Favourite Movie Scenes #5: Naked Gun 3, The Opening Dream Sequence

I'm stretching the term "favourite" more and more with each one of these posts, but here goes anyway...

Recently, I've been watching the original Naked Gun trilogy, since they're all on Amazon Prime at at the moment. I started with the third, since it's actually my favourite, despite getting the worst reviews. (But in all honesty I think they're all much of a muchness.)

There are so many brilliant scenes in the trilogy that there's something a bit arbitrary about choosing one, but it's hard to beat this one. I've always seen it described as a spoof of two different scenes, from The Untouchables and Battleship Potemkin. I've never actually seen The Untouchables. I did watch Battleship Potemkin many years ago, and found it so boring I was literally falling asleep.

The scene is funny even if you don't know what it's spoofing, though.

My favourite moments in the scene:

1) When Frank Drebbin runs out of bullets in his gun, but in the next shot suddenly has a machine gun instead. (Since it's a dream sequence, this is quite realistic.)

2) "Look! It's disgruntled postal workers!" (You may not get this if you didn't live through the nineties. If so, do an internet search for "going postal".)

3) Norberg catching the falling babies and doing a victory dance.

4) The sudden appearance of the President and the Pope, along with their entourages, who both just happen to be walking down the steps of the train station at the same time.

The fact that the scene is beautifully shot (quite a set-piece, in fact) is in character for the trilogy. The brilliance of the Naked Gun films is that they combined the silliest, most throwaway humour with such high production values. The viewer's brain is engaged on two tracks: the humour, and the underlying story which you can't help taking seriously on some semi-conscious level.

These films seemed to constantly be on television when I was a kid, and into my teens. I laughed at them but I never thought of them as classics. I do now. They all get the maximum of five stars in my "movie seen" spreadsheet, an honour restricted to only twenty-eight films out of 1380.

I went to see the recent remake in the cinema. It was surprisingly excellent, refreshingly non-woke, and fully in the spirit of the original trilogy. But not quite up to their standard.

One final thing: I've always loved the phrase "dream sequence", and hearing film critics talk about "the dream sequence". It seems so portentous. 

Are you a Nationalist?

Very often, I hear people talk and write about nationalism as if it's some rather extreme doctrine, like anarchism or communism or complete pacifism.

Personally, I don't think this is true of nationalism at all. I think most people have been nationalists throughout history, even if they didn't use the word.

In my view, if you can answer "Yes" to the following two questions, you're a nationalist:

1) Do you think the nation-state should be the basic unit of international politics, rather than a World Government, or supranational organizations, or empires, or some other system? Do you think nations should have fundamental sovereignty?

(People sometimes quibble about sovereignty, pointing out its inevitable limitations. Everything has limitations. I don't think this is a serious objection.)

2) Would you prefer that national cultures should persist? That the French should continue to speak French and make celebrities of bad philosophers, that the Irish should continue to play hurling and apologize every six seconds, and so on?

(Tiresome objections that "you can't preserve a culture in aspic" are often advanced here. The question is not: "Would you prefer that national cultures should never change or evolve?". The question is whether you would prefer them to substantially persist through those changes.)

I think most people would answer in the affirmative to these two questions, and that most people are therefore nationalists. 

Unseasonal

I tried to change the blog's colours to purple for Lent, but for some reason I've lost the ability to do it. At least, I can only do it partially.

Which reminds me. Here's a word that never ceases to delight me-- season. I think there's immense poetry in the word. I would write a meditation on it, similar to my meditation on the word "midnight"-- but I don't have time right now.

Poem for Shrove Tuesday

Our Blessed Lord, the Man of Sorrows,
Went to the Cross for every man's sake.
So let us start our fast tomorrow
But for today let's have some pancakes.

The Pedant's Gambit

I propose that this term should be used for that tiresome challenge one often meets in debate: "Define what you mean by x..."

(I can only find one "hit" of the term on the internet, and not in that context. So I hereby claim its invention.)

I'm very suspicious of the whole business of definition. My standard response to this is: "Define what you mean by define."

Every definition rests on terms which themselves require definition. It's a silly game.

Of course, there's a place for definition in law and other specialist contexts. But even here, things get fuzzy.

I was a member of a jury once. I remember the barrister giving us the following (apparently celebrated) example of what "reasonable doubt" entails. If a person walks into a building all wet, you can know it's raining beyond a reasonable doubt. They might be filming a movie outside and have some kind of rain machine, but that's highly unlikely.

I consider that fuzzy.

People only play the definitions game to score points and throw their opponent, anyway. We all use words every day without demanding definitions and we generally understand each other.

I suppose an exception is words and phrases that do have several different usages, such as "sanction". (I've been married to an American for thirteen years and we still occasionally hit the Shavian obstacle of "two countries divided by a common language." As in; "Why was there a buoy in the water? Why didn't someone pull him out?" But rarely.)

Yes, I've been arguing with someone on the internet. (I try not to.)

St. John Paul II speaks about Ireland, in English!

Here's an intriguing and delightful little clip that popped up on my YouTube feed. St. John Paul II, on board a plane about to land in Ireland, says that he prays for Ireland every day, and that it's been near to his heart since he was a boy. He also teases the journalist a little. His personal charm and warmth is very evident. We also learn what he had for breakfast that day. The answer will STUN you! (Well, not really, but it's interesting all the same.)

I was in that million-strong crowd for the Papal Mass in the Phoenix Park. I was still a little bit short of my second birthday so I don't remember it at all. But apparently I was a Pope fan, and had a white Lego vehicle that I dubbed the Popemobile.

I can best describe my upbringing as solidly Catholic but rather casually so. My parents were firm Catholics and loyal to all the social teachings, but my father very rarely went to Mass. He did, however, always bring me into the Pro-Cathedral, as it was then, to light a candle whenever we were in the city centre. My mother brought me to Sunday Mass, which I hated, but we didn't go every week by any means-- it was more intermittent. 

My father was very much from a left-wing republican and trade-unionist background. As he grew older, he became more outspokenly Catholic on social issues. But I think that was more a result of the increasing secularisation of Irish society, and the increasing anti-religiosity of the Irish left, than any change in him. (The Irish Labour Party were once famously described as the political wing of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. But that's a long time ago.)

I had long stopped going to Mass by my teens and I can't remember anyone ever saying a word about this. (I actually felt more awkward when I started going to Mass as an adult, though nobody said anything about that, either.) Nobody ever taught me to pray and the rosary was never said in our home. There were no holy pictures or holy statues. I wasn't baptised until I was three yeas old, when I was batch-baptised with my brother and cousins.

I went to an Irish language school which was one of the relatively few non-Catholic schools at that time. My parents had helped to get it set up, which was a considerable battle. (Be it understood, their battle was to have an Irish-language school in the area, not a secular school.) The fact that it was non-denominational was rather academic, however. All the religious instruction was Catholic, and we were prepared for sacraments there.

I'm actually rather grateful my parents were not very insistent about practicing the faith. Being something of a contrarian, it might have made me rebel against it. 

I didn't intend that digression. Anyway, here's the clip, which I'd never seen before. Apologies if it's old hat to anyone else.

Favourite Movie Scenes #4: Gandalf and Saruman at Isengard, from The Two Towers

For this post, I'm almost at a loss what to say. 

I have a strange feeling that any commentary I can make on this scene will almost be an insult to my readers. The camera angles, the set, the blue filter, the acting performances, the dialogue, the moment where Gandalf sees the Eye of Sauron...every moment is pure movie magnificence, concentrated and compressed and triple-filtered.

As with everything else, one can make objections. To be honest, I never particularly liked the choice of Ian McKellen for Gandalf. My reason for this, I'll freely agree, is rather stupid: I don't want an outspoken progressive atheist playing a character who is more or less God's emissary. But acting is acting. That probably shouldn't matter.

I've also always felt that McKellan had the wrong face for Gandalf, but that's even sillier.

Christopher Lee, of course, might havea been born to play Saruman.

The Lord of the Rings occupies a strange place in my life. I "read" the books when I was about seven, but I barely took most of the story in. After finishing them, for all the rest of my juvenile years, I only had continuing access to an incomplete copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. Still, Middle Earth made such an impression on my mind that it would be difficult to quantify it. (I can remember being told, at the time, that it would be impossible to make a film of the book.)

I'll try to explain the significance of Lord of the Rings in my childhood with a metaphor. Imagine some early Christian missionary had found himself on some island that was cut off from the rest of fhe world. The missionary himself only has the basic knowledge of Christianity, and perhaps a few pages from one of the Gospels. Then he dies of a fever. The islanders embrace the faith with great gusto, it pervades all their lives, and they weave all sorts of devotions and folklore around it. But they still only have a shaky knowledge of it. That was me and Lord of the Rings.

Funnily enough, this scene-- Gandalf and Saruman's concentration at Isengard-- wildly excited me as a child, more so than almost any other literary scene I can remember. (Sherlock Holmes's description of Moriarty in "The Final Problem", which has obvious similarities, excited me in the same way.)

This passage especially:

'For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colors!'

I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colors, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

'I liked white better,' I said.

'White!' he sneered. 'It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.'

'In which case it is no longer white,' said I. 'And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.'

But even now, after I've read the trilogy all the way through three times or so (as an adult), I'm still not equipped to enter a conversation with Tolkien afficionados who can name every character's horse, sword, and grandmother. (I did push myself to read The Silmarillion when I was seventeen but remember next to nothing about it.)

Then the films came out just as I'd started my career in UCD. Everything seemed new and exciting. I loved all the coffee-break conversations about the movies-- not just among movie buffs, but among everybody. It was one of those films, like The Exorcist or Star Wars, that became a pop cultural landmark, and indeed a cultural landmark. I had never lived through such a moment in cinema history myself, so I relished it. (The release of the Director's Cut DVDs, a year after each film, were also a part of this cultural moment.)

Of course, a lot of people who loved the books hated the movies. There were things I hated about them myself. I hated all the laboured hobbit humour, which actually made me cringe-- even though you could say, fairly enough, that these scenes were in the spirit of Tolkien's book. I hated Cate Blanchett's ham-acting, as I saw it. There were other things I didn't like.

On the whole, though, I think the trilogy is a triumph that deserves all the plaudits heaped upon it. There are a few other scenes that I expect will feature in this series.

Friday the Thirteenth

Today is Friday the Thirteenth. Some months ago, I wrote a blog post about Friday the Thirteenth for my other blog, Traditions Traditions Traditions! That blog is probably the loneliest and least-frequented spot on the whole internet, so almost nobody read it. I thought it was a pretty good post, and put considerable effort into it, so here it is.

Is Friday the thirteenth a tradition, or a superstition? It's mostly a superstition, I'd say. But surely a superstition is, to some extent, a tradition in itself.

Friday the thirteenth is interesting because it's somewhat below the radar of popular consciousness. It's not a holiday. It's not a memorial. It's not an occasion in any meaningful sense. Mostly it creeps up on us without us noticing (rather appropriately) and exists in a kind of netherworld (also appropriately). If it's remarked upon at all, it's usually jokingly.

The superstition regarding Friday the thirteenth is a recent one, dating to Victorian times.  So (most surprisingly) is the superstition regarding the number thirteen itself. Interestingly, the idea that Friday is unlucky is much older.

Snopes.com says of the Friday superstition: "The reasons why Friday came to be regarded as a day of bad luck have been obscured by the mists of time — some of the more common theories link it to a significant event in Christian tradition said to have taken place on Friday, such as the Crucifixion, Eve's offering the apple to Adam in the Garden of Eden, the beginning of the Great Flood, or the confusion at the Tower of Babel."

Surely the Crucifixion is the stand-out there, and all the more because it definitely happened on a Friday.

Similarly (as most people know) the most common explanation of the superstition regarding thirteen is that Christ and his disciples numbered thirteen at the Last Supper. It's the most satisfying explanation, too, especially since it links both elements of the Friday the thirteenth superstition.

Not long ago there was a specific superstition against thirteen people sitting down together, and especially against being the first person to get up from such a gathering (presumably because Judas was the first person to rise at the Last Supper). This is alluded to in one of my favourite novels, Diary of a Nobody by George and Weldon Grossmith (1892): “I hate a family gathering at Christmas. What does it mean? Why someone says: ‘Ah! we miss poor Uncle James, who was here last year,’ and we all begin to snivel. Someone else says: ‘It’s two years since poor Aunt Liz used to sit in that corner.’ Then we all begin to snivel again. Then another gloomy relation says ‘Ah! I wonder whose turn it will be next?’ Then we all snivel again, and proceed to eat and drink too much; and they don’t discover until I get up that we have been seated thirteen at dinner.”

(Perhaps this superstition has become more obscure today because, as a result of social atomization, it's uncommon to have thirteen people sitting together at a table.)

On the specific superstition of Friday the thirteenth, The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland has this to say: "The belief that Friday 13th is an especially unlucky day is one of the widest known superstitions in Britain today, and is erroneously assumed to be of great antiquity. The only one of the superstitions regarding the number thirteen which can be traced back further than Victorian times is that it is very unlikely to have thirteen at table, which first appears in the 1690s. The notion that thirteen is a generally unlucky number has not been found earlier than 1852. Fridays, however, have been regarded as unlucky since medieval times."

According to this NPR article (and other sources), the first printed mention of Friday the thirteenth comes from a French play in 1834, when a character says: "I was born on a Friday, December 13th, 1813 from which come all of my misfortunes."

Returning to the Penguin Guide, the article continues: "The idea that Friday 13th is an ancient superstition is so engrained that the assertion that it is no older than Victorian times is frequently met with disbelief, even anger, but the evidence is overwhelming." I found myself wondering if the writer is appealing to personal experience here. Did he enrage somebody by mentioning the recent origins of Friday the thirteenth?

There are plenty of articles online about real-life tragedies and disasters that occurred on Friday the thirteenth. None of these are terrible interesting (in my opinion); you could surely find as many horror stories for any date of the year. The only one that intrigued me is the 1972 plane crash in the Andes which formed the basis of the movie Alive. Not only did this occur on Friday the thirteenth, but the deadliest civil aviation crash up to that time occurred on the same day in Russia, killing all 164 passengers. That's a bit freaky.

(We were shown Alive in religion class in school. This puzzled me at the time and has puzzled me ever since. What life lesson was it supposed to be teaching us? That it's OK to eat your dead fellow passengers if you get captured in the Andes after a plane crash?)

Interestingly, Samuel Beckett, that most pessimistic of authors, was born on Friday the thirteenth in 1906. In some biographies, doubt is cast on this fact, because his birth certificate has it as May the thirteenth. Some writers even assumed Beckett was engaging in some creative misremembering. But his biographer James Knowlson says: "The truth is less dramatic. A mistake was clearly made. Everyone who knew Beckett as a child thought of his birthday as being on 13 April. This never changed. But fortunately, and surely conclusively, even for those who believe in Beckett's propensity for myth-making, the birth was announced in the Births and Deaths column of the Irish Times of 16 April 1906, that is, a month before he was officially recorded as having been born."

Is this truth less dramatic, or more dramatic? The fact that this darkest of playwrights was born on the most ill-omened of days seems too good to be true, but it is.

The year after Beckett was born, a novel titled Friday the Thirteenth was published by an American financial speculator called Thomas Lawson. It centres on a stock market panic that occurs on the titular date. (Interestingly, a stock market crash did occur on the infamous date in 1989.)

Of course, the most famous work of fiction with the title Friday the Thirteenth is the slasher film that came out in 1980, and that spawned eleven sequels (so far). The original movie features a group of young employees of a summer camp in New Jersey, who are bumped off one by one by a mystery killer. Although I'm a huge fan of the horror genre, I've never actually seen Friday the Thirteenth, though I've seen one of its sequels: Freddy vs. Jason (2003), a cross-over with the Nightmare on Elm Series franchise. (It was dreadful.)

The central villain of the franchise is Jason Vorhees, he of the iconic hockey mask (though apparently this is first donned in the third film).

But to return to the first instalment...

The title Friday the Thirteenth was considered so important by its writer/producer Sean Cunningham that he published an advertisement in Variety magazine before the script was even finished-- partly to make sure nobody else would grab it. The ad was simply the title (in 3D letters) smashing through glass, with the slogan: "The most terrifying film ever made." It created enormous industry anticipation.

What's really interesting is that Friday the Thirteenth was a cash-in on another hugely successful slasher film, Halloween, which was released in 1978. The producer of that movie, Irvin Yablanz, was astonished that nobody had used the word Halloween in a title before. And it is quite astonishing. So two of the most lucrative slasher franchises came from very inexpensive movies, released within a few years of each other, each trading on the associations of a calendar day that nobody else had exploited.

How much did the titles contribute to the success of these films? In the book Blood Money: A History of the First Teen Slasher Film Cycle (2011), the sales manager of New World Pictures is quoted as saying: "Sixty to seventy per cent of an exploiter's initial [ticket sales] lies in the promotion and the title."

Bizarrely, another horror film had used the title the very previous year: The Orphan, otherwise known as Friday 13th: The Orphan. But this is completely forgotten today, proving that a killer title isn't everything. 

Setting a horror story on an ominous date seems to give it a definite edge. The addictive website TV Tropes has a list of these (with the amusing title "Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesdays"), although funnily enough Friday the thirteenth isn't one of them.

As for traditions, Friday the thirteenth doesn't seem to have gathered any well-known traditions (so far), although it has given rise to some lesser-known ones, as we'll see.

I found the following delightful story on the Facebook page of the Lawrence History Center (from the city of Lawrence in Massachussets), posted by a Deborah D'Elia Beaudoin: "I thought you might be interested in a social club that was founded in 1935 by Stanley Mazzota.  A group of high school friends who didn’t want to lose touch after graduation decided to form a club that flaunted superstition and walked under ladders, spilt salt, and broke mirrors. Of course they celebrated every Friday the Thirteenth in style!  They also belonged to a bowling league and raised money for charity. 

"My dad, Joseph D’Elia, was one of the original members and served as treasurer and  later as president. The club disbanded when the members began enlisting to serve in World War 2." (Presumably this was in Laurence, Massachusetts.)

Jumping back into the present, New York City (where else?) has a sort of informal Friday the Thirteenth Tattoo Festival; "An all-day marathon of affordable work for anyone with a few extra dollars, time to wait in line, and the boldness to permanently memorialise our unluckiest date", according to this recent article. The tradition began in 1995. On Friday the thirteenth, participating tattoo parlours don't do appointments (only walk-ins), they stay open late, and they offer bargain tattoos...but you have to choose from a menu of designs, rather than a custom tattoo. (I've never understood why anybody would want a tattoo. But aside from that, I'm greatly tickled by this story.)

Last Friday the thirteenth (which was this June), the Frida cinema in Santa Ana, California, played ten Friday the Thirteenth films over two nights. There were fifteen minutes between showings and a total running time of 540 minutes. Sounds fun. (I've never been to a cinema movie marathon. I'd love to go to one.)

In the "unincorporated community" of Port Dover in Norfolk county, Ontario, Canada, there is a motorcycle rally every Friday the thirteenth. The tradition began with twenty-five friends in 1981 and has now become a candidate for the biggest motorcycle rally in the world, attracting about a hundred thousand bikers when Friday the thirteenth falls in the summer.

So it seems like North Americans embrace the quirkiness of Friday the thirteenth to a much greater extent than us dour Europeans.

The last thing I'll mention is a television drama where the motif of Friday the thirteenth is a recurring one. It's "Rude Awakening", the third episode of Hammer House of Horror, which originally aired in 1980 (on September 27th!). This is my all-time favourite made-for-TV horror production, featuring Denholm Elliott (the butler in Trading Places) as a somewhat sleazy estate agent who finds himself trapped in a series of nightmares, each one giving way to the next. (I love anything about dreams within dreams, nested realities, and so on.) It's available to watch on YouTube at the time of writing, and has been for several years now. Check it out.

Can You Suggest Me More Songs LIke this?

 

"Hall of Mirrors" by Horslips is one of my all-time favourite songs. I would like to find more songs like it.

By which I mean, songs that contain one or more of the following characteristics:

1) Using imagery that draws on funfairs or carnivals.

2) Psychedelic, even if mildly psychedelic.

3) Using vague but rather heavy-handed metaphors for life experience.

Any suggestions?

Twenty Years of the God Delusion

I've just read that The God Delusion, the central text of the New Atheist movement...is now twenty years old!

In one way, it's hard to believe. In another, it's easy. The book seems to belong to a very different era now.

I bought it perhaps a year or two after it came out. I was still hovering between agnosticism and faith at that time. As many people have said, the actual arguments in the book are very poor, but the strength of Dawkins's conviction was quite intimidating.

When I started this blog in 2011, it was very much in the atmosphere of the New Atheist moment.

I'm glad that moment has gone, but I did like one aspect of it: the resurgence of Christian apologetics that it spurred. The New Atheists demanded evidence, and Christian apologists were suddenly in demand. As Edward Feser says here, the New Atheist onslaught did have the benefit of making Christians seek rational grounds for their belief.

Times are changed now. Militant atheists like Richard Dawkins have been replaced by respectful atheists such as Alex O'Connor. Flame wars have been replaced by friendly dialogue.  Richard Dawkins has become something of an ally, pushing against woke and defending cultural Christianity. Another New Atheist (though one I was only ever vaguely aware of), Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has become a Catholic. And I get the impression that many of the rank-and-file of the New Atheist movement are now either believers or have at least come to appreciate Christianity. (I've heard plenty of accounts of that journey, though I can't remember where exactly.)

And there are even some hopeful signs that a Christian revival is coming about.

So we have much to be grateful for. But let's hope that the beefing-up of apologetics that came about in the New Atheist era doesn't wither away.

Dead Letters: A Poem

I haven't written poetry in a long time. My spirit was broken by the (non)-reaction to my poetry on Facebook, over years. I'll probably get back to it eventually.

I've just raided my archives looking for a poem. Most of them are poor, in my view. Here's one I wrote in Dublin Airport (of all places) some time early in the millennium. It's not bad, I think.

My entire life, I've had an obsession with memory and oblivion. Is it healthy? I don't know. It makes a poem, anyway.

A sure-nuff archivist has told me that wearing latex gloves is not encouraged in archives as it reduces dexterity. I'd heard that already, although I can't remember if it was before I'd written this poem, or afterward.

Dead Letters

Folded and read and folded so often now–
The fingers that folded it first, the eyes that read
Stopped work last century. In latex gloves
The doctorate student folds it, wonders how
Her days will be replayed when she is dead.
Those hour-long evening phone calls that she loves
Will leave no trace. What will her photos say?
She smiled at weddings, liked to dress in green.
She’s poured her soul through a keyboard now for years
But none of that was ever stored away
In a cardboard box. Her life unrolls on screen;
Each day gets written, sent, and disappears.

What then? The video her sister made
One Halloween? A camera never caught
One motion of the soul. What’s to be seen
In a winter’s evening endlessly replayed?
No trace or what she loved or what she thought–
Life’s glories gone as if they’d never been.

She thought of all that’s tapped out, signalled, said;
An endless thirst for words endlessly fed;
And all will die before these words of the dead.

Favourite Movie Scenes #3: Shaft (1971)

Shaft is one my favourite movies of all time. It's far more than a brilliant soundtrack. It's full of goodies all the way through, especially the slick dialogue. (Such as the gangster who always answers his phone: "Wrong number".)

Yes, it has a lot of racial themes, and race is one my least favourite subjects (because it's been weaponized in the way it has been). But the movie is from the "Black is Beautiful" era, which is at least a positive approach. The film is also gloriously un-PC, even for a time long before PC.

Most of all, I love the look and atmosphere of the film. It's so deliciously seedy, run-down, ramshackle, and streetwise. (The opening montage of Tradings Places is another great evocation of this atmosphere-- which I don't find at all unpleasant or even unpoetic.)

Although there's far more to this film than the famous opening scene, how could I not choose the opening scene? Isaac Hayes's theme might be the greatest opening credits theme of any film ever. And John Shaft's swagger as he makes his way to his office, through a panorama of the American seventies, is beautiful. I've several times listened to this music as I walked into work. (I never use headphones when I'm moving about, so everyone I pass hears it, too.)

For Crying Out Loud

I saw this book in a bookshop today. I have no idea who Jamie Laing is, but the title completely exasperated me.

I'm forty-eight years old. Reader, I have never (ever ever) been told that boys don't cry. Not by a parent. Not by a teacher. Not by a kid in the street. Never, by anyone.

I was never told that boys or men shouldn't have feelings.

I was never told that boys or men shouldn't be vulnerable.

I'm guessing very few boys have been told this in recent decades. If, indeed, they ever were.

But here is what boys have been told for decades now.

That they are somehow complicit (no matter what they do) in something called The Patriarchy which wields absolute power and crushes men, women, children, the environment, and probably dogs and cats under the weight of its iron fist.

That they are vicariously guilty for anything bad that a man has ever done. (It doesn't work the opposite way, strangely-- they don't get any reflected glory for the achievements of Shakespeare, Edison, Tolkien, etc.)

That there is something called toxic masculinity and that they are somehow a part of it.

That their natural desires are "the male gaze", which is something to be ashamed of.

That, no matter how bad their life is or how much they might feel they are at the bottom of the heap, they have something called "male privilege".

And so on. And so on.

Society ladles endless helpings of guilt on boys from their earliest days. But not for crying.

Favourite Movie Scenes #2

Well, it's more a couple of scenes than a single scene, but they go well together. The last few minutes of Zodiac (2007).

I remember a colleague raving about this film when it came out. For whatever reason, I wasn't interested and I didn't go to see it.

Then, more recently, my favourite podcast Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World featured a few episodes about the Zodiac killer, and I found myself searching the film out. I was hugely impressed. Quentin Tarantino has put it in his list of the ten best films of the twenty-first century. High praise indeed. (My favourite film is Groundhog Day, but I think Pulp Fiction is the greatest and most accomplished film ever made.)

As wtih many of my favourite scenes, it's the crackling tension and understated drama between two characters that I love.

The musical choice at the very end of the film is also inspired. I'd never heard "Hurdy Gurdy Man" before, except in the film itself, but it's amazing how such an apparently innocuous song can sound utterly sinister in this context.

Somehow, this film seems to be about much more than a serial killer, or even an investigation into a serial killer, although it's hard to say exactly what that "much more" is.

A Video Worth Watching

For the last week or so, I've been watching (in instalments) the long video below, which traces the family tree of Christian denominations (going right back to the Jewish roots of Christianity, before Jesus). It's fascinating stuff, presented objectively, and rather warmly and sympathetically to each denomination.

I was surprised, almost amazed, at how much I didn't know. There were many denominations I'd never even heard about, such as the intriguing Two-by-Two Church. I expect to rewatch the video several times, and to use it as a springboard to look into the more interesting of the denominations it mentions (as I've already been doing).

The narrator, on several occasions, mentions another YouTube channel, Ready to Harvest, which I expect I'll also be exploring at length. It describes itself as: "Christian Denominations explained in a neutral and concise way."

Love of the Poor

A quick thought: whenever I read the lives of the saints (or Christian holy people), one constant that strikes me is their love of the poor.

Not just a humanitarian desire to make life better for the poor, but a positive love of the poor themselves-- as human beings, not objects of charity.

George Bernard Shaw famously wrote: "For my part I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination." Obviously, he was being provocative and epigrammatic here: he didn't want to exerminate poor people, but to exterminate poverty. (He also said he wanted to exterminate the other classes.)

I think we all tend to be Shavians today, in this regard. We see nothing good in poverty.

This love of the poor and solidarity with the poor seems an aspect of the Christian tradition that is rather sidelined today, even among Christians.

The Pure Form, or the Drift and the Recoil

Going through my blog archives, I came across this post which I wrote in 2014. I think it's pretty good and stands up after all these years. (I've written a lot of other stuff that I read back with embarrassment.) I don't think I've ever seen anyone else make this point before, although of course somebody might well have and I just haven't read it.

It's four minutes past two a.m., I'm not sleepy, and an idea that has been buzzing around my head for a long time has finally come into focus. The phrase I can best use to describe it is 'the pure form'.

This is my theory; that in all human things, there is a pure form, an archetype, an ideal type, from which we constantly find ourselves drifting and to which we inevitably find ourselves returning. The drift from it is often incremental but the return to it is usually instant, like the recoil from a crossbow. I think this principle applies to so many aspects of human life.

Take comedy. There is an eternal attempt to escape the formulaic in comedy. It seems that jokes-- stories with a set-up, with certain recurring motifs such as triads, and with a punch-line-- are always going out of fashion, in favour of observational humour, surreal humour, 'alternative' humour, whimsical humour and anti-humour. Jokes like: "What's the difference between a duck? One of its legs are the same size" become all the rage. People groan at stock comedy characters like mothers-in-law and lovers hiding in closets.

But always there is the recoil. And, more often than not, the recoil is sudden and almost violent. The resistance against the pure form becomes unendurable, often in a single moment. It's like the moment a polite listener finally loses patience with a bore. And the very fact that the pure form might have become taboo in certain circles only makes its return all the more irresistible and defiant.

I think this principle applies to so many things. It applies to narrative-- the moment when the poseur finally puts down Proust and picks up Stephen King, with a mingled sense of shame and relief. It applies to political correctness-- the moment that someone gets tired of pretending that ethnic and other politically incorrect jokes are not funny. It applies to feminism-- the moment when the feminist gives up and admits that there's nothing arbitrary about the fact that women kiss each other and men shake hands, or that girls often prefer to play with dolls and boys to play with trucks. (I'm not saying a person can't go his or her entire life without ever succumbing to this recoil. But I am saying that humanity en masse, or in sufficient numbers, will always be subject to it over time.)

If I make it sound like this recoil is always from the idealistic to the disillusioned, or from the determined to the line of least resistance, that would not be a reflection of the reality. A dyed-in-the-wool cynic is disregarding the pure form as much as a hopeless sentimentalist. A drop-out, experiencing this moment of recoil, will cut his hair and buy a suit and become more disciplined. (Admittedly, this might in a sense be the line of least resistance, even though it requires more effort.)

My examples also suggest that the 'drift" is always in the direction of liberalism or progressivism, and the 'recoil' is always a return to conservatism. This is by no means the case, and my examples only betray my own experience and way of thinking. The 'recoil' tends not to be in a particular direction, but rather centripetal. In my own late twenties and early thirties, I became so ultra-conservative that I came to see the human hankering for novelty and excitement and exoticism as a kind of original sin. People who took package holidays to Tenerife, or were fascinated with gadgets or cars, were (I decided) traitors to the traditions of humankind. This was nonsense, of course.

The 'pure form' is not the golden mean, or moderation in all things. It's something very particular.

I don't believe that the 'pure form' is something that can necessarily be known, other than approximately. To take my first example; I think an old-fashioned joke-teller is closer to the 'pure form' of comedy than an alternative comedian such as Bill Hicks. But I wouldn't claim to be able to say exactly what the 'pure form' of comedy is, or where its boundaries lie. (And, of course, comedy is just an example.) I think the claim to know such things with certainty would be dangerous and potentially totalitarian-- if we accept my theory, of course.

One of the reasons I am a Catholic is because I believe Catholicism is the 'pure form' (in this sense) of Christianity. (I don't think this conflicts with what I just said. Even though some people see Catholicism as a religion ironclad with certainty, this is not the case. The Church doesn't claim to know everything. It doesn't even claim to know everything about spiritual things.)

The 'drift' against certain aspects of Catholicism is perpetual. People will always be coming up with objections, very plausible-sounding obections, against aspects of its teaching-- Papal infallibility, or Purgatory, or prayer to saints, or celibacy, or auricular confession, or sacramentals, or vestments, or venial sin.

But the recoil, the snap back into place, is inevitable.

I saw a documentary recently which mentioned that prayer to saints was coming back into the Church of England. Of course it is, I realized. It's such a natural instinct that it could only ever be kept at bay for a certain amount of time. Ditto with all the other aspects of Catholicism that are rejected at this or that moment of history. The reasons for the rejection are all very convincing and deep and sincere, and the rejection may indeed be made with gusto and a sense of released energy. But sooner or later-- perhaps over centuries-- sustaining the rejection starts to feel like standing on one leg. People start feeling they are missing out on the fullness of the faith. And hence we see moments like the Oxford Movement, or the current minor renaissance of orthodoxy amongst younger Catholics.

The picture is complicated because the drift and the recoil might be happening at the same time, in different ways. For instance, I think there is a drift against the Church's sexual and hierarchical teaching right now, even as their is a recoil towards its sacramental and artistic and contemplative heritage. Celibacy is out, while pilgrimages and the rosary and Eucharistic Adoration and lecto divina are in-- even amongst non-Catholics.

I don't think there is any moment of repose between the drift and the recoil. It is always one or the other-- though the majority might be drifting or recoiling while a minority, or an individual, is doing just the opposite. The drift lasts longer, but the recoil is more decisive.

I can observe drift and recoil in my own mind, in my own experience-- not only in the past, but actually in the present. It seems to be as inevitable as breathing. Something about human nature means we are always sliding away from some 'pure form' or other, or more likely, from many of them. I can relate this drift, in my own experience, to humble things like the cinema. I've gone through phases of 'drifting' away from action movies or superhero movies in favour of 'deep' movies that could be watched over and over again. But then the recoil happened, because action movies and supero movies are at least visually appealing, and usually have solid story-telling and some uplifting message. In fact, I am now 'drifting' in the opposite direction-- to the extreme that I only want to see pure entertainment, romantic comedies and action films and so forth, and I despise 'deep' movies. The 'pure form', I would guess, lies in neither of these directions-- but it's not bang in the middle either.

Very often we take the 'drift' for the 'recoil'. A rather hackneyed example; after the fall of the Soviet Union, the idea went around that the world was returning from the lie of communism to the inevitable truth of free market capitalism. But, while it's certainly true that free market capitalism is much closer to the 'pure form' of economics than communism is, it's not quite there-- or so, at least, I would argue. Humanity doesn't seem capable of reposing in it, anyway.

OK, now I'm tired. I hope this makes sense, but I'm too sleepy to make sure it does. Night night!

That's Right Wood Chuck Chuckers, it's...Groundhog Day!

Today is Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of our Lord. The account of the Presentation includes some of the most moving words in Scripture, (in my view) when Simeon holds the baby Jesus and says: "Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel." Why these words should be so moving, I'm not quite sure.

It's also Groundhog Day, which inevitably makes me think of my favourite movie of all time.

Here's a blog post I wrote back in 2012, soon after I started this blog, in which I explain why it's my favourite film of all time. I haven't changed my mind on any of it. (Although it's a while since I've watched the whole film through. I watch scenes from it on YouTube every now and again, like this morning. I almost know the dialogue by heart by now.)

I also watched this interesting YouTube video about the film's production, which taught me some stuff I hadn't known already. I was especially interested that Danny Rubin, the scriptwriter who came up with the original idea (and later wrote the screenplay with Harold Ramis), chose Groundhog Day as the day for the loop specifically because it was a more obscure occasion. I like that  lot. I've always disliked the fact that Christmas and a few other days in the year get all the attention.

Recently I made a note for a blog post entitled "the miracle of familiarity". Occasionally it srikes me as truly miraculous that we can ever find anything familiar, as life is simultaneous so strange and so fleeting.

All art is an island of permanence-- or the illusion of permanence-- in an ocean of flux. But this film especially, since it's about a timeloop. I'm always sad when Phil escapes the loop at the end. But not too sad, because he only exists inside the film anyway, and you can always just play it again.

Favourite Movie Scenes #1

I've long had the idea of posting about my favourite movie scenes. So I'm going to start now, with a scene from Casino Royale (2006).

(God Almighty, that was twenty years ago! I remember seeing it in the cinema.)

I've never been a big James Bond fan, though I like the idea of James Bond a lot. I like the thought of Bond as a British Institution, with all its attendant tradition-- the Bond song, the Bond girl, the opening credits sequence, the gadgets, etc.

When I love a movie scene, it's often because of its use of understatement. I love how we see the new Q and James Bond warm to each other after an opening gambit of insults-- it's very English, like Robin Hood and Little John fighting on the bridge. (Even the moment Q says "007", just as Bond is walking away, is brilliant. I also really like: "Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don't really do that kind of thing anymore.")

Calling this one of my favourite movie scenes is a bit of a stretch, but I've found myself watching it a lot recently.

And after that, you can watch this fairly good sketch of a woke James Bond. "Extra decaf" is a brilliant line.

Happy St. Bridget's Day!

 

Time again for one of the very few poems I've written that I'm actually fairly happy with, especially the third verse. I wrote this quickly on my phone while walking along Sandymount Strand on a cold night. It's a lot better than many poems I laboured over for hours and days.

Bridget, Mary of the Gael

Your fire has never ceased to burn
A glow by which we live and learn
And when spring dawns our thoughts return
To Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

You are no pagan deity
But God bathed you mysteriously
In lights of ancient piety
Dear Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

Within the Bridget's Cross we find
The fabric of the Gaelic mind
Folklife and faith securely twined
Dear Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

With Patrick and with Colmcille
You guided us to do God's will
In these dark days, be with us still
Dear Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

Ar uair ár mbás bí linn go fóill *
To watch, to comfort, and console
Spread out your cloak upon my soul
Dear Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

* In our moment of death be with us still.

A few years ago, near St. Patrick's Day, an acquaintance of mine greeted me by saying: "We have to brace ourselves for all the Paddywhackery now". I liked him until then. I've never really liked him since then. If you can't get into the spirit, what's the point of anything?

I dislike anyone who is:

1) Anti-sentimental

2) Anti-romantic

3) Anti-nostalgic

4) Anti-hype. (Unless it's hype about something intrinsically bad.)

5) Anti-craze. (As above.)