IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

Over a million listens on Youtube, so you’ve heard this, right?

A couple of Quebec comics, the Masked Avengers, managed to get hold of Palin on the phone and had her believing she was speaking with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Palin was so taken in she scarcely seemed to blink as the conversation departed the interstate for tricky woodland paths then swang through the crazy jungle with such goodies as…

A: I just want to be sure. That phenomenon Joe the Plumber. That’s not your husband, right?

P: That’s not my husband but he’s a normal American who just works hard and doesn’t want government to take his money.

A: Yes, yes, I understand we have the equivalent of Joe the Plumber in France. It’s called Marcel, the guy with bread under his armpit.

P: Right, that’s what it’s all about, the middle class and government needing to work for them. You’re a very good example for us here.

Transcription tidbit courtesy Gawker.

And there’s the part where she doesn’t blink over Sarkozy talking about how hot his former model wife is in bed and the part where Sarah is all up for going hunting with Sarkozy and agrees that no they don’t need to take Cheney with them, she promises she’ll be a careful shot and that hunting and working together they can “kill two birds with one stone”.

You can’t read this conversation and fully appreciate it. You must hear it.

Which you have certainly already done so why I am I posting this here.

At the end, when Palin is told she has been pranked, she limply replies, “Oh, have we been pranked…and…what radio station is this…” as her brain stumbles to comprehend and deal with the situation, and by dealing she hands the phone off to an assistant who terminates the conversation with, “I’m sorry I have to let you go, thank you.”

Five minutes worth of conversation which begins with Palin effusing, “We have such great respect for you, John McCain and I. We love you!”

We love you, Sarkozy!

That’s just the way I’d choose to speak to the President of France. Those are the first words that would pop to my mind. “WE LOVE YOU!” Toss a little teenage heart in that exclamation point why don’t we?! And an internet fuzzy yellow smile. “WE LOVE YOU!” That’s all statesmanish isn’t it. And diplomaticky. Cuddzy warm cuddles.

Gawker also supplies this bit of transcription…oh, well, never mind, I just closed that browser window by accident…

Anyway, Gawker transcribes the Masked Avengers as saying, “You know we have a lot in common also, because, except, from my house I can see Belgium…”

But that’s not what was said. What was actually said was, “You know we have a lot in common, because, except, from my *ass* I can see Belgium…”

To which Palin responded, “Well, see, we’re right next door to other countries…we need to be working with.”

It’s not so much that Palin is dumb as she’s remarkably disingenuous.

Palin’s is the voice of a parent who stopped listening to their child five years ago and just rolls right along with and ultimately over whatever that child says because what that child says doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, she’s not hearing it, she’s not responding to it, she’s got her own script and that’s all there is.

Except, well, she is, yes, dumb. It’s one thing to pull this tactic on a constituency which she treats as children, another to babble that brand of ride-along-with-and-over-you nonsense when she believes she’s talking to a French President.

Which is why McCain was so relaxed and had such a good time on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, because he’s hoping the polls are right and that he won’t have to live with that mistake.

And he won’t have to rule over crazy Joe American the Bomber, which has got to be relief.

Tomorrow we vote.

Please, let there not be a Ghost in the Machine. Please, let the Republican powers-that-be look at their stash and say, “Yeah, we’ve got enough for now. Let’s park the Fisher Price clown car in the garage and fly to our tropical island retreats and let someone else deal with the mess.”

Tomorrow we vote. We must vote as if it means something. The overwhelming crowds that have been turning out for Obama, thousands upon thousands in every city, are counting that it does.

5:23 A.M. We are getting ready to go and vote because I’m going to collapse in a heap o’ panic if we don’t get down to the polling place now. I’ve been hyperventilating for two months now. Eight years ago when we took H.o.p. with us to the polls, damn, looking back it seems like peering in on innocent babes, though we’d been through the hell of the Reagan years. I was smiling. People were cheery.

Look H.o.p.
Look and see.
Look and see mom vote.
Look and see dad vote.
Look and see mom and dad vote.

Look at Bush steal the election.

This time? I’m a nervous wreck.

8:20 A.M. We’re back! Walked several blocks down to the polling place by 6:15 and there was already a nice, healthy line which calmed me considerably. I’ve no idea how long the line was by 7:00 because there was no seeing the end of it from where we were. There was a steady stream of people arriving from the moment we got there.

There were a lot of young people.

Things moved smoothly and uneventfully here in the heart of Atlanta. We were both casting our touch screen vote for Obama and Biden by 7:50-7:55. H.o.p. watched the process to the point where we went to the voting booths, then he quietly waited for us by the exit. One of the poll workers gave him an “I’m a Georgia Voter” sticker, which pleased him greatly, and he brought it home as a souvenir.

H.o.p.’s very aware he was present at an historic election.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After midnight and many are celebrating. People yelling out their balconies around the block. I followed the honking horns up to Peachtree Street where cars were streaming up and down, honking horns, a lot of joy to share around. I came back home and rounded up H.o.p. and Marty and we three returned to Peachtree and walked down to Peachtree and Ponce De Leon where we joined up with a group of celebrators.

It was good. It was just what was needed. It was just what *I* needed following up eight years of hell, weeks of extreme anxiety and finally tears of relief following Obama’s speech.

People came and went, all shouting and celebrating. We hugged. The cars streamed by honking. They stopped at the stop light and there was in communion chanting of…

O-bam-a!

No More Bush!

Yes we can!

We did it!

One nation!

Over and over. The light turned red. The cars stopped. There was chanting and dancing around the cars with Obama signs held high (police came and went with a blind eye) and people reached far out of cars in their enthusiasm and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much welcoming eye contact ever in my life time everyone seeking to connect with every face and share in the joy. The light turned green. The cars drove on and honked and honked. The cars stopped at the light and we chanted and there was scarcely a car without a camera recording the jubilation.

I didn’t take along my camera. Marty had encouraged me to but I figured I wouldn’t get a good shot and really all I wanted to do was celebrate.

Georgia may have come out red but it wasn’t red on Peachtree. And there wasn’t a frown out there. I haven’t seen so much good feeling.

H.o.p. waved and chanted and he loved every second.

We each enjoyed the presence of *all* of us.

“So, this is a historic night,” H.o.p. said as we walked home. “This is a once-in-a-life-time event!”

I’m a hopeless romantic.

Being a hopeless romantic, I have subscribed to the RSS feed for Change.gov.

Change.gov provides resources to better understand the transition process and the decisions being made as part of it. It also offers an opportunity to be heard about the challenges our country faces and your ideas for tackling them. The Obama Administration will reflect an essential lesson from the success of the Obama campaign: that people united around a common purpose can achieve great things.

I’m not so hopeless a romantic as all that. But in this case I am hopeful. After nearly thirty years of carte blanche Republican rule and seizure of the whole kit and kaboodle by the Neocons, I’m hopeful. There will be plenty to criticize in the coming days, but I’m hopeful.

Nearly thirty years ago, I stood with a group of people who cried when Reagan was voted into office, well understanding what was to come and that the full fruits of that cornucopia would be decades unfolding toward their fullest horrors. I was only 23 but I knew I would be middle-aged and gray and paying even more heavily for that election than in Reagan’s first coming term.

The past eight years have been a terrible ordeal. Not only were oppositional voices unwelcome, we were relentlessly stigmatized as virtual enemies of the State.

Yesterday was the first time ever I’ve talked about government to H.o.p., instructing him on its branches, where I didn’t feel the prick of mocking barbed wire, that I didn’t feel we were a hated and barely tolerated minority. He is ten years of age and for the very first time I felt as if I was instructing him on possibly “our” United States, a problematic United States with much to account and atone for, where perhaps the kind of atoning for and accounting I’d see as desirable would never happen, but at least we were potentially real citizens with voices rather than scorned outcasts.

When I visited Change.org and saw “Your Administration” I looked long and hard at it.

I see it as a desire. I took it as a promise.

My heart received it as a Welcome Home.

We’re watching the Attenborough narrated “Life of Birds” shows on Netflix. After viewing segments on birds which had lost their ability to fly, H.o.p. asked, “What about play and evolution? If they had fun flying, doesn’t that count in evolution?”

So, what is the role of play in evolutionary process?

Susan Och over at French Road Connections, who recently ran for and was voted into community service (congratulations, Susan), today has a post on a new book written by her brother, Tim Wendel. Titled Red Rain, the novel took its inspiration from fire balloons the Japanese set loose over the Pacific, their intended purpose being to ride the jet stream some 5,500 miles, at least, and finding home in America, settle down and get to business sparking wild fires.

Today, Susan supplies a link to an interesting video made by her brother, promoing the book, with old footage of the balloons which were kept secret from the U.S. public as it was feared knowledge of them would ignite hysteria.

Out of some 9000 launched, about 300 balloons made it to U.S. soil. Interestingly, Tim’s video informs that one made it up to Hanford and briefly derailed work on the Manhattan Project.

I thought I’d look up “balloon” in the Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System to see what was there. There was one relevant return but I don’t know if it is related to the fire balloons. The document is dated Jan 13 1945.

Over Victoria, B.C. noon twelve was sighted balloon about 10,000 feet altitude. No additional details presently available. (DLY RPT) (REF EIDM MI from Johnson) Corrected information re balloons reported downed by Navy base, Klamath, Oreg eleven Jan is that only one balloon, not two, was sighted and downed by that base. Details and description of balloon recovered in isolated section of Calif yesterday still not available…

The Jan 13 1945 report is in the window for these balloons, which were launched from late 1944 to early 1945. The balloon which found Hanford landed on March 10 1945 and caused a short circuit in the power lines supplying supplying electricity for the nuclear reactor cooling pumps.

Using the exact date I finally found in the documents one that referred to the incident.

L. A. Darling
Works Engineer

Unusual Incident

At approximately 3 (illegible) March 10, the process units in all 105 Buildings were shut down by automatic action of the safety circuits because of an electric power (illegible) of very short duration. Motor-driven equipment (illegible) stop, and as a result, process was restored within a matter of several minutes in the B and D Areas and a little over an hour in the F Area. Subsequent investigation indicated that the voltage dip was caused by a fault which occurred (illegible) the Midway-North Bonneville Mo. 2 230 KV circuit. This is one of four 230 KV lines which (illegible) terminate at the Midway Substation and from which power is taken for (illegible). The fault was automatically cleared by the line terminal breakers. The circuit was restored manually by the Midway and Bonneville operators in about two minutes.

From Military intelligence sources, it was learned that the line fault was caused by a large balloon of enemy origin dropping into the phase wires of the circuit. It burst into flames upon contact with the power line and the underhung equipment on the balloon dropped to the ground. The line was not seriously damaged as evidenced by the fact that it was restored to service in two minutes.

It should be noted that the balloon could have dropped anywhere on the Project Area, and its equipment could have caused much more serious damage as far as the plant and its processes are concerned.

P.S. Skaff
Electrical Superintendent

Indeed, a wild fire in the Hanford Project desert area could have been disastrous for the region. Considering the plutonium that would devastate Nagasaki came from Hanford, it is well nigh mind-boggling to imagine this balloon having not only drifted with the winds to Hanford, guided by happenstance, but landing directly on these wires.

Imagine standing in the Hanford desert on March 10, 1945, watching the balloon descend, and that you are perhaps a Hanford worker who has no idea plutonium is being manufactured at Hanford and that its destination is Nagasaki, and that you have no idea yet this is a Japanese fire balloon that has been manufactured by Japanese who have no knowledge of what is being manufactured at Hanford, who did not know where the balloon would land, who may not have even known what they were making….

Much like the majority of the Hanford workers, the laborers who were employed in gluing together the “road-map” sized squares of mulberry paper for the balloons were unaware of the purpose of their work. Many of the workers were teen-age girls, preferred for their nimbler fingers.

The hunger of the workers was such that they stole the edible paste, used in gluing together the paper, for eating.

(Note: Originally placed online 2000. Am migrating it over here from another section of the website.)

“I put him on the massage table in front of the fire. He always liked fires, and poking at them with a stick.”
Norma Desmond–”Sunset Blvd”

My son is two and a half years of age. He is standing in front of the television repeatedly rewinding the scene in Sunset Blvd where Joe Gillis (William Holden), having stumbled upon the art deco ghost mansion of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), is confused with an awaited mortician and is called up to Norma’s room. To be more precise, he is watching over and over that part of the scene where it’s revealed that the dead party is Norma’s pet monkey. “Monkey! Monkey!” my son says when Gloria/Norma peels back the covering to show the chimp’s face. Then he rewinds it again, and Norma Desmond gets to again reveal to Joe Gillis the dead pet, and my son exclaims, “Monkey! Monkey!” and rewinds it again.

This viewing, I was immediately struck with how much the pair of motorcycle policemen, at the film’s beginning, remind me of the bikers who accompany the princess, Death, in Jean Cocteau’s film Orphee. Their precise choreography carries a ceremonial weight so strikingly familiar that it particularly colored my experience of the film and has inclined me to look for where other comparisons might be drawn, for Orphee was released in 1949, and Sunset Blvd in 1950.

When I was looking up Orphee to see when it was released, I found Rogert Ebert had, on May 14th, 2000, reviewed the film. He mentions that Cocteau wanted Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich for the role of the princess, and in Sunset Blvd Norma talks about how all the idols have been struck down, except for Garbo.

Released 1950

(Note: Originally placed online in 2000. Migrating over here from another section of the website.)

Something about the Kirk Douglas scenes in Spartacus made me feel as if I was watching an old Star Trek script blown up to fit a big screen epic. But as Spartacus preceded Star Trek by a few years, then I should instead perhaps say that some of the Star Trek episodes feel like a downsized Spartacus. What is supposed to be a film of mega proportions, the full bull as opposed to a hamburger pattie, has the resonance of a shoebox-sized television production. It’s flat, compact and tidy, especially in scenes involving the slave messiah Spartacus. Don’t stretch your arms too wide or you’re likely to hit a wall.

Now, thing is, I like the old Star Trek. When I was in my late teens and the series already worn thin with syndication, a daily dose of William Shatner grandiosity and Leonard Nimoy’s countering lack of enthusiasm was a great diversion. Consistently fun candy, when I was a bit younger it was the bit of gum on my shoes that each afternoon was my virtual television mom gluing me down to earth with a boiled-down recipe of safe boundaries, sci fi soap opera-washed dish in each hand filled with the appropriate cookies of melodrama, comedy, sex and violence. Wash down with the milk of idealistic justice, equality, and fair play. When I was older it was a mac and cheese dinner reassuring with compact beginnings, middles and ends. At least once a day everything was all right with the world because there was Kirk again swashbuckling his way through another moral dilemma, the Marvel comic book hero without the muscles bulging his clingy second-skin uniform (velour). Kirk’s head always followed his heart (or groin), Spock’s heart always followed his head, and one could be assured of a little humor, a little pop clash. The psychological body of man stripped down to no frills essentials, the characters were little more than lightweight cardboard built to move in only so many directions, each geared to compliment and augment the incomplete other, which is how it is with most video, film and book-bound fantasies, the plot steams its way along on smooth rollers, and no one ever opens their mouth to have out pop an asymmetrical thought unless an identifiable puppet master is to be unveiled within the next hour. Every adventure comes packaged with the aforementioned clear beginning, end and definitive stepping stones that take you from here to there, because all hands involved have been taught to eschew whatever doesn’t help synthesize the plot. Red herrings are thrown back into the ocean to grow into their own neat and orderly episodes.

I understand and appreciate that Spartacus was a bit of a ground breaker for its time; ditto with Startrek. The problem remains that Spartacus, for all its bluster, is a comic book that doesn’t want to be a comic book. Wash off a little of the technicolor and up pops the storyboard.

If Spartacus was in Star Trek land, Kirk would be hit on the head and stumble through a time portal to find himself an amnesiac in another world that somehow paralleled Earth, but wasn’t Earth, despite it looking and sounding just like Earth and having something in its history like a Rome. In Star Trek land the whole planet is divided between the toga-clad and those in sackcloth bondage, nothing but, because one big city-state is enough for any planet if you think about it.

Captain Kirk, immediately identified as a fine, physical speciman by Lentulus Batiatus (played by Peter Ustinov in the movie), is purchased to be trained as a gladiator. We already know he’s feisty because we’ve watched him sink his teeth into the ankle of a Roman guard. At gladiator school though, he’s just another potential gladiator for now, but it’s promised if he manages to stay alive he may secure his freedom eventually.

Enter the love interest, Varinia (played by Jean Simmons in the film). A sadistic “I own you” voyeurism escorts slave ladies to the cells of the gladiators. A “Hey, you get some tonight!” morale builder. This is perfect Star Trek, Kirk falling in love at first sight, and yet manifesting the control and dignity to yell, “I’m not an animal!”, refusing to satisfy the desire of the voyeurs to watch as the slaves mate. No, not-an-animal Kirk knows the finer emotions of love better than his elite captors, is more human than the zookeepers. If Kirk is going to get the girl, he’s going to have to win her.

Decadent female aliens who appreciate a fine physique visit the school with Crassus, an up-and-coming Senator. The decadent female aliens want to see a fight. Good television fodder, Kirk is compelled to battle with a fellow gladiator at the school, a black man by the name of Draba (Woody Strode). Draba pins Kirk with his trident and could kill him, but instead turns upon the voyeurs and is himself killed.

The black man of the 60’s may struggle for Civil Rights, but it is the white Kirk who will carry on the fight in the big way. After all, it’s one thing to be a tethered black fighting for dignity, and another to be white and go against the white boy network for the lowly slave. Despite the story being supposedly without color, Kirk himself being a slave, that’s what we have here. White man is inspired by noble, self-sacrificing black man to stand up and buck the system, for the casting of the self-sacrificing Draba as black, this Draba who spurs the other gladiators to action, is certainly a comment on the 50’s and racial inequality in America (even the film’s narration comments that Spartacus’ rebellion against slavery wouldn’t be fulfilled until nearly two thousand years later). Spartacus does star Kirk rather than Woody Strode. It was Kirk (Douglas’) idea to make the film. But I don’t recollect there being any black faces among the freed slaves who went on to cause Rome great consternation. Which cements my point that the black Darba could be the footstool but have no role as a battling victor.

A lot will have to be trimmed in order to fit Spartacus into a one hour Star Trek episode, but it can easily be done–and was, I believe, several times. The initial rebellion of the gladiators, spurred by the slain black man’s body being hung up to dry in full view, will be followed up by a bit of rambunctious but honorable rampaging through the countryside as the gladiators free other slaves, but rather than going to the sea where they will not find the ships that are supposed to export them from Italy to freedom, they’ll go straight to Rome. Kirk and his love interest will get together as free individuals. She will even, this being a season-ending episode, become pregnant! Which means she’ll have to die, doesn’t it? When it comes to serious love interests, Death is Kirk’s Best Man.

A cursory nod will be given the subplot of Crassus using the slave rebellion as his stepping stone to a dictatorship, mowing under the top-gun Gracchus. Charles Laughton as Gracchus and Lawrence Olivier as Crassus had fine moments in their struggle to add more depth to their characters than the dry cinematography and sterile, dull settings allowed. And, yes, though this film won an Oscar for cinematography, and I understand Kubrick choreographed the shots, with the exception of a very few interesting points of view (such as the facade of Lentulus’ compound in the scene where Kirk Douglas arrives–for some reason that shot caught my attention as different) the framing (and editing) is either lackluster or overblown and manipulative in the manner of a Spielburg spoonfeeding his audience, albeit brilliantly, how they will feel. At the film’s worst, I felt all around the hot Hollywood lights bathing the scene.

Following after the genius exhibited in Paths of Glory, Spartacus reads like a deliberate “See, I can do exactly what is required to win an Academy award. Maybe now that I’ve proven how middle-brow I can be, you’ll expect the same of me next and grant me the kind of leash I want to run with.”

Lawrence Olivier did his best to communicate the message of his being Spartacus’ alter-ego of a sort, the un-Spartacus who wanted to meld with and be Spartacus–never mind his supposed fascination with Spartacus’ “woman.” Tony Curtis as Antonius, Crassus’ boy-toy, slave poet turned gladiator, did nothing to help get this across. Neither did Kirk Douglas. In the Star Trek version of Spartacus, the dynamic will probably be even further confused by Crassus being portrayed as simpering and effeminate. But after the slaves are defeated, we will have Crassus commanding Kirk to fight Antonius, as happens in the film. Kirk will even slay Antonius in what amounts to a mercy killing to save him from the humiliation and slow death of the cross.

Oh, but see now, if one doesn’t know the story then a few names and sub-plots piled upon each other begin to get confusing and if one at any point in time reading a Star Trek script would ever have cause to say, “Wait, who is this?” then throw the plot into a Reader’s Digest condenser, chop and consolidate.

There being multiple dimensions in our Star Trek version of Spartacus we’ll have no problem with a parallel ending in which Kirk’s love interest survives, at least for a little while.

At the end, Kirk will suffer himself to be crucified alongside all the other slaves, each man a Christ figure nailed to his own cross, each having declared himself a Spartacus, a warrior-messiah. Kirk’s love interest, who Gracchus helps, will again be permitted to flee the country and will stop to stand at Kirk’s feet and show Kirk their son who will grow up free and she will declare to Kirk how she will tell the boy all about his father. Then after she has ridden away on her cart, Kirk will finally be beamed back to the ship by Spock and McCoy (”Son of Jupiter!” cry the Roman soldiers, falling to their knees), engineer Scottie having dealt with whatever force field had prevented their rescuing him earlier. Kirk will spend a few days in the infirmary recuperating. But, as McCoy will point out, only time will fix his heart, if ever. End another episode of Kirk exploring the galaxy and failing to not interfere with life on other planets, freedom of thought following him wherever he goes.

A few years later, a movie will be done in which Kirk accidentally meets his son. Maybe it will involve another war of some kind. Star Trek was both pro civil rights and anti war but it was one of those anti war shows that needed some good fight scenes around which to fit the anti war vibe. The flowers of peace were usually watered with bloody conflict, though more sweat than blood was involved in Star Trek, where when things turned gory the elixer of life turned green. Battle and fight scenes were confused with good old exercise.

Spartacus is effectively anti-war. The march of the gladiators through Italy is not portrayed with battles, rather by families. Paths of Glory was concerned with soldiers, though we are continually reminded they were once civilians. Spartacus is the campaign of the people. A spartan, no-nonsense people of earthy sensibility in contrast with the Roman taste for luxury. Non-militant men cart laughing children on their shoulders (we are on our way to freedom), smiling children carry babes, old women spin and cook, young men and women dance and romance. Images of hopeful children so dominate that after the battle (preceded by a rather awesome scene of the Roman shoulders marching in varying, superlatively organized formations that nevertheless made me think of a half-time band exhibition at a football game) when we see the children lying slaughtered on the field, body piled upon body, we are startled and ashamed, and feel even the horror of Crassus who isn’t immune to the spectacle, even though many of the dead look bizarrely peaceful. On the other hand, we are never treated to the delightful antics of a single Roman child, for Rome is only the Senate, the baths, and nonprocreative sex. Gracchus keeps a harem of slave women while refusing to marry for he honors the institution too much to dishonor it. Crassus is bisexual. Honestly, if Spartacus had just bided his time, the negative population growth factor would have taken care of the problem of the Empire.

Similar folk images were used in The Ten Commandments, and a certain amount of the same sensibility will be revisited in The Sound of Music a few years down the road. The biblical Exodus of Moses and the Jews somehow morphs into a Christian persecution complex, a rather kingly and militant tribal figure freeing his followers from slavery. Run a thumbnail over the surface and what one comes up with are Gauls and their tribal leader sun gods. The poetry of peace and the philosophy of love comes with loads of qualifiers, as evidenced by the history of Euro-Anglo-American civilization. Spartacus did confront some latent hypocrisies with the images of slaughtered children.

There are other bright spots. Peter Ustinov won an academy award for his supporting role as one of those bright spots. He is wonderful as the owner of the gladiator school who plays a key role in unleashing Kirk upon the world through finding Kirk and taking him into the school, Ustinov’s importance further cemented by his being the individual who Gracchus gives charge of seeing to it that Kirk’s son and his mother are safely delivered from Rome to Aquitaine. He makes his character human. He invests it with unspoken doubts, contradictions and sometimes convictions. He knows a mind irritated by a bad stomach can make for tragedy. His role in history however is only as the one who presides over the gladiator school from which Spartacus and the other slaves escapes, for there was no Varinia, no Antoninus, no Gracchus, no Draba.

As an afterthought, Spartacus, the Thracian slave, gladiator and insurrectionist, is an historical individual, but he also brings to mind the Sparti, the story of a race of warriors springing fully armed from dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus, founder of the city of Thebes. The dragon’s teeth men fought among themselves until only five survivors remained to form the base of Theban nobility.

The story of Cadmus (a name of Semetic origin meaning “Eastern”) is that he killed the serpent guarding the Spring of Ares by crushing its head with a rock, which is reminiscent of the biblical promise to the serpent of enmity between its seed and the seed of the woman, “it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” After offering a calf in honor of Athene, she appeared and directed him to sow said serpent’s teeth. He obeyed and the armed Sparti, or Sown Men, sprang up. Cadmus tosses a stone among them and the Sown Men accused each other of throwing it and fought furiously until only five remained, who offered Cadmus their services. I read that Ares didn’t let Cadmus off scott free for killing the dragon. He was ordered to become his bondman for a time.

This inclines me to wonder if the myth of the sown teeth isn’t referenced when Kirk Douglas buries his teeth in a Roman ankle. Or perhaps I read too much into it. I probably do.

In real history it was under the command of the praetor, Publius Varinius, that the Roman Army was defeated several times by Spartacus and his compatriots. Curiously, in the movie we have Spartacus’ woman named as Varinia. It would seem that Publius Varinius, who was defeated by Spartacus, has been for some reason preserved and remade as Varinia, his lover and mother of his child. In the film, there is even a clash between Varinia and the leader of the Roman troops, under whose direction will be defeated by Spartacus. During the critical gladiator fight at the school, she disdains the leader of the Roman troops (indeed Crassus has just made him leader) and pours the contents of the jug she’s carrying on him. Thus Crassus’ initial interest in her gumption, and he purchases her for a large sum, but when Lentulus sets out to deliver her personally to Crassus, she leaps from the cart and runs off. She and Spartacus later share much laughter over how slow Lentulus is, because of his size, for which reason he was unable to catch her (Lentulus, by the way, means “slow”).

There’s a scene in which the free Varinia asks Spartacus to command her never to leave him, making her a slave of him, but a slave of love. During Spartacus’ association with Varinia he becomes progressively more refined and less strictly the warrior, the feminine influencing the masculine. When she is first brought to Spartacus, her femininity and dignity awe Spartacus (read, the warrior barbarian) who says he’s never had a woman before. He says something about his being a human being. She says she is as well. Thus he refuses to “take” her and proclaims he is not an animal. His refusal however leads the instructor (a former slave, now Roman citizen) to taunt Spartacus as being a coward.

How many movies and television shows have offered the plea, “I am not an animal!”

Varinia is the one slave who manages to become a Roman citizen in the film. So, yes, she in some way ends up representing Rome (though she is also represented as British), a side of Rome as if in slavery to itself that is freed as the slaves are freed. I guess. Maybe.

Oddly, as Gracchus prepares to commit suicide toward the end of the film, one of his attending slave women, Julia, weeps. It is also the one scene of the entire film in which I really felt Kubrick’s hand. In the room where Gracchus gives Varinia her freedom, there is a mural on the wall. Here, the set is striving to take part, to speak as much as do the characters, but the camera doesn’t seem to quite get it. Is the mural of winged Victory? We have only a passing glimpse. Indeed, we are teased with that passing glimpse.

Though Kubrick was called in after Kirk Douglas fired the first director, it’s said that with the exception of the script, which he thought was needlessly moralizing, the majority of the film was under his control. Yet it so little reads like Kubrick that I don’t think of it as a Kubrick film.

When I think of Spartacus I don’t think of Kubrick, I think of Star Trek and consider how Star Trek wouldn’t have been the show it was if not for Spartacus.

* * * * * *

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Kirk Douglas–Spartacus
Laurence Olivier–Marcus Licinius Crassus
Jean Simmons–Varinia
Charles Laughton–Sempronius Gracchus
Peter Ustinov–Lentulus Batiatus

Released October 7, 1960 (USA)

(Originally placed online in 2000. Am migrating here from another part of the website.)

Unusual for him to do while watching a film, about a quarter of the way through Paths of Glory my husband got up, went in and sat in front of the computer to check the email. I waited a moment then asked, “Can’t watch?” “No,” he said.” “It’s too real and people are too stupid.”

Paths of Glory may be anti-war, but it also contemplates your basic problems in “power over” hierarchical structures. Actually, it’s anti-war primarily through exploration of what happens when you take your typical business situation only instead of bottom-level employees you have infantry privates, and the pyramid of managers ranges from non-coms to commissioned officers to the Board of Directors parading about as Generals, occasionally visiting the floor all nice and friendly like, querying all the clerks and hosts and hostesses and stock personnel, “Hey, you ready to smile and sell today?” Most people would do well to ask themselves (at least those with a thread of cynical honesty in their blood) how they think they’d fare as an infantry private under any number of managers/bosses they’ve had. Think dealing with people’s lives lends any more responsibility and/or intelligence than pushing the employees to sell more, sell more?–hey buddy, you, the one leaning against the wall, I don’t care if you have been busting your ass all day and are taking a brief breather, I want to see all my little chickens out in the aisles doing something continually even if the something means and merits nothing, so you get out there and sell yourself because it’s not just product we’re interested in pushing we want to project an image that’ll make the civilian sigh and say, “Wow, they really care about people there, don’t they. Instead of going to church this Sunday, what say we go down to the local Wal-Mart.”

Scary to think how capriciously my life would have been handled, considering some of the people I’ve worked under, if we had been dressed in military fatigues.

The good thing about a job is you can always quit. As an infantryman in Paths of Glory, if you think you’ve been ordered to do something so radically stupid that you’re soon going to be mulch for no other reason than to satisfy someone else’s ego-mania, to dare to balk means you’re dead meat anyway. Fail and you’re dead meat anyway. As is pointed out in the film, what’s the proof an objective is impossible if not for heaps of dead bodies that testify to that fact.

Near the beginning of Paths of Glory General George Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) goes to visit General Mireu (George Macready) at the palatial chateau from which he’s running his command. When he compliments Mireau on the environment, Mireu’s reply is, “Well, I try to create a pleasant atmosphere in which to work.”

The reason Broulard is there is very secret. Top secret. A group of armies is forming on the front for an offensive very soon and headquarters is determined to make a complete break through. Hearing this news, Mireau smiles. Broulard wants to know why Mireau is smiling. Mireau says he thought, for a moment, that he knew what Broulard was going to say. Broulard says he didn’t know Mireau was a mind reader. Mireau says it’s about the ant hill, isn’t it? And yes, it is, about the ant hill. Broulard wants Mireau’s men to take it. Mireau argues his men couldn’t possibly take it. Broulard suggests a promotion is in the wings for Mireau if his men are able to do it, and Mireau literally does a reverse-face and says, yes, his men mean more to him than any new stars but he believes his men can do the job.

How many would take Mireau’s words at face value–I don’t mean in the movie, but if reading a nice PR story about the General and how much he cares for his men and their lives? If the veneer says yes we’ve got some precious wood here, how many will care that it’s laid over masonite? So, I can’t really say if Kubrick makes his point subtly or not, when next we see Mireau he is gliding through an otherworldly hell of log and twig banked trenches, a very different wartime work environment from the palatial chateau where he runs his command. To Private Ferol (Timothy Carey) he says, “Hello there soldier, ready to kill some Germans?” A few yards later, he asks the same of Corporal Paris (Ralph Meeker). The third fellow he asks is, however, shell-shocked and his reply isn’t quite what the General wants to hear. Livid, the General punches him then orders him taken away to where he can’t contaminate the other men.

The General has come down to the lower reaches of hell to tell Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) his men are to take the ant hill. The expense? It’s estimated Dax willl lose 5 percent of the men to their own barrage, 10 percent more crossing No Man’s Land, a further 20 percent at the wire, and 25 percent more with the taking of the ant hill. The attack is to be the 10th, the next day.

Or, if you fail to get yourself killed trying, you can be one of three men chosen for a court-martial and execution. Which is what happens. Dax and his men fail, one company never even making it out of the trenches.

Revisit Mireau’s tour of the trenches, for the first individual he questioned, Ferol, has been chosen to undergo the court-martial because he is “socially undesirable.”

The enemy is anyone socially undesirable.

Paris is chosen because the night before the failed attempt to take the ant hill, he went on a reconnaissance mission with Private Lejeune and Lieutenant Roget. Under the direction of Lieutenant Roget, breaking up the night patrol, Lejeune was sent ahead to explore an unidentified fixture in the Max Ernst surreal landscape which, when briefly illuminated by a flare, reveals what had seemed to be earth as a dead body. Roget panicked when Lejeune was tardy in returning. He threw a grenade and ran, the grenade killing Lejeune. Paris being a witness to this cowardice, is thus chosen by Roget out of his group for the court-martial.

For Roget, the enemy is a witness to his own critical shortcomings.

The third individual, Arnaud, did not speak to the General during his tour. Interestingly he stood nearby during the confrontation with the shell-shocked soldier. But this third individual was chosen by lot for the court-martial.

This is an enemy selected purely by chance.

During the trial we learn that Ferol had returned to the trenches during the disastrous attack on the ant hill because with the exception of one other individual, the soldiers around him had been killed; they couldn’t take the ant hill alone. Arnaud had been ordered back to the trenches with the rest of his company. Paris had never made it out of the trenches, a dead soldier falling on him and knocking him out, causing a head injury.

Dax stands as defense for the three men, but the conclusion of the trial is foregone. The men are sentenced to death.

In Spartacus the defeated slaves were all crucified, each declaring themselves Spartacus, each man in essence a Christ figure. Here instead we have three men chosen as a substitute sacrifice for the remainder of their fellows. Scapegoats to shoulder the sin of failing to carry out the will of the generals.

The three men are served their “last supper.” Ferol decides not to eat in case the food is drugged. A priest (Emile Meyer) arrives to hear their confessions. Arnaud brandishes a bottle of wine which he says is his religion. The priest talks of salvation for all. Arnaud says that in his home town is a cafe where above the bar is a sign which says “Don’t be afraid to ask for credit, for our way of refusing is very polite.” When Arnaud attacks the priest, Paris strikes him. Arnaud falls against a wall and sustains a skull fracture.

In a conversation highlighted before the attempt to take the ant hill, Arnaud (I believe it was Arnaud) had discussed with a fellow soldier what people feared most, death or being hurt. He said it was being hurt. He talked about how he preferred protection for his head, rather than his tail, because the tail was meat while the head was bone. The irony is that he, the Dionysian wine-drinker, goes to his execution almost unconscious from a head injury and near death anyway. Not to mention that he receives the head injury fighting with Paris, who himself was kept from going into battle because of a head injury he received when a man fell on him and knocked him unconscious. It should also be considered that Arnaud was standing nearby when Mireau struck the shell-shocked soldier.

In a sense, Arnaud has achieved what he wanted, oblivion. He will go to the stake barely semi-conscious. Arnaud will be later recalled in “The Shining”, Turkel appearing as the phantom bartender who assures Jack Torrence his credit is good.

The crucifixion motif is played out with the execution. The priest tells Ferol he will be that day in paradise. Ferol, lamenting and unreconciled to the end, is tied to the central stake, while Arnaud’s stretcher is lashed to the stake to his right, and Paris is tied to his left. Christ and the two thieves. I have wondered if this is intentional or if archetypes are so persistent that it is almost inevitable that in conjunction with certain artifacts there will appear a Christ/surrogate king figure as well as his Judas. And if it is intentional, how do the men compose in effect a single body, each communicating a different aspect of the individual.

Had they taken the ant hill, they were told they would have to last until 7 in the evening when they could then expect some support from the 72nd. Having not taken the ant hill, they are executed at 7 in the morning on the 12th.

Incredible really that the cartoonish Spartacus would follow such a biting film as Paths of Glory. Each man is real, fully fleshed, whereas in Spartacus they each have a flat cardboard quality never moving beyond the boundaries of a “character.” But then Paths of Glory was controversial and bypassed for any Academy Awards. Spartacus garnered several.

Macready and Meeker both took on difficult roles, playing utterly detestable if pathetic men, and are so convincing it is difficult to imagine them as anything but. Douglas flashes his pecs, but it’s when he first appears, and that gotten out of the way he becomes the soldier-lawyer, so disgusted by the war and his superiors that he would inform Mireau that Samuel Johnson said patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel. Carey, Turkel and Morris are beyond fine, so that by the time they are being paraded to their execution it occurs to one how much of the film is a matter of the ensemble. The camera grasps each of them in the frame and each holds his place, none extinguishing the other, no one overshadowing or being eclipsed by any other.

The movie ends with our first sighting of a German. A prisoner. A civilian. It is a young woman who is forced on stage to perform before a rowdy crowd of soldiers. All this time, we have been encouraged to see each infantryman as an individual of independent dignity, whose lives are ruthlessly handled by superiors who count them as nothing but animals. Dax stands at the doorway, disgust at their beastliness etching his face. Then the girl begins to sing, and in what is rather the only unbelievable scene in the film, all the soldiers fall under the spell of her poignant song which is sung in German. Do they understand the words? Now, they all seem to speak again the same language, civilian or soldier, German or French. The holy spirit has descended. It is the pentecost. The men, one and all, give in to the song. Some cry. An impressive scene, but one that rings idealistically false. There will always be one or two hecklers.

A curiosity to be considered is that when Dax is ordered to take the ant hill, Mireau says it is certainly pregnable, to which Dax responds, “Sounds kind of odd though, doesn’t it, something to do with giving birth?” As pointed out, until now we haven’t seen a single German, not one enemy soldier. For that matter, we haven’t seen a single woman either. Then when an example of the captive enemy is show, is it a soldier or a man? No, a civilian woman who sings “like a bird.” Stray words are choice in the majority of Kubrick’s films. And birds form a theme here so that they become as spare, pointed voices. When Roget, Paris and Lejeune are on reconnaissance, when the flare goes off, right before Lejeune (le jeune meaning “the youth”) is killed, there is the caw of a crow. Then the morning of the death march of the prisoners to be executed, we have the crow of a rooster. Now, finally, here is this woman whose bird song quiets the men, calls them to hum along with her, to retreat into the privacy of each their own thoughts. I’ve no conjectures to make on meaning, I only thought these details merited some notice.

The German woman does bring us round to the question again of who is the enemy, and what is the ant hill? When Mireau realized that the men weren’t advancing, that an entire company still remained in the trenches, he ordered his own artillery to fire on them. The order was refused, was reported and becomes at the end the hint of Mireau’s eventual downfall, for he will have to face an inquiry into his actions. His friend, General Broulard, thus becomes his enemy; not to mention Mireau is an enemy to himself in that this order is what will take him down.

So is the enemy the brass to the private–and yet the brass are willing to turn on each other when the evidence is uncontestable. Is the enemy everyone, each man to himself. From where comes this captive woman who sings her plaintive song that softens the hearts of the soldier?

As the film winds its way along, the relentless destiny of death coming to us all becomes the primary theme, overtaking anti-war sentiments. What struck me most about Barry Lyndon when I first saw it, was the sense of the eternal, man diminishing to nothing in the face of the infinite. In Paths of Glory the pitiless infinite is also felt roaming the impersonal halls of the French chateau (actually Schleissheim Palace, near Munich) and the trenches in which so many men are packed like ants, all looking like they are already in the grave and dusted with lime. But there is also an intense, personal intimacy. The two are played against each other and conspire together as if the impersonal infinite is one pole of a cross while the individual is the other and where the two poles meet a mystic equation is presented which has no summation other than “it is”. Combine millions of such mystic equations, one for every individual who has lived and died, and fate becomes a mosaic of interlocking leggo blocks with cause and consequence for every individual action in the ant hill sharply defined but no less a mystery for the factor of chance which invisibly mortars all conjunctions. Whether intended or not, all this is communicated in Paths of Glory.

* * * * * *

Paths of Glory

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Kirk Douglas–Colonel Dax
Ralph Meeker–Corporal Paris
Aldolphe Menjou–General Broulard
George Macready–General Mireau
Wayne Morris–Lieutenant Roget
Richard Anderson–Major Saint-Auban
Joe Turkel–Private Arnaud
Christiane Kubrick–German singer
Emile Meyer–Priest
Kem Dibbs–Private Lejeune
Timothy Carey–Private Ferol

Released 1957 (USA)

(Originally placed online in 2000. Am migrating it over from another section of the website.)

Whistling under the credits.
MA
SCU
LIN
FEMININ

Sound of gunshots.
15 scenes

Straight to Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the face (or one of them) of the French New Wave Cinema, a role he’d occupied since starring in Truffaut’s “400 Blows” about seven years earlier. A picture of the disaffected romantic, he’s reading out loud in a cafe while he writes, self-conscious, attempts to nonchalantly flip a cigarette into his mouth, we are all important when young and all the world is a stage and the sounds of traffic aren’t just sounds of traffic they are potential poetry, are music, all is drama and where is the love interest who will make me an enduring star in the heavens. Paul isn’t literally writing this down but he may as well be, the sole subject of one of those long, long, long just sitting there watching, watching, watching, waiting to see what happens shots of Godard’s that ends with Paul writing something about sharing life, unable to be alone, maybe, I don’t remember my French and I don’t know if I should trust the translation. And it’s important. Paul voicing the need to share. The film doesn’t hang upon this scene but it certainly cuts to the chase here.

We don’t have to wait long for the love interest to enter. A young woman, attractive, stylish brunette, hair in a sleek pageboy flip, sits down and smooths her bangs, examines her reflection in a compact mirror. She is wearing a tight sweater but I didn’t notice that, someone years back noticed that for me. I am female and at that point in time hadn’t considered that the brunette would be seen as wearing a tight sweater and that this would be a reason to talk to her, there are other females who would have known this but I didn’t so it’s not just a matter of difference in sexes. Paul asks if she is Madeleine Zimer? A mythic moment, have they met before, future present and past wound up and tied eternal here, the harder you look the cloudier the picture becomes Godard ushering through. Paul says they have a mutual friend, Robert Poucard, through another guy, Marcel Dumas. If Madeleine wasn’t interested she could have gotten up and moved, walked out the door, but she doesn’t, she stays though it would seem she’s attracted to the opportunity of being presented a stage upon which to perform by an admirer, as long as he’s not a total loser. She could almost be a model but is not if she is still looking for an audience. As Paul speaks, she flips through what appears to be a fashion magazine, taking notes. Paul wants a job and Marcel said he could get him one. Madeleine says he works on the newspaper. Does she? She used to, in the photo lab, but is now cutting a record. As for Paul, he is just out of 16 months in the army. Was it nice, she asks. Was it nice? But it’s just the kind of thing Madeleine would ask. Paul talks of the life of taking orders, he reads from the notes he’s been making on it being modern life, prey to boundless authority, military going hand in hand with industry, money having the same logic as order.
Madeleine admits it doesn’t sound so hot. And that too is just the kind of thing she’d say.

Paul says he is working now for Naphtachemical. He talks of how work leaves no time for being militant.

Have they met before? The idea had come up earlier. I think they’ve met just about here there and everywhere in western society and maybe every society, but as far as on film their way of meeting is Godard-exceptional. The centerpiece couple of a love story which is and is not going to be about them and does ultimately end up being about them, in the sixties the story was more about technique because the technique was different was Godard, but that was wrong, the story is about Paul, about Madeleine and always has been. This perhaps first meeting of theirs suddenly is invaded by an argument by a man with a woman with a blond ponytail. He calls her a slut and says insults are all she understands. She walks out with a boy who is presumably their son, yelling he can get another maid, or is preparing to exit with the boy when the man takes him from her and as he steps out onto the sidewalk she takes out a gun, Paul asking her twice to close the door to the street that’s letting in cold air and shoots him blam down, no big build to it, no close-ups, just bam, you’re dead.

That is the second clue you’re watching early Godard. Bang you’re dead down bye. The first clue was the long long long long sitting there watching what’s happenin’ shooting style of the camera. And maybe the gun is just finishing off what the camera started. We can’t even begin to communicate. Bam.

Another cafe. Paul meets one of his friends who works at the plant. Robert. There’s a strike. Robert, a fellow party member, hands him a petition to sign calling for the release of writers and artists imprisoned in Rio de Janerio. Paul signs but cynically wants to know what petition will he be signing next week?

HUMAN LABOR BRINGS THINGS BACK FROM THE DEAD

Is Robert still sleeping in his car? Yes. And Paul’s romancing Madeleine? No go.

A middle-aged man wants to know where the Sports Palace is. Paul imitates him. Says that to feel, to understand people one must be in their shoes. Says it’s dumb. (At least according to the subtitles.) Robert says to watch this and he goes and asks a woman for sugar in order to brush his arm past her in getting the sugar and thus feel her up. Paul does the same. That is perhaps about as close to feeling a woman as some men get, and vice versa. Yep. I think that in ten years my seven year old son will probably be pulling stunts like that.

Me. I first became aware of the film “Masculine Feminine” via a book, mid 70s, Black Cat I think, screenplay. I was infatuated with the stills, the way the shots were framed, the idea of the film, as infatuated with the Pop end of it as I should have been considering Madeleine in real life was a ye-ye singer though I didn’t know that at the time, that she was what she was portraying. For me, then, the film was less about a relationship than the sense of something mythic they represented. Several decades hence what I concentrate on now is that “Human labor brings things back from the dead” which goes by too quickly, that flash on the screen. It’s a stumbling rock that I keep returning to, to stumble on, look at it and think about it. Heavy leanings to Cocteau but placement here is all. I realize finally it’s a tale of Orpheus. I may have known this several decades ago and forgotten and am realizing again. Life can be like that.

But several decades hence I realize how much it is about Madeleine and Paul as well. As said, it is their story. Not a myth.

The Newspaper.
A brief shot of Madeleine at a department store followed by more newspaper.
What do girls dream of? Of what do overworked checkers dream? Of what do the whores dream? The girls who are imprisoned by the bourgouis interests of their parents? There are no ordinary girls, Godard says.

3

Paul strikes up a conversation with Madeleine in a bathroom at the paper. This is the awkward, “Will we or won’t we agree to progress to a relationship where we will or won’t agree to sex but probably will.” He says she had promised to go out with him on the 23rd. She smiles to everything he says but insists no, she hadn’t agreed, while she combs her hair and freshens her make-up. He calls her a liar and she smiles saying she isn’t. Eventually, she admits she sometimes lies. She would leave if she wasn’t interested but instead she stays and smiles and acts prettily befuddled and eventually admits she does lie to him sometimes. She keeps combing her hair. What in the world is on her mind? She refreshes her lipstick and I can taste the wax because the camera has held on her so long watching her face flip through one after another its two expressions, the smile and the clueless vacant look between smiles so you know just how much that lipstick means as far as keeping up appearances. She asks why he wants to go out with her. He says she’s pretty, he says she’s tender. She pushes for something else, what other reason? I think he probably does believe she’s tender, but that he’s got tenderness confused with her safety latch smile. He says he likes her hair, eyes, nose, mouth. She asks if he intends for them to go to bed. Whomp. Paul looks stumped. What to say? Of course he wants to go to bed with her, I think, but I think he also probably thinks she is tender and the romantic side of him wasn’t expecting this. Madeleine asks how old is he? 21. He flips a cigarette. Are his parents alive? One long shot focusing on Paul’s confusion. His mind dancing about what to say? Yes, when the camera cuts back to her he admits he’d like to go to bed with her and she says she never gave it a second thought. He says he believed her lie of going out on the 23rd. She wants to know if he goes out with whores and he says sometimes but they’re sad and cold and she says she isn’t interested in hearing about it. He says he was telling her so she would know what he thinks. She is telling him nothing of what she thinks. He points out she had said she was through with the paper, but she says she can still catalogue fashion shots. He says he likes her breasts and she laughs. He asks her to look him in the eyes and tell him what she is thinking. She insists she is thinking nothing. She asks him what’s the center of his world and he replies love, and she says me. He’s amused. She finds it strange that someone would not believe they are the center of their world. He insists one can’t live without tenderness, that one may as well shoot themselves. She asks him to look in her eyes. “If I said someday maybe I’d love you would you be glad?”

4

gunshot

The narrative relates that times had changed, it was an era of James Bond and Vietnam. Election time. The French Left expected great things. Robert and Paul put up posters. Madeleine introduces Paul to Elizabeth. Robert likes Catherine “who is probably a virgin”. Catherine’s interest is obviously in Paul. Robert brushes his hand over Catherine’s hair and she pulls away from him.

4A

A Ford pulls up and out steps a very well dressed young woman in go-go boots, long hair, light coat. She enters a building. The driver is military. Paul asks him, “It’s going well in Vietnam, heh? Killing lots of Commies?”
Robert writes on the car Peace in Vietnam and both yell for the U.S. to go home.

Philosopher and film maker share a way of being, a certain view of the world that belongs to one generation

gunshot

Paris, Nov 25 1965

It’s Madeleine’s turn to narrate. She says her coat is solid blue while Elizabeth’s has white trim. They share an apartment. She comments on Elizabeth’s jealousy of Paul. A touch of ambiguity as to just how Elizabeth is jealous. RCA is bringing out her first 45 in 2 days. She wants a hit. She’ll buy a Morris Cooper. Maybe she’ll go to bed with Paul as long as he’s not a drag. These are the things important to Madeleine.

Two black men sit with a white woman on the train and talk about Bessie Smith, how whites don’t understand she’s singing not about desire but kiss my ass.
They eye Paul as they speak, he sitting across from them, and persist in saying whites (Paul) don’t understand even as he calls for who to look out as he sees the white woman with them take out a gun and hold it in her lap. Paul has, after all, been through this before, telling the pony-tailed blond at the cafe to close the door rather than yelling gun. The young man is slightly less innocent but loss of innocence doesn’t add up to knowledge.

Gunshots.

IL N’Y A
PLUS QU’UNE
FEMME
ET UN
HOMME
ET UN OCEAN
DE SANG REPANDU

Catherine and Elizabeth are in a bathroom in their underwear talking about sex. Catherine says that skin is important to her. But Elizabeth wants to know about the eyes.

LA TAUPE EST INCONSCIENTE, MAIS ELLE CREUSE LA TERRE DANS UNE DIRECTION DETERMINEE

Paul and Madeleine arrive in a bar. Her record is about to be released and she doesn’t want to be late. She accuses him of not caring. He leads her into the pool room. He’s looking for a place in which to speak to her. They go to the other side of the bar where people are seated at tables. They sit down next to two older men who are reading a sex scene aloud. No, Paul can’t talk to Madeleine next to this. He has them move again. They sit next to a man who is talking about his wife having died. Grieving her. And it’s this that Madeleine can’t sit beside and stands to leave. Madeline’s song begins playing. “Let me go on with my own life…” Paul says he wanted to ask her to marry him. She says later, she has got to run, bye.

Let me know the day of my first great true love, let me finally discover the person who will hold my hand…

Madeleine and Elizabeth sit at a cafe and Paul joins them. He apologizes–for what? Madeleine ignores him. Paul says he thinks it’s disgusting, carrying on like that, it burns him. Madeleine says it’s time to go, that she’s had enough of him today. After they have left, a woman comes up and propositions Paul, asking if he wants to take some photos with her. He says OK. Once in the booth, she tells him how much it will cost to see her breasts. He bargains for a lower price then says she’s crazy. He leaves the photo booth to go into the next booth that makes voice recordings. Madeleine has made her own record. Now he makes one for her. He composes a poem for Madeleine. He talks about a night of shooting stars. Remember. Remember. His images are like movie clips. Afterwards, a man confronts him with a knife but then stabs himself in the stomach. Y’know, it’s got to be harrowing for Paul, that people keep killing and being killed right in front of him with no warning at all.

Paul meets with Robert at a laundromat. He says that he sometimes thinks he’s being followed. Orpheus and shadows. The playwright Arthur Miller said that his time as a carpenter fascinated him with creating another shadow on earth. Paul’s landlady has tossed him so tonight the young man will know if things will continue with Madeleine or not. She and Elizabeth have two beds. He anticipates living with them.

LA PURETE
N’EST PAS
DE CE MONDE
7
MAIS
8
TOUS LES DIX ANS, IL Y A SA LUEUR, SON ECLAIR

Madeleine narrates, give us a tv and a car but deliver us from liberty.

Paul sits eating with Catherine. She reads to him. She is perhaps hoping he will notice he has a brain. Paul says his speech doesn’t reflect the depth of his thoughts and that this happens a lot. He wonders where Elizabeth and Madeleine are. He tells Catherine she may seem frank but it is a defense mechanism. He says he’s not interested in Madeleine, which throws me, I’d not seen that coming. Catherine asks if he’s scared Madeleine will get pregnant? She says Madeleine wants to know. She confides that she has a diaphragm but that Madeleine doesn’t like to think about such things. Seems Madeleine is still in the sex needs to be unpredictible or she’s a whore phase of growing up. Paul doesn’t believe that Madeleine wanted Catherine to ask about a fear of pregnancy. Well then just ask Madeleine.

And, entering, Madeleine wants to know ask me what. She is number 5 in Japan. She stands and listens as she is read to a bit of Madeleine the teen star bio. How she is genuine through and through. How she is supspicious of fakes. A comment is made that as it’s in the paper it must be true.

Madeline and Elizabeth take a shower together. Paul is jealous but Paul looks like he may have cause to be jealous. Lots of skin contact and laughter. Seems Elizabeth may be getting some of what Paul isn’t. He climbs into bed with them both and Madeleine asks Elizabeth if she minds. No. Joking. Nervous. They discuss slang for rear ends. Madeleine permits Paul to touch her breasts. She says something thoughtful. It’s a first. I don’t write it down because I don’t know why she’s suddenly reciting this thoughtful thing out of the blue. But the way she does, is it Madeleine speaking. Or is she a medium for the shadows in all couplings. An echo of some disgruntled diety condemned in the underworld to repeat the same task for eternity, humans the unconsious bearers of those actions.

SOMMEIL QUI PARFOIS FERMES LES YEUX DE LA DOULEUR, DEROBE-MOI uN MOMENT A MA PROPRE SOCIETE

Catherine plays with a little guillotine while Paul watches and pushes his finger out of the way so it’s not sliced. I wonder if Madeleine would simply have looked on with passive curiosity, said nothing.

DIALOGUE AVEC UN PROFUIT DE CONSOMMATION

Paul now talks with a friend of Madeleine’s who she met on the magazine Miss Nineteen. Paul says he’s interested in sociology, doing surveys. The girl was elected Miss Nineteen. She got a car, trips. Before that she studied to get her BA. Winning changed everyting. He asks her if socialism has a chance and she says she knowns nothing about it. It confuses her. She is asked what the American way is. Fast and free. You’re important and have lots to do. Women have a say in America. He asks her about birth control. He tells her she must answer. He asks her if she falls in love often. He’s persistent. And she smiles a lot. Like Madeleine smiles a lot.

1965

Paul tells Elizabeth he doesn’t want Madeleine singing at a club. (Connect the dots with the Miss Nineteen interviewee liking it that women have a say in America. But listening to Miss Nineteen and Madeleine you have no idea what they’d say other than things that they want.) Elizabeth
tells Paul they’re not for him. That he’ll always be unhappy. He says Madeleine’s pregnant. Wooh, big bomb. Elizabeth refuses to believe it. Madeleine comes running in sorry to be late, been so busy, puts Paul’s hand to her breast so he may feel how her heart is pounding. Elizabeth disapproves. “Now, Elizabeth, I think he’s allowed,” Madeleine says.

The blonde woman who earlier shot her husband is there (this is remarked upon, so I suppose this means we can’t take it as strictly metaphor) and is a prostitute bargaining her price with a man who turns out to be German. Her parents were killed in a concentration camp. She hates Germans. He doesn’t want to hear it. It has nothing to do with him. Brigitte Bardot is also there, rehearsing a script. For some reason I always think Godard’s “Le Mepris”, in which Bardot starred, followed “Masculine, Feminine”, when instead it preceded.

They go to see a film, Elizabeth is upset with Madeleine’s attention to Paul and seats herself between them. Madeleine finally gets up and goes to sit next to Paul, tells him that she loves him. She seems attentive, seems tender, seems that she may care about him.

Ah, she loves him. What would he feel if one day she loved him? Would he be glad?

4X EIN
SENSITIV
UND RAPID
FILM

Paul says he’s going to the john. A film in a film begins as Paul goes to the bathroom where he finds two men necking in a stall who tell him to get lost. He writes on their door “Down with the republic of cowards”.

He returns to his seat. The couple in the film have gone to a motel room. They fight each other. All the man does is grunt. Never a word, just grunts.

Paul yells at someone “Dirty Trotskyite!”

The woman in the film in a film looks like she would run out of the hotel room but the man catches her. Paul says it’s widescreen and he’s going to complain. He exits screen left, and from screen right comes a masculine hand that briefly fondles Madeleine’s hair. She smiles and says nothing. Paul runs to the projection room giving instructions. Coming back down he begins to paint graffiti on the wall about de Gaulle. He passes a man and woman kissing. Madeline, madeliene, is heard. He goes and sits next to her again.

Paul wants to leave. Catherine doesn’t. Elizabeth says eroticism revolts her. Madeleine, impossible to say what she thinks. There is a shot of the man in the film, of him looking at a grotesquely enlarged view of himself in a mirror and one is, of course, reminded of Madeleine’s relationship to mirrors, her constant referencing them. The camera goes to Madeleine thinking, stroking her hair. The narration is, “More often we’d be disappointed….it wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts the film we wanted to make and secretly wanted to live…”

12

Catherine eats an apple and asks Robert why he has trouble talking. He says the government won’t let workers go to college. He asks why she loves Paul. She says she’s not, that Madeleine is. She’s asked why she won’t she talk about herself and she says she doesn’t see the purpose. She asks if he goes out with whores. Robert says he likes them for different things. She says they can’t go out.

He bludgeons her with the same questions over and over again.

CE FILM POURRAIT S’APPELER
LES ENFANTS DE MARX ET DE COCA-COLA
COMPRENNE QUI VOUDRA

The children of Marx and Coca-Cola.

Paul is walking with Catherine. A man asks him for matches. The man takes them. The man he gave them to calls himself a Christ and goes off screen. Paul informs the man has set himself on fire. Catherine says he’s lying. Paul has her go see for herself. She returns and blandly remarks that the man left a note that said Peace in Vietnam.

Catherine and Paul go to the studio to see Madeline record.

She urges Paul to leave. He goes into the recording booth with her while she is singing. Which is peculiar. Any normal studio, recording would have stopped right then. But it doesn’t. Paul positions himself in front of Madeleine while she sings and waves his hands, she looking through him as though he doesn’t exist. A perplexing scene. Humorous scene. Seemingly straight-forward scene. She doesn’t see him. Another scene that the viewer may partly discard, partly keep, unable to completely digest in the moment, what has just happened. Godard’s films are full of such scenes which explode the expected with the paranormal, superceding, infusing.

As they all leave the studio, a man from a radio station comes up to interview Madeleine. She calls Paul her secretary and sends him to get the “car”. While he does so, she relates in the intervew how she rarely wears make-up. Her pleated skirt and flat shoes are noted, that she is going for the youthful look. . She adores Pepsi. Paul returns and says he called the Ministry of War for a car. It drives up.

And that is about it. Some voice-over about how Paul did surveys for a little while, uncertainy, despair and alienation being his pay for them.

16

Then now we are at the end, the police interviewing Catherine. She says Paul bought an apartment with the money his mother left him. There was an argument about whether or not Elizabeth would live with Paul and Madeleine. “He wanted to take photos and stepped back too far and fell.” She’s sure it wasn’t suicide. An accident. And then a brief bit of interview with Madeleine who remarks it was just as Catherine said. She confirms that she is pregnant and doesn’t know what to do.

Curious, but when I first read the film, then first saw it, years ago, I saw the interviews with suspicion and my focus was on what had really happened to Paul. Even if the women spoke the truth then it seemed Paul’s death was still more a matter of murder than suicide, a life pushed to the edge and finally denied so completely, spiritually, emotionally, that it went over the edge. Viewing many years later, the question mark looms not so great over what happened to Paul, as to Madeleine and her child.

FEMININ

FIN

If there was a film that ever smelled as green as spring it is this one. All innocence, filled with fresh faces and feet that have only just begun to stumble on the threshold of experience. A film all about dreams and ideals and fancies of children who’ve not yet made a cultural journey into adulthood, and yet are already physically there, ready to conceive the next generation. Kubrick’s “Lolita” several years earlier rather cooberated what Nabakov had to say about Europeans and Americans, that Europeans were somewhat in awe of America’s child-like grandiosity, the refusal to grow up, the fascination with novelty and its power. I can’t help now but think of this, in a sense, as Godard’s “Lolita”. Only here Lolita is adult and correct me if I’m wrong but the impression I have of Madeleine decades ago, as today, is of a thoroughly unconscious form of Kali, but a Kali none-the-less, death-wielding in her self-occupation.

Kali, Eurydice, Orpheus. Quite a combination to take on.

It doesn’t seem right to approach a film, as I did this one, via a book. I had the Black Cat screenplay in my hands a number of years before I finally saw “Masculine, Feminine” and the words and stills had formed their own poem, incomplete of course. So, when I did see the film, it was in conflict with what I’d imagined for many years. There was a sense of loss. I suppose a sort of loss much like Godard comments upon in the film. “It wasn’t the film we had dreamed, the film we all carried in our hearts.”

But returning to it in 2005, it has become exactly what I dreamed and more so. I knew Godard was good, but didn’t know he was that good.

* * * * * *

Masculine, Feminine

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Pierre Léaud–Paul
Chantal Goya–Madeleine
Marlene Jobert–Elizabeth
Michel Debord–Robert
Catherine-Isabelle Duport–Catherine-Isabelle

Released 1966
Rates 10 stars