Review: Jonny Quest [TV]

Throughout my weeklong miasma I watched a good deal of TV, so remarkable is it for demanding absolutely no cognitive activity from the viewer whatsoever. Anyway, as I watched and watched I began to notice a lack of cartoons in my viewing. So as I looked and looked I found only a lot of junk on Cartoon Network, vulgar and dappy nonsense. Saturday morning cartoons have shrunk to a small quarter of badly animated singsongy nonsense for children.

Now I watched a lot of nonsense growing up, but I had Garfield and Friends, which was splendid satire of TV itself, poking barbs at writers, producers, networks, and the viewers themselves. I also watched reruns of Rocky and Bullwinkle, with their cleverly retold fairy tales and fables from Aesop, and of course the adventures of the titular moose and squirrel, which always turn satirical, skewering everything from college sports to the stock market to government assistance.

One of my favorites, though, I looked up this passed week and found not on TV but streaming from Amazon Prime: The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. The show only lasted two seasons with a total of 52 episodes, but what a blast it is.

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Like all good adventure serials, the premise is simple. Dr. Benton Quest and his son Jonny scour the world investigating unusual phenomena. Along for the ride are Benton's friend, Race Banner, and his daughter, Jessie. Countering the kids' unrestrained zeal is their friend Hadji, who brings a dose of prudence and moderation to their plans. Inevitably, adventure calls and inevitably the kids, separated from Benton and Race, must fend for themselves and help save the day.

It won't do to summarize serials, but we should look at what makes Jonny Quest so satisfying.

First, JQ walks a reasonable line between visual excitement and graphic violence. While cartoon action programming has mostly vanished and there's no standard or median today, it's easy for a show to be too bloody or squeaky clean. JQ has a surprising amount of violence, but there isn't a lot of visual detail. People sure do die, though. They're shot, blown up, trampled, impaled, and eaten. Many episodes open with a spectacular death as a maguffin, just like movies. This is just the right level of realism to remind a young boy that the world's a dangerous place, but not enough to shock him with the blood spattering and limb-flying gore of 300 and Call of Duty. It's just enough to remind us that Jonny is in some real danger.

Second, there's no backup. The cavalry is rarely, if ever, on the way. Jonny and friends have to start thinking and acting for themselves. Help is not around the corner.

Third, there is a palpable masculine vibe to the show. Tools, technology, myths, legends, globetrotting, danger, mystery. . . all without Jonny being nannied to tie his shoe laces, go to bed, and look both ways before crossing the street. It would have been more dramatic if Jonny's mother were living and she could contrast the boys' zeal, but her complete absence gives the show a freewheeling boys-and-toys energy.

Fourth, there are plenty of toys, both electronic and traditional. On the one hand the team has the digital wizardry of "Quest World" and its array of 3D imaging, computational, and data-sharing abilities. On the other hand the team invariably finds itself in the middle of nowhere, technology lost or destroyed, and resorting to devising traps, making fires, makeshift weapons, and guile. It's a welcome blend of the geeky and brawny, either of which grows tiresome on their own.

Fifth, and some people will balk about this one, the Quest team explores plenty of myths, legends, and tall tales, with them on occasion turning out to be true. Hardline materialists will balk, and the tales are silly, but if all the mysteries turned out to be false then the show would lose the sense of mystery which drives it. The writers probably could have finessed both ways with some fancier writing, but this is a dramatically acceptable turn even if we have to look the other way on occasion. These stories, from the philosopher's stone to the Mary Celeste, are springs of mystery which get us excited about investigating the world, and keeping them mysterious leaves the world, to paraphrase John Buchan, an oyster for the opening.

Sixth, the villains hold their weight. Among clashes with looters, poachers, predators, nature, and the supernatural, Team Quest has two fierce adversaries. The first is their formal nemesis, Dr. Jeremiah Surd, who dogs the team hoping to acquire their technology and take revenge on Race Bannon for the injury which consigned the doctor to a wheelchair. On the other hand we have Ezekiel Rage, who is equal parts brimstone-spewing preacher, Bond villain, and Jason Bourne. Both villains were spurned government agents, adding a political dimension to their personal vendettas with the Quest Team.

Finally, there's a slight but noticeable and welcome cultural thread running throughout. Whether it's Hadji's Confucian aphorisms, historical quotes or references, or Race's homespun wisdom, the team is wrestling with questions by means of ideas as well as guts. Whether it's fighting off poachers, outwitting their longstanding enemies, or rescuing artifacts, the team is always balancing whom or what to save and what to sacrifice. It's not always brilliant or novel, but satisfactory and satisfying for serialized adventures. In an especially nice touch after one adventure, Benton begins reciting the end of Tennyson's Ulysses, which Jonny completes, and without naming the title.

Jonny Quest isn't highbrow or perfect, but it's a young man's Indiana Jones or Hardy Boys. Sure, it'll introduce to him some interesting ideas, but more importantly it might stiffen his sinews and kindle in him perhaps a little of the old strenuous zeal. Most of all, it shows that Jonny's courage is the key to practicing the other virtues. A young man could do worse.

The show also has an irresistably energetic, swashbuckling opening:

Unity of the Muses

Mozart encompasses the entire domain of musical creation, but I've got only the keyboard in my poor head. –F. Chopin

Most minds relish the familiar. We like familiarity, consistency, and sameness, whether it's in our television programming, house furnishings, or daily routines. Yes, some people seem to worship all things new, but that's just an attempt to relive the thrill of novelty. Smart people are not exempt either, most only holding a few stock ideas about which they ramble before attaining senility. Even the mind of a genius is usually confined to relatively tight quarters. Yet we have all-encompassing geniuses like Aristotle and DaVinci, and lesser polymaths from Cicero to Jefferson, but far-seeking minds are the most rare, and the most rare of them was Mozart. Mozart absorbed, innovated, and perfected with a speed which amazes and terrifies. The Greeks would have called him δεινός, marvelous, wondrous, and terrible.

21 piano sonatas, 27 piano concertos, 41 symphonies, 18 masses, 13 operas, 9 oratorios and cantata, 2 ballets, 40 plus concertos for various instruments, string quartets, trios and quintets, violin and piano duets piano quartets, and the songs. This astounding output includes hardly one work less than a masterpiece. –George Szell

Absorbed, innovated, perfected. Each of those words needs a little qualifying. Mozart absorbed the work of his models with astonishing rapidity, from his father's early assignments at the harpsichord, in which little Woferl delighted, to string quartets, concerti, and fugues. One story from April 1770, when Mozart was fourteen and impressing the Italian contrapuntists in Rome, paints the picture. Herr Mozart and his son attended a performance of Gregorio Allegri's Fiftieth Psalm, a passion piece for two choirs, four- and five-part, which concludes with a finale that interweaves both choruses in nine-part counterpoint. Shortly after the performance the teenage composer proceeded to write out the piece from memory. (W. A. Mozart by H. Abert. p. 135)

From this immense facility for absorption grew Mozart's own interpretations in his early maturity. Hoary polyphony and contrapuntal exercises became the ebullient Salzburg masses. Mozart devours set after set of Haydn's string quartets and again and again throws the spear from sight. The prettified keyboard tinkering of the galant becomes an endless parade of Mozartian characters. The snoozy nocturnes and pompous end-of-semester finalmusik become the serene lightness of the Gran Partita. Endlessly rhyming, sing-songy, and audience pleasing singspiels become the the giddy love of Die Entführung and a frightening, untamed spirit is breathed into old an workhorse text in Idomeneo.

Finally, perfection unto death. The body of Mozart concerti is one of most stupendous achievements ever, without qualification. The endless variety of melody, the relentless ability to tease excitement and novelty from sonataform and even rondo, shifting keys, moods, and characters, is nothing short of astounding. Not only do we find with glee intellectual rigor and structural novelty, but even in its most tumultuous depths, the cosmos-rending D minor, the Mozart concerto is life-affirming, pleasing the heart and the mind. And what love Mozart has for his instruments: the jovial horn, the oboe here sprightly there melodious, and the chimerical clarinet.

All the while, through the counterpoint and delayed tonal areas of the quintets and the vast sonataforms of the operas, and the ever more-delicate symphonies, always we find a unity of style and affect. We're never distracted by learned or simple elements for all is reconciled by the most perfect taste and order. We don't hear a contrapuntal marvel when we see finale to Act I of Don Giovanni, we see a carnival. We don't hear a north German choral in Die Zauberflöte but see the initiate poised before his sacred trial. We don't listen for fugato in Piano Sonata No. 18, but delight in the interplay between these wildly diverse themes. There is only the music, unifying as it goes: time, place, us, everything.

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness. - Aaron Copland

Mozart's earthy side confuses many, whether it's by his priapic joke in the Champagne Aria, his song Kiss My Ass, or his bawdy letters to his cousin. It's not a side that would have confused, say, Catullus or Rimbaud, but it befuddles those who seek a clean idol. We need a pure font because we see time as expendable. We need to get and use as much of time and Mozart as we can. Yet it is time which is sacred, not the man Mozart. Yet he doesn't have to be because he has preserved the best of us in time, and we don't nee to horde it, nor do we even need to share it. We nee to be it. We need to feel his melodies in our step and his shapes in our thoughts. We need to feel his terror and chipper love, his lonely afternoons and sumptuous galas. Mozart is not the font, but the unity of the Muses, and beyond performance and beyond listening there is living, where the perfected goes on forever, though only for a time through us.

Mozart's music is the mysterious language of a distant spiritual kingdom, whose marvelous accents echo in our inner being and arouse a higher, intensive life. –E. T. A. Hoffmann

Bring Back the Funny Aesthetes

Complaints about a lack of diversity usually come from politically motivated quarters, but it's not a useless or inappropriate question. Is it not, at least potentially, significant when some person, group, or idea is completely excised from a medium of expression? Being sick this week I took refuge to the television and skimming around I began to wonder: where did all the funny aesthetes go?

Yes, there are plenty of intelligent people on television, in fact there is a superabundance of them, but there isn't any character I've seen in the classical, liberal, or traditionally educated mold. We have nerds, doctors, lawyers, detectives, teachers, and so on and so fort, but none of them live in the world of refined culture. In fact, they don't even visit that world. They're all brilliant philistines. While the aesthetes have never dominated either sitcoms or dramas, their complete absence seems remarkable.

The 1950s and '60 saw an aesthete in the surprising, furry form of Bugs Bunny. From the 40s to the 70s, in fact, the Merry Melodies star had hilarious run-ins with the classics, most notably musical. He fled Porky Pig to Strauss' Tales from the Vienna Woods (A Corny Concerto), became Mrs. Fudd on two separate occasions, to both Rossini's Barber of Seville in 1950 and then Wagner in 1957's What's Opera, Doc? Bugs even takes up the baton himself, the first time in homage to the great Leopold Stokowski conducting one poor tenor to a house-felling finale in The Long Haired Hare. His second turn at the podium is a satire of the conductor's histrionic gestures as Bugs conducts Franz von Suppe's Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna. Finally Bugs turns to performance himself and after a hilarious attempt to get Daffy Duck to pronounce Camille Saint-Saens, tickles the ivories of Carnival of the Animals conducted by none other than Michael Tilson Thomas in 1976.

Although it lacked persistent characters, the '70s also enjoyed the liberal erudition of Monty Python's Flying Circus, who veered philosophical in their philosopher's soccer match, and historical in their infamous sketches The Spanish Inquisition and The Funniest Joke in the World.

The '70s also saw the Odd Couple's neurotic Felix Unger, whose love of the arts ran afoul of his roommate's congenital sloppiness and barbarism. This was a revealing play of contrasts, with Felix ever hoping to show Oscar that the arts are for everyone. The show saw the duo manhandle Carmen and Swan Lake, opera club meetings gone awry, and the occasional poignant turn, like when the two quarreled about whether a multitalented protege should follow his talent for football or the cello.

Perhaps M.A.S.H had the most famous aesthete of the era, though, in the irascible Charles Emerson Winchester. Played by David Ogden Stiers, Winchester found himself the recipient of relentless scorn and pranks from Hawkeye and friends who enjoyed tormenting the major for his priggish pomposity, yes, but also for his overblown longing for the arts and civilization. This premise took turns comic, when Winchester's French horn drives his tent-mates bananas, and painful, as when Winchester treats a soldier who had lost a hand, and in doing so finds out the man had been a pianist.

On Frasier Crane, who spanned the '80s and '90s, it'll suffice to make two comments about it. First, nearly every episode featured some cultural context, whether he and his equally picky brother were arguing over a recording, they walked in singing Wagner, or they were making quips about random cultural trivia from Middlemarch to O. Henry. These touches were slight but voluminous, selling the fact that these guys lived and breathed the rarefied air. Second, there's a consistent thread of Frasier's elitism distancing himself from other people. In one episode, offended by a scurrilous graffito, Frasier tries to open up to the common man, only to find himself swarmed by the masses. One of the show's best bits, typically, is a combination of the highest and lowest brow.

Part I of Three Valentines. S06.E14

It'd be easy to let the science fiction and special effects distract from the high culture of Star Trek: The Next Generation if it weren't so frequent. Whether it's Captain Picard speaking French or even Latin–gasp!–the crew concerts of Chopin and Schubert, or performing Henry V and Cyrano de Bergerac, the Enterprise was not a ship of war but of exploration, a sort of traveling cultural capsule of Earth. Alongside, or inside, also dwelled the android, Data, with his attempts to study and mimic humanity by playing the violin, writing poetry, painting, and acting.

Alongside Frasier, the two other most influential shows of the '90s made few but significant nods to high culture. It was hilarious to see the vulgar quartet of Seinfeld, with their petty concerns, interact with the world of concerts and culture, which they always proceeded to bring down to their level, as when one Pez dispenser destroys a performance of Beethoven. Meanwhile on the Simpsons, in a brilliant but brief bit of satire, the town of Springfield votes to build a new concert hall. Success! The people fill on opening night, and four notes into the first concert, of Beethoven's 5th, everyone leaves. The people, philistines that they were, knew they had to at least make a little pilgrimage to the realm of high culture.

I'm not just talking about hoity-toityness either. There are no classical intellectuals or aesthetes on Downtown Abby, for example, despite the formality of the time and place. Aesthetes often bewail the lack of funding for the arts and the prominence of the arts in our society, and they often do so with just cause. I wonder though that the seemingly complete disappearance of the arts from representations of life, from art, in this case popular television programming, might indicate that the cause is further gone than we thought.

We're Not Dead Yet

We're not dead yet, but I have been quite sick all week. Our annual commemorative Mozart essay will come a week late, on Feb. 3. Posting will resume later today with some reflections on my illness-induced gluttony of TV. (It's all positive, really.)

Thanks as usual for staying with us!

The Wanderer

The second most boring part of teaching is reviewing material, for it catches the teacher in the doldrums between summarizing and examining. Said teacher always wants to teach something new, but the students would say such is not review. True, true. So alas we must say again what was said before. And say it again and again ad infinitum. The most boring of the teacher's tasks is proctoring. Here the teacher is caught between daydreaming and that unpleasant task of policing. The other day, though, all the students had finished their tests and in the fifteen minutes before we were permitted to leave, I picked in desperation a book off the shelf to stir my stilling mind.

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What I picked up was Heart of Darkness, and what I found of course and in irony was the serene stillness of Conrad's opening with its pacific water, flat sails, and seamless sky. What caught my mind, though, that is before the school bell shattered it once more, was not the quiet grandeur of the Thames or the brilliance of its description as introduction, but  Conrad's characterization of Marlow as a wanderer.

The seaman, we learn, is always at home at sea, for the sea never changes and all boats are the same. The seamen's minds are sedentary, their stories singular.  These men may move about, but on the ocean his mind is ever at home. One might say of them what the narrator says of their stories: they have a direct simplicity. They're simple, perfected, self-contained. Later, Marlow comes upon a book, reflecting again on the type:

The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real.

There is something authentic and revealing in such simplicity. Conrad's brilliant touch, though, is adding that someone had written notes in the margins of the book, and in cipher at that. Some greater intellect had come along and contributed incomprehensible commentary, muddling the simplicity as Marlow himself muddled the luminous Thames, describing it amidst its brightness as, "one of the dark places of the earth."

Marlow, in contrast to the simple seaman, is a wanderer, not with respect to body for he sails about like his fellow seamen, but rather Marlow is a wanderer of the mind. His stories are not about a simple moral but an unfolding, enveloping meaning.

Now one could surely discuss the theme of simplicity in Heart of Darkness, but I hadn't read the book in a while and I only had fifteen minutes. What was on my mind, then, wasn't the rest of the novel but a piece of music, Schubert's Der Wanderer an den Mond.

Schubert's song of Johann Seidl's text shares Conrad's fascination with simplicity. Here, the moon is simple and perfected, at home everywhere just like the seaman, even though it ranges far and wide. Opposed is the poet or speaker, who is a stranger wherever he goes. We sense this isolation in Marlow as he recounts the life of the Thames throughout history, always an observer, and sits "like Budha."

Marlow and Seidl's speaker sit at that mediating, meditative point between simplicity and complexity which stirs, perplexes, even torments the observer. Seidl longs to be at home although he lacks the simplicity of the moon, and Marlow admires the simplicity of the simple seaman untouched by the "detestable incomprehensible."

Thinkers perhaps too often idolize intellect, insisting it is edifying and unifying and not isolating, but seeing the boundaries of the comprehensible makes, as Waugh wrote, "a tedious journey to the truth," a journey, "confused with knowledge and speculation." The faithful also too often, perhaps, pontificate about the joyful universality of the faith without emphasizing the peregrinate nature of the worldly journey. The invariable existential question–compare Seidl's moon to Camus' omnipresent, impotent sun in The Stranger–leads he who walks the path of perception or faith, to a tortuous, wandering journey through seeing and seeking the incomprehensible in the light of the simple.

So Let It Be Written

Two hundred twenty one years from the founding of the republic, in the year they called 2008, the people of the nation America turned out in record numbers to vote in a landslide victory for the first black president of the country, Barack Obama. At that time the nation was laboring in economic depression after the previous president, George W. Bush son of George H. W. Bush, also a president, had removed regulatory laws, permitting banking procedures that precipitated the crisis.

So committed to the presidency and the nation was the statesman Obama that before he assumed the office he established the Office of the President Elect, which prepared the way for the new administration. While the first speech of his administration, called the inaugural, does not survive, it was referred by the authorities of the time as being "worthy of marble" and comparable to the most ancient masters of public speaking.

Energized and empowered by his party's control of the legislature, the democratic President passed laws which halted the recession and began putting the nation's suffering unemployed back to work by funding new jobs. These measures were roundly supported by economists but pilloried by the defiant republican party who resented his leadership. Thus President Obama saved the economy by means of laws, without which the nation surely would have suffered beyond the scope of grief. In the following months, succeeding the President's efficacious recovery laws, the economy slowly stabilized and supported by further government spending, recovered slowly throughout his tenure.

After defeating the pirates East of Africa, President Obama began to reconstruct the nation's image throughout the world, which had been stained by his predecessor. He strengthened diplomatic ties with Russia, stood firm against the nuclear ambitions of Korea and Persia, called North Korea and Iran at the time, and by his most exceptional speech at Cairo renewed dialogue with the Muslims of the world, to whom he declared, "The people of the world can live together in peace." Indeed peace reigned throughout the rest of the President's administration, except for his deposition of an obscure tyrant from North Africa some years later.

Having secured stability throughout the world, President Obama sought to bring new security to America in the great tradition of progress. He drafted historic legislation which would bring affordable healthcare to all Americans. When the legislature brought the matter to the people, the people approved it. When the legislature voted, it was passed. The law was then challenged by several states whose claims came to the Supreme Court, at the time a body of radical conservatives, who eventually declared the law legal. Eventually the law took effect in 2013, after President Obama's landslide reelection, and after technical problems stemming from a foreign contractor, fulfilled its goal although healthcare costs would continue to rise due to lack of regulation.

Despite the fact that conservatives and anti-government radicals overtook the republican party and the House of Representatives, denying the president means by which further to enrich the nation, President Obama was one of America's greatest presidents. An apocryphal story best exemplifies the man and leader. When a dispute arose in the city Boston between an officer of the law and a college professor, President Obama invited the men, differing with respect to color of skin, to the White House to resolve the dispute. In the end, the professor and the patrolman by Obama were reconciled to one another, as the world was to America by that same president who was part Solon, part Solomon and whose only vice was the excess of virtue by which the nation's radical's restricted the country's final steps toward progress.

Memento

Memory is a strange word for a strange concept. What does it mean to remember? Our English word memory is not helpful, conjuring images of a faculty of remembering, as if drawing water from a well. The clunky memorize has its connotation of firing synapses, but tells us how, not why is memory. Latin's tenere in memoria is an improvement, suggesting as it does the activity of holding in memory, as does its recordare, the holding of something in one's cor (stem cord-) or heart, living spirit. We retain something of this understanding in the phrase, "learn by heart," which alas seems to be ebbing away.

As we often do, though, we turn to the Greeks, and not just to their pair of λήθη and μνήμη, forgetfulness and memory, but to the famous discussion of memory which concludes Plato's Phaedrus. This passage is often quoted by proud memorizers who revel in recollections of their favorite poems, and while it's all well and good to wag a finger at the philistine who can't quote a line of any significance, it doesn't answer much to say tritely that reading print simply weakens the memory. It even elucidates little to say that the written word is not knowledge, as pretty as the thought may be.

Plato's insight, though, comes soon after the oft-quoted and there he idealizes not the tender of letters who sows words in the garden of letters for recollection, but the dialectician who plants words in souls, not perfected but alive, potent to propagate. This claim sounds incredible, for how can an idea differ simply by its location? This is surely some ploy to lay secret knowledge in the hands of the few. Our lack of imagination often fails philosophers, but especially Plato who might jest about our mental infecundity. Here, imagine a word in a book: it does nothing. If one asks it a question, as Plato said, it responds nothing. Yet the word in the mind partakes in our activities, observes them and changes them, even perchance changing itself. It is only passed on if by, or through, a memory.

There is something of this thinking, quite unexpectedly, in Aristotle's causality wherein man, the lover of understanding, seeks that "why" of things which is both question and answer, and in understanding fulfills his nature and the promise of worldly intelligibility. Understanding, then, is a reconciliation of self and other, and to remember Plato and Bach and Horace as much as mathematics and astronomy is as much to know oneself as to know them as to know the world. To hear the words of the mass not as spoken text but as an awakening of the words within you, an awakening of words shared, transferred through time and transfigured through the sacrifice, is the reconciliation of all things.

Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
–Little Gidding

The Lost Calendar

Time is shaped or it is incomprehensible. Scientists peer in vain back at the still time before time which began time and forward through the eons to time's still termination to avoid the eternal presencing through space. A poetical thought few if any minds can live on, man seems to find it simply one damn thing after another. Man must fix time for himself. Art satisfies man as it does for it seems to tame time into something recognizable: film sculpts time, music meters time, and painting stops time. For moments these move the soul beyond the world but they cannot remove his intolerable shirt of fire.

The Christian calendar orients man's world around Christ while we dwell in the world, reconciling the corporeal and transcendent. Scripture and saintly homage, sacred remembrance and theology are all reconciled through the mass. The Christian however calendar is also gone, replaced socially by secular holidays and that most sacred bourgeois feast, the weekend, and liturgically by that ternary bloc of Advent, Lent, and Ordinary Time. The epoch of Christ's redemption, the years Anno Domini, are now the years of the "Common Era," an epithet slapped on by those so indolent, unstudied, and cowardly that they didn't even have the decency to fish for a new date from which to start their age. Even the French Revolutionaries had the decency to do that. Add to this disorder the rotation of scriptural readings and the liturgical breakdowns and we have a true loss of time, season, and center.

You'll notice that the leading image above isn't that of a liturgical calendar. How many of those round doohickies (left) do you see, taped and torn, festooned around schools and church vestibules everywhere? I've never known anyone to find it more inspiring than its color-coding. With it's arbitrary transferring and shifted observances, it's the fruit of tinkering and not tradition. The image above is that of the Labors of the Year, that is, the seasonal organization of life which results from the order of the Christian calendar.

It is no coincidence and to their credit that the online spaces of so many Catholic writers and bloggers become calendars where they mark the feasts, posting paintings, pieces of music, and prayers which they are discovering for themselves. They miss the order, surely, but also the pleasure which shaped time gives, for the calendar gives not only purpose but season to worship as does a Bach cantata or an altar cover of Bernini.

The traditional mass, its shape of and through the year, and the art of its expression are instead of interminably presencing through time, of time, man, his expression, and God a perpetual reconciliation. The alternative is one damn thing after another.

Movie Review: The Wolf of Wall Street

Directed by Martin Scorsese. 2013.

J. J. Abrams burnt out Star Trek in two movies, George Lucas tinkered Star Wars to death and then gave up, Steven Spielberg missed his true calling with Indiana Jones, Ridley Scott has no taste in scripts, Tarantino and Fincher and Burton got bogged down in their own shticks, and I worry that Peter Jackson and Daniel Nolan will get bogged down in nerdy details like James Cameron.

Enter Martin Scorsese, who at 71 delivers a walloping three hour drama as his 23rd major cinematic release. Add to that Scorsese's bravado in directing a frank riff on Citizen Kane, and I think some recognition is in order. Would that it were a better picture.

Two major themes run through Wolf, the first revolving around its Kane roots and tragic arc. Alas, this theme is incomplete to the point of hobbling the movie and for four reasons.

First, we never get a clear picture of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo diCaprio) as a young man. He seems innocent enough, but tells us of his ambition and that he went to Wall Street because it was the only place big enough to satisfy them. On the other hand his first boss becomes his mentor for a short while and seems to corrupt him. Which is it, or perhaps it was the riches which seduced him?

Second, we have conflicting information as to why Jordan pursues greater and greater spoils. Here Jordan says he has a big appetite and there that it's in his nature. Early on Jordan says he is ambitious, but later he seems to pursue particular material ends. Jordan even says that he's addicted to money, a diagnoses which implies clinical analysis. Lastly, when Jordan refuses a plea deal, is this because of any or all of the aforementioned, or some other which might fit the bill, such as hubris? On top of this ambiguity, Jordan is the narrator, a fact which calls everything he says into question since we surely can't presume self knowledge on his part.

Third, the denouement fails to deliver because Jordan never has a moment of recognition. Note that while Jordan talks about the good he does with his money and yet wastes and flaunts it is dramatically acceptable: he's allowed to have contradictory ideas. We however still need to know what is going on and why. We don't need to see retribution or redemption, but Jordan has to change for anything to have happened. Whether your protagonist is Oedipus, King Lear, or Charles Foster Kane, he needs a moment of recognition of the scope of the drama so we can feel pity, fear, indignation, or anything so precise that we should take notice.

The obvious objection to this premise is the antihero, such as Scorsese's own Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver. Travis is infamously lacking in self awareness, but that's established and developed through the plot and is in fact the theme of the film: we wait for the time bomb to go off as Travis' disaffection grows.

In Taxi Driver that explosion is the finale, an active denouement which results from the plot's activity which is the result of his character. As such the resolution is significant. In contrast, Jordan Belfort is aware to some extent, the difference being that the script throws a bunch of explanations against the wall: appetite, ambition, corruption, and so forth. Also, because what happens in Wolf can't refer back to a definitive characteristic, see paragraph four above, the action lacks meaning and therefore so does the ending. There can be tragedy without character but not without activity.

Fourth and finally, all of Jordan's profligate libertinism which consumes the lion's share of Wolf's runtime is meaningless because it neither impacts the plot–Jordan's downfall is caused by the accidents of others, the cheapest and least satisfying of plot resolutions–nor does it have any effect on Jordan. Jordan is the kind of man he is because of his character, but what is the result of his actions? Only at the end does Jordan fleetingly reflect on how he misses getting "fucked up," at which we wonder first whether all of his antics were an escape from some fears or such, and then why that thread was never developed and only even mentioned 2.5 hours into the movie. With that lack throughout, none of the spectacles of debauchery have the power to rouse any fear or pity and thus for all of their panache, lay flat.

–

The other theme running through Wolf is Jordan's fascinating-yet-unexplored talent for demagoguery. Jordan has the uncanny ability to persuade and inspire. Whether he's selling penny stocks to rubes on the phone or encouraging his employees to work and improve their lives, he's magnetic. Still, this theme falters in the drama, for while his artful persuasion explains his rise, Jordan's downfall still happens by chance. Wolf would be much more interesting, and its ending significant, if it asked whether Jordan had persuaded himself as well, in which case a tragic end or redemption could be predicated on the protagonist's success or failure to repurpose his talent, as in the recent American Hustle.

–

Wolf's most subtle scene could have closed a powerful peroration, but fails. At the end, Agent Denham, who has dogged Jordan for years, sits on the subway riding home, the very plebeian trip for which Jordan had mocked him. Denham, committed to justice and his job, looks up at a poor pair across the car: a man and his mother. The agent we presume remembers a story about which Jordan bragged, in which he the rich man playing philanthropist paid a boy's debt and his mother's medical bills. So when the agent looks at the boy and his mother, whom does he see: people Jordan fleeced or people he might have helped with his ill-gotten gains? Yet we know the agent doesn't think that because he never expressed any sympathy for Jordan or doubts about his FBI duties. What an interesting foil Denham might have been. Scorsese is quoted as considering whether Denham had doubts, but his context excludes the aforementioned and lacks internal evidence to support the speculation even though it comes from the director.

Scorsese ends with a line from Jordan bragging about how because he's rich he even bough himself a posh lifestyle in jail, glad he lives "somewhere where everything is for sale." Is this a dig at politicians? Citizens? Why is the script throwing this in now, with no preparation or room for development?

–

Ultimately, Wolf of Wall Street fails because it's badly plotted and it looks like Scorsese's done himself a disservice by hewing close to the real Jordan Belfort's book. It's easy to gloss over the movie's flaws because Wolf is so energetically styled and because its lack of proper resolution seems glibly to say that nothing changes and justice was not done, but it's really just incomplete. Let us recall how high the tragic bar has been raised by the Bard, whose twisting few sentences from the end of Richard III are worth more than the whole of Belfort's sorry inconsequential tale. Here is true ambition, pride, indignation, fear, recognition, and tragedy, in but a few words.

Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No-yes, I am.
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why-
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself!

Movie Review: American Hustle

Directed by David O. Russell. 2013.

Casting actors is an art. The casting director has to balance an understanding of the film's story, setting, and tone with the harsh realities of budget and availability, all the while coordinating with those notoriously easygoing people: directors and agents. On what sides does the casting director err: looking the part, giving a good reading, playing well with the other lead, or popularity?

Don't knock popularity either; too many movies try and recreate the buzz of yesteryear by nostalgic casting, such as Gravity's pairing of George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, and the umpteen re-pairings of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, to leave aside altogether Hollywood's infinite capacity for remakes, reboots, and ripoffs. So how does American Hustle fare? It's a triumph, the perfect pairing of 2013 A-listers with the acting chops to boot.

Breaking out of the Batman mold is Christian Bale as Irving Rosenfeld, the Bronx-born minor business owner who moonlights as a bogus financier promising to procure loans in exchange for a modest fee. Irving's personal and business arrangements stay private because he keeps things modest; the feds don't poke around a measly 5k scam and with the extra income Irving is able to keep his flaky, moody, and wildly irrational wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) quiet at home. Everything is neatly under wraps until Irving meets Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) at a pool party. The two don't simply bond over the recent passing of Duke Ellington, but bond over a sobering fact: his music saved their lives. After they finally fully fall for each other in the most romantic kiss ever at a dry cleaner's, Irving reveals his little scheme to Sydney, who first storms out only to return in the persona of Edith Greensly, an English aristocrat with overseas banking connections. In other words: she's in.

That's really the theme of American Hustle, the mask that each character puts on for the world and for themselves, and while Sydney's guise is the most histrionic, Irving's covers the most. Literally. The movie begins with a close up look at Irving's extraordinary efforts to cover up his receding hair by means of styling, hair spray, and a preposterously large tuft of hair. We laugh until he pulls of the look and realize his talent for fraud. Talented and small-time, two traits FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) picks up on when he pinches the pair for impersonation. Actually, he only pinches Sydney, a fact which he uses to pin down Irving: she'll go free if they help DiMaso hook some bigger fish.

As the fish get bigger and bigger, moving up to mayors, congressmen, senators, and full-blown mob kingpins, we realize two things about DiMaso. First, he's ambitions. Second, he's wearing a mask too, playing the part of the hard-nosed FBI mastermind when he's really an upstart agent who can't get funds from his boss and lives with his fiancé and mother in a tiny apartment. Like his criminal catch, DiMaso even has a physical affectation and like Irving's, DiMaso's is a follicular fetish: curling his hair.

The script wisely begins in medias res, getting straight to the political plot which plays like a thriller, and then doubles back to give us backstories. This not only whets our appetite for the resolution, but a head start allows the script to labor over details which might seem ponderous if they prefaced the plot. Likewise the backstory elucidates details of the opening scene, such as the tension not only between Agent DiMaso and Irving, but also between Irving and Sydney. We learn that love and lust  have blossomed into a quadrangle of confusing affections. Irving loves Sydney, but really does care for his wife and of course her son, whom he adopted. Rosalyn has feelings for Irving, but is too flaky to maintain any healthy relationship. DiMaso falls hard for Sydney, but how do we judge Sydney's reaction to his advances? On the one hand she's bitterly angry with Irving for not fleeing with her on account of his family, and on the other she needs to play DiMaso so they can try and put on over on him and come away clean.

As characters develop, relationships weave together, the fraud gets more and more elaborate, and the fish get more and more toothy, we start to realize we're in a pretty hefty movie. You'd never know it from Hustle's light tone, though. Whether it's Rosalyn's preposterous rationalizations, Sydney's poised juggling of Irving and DiMaso, or our glee at Irving's audacious hoaxes, we're always coming from or heading to a laugh, the biggest owing to a running joke that puts the laughs of most comedies to shame.

Yet pleasing as it is, Hustle is no pushover and one foil puts the drama into perspective. Of all the phony accents and primped hair and personae, of all the aspiring agents and two-bit cons on one side, and all the corrupt targets they're after on the other, NJ Mayor Carmine Pollito (Jeremy Renner) is a good man caught in the middle. The chimerical perfect politician, family man and servant of the people beloved by all, Carmine gets caught in DiMaso's sting to bring down the congressman and mobsters. He's innocent, so naive, and so comfortable with himself that he befriends Irving, taking his ensnarer to dinner and buying him gifts. Renner is really splendid here, with Carmine's unaffected manners, chummy talk, and wide grin throwing everyone else's phony act into sharp relief.

The denouement is surprisingly complex, satisfying the drama with a finale consistent with the movie's tone. Just look what gets wrapped up:

1. DiMaso, Sydney, and Irving have to trap the mobster whose rear end is very well covered.
2. Sydney has to choose either DiMaso or Irving.
3. Irving and Sydney have to try and out fox everyone.
4. Irving has to choose between Sydney or Rosalyn.
5. Irving has to overcome or mend his increasing guilt over selling out Carmine.
6. And keeping her in the loop consistently with her character, Rosalyn's mouth runs over and throws a wrench into the whole operation.

It looks for a while like American Hustle is going to go for a cheesy happy ending or a full-blown bloodbath a la Scorsese, but finds its own way not only to resolve its caper, but to bring its characters to meaningful ends. Love and lust, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and redemption, I won't spoil the resolutions but they are rewarding endings to rich a rich movie. A brilliant touch, the script leaves one of its characters exactly the same, adding to the final scene two priceless things best taken together: a reminder to know your self, and a little laugh.

All Too Simple

Ours is a complex age, contemporary wisdom advises. Everyone is so busy and there are so many people bustling about, doing different things. Manmade electronic satellites are whirling around the earth, for crying out loud. And that internet. No one ever exclaims, "What a complicated world: There are so many ideas!" The antidote to complexity is naturally simplicity, right? If we take a blade to complexity we can whittle it down to something more manageable.

This is the fool's game, for while simplicity is the opposite of complexity, its antidote is unity. People perceive the hustle and bustle of life, with all of its commerce and commotion, to be complexity because they presume there is some conglomerate entity, called society, which out to have a definitive character. The society which deviates from that character appears disordered. The phrase social engineer is often propped up by the paranoid and derided by political movers, but what does he do who attempts to move the masses of the polity?

Simplicity is harder to judge with respect to other aspects of life. Living seems complicated when it is not unified by purpose and the universe seems a maze of physical laws in the absence of a prime mover. Philosophy and physics are the tortured pursuits not for simplicity but for a principle of unification. As in philosophy and physics, though, it is challenging to comprehend the presence of simplicity in aesthetics because it is difficult to understand the unifying principle of complex art. How easily to explain that an overture is structured around the deviation from one expected note in the first few bars, or to trace out the vanishing point of a painting? Of course it is very easy to apprehend the purpose of great art and one, thankfully, need not be an expert to appreciate Bach and Shakespeare.

That nature tends to hide, however, does mean, though, that simplicity makes a dangerous mantra. Roger Scruton has pointed out that much simple modern art is simply a disguise for an artist's lack of creativity, from Duchamp's urinal to Koons' kitschy balloons. Artists have worked furiously to be creative within genres and limits; just compare Schubert's lieder, Mozart's concerti, Shakespeare's histories, or Rembrandt's portraits. And yet sterility persisted in the name of simplicity until it reached its apex, utilitarianism. One of the most egregious intrusions of this trend has been in architecture, specifically architecture with the most specific of purposes: churches.

Of church architecture, architect Ralph Adams Cram wrote that, "Every line, every mass, every detail, is so conceived and disposed that it exalts the altar, as any work of art leads to its just climax." [1] As a demonstration of this principle and the danger of adopting simplicity as a master, let us look at a church altar and its reredos, aka altarpiece.

The altar and altarpiece below reside in the chapel at Alton Towers, home to the Early of Shrewsbury in Staffordshire. Anyone who doesn't sympathize with the Crawley's of Downton Abbey and their quest to preserve the estate should know that Alton Towers was sold in 1924 and, with the exception of Alton's chapel, the property is best known today as Alton Towers Resort, "Making Britain Happy" with eight roller coasters and five water rides. [2, 3]

Anyway, Alton's chapel is beautiful and in the following images I've progressively eliminated the visual complexity of its altar and reredos. Let us see what the simplification reveals.

We could have reduced the structure further, leaving only the altar, but the points are apparent. Notice foremost that contra complaints about baroque detail distracting us, our attention to the altar fades in proportion to the removal of the detail, especially the loss of contrasting colors, shapes, and textures, namely the vertical elements which raise the parallel dimension of the altar upward. We also can see how, far from being busy, the structures neatly scaffold atop the altar. Finally, even those tiny details first eliminated serve to exalt the altar, adding contrast by their shape, direction, and texture, and a unity by their symmetries. All of the detail points to one purpose: Soli Deo gloria.

In contrast we may say paraphrasing architect Duncan Stroik, [4] that architectural reductionism reflects a liturgical reductionism. While we have examined diminution, the opposite is true too, for neither by addition or subtraction can we impose meaning irrespective of form, but must pursue through creativity, with existing forms and in tradition, an exalting unity.

–

[1] Rose, Michael S. Ugly as Sin. 2001. p. 84
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alton_Towers
[3] http://www.towersalmanac.com/history/index.php?id=1
[4] Rose, Michael S. Ugly as Sin. 2001. p. 153
–– H/T to the Modern Medievalism blog for the picture of Alton's chapel.

Good Intentions

Traditionalists are seldom lacking reasons they prefer the older form of the Roman Rite: the lectors, the extraordinary ministers of communion, the priest facing you, the sign of peace, and on and on. You name something, and one of us has a gripe about it, wisely or not. Experts might be able to justify better candidates and name a more egregious cobbling or snipping, but for my part as a humble layman I find the recitation of the petitions the most awkward part of the Novus Ordo.

To begin with charity, the notion of simple requests for God's help was a noble idea. It hearkens back to one of my favorite passages from Classical philosophy, a passage from Marcus Aurelius Meditations in which the emperor reminds himself to pray like the Athenians, "simply and freely" or not bother praying at all. Not structured by formula or tradition, these are short, simple petitions–even the word is appropriate, from Latin peto, which simply means to ask–seeking help. With regrets, that's where my charity ends and my frustration begins.

First, you can't structure spontaneity. I cannot force a genuine, simple outpouring of concern for these fleeting, unprepared announcements, whether or not I actually have concern for them, just because they're tossed at me. I know what the mass is and prepare myself for it, but these petitions blindside me and I'm paralyzed.

Second, the petitions often wildly differ. Who can with honesty and a moment's notice, pray for earthquake victims, political leaders, vocations for the priesthood, the military, and the deceased of the parish? This variety is also distracting and sends my mind down various byroads away from the mass.

Third, these requests are usually read by lay readers. Why? Who is this person and what function of the mass do they serve? Are they saying prayers? The Missal Instructions (GIRM 69) say that the priest "regulates" the "prayer" from the altar and then (GIRM 99) that the lector announces the petitions.

So are the words of the lector the prayer or not? If not, what does it mean for the priest to regulate my prayer?

Also, nuntio in Latin means to bring news. To whom is the lector bringing news? If it's God he brings the news to, then it's a prayer (whose?), and if it is I to whom be brings it, then how can he bring me my own prayer? What's going on here?

I'm really not trying to be clever here, but this is confusing.

Fourth, what about the Kyrie at the beginning of mass? Yes, those six words which so many priests speed by are prayers for mercy from God. I find when they're sung as some length and with beautiful music the words are a perfect time for collecting one's various concerns, and coming at the beginning of mass they are gradually focused into the prayer of the mass.

Fifth, why do the petitions have to be the same for everyone? Who decides what "the prayer of the entire community" (GIRM 69) is, and why does it change on a weekly basis? Why is it called the "Universal Prayer" or "Prayer of the Faithful?" What about other prayers? What about the mass itself?

Sixth, The Missal Instructions define the Universal Prayer as one in which "the people respond in some sense to the Word of God which they have received in faith. . ." (GIRM, 69) This is not even a syntactically comprehensible sentence, let alone a theologically comprehensible one.

Seventh, the speaker always references a "parish book of intentions," which I'm apparently supposed to have read, perhaps? Or maybe I'm just supposed to offer prayers for everyone? I just don't know what to do here.

Finally, the Universal Prayer always ends with an encouragement to pray for our own special intentions, as if to say, "Right now find something to pray about!" Or am I supposed to save something to pray for at this time? What about that spontaneity? Or why not just pray when it occurs to you? What's special about saying it right at that time?

Also, why send everyone off on their own prayers right before the Liturgy of the Eucharist?

–

I might seem out to be contentious, but I'm bewildered by the fact that no matter my preparation or disposition I always feel awkward at this part of the mass.

Top Ten: Polyphony for the Nativity

In celebration today I humbly present a small, choice sampling of my favorite polyphonic pieces for the Nativity. I've taken a few liberties listing a few pieces not specifically part of the liturgy for today, so I hope you'll pardon me. Contemporary and frivolous pieces have their places in our hearts, for sure, and while we don't have to reject Rudolph and friends, these pieces, their texts and the music which elevates them to that realm of purest expression, dwell at the centers of hearts which they elevate to the cosmic dimensions of this holy day.

These pieces, against the traditions of our day, remind us that solemnity, reverence, and joy are not contradictory, but in fact very much one and the same.

–

10. Missa Puer Natus Est Nobis. Thomas Tallis [YouTube]

9. Mirabile Mysterium. Jacobus Gallus [YouTube]

8. Ab Oriente Venerunt Magi. Jacobus Gallus [YouTube]

7. Hodie Christus Natus Est. Giovanni de Palestrina. [YouTube]

6. Videte Miraculum. Thomas Tallis [YouTube]

5. Jauchzet, frohlocket! J. S. Bach [YouTube]

Movie Review: Christmas Vacation

Directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik. Written by John Hughes. 1989.

Christmas Vacation is one of the most American of Christmas movies, and not just because Aunt Bethany manages to recite both the Pledge of Allegiance and the National Anthem. Rather it's American insofar as it captures what has for decades now been the American father's quest for the perfect family Christmas of presents, good food, and festive tradition. This third entry in the Vacation series again follows the hapless but well-meaning Clark W. Griswold as he attempts against ill fortune, yuppie neighbors, selfish relatives, cheapskate bosses, and his own ineptitude to pull off the Griswold Family Christmas.

The real star here is John Hughes script which keeps the Yuletide vexation of the American everyman running through every scene. Whether it's the jerk pacing you on the highway and souring the family's car-ride caroling, your kids complaining about the house guests, or the neighbors' contempt for your holiday decorations that troubles you, Christmas Vacation knows your frustration. Some of these scenes are played for broad comedy, but some remind us how hurtful simple slights can be, such as the in-laws' mocking Clark's efforts.

Not all of the scenes hinge on curmudgeonry, though, and some of the movie's best gags are Clark's fumbling attempts to decorate the house, a task which sounds trivial until you go to put up Santa. The scenes of Clark festooning the house with hundreds of strands of lights only to be outdone by one overlooked switch and his subsequent attack on the lawn reindeer are infamous, but one quickie late in the movie is my favorite. Here, after most of the season's damage has been done, Clark is on the precipice of hysteria. As he prepares to chop down his own tree from the lawn to replace the Official Griswold Family fir that Uncle Lewis flambéed, Clark heads down the stairs with his chainsaw and in stepping down he notices the wobbly rail post. With Chevy Chase's classic straight face Clark fires up the chainsaw and lops the post right off, declaring afterwards with pride, "I fixed the newel post!"

Probably my favorite scene overall, though, combines Hughes' affection for the beleaguered father and plain old physical comedy. Here, Clark's oafish cousin Eddie (Randy Quaid) has arrived unannounced with his family in their dilapidated motor home. Sipping some egg nog the surprise guest begins to fidget with the Christmas Pyramid and promptly destroys it with Clark looking on in suppressed horror before he fumbles in vain to re-attach the delicate fins. Now Eddie isn't a bad guy, in fact he has a good heart, but his arrival has just  thrown a huge monkey wrench into Clark's plans and he doesn't realize it at all. In fact, that's what everyone does, including Clark himself by his own stubbornness. The difference for Clark is that he's in charge of Christmas and he has to pull it off for everyone.

Which eventually he does despite himself and despite everyone's foibles because of a few pointed reminders from his father and some old home movies which remind him of what matters. These are nice little Hughes touches which hit the sweet spot between serious and sappy, just enough to give an honest heart to the movie and ground the slapstick in something meaningful. The finale is famous for being over the top, but it actually amplifies the plot's resolution: once Clark realizes that he has overreacted and learns to rejoice simply in togetherness, who cares what happens? Everything else rips loose then, SWAT raids and gas explosions included. It's appropriate, though, that the father who suffered much on land and in snow to keep Christmas together gets the final triumphal words: he did it.

Movie Review: Bad Santa

Directed by Terry Zwigoff. 2003.

Bad Santa is a refreshing reactionary Christmas movie. Instead of setting in us the typical frosty New England milieu, Zwigoff tosses us into the desert of the Midwest. Instead of setting the scene around family, hearth, and home, the lives of his characters revolve around a shopping mall. In place of cliche Christmas tidings we get profanity-laced tirades. Finally, rather than show us a good man who triumphs in the exultation of the Christmas spirit, we get a nasty misanthrope who repels us with his every boozy breath. In this respect Bad Santa is a riff on A Christmas Carol, but whereas Dickens' tale reaches its moment of recognition by presenting to its hero his mistakes and baleful demise, the antihero of Bad Santa is transformed by the love of others unfolding in the present.

Billy Bob Thornton is Willie, the drunken, lecherous, thieving, cussing, safe cracker who sneers at any hint of kindness or good nature and, of course, plays Santa Claus at the mall. Thornton's performance here was inspired enough to earn cheap encores in the Bad News Bears and Mr. Woodcock, but there really is something to Willie. He loathes everything he lacks, namely all of the bourgeoisie pleasantries and kindness which surround him at Christmas time. More importantly, he had a lousy childhood and can't find it within himself to strive for anything better than he knows. Because he hates what he lacks as inauthentic, he justifies and revels in his disgusting self. Add to this character Willie's predilections, inspired cussing, and crackling indifference to social mores, and then finally mix in that strange, Zwigoffian tone, and you have one bad and memorable Santa.

Bad Santa also has a rich bag of foils for the holidays, though. Willie's partner, Marcus, tolerates his shenanigans because Willie is the other half of their scheme. Every Christmas they play Santa and elf at a mall and on Christmas when everyone goes home, Marcus disables the alarm and Willie cracks the safe. The duo parts ways with their loot and meet up at a new mall the following year. Yet while Marcus takes ribbing for his height, he's not just there for cheap laughs. There's a dark heart to his character, for while Willie steals out of indifference to his life, Marcus is genuinely greedy. He likes life, or its luxuries, so much that he's willing to destroy some of it to gain for himself. Willie's at least consistent in hating what he's tearing down. There's a similar contrast within Willie's other foil, mall guard Gin, played by the late Bernie Mac. He's nominally on the side of the mall and law and order, preaching about justice to the mall's delinquents, but when he catches wind of the pair's Christmas scheme, the store dick wants a piece of the action, a piece he wins in a side-splitting scene of bargaining with Marcus. Willie may be a criminal and reprobate, but he's decent enough to be unhappy whereas Marcus and the store dick relish in their natures.

Willie's redemption comes in the form of Thurman Merman, whom Willie calls with increasing affection, Kid. Thurman's a miserable, friendless boy and raised by his senile grandmother he doesn't have any parents to guide him either. The Kid latches onto Willie, naturally, when "Santa" breaks into his house. When Willie realizes Thurman's place is a free safe-house for the season, he shacks up with Kid and Grandma. As he gradually realizes how miserable Thurman is, Willie starts to tutor him in not being quite such a wuss. Finally, when Willie in full Santa regalia goes flips out in rage on a bunch of punks who were bullying Thurman, we realize he's turned a corner and started to live for someone else. Similarly we find Sue, (Lauren Graham) a bartender and fling of Willie's who moves in with the increasingly motley crew of Grandma's House. She might seem a simple love interest or sexpot for spicing up the movie, but she has depth and significance: Sue has confessed kink for Santa because she was raised without Christmas. Like Thurman, and opposite Willie, she's reaching out for, and overcompensating for, what she lacked as a child.

If you can't see the makings of a happy ending you don't know the genre, and if you think it'll be your vanilla conclusion then you don't know Terry Zwigoff. Bad Santa's thoughtful characters and development are spiced up by Zwigoff's inimitable sense for humor in incongruity and the finale is no exception. Even as Willie finds others to live for and the three make a new and wacky family, it's amidst clever montages (with some smart and subversive use of classical pieces), gunfights, profanity, one hilariously flipped bird, and a bloody wooden pickle. Merry Christmas.

Thanksgiving, 2013

With apologies to J. R. R. Tolkien.

Out with the schola and toss out the chant!
     Graduals down and hymnals up!
There's no tradition we can't replant,
     You'll love it til your all grown up!

Sunder the altar and rip off the rail!
     Hands apart and up in the air!
Now reach across and shake without fail:
     Pray by yourself? Now don't you dare!

So dump the trads in a boiling bowl;
     Pound them up with a thumping pole;
And when you've finished, if any are whole,
     Send them down the hall to roll!

That's what every Catholic does hate!
So, carefully! carefully with the faith!

This year I'm grateful for the Latin mass, for everyone who has preserved it, and for everyone with whom I have shared it. In thanksgiving, my Top Ten Chants.

10. Creator Alme Siderum [YouTube]

9. Pange Lingua Gloriosi [YouTube]

8. Asolis Ortus Cardine [YouTube]

7. Viderunt Omnes [YouTube]

6. Miserere [YouTube]

Theater Review: Betrayal

Directed by Mike Nichols. 2013.

Is it inevitable that any story touching on love or romance or sex eventually gets sold in tarted-up packaging designed to lure in the hoi polloi? Is it inevitable that philistines gravitate toward those strains of works? Yes and yes, if the reviews that festoon the Barrymore Theatre are any indication. Betrayal is "sexy" and full of "powerful performances." It's "great," too. And so is the cast. Perhaps the marquee layers and theater owners were simply trying not to spoil the show for new generations experiencing Harold Pinter's 1978 play. We thank them.

Famous for its reverse chronological narrative, Betrayal is the story of a love triangle between married couple Emma (Rachel Weisz) and Robert (Daniel Craig) and Jerry, Robert's best man and Rachel's lover of five years. It isn't the reverse chronology so much as the economy of the dialogue which gives Betrayal its bite. The characters don't have the luxury of grand speeches, monologues, or explanations, but only fleeting replies to suggest themselves to us, a technique that gives Betrayal an inviting intimacy. We always wonder just what characters mean with their words, whether they have the self-knowledge to mean what they say or be ironical. The reverse chronology only serves to magnify these doubts, forcing us to wonder at both the stage of the infidelities and who knows what about them.

What could easily turn into a jigsaw puzzle merely awaiting its final pieces, though, becomes an engrossing look at this triangle of betrayal. As we peel back into the past we realize that the breakdown begins earlier and earlier. We look back though lunches and afternoon getaways and vacations spent in isolation until in the final act we see that the betrayal began some point soon after the wedding of Robert and Emma When we realize this we revisit the whole story chronologically and wonder whether Robert didn't always know about Emma and his best man. If so, why start cheating, a reaction which doesn't forgive, confront, separate from, or punish Emma? Likewise the fact revealed in the opening that Emma had not only broken things off with Jerry but also plans to separate from Robert becomes less explicable the more the play progresses and we look back. It makes sense that she'd betray Robert for Jerry, but why break things off with Jerry, then separate from Robert, and in the opening scene not even make amends with Jerry?

Ultimately we wonder which spouse caused the rift. Was Robert always indifferent? Were his increasingly aggressive, insensitive behavior and his own affairs a reaction to his wife's infidelity or the cause of it? Was Emma's interest in Jerry a response or the cause of Robert's betrayal? We never lean for certain and the most truthful scenes of the play belong to neither spouse but Jerry, who pours his heart out to both of them, full of outrage at his friend's indifference to the betrayal, and full of love for Emma. Yet both Emma and Robert are ultimately indifferent to him. We empathize with Jerry while we experience Robert and Emma's lack of self-knowledge as Jerry's bafflement at their motives.

It's always a fear whether a film actor who can fill the screen with the benefit of effects and camera trickery can command the stage. The answer for Betrayal's trio is yes, although Rafe Spall is the more obvious success because of his character's greater dynamic range. He brings a manic energy to Jerry's outrage, although I'm puzzled why the audience found those tender, vulnerable moments funny. Craig and Weisz do an impressive job conveying interiority through sparse and veiled lines. Craig is always making himself comfortable, sprawling out on the furniture, despite the tension, and seems as if he's about to give up on every question. Weisz on the other hand shrinks inward and we feel her disappearing from the marriage as we imagine her next afternoon with Jerry.

No, Betrayal is not the sexy smoldering play it's billed as, but it's a perceptive, intimate question whether the betrayal of another doesn't begin with the betrayal of oneself.

App Review: Classics App Roundup (iOS)

It's curious that the discipline which forever insists that it relates to absolutely everything, which lectures about Vitruvius and Archimedes, which brags about ancient wonders, should be so technophobic. Yes, there's the TLG and the Perseus Project, but databases aren't quite cutting edge in 2013. Maybe the classicist's mind is truly tuned to the past. Perhaps the classicist's heart is quickened only by the authenticity of aged print and spoken words. Maybe they are impecunious or, like many students of the humanities, maybe they simply act the part of the technophobe and luddite. The reason for the technology gap in classics might be that it's a field dominated by academics who don't want to adapt. Whatever the reason, there is interesting and productive work going on in the mobile app classics world. Here are my 10 favorite classics apps on iOS. 

As a note to teachers, you can stream all of these to a TV or projector via an Apple TV.

I. Colosseum 3D

I remember the first time I picked up Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome mostly because I put it down in despair after a lengthy description of the dimensions of some building or other. Colosseum 3D offers some spectacular fly-through renderings of the Colosseum. It's exciting to get a sense of scale for the massive space and to get the teensiest hint of its former glory. 

Free Demo. $3.99 to buy in-app for the full version. 

II. Great Battles: Cannae & Gaugamela 

It's always a pain to study battles because you have to examine the action at so many stages. Descriptions in books are strewn with layers of color-coded, dotted, and dashed-lines or if you're lucky, pages of images, all to compensate for paper's inability to show you the unfolding visual. These apps from Amber Books present you the stages of the battle but both animate and narrate the transitions. They also have some light historical information.

$2.99 each

III. Virgil Out Loud

It's one of the  blessings and curses of classical languages that their study tends to subordinate pronunciation and conversation to grammatical concerns. Add the difficulties of meter and scansion to the pronunciation lacuna in the curriculum and it's no wonder poetry is a tough sell. In Virgil, iOS developer Paul Hudson teamed with University of Exeter's Stephen Jenkin and Llewelyn Morgan of Brasenose College Oxford for an app which gives you four choice selections of the Aeneid with reading notes and, more importantly, recitations. Morgan reads the hexameters slowly enough for students to follow, but the app highlights the line just in case.

Free