Is There a Limit to Crying “Fire?"

The publication of caricatures of Muhammed by Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly, has opened up a new chapter in the unrest that is sweeping the Middle East in the light of the release of the anti-Islam video The Innocence of Muslims.  “In Egypt, where protesters last week attacked the American Embassy, the Muslim Brotherhood said the cartoons were blasphemous and hurtful, and called upon the French judiciary to condemn the newspaper,” the Times reported (“Paper in France Publishes Muhammed Caricatures,” NYT, 9/19/12). “Mahmoud Ghozlan, a spokesman, noted that French law prohibited Holocaust denial. Similar provisions might be made for comments deemed blasphemous under Islam, he suggested.” But the question is, what are the limits of free speech? In the famous Schenck ruling Oliver Wendall Holmes established that there was a limit to free speech and the limit would be if the speech created “clear and present danger." Free speech was limited when it could cause harm such as “shouting fire in a crowded theater.”  French law may prohibit the denial of the holocaust, but there is no such law here in the United States—where a Holocaust denial industry, however small, still exists. If for instance the Muslim Brotherhood wants the Charlie Hebdo caricatures suppressed, are they willing to agree that similarly anti-semitic distortions like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a universally discredited hoax which purported to outline a Jewish plan for the take over of the world, and which is widely available in Middle Eastern countries, should be suppressed? Is it possible to establish the truth and if so, would the line of demarcation be that untruthful statements, like that there was no holocaust should be suppressed while satires, like the Charlie Hebdo caricatures and the Protocols, which are obvious distortions, are allowable even if there intent is to stir up rage? Despite the Schenck ruling American courts have been loathe to argue for any real censorship, due to the many fine points and also due to the degree to which Americans cherish their First Amendment rights (take for example the famous Skokie case, argued before the Supreme Court as Smith v. Collin). Which brings us back to the Schenck ruling. What if there really is a fire? Is the duty of an observer to alert other theatergoers of the danger, even if the ensuing stampede results in greater deaths than if he or she had simply kept their mouths shut? It’s like the old Trolley problem in philosophy. Should the engineer divert the train so that it only hurts or kills one person, when it stayed on its original course, it would have hurt or killed many more?

Joseph Anton

Photo: David Shankbone

The New Yorker has run a section of Salman Rushdie’s, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, which deals with his life on the run (“The Disappeared,” 9/17/12). Rushdie writes his own story in the third person, as if he were describing someone else. But the most affecting moment of The New Yorker excerpt accounts the creation of the pseudonym made up from the first names of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. Salman Rushdie becomes Joseph Anton. “He had spent his life naming fictional characters,” Rushdie’s alter ego muses. “Now, by naming himself, he had turned himself into a sort of fictional character as well.” The words by which he would live come from Conrad too, from what he points out to be “the now unacceptably titled ‘The Nigger of the Narcissus.’” When the protagonist of the novel, James Walt, who is suffering from TB, is “asked by a fellow sailor why he came aboard, knowing that he was unwell,” Rushdie quotes Conrad’s character as answering, “I must live till I die—mustn’t I?” Taking the first name of the writer of Heart of Darkness would indeed seem apropos. The will to live itself is an animal urge, but considering the Faustian bargain Rushdie is forced to make, in which he sacrifices his identity to save his body, he could have iterated Janis Joplin’s famous, “take another little piece of my heart now baby!" The question is, now that the fatwa has been lifted and Rushdie is free to take his identity out of the closet, like an old suit of clothes, what to do with Joseph Anton? Joyce Carol Oates wrote books under the name of Rosamond Smith (her first husband was the Ontario Review editor Ray Smith) and John Banville has written novels under the name Benjamin Black.  Will Joseph Anton aka Salman Rushdie also start to get published?

The Bunny Game

Photograph: Adam Rehmeier

In a piece in the Sunday Times Arts and Leisure Section about how far directors and in this cases actresses will go to create horror (“Testing Horror’s Threshold for Pain,” NYT, 9/14/12), Erik Piepenburg remarks, “Rodleen Getsic—who endured unspeakable acts while shooting the film ‘The Bunny Game’—is no mere scream queen. Ms. Getsic, 37, plays a prostitute abducted by a crazed truck drive (Jeff Renfro), who drugs and strips her and chains her inside his rig. For the rest of the film’s 76-minute running time he sexually assaults her; slaps and spits on her; shaves her head; drags her, in a grotesque rabbit-shaped hood that gives the film its title, on a leash through the desert. There are other indignities as well, but in the film’s most brutal scene the actress is actually branded on her back.” The question is what is the demographic for such a film? Back in the 70’s a movie called Snuff, purported to depict in a no holds barred way the murderous exploits of a gang of real bikers. Snuff targeted necrophiliacs the same way, from a marketing point of view, Pasolini’s Salo, would have been a sure thing for coprophilia oriented focus groups. The conceptual artist Chris Burden literally crucified himself for the sake of art in his piece Trans-fixed (l974) and the penectomy in In the Realm of the Senses could have be blamed for stimulating a copy cat crime if Lorena Bobbitt had been a student of  Japanese film. Was Adam Rehmeier, who directed the The Bunny Game, aiming to appeal to the audience of pimps described in some of Nicholas Kristof’s journalistic exposes, the kind of pimps who think nothing about branding a young girl’s cheek? On the art side are we playing to ever growing followings of self-mutilators like Marina Abramovic, who might have cut off her penis for art, if only she’d had one? 

Einstein on the Beach

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

There must be a God. Otherwise how would Robert Wilson get people to stop what they are doing to do nothing? Robert Wilson is like one of those guys who gets sick of city life and heads upstate where the pace is supposed to be slower. The classic Wilson style is to slow things down. For instance, his Berliner Ensemble production of The Three Penny Opera at BAM last year was Brecht at one quarter tempo. Einstein on the Beach had its first iteration at the Met back in ’76;  we are witnessing the classic Wilson palette in the current BAM revival in which the Philip Glass score is nestled amidst the freeze framed running figures, the innocence of the child mind (in this case a child cantilevered over the action and throwing paper planes), the Ebonics, in the form of a black judge who refers to Kalamazoooooooo, and the endless repetition of jibber jabber that makes sense and nonsense. There’s the famed narration written by Lucinda Childs,  “you know I was in a prematurely air conditioned supermarket and there were all the aisles and all these bathing caps you could buy with Fourth of July plumes on them,” or another that might sound familiar to ‘60’s vets “Harry Harrison from 6 to l0, Ron Lundy 10-2, Dan Ingram…” All of these repeated again and again. Einstein really only appears three times as a white haired violin soloist (played by the renowned violinist Jennifer Koh), as a young man on a train and the child throwing a paper plane, but Wilson’s style is relativity. To get slow motion in film you have to speed things up shooting more than 24 frames per second. On the stage repetition has a similar effect.  By repeating the same actions and language again and again, Wilson creates the impression of stasis (no matter how fast you repeat things or how insistent Glass’s score), in such a way that the audience’s pulse rate comes down. As he does this, the hands of a clock, projected onto one of the scrims, literally start to go backwards. You yawn, you get antsy and start wondering if Wilson and Glass aren’t pied pipers directing a great production of Emperor’s New Clothes, if they hasn’t Tartuffed you, if Wilson's tableaux vivants aren’t really tableau mordants. But you can’t stop thinking about what you’ve seen. The emperor may have lost his clothes, but he’s still finely attired in ideas.

Le quai des brumes

If you want to find the provenance of the final scene of Godard’s A Bout de Soufle (Breathless, l960), in which the dying Jean Paul Belmondo is cradled in the arms of his American femme fatale Jean Seberg, see Marcel Carne’s Le Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows (l938) now playing at the Film Forum. In this case it’s Jean Gabin lying in the arms of Michele Morgan on the cobblestoned streets of Le Havre. Michel Simon, the star of Renoir’s Boudu sauve des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning 1932) plays the role of a murderous lover of beauty. The great Jean Gabin who would later star in the movie version of Zola’s La bête Humaine (1938) is an AWOL soldier and Pierre Brasseur who would play the actor, Lemaitre in Carne’s great masterpiece Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise l945) is the cowardly gangster. Fog, leafless trees, rain slicked highways, and steam ship smoke stacks sounding off urgently as shots are fired all are part of the making of an impressionistic landscape that’s been termed “poetic realism.” In actuality Le quai des brumes might be termed an ode to French iconography. Amongst these are a cigarette perpetually hanging out of the side of Gabin’s mouth, a stray dog, an orphaned girl, an artist who explains his suicidal impulses by saying, “you have to kill someone,” a drunk trying to drink out of wine bottle which encases a miniature boat, a script by Jacques Prevert, a score by Maurice Jaubert and naturally the lone word “Fin,” with which all the great films of the black and white era end. Le quai des brumes, c’est Francais!