A WInter's Tale

 “The Left Hand of Darkness,” by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969

This is a science-fiction novel set on a planet inhabited by ambisexual humans.  In ‘rut’ – called klemmer – they can be either male or female, and then either person can produce a baby.  The story is about an ambassador from a well-organized, advanced league of 84 planets named Genly Ai and a league called Ekumen.  It is a sort of a Star Wars ‘galactic republic’ which still has sex and babies the old-fashioned way. The world Ai is visiting, Gethen, is more primitive in many ways.  One is a ‘centuries-old’ local medieval economy run by kings that has yet to experience full-scale war - Karhide.  Another is an organized bureaucracy dominated by the secret police – Orgoreyn – where everything is owned by the government and there are ‘communal’ farms.  (That should rings some bells…) They both are suspicious of space travel, his communication device and the broad social organization Ai speaks of.  Like all science fiction, there are obvious parallels and inspirations in human social reality.

I’m not sure why Le Guin wrote this except as a kind of ‘thought experiment.’  It is part of a story cycle of 6 novels, of which The Dispossessed is one of the latter.   At the time it was published it became some kind of feminist novel by bringing up genetic androgyny.  The story is mostly narrated by the envoy, with primitive tales and mystic mediations of past times interspersed into the narrative; the thoughts of an ally, who had to escape the monarchy as a ‘traitor;’ along with records of prior ‘Investigators’ who visited the planet. The envoy Ai wants to enlist the whole planet, or its societies, into the republican confederation of Ekumen.  Ekumen (‘ecumenical’) is an organizer, not a ruler of 84 worlds, so in a way a U.N. without an army, jails or a police force.  It is more interested in trade, communication and social goods … sort of a communistic international body.  On the other hand planet Gethen is very cold and isolated, and Ai suffers because his home Terra is much warmer and more comfortable.  His people call the planet Winter due to its icy nature.  There are clear parallels with Siberia and prison camps in Gethen.  Overall it’s a pretty sad place, no matter how they have babies or sex.

The envoy speculates that due to the totally ambiguous sexual role each person plays, there are no hard and fast gender roles throughout the societies … no expectations of gender, sex, personality, strength or abilities given your birth.  There are ‘kemmerhouses’ for those without a partner or still sexually high.  Ruts are periodic, lasting for 3 days, usually successful, so sexual loneliness is uncommon.  The locals mate for life, though seduction by others is possible.  You can take a drug to stop klemmering, something given to prisoners.  Even the King has a baby, but the baby dies.  This setup should thrill the trans ideology caucus. 

Le Guin graces the story with made-up words and portmanteaus, a common practice in science-fiction, along with some technical advancements.  One word – shifgrefor – is almost incomprehensible, so this method is tricky. They have electric cars and trucks on the planet, though how the Gethens figured that out is left unsaid.  There are no sign of windmills or power plants of any kind.   She creates two different though similar ‘worlds’ (societies) edging towards war due to the violent patriotic ravings of a proconsul on one side and the secret police on the other.  Ekumen abandoned war after suffering its effects for years and the envoy gets caught in the middle of their crude conflict.  A small faction in the Orgoreyn bureaucracy wants to align with Ekumen but they are a minority. Others believe the envoy, his space ship, the other planets, Ekumen itself – is a hoax.  No one in the Karhide kingdom is positive about Ekumen, so there’s that.  These reactionary nationalisms are resonant in the world today.

The Siberia of 'Winter'

The androgyny side of this story doesn’t save Gethen from being a troubled and backward place, which puts androgyny in its real location in Le Guin’s anthropological view.  Ultimately the retrograde Gethens in Orgoreyn treat Ai like a pervert, a spy or a hoax and threaten his freedom and life.  Here follows the key scenes in the book, as he and his multi-sex ally Estraven (estrogen?) escape across hundreds of miles of ice, snow, crevasses and the like, like scenes out of Jack London.  There is even some sexual tension in the tent between the two unlike friends.  

Ai's attempt to get this world to join Ekumen is like a socialist trying to convince capitalists and backward nationalists to join in a socially-useful society.  Without some form of force, the mission should be a failure.  Except in this case it is successful due to political circumstances that change, giving the book a 'happy ending.'  In a way, Le Guin probably felt like Ai, an alien on this sorry planet.  The book is not as progressive and political as The Dispossessed though it hints at a trajectory away from standard U.S. sci-fi tropes of dystopia, war, social medievalism and hyper-technical inventions.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “The Dispossessed” (Le Guin); “The Road” (McCarthy); “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (Dick); “Red Star” (Bogdanov); “People’s Future of the United States,” “Damnificados,” “Blade Runner,” “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson)’ “Hunger Games,” “The Matrix,” “Divergent,” “The Heart Goes Last” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” (both by Atwood); “Cloud Atlas,” “Good News” (Abbey).    

And I bought it at May Day’s excellent progressive fiction section!

Red Frog

September 5, 2023

And Now For Something Completely Different...

 Unlikable Protagonists and Ulysses

Unlikeable Protagonists

The more fiction or films or streaming series you see a certain pattern takes place.  You can't actually place it for a while.  But it happens again and again in current work as you watch characters writhe around under the camera lights or through the author's typing.  It's this.  The characters are many times drama queens and kings - idiots, emotional wrecks, damaged, childish, clueless, angry, depressed, violent, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, incompetent, crazed, sad, fucked-up, neurotic, addicted, evil, thuggish, generally dysfunctional.  And that’s just the adults.  Name your diagnosis.  This overly-emotional baggage seems to be the only character currency that modern fiction spends.  You wonder – who are these fuckin' theatrical people?  They are all over the top.  Are these figures drama and comedy click-bait or real?   People I've rarely met? I'm not talking about super-heroes, cartoon characters or some fake avenger who can't be killed by a thousand bullets.  Those are made-up. Instead these people are deeply but cutely flawed.  Angerholics, assassins, criminals, killers, druggies, alkies, neurotics, narcissists, fools and cops. So much comedy!  So much drama!  So many clicks!

So the question that follows is – is this descriptive or prescriptive?  Or a combination of both?  In other words, do these kind of portrayals actually encourage dysfunctional human emotions and normalize them, making them seem just fine?  Giving neo-liberal capitalism and its psychological impact a 'normality' it shouldn't?  Or is this a literary therapy mentality, being considerate and observant of 'the human condition' or 'the human comedy' with the aim of enlightening the viewer or reader or cozily identifying with them?  Or is portraying these kinds of overwrought people a trick so we can gawk?   Quirky dysfunctional fuckups, aye!  It's like psych porn.  I think it is a form of normalization in the end.

JAMEY JOYCE

James Joyce's main works – 1922's Ulysses and 1939's Finnegan's Wake – are usually considered as strictly modernist books given their sexual undertones, interior monologues, fractured structural techniques, inventiveness and playful use of language.  Most critics agree with this approach. However, if you delve into the philosophy behind them, you will find pre-modern thinking ... really becoming the last major classical works in English literature.  They straddle two worlds but are intellectually tethered to the past, perhaps attempting to create a 'wholeness' of some sort between the two periods.   

Ulysses is based on the Greek myth, carefully structured to mimic each of the 18 episodes in Homer's original epic written in the 8^th Century.  In Ulysses Homeric characters interpenetrate with Dublin ones - Greece and Ireland together. Few now follow Greek myths - except maybe the Cohen brothers.  New myths are being created yearly and have more relevancy for all but the classically-trained - like Lord of the Rings and even Game of Thrones. Someone please tell Levi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell. The Bible still packs a small punch, but its influence is waning in fiction except for The Book of Revelation.  While Nordic sagas are having a bit of a comeback on streaming, they are still relatively unknown except, again, Ragnarok.  Using a Greek fable set in modern times could be construed as adapting the past to the present – substituting a normal human salesman, Leopold Bloom, for a heroic Phoenician mariner.  Bloom sallies forth from 7 Eccles Street in Dublin like Odysseus, then returns in the evening, a perfect loop. Like Picasso's Minotaur or Dali's Renaissance surrealism, Ulysses brings the past into modernity.  In this case this approach is a hint that the philosophic view is backward, towards some kind of aesthetic 'eternal.'

There is politics of a sort in Ulysses. A 'cyclops' Fenian Irish nationalist in a bar is an anti-Semite, a hater of Scots and any non-Irish.  Bloom the Semite gets his ire.  The cyclops is the typical right-wing nationalist found in nearly every nation. In chapter one Stephen Daedalus says that he, like Ireland, is cursed by Catholicism and the British, both repressive forces.  And many nationalists were just that, virulent Catholics.  Joyce goes on to make fun of sensationalist newspapers and undermines prudes and religious nuts – easy to do now, but not then. This is why he moved to Paris and Europe.  But other than that ... politics is a dim sidelight in this book.   Joyce himself was involved in the Easter Rising as a young man, and took over a café from his boss for a time during that event.  Joyce was clearly a liberal humanist of some sort.  Ulysses was banned by the censors, but that ban was eventually defeated, as the books are in no way ‘prurient.’ The bourgeois press excoriated Ulysses anyway.   

They still call him 'the prick with a stick.'

The Philosophy

The philosophy animating both of Joyce's books is 'recurrence' – a circular view of history, human life, nature, technology, etc.  The focus on the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, whose idea this was, is littered throughout Ulysses.  Vico considered his idea to be an 'empirical deduction' based on his study of history.  In the same breath Vico opposed rationalism in the name of classical antiquity.  The title Finnegan's Wake is word play on circularity – Finn Again, Finn Awakes.  Which Finn kinda does when beer is spilled on his corpse in an open casket.  Recurrence relates to the idea of Hindu reincarnation scattered through the books ... another religious, circular idea. Joyce uses the term 'metempsychosis' – the transmigration of the soul after death – for this same idea.  The reactionary philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer dwelled on transmigration. Circular ideas of history are also related to transcendentalism.

A funeral, a birth; a butterfly, a man; a death, a return. Christ's death and resurrection, Christ Again.  In Ulysses, Leopold is the Jewish father and his spiritual son, Stephen, is not - he's a renegade Christian.  Molly, his wife, might be the Holy Ghost, but she is really a lover of life.  They are really a very odd  Trinity.  Now reincarnation does not account for the rise in the Irish population, nor the planetary one by any scientific logic.  Somehow the butterflies are so 'good' they've become humans on an algebraic scale.  It's a joke as a philosophy but it provides some kind of conservative comfort.  We're still waiting for the 'second coming,' another chimerical idea. This eternal return is the logic embedded in the books - and not shyly.  Finnegan's Wake begins with a half sentence which connects it to the half last sentence in the book - making a circle. 

Aesthetically it means a calm, all-encompassing stasis, which was Joyce's literary goal in spite of his avant-garde techniques. I think it was achieved.  These are great, if complex and dense works of art, of artifice, of artificial construction, of humanity.  But that humanity is not unusual, as many pre-modern writers attest.  For Ulysses you need a deep knowledge of Irish history, the Odyssey, Greek culture, Shakespeare, Hamlet, mysticism, Dublin, rhetoric, Christianity, the Bible, languages and music, along with a perceptive toleration for word fun.  No one has all this, which is why it remains a partial mystery to nearly every reader and every avoider.

Circular thinking is conservative because it ignores change.  At the time Joyce was writing these books Marxist dialectics and revolutionary movements were intruding on normal bourgeois philosophy and life.  Not to mention the capitalist disasters of the First World War and fascism.  'Human nature' in bourgeois philosophy is not thought of as human physical needs but as innate corruption that will never change, leading to social corruption and on and on. It is the Christian idea of 'original sin' or the Hindu understanding of karma, which is also in the books.  And Joyce, for all his ex-Catholicism and ‘lewdness’, was imbued with sub-Christianity if these books are any intimation.

HISTORY

History in the books, especially Irish history, soaks the narrative, as if all history is present at all times. Parnell and O'Connell loom large - yet there is no hint of the Easter Rising to come. As Faulkner put it 'the past is never past' but evidently the future is also past.  In a sense this is true, but it’s an archaic idea that ignores change.  Joyce got a classical education at a Jesuit college in 1893 and went on in 1898 to a higher Dublin university studying languages.  He published his first book, Dubliners, in 1914 at the start of World War I, though he'd written it in 1905.  His second, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was published during the war in 1916, but written prior to that.  Bloom's day, June 16, 1904, - the day in Ulysses that is pictured - is prior to World War I too, set in the waning days of Victorian colonialism.  The period these focus on is a high point of early capitalist society before the great disruption of the world war, which is the historical event that really led to full modernism.  As that war showed, even war had morphed into something else, something bigger and more destructive, not a mere repetition of the past.

We are taught that the sun rises, the sun sets and the days march in a regular order until the end of time. Humans wake, humans sleep, humans live, humans die.  Humans never change and are on a treadmill – yet they do change constantly.  Even nature changes.  Climate change is the obvious example, as humans have affected the apparent cycles, destabilizing a semi-predictable system.  Nature has been disrupted before of course, as our geologists know. Even solid rocks degrade.  Joyce sought to create a reproduction of the universe in his books, a smaller literary version.  The real universe is not a static, aesthetic 'place' but a dynamic, tumultuous material network of plasma filaments and electro-magnetic energy, an infinite aurora borealis of galaxies, stars, planets, magnetism, dust - ever-changing, not merely repeating.  In a way Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake replicate this dynamism, but swirling in a closed globe.   

WORDS

One of Joyce's foremost interpreters, Stuart Gilbert, agrees on this thesis regarding Ulysses  … it's promotion of aesthetic stasis and philosophic recurrence.   Another stylistic hint in the book is 'the words.'   First there was 'the word,' then a world created by words, then a world filled with words, then the word’s many derivations and tongues, then two books which contain the greatest profusion of English wordiness ever to be done, and probably never overcome or undone by anyone.  The word is actually the endgame here.  This is the method of semiotics, of hidden and mystic signs, delightful as it is.  Its high literature so it counts, but it’s not grounded materialism.  It's word magic.

I later came across a full defense of Joyce in Socialist Revolution about his progressiveness and modernity.  I think the author reads too much of his own ideas into the text, while making the point that Joyce was thoroughly grounded in ‘the ordinary man.’  Many European writers prior to Joyce were also ‘grounded’ like this – witness Balzac, Zola, Dickens or Hardy.  This is standard humanism, divorced from gods and heroes.  SR accurately defends Joyce against the depredations of Radek and some other Marxists, but in doing so go the opposite route.

P.S. - "The CIA published Russian translations of Joyce’s Ulysses in Italy, as part of a program the Agency called “a Marshall Plan for the Mind.” The idea was to distribute Western literature in the Communist Bloc during the Cold War. CIA-backed Bedford Publishing Co. had an office in Rome. At the time, Italy had the largest Communist Party in Europe. (See Hot Books in the Cold War by Alfred Reisch)."

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “The Irish Literary Trail,” “1916 Rebellion Walking Tour,” “History and Class Consciousness,” “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “The Immortal Irishman,” “Sean O’Casey,” “James Connolly,” “Jimmy’s Hall,” “The Wonder,” “Black 47,” “Rebellion,” “Dream of the Celt.”

The Cultural Marxist / September 2, 2023

An Almost Unreadable Book

 “Uncomfortable Television” by Hunter Hargraves, 2023

This is a turgid, jargon-filled academic work on how neo-liberal television after 2000 is acculturating people to a declining and more brutal society.  At least that is my take. The writing style in the book puts one off, and yes, the first quote is from Foucault. If anyone ever teaches academics and lawyers how to write – and that is probably impossible – they should take hints from David Foster Wallace and George Orwell.  That is not happening here, as Hargraves is a professor of Cinema and Television Arts at UC Fullerton.  Clearly, he’s not trying to be a public intellectual.

“I regard academic English not as a dialectal variant of Standard Written English, but as a gross debasement.,,” - David Foster Wallace, Authority and American Usage.
          Academic English is “a mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence” in which “it is common to come across long passages which are almost completely devoid of meaning.” - George Orwell, Politics and the English Language.
           Wallace again: “…the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer’s own resume. In other words, it is when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual that his English is deformed … by opaque abstraction” - Wallace, Authority and American Usage.

That said, let’s get to the heart of the matter, if we can.  You see, the ‘heart’ is so elusive it might not even be there, as the style is so elliptical and murky its hard to decipher. Hargraves uses specific examples of comedy, reality TV, fan remixes, detective series and ‘woke’ television after 2000 to make his points.  His introduction dwells on Louis CK, seeming surprised that a series centered around an obnoxious male comic might be problematic.  Anyone who has watched enough comedy acts or shows basically knows when to turn them off, as the tight, drunken world of intimate and adult comedy clubs has been mainstreamed onto Netflix.  A Marxist might put it this way, that the commodification of ‘transgressive’ jokes is fake dissent, or as Orwell put it, just an exciting “escape into wickedness.”  Some of these comics are cheap and lazy ‘boat-rockers,’ if not outright reactionaries.  Some are not.  It’s the difference between liberal 1^st Amendment absolutism and actual liberation.

‘Discomfort’ in Hargraves analysis is the feeling that something is not quite right with the images, plot, characters, language or point of a TV show.  He thinks this is a symptom of “the television industry that late capitalism depends on in order to maintain its ideological hegemony.”  This means depicting ‘unlikeable protagonists, profanity, graphic violence, explicit sex and abuse of cultural minorities, women and children.’  Drug dealers, assassins, hit men, Mafia and serial killers are prominent.  Or “cringeworthy interactions between co-workers, friends and potential romantic partners” and “irritating or mentally unstable” characters.  No shit.  It is actually hard to find normal, grounded people in movies or on TV anymore.

Hargraves does not discuss class, seemingly oblivious to the sea of class references found on television.  The military, CIA or FBI are also invisible in his analysis. He seems to think that ‘woke’ TV will somehow be liberating.  His comedy section focuses on Lena Dunham’s Girls. The reality TV section is on the recovery series Intervention.  The fan ‘remix’ is an adultified, lumpen version of Jem & the Holograms.  The cop series covered are The Wire, CSI and Law & Order. The ‘woke’ TV section is about 30 Rock and Atlanta.  His selections seem mostly frothy. He omits the biggest streaming blockbuster of all, Game of Thrones. Since I’ve not watched most of this, I’ll focus on the detective series section and his conclusion. 

In the 'Lab' at CSI Las Vegas

The Cop Shows

If it’s not obvious by now, CSI and Law & Order SVU are both very pro-police procedurals.  They are the heroes and techie geniuses in ‘our’ fight against crime, with the viewer getting the serial satisfaction of nailing the bad guy, an actual rarity.  Dick Wolf, the producer of L&O: SVU, is openly pro-cop and close to the NYPD.  Anthony Zuicker, who created the CSIs, promoted surveillance, almost laughably-accurate tech science gimmicks and lax civil rights. 

The Wire first focused on an efficient police surveillance unit dealing with black ghetto crime and violence in Baltimore, though surrounded by corrupt or incompetent cops and brass.  In additional seasons it extended to corrupt politicians, schools, unions and newspapers, so it’s not a typical take, but it still carried over the eternal ghetto theme in each season. The showrunner David Simon – a semi-Marxist – is still semi.  This is why he had to make the great Treme series set in New Orleans as a mea culpa.  Hargraves finally makes the point about the show’s focus on black crime, along with another obvious point about the violence in the show.  Is the violence real or imagined is a question he does not address.  Nor does he mention class in regards to The Wire.

What else does Hargraves have to say?  Well, he thinks it’s all about ‘white guilt.’ At least that is his chapter title but I could not find it in the text.  Watching cops abuse process and suspects, or omnipresent swat team raids is not ‘uncomfortable’ television?  This is unmentioned.  He contends that the ‘high-quality’ series loved by critics like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire and Deadwood are all full of conflicted male anti-heroes.  Yet not everyone in the Wire police unit are ‘anti-heroes.’ I’ve seen Deadwood and there are some – like Swearengen – who ‘might’ be - and there are others – like Seth Bullock and Sol Star – who are not.  Swearengen is no kind of ‘hero,’ he’s an interesting shit, one of those unlikable protagonists.  Anti-hero seems to be an outdated way of phrasing it. 

Hargraves whines about how these series are called ‘quality’ without explaining why they are not the same as CSI/L&O SVU, which he says is ‘middle-brow.’  Perhaps it’s the money invested and the audience aimed at?!  Instead he claims they are ‘intermedial’ and ‘televisual.’  This is in line with the frequent resort to a ‘lit review’ of other academics opinions that overly clutter the book like its a Ph.D thesis. 

In CSI, the episode he cites about a “Las Vegas real estate magnate’ being murdered misses the fact that the man’s infantile perversities – and they are gross – blackens the image of the rich.  Again, missing class.  In L&O, he pokes at the alleged feminism of the series and actually quotes people who buy the fact that the male cop Stabler is some kind of feminist hero.  Stabler is a disturbed thug playing the ‘protector’ role for his ever-in-danger and stupid teenage daughter, another trope.  This shows’ focus on sex crimes makes it one of the more lurid, which is uncomfortable. After all, how many dead female bodies do we see, not just here, but constantly? Or imprisoned or kidnapped girls?  Talk about getting us used to crumbling, late capitalism in the U.S.!  At least Olivia Benson / Mariska Hargitay has played a real role in getting incompetent and sexist police departments to actually investigate rape with their unused rape kits. 

Another side of these two shows which he ignores is that the ‘ripped from the headlines’ style used which is frequently focused on rich or powerful people committing crimes. Hargraves misses that, as he’s an identity academic under all the verbiage, abstractions and bow-ties.    

The Wire

Solutions?

The change from ‘family friendly’ TV to uncomfortable ‘realistic’ TV after 2000 is Hargraves’ theme.  This corresponds to the technical changes from 4 TV networks to a sprawling geography of hundreds of media outlets.  That parallels a corresponding decay in U.S. capitalism, which is reflected in the culture industry, normalized by it as ‘just the way things are.’  Hargraves thinks that the new media landscape has also allowed ‘cultural minorities’ to gain access for ‘woke TV’ - which is also ‘uncomfortable.’ His understanding of who are involved in this opening are color castes, women, queer folks and disabled people, but it will only go to the ‘awareness’ level and not that of actual action.  He knows these efforts can be and are commodified and co-opted by media.  

Hargraves points to a ridiculous glut of content and uses 30 Rock and Atlanta for his point about woke TV – shows I have not watched – while ignoring the profusion of muck-raking documentaries.  He does note the handmaid cloaks in The Handmaid’s Tale were used in protests against Bible thumpers and Trump’s sexism, just as the hand signal in the Hunger Games was used in Thai protests against the dictatorship there.  Both to no avail.

This book is for the TV academic or TV geeks.  But it’s all weak tea for anyone else.  No mention of 6 capitalist combines owning nearly all the media in the U.S. No mention of socialization of these sources.  No discussion of public television or collaborative efforts by workers in media – many of whom are currently on strike. Seemingly ‘late capitalism’ still has things in the bag.

P.S. - I've been told by current college students that it is common for cultural studies writing to be incomprehensible and bloated.  Here are the so-called top 100 series:  https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-the-100-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “The Wire,” “Deadwood,” “The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows,” “Bad Cops, Bad Cops – What Ya Gonna Do,” “Trapped and Detective Series in General,”  “Handmaid’s Tale," "Treme" or the word ‘streaming.’

The Kultur Kommissar / August 29, 2023

Direct This!

 “Chasing the Light” by Oliver Stone, 2020

This is an autobiography of Stone, a director and screen-writer who had a reputation for liberal-left politics, wild or intoxicated behavior and kamikaze directing.  It tells the first part of his life, from his parents in Paris and later New York, the education at Yale that he abandoned and his stint as a grunt in Vietnam.  This last formative experience led him to a real career in film, which really went into overdrive with Platoon, his Oscar-winning Vietnam epic. 

Prior to that Stone discusses working on the scripts for Midnight Express, which was about being jailed in a Turkish prison for hashish; Scarface, the story of a violent Marielista Cuban thug getting rich in Miami’s drug trade; and Year of the Dragon, about the Chinese tong gangs in New York.  If you sense a certain theme here, you wouldn’t be far off.  Stone was not just an angry veteran but also a heavy drug user like a lot of Hollywood types, until he kicked the habit before Platoon.  In between he directed a film called The Hand with Michael Caine, a psych-horror film that no one watched. 

The book opens with the chaotic filming of the last scenes of Salvador, as leftist rebels overrun a government military unit in a small Salvadorean town, a town which was really in Mexico.  What’s funny about this is that Stone admits he voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 – later the sponsor of El Salvador’s bloody dictatorship.  His politics before, during and after Vietnam were somewhat muddled for a long time.

His father was a Republican Wall Street finance broker; his mother a French-born socialite and bon vivant.  They finally got divorced when Ollie was 15.  He went to a strict boarding school in Pennsylvania, then on to Yale where he failed to attend classes and instead began to write.  Oddly, he taught English in Saigon for a while before enlisting.  As his career takes off, the book drops names of producers, directors, actors and films like he’s trying to bomb his own insignificance out of existence. And he does!

This is a book that will probably thrill movie fans, wannabe directors and screen-writers with the inside dope. It’s personal and a bit self-obsessed, but then this is an autobiography.  His sexual liaisons, LSD and cocaine use are mentioned, but in no detail.  He has a soft spot for Paris, his mother’s home town; he also feels at home in the jungle after his 15 months around the A Shau Valley with the 1st Air Cavalry and 25^th Infantry of I Corps in Vietnam.  He was in a firebase during the attacks of Tet in ’68. These direct experiences allowed him to make Platoon and Salvador.  The violence he saw also led him to make Scarface, Midnight Express and Year of the Dragon.  He’d worked on an early script version of Born on the 4^th of July and had gotten to know Ron Kovic well.  He also had a hand in the Conan script with Schwarzenegger, which was later butchered.

A journalist, photographer and 'guide' walk into a bar in El Salvador 

Salvador and Platoon

Stone had to sue Dino DeLaurentis for his Platoon script back, which is one of the stories he tells about the massive problems in making films.  He had to deal with nasty reviews by the faux doyen of American film criticism, Pauline Kael of the New Yorker until the end.  Shortness of money, broken promises, fickle studios, the odd variety of actors and the stupidity of some script changes are prominent.  And ‘chasing the light’ to get every shot needed on each day’s shooting schedule.  The experience in Mexico making Salvador is epic. Stars walk off the set, extras go on strike, actors get drunk, equipment is late, money always tight or non-existent, stunt men are injured, a case of heat stroke, a conservative Mexican censor, camera and sound people unreliable, a bad film lab, personal antagonisms galore and money-men telling him to ‘cut, cut, cut’ the script to save cash.  He still doesn’t know how the film was paid for, but it finally got shot.

That experience prepared him for Platoon, as the films were tied together by the studio.  It had more money behind it courtesy of Orion, but was staged in the Philippines just after an election ousted Marcos, so turmoil was at its birth.  They had to clear the jungle for the set and the actors were trained by a hard-ass military man to achieve realism.  Some of the film’s choppers were so overloaded they almost crashed. His crew of mostly young actors were ‘blooded.’ Problems occurred – heavy rain, bugs, bad light, snake bites, truck accidents and a strike due to Stone losing his temper with the Philippine crew, but it, like Salvador, eventually wrapped.  It was not a disaster like the filming of Apocalypse Now or as difficult as Salvador.

These two were both leftist films subject to the winds of politics.  Stone put in an unreal, untruthful scene in Salvador about rebels executing National Guard soldiers after they surrendered, which never happened.  The rebels were interested in making surrenders easier, not harder.  He regrets that decision in trying to appeal to the typical government narrative on Central America, in the pursuit of ‘balance.’

Above all this is a careerist story, as being a famous director was the goal and Stone succeeded.  His glory at Platoon’s Oscar is palpable. Even his conservative father finally approved of his hippie son.  Whether that would be possible now, with the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s fading away, is debatable, as those were different times in Hollywood. Movies are now being supplanted by streaming series.  ‘Safe’ cash outlays are even more prominent, as the profusion of sequels attests.  And world cinema is intruding on Hollywood. Autobiographies are self-aggrandizing for the most part, and he lets his opinion of figures in Hollywood show.  He’s famous enough now, in spite of his bete noire image, so he can. This book shows that even people with incoherent political instincts come around if enough facts from their own life experience start to accumulate, as did Stone, who became a liberal-leftie after being an amorphous aesthete.  That is the influence of material reality, of materialism.  

Stone went on to make two Wall Streets, Born on the 4^th of July, The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Nixon, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Snowden and The Untold Story of the United States, among others.  As you can by this selection, his films were not too radical, but they all undermine conservative orthodoxy about Wall Street, Vietnam, hippies, the JFK assassination, porn, surveillance and history.  They are all a bit sensationalist and do not focus on capitalism or class.  Yet many in Hollywood intensely dislike Stone because of his ‘slant,’ including liberals and centrists. So you wannabe Stone’s out there, here is how it worked for him.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Chasing the Light,” “Wall Street – Money Never Sleeps” (Stone); “On the Trail of the Assassins”(Garrison); “November – A Novel,” “Central America’s Forgotten History” (A. Chomsky); “Manufacturing Consent” (N. Chomsky) or the word “Vietnam,” which will give you multiple hits, as the blog specializes in books about Vietnam.

And I bought it at May Day Books! … which has solid fiction and culture sections.

The Cultural Marxist

August 25, 2023

Bloody Hungry

 “Hunger” film directed by Sitisiri Mongkolsiri, 2023

No, it’s not the Hunger Games series or the film about the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland in 1981; nor is it the book by Knut Hamsun about poverty in rural Norway, a memoir by Roxanne Gay or a triple CD rap release.  It is a Thai film taking a look at Bangkok’s high-living upper class and their obsession with food and the chef(s) that cater to them.  It comes out of the same class conscious Asian approach as the south Korean gems Parasite, Squid Games and Snowpiercer. 

Ruling class pigs out

A brutal and driven Chef Paul is the pivotal character.  He says that the more money you have, the ‘hungrier’ you get.  “What you eat reflects your social status” according to him.  Or as another puts it, when reflecting on Chef Paul’s autocratic style:  “In kitchen, there is no room for democracy – it’s a dictatorship.”  This reflects the Thai government itself, a militarized authoritarian, monarchist clan coddling the self-same rich gobbling down the Chef’s ‘perfect’ delicacies.  The Chef runs a catered, on-site kitchen for upscale parties.  We are taken to the birthday party of one of the bloody and aging military men of Thailand, also attended by celebrities, politicians and businessmen. Then to a pool party by a bunch of drunken and obnoxious rich kids; and a ‘hunters’ outdoor lunch consisting of a protected species of bird.  A secretly-fraught private dinner for a rich family, later discovered to be bankrupt, is next.  Lastly, a leading Thai socialite’s huge bash, where two chefs battle it out for her ignorant approval. 

If this all sounds like a darker version of Crazy Rich Asians you wouldn’t be far wrong. Class understanding is something that seems obvious across the world now.  Class consciousness is no theoretical concept to most - it’s everywhere, which is a good sign. Chef Paul himself came from poverty – his mother was a maid to a wealthy family, but he saw how they ate.  He accidentally broke one of their caviar jars and tasted its terrible contents, and he decided then and there to be the yelling, pan and plate throwing, brow-beating asshole that he became – a Thai Gordon Ramsey.  Sometimes the worst petit-bourgeois are former proletarians, and he’s no exception.

Into this mix is a dead-faced noodle-shop cook named Aoy who wants to become ‘special’ and so she joins Chef Paul’s crew after a harrowing cooking test.  The hunter’s dinner of a dead rare bird forces her to leave and she joins another restauranteur, highlighting her ‘burning wok’ style.  She partially mimics Chef Paul's brutal attitude towards her own kitchen staff.  Eventually she realizes that cooking pretentious and very expensive food for rich people is a no-go.  She returns to her noddle shop to make ‘Cry-Baby Noodles,’ a family favorite, and create her own menu for her neighbors.  It is somewhat similar to the other cooking series The Bear where an upscale chef returns to a hot beef sandwich shop in Chicago, and perhaps has the intention of upgrading it.  The Bear, being U.S. based, has an undertow of class consciousness in the debate between Richie and Carmen, but it’s really a typical family story.  Not so in this film, where class is up front. The neo-liberal obsession with eating, cooking and chefs is widespread – the flip side of the real hunger affecting millions. 

Food is a fraught topic with class and knowledge overtones.  The less income and education you have in the U.S., usually the worse the quality of the food you eat – though it may taste addictively good.  Marx saw this in his time in London – workers eating toxic, non-nutritious and cheap food that barely kept them alive.  Even Little Shop of Horrors is a play on that idea. Now U.S. food eventually makes many proletarians sick with obesity, hypertension, cancer, heart disease and diabetes, let alone its animal, social and environmental impacts.

Meat and fish seem to be the gastronomic stars in this movie … the bloodier or wetter the better. Claiming the lives of animals is a form of power to this upper class.  But without saying it, this animal focus is a quiet commentary on the unjust and expensive gluttony of the Thai capitalists … a class that is not unique, but spread across the world in nearly every country.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “The Bear,” “Hunger Games,” “Parasite,” “Squid Game,” “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Salt, Sugar, Fat,” “Vegan Freak,” “Animal, Vegetable, Junk,” “Kraft-Heinz,” “Foodopoly,” “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism.”

P.S. - An ex-Primer Minister of Thailand returned from exile yesterday and was immediately put in jail.  The winner of the May election has been blocked from taking office by the military/monarchist bloc. An unelected real estate tycoon has been backed by the king and generals for prime minister.  Maybe they'll appoint an authoritarian chef next.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist

August 22, 2023

A Guide Book

 “Obstacle Course – The Everyday Struggle to get an Abortion in America,” by David S. Cohen, Carole Joffe, 2020

This is a primer on going through the whole experience of abortion in the U.S.  It is based on over 70 interviews – women that have had an abortion; providers, volunteers and allies.  That experience is closely based on what state you live in, your age, whether you have health insurance, a car, money, various kinds of support and a strong stomach to deal with fake clinics and lunatic anti-abortion protesters.  There is also the tight web of abortion restrictions that occurred prior to the reversal of Roe v. Wade, both national and state. This book is written before that ruling, so the picture now is even more difficult – making miscarriages and non-viable fetuses subject to the new law in some states, which additionally threaten women’s health.  This was seen in the recent lawsuit against Texas by 13 women.  The south and prairie states are the worst offenders, as they are in favor of forced child bearing.

The authors take you, in detail, through ‘making the decision’ to terminate the pregnancy; finding a clinic; coming up with the money; waiting periods; transport; getting past the clowns; clinic counseling and the procedure – whether it be medical or drug-induced.  They end by trying to paint a picture of what a sane approach would be, which in their mind is very limited.  

Of most import is that working-class people, many times of color, have the most difficult time accessing reproductive health services like abortion.  Abortion rights are part of working-class struggle, especially of working-class women’s rights.  It is pretty clear that the Democratic Party talk to ‘just elect us’ went on while abortion rights were being whittled away for years, clearly leading to an overturn of the 1973 law.  The Dems were asleep at the wheel – when they had it and when they didn’t.  Trusting them again is fraught.

Here are some relevant facts from the authors:

     1.    They call the treatment of abortion as a medical condition ‘abortion exceptionalism’ due to the multiple restrictions on the practice.

     2.    From their 2018-2019 figures:  half of women seeking abortions are below the federal poverty line, and another quarter just above.

     3.    A quarter have no health insurance.

4.    A third have Medicaid, but at that time only 16 states allowed its use for the procedure.

5.    60% of patients are already parents.

6.    Three in five patients are women of color – African-American at 28%; Hispanic at 25%; Asian/PI at 6%; European-Americans at 39%; 3% other.

7.    The rate of abortion is going down because of better contraceptive practice.  There were 862K abortions in 2017, down from 1.2M in 2008. The rate has not dropped as much in conservative / Republican-dominated states.

8.    1 in 4 women will have an abortion by age 45.

9.    39% of abortions in 2017 were through medication.

10.                Abortion is incredibly safe, at 2%; far safer than childbirth, colonoscopies, liposuction and vasectomies.

11.                 The large “Turnaway’ Study showed that the economic, social, medical and psychological health of women declines if they fail to get an abortion they wanted or needed.  They are more likely to be a, poorer; b, on public assistance; c, have a negative outlook on the future; d, bad partner relationships; e, the children are worse off; f, lower health overall; g, and introduces them to the high mortality rate of pregnancy in the U.S.

The 'pro-lifers' love a good bomb or burning

They cover the legal decisions that whittled away at abortion since 1973 – Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992; Gonzales v. Carhart in 2007; Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt in 2013 - a case which supposedly slowed restrictions.  The latter was mostly ignored until the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which came out of Alabama and led the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade. 

Their solutions are to follow the best practices in states where abortion is still fully legal.  Added to that they want Medicaid to cover abortion; advanced-practice clinicians to be allowed to do the procedure and making abortion by mail, using Mifipristone, fully legal.  They go into the questionable practice of self-managed abortion.  Stunningly they do not call for nationalized health care, an independent and militant abortion-rights movement or any political recommendations like a labor-left-populist party.  They instead have some weak language about ‘seeking allies.’  They limit themselves to the most conservative approach, which has proved to be a failure.

If you are an activist, a volunteer, a patient, a medical professional or just curious, this book will provide a guide to the situation of getting an abortion in backasswards 'America.' 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms:  “Without Apology,” “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “Lets Rent a Train!” “Feminists and Feminists,” “TexAss,” “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism,” “Really?  Rape?  Still?” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Ireland – What’s Up?”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 19, 2023