IdyllopusPress Presents

The last few days I’ve been getting a fair number of hits on my site for “Leigh Bielenberg”, which will have had to do with her death, most landing on the page I put up to do with Leigh’s talk before the Atlanta City Council in August of 2008.

On Monday, Leigh died after another very long battle, one in which she never ceased to display her indomitable courage and near ferocious love of life. I don’t know if there is a memorial page yet for her started by friends and family. Marty, my husband, was a close friend and doesn’t know of one yet, so he suggested I put a page on my website for her in case anyone has something they would like to share.

I, personally, wasn’t close friends with Leigh. But she was a friend and I greatly admired her. She had a huge spirit.

If you would like to share, please do.

2010 March 9
Almost Spring (Before the Space Heater is Put Away)

Seeing what my new iPhone app can do. Not adequate on its own. I had to take it into Photoshop and add grain.

Not having seen “Doubt” on the stage, and having read some reviews of the play that laud it over the film and remarks on some differences, I feel at a disadvantage discussing the film, but as John Patrick Shanley, the author, also directed the film, unless he privately changed the motivations of his characters during the shift from stage to cinema, then the unvocalized back story which cements the action should be one and the same. Even if the dialogue is different and the actors in the cinema version have colored and weighted the story elements differently than the stage version, we should find rectification in the film via Shanley’s symbolic choices and editing.

The opening story is this. One Sunday, the progressive Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives an impassioned and seemingly personal sermon on doubt, relating the tale of an experienced sailor who, having survived a ship wreck, finds refuge on a raft and sets his course by the stars just before a 20 day fog rolls in that will eventually leave the sailor in the troubled dark of doubting his course and his fate. During this sermon, the severe Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is drawn out of her seat and progresses up the side aisle intentionally terrifying children into alert attention. Though the Father speaks of the isolation of personal doubt, such as doubt as a consequence of knowing one has done something wrong, he ends on the note that doubt is as strong a bond between people as is certainty–and as the sermon ends we see Sister Aloysius staring fixedly at the priest from the side aisle, as if an oppressive shadow opposing his empathetic and consoling spiritualism.

During the sermon, one of the altar boys, Donald Miller, sees a pigeon fly into the dome of the church, the signal of a comforting Paraclete. A shy and introspective loner, the boy is so impressed by the service–and perhaps by the bird’s appearance as well–that afterward he approaches the priest to tell him that was quite some sermon. Father Flynn asks if it meant something to him and the boy replies he would like to “do that”, to be a priest. The Father reaches into a box on a high chest and pulls out a brightly colored toy, a ballerina whose spins are guided by a magnetic mirror. He entertains the boy with it then gives it to the boy as a gift.

The next day, as the students of her school line up in the courtyard, from her window the old guard Sister Aloysius observes the friendly Father Flynn inspecting the students. She sees him grab the wrist of one of the students, William London, to joke about his filthy hands, and she observes London jerk away. Based on this alone, but having had former experience in the matter, Sister Aloysius, who has little use for a progressive, friendlier church, becomes suspicious of Father Flynn and determines to be on the look out for anything questionable taking place at her school, fearing the children under her charge are under threat of a pedophile.

There is never any hard evidence.

By all appearances, Father Flynn’s style is only different from the “hungry dragon” he states Sister Aloysius to be. When Donald Miller returns, one day, from a meeting with the Father in the rectory, and has alcohol on his breath, this only hint at impropriety is explained away by the Father as his having called Miller to his office when he learned Miller had drunk the church’s wine. Rather than embarrassing the boy, at his tearful request, Flynn permits Donald to remain an altar boy. He tells Sister Aloysius that, for sake of the boy, he had hoped no one would ever learn of the incident and reprimands her for prying.

Donald is the first African American in the school. He is alienated from his peers not only through this but by being possibly homosexual. His father beats him. He is having difficult enough time and needs friendship.

Sister Aloysius remains convinced that Father Flynn has taken advantage of the vulnerable boy.

Sister James, who is younger, takes the part of the waffling audience, suspicious when she is in the company of Sister Aloysius, reassured when in the company of Father Flynn, buffeted by the confidences of both.

Though it seems a true Rorschach test regarding the impression of the viewer as to whether the priest is predator or mentor–and the writer/director, John Patrick Shanley, artfully arranges the elements so that the final resting point for every action and its reaction is ambiguity–it still seems to me that, though he only disclosed to the actors playing the priest, both in the film and on stage, whether the priest was guilty or innocent, Shanley likely has engraved this knowledge in the film, extra the dialogue and overt story line.

Must we know what the truth of the matter is? No. The point of the film is given to be doubt. Even if Streep covers us in her skin so that we divine just why she is so certain of Flynn’s guilt, there must remain doubt when no sound evidence is provided. Just as even if we are entirely convinced by Seymour that his character’s intentions are wholly honorable, and that he is only the victim of a 20th century witch hunt, we should again have for him the same doubts as we do for the sister. I say “should” because I, in fact, believe it is impossible to approach Streep’s character and Seymour’s with a balanced level of doubt. Streep must always be at the disadvantage precisely because Shanley has given us more of her, has shown us more of her nature, her character, her intentions. He has given us more of her personal world, her introspections, whereas Seymour’s character is all veneer. We never glimpse behind the curtain into his personal life, whereas we do with Streep.

“I will step outside the church if that’s what needs to be done, though the doors should shut behind me,” she rages. “I will do what needs to be done though I’m damned to hell! You should understand that or you will mistake me.”

If this is only a power struggle, she is willing to give up all that she has to oust Flynn from the parish.

Or are her suspicions the grotesque delusions of a woman who believes Frosty the Snowman is a pagan evil that should be banned from the airwaves. We even are given to know that she is a superstitious type, looking to the wind and blown out electric lights as signs supporting her quest and conclusions.

I’ve listened to Shanley’s interview with Charlie Rose on the play. He draws a comparison between “Doubt” and the “rush to war” with Iraq, saying that he didn’t want to write a political play but that he was inspired by so many people around him not giving room for doubt, that he preferred doubt over a “couch of convictions”. Assuming he had questions about the war, for he states he was troubled by people who expressed doubts being seen as unpatriotic, this divulging actually does more than hint at the innocence of a priest who is the subject of a witch hunt–and I certainly empathize with this. I, too, was troubled by those couches of convictions and doubters being branded as unpatriotic. But I frankly feel it’s a bit of a red herring here, and a little disingenuous his continuing on, in the same interview, that “there’s always something you want to believe” because “it serves some deep purpose or need”, even if this may be true for the majority, for there are truths just as there are lies and propaganda–as in the case with Iraq there were indeed truths buried by lies and propaganda. Just as I think it’s a little disingenuous his remarking that “there’s the wisdom to step aside from your emotions, to step aside from what you want to believe and look at the evidence before you and say I don’t have enough evidence to know this, so this in fact belief that I have is an emotion”. For later in the same interview Shanley states he was raised in an age of certainties, in the Catholic church which had a code of beliefs (certainties), a culture of manners, that much was taken for granted, and that such people are vulnerable to someone who isn’t thinking that way, a predator, and that people who assume that everyone around them is operating from the same base are “blind to obvious things in front of them”.

We can’t have one or the other in “Doubt”. We can’t have the audience beckoned to reflect on the fact that they are relying on emotion rather than fact, that there isn’t at all solid evidence, and at the same time have it be an audience that is wrestling with being “blind to the obvious”. In this way, I think certain discussions, as advanced by Shanley, on the play and film and its inspirations, though he has his purposes, are a rather raw and unfair gaming of the audience. By means of a story in which confidence isn’t assured on the part of the audience, to explore the positive and negative aspects of doubt is one thing. But it is another to artfully permit the audience to follow their own lead on the leash to a place of conviction, whether it be in guilt or innocence, then step to the side and say, in effect, this isn’t a story about these characters at all, but about how each individual member of the audience reached that place of conviction and how they are all wrong, every one of them, in not remaining in a place of doubt. This may be an interesting psychological exercise but only works so far before it becomes an unfair tweeking. We can’t have an audience that is at risk of of the guilt of both being blind to the obvious and of rushing to judgment, one way or the other, based on no solid evidence. In other words, an audience may misinterpret, but the author and director should not place the audience in a position of only being capable of misinterpretation, at least not in the case of a story where it is made known there is a truth and the director/author knows and is privy to this truth. At the very least, don’t be glib about it and assert, as Shanley does in the aforementioned interview, that the reason he’s made a film about doubt is because the world doesn’t need a story about how it’s bad for a priest to be a predator, as we already all know that is so, just as we know there were Nazis and they were bad. For not all of us do know that there are indeed predator priests, and not all of us know why it might be bad to cover up for them.

One could ask, then, how to make a film wherein the audience experiences absolute, unrelenting doubt, if it isn’t manipulated so the audience is only ever in a position of misinterpreting what’s presented? And I’d say, well, you can. With “Doubt”, however, instead you have polarization, the majority of the audience taking firm sides.

Or perhaps I’m only irritated that Shanley smiled throughout his interview with Charlie Rose, as if very satisfied with his game, discussing how he found very satisfying the arguments between couples following the play, and posing that the tension of doubt is a much more vital and lively position to inhabit rather than certitude.

This may be true in many circumstances, but Shanley has set up a situation in which he knows the answers but permits no investigation. Which is problematic. We are told we can only be wrong, no matter our conclusions, we are given no way to sort out this mystery which does have an answer.

Past a certain point doubt itself can become an excuse for the silent, defeated apathy of a public whose opinions are rendered meaningless by ever new twists of artificial facts intended to strand individuals in a quicksand of hopeless acceptance of any answer ever being elusive. Just as doubt can also become the excuse for a zealot’s intolerance.

When Sister Aloysius promises Donald Miller’s mother that she will leave Donald out of her efforts to remove Flynn from the parish, that she will not sacrifice him in her pursuit of the truth, though this is admirable and justified, the audience is deprived the route of investigation and is again gamed into an enforced ambiguity, Sister Aloysius proceeding only on intuition.

Again, must we know what the truth of the matter is? No, but I’m fairly sure that Shanley has inserted clues in the film that have nothing to do with the evidence or lack of it presented, or how we may be convinced by either Streep or Seymour. That doesn’t mean I think it’s possible to divine those clues with certainty, but I believe they’re there.

In the opening pages of the published script of “Doubt” (which I’ve yet to read but am ordering), Shanley dedicates the play to the devotion of nuns, balances this with acknowledging that time after time he was ejected from both sacred and secular institutions for reasons as to which he was unclear (but which one assumes were to do with judgmental authoritarianism sacrificing individuality), and highlights three admirable quotes: “The bad sleep well”, a title of a film by Kurosawa; Ecclesiastes’ “In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow”; and Ptolemy’s “Everything that is hard to attain is easily assailed by the mob.” And, again, he asserts that the only answer to the play is to reside in a position of doubt, though Sister Aloysius does not sleep well, though she is sorrowful and aggrieved.

Reflection is a theme used in the film. We have it when Sister Aloysius suggests Sister James place on her blackboard a picture of the pope, not out of reverence but that its glass may serve as a mirror so that Sister James can see what is going on with the students behind her back. We observe it when, at the beginning of the film, the organist takes his seat in the choir loft and adjusts a mirror by which he can see the altar and the body of the church behind him. And we have it again when Father Flynn gives Donald Miller the gift of the toy that was a tiny ballerina whose alternately clockwise and counter clockwise whirling dance is choreographed by a magnet in a mirror.

There is one other dance in the film, and it happens to take place after Donald Miller is called to the rectory by the priest, this visit being one which Sister Aloysius takes as suspicious. While Donald is absent, his class moves to the gym for a dance lesson. “Blame it on the Bossa Nova” is the recording to which they practice.

I was at a dance when he caught my eye
Standin’ all alone lookin’ sad and shy
We began to dance, swayin’ to and fro
And soon I knew I’d never let him go

Blame it on the bossa nova with its magic spell
Blame it on the bossa nova that he did so well
Oh, it all began with just one little dance
But then it ended up a big romance
Blame it on the bossa nova
The dance of love

…

And when our kids ask how it came about
I’m gonna say to them without a doubt

Blame it on the bossa nova with its magic spell
Blame it on the bossa nova that he did so well…

Without a doubt.

Father Flynn advocates love and insists Sister Aloysius has no compassion. Those who believe in his innocence view Sister Aloysius as a tyrant harboring a corrupting hatred. Sister Aloysius decries Flynn as being a person who misuses love and is utterly incapable of regret, for which reason she has hidden her compassion where he will never get at it.

Pedophiles, sociopaths and authoritarians don’t play by the rules and “hard evidence” is often difficult to come by because of their machinations and subterfuge. One of their boldest refuges happens to be doubt, which itself can be manipulated to be absolution. However brilliant the play’s dialogue (and it is, I’ve glanced at it and it is brilliant, superior the film), however devastatingly skilled Shanley is, I question whether it is somewhat unfair that the audience is emotionally involved in a film that is also exploded out of its story frame, ostensibly having nothing to do with characters and plot, and is instead an intellectual exercise in accepting the tension of doubt over a more comfortable couch of convictions.

As to whether Sister Aloysius has any doubts in her conviction that Flynn is a pederast, she does not.

Nor is she comfortable.

“In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from god,” she says at the end. “Course, there is a price. Oh, Sister James, I have doubts. I have such doubts.”

Some take this as her doubting her condemnation of Flynn, when it is not. Instead, pursuing her belief in Flynn’s wrongdoing, she has stepped away from simpler, easier trust. If to be in the presence of her god is to rest in security and love, then she has taken the course that she threatened Flynn she would pursue, if need be, to remove him from proximity to her students, stepping out of the confidence of an altruistic universe and into the paw of hell.

Was she right? Was she wrong? We can weigh the possibilities all we like and in the end, despite personal feelings as to whose character seems to play truer, not knowing ultimately too whether the performances and script were true to the mark or sacrificed telling bits for sake of maintaining ambiguity, one can really do little more than accept Shanley’s assertion that doubt is all that can be held in any confidence.

Shanley assures that this doubt is the livelier more invigorating position to inhabit. My life is one great big bag of doubt and I accept that; it’s how I daily live. But as one who has known individuals who were indelibly and terribly scarred by pedophiles who did take advantage of individuals assuming that everyone around them was operating from the same base, who were blind to obvious things in front of them, and as one too who knows the fatigue that comes of being made an outsider by fences formed of couches of convictions, I am only exhausted and enervated by “Doubt”. I wish there was less of the psychological exercise to it. Less of Shanley’s playing mate and checkmate with the audience, in order to keep them in the dark. Though I think it’s brilliant, I’m not altogether sure, for reasons given above, that it is honest with the audience, especially when Shanley repeatedly insists that he was not at all interested in the church scandals but rather–and I’m paraphrasing here–used them because they served as a good vehicle for exploring the fallibility of moral certitude.

I fail to understand how and why, if he had no interest in the scandals, he picked them as a vehicle when there are so many other situations from which to choose.

I wonder at any sacrifice of sincerity in broaching a subject he cares nothing about, in service of using it as a launchpad for the exploration of an intellectual exercise in embracing and maintaining the tenuous position of doubt.

Boingboing today pointed to this film, “Century 21 Calling…”, dated 1964 but courtesy of the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle.

Toward the beginning of the film, the camera following a teenage couple gleefully riding the monorail, we get this rear shot of them.

What first comes to your mind?

Me? I thought, ah, so here we have the nativity of the early Star Trek uniform, the dark oxford shirt with brighter cardigan. And I decided to later blog about this astute notice on my part.

I watched the rest of the film then dragged my 12 year old son in.

“Young son,” I said, “come and look at the childhood home of your antique mother. See how the natives dressed. Ogle the Space Needle. These are the scenes as I would have viewed them at the tender age of five.”

I began to play the film for him. The first words out of his mouth? As this above scene played on the screen, he whooped, “It’s Star Trek!”

We’re not even Star Trek geeks. Though I used to love the show, we’ve never watched an episode with him. Yet this rear profile–the haircut, the collar and cardigan–is immediately defined by him as “Star Trek”.

I just watched a film short on Turner Classic Movies that was pretty interesting, titled “Of Pups and Puzzles”. The film was released Sept 1941 and thus predated, if by just a few months, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into WWII, so it wasn’t your standard WWII patriotic oompahpah, though I felt the stars and stripes in a back closet chafing at the bit. Instead, the film’s focus was to educate the public on the advances of modern science and psychology in building imminent utopia, the subject that day being how “psychometricians” had perfected the ability of matching the applicant to the perfect job, which of course makes for a happy, jolly, no-complaints universe in which no one’s talents go unappreciated and even the stoop-shouldered depression era hobo would now be able to exchange his hobo bag for a proper lunch pail.

The desperate, Grapes of Wrath, father figure shuffles off screen, replaced with three young, white, male applicants who will be funneled into job nirvana via three tests.

Kind of like a fairy tale.

In the first test, there are rows and rows of tightly packed stacks of poker chips, and the applicants have to pick up each stack and flip it over as quickly as they are able.

The film then scans the titles of a number of animal behavior books as it prepares to divulge for us exactly how the second test had come about via animal testing. You see, there were once three dogs and each dog was Pavlovian trained to expect a bowl of food when shown a perfect circle on a screen. Then the three dogs were trained to expect a pane of glass separating them from their food when they were shown a flattened oval. Now, how would each of these dogs respond when shown neither the flattened oval or a circle but a fuller oval? The breed that was something like a Shetland sheep dog started barking, and thus its nervous system was determined to be naturally inclined to “hysteria”. The spaniel cocked its head then laid down on one side and just looked kind of confused. The bull dog turned its back on the whole shebang, laid down and prepared to sleep. The bull dog was declared to have the best adjusted nervous system response.

This animal test was given as the foundation for the second test to which the job applicants were subjected.

They sat three men down and gave them each a row of figures they had to tally up within the space of a minute. They were told they would have a surprise, not a bad surprise, but a surprise, and must finish up the row of figures regardless of whatever happened.

I wondered what would the surprise be and decided a stripper would fit the bill for a distraction that was a “surprise” but not a “bad surprise”. But because you can’t have a stripper in a film from the 1940s I waited for a cake to be rolled on scene and a woman to pop out.

So the three men sit and begin working on the figures.

Behind their backs, the tester pulls a handgun.

You read that right.

A revolver.

And standing behind the men he began firing blanks at the ceiling.

No one ran from the room. No one tackled the tester. No one screamed, “You crazy shit!” and called their lawyer. No one dove under the desk.

Which amounts to a big Fail! Right? Let’s see who survives the real world. The hobo? Certainly. The Grapes of Wrath father figure would have quickly, reflexively determined whether his best bet was to heave his chair at the tester and attempt to bean him with a second, or dive under his desk and overturn it to form a shield.

Instead, the film was scripted so one applicant showed just enough alarm as to be too nervous to finish his task on time (the hysterical one, I guess), one showed moderate confusion, while the third–the applicant with the reflexes of a rock–looked briefly up after a moment to see if if anyone had got the phone yet then returned to finishing his mathematics problem.

I fully comprehend that testing how dogs respond to a geometric form is exactly the same as seeing how job applicants tabulating numbers respond to a gun being fired behind them. Don’t you?

Thus did Hollywood demonstrate that no corporate job applicant who buys that hazing is all fun and games is a real world survivor, and every theater-goer was trained to expect and accept the corporate boss discharging a pistol behind his back as only a test of his ability to keep his dedicated nose to the wheel.

Directed by George Sidney, who next would be trusted with his first feature film, won the 1942 Oscar for best one-reel short subject, not humor.

I was thinking, “Why not take a virtual trip to your Custer Avenue Wastewater Treatment Facility”, and so found my way to the website for Alberici Enterprises, which contracts the cleaning of what winds its way through this area’s drains for $37,000,000. And looking at the website, which has only two teeny pictures to educate me on what goes on down at the Wastewater Treatment Facility, I wondered, “Why such an unattractive website, especially that left column with the pictures photoshopped so at the bottom they do a messy 1/2 inch fade into the beige background? Who convinced them this looks good? Or did someone at the company decide to get artistic and insisted it be done this way and the web designer knew better than to deliver their personal opinion?”

I looked up pics of sewage treatment atlanta custer on Google and the first result is buffalo, the second goes to a City of Atlanta Dept of Watershed Management page with a teeny tiny pic of a big concrete block of a building that leads to a defunct altantawatershed page, and then after that are pics related to the infamous General George Armstrong Custer.

Our wastewater treatment facility doesn’t show itself off big and bold and grand. You could drive past with no idea what the building down that road was all about.

Kind of a shame.

Dear Alberici Enterprises,

Please consider cleaning up that mess of a left column on your website.

The Custer Avenue treatment plant needs sculptures of water spirits flowing up and down the facade and a big fountain upon which Neptune lords his trident.

Respectfully

My Opinion

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One of the better comments I’ve seen on yesterday’s diabolical Supreme Court ruling is over at Americablog.

Ode to a Frog

And as she ran from the room screaming and crying he was heard to say…….

“Was it something I did, was it something I said???”

“Let’s watch The Time Machine,” I’ve been encouraging H.o.p. for a couple of weeks, and he always declined, intent instead on working on his projects, not wanting to be distracted despite the fact it was directed by animator and special effects artist George Pal. Which surprised me as he loved Pal’s “War of the Worlds” and even did a short claymation several years ago attempting to copy a clip of a Martian emerging from his spacecraft.

Today, I finally just started the movie up and, as it turned out, the intro music was enough to catch his attention.

“Wow, I love the music,” he said, leaving his computer and shuffling over to mine as I was playing the movie on Netflix streaming.

I was curious what his response would be to “The Time Machine”, and how my memory of the movie would hold up as I’ve not had a full viewing of it since I was a child. The scene that had remained with me all these years was when the blond Eloi, sirens blaring, had become as somnambulists and walked en masse to certain doom through the mysterious sliding door of the Morlock den.

That memory which stayed with me was as if I’d not seen the movie past that point, for its chill was wholly concerned with the drone-like submission to the blank, black future beyond that door, as if I’d not ever learned what the Morlocks looked like (pretty cheesy, as were the Eloi in their bad blond wigs), never learned the end of the film. But I had seen the entire movie and the little that stuck with me of its resolution was again unsettled emotion, the unease of no certain outcome.

H.o.p. had seen, when he was seven or eight, clips from the movie so that he knew already about the Morlocks, a good deal of suspense thus absent from his viewing, and it was on these he focused as being rather frightening with their bright, shiny eyes, but not too much so, just enough to be kind of scarily enjoyable.

As I watched the film and we reached the stage where The Traveler begins his journey, I recollected the spinning orb of the sun and the mannequin who shows the passing of time with the change of attire in the shop window of the narrator’s store, Filby’s, across the street from The Traveler’s window.

But for me, as a child, the opening meeting of The Traveler’s peers at his home on New Year’s Eve must have been purely extraneous and I’d no recollection of it at all, nor did I have any recollection of The Traveler first exiting his Time Machine to encounter who he believes is Filby before the department store which is, incidentally, located next a clock repair shop. Remarking on the absence of his mustache he instead learns this is Filby’s son James, and that the elder Filby had died in the war the year before.

The position of the store in relation to The Traveler’s home is important, as is the red-haired Filby’s friendship with the doctor. The movie opens with Filby closing his shop and crossing the street to The Traveler’s house. The Traveler’s draw to focus upon this shop and its mannequin during his initial leaps through time is strong enough that when he returns to his time machine, so he may have again a clear view of the window he removes boards that had been apparently placed over his home’s windows following the elder Filby’s death.

Advancing to 1966, The Traveler finds the street in a commotion, people rushing to underground shelters, and his house is gone, replaced by a garden dedicated to elder Filby’s devotion to him.

Here we see The Traveler passing by a new flat screen “tubeless tv” just prior to meeting James Filby a second time. He also examines a sidewalk display of battery-powered razors with which he briefly shaves, an odd touch considering the destruction of the city directly follows.

Despite growing up during the Cold War near Hanford, where the plutonium bomb was born, I’d no memory of the 1966 atomic warfare scene in which The Traveler encounters again Filby’s son, now quite old, who is also fleeing to the air raid shelters. Though we see that Filby’s has become a large department store, James exits the same small shop his father had kept which has been preserved next the much larger, new store, and in the window of the older store is still the mannequin, and on the door of the shop is a newer version of a Red Cross poster, there also having been one on the shop’s door during the WWI scene. The Traveler, unaware what the air raid sirens mean, enthusiastic about the amazing progress that civilization has made, entreats Filby to stay and talk with him, Filby warning him that the sirens are for silly youngsters like himself who don’t know any better than to take cover, which refers to the future in which the underground Morlocks take care of the Eloi who have lost the ability to tend to their own needs or think for themselves.

Time and again Filby, then his son, attempt to divert The Traveler from his enterprise with friendly or concerned gestures, which The Traveler always turns away.

The apocalyptic special effects accompanying that portion of the film–the earth unleashing its fury in response to atomic warfare, volcanic lava flooding streets and moving about toy cars–seemed out of place with the movie on the whole and the subtler yet more impressive effects used elsewhere.

Some of the more impressive displays in the movie we see only briefly, such as the domed building in the land of the Eloi, the twin sphinxes guarding, and a pyramid shaped structure in the background.

When The Traveler is shown the old library in which are crumbling books which no one can read nor could read due their age, there is Egyptian statuary of a scribe, and again when he is shown the room in which are housed the memory rings which no one understands, there is more Egyptian statuary.

Though I enjoyed his acting, Rod Taylor amongst the Eloi unrolled as a rather weary romantic adventure, perhaps the excuse for the film’s existence considering that Wells’ elfin Weena was transformed into a nubile Yvette Mimieux, and I thought it curious that none of the battle and rescue scenes had stuck with me, instead only the Eloi’s spellbound, conscious-less march through the dark door.

Following the end, I read a few reviews from the time remarking on the film’s hollowness and that the ending was far rosier than Wells had depicted, but I instead understood how as a child I would have comprehended the end as so ambiguous that I’d keep no solid recollection of it.

Then I looked up the book online and finally gave it a quick read, which is easy to do as it’s pretty plainly told and not too long. I read of the entry to the underground world of the Morlocks’ watched over by the White Sphinx, the smile of which first appears friendly to The Traveler and later malicious and taunting, and how when The Traveler returns his heel is hurting him, both obvious references to the tale of Oedipus who is unable to alter fate, which every high school student is going to know who has had to study the book for a class and has referred online for canned notes for an essay.

The idea of this sphinx standing upon the pedestal above the entry to the Morlock’s underground world isn’t so obvious in the film, reduced to only a head, and because this head is glimpsed only briefly the viewer isn’t given much of an opportunity to decipher the environment.

Then I thought of Pal’s mannequin, the one in Filby’s shop window, which so captures The Traveler’s attention, of how she had been curious to me as it would have been impossible that she remained in that shop window for decades, of how it had been curious to me that Pal so focused upon her, even having The Traveler remark upon how he felt they were alike as they never aged. And it occurred to me that, for Pal, the mannequin upon whom The Traveler has had his eyes set since the beginning of his journey is a representation of the White Sphinx.

No sooner does The Traveler comment on his fondness of the mannequin and how neither of them age than Pal inserts a brief clip of the growth of several rosy red apples upon a tree limb, bringing to mind the fabled Garden of Eden, linking into The Traveler’s later conviction, upon reaching the world of the Eloi, that he has found paradise, where all needs are provided for and also none of the Eloi (whom Wells has cast as deity-like with that name) grow into later maturity and old age…because the Morlocks consume them.

One may even glimpse in Pal’s combination of the chariot and sphinx (perhaps even in Wells’) a version of the Chariot card of the tarot in which dual white and black sphinxes lead a chariot.

Wells takes The Traveler far far into the future, into a world where humanity as we know it no longer exists, where the White Sphinx may be perhaps glimpsed briefly as a winged thing screeching mournfully in the sky while The Traveler is beset upon by giant crabs. Then even further into the future still to the close of the world.

Pal refrains from this and instead casts The Traveler as a sort of serpent in the garden, a helper whose conviction is that the best thing for the Eloi is to awaken them, destroying the world of the Morlocks, forcing the Eloi into a position of thinking and taking care of themselves.

Though he had sought peace and paradise, had been horrified by war and attempted to flee it by venturing into the future, in his determination to assist the Eloi, as a means of introducing them to free will and waking them from thoughtless submission, The Traveler brings conflict and battle to their world. He acts as a Promethean light-bearer with his fire, a thing with which the Eloi were unacquainted until his arrival.

Having returned to his friends in 1900 and then leaving again, The Traveler is noted as having taken with him three books, Filby and the maid servant building a romantic story that certainly The Traveler has returned with those books to where he’d left Weena so that he may help the Eloi build a new world.

We are deprived of seeing whether or not he has returned.

“Do you think it could have caused a time paradox, him telling everyone about the future?” H.o.p. asks.

I didn’t take it. The photo is from the Hanford Declassified Project and the nearly 800 photos I culled from the Hanford Declassified Project and loaded up at Flickr because of the govt’s unfriendly navigation and search system.

Hairstyles. Of Starlets. This photo has 12 favorites to date. And I think it is second as far as number of page views.

I don’t know whether or not I should be amused that a photo I didn’t take has the most favorites on my Flickr account.