Young Washington trailer reaction

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

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

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

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

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

Here are Variety and The Hollywood Reporter with more details.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great literature is popular literature

…but not necessarily vice versa.

Two items that got my attention this week and continue some literary themes I’ve thought a lot about over the years (eg here, here, and especially here):

First, a writer at Front Porch Republic bookends his review of Alan Jacobs’s new book Paradise Lost: A Biography with an interesting story. Here’s the beginning of the review:

As I drove into a hotel parking garage one afternoon, I mentioned to the attendant that I had come for a conference on John Milton. “Milton?” he replied. “Wasn’t he the one who had Satan say it’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven?” Yes, I said, that’s the guy!

and the conclusion:

Jacobs ends the book by asking whether Paradise Lost has any future outside of academic scholarship. He suggests that yes, it might. . . . After all, if a parking garage attendant in an American city still knows who Milton is, there is hope that Paradise Lost will continue to find admiring readers in the twenty-first century.

Second, a friend on Instagram sent me this reel of an Italian butcher reciting part of Inferno in his shop. As I noted on Instagram, hearing a native recite Dante really brings out the rhythm of Dante’s verse and especially the rhyme of terza rima in a way I seldom get picking through a bilingual edition. But what I most appreciated was his exuberant enthusiasm for Dante and the way he brought that into his shop. Here’s a man who has passages of the Comedy memorized and can recite them at length for their own sake, not because he’s a tweedy professorial type or so that he can dissect and deconstruct them.

This brought to mind a story about Dante himself related by 14th-century Florentine writer Franco Sacchetti. One day Dante overheard a blacksmith singing some of Dante’s poetry but garbling the words, “clipping here and adding there,” which “seemed to Dante to be doing him a very great injury.” Dante entered the smith’s shop and started hurling his tools into the street. When the smith protested, they had this exchange:

“What the devil are you doing? Are ye mad?”

Dante asked him: “What art thou doing?”

“I am doing my own business,” answered the smith; “and ye are spoiling my tools, throwing them into the street.”

Said Dante: “If thou desirest that I should not spoil thy things, do not thou spoil mine.”

“Thou art singing out of my book,” Dante explains later, “and art not singing it as I wrote it; I have no other trade but this, and thou art spoiling it for me.” Again—a writer’s words matter.

But that’s not my point here. What struck me in both stories were the humble—a butcher, a parking lot attendant—knowing their epic poetry (albeit imperfectly in the case of the smith, but who wouldn’t prefer a world in which you could walk downtown and hear tradesmen and shopkeepers talking about great literature, even if they make mistakes quoting it?). And they didn’t just know this poetry—it mattered to them. In case we needed any further proof, great literature really is for everyone and always has been.

By the way, the butcher is eighth-generation butcher Dario Cecchini. Here’s his shop and one of his restaurants, which specializes in fantastic-looking steaks. If and when I ever visit Florence again, this is on my to-do list. And he’s reciting lines from the beginning of Canto V of Inferno.

Artistic appreciation comes first

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

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

That last line is gold.

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

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

— GK Chesterton

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

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

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

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

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

Merrill’s Marauders

Jeff Chandler as Gen Frank Merrill inspects his exhausted men before the final assault In Merrill’s Marauders (1962)

There’s a scene in Norman Mailer’s war novel The Naked and the Dead in which the recon squad at the center of the story are ordered to drag an artillery piece into position in the jungle. They must first get it across a river and then up a muddy, deeply rutted track to the top of a hill with no mechanical assistance. It takes all day. And it’s agonizing. Mailer makes the reader feel—for pages and pages—the messy, clumsy, impossible effort as well as the inevitable frustration when the gun finally slips loose and slides right back down the hill into the river. The reader ends the chapter as exhausted as Mailer’s soldiers.

Precisely that note of weariness and exhaustion is the salient mood of Merrill’s Marauders, an unusual 1962 World War II movie I recently rewatched with my sons after an interval of many years.

I don’t intend this post as a proper review—if you’ve found your way here you probably already know something about the movie—but I do want to draw attention to this aspect of exhaustion. Few of the classic 1950s and 60s World War II films approach their subject with the attention to labor, repetitiveness, and sheer tiredness that Merrill’s Marauders does.

Briefly, Merrill’s Marauders tells the true story of a special US Army unit deployed to Burma in support of British efforts there. Burma is a neglected corner of the war anyway, and the unfamiliarity of the story as well as its realistic, serious depiction of the wastage and attrition of the campaign make it worthwhile viewing.

This is despite the movie being quite rough around the edges. Wikipedia diplomatically calls it an “economical historical epic,” which being translated is “low budget movie.” It shows in different ways, most obviously and jarringly in a sequence incorporating stock footage from Battle Cry, a film about Marines in the Pacific, into a film about the US Army in Burma.

That Merrill’s Marauders works at all can be credited to its director. Sam Fuller was himself a veteran of the war and would go on to write and direct The Big Red One based yet more directly on his experiences. Presented with this story and a small budget, Fuller mostly dealt with his constraints artfully and used his funding where it could make the most difference. The film begins in medias res, with the Marauders already worn out and their numbers depleted after weeks on the march in the jungle, and it ends not with the final great battle to take their objective but on a character-centered moment just before the action—a daring move that works perfectly. That’s the writing. Technically, a pair of mid-film assault sequences are staggeringly well executed, as is a climactic defense against a banzai attack.

Action punctuates the separate acts of the story but the subject is really the men themselves, their leader, General Merrill, and their exhaustion. At several points in the film they are declared used up by the unit surgeon, utterly incapable of more, and yet when they receive new orders they pick up and carry on. There is heroism in the combat scenes but a no less extraordinary heroism in the long marches through jungle and over mountains in between. One senses that Fuller, a combat infantryman himself, understood well the drain of boredom and endless work and wanted the audience to feel it in their bones.

Where Merrill’s Marauders differs most starkly from the scene I opened with from The Naked and the Dead is in its earnestness. Mailer’s novel is a bitter, cynical story in which endurance and courage are rewarded with yet more pointless hardship. Merrill’s Marauders believes in its men and their work. The war is terrible and wastes good men, but their unromantic, plodding tenacity is something to be admired.

The film’s best moment, for me, and one that illustrates beautifully the place Merrill’s Marauders reserves for sincerity and goodness, is not General Merrill’s final scene—a calvary-like passion complete with pietà—but a quiet one near the middle. The Marauders, despite their weary, malnourished, disease- and leech-ridden condition, have liberated a strategically important rail junction from the Japanese. While Merrill considers the situation, his men sack out anywhere they can sit or lie down. The Burmese natives appear—they’re all women and children, a fact with dark implications that the film wisely leaves us to intuit. An old woman approaches one of the toughest sergeants in the unit and gratefully offers him rice. He breaks down weeping before he can finish eating it.

If few of the classic war movies portray the weariness and sheer effort of the war as little more than a discomfort or inconvenience, fewer still offer us moments like that.

Merrill’s Marauders is a unique little movie, telling a unique story with the sharp perspective of a veteran spiritually unwearied by cynicism. It’s worth checking out if you haven’t seen it, or revisiting if you have.

Palma’s Divine Comedy

Considering how much space his work takes up in my mind, I don’t write about Dante often enough here. Some books you read so early, and at such a formative time, that they become part of the foundation of one’s taste, worldview, and imagination, informing everything without always being seen. The Divine Comedy is one of those for me, and I want to make a rare comment about it here, specifically in praise of the recent English translation by Michael Palma.

One of the commonplaces of writing about Dante in English is the difficulty—in English—of terza rima, the rhyme scheme Dante created for the Comedy. This is a “threefold rhyme” of aba-bcb-cdc-ded-efe etc, with each tercet linking ahead and behind. It’s elegant, beautiful when done well, and theologically significant. (Dante’s three-part epic ends with a vision of the Trinity, after all.) All well and good, but it’s also a bear to work with. As many, many translators have noted, the lack of inflected endings on English words severely limits possible rhymes in comparison with a Romance language like Italian.

What’s an English translator to do, then? The solutions depend greatly on a given translator’s priorities, which usually boil down to choices between the following:

• Accuracy of wording or sense

• Accuracy of tone

• Accuracy of form, including rhyme

Wording, of course, is the most flexible of the three. Dante wrote in medieval Italian. The particulars of how one renders that in English is going to depend greatly on the latter two priorities. Most translators go for tone, capturing Dante’s force and directness while using an unmetered or loosely metered line and little or no rhyme. The most literal translations—Hollander and Singleton, for example—do this successfully. Dante comes through even if a notable aspect of the form doesn’t.

But there are rare translators who do chase the white whale of rhyme. The most successful have typically done so only when natural-sounding rhymes present themselves, like Anthony Esolen, long my favorite for reading, or by limiting or altering the rhyme scheme in some way, like John Ciardi, who rhymes the first and last lines of each tercet and doesn’t worry about the rest. Both suggest what Dante sounded like without straining.

Much more rare is the translator who tries to do the entire Comedy in Dante’s rhyme. Dorothy Sayers is the most famous example. While her notes are rightly praised and valued, her translation, in retaining terza rima, lengthens the poetic line to accommodate involuted English constructions, the contorted grammar of which is larded with archaisms. One feels at all times the effort she is putting into achieving end-rhyme. While she manages to keep the rhyme, she loses Dante’s concision, energy, and wording. I’ve never found that a worthwhile sacrifice.

I mention all these technical considerations and poetic hazards to highlight Palma’s achievement in his Divine Comedy. He has successfully translated the Comedy in terza rima from start to finish—one hundred cantos!—without strain or contortion, without reaching for rhymes, and while accurately capturing both Dante’s wording and his forcefulness, directness, and every subtle emotional register. Words, tone, and form all align effortlessly. I didn’t think it was possible.

The greatest pleasure of this reading of the Comedy, which I undertook at leisure over the last five weeks, was to glance up from the page and realize I’d been reading English terza rima without even noticing. Palma has made this great work, which I’ve read umpteen times over the quarter century since I discovered it in high school, fresh and powerful again. Dante’s final vision in Paradiso XXXIII, which I read this afternoon while giving an exam, was vivid to me in a way it has never been before.

Given recent receptiveness to formalism in translation—such as Emily Wilson’s blank verse Iliad and Odyssey—I hope Palma’s Comedy will find enthusiastic widespread appreciation. It will certainly take its place on my Dante shelf alongside Esolen, Musa, and Ciardi as one of my favorites. If you’re looking for a good opportunity to reread Dante or to read the Comedy for the first time, I heartily recommend it.

Epistolary authority, uncertainty, and mystery

When I wrote about the epistolary form and other framing devices in gothic storytelling earlier this week I forgot to mention The Screwtape Letters. I want to correct that. But first, check out this short Substack piece, which looks specifically at the opening “Author’s Preface” of Dracula.

In the essay I quoted Monday the author argued that framing devices like letters and diaries create a metanarrative “uncertainty” that tinges the reader’s perception of the story, building suspense and horror. The form itself generates the gothic’s sense of the uncanny. I agreed, and added that the epistolary or found document form also contributes the sense of discovery or unveiling that digging through old documents produces, heightening the genre’s feeling of mystery.

The above piece from The Middling Place about Stoker’s preface looks at another aspect of the form, namely the authority and veracity established by presenting a story’s “sources” in the manner of non-fiction:

This is not a fictional story written by an author. In fact, the author has nothing to do with the story. . . . Because they were found, they must be fact and not fiction. Obviously, we know that these are indeed works of fiction, yet it is a technique used by the author to make it seem less so.

In other words, they “substantiate authenticity.” The verb “seem” near the end is especially important, as while all fiction is an illusion of sorts—or a dream, as I prefer to think of it—the gothic relies upon and exploits the seemingness of the illusion more than usual.

So, what framing devices like letters or diary entries do for a gothic tale, in brief:

• Create uncertainty

• Engender a sense of discovery

• Establish the illusion of authenticity or reality

The Middling Place author does a good job examining how this works through a close reading of Stoker’s preface to Dracula. Consider two other cases.

First, the Coen brothers’ Fargo opens with this notorious title card:

THIS IS A TRUE STORY.

The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.

At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.

Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

I say “notorious” because some people think this crossed a line, but considered in relation to Dracula and the other examples provided in those two Substack essays, the Coens don’t seem to be doing much different here. Leaving that aside, those who view this opening text as a violation or lie confirm the ability of this kind of preface to sell the strange and unbelievable as authentic—which was the whole point, according to the Coens.

But Fargo poses as a low-key true crime story. The gothic asks its readers to accept much more, which brings me back to The Screwtape Letters.

Lewis’s opening note to this epistolary novel is often forgotten—it’s not even included in the sample on Amazon—but look at these sentences and, in light of the above, think about what they accomplish for Screwtape:

I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.

Like Dracula, The Castle of Otranto, or what have you, this one sentence both 1) tells the reader that what he is about to read is real and 2) suggests immediately the mystery of its origins and contents. Not only can the editor not explain what we’re about to read, he won’t. Lewis reinforces these effects throughout the note while maintaining what seems, on a literal reading, the dry, dispassionate language of the textual critic. Consider this line from the final paragraph:

In conclusion, I ought to add that no effort has been made to clear up the chronology of the letters.

The authenticity or reality of the story—one can picture the scholar, frustrated, working into the night to compile and arrange Screwtape’s correspondence—as well as the mystery are reiterated one last time, and lines in the middle like “The reader is advised to remember that the devil is a liar” develop the aforementioned uncertainty. The whole effect is powerfully tantalizing, and though I’ve never heard anyone describe Screwtape as gothic, Lewis uses these effects masterfully.

By a nice coincidence, I just started Dracula last night. It’s engrossing. The gestures toward authenticity, uncertainty, and mystery embedded in Stoker’s preface are not the whole reason for this—plenty of bad books open with similar notes (pick up any Dan Brown novel)—but they have a subtle power worth learning from.

The epistolary and the gothic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letter-writing in Emma revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erzberger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes on Christopher Nolan’s best movie

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

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

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

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

Some notes toward refining my argument:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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