Mister Roberts

Does Captain Owen Honors, the commander of the nuclear powered aircraft carrier Enterprise (also of Star Trek fame), sound like someone who would make lurid videos, which, according to the Times ("Navy Captain Is Investigated Over Videos," NYT, 1/4/11), included "…scenes of simulated masturbation, simulated eating of feces and two men as well as two women showering together…" and show them "...as entertainment to some 6,000 sailors and Marines…"? Captain Honors, who was relieved of his duties for "profound lack of good judgment" just as the Enterprise was being deployed to Afghanistan ("Aircraft Carrier Captain Is Removed Over His Role in Coarse Videos," NYT, 1/5/11), received over 11,000 supportive comments on Facebook, according to the Times. Plainly this is progress from Tailhook, the scandal that shook the Navy back in 1992. Tailhook occurred primarily in hotel corridors, but it gets lonely and boring for sailors out at sea, and the search for suitable entertainment is always a challenge. When it comes down to it, Honors’ videos, however inappropriate, were a victimless crime that may inadvertently have provided a realistic picture of life on a gigantic carrier, where the food tastes like shit and where masturbation is the only kind of outlet possible in cramped quarters. Instead of showing his videos aboard the vessel during 2006 and 2007, as the Navy alleges, Captain Honors should have sent them to Sundance, where they might have been treated like Mister Roberts—another film that portrayed the lives of American sailors on a ship. The videos also included "…a scene that suggests an officer is engaged in sex with a donkey…" but as anyone who has been under fire knows, both men and women react to danger in a wide variety of ways.

The Red Shoes

What happens when you pick the el primo dance critic to discuss the vocation of prima ballerinas with an analyst versed in question of the character of maestros who create great works of dance? And what if you do it in the context of perhaps the greatest dance film of all time, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes? Martin Scorsese’s recently released print of The Red Shoes provided the occasion for the above-mentioned chemistry this past Saturday at The Philoctetes Center. So what did Joan Acocella of The New Yorker and Leon Balter of The New York Psychoanalytic Institute reveal about the film? That The Red Shoes is based on one of Hans Christian Anderson’s grisliest fables. That the male lead, Lermontov, was based on Diaghilev, the creator of the famed Ballets Russes, for whom Léonide Massine (who appears in the film as Lyubov) had danced, done choreography and commissioned sets by Picasso. That Diaghilev had fired his lead dancer Nijinsky when the latter announced he was getting married, and that Nijinsky subsequently went mad. That Moira Shearer, the dancer who played Vicky Page in the film, had given up her career as a dancer at Sadler’s Wells, where Margot Fonteyn was prima ballerina assoluta, though compromises not of art but of life itself would exact a far greater toll on the character in the film, whose fate is mirrored by the ballerina in Darren Aranovsky’s Black Swan. Acocella invoked the famed Yeats quote, “perfection of the life or of the work,” to explain the predicament of dancers whose devotion to their craft may start as early as age eleven. “Why do you want to dance?” Lermontov asks Vicky early on. “Why do I want to live?” is her reply. The monomaniacal obsession that makes great dancers was explored, along with the psychoanalytic notion that for a certain kind of maestro—the kind that the film describes—the dancer becomes a phallic extension. Central to the discussion was the astonishing, surrealistic disquisition of a ballet called The Red Shoes, which forms the core of the film and which, as a kind of play within a play—similar, Acocella pointed out, to “The Mousetrap” in Hamlet—inevitably illumines the world of movement genius that the movie describes.

John Gabriel Borkman

One could have joked that there was some sort of structural damage to BAM’s Harvey Theater, and that the damage became the set for the Abbey Theater’s production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman. The snow and ice that New Yorkers have seen quite a bit of lately was as ubiquitous on the stage as it was outside, particularly in Brooklyn. Blinding snow is indeed a fitting image for the agon that is described between the title character (Alan Rickman), who excuses the financial transactions that have destroyed so many lives by saying that he wanted to achieve the power to make other people happy, and the universe. Borkman, according to the woman he has thrown off, Ella Rentheim (Lindsay Duncan), is guilty of another crime, “the murder of love in a human being,” in that he has sacrificed her love, given her up for the sake of his ambition. The play begins with Borkman’s wife Gunhilde (Fiona Shaw) saying, “People like us have no time for happiness.” And happiness becomes the lingua franca of the play. When Borkman’s son Erhart (Marty Rea) brings it up as the goal to which he aspires, his mother mockingly asks him where he thinks he will find this so called happiness (the burden of parental wishes is yet another theme of the play). And what is the relationship of happiness to aspiration? In late Ibsen plays, imagination is always juxtaposed to reality. In The Master Builder, Solness’s muse Hilda pushes him to make “castles in the sky.” Isn’t the imperfect nature of reality always at odds with the perfect world that the imagination creates? The start of John Gabriel Borkman presents a compelling metaphor: imagination held prisoner. Borkman, convicted of his crimes, sentenced and now released and in exile in his own home, walks back and forth in his room as the clock ticks. Ibsen introduces us to his character through the sound of his footsteps. Ibsen’s characters could be artists or dictators in the monomaniacal way they subsume humanity to ideas. Both Strindberg and Ibsen influenced Bergman, and one is reminded of the harrowing picture of the artist in Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly, sacrificing the sanity of his abandoned children to his ambition for greatness. 

Lives of Our Leaders: Watch Out for Your Boner

John Boehner, whose name is pronounced variously as “Bo-ner,” “Bay-ner,” or, for Francophiles, “Bonheur” (for the sake of argument, we’ll stick with Boner), is the new Speaker of the House. He is known to be a hard man, except on those occasions when he makes a boner. Ostensibly he’s had one of those, since he has daughters. There is also a picture of him hugging Nancy Pelosi. It’s hard to decipher what all the hugging is about, since Boehner’s Republican party is out to undo all of President Obama’s work, particularly healthcare reform. Without being crass, can we assume it has to do with one of the pronunciations, or mispronunciations, of his name? Boehner, the Times points out, has a hard job. He has to satisfy the Tea Partiers, who want “to cut spending and rein in what they see as an overactive government” (“Taking Control, G.O.P. Overhauls Rules in House,” NYT, 1/6/11), while living up to his promise “to run the chamber in a more inclusive and business like way,” which presumably means not tea-bagging his opponents. The Times also reported that Boehner’s wife “kept hitting on the theme of how she and her husband are ‘just normal, average people’” (“Speaker’s Wife Emphasizes ‘Normal, Average’ Life,” NYT, 1/6/11). Mrs. Boehner, the Times reported, bought “a $100 beige dress from Dillard’s to meet Queen Elizabeth II at a state dinner in Washington in 2007.” It looks like you have to give up a few things when you marry into a family of Boehners.

Mark Twain at the Morgan

In his journal of November 6, 1953, Alfred Kazin remarked that both Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield didn’t like "phonies." The passage is part of the recent Mark Twain: A Skeptic’s Progress exhibition at the Morgan Library, where the curators also quote Kerouac, another Twain admirer, as saying, "[Twain] was an uncomplicated man, a man who did not believe that literature is a constant tale of sorrow and nothing else. Mark Twain piloted steamboats, dug for silver in Nevada, roamed the West, 'roughed it'…worked as a foreign correspondent, newspaper editor, lecturer, and was a family man—and yet, he did not have to sacrifice all that to his 'art'…. He was just writing what he felt like writing, not what he thought 'literature' demanded of him." The exhibit also devotes some time to Hank Morgan, the firearms foreman who is the hero of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It’s Hank’s love of empiricism and pragmatism that makes him the enemy of the inequalities of the chivalric world into which he is thrust. However, it’s the same traits that enable him to use all his capabilities to destroy himself and Camelot too. That contrariety of motive, which is so aptly underlined in the Morgan Library’s presentation, hardly reflects the workings of an uncomplicated man. Garrison Keillor’s unflattering front-page New York Times Book Review critique of Twain’s recently released autobiography, the sleeper bestseller of the current season, further complicates the question of Twain’s personality by pointing to the disingenuousness of an author whose reputation was based on honesty. As Keillor comments,  "He speaks from the grave, he writes, so that he can speak freely — 'as frank and free and unembarrassed as a love letter' — but there’s precious little frankness and freedom here and plenty of proof that Mark Twain, in the hands of academics, can be just as tedious as anybody else when he is under the burden of his own reputation" ("Mark Twain's Riverboat Ramblings," NYT, 12/16/10).

Twilight Time

Two Twilight Zones shown during the annual New Year’s marathon hearken back to literary past and foreshadow, in line with the Sci-Fi mythos of the series, inventions of the future. “The Little People” is Gulliver’s Travels with Swift’s satire of human nature in a space-age context. Two astronauts crash land on a far-away planet. Fletcher, the captain, is all about working to get the ship back into orbit again. His despondent subordinate Craig wanders off and discovers a civilization of microscopic people who treat him like a god, even going so far as to erect a statue in his honor. Convinced that he can become the one and only God, Craig orders Fletcher off the planet as soon as the ship is repaired. The only problem is that enormous Brobdingnagians also appear on the planet. In a climactic scene, the little people pull down the statue they have erected, much the way the statues of Stalin and Lenin were be pulled down at the end of the Communist era. “A Kind of a Stop Watch” introduces the garrulous character of Peter Thomas McNulty, who abuses the gift of time. This episode introduces a device like the one that would become the centerpiece of Nicholson Baker’s erotic novel The Fermata. McNulty wants attention, but no one listens to his ideas and he is soon fired from his job at a lingerie company. However, given a magical stopwatch that puts time on hold, McNulty realizes he can rob all the banks and get everything he wants. The problem is, the stopwatch breaks, and though he has all the money in the world, he can’t start life up again. The denouement is reminiscent of the famed Burgess Meredith episode (“Time Enough At Last”) about the book lover who finds himself in a paradise without people until his glasses shatter on the ground.

Chaos and Classicism

It is disconcerting to find oneself enchanted by the images of Leni Riefenstahl’s prologue to the Festival of Nations, from the 1936 Olympics, which is literally the apex of the current Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy and Germany 1918-1936 show at the Guggenheim. The Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Acropolis and the famed Discobolus superimposed over a shot of the German decathlete Erwin Huber all serve to tie Teutonic with classical Greek and Roman culture. It’s also a testament to the profoundly immoral intelligence of the fascist project and propaganda machine that aestheticization of the human figure was conscripted in the war against mankind. “I love Caesar,” the curators of the exhibit quote Musssolini as saying. “He was the only one who united the will of the warrior and the genius of the wise man.” Mussolini coined the term “uomo nuovo” to characterize the classical model for the new superman during his march on Rome in 1922. Ironically, the futurist Marinetti, who was a follower of Mussolini, eschewed classicism, but the flirtation with classical forms in the work of Italian artists like Morandi, De Chirico and Severini, and amongst Picasso and other artists and filmmakers who were anti-fascist (segments of Cocteau’s surrealist film masterpiece The Blood of a Poet are shown in the exhibit) are indicative of how pervasive the aspiration to what Cocteau termed the “rappel à l’ordre” was on both ends of the political spectrum during the interwar period. Interestingly, representations of ideal forms could apotheosize the human face or return as satiric jeremiads against regimentation amongst those who foresaw the looming threat of totalitarianism.