On the Importance of Being Silly

I fenced last night, (footwork only as I have some sort of shoulder muscle pull) and this morning I’m awake late and feeling scattered and silly.  For example, I’m imagining say that Archimedes had invented and marketed smart phones and some subsequent texts and conversations, say betwixt Hippolyta and Theseus or betwixt Bohemund I and Anna Comnena or betwixt John Wycliffe and John Hus (the great Christian religious reformers who preceded Luther).

As I said, silly.  So in the spirit of Python (Monte) take it further, imagine text conversations not bound by concurrency, such as Churchill texting with Marlborough, his hero and ancestor, during the battle of Britain, or between the modern architect Frank Gehry and Filippo Brunelleschi, the designer and builder of the impossible dome of Florence Cathedral.  Or George S. Patton in the Ardennes in December of 1944 texting with George S. Patton at Thermopylae in September 480 BC.

Silly, absurd, but potentially interesting.  Tuesday afternoon, on the way to another fencing lesson, I listened to Terry Gross interviewing the actor Edward Norton on her program Fresh Air.  He said that in his youth he and his friends had made amateur Kung Fu and Spaghetti Westerns with a VHS camera using just the pause and rewind buttons to cut between scenes or capture retakes.  Then there was a moment of perfect wisdom, he stated that one of the great challenges in creating a great film or finding a great filmic performance in spite of all the expensive toys, schedule constraints and bureaucracy, is finding that wild, silly spirit you that made you want to try anything with an old VHS camera.  Dylan Thomas and Dan Jones in their famous pub flights of fancy understood the same thing.

I’m particularly fond of two of Edward Norton’s characterizations:  the leper king Baldwin in “Kingdom of Heaven” in which in spite of his silver mask he manages to find the perfect balance of frailty and heroism to evoke a certain kind of medieval ideal.  The second is his performance as Eisenheim in “The Illusionist.”  When he and his childhood love played by Jessica Biel are finally reunited in a coach he delivers a simple line with perfect, understated, romantic force.  “Hello, Sophie.”  And, because it’s so minimal, so perfectly set up dramatically, it’s as good as Bogart’s “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

The Unnamed Knight

Mark Twain blamed Chivalry for the American Civil War.  He thought that southern gentlemanly values had its roots in Sir Walter Scott,

“But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner-- or Southron, according to Sir Walter`s starchier way of phrasing it-- would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.”

Really?  Were Ivanhoe, the Waverly novels and Sir Walter Scott’s fictive conception of Chivalry responsible the socio-economic structure of the south and the religious institutions that rationalized and supported it?

In any case, there can be no doubt that there’s a strong current of anti-chivalric sentiment in English and American letters from the mid-nineteen century onwards.  The lost generation found the sentiment particularly appealing.  The irony, of course, is that American letters, even Twain and later Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Mamet never eschewed chivalry they just portrayed it (unnamed but rightly) as something that can exist independent of class, caste, ethnicity or sex.  (That’s also not new, Thomas Malory portrayed Sir Palomides as an African after all.)  And even Huck Finn as well as Bayard Sartoris were guilty of behavior that can only be called chivalrous.

I bring this up in the context of the horrific murders of the two journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, at the hands of the of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State.”  The black ninja-dressed executioner was of British origin and apparently there are numerous benighted Americans among their ranks as well.  We wonder why.  Perhaps, partly, it is a grotesquely corrupted but natural urge to serve a greater good in the absence of any humane “chivalric” values that could serve to direct that will to power to more virtuous ends.

Picasso loved knights, the symbolism, the ironies, the allusions.

"Be without fear in the face of your enemies. Be brave and upright that God may love thee. Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong. That is your oath.  Rise a knight."  - William Monahan ("Kingdom of Heaven")

Good Stories are Hard

A day ago, on the Guardian site, Jonathan Jones took critics to task for criticizing Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” for its lack of historical accuracy and pointed out that many historical films, including last year’s “The King’s Speech” also were less than completely accurate. All true, but alas historical verisimilitude isn’t the issue at all. Finally, "Robin Hood" wasn’t a good movie because it wasn’t telling a very good story. Script writer Brian Helgeland gave us a character who was not particularly clever or interesting and nothing particularly clever or interesting happened to him. Who cares if the medieval world may have actually had something like a Higgins boat, as Will Mclean cleverly pointed out, http://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/ ,so that the final scene was not nearly as anachronistic as it seemed?

Two interesting counterpoints are Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” and “Kingdom of Heaven.” Neither had particularly strong stories either but both immersed the audience in a world that was surprising and new and which alluded to central historical truths about their respective times. For example, the beginning battle scene in Gladiator illustrates the power of technology, organization and discipline even in a relatively primitive world, a key aspect of historical Roman success. Of course it is also relevant to the kind of real warfare we see on the news at the moment. In that context, it’s interesting to compare “Restrepo,” Sebastian Junger’s documentary about a US platoon in one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan, with "Gladiator" which suggests that very different kinds of stories about the Roman invasions of Gaul and England could be very interesting indeed.

Good stories are hard.

But they always have been. Very occasionally, I find myself musing that in spite of the sea changes in media at all levels, we’re becoming worse at it as a culture. Certainly, the immediacy of things like Facebook pose interesting obstacles to the creation of suspense, a vital narrative element.

Unfortunately, a couple of experiences this week have only served to support that rather gloomy opinion. Lynn and I watched the first episode of the Camelot miniseries on Starz. Like, Michael Hirst’s previous production, “The Tudors,” it seems to have no idea of what it’s about. The first episode gave me no reason to watch a second and even if we do I fear I may be unable to keep with it due to severe, aggressive apathy.  Ironically, one of the six word stories from the New York Times, http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/whats-your-six-word-love-story/, serves as a perfect review:  "Note to self:  no more surfers."

More interesting and possibly more sadly, Bioware has released a demo of their RPG "Dragon Age II." "Dragon Age I" was one of the most successful computer games of last year and was particularly interesting because a story with strong ironies, difficult choices and well-realized characters was one of the central and unique elements. I’ve long felt that computer gaming, still relatively young, was waiting for its “Birth of a Nation” and "Dragon Age I" suggested that moment might be very close indeed. Alas, the demo of DA II suggests that those elements have been forgone in favor of developing an anime-styled game to appeal to fourteen year-old ADD console players of FPSs, a caricatured demographic I suspect is actually microscopically small. I have fingers crossed in hopes that it was no more than a terrible demo.

I’m going to go reread some Borges and Lovecraft.