I WOULD RATHER NOT GO BACK TO THE OLD HOUSE: I have a post at the spoilerous blog, comparing the endings of Silent House and Veronica Mars season one.

"THE GUILTY CAN FORGIVE--THE INNOCENT TAKE REVENGE!" Before the first movie in the National Gallery of Art's Robert Bresson series started, we were warned that it was uncharacteristically melodramatic. Maybe that's why I liked it so much! I find Bresson's "mature" style emotionally battened-down to the point of catatonia, and it's really hard for me to get on board with his work, whereas in the early movie Les Anges du Péché (The Angels of Sin--!!!) I was totally engaged and found the characters and their dilemmas really compelling.

The movie takes place in a convent of nuns whose special charism is ministry to women in prison. Many of the nuns are ex-cons themselves. There's fierce Mother St. John, a hard-bitten but deeply humble lady who reserves her tenderness for her cat; well-meaning Anne-Marie, a daughter of privilege with all the self-involved stupidity privilege can breed, but also with a sort of springtime sunniness of nature which evokes empathy even as you want to shake her; Therese, a convict to whom Anne-Marie feels a special and intense pull; and the Mother Superior, working to exercise leadership in a hothouse world of gossip and point-scoring disguised as spiritual direction.

Therese, wrongfully convicted of a crime committed by her lover, speaks the line I used as the post title (which is a better way of describing my problem with Silent Hill, as well!), and the treatment of forgiveness in the movie is rich and insightful. The nuns' humility, pride, complicity, sincerity all come through clearly. The movie has a few noir touches or sequences but is mostly straightforward drama. If you like Dostoevsky and also nuns, you should give this a spin.

DEVELOPING CONFLICTS: Some quick thoughts about Time Stands Still, at the Studio Theater through 2/12.

The play is about a war photographer and her reporter boyfriend; when she's almost killed on the job, they retreat to their Brooklyn apartment and try to figure out how to move forward with their lives. There are only two supporting characters, Richard the somewhat plastic editor and his new fiancee Mandy the cliched, saccharine Americaness. (After one scene with Mandy I found myself thinking, "Wait, but I thought this play was written by a woman?" It wasn't.)

There are a lot of problems with this play. It can be cheap and predictable (of course the photographer's much-divorced, horrible father is a conservative Christian! of course Mandy is much younger than Richard!) and the big-idea lines are often pat. The shifts in audience identification are what you might expect: Mandy gets her moments, etc. The actual war-zone descriptions are a bit tinny--I wasn't super surprised to find out after the show, from the playwright bio in the program, that David Margulies wrote it because he was troubled by his life in Connecticut rather than because he was troubled by his many trips to Iraq, you know?

That said, the play's heart is clearly in its portrayal of "emerging adulthood," anchorless people who are no longer as young as they act, people to whom life is starting to catch up.

I think one contrast between Sarah the photographer and Jamie the reporter/boyfriend is that he's trying to be a man, and she's trying to be an adult. Her task is more straightforward, and she's a more straightforward character in general. The way longing for connection and stability shapes a man is portrayed very keenly and subtly here. (I initially thought that Sarah had been captured, and that the suppressed aggression in Jamie's haunted eyes would come forward more directly. That didn't happen, and I think the play is better for it. Holly Twyford is pretty terrific as Sarah, but on the basis of those sunken eyes I'm giving the award here to Greg McFadden as Jamie.)

There are also some hints about the ways in which disaster-journalism requires the complicity of the suffering locals; the ethical dilemmas inherent in the practice are sharpened when the locals don't hand themselves over to the camera.

I'm glad I saw this and I'd generally recommend it, despite its flaws.

"SEEING LIKE A STATE": I review Collaborators, in which Mikhail Bulgakov meets Joseph Stalin and hijinks ensue....

THIS COUNTRY IS A GUN AND YOU ARE THE SILENCERS:

...As throughout the review, Gray is being a little unfair to Pinker here. (The book isn’t quite so blithe about mass incarceration as Gray makes it sound.) But his example gets at an important point about what you might call the hiddenness of contemporary violence, and the extent to which modern people can afford to recoil at various forms of cruelty not because they’ve completely gone away, but because they take place offstage, behind society’s scenes, in forms that most people don’t experience directly and therefore don’t need to reconcile themselves to.

So we regard public executions as an anachronistic barbarity, to say nothing of flogging, the stocks, and other pre-modern forms of punishment. But we’re kept safe from crime by a penal system that locks lawbreakers away in a self-enclosed world pervaded by hidden cruelties and unacknowledged forms of torture. We have a growing distaste for cruelty to animals, manifest in polls, pop culture, foxhunting bans, you name it. But the vegetarian minority notwithstanding, our daily meals come from factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses where animals are treated in ways that would make our gorges rise if we ever actually confronted them. And more provocatively, of course, there’s the case of infanticide: Common in premodern societies, abhorred in our more civilized age … unless, of course, you count the million-plus abortions in America every year, perhaps the most common and the most concealed form of violence that our society accepts.

more

THE NEEDLE'S EYE AND THE DAMAGE DONE: In 2008, Walter Olson of Overlawyered recommended This Gun for Hire. So now you know how long it takes something to reach the top of my Netflix queue! Here are a few thoughts on this terrific movie.

First, Veronica Lake is extraordinary. Her sad, forgiving eyes and husky, hopeful, low-rent voice might be even more startling here than they were in Sullivan's Travels. She's a noir woman who is neither brassy nor slinky, with more future than past and more wisdom than sense.

Alan Ladd is also really good here. He gets all the sentiment of the show (based on a Graham Greene novel, which I suppose explains the brief suicidal-tendencies scene) but he makes a difficult part work about as well as it could.

The direction is classic noir, opening with Ladd, as killer-for-hire Raven, sweaty and off-kilter in his flophouse bed. We get venetian blinds, centered framing when the major villain is finally cornered, candles in a thunderstorm and searchlights raking a railyard, menacing opulence and magic tricks. This is a hugely engaging and entertaining movie.

Its characterizations also reminded me, unexpectedly, of Jamaica Inn, which I recently rewatched as part of AFI's Hitchcock retrospective. Both movies feature a smart, basically "lawful good," resourceful young woman whose sympathies are torn between a lawman and an underclass killer. In both movies compassion, guilt, and repentance are the provinces of those without much money; the rich are irredeemably cruel. I think This Gun for Hire glosses over its killer's opening violence toward a housemaid, whereas Jamaica Inn doesn't prettify the head wrecker's cruelty to his wife, but overall their characters and situations are surprisingly similar. In both movies, power corrupts--the power of the gun, but even more deeply, the power of money.

ONE GOD, THREE OPINIONS: OK, unsurprisingly it looks like I can't get the more reviewy version of my take on The New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza published for money before the play's run ends. But my wallet's loss is your wallet's... also loss, since I cannot let you guys go without telling you why you have to see this terrific play!!!

It's showing at the DC Jewish Community Center until July 25 and seriously, people, I can't tell you. If you like this blog and you live in the area, eat some ramen so you can afford this play.

Here you can find my somewhat more personal and somewhat less reviewy take on the play. I just loved it. Y'all, if you see it, link me to your thoughts and reviews!

(As always, Blogger is adding an extra "tail" to my posts, so be sure to use this link and not whatever happens if you just go to my main secondary site.)

But let us proclaim proudly that we are hypocrites, that we will stop at nothing, not even hypocrisy, in our struggle to take control of our lives.
--some manifesto or whatever

I am obviously always going to prefer surrendering control to taking it, and in general I don't think it will be hard for longtime readers to discern which bits of this manifesto I think are self-comforting relativism and which I think are necessary defenses of complicity (see here for a gnomic utterance!). But I liked this line a lot. Better a hypocrite than a heretic.

"HOLDING YES AND NO TOGETHER IN ONE HAND": Here, have a long but (I think) really fruitful discussion between me and the awesome Jendi Reiter. It's about closets and complicity, and Catholics, and it's part of the reason I'm working on a post about why I think the "intrinsically disordered" language the Church currently uses is simplistic and mechanical. I hope to offer alternative ways of talking about and understanding same-sex desire from a faithful Catholic perspective.

CAMASSIA REVIEWS (PART OF) DEFIANCE:

This, probably more than anything, is what keeps the story from being a Tarantino fantasy. The Bielskis want to die like men, but they also recognize their own impotence. As much as Tec highlights the importance of their resistance, in contrast to the more typical images of Jews as passive victims, the Bielskis are ultimately also waiting for a much bigger war machine to rescue them. And so they have neither the moral purity of the ghetto victims, nor the masculine heroism of American mythology. Instead, like most people, they live somewhere in between.

more (and my grandfather on the Jewish Councils, here)

"OFFICER PURCHASES FOOD FOR MAN CAUGHT STEALING."

WILL THE FETUS BE ABORTED? BY AND BY LORD, BY AND BY: I just got the second installment of Alphonse: "Murder Sleep."

Alphonse is a horror comic about a fetus who survives abortion; he knows, and thinks, and hates. My review of the first issue is here.

The cover of this second installment tells the story. A broken doll sits in horrifying suspense in front of the inevitable revenge: a carving-knife. All my Pet Sematary terror-feelers started tinglin'.

Alphonse continues to complicate the categories of abortion-horror I talked about here. It's baby-horror and grief-horror at once--almost as if both sides had a point!

The art is lumpensympathetic. The grays are used to suggest a world of complicity and fog and nightmare. There are some well-chosen, sharp echo images: The light gleams and breaks against the ice in a glass of scotch the way it breaks against the display window of a cell phone. The overall aesthetic is a wash of gray with sharp black character-defining lines coming out of the quicksand.

The actual storyline is hard for me. This is the second installment, thus we're getting more pieces on the chessboard; and I guess I don't care yet about the new pieces. There are suddenly mafiosi (yes, with heavy irony and a pet white cat, but still) and some kind of conspiracy plot. This seems more... comic-booky, and you know what I mean even if you want to be defensive... than the basic wrongful-birth plot. So far I'm okay with the comedy-horror of the conspiracists, but I wish we had more sympathy for them. The first issue of Alphonse was striking in large part because of its relentless focus on suffering and complicity: No one was exempt from its punishing storyline. This issue, again solely because the conspiracy tropes are hit so hard, seems to exempt its audience from some of its horror. Not all the horror, by any means--the pro-life girl and guy are still really messed-up, and their dialogue is well-balanced and gives a real sense of how people suddenly dropped into an impossible, perhaps miraculous but also horrifying, situation might respond. But this issue seemed to have "villains" in a way which the first one didn't.

It's impossible to talk about this comic without talking about abortion. I think the first installment was less-polarized than this one. Nonetheless I think this comic understands the terror of pregnancy and childbearing. So far, I'm not sure this comic will work--especially if it goes too far in the conspiracy direction, which is what soured me on Human Target, since I honestly think conspiracy stories are the opposite of complicity--you don't do conspiracy stories unless you think no one would ever do bad if they knew they were wrong.

But so far, I'd strongly recommend Alphonse to every horror-comics fan who doesn't immediately reject it based on the subject matter. That isn't a criticism. The politics of abortion are intrinsic to the story. There are at least a hundred reasons you wouldn't want to read a comic in which that was a plot element. So far, though, I--as a pro-life Cat'lick dyke, who has never been in danger of pregnancy in all her ramblin' life--think this comic is presented without sentiment, with sympathy for those who support abortion rights, and with... it's hard to tell because of the particular storyline... but with at least some sympathy for women who abort. I think if you can read Alphonse as a story about abortion it makes sense; I don't know if it makes as much sense if you read it as a story of one woman's abortion. But the narrative hints that we will learn much more about Alphonse's unwilling mother, and if that happens, I think it will go a long way to addressing my uncertainty about this approach.

Highly recommended; despite my qualms, I have to admit that nobody else is doing this, and someone should be. If you read this blog, you may be the sort of person who wants to support Catholic arts! This is a great way to do so!

ALL INSTITUTIONS ARE "STRUCTURES OF SIN"; BUT WITHOUT THESE INSTITUTIONS THERE IS NO VIRTUE.

THREE LINKS. First, in honor of the 75th anniversary of the Yale Political Union, the only article you'll ever need about the ypu.

But also: Noli Irritare Leones turned me on to these two interesting posts: a friendship contract; and the "moral murkiness" of charity. The latter link has a terrific story of a fistfight, and reminds me of my post about pregnancy center counseling, leadership, and complicity.

ANTI-IRONY CHARMS: Some rambling thoughts on "sincerism" and why it's no fun. So a couple times here I've growled at sincerism, without ever telling you what it is! Which... is certainly not the sincerist way, so props for consistency, but I do think at some point I might explain myself. Here are some partial notes.

Sincerism means--probably among other things--requiring a sincere, authentic, honest accounting of one's thoughts and emotions. It opposes irony, misdirection, self-protection (which, to be fair, I also oppose in most cases!), exaggeration, agent-provocateur behavior, unspoken understandings, WASPish complicity in one another's secrets, and your mouth writing checks your ass can't cash.

Think of it as American newspapers' claim to "objectivity," by which we mean mainstream conformity, vs. European newspapers' tabloid partisanship. Think of it as realism vs. "genre."

Sincerity, as a mode, has its good points. If anything, I think I tend to be much more sincere than I should be! The world does not care about the sparklyhearts authenticity of my feelings; nor does it really need every idea chewed into obviousness and pablum. But there are times when withholding sincerity from another person is prideful and/or cruel. If they need you to say, blatantly and without regard for your own self-image, "I love you," or, "I think you're amazing," you should do that. You don't always have to disclaim it or quote it ("I've known you longer than anybody, Eddie, and anything you do is all right by me--can I borrow the car?") or make them work for it.

But here are just a few of the many problems with sincerism.

* It's a genre which thinks it's the whole of art; it's a perspective which won't acknowledge its contingency. If I speak in aphorisms or jokes or provocations, I am actually conveying something about both myself and my view of the truth, just as much as if I *~*bared my heart*~*.

* It's the privilege of those whose beliefs are basically mainstream to think that "realism" and sincerity are good ways of conveying the truth. Only those whose experiences and interpretations line up with mainstream culture can be guaranteed that their sincere heart-baring tales will be believed; and they're the ones for whom this language of sincerity was made. To take the boringly obvious example, if I want to talk about Gay Catholic Whatnot, I need to somehow entice or bully straight people (and non-Catholics, for that matter) into learning my language; I can't convey what I need to say in theirs. And I strongly suspect this is also true of other kinds of privilege, which is why Invisible Man is one of the greatest American artworks ever created.

It's never joking all the way down.

* Sincerism is the opposite of camp. Camp, as far as I can tell, only works if the thing parodied has some real emotional and personal resonance. Camp is never loveless or rationalist. Sincerism divides the world into "serious" and "oh but you don't really mean that"... when our actual hearts and lives are much more conflicted, complex, and complicit than that.

If I can think of more to say, I'll say it; and I do apologize for the deeply sincerist nature of this post! It's a Mobius strip of ridiculous.

JUST MAKE ME SOMETHING SOMEBODY CAN USE: It occurred to me that my earlier post on crisis pregnancy counseling--specifically, the issue of complicity with the client vs. complicity with the "system"--might shed some light on what my admittedly over-abstract discussion of conservatism looks like in practice.