Django Unchained

In Django Unchained, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) is a German dentist who has become a bounty hunter. Bounty hunting Schultz explains to Django (Jamie Foxx), the slave he frees, is a little like slavery in that you pay money for flesh. The logic will recall the disquisition on the burger known as the Royale in Pulp Fiction. We right away know that we are in a parallel universe due to the absence of the usual parameters of good and evil that characterize the Western genre. This absence of the categorical imperative, of a Kantian moral imperative, is what many people find so disconcerting about Tarantino in general and this movie in particular. Spike Lee has refused to see it telling VibeTV that to do so would be “disrespectful to my ancestors." “American slavery was not a Sergio Leone spaghetti western,” Lee commented on Twitter. “It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them."  In Django, the camera lingers on blood shooting across sparkling cotton fields, on beer suds combed off of a mug, on the masks of a bunch of proto Klansmen (uproariously fighting over the eyeholes obscuring their vision). The desecrated antebellum houses are a mixture of Tara and Wes Anderson style magical realism. Spielberg’s Lincoln deals with a similar universe, but it’s light years away. Lincoln is about slavery and Django is about film. Schultz, who travels around the West and South, with a big tooth (which is actually a safe) hanging from the top of his wagon is really a stand in for Tarantino (who plays a cameo in the film). Though Schultz speaks English, he speaks in arch tones using words like “caterwauling” and “aficionado” which might as well be another language to the cowboys. Similarly, Tarantino is employing the language of post-modernism, forever estheticizing, in a guiltless and value free way, as he ventures into the hinterlands of cowboy and civil war mythology. One anomalie is the romance between Django and his wife, Broomhilde (Kerry Washington), a German speaking slave. It’s curiously believable and almost moving when Django dynamites Kevin Candle’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) plantation, Candyland, and rides off to freedom with the woman he loves.

A Late Quartet

What is the difference between drama and contrivance? What separates melodrama from the catharsis that occurs in a deeply moving work of film or theater? Yaron Silberman’s A Late Quartet starts off with Christopher Walken quoting T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and explaining to his students how they are related to late Beethoven. Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C minor, Opus 131 as rendered by the Brentano String Quartet, which plays the musical equivalent of the stunt man in the film, adds to the leitmotif of late works of music being rendered by aging musicians. After this the two central plot devices are Parkinson’s disease and flamenco dancing. The Parkinson’s Disease interrupts the career of the quartet’s cellist, Peter (Christopher Walken), and a stunning flamenco dancer (Linaz Charhi) interrupts the marriage between Robert (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), the second violinist, and Juliette (Catharine Keener), the violist—both of these in turn threatening the upcoming season of their group, the Fugue String Quartet. A burgeoning romance between Daniel (Mark Ivanir), the first violinist, and Alexandra (Imogen Poots) Robert and Juliette’s daughter is literally interrupted by her mother who has previously had an affair with Daniel. There is a subtheme of passion and intellect as manifested in the conflict between the studious Daniel and the more romantic Robert, but A Late Quartet is less concerned with violin than heartstrings. One might think that veteran actors would shine some light on the aging musicians they play, but the stellar cast  chokes on the lines of a plodding and predictable script.  It’s another version of the locomotive bearing down on the young girl tied to the tracks. Usually the dramatic music accompanies the action. In A Late Quartet, it’s the other way around.

Dear Abby

Did you know that Pauline Phillips who wrote the Dear Abby column was the twin sister of Esther Lederer aka Ann Landers? Did you know how Abby got her name. “Mrs. Phillips chose her pen name herself, taking Abigail after the prophetress in the Book of Samuel (“Then David said to Abigail ‘Blessed is your advice and blessed are you’”), wrote Margalit Fox in a recent Times obit (“Pauline Phillips, Flinty Advisor to Millions as Dear Abby, Dies at 94," NYT, 1/17/13). The Times obit begins by quoting Dear Abby’s response to a newly wed  named Ed whose wife “showers, brushes her teeth and fixes our breakfast--still in the buff.” “Dear Ed,” the Times quotes Abby as responding, “It’s O.K. with me. But tell her to put on an apron when she’s frying bacon.” Neither Dear Abby, which was syndicated in 1400 papers and had over 100,000,000 readers, nor Ann Landers were the first advice columns, but they were icons of American life, reflecting a genre that was carried on in television programs like Montel Williams, Oprah Winfrey that themselves anticipated reality TV. Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts was the first and most notable of a series of fictions that appropriated the advice column format for literary purposes. The Internet would be a walking Dear Abby and Ann Landers and it’s a wonder that columns like Dear Abby managed to stay alive in a world of social networking where in effect everyone was either writing or responding to their own personalized Abigail Van Buren. Still in all there was great wit, occasional brilliance and quite a bit of solace in Dear Abby’s columns which also anticipated the onslaught of Americans vomiting their guts out on a large scale, in or to purge themselves of their toxins.

Cambodia Journal V: Encore What?

Photograph by Hallie Cohen

Angkor Wat is the biggest religious site in the world, larger even than the Vatican, though it doesn’t command as much tourist traffic. It’s hard to imagine that such an imposing structure, which took between 300,000 to 400,000 laborers and artisans to build, could ever have disappeared from history—though it did. In E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, there’s an episode which takes place in the Marabar caves. The ancient caves themselves catalyze a dramatic turn of events where the separations between East and West and in fact all men are epitomized in whirlwind of confusion and misunderstanding that leads to an accusation of rape. Angkor Wat is a Marabar Caves that is waiting to happen. Thousands of American, British, Japanese and English tourists flock to the site and considering the history of French colonial occupation which took place from 1863-1953, the embattled Khmer kingdom’s role as a pawn in the struggles between Moscow and Peking and the US bombings of Cambodia in the last years of the Vietnam War, it’s amazing that it’s a Unesco world heritage site rather than another embattled holy territory like say Jerusalem. It’s also spawned a virtually industry of guides which is a welcome addition to an impoverished country’s GNP. There are still bullet holes on some of the pillars as a memento of war. But in another sense, what’s the big deal all about? Angkor Wat, encore of what you might ask? It’s too big too fail; it was one of the few images of the past that Pol Pot not only didn’t set out to destroy, but which he exploited for his new Cambodia. One of the seven wonders of the world, it sucks up the cries of its varying constituencies. Perhaps like a guerilla fighter it will camouflage itself and vanish back into the jungle in which it was once buried, at the threat of the next Armageddon.