching to himself a thriller in a yellow jacket. It, too, like the pince-nez, seemed minute by comparison with his immensity. By that time, the glory of the earlier occasion had departed.

As it happens, I’ve seen two photos of Chesterton in Brighton from 1935, the year before he died: one of him walking down the seafront across the street from the Old Ship Hotel and one that closely matches Muggeridge’s description of Chesterton reading (see also the top of this post).

Like I said, two wonderful and vividly realized reminiscences. Looking forward to reading more in this book.

More notes on The Batman

Vengeance comes for the Penguin in The Batman

I haven’t gotten to see The Batman a second time yet, but it’s stuck with me. It’s among the best movies I’ve seen in the last few years, and so I’ve been thinking about it a lot since. And while I’ve mostly stayed out of online discussions surrounding the film, I have come across a few interesting and thought-provoking items like these.

So, for those of y’all who have seen The Batman and/or read my review, here are some further notes that I think can enrich your discussion or understanding in the form of a disputation and a meditation:

Ready… fight!

Jack Butler of National Review is one of my favorite young conservative writers, not least because he takes the arts and storytelling seriously and has generally excellent taste. His writing on Dune and Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation are good reading, as are his posts about his hopes and worries for Amazon’s Rings of Power series. And don’t miss his takedown of Ross Douthat’s lockdown-induced Stockholm Syndrome for the Star Wars prequels.

But Butler’s take on The Batman was one of his rare bad takes. A very bad take. He writes that the movie is “far too long” and that while “the film sells itself as an authentic detective story . . . most of the clues are figured out without any real sense of how Batman arrived at the conclusion.” It was long because it was filled with scenes of Batman examining evidence, laboriously following leads, patiently staking out crime scenes and observing suspects, and interrogating people. You know—detective work. I could easily understand someone complaining that there’s too much gumshoeing in The Batman, but claiming the movie doesn’t explain how Batman figures things out? Bizarre.

Butler also questions Batman’s motivations, describing Pattinson’s Batman/Bruce Wayne as “largely a cipher,” dings Colin Farrell’s Penguin as “pointlessly unrecognizable,” and calls Riddler’s online following “odd” since “the Riddler is, well, correct about the corruption of Gotham that he seeks to expose,” as if Batman villains have no history of kind of having a valid point.

And there is also typical internet nitpicking, as when Butler writes that Batman “survives an explosion and multiple volleys of various kinds of gunfire—including a shotgun blast to the chest—without much effect on him.” While Batman’s body armor kept that shotgun blast from killing him, the concussion nearly incapacitates him (realistically, since body armor stops bullets by redistributing their force across a broad area, meaning you might not “get shot” but it’ll look and feel like you’ve been worked over with a baseball bat). The movie goes out of its way to show this, leaving one wondering how much Butler was even paying attention.

But like Butler’s earlier contretemps with Douthat over the Star Wars prequels (in which, again, Butler was 100% correct), there is pushback from within National Review—this time in the form of Kyle Smith, a professional film critic I mostly like. Smith’s initial review of The Batman was positive, and he sticks up for the film in a solid response to Butler. Responding to an offhand comment from Butler that The Batman brings unwarranted gravity and complexity to kiddie stories, Smith writes:

We have plenty of movies for kids. Most of the other studio pictures these days amount to a birthday party for middle-schoolers: Yay, here’s the piñata and let’s have some cake. Birthday parties are fine with me. Spider-Man: No Way Home is such a movie done poorly; Spider-Man: Homecoming was such a movie done brilliantly. However, there is a place for grownup movies.

And, that’s what The Batman is: “a different type of movie: the kind made for grownups.” Which is precisely what I thought, with a sigh of relief, as I watched an intricate, careful, slow-moving story develop. It doesn’t dumb things down, it doesn’t overexplain, it doesn’t think the audience can’t follow what’s happening, and it doesn’t preach.

Ultimately, Smith writes, “we rate a film based on how well it does whatever it’s trying to do, not whether it’s the movie you imagined seeing when you bought your ticket, or whether it’s the movie promised in the trailers, or whether it’s like previous movies featuring the same characters.” This is essentially a rephrasing of the late Roger Ebert’s basic rule for reviewing movies—review the movie the filmmakers made, not the one you wish they’d made—and while Rog sometimes failed to live up to his own rule, it’s nonetheless a worthy ideal.

Read Smith’s first review here, Butler’s post here, and Smith’s rebuttal here. And, if you’re a National Review completist and need to perform penance for something, you can read Armond White’s typically perverse and pretentious review here.

More than vengeance

That’s the dispute, now for the meditation. In what is probably the best thing I’ve read on The Batman thus far, Alexi Sargeant elaborates on some themes I discerned but had only partially thought through and concisely lays out some of what I could only gesture toward in my review last week. He also, indirectly, answers the worst of Butler’s criticisms.

After noting the role played by tainted legacies in all of the characters’ storylines and the importance of shouldering responsibility, which is what sets Batman apart, Sargeant looks at one of the film’s most intriguing and unsettling plot developments—the way the Riddler has been inspired by Batman: “He’s also reacting to corruption, but in the extreme manner of those maddened by ideology. His murders are baroque, but the underlying schema is like Batman’s, sans moral compunctions.” He “doesn’t view himself as Batman’s opposite, but rather considers the Dark Knight a kindred spirit.”

So far so Joker, right? Sargeant continues:

[W]hile many films use some hero-villain parallel as a trope, fewer have the hero explicitly choose to change for the better after recognizing a disturbing kinship with his foe. It’s when one of the Riddler’s own radicalized acolytes claims the mantle of “Vengeance” that Batman commits to a different path. In the end, it’s better to light a Bat-flare than to curse (or embrace) the darkness. In some of the movie’s final scenes, we see Batman as a torchbearer for a battered Gotham rising out of the deluge of its sins. He steps out of the shadows and can be seen by his fellow Gothamites for what he is: a wounded man trying to do right by them. By losing his persona as an inhuman minister of retribution, he becomes a more genuinely inspiring hero.

I was surprised, watching The Batman, how early in the proceedings Batman uttered his “I’m vengeance” line from the trailers. That’s the kind of thing filmmakers usually build up to, as in a famous episode of “Batman: The Animated Series.” But Reeves’s film takes this as Batman’s immature starting point and tests him, confronting him with more sinister versions of similarly motivated people, and forces him to grow past it: “beyond vengeance,” as Sargeant’s piece is titled.

An excellent essay, and a good sample of how rich this particular movie is. Read the whole thing here.

Rationality's bumptious myopia

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a post, based on an aside in John Lukacs’s book The Hitler of History, about why it’s a mistake to assume Hitler was insane. In addition to being untrue—which is reason enough—to do so absolves Hitler of moral responsibility for his actions and distances us from some needed self-reflection.

Today at The Critic I came across this excellent short piece by Stephen Wigmore: “Putin must be mad… and other lies Western elites tell themselves.” From the introduction:

Nobody is infallible, but it’s interesting that many commentators seem to respond, not by reflecting on their own mistaken assumptions, but by declaring that the problem wasn’t their analysis, but just that Putin was intrinsically “irrational”, “deeply irrational”, “not in his right mind”, an “irrational actor”, etc, and therefore, presumably, impossible to predict.

This sounds suspiciously like a cop-out, from people who have failed again to do the thing they claim expertise in: understanding the minds and thinking of global leaders and political actors. This isn’t just people instinctively covering their backsides, but reflects a mistaken and superficial understanding of what “rationality” is, that underpins the worldview of modern progressive liberalism.

Wigmore examines Putin’s perspective on world events, contemporary political alignments, Russian security and economic needs, and the very history of Russia itself—filtered through Putin’s Pan-Slavic nationalism—to explain that Putin is, by his lights, proceeding rationally: “None of this is to say Putin’s decision was wise or correct or even safe for him, let alone anyone else. The decision to invade Ukraine clearly represented a huge risk but for Putin and Russia, given his aims and objectives, a measured one.”

Describe Putin as evil, certainly (I do, and find this covers most of what I need to communicate); talk of him having miscalculated or having made strategic errors; describe his assessment of the relative preparedness of his own forces as mistaken. But to describe him as irrational or mad? Wigmore digs into this:

What do Western commentators mean when they label Putin irrational? Some appear to simply mean that he does not think like they do, or make the decisions they would. They appear genuinely unable to understand how someone may coherently and logically think from different assumptions than Western Liberals to reach different conclusions. One particularly laughable set of questions was asked by a liberal US commentator called Lawrence O’Donnell, who back in the day was also a writer for The West Wing, the political fiction so beloved of American and British liberals. “Is Putin smart? What would make him smart? His (weak) education? […] Has he had any valuable learning experiences anywhere in the world?”, he sneered to his 2.8 million twitter followers. He may as well have said with appropriate hauteur, “well, he’s not an Ivy League man, is he?” Bizarrely, it did not seem to occur to O’Donnell that after rising from being an obscure KGB officer to the undisputed ruler of Russia for over 20 years, Putin might have had some relevant experience and skills, despite not attending Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Throughout his piece, Wigmore makes similar arguments to those of Lukacs but goes yet further, arguing that the retreat to insanity or “irrationality” as an explanation of Vladimir Putin’s actions is a symptom of intellectual failure: “Western elites must label Putin irrational because they are committed to the idea it is not really possible to be intelligent, rational or logical and disagree with them.”

This is the fruit—borne out, as Wigmore notes, everywhere from John Rawls’s philosophical arguments that “by sheer coincidence” lead to liberal social democracy to the implosion of nation-building experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan—of Enlightenment assumptions. High on the discovery of the laws governing physical reality, Enlightenment rationalists sought analogous universal laws for what had previously been the realm of art, theology, tradition, or happenstance and arrived at the conclusion that their preferred systems—liberalism, democracy, and secular representative government—are universally accessible to pure reason and therefore not only universally desirable but universally applicable. The two-hundred-odd years of application have been mostly a disaster.

Wigmore rightly condemns this misbegotten “bumptious myopia.” But he might have used one word, which Chesterton defined as “the incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition” or elsewhere, and more pithily, as “the failure of the mind to imagine any other mind.” That word is bigotry.

To return to Wigmore:

Western secular elites are committed to their ideas; their policies and conclusions follow inevitably out of “Reason” itself. But any mathematician could tell you that Reason is a GIGO system—Garbage In, Garbage Out: any amount of nonsense can be logically derived from incorrect premises.

And until Western elites reckon with that, recognizing that even evil men can be just as rational as they are, and return reason to its rightful and honorable place as a tool—but just a tool—there will only be more hubristic bigotry, and more nasty surprises.

Read Wigmore’s entire piece at The Critic here. You can read that lengthy passage from Lukacs with my glosses here, and I quoted from the same book in a more apocalyptic register here. Finally, here’s Chesterton on bigotry.

The Batman

My spring break has started with a bang. Having avoided reading much about The Batman but having been impressed with the trailers, I caught a late-night showing on a whim opening day. I was enthralled. The Batman is intricately plotted and well-written, atmospheric, refreshingly low-stakes, and—what is more—despite beginning a new film series for my favorite superhero, it’s not an origin story.

Happy Halloween

The Batman begins on Halloween night in Gotham, two years into Bruce Wayne’s career as Batman and about a week before the city’s mayoral election. While Batman fights a gang of muggers across the city, a figure in glasses and a spookily crude mask stalks the incumbent mayor, watching as the mayor’s wife and son leave to trick-or-treat. With the mayor alone, the stalker breaks into the house through a skylight, knocks the mayor unconscious with a strange hammer-like tool, and, having calmed himself from that initial excitement, begins to unspool a roll of duct tape.

Later, with dawn and the discovery of the crime, Gotham Police Lieutenant Gordon calls in the Batman, who is not exactly welcome at the scene of the murder. And it is murder—the mayor is dead, suffocated in duct tape, with one thumb severed and cryptic messages about Gotham’s lies scrawled in blood around the room. As Batman and Gordon continue the investigation semi-officially they discover something even more unsettling—a card inscribed with a children’s riddle and addressed To the Batman.

The sleuthing goes on, as do the murders. Before long the killer has a name, The Riddler, and the cat and mouse game he plays with Batman and the police grows more elaborate and his promised revelations of corruption more wide-ranging and damning. To track him down, Batman follows the Riddler’s hints into the world of organized crime, particularly the Carmine Falcone mob and its leadership’s primary hangout, The Iceberg Lounge. This is a nightclub run by the Penguin, Falcone’s chief lieutenant, and while looking into the Penguin’s ties to powerful Gotham City officials Batman meets Selina Kyle, a club waitress with her own side hustle in burgling and revenge.

Proper procedure

I don’t want to say much more about the plot, as one of the distinct pleasures of The Batman is the detective work. This Batman is very much a detective, working logically and methodically, gathering and examining evidence, chasing leads and occasionally red herrings. His teamwork—both on the side of law and order in the form of Lt Gordon or outside the law with Selina Kyle—is crucial to his work and another of this film’s pleasures. Batman and Gordon have real chemistry and respect for one another despite the fact that, as Gordon notes, “I don’t even know who you are, man.” The Batman is not a superhero movie of the bloated Avengers variety, as fun as those are, but a procedural, set in a dense and richly tactile world but limited in scope to the crimes being committed by one man and investigated by a handful of others. It’s great.

The acting is also superb. The standout is Robert Pattinson as Batman, who gives a wonderfully subtle performance despite the mask and gear. Pattinson is especially good at using silence, which the script wisely gives the character a lot of, as in the scene in which Batman finally gets to interrogate the Riddler. Paul Dano does more with the Riddler than I thought possible, posing a genuinely creepy threat in the first two acts of the film before, upon his arrest, appearing both pathetic and deeply, alarmingly disturbed. Again, watch that interrogation scene. Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle (she’s never called Catwoman at any point in the film) is also a surprise, and her collaboration with Batman, in which she has her own agenda and is willing to dump Batman’s plans to pursue it, is excellently plotted and performed.

The performances in the smaller roles also stand out, especially Jeffrey Wright as Gordon, who is dogged and taciturn but a capable partner for Batman. Andy Serkis makes an interesting Alfred, bringing a lot of gravitas to an underwritten part, and Coen brothers stalwart John Turturro was good as Carmine Falcone—a soft-spoken, avuncular, disarming liar. But the scene-stealer par excellence is Colin Farrell as the Penguin. His exchanges with Batman include some of the wittiest dialogue in the movie and his role as both nightclub manager and mob enforcer make him an interestingly daunting target of Batman’s investigation.

But again, I don’t want to say much more about the plot.

While The Batman does have its share of exciting set pieces—like the car chase with the Penguin excerpted in all the trailers—its story is driven much more by Batman’s character (about which more below), the mechanics of investigation, and mood. This is one atmospheric movie. If Christopher Nolan took inspiration for The Dark Knight from Michael Mann’s crime thriller Heat, The Batman owes a lot to David Fincher’s two great serial killer films Seven and Zodiac, where chilly settings and an atmosphere of pervasive dread are half of what makes the film work. This film’s Gotham is old, ancient even, with brooding stone skyscrapers and gothic and neoclassical architecture rather than the concrete, glass, and brushed steel of Nolan’s films, and it is dark, overcast, and constantly rainy. This Gotham looks and feels like I have always imagined it would—old, East Coast, grand but decayed, and cold and wet, with layers and layers of city to descend into.

The Fincher feel extends to the cinematography by Greig Fraser, who also shot Dune. Fraser shot The Batman in rich, dark, shallow-focus compositions that are carefully composed and controlled. This, along with the set and costume design, give the film a grit and intensity unlike even The Dark Knight. They also make it one of the best-looking movies I’ve seen in years, and the atmosphere only enchances everything that happens onscreen. The shadows in this film really hide things.

Further, this film’s Riddler is not just a punster in a green suit, but a serial killer, and even dresses in a disturbing homemade costume complete with his own symbolic logo, not unlike the Zodiac killer at Lake Berryessa. He leaves ciphers and taunting riddles for the police to solve before he commits his next crime, lives in a creepy apartment filled with closely-written ledgers, and, like Seven’s fictional John Doe, he has a sweeping, apocalyptic mission.

The Batman comes of age

Once the full extent of that mission is revealed, The Batman enters its grand and operatic final act, where it dabbles in The Dark Knight Rises territory in terms of scope and theme. But as much as I love the Nolan movies, even that one, The Batman does what The Dark Knight Rises set out to do better, especially thematically. The Batman explores genuine corruption, societal rot, the morally tricky question of vigilantism, and the seething resentment of an underclass fed on lies—about both the best and the worst of their city’s history. It does all this quite well but always in a way arising organically from the story, never with clumsy speeches or sermonizing. In fact, the characters who explicitly bring up such themes only do so as an excuse for their own resentments. Selina Kyle actually uses the phrase “white privilege” in one scene, unaware that she’s talking to Bruce Wayne, illustrating without calling attention to it the emptiness of such slogans as a diagnosis of what ails a dying culture.

The Batman is not an origin story, but it is a coming-of-age story. Early in the film we see Bruce Wayne logging a night’s activities in a notebook labeled Gotham Project, Year Two. The word project is important, I think. There’s a lot he’s still perfecting, like his dramatic entrances. At the beginning of the film, Batman just walks into situations, using the thudding of his boots to intimidate bad guys. Tellingly, not all of them oblige, and he has to solve a lot of problems with brawn.

This Batman is capable but still unsure of himself—his goals, his methods, his purpose. In other words, he’s an adolescent. Pattinson’s performance conveys all of this brilliantly, giving his Batman both menace and uncertainty in key scenes. Again, the standout scene is his interrogation of the Riddler, where his controlled silence saves him from a potentially grave mistake, but this tension runs through the entire movie. Only at the end, when he’s mastered the art of appearing unexpectedly, found the moral line he shouldn’t cross, and first questioned and then returned to the sense of noblesse oblige with which his father imperfectly served his city—that is, when he’s proven himself—does he emerge purposeful and confident. And we know this when he rejects a final temptation and turns, purposefully, toward Gotham.

Conclusion

If I have any complaints about The Batman, they’re relatively minor. The social media angle of the Riddler’s killing spree feels slightly underdeveloped, as does Serkis’s Alfred. I hope we get more of him in the sequel. And while the film has excellent special effects and—again, refreshingly—doesn’t rely too much on CGI, there’s perhaps a tad too much in the climax. But at this point that’s nit-picking.

Otherwise, The Batman is a magnificent movie. It’s got an intricate plot and writing that doesn’t spoon-feed the audience the story; interesting characters excellently performed; brilliant visuals and atmosphere; and, to my shame, here’s my first and only mention of Michael Giacchino’s score. It’s some of his best work; listen to the entire soundtrack here. Further, in addition to being enjoyable on its own merits as a crime drama and superhero movie, The Batman engages with genuine seriousness with some deep themes, and does so in the form of the story itself. Like its hero, it uses silence and observation to great effect. It’s a rich, subtle character study wrapped in a compelling and enjoyable procedural thriller.

I could do with more movies like this.

Song that can't be bought or sold

Alan Jacobs has a lovely and deeply melancholy reflection on orally transmitted song and music, sparked by a recollection by the poet Edwin Muir, a native of the Orkneys. Here’s a particularly poignant reflection from Jacobs himself, one that chimes with memories of sitting with my grandparents on their front porch, eating popsicles and talking:

When my late father-in-law was a child in Columbiana, Alabama, his family was very poor, and could afford no musical instruments; so evening after evening, they just sat on the front porch and sang in four-part harmony. All of them experienced music in a way I never have and never will. Eventually they did a little better, financially, and Daddy C—as I would call him, decades later—got a cheap guitar from Sears as a Christmas present. But he had no one to teach him to play until a friend of his sister’s, a fellow his own age but from Montgomery, came by one day and taught him a few chords. That friend was named Hank Williams—and yep, it was that Hank Williams.

That’s a marvelous surprise ending, and the stuff family lore is made of, but Jacobs’s line about his father-in-law “experienc[ing] music in a way that I never have and never will” expresses what I was driving at in my memorial reflection on Jon Daker last week. That was a world in which a great store of music, stories, and culture was still traditional in the literal sense of being handed over or handed down, generation by generation. That world is disappearing, replaced, as I noted, with canned music by digitally tweaked and scrubbed professionals, with whom we compete at our peril.

There is great danger in this state of affairs. I feel this acutely in the case of my own children. Jacobs touches on this anxiety by quoting this passage from novelist and critic Marina Warner: “We are in danger of cultural illiteracy, of losing the past. If nestlings are deprived of their parents’ song during a certain ‘window’ at the beginning, they will not learn to sing. This sounds uncomfortably recognizable.”

And summing up, Jacobs writes:

Children will always play, when allowed to, and people will always sing. But will they play or sing anything that can’t be bought and sold? Will playing and singing, in the Western world anyway, ever again be anything other than a set of commercial transactions?

Read the whole post. It’s worth your while. And for a related point, listen to this piece by the late Roger Scruton, “The Tyranny of Pop Music.”

Jon Daker, RIP

I learned yesterday that a genuine internet legend died this week, aged 82. His name was Jon Daker.

Jon Daker was the accidental star of one of the first real viral videos, a two-minute public access TV segment in which he sang in a recital organized by an elderly piano teacher at his church. I discovered this video in college, in the days before YouTube, embedded with other segments from the same broadcast on an already ancient website that I believe is now defunct. There were probably about fifteen or twenty minutes total preserved from that recital, including some standup comedy, choral numbers, and other soloists, and while many of these were funny or awkward, Daker’s was far and away the funniest of them all—one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

It’s an accidental comedy masterpiece, growing continuously funnier from start to finish. Daker awkwardly introduces himself, he misses his first cue and rushes to catch up, he visibly forgets the lyrics to his second number, he tries to recover with a little gesture and movement at the mic only to end up humming his way to the final lines of the song, and all the while Mrs Unsicker, the piano teacher, sits playing away at her upright piano like a machine. Daker’s portion of the show is only a minute and a half long, but he wraps those ninety seconds up with an iron-jawed stoicism and an obvious sense of relief.

I’ve watched this clip every so often for close to twenty years, and it never, ever stops being funny.

But why? Part of it is the obvious—it’s awkward, it’s embarrassing, he forgets the words, he clearly doesn’t know what to do with his face. His utterly rigid body language screams his keen, moment by moment awareness of how badly it’s going, and that with the pianist pounding through his two songs like an automaton heedless of his calamity there is no stopping. Then there are subtler things—the perfect comedy timing of his name, misspelled, popping up onscreen after his introduction and in perfect time with Mrs Unsicker’s first chord; or the truly daft pairing of Charles Wesley with Dean Martin. The more you watch it the more you see.

But for me, the laughter—and I laugh till I cry—is also a laugh of recognition. It’s sympathetic, even affectionate. I see in Daker’s ninety seconds of gawping, humming, halting Sprechgesang my own worst case scenario for public performance. I flop sweat for him as he nears the end of his set. It’s the laughter you share with your buddy who completely blew his lines in the Christmas cantata, grateful it wasn’t you but glad you can laugh him through the embarrassment. Because in that situation Daker is me, right down to the eyebrows.

That is, he would be me—if I had the guts and humility to volunteer for a solo on television, accompanied by a lady from my church.

Which brings me to this piece by Jonathan Aigner, which I ran across—in keeping with the spirit of Jon Daker—completely by accident this morning, thus learning that Daker had died. Aigner’s tribute to Daker is a genuinely sweet and surprising piece, not least because of the details it offers about the real man behind the viral video. But this passage in particular struck me:

You see, in a world plagued by sin and evil, in which churches increasingly have no room for church musicians without commercial appeal, Jon Daker represents hope, joy, and faith. Here is a regular guy who has managed to lift the spirits of millions thanks to his love of singing and a willingness to crash and burn with dignity.

In my classes I have often lamented to my students that for all the pop music on the radio and store PA systems, we actually live in a less musical world than our ancestors, who had songs for everything and celebrated, mourned, worshiped, mocked, marched into battle, or simply began their daily chores by bursting into song. Think of the last time you heard someone singing in public for no apparent reason, I tell them, and consider how odd you almost certainly found it. That was the norm even within living memory. Now, unless one has the polish of a professional (and digitally assisted) singer, you’ll be hooted into silence.

But there’s a deeper point here, and an explicitly religious one. Aigner links to an earlier post of his in praise of church choirs, in which he invoked Daker with both obvious affection and in service of a great point:

There’s no way John would make it onto any praise team anywhere. He’s not cool enough, young enough, or stylish enough, and his tendency toward performance anxiety doesn’t help, either. But, you know what? John obviously loves to sing, and I’m guessing his service in the Chancel Choir at First United Methodist Church is diligent and earnest. We already know he can match pitch (and sing in diverse styles), and having sought out the services of Mrs. Reva Cooper Unsicker, he must be quite teachable. For those qualities, he would be more than welcome in most church choirs. He could sing in my choir any day, although I probably wouldn’t let him do “Amora” too, okay?

Seriously, there seems to be a trend in contemporary worship culture that says unless you look a certain way, dress a certain way, have the right personality, fit into the targeted age bracket, or meet some other predetermined “coolness” factor, you cannot lead in corporate worship. This is wrong. Worship leadership should resemble the radical diversity of Christ’s Kingdom, and a choir facilitates this quite well.

And that, in its turn, brought to mind CS Lewis and Uncle Screwtape. In Letter 2 of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis’s elder devil mentors his nephew, a tempter in training, with reflections on how to distract his “patient,” the human man subject to temptation, with the embarrassing reality of church:

When he [the patient] goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.

The one-word name for this temptation, of course, is pride. To which I have to say, Mea culpa—I’ve been guilty of precisely what Screwtape describes here. But this beautiful imperfection, this “radical diversity” that Aigner describes, is the real and joyous face of the church, and I’m willing to bet, based on the way Jon Daker put himself out there, willingly entering into a situation I certainly never would for the sake of the people he knew best, that pride did not enter into his character much. He’s a man we do well not to laugh at, but with.

The world needs more Jon Dakers, and not just because of the laughs. As Aigner fittingly concludes in his piece, “may his memory outlast the internet.” RIP.

Watch the original—first uploaded to YouTube in the summer of 2006!—here or embedded above. For an extra layer of comedy, here’s a version with very literal subtitles. Be sure to read all of Aigner’s memorial post for Daker at Patheos here, and take a moment to read Daker’s obituary in the Peoria Journal Star here.

Lewis and Scruton on monarchy, titles, and celebrity

I’ve been reading Against the Tide, a posthumous collection of Roger Scruton’s journalism and essays collected by his literary executor, Mark Dooley. It’s good stuff so far, though not as deep or meaty as Scruton’s longer work (like the essays in A Political Philosophy or especially Confessions of a Heretic) owing to the limitations of journalism. But, also owing to the limitations of journalism, these pieces are punchier, more humorously combative. You can feel Scruton winking in some of them in a way you seldom get when he’s unpacking Kant or Wagner.

At any rate, this passage on aristocracy and its vulgar modern ersatz, celebrity, published as a “diary” piece in the Spectator, August 25, 2016, particularly caught my eye:

Of course, in the first-name culture that now prevails, titles might seem merely decorative, and offensive to the cult of equality. The death of the Duke of Westminster has briefly raised the question of what a titled aristocracy does for us. My own view is that titles are much to be preferred to wealth as a mark of distinction, since they give glamour without power. They promote the idea of purely immaterial reward, and represent eminence as something to live up to, not a power to be used. Of course they can be abused, and a kind of snobbery goes with them. Take them away, however, and you have the mean-minded obsessions of ‘celebrity’ culture, the American idolization of wealth or the power cult of the Russian mafia. An inherited title sanctifies a family and its ancient territory. The poetry of this is beautifully expressed by Proust, who wrote of an aristocracy from which everything had been taken except its titles—think of ‘Guermantes’ and compare it with ‘Trump’.

That paragraph caught my eye because it echoes, at a remove of three quarters of a century but with startlingly precise parallels, this favorite passage from CS Lewis’s wartime essay “Equality”—coincidentally also published in the Spectator, and on almost the same date, August 27, 1943:

We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man’s reaction of Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, of film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

You can read the entirety of Lewis’s essay “Equality” at the Spectator’s archives (paywalled) or here. It’s collected in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, which is perhaps my favorite short collection of Lewis’s writings. I’ve previously quoted the line about “gobbling poison” as recently as the new year, in this post on Ernst Jünger’s vision of the homo religiosus in The Forest Passage.