Sometimes minor books are great. But they are great in small ways, indirect ways. Often their lack of focus is their strength. George Woodcock's little study of George Orwell, The Crystal Spirit is such a book.

It never really gets going. Every time he gets close to saying something important he says he'll come back to it later. It never really matters if he does. Mostly he doesn't.

As Woodcock rambles along he stops for a moment to consider Orwell's Wordsworthian side, his fondness for what he considered the simple life of the country and his antipathy for the city. Woodcock finds a passage from Wordsworth that he thinks Orwell would have approved of.

Humble and rustic life was generally chosen because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forces of nature.

Woodcock compares this with a passage in which Orwell speaks of the virtues of the home life of the working man. Orwell writes:

I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good wages--an 'if' which gets bigger and bigger--has a better chance of being happy than an 'educated' man. His home life seems to fall more naturally into a sane a comely shape. I have often been struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working class interior at its best. Especially in winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when father in shirtsleeves sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, the mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat--it is a good place to be in, provided you can be not only in it but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted.

I haven't a clue what a 'pennorth of mint humbugs' is but Orwell does make it sound comforting. Indeed, the last part of the passage is important where Orwell says that one must be more than 'in it, but sufficiently of it'. It was Orwell's experience to be in search of such comforts and to have lived in various 'working man's' quarters but never to have felt fully at home and accepted. The 'easy symmetry' that Orwell speaks of may feel natural, but it takes a certain knack. You have to know just where to throw the coat on the armchair, just how to hold the pipe off the mouth, just how to plop down in front of the fire. It takes habituation into a certain way of life.

You can call such a thing natural, as Orwell does, but it is still a kind of 'second nature'. No one would know how to live that way without having been raised with those tastes, mannerisms, styles, and habits all around them. Orwell was not.

It is hard not to conclude that Orwell's distaste for the Utopian projects and totalitarian yearnings of the far Left and Right were related to this intuitive abhorring of modern life and its obliteration of simple ways of life and time-tested traditions, what Wordsworth calls the 'beautiful and permanent forces'.

But this would also be to tie Orwell's greatest and sharpest political instincts to a vaguely anti-modern sentiment that yearned more for the simplicity of rural experience than the buzz of urban intellectual life or the dream of something new. In one way at least, Orwell was a conservative. Woodcock quotes him as writing "so long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information."

It was this mood that kept him inoculated from the absurdities that flowed, and still flow, from the pens of fancier thinkers. But it also poses interesting questions for those of us who would like to preserve the tenor of his political instincts without the nostalgia for rural life. Or is it the case that once one has lost that connection to simpleness, one has also lost the ground for good judgment that served Orwell so well?

- posted by morgan @ 5:29 PM

 
There is a style of traditional Portuguese music called Fado. Fado translates as 'fate'. The music is rather difficult to describe. 'Mournful' is one adjective that often comes up, 'fatalistic' another. Fado originated out of the folk singing of Portuguese women lamenting sailors lost at sea in the 19th century.

Eventually, Fado came to represent something melancholy about Portuguese identity in general. Portugal, the little country with its slice of the Iberian peninsula. They owned the world for a few years at the beginning of the great stage of European exploration. But it didn't last for long. And maybe it wasn't that great anyway, those imperial dreams. Portugal became a more complicated and intriguing place in its decline.

The dark reflectiveness of Fado is also there in the brilliant, layered works of Fernando Pessoa and, more recently Jose Saramago.

Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is a work of American Fado. The movie looks forward to the inevitable, not too distant, moment when the Far East is the center of the world and it will be the West's task to adequate itself to a Far Eastern self-understanding instead of the reverse. This is always an alienating experience.

Alienation can destroy you, or it can give you a dose of self-understanding, a dash of complexity that adds something. Perhaps that is the thing missing from the American character that tends to frustrate Europeans so. But you can only achieve that kind of understanding through experience, experiences lost and gained. And you lose something when that happens too. Too much experience slows you down. Lost in Translation is about the slowing down and complexification of the American identity as historical accumulation takes its toll.

If Coppola is right, and one hopes she is, the death of the American Empire has interesting things in store for us. The weary exhuberance of Bill Murray isn't heroic in any sense of the term, but it has nobility and sadness that makes the humor ache twice as much. Being on the outside looking in can be a nice place to re-find your humanity again, for the first time.

- posted by morgan @ 1:59 PM

 
SIDEWAYS (for Steven Levine)

I have become more and more enthused with the idea of writing a new kind of review. It is called, the Review of the Review, Review. There is something about reviewing the review that brings you back around to the work of art you wanted to talk about in the first place, but through a lens that has already reflected once. It is like achieving immediacy through the over-application of too many layers of mediation.

David Denby tends to stimulate the kind of mental activity that leads to a review of a review. Maybe that is because he is a smart man so intensely wrapped up in his own petty neurosis that he makes you notice things you might not have otherwise. His absurdly prudish response to Quentin Tarantino, for instance, was good for stimulating further thought on exactly what is so delightful in Tarantino. Thus, a previous Idle Chatter column on Kill Bill.

More recently, the stimulating Mr. Denby has written of Alexander Payne's (Election, About Schmidt) new movie, Sideways. He writes,

Things happen on trips; that's why the road-movie genre, with its radical concentration of means, never seems to tire. An opening to landscape, movement, adventure, and the eternal American desire to drop everything and light out for the territories, the form is both inherently dramatic and supremely flexible. It has served as the basis for crime thrillers (They Live by Night, Bonnie and Clyde), for violent explorations of the limits of freedom (Easy Rider, Thelma & Louise), for bruising tests of love and friendship (Two for the Road, Scarecrow).

In this case, Denby is right. Sideways is, in an essential way, a road movie. But it is exactly where Denby is disappointed in the movie that he gets something wrong about why it is such a wonderful movie. Denby complains that,

Some of the camera setups are too obvious; the shots of faux-Tudor inns and luscious vineyards come off as conventionally handsome. Payne has finally got himself out of Nebraska--you can feel his limbs warming in the sunshiny beauty of California--but he hasn't come close to developing a visual style that can sweep the audience along. He never breaks free into anything like the startling, brutal lyricism of the French director Bertrand Blier, whose own two-men-on-the-road movies, Going Places (1974) and Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978), were exhilaratingly beautiful, amoral fantasies.

No. Denby is missing the point here. Payne is not Bertrand Blier and he isn't interested in 'brutal lyricism' or in 'beautiful, amoral fantasies'. There is nothing wrong with those things, but they aren't what Payne is after. Neither is he so interested, as Denby assumes he must be, in sloughing off the constraints of Nebraska and soaring to loftier heights. Alexander Payne isn't Plato's Phaedrus. And he tells you that in the movie.

There is a remarkable scene a third or so into the movie where Miles and Jack, the two main characters, are driving through the vineyards on the first day or so of their week of 'absolute freedom'. Suddenly the screen splits and, for the next minute or so, splits several times more as Jack holds his hand out of the window and moves it with the wind while Miles drives.

It is a ridiculous scene but it's extremely touching at the same time. It is ridiculous because the film technique is so grandiose, yet it captures a moment so small, so completely lacking in 'epic'. For film buffs, the split screen technique can only recall those innovative giants of early film like Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, or, most aptly here, Abel Gance in his magisterial Napoleon.

For those men, splitting the screen was a way to challenge the limits of experience itself, to push the technical boundaries of film in order to capture world historical moments or in order to revolutionize the very means and manner of human sensation. Innovation in film was innovation in life; potentially even a form of transcendence. Film could be radically democratic in its ability to transform and liberate the masses.

Alexander Payne turns this technique toward the painfully mundane. In doing so, he captures something radically democratic not in its grandiosity but in its loving attention to the texture of everyday life. He isn't soaring away to something grand, as Denby wants him to and as Abel Gance might have. But he is illuminating the quiet sublimity that lingers around losers and schlubs and jackasses. Payne isn't seduced by how wonderful the scenery of California is, but by how plain it is. There must be at least seven scenes where Jack or Miles or both walk down a strip of a shoulder of a highway between a motel and a middlebrow restaurant.

There has always been a kind of film that tests the limits of what is human, or what is freedom, or what is experience. Hopefully we will always have those kinds of experimenters. But there are also great films that explore the territory of what we already have, that find wonderful possibilities in the middle of things. Such is the stupid splendor of Sideways.



- posted by morgan @ 5:40 PM