What's Good for the Goose...?

Ian Ground offers the following précis of Frans de Waal’s thinking in his TLS review (May 26) of the ethologist’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? “We have in effect been Darwinists about the animal kingdom and creationists about the human head.” In discussing the question of animal mind Ground goes on to say “It has remained normal for philosophical accounts of mind and language to be completely ignorant of empirical discoveries about animals. And it is not uncommon for philosophers to deny that any non-linguistic animals ‘really’ have beliefs, are conscious or even perceive the world.” The subject as Ground points out is really anthropomorphism. We fail to understand animal mind since we look at it in human terms and he offers up the example of the equation of “self-consciousness” with “self-recognition”  demonstrated in the “sometimes acrimonious dispute abut whether animals recognize themselves in mirrors and have, it is inferred, something like a sense of themselves.” The most interesting part of this whole debate is the fact that humans not only experience confusion about the relationship with species who occupy a lower rung on the food chain. The failure to detach from a human form of understanding is equally demonstrated in the attempt to understand the person or thing occupying the highest run on that chain, ostensibly God. If there is such a thing as God, it is highly unlikely that he, she or it thinks or acts in any way that is “dreamt of” in our “philosophies.” Not only is it unlikely that God is an authority or parent figure who exists to answer prayers or requests, there is no evidence that the concept of a God is something that can even be envisioned by man, if you consider man’s relation to God similar to animals relation to man ie that of a lower order. Is God the first cause of all being? Even that, in the absence of divine revelation, neither beast nor man will ever likely be in a position to know.

Beatriz at Dinner

Miguel Arteta’s Beatriz at Dinner’s dubious achievement lies in making a real estate tycoon of the Donald Trump variety actually look good. Under the rational that animals and man are both dying anyway, the character of Doug Strutt ( John Lithgow) destroys indigenous communities, along with the ecosystems that support them. His greatest pleasure comes from hunting endangered species, an activity he describes as exceeding sex or drinking. In the movie he shows pictures of himself killing a rhino. He’s the kind of hunter that's the subject of manhunts. His adversary Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a Mexican born healer who treats cancer patients with alternative therapies and should shine out as a force of good by contrast. Instead the script writer Mike White has fashioned her into a murderer of another kind. She storms into the Southern California house of one of her clients, entertaining a foolish crowd of airheads who order drinks like Jack and Coke and Grey Goose with Cran. Her recipe for redemption lies in confronting the venality and materialism of the guests and in a final moment at least contemplating a physical attack on the most prominent symbol of the world she hates—before taking her own life, Virginia Woolf style by choosing a watery death. Hayak’s character actually succeeds in becoming more repugnant than any of those whose consciousnesses she has sought to raise. The disquisition in which the problems of Beatriz car (the car has a breakdown and so does she) become the catalyst for the action is almost as contrived and fastidiously predictable as the film’s self-righteous message. 

To Be or Not to Be

There are many wonderful things about To Be or Not to Be which was recently revived as part of the current Ernst Lubitsch series at Film Forum. Firstly there’s Jack Benny playing the Hamlet of a great Polish actor, a great comic creation named Joseph Tura. And then there’s the famous interruption of  Hamlet’s soliloquy when a British flyer (Robert Stack) attempts to intercept Tura’s wife, Maria (Carole Lombard) in her dressing room. Lombard displays a beauty for which it's almost impossible to establish referents; the choreography of her allure constitutes another aspect of the wonderfulness of the movie. “All the world’s a stage” is the beginning of Jaques famous speech in As You Like It but it constitutes the essence of Lubitsh’s whole project. There’s one moment of reality at the very beginning when the movie released in l942 paints a picture of a thriving Warsaw only days before the Nazi Soviet invasion in September of l939. From then on like a walking defense mechanism To Be or Not to Be becomes a self-conscious succession of stage sets and impersonations in which existence is temporarily relieved of the pain of reality. A theater is turned into a Gestapo headquarters, a Nazi counter intelligence operative named Siletsky (Stanley Ridges) himself is impersonated and the local theater company escapes Poland by disguising themselves as the Fuhrer and his entourage. Throughout To Be or Not to Be, a narcissistic actor's concern about his wife’s infidelity is the comic constant and it embodies the essence of the humor which is to juxtapose triviality with tragedy. "Springtime for Hitler" is another example of a similar farcical impulse and as you watch the Lubitsch classic you marvel at the director’s ability to create laughter amidst horror.

The Ultimate I Thou Relationship

Martin Buber

If you subscribe to the doctrine of eternal recurrence as iterated by Nietzsche and also the mathematician Poincare then at some point in the infinity of parallel universes you would run the risk of encountering a form of your self. Dostoevsky dealt with this in The Double and Borges adopted the idea in his story The Other, with the notion that an older form of the famous author met a more youthful form of himself. The idea of the Doppleganger or alter ego turns out to be a distinct possibility. Identical twins seem to present a version of this since in looking at each other they would enjoy the experience of looking at themselves in the mirror. But even identical twins can develop in entirely different ways. You have to depend on the notion of infinite possibility—the same one that would allow a monkey sitting in front of a typewriter forever to produce Shakespeare’s works—in order to get the right concatenation of DNA and neurons to present an equivalent consciousness to one’s own. But what would this be like? It’s one thing to have something in common with another person and that's a feeling one might experience towards one's “significant other,” but to be confronted with an other who is you? Would it be like the competitive and slightly annoyed feeling you experience when you run into someone who completely identifies with your feelings and is constantly exclaiming “me too,” or “eureka” instead of  “I understand?” Or, would you feel that your life’s work was done and you were finally rescued from the lonely prosecution of being, having found the ideal soul mate, Martin Buber’s ultimate I Thou relationship, in another self?

At Least Someone Cares

Only in the letters column of the venerable of Times Literary Supplement, is there  reassurance that in a turbulent world, there are people who still care about dotting I’s. Civilization as we know it is having a hard time. Barbarian hordes on both sides of the ideological spectrum are literally trampling over monuments (for example in Palmyra and on national park lands of over l00,000 acres). God bless one James Connelly from Hingham, Massachusetts who writes in to correct Lucy Scholes’s “enthusiastic and enjoyable review of Noah Isenberg’s We'll Always Have Casablanca (May 12)…blemished by one error of detail.” What was Scholes’s faux pas? In discussing the Brattle, an art house, near Harvard Square, she had mistakenly referred to it as “Harvard University’s art-house cinema." Connelly goes on to say, “The Brattle is not and has never been part of Harvard University, as she seems to suggest. A minor point, but one worth clarifying.” Though in Scholes’s defense one might aver that her statement was almost metaphoric, one can only applaud Mr. Connelly’s fastidiousness. But here's a doozer. Alan and  Catherine Castree of Fecham, Surrey respond to one Bridget Allen who “enquires (Letters, May l9) whether Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s readings at the Men’s Union of Edinburgh University in l962 were accompanied by readings of translations, as in Oxford, Cambridge and London or whether ‘Baby Yar’ was ‘intelligible only to Russianists.’” In lieu of having to issue a spoiler alert, let’s just say that the Castree’s answer to Bridget Allen’s inquiry is fulsome and almost novelistic culminating in the revelation that the couple have been married for fifty-four years.