Getting Un-Surrounded: Glenn Frankel on The Searchers

Jeffrey Hunter and John Wayne, in a scene from John Ford's The Searchers

Among the autuerist critics who re-evaluated the reputations of American studio directors in the 1960s, and the new generation of filmmakers who created a renaissance in American moviemaking in the 1970s, no Hollywood film casts a more intimidating shadow than John Ford’s 1956 Western The Searchers. Legend has it that the movie was overlooked in its time, only to be rediscovered by a discerning group of artists and movie lovers as, in the words of J. Hoberman, one of the “few Hollywood movies so thematically rich and so historically resonant they may be considered part of American literature.” As Glenn Frankel acknowledges in his fine new book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, the mythology around the film’s rediscovery is a little overblown. No, it wasn’t nominated for any Oscars, if that’s your idea of the true credit due a work of film art. But it wasn’t a flop; it did pretty well at the box office, and the reviews were mostly good. If there’s anything scandalous about the response to the movie when it was new, it’s only that critics and audience seemed to regard it “merely” as another John Ford-John Wayne Western, albeit a good one with an epic scope. The general consensus among those who came along to acclaim the film ten or fifteen years after its initial release is that it is so much more.

Ripper Street: A Fresh Take on Old Crimes

Jerome Flynn, Matthew Macfadyen and Adam Rothenberg star in Ripper Street

You can’t swing a remote control these days without hitting a period drama. From Downton Abbey, to Mad Men, to Copper, it seems that TV producers and TV audiences are interested in stories that happened ‘back then.’ The dividing line of these period offerings is whether the television produced mobilizes feelings of nostalgia and wants us to long for those times, or whether the stories are told precisely to disturb that warm and fuzzy feeling for the days of hats, cigars, and clear social structures. The new BBC/BBC America co-production, Ripper Street, falls firmly into this second category. The Victorian-era crime drama opens a door into a distinctly gruesome version of Conan Doyle’s London: a re-imagining which upsets and reconfigures our set notions of the past. It is easy to imagine Holmes and Watson moving about in hansom cabs, solving their own mysteries just five urban miles west of Ripper Street's Whitechapel district. Mind you, I was inadvertently well-prepared to imagine just that, having recently finished Anthony Horowitz’s novel The House of Silk, a faithful and gritty take on Conan Doyle’s characters and setting. Horowitz tells a dark story perfectly in sync with the spirit of Richard Warlow’s Ripper Street – both tell period stories geared towards an audience willing to glimpse just a little deeper in the depths of human depravity than previous generations.

It’s 1889, and London’s East End is still reeling from the effects of the grisly Jack the Ripper killings. Jack has gone silent, but the repercussions of those murders are still emerging: both for a traumatized population and for the policemen who failed to catch him. Such is the setting of Ripper Street. And it is gripping stuff.

Bad Things Happen: Arnaldur Indridason’s Black Skies

Nothing comes without consequences - Charles Ferguson's 2010 Inside Job.

In a 2008 interview with the CBC’s Michael Enright, the Swedish novelist, Henning Mankell, commented that the vast majority of lawbreakers are not evil but that they get caught up in evil circumstances. I thought about Mankell’s musing while reading the Icelandic novelist, Arnaldur Indridason’s most recent police procedural (published in English) Black Skies (Harvill Secker, 2012) since greed, fear of public disgrace and revenge for a terrible injustice committed years earlier provide the motivation for the murders committed. In Arnaldur’s (in Iceland everyone is known by his first name) oeuvre, he is primarily concerned about domestic and social issues, and how the harsh Icelandic climate can affect people. Bad things happen when people make ill-considered decisions. He does feature psychopaths but they are frequently murdered, sometimes decades later, as a result of their incessant abuse of others.

From Jar City (2004) to Hypothermia (2009), Arnaldur’s brooding but resourceful loner, Erlander, is the senior member of the police investigation team. Burdened with guilt because of an incident in which he lost contact with his younger brother in a storm, compounded by having abandoned his wife and two young children years later, he tries in Silence of the Grave to explain to his almost comatose drug-addled daughter who has tracked him down after over twenty years that “he had been battling against that blizzard for all his life and all the passage of time did was to intensify it.” Yet in his professional life, Erlander draws upon that pain to crack open cases that were perpetrated years earlier in Silence and The Draining Lake or relive his personal tragedy in Voices so that he can salvage his daughter’s life in the present. He is assisted by the capable Elinborg, who successfully juggles her career with managing a family, and by Sigurdur Oli, a graduate of criminology from an American university, even though he is hampered by a stiff-necked personality with rigid attitudes. When Outrage begins with the murder of a young man with a rape drug in his possession, Erlander is on leave to wrestle with personal demons and the case is assigned to Elinborg, who is particularly astute in investigating cases of sexual abuse. At the same time that she is working on that investigation, Sigurdur Oli is at the centre of two cases that are the focus in Black Skies.

A Puzzle of a Play: The Glass Menagerie at American Repertory Theater

Zachary Quinto, Cherry Jones, and Celia Keenan-Bolger in The Glass Menagerie (All photos by Michael J. Lutch)

The audience stood and cheered at the end of the performance I attended of The Glass Menagerie at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theater, and a few weeks later Ben Brantley in The New York Times made it sound like one for the ages. I wish I could echo that proclamation of greatness and the sentiments expressed in that ovation. This production of Tennessee Williams’ beloved play, directed by John Tiffany (represented on Broadway last season by Once, which began at A.R.T.), is performed with tremendous fervency by the four-person cast – Cherry Jones as Amanda, Zachary Quinto and Celia Keenan-Bolger as her children, Tom and Laura, and Brian J. Smith as the Gentleman Caller. Nico Muhly has supplied lovely incidental piano music, Natasha Katz’s lighting is gorgeous, and the non-realist set design by Bob Crowley (who also did the costumes) is lyrical and evocative. An abstracted pyramid of scaffolding stands in for the fire escape attached to the Wingfields’ Depression-era St. Louis apartment, and a reflecting pool with a quarter-moon dipped in it provides a downstage frame for the action. I have no idea what that pool is supposed to signify (Brantley’s explanation, that it’s “the abyss of being lost,” doesn’t make sense to me in terms of the text, and it isn’t even good English), but every now and then one or another of the characters wanders to the edge and sways toward it, as if in danger of tumbling in. That’s one example of the movement provided by Steven Hoggett, who collaborated with Tiffany on Once as well. I loved the strangeness of the movement in Once, but it was really choreography; here it intrudes on the play, and the actors are so obviously not dancers that it feels awkward, even occasionally embarrassing. I felt the same way about some of the staging, too, like the way Laura enters at the top of the play and exits at the end through the back of the living-room couch, and the miming of the meals. It’s OK, I guess, that Tiffany wants to do without silverware, but it’s absurd to imagine Tom would eat with his fingers or lick up the last traces of food on his plate. This is nonsense of a specifically A.R.T. brand. And it’s less forgivable that there’s so little on stage in the way of furniture and props that we don’t get to see the photograph of the absent Mr. Wingfield that Tom repeatedly draws our attention to, or that all we’re shown of Laura’s titular glass collection is a single figure.

Love Letter to Days Gone By: Dave Grohl's Sound City

Sound City is a very sentimental look at one of L.A.’s most successful recording studios. It was established in 1969 and became famous for recording some of the best known and biggest selling albums in rock. For Director Dave Grohl it was his connection to the human-side of the recording process, a point that he repeatedly makes throughout the movie. In 1991, his band Nirvana made the trip from Seattle to Van Nuys, California, to record their second album, Nevermind, over a period of 16 days. The result was a smash hit for the band and the studio, which had fallen on tough financial times. For Grohl, who learned that the studio was closing in 2011, it was the last straw. Somebody had to tell the story of the studio and the people behind it, before it was permanently closed. The result is Sound City, a slick, yet informative documentary that covers everything you need to know about the recording business from the technical to the creative.

Sound City, the studio, ranks with some of the most important and beloved recording facilities in music. Considering the history of music, studios often take on a status of importance that is as significant as the music it documents. When you think of Sun Studios for instance, you think of Elvis Presley or Carl Perkins. When you think of Abbey Road in London, you automatically think of The Beatles or Pink Floyd who recorded their best work there. So it is with Sound City whose wide-ranging facility was the home of the Nirvana’s Nevermind, and Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled recording in 1975 with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. In fact, Mick Fleetwood met Buckingham just after the release of Buckingham Nicks their acclaimed debut.

For a list of Sound City recordings, click here.

Neglected Gems #35: Soapdish (1991)

The 1991 Soapdish is consistently inventive and high-spirited. The script by Andrew Bergman and Robert Harling takes us into the world of daytime soaps – a delectable subject for burlesque that Tootsie (released nine years earlier) didn’t come close to exhausting. Soapdish lacks Tootsie’s polish and style, and it doesn’t offer the same kind of emotional satisfaction, but it has its own teeter-totter, whirligig pleasures.

Sally Field, parodying herself good-naturedly, plays Celeste Tolbert, the reigning – and grasping – queen of the soaps. Star of The Sun Also Sets for the last couple of decades, she wins the daytime Emmy years after year (yes, the script includes a Sally Field acceptance speech, though it’s tamer than you’d hope). But her love life is going to pot. And though she doesn’t know it, she’s in danger of having her throne usurped by Montana Moorehead (Cathy Moriarty), who plays “Nurse Nan” on the program and is fed up with being stuck in the background. Holding sex at arm’s length like the fruits the gods tempted Tantalus with, Montana entices the show’s horny young producer, David (Robert Downey, Jr.), into helping her oust Celeste. Working around the head writer, Rose (Whoopi Goldberg), who’s also Celeste’s best friend, he dreams up a scheme for having “Maggie,” Celeste’s character, stab a homeless person, assuming that act will lose her the audience that adores her. His plan is short-circuited, however, by Celeste’s discovery, on the set, that the extra cast as the homeless woman is her own niece, Lauren (Elizabeth Shue), who ends up joining the show as a regular. So David casts around for alternative attacks and decides to unseat Celeste by hiring the last person she’d want to play opposite: her one-time lover, Jeffrey Anderson (Kevin Kline), whose character she had written out of the show nearly twenty years ago.

Finally, Just Another Example of Israel Bashing: Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers

At first glance, Dror Moreh’s The Gatekeepers, his seemingly probing interview documentary with the six living former heads of Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet (roughly akin to the FBI), all besides its current head Yoram Cohen, would seem to make for startling revelations as he goes behind the scenes of an agency few know much about. (The famed Mossad, Israel’s equivalent to the CIA, with its rescue of the Jewish hostages at Entebbe or the capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and other such remarkable feats of derring-do usually gets all the international headlines.) But gradually, one begins to notice a sameness to all the interviewee’s political views and, more significantly, an agenda held by the filmmaker which ultimately holds his country up to the worst possible light. It’s not that Israel should be immune to criticism, even from its highest placed civil servants. It’s more that a look at the complexities and nuances of Israeli life and actions should reflect that complexity, instead of coming across as an excuse to beat up on the country to an unbalanced degree. But The Gatekeepers, which lost out to Searching for Sugar Man for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award, refuses to do that, preferring to place all the blame and onus on the Palestinian-Israeli impasse or the fraught relationship with Iran, among other issues, on one side instead of examining how we got here from there. That blinkered, myopic and highly biased point of view ultimately dooms The Gatekeepers to mere propaganda and polemic instead of its being crafted as the powerful, informative documentary it ought to have been.

Stay Up Late: V/H/S, The ABCs of Death, John Dies at the End

Chase Williamson, as Dave, in John Dies at the End

One of my favorite movie books is J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Midnight Movies, which was first published in 1983 when the midnight movie as countercultural phenomenon was about to go the way of all flesh, displaced by the convenience and insular charms of home video. Hoberman captured the special appeal of midnight movies when he wrote of “epic, environmental films – really crazy ones,” that “instead of dreaming, you could spend the night with these visions.” One of the earliest and most prolific creators of midnight hits was George Romero, whose Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968 and played the international midnight circuit for years, and who followed it up with both the sequel Dawn of the Dead and his riff on vampire mythology, Martin. And the midnight horror movie reached an apotheosis in 1985 with Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, which, like Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, was probably ultimately seen by far more people who caught it on video than in a theater. Not all the major midnight hits were horror movies, but most of them – Eraserhead, El Topo – were nightmares of some kind, and even the congenial, geek-show vaudeville of early John Waters and the communal-utopian The Rocky Horror Picture Show, drew much of their appeal from their fans’ sense that they were identifying with people who could have starred in their parents’ nightmares.

Even without an actual, theater-going subculture for the movies themselves to tap into, there remains a special, hip allure to a horror or fantasy picture that can generate a plausible “midnight” vibe – that seems as if it would be a natural to tap into that audience, if it still existed. The Toronto International Film Festival, which has managed for years now to cling tight to a reputation as the premiere film festival for that select group that actually attends film festivals to see movies, still programs its “Midnight Madness” lineup every year, and now that several of last year’s entries have trickled into theaters (and onto Video On Demand), civilians and people who couldn’t schedule their vacations for September can get a taste of what passes for hip horror these days. The ABCs Of Murder and John Dies at the End, and another recent horror picture, V/H/S, may provide some hints about the current state of the midnight movie gene and how today’s indie-genre filmmakers are trying to tap into it.

The Murder Gene: Defending Jacob, We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Good Father

There is a general belief that having a genetic predisposition for violent behaviour and growing up in an aggressive environment can be lethal. In the novels Defending Jacob by William Landay (Delacorte Books, 2012), We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver (Counterpoint 2003) and The Good Father by Noah Hawley (Double Day 2012), the second condition is absent yet horrific crimes are perpetrated. The mystery is not about the identity of the perpetrators – in two of them the reader is informed at the outset and in the third, early on he has a sneaking suspicion – but rather why these murders were committed, to what extent genes play a role and, perhaps most interesting, the response of the fathers when their sons are charged with murder.

The science of behavioral genetics is most explicitly raised in Defending Jacob when the fourteen year old son of the Assistant DA, Andy Barber, is accused of knifing a classmate to death. Although Andy is a successful lawyer, who with his wife, Laurie, and their son, Jacob, enjoys a comfortable suburban lifestyle until the son’s arrest, he harbours a secret that he has never told his family. His own father, whom he has not seen since he was a child is serving a life term for murder, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were violent men, both incarcerated for many years. With Jacob’s trial approaching and the possibility that his family history will be raised, he has no choice but to inform his family. They visit a scientist, who, while assuring them that “predisposition is not predestination,” solicits a DNA test from the three generations to determine whether their genes might be encoded for violence. Although Andy considers this “junk science,” he accedes to the request even though he insists that he has never been violent at any time in his life. That may or may not be true but in his understandable belief that Jacob is innocent, he will do anything to prove it. 

Keeping Promise: Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell's Old Yellow Moon

Confidence and a refined sense of music making is the foundation of Old Yellow Moon (Nonesuch, 2013), this superb new album from Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris. It’s a welcome return for these musicians who first collaborated on Elite Hotel (1975), one of Harris’ most popular and familiar albums. Crowell was a member of the Harris’ Hot Band in the mid-70s and oddly enough this is their first album. Old Yellow Moon is a no-nonsense country music record from start to finish. It features the busiest fiddler in music, Stuart Duncan and some members of the original Hot Band. The production values are strong and the song selection is mix of new and old with just a dash of nostalgia to keep everybody honest. And honesty is a key value to this record and for these two experienced artists.

I first heard Emmylou Harris on Elite Hotel and her stand out version of the Lennon/McCartney ballad, “Here, There and Everywhere.” It was one of those songs that crossed over into pop with just enough Nashville twang to gratify the purists. Since that release, and some 26 albums later, Emmylou Harris has been one of the most interesting vocalists in music. Her unmistakable voice is a sweet, earnest sound makes you sit up and take notice. But she’s no pushover because she’s rocked with the best of them. Consider her work with Lucinda Williams, Little Feat, or Steve Earle. Not to mention her electric band with Buddy Miller, called Spyboy, Harris has been successful at blending the edgy side of rock 'n' roll with the sweeter, gentler sounds of country.

Caesar Must Die: Shakespeare Behind Bars

Giovanni Arcuri (centre) and members of the cast, in a scene from Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die

“That was amazing,” the woman next to me at the New York Film Festival screening of Caesar Must Die last fall said to me as the lights came up. The new film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani is the kind of experience that makes speaking acquaintances out of strangers. It was shot in Italy’s Rebibbia Prison, a maximum-security facility that houses mostly Mafiosi and drug traffickers, some of whom have been sentenced to “life meaning life,” a colorfully insistent Italian idiom meaning life without parole. At Rebibbia, Fabio Cavalli conducts a theatrical workshop that produces classic plays performed by prisoners, who audition just as they would in any other theatre. The show the Tavianis depict is Julius Caesar, in a free-form translation that Cavalli coaches his actors to read in their own regional accents. But Caesar Must Die isn’t exactly a documentary. The Tavianis apply their trademark expressionism: we hear the thoughts of the prisoners as they lie on their cots, sometimes in that overlapping concatenation we associate with the brothers’ masterpieces, Padre Padrone and The Night of the Shooting Stars, and Simone Zampagni has lit the film, which is mostly in black and white, expressionistically. Only a few sequences are shot in the rehearsal hall or in performance. (We see only the last few scenes and the curtain call of the actual performance: shot in color, they bookend the picture.) Mostly the actors perform in the corridors of the prison, in the yard or in other common spaces, or else in their own cells, so the reality of the prisoners’ lives bleeds into Shakespeare’s narrative – which is, of course, about violence and power, betrayal and vengeance, ideas that, as we don’t need to be told, have peculiar resonance for these men. Sometimes they’re clearly prisoners acting roles and commenting on their meaning, as when Salvatore (Sasà) Striano, playing Brutus, explains to his cellmates what happened in Rome after Caesar’s death and one of them, a Nigerian, relates it to his own country’s history. At other times they seem indistinguishable from the characters they’re portraying, partly because there’s no stylistic discrepancy between Shakespeare’s scenes and the private (and clearly scripted) exchanges among the prisoners. The movie is simultaneously expressionistic and Pirandellian.

Pure Liquid Sunshine: Grupo Corpo at Harbourfront Centre

Members of the Brazilian dance company Grupo Corpo, performing Imã (All photos by José Luiz Pederneiras)

Dance to blast away the February blahs. Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre is not marketing it as such. But there’s no question that the two hours recently spent in the presence of Brazil’s dynamic Grupo Corpo dance company, a feature of Harbourfront’s ongoing World Stage series at the Fleck Theatre, instantly lifted the spirits. The dancing by the 22-member ensemble is bouncy, bright, infectiously happy – pure liquid sunshine. The dancers themselves appear loose limbed, even rubbery, propelled by a love of dance which makes them a true delight to watch. The movement is mostly the message, and it’s physically daring and expressive, fantastically athletic and sensual all at once. Nothing appears capable of stopping the forward-motion drive. Whether pirouetting, leaping or doing a samba on the spot, the dancers are nothing but remarkable specimens of human achievement: the survival of the fizziest.

Breaking the Proverbial Fourth Wall: Soulpepper's Production of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Ted Dykstra & Jordan Peddle

In the middle of Act II of Soulpepper Theatre's new production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Rosencrantz (played by Ted Dykstra) ponders the feeling of being buried alive and comes to the conclusion that “life in a box is better than no life at all…I suppose.” Such is the dilemma of two minor Shakespearian characters brought to life in one of Tom Stoppard’s most popular plays. Written in 1966, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was an immediate hit and once you’ve seen it, you’ll know why. First, it’s a wide-ranging comedy featuring a consistent series of pratfalls matched by some of the wittiest dialogue ever written for the theatre. Second, it makes fun of one of Shakespeare’s most beloved tragedies (Hamlet) as seen through the eyes of two of its minor characters. The rest is an imaginary ride into the unknown as notions of being are seriously considered by the leading characters: Why are we here? Where are we going? And what is the point of all this? The play also offers up cogent ideas central to the art of theatre: What is the difference between acting and reality.

One of a Kind: A Woman Like Me by Bettye LaVette

Bettye Lavette at the San Jose Jazz Festival in 2009 (Photo by Andy Poupart)

Bettye LaVette has been waiting a long time to tell this story. In fact she has been waiting a long time to have anybody care about the story she tells. Her success in the last couple of years has seen this remarkable singer move to the top of the world. Elvis Costello, Pete Townshend and Paul Shaffer are all quoted on the back cover, raving about the book. They all mention her voice in their blurbs. They’re not only talking about her singing voice either. That voice stands on its own as one of the finest R&B instruments in use today. They are referring to the voice she uses to tell her story: a raw take-no-prisoners voice that is not afraid to tell it like it is.

Pills and Thrills: Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects

Jude Law stars in Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects

Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects opens like a horror movie, with a tantalizingly eerie scene of bloodstains, and bloody footprints, on the floor of a New York apartment. While the audience is perched on the edge of their seats, waiting to find out what’s happened, the action flashes back to the events that brought us here: a young, would-be Master of the Universe (Channing Tatum, the smooth operator who was the central focus of Soderbergh’s previous film, Magic Mike) is released from prison after serving four years for insider trading, and is greeted by his mousy wife, Emily (Rooney Mara). Emily, who appears to be unmoored and suicidally depressed over the change in her family’s fortunes, begins seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Banks (Jude Law), and is put on a (fictional) new drug called Ablixa, whose manufacturers have a financial arrangement with the good doctor. (Basically, he’s trawling among his patient base, looking for willing guinea pigs.)

By the middle of the movie, we come full circle and find out how that apartment floor got so red and messy, and it’s a horrific event, all right. But although Side Effects is, in essence, a kind of murder mystery, the murder itself isn’t its main engine for generating suspense. It’s just the plot device needed to get the Law character in a position to worry about being professionally humiliated and discredited, to such a degree that it costs him everything: his reputation, his business (his partners are quick to dump him when things look bad), his income stream, even his marriage (to an expertly tart Vinessa Shaw). Part of what makes Side Effects such a modern American movie is that its hero, whose life never seems to be in danger, qualifies as being in dire peril because his career might be heading for the drain. 

House of Cards: Netflix Deals Us a New Hand

"You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment." – Kevin Spacey stars in House of Cards, on Netflix

On February 1st, the entire first season of the new American version of House of Cards became available on Netflix worldwide. In light of these unique circumstances, I should emphasize that this post only contains very minor spoilers for the first of the show’s 13 episodes.

A little over a year ago, Netflix launched its first original program, making the first season of Lilyhammer available to its subscribers. The Norwegian-American co-production was big hit in Scandinavia and a moderate critical success here in North America (it’s light, but uniformly enjoyable, fare). It was by no means a quiet rollout, but compared to the press and enthusiasm of the Kevin Spacey/David Fincher produced House of Cards, in retrospect Lilyhammer seems almost like an open secret. (A second season of the Steven Van Zandt series, it is worth noting, goes into to production in March).

Last January, when Lilyhammer was first being rolled out, there was some talk about Netflix’s entry into original programming, and even more talk in recent weeks since House of Cards’ much publicized launch on February 1st. Certainly, House of Cards deserves the press – it is actor Kevin Spacey (American Beauty) and director David Fincher’s (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) first foray into television, and it is much more ambitious both narratively and artistically than Lilyhammer, but all talk of revolutions notwithstanding, it isn't likely to herald a new age of television by itself. But let’s just say this: House of Cards is worth watching. What else does a viewer really need to know?

The Gothic Mode in That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden

On Thursday, March 7th, between 6 and 8pm, at Ben McNally Books 366 Bay St. (Richmond and Bay) in Toronto, Bob Douglas of Critics at Large launches the second volume of his study of the Gothic mode in history, That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden. Today we feature a specially prepared excerpt from the new volume.

When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul.

– Former CIA officer. Quoted by Jane Mayer

Gothic is a mode – perhaps the mode – of unofficial history. 

– Literature of Terror by David Punter.

Gothic texts frequently chart the trajectory of individuals who suppress or lack the capacity to empathize with others. Similarly, when individuals in the larger world succumb to an ideological virus, neither experience nor reality can disrupt their single-minded quest to achieve utopia. Their narrative often includes sanctioning the emotional humiliation and the physical assault upon people they consider non-persons. If intended victims are regarded as vermin or parasites that must be eliminated, moral restraints to cold-blooded violence are atrophied, if not abandoned. The Gothic mode employs filters – the demonization of the other, the double or a sinister duality, psychic vampirism, the obsession with bloodlines – to explore how individuals and groups inspired by an ideology or opportunism can lose their moral compass and descend into a gray if not dark zone. In Gothic fiction ethical codes “operate at best in distorted forms.” The same can be said of totalitarian states and the militant Islamists. In a chapter from The Dictators titled, “The Moral Universe of Dictatorship,” Richard Overy argues that the Nazis and the Stalinists adopted an extreme moral relativism that subsumed individual conscience into the collective will, one that was driven solely by ideological imperatives. Just as moral elites like the church and the law were co-opted or destroyed by Nazi and Soviet ideology, the original meaning of the Quran is lost, even repudiated by the actions of militant Islamists.

Politics and Poker: Fiorello! at City Center

Danny Rutigliano, center, as Fiorello LaGuardia in Fiorello! (Photo by Sara Krulwich)

One of my earliest musical-theatre memories is of seeing Fiorello! on Broadway with my parents in 1960, after it had won the Pulitzer Prize. I can still remember some of George Abbott’s staging, most vividly the big “The Name’s LaGuardia” number in the middle of the first act, where the title character, Fiorello LaGuardia (Tom Bosley), campaigns fervently in English, Italian and Yiddish to secure the Republican vote for a Congress seat in a district nailed down for years by Tammany Hall. It’s a marvelous show-stopper, one of the most memorable pieces in the musicals of the late fifties, like “Ya Got Trouble” in The Music Man and “The Telephone Hour” in Bye Bye Birdie. This musical bio of the man who became one of New York City’s most beloved mayors – the diminutive but fierce character known as the Little Flower – is a terrific show; the original cast recording captures its brio as well as the melodic range of Jerry Bock’s music and the wit of Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics. (It was their first hit, predating She Loves Me by four years and Fiddler on the Roof by five.) So I was in a state of joyous anticipation from the moment Encores! announced that Fiorello! would be the show to open its twentieth season. (The series began with the same musical in 1994, but I missed it.)

The Hindsight of Time: Ben Affleck’s Argo

Ben Affleck's Argo

There are a number of good reasons why many of the post-9/11 movies (In the Valley of Elah, World Trade Center, Reign Over Me) have failed to come to terms with the aftermath of that tragic moment and the subsequent wars that followed. Besides depicting those events through conventional melodrama employed only to stir audience empathy, these films actually leave little to the imagination.While trying to make sense of a time that is still being played out, each movie leaves scant room for reflection. This might be why Zero Dark Thirty, a movie about the mission to kill bin Laden, fails to resonate with the power the subject warrants. Despite all the heated debate about the picture’s point of view on torture, for example, director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) actually backs away from the dramatic core of that subject.

While I think it’s clear that she isn't endorsing waterboarding as a means of getting information, she also isn’t delving into why it would be a considered means of interrogation for tracking down the mastermind of 9/11. Her picture simply depicts the steps of that quest, the full facts not withstanding, but she leaves out the dramatic ambiguities that would give the story a quickening pulse. The performances in the movie are also so attenuated, so inert, that the actors can't take us into the larger, more disturbing questions which means they never get engaged (despite the media hoopla). Zero Dark Thirty fails, for instance, to even bring to light how national policy has changed significantly from the era of the Cold War (where two superpowers with the ability to incinerate the planet tried to avoid that catastrophe) to the post-9/11 period (where the enemy isn’t concerned with what happens in this world, but rather the possibility of salvation promised in the next one). These uneasy examinations of interrogation, international security and the subject of terrorism (which has a whole different cast when seen in the context of religious fundamentalism instead of the secular kind offered by Communism) are not being explored in these 9/11 movies because the thinking in them hasn't moved past the tropes of the Cold War years. They may be contemporary films about post 9/11 but they end up feeling stuck in the past.

Hit and Miss – Beethoven: The Symphonies w/ the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, Franz Bruggen, conductor

A certain rite of passage is writ large for conductor and orchestra when it comes to Beethoven’s nine symphonies, their commercial interests notwithstanding. What was once a serious musical statement has now become a novelty. Since the advent of recorded sound, there are dozens of Beethoven Symphonic cycles, including such prestigious conductors like Herbert von Karajan (4 versions), Bernard Haitink (3) Arturo Toscanini (2) and more recently Emmanuel Krivine's in 2011, the latter on so-called, period instruments dating back to Beethoven’s era.

For Frans Bruggen (b. 1934) the Dutch-born musician and conductor, whose recent set was released last year on the Glossa label, he had the desire to re-create the sound of Beethoven’s music. When he formed the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century in 1981, he sought to reproduce something close to the original instrumentation. As listed in the All Music Guide, “All its members play instruments either built during the Baroque or Classical eras, or on modern-built instruments that are replicas of authentic period instruments.” The orchestra was originally set up to perform a few times a year due to the international make-up of its members.

In the early 80s, the period instrument concept was the new wave of classical music. Suddenly it wasn’t just a modern orchestra playing Baroque and 18th Century music; it was an orchestra looking to re-create sounds that once filled the concert halls of Vienna, London and Berlin, 200 years ago. Bruggen and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century made a safe start with their early recordings on the Philips label, featuring compositions by Mozart, Haydn and selected works by J.S. Bach. Meanwhile, similar period-instrument ensembles released several Beethoven symphonic cycles: Monica Hugget and the Hanover Band (1982), Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players (1986) and John Eliot Gardner and the Revolutionary and Romantic Orchestra (1993).

Bruggen and the Orchestra of the 18th Century first released the complete symphonies of Beethoven in 1994. In spite of the competition, it made the musical world wake up and listen anew. Bruggen’s careful research into the instrument tuning; tempo markings and the composer’s intentions were critically acclaimed. Suddenly the battle between the modern orchestras and period orchestras was on. It wasn’t so much about the differences in orchestration, as it was the shapes, colours and emotional content of Beethoven’s music that was revealed to listeners. I’m happy to report that this new complete collection of Beethoven’s Symphonies has quite possibly surpassed Bruggen’s recording 18 years earlier, and timing has a lot to do with it.

In 2011, in a dedicated effort to present the Beethoven Symphonies as a whole, the orchestra was booked in Rotterdam to perform a Beethoven cycle like no other: all nine symphonies in ten days from October 6 to 16th. Individually the symphonies aren’t that long, except for SY 9, which is usually over an hour. So it is possible to play 2 per night depending on the length of the program, which is exactly what they did. This new collection, released last October, captured those performances and for the most part, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century delivers the goods. But with every Beethoven "cycle" some hit and some miss.

I tried to recreate that Rotterdam experience by listening to the entire symphonies within 2 weeks. These are my impressions in numerical order: