Look Who's Back (Er is wieder da)

It's not hard to resurrect Hitler, even easy, I think, to put him through his paces in encounters with current fashion and events.  But it's not so easy to get rid of him once he has been summoned for whatever metaphorical or political or artistic purpose.  This message is clear enough from both Timur Vermes' bestselling comic novel, Er is wieder da (He's Back Again) and the movie based on that book.  I counted at least three and, possibly, four endings to the film, a pretty clear signal that the film makers have tapped into something larger than their project and have unleashed a genie that is not so readily crammed back into his bottle.  Vermes' novel imagines Hitler suddenly appearing in Berlin, seemingly resurrected from the wreckage of the Fuehrer bunker.  The novel imagines Hitler is various comical situations and reads, at times, like outlines for skits in a sketch-comedy revue -- Hitler examines a cell-phone, Hitler on a date, Hitler interacting with various minorities, Hitler surfing the internet.  The novel is written in the third-person and part of its charm lies in Hitler's diction -- he applies grandiose Nietzschean language about strife and combat to every day life and remains supremely confident of his powers, certain that he is a man of destiny, and, indeed, enormously resourceful in exploiting all circumstances to his benefit.  Unwittingly, Vermes makes Hitler seem a bit endearing, a kind of half-mad Don Quixote, and, ultimately, the book has nowhere to go -- like the movie, it can't quite bring itself to an end and, if I recall properly (I read the novel last year) the book simply peters out.  The film is more inventive and its creators labor mightily to bring some closure to the fantasy.  Ending 1 shows the hero, Sawatzki, Hitler's discoverer and promoter, finally learning that the man that he has been displaying to the world is really  der Fuehrer somehow revived after his death in April of 1945 -- the knowledge drives Sawatzki mad.  In the second ending, Sawatzki kills Hitler by pushing him off the edge of skyscraper; Hitler falls to his death but, then, immediately reappears proclaiming that he will always be a part of Sawatzki, and, presumably, all Germans.  In Ending 3, really a meta-ending, we discover that Sawatzki is directing another actor playing Sawatzki (in a hyper-realistic plastic mask) and that the whole thing is just a movie, a kind of grandiose fantasy enacted on a massive scale like the all-encompassing theater work in Synecdoche, New York -- this is a variant on The Wizard of Oz notion that it was all just a wacky dream.  In the fourth ending, really a part of the closing credits, Sawatzki chauffeurs Hitler around modern-day Berlin in an open car and the bemused men and women on the street alternately hurl insults at him or salute him enthusiastically with arms upraised as if the proclaim "Heil Hitler!" -- this sequence is intercut with images of European politicians making xenophobic comments about immigrants, pictures of anti-immigrant protests as well street fighting all scored to Dowland's funeral music for Queen Ann, synthesized as in Clockwork Orange for maximum portentous and sinister effect.  The fourth ending epitomizes an aspect of the film that is derived from Sasha Baron Cohen's pictures, most obviously Borat -- the man impersonating Hitler wanders around Germany encountering various bemused people who are clearly not actors and not aware that they are being filmed:  some of these people seem to revile Hitler; others greet him with warmth and remark that they've missed him and that German democracy is a failure.  (German privacy laws apparently forbid the filmmakers from showing anyone on screen who has not given a proper release of his or her image -- as a result, many of these scenes are disfigured by little black strips covering the eyes of the people shown and signifying that they wish to remain anonymous.) 

The movie is reasonably funny.  Like most comedies, it is indifferently lit and photographed:  the film is shot like a larger-scale version of an American TV show like The Office, mostly handheld camera on overly bright sets with snappy editing.  The film follows the efforts of a recently fired TV producer, the hapless Sawatzki, to exploit Hitler and win his way back into TV production.  He discovers Hitler lumbering around in the background of some shots that he has made in Berlin.  (He's making a documentary that no one wants to see about homeless children and poverty in Germany's big cities.)  Sawatzki hauls Hitler around Germany during the first third of the film and that part of the movie features the most Borat-style interaction with puzzled non-actors.  Back in Berlin, Hitler appears on comedy-show, a sort of Teutonic version of the Howard Stern show; the program is called (in translation) "Whoa, Dude!"  Hitler disconcerts everyone by a staging a wild tirade.  The public thinks that Hitler is merely a comedian and takes his rants to be ironic comedy.  But as with Archie Bunker in the American TV series, All in the Family, a sizeable portion of the population seem to agree with Hitler and, in fact, he becomes a popular TV personality.  Unfortunately, Hitler is filmed shooting a dog and falls from grace.  But, because he is Hitler, he writes another book, refuses to be discouraged, and mounts a comeback.  (The novel ends with Hitler re-establishing his party through the internet and TV appearances, an apparently irresistible force.)  As in the novel, there are lots of sequences that are designed to exploit the sheer incongruity of the absurdly charismatic, but sinister dictator interacting with the more silly aspects of modern life -- we see Hitler in love, Hitler commenting on a TV cooking show, Hitler berating neo-Nazis for not being tough enough and so on.   Parts of the film are evasive, a characteristic shared with the novel.  In the book, Hitler discovers that Sawatzki's goth girlfriend is part Jewish and, in fact, confronts her elderly grandmother who complains about the deaths of family members in the war.  Hitler commiserates about the brutality of allied bombing campaigns only to be told that the family members were murdered in the camps -- in the book, Vermes sets up a confrontation between the old lady, a victim of Hitler's anti-Semitism, and Hitler, but, then, he shifts the subject and deflects the issue, suggesting obliquely that even the Jewish grandmother could be won over to Hitler's side by his sheer charisma.  The movie follows this plot line quite closely -- the movie is not particularly faithful to the novel in general -- but doesn't seem to know how to handle the old woman's wild-eyed and hysterical revelation that this man is, in fact, the real Hitler and not merely a comedian with a gift for remaining in character.  The old woman shrieks wildly at Hitler and, the movie changes the subject.  The movie is interesting, fairly amusing with a  few laugh-out-loud scenes.  And the picture is particularly revelatory in light of the United States election and rise of Donald Trump, the main reason, I think, that this picture can be found on Netflix.   

Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974

It is hard to write about Kazuo Hara's alarming documentary Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 without adopting a morally judgmental tone that might disturb some people.  We are told that all families, whatever their configuration, are equal; we understand that women must be accorded full control over their reproductive systems; in principle, I suppose, we are willing to salute those who dare to be different, those who are willing to risk an experimental life-style:  in Chasing Amy, the protagonist says something to this effect:  "I'm an experimental girl.  If I came with an operator's manual, no one showed it to me."  That stated, Hara's Extreme Private Eros portrays a kind of specifically female pathology, a sort of amoral squalor that is characteristically gendered and pretty much instantly recognizable  -- the film explores the uneasy boundary between behavior that might be thought to be vaguely feminist in nature, but that, also, has a decidedly perverse and self-serving character.  Simply put, the film poses the question of whether the women depicted in the movie are skanky promiscuous losers or bold sexual outlaws.  My inclination is to see the heroine and her friends as the former, but, I should note, that there are a number of reviews that tend toward the latter interpretation as well.  Everyone has glimpsed the world shown by Extreme Private Eros -- it's an entirely female world, ruled by women who live on government entitlement checks, a place where men are merely transient, unwelcome guests, generally prized, and, then, despised for their violence and sexual selfishness; in this world, no one has any money, everyone raises everyone else's children, the girls and women seem never to have heard of birth control and are all casually promiscuous, the babies have no fathers, diapers are always dirty and everyone has a grievance against everyone else.  Masculinity, of course, has its own pathologies and they are mostly violent and cruel, but the milieu depicted in unsparing terms in Hara's film is one that is terrifying to most men -- an abyss where everyone is enthusiastically making babies without any concern as to how those children will be cared for.

Hara's picture records his ongoing relationship with the rather squat and plain-looking Takeda Miyuki.  Miyuki is Hara's ex-wife and the mother of his small son.  She announces that she intends to travel to Okinawa.  Hara pursues her to that place, corners her with his camera, and films her incessantly.  At first, we see Miyuki, who is a vicious nag, verbally abusing her taciturn girlfriend.  While rug-rats creep on the floor, Miyuki belabors the other woman who ignores her, sulking as she gnaws on her fingernails.  This lesbian love affair collapses and next we discover that Miyuki has an African-American GI boyfriend, a nice-looking kid named Paul.  This love affair lasts only three weeks but results in Miyuki's pregnancy.  Miyuki hangs around low-rent bars on a squalid GI strip in Okinawa -- the various homely bar girls explain how they have been abused, beaten and knifed.  Inserting himself in this depressing situation, Hara has brought with him to Okinawa his present girlfriend, the much more attractive, chipper, and aggressively cute, Miss Kobayashi -- she sticks the microphone in Miyuki's face so that the heroine can engage in her tireless rants about her happiness that she is pregnant with a "mixed" (that is, half-black) child.  Miyuki has the baby in an alarming single-shot sequence with the camera aimed directly at her vagina -- Kobayashi holds the microphone up to laboring mother's mouth but, otherwise, doesn't help her at all; Miyuki's little boy sits next to his mother's spread knees and wails during the bloody spectacle.  (Hara is overly excited and the image is out-of-focus, something that is, I think, a blessing.)  Later, Miyuki's lesbian lover also has a half-black baby -- that kid is born very floppy with head crushed into a cone and, for a few alarming minutes, it seems that the child is not going to survive.  Along the way, Miyuki has authored a tract about the evils of prostitution -- the tract is supposed to help the hapless bargirls and warns them to stay about from "Black men with their big cocks."  The local pimps are not amused and beat up Hara for fomenting trouble among the girls.  We see Miyuki taking a bath in a tub full of infants, a grotesque kind of earth mother.  In the final scene, she is dancing naked as a go-go girl in the bar on the GI strip. 

The film is casually cruel -- apparently, Miyuki's mother suggests to her daughter that she kill the half-Black baby -- and everyone is constantly berating everyone else.  These tirades are disorienting because the sound doesn't synchronize with the image -- we hear the voices but lips don't move.  The movie is made in black and white and its intentionally shoddy -- the images are out of focus, either under-lit or over-lit.  The shabby concrete block apartments are like something from a nightmare -- you can almost smell the filth, the tropical heat, the dirty diapers and rotting food.  In one scene, Kobayashi and Miyuki discuss Hara's deficiencies as a lover -- as usual, Miyuki is warning someone about imminent trouble.  The two women are lounging against a wall.  When the camera pulls back at the end of the conversation, we see that both of them have been standing in about six-inches of nasty-looking bilge-water under a sea wall -- they seem to be literally ankle deep in crud.  The film is astonishing enough -- it's about a rough, negligent, lawless life-style and the movie is shot in a casual way that is wholly consistent with the subject matter.  The picture is about a woman who just doesn't give a shit although she has endless outspoken grievances and the movie is made in such a way as to make it obvious that the woman's carelessness is commensurate with the studied carelessness of the way the picture is produced:  it's complete poverty on all levels -- no money, no father, no income stream to support the babies and their mothers; no money to make the film and not even any commitment to getting things in focus or making the sound match the motion of people's lips. 

Hara is famous for the film he made 13 years later, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On -- the ultimate in investigative journalism.  In that film, the protagonist wants to get war veterans to admit that they encouraged cannibalism in order to survive in the jungles of New Guinea.  When the old men balk at this admission, the  hero literally beats the truth out of them.  The movie is staggering and Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 is, in its own way, equally uncompromising.

The Duke of Burgundy

The metaphor governing Peter Strickland's eccentric Duke of Burgundy (2014) is an entomological specimen -- a butterfly or massive moth pinned through its body within a glass case.  Although this conceit doesn't make much sense of Strickland's S & M melodrama, it does clarify the form of the film and its aspirations:  Strickland is a collector presenting for our delectation the corpse of a soft-core Eurosleaze film, circa 1975, pinned through its belly and tastefully arrayed under glass.  Eurosleaze, the genre favored by such notables as Jesse Franco and Jean Rollin featured idyllic landscapes, dark baronial castles, and topless maidens cavorting in Sapphic abandon that always threatened to become violent or, even, deadly -- focus was soft and blurry; the mise-en-scene casually dreamlike; and the sex, almost entirely off-screen and, therefore, imaginary, was generally perverse.  These films were all a morbid tease with lilting soundtracks, sun-dappled walks in the park, and dubbed voices moaning in ecstasy. (Franco who also specialized in zombie films ended-up more hard-core, directing sadomasochistic female concentration camp movies.)  It's a tribute to The Duke of Burgundy's scrupulous authenticity that the dialogue, such as it is, sounds dubbed. 

In some vaguely Hungarian or Czech village, a group of austerely clad women have gathered to study entomology.  They meet at intervals to listen to lectures on bugs.  The lectures are delivered by fierce-looking dominatrices in shiny jackboots.  Evelyn, a mousy little woman, rides her bicycle to the vine-shrouded manor where Cynthia lives.  Cynthia is severely dressed and she is constantly drinking water so as to better urinate in Evelyn's mouth.  Evelyn knocks on the door, is met by Cynthia, who, then, orders her to perform menial household chores.  One thing leads to another and Evelyn has to be punished.  The film repeats this scenario with only tiny variations four or five times.  Evelyn controls the ritual, writing demanding notes to her mistress on 3 x 5 cards.  She is a bossy slave and persnickety -- she doesn't like it when Cynthia snores.  Evelyn hauls a big chest into the bedroom and forces Cynthia to lock her in the box every night -- even from within the casket, Evelyn is exceedingly bossy, waking up Cynthia with the hissed demand, "Be nasty!"  Ultimately, Evelyn is bored and contrives a session of boot polishing with another harsh and cruel lady-entomologist, Dr. Schuller.  This leads to a crisis in the relationship between Evelyn and Cynthia, some hard words are exchanged, and Evelyn agrees to be more spontaneous in their love-making -- they deviate from the fixed scenario but, after a while, it is just simpler to revert to their previously well-established rituals.  Cynthia, who has to play the role of the cruel mistress, seems sad and put upon; Evelyn constantly orders her around, probably, because the baronial manor, in fact, is Evelyn's home and she seems to be the world-renowned entomologist in the couple.  All of this is filmed with the utmost languor -- slow tracking shots linger on lingerie and glistening leather surfaces; the casket-like box has a sinister presence; and the women's love-making, to the extent that it is shown, is generally revealed in a mirror poised somewhere in a candle-lit room.  The film's surface is gorgeous in a conventional way, soft light and haloed rim-shots of luminous hair, sun-dappled exteriors.  The S & M rituals, comprising most of the film, are intercut with various shots of moths and butterflies in flight, pupa emerging from cocoons, grubs burrowing through deep rich soil so chocolaty in color that you feel like you could eat it with a spoon.  The entomological imagery doesn't exactly match anything in the film and remains a puzzling tangent that never really intersects with the arc of the narrative such as it is.  (The conclave of women could be bicycle enthusiasts or hydraulic engineers -- the fact that they spend their time in dusty libraries reading about crickets and moths seems arbitrary.)  The film has the strength of its own peculiar convictions -- there are no men anywhere visible in the picture and, indeed, no suggestion that there is anything like another (male) gender in this exclusively female world.  The closing titles are funny:  the film features "entomological collections from natural history museums in Hungary" and not one, but two, "human toilet consultants."

The League of Youth

Henrik Ibsen wrote The League of Youth during his exile in Berlin during the early 1870's.  The play follows Ibsen's two great verse dramas, Brand and Peer Gynt, and, in contrast to those works, The League of Youth is determinedly prosaic and conventional -- a well-made play after the French manner with a circuitous plot and a complex denouement involving no fewer than three marriages.  The story involves an ambitious young lawyer, Stensgaard, who comes to a small village in the hinterlands, dabbles in a local election, and rattles the status quo both erotically and politically.  Although the play is said to be popular in Scandinavia, it is rarely performed elsewhere -- indeed, there is a possibility that the production mounted by the Commonweal Theater in Lanesboro, Minnesota between April and June 2016 is the premiere of this work in the United States.  That said, the play is so cunningly constructed with such a wealth of fascinatingly cynical characters that the work is fairly well-known in translation.  My big book of Ibsen plays, reprinted from the 1950's with an introductory essay by H. L. Mencken publishes a translation of the work and my guess is that the play is frequently read and studied -- it is after all an interesting transitional work between Ibsen's visionary verse plays (heavily influenced by Goethe) and his later realistic and, indeed, symbolist works. 

A word of caution is in order.  The version of The League of Youth presented at the Commonweal Theater is "an adaptation" by a Minnesota playwright, Jeffrey Hatcher.  The original play is lengthy and extraordinarily complex with a huge cast of characters.  Hatcher has substantially abridged the play and eliminated half of its cast -- he has switched genders with respect to some of the characters and the climactic roundelay of farcically botched wedding proposals involves, to some extent, entirely different characters than those who end up getting "hitched" in Ibsen's original work.  Hatcher has eliminated the drunken newspaperman, Aslaksen, the cynical doctor/commentator Fieldbo, and has changed Mons Monsen into Mrs. Monsen; some minor roles he elevates, other major parts he reduces or excises entirely.  Several of the erotic subplots are cut -- Stensgaard is an equal opportunity seducer; he makes passes at all of the women in the play regardless of their marital status or age.  As a result, The League of Youth only slightly resembles Ibsen's play -- the skeleton of the work is on display, but much of text's hyper-complex narrative is eliminated.  Things only suggested in the original are made overt and much of the play's elliptical and ironic dialogue is missing.  (In my translation, League of Youth has an eerie dream-like indeterminacy -- we know that Stensgaard is constantly conniving, but we get the sense that he doesn't really have any firm objective in mind.  When he gives a rabble-rousing Communist speech at a local election party, Stensgaard seems to astound himself and spends the rest of the play improvising different schemes based upon the splash that he has made with that oration -- no one knows what to make of Stensgaard including, I think, Ibsen himself.  League of Youth implies something quite unsettling -- for Stensgaard everything is provisional except his Nietzschean will-to-power and he acts by intuition as opposed to calculation.  He's like Donald Trump -- everyone knows he's in the game only for himself but no one can figure out his next move or why he will make that move.)  In some ways, Hatcher's version of The League of Youth feels like King Lear with the entire subplot involving Edgar and Gloucester eliminated -- it's like Hamlet without Ophelia. 

Hatcher's adaptation is probably all to the good.  It seems likely that League of Youth would be much too long, too clogged with speeches and too intrinsically local to be acceptable to American audiences.  (The play caused street-fighting in Oslo when it was first premiered -- the pragmatically vague political agenda espoused by Stensgaard led conservatives to think they were being ridiculed while the liberals were similarly outraged by what they were perceived to be mockery of their party.  This situation is echoed by a scene in the play in which Chamberlain Bratsberg, the local grandee, is not clear whether Stensgaard's maiden speech is denouncing or praising him -- although all the auditors of the speech know quite well that Stensgaard's intent is malicious.)   Hatcher's adaptation is a sprightly 2 hours and five minutes long -- probably less than half the running time of the play as written.  The show preserves the lineaments of Ibsen's complicated plot -- Stensgaard espouses a political position that he changes in every act depending upon who is trying to impress and seduce.  He proposes marriage to all of the women in the play in turn -- desperate to secure an advantageous match.  The proceedings are generally very funny and the script is sharply written -- it has something of the air of a fast-paced screwball comedy, a tone that is foreign, I think, to the original but that works effectively.  Stensgaard's wild egotism and self-serving antics are picturesque and he is amusing without being actually loathsome.  The battered and dilapidated local elector, Lundestad, is funny -- deemed to be a great orator, he is unable to say anything without slipping into tautology and malapropism.  Chamberlain Bratsberg is a wonderful combination of angry indignation and unctuous self-aggrandizement.  Everyone in the play is some species of business failure or crook and the show is wonderfully cynical.  Hatcher superimposes on the play a final speech by Stensgaard who has been rejected by all of the women, his political prospects dashed and his hopes for prosperity ruined -- in livid red light, Stensgaard cries out for revenge, suggesting, perhaps, that the Communist revolutions of the 20th century will be an outcome of the resentment that he feels at his failures in the small Norwegian town.  This is gratuitous but effective -- it's as if Malvolio were allowed the last word in Twelfth Night and permitted to prophecy the coming revolution of the Puritans.  The show is presented on a thrust stage with a couple pieces of furniture that cast members lugged on and off as required -- there was a hand-painted flat representing some birch trees that could be reversed to simulate, very crudely, the interior of a house or saloon.  Good theater doesn't require anything in the way of sets -- the Commonweal production made this eminently clear. 

Villainy: Spotlight and The Night Manager

One of the defects of real life is its lack of villains.  Even Donald Trump, so people say who have been granted an audience with the great man, is charming in person, friendly, and accommodating.  Art repairs this deficit by devising scenarios in which ordinary, banal evil is concentrated in the character of a villain.  The popular cinema is enamored with villainy -- indeed, a film's success can sometimes be measured in terms of the charisma of its villain.  By this standard, the six-part AMC mini-series, The Night Manager, is a great triumph.  Conversely, the Oscar-awarded Spotlight is notably deficient with respect to "hiss-able" villainy and it is worth considering whether this detracts from that film's merit.

The Night Manager is adapted from a novel by John LeCarre and features Hugh Laurie as the bad guy, Richard Roper.  Laurie (with LeCarre) is a producer of the film and he appears in, at least, half of the scenes in the six-hour show.  One can see why Laurie was sufficiently interested in this material to produce this lavishly staged and opulent mini-series -- Richard Roper is characterized as "the worst man in the world" in the opening 15 minutes and Laurie does everything to make his character live up to that reputation.  The series' premise is that Roper is an international arms dealer masquerading as a humanitarian-supplier of agricultural equipment.  His adversaries are a black American spy-master (the actors has huge protruding ears and, amusingly, imitates Obama's hipster cadences) and a heavily pregnant bureaucrat employed in some covert department in Britain's M6.  Roper's vast wealth has corrupted everyone, including the unctuous officials who employ the pregnant intelligence analyst -- whenever she gets close to busting Roper, information is leaked to allow him to wiggle out of adversity.  And, from time to time, the person's complicit with Roper in her ministry try to shut down her operations.  The pregnant analyst, driven by a backstory involving children killed by Roper's weapons in Kurdistan, plants an agent in Roper's household -- this is the titular "night manager," an existential loner and war veteran, played by Tom Hiddleston.  Hiddleston's hunky soldier-of-fortune is also driven by a Jacobean back-story -- a woman that he loved in Cairo was murdered by Roper's agents when she stumbled into evidence of his arms business.  Most of the show involves an elaborate cat-and-mouse game between the double-agent night manager and Roper -- at stakes of this conflict include napalm, chemical weapons, and all sorts of horrendous armaments (barrel bombs for instance) and Roper's girlfriend, a cool, if secretly tormented, American blonde bombshell who succumbs, of course, to Hiddleston's charms.  There's nothing innovative in this material -- in fact, the show resembles a slow-moving James Bond film:  the action is set in spectacular locations such as Mallorca where Roper has a sea-side fortress of solitude and involves much carousing in expensive restaurants and casinos.  There are beautiful women who offer themselves to the brave and heroic hero and, then, are tortured for their love as well as lots of MacGuffin-like documents, inventories of armaments that the spies are always stealing and using to blackmail one another.  The Night Manager, living in Nietzschean solitude in a concrete bunker somewhere near the Matterhorn -- he is grieving the death of his love in Cairo -- is recruited by the pregnant lady spy-master to infiltrate Roper's operation.  She, then, monitors his close-calls and various adventures until the climactic confrontation in Cairo -- with her African-American CIA-buddy (probably a former lover), the pregnant lady faces down Richard Roper, and, of course, with the help of the Night Manager, destroys him.  This is standard stuff but given authority by the bravura performance by Hugh Laurie -- Laurie embodies a particularly British kind of malevolence:  he thrusts out his lower jaw pugnaciously like Churchill and glowers at everyone with great bulging eyes.  Like George W. Bush, he has given all of his henchmen nicknames -- his chief torturer is called "Frisky" and his dwarfish homosexual consiglieri is named "Corky."  Roper's menace arises from his high degree of vigilance -- he watches everyone around him with his malign, immense eyes, fixes people in his baleful laser-gaze and penetrates to their deepest secrets.  Of course, he is fantastically powerful and cruel -- he has his mistress tortured and threatens to disfigure her and his opponents are ruthlessly savaged and killed.  Like Iago, he maintains his villainy up to the bitter end -- dragged away in handcuffs, Roper exclaims to his pregnant adversary:  "A wonderful world to bring a child into!"  All of this is staged with great aplomb and conviction -- there is a huge and spectacular demonstration of armaments in the Turkish desert, including a vast napalm drop that allows Roper's to utter a variant on Robert Duvall's famous lines about "napalm in the morning" from Apocalypse Now.  (Needless to say, the impressive napalm blast manages to kill some innocents -- when their charred bodies are brought to Roper for compensation, he has everyone else in the family killed as well.)   Laurie plays the part of the villain enthusiastically -- it's a role in which "to tear a cat" to use Shakespeare's phrase.  The show works on the audience's most primitive impulses -- about half-way through, we begin to desire to see Roper's comeuppance.  Justice requires that evil be punished and the more viciously Roper acts, the more the audience desires his punishment.  In the end, the blandly handsome Hiddleston contrives an elaborate double-cross, Roper is caught in the coils of his own evil, and richly rewarded for his iniquity -- exactly what we have been hoping for three hours to see.  The Night Manager is likewise rewarded for his courage by succeeding to the sexual charms of Roper's beautiful American mistress, who has suffered for her love of the hero.  On all levels, the show is emotionally effective -- good triumphs and villainy on an almost cosmic level is punished.  There isn't anything profound about the show --it's all glittering surfaces, but the director Susan Blier keeps things moving briskly, there are gorgeous sets full of beautiful people, some of the action and suspense sequences are thrilling, and the show can be praised as an entertainment of a high order.

Spotlight (2015) is a film directed by Tom McCarthy that details the efforts of a group of Boston Globe journalists to expose a child sexual abuse scandal systemic to the Catholic church in that city.  The film features superb ensemble acting with respect to the crusading journalists who include Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, and Mark Ruffalo.  These journalists comprise the so-called "Spotlight" investigative reporting team and they are under the command of a steely, imperturbable Jewish publisher played by Liev Schreiber.  The film is scrupulously realistic.  I was concerned that the movie, focused entirely on a journalistic investigation, would feature Aaron Sorkin style razzamatazz -- that is, baroque threats, elaborate and programmatic speeches, vehement and continuous insults, spectacular profanity/obscenity, and emotional outbursts about every ten minutes.  In fact, the tone of the film is almost hushed -- everyone is polite and there is almost no obscenity. There is only one outburst, a brief and impassioned speech by Ruffalo's character, that is met by Michael Keaton's simple response:  "Are you done?"  Everyone about the film feels realistic -- the people interact professionally, the lawyers are all suitably discrete and close-mouthed, even the wicked church officials seem plausibly low-key, indifferent, people so ensconced in their positions of privilege and power that they aren't even indignant about the challenges posed to them by the reporters.  The film's irony is that the elaborate investigation seeks facts that are hidden in plain-sight.  The documents central to the film (and this movie involves just as many secret documents as The Night Manager) turn out to be of public record.  The investigation doesn't uncover anything that people haven't known for many years.  Indeed, there is even an element of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in the film -- at the climax, if you can name the film's low-key denouement with that term, the crusading journalists discover that they have been complicit themselves in the cover-up that they are now exposing.  The theme of the film is summed-up clearly enough in one of the statements made by a character:  "If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a village to cover-up the sexual abuse of a child."  Everything about this film is admirable and it is wholly fascinating -- the film follows the investigation single-mindedly:  there are no deviations for romance and the characters, all obsessives, seem to have little or no personal lives -- they are exclusively devoted to their careers.  The Boston milieu is well-observed and there is no point at which a viewer might resist this film on the basis of plausibility -- everything about the movie seems true.  On the other hand, it is also noteworthy that the film has no villain and no villainy.  At one point, a reporter meets one of the priests who has molested hundreds of children -- he's a bespectacled old man with the demeanor of a confused owl who insists that he derived no pleasure from his sexual encounters, all of which he admits without a twinge of guilt. (The man's savage-looking harridan-sister intervenes to protect him from the astonished lady-journalist).  Clearly, this guy is an inadequate villain to shoulder the weight of iniquity that the journalists have exposed.  Everyone knows that the crime is institutional -- this is described and analyzed as a necessary result of code of celibacy that less than half of its supposed adherents practice -- and, indeed, there is no doubt that the corruption extends to the Vatican itself, but none of this is crystallized in the form of any specific villain.  The Church's misconduct remains institutional, without much of a human face -- the befuddled child molester that we see is like the victims also shown in the film, touchingly human, confused, and, more or less, powerless.  The absence of a villain in Spotlight is certainly noteworthy -- and, probably, pragmatic:  I think the film may have offended big swaths of the public if more villainy on the part of the clerks and prelates were shown.  Instead, the evil is "in the air" as it were, not concentrated in any emblematic figure.  As a result, Spotlight feels just a little bit abstract and bloodless -- the film's primary rhetorical effect is irony:  the newspaper publishes to great fanfare information about scandals that was a matter of public record and that is well-known by all and that was, apparently, simply forgotten.  It seems that we are doomed to "discover" these crimes, pretend to address them, forget them, and, then, rediscover the scandal about every twenty years. The movie is honest enough to not dramatize anything -- in the final scene, we see one of the plaintiff-lawyers about to meet with two children that have been sexually abused by priests.  The lawyer is flawed, fanatical obsessive.  The two children, seated with their drab-looking mother, are vigorously coloring in coloring books -- they look exactly like children that you and I know.  There is nothing special about any of these people.  But this raises the question -- when a subject involves serious and abiding evil, isn't it, perhaps, aappropriate to distill that evil into the figure of a villain?  Or is that just a cheap-shot that simplifies and consoles but also falsifies reality?

The Lobster

I was surprised to hear Minnesota Public Radio promoting to its listeners the new film by Yorgis Lanthimos, The Lobster.  Apparently, the producer of the film sponsors some air time and the announcer politely suggested that listeners attend the film, implying that the picture is audience-friendly, witty, and charming:  "A comedy about a world in which people must find romance within 39 days or be changed into the animal of their choice."  Woe  to those who harken to this suggestion and, perhaps, consider the film to be a 'date-movie."  The Lobster is not a ' date movie' -- it is dire, brutal, and appalling, more like Pedro Almodovar's alarming The Skin I live in than The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.   The Lobster's opening shot establishes the tone -- the landscape looks like the Outer Hebrides islands, barren moors and stony headlands; a woman drives her car through the rain, stops by a primitive stone wall, and, then, taking a gun from her purse, strides up to a Shetland pony firing a half-dozen shots into the unfortunate creature.  Rabbits are skinned in big close-up and an endearing border collie gets kicked to death -- the act occurs off-screen but we see the bloody-spattered foot of the woman who has tortured the dog, there is a grotesque verbal account of the animal's death, and, then, we are shown the poor dog mangled, lying in a pool of blood and entrails.  Loners from the tangled woods are shot with tranquilizer arrows and dragged to lie in a hotel courtyard like so much wild game gathered after a successful hunt.  A man caught masturbating has his hand fried in a toaster.  People discovered kissing one another are mutilated, their lips shredded with razor blades and, then, are forced to continue kissing so that they bleed all over one another's faces -- this is the so-called "red kiss" torture.  The transformation from human to animal that occurs as a penalty for not finding romance is not a charming metamorphosis out of Ovid -- rather, the process is more akin to torture porn:  We are told that the victim's eyes, heart, and parts of the brain are extracted to be grafted into the animal -- the victim is exsanguinated and his or her blood delivered to a local hospital to be used in transplants.  The movie ends with a man using a steak knife to gouge out his eyes.  Whatever one may think about his subject matter, Lanthimos is a great director -- his visual imagery has immediate presence and authority and the film is not abstract or remote but rather powerfully palpable and vivid.  The rotting seaside hotel where much of the action takes place is clearly visualized -- you can almost smell the shabby, genteel panic investing the place.  The characters are concrete and plausibly miserable.  The landscape of sodden forest where the "loners" hide in their long, muddy rain slickers  is also extraordinarily vivid.  The experience of watching the movie is schizoid -- the grotesque fantasy elements motivating the plot keep you remote from the action except that the extremely realistic and carefully imagined staging of events involving what seem to be actual people keeps pulling you back into an emotional engagement with the film.  The movie is like some of the exceptionally disturbing films by Peter Greenaway, for instance, A Zed and two Naughts or The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and  her Lover -- it's all as abstract and cerebral as a theorem until someone is stabbed to death in huge lurid close-ups or roasted for a cannibal feast.  (Also disorienting is the fact that the script was apparently written in Greek and, then, translated into English, a language that Lanthimos seems not to know very well -- the performance by the actors involve lines that are, often, recited robotically or as if learned phonetically; it's not clear to me that this effect is wholly intentional.)

The Lobster is a melancholy middle-aged man played by Colin Farrell as a bemused, ineffectual milquetoast.  He goes to the resort to find a romantic partner.  At the resort next to a barren rocky coast, the assembled guests are treated to lectures and demonstrations enforcing upon them the urgency of finding a mate.  Sexual tension is kept to a maximum by maids who wriggle their buttocks over the genitals of the male patrons, but won't have intercourse with them.  (Olivia Coleman, spectacular in the John Le Carre mini-series, The Night Manager, plays the role of the steely eyed and sadistic hotel proprietor -- she is particularly effective in this part.)  Under the pressure of the deadline -- you have 39 days to find a partner or be turned into an animal -- the people form couples that are, more or less, unhappy.  A number of people fail and are turned into animals.   Generally, the patrons fixate on their deficiencies and try to find someone who shares those failings.  For instance, a woman has repeated bloody noses; one of the men smashes his face into a table to cause his nose to bleed and, then, bonds with the girl on that basis.  One couple limps.  The hero, who will be turned into a lobster if he fails in his quest for romance, tries to form a couple with a woman who has "no heart" -- she recognizes him as a potential soul-mate when she begins to choke in a hot tub and he does nothing at all to save her.  (Of course, she is only testing to see if he shares her brutality.)  The two pair off, but she distrusts his coldness and cruelty.  To test him, she kicks his dog to death -- the animal is more than his dog; it is also his brother who has been transformed into a beast.  The hero explodes in rage when he sees his dead dog-brother and he shoots the woman with a tranquilizer and has her turned into a Shetland pony.  Then, he escapes into the woods helped by a maid.  The maid falls in love with our hero.  The two meet in the woods among the loners.  The loners are a group of people who live in the forest and have renounced love.  They are allowed to do anything they want -- they can masturbate and listen to music on their head phones and dance so long as they dance alone.  But if one of the loners is caught flirting with another loner, dire consequences follow --  "the red kiss" involving razor blades and lots of blood and another worse punishment called "the red intercourse."  Unfortunately, the hero and the maid fall in love and are subject to punishment as loners.  One of the rules of Lanthimos' world is that couples bond by mutual disability -- the maid has good eyes, but the hero's eyes are weak.  She goes to the city to get a kind of reverse Lasik surgery -- her eyes will be slightly damaged so that she will be nearsighted and have astigmatism like the hero.  But the villainous leader of the loners instead has the ophthalmologist blind the girl.  The hero is horrified but decides he will gouge out his own eyes to seal his bond with her. 

The film is an allegory, but one that takes itself very, very literally.  Three propositions about human nature and relations between the sexes are argued by the film.  First, the man or woman who has no romantic companion is not a human but a kind of animal -- this is made literal when people fail to couple within the prescribed time period and are turned into beasts.  (It's the opposite of Ovid -- in the classical myth, people turn into beasts when they are loved by the gods; carnal love makes people into animals as in Apuleis The Golden Ass).  Second, people form couples on the basis of their perceptions of mutual affliction --  for instance, I love you because you have a bad hip like mine.  Third, those who are without romantic love, the loners, have their own rules, protocols for being alone, and seem to inexorably hated by those who have formed couples.  These are the rules of the game of love.  There is a fourth proposition  implicit in this allegory, one that is particularly disheartening:  Almost all couples fail to be together -- after an initial honeymoon in the hotel, the couples are sent on a 15 day yacht cruise.  Almost invariably, the yacht cruise ruins the relationship.  Management at the hotel promises that if the couple successfully completes the cruise, "a child will be available" to further cement the relationship.  At one point in the film, the loners attack the hotel and interrogate the man and woman who run the place -- at gun point, even the successful couples, admit that they really no longer love one another. 

The Shining (Minnesota Opera Company -- May 12, 2016)

The Minnesota Opera Company offers three rewards:  first, each show contains at least a couple of blunders so inexplicable and overt as to be inadvertently amusing -- this is not a criticism of this specific company but rather a frailty to which all productions no matter how sophisticated are heir.  The art form is simply too complex and has too many moving parts to ever operate in a reliable and trouble-free manner.  Second, each season, there are a few, fleeting moments when the stars align and the audience is particularly receptive, all antennae exposed and twitching, so that something inexpressibly wonderful occurs in the transaction between viewer and performers -- when opera is fully successful, it delivers a transcendent experience of rapturous, highly organized passion and synesthetic beauty that is hard to surpass.  And, finally, the Minnesota Opera company is famously receptive to new work and, indeed, sponsors an initiative program that commissions world-premiere operas from the best American composers and librettists -- The Shining based on Stephen King's horror novel is an example of one of these commissions, works that are always fascinating even when they don't fully succeed.

Of course, everyone knows the story of The Shining, although most people remember Stanley Kubrick's iconic film based, apparently, rather loosely on King's long novel.  Kubrick's movie contains so many memorable inventions and so many unforgettable images that it casts a long shadow of subsequent productions -- including a made-for-TV version sanctioned by King himself and this opera.  Kubrick's film, perversely abstract and, yet, exceptionally, frightening is one of cinema's greatest horror movies and so sets a high bar -- a bar best disregarded when considering this opera.  By contrast, with Kubrick's schematic nihilism, the opera based more literally on King's novel, has an almost happy ending -- the Black cook, Dick Halloran (memorably dispatched with a single axe-blow in Kubrick's film after his extended "ride to the rescue"; it's like having the cavalry arrive only to be immediately rubbed-out) survives to more or less save the day; the haunted Jack Torrance is given a politically correct motive for his murderousness -- the poor fellow was the victim of childhood physical abuse -- and, indeed, he breaks the cycle of violence by allowing the Overlook Hotel's boiler to explode spectacularly, bringing the whole place down in a riot of fiery destruction.  There is even a coda set at a lake in Maine that operates on two levels -- first, the audience not familiar with horror films is soothed with some serene and bucolic music dramatizing that all is well; but, second, the horror movie fans in the audience are titillated with the possibility that the decomposing spooks from the haunted hotel will emerge from under surface of the lake to suddenly seize the survivors -- an ending that graces a number of mad slasher films.  (A fish bites and jerks the boy's rod to a burst of sinister music, but no corpselike zombie emerges from the placid waters.)  With these exceptions, the opera follows, more or less, the plot of the movie and the novel -- it is, after all, just standard haunted house stuff, a sort of crudely obvious version of Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher".  

Adaptations of this kind always beg the question of whether the transposition of such well-known material into opera is warranted.  Simply put, does singing and orchestration add to the artistic concept, subtract from it, or seem merely superfluous?  My view is that the Paul Moravec's score, a composition that lacks any audience-pleasing melodies, doesn't really harm the material but, also, is unnecessary -- the show is streamlined, periodically frightening, and cleverly staged.  Moravec's music is mostly on par with Bernard Herrmann's famous scores for Hitchcock and Scorsese films -- the composer underlines the horror with growling chromatic scales, shrill quavers in the strings, and periodic explosions of brass and percussion; in most instances, Moravec's music is exactly suited to the material displayed on stage and, therefore, somewhat banal and unimaginative.  When Jack Torrance goes hunting for his wife with an outsized croquet mallet -- a motif adapted from the book and not nearly as fearsome as the axe wielded by Jack Nicholson in Kubrick's version -- the music predictably plays "gorilla in the haunted house" trills inflected with sinister menace to make sure we know what to feel.  The great operatic composers like Verdi and Puccini and Mozart conceived of their compositions in terms of musical structures and balanced voices accordingly between the high and low ranges:  a Puccini opera is built up as a series of musical forms -- choruses, arias, duets, quartets, etc.  For the most part, Moravec doesn't do this -- rather, he just writes mood music, prosaically following the action.  You get the effect that the opera is really just a series of hyperactive film sound-cues, a movie soundtrack.  Moravec is a modernist composer; he writes in the tradition of Richard Strauss -- somehow, he manages to compose music wholly lacking in audience-pleasing melodies that is, nonetheless, lushly tonal and, even, late-romantic in texture.  This is quite an accomplishment, but one that is perverse:  it seems that Moravec is dead-set on denying his audiences the pleasure of hearing a pretty-sounding, hummable tune.  (I thought that Moravec's previous commission for the Minnesota Opera was particularly perverse in this regard -- in his Silent Night, a production about the World War One Christmas truce, he managed to write two-hours of music about Christmas without once cloying the ear of his listeners with anything that sounded like a Christmas carol or a religious hymn or even a pop-song or music-hall tune about the season.  I thought this was unnecessarily rebarbative and, even, a little sadistic.  I'm in the minority with this criticism:  Moravec won a Pulitzer Prize for that score.  In The Shining, this defect is less obvious -- the deficit in memorable melodies doesn't hurt the show since, after all, it is about a man trying to murder his wife and children.)

The opera in the production that I saw on May 12, 2016 is handsomely mounted.  Kelly Kaduce, the Minnesota Opera's resident workhorse, sang the thankless role of Wendy Torrance -- she's written as an annoying combination of perky optimism, hysteria, and quarrelsome nagging and the audience can't wait to see Jack go after her with his croquet mallet.  Jack's part is written in a deep baritone and .... performed the part effectively.  Predictably enough, Halloran, the African-American cook, is scored even below Jack, down in the "Ole Man River" range, an element of racial stereotyping that some might regard as marginally offensive.  Danny, the endangered child, is as annoying as his mother, but, fortunately, he really doesn't have to sing more than a few bars -- most of the time, he simply staggers around with his eyes wide with terror.  The set is impressive -- a long flight of stairs runs transverse to the audience connecting the lower half of the stage to an upstairs gallery that simulates a hallway with sinister-looking doors opening into the haunted rooms.  In the lower half of the stage, moving cottage-sized platforms open into the family's small, domestic apartment, the menacing boiler room for the hotel, and a walk-in pantry where Jack is locked after Wendy knocks him unconscious during one of his assaults.  These large, mobile sets offer huge surfaces onto which a nasty-looking wallpaper pattern, fleur-de-lys figures against a vaguely fecal background, is projected.  This wallpaper projection, something that looks like it derives from one of Terence Davies' more mournful films (it almost seems to smell of mildew and dust) writhes and wriggles -- it's as if the hotel has a kind of reptilian skin that twitches with horrid motion.  Sometimes, the wallpaper projection gives way to a Jackson Pollock fantasia of blood and twisted sinew, internal organs in a stew of gore.  Exteriors are managed by projecting large late-Romantic vistas of beetling cliffs and Alpine peaks onto a translucent scrim -- these landscapes can be manipulated cinematically:  we seem to track through them, giving an illusion of motion that is very effective.  When the boiler bursts, a big front-projection of the hotel, clearly derived from images of the infamously haunted Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, bursts into flame, flares with explosions, and, then, crumbles into ash -- collapsing into ruin like Poe's House of Usher.  The assorted zombies inhabiting the hotel are mostly risible -- the exception is a dead woman with a bloated belly and pendulous green breasts:  when she appears out of a bathtub to menace little Danny some members of the audience covered their eyes and others squeaked-out a few high-pitched screams.  Unfortunately, this scary apparition -- she's very frightening in Kubrick's movie as well -- is just a shock effect and has nothing to do with the plot; once she puts in her appearance in novel, movie, and opera she's offstage for the duration.  The zombies periodically dance about and cavort in tableaux that are supposed to embody awful decadence -- these are dancers and chorus members with white faces, red bags under their eyes, and fright wigs.  One of them is a "furry", that is a sexual pervert who imitates a dog -- of course, he's much more funny than frightening:  I think he replaces the guy in the pig-mask in Kubrick's film.  Another zombie, rather disconcertingly, is a fat male transvestite wearing a black bra and panties -- he/she is supposed to represent the ne plus ultra of sinister decadence, an element that seems a little politically incorrect during the week that the Obama administration announced toilet guidelines allowing trans students to use the bathrooms congruent with their gender and not their biological sex:  someone seems not to have got the memo about civil rights for this minority group.  The most frightening aspect of Kubrick's film version was the equation of Jack Torrance's writer's block with his murderous rage -- Kubrick's later films had long gestation periods and the director seems to have often been occluded; accordingly, there is a powerful and frightening element of identification between the director and Jack with respect to that theme.  Stephen King, of course, has never suffered even an instant of self-doubt and that theme is not really important in the novel.  The opera similarly makes Jack's madness the product of childhood abuse and a tendency toward alcoholism -- it's all comfortably rational and, even, politically correct.  The opera is short and efficiently designed -- there is less than two hours of music, probably about the right length for this material.  The first half of the opera is more atmospheric and frightening than the second half of the show.  In the last act, the characters just run around frantically while the music menaces them.  It's all reasonably entertaining, but I don't think this show will survive more than few productions.

In some ways, the audience at this opera was more eerie than the proceedings on-stage.  Matronly women appear in gowns too revealing for their advanced age, showing acres of withered décolletage.  Elderly cavaliers strut around like animated mummies and there are mincing Queens done-up in flamboyant vests and tight trousers, aging rent-boys with rapacious eyes, old courtesans showing their nipples through tight silk blouses.  There was more sinister-looking corruption in the audience, I thought, at the sold-out show than on-stage.