Woody Allen was a prolific filmmaker who shared with two other prolific filmmakers, Billy Wilder and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a preference for character and plot over spectacle, which is what most American directors do instead, even though through his career he was particularly good at filming places such as New York City, Paris and Barcelona. What stands out about all three of these directors is that they were adept at tussling with moral dilemmas, Wilder was the most cynical of the three, as when he dealt with the fine points of the moral ambiguities to be found in “The Apartment”. Sure, Fred MacMurray was a louse, but was the Shirley Maclaine character any better even if Jack Lemon fell for her? Or was that just another side of his weakness as a human being? Fassbinder gives away that his movie “World on a Wire” is about the nature of identity in that most of the people at a party at the beginning of the movie seem like mannikins. So the question is what is a mannikin and what is a human being. “Crimes and Misdemeanors”, which is one of Woody Allen’s most memorable films, has a message, as do many of them. In this case, it is not the claim that there is no justice, which is what some critics at the time of the release of the film in 1989 said was the case. The thesis of the movie is that people can be forgiven for their crimes but are never forgiven for their misdemeanors. That is a morality far harsher than any other I know of, and is very carefully arrived at and so, I would suggest, Allen makes a contribution to thought far greater than film directors are usually credited with, however much Allen himself has many times said he only retails what he has read in one book or another during his career of self-education.
Read MoreThe Future of the Presidency
Gerald Ford, in his first speech in office, said that we were over our “national nightmare”. What followed from it were a series of measures to bring some control over the federal bureaucracy so that a future President could not manipulate it in the ways Nixon had. These included the Inspectors General offices in the various cabinet departments, those same offices which President Trump has vacated so that he can replace the career officials with his own supporters. What will happen when the present national nightmare is ended and Joe Biden becomes President, which assumes that state election officials will conduct honest elections and that the Russians will not very significantly influence the campaign or its results? The larger question is a very hard one to answer.
Read MoreWedding Announcements
A good way to see that social class is alive and well in the United States is to consult the wedding announcements in the Weekend Style Section of the New York Times. This is not what most sociologists would do. That is because those announcements are not a random sample of anything and, with the exception of the piece about the featured couple, largely contain only the information selected for presentation by the people making the announcements. Sociologists (and, nowadays, economists have entered this discussion) prefer to look at the various determinants of social class such as prior family wealth, education, and income to predict whether people are more likely over the generations or within a career to improve their chances of having power, prestige or position or additional wealth and income. But a consideration of what the Times chooses to notice about the lives of people tells more about how people make choices which have to do with social class or, more to the point, what beds they chose to sleep in for the long run.
Read MoreHeroism
Heroism or courage is usually thought of as a personality attribute. People are either brave or they are not when they are called on to be so, which means a hero is the opposite of the normal person who could not or would not rise to the circumstances. Achilles was brave; Audie Murphy and Sergeant York were brave; Freud was brave, in an extended sense of the term, because he was willing to challenge the conventional thoughts of his time in a major way that earned him derision at best and a suspicion that this man was preoccupied with things better left alone. Part of his success was to legitimize the connection between sex and ordinary feeling as a fit subject for communication. Most of us just keep our secrets.
There is another way to look at heroism or courage. It is to emphasize the situation rather than the person. Certain situations require a person to take an action that will be thought brave or courageous; to act otherwise is cowardly rather than ordinary. The soldier who is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for throwing himself on a grenade to spare his comrades is brave, though, depending on the details of the circumstances, if he had acted otherwise so as to save himself when that would only have meant that all the people in his foxhole would have died, would have made him a coward, and we do not know whether there was a way he might have hunkered down and saved only himself and still have been considered honorable.
Read MoreWalter Benjamin
Literary criticism in the Thirties had a number of branches. Edmund Wilson published “Axel’s Castle” in 1931. It was a book that compared Imagist poetry to the poetry that came before. It was followed in 1941 by “The Wound and the Bow”, which was a Freudian interpretation of the Modernist literature of his time, and in 1943 he published “To the Finland Station”, which was an assessment of Marxist writers. Wilson was less driven by ideology than by the critical project itself, which was to get the hang of what an author was saying, whatever was the subject matter or the relevant theory. William Empson, on the other hand, had a consistent point of view. He published “Seven Types of Ambiguity” in 1930 and “Some Versions of Pastoral” in 1935. In the first book, he carefully took apart the idea of simile and metaphor so as to establish the resources language provided to a writer. In the second book, he reduced literature to its conventionalized genres, so that the Gothic romance was a form of the pastoral, a form that stretched back to Vergil and beyond. Literary language and literary form were what made literature work. Walter Benjamin, for his part, had a Marxist interpretation of literature that was perhaps best realized in his “The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, published in 1936. This last has remained remarkably influential. Both Susan Sontag and Rosalind Krauss took it seriously as the way to understand art. I want to look at what Benjamin proposes in this very short book of his, why I think it is so imperfect, and compare it to other works of aesthetics which seem to me to get the relation between art and modernity more correctly.
Read MoreNuclear Amnesia
The coronavirus pandemic is pretty bad as catastrophes go. It has killed more people in the United States than the number of U. S. soldiers killed in World War I. It has had a heavy economic impact and we do not know how quickly the country will recover from the economic downturn. It has had a psychological impact in that people are asked to stay home and they are rebelling against that because it disrupts their lives too much, whatever may be the dangers of contagion. It leaves everybody with the feeling of how vulnerable we are to the almost invisible world of microbes. And the situation is getting worse rather than better. What if this turns into a general panic, with people roving the streets to attack who knows what? I have been told that Periclean Athens survived a plague and life went back to normal. I am not so sure that will happen this time around. The Black Plague changed the European economy and may have been responsible for the end of feudalism.
But this pandemic, I would insist, has not been the scariest time in the past hundred years, dating back to the last pandemic, the so-called “Spanish Flu”, which was, in fact, of American origins. That “honor” is to be reserved for the Cold War which was waged between the United States and the Soviet Union from, let us say, the time of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, which all but declared it, the President of the United States sitting behind Churchill at the time, to 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and Reagan had arrived a few years before at what amounted to a Soviet surrender arrangement with Gorbachev, the details of which have not yet been made public. During that 43 year long war, the United States also lost as many soldiers as it had in World War I, if you add together Vietnam and Korea, two wars in which the United States and its allies engaged with Soviet or Communist proxies, and also add in the dead among our allies that resulted from other proxy wars in Africa and South America (remember Chile? Remember the Bay of Pigs?). Worse than that, during the Cold War. we were under the threat of most of us dying as a result of a nuclear exchange in which both sides would destroy one another within thirty minutes of launching. “The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” was posting how close we were to midnight on its monthly cover and, according to its editors, we came within one minute of midnight. The talk was of “Better Red than Dead” and children were taught to hide under their desks to avoid bomb blast and many of us who were children at the beginning of the Cold War dreamed about atomic attacks and their aftermath.
Read MoreReligious Schools
The gimmick behind most Supreme Court decisions is to find a set of circumstances that allows the Court to kick a can down the road rather than to settle a large outstanding issue even if the Court does shift slightly the balance between obdurate public interests. I would call this doctrine of constitutional interpretation “consequentialism” because the Court becomes legitimately, in its own lights, concerned with the consequences of its decisions more than it is with the particular legal reasoning it engages in. So much for “textualism” or “originalism” or even “moral principle” as serving as the basis of Supreme Court decisions. The exceptions to consequentialism are very rare and they are often cited. Brown v. Board of Education was understood as a departure from consequentialism but understood as necessary because to uphold Jim Crow in schools was simply beyond the pale after the Second World War, and even Roe v. Wade, a notable non-consequentialist decision, hedged its bets by insisting that women had to consult their doctors before having an abortion, which is something that has now been superceded so that it is purely the woman’s decision whether she should have an abortion. The doctor doesn’t get to say whether it is a wise decision.
Read MoreNational Styles of Moviemaking
National styles in movie making predominated during the Silent Era. You could tell the nation in which a movie was made without referring to the opening titles or the street signs. Themes important to the culture of each nation accompanied the distinctive craftsmanship. The important point is that those styles and themes have not changed in the decades since. That is worth remarking on, given that so much is made of how film has become different from what it was because of technological innovation and the importance of the Hollywood-raised dollar. Well, just as there are still national styles in novels, even though novels are translated into at least the major world languages, there are still national styles in films.
Read MoreMonuments and Politics
This is going to be a long hot summer. The coronavirus is not going away and there is no plan to deal with it until Joe Biden, should he be elected, puts one in place, the current President having no plan other than denial. The public protests that started with the death of George Floyd seem not to be abating, though they eventually and inevitably will, with nothing to show for it, because the Republicans think that they can wait the protesters out, which is the way they handled protests against mass shootings, and so no legislation will get passed to decrease police brutality until Joe Biden gets elected with a Congress that will support him. The economy may rebound a bit, as is indicated by all the traffic on the roads in New York City, people commuting to their jobs and probably avoiding mass transit as a way to do that. But those who are running out of money, which means workers and restaurants and those who own the office buildings where the businesses have switched over to telecommuting, suggests that the road to economic recovery is very rocky and likely to be long, at least until Joe Biden comes up with a plan on how to develop a new economy for post epidemic times, including how to revamp research and forecasting so that we are not caught so badly when the next pandemic rolls around. Meanwhile, what do we do until the election rolls around and we get to see if that is conducted fairly so that the winner can seem legitimate? That is a problem we have never had before, given that elections were conducted fairly in the midst of a Civil War and during the Second World War.
Read MoreSargent's Late Style
John Singer Sargent earned for himself fame and fortune as a painter of realistic portraits of society ladies adorned in fashionable and elaborate dress and carefully posed so that the viewer of the painting knew that they were posed. After that period, which covered about the last two decades of the Nineteenth Century, and after which time Sargent was known as a painter of the previous generation, he tried to reinvent his style, however much, when he went back to doing an occasional portrait, he returned to his original realistic style. The new style was to be a take on Impressionism, and it did not catch on, however much he worked at it. Now, there are other great painters who are able to develop alternative styles that are impressive, Picasso and Matisse among them, Picasso, in fact, inventing a new style every decade of his career, but that was not to be for Sargent, and so his efforts in that direction draw attention to how difficult it is to think up a new way of seeing especially after having so thoroughly mastered a previous one.
Read MoreGold Diggers
There were musicals both in movies and on Broadway that told tales of social significance before the song “Sing Me a Song of Social Significance” appeared in 1937 in the Broadway musical “Pins and Needles”. They go back, of course, to Kern and Hammerstein’s “Showboat” and even King Vidor’s silent movie, “Hallalujah!”, a film that takes the form of a musical of the sort that will be discussed here as much as it also embellished the form of the documentary. There are images of stooping field hands interspersed with images of rousing Church choirs that leave you asking which one of these is the true life of Negroes in the South. Forget about Gershwin’s “Of Thee I Sing” whose relation to politics is to the clichés told about politicians, and so is somewhat like Kaufman and Hart’s “Merton of the Movies”, which is a satire on the conventions of Hollywood as they are known from what were then the already well established conventionalized portrayals of Hollywood. First rate political satire such as is found in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” or in “Primary Colors” does not readily yield itself to the musical form because its métier is the rapture caused by political rhetoric, which has rhythms all its own.
Read MoreTrue Lies
Immanuel Kant is a philosopher who is easily parodied as the one who thought people should tell the truth in all circumstances, no matter what, because only in that way would a person be treating himself and those he was talking to as full human beings. You should even reveal the whereabouts of a friend to the murderer who comes to your door asking where your friend is. Kant had obviously never heard of the Gestapo.
Not so fast. Kant's depiction of moral life makes sense if we compare his description of true lies—lies that are truly lies—with something else that is closely akin to true lies: white lies, the kinds of things people do all the time and which are regarded as necessary evasions that help move life along without doing great damage to our stature as moral beings. Consider the following examples of white lies that are drawn not from fiction but from social transactions in which I was myself involved.
Read MorePop Art Jokes
Andy Warhol wasn’t the only artist of the mid Twentieth Century who broke out of the era of Abstract Expressionism, which had lasted, after all, for only about twenty years, by painting objects that were found all around us in the consumerist culture recognized by the thinkers of the time and in ways that led to ready duplication by all the technology of the mechanical revolution. It was just that Warhol was expert at merchandising himself, which was perfectly appropriate a way to unify production with the meaning of his product, though one can claim that all artists, back to those recorded in Vasari, were up to the same task of projecting their names and reputations and in competition with one another for fame and money. Here are three other pop artists worth notice and from whose works we can assess the purely artistic strengths and shortcomings of their movement.
Read MoreOld and New Protests
Rather than think of the current protests in isolation, compare them to the protest that went on during the Sixties. There was, then, much more damage to property, and a far greater impact on social structure. This time the protests are aimed at revising police policies so that they are less brutal without requiring any large scale change in the way society is ordered. Back in the Sixties, demonstrations that led to the burning down of large parts of downtowns, usually those inhabited by African Americans, and that required significant presence of the National Guard in a number of states for a number of weeks, was part of the movement to change American society as a whole so that its Black citizens would no longer be members of an inferior caste but understood as an ethnic group like any other ethnic group in American society. The stakes were bigger and the outcomes more significant. It is a shame that sixty years later, it is that same ethnic group that is at the forefront of national concern, portrayed by some as victims or heroes and by others as troublemakers. That we have not moved further on in black-white relations shows just how much slavery was our original sin. America has not yet found a way to put race behind it.
Read MoreThe Importance of Lady Windermere's Fan
What might seem a failure of plot structure in Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan” is, in fact, a key to understanding the play. There are numerous occasions on which the characters in the know are about to break the truth of Lady Windermere’s birth to her so that she will put a stop to some very self-destructive behavior. She is about to go off with a man not her husband because she thinks her husband has been unfaithful to her with a woman who is in fact her mother and who has been supported by Lord Windermere so that she can find herself a suitable match and so put an end to her years of wandering about the Continent as a fallen woman who had apparently turned to her wiles as the way to support herself.
Read MoreDefunding the Police
Defunding the police is a policy initiative that has arisen in recent days perhaps because of the exuberance of protesters who see that the protests have sustained for a while now and so want to implement something that will really change the lives of people in their communities as well as settle old grievances held in their communities. So the idea of funding new programs that aren’t all that new is yoked with taking revenge on the institutional oppressors, the police, by hitting them where they can be hurt, in their funding. But this is a very bad policy initiative. It does not stand up to scrutiny and so Joe Biden was correct to deny any interest in it right away and not just because Trump wanted to pin the policy on him.
Read MoreOpinions on the Current Demonstrations
Opinion is a burden. If I have an opinion about something, whether a Presidential candidate, or when is the right time to reopen the economy, or whether the protesters in the street are correct even though looting is going on under the cover of protest, then I am responsible for saying why that is plausible to me or even just feel the emotion that goes along with the opinion and so attest to the validity of that insight even if I cannot explain it. Time can tell whether my opinion was correct or not and so an opinion is a forecast, as when one says bad people receive their just deserts, even if proof or refutation is never unambiguous. I am rooting for the future to be one way or another, to support or negate my opinion, and so I am always, as an opinionator, making a gamble on the future and that can render me tense, because I could be wrong about the future, while to be liberated from opinion means that I do not have to worry about the future. I can just watch it play out, proceed as it will, me a bystander rather than a participant. Being without opinions is therefore to no longer carry everywhere Kant’s burden of responsibility, life one set of obligations after another, even if there are also judgments of taste that people also make, but those have no cost, in that whether you prefer Schiller to Lessing makes no difference unless you mix with a set of people who think taste has a moral gravity. Rather, to be without opinion is to leave to history and, more directly, the knowledge of experts, how to proceed from here. They will know when to open up the economy if anyone knows because it is a technical matter rather than a moral one or open to everyday reason, and the unfolding statistics will tell if they are wrong or right. As a citizen, I am entitled to my opinions, but they are relevant only at election time or when a profound change of group opinion takes place, as happens when people may, now, at this moment, come to think that occasional instances of police brutality are not to be swept aside but are perhaps part of the continued subjugation of black people.
Read MoreThe Essential Forces
What is the fundamental process that governs social or physical existence? This is a very old sounding question in that the Greeks wondered which of the four elements predominated in the makeup of the world. Was it air, fire, earth or wind? And, later on in the ancient world, there was a search for the greatest good, the most perfect emotion. Was it stoicism or cynicism or pleasure? Far from being put away, this same question crops up in modern thought. When I was a graduate student, people discussed whether Hobbes had found out the true secret of social life, that the fundamental force was violence; that was what guaranteed social order and so economic forces and other social forces paled in comparison with the ability of violence to dominate the scene. Hobbes had discovered not invented a solution, never mind that Hobbes thought reason rather than violence governed human interaction or that violence is useful under certain conditions but that under other circumstances money and prestige are more important motivators. People die for their country for a reason and arms merchants are motivated by greed. Violence is useful only when there is anarchy in the air or when there is foreign invasion or there is a crime of passion.
Read MoreThe Current Riots
When the worst riots since those of the Sixties broke out only a week ago, I thought that I was ahead of the curve by opineing to friends that outside agitators were behind them. However much I dislike conspiracy theories, in that I did not think either the left or the right had brought down JFK, even though there did seem some money behind James Earl Ray, the assassin of MLK, so that he could temporarily avoid capture, this time the pattern seemed to be clear. In many cities across the country with not enough time for the rioting to mushroom beyond Minneapolis, there were peaceful demonstrations in the daytime and evening followed by arson and looting in the night by people who were unknown to the local community and who did not identify themselves. That has since become the standard explanation provided by the media, whose interviews of peaceful protestors tell them the arsonists and looters are shadowy figures. I speculate that they are leftists or rightists or agent provocateurs employed by the Russians, who mean us no good and are availing themselves of a tactic well known to the Czarist regime and afterwards. This theory has been picked up by the Trump administration, though they are careful to accuse only the left wing Antifa and not white nationalists of being the perpetrators.
Read MoreHammett's Thugs
Dashell Hammett and Lillian Hellman were known to have kept their Stalinist sympathies long after such sentiments were no longer in fashion, which is close to what Hellman said in her defense during her appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hellman’s Stalinism is clear in her writing. Her “Watch on the Rhine”, which gained fame for its prematurely anti-Fascist sympathies, to adapt another phrase that had weight in its time, should also be remembered for its major plot device: an ostensibly all American family becomes involved in a plot to murder a Nazi envoy, despite the fact that committing political murder is illegal in the United States, as well as a violation of the spirit of the national political culture, even if the play provides prudent motives for doing so. Hellman approves of thuggery as sometimes moral. It is a necessary means to a good end: participating on the right side of a world wide war that at the time happened to be undeclared. By that reasoning, anti-Communists would have been in their rights, some fifteen years later, to kill her. Politics may go in and out of fashion, but American political principles, I like to think, are for the long run. It is better for Jews and Arabs to live together in peace in Brooklyn than to carry over to here the conflicts that inflame some other region of the world.
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