Agatha Christie vs the dominion of content

Near the end of the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, hitman Anton Chigurh breaks into his employer’s office and shoots him. The reason? Professional betrayal. His unnamed boss had not only hired him but put a group of cartel killers on the same job without telling him. The result was half of the chaos in the film. As Chigurh watches the light go out of his boss’s eyes, a hapless accountant explains the reasoning behind the betrayal: “He feels—he felt that the more people looking—”

Chigurh cuts him off. His reply is a line I often think of: “That’s foolish. You pick the one right tool.”

Up until now I haven’t written about the Roald Dahl fiasco, a story that has turned into a slowly unfolding revelation of widespread censorship of long-dead novelists. Since Puffin’s silly, craven, artless changes to Dahl’s stories were revealed earlier this year, changes to other authors have come along including Ian Fleming and now Agatha Christie.

Still, I felt like I had actually anticipated this and said all I had to say about it two years ago, when a small but loud number of book influencers on Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram, and TikTok demanded the cutting of individual lines from several popular authors’ latest books. Then, while reading about the Agatha Christie revelations this week, I saw this:

I had heard that Oates is a bit of a… character on Twitter. I can’t judge based on one screenshotted tweet, but even if this were the first strange, ill-informed, and thoughtless thing she had said it would still belong in the Condescension Hall of Fame.

There’s the backhanded compliment of “clever,” the kind of word used of a precocious toddler or a dog that answers more than six or seven commands; the sniffy invocation of style and “sociological realism” as standards of excellence that poor Mrs Christie simply can’t afford; the scare quotes around the idea of a plot twist, as if this is some kind of outlandish and distasteful feature of primitive storytelling; and of course comparison with “more literary” authors, whatever “literary” means here. Probably arbitrarily difficult, though that doesn’t describe Twain, who certainly wrote to entertain, and only some of Faulkner, who still had a connection to a reading public in a way most latter-day “literary” types do not. This is the kind of blithe snobbery more likely heard from the mouths of clichéd British aristocrats in bad movies than in real life.

Last week I finally got (most of) my thoughts about the dominion of “content” out of my system. Read that if you haven’t so you can see where I’m coming from. But note Oates’s last and presumably most important argument: “changing her language will hardly matter.”

Oates’s snobbery is nasty enough, but the implications of this idea are abominable. A good writer is a craftsman. He selects his words carefully and precisely. As he writes he looks for—to bring Chigurh back in—the one right tool, the exact word expressing what he intends and that no other word can. Each word matters. Each must be right. A good author will find it regardless of whether he’s trying to be “literary” or not, and Agatha Christie was a good author. She paid attention, planned carefully, and worked hard at what she did. So did Ian Fleming, something I’ve taken pains to point out.

What Oates is arguing here is the logical endpoint of storytelling as mere content production. She suggests that some gnostic form of Christie’s stories exists independent of the words with which Christie, their author and creator, constructed and told them. As long as you get that, it doesn’t matter what particular words are used to deliver it. They’re interchangeable and replaceable and can be tailored to the consumer. All of this reduces Christie’s careful work to branding on content. The snobbery is a cheap justification of vandalism.

I go into this not because I have an animus toward Oates—I’ve never read any of her presumably “more literary” work and don’t really know anything about her—but because the sentiment she expresses here is representative. I’ve seen many variations of it, usually something like: “They’re just changing a few words so that modern audiences can continue to enjoy them.” Enjoy what? Christie’s books? Because that’s what the editors and sensitivity readers are fooling with.

It’s not Christie’s books that need to change. Oates—a writer!—and everyone who agrees with her or supports the alteration of old books should be ashamed. Not because Christie was the greatest writer who ever lived, though she was a good one, and not because purportedly offensive things must be left in print, but because to treat a writer’s tools, his words—every one of them, even those of which we disapprove—as irrelevant is to undermine the very idea of writing as a craft. It’s an ugly and destructive betrayal.

As it happens, the changes to Christie’s books were not news to me. Last year after Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s The Rest is History episode on Christie I dropped by Barnes & Noble to browse her books. On the copyright page of the very first one I picked up I read a note from the publisher stating that “minor editorial changes” had been made to “outdated cultural representations” but that “for the most part this classic work is reproduced as originally published.” For the most part is doing a lot of work there.

I didn’t buy that book. It wasn’t the one Christie wrote and I was not going to pay for one some grubby failure of a sensitivity reader had gotten ahold of. If you care at all about stories or the art and craft of writing, I encourage you not to settle for bowdlerized, compromised editions, either. And I hope publishers take note.

*****

Addendum: The commonly repeated and mindless rejoinder to the specific example of Agatha Christie is: “What about And Then There Were None? AKA Ten Little Indians? AKA Something Much Worse?” If you can’t tell the difference between changes to a book overseen and approved by the book’s author and those undertaken long after the author is dead, you don’t belong anywhere near someone else’s work.

Against content

In the latest episode of “Half in the Bag,” during an interlude regarding The Whale, streaming entertainment, and the recent cancelation of shows with low viewership, hosts Mike and Jay enter their weary satirical mode:

Mike: [zombie-like] Watch the programs on your TV.
Jay: [laughs]
Mike: Watch programs. Watch the movies that we talked about, I guess, or don’t. Watch the programs. Programs!
Jay: Content!
Mike: Content!
Jay: Content! It’s not “movies” anymore, it’s “content.”
Mike: Watch those contents.
Jay: It’s not TV shows, it’s content. “Willow” didn’t make enough money with its content so they canceled it. Move on to next content. “Mandalorian” season three is not doing as well as season two.
Mike: Bring back Grogu.
Jay: Bring more content. Give me content.

And, finally:

Mike: [demonic, surrounded by flames] CONSUME MORE CONTENT.

They put it even more succinctly a few years ago.

If there are any themes to speak of in this hodgepodge of a blog, this commonplace book, one of them is surely the idea that not only the things we talk about but the way we talk about them matters. This applies not only to our meaning but to the individual words with which we express it. Words have meaning. They should be used precisely and with care. This isn’t pedantry. As George Orwell argued in an essay I’ve invoked here many times, sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking. And vice versa.

The trends Orwell and others in his day noted have continued uninterrupted. We’re living at the sharp end of a long period of careless, apathetic imprecision in how we speak, write, and think. To be precise: a decline. The signs are everywhere. But nowhere is the sloppiness, vagary, imprecision, and muddle more pronounced than in the way people talk about art and creativity. And again, this can be seen most clearly at the vocabulary level—words.

The movies are particularly vulnerable to the rot, especially in popular discussion of the unstinting flux of superhero movies, remakes, video game adaptations, and streaming series. “Franchises” and “IP”—business terms that stink of the boardroom and the copyright lawyer—are commonplace ways to talk about movies now.

But the vilest, the stupidest, the most insidious and invasive of all of today’s sloppy art language is “content.”

A word that, like franchise and IP, began as a lowest common denominator legal term is now the default among even the general public. Instagram and YouTube users tell their favorite photographers and video essayists “Great content” and “Quality content” and “I love your content!” All of which are apparently meant to be compliments.

A book has a table of contents to tell you the most important thing about itself—what precisely is in it, what specifically you can expect. Ditto the lists of contents on medicine bottles, shipping containers, and boxes of Legos. But as used today content means nothing more than “stuff.” Everything is content. Novels and short stories are content. Movies and YouTube videos are content. Photos are content. Music is content. Book reviews and blog posts and longform essays are content. The news is content. If all of these things and more can be called by the same word, the word is useless.

I am writing a blog post right now. This morning I wrote announcements for my students and e-mails for my colleagues. Last night I passed the 30,000-word mark on a short novel. This week I revised and submitted an epic poem to an online magazine. A few weeks ago I drafted, revised, and submitted a short story to another. At supper the other night I drew Puss in Boots on a napkin for my son. Are all these things just so much content?

Once upon a time, art was specific. We described it with a huge and sometimes highly specified vocabulary. It was rich in specific nouns and precise verbs. Writers and journalists wrote stories. Authors wrote novels. Musicians composed or improvised thousands of kinds of music and played hundreds of different instruments. Poets composed poems—or, if you go back even further, they shaped songs. The vast team of the film crew wrote, directed, blocked, lit, costumed, miked, slated, shot, cut, and printed whatever part of the film fell within their prerogative. What do creative people do now? They “produce” “content.”

Produce, like a factory. Mechanically, seemingly automatically, with no single person to credit and in great quantities. Should we be shocked that the quality has suffered? My colon produces content.

And what do you do with content? Verbs again. We don’t read, watch, look at, listen to, or even think about content. Sure, all of those faculties are engaged on some low, barely involved, power-saving level, but what we do is consume it. Like a fire, a monster, a glutton, a plague of locusts, or a wasting disease. I have actually heard living human beings use one of the handful of breaths they get in their one precious finite life to begin a sentence with, “When I consume content…”

I am become content, the destroyer of worlds.

“So what?” I imagine lots of people saying. “That’s just how people talk. Let them like what they want to like.” First, no. Second, consider the consequences of our imprecision, the knock-on effects. Just like produce uses the language of the factory to erase the artist and his craft, discipline, and hard work, content boils the vast universe of art into whatever porridge-like slurry fills a particular vessel. Doesn’t matter what it is as long as there’s something in there to be consumed. Then you can demand more. And complain that it’s not very good.

Art is unique. Content is interchangeable. Art is irreplaceable. Content is disposable. Art is challenging. Content is numbing. Art strengthens. Content atrophies. Art satisfies. Content addicts. Art demands excellence. Content needs only to be available. Art endures. Content fades, falls apart, and is forgotten. Art is life. Content is death.

I keep wanting to hedge or claim I’m using hyperbole to make a point, but I really mean this. The state of the arts, of creativity, culture, and most especially storytelling, is dire. And the sloppiness with which we talk about producing content rather than making art only makes things worse. It’s a vicious cycle. To take it back to Orwell:

[A]n effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. . . . It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

But note that I said “dire” but not “hopeless.” Following that passage from Orwell, the very next sentence is this: “The point is that the process is reversible.”

It starts with each of us and our habits of speech. If you’re an artist, don’t call your work “content.” Call it “work.” Don’t be a “content creator.” If you write stories, paint pictures, compose music, or even make videos, call it that. And insist on it. Whether your work is an a hobby or a profession claim it specifically, as an honorable way to spend your life doing something specific and meaningful. Show yourself and your work some respect.

And if you are only a “consumer” meant to “consume,” get specific again. Don’t talk about, praise, or even criticize “content” any more. Talk about stories, movies, videos, music—all of it, specifically, and what the real people behind art have to do to make it—and don’t consume them, but watch, read, listen to, or even just look at them. In a precise word, enjoy them. That, too, is honorable. For what other reason would an artist make art except for people to enjoy it?

I don’t know how to save all of art or to encourage a new wave of creativity or to save Western Civilization, but speaking and writing precisely and specifically, not settling for content—whether as mechanical producer or gluttonous consumer—will force us to think in new ways about our stories, music, and art and how and why we make them. More precisely, more specifically, and hopefully in the cause of truer, better, and longer lasting art.

What a good boy am I

Big Jack Horner exasperates his conscience in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

After muddling through my mixed feelings for a movie at great length, here’s a brief note on a movie that, to my great surprise, I unreservedly enjoyed: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.

The villain of the film, Big Jack Horner—Little Jack Horner, all grown up and a titan of the pie baking industry. Jack is a gigantic, resentful businessman who collects magical baubles (Cinderella’s slipper, Mickey’s wizard cap, Aladdin’s magic carpet, Mary Poppins’s bottomless carpetbag, and numerous other Disney Easter eggs show up in his collection) and wants a magical Wishing Star’s one wish for himself. He sets out in pursuit of Puss and company with a bag full of these trinkets he intends to use as weapons.

Among them is a parody of Jiminy Cricket with a Jimmy Stewart-soundalike voice. His name according to the credits is Ethical Bug. As Jack’s misdeeds and casual cruelties stack up, Ethical Bug becomes more and more distraught. They have this exchange as Jack walks across a human bridge made of his (surviving) bakers and Ethical Bug decides to try out some therapy:

Ethical Bug: There’s good in all people, there’s good in all people… You know, Jack, maybe we oughta dig a little deeper. Tell me about your childhood.

Jack Horner: Ahhh… You know, I never had much as a kid. Just loving parents, stability and a mansion, and a thriving baked goods enterprise for me to inherit. Useless crap like that.

EB: [facepalm]

JH: But once I get my wish I’ll finally have the one thing that will make me happy!

EB: Oh, well, what’s that?

JH: All of the magic in the world. For me. No one else gets any. Is that so much?

EB: Yes!

JH: Agree to disagree.

You can watch this sequence in the first minute and a half of this clip montage. Jack, I should mention, is brilliantly voiced by John Mulaney, who makes him both evil and hilarious. He might be my favorite movie bad guy in a couple years.

One of the reasons for that is Jack’s refreshingly straightforward quality. He’s resentful—an almost Dantean picture of envy, as his wish above suggests—but not damaged. He has no tragic backstory, he is a victim of neither systems nor individuals, and he has no legitimate grievances whatsoever. He has just learned to desire what he shouldn’t have. And he flummoxes the naïve therapeutic talk of Ethical Bug. Sometimes—most of the time—people are just wicked. And far from being reduced to a simplistic bad guy, Jack is a fully rounded and believable character.

Where the trend at Disney is to explain away villainy as victimhood—think Maleficent or Cruella—Puss in Boots: The Last Wish gives us a cartoon Chigurh, or the Joker, or, more to the point given the film’s spaghetti western influences, Angel Eyes. It’s funny, it’s smart, and it strikes nearer the truth than a lot of other recent movies. Of all the Shrek films’ subversions, parodies, and outright vandalism of Disney, this may be the best.

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) takes cover in Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front

Last Sunday night, as Netflix’s new German-language version of All Quiet on the Western Front was winning four Oscars, I finally got the chance to watch the film. This was thanks to a limited one-night theatrical release. I’m really grateful I got to watch it on the big screen, with high-quality theatre sound. I can’t imagine how watching this on a TV, tablet, or phone would diminish it.

I have, however, had a hard time writing a review of the film. I’ve been fiddling with this—fighting with it—since last Monday. As I wrote last fall, I have anticipated a new film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front for more than twenty years, and as I wrote in my movie year-in-review, I had had enough of the new film spoiled for me to be anxious about just how good of an adaptation it is.

Sure enough, having seen the film I am of two minds about it. So I’ve decided to approach the film from two angles.

As a film

Considered purely as a film, this All Quiet on the Western Front is effective and technically impressive. Sunday night it quite rightly won Oscars for production design and cinematography, and I think its makeup and sound, for which it was nominated but didn’t win, and its costume design, for which it wasn’t even nominated, were award-worthy as well. The care taken over its locations, sets, costumes, and how all of these were photographed give the movie a remarkable tactile quality. Not only does the film look and sound great, it also feels real.

The lead performances are also good, especially Felix Kammerer as young Paul Bäumer and Albrecht Schuch as the gruff veteran Kat. Kammerer in particular proves extraordinarily expressive in an underwritten lead role. His boyish scarecrow frame from which his oversized woolen uniform hangs and his enormous blue eyes, which stare out disconsolately from beneath his enormous steel helmet, really sell him as a teenager in over his head, going from wide-eyed enthusiasm to shellshock. Schuch, as I had hoped, offers a Kat more true to the mentor and expert scrounger of the book than previous versions but excels most by showing the bond between himself and the younger men he takes under his wing. Bäumer and Kat’s relationship is perhaps the best thing about the movie.

The battle sequences, which I have seen praised to the heavens, are excellently staged and shot. Long gliding Steadicam shots follow the characters in mad dashes across no-man’s-land and through the trenches. A raid in which Kat and another older soldier named Tjaden—about whom more below—work their way through the French lines and stumble upon a well-stocked field kitchen is especially involving. The filmmakers also depict the fevered brutality of hand-to-hand combat with bayonets, shovels, and fists clearly and realistically.

Again, as a film, this All Quiet also has weaknesses. One of its four Oscars was for its score. I found it distracting—jarring bleats of dubstep and seemingly random snare drum hits punctuate quiet scenes, an obvious intrusion of the modern into painstakingly authentic visuals. Some of the supporting roles are not well performed, especially a German general added to the story by the filmmakers (again, more below), although this weakness has more to do with the writing than the actors. And the film’s tactility and brutality sometimes feel gratuitous, like slasher-movie squick that is only there for shock value.

This last criticism is the hardest for me to formulate, probably because it has to do with the film’s overall tone and approach to the material. It also points toward the film’s most fundamental problem. An analogy from the film itself occurs to me: in one of the film’s final moments, Bäumer, fighting a poilu with his bare hands only minutes before the armistice, has his face shoved into the muck at the bottom of a French trench and he almost smothers. The in-your-face quality of the violence—the grossness, the muck, the squirming, the goopy sound effects—is supremely unsubtle.

That lack of subtlety is my most serious criticism of this finely crafted movie. And, as I hinted above, this, its tone, and its horror movie sensibility are also indicative of its most basic fault—it is a bad adaptation of the novel.

As an adaptation

This film is not All Quiet on the Western Front. I’m not sure I’d call it an adaptation, more another World War I story very loosely using elements of the novel. I got the sense even before the film was half over that the filmmakers had approached the novel as raw material to be cut up and repurposed. I’d estimate about 20% of the book is here, mostly in isolated incidents, visuals, and individual lines of dialogue.

Whatever, right? You can’t get everything in. An adaptation has to adapt. These are all things I’ve said myself, and they’re true. The problem is the basic approach, structure, and attitude of the film, and a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes All Quiet on the Western Front great that informed these decisions.

That the filmmakers view the novel as raw material is clear from the fates the characters suffer. In the novel, Kropp, the smallest and sharpest of Bäumer’s classmates, is wounded with Bäumer, loses a leg, and contemplates suicide as he thinks ahead to civilian life as a cripple. Movie Kropp attempts to surrender to the French and is torched with a flamethrower, thrashing in agony in the omnipresent mud as Bäumer watches. Tjaden, a lanky chowhound with a special hatred for their drill instructor (Corporal Himmelstoß, AWOL) survives the novel and even appears in its underwhelming sequel, The Road Back. Movie Tjaden is wounded and kills himself with a fork in the field hospital. Kat’s death, one of the most poignant scenes of the novel and both previous film versions, is altered so that rather than suffering a minor wound and being killed by shrapnel as Bäumer, unaware, carries him to the aid station, he is shot by a scowling French farmboy while stealing eggs and bleeds to death.

I go into detail here not only because the alterations are so extreme but because most have clearly been made for shock value. (People in the theatre visibly jumped and turned away in disgust when Tjaden started stabbing himself.) The film is as subtle as a sledgehammer.

The structural changes are more extreme. Huge sections of the story are missing entirely. Bäumer and his friends’ training under the martinet Corporal Himmelstoß, Bäumer’s time home on leave, Bäumer’s time recovering from his wound with Kropp in a military hospital—these subplots, which are not only thematically important but provide crucial moments in Bäumer’s character arc, and many smaller incidents are gone.

All of this has been left out in order to facilitate the strangest artistic choice made by the filmmakers: to compress the years-long story of the novel into the final three days of the war. Following a brief prologue set in the spring of 1917, the film picks back up with Bäumer and his comrades on November 8, 1918. Their activities at this time—patrolling, scrounging, flirting with French farm girls, reading the mail, going up to the front again—are intercut with the peace mission of Matthias Erzberger, the Centre Party politician who met French Marshal Ferdinand Foch and signed the armistice that ended the war.

Did that summary sound like it had turned into the introduction to a Wikipedia article to you? That’s how out of place this subplot feels. The inclusion of Erzberger and the armistice negotiations—scenes around which Bäumer’s entire story has been reorganized—wrecks the film.

The problem with jettisoning large parts of your source material and inserting a lot of original material—Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies also come to mind—is the almost inevitable mismatch in quality. Great novels become classics for a reason. Who do you think you are to improve them? If you’re going to do this, you had better insert really, really good material, something that tonally and thematically enhances and reinforces the point of the original. Occasionally this works—the Coen brothers’ True Grit pretty seamlessly blends verbatim adaptations of Charles Portis’s novel with scenes and dialogue of their own—but more often it weakens things.

Where All Quiet adds to the novel, it falls back on the hoariest World War I clichés available. Erzberger’s real-life mission spurs the fictional General Friedrichs, in the last few hours of the war, to launch an attack on French positions out of spite. This is pure invention. (A few historians have pointed out that if you want a real historical example of a hardass general who got his men killed on the last day of the war for no reason, you should be looking for an American.) Friedrichs is a cartoon character: an overweight, goggle-eyed Prussian with a shaved head and handlebar mustache who fulminates against the Social Democrats over champagne in his chateau while his men die in the mud. I can’t fault the actor; he does his best with a caricature. But a caricature it is.

These changes also grant the film an omniscience that is pointedly lacking in young Paul Bäumer’s narration in the novel. Like any soldier, all he knows of the war is the bit he sees, which in a trench is little enough. Bäumer himself says that the only important things to him are the purely practical things—food, sleep, boots, a comfortable toilet seat, the best weapons for hand-to-hand combat—in the little patch of the war where he and his friends are trying to survive. What matters in the novel, all that matters, is Bäumer, his friends, his slow-motion destruction. He is quite explicitly a stand-in for an entire generation. Roping in Erzberger and Foch gives the film a top-down political perspective that Remarque quite rightly chose not to give his narrator. In this way the film achieves political awareness at the expense of the thing that made the story powerful.

That’s a lot of detail, but I don’t mean to be laborious. I want to illustrate specifically the results of the filmmakers’ artistic approach to Remarque’s novel. All of these problems, as I suggest above, stem from a misapprehension of what All Quiet on the Western Front is meant to say and what it is that makes its message so moving.

Irony and pointlessness

I’ve seen a number of critics and online fans of this new film, when someone has dared to point out how badly it deviates from the book, argue that the changes don’t really matter. Two representative examples pulled from YouTube: “[Y]ou’re missing the point of it all: this is the movie that best depicts the meat grinder that was this war,” and, speaking of clichés, “To people that say that it isn't an accurate adaptation, at the end of the day, the book’s point was to make people understand that war is hell and no movie has come close to eliciting that feeling to me like this.”

But here’s the thing—none of that is, in fact, All Quiet on the Western Front’s point.

This should be obvious. “War is hell” is a platitude. It’s a cliché. It’s a substance-free statement that can be used as both excuse and condemnation; one can apply it to any conflict and people will nod piously. (Remember that the man who made that expression famous died in 1891; he was not talking about the industrialized slaughter of conscripts in World War I but the much smaller-scale wars of nationalist suppression he ruthlessly waged against Southerners and Indians.) But platitudes stretched to movie length are boring. And is there anyone today who doesn’t “understand that war is hell”? Why bother with the obvious?

I’d argue instead that what makes All Quiet on the Western Front a tragedy is not the horror of what happens in major assaults, trench raids, nighttime patrols, or artillery barrages, but its pointlessness.

One of the things I’ve come to admire about Remarque’s novel over more than twenty years and many readings is its deep and subtle irony. Remarque suffuses his story with irony. Positively, this creates nuance reflective of the complexity of real life. When he arrives at the front for the first time, for instance, the hated drill instructor Corporal Himmelstoß turns out to have redeeming qualities after all, not least real physical courage. Negatively, Bäumer and his friends find that nothing they do matters.

The book is full of examples. Every major episode makes this point. Steal food, earn a medal, get ahold of some nice comfortable boots, trick out your personal toilet seat, convince a French girl to sleep with you, avoid catching your head in the telephone wire over the road, learn how to identify artillery shells by sound, tell the cook that the entire company is here for lunch, tell the people at home what the war is actually like, be brave, be cowardly—none of it makes a difference. That, not the hellishness, the dismemberment, or the filth and discomfort, is what makes modern war terrible.

The book’s two climactic episodes drive the point home. In the first, Kat receives a minor leg wound from some shrapnel. Bäumer carries him to an aid station only to find that, at some point along the way, more shrapnel has hit Kat in the head and killed him. Bäumer didn’t even notice. All that effort and Kat dies anyway. The second is the novel’s famous concluding note, the only part not written in the voice of Bäumer himself:

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

The irony is not that a huge, horrific attack was ordered by a bonehead general just hours before the armistice—something that would be remarkable—but that the snuffing out of one young soldier’s life is not worth noting. It doesn’t even matter specifically what day it is. “All quiet” or, to translate the original literally, “nothing new.”

Both of these incidents make it into the movie and both are altered according to the filmmakers’ vision, and both lose the nuance and subtlety that make the novel so poignant.

Remarque’s novel is painful because the reader is won over by a band of young men whose worth Remarque makes obvious and whose destruction he shows to be pointless. The film is painful because it screams in your face for two and a half hours. One of these is not only a more truthful dramatization of modern war, it is better art, and it will be remembered far longer.

Conclusion

I’ve just spent a hundreds of words being the “The book was better” guy, but when a book is as good as All Quiet on the Western Front it pays to respect it. This film simply uses the title.

I do, however, want to end on a note of praise. Where the film does stick closely to the book it excels. Again, most of the material taken from the book consists of individual images (a naked corpse high in a tree, blown out of its uniform by a trench mortar), repurposed scenes (the novel’s darkly humorous and ironic opening scene at a field kitchen, shifted in the film to the final act and made another moment of horror), or specific lines of dialogue, but one sequence in particular stands out as an example of what the filmmakers might have done with a closer, more faithful adaptation.

One of the most celebrated scenes in the novel, one rendered in all three film versions now, is that in which Bäumer takes cover in a crater during a French counterattack and stabs a French soldier who unwittingly jumps in next to him. Both are left isolated in no-man’s-land, and Bäumer watches the Frenchman die, choking on his own blood, for hours. After that he goes through the man’s wallet and learns about the man he has just killed.

This All Quiet dramatizes this sequence brilliantly, and is one of the few places where I’d say more realistic gore has improved upon previous versions. The Frenchman’s death is agonizing; watching it wrecks not only Bäumer but the audience. And going through the dead man’s effects to find his name, his occupation, a photo of his wife and daughter quietly achieves what the entire rest of the movie has laboriously striven with noise, blood, and guts to do.

That’s a credit to Remarque. As for this film, it was for me a huge If only.

If you’re looking for World War I-branded action in an authentic pitch of icky horror, if you just want a war movie produced to the highest technical standards of modern filmmaking, if you want to see Saint-Charmand tanks onscreen for the very first time, or if you’re trying to dissuade someone from joining the military—all reasons I’ve seen given out to watch this film—then perhaps this All Quiet on the Western Front is worth seeing. But if you’re looking for a film version of the novel, this just isn’t it.

Orwell, Camus, Chesterton, and bad math

Earlier this week I read this really interesting piece by William Fear on the most distinctive trait shared by Orwell and Albert Camus: “Both of these writers took the view that truthfulness was more important than ideological allegiance and metaphysics, that the facts should be derived from the real world, rather than the world of ideas.” I can’t weigh in on whether this is true of Camus—I think I read The Stranger and The Plague somewhere around seventeen years ago in college—but it strikes me as a good assessment of Orwell.

Fear uses a particularly striking example to illustrate the closeness of Orwell and Camus’s thought on truth and the threat posed to truthfulness by modern ideology, a major concern for both men—what Fear calls “common ground.” He begins with a line from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

“There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death.”

— George Orwell, 1949

He then points out that, in fact, “these words are not Orwell’s at all. This is a quote from Albert Camus’ novel La Peste, which was published two years before Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1947.” Fear doesn’t give the exact quotation but this is what I turn up in searching for it:

“But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four.”

— Albert Camus, 1947

Orwell’s quotation is almost exact, and the import of the quotation—the ideological threat, enforced through peer pressure and naked authority, to admitting what is objectively true and the courage required to do so—is precisely the same. Again, common ground for these writers.

So Orwell got the idea from Camus. But… did Camus get the idea from Orwell? Fear quotes one of Orwell’s book reviews from 1939:

“It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.”

— George Orwell, 1939

Fear declines to speculate on precisely whether Camus got this mathematical example from Orwell, noting that the nature of each man’s influence on the other is really beside the point, and continues with his essay. I recommend reading the whole thing.

But a longtime reader of Chesterton cannot read the these three variations on one idea without going back yet further, to a column by GK Chesterton published in the Illustrated London News in 1926. I quote this at greater length because the context makes it clear that the parallel runs deeper than the use of 2+2 as an example:

“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four.”

— GK Chesterton, 1926

But there is not only doubt about mystical things; not even only about moral things. There is most doubt of all about rational things. I do not mean that I feel these doubts, either rational or mystical; but I mean that a sufficient number of modern people feel them to make unanimity an absurd assumption. Reason was self-evident before Pragmatism. Mathematics were self-evident before Einstein. But this scepticism is throwing thousands into a condition of doubt, not about occult but about obvious things. We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.

And this in itself recapitulates something Chesterton wrote as early as his essay collection Heretics, published in 1905. Its stunning final paragraph includes this passage:

The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.

So did Orwell get this example from Chesterton? We know Orwell read Chesterton, and that Chesterton even published some of Orwell’s earliest work. So I’d add Chesterton to the lineage of this idea.

But alongside Fear, I’d also say it doesn’t entirely matter. What does matter is the reason Chesterton and Orwell and Camus kept coming back to the childish simplicity of 2+2: an abiding concern for the truth, a truth to be found out there in reality rather than in here in personal perception or political ideology, and a shared—and quite justifiable—anxiety about the threats it faces.

I’ve written before about Orwell’s view of the relation of the modern historical discipline to objective truth, here and here, and about Chesterton and Orwell’s overlapping concerns with language and clarity here. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni quoted the Heretics version of Chesterton’s line in a clip that went mildly viral—at least among Chesterton fans—several months ago. I still know next to nothing about Camus, largely owing to a prejudicial suspicion of twentieth-century French thinkers, but Fear has convinced me to look again, and more closely.

A visit to Tulum

“He thought too much fuss was made over all this ancient masonry. . . . It was all a great bore to him, the Maya business, except for the tourist aspect. It gave people the wrong idea about Mexico. Blinking lizards on broken walls.”

— from Gringos, by Charles Portis

Last week, as part of a family trip to Mexico, I got the chance to visit my first Mayan city—the Yucatec town of Tulum. Having never been to this part of the world and having only studied it cursorily, I looked forward to an opportunity to learn a little more directly, on the ground. It was a great experience.

Tulum stands on rocky cliffs overlooking the sea on the Caribbean coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, about a third of the way between Cancun to the north and Belize to the south. The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, which stretches from north of Cancun to Honduras, lies just offshore. A natural gap in the reef created by the undersea outlet of a freshwater underground river that flows into the ocean below the city played an important role in the siting of the city sometime around 800 years ago. Possibly more.

In the broader context of Mayan history, Tulum is a late post-classical city. The classical era—the one most people imagine, however vaguely, when they hear the word Maya—lasted about seven centuries, from c. AD 250-950. The post-classical period saw the diminution in size, population, influence, and order of the great classical city-states. Some were abandoned outright. Tulum was founded and flourished.

The playa at Tulum, now closed to the public as its shelter and ready supply of sargassum (the reddish brown seaweed visible along the shoreline) make it an excellent nesting site for sea turtles

Tulum is unusual in two respects. First, it sits on the coast, as a port. Though historians and archaeologists are discovering or recovering more and more about travel, communication, and trade throughout the Maya world, port cities are uncommon. That gap in the reef is the key. By aligning the city with the gap, Tulum allowed for the easy entry and exit of the large canoes used for trade up and down the Yucatán coast. A sheltered beach below a notch in the cliffs provided a natural dockyard. Further, the central political and religious complex of the city and its most important monumental building, the Castillo, were oriented to the gap in the reef. Not coincidentally, this the same direction in which the sun rises.

Second, Tulum is small. The city’s walls, greatly diminished but still impressive, enclose and protect a space 400 meters wide and 200 deep. Our guide, Pedro, estimated a population of 2,000, predominantly the city elite and traders, who lived in luxurious stone houses within the city walls. A larger population of farmers and slaves lived outside, growing the food.

So Tulum is no Chichén Itzá, perhaps the most famous late classical city, or the much earlier Tikal, but it has a unique history and its ruins are still impressive. Several houses, including two called the “palace” and “great palace” by archaeologists, have been excavated and partially reconstructed, but the centerpieces are the walls and the temple complex. Two smaller temples, the Temple of the Wind God and the Descending God Temple, sit atop the cliffs bracketing Tulum’s sheltered beach. The latter, presumably dedicated to a solar deity, has doorways aligning with the sunrise on the summer and winter equinoxes. On those days, dawn light shines straight through and clear across the city, striking a large stone in the outer walls.

Temple of the Descending God, visible upside down above the opening at the top of the stairs

But dominating the city is the Castillo, so named later, after the city’s abandonment, but in fact a combination temple and lighthouse. Canoes seeking to pass through the reef could aim for the Castillo. According to Pedro, fires were kept burning to help navigators aiming for the port.

The “great palace” in the foreground and the Castillo beyond

It also provided a stage for human sacrifice. Pedro proved refreshingly straightforward about this, indulging neither romantic notions that the victims offered were idealistic volunteers (something I’ve heard, absurdly, about the occasional victims of Viking human sacrifice, but never about the Maya) nor trying to diminish or explain away the practice. These were human sacrifices. Those offered were other Maya, captured in the ongoing internecine warfare characteristic of the ununified, warlike Maya world, and the offerings were meant to ensure good harvests, success in war, prosperity and stability for the city and all of its inhabitants.

That fact gives this sunny spot by the ocean, cooled by continuous breezes rushing in over the reef, an ominous aspect not unlike the Colosseum or some other ancient site of bloodshed. The intimacy, the smallness of the setting only strengthens this impression. Gladiator notwithstanding, it’s hard to visit the Colosseum and imagine it full of people celebrating bloodsport. At Tulum, it is easy to fill the avenues and plazas with people and visualize them staring up at the priests and doomed offerings. It’s easy because on the morning we visited, Tulum was full of people, and it is hard not to look up at the temple. Reverence comes naturally in a place like this.

The Castillo looms above the central plaza, the palace in the foreground, and dominates even the Temple of the Descending God at left

This in no way diminishes Tulum. It’s just a fact of the place, and Pedro treated it as such, explaining things gently but firmly. This is history—accept and understand it. I appreciated that approach.

The face of a god on the facade of the great palace, with yellow, red, and black paint still decorating the eye and nose

The human sacrifice and the dedication to astronomy that I’ve already mentioned are perhaps the two most famous aspects of Maya culture, but do not come close to expressing all of it. In addition to telling us about trade, the observation of the stars and the careful orientation and construction of Tulum’s monumental buildings, Pedro described the art and decoration of the city. Rather than bare stone, Tulum in its heyday was brightly painted with a variety of colors derived from natural pigments. The dominant color scheme was a bright turquoise, though reds, blacks, yellows, and other colors were used for murals or to accent sculpture.

On “the great palace,” in addition to the faces of gods sculpted in larger-than-life size into the masonry at the four corners of the building and reliefs of other gods—including the Descending God and a squatting goddess of birth and fertility—ritual scenes were painted inside. The paintings were still visible through the columns supporting the upper level. The faces of the gods still bore traces of yellow and red paint, and red handprints—artists’ signatures? marks of prayer? pure decoration?—showed plainly all over the building.

Tulum, as Pedro explained, was seen and described but never conquered by the Spaniards. It was abandoned in the 1540s. The pressures of war, overpopulation, and crop failure led the people of Tulum to pull up stakes and leave. And where did they go? Yet another unexplained aspect of the mysterious Maya?

That reputation, after all, has drawn people to ruins like Tulum from all over the world for the better part of a century. Charles Portis’s final novel Gringos, which I reread during the trip, is in no small part about the cranks and oddballs who all wind up in the Yucatán hoping to get something out of the Maya. The allure of the mysterious and the uncanny. But here Pedro was excellent as well. The city was abandoned, yes, later to be claimed by the jungle and rediscovered by European travelers exploring rumors of lost cities, but the people did not disappear. More than twenty Mayan languages are still spoken in Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.

There was much more I could describe and much more detailed information imparted by Pedro and the bilingual signage around the city, but I want to encourage y’all to visit for yourselves if you can. I came away with a strong impression of the strength and vibrancy, the ingenuity and ceremony, the good and the bad of a civilization even in its period of decline and of Tulum’s unique place in the broader Maya world. And visiting in person—seeing the centuries-old handprints on the great palace, staring up at the site of a long ago bloodstained altar, feeling the relief from the tropical heat borne from the sea by the wind—gave me a flesh-and-blood appreciation for the history I’ve previously only read about.

If you’re going to visit Tulum, let me corroborate a few things that a travel agent will probably tell you:

• Dress comfortably and coolly, even if you’re visiting in the late winter, like we did.

• Wear a broad-brimmed hat, and make sure it fits well. The closer you get to the cliffs the more likely it will be blown off.

• Bring bottled water, and plenty of it.

• Bring sunglasses and sunscreen.

• Bring bug spray. We came well-equipped in this regard but had no trouble with insects whatsoever. But it can’t hurt to be prepared.

And a final, personal and historical bit of advice: behave yourself. Much of the ruins of Tulum are roped off and closed to the public—with armed federales at the entrance and local police hanging around, watching—because of vandalism. Per Mark Twain, “There have always been ruins, no doubt; and there have always been pensive people to sigh over them, and asses to scratch upon them their names and the important date of their visit.” Always have been, perhaps, but it doesn’t have to be you.

My wife and I have been back in the States for a week and have enjoyed going over our experiences on the trip, especially our visit to Tulum. I hope this rare travelogue will entice y’all to visit, too. In the meantime, I’ll conclude with a gallery of a few other photos from our visit.

The scorn of one crank for another crank

With my dad in front of the Castillo at Tulum. That’s Gringos that I’m carrying in my right hand.

Late last night I returned from a trip to the Yucatán, during which I got to do two amazing things—one for the first and the other for the third time. The first was visiting the Yucatec Maya city of Tulum, which I hope to write about in the coming week. The other was rereading one of my favorite novels, Charles Portis’s Gringos. I’ve been planning to reread this particular novel on this particular trip for months, as the story takes place in the Yucatán and concerns the use and abuse of Mayan sites and artifacts. I enjoy reading novels in story-appropriate settings, and this reading of Gringos was one of the best I’ve ever experienced. Five stars, would recommend.

I hope to write more about Gringos and Portis in the coming weeks, too, but for the time being I wanted to share a longish passage from early in the novel. The narrator, Arklatex expat Jimmy Burns, has just run into the young UFO researcher Rudy Kurle broken down midriver deep in the Yucatán jungle. Rudy is on his way to a Mayan city he believes is a UFO landing pad.

He wore a bush hat with the brim turned up on one side, Australian fashion, and a belted safari jacket with epaulets, rings and pleated pockets, and he wanted to be known as “Rudy Kurle, author and lecturer.” He and Louise were in Mexico to gather material for a book about some space dwarfs or “manikins” who came here many years ago from a faraway planet. There was no connection to the chaneques, as far as I knew. Their little men were benign, with superior skills and knowledge, and they had transformed a tribe of savages into the Mayan civilization. Not very flattering to the Indians, and it wasn’t of course a new theory, except perhaps for the dwarf element. There had been recent landings as well. 

As a geocentric I didn’t find this stuff convincing. I knew the argument—all those galaxies!—a statistical argument, but in my cosmology men were here on earth and nowhere else, go as far as you like. There was us and the spirit world and that was it. It was a visceral belief or feeling so unshakable that I didn’t even bother to defend it. When others laughed at me, I laughed with them. Still, the flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment. 

Rudy was often gone on these mysterious field trips, to check out reports of ancient television receivers, pre-Columbian Oldsmobiles, stone carvings of barefooted astronauts strapped into their space ships. The ships were driven by “photon propulsion,” although here in the jungle the manikins went about their errands in other, smaller, “slow aircraft.” Rudy wouldn’t describe the machines for me. He and Louise tried to draw people out without giving away anything themselves. There were thieves around who would steal your ideas and jump into print ahead of you. So much uncertainty in their work.

And so little fellowship among the writers. They shared a beleaguered faith and they stole freely from one another—the recycling of material was such that their books were all pretty much the same one now—but in private they seldom had a good word for their colleagues. There were usually a few of these people in temporary residence in Mérida. They exchanged stiff nods on the street. Rudy even expressed contempt for Erich von Däniken, his master, who had started the whole business, and for lesser writers too, for anyone whose level of credulity did not exactly match his own. A millimeter off, either way, and you were a fool. It was the scorn of one crank for another crank. 

A few observations: First, this is some really fine writing. It’s almost pure exposition but it also characterizes Rudy and his colleagues and Jimmy Burns all at the same time, and is peppered with dozens of vivid, concrete details, which as I’m always noting are “the life blood of fiction.”

Second, this is hilarious. The bit about preferring the belligerent UFO books has made me laugh for ten years now. But it was that line’s context which really struck me this time around.

Third—that context. There’s the accidentally insulting (and potentially racist) condescension of ancient aliens theories, the continuous cross-pollination and outright plagiarism of unverified and ultimately unverifiable information, the jockeying for position and originality, the caginess, the backbiting, and the strange hauteur of the precisely defined and defended wackadoo position. This is a sharply observed and pinpoint accurate description of the UFO community—or any conspiracy-minded community, for that matter.

And the whole book is like this. Actually, it gets even better.

Check Gringos out if you haven’t. While Portis’s best book is incontestably True Grit, Gringos has many of the same strengths—a straightforward plot, a brilliantly realized setting, great humor, a strong narrative voice—but a more intricate plot. That makes it certainly, I think, his most finely crafted novel. I strongly recommend it. And if you can read it while visiting Mayan ruins in the Yucatán, all the better.

I’ve written before about cranks, with reference to Chesterton, here, and—once again with reference to Chesterton—about chronological snobbery and the inadvertent (or not) racism of ancient aliens theories here and here. And Gringos was the subject of one of the very first posts on this blog, in which I quoted the “belligerent” line above as well as another gem about a subject dear to me, here.

Against value in literature, for delight

An interesting exchange from near the end of the latest episode of John J Miller’s Great Books podcast, with translator David Slavitt talking about Orlando Furioso:

Miller: What is the value of reading Orlando Furioso today?

Slavitt: None whatever! There’s not a value of reading anything. I mean, there’s a value of reading instructions when you have a new electronic device, but reading by itself does not make anybody better, certainly doesn’t make anybody wiser, it just refines your sensibility. Now, a refined sensibility you would think is an advantage, but what it does is it allows you to be assaulted and affronted and outraged over and over again, probably fifty times more frequently than somebody who has no refinement whatever. The notion that reading is “good” or poems are “great”—all of that seems to me defensive without anybody having attacked. The reason for reading is that it entertains you. I can’t remember which medieval guy it was—Pound quotes him—[wrote that] the purpose of literature is . . . that it may move, that it may teach, that it may delight. And the delight part is more important than the other two. And without that, there’s no sense in undertaking the effort.

Miller: Does Orlando Furioso move and teach?

Slavitt: Well, it teaches because it gives you confidence to turn on any text or any saying, any utterance, and ask of it, “Are you kidding? Do you mean that? Is this true? Is it useful? Is it nonsense?” And “Is it nonsense?” is a question that all readers should bring to whatever they’re reading all the time.

Two things:

First, Slavitt is clearly responding to the instrumental use of literature, which is borne of a widespread viewpoint that to be of “value” a text must inform or persuade in a particular way. Literature must have a function; it must get you something. This is a commodification of literature, and pretty typically American in its pragmatism and evangelicalism. And Slavitt’s point that praising great literature smacks of protesting too much, of trying too hard to convince the unsympathetic that it’s worth their while, highlights the same problem. Note the metaphors this discussion has to fall back on: value, worth, etc.

I might quibble with Slavitt’s hyperbole here, but I agree that stories and literature must be enjoyed for their own sake before they can be “used” for anything. As it happens, delight will also give a good story staying power, and as Slavitt hints in his answers, delight will open you up to be taught and formed—the “useful” parts. Writers who entertain will continue to entertain and teach long after their “usefulness” has expired. Who do people still talk about more outside the classroom: Shakespeare or Upton Sinclair?

Second, Slavitt, in arguing that reading per se does not necessarily make a reader better or wiser (again, an instrumental assumption), brought to mind what might be my least favorite popular slogan: “Fight evil, read books.” Google that phrase and just see how much garbage merch you turn up. Beyond being a comma splice, this sentiment shouldn’t withstand even ten seconds of reflection. Have no evil people written books? Have no evil people been influenced by books? Do evil people not read, too? Are there no books modern people think are evil?

As with so much other nerd culture, the “Fight evil, read books” t-shirts and totes and bookmarks and memes are just so much self-serving gloating. Congratulations, you’re literate. But goodness—before you even get to “fighting evil”—takes more than a library card and an addiction to YA novels.

One of the delights of the above exchange is the 88-year old Slavitt’s wry crustiness and the usually unflappable Miller clearly struggling to recover from that first answer to a pretty standard wrap-up question. The episode doesn’t actually cover much of what Orlando Furioso is about, but it’s certainly piqued my interest to finally read this Renaissance epic and Miller and Slavitt’s discussion is great fun. Check it out.

Addendum: Coincidentally, after listening to this episode on my long Thursday commutes I tuned into the latest episode of Alan Cornett’s Cultural Debris, in which Holly Ordway discussed CS Lewis’s distinction between “using” and “receiving” literature. A helpful parallel line of thought.

Beethoven, art, criticism, and enjoying yourself

From the late Edmund Morris’s Beethoven: The Universal Composer, an excellent short biography for the Eminent Lives series, on the composition Beethoven undertook during a dark period before the premier of his Eighth Symphony in December 1813 and his hugely successful revision of Fidelio:

He went about the task of composing the “Battle Symphony” (known in Germany as Wellingtons Sieg, or “Wellington’s Victory”) with typical professionalism, expanding it to two movements and throwing in “Rule Britannia” for good measure. After scoring it for Panharmonicon, he composed an alternative version for grand orchestra. This enabled him to indulge his love of military field drums, beginning the piece with two enormous rattling crescendos in contrasting rhythms, as if marshaling his aural forces. In the ensuing “battle,” he marked 188 exact cues for cannon fire, with solid dots for British artillery and open ones for French, plus twenty-five musket volleys of precise length and direction, indicated by tied, trilled ghost notes. He synchronized all these salvos with his music so precisely that at the height of the conflict, six cannonades and two musket volleys went off within three seconds.

The “Battle Symphony” commemorates Arthur Wellesley’s victory at Vitoria, the victory that resulted in his elevation to the peerage as the Duke of Wellington. I’ve loved Beethoven since childhood but am by no means a connoisseur, so I had to look the “Battle Symphony” up. It’s wild. In addition to “Rule, Britannia,” it incorporates “God Save the King” as a leitmotif for the British and a French folksong better known as “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” or “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” I’ve embedded von Karajan’s performance in this post; you really have to hear it.

Morris points out several times that critics—actual connoisseurs, unlike yours truly—hold Beethoven’s “Battle Symphony” in pretty low regard. But he also offers this important caveat:

The “Battle Symphony” is by scholarly consensus the worst potboiler Beethoven ever composed, infamous for noise and naïveté. Yet its disparagers ignore that he obviously enjoyed writing it, and that its huge popular success—fanned by Prince Karl Schwarzenberg’s defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig in mid-October—helped pull him out of the Slough of Despond.

Critical consensus matters, as it often does, over enough time, sift what is best from what isn’t, but popular success and pure personal enjoyment matter, too. Sometimes it’s good to remember that. In any art form, if you’re not having fun doing it at least some of the time, why bother?

Bonus trivia or, When Interests Collide: The idea for the “Battle Symphony” came from Beethoven’s acquaintance Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, an inventor who wanted something topical to play on the mechanical orchestra contraption mentioned above. The name sounded familiar to me, and I finally realized where I’d run across it: an early and influential Southern Literary Messenger essay by none other than Edgar Allan Poe, in which he exposes a chess-playing automaton called The Turk that Mälzel had exhibited up and down the East Coast as a hoax. Small world.

Clarity and confusion in war movies

Tom Hanks and Gary Sinese in Forrest Gump’s ambush scene

Happy St Valentine’s Day! Let’s talk about war movies.

One of my favorite podcast discoveries last year was School of War, a military history podcast hosted by Marine veteran Aaron MacLean. School of War gets fantastic guests and covers a wide array of topics—just recently I’ve listened to episodes about Gaius Marius, Erich Ludendorff, the Battle of Crécy, the Anglo-Zulu War, and the myth of Spartan invincibility. This morning the show’s latest episode covered “something a little lighter,” as MacLean puts it: the best of American war movies with guest Sonny Bunch, film critic for The Bulwark.

This episode was a great surprise, and exactly the length of my commute this morning. After an initial discussion of what precisely constitutes a “war movie,” MacLean and Bunch talk through a series of great films in chronological order from Last of the Mohicans and Gettysburg (MacLean sounds like he had a childhood very similar to mine) to Zero Dark Thirty and The Outpost. Along the way they consider a lot of recurring themes as well as the manifold problems of telling war stories on film.

One exchange that particularly struck me relates to a tension running through all war movies. MacLean and Bunch raise this topic a couple of times, but perhaps in greatest detail (at approximately 21:00) as they discuss another old favorite of mine, Sergeant York:

Bunch: That is classic [Howard] Hawks, just pure visual storytelling. The sequence where he’s running essentially from, like, hole to hole taking out German forces, you’re never confused about where he is. There’s a perfect spatial understanding of what is happening in the picture. Again, Howard Hawks is one of the greats, and that is a great movie.

MacLean: Which actually—if I may make a thematic observation—is the thing about war movies that is probably, you know, necessary to making a good movie but the least truthful about the actual battlefield. From time to time, you’ll hear people say, you know, who were in combat, “That was just like a movie on some level,” or we’ll get asked, “Is it like the movies?” And the answer is “In some ways Yes and in some ways No,” and the principal way in which it’s “No” is that, in the movies, you know, as you just pointed out, in a good movie you’re not confused about what’s happening in the action. So in, take Black Hawk Down, for example. Right before the RPG hits a truck, what do you see? You see a bad guy on the roof pop out with the RPG launcher and fire the thing. But if you’re in real life, you’re the kid in the truck, you don’t see the guy pop out with the launcher nine times out of ten, you just see Boom! So the actual battlefield is a place of genuine confusion, where a lot of your energy is going into the most simple tasks of, like, Where are they? Who is shooting at me? From where? You know, those things are what you’re spending a lot of your time doing. But if you made the audience do that in a film you would alienate them very quickly. So even in—I’m curious to know your view on this—even in films that—maybe we’ll talk about this one in a minute—like Saving Private Ryan, where famously the chaos of Omaha Beach is a major subject of the film’s first thirty minutes, even there you’re pretty well oriented, actually, as the viewer. You’re not hiding behind something looking at the back of that thing, like, peeking out from time to time trying to figure out what the heck is going on. You actually have a pretty mobile eye that gives you some sense of orientation to what’s happening.

The discussion moves on from there, but MacLean nicely expresses the tension between the needs of film as a medium and the actual experience of combat. Every war movie has to make decisions about how to handle this. The classic war movies often err in the direction of clarity, with alternating scenes of crisp, clearly shot combat and generals pushing flags around a map table. The choice here is explaining a narrative. Alternately, and more rarely, some films err on the side of chaos and bewilderment, but these often do alienate the audience (and, as MacLean and Bunch discuss later, they tend to have explicit political aims). The best war movies manage a little of both.

One that I think balances this expertly is Forrest Gump. Every year in US History II I show my students the film’s Vietnam ambush scene. Among the things it does well:

• the scene goes from tranquil to chaotic instantly;

• Lt Dan’s platoon returns fire—somewhere. Despite the immense firepower they’re spraying out there’s little indication of what they’re shooting at or whether they’re having any effect, and that’s because

• the enemy is invisible. There are muzzle flashes in the distant treeline, and that’s just about it.

After I show this clip, I ask my students how many enemy soldiers they saw in the scene. Very rarely one student will have caught the movement, out of focus in the extreme lower lefthand corner of one shot near the end, of a few VC, though even after viewing it dozens of times myself I’m not sure precisely how many there are. This situation, I explain, was typical. Hollywood action—or the kind of clarity and control you get in Call of Duty—was not.

Anyway, a great discussion in a great episode, and I heartily recommend listening to it. I’ve seldom wanted to jump in and participate in a podcast more. If I could have—and since I’m on the subject anyway—here are two war movies from periods they skipped over that I would strongly recommend:

• Revolutionary War: The Crossing, a cheap TV movie about Washington’s crossing of the Delaware and the Battle of Trenton, but a solid short dramatization that I sometimes show US History I classes.

• Texas Revolution: The Alamo, the Billy Bob Thornton one. I wrote about this some years ago and I show it every time I teach US History I.

In the meantime, MacLean and Bunch have got me wanting to revisit a lot of old favorites. If you need me, I’ll be trying to convince my wife to celebrate St Valentine’s Day with a viewing of Glory.

I’ve written about war movies here plenty of times before. Last summer I considered the difference between Hollywood action and actual combat footage. Two summers ago I considered what “realism” means in a genre often tasked with depicting already unbelievable events. I also reviewed Sergeant York in some detail for the same defunct Historical Movie Monday series in which I reviewed The Alamo back in the first months of this blog.

Maybe the classified documents are the problem

Last month Tablet published a bracing essay titled “Secrecy is for Losers.” Commenting on the then-ongoing saga of classified documents turning up in the homes, offices, storage units, and outhouses of everyone from sitting presidents to minor federal apparatchiks—a truly bipartisan effort—the essay’s author, Jacob Siegel, noted the scale of official secrecy:

The United States now has more secrets than ever—far more than it can possibly keep track of or justify on national security grounds. As of 2019, 4.2 million people in the United States held security clearances. That’s not a specialized core of security professionals; it’s the population of Los Angeles. And while the clearance holders are now a class unto themselves, that’s nothing compared to the number of classified documents in existence. The government not only doesn’t know how many classified documents it has circulating but also has no way to find out . . . since there is no system for tracking all of them. Mark Bradley, director of the National Archives Information Security Oversight Office, acknowledged that his office has stopped trying to count the number of new secrets being created.

Everyone gets to be James Bond, and M cannot keep up with the reports. Doesn’t even bother, really.

Siegel’s piece is especially good on some of the societal consequences of the federal government’s paranoid addiction to secrecy. Conspiracy theories flourish not only because of the chaotic, omnidirectional, unfocused media ecology—a state of affairs pretty much predicted by Neil Postman—or because of collapsing educational standards, although that is a problem, too, but because secrecy and suspicion breed secrecy and suspicion:

[T]he outrage over Jamie Lee Curtis’ wall art and the far larger scandal over President Biden’s improper handling of classified documents are both products of an enormous, opaque system of secrecy—so opaque we don’t know how enormous it is—that has captured American politics. The principle of democratic self-governance is obviously incompatible with that system, but so too is the sanity of individuals living inside of it. Americans who want to join in their country’s civic life now find that the main way to participate is by following the trail of clues leaked by official sources while trying to solve elaborate, rigged puzzles about the nature of reality. It’s no surprise the country is going nuts.

This situation is only aggravated by the flagrantly partisan way secrecy is used to target political opponents:

The unprecedented use of a state security agency against a former president was justified by what was purported to be an urgent national security threat. And what was that threat? We still don’t know since the whole matter remains a secret. In The Washington Post, anonymous government sources claimed that the raid was triggered because Trump was holding on to documents containing nuclear secrets. Each individual component of the story—the anonymity of the sources, the unknown nature of the documents, the secrecy surrounding the timing of the raid—might appear weak on its own, but together they were mutually reinforcing and created the illusion that there was solid evidence of an imminent national security emergency. Even better, since the claims were secret, they couldn’t be refuted—an arrangement that granted the federal agencies impunity and allowed pundits’ imaginations to run wild devising the most grandiose possible justifications for the raid.

For what it’s worth, I don’t have a dog in this fight. The political gotcha game of which party’s guy was illegally in possession of which secrets got boring very quickly. But watching this unfold, especially after reading Siegel’s piece, got me thinking. Whether classified documents are turning up in the possession of Biden or Trump or one of their cronies, maybe the problem is all that classified information itself. What kind of vast, protean, invasive, totalizing, unaccountable but incompetent government generates this much secret material?

Secrecy, especially for national security purposes, is offered as a solution but rapidly becomes a problem. It’s addictive, pathological, mind-warping. If all you have is a hammer, etc. Siegel once more:

Different forms of government can heighten certain human traits while inhibiting others. Democracy can enhance reason while taming faithfulness. Secrecy turns cunning into a virtue. It rewards plotters, schemers, and the lackeys they rely on.

I’d quibble with whether democracy enhances reason at the expense of faithfulness; I think democracies, if they last long enough, wind up without much of either. But I agree that secrecy is unbecoming of a free people, and a regime of secrecy and classified, need-to-know information will only operate at a greater and ever less accountable remove from the people the government notionally represents.

Siegel’s piece is worth reading in its entirety. You can find it at Tablet here.

The Pale Blue Eye

Speaking of breaking the basic rules of fair play in a whodunit, my first fiction read of 2023 was the historical mystery thriller The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard. I first heard of this novel late last year when the teaser for the Netflix film adaptation arrived. A lifelong Poe devotee, I was immediately intrigued. I dithered over whether to read the novel as I have had some of my own Poe-related fiction simmering for a few years, but as I don’t have Netflix and the basic premise wouldn’t leave me alone, I decided to go for it.

I read it in just a few days right after the New Year. I’ve been thinking about and reconsidering it ever since.

The film has been out a while now so the broad outlines of the story should be familiar. Retired New York City constable Gus Landor is called one fine autumn day to meet with the commandant of the United States Military Academy at West Point. The commandant, Sylvanus Thayer, tells Landor that one of the Academy’s cadets has been found hanged. Thayer has already ruled out suicide, as after the victim was discovered his body was cut down and his heart cut out. The corpse they removed to the infirmary. The heart has yet to be found. Thayer asks Landor to investigate, both to find the killer and to protect the Academy, which is still new, untested, and the object of suspicion among some citizens of the young republic.

Landor, a consumptive who lives continuously aware of his impending death, agrees to his request with some strict conditions and begins. He questions witnesses, examines the body, searches the barracks, and goes over the grounds of the Academy and the place near the Hudson where the body was found. In the course of his searches he meets a first-year cadet from Virginia, one Edgar A Poe, who offers Landor one sharp bit of advice and disappears. His curiosity piqued, Landor later seeks Poe out at a local tavern and the two strike up an odd partnership built around solving the crime—part crime-fighting duo, part mentor-protégé, part estranged father and orphaned son.

Their partnership is deepened and tested when more cadets are murdered and, even more disturbingly, evidence mounts of some kind of satanic worship extending right into the ranks of the Academy itself.

I don’t want to give much more away, as the unfolding of the investigation, the accumulation of clues, and the working relationship between Landor and Poe is one of The Pale Blue Eye’s great joys. It is also, as it turns out, one of its great frustrations.

Before I get into the one major spoiler, let me praise the two best features of the novel. First, the narrative voice: wry, sardonic, blunt and straightforward but with a finely honed poetic edge, Landor tells his story in such a way that a reader is guaranteed to be hooked. Even when the story’s pacing flagged—as it does in a few places near the middle—I was drawn along by Landor’s narration, which never lost my interest.

The other strength of The Pale Blue Eye is its portrait of young Poe. His semester and a half at West Point is often passed over as a biographical curiosity, but Bayard gives Poe’s time there a central place in his life story and brings this young man, burdened with a hard background and self-sabotaging flaws but buoyed by a tremendous trust in his own gifts, to vibrant life. (Bayard’s interpretation owes too much to Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman, who psychologized and pathologized and autobiographized Poe’s work to death, but that angle is probably only discernible to the enthusiast.) I’ve seen some readers complain that the novel is dull whenever Poe is “offscreen”; I disagree, but it does take on an irresistible energy whenever he appears.

That said, I’ve been reflecting on The Pale Blue Eye ever since I finished it not only because I enjoyed it so much, but because its conclusion, its climactic revelation, was such a cheat: it turns out that the first murdered cadet was killed by Landor himself.

In my post about Glass Onion’s failure to play fair with its audience, I mentioned Ronald Knox’s ten commandments of detective fiction. Knox’s rules had been on my mind because of that movie and I sought out the specific rules again because of this novel. In the case of The Pale Blue Eye, rules seven and eight are broken: “The detective himself must not commit the crime” and “The detective is bound to declare any clues he may discover.”

Given the structure and narration of The Pale Blue Eye, violating the one necessitates violating the other. Landor, having already murdered the first victim when the novel begins, withholds key information—namely, that the cadet had been one of several who had gangraped Landor’s daughter, an act that drove her to suicide. Instead, Landor misleads, telling everyone he meets and us, the readers, directly, that his daughter has left him. This is left as vague as possible: perhaps she ran off with a man, perhaps she died… somehow. Landor’s own tuberculosis offers the reader a red herring by association. His tragic backstory, when it is alluded to, is only a tragic backstory, presented with no apparent connection to the events at the Academy because Landor never gives any specifics regrading what happened to his daughter.

The point is that, until Landor explains precisely what happened in the final pages of the book, the reader could never have guessed at these relationships or events. Even when, about halfway through, I first darkly suspected that Landor was involved in the first murder I told myself it couldn’t be—there was nothing to base that suspicion on. Once Landor confesses to Poe and the reader, it recasts not only the meaning of every event in the book like a good twist should, but the very premise of the story itself. It just doesn’t work. The reader rejects it. The revelation is meant to be a tragic surprise but feels like a betrayal, a betrayal compounded in the last few pages by absurdity as Landor, somehow, narrates throwing himself over the same cliffs where his daughter killed herself.

As I mentioned last time, rules are made to be broken, and I didn’t look up Knox’s rules to hold The Pale Blue Eye accountable for some minor breach of protocol. I despise that use of rules for fiction. (Here’s the worst offender, an utterly arbitrary and stupid measure that many readers take as gospel.) But rules like Knox’s exist for a reason. Think of them less as an imposition of external standards on how to tell a story and more an empirical record of what doesn’t work.

A master, fully cognizant of the rules and of the risks he runs in purposefully breaking one, might get away with it. I’ve mentioned Agatha Christie in this connection before. But more often you will get a novel like this one.

The Pale Blue Eye is a case study in taking such risks and failing. It is brilliantly and often poetically written, full of well-realized characters, spooky gothic atmosphere, evocative and realistic Jacksonian-era period details, and a striking portrait of a real person at a formative moment in his life. But its final twist undermines the entire novel up to that point, making the reader doubt whether it was worth the investigation at all.