Quotulatiousness

June 11, 2019

“[I]t may suddenly occur to you that Mazin has turned a deadly epochal disaster into … a buddy-cop movie”

Filed under: Environment, Health, History, Media, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I haven’t watched Chernobyl, but a lot of sensible people, including Colby Cosh, insist that it’s well-worth the watching:

It looks as though HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl will take the title as the prestige TV event of the first half of 2019. This is pretty remarkable, all things considered. The writer of the series, Craig Mazin, is still described on Wikipedia as “an American screenwriter and film director best known for writing Identity Thief, The Hangover Part II, The Hangover Part III, and The Huntsman: Winter’s War.” The director, Johan Renck, is a Swede who got his start as a Eurodance performer with the nom de guerre “Stakka Bo.” For the zillionth time, HBO has spread its patented secret sauce over unpromising ingredients and delivered superb television.

I am being something of a jerk about these people, of course. Screenwriters don’t have much control over which of their scripts get made and what happens to those scripts on the set, and Mazin is admired as a critic and teacher. (Unusual respect for writers is an obvious component of that HBO magic.) As for Renck, he got from trashy music to HBO through an apprenticeship in music video — the same kind of apprenticeship that brought us David Fincher, Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. He may, in this regard, be the last gasp of a noble tradition.

It is not that the Chernobyl series doesn’t have elements of hackiness. After spending a couple of hours watching Jared Harris’s austere scientist and Stellan Skarsgård’s smarter-than-he-looks apparatchik warm to each other while trying to save Eastern Europe from obliteration, it may suddenly occur to you that Mazin has turned a deadly epochal disaster into … a buddy-cop movie. Set aside the wonderful visual poetry, the period detail and the fine soundtrack, and the spine you’re left holding is a whodunit. It’s the Case of the Exploding Reactor.

I think Mazin would probably admit this, if he hasn’t already, but if it’s not clear enough, the whole thing winds up in the last episode with a contrived courtroom drama, one which does not quite resemble anything that ever happened in connection with Chernobyl.

Here is the funny and admirable thing: the solution that Mazin’s “cops” work out is highly technical and involved, is explained in careful detail, and is more or less the real solution to the mystery of Chernobyl. Mazin, who is my age and was therefore a teenager when the reactor went kablooie, is not some Jordan Peterson-esque Soviet-history nerd or someone who wanted to turn Chernobyl into a metaphor. It just seems to have occurred to him one day, quite recently, that he knew the word “Chernobyl,” and remembered that Chernobyl was very bad, but wasn’t sure what exactly had happened. When he found out he realized there was a movie in it.

Between the accidents at Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island (in 1979), the nuclear power industry was set back literally decades … despite being one of the best — and safest — answers to the problem of generating enough electricity to keep modern industrial countries humming along while also reducing production of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Maybe someone will produce a TV mini-series to de-mystify the American nuclear accident soon, and debunk the half-truths, quarter-truths, and outright lies that still bedevil any discussion of nuclear power in the western world.

June 6, 2019

QotD: Reviewing Saving Private Ryan

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When Saving Private Ryan was released in America, I made a mild observation to the effect that its premise was a lot of hooey, and received in response several indignant letters pointing out that it was “based on a true story”, that of the Sullivan brothers. Er, not quite. The Sullivans’ story is stirringly told in The Fighting Sullivans (1942, directed by 42nd Street’s Lloyd Bacon): after Pearl Harbor, all five brothers enlist — and all five die aboard the [cruiser] Juneau at Guadalcanal. As a result, to avoid the recurrence of such a freakish tragedy, the United States changed its policy on family members serving together. Steven Spielberg’s film is not “based” on the Sullivans, except insofar as General George C. Marshall, the US Army’s chief of staff, mentions their fate to explain his decision.

Rather, the film is a kind of extension of the thinking behind the policy change: when three out of four Ryan brothers are killed in action, General Marshall orders a rescue mission to retrieve the sole surviving sibling, whose general whereabouts are somewhere behind enemy lines in Normandy — and all this a couple of days after D-Day. No such incident took place: no Allied commander would have thought it worth the risk in lives to assuage one distraught mother’s potential further bereavement.

Spielberg’s mistake is that, as one of the last remaining hardcore Clinton groupies, he’s thinking in Clintonian terms — about publicity, image, spin: the death of another Ryan brother would not “look good”. When Spielberg has General Marshall read out a letter from Lincoln to a mother whose sons all died in the Civil War, we’re certainly meant to find his consoling words — that they gave their lives in a great and noble cause — inadequate. It’s a measure of the gulf between 1944 and 1998 that The Fighting Sullivans was released during the war because it was thought the supreme sacrifice of one family would be inspiring. Alas, not to baby boomers.

So much has been written about the unprecedented “realism” of this film’s war scenes that the equally unprecedented unrealism of its thinking has passed virtually unnoticed. You’ve probably seen a zillion articles about the film’s prologue — a recreation of D-Day which lasts almost as long and doubtless cost a lot more — so I’ll say only this: yes, it’s impressive; yes, every shot of blood and tissue and body parts is underlined by adroit effects; yes, every moment is a testament to Spielberg’s command of cinematic technique; but that’s the problem — you react to it as technique, as showmanship. There’s one perfect shot after another: the silence underwater, with its dangerous illusion of respite; the pitterpatter of rain on leaves gradually blurring into rifle fire. The whole thing is oddly pointless: you’re not engaged by the predicament of the troops because you’re so busy admiring the great film-maker behind them. A film cannot really be “authentic” if all you notice is the authenticity.

Mark Steyn, The Spectator, 1998-09-12 (linked from SteynOnline).

June 5, 2019

QotD: The almost unknown economic good news since 1800

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Ordinary people, and some economists, and even a few economic historians, don’t know it. Hans Rosling, the late, great Swedish professor of public health, emphasized how little most people, even very well-informed people, know about the overwhelmingly good news 1800 to the present, or even 1960 to the present (e.g., falling birth rates, falling infant death rates, rising literacy). He surveyed people, in his various audiences to the number of 20,000. They were embarrassingly less accurate on the whole than monkeys would be throwing darts at the multiple choice possibilities. And the human experts, with ordinary citizens, were always biased in a pessimistic, anti-modern direction. Consider Kenneth Pomeranz, in his fine book with Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created. Pomeranz and Topik tell many interesting and accurate stories about the bad side of creative destruction (which comes from any human progress, not as is often said on the left from “neo-liberalism”). But they never acknowledge the gigantic improvements coming from it for ordinary people. Not once.

Dierdre McCloskey, “How Growth Happens: Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment (Preliminary version)” [PDF], 2018-11-29.

May 31, 2019

History Buffs: Master and Commander

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Buffs
Published on 18 Sep 2016

History Buffs is back! To thank you all for your patience while I’ve been away on holiday, I’m starting off with Master and Commander!

SUPPORT HISTORY BUFFS ON PATREON
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● Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HistoryBuffsNH

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Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is a 2003 American epic historical drama film written, produced and directed by Peter Weir. The film stars Russell Crowe as Captain Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany as Dr. Stephen Maturin. The film, which cost $150 million to make, was a co-production of 20th Century Fox, Miramax Films, Universal Pictures, and Samuel Goldwyn Films, and released on November 14, 2003 to critical acclaim. The film’s plot and characters are adapted from three novels in author Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin series, which includes 20 completed novels of Jack Aubrey’s naval career.

At the 76th Academy Awards, the film was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture. It won in two categories, Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing and lost in all other categories to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

QotD: How we gain weight

Filed under: Books, Food, Health, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I first learned about [Stephan] Guyenet’s work from his various debates with Gary Taubes and his supporters, where he usually represents the “establishment” side. He is very careful to emphasize that the establishment doesn’t look anything like Taubes’ caricature of it. The establishment doesn’t believe that obesity is just about weak-willed people voluntarily choosing to eat too much, or that obese people would get thin if they just tried diet and exercise, or that all calories are the same. He writes

    The [calories in, calories out or CICO] model is the idea that our body weight is determined by voluntary decisions about how much we eat and move, and in order to control our body weight, all we need is a little advice about how many calories to eat and burn, and a little willpower. The primary defining feature of this model is that it assumes that food intake and body fatness are not regulated. This model seems to exist mostly to make lean people feel smug, since it attributes their leanness entirely to wise voluntary decisions and a strong character. I think at this point, few people in the research world believe the CICO model.

    [Debate opponent Dr. David] Ludwig and I both agree that it provides a poor fit for the evidence. As an alternative, Ludwig proposes the insulin model, which states that the primary cause of obesity is excessive insulin action on fat cells, which in turn is caused principally by rapidly-digesting carbohydrate. According to this model, too much insulin reduces blood levels of glucose and fatty acids (the two primary circulating metabolic fuels), simultaneously leading to hunger, fatigue, and fat gain. Overeating is caused by a kind of “internal starvation”. There are other versions of the insulin model, but this is the one advocated by Ludwig (and Taubes), so it will be my focus.

    But there’s a third model, not mentioned by Ludwig or Taubes, which is the one that predominates in my field. It acknowledges the fact that body weight is regulated, but the regulation happens in the brain, in response to signals from the body that indicate its energy status. Chief among these signals is the hormone leptin, but many others play a role (insulin, ghrelin, glucagon, CCK, GLP-1, glucose, amino acids, etc.)

The Hungry Brain is part of Guyenet’s attempt to explain this third model, and it basically succeeds. But like many “third way” style proposals, it leaves a lot of ambiguity. With CICO, at least you know where you stand – confident that everything is based on willpower and that you can ignore biology completely. And again, with Taubes, you know where you stand – confident that willpower is useless and that low-carb diets will solve everything. The Hungry Brain is a little more complicated, a little harder to get a read on, and at times pretty wishy-washy.

But listening to people’s confidently-asserted simple and elegant ideas was how we got into this mess, so whatever, let’s keep reading.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Hungry Brain“, Slate Star Codex, 2017-04-27.

May 27, 2019

Victoria & Abdul, a film about “the brown John Brown”

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn on the 2017 movie Victoria & Abdul:

As I mentioned on the radio yesterday, May 24th 2019 marks the bicentennial of Queen Victoria. So it would seem appropriate to have a bit of cinematic Victoriana for our Saturday movie date. Her Majesty was an important and consequential figure in almost every corner of the world, and once upon a time the biopics reflected that. But she was to a degree unknown and unknowable, which offers great opportunities to the contemporary biographical sensibility. And so the most notable films of the last two decades belong to a sub-genre of their own: the Queen-Empress and the men who caught the eye of a lonely and isolated woman in the long decades of her widowhood. John Madden’s Mrs Brown (1997) is about the Queen’s relationship with her ghillie; Stephen Frears’ Victoria & Abdul (exactly twenty years later, 2017) is about the Queen’s relationship with her munshi.

Queen Victoria (1819-1901) portrait by Bassano, 1882.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

If you don’t know what a ghillie is, well, it’s a Scots Gaelic word for a Highland chief’s attendant on a fishing or hunting trip. If you don’t know what a munshi is, hey, relax: Nobody in the Royal Household does either, and so they’re a little taken aback to find that a Hindu waiter brought over to add a bit of imperial exotica to the Golden Jubilee in 1887 has suddenly been promoted to the hitherto unknown position of “Munshi and Indian Clerk to the Queen-Empress”.

A court favorite is always resented by less-favored courtiers – for whatever reason suffices. In Mrs Brown (the below-stairs mocking name for her ghillie-smitten Majesty), the favorite, John Brown, is resented for being a big brawny bit of Highland rough. In Victoria & Abdul, which begins four years after the Highland fling’s sudden death, the new favorite, Abdul Karim, is resented because his insinuating Moghul and Persian airs are regarded as ludicrously above his station.

Yet they all get what’s going on: As one lady-in-waiting at Balmoral titters, Abdul is “the brown John Brown”.

To confirm that we are in the realm of sequel, the Queen in both films is played, splendidly and sympathetically, by Judi Dench, and the supporting characters are largely identical, too – from Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s Private Secretary, to her long-serving Lady of the Bedchamber, Lady Churchill. As in Mrs Brown, the latter screenplay is disfigured by solecisms. In the earlier film, the script cannot quite decide whether the Private Secretary is “Sir Henry” or “Mr Ponsonby”. In the sequel, Judi Dench sighs that, “I have almost a billion citizens” – not a sentence she would ever have uttered: she had almost a billion subjects – and, as wily old Éamon de Valera would later remark in another context, the concept of “citizenship” was all but unknown in the British Empire. One of her last major legislative acts was to give Royal Assent to the Australian constitution – which she found to be in very poor taste, as the word “Commonwealth” reminded her of Oliver Cromwell.

May 25, 2019

QotD: Orwell reviews Hayek

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Taken together, these two books give grounds for dismay. The first of them is an eloquent defence of laissez-faire capitalism, the other is an even more vehement denunciation of it. They cover to some extent the same ground, they frequently quote the same authorities, and they even start out with the same premise, since each of them assumes that Western civilization depends on the sanctity of the individual. Yet each writer is convinced that the other’s policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing is that they may both be right.

Of the two, Professor Hayek’s book is perhaps the more valuable, because the views it puts forward are less fashionable at the moment than those of Mr Zilliacus. Shortly, Professor Hayek’s thesis is that Socialism inevitably leads to despotism, and that in Germany the Nazis were able to succeed because the Socialists had already done most of their work for them, especially the intellectual work of weakening the desire for liberty. By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it. Britain, he says, is now going the same road as Germany, with the left-wing intelligentsia in the van and the Tory Party a good second. The only salvation lies in returning to an unplanned economy, free competition, and emphasis on liberty rather than on security.In the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.

George Orwell, “The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek / The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus”, Observer, 1944-04-09.

May 23, 2019

QotD: “Prestige” TV shows

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Just a bugaboo of mine: These “Prestige” TV show seem to think that a bore-you-to-tears pacing is a de facto marker of “quality writing and deep characterization,” and most TV critics aren’t hip enough to get the con. A lot of these shows’ very slow pace suggests to me they are being written with a target audience of people “multitasking” on the computer as they half-watch in mind. I guess when you’re mostly reading Instagram while the TV is on, you maybe don’t notice that nothing has happened in the past three minutes. And I guess if you’re one of the one-eye-on-tv-one-eye-on-twitter crowd, you need nothing to happen for long stretches, or else you’ll be missing important stuff.

Ace, “Does ‘Prestige TV’ Just Mean Slow, Tedious, Unpleasant and Dimly-Lit?”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2017-05-15.

May 16, 2019

QotD: Reacting appropriately to criticism

Filed under: Germany, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Ich sitze in dem kleinsten Zimmer in meinem Hause. Ich habe Ihre Kritik vor mir. Im nächsten Augenblick wird sie hinter mir sein! (“I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me!”).

Max Reger, responding to a review of his work by Rudolf Louis in the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, 1906-02-07, as reported by Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective, 1965.

May 15, 2019

Modern architecture as a generations-long art crime spree

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, Europe, France, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple is clearly quite a fan of Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism by James Stevens Curl, as this is at least the third review of the book I’ve seen by him (and you can probably tell I agree with much of his viewpoint that I’m blogging it yet again…)

In a recent debate in Prospect magazine on the question of whether modern architecture has ruined British towns and cities, Professor James Stevens Curl, one of Britain’s most ­distinguished architectural historians, wrote as his opening salvo:

    Visitors to these islands who have eyes to see will observe that there is hardly a town or city that has not had its streets — and skyline — wrecked by insensitive, crude, post-1945 additions which ignore established geometries, ­urban grain, scale, materials, and ­emphases.

This is so self-evidently true that I find it hard to understand how anyone could deny it, but modern architects and hangers-on such as architectural journalists do deny it, like war criminals who, for ­obvious reasons, continue to deny their crimes in the face of overwhelming evidence.

This is true not only of Britain but of many, perhaps most, other countries that have or had any towns or cities to ruin. Anyone who rides into the center of Paris from Charles de Gaulle Airport, for example, will be appalled at the modernist visual hell that scours his eyes as he goes.

Nor is this visual hell the consequence of the need to build cheaply. Where money is no object, contemporary architects, like the sleep of reason in Goya’s etching, bring forth monsters. The Tour Montparnasse (said to be the most hated building in Paris), the Centre Pompidou, the Opéra Bastille, the Musée du quai Branly, the new Philharmonie, do not owe their preternatural ugliness to lack of funds, but rather to the incapacity, one might say the ferocious unwillingness, of architects to build anything beautiful, and to their determination to leave their mark on the city as a dog leaves its mark on a tree.

Professor Curl’s magnum opus is both scholarly and polemical. He has been observing the onward march of modernism and its effects for sixty years and is justifiably outraged by it. British architects have managed to reverse the terms of the anarchist Bakunin’s dictum that the urge to destroy is also a creative urge: Their urge to create is also a destructive urge. I could give many concrete examples (no pun intended).

Philharmonie at the Parc de la Villette, Paris.
Photo by Zairon via Wikimedia Commons.

Curl knows that he is arguing not against an aesthetic, but against an ironclad ideology. The architectural Leninists have been determined so to indoctrinate the public that they hope and expect a generation will grow up knowing nothing but modernism, and therefore will be unable to judge it. (All judgment is comparative, as Doctor Johnson said.) In Paris recently, I saw an advertisement on the Métro (a few days before the fire in Notre-Dame) to the effect that Paris would not be Paris without the Centre Pompidou — which, of course, has a good claim to be the ugliest building in the world. In the face of such an advertisement promoted by the cultural elite, what ordinary person would dare demur?

Centre Georges-Pompidou (no, this isn’t an under construction image … it’s from 2017 and the construction was technically complete in 1977)
Gerd Eichmann photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Could anyone imagine a worldwide outpouring of genuine and heartfelt grief, such as that which greeted the burning of Notre-Dame de Paris, if any building of the last seventy years burnt down? Indeed, the destruction of many would be a cause almost for rejoicing. Modernist buildings will never age as Notre-Dame aged; they will merely deteriorate, and usually do deteriorate even before completion.

May 8, 2019

Brave New World – Dystopias and Apocalypses – Extra Sci Fi

Filed under: Books — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published on 7 May 2019

We kick off a new season of Extra Sci Fi exploring the theme of dystopias and apocalypses. We begin with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — a very early novel that make a compelling argument for why the dystopia exists at all.

Dystopian literature really began when the two World Wars, the Great Depression, and more socio-political unrest in the world began to disrupt the utopian aspirations of science fiction at the time. So enters Brave New World.

May 4, 2019

Justin Trudeau’s (French) language problem

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh reports on a recent academic paper that sticks the boots into the little potato and his, um, problematical French language issues:

Thursday’s hot-off-the-press Post contained a short summary (by CP’s Giuseppe Valiante) of a recent academic paper about how Justin Trudeau’s handling of spoken French is regarded in Quebec. In case you didn’t read Valiante’s summary, I’ll give you a four-word abstract: it drives people nuts. Obviously it’s hard to know how many Quebeckers are really annoyed or nauseated by the prime minister’s French, but if you judge by the newspapers, as Binghamton University French-language scholar Yulia Bosworth did in her article for the American Review of Canadian Studies, it seems Trudeau is the equivalent of fingernails scraping a chalkboard forever.

Hungry with curiosity, I got hold of Bosworth’s paper, entitled “The ‘Bad’ French of Justin Trudeau: When Language, Ideology, and Politics Collide.” As writing it suffers from the typical defects of published scholarship in the humanities: as the title suggests, it is one of those things in which every mental construct of any kind becomes an “ideology.” As scholarship it is pretty good: it contains a useful potted history of Quebecois linguistic self-hatred, and how “Quebec French” went from being a perennial object of shame to a rigid conscious standard, enforced with the same pride and viciousness as Parisian French within France.

But as disguised comedy, the article can’t be beat. When Bosworth wants to give the flavour of her sample corpus of Quebec newspaper abuse of Trudeau, she has to clear her throat professorially first. “Titles, arguably, play an important role in constructing public images; they constitute visible and frequently consumed newspaper content and help construct a linguistic landscape.” Zzzz. But then you get to the good stuff, the distilled liquor:

    In Justin Trudeau’s case, headline readers encountered ‘a beautiful empty shell,’ ‘the little boy,’ ‘a privileged target,’ ‘a thinker of nothingness,’ ‘a deserter,’ a ‘mythical hero,’ ‘window dressing for radical individualism,’ ‘a young dilettante,’ and ‘Justin-the-Red.’ Among the many examples of negative descriptors pinned on Trudeau are: ‘smokescreen,’ ‘the call of the void,’ ‘hypocrisy,’ ‘lack of courage,’ and ‘Pee-Wee’s revenge.’ In terms of adjectives, Trudeau was called ‘slimy,’ ‘tricked,’ ‘attacked,’ ‘targeted,’ ‘troubled,’ and ‘criticized.’

Obviously there is a lot of that sort of talk around, and certainly JT gets a rough ride in the Post and the Alberta broadsheet papers from time to time, but I think only in Quebec do you find this language in headlines, rather than in the comment threads or your uncle’s Facebook feed. (“Radical individualism”? Really?)

April 30, 2019

You Will Never Do Anything Remarkable

Filed under: Health, History, Humour, Space — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

exurb1a
Published on 28 Apr 2019

Illegitimi non carborundum, yo.

So.
The original line was, “If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.” As far as I can tell it’s Juan Ramón Jiménez’s.

I am also now painfully aware I’ve written a half as ‘2/1’. Sorry maths.

Please note that this wasn’t intended to be a diatribe against critics or experts. They obviously play an important role. It was more directed at the recreational cynicism one comes across in daily life from time to time, generally pointed at young artists. I have had the privilege to meet plenty of people 1000x more talented than me, who are simultaneously doubting their abilities because of some stupid comment made by an unpleasant teacher or jaded family member.

If you are that artist, I really just wanted to say: You’re in good company; the Greats doubted themselves too. Don’t let the bastards get you down and I hope you make all manner of interesting and fantastic things.

The music is the 3rd movement of Big Baus Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Major: https://youtu.be/Ev45Knhdlp8

I like that piece lots. I hope you do too.

Again, all the very best of luck in your projects.

April 18, 2019

Shakespeare’s work is merely used to highlight the brilliance and originality of modern theatrical directors

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Anthony Daniels reports for Quadrant Online of how he recently attended a performance of a play by some unimportant dead English white guy:

The precise date of the discovery by theatre directors that they are greater than Shakespeare cannot be specified: the discovery was more a process than an event. But by the time I saw a production of Richard II at the Almeida Theatre a few weeks ago, the superior genius of any director over that of Shakespeare was an established principle and indisputable fact.

[…]

But if I had an elevated conception of Shakespeare, how naive and mistaken I was! I knew nothing of Richard II — the play, that is, not the king — until I saw the production by Joe Hill-Gibbins. How narrow had been my previous conception of it! I discovered, among other things, that Richard was a short, fat fifty-eight-year-old in a black T-shirt, with a crown of the kind that is awarded to the person who finds the fève in the galette des rois that the French eat on the sixth of January, that the Duke of Norfolk was a woman dressed like a cleaning lady, and that all the action of the play takes place in what looks like a large biscuit tin, without exit or entrance. All this, of course, means something far deeper than anything that a mere Shakespeare could convey, being deeply symbolic, and therefore required real inventive genius on the part of the director to bring forth.

While the same actress took the parts of the Duke of Norfolk, Bushy and Green (all of them looking like cleaning ladies and each indistinguishable from the other because they could not leave the stage even to change costume), and the parts of both the Earl of Northumberland and the Bishop of Carlisle by other actresses, actual women’s roles such as that of Richard’s Queen were expunged entirely from the text. Between them, three actresses played five male parts and only one female. There is a profound lesson in this somewhere, no doubt in enlightened gender fluidity.

Most of the lines were delivered as if they were a religious incantation in a dead language that both the celebrants and the congregation desired to get over with as quickly as possible, clear diction being one of the many tools by which class hegemony is so unjustly exercised. The actor who took the part of Richard, it is true, was comprehensible, but made the acting of Sir Henry Irving appear taciturn by comparison. If emphasis is good, overemphasis must be better: no more stiff upper lip, we are all hysterics now, and can understand nothing that is not accompanied by gesticulation.

The director fortunately realised that Shakespeare got the order of his play wrong: Richard’s great speech in Act V scene 5 (“I have been studying how I may compare / This prison unto the world …”) was actually a prologue. The director is not the interpreter of Shakespeare, but rather Shakespeare is, and ought to be, the occasion, the opportunity, for the director to place his own immortal (and highly original) genius before the world.

April 11, 2019

QotD: How to improve David Lynch’s Dune

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Dune (1982) is a Lawrence of Arabia pastiche with a mad bucket of half-baked science fiction tropes bolted onto it. It includes so much extraneous, confusing detail from the novel’s world, but when you think of all the things it omits you really get a good sense of why Lynch (or anyone?) could not form it in 2 or 3-hours.

I think there are two things that could be done to fix it. Firstly, remove all the speaking and turn the whole thing into a hallucinatory Lynchean nightmare, perhaps to be accompanied by Brian Eno’s mythic 45-minute album of Dune music. […]

Secondly, use Lynch’s movie as the basis for a full-length animated TV miniseries by rotoscoping it and bringing back the original actors for several hours or so of newly-animated scenes.

Rob Beschizza, “Sorry, David Lynch’s Dune sucks (or does it?)”, Boing Boing, 2017-04-21.

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