Sunday, March 25, 2018

The Thin Man


The visual appearance of The Thin Man (1934; dir. W. S. Van Dyke), based on the Dashiell Hammet novel, is so stage-like as to seem static and artificial.  But this is simply a convention to which one can adjust, just as the ultra-realism of many contemporary films is a convention.  The hero, Nick Charles (William Powell), is a retired detective whose marriage to a wealthy woman, Nora (Myrna Loy), allows him to retire and live a life of leisure in San Francisco.  The film doesn’t look askance at his life style, which is simply part of what makes him interesting.  (Interesting in the same way one might read Fitzgerald without noticing, at least in his better stories, the undertone). During a visit to New York, the case of a missing scientist lures him back to sleuthing.
Powell isn’t the modern conception of a handsome leading man.  He is middle-aged, with a weak chin and somewhat dangling under chin.  He ranges from tipsy to more than tipsy throughout the film, as does his wife.  Rarely drunk, they are always drinking, and always in control.  What makes this film entertaining as well as interesting is the constant repartee between husband and wife, their sexy double entendres and wordplay and banter.  What also makes it interesting is the array of secondary characters: eccentric, quixotic, often inebriated.  During a Christmas party at Nick and Nora’s apartment, these characters show their stuff. When the plot occasionally falters, these major and minor characters maintain our interest.
I’ve always thought of Nick and Nora as a husband and wife team.  While they are married, they are not equal partners in sleuthing, and when dangerous work is to be done, Nora stays at home.  The missing scientist had been conducting an affair with his secretary, who is referred to as a girl, though she seems close to middle age.  The scientist’s ex-wife, always in need of money, is having an affair with a younger man played by Caesar Romero—he, as it turns out, is a swindler who is still married.
The Thin Man is far more comedy than mystery.

Monday, March 19, 2018

The Black Panther


While it has certain original and distinctive elements, The Black Panther (2018, dir. Ryan Coogler) is a super hero story.  Unlike most super heroes, the Black Panther (T’Chalia, played by Chadwick Boseman) is the king of a nation called Wakanda, in Africa.  The kingship is passed down in patrilineal fashion, from father to son. The king owes his unusual powers to the element vibranium, which is the basis of Wakanda’s wealth and advanced technology.  But the Wakandan king is more a leader/hero than a super hero.  His character and force of personality form the basis of his ability to lead. He’s more like Beowulf than Superman.  The support of the people of Wakanda, and the cultural values in which they believe, also help make him powerful.

Wakanda is both a representation of African culture and traditions—an idealized utopia—and also of the western nations, especially the United States.  A basic issue argued out in the film is that wealthy and technologically advanced nations should share their fortunes with less affluent nations.  The Wakandans have resisted allowing outsiders to enter their nation, which is hidden from view by a force field.  The analogies to our present situation are clear.  The film is not especially friendly towards the US—at the end, when the King of Wakanda addresses the United Nations, he does so at the UN headquarters in Vienna, Austria—it’s been relocated. The political and human messages at the center of this film distinguish it from most other super hero films.

The film also dramatizes a conflict over whether people of color should use the wealth and power of Wakanda to wage a war of revenge on the white world, or whether an approach of constructive leadership is preferable. The Black Panther favors the latter approach, but the film does not dismiss the first one: if powerful nations do not share their wealth and knowledge with impoverished parts of the world, if economic and cultural disparities are permitted to persist, then a war of revenge may happen.

Ironically, an American CIA operative, played by Martin Freeman, befriends the Wakandans and assists in their battle against evil.  His role as an ally to the Wakandans is ironic because he works for and represents the very thing the film seems to criticize.

In developing the story of Wakanda and the Black Panther, the film makes use of African customs, religion, wildlife, and language.  It’s not infused with white European/American traditions. Costume design based on African fashions make it distinctive.  The African setting is vividly realized --it’s truly envisioned.  The city at the center of Wakanda is imaginatively detailed DGI.

Although the Black Panther is a man, he is surrounded by women who hold important positions: the King is protected by a highly trained retinue of women guards.  Women are sent on missions and give advice to the King.  A woman commands the military forces. Women fight battles on an equal basis with men.  In Wakanda women hold equal or nearly equal status with men.

Avenue of Mysteries, by John Irving


The best of John Irving’s novels have a powerful narrative impulse.  You can’t stop reading them.  One reason is that Irving plants clues about what is to come.  The anticipation or dread pulls you along.  This was certainly the case with The World According to Garp (1978) and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989).  Added to this narrative pull are his distinctive, sometimes lovable, sometimes eccentric characters.  The reader grows fond of them, and this is certainly true of the leading character Juan Diego in Avenue of Mysteries (2015).  This novel contains many elements from Irving’s earlier novels: a dead mother, ambiguous concerns with religion, anticipation of an event that is telegraphed from the beginning but that doesn’t happen until the end, transsexuals, abortion, sex, an array of interesting characters. I have read various discussions about whether Irving is a truly literary novelist, or whether he was at his height simply a pop culture phenomenon, popular in the same way that the Beatles are (or were) popular.  Irving is certainly a “literary” writer, that is, a serious novelist who explores with skill and finesse important ideas. His method right now may not be fashionable, but being in fashion and being a significant novelist are not related concepts.

Juan Diego is a novelist who resembles Irving in a curious sort of way. He has written a novel about abortion, and another about an Indian circus, for example. He spends much time thinking back on his early life, and it is easy to imagine that Irving may have examined through Juan Diego some of his own concerns as a writer who has entered his later years. But in other ways Juan Diego and Irving are not alike.  The novel moves back and forth in time between Juan’s early life in a Mexican garbage dump and his later years as a highly successful novelist travelling to a cemetery in the Philippines to pay homage to a man killed in the Second World War.  He doesn’t know the man’s name or exactly where he is buried, which creates a challenge for him, but in making this trip he is keeping a promise to a drunken hippy whom he knew in his early days in Mexico. Avenue of Mysteries does not describe Juan Diego’s middle years, only his life as a child and as an older man.

Avenue of Mysteries has a particular interest in religion, spirits, mindreading. Above all, it’s interested in death.  By the end, almost everyone who has passed through its pages has died.  Juan Diego dies.  To say this is not to give anything away since the novel hints at his future end from the beginning.  He has stopped taking his beta blockers on a regular basis, for instance, so as to increase the effectiveness of the Viagra which he also takes. He grows increasingly fatigued, is sometimes confused, feels nauseous—these are ominous signs.  Irving mentions the beta blockers often enough that it is too easy to describe them as clumsy foreshadowings.  He wants the reader (I think) to notice these clues, to recognize that they are leading towards Juan’s final mortal moments, to make them part of the novel. Life has both a beginning and an end.

There is at least one miracle in the novel involving a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe.  (Juan is named after the farmer who first had a vision of the Virgin 400 years before.)  Juan’s sister Lupe can read minds and sometimes see the future.  She speaks in a garbled tongue that only Juan can understand—he serves as her translator. There is a sacrifice (reminiscent of the one in Owen Meaney).  Just as it was possible to find an underlying Christian meaning in Owen Meany, we can do the same in this novel.  But there are other religions at issue here: the Aztec religion, to which the Virgin of Guadalupe may be related.  And perhaps some strain of Buddhism or Shintoism: two women—a mother and her daughter, both very lusty, trail Juan throughout his travels in the novel, and at some points he realizes they cast no shadow and produce no reflections in mirrors.  The function of these woman and possibly other elements reminded me of Haruki Murakami. 

A highpoint is the scene in which Juan’s mother Esmerelda, a simple-minded prostitute who works her trade near the garbage dump, dies while cleaning the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The tone of this novel is light and whimsical. Despite its subject, it is not dark.

The New York Times reviewer wrote that “More often this novel is so life-affirming you want to hurl yourself into bus traffic. The things that for a while were magical in Mr. Irving’s writing long ago came to seem, instead, like tricks. From the reader’s perspective, this is magic ordealism.”[1] I disagreed with this review, which while not entirely dismissing the novel disparaged its methods and messages as too obvious and hackneyed.  Irving may be following a formula of sorts that worked for him in his earlier novels, but it does not fail him in Avenue of Mysteries.  Juan Diego is a remarkable character.