The Cabal of Goodness

photograph of Bernie Sanders (United States Congress)

Everyone wants to do or be Good. Even those who are doing Bad think they are doing Good. For instance the two inmates who defied all the odds and broke out of the Clinton Correctional Institution in Dannemora undoubtedly felt they were doing Good, not necessarily because they were convinced they were wrongly accused of their crimes, but because they should not have to pay the price for having committed them. With a few exceptions, even the most remorseful criminal isn’t going to pass up the opportunity to be freed by legal or illegal means. But Goodness has its down side. Our current primary elections have given average people the opportunity to be suddenly conscripted into Cabals of Goodness. If you’re a resident of New York City, you’ve undoubtedly been at numerous dinner parties which are Cabals of Goodness against the evil represented by Donald Trump. It’s all fine and dandy to enjoy the cozy warmth of being righteous. Donald Trump is the perfect foil since he says so many stupid things. Another Cabal of Goodness is to be found in the Hillary Clinton camp and yet another in the followers of Bernie Sanders, who like Trump, is riding a wave of disenchantment with establishment politics. What all these Cabals provide is a self-congratulatory feeling of superiority. Martin Buber distinguished between I/Thou (Ich-Du) and I/It (Ich-Es) relationships.The I/it ones are those lacking identity with the other, who is reduced to being a thing. When you join a cause, even a very commendable one you run the risk of deluding yourself with the notion that you’re  suddenly wafted out of your unruly imperfect existence made of willful and selfish desires, your humanity that is, into a spiritual ether in which in certain severe cases you may even begin to imagine your head surrounded by a halo.

When It's Bad to Be Good

Some of the greatest atrocities have been perpetrated in the name of the good. Certainly the Inquisition was one of these. In The Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky describes the condition of Christ being brought before the Grand Inquisitor for sacrilege though it was Christianity that the Inquisition was supposed to be protecting. Goodness can become a juggernaut, a tsumani in which initial objectives may be lost in the whirlwind, the inertial force of the movement itself. Max Weber distinguished between a sect and a church, with the sect representing the institutionalization of extemporaneous fervor. It’s like that with adherence to the cause of Goodness, whose original principals may be lost in the bureaucracy that's left in its wake. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" goes the old homily and Goodness is supposed to be the best good intention. When Armageddon comes as a result of a nuclear device being dropped to thwart evil, what will we be able to say about the triumph of Good? You might say that Goodness can only be defined as a process, a means rather than an end, as a way of deterring those who would commit destructive deeds under the banner of Goodness. But Goodness itself is elusive. It’s a public relations device that creates a sanctimonious, self-congratulatory air around  its adherents and that buys them immunity from detection or prosecution. When Bad Things Happen to Good People was a bestselling book about how misfortune can befall even the most well-meaning of people. But sometimes it's just bad to be a goody two shoes.

Abbott and Costello

Abbott and Costello (NBC Radio)

Carol Costello is the anchor of the morning edition of CNN's Newsroom. She’s sexy and wholesome and outspoken. One of her editorials was “'Sexy' clothes don’t excuse sexual violence,” CNN, 10/9/14) If she hadn’t chosen news she might have been a candidate for the Playboy show The Girls Next Door, a reality program which aired from 2005-2010. John Berman and Kate Bolduan follow her at ll:00 AM with At This Hour and one wonders how her ratings would fare if she had a partner. Calling all Abbotts with experience as news anchors. Imagine a new 9:00 AM Newsroom feature called Abbott and Costello. News is a competitive business and you have to use everything you’ve got in the arsenal of promotion. It’s lucky Carol Costello isn’t Carol Amos, as the natural choice for a sidekick would be Andy and as CNN Newsroom with Amos and Andy would not exactly pass muster in our PC era. Greg Abbott is the governor of Texas and he has the kind of chiseled Mount Rushmore worthy face that would make him a great news anchor after retirement. He wouldn’t be the first politician who went on to a career in news. Look at George Stephanopoulos who is now an anchor for ABC. However, though Abbott has the right name for the job, his politics (which include taking the fight to display the l0 commandments on the capital building in Austin to the Supreme Court) are a bit too right of center for CNN, and a team with a name like Stephanopoulos and Costello lacks the mellifluous alliterative sound of say Berman and Bolduan. Right now Costello is holding her own, after years of experience as a reporter in the field, but it’s hard to remain "king of the road," to quote Roger Miller. Tom Costello is a correspondent for NBC and when and if Carol Costello’s ratings start to sag, CNN might consider ramping up their ammo by instituting CNN Newsroom with Costello and Costello.

Eqwas

The Brazilian director Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull was highly touted by The Times "'Neon Bull,' With Creatures Great and Small," 4/7/16) and there were intimations of exotic sexuality to boot. With all that's appeared on the screen from Blue is the Warmest Color to Gaspar Noe's Love, that’s a pretty tall order. Actually Neon Bull might better be titled Fashion Designer in a Bullpen, as the central character Iremar (Juliano Cazare) is a cowboy by day who dreams of being a fashion designer by night. He draws his designs on the centerfolds of pornographic magazines and his scavenging for mannequins in a muddy dump recalls Waste Land, Lucy Walker's film about the artist Vik Muniz and the Jardim Gramacho. Iremar has an ambiguous relationship with Galega (Maeve Jinklings) an exotic dancer who dons a horse’s head and hooves as part of her act and looks like she'd once been extra in Eyes Wide Shut. In the course of the movie Iremar has an affair with Geise (Samya De Lavor), the pregant security guard in a panties factory. It is shall we see say Iremar’s backdoor entry into the world he aspires to and one can't help think of Annie Leibovitz's famous Vanity Fair cover of the pregnant Demi Moore. Lautreamont's "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" is often used as a definition of surrealism. (Was Iremar and Gelse's lovenest with its sewing machine a reference to the Lautremont quote?) So any film dealing with unlikely appositions or oppositions, in the service of a surrealist esthetic, is going to be jolting. Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou was one of the most famous illustrations of jarring contrasts with a nude woman, a bicyclist in a nun's habit and the famous slit eyeball providing the requisite cocktail of humor, sexuality and aggression. But what is missing in Neon Bull is the weaving that characterizes great surrealist works. Mascara's scenes are mini homiletics that end abruptly, with lots of fervor, but little elegance or flow from one to the other. The movie is fragmented and jumpy and after a while you wonder what all the fuss is about. Even the sex, which does succeed in adding one more color to an otherwise crowded palette seems to have a take it or leave it quality. Are we supposed to be shocked, titillated or enthralled and to what end? Even though the point that men and animals have something in common is hammered out in almost every take, the film ultimately seems disjointed, with most of the incipient drama foreshortened and dissipated by film's jumpy and often jagged cutting and pacing.

Notfilm

Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived is the famous line of the l8th century Anglo-Irish subjectivist philosopher Bishop Berkeley that Samuel Beckett disputed in his sole screenplay, Film--in which Buster Keaton played the leading role. Would Beckett have said, "to be perceived is to die?" Film, shot in l964, was commissioned by Beckett’s American publisher Barney Rosset, directed by the renowned theater director Alan Schneider and shot by Boris Kaufman the cinematographer whose older brother was Denis Kaufman aka Dziga Vertov director of the iconic Man With a Movie Camera (1929). All of this is more significant than it even sounds since Beckett shared the protomodernist rapture with celluloid that’s the basic theme of the Dziga Vertov film;  at one point in his career he even applied to study with Eisenstein, while at the same time experiencing a rejection of photography not dissimilar to that of a body rejecting an organ transplant. Notfilm,  which recently completed a run at the Anthology Film Archives, is Ross Lipman’s movie about the making of Film. But Notfilm is less a documentary than a filmic homage to the original, adopting the form of the Beckett work in which the world that is being sought by the camera vanishes before the viewer’s eyes. Partly due to the vicissitudes of age, Rosset and the famous Beckett actress Billie Whitelaw (whose legendary performance in Not I, the film's title references) are interview subjects whose very being seems to dissolve in the course of Lipman’s encounters with them. Replication is a little like what water does to the Wicked Witch; in a famous moment of the original Film Buster Keaton’s vision of himself is met with great horror recalling the dopplegangers in both the Borges version of Dostoevsky’s The Double: A Petersburg Poem, The Other and also the terrified look of the nurse in the famous Odessa steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). The plot of Film is rather simple an Eye (E) is seeking to capture an object (O) and Lipman brilliantly frames the narrative movement of the Beckett work as a chase film, which segues perfectly from the heyday of silent film out of which Keaton emerged (Chaplin had been offered and declined the role). Lipman is a little like an obsessed lover who is competing for attention with the object of his adulation, only to fall short in almost oedipal way. Yet Notfilm is loaded with wonderful perceptions  (“Soundlessness became for Beckett a metaphysical campaign,” Lipman comments at one point) and invaluable archival research.