Clotted Hinderparts and Privy Drains: Game of Thrones and a History of Death on the Toilet

The twentieth century saw an abundance of famous toilet-related deaths. Elvis died in 1977 at just forty-two years old, found on the bathroom floor of his Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee, apparently having fallen from the toilet seat. Obese, and struggling with glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage, and an enlarged colon, the cause of his death was given as cardiac arrhythmia: essentially an irregular then stopped heart, widely believed to have been a direct consequence of his abuse of prescription drugs. However, with Elvis theories abound, including the idea that he faked his death, that he succumbed to Hirschprung’s disease, and that – as recent DNA analysis has suggested – he suffered from genetic heart disease. Elvis is buried, alongside his mother, father, and grandmother, in Graceland’s Meditation Garden.

Comedian Lenny Bruce died at forty in 1966, having overdosed on morphine while seated on the toilet of his home in Hollywood Hills. Phil Spector, a close friend, paid $5,000 to the Los Angeles police department for a set of photographs taken of the scene of Bruce’s death, in order to keep them from the press – though he sold at least one of the photographs years later to the filmmakers of a documentary about Bruce. Spector also took out an advertisement in Billboard magazine, stating that Bruce – whose career was hampered by numerous arrests on charges of obscenity – had died owing to an ‘overdose of police’.

The architect Louis Kahn died in 1974, aged seventy-three, in the public lavatory of Penn Station in New York. Kahn – the creator of some of the most influential and starkly beautiful architecture of the century, including the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban, the parliament of Bangladesh – had just returned from a work trip to India, and was set to take the train home to Philadelphia. When he died – of a heart attack – he had with him a briefcase containing his final drawings for a memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt, to be located on the southern tip of the recently rechristened Roosevelt Island. While Kahn’s designs for the memorial park were retained, it was not until 2005 that the funds were raised to advance the project. Ground was broken in the spring of 2010, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park opened in October 2012. Back in 1974, Kahn died with little on his person in the way of identification; and it took his wife in Philadelphia two days to discover that her husband was deceased.

Don Simpson – the producer of films including Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, and The Rock, and well known in Hollywood for his drug use –  died in the toilet of his Bel Air home in 1996, of heart failure after taking a combination of cocaine and prescription drugs. And the writer Evelyn Waugh died in 1966 aged sixty-two, purportedly passing on the toilet on Easter Sunday having attended a Latin Mass earlier that morning. Waugh was a devotee of the Mass in Latin, lamenting the changes instigated by the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965, which allowed for the vernacular language to be used over Latin, and brought about the eventual replacement of the Tridentine Mass, celebrated in the Catholic Church since 1570.

Amidst the celebrity and the diversity of the above figures, there shows an important issue of classification. We may distinguish between those who die only within or in proximity of the toilet or bathroom, inevitably a fairly typical occurrence; and those who die asquat the toilet seat. Of course, even ‘seat’ may be a misnomer. In an episode from the fourth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, entitled ‘The Weatherman’, Larry David attempts to go to the toilet but – refusing to turn on the bathroom light – doesn’t realise that the toilet seat is up, and thus falls into a potentially perilous position. There are toilet-centric deaths too on the small and big screens. In The Sopranos episode ‘He Is Risen’, from the third season of the show, Gigi Cestone, capo of the Aprile crew under Tony Soprano, has a heart attack while struggling with his bowels on the toilet. However, in Pulp Fiction, Vincent Vega – played by John Travolta – finishes his business on the toilet, and is only shot and killed as he emerges from that dwelling place. The point is that we will consider here only those whom we can reasonably suspect to have passed away atop the toilet, in seated position.

More, toilet-based deaths seem to impel an inclination towards particularly obscene exaggeration and rumour. The fact of a death upon the toilet is taken as license for the promulgation of all manner of hearsay, and for the development of sordid addenda which come to furnish or replace initial accounts. There is, for instance, the scurrilous suggestion that – rather than owing to drug abuse or the affects of any disease or illness – Elvis died simply of constipation. Catherine the Great died at sixty-seven in 1796, having greatly expanded the Russian Empire throughout her thirty-four-year reign, winning control over Crimea from the Ottoman Empire, partitioning the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and beginning the Russian colonisation of Alaska. There is some dispute among historians as to whether she suffered the stroke which brought about her death only in her dressing room, or on the toilet seat. Robert. K Massie provides the following description:

The next morning, November 5, she rose at six, drank black coffee, and sat down to write. At nine, she asked to be left alone for a moment and went into her dressing room. She did not reemerge. Her attendants waited. Her valet knocked, entered the room, and saw no one. He waited a minute, then pushed on the door of the adjacent water closet. It was partially jammed. He and a maid forced the door open and discovered the empress unconscious on the floor against the door. Her face was scarlet and her eyes were closed […] thirty-six hours after she was stricken and without ever recovering consciousness, Catherine died. (Massie, chapter 73)

Whatever, the apparent relationship between Catherine’s death and the restroom soon resulted within Russia in the commonly held belief that she died after the toilet she was seated upon cracked and broke underneath her. This version of her death was alluded to in a poem by Alexander Pushkin, ‘Мне жаль великия жены’. Equally popular, and eschewing any notion of a stroke, became the story that Catherine suffered death squashed by a stallion: according to this tale, her attendants were lowering the horse onto her for the satiation of her sexual desires, when the harness broke, and the horse fell and saw her killed. Thus along with precision when it comes to identifying the site of these deaths, we must also allow for the tendency for such accounts to become overblown, or to show the considerable bias of their narrators.

The concluding episode of the fourth season of Game of Thrones  – ‘The Children’, which aired in June – showed Tyrion Lannister avenge a litany of abuse by killing his father, shooting him with a crossbow while Tywin sat in his dressing gown on the privy. Perhaps George R. R. Martin, the author of the A Song of Ice and Fire books upon which the television series is based, drew something in his depiction of Tywin’s murder from the infamous and untimely deaths of the last century. Yet for the sort of bloody political intrigue which defines both the novels and the show, we have to look further back in history, to a religious heretic, a number of English Kings, a Japanese feudal lord, and an American judge.

Arius (256-336) was a presbyter, apparently of Libyan descent, who ministered in Alexandria, which was in the beginning of the fourth century one of the centres of Christendom. Considered a heresiarch – someone who, more than a mere heretic, led a sect which opposed the accepted beliefs of the Church – the school of thought which he popularised, Arianism, has been described by Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, as ‘the archetypal Christian deviation, something aimed at the very heart of the Christian confession’. At a time when the precise nature of Jesus Christ was still being defined within Christianity, Arius argued that Christ was not co-eternal and equal with God the Father. Accepting that Christ was begotten, and came into existence before time, Arius nevertheless held that God was the only being without beginning.

Within the Christian world, this was seen as a divisive challenge to the conception of the relationship between Father and Son. In an attempt to settle what had become a pressing issue, particularly in the Greek-speaking east of the Church, the Roman Emperor Constantine – the first Christian ruler of the Empire – convened the First Council of Nicaea in 325. After heated debate, the Council of Nicaea decided firmly against Arius. A creed was established which determined Father and Son to be co-eternal and ‘homoousios’, which means of the same substance.

Arius was exiled from the Church. Yet his views and his charismatic presentation continued to exert a strong influence, and by 336 it seemed likely that he would be restored to communion, only for his death to preempt this conclusion. The circumstances of Arius’s death were first recounted by Athanasius, his chief ideological opponent, and the Bishop of Alexandria in six spells between 328 and 373. Despite Athanasius’s lack of impartiality, he affords us with the only allegedly eye-witness account of Arius’s demise; and his letter to Serapion was the source for all later retellings.

Ecclesiastical writers from Epiphanius to Sozomen elaborated after Athanasius on the manner of Arius’s death. Socrates Scholasticus’s account is the most explicit: affording details of the place of Arius’s death, which he depicts as Constantine’s Forum in Constantinople, today the site of Çemberlitaş Square in Istanbul; and describing in lurid imagery the ‘evacuations’ of Arius’s bowels, ‘followed by a copious hemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: moreover portions of his spleen and liver were brought off in the effusion of blood’. Yet it is Sozomen, who wrote following Scholasticus, who perhaps best summarises the occurrence of Arius’s death and its aftermath:

Late in the afternoon, Arius, being seized suddenly with pain in the stomach, was compelled to repair to the public place set apart for emergencies of this nature. As some time passed away without his coming out, some persons, who were waiting for him outside, entered, and found him dead and still sitting upon the seat. When his death became known, all people did not view the occurrence under the same aspect. Some believed that he died at that very hour, seized by a sudden disease of the heart, or suffering weakness from his joy over the fact that his matters were falling out according to his mind; others imagined that this mode of death was inflicted on him in judgement, on account of his impiety. Those who held his sentiments were of opinion that his death was brought about by magical arts. (in Schaff, 279)

Arius’s death on the toilet was recalled early in the twentieth century by James Joyce. In ‘Proteus’, the third episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus walks along Sandymount strand and considers to himself:

Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred heresiarch! In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia. With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts. (Joyce, Ulysses, 3.50-54)

In April 1016, King Æthelred II (Æthelred the Unready) of England died and his son, Edmund, gained the throne, becoming Edmund II (Edmund Ironside). A succession of Danish raids on the English coast since the 980s had forced Æthelred in 991 to pay a tribute to the Danish King, as a means of keeping the peace. Despite the repeated paying of the Danegeld, Danish raids continued until, in late 1013, King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark invaded and took the English crown. Æthelred was forced into exile in Normandy, but was restored the following year upon Forkbeard’s death. Soon Forkbeard’s son, Canute, began laying his claim to the English throne, and engaged in a series of battles on English shores, first with Æthelred, then with Edmund.

In contrast to his father, Edmund is widely considered to have been a brave and competent leader, but he was ultimately defeated by Canute at the Battle of Assandun in October 1016 – after being betrayed by Eadric Streona, the Ealdorman of Mercia. Respecting Edmund and realising he still had much support in London and Wessex, Canute agreed with Edmund that they would divide England between one another. Yet by the end of November, Edmund was dead. The cause of his death is debated, but writing in the 1120s, Henry Huntingdon offered the following version:

King Edmund was treasonably slain a few days afterwards. Thus it happened: one night, this great and powerful king having occasion to retire to the house for relieving the calls of nature, the son of the ealdorman Edric, by his father’s contrivance, concealed himself in the pit, and stabbed the king twice from beneath with a sharp dagger, and, leaving the weapon fixed in his bowels, made his escape. Edric then presented himself to Canute, and saluted him, saying, ‘Hail! thou who art sole king of England!’ Having explained what had taken place, Canute replied, ‘For this deed I will exalt you, as it merits, higher than all the nobles of England.’ He then commanded that Edric should be decapitated and his head placed upon a pole on the highest battlement of the tower of London. Thus perished King Edmund Ironside, after a short reign of one year, and he was buried at Glastonbury, near his grandfather Edgar. (in Forester, 196)

Other accounts of Edmund II’s death which posit murder suggest he was killed by a spear rather than a dagger; or indeed by a sort of crossbow, booby-trapped to fire when Edmund put his weight on the privy seat. And the specifics of Eadric’s subsequent demise at the hands of Canute also vary, with Florence of Worcester writing that it occurred at ‘the Lord’s Nativity’, the Christmas of 1017, with Canute ordering that Eadric’s body ‘be thrown over the wall of the city and left unburied‘. Such an analysis suggests that Canute had Eadric killed owing to concern over his treacherous nature,  and not as a direct response to the demise of Edmund II.

Edward II is alleged to have been murdered in 1327 by means of a red-hot poker shoved up his anus – gossip which gained traction through the Brut chronicles and Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon. While other interpretations of Edward’s death are more widely supported – including the view that he escaped death entirely in 1327, and lived out the rest of his life as a hermit on the continent – the image again calls to mind The Sopranos, and the murder of Vito Spatafore, who is sodomised with a pool cue in a brutal remark upon his homosexuality. James I of Scotland died trapped in a sewer in 1437; but we must move to Japan for our next enthroned death, and to the daimyo Uesugi Kenshin. Kenshin was a powerful feudal lord, who ruled Echigo province until his passing in 1578. His death while seated on the toilet has been attributed to a lifetime of heavy drinking, to stomach cancer, or to a ninja who rose from beneath the latrine before stabbing Kenshin with a spear. Kenshin’s downfall allowed Oda Nobunaga to initiate what would be the eventual unification of Japan, and the onset of the Edo period.

The spectacle returned to Britain in 1760, when George II – already blind in one eye and hard of hearing – passed away on his close stool aged seventy-six. The account is provided in the memoirs of Horace Walpole:

On the 25th of October he rose as usual at six, and drank his chocolate; for all his actions were invariably methodic. A quarter after seven he went into a little closet. His German valet de chambre in waiting, heard a noise, and running in, found the King dead on the floor. In falling, he had cut his face against the corner of a bureau. He was laid on a bed and blooded, but not a drop followed: the ventricle of his heart had burst. (Walpole, 302)

Webster Thayer was a judge of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, who achieved notoriety for his role presiding over the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian-born Galleanist anarchists, who were accused in 1920 of murdering two men during the armed robbery of a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts. At their trial the following year – despite apparently strong alibis, inconclusive ballistics evidence, and the dubious testimony of some prosecution witnesses – they were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Thayer was roundly criticised for his conduct during the trial. It was argued that he had shown consistent prejudice against the defence; and more, it emerged that in private he had referred to Sacco and Vanzetti as ‘Bolsheviki’, remarking that he was out to ‘get them good and proper’.

Supported by the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee – which in seven years raised $300,000, and hired legal professionals, organisers and publicists to aid the cause – a series of appeals ensued, but dismissing claims of evidence tampering and the confession of another man, Thayer repeatedly denied motions for a new trial. After a second appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court was rejected in early 1927, Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller – beset by calls for clemency – established an Advisory Committee to review the trial’s proceedings. When this committee determined that the trial had been fair and should stand, there was nothing left to be done, and Sacco and Vanzetti were executed by electric chair on August 23, 1927. Their case and their eventual demise was accompanied by a spate of demonstrations in cities across the world, and by letters from major international figures including Anatole France, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. In October 1927, Wells wrote in The New York Times:

The guilt or innocence of these two Italians is not the issue that has excited the opinion of the world. Possibly they were actual murderers, and still more possibly they knew more than they would admit about the crime…. Europe is not “retrying” Sacco and Vanzetti or anything of the sort. It is saying what it thinks of Judge Thayer. Executing political opponents as political opponents after the fashion of Mussolini and Moscow we can understand, or bandits as bandits; but this business of trying and executing murderers as Reds, or Reds as murderers, seems to be a new and very frightening line for the courts of a State in the most powerful and civilized Union on earth to pursue. (Wells, The New York Times, 16 October, 1927)

In rejecting Sacco and Vanzetti’s second appeal, the Supreme Judicial Court had declared, ‘It is not imperative that a new trial be granted even though evidence is newly discovered and, if presented to a jury, would justify a different verdict’. The extent of the ordeal and the ramifications of this statement ultimately brought about significant judicial reform, requiring that all capital cases be subject to review. Meanwhile, anarchists sought retribution. On 27 September, 1932, Thayer’s home in Worcester was destroyed by a bomb, which saw his wife and maid injured by falling debris. He lived the remainder of his life under guard at his private club in Boston, and died there of a cerebral embolism, aged seventy-five, on 18 April, 1933. The anarchist Valerio Isca commented on the rumour that Thayer had died on the toilet seat, adding ‘and his soul went down the drain’.

——————

Forester, T. (ed. and trans.) The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon (London: H. G. Bohn, 1853)

Joyce, J. Ulysses ed. Gabler, H. W. (New York: Bodley Head, 1986)

Massie, R. K. Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Head of Zeus, 2012)

Schaff, P. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II, Volume 2 (New York: Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1886)

Walpole, H. Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Second: Volume III (London: H. Colburn, 1847)

Wells, H. G. ‘Wells Speaks Some Plain Words to US’ The New York Times, 16 October, 1927

The Unknown Known: The Epistemologies of Errol Morris and Donald Rumsfeld

Errol Morris’s documentary The Unknown Known views the political career of Donald Rumsfeld and his time as US Secretary of Defence between 2001 and 2006. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival at the end of last August; was given a limited release in the United States on Wednesday; and has been showing at select Picturehouse Cinemas in the UK this week. Conceived as a companion piece to Morris’s 2003 documentary, The Fog of War – Morris has called the two works ‘salt-and-pepper shakers’ or ‘bookends’ – where that film explored the War in Vietnam, this focuses on the early days of the War in Iraq. Morris views these two wars as disastrous, unjustified and error-strewn, horrific episodes in American and world history. Yet where The Fog of War was a penetrating analysis of Robert McNamara’s decisions, considerations, and regrets regarding the Vietnam War, structured within a chronology of McNamara’s life, The Unknown Known is more amorphous.

McNamara had already shown a penchant for retrospection and reconsideration. His 1995 book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, and 2001’s Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century, co-authored by James G. Blight, were both impetuses for Morris’s film, and Morris drew from the former for the eleven lessons which serve as structural points in The Fog of War. Rumsfeld’s participation in such a project comes as more of a surprise. Morris has recounted that when he first contacted Rumsfeld’s lawyer, this lawyer assured him that Rumsfeld was never likely to speak to him on film. Rumsfeld eagerly chose to engage; yet at the close of the documentary, when asked by Morris the reason for his participation, Rumsfeld hesitates and offers only ‘I’ll be damned if I know’, his words accompanied by the grin which has become his trademark over the preceding hour and a half of footage.

Emerging from a closed subject, this grin comes to serve as a point of reference for the audience, appearing to offer some insight into the nature of the man. It can be read in a number of ways: as the sinister smirk of someone unwilling to reflect openly on his own failings or wrongdoings; as the connivance of a lifelong politician; as an attempt to disarm his interviewer; or more plainly as a genuine expression of engagement, of pleasure, or of well-being. For Rumsfeld himself, the smile seems both to challenge and to conciliate. With it, he affirms to his correspondent that they are engaged together in a battle of wits, while suggesting that this battle amounts to a game, to a play of language and personality, rather than to any deeper ideals or absolutes.

Morris interviewed Rumsfeld for 33 hours over the course of one year. The interviews followed the same filming technique which characterises The Fog of War and several of Morris’s other works: Morris utilised what he calls the Interrotron, which allows interviewee and interviewer to sit apart, but to look at one another via a screen while they talk. This enables Morris and his interviewee to maintain something approximating eye contact, while on the other hand providing the separation which Morris believes is conducive to revealing interviews. Morris thinks that subjects will say more to a camera than they will face-to-face with a person; and that with a camera in front of them, he can use pauses to encourage his subjects to fill in the blanks, speaking where they would otherwise remain silent. The Unknown Known centres entirely on Rumsfeld’s face: largely eschewing the archival footage that was a feature of The Fog of War, we are given Morris’s interview, and brief clips from Rumsfeld’s press conferences, while dictionary definitions of words circle against the dark background as Rumsfeld extends his own endeavours with language.

There is a brief recapitulation of Rumsfeld’s earlier political career. After opening in the midst of the Iraq War, and with the suggestive phrase which makes up the documentary’s title, we go back to the late 1960s and the 1970s, when Rumsfeld served first under the Nixon administration, then later under Gerald Ford. As Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity during Nixon’s Presidency, Rumsfeld appointed Dick Cheney and Frank Carlucci, then at the very beginning of their careers in politics. Serving as Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford from September 1974, a reshuffle the following year saw Rumsfeld become the 13th United States Secretary of Defence, with Cheney taking Rumsfeld’s previous position as Ford’s Chief of Staff. This reshuffle was dubbed the ‘Halloween Massacre’, and as Morris shows, Rumsfeld was widely fingered as its chief architect. While it effectively saw Rumsfeld and Cheney promoted – and made Rumsfeld, at 43, the youngest Secretary of Defence in US history – it saw several moderate Republicans fired, and made George H. W. Bush the Director of Central Intelligence, head of the CIA. While ostensibly a promotion for Bush too, the move has been seen as an attempt on the part of Rumsfeld to compartmentalise and therefore marginalise a political rival. Yet in 1980, it was Bush rather than Rumsfeld who Ronald Reagan chose as his Vice Presidential running mate.

Bush would succeed Reagan as President in 1989. Morris suggests to Rumsfeld that, had Reagan chose his Vice President differently, it would have been he rather than Bush in line for the Presidency. Rumsfeld’s response is one of the most revealing in the documentary: a terse, purse-lipped ‘That’s possible’. The prominent economist Milton Friedman once stated that he personally regarded Reagan’s selection of Bush over Rumsfeld as ‘the worst decision not only of his campaign but of his presidency’; and that had Rumsfeld been chosen, ‘I believe he would have succeeded Reagan as president and the sorry Bush-Clinton period would never have occurred’.

Overall, this section of Morris’s film is richly instructive, informing or reminding viewers of an able and precocious political career, and one characterised by maneuvering and ambition, plus some disappointment. After 1977 and the end of the Ford administration, Rumsfeld spent the next two decades developing a career in business, and continuing to take part-time political roles. The most significant of these saw him appointed Reagan’s Special Envoy to the Middle East: travelling to Baghdad in December 1983, he met with Saddam Hussein and Hussein’s deputy, and Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz. It was not until 2001 that Rumsfeld returned to the forefront of politics, when he was appointed Secretary of Defence in the administration of George W. Bush. Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx and Bush’s friend at Yale University, had been the newly elected President’s first choice for the post, but he turned the position down; and Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney, forwarded the name of his old colleague, which Bush agreed to despite Rumsfeld’s differences with his father. So Rumsfeld became the 21st United States Secretary of Defence, and he would now become the oldest in US history.

Morris’s endeavour is to navigate the Iraq War perceived and conceptualised by just one of its predominant figures. He does not attempt an exhaustive account of the war, nor does he succeed in explaining its causes. Given the nature of Rumsfeld’s responses – by turns resolute and equivocal – the documentary poses more questions than it answers. It is one of Morris’s most provocative searches into his perennial themes: how we wilfully construct knowledge and how this constructed knowledge entangles with truth. We traverse the Iraq War amidst ‘snowflakes’: the name Rumsfeld embraced to refer to the memos he would send other officials and members of staff. He suspects he wrote and sent at least 20,000 of these during his six years as Secretary of Defence as part of the Bush administration: when he finally left the role at the end of 2006, a final memo sent to all Pentagon personnel declared ‘the blizzard is over’.

Morris displays some of these snowflakes on screen, and asks Rumsfeld to read several aloud. Some of the liveliest exchanges between the interviewer and his subject centre upon the two major controversies of the Iraq War: the decision to go to war itself, which implicates Iraq’s alleged but nonexistent weapons of mass destruction; and the abuses of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Yet even here, while Morris’s opposition to the Iraq War and his absolute disdain for its atrocities is clear, he does not attack Rumsfeld directly or attempt to hang blame heavily about his shoulders. There exists a memo, for instance, written by Rumsfeld on 27 November 2001, which appears to show him willing to concoct motivation for a war in Iraq, rather than responding honestly to intelligence:

Even on the day of 11 September 2001, Rumsfeld is reported to have asked for any evidence that might link the day’s terrorist attacks to Saddam Hussein, and thereby legitimise military action. Morris doesn’t include the above memo in his film. Rather than analysing the motivations for war, he prefers instead to contemplate Rumsfeld’s response once it had been concluded that Iraq did not, after all, possess weapons of mass destruction. He wants to allow Rumsfeld the space in which to express himself, to implicate himself or to reveal some pertinent detail as he sees it. Instead, Rumsfeld embarks on a rhetorical exercise, suggesting that ‘absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence’ – words which, applied to the context of Iraq and the devastating loss of life war has caused, Morris has subsequently called the most disturbing in his film.

Rather than open hostility, Morris expresses scepticism, and at certain moments allows his camera to linger on Rumsfeld after he has finished speaking in an attempt to achieve a sort of dramatic irony: viewers are supposed to understand the flaws in Rumsfeld’s arguments, and to see that his reflections upon and criticisms of others apply equally to himself. Speaking of his meeting in 1983 with Hussein and Aziz, and remarking that he continues to find it difficult to understand their respective states of mind, he reflects that they lived ‘pretend’ lives, fulfilling only their images of themselves. The lingering camera implies that this can be applied equally to Rumsfeld; but beyond the extent to which we all build our selves through images, it is not easy to conclude that there is anything especially counterfeit or deluded about Rumsfeld.

While expressing no remorse for his role initiating the Iraq War, readily chalking up points in his own favour when he feels he has bested Morris or uncovered a misleading interpretation of events, speaking sometimes directly and sometimes ambiguously, and appearing impervious to the lures of self-reflection, still there are few points in the film where Rumsfeld does not appear to be speaking candidly. Morris asks him about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Rumsfeld argues that the public opinion of Guantanamo Bay is grossly misguided; and describes it as one of the best-run prisons anywhere in the world. Of course, this lays aside concerns over the ideology behind the prison, and over the morality of the procedures which those who run it are required to carry out. Rumsfeld discusses authorising ‘Special Interrogation Plans’ for Guantanamo detainees in late 2002, but he depicts this as a procedural responsibility, in which he was essentially obliged to sign off from a list different levels of interrogative techniques.

Rumsfeld is adamant that Guantanamo Bay remains a legitimate institution; but he admits himself appalled by the abuses which took place at Abu Ghraib, the central prison twenty miles outside of Baghdad, in late 2003 and early 2004. Morris asks Rumsfeld whether the fact of Guantanamo Bay, its ‘Special Interrogation Plans’, and a lack of clarity within the military regarding these, together influenced events in Abu Ghraib, and after some hesitancy, Rumsfeld admits this possibility. It was his sense that, as Secretary of Defence, he was ultimately responsible for these wrongdoings which caused Rumsfeld to twice offer his resignation – which was twice declined by President Bush. On the other hand, pushed to admit a narrower responsibility for the Abu Ghraib abuses – which saw detainees stripped, tortured, raped, sodomised, and murdered – Rumsfeld declines. Regarding the ‘Torture Memos’ – sent by the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice in August 2002 and March 2003, and advising that ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, including waterboarding, might be permissable outside the United States – Rumsfeld states that he never read them, which prompts Morris’s most physical reaction: an immediate, incredulous ‘Really?’.

As with others who were part of the Bush administration, it is difficult to discern whether Rumsfeld is a deep thinker or instead a quick thinker, whose strength lies in thinking on his feet and making points firmly and effectively. Still – even for someone who disagrees wholeheartedly with Rumsfeld’s militarist ethos and with so many of his conclusions – The Unknown Known suggests Rumsfeld as a ready intellectual, who might be guilty of intellectual error more than moral malevolence. There is much philosophical interest in how Rumsfeld conceptualises power and its responsibilities, and in many of the things he says – even in his most notorious soundbites.

The film’s title derives from a Department of Defence briefing given in February 2002. Rumsfeld was discussing the lack of evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Utilising a form of tricolon, he said:

‘Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.’

The idea of ‘unknown knowns’ emerged as the logical fourth part of this series. Yet what ‘unknown knowns’ actually are remains a point of contention throughout the documentary, as Rumsfeld himself fluctuates between opposing definitions. At the beginning of the film, he defines them as ‘things that you think you know, that it turns out you did not’. This is a reading whose sense has precedents, for instance in the phrase attributed to Mark Twain that, ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so’. However, Rumsfeld’s initial definition does not follow the grammar of the earlier three; and at the end of the film, he redefines ‘unknown knowns’ accordingly as things that we do not know that we know. As Morris points out, the difference here is polarising: according to the first definition, we know less than we think; whereas according to the later definition, we know more. So do we know more than we think we know, or do we know less? Or is it not both?

Rumsfeld believes that all policy, but foreign policy most of all, requires imagination. This imagination is not cast as empathetic, and it does not, in the view of Rumsfeld, extend directly from knowledge. Elaborating on his quote, he locates ‘unknown unknowns’ as the sites of fundamental, world-altering change – which is to say that, for Rumsfeld, the most important events which occur are often those of which we have not even conceived, never mind expected. For Rumsfeld, Pearl Harbor and September 11 are the defining moments in American history, and they were allowed to come about through a complete vacuum of knowledge: America had not conceived of such attacks, and did not appreciate that such attacks were possible: the possibility of such attacks was unknown and had been unthought. So for Rumsfeld it is in the area of ‘unknown unknowns’ that we must imagine. He believes that the imagination must be harnessed to give the best sense of what is possible, thereby allowing not only for preparation, but for action. This sense of what constitutes an ‘unknown unknown’ may be debated: was there not a store of knowledge out of which Pearl Harbor and September 11 could have been conceived? And at the same time, Rumsfeld’s series raises interesting epistemological questions regarding how we build and access knowledge: to what extent is imagining and thinking through an ‘unknown unknown’ possible, and to what extent is all thought merely a reconfiguration of existing knowledge? Should ‘known unknowns’ be the realm and starting point of the imagination rather than ‘unknown unknowns’?

Whatever, we can allow even extreme or apparently absurd hypotheses as important facets of scientific and philosophical methodology; and we can allow hypotheses an important place too in political thinking. Yet to embrace the unfettered imagination as a source of potential knowledge, which can and ought to then be acted upon, seems profoundly dangerous in the political sphere. Rumsfeld’s philosophy allowed him a justification for war in Iraq regardless of all evidence – essentially on the basis of what might exist, and what, if we stretch thought to its limits, might occur. It is a chain of reasoning which results in militarisation, preemptive military action which in fact initiates rather than counters conflict, and a marked lack of proportionality in all military endeavour.

So in Rumsfeld there is a peculiar compound of narrow accountancy when it comes to analysing military might (as Secretary of Defence in the 1970s he was concerned at trends in comparative US-Soviet military strength, and ordered the development of new weapons and machinery in order to restore the balance in the Americans’ favour) and of free thought when it comes to evaluating the justifications for military action. Errol Morris’s friend and sometime collaborator Wernor Herzog has spoken with regard to his own documentaries about foregoing an accountant’s truth for the ‘ecstatic truth’ of the cinema: but aside from their widely different mediums, Herzog seeks in his films to reveal the full consciousness of individual human beings, while Rumsfeld too readily forgets the lives of others and asserts his own psychology in place of matters of fact. So too when it comes to language, Rumsfeld at once understands how words are used as tools, with nuanced and changeable meanings, yet seeks to fix their power by restricting and defining their application. He is an adroit and entertaining communicator, but his numerous memos seeking after dictionary definitions of words make it clear that he does not feel himself their master. He was content enough with his speech on knowns and unknowns that he incorporated it as the title of his autobiography, Known and Unknown: A Memoir, published in 2011. Considering the aftermath to September 11 and the path towards war in Iraq, Rumsfeld writes:

‘It was a time of discovery–of seeking elusive, imperfect solutions for new problems that would not be solved quickly. There was no guidebook or road map for us to follow.’

In fact, it was Slavoj Žižek, in a May 2004 article entitled ‘What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib’, who first theorised the missing term in Rumsfeld’s series. Žižek argued about Rumsfeld that:

‘What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know—which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.

If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns”—the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.’

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A transcript of an interview with Errol Morris, in which he discusses the film, at Democracy Now!: http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/27/the_unknown_known_errol_morris_new

Another interview with the director via Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/01/us-donaldrumsfeld-idUSBREA300TM20140401

Two insightful reviews of The Unknown Known, by The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/movies/deciphering-donald-h-rumsfeld-in-the-unknown-known.html?hpw&rref=movies&_r=0 and The Spectator: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/culturehousedaily/2014/03/the-unknown-known-errol-morris-tries-to-trip-up-donald-rumsfeld-and-fails/

A 2003 article in The Atlantic on Rumsfeld’s early political career: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/close-up-young-rumsfeld/302824/

Slavoj Žižek’s piece ‘What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib’, from In These Times, 21 May 2004: http://inthesetimes.com/article/747

The Unknown Known Trailer:

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – starring James Stewart and John Wayne – is often considered the last great film John Ford directed, in a career that comprised around 140 films over a period of fifty years. Released in 1962, Ford would direct only four more feature-length pictures; including one more with his friend and longtime collaborator Wayne, in 1963’s Donovan’s Reef; and one more with Stewart, 1964’s Cheyenne Autumn.

The total number of films on which Ford and Wayne worked together is difficult to precisely ascertain: Wayne began his career working as an extra, and went unbilled on as many as eight Ford dramas in the late 1920s, just as Ford was making the transition to sound. Some of these films have been lost; for some, it is disputed whether Wayne actually appeared on screen at all. In 1930, with Ford’s support, Wayne obtained the lead role in director Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail. Despite a vast budget of over $2 million, and shooting in two formats – traditional 35 mm and 75 mm Grandeur film widescreen – the film failed at the box office, and Wayne spent much of the subsequent decade appearing in smaller roles and in B-movies. This persisted until 1939, and Stagecoach. Though he had directed numerous silent Westerns, Stagecoach was Ford’s first Western in sound; and Wayne’s first leading role in a Ford film.

Its success established Wayne as a leading man and as a leading star. From Stagecoach to Donovan’s Reef, Ford directed Wayne fourteen times. Only Harry Carey worked with the director more, serving twenty-five times as Ford’s lead, a fixture in that role in the first three years of Ford’s career from 1917 to 1919. Carey is perhaps best known today for playing the President of the Senate in the James Stewart-led Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, from 1939. Wayne and Carey would also work together and become close. Wayne’s pose in the closing scene of The Searchers – now considered Ford and Wayne’s definitive work, and one of the greatest films of all time; which features Carey’s son as Brad Jorgensen, killed early in the proceedings – was an homage to Carey, who often appeared with the same gesture, his left hand loosely clutching his right elbow.

The plot of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance concerns the end of the Old West, as the society of a small rural town (in this case, the undistinguished town of ‘Shinbone’) transitions towards becoming part of a federal state. This political change implicates for Ford other themes and other contests: it suggests the potential disenchantment of the individual and the end of rugged heroism; and encourages a questioning of the natures of truth and legend.

——

Senator Ransom ‘Ranse’ Stoddard (Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) arrive in Shinbone via steam train. They are there for the funeral of a local named Tom Doniphon, apparently unknown by much of the town. The editor of the local newspaper, the Shinbone Star, asserts his right for information, and demands of Stoddard, ‘Who was Tom Doniphon?’. It is Stoddard’s response which comprises the remainder of the film, occurring in continuous flashback, recounting events which took place several decades before. This means that for much of the film, Stewart and Wayne – 53 and 54 years old respectively at the time of shooting – portray men in their twenties.

‘A youngster, fresh out of law school; a bag full of law books and my father’s gold watch’, Stoddard journeys to Shinbone – prior to the introduction of the railroad – on stagecoach. The coach is stopped by a group of outlaws, who beat Stoddard when he attempts to prevent a woman losing the broach given to her by her now-dead husband. The leader of the group, the titular Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), ransacks Stoddard’s bags and finds only ‘Law books? Well I’ll teach you law…Western law!; at which he brutally whips him.

Stoddard is recovered by Tom Doniphon (Wayne), a rancher, and taken to the local eating establishment, the home of Hallie and her Swedish parents, Peter and Nora Ericson. As Stoddard revives, weak and in a daze, he feels he has something he must do: he wants to arrest Valance and his men. Doniphon – calling Stoddard ‘Pilgrim’, an epithet which has become popularly associated with Wayne – is dismissive, telling Stoddard, ‘I know those law books mean a lot to you, but not out here. Out here, a man settles his own problems’. Stoddard equates Doniphon’s   philosophy with the lawlessness which allows Valance to thrive; he argues vehemently, proclaiming ‘The law is the only…the only…’, but collapses to his bed before completing his sentence.

Stoddard recuperates and settles in to life in Shinbone, continuing to stay with Hallie and the Ericsons. He works washing dishes and waiting tables in their eatery, and establishes a daily school to teach the locals, including Hallie, how to read and write. Valance continues to menace the town. Doniphon and Hallie have a simmering relationship: the Ericsons initially consider a marriage proposal only a matter of time, but whether it is restraint, a languid style, a certain complacency, or whether he is simply waiting for the right moment, Doniphon proves slow to act. Meanwhile, Stoddard and Hallie grow increasingly close. When Stoddard visits Doniphon’s ranch, Doniphon allows himself to be explicit: he tells Stoddard ‘Hallie is my girl. I’m building that brand new room and porch for her for when we get married’. ‘Well Tom,’ Stoddard responds, ‘I guess everybody pretty much takes that for granted’. Yet Doniphon is never so expressive with Hallie, and fears her developing feelings for the young lawyer.

Stoddard befriends Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brien), the founder and sole writer of the Shinbone Star. A growing population means that Shinbone is required to send two delegates to a territorial convention for statehood. While the townspeople are initially wary, Peabody and Stoddard succeed in explaining the benefits statehood would bring the town. An article Peabody writes for the Star highlights the attempts of cattle barons to keep the area an open range; Peabody argues that this is borne of vicious self-interest, and would endanger smaller homesteads; Stoddard is admiring of the piece. He speaks before the town votes for their two delegates, and proclaims that ‘Statehood means the protection of our farms and our fences, and it means schools for our children, and it means progress for the future!’. The townspeople agree. Liberty Valance – whose group of men has grown, backed by the cattle barons who seek to prevent a fair vote – arrives and attempts intimidation, but Stoddard and Peabody are voted as the town’s two delegates.

Soon after, in revenge, Valance and his men assault Peabody. Stoddard silently determines to act. He takes a gun and waits for Valance in the street. When Valance emerges from the town’s bar, the two stalk each other, with Valance shooting Stoddard’s right arm and forcing him to retrieve his gun. Somehow – despite a lack of technique embarrassingly demonstrated earlier by Doniphon – and despite faltering with his weapon, Stoddard triumphs, with Valance shot dead. Witnessing how Hallie tends for Stoddard’s wound, Doniphon first drives Valance’s remaining men from town, then drunkenly heads to his ranch, where he sets fire to the new room he had been building, ultimately engulfing his entire home.

At the convention for statehood, the gathered delegates must vote for one man to represent the region at Congress in Washington. Peabody boldly nominates Stoddard. The objections to his candidacy centre on his shooting of Valance: should a Congressman be one who takes the law into his own hands; ought the delegates send Stoddard ‘with bloodstained hands to walk the hallowed halls of government’? These protestations cause Stoddard to leave the delegation in distress and uncertainty. He is halted by Doniphon, who reveals that it was he – hidden in an alleyway across the street – who shot and killed Valance. Doniphon states that he did it ‘in cold blood’ because he knew it would make Hallie happy, and tells Stoddard ‘Hallie is your girl now’. As he departs, he demands of Stoddard, ‘Go on back in there and take that nomination. You taught her how to read and write – now give her something to read and right about’.

Thus Stoddard concludes his recollection and we return to the present day. ‘You know the rest of it’, he tells the young Star journalists: he went to Washington and statehood was achieved; he became the state’s first Governor, serving for three terms; served two terms in the Senate; as ambassador to the United Kingdom; returned for one more term in the Senate; and now stands on the threshold of becoming Vice President. Yet the Star‘s editor throws everything Stoddard has just dictated into the furnace: he does not want its revelation. ‘This is the West, Sir’, he says, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’.

A train sounds in the distance. Stoddard and Hallie take their leave. On the train back to Washington, Stoddard suggests leaving political life – after passing an irrigation bill – and returning to live in Shinbone. Hallie responds enthusiastically: ‘If you knew how often I’d dreamed of it. My roots are here…I guess my heart is here. Yes, let’s come back. Look at it: it was once a wilderness; now it’s a garden. Aren’t you proud?’. Stoddard’s thoughtfulness is briefly interrupted by the train driver, who promises to expedite the Senator’s journey. ‘Think nothing of it. Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance!’.

——

Sergio Leone called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance his favourite Ford film, remarking ‘it was the only film where he learned something about pessimism’. Locating the sources and specificities of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance‘s pessimism goes a long way towards interpreting the film. Certainly, pessimism can be traced in everything from Liberty Valance’s tyranny over the emerging town; to the careless attitude the press are shown to hold towards fact; to Tom Doniphon’s lonely demise; to the laments which Stoddard and Hallie bear regarding aspects of their own lives. Many critical evaluations of the movie extend these particular concerns into a pessimism that encompasses the whole film; arguing that it serves ultimately as a reflection on the loss of the Old West, Doniphon’s heroism forgotten and foregone, Stoddard the mistaken hero, whose career is based on a lie.

Perhaps this is how Ford and Wayne would have seen the film; perhaps this is the reading Ford endeavoured to provide. Ford’s earlier Westerns typically romanticise the world of the genre, with broad vistas, bold villains and brave heroes. Wayne had teamed with Howard Hawks to make Rio Bravo as a response to High Noon: in High Noon, Gary Cooper’s marshal has to fight a group of murderous outlaws alone, neglected by a fearful townspeople, only aided by his wife, who ultimately shoots one of the outlaws from behind – a plot which Wayne viewed as an allegory of blacklisting and described as ‘the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life’. In some sense Liberty Valance speaks also to High Noon, possessing in Tom Doniphon another neglected hero. Here, however, that neglect owes to time and to the hero’s own selfless withholding of the truth.

Both within the film and in the apparatus to it, Ford made attempts to affirm Doniphon’s heroism. The film is peculiar in that Stewart was given top billing in its promotional materials, whereas Wayne has top billing in the film itself. This reflects the nature of the film as well as the equal stature of its two stars. Ford admitted to wanting Wayne to be the lead; in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, he stated that he tried to stress Hallie’s lasting attachment to Doniphon throughout the film in order to assert that character above Stewart’s Ranse Stoddard. At significant moments, the film’s score – otherwise composed by Cyril J. Mockridge – utilises a piece entitled ‘Ann Rutledge Theme’, originally composed by Alfred Newman for Ford’s 1939 film, Young Mr. Lincoln. The composition was evidently kept in mind by Ford for twenty-three years, used in Liberty Valance to express the lost love that characterises Hallie and Doniphon’s relationship.

Hallie’s fondness for Doniphon, and her sense of regret at how things ended between them, is emphasised especially in the film’s framing scenes, set in the present day. When she and Stoddard first arrive back in Shinbone, Stoddard is whisked off by the eager men of the Shinbone Star for an interview; while Hallie – with Link Appleyard, the town’s former marshal – visits Doniphon’s old ranch, never fully restored after the fire. On the way, she points out that ‘the cactus rose is in blossom’. Later, in the body of the film, we see Doniphon present Hallie with a cactus rose as a present; she shows it to Stoddard, proudly acclaiming it ‘the prettiest thing you ever did see’; Stoddard admits its prettiness, but asks, ‘Hallie, did you ever see a real rose?’. Back in the present at the close of the film, Hallie has left a cactus rose atop Doniphon’s coffin – a fact which causes Stoddard some furrow-browed reflection.

It is interesting in this respect to briefly consider the relationships certain directors have shared with their leading men. Ford is attributed as saying, early in Wayne’s career, that Wayne would become the biggest film star ever owing to the public’s sense of him as an everyman. After Harry Carey, Wayne became Ford’s hero; a position that suggests some emotional investment on the part of the director, which may intertwine man and actor, and which might prove difficult to break. Alfred Hitchcock famously called Cary Grant ‘the only actor I ever loved’, and used Grant for his heroic leading parts, whereas Stewart – in Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo – played the physically inferior, more psychologically troubled roles.

The emphasis given to Hallie’s remaining feelings for Doniphon brings into question her relationship with Stoddard. The development of this relationship is complex. Hallie is frequently Stoddard’s carer, for instance when he arrives in Shinbone after being beaten by Valance, and following the gunfight in which his right arm is injured. On the other hand, intellectually Stoddard is superior to his future wife, and it is arguable that he condescends to her at points: in his surprise at her inability to read and write, and again when he asks her if she has seen a ‘real’ rose. Yet the two do forge a close attachment; Hallie’s choosing Stoddard over Doniphon appears quite definite; and we do not sense that the decades the pair have spent married have been at all unhappy or beset by remorse.

Perhaps, seeing Doniphon’s coffin, and then on the train journey home, Hallie is simply in grief, and understandably feeling some guilt for Doniphon’s isolated later years. Likewise, if Stoddard appears disconcerted at her enduring feelings for Doniphon, perhaps this is only natural, philosophical and fleeting. To attribute truth and permanence to the emotions we see here is to give them a symbolism and a finality which other parts of the film cannot bear. If Ford did, in a few notable ways, engineer a certain preeminence for Wayne and Doniphon, his film is by no means unequivocal in proclaiming Doniphon’s person and his values over Stoddard’s.

The climax of the film arrives with the convention for statehood and Stoddard’s nomination for Congress; which is entwined with the twist which reveals Doniphon, not Stoddard, as Liberty Valance’s killer. The crux of some interpretations of the film is that this revelation upholds Doniphon and undermines Stoddard’s future successes, showing that they have a dishonest foundation. This interpretation is seemingly confirmed by the film’s ironic closing line, ‘Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance!’. However, what we are shown during the convention challenges such a straightforward reading. Stoddard has earned the respect and friendship of his nominator, Dutton Peabody, and the people of Shinbone not through force, but owing to his personal warmth, his generous intellect, and a sense of morality which prioritises law and the equality of all. The belief that he shot and killed Valance – far from establishing his credentials – serves as the sole barrier to his nomination; allowing those opposing him to cast him as heedless and blood-stained.

Stoddard realises himself that Valance may continue to define him: he says to Doniphon, ‘Isn’t it enough to kill a man without…without trying to build a life on it?’. This deeply-felt remark is more ambiguous than it may first appear: it can be read implicating Valance’s death as a springboard, or as something which makes a successful career more difficult or even irrelevant. Regardless, what we see in the convention and elsewhere renders it plausible that Stoddard’s career could have thrived without his reputation for shooting Valance.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was based on a short story by Dorothy M. Johnson, published in her 1953 collection Indian Country. There, Doniphon and Stoddard share a closer relationship, Doniphon proactively mentoring the younger and less experienced man. The screenplay – adapted for Ford by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck – has the effect of placing the two men in contrast; but it also makes the character of Doniphon more ambiguous, and less sympathetic. Ford shot in black and white, a decision which has been both criticised and praised; it is debated whether his choice was enforced by a limited budget, or whether he deliberately forewent wide landscapes and colour for an atmospheric black and white, rich in shadow, and well suited to the film’s close study of character. Others have posited that the black and white photography served to mask the makeup used to make Stewart and Wayne appear young men. Still others suggest that the film’s casting has its own thematic function: that Stewart’s age is evident in the body of the film despite makeup, but this reflects the fact that he is recollecting for us, looking back on his youth as a much older man, with the story we see unfolding marked by his age, an inevitably subjective account.

Despite the lack of scenery, the film is still evocative of a past time, but it cannot be reduced to an easy allegory asserting the wilderness over civilisation, or even the individual over society. That statehood and the rule of law genuinely represent progress – in a positive, unsatirical sense of the term – is not significantly argued against. To view Doniphon as a forsaken hero, Stoddard as an impostor, is to limit the film’s scope; it would be for us to accept the legends of the West, and to some degree of Wayne and Ford, rather than facing the film’s particular set of facts. It would, in a word, render us guilty of printing a narrow legend.

Nor is it sufficient to argue that the movie’s conflicts lack meaning because they lack resolution, or that they are the products of a sometimes confused film. Great works of art require our openness as viewers: their flaws and conflicts are, after Joyce, the portals of discovery and ought to be accepted and investigated rather than dismissed. It remains to appreciate The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance through its complexities: its demonstrating of the irreconcilability of different truths; the inevitability of chance; and the nuanced, small but decisive ways in which societies and personal relations run their course.

Silver Linings Playbook: Romance by Stealth

Silver Linings Playbook was given a gradual, staggered release in North America. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival early last September; featured at a number of smaller, independent film festivals throughout the United States across October and early November; received a limited release in cinemas in the middle of November; and was finally afforded a wide release towards the end of the following month. Its relatively slow emergence, accompanied by increasing critical acclaim, was timely with regard to the awards season; David O. Russell, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro all won awards and received numerous nominations, the film’s successes culminating with Jennifer Lawrence winning Best Actress at the 85th Academy Awards ceremony on February 24.

The film’s steady progression across North America has been mirrored by its release pattern in Europe. Silver Linings Playbook appeared in the UK in late November, in Germany at the beginning of January and in France at the end of the month, and has only received a wide release in the Netherlands over the last couple of weeks. I went to see the picture at the Tuschinski theatre – in the balconied ‘Great Hall’ of the wonderful building, a conflux of Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and several other architectural schools and cultural motifs – last weekend.

Whilst Jennifer Lawrence has perhaps received the most acclaim for her performance in the film as Tiffany, it is notable the way in which the film’s structure allows her to stand out. Bradley Cooper’s Pat (or Pat Jr.) bears the attributes of the film’s lead character – it is he who we are first introduced to, and it is he who we follow, who we focalise through, whose thoughts and emotions are most discernible and impressed. Where both he and Tiffany have suffered mental health issues relating to their previous relationships – Pat discovered his wife cheating on him and responded by beating her partner in adultery; Tiffany’s husband died in a car accident – it is Pat’s illness which we most inhabit, shown the incident at its core by way of flashback, and witnessing its recurring pattern in those moments where Pat loses control, becoming agitated in particular whenever he hears the song intertwined with the incident, which has become for him a trigger for distress.

As well as focalising through Pat, it is his life, his world, which is positioned at the film’s centre. Pat and Tiffany are its two poles, but the film possesses an excellent ensemble cast, which is comprised overwhelmingly of Pat’s circle of family and friends: his mother, Dolores; his father, Pat Sr.; his brother Jake; his doctor, Dr. Cliff Patel; and his two closest friends, one of whom he met at the mental health facility in which he spent eight months, the other an old friend from the exterior world. Thus Tiffany is in all manners an outsider: not part of Pat’s family; on the outskirts of his group of friends; living at a physical remove from her own parents, in a garage she has converted which is separate from the family home; and her promiscuity in the aftermath of her husband’s death has made her also an outcast, a sort of black sheep, in the bearings of wider society. Her power is rooted in this, in this relative darkness and isolation: despite some of the subject matter (mental illness, loneliness, a risky and potentially addictive gambling habit), this is not a dark film, but Tiffany is illuminated because she is something relatively marginalised and dangerous, seemingly offering Pat a course which is unconventional and unsafe.

Silver Linings Playbook is a film that works by hiding events and emotions off-screen, and then leaving them unsaid but implied by what is later uncovered. The film reaches its climax in a dance competition, in which Pat and Tiffany dance together. In culminating in dance, a point of connection is offered between Silver Linings Playbook and The Artist, which swept the Oscars last year; and also with films including Little Miss Sunshine and Napoleon Dynamite. The Artist‘s easy elegance – an elegance won through silence, which is resolved in a dance both energetic and fun, but also graceful and lithe – allows it to stand apart. The other two films exemplify a contemporary tendency to either play dance for laughs, with so-bad-they-must-be-good performances which are supposedly nourishing because so free of care; or to make an impending dance appear an impending disaster which, when the dance in fact comes good, provides a sort of transcendence for the character involved. In these latter cases, the aim of displaying dance on screen is to encourage the audience’s warmth. Silver Linings Playbook takes a different tack. The dance between Pat and Tiffany is not framed for us as surprisingly triumphant or comically disarrayed (Tiffany’s leap upon Pat’s shoulders aside), but is instead shown as enthusiastic yet mediocre – which mediocrity, by way of a 5.0 out of 10.0 score and a clever plot device, ties the film’s story-points together and makes the evening of the competition a success.

Pat and Tiffany’s dance demonstrates no remarkable talent; and it is neither transcendent nor the cause of some psychological breakthrough or breakdown; yet it is revealing in a subtler way. We see Pat and Tiffany meet for rehearsal each day in Tiffany’s converted apartment, but we see very little of their actual rehearsing, very little of the dance which they are working upon. Instead, we witness the characters communicate with each other before, after, or in between rehearsals, and their conversations often involve stakes not explicitly relating to the dance: most prominently, Pat, who has only agreed to dance in an attempt to win back his wife, repeatedly focuses on a letter he has sent to her through Tiffany, for which he is hopeful of a response. In this way the dance itself is concealed, so when we do see it in full on the evening of the competition, though the performance qualitatively is mediocre, it is revelatory in implying their route and showing the point to which Pat and Tiffany have come: the dance is amateurish but intimate, and emphasises the cloaked truth that to dance with someone is to be intimate with them, and to enter deeply into a shared dance requires a physical and emotional connection. How could Pat and Tiffany not become close practicing this dance each day?

In such a manner the structure of the story is to suggest the potential of a relationship between Pat and Tiffany, but to hide the flow and development of that relationship from us, to make its appearance unsure, until revealing at the climax its progression and its logic. Pat Sr., played by De Niro, has been gambling superstitiously on football games, aiming to make sufficient money to open a restaurant. Pat Sr. maintains the notion that the success of his team and of his betting depends on Pat Jr. witnessing the games; after encouraging Pat to miss a dance rehearsal in order to attend a game in person, and subsequently losing much of his money when things don’t go to plan, Pat Sr. contrives a new bet, a parlay, double or nothing, comprising a football game and the result of the dance. Berated by Tiffany for missing practice, disapproving of his father’s new bet, and feeling generally abused, Pat declares that he’s pulling out of the dance competition, and leaves the group to go outside. Pat Sr. and Tiffany, desiring Pat to compete for different reasons, agree to mislead him into thinking his wife will be at the dance competition, believing this is the only way to ensure his attendance.

We do not see either Pat Sr. or Tiffany inform Pat that his wife is going to be there: instead, we assume that they’ve convinced him of this by Pat’s presence the next day for dance rehearsal as usual. So Pat and Tiffany rehearse through the week, and the evening of the competition arrives, and by chance Pat’s wife does make an appearance. After Pat and Tiffany dance and achieve the score required to win Pat Sr. his bet, Pat moves across the room to talk to his wife. This distresses Tiffany, revealing her emotional attachment to Pat. When Pat takes leave of his wife and finds out that Tiffany has fled the building, he races after her and the pair express their love for one another. We realise that Pat made his decision to dance not because of anything Pat Sr. or Tiffany said to convince him – but because, when outside on the doorstep alone after threatening to quit, he unraveled Tiffany’s feelings for him and, inwardly, without expression, understood that he felt the same for her.

Robert De Niro gives a strong portrayal throughout the film. When Pat Jr. goes to his wife in the ballroom and whispers into her ear, causing Tiffany to flee, we sense Pat Sr.’s emotion and also his reserve – we sense his inclination to go after her, but he restrains himself; marching stridently, however, towards his son to tell him what he himself knows he must do. De Niro chasing after Lawrence would have been a powerful scene, a most esteemed older actor progressing towards possibly the most acclaimed young actress about; but this would have taken something from Cooper’s magnificent performance, and was not the way for the resolution of the plot, the couple coming together of their own volition.

Pierrot Through the Arts: Deburau, Laforgue, Schoenberg and On

Pierrot, the sad clown, with white face and loose white blouse, expressing slowly and subtly and in the absence of and beyond words, emerged in the nineteenth century from his roots in stock comedies and pantomimes to become the embodiment of a certain artistic type, a specific strain of artistic emotion: sensitive, melancholy and solitary, and at once playful and daring in subverting language and suggesting the fraught but still facile and fluctuating nature of gender.

The character of Pierrot can be traced back to Molière’s Don Juan, or The Feast with the Statue, first performed in February 1660 at the Palais-Royal theatre in Paris, and with Molière playing the role of Sganarelle. Pierrot is the name of a peasant character who appears in the second act of the play, the fiancé of Charlotte. The Palais-Royal theatre had been established by Cardinal Richelieu, in the east wing of the Palais-Royal, in 1637; and by 1662, Molière’s acting troupe was sharing the venue with a troupe of Italian Commedia dell’Arte performers, including Domenicio Biancolelli, famous for his performances in the role of Harlequin. The Italian Commedia dell’Arte flourished throughout the seventeenth century in France, and in fact the character of Molière’s Sganarelle already drew from the Italian comedians. With Molière and Biancolelli’s troupes in such proximity, this interplay and cross-pollination continued, the Commedia dell’Arte incorporating Pierrot into its repertoire and well establishing the figure by the time of the Italians’ expulsion from France, by Royal decree, in 1697.

So Pierrot persisted on in Italy, and then again in France after Italian troupes were permitted to return during the second decade of the following century. Through the 1700s, though the character began to appear in performances in European centres outside of Italy and France, the Pierrot on display often featured in lesser and disparate roles: the basis of the character, his unrequited love for Columbine, who prefers Harlequin, was sometimes lost, and he was frequently portrayed in a purely comic, or even bumbling and foolish manner. It was in the 1800s that Pierrot gained stature, and began his reach into the other arts, developing in literature and painting as an emblem and as a muse.

Jean-Gaspard Deburau, a mime from Kolín, in what is now the Czech Republic but was then Bohemia, was most responsible for this recreation of Pierrot. Born in 1796, he began appearing in Paris at the Théâtre des Funambules some time around 1819, under the stage-name ‘Baptiste’. The Funambules had opened in 1816, on the Boulevard du Temple, otherwise known as the Boulevard du Crime owing to the volume of crime dramas shown nightly in the Boulevard’s numerous theatres – all but one of which, including the Funambles, were demolished during Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris in the 1860s. The Funambules originally hosted only acrobats and mimes; and Deburau, taking the role of Pierrot as a young man, would continue at the part until his death in 1846. He extended and deepened Pierrot, his restrained and nuanced acting style replacing the tendency towards bold and gesticulating comedy; gaining recognition and increasing fame towards the end of the 1820s, Deburau’s Pierrot would even be compared to the works of Shakespeare when, in 1842, the versatile and distinctly modern man-of-letters Théophile Gautier wrote a fictionalised review entitled, ‘Shakespeare at the Funambules’.

Other mimes would continue to have success playing Pierrot after Deburau’s death. These included his son, Jean Charles, and most notably Paul Legrand. Still, it was Deburau who enshrined Pierrot within French culture, and established the sense of Pierrot as a sensitive and anguished artist. This conception of Pierrot was celebrated, explored and entrenched in 1945 with Marcel Carné’s film, Les Enfants du Paradis, often considered one of the greatest films of all time; which suffered its own anguishes as it was made in occupied France, with damaged sets, short of supplies, with a cast and crew short of food and comprising several Jews who had to work secretely or risk production shutting down; and consisting of a fictionalised story drawing upon real figures from early nineteenth century France. Deburau is portrayed in the film as ‘Baptiste’, a lovelorn mime who achieves success in the Funambules, in a magnificent performance by Jean-Louis Barrault.

Gautier’s piece on Deburau’s Pierrot was but one of the first entwinements of Pierrot with literature. Writers including Flaubert (who, early in his career, wrote an unperformed pantomime entitled Pierrot au sérail), Verlaine and Huysmens incorporated Pierrot into their works. Most extensively, he was the central figure in the poetry of Jules Laforgue. Laforgue – a French Symbolist poet who died in 1887 aged just twenty-seven years old – wrote three of the ‘complaints’ in his first selection of poems, Les Complaintes (1885), in Pierrot’s voice; then devoted his second collection, L’Imitation de Notre Dame de la Lune (1886), entirely to Pierrot and his moonlit world, influenced by Albert Giraud’s poetry cycle published a couple of years previously.

In his book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, first published in 1899, which served to introduce French Symbolism to an English readership, Arthur Symons devoted a chapter to Laforgue. Symons describes Laforgue’s verse and prose as,

‘alike a kind of travesty, making subtle use of colloquialism, slang, neologism, technical terms, for their allusive, their factitious, their reflected meanings, with which one can play, very seriously. The verse is alert, troubled, swaying, deliberately uncertain, hating rhetoric so piously that it prefers, and finds its piquancy in, the ridiculously obvious…It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all their journeys.’

and defines Laforgue’s laughter in the following terms:

‘His laughter, which Maeterlinck has defined so admirably as ‘the laughter of the soul’, is the laughter of Pierrot, more than half a sob, and shaken out of him with a deplorable gesture of the thin arms, thrown wide. He is a metaphysical Pierrot, Pierrot Lunaire, and it is of abstract notions, the whole science of the unconscious, that he makes his showman’s patter.’

Laforgue was a great influence upon a young T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Eliot would write that, ‘Of Jules Laforgue I can say that he was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech’, and, ‘I have written…nothing about Jules Laforgue, to whom I owe more than to any one poet in any language’. In this way the figure of Pierrot maintained a relevance beyond French Romanticism and Symbolism, on into the literature of the Anglophone Modernists. He also appeared in canvases by painters who led their art-form into modernity: in Seurat’s Pierrot with a White Pipe (1883); in Cézanne’s Pierrot and Harlequin (1888); whilst Picasso’s Pierrot and Columbine (1900) was the first of several pieces in which he depicts Pierrot.

Pierrot became a canonised figure within twentieth century classical music with Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, a setting of twenty-one poems from a German translation of Albert Giraud’s cycle. Schoenberg’s work was premiered in Berlin, on 16 October, 1912, with Albertine Zehme the solo vocalist. Theodor Adorno, theorist, philosopher and musicologist, wrote some of his earliest pieces on Schoenberg; including a 1922 review of a performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Frankfurt, in which Adorno puts it that Schoenberg’s piece characterises ‘the homelessness of our souls’. Musically and aesthetically, Pierrot has exerted his influence too on popular music: Björk, a fervent admirer of Schoenberg, sang Pierrot Lunaire in a one-off performance at the Verbier Festival in 1996; whilst David Bowie, after studying theatre and mime, played a role in the 1967 theatrical production Pierrot in Turquoise, and appeared as Pierrot in the video to his 1980 song, ‘Ashes to Ashes’.

____________

Jean-Louis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis

____________

Jules Laforgue – ‘Autre Complaint de Lord Pierrot’ (‘Another Complaint of Lord Pierrot’). In French; then translated into English courtesy of Paul Staniforth and brindin.com

——–

Celle qui doit me mettre au courant de la Femme!

Nous lui dirons d’abord, de mon air le moins froid:

“La somme des angles d’un triangle, chère âme,

Est égale à deux droits.”

–
Et si ce cri lui part: “Dieu de Dieu! que je t’aime!”

– “Dieu reconnaîtra les siens.” Ou piquée au vif:

– “Mes claviers ont du coeur, tu seras mon seul thème.”

Moi: “Tout est relatif.”

–

De tous ses yeux, alors! se sentant trop banale:

“Ah! tu ne m’aimes pas; tant d’autres sont jaloux!”

Et moi, d’un oeil qui vers l’inconscient s’emballe:

“Merci, pas mal; et vous?”

–

– “Jouons au plus fidèle!” – “à quoi bon, ô Nature!

Autant à qui perd gagne!” Alors, autre couplet:

– “Ah! tu te lasseras le premier, j’en suis sûre…”

– “Après vous, s’il vous plaît.”

–

Enfin, si, par un soir, elle meurt dans mes livres,

Douce; feignant de n’en pas croire encor mes yeux,

J’aurai un: “Ah! ça, mais, nous avions De Quoi vivre!

C’était donc sérieux?”

——–

The one who’ll give an update on her sex!

We’ll tell her first in our least frigid air

“The sum of a triangle’s angles makes

exactly two right angles, dear.”

–

And should she peal “O God! how I love you!”,

‘God’ll know his own’ – or, cut to the quick: 

“My heart knows love’s keys; I’ll play but of you!”, 

then I: ‘All’s relativistic.’

–

Then, with all eyes, feeling too commonplace 

“You don’t love me whom men crave with each muscle?” 

And I, with an eye on Unconsciousness, 

‘Oh, not so bad, ta, and yousel’?’

–

“Let’s vie in fidelity!” – ‘Might as well play

(Nature!) loser wins.’ And after those, these: 

“Oh, you’ll tire of me first, you’ll go away…” 

‘Oh no: ladies first, if you please.’

–

Last, if one night she die in my ‘Divan’, 

soft … with fake disbelief in my closet 

I’ll go ‘Well, now, we’d something to live on –

it was serious then, was it?’

____________

Pierrot with a White Pipe, by Seurat

____________

Pierrot and Harlequin, by Cézanne

____________

Pierrot and Columbine, by Picasso

____________

Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21

____________

David Bowie as Pierrot

____________

Raine, C. T. S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, 2006)

Symons, A. The Symbolist Movement In Literature (Dutton & Company, 1919)

Wiggerhaus, R. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (MIT Press, 1995)

2013 Oscars Best Dressed: The Definitive Analysis

In their lamentable haste to set the agenda and furnish the world with their opinion on the best and the worst Oscar garments, most publications released their merely subjective takes on this matter in the hours and days immediately succeeding the ceremony which marked the 85th Academy Awards. A week, or the best part of a week, may seem a long time in which to consider outfits. In fact, I did not stay awake to watch the Oscars on Sunday night; instead watching it in parts over the following two evenings. And in the time which has elapsed since those evenings I have been considering those outfits which I saw carefully, so as to give them their proper due.

My analysis of 2013 Oscar dresses and dinner suits will be pictorial and broadly thematic, with themes indicated by way of headings.

Best Actress Contenders

Jennifer Lawrence beat out Jessica Chastain to win Best Actress for her part in Silver Linings Playbook; but I think Chastain edged Lawrence when it came to their respective garments. Jennifer Lawrence looks perfectly lovely, but in all truth I’m not convinced that her dress complements her ideally: its roundness doesn’t suit the roundness of her cheeks; nor do its three curves suitably adorn her hips. Perhaps the fault lies with the second curve, which comes in too much before moving into the skirt. Jessica Chastain, meanwhile, looks glamorous in an Armani dress which obviously complements her hair – though some commentators spoke and wrote as though this similarity of colour emerged only slowly, unapparent at first, then appearing as a sun through clouds.

Double-Breasted Dinner Jackets

Both Hugh Jackman – pictured here with his wife, Deborra-Lee Furness – and Chris Pine wore six-button double-breasted dinner suits, both with buttons in a keystone pattern, Jackman’s with a shawl collar and Pine’s with peaked lapels. Both look good. There are a few issues, however, with Pine’s outfit. Where Jackman has left his bottom-right button undone, creating a pleasant and relaxed diagonal when the jacket is in motion, Pine has left both bottom buttons unfastened; and though his jetted pockets are traditionally correct, their positioning aligned with the unbuttoned button holes together appear cluttered. More, Pine’s trousers seem a little tight in the thighs, and taper too much into an excess of fabric round his feet. Jackman’s trousers, on the other hand, break perfectly.

Pale Tones

Apparently, so it has come to light, the dress Amanda Seyfried is pictured wearing above bore such similarities to the Valentino dress Anne Hathaway intended to wear to the ceremony that Hathaway ditched the Valentino fairly last minute, and went with the above Prada creation instead. This has caused all sorts of consternation, not least because Hathaway has been a long-time and much publicised wearer of Valentino.

Perhaps some things turn out for the best, for both ladies attended the Oscars wearing pale dresses, but in very different styles; and as both looked excellent, a victory was thereby obtained on behalf of variety. Anne Hathaway is supremely elegant in her pale pink dress, and I think all claims and concerns regarding its chest area were very much overplayed. Amanda Seyfried’s dress seems to have divided opinion, some saying it washes her out; I disagree, and instead admire the neck and the shape.

Foregoing the Bow Tie

Jean Dujardin was dressed impeccably last year, when he and The Artist swept the awards. Much discussion in the build to this ceremony centred round concepts of sexism and xenophobia and the film Zero Dark Thirty: were the Academy guilty of sexism in failing to nominate Kathryn Bigelow for best director; and did the depiction of torture in the film support the idea that America can disregard morals and laws in their pursuit of information? In all earnestness, one may wonder whether the real scandals of sexism and xenophobia do not involve instead Jean Dujardin, emblematic of male actors in Hollywood who do not speak an Anglicised or Americanised form of English, and are therefore marginalised, their talents wasted in lesser and infrequent roles; or else they’re made light of, as Seth MacFarlene, this year’s host, made cruel and unnecessary light of Dujardin.

As for his attire this time round, both he and Liev Schreiber, among others, wore plain silk ties rather than bow ties with their dinner suits. Indeed, the regular tie, usually tied in a four-in-hand-knot, is an increasingly common but nevertheless non-traditional substitute for a bow. It is non-traditional for a reason, for it is not an optimal solution to black tie. In theory, perhaps the higher buttoning point of Liev Schreiber’s jacket should offset the incongruity of the long tie. In this comparison, however, I think Jean Dujardin comes off best. His jacket is better for being slightly fuller and longer; his trousers are a better length; and the single-button jacket at least emphasises that he is wearing a dinner jacket. Schreiber’s dinner suit looks too much like a regular black suit.

Architectural Dresses

I am not convinced that either of these dresses worked out for the individuals involved. Anne Hathaway’s short haircut suits her well; but whilst I’ve liked Charlize Theron particularly since Young Adult a couple of years ago, her short hair is too severe, and doesn’t have her looking her best. I don’t see the logic to the top half of her outfit, or find flattering the way it protrudes from her waist. Kelly Rowland so nearly pulls her dress off, but not quite: viewed from the front, it is just a little too architectural and jutting at the top.

Award-Appropriate Attire

All three of the producers who ascended the stage to receive Argo‘s award for Best Picture look good. Ben Affleck’s outfit is the most stimulating, comprising a fairly typical modern five-button waistcoat (without lapels, and, alas, Affleck has buttoned all of his waistcoat buttons), wing collar, and pleated shirt front. Grant Heslov’s dinner jacket fits him well, and he offers a contrast in shirt studs. George Clooney went for a somewhat louche look, spending most if not all of the evening with his dinner jacket undone, and without a waist-covering underneath, instead displaying the satin waistband of his trousers.

I do wonder – taking the cases of Dujardin and Clooney, for instance – whether some men deliberately dress down when they appreciate that they are not to be the focus of an evening’s attention. Dujardin’s long tie and Clooney’s casual appearance perhaps reflect the fact that the former was presenting rather than receiving an award this year, whilst the latter was keen to allow Affleck his moment.

It is interesting also to note the same three men’s attires for the British Academy of Film and Television Awards. Argo won Best Picture at the BAFTAs too, but all three men wore long silk ties for the ceremony. It may be that they hoped a more prestigious moment awaited them. Here, Heslov looks the best with his peaked lapels and well-cinched four-in-hand. Affleck’s dinner jacket seems to pull a little, and his tie isn’t tied effectively; whereas Clooney’s combination of shawl collar and long tie doesn’t work.

Silver and Black

Halle Berry’s Versace outfit is too strong in the shoulders, exacerbated by the thick stripes of the shoulder pieces. I much prefer Stacy Keibler’s take on silver and black, with its high neckline, sweeping pattern and belted waist.

The Younger Gentlemen

The buttoning point of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s dinner jacket is too high, its quarters too closed, and he could possibly have used some padding around the shoulders. As it is, he is all hips. Eddie Redmayne’s outfit is very fashion-forward: very slim fitting, with short jacket, and with slippers by Alexander McQueen. I don’t like the slippers, and I think the dinner suit is too small throughout. Daniel Radcliffe’s pockets display an interesting variety, jetted pocket on the right hip, flap pocket on the left; regardless, his suit fits him really well.

Bold Colours

I will limit my thoughts here towards suggesting that all of these ladies wore bold colour well; and we should appreciate them for it at least until next year. An additional thought: the black diagonals on Reese Witherspoon’s blue dress seem an almost overly and overtly simple device, but they function so effectively and suggestively to depict her waist.

Django Unconstrained by the Proprieties of Formal Evening Wear

These makers of Django Unchained appear more brazen in their choice of dress than they do in their choice of film: Django is an entertaining film which never lagged for me despite its length (and more, I was content with Tarantino’s role within it), but it also felt fairly formulaic. Samuel L. Jackson’s burgundy velvet jacket, with shawl collar, manages to be neither formulaic nor especially entertaining, offset by grey shirt and off-black trousers. Jamie Foxx – at the Oscars with his daughter – wore a well fitting suit with black satin peaked lapels, but I’m not fond of the black shirt and, again, it’s a dinner suit that looks too much like a regular suit in its cut and in some of its features. Quentin Tarantino looked willfully disheveled, with open collar and tie slung anyhow.

Christoph Waltz, however, always appears precisely and pleasingly fitted; and so this picture may serve as a reward for reading to the close of this piece.

Sound and Meaning in A Serious Man

The Coen brothers, throughout an increasingly acclaimed career, have nevertheless faced frequently the criticism that much of their work is elusive; creative and visually strong, atmospheric, and humorous whether that humour is considered broad, black or satirical, but lacking coherent and sustained themes, convincing character development, and narrative resolution. A Serious Man – with its oblique opening set in a richly atmospheric but historically and geographically indistinct Polish-Yiddish past; and its sudden ending, where earlier reconciliations are thrown to one side as plot elements are introduced and left implying an uncertain and unwelcoming future – has faced each of these related criticisms. In fact it is a film strong in purpose, its central theme precisely that life is elusive, and that the questions we inevitably ask of it will return to us haughtily unanswered or hastily postponed; as though we ask a question down a line expecting a neat response and receive, instead, only a garbled, and therefore disembodied, reproduction of our own voice, our hope persisting only in that something else seems responsible for the garbling.

The opening act of the film establishes this broad theme. A Jewish man named Velvel marvels at the world as he walks home with his horse in the snow, somewhere in what is today South-Eastern Poland – he mentions the Lublin Road and Lvov, now across the border in Western Ukraine. The marvel lies in the beauty of nature; but foremost for this man in the fact that, his cart having upturned on the way home, he was stumbled upon and aided by an elderly gentleman known to him and his wife. This seems to him an occurrence of remarkable serendipity; but his excitement is cut short when his wife, Dora, proclaims the gentleman, Traitle Groshkover, a ‘dybbuk’ – which in Jewish mythology refers to a type of the transmigration of souls (O, rocks!), where a malevolent soul inhabits the body of a person recently deceased. Dora declares that Traitle Groshkover is already dead and mourned.

So Velvel’s framework for understanding is thrown into confusion, violently contested by the opposed framework of his wife. Both frameworks reside in the mysterious and the unknown: the one in a type of coincidence which, in its positive aspects, seems product of something more than chance; the other in the possibility of souls somehow persisting and taking possession of bodies to fulfill evil deeds. The existence of meaningful coincidence is more easily accepted than the existence of dybbuks not only because it is more positive, but because it can be reasoned through in other ways; Velvel suggests that he as a ‘rational man’ should not believe in dybbuks; yet he is palpably frightened at the prospect. When Traitle Groshkover arrives at the couple’s home, having been invited on the road for some soup, the debate ends with Dora plunging a pick into his chest. A circle of blood gradually emerges upon Groshkover’s shirt, and he departs into the dark snowy night. Velvel suggests his body will be found in the morning, and they will be ruined; but Dora is content she has seen off a dybbuk.

Various subservient themes explore the general theme of life’s complex uncertainty and apparent indifference. One of the most prominent revolves around language and sound. The films considers how language often proves insufficient as a tool for communication and understanding; and how words misunderstood or out of their most welcoming contexts are often reducible to mere sounds.

Religion is a significant aspect in the lives of the family A Serious Man contemplates, yet it is a source of confusion more often than clarity. In the early stages of the film, the protagonist Larry Gopnik’s wife, Judith, tells him that she has become close to a family acquaintance named Sy Ableman, and wants a divorce. Taking these two statements, Larry naturally puts them together; but Judith refutes the apparent logic of her own speech by denying any relationship between Sy and her desire for divorce. She explains she wants a ‘get’, without which she will be an ‘agunah’. This is to say that she wants a Jewish ritual divorce, without which she will be considered ‘chained’ to her marriage and won’t be able to remarry within the faith. However, the religious terminology is lost on Larry, who responds with an incredulous ‘What?’ in each instance.

He does not comprehend her, but is still prompted by her when he seeks answers in the shape of three rabbis; only visiting the first two because he is unable to arrange an appointment with the elderly, reclusive, but supposedly eminently wise senior rabbi, Rabbi Marshak. From the two rabbis he does get to see Larry receives worldly advice (from a man much his junior) and suggestive anecdote, but nothing in the way of definitive spiritual guidance.

Concurrently, Larry’s son, Danny, is studying for his bar mitzvah. This involves chanting a passage in Hebrew, which he must learn by heart by the time of the ceremony. Music is a passion shared by father and son, but it doesn’t bring them together: ‘Dem Milners Trern’ by the Yiddish singer Sidor Belarsky provides Larry with some solace and content; whereas Danny listens to contemporary popular music, notably Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody to Love’. Danny succeeds in grasping the passage, but he learns it by rote, as a passage of noises rather than as a meaningful piece of writing. Unlike his father, he does get to meet with Rabbi Marshak, after his bar mitzvah. The words the Rabbi proffers bear secular rather than religious meaning: he paraphrases a lyric from the Airplane song, ‘When the truth is found to be lies / And all the hope within you dies…Then what?’; recites the names of the band; returns the boy’s radio, taken by a schoolteacher earlier in the film; and advises, ‘Be a good boy’. In this the rabbi shows a human rather than a spiritual understanding; a strength of empathy which Larry may share for others, but which he finds hard to express.

The figure who he seems to share the closest bond with is his brother, Arthur; but this is an emotional understanding enabled precisely because mental and verbal communication is precluded: Arthur primarily resides in and communicates through a string incomprehensible mathematical symbols, which he sets down in a notebook he calls ‘The Mentaculus’. When Arthur’s physical activities are revealed – he gambles, and is later accused of sodomy – they are further removed from Larry’s world, and he seeks legal aid and is acutely sympathetic in part because Arthur’s life is an embodiment of his own related difficulties communicating with other people.

In his work life, Larry reinforces the film’s central theme in lecturing on the uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s cat. Travelling to work one day, he is involved in a car accident, which, as he later realises, occurs at precisely the same moment Sy Ableman is killed in a car crash elsewhere in town. A Korean student taking his class, named Clive, is struggling with his course; Larry having failed him on his midterm, Clive fears he will lose his scholarship, and so (we presume) surreptitiously leaves an envelope containing money to encourage Larry to alter his grade. When Larry later calls Clive to his office to discuss this, Clive’s verbal manoeuvrings repeatedly imply the impossibility of knowing another person’s motivations conclusively. Aside from refuting Berkeley by accepting that the letter does in fact exist, Clive denies knowing anything about it; when Larry presses him, the resulting conversation is one of the most telling in the film:

Larry: Actions have consequences.

Clive: Yes. Often.

Larry: No, always! Actions always have consequences! In this office, actions have consequences!

Clive: Yes, sir.

Larry: Not just physics – morally. And we both know about your actions.

Clive: No, sir. I know about my actions.

Larry: I can interpret, Clive. I know what you meant me to understand.

Faced with the obstinacy of his student, Larry at once withdraws his assertion that actions always have consequences; substituting instead the offer that, at least in his office, where he feels he can maintain a degree of control, this chain of cause and effect, action and consequence, will be and remain. When Larry suggests he can interpret Clive’s actions, Clive responds with an apparently gibberish phrase which Larry hears as ‘Meer sir, My sir’. Speaking more slowly, Clive clarifies – he actually said ‘Mere surmise, sir’; and emphasises his point with a ‘Very uncertain’ whilst shaking his head. What was, upon first hearing, an unintelligible sound pattern in fact tersely summarises Clive’s point, and Larry’s difficulty. Larry’s eyes turn away thoughtfully.

After Sy Ableman’s funeral, Danny’s bar mitzvah, Larry winning tenure, and a decision on Clive’s money together provide a sense of things being reconciled, the film ends with two scenes which throw everything into a deeper and darker disarray. Larry, who we see at his doctor’s office early in the film, receives a call from this same doctor who asks him to come to the surgery immediately to discuss his x-ray results. Seemingly serving as a visual metaphor for impending bad news, the final scene of the film shows a tornado making its way towards Danny’s school. A sub-plot in the film has seen Danny owe money to a large boy named Fagle. Fagle chases Danny home on several occasions, too cumbersome and short of breath to catch him up. While the pupils stand outside their school building, in the process of being relocated to the basement of a synagogue, Danny – who now has the cash – calls out Fagle’s name, ready to reimburse him. Fagle, however, is focused on the tornado in the distance, and turns his head to look at Danny with neither comprehension nor interest. Here even the familiarity of our everyday cares, and more, even the familiarity of our own names are disrupted, losing their ability to connect and relate us. Fagle’s name is taken by the wind – a mere passing sound.