Hail, Caesar!

Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar! is predicated on a wonderful conceit. A cell of left wing screenwriters are hijacking Capitol Pictures. They’ve kidnapped one of its stars George Clooney and have even converted him to the Communist mantra.  “The studios are making them the instruments of capitalism,” Clooney breathlessly tells his boss, the studio head Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin). “The studios make pictures to serve the system." Trumbo, the story of a blacklisted writer was recently released, but in one fell swoop the Coen Brothers have turned the tables. The victims of the blacklist are now perpetrators, one of whom says, “we’re not talking about money. We’re talking about economics.” In a particularly hilarious scene the group actually paddles out off the waters of Malibu to meet a Russian sub in front of which they pledge their allegiance to the Comintern. The film, set for the most part on the Capitol Picture lot, flips from a Western, to a Busby Berkeley musical to an English drawing room melodrama where one of the studio’s cowboy stars, Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) is being cudgeled into affecting an aristocratic “mirthless chuckle” as he's urged by his female counterpart to join her “on the divine” In a scene out of My Fair Lady the director, the effete Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes), futilely attempts to get his cowboy to say “would that it t'were so simple.” But the major picture being filmed  is Hail, Caesar! in which the studio’s big star Baird Whitlock (Clooney) playing the Roman warrior Autolycus  botches the last word of his last line “faith” as he stands by the feet of the dying Christ. Considering all the artifice the one believable character in the mix is Mannix himself played brilliantly by Josh Brolin. Amidst a series of set pieces which are satires of set pieces, Brolin is struggling to quit smoking and decide about a job offer from the Lockheed corporation which will provide him with a  stability he will never find in Hollywood. The juxtaposition of Clooney being converted to Christ and Brolin talking to his priest in confession is a masterpiece of juxtaposition or shall we say montage. Teaser alert: Mannix chooses glamour over security. Among Mannix’s many duties, which include having a pregnant actress adopt her own child to save face, is getting religious leaders behind the Christ story, a task that is obstructed by a recalcitrant rabbi who says about Jesus, “God doesn’t have children; he’s a bachelor and very angry.” Hail, Caesar is hilarious in spots and wild. It’s as if the Coen Brothers, intent to have fun, were pulling out all the stops  But it’s no match for Barton Fink, their paen to the murderous juggernaut they both hate and love. The irony is that in the vintage Hollywood the film describes George Clooney might very well have played Spartacus.

My Girl

“Even the word ‘woman’ has come under assault by some of the very people who claim the right to be considered women,” wrote the journalist and filmmaker Elinor Burkett, in a recent Times Op-Ed piece ("What Makes a Woman,” NYT, 6/6/15). According to Ms. Burkett there is an acronym used by those who take offense at the supposedly exclusionary politics of some feminists. Ms. Burkett describes a “new trans insult, a terf, which stands for ‘transexclusionary radical feminist.’” The politicization of sexuality is producing infighting that’s fracturing one time alliances in much the same way that you find infighting amongst revolutionaries who were once unified by their opposition to a common enemy. Now it’s not merely male dominated society or fundamentalists who believe that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman, or pro-lifers who are the enemy. Now the enemy is language itself. Ms. Burkett reports that a performance of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues was cancelled at Mount Holyoke and quotes a leader of the student opposition as explaining that the play “offered an ‘extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman.’” The semantic consequences are delightful and amusing and someone should undertake a parody of a politically correct version of My Fair Lady, to demonstrate the reach of Big Transgender Brother. What would the new play be called?  Perhaps there could even be a contest. My Fair Person Who Might Have Been Born in a Man’s or Woman’s Body, My Fair Sensibility of a Woman, My Fair Lady (including Wannabees).The  possibilities are endless, but one thing is sure “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain,” or to quote Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, “Woman, have you got cheating on your mind?” And be careful in our current world of Newspeak not to get caught listening to the Temptations classic, “My Girl.”

Look Back in Perpexity

Photo of Hanif Kureishi: Brett Weinstein

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion was one of the greatest plays ever written about class and it developed directly out of the particularities of language that defined British society in a way that was notorious and sometimes clichéd. The genius of the play is not only to create a character like the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle but to embellish the contrast by making her Pygmalion not only upper crust, but a student of language itself. Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady set it all to music. Language is of course what plays are made of, but it’s really only the tip of the iceberg. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were inhabitants of London who found a deeper explanation for class division. Das Kapital was Marx’s analysis of the workings of the capitalist economy. Later on Ralf Dahrendorf, a sociologist who was a member of both the German parliament and the House of Lords, would offer an post-Marxist understanding of society in Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. And the legacy of colonialism evidenced in a movie like Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette, written by Hanif Kureishi, the son of a Pakistani immigrant, might better speak to class division than the facile linguistic dichotomies put forth by Shaw at the turn of the last century. But here comes Fiona Devine, a sociologist from Manchester University hired by the BBC to create The Great British Class Survey. According to the Times (“Multiplying the Old Divisions of Class in Britain,” NYT 4/3/13), the results of the survey responded to by 161,000 people were that “in today’s complicated world, there are now seven different social classes…These range from the ‘elite’ at the top, distinguished by money, connections and rarefied cultural interests, to the ‘precariat’ at the bottom, characterized by lack of money, lack of connections and unrarefied cultural interests.” The in- between categories that the study describes as quoted by the Times include “the ‘technical middle class,’ a group that has a lot of money but few superior social connections,” “’the emergent service workers,’ a young urban group that has li little money but a high amount of social and cultural capital” and “the ‘new affluent workers,’ who score high on social and cultural activity, but have only a middling amount of money.” Sounds like it’s no longer the mythological character of Pygmalion, but Pandora or Proteus, that the up and coming generation of British playwrights will turn to when they try to deal with the changing complexion of English Society at the Royal Court.