Movie: Frankenstein (1931)

Trailer to Frankenstein

Our lazy afternoon viewing was James Whale's 1931 "horror classic." What makes a movie a "classic?" Innovative camera work, mainly. Frankenstein has some truly incredible visual offerings: burying a man out in a creepy graveyard, complete with angel of death. A windmill out on a precipice. Arcs of electricity in a mad scientist's lab. The appearance of the monster. A scene in which the monster kills a little girl.

But perhaps the deepest lesson to get from watching Frankenstein, or any "classic" movie, is about maintaining your love of craft in a world that best appreciates convention. There are horrible character actors here: the guy playing Dr. Frankenstein's dad is just terrible, and even Boris Karloff's own performance is, for me, overrated. The story has been mangled twice over since "Mrs. Percy Shelley" (yes, that's what it says in the opening credits!), leaving us with a version in which Frankenstein's murderous nature can be explained by installation of the wrong brain, and both Dr. Frankenstein and his fiancée Elizabeth live to the end, presumably happily ever after. The evidence is clear: Hollywood made a blockbuster out of the Frankenstein story, and they very likely distorted Whale's directorial vision as well. But Whale is a professional, which means here that he fills the picture with just the conventions the audience wants, with just a touch here and there of features that might possibly challenge the viewer (Frankenstein says he knows what it means "to be God," little girl murder, Swiss wedding dances). He didn't abandon his project because he had to compromise on his vision. That's certainly a lesson for the young person.

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The Days of Salty Reading

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

One day in the street, rattling off some story or other, she stopped and looked up at him, surprised, and said “I want to know everything!”

I respect very much the intentions of this book: to re-invent a wide range of historical readings, to activate the historical imagination, to envision a world where Islam might not seem attached at the hip to violence, intolerance and authoritarianism, and to argue for the human experience as a slow, blundering evolution towards higher moral and ethical consciousness. Kim Stanley Robinson aims for all of these lofty goals, and he aims to frame them all as hit adventure stories as well, starring a common cast of character-types as they live, die, and return to earth again as different people in different places.For me, though, a truly laughable writing style (seriously, lines like “One night can change the world” would make good drinking games for alcoholics of taste) makes it impossible to really enjoy Robinson. I say this with great sympathy, because I can all too well picture my efforts at story leading to such a train wreck. I leave two notes here in case I ever return to this book (thanks to AB for presenting me with a copy), to measure whether my taste will change or whether I might ever learn more from the book about the art of storytelling.
1. Kim Stanley Robinson doesn’t understand tension, conflict and crisis. Book One of this 10 book monstrosity doesn’t have a clear protagonist. Bold Bardash, an incarnation of the Monkey figure, is allegedly the protagonist, but Robinson all too often conflates his third-person omnipotent narrator voice with Bold’s own voice, with the result that Bold only reacts to circumstance, and never seems to be making a decision that determines himself as a character.On the other hand, the character with a clear motivation and clear values is Kyu, the little African boy whose penis and testicles are severed in one clean slice by the Chinese sailor-eunuch acting as first mate to Zheng He. Why isn’t Kyu the protagonist? The buddy drama that this first book enacts asks us to care about Kyu a lot, but assumes we will identify with Bold as protagonist. The result is a crippled story, and I would submit that it effectively has no climax, because neither character is forced to make a crisis decision to conclude the story.2. Kim Stanley Robinson can’t write sentences. I submit a few examples:

A confused and often angry little girl, in fact, although clever in manipulating others, quick to caress or to yell, and very beautiful.Shaking his head at Bahram’s drunkenness, Khalid began going through the box, whistling and chirping.Strange the people who surrounded us in this life.The emperor was inclined to avenge this unprovoked assault (if you did not count the two unsuccessful attacks on Nippon made by Kublai Khan), and to remove the danger of any future problem arising from Nippon, by subjugating it to Chinese suzerainty.

KSR’s defense to both of the defects I point out would probably be that he is working with very large blocks of data to shape a ten-act epic, what one effusive newspaper critic calls “a meditation on history and humanism.” I would respectfully (okay, not too respectfully) disagree with this implied distinction between form and content. I think the banality of story in these ten books figures a deeper banality of message, which is something like, “We humans can learn to live with each other eventually, but it’s going to be painful.” Gee, thanks. Next!

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Pleasure Reading: Memoirs of Hadrian

Antinous, from the statue at Eleusis

Yourcenar, Marguerite. Memoirs of Hadrian. Translated by Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar. New York: Farrar Straus and Young, 1954. The Emperor Hadrian is near his death, about 138 AD, and decides to write the story of his life, how he became emperor, and the great (queer, pederastic) love affair of his middle age (which in the ancient world counted old age; Hadrian died at 60).

I just finished this book and was mightily impressed. I can't help but compare it to a couple of volumes of American fantasy genre lit (Sir Apropos of Nothing comes to mind) and this comparison makes the French historicist Yourcenar seem even more powerful -- almost god like in her ability to weave fantasy. To readers and writers like Peter David: here is what I mean when I say I want to read fantasy.



First, Yourcenar's imagination channels the voice and persona of man unlike any a modern reader has ever met, but which must be familiar to any who study the classics: a ruler and egoist of the ancient world. This ruler persona sketches in adventures in a world of battles, political intrigue and affairs of the heart and we gladly travel along so that we can imagine ourselves taking on great power, or accepting the pains and pleasures of great passion. More importantly, we learn something of the layers and masks of any powerful ruler, of the many kinds connections he forms with other people, and we sense that a certain richness immanent in his identity is after all not that different in any modern identity:

Different persons ruled in me in turn, though no one of them for long; each fallen tyrant was quick to regain power. Thus have I played host successively to the meticulous officer, fanatic in discipline, but gaily sharing with his men the privations of war; to the melancholy dreamer intent on the gods; the lover ready to risk all for a moment's rapture; the haughty young lieutenant retiring to his tent to study his maps by lamplight, making clear to his friends his disdain for the way the world goes; and finally the future statesman. But let us not forget, either, the base opportunist who in fear of displeasing succumbed to drunkenness at the emperor's table; the young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark; the soldier exercising with mechanical precision his vile gladiatorial trade. And we should include also that vacant figure, nameless and unplaced in history, though as much myself as all the others, the simple toy of circumstance, no more and no less than a body, lying on a camp bed, distracted by an aroma, aroused by a breath of wind, vaguely attentive to some external hum of a bee. But little by little a newcomer was taking hold, a stage director and manager. I was beginning to know the names of my actors, and could arrange plausible entrances for them, or exits; I cut short superfluous lines, and came gradually to avoid the most obvious effects. Last, I learned not to indulge too much in monologue. An gradually, in turn, my actions were forming me.

Here the trappings of fantasy literature -- "the privations of war," for example -- are forged in tandem with a more universal experience of maturing. The vision of a "young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark" brings a wince and a smile to this reader, who sees in the line someone very much like himself, observant and interrogating by mind but nevertheless and after all limited by self-absorption in the end. This is meta-fantasy: the emperor figure in the fantasy is also admittedly a fantast, and points the way for the reader to realize that we are all always already pretenders.

Of course, lurking behind all this is Yourcenar the researcher and reader, a personality one of my teachers described as "creepy." I think the novel is at its weakest when this persona shines through with its eccentric and vaguely elitist tastes, and for me at least this seemed to happen more often in later passages of the novel:

...among the ancient poets Antimachus especially won me: I liked his rich but abstruse style, his ample though highly concentrated phrases, like great bronze cups filled with a heavy wine. I preferred his account of Jasno's expedition to the more romantic Argonautica by Apollonius: Antimachus understood better the mystery of voyages and horizons, and how ephemeral a shadow man throws on this abiding earth.

As the last sentence indicates, this is part of a longer passage describing the progress of Hadrian's mourning, but too often Yourcenar is not able to achieve the pathos either of grief or of true love -- both fold back into artfully fluffed-up reading notes that reveal nothing to me so much as the writing subject ensconced for emotional and social reasons behind the covers of old books. This is also revealed in scene after scene that should be charged with overt eroticism, but ends up a sketch completed with only to broad a brush. The best passage describing Hadrian's lover Antinuous seemed a great start:

If I have said nothing yet of a beauty so apparent it is not merely because of the reticence of a man too completely conquered. But the faces which we try so desperately to recall escape us: it is only for a moment ... I see a head bending under its dark mass of hair, eyes which seemed slanting, so long were the lids, a young face broadly formed, as if for repose. This tender body varied all the time, like a plant, and some of its alterations were those of growth. The boy changed; he grew tall. A week of indolence sufficed to soften him completely; a single afternoon at the hunt made the young athlete firm again, and fleet; an hour's sun would turn him from jasmine to the color of honey. The boyish limbs lengthened out; the face lost its delicate childish round and hollowed slightly under the high cheekbones; the full chest of the young runner took on the smooth, gleaming curves of a Bacchante's breast; the brooding lips bespoke a bitter ardor, a sad satiety. In truth this visage changed as if I had molded it night and day.

Still, we can tell from the opening of the passage that our author does not really want to dabble to much in erotica (that job of examining the scenario with a stronger magnifying glass perhaps falls to another writer!), and this impressionist sketch really is just as much of boy beauty as we ever get to see. More often it comes in tiny fragments weighted with bland words like "beauty."


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Pleasure Reading: The Manuscript Found at Saragossa

This map of Spain shows the mountain ranges off, making it convenient as I read this amazing book

My notes on the book so far.

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No Self in the Guts

One night Chu got tipsy and went to bed first, leaving the Judge drinking by himself. In his drunken sleep he seemed to feel a pain in his stomach, and waking up he saw that the Judge, who was standing by the side of the bed, had opened him, and was carefully arranging his inside.

“What harm have I done you,” cried Chu, “that you should thus seek to destroy me?”

“Don’t be afraid,” replied the Judge, laughing; “I am only providing you with a more intelligent heart.”

He then quietly put back Chu’s viscera, and closed up the opening, securing it with a bandage tied tightly round his waist. There was no blood on the bed, and all Chu felt was a slight numbness in his inside.

From "Judge Lu" by Pu Songling, translated by Herbert Giles (read it at GoogleBooks). Strange medical conditions and medical practices are a major theme in Pu Songling's stories of the fantastic; a recent post on by an LJ friend on their medical conditions reminded me once again of this. I think I might actually use "Judge Lu" in my class next fall, because it can start a dialogue about where the "self" resides -- is it in the body, and if so what region of the body. This guy gets a new heart and so becomes smarter, and later on Judge Lu helps him get a new head for his wife. But unlike in, say, The Eye, neither husband nor wife get any of the "self"-baggage that their new body parts might have brought from their old owners. This story and this idea is apparently still active enough to deserve mention in a 2006 article in a Chinese technology magazine that debunked the idea that someday we will have "head transplants." (I found a couple of Chinese television versions of the story as well; this one looks good.)
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The Monster Lecture

Ahhhh!

A good theme deserves a good teacher

My advisor P. is always a great lecturer, a real master of the engaging, conversational style that was common at Harvard but rarer here at U of M. I really have learned a lot from watching him. Today he was in particularly good form with a totally new lecture on yokai culture in Japan. The term yokai refers to monsters like ghoulish women or demons, but also fears, like the fear of being watched. P. becomes a sort of tour guide through this world, and I was really impressed that he was able to introduce contemporary scholarship (he acknowledges his debt to the new book Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai by Michael Dylan Foster), cultural practices, art and artists from Edo, Meiji and modern Japan, and even concluding on the topic of urban legends. His lecture really worked because it showed that the theme of yokai shows up again and again in Japanese history for reasons that are uniquely Japanese, although not at all alien or difficult to understand once they are explained clearly. Most importantly, I really felt that P. gets across the important point that we are always constructing ourselves and our history at the same time.

The morass of culture

Take the "slit-mouth woman" (Kuchisake-onna 口裂け女), for example. Lots of people firmly believe that this is a yokai from ancient Japan, but it seems more likely to have been a uniquely modern urban legend, sort of like the Donkey Lady or the Candy Man. But the nostalgic and playful artist Shigeru Mizuki has rendered the story of the slit-mouth woman (she kills kids, basically) into his own manga and sculpture and so on, lending credibility to the idea that the creature really does come out of Japanese history. I just think this is the most sophisticated way of looking at culture through art and literature that we have today, and it's a real treat to see P. deliver the message to undergrads. Examine his powerpoint presentation (read-only; opens in Google docs) if you wish; I don't think he would mind.
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Fantastic Film

A revised draft of my AAS paper (links to a Word ".docx" file) is done. In other news:

Cave of Silken Web (1967)

This was our last film before spring break in the "fantastic" class. This is just good campy, fun from 1960s Hong Kong. I think it manages to bring to mind both Peking opera and the original Batman series at the same time. This sort of makes sense when you realize that all the percussion sounds are doing basically the same thing as "BLAM! BING! BOING!"
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Black Dossier: I heart Reading

Moore, Alan and Kevin O'Neill and others. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. La Jolla, CA: America's Best Comics, 2008.

Overall, Black Dossier was a disappointment. I like the idea of a syncretic history of the world through fantastic stories and myths, but unfortunately none of the characters are particularly interesting. Lacking a Batman or other properly mysterious and angsty hero or villain, Black Dossier builds a nice house but doesn't rent it out to anyone.

That said, I did sort of enjoy trying to identify all of the references. In this panel, for example, we have a major figure in ancient Chinese mythology having some fantastic same-sex lovin' with Orlando, a popular figure among historically-minded Western gender-wonks.

So that panel's fun. And I must admit, I don't know if Alan Moore combined the Queen Mother myth with the later trope of the sexual-vampire-witch, or if there is some story about that in the tradition that he read somewhere. Either way, he is definitely a genuine lover of art and literature, and if that comes across to readers, he's still earning his keep.

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