Chateau Lloyd

Until last week, the only Vladimir Nabokov book I read was, for obvious reasons, Lolita.  I suppose it is worth a post on its own merits, but my father, who is a serious Nabokov nerd, said it was not emblematic of his other work.

I therefore decided to read Mary, his first novel but one that only received an English translation after his career was well established.  It is a quirky book, not the most accessible and I found its conclusion to be unsatisfactory.  It's very much a first-try kind of book.

As I often say, you write what you know, and Nabokov wrote of being a Russian emigre in Berlin during the 1920s.  The tale is set in a pension filled with Russians from various walks of life.  The protagonist is Ganin, a young man who served with the "Whites" (counterrevolutionaries) and was evacuated from Crimea.  The story (which is quite short, barely breaking 100 pages) is about him finding renewed motivation to move forward with life via recollections off Mary, whom he hopes to meet soon.

Much of the text is taken up by description, which is precise and sometimes unsettling.  Ganin's physical relationship with Mary is described in some detail, which I'm sure was unusual at the time.  I'm sure some readers might fight it erotic, but it seemed to me that Nabokov was trying to recreate the sensations of the relationship with precision rather than eroticism.

While easy reading, I found the pacing to be slow and was heavily tempted to flip ahead to the end.  That speaks well of the tension, but it induced impatience rather than interest.

I've got some more of his stuff and will reserve judgement until I get deeper into his works.

Amazon Prime's desecration of J.R.R. Tolkien's work continues with the release of the second season of The Rings of Power.

A stunning (but at the same time predictable) development is the decision to "humanize" the orcs.  Tolkien's villains were cruel, cowardly, cannibalistic monsters who lived a debased existence.  They were a twisted mockery of elves created by Morgoth to serve as the foot soldiers for his war against the Valar.

These creatures immediately struck a nerve in the popular culture and were part of the original elements of Dungeons and Dragons and are now a staple of fantasy environments.

Alas, in our decadence, people have decided that what was once obviously evil must now be seen as good, so just as sodomy is the highest form of sex, so orcs are just misunderstood and must be rehabilitated into yet another People of Color oppressed by white bigoted imperialists.

I've dealt with the whole question of whether they are supposed to be an allegory for actual people, and the short version is "yes and no."  Yes, they represent human vices and were written with bloodthirsty and battle-crazed soldiers of World War I in mind.  No, they are not a racial caricature of anyone.

As the old saying goes: if you hear a "dog whistle," you're the dog.  Anyone who looks at misshapen, homicidal, cannibals who delight in cruelty and says:  "You know who this reminds me of..." is the bigot, not the guy who made them up.

It is yet another milestone on our civilization's downward path, and their utter rejection gives me comfort and hope for the future.

It has long been axiomatic that most film adaptations from books are flawed if not outright terrible.  

What is far less common, however, is for the film to exceed the book.  The three examples I usually cite are Jaws, M*A*S*H and Last of the Mohicans.

The book version of Jaws contains several annoying side plots involving class differences in the seaside community (summer homes vs year-round residents) and Mrs. Brody cheats on the chief with Hooper, who in the book is a tall, stud rather than Richard Dreyfuss' brilliantly played shark nerd.

M*A*S*H bogs itself down with comparisons between service status (draftees vs regular army or reservists), and it comes across as totally cartoonish.  That element was toned down precisely because it was boring and rendered it even less plausible than it already way.

As for Last of the Mohicans, Mark Twain thoroughly dismantled James Fenimore Cooper more than a century ago, and Michael Mann's 1990s production is far superior to the written version.

A similar situation exists with The Big Sleep.  I've long enjoyed the Bogart and Bacall film, which while light on the plot, has excellent acting, great dialog, and is just wonderfully evocative.

When I saw a used copy of Raymond Chandler's book, I picked it up because I wanted to see how much had been changed, and whether the changes work.

In fact, a lot had been changed, and not for the better.  Back in the 1930s and 1940s, movies were still subject to the Hayes Code.

In the modern age, the code has been held up as horrifically stifling censorship, but it is no accident that films were much, much better when they had to use story, character and setting rather than just flash boobs to pack people into the seats.  Books, however, were under no such restriction, and so topics like homosexuality, drug use and pornography could be openly discussed in Chandler's book.

For the film, these topics had to be approached with care and ambiguity, which made for better storytelling.  I'd heard that the book's ending is better, but it's actually much worse - everything is tied into a tidy little bow that makes no sense.

Chandler has some great conversations, and writes well, but his characters as written simply aren't as compelling as the cast of the film.  I have no desire to re-read the book, but I know I will continue to re-watch the film.

Is any movie a better distillation than 1990s youth culture than Wesley Snipes' Blade?  It's got a bit of everything - the brash anti-hero, vampirism as a decadent (secular) lifestyle, and of course that sexy soft-core lesbian porn that was just starting to creep into the popular consciousness.

Indeed, in retrospect that was a clever marketing ploy by Hollywood, because while two men having sex is disgusting, two women having sex is merely absurd - and far more aesthetically pleasing.

In any event, I hadn't watched it in many years, which may strike people as surprising given my (fairly) recent authorship of The Vampires of Michigan.   To a certain extent, Blade was the Ur-text of that book insofar as it treated vampirism as a morally neutral biological phenomenon.  Obviously, the blood drinking was bad, but religious symbols and sacred objects were specifically mentioned as useless.

Garlic and silver were instead the primary threats to the vamps.

The storyline is unremarkable, and what sells the picture are the actors and the remarkably slick aesthetic.  Wesley Snipes is just so damn cool.  He oozes cool, personifies it - women want him, men want to BE him.  Modern movies simply cannot produce that level of charisma.

Put simply, it knew what it wanted to be and became that thing.  

That being said, there is a spiritual void at the heart of the picture which I had not noticed before - in part because it has been so long since I saw it.  When you are in your 20s, partying and lots of sex seems all that one could want in life.  Later on, other priorities emerge.

That was a large part of what inspired my take on vampires.  I very much enjoyed (and incorporated) fight scenes with cool weapons and people capable of dishing out (and taking) absurd amounts of damage, but the real heart of the matter to me was how one kept going after 100 years of orgies.  There had to be something more.

Anyhow, the film has held up remarkably well.

For the last few weeks Billy Joel's "Honesty" has been running through my mind.  The scope and quantity of lies in public discourse is simply overwhelming.

As the title of the post says - everyone is so untrue.

It is no accident that Man's from grace began with a lie.  Lying comes natural to evil people and often reaches the extent that they lie about everything, no matter how trivial or self-defeating.

We're to the point where once-respected organizations are now rejecting their own reportage in order to toe the Party line.  It's completely self-defeating, but so is evil.

As the song says:

I can always find someone who says they sympathize if I wear my heart out on my sleeve, but I don't want some pretty face to tell me pretty lies.  All I want is someone to believe.

Apparently, pretty lies are in great demand these days.

There is a strain of thought - popularized by Hollywood and contemporary culture - that lies indicate intelligence, and clever lies are the sign of a superior kind of person.  This has obvious appeal to prideful people lost in their vanity, and is of a piece with the elevation of cowardice to a virtue as well.

None of this is new, Chesterton and Belloc wrote about it more than a century ago, and Waugh's writings also address the issue.  A key plot point in his Sword of Honour trilogy is how an otherwise admirable British officer convinces himself that the smart thing to do is abandon his men on Crete and save himself, only to realize that while lip-service is paid to such cleverness, in practice society finds it despicable.  

The scandal is so great that punishment is out of the question, and he is hustled off to the Pacific theater, where he finds redemption through conventional acts of bravery and courage.

Of course modern society also rejects the notion of redemption or forgiveness.  There are only the Yard Sign Calvinists and everyone else.    As I noted a couple of weeks ago, one of the most consequential shifts in American culture was when progressive Christians decided that their mission was to condemn rather than convert.

If one isn't trying to draw people to eternal truth, duping them with lies seems a reasonable thing to do, especially if you merely want to keep them in line.

It's a self-limiting tactic, but siding with evil has always been a sucker's bet.  That's because the biggest lie of all is that one can somehow escape divine judgement.

Last night I watched the original theatrical release DVD of Star Wars with my grandkids.  The elder was my age when I first saw it (4) and the younger predictably fell asleep (which was part of the point).

After decades of fandom and the current culture war over the franchise, it was refreshing to see the film through the eyes of a child.

She was very impressed, saying "Wow!" during the opening sequence and reacting throughout the film.  By the trash compactor sequence (which terrified me back then), she was sitting in my lap for reassurance.  She loved the battles and cheered at the end.

And - like my generation - she wanted toys from the film.

I think there are several issues wound up in Star Wars and these have concealed the essential greatness of the original films.

Obviously, the dominant issue now is the fundamental reworking of the entire franchise, an action that seems motivated by sheer vindictiveness towards the original fans.

The original films succeeded because they pointedly were set in an imaginary setting and the sides were clearly identified as good and evil.  It's right there in the screen crawl.  There's no need to overthink it or break it down using critical theory.

The characters work because they suit the actors, who had some leeway in how they interpreted their roles.  

There is also the weird obsession of George Lucas with tweaking his films.  It's one thing to digitally remaster something and clean up bits of dust and lint.  It is another to actually recut the thing, splicing in scenes, altering dialog, even switching out actors and voices.  It is said that George Lucas' then-wife (Marcia) and the editing team saved the film with last-minute changes and that because of their acrimonious divorce, George wanted to reverse as much of that as he could.

The "special edition" is a worse film, breaking up the flow, introducing unnecessary special effects and severely compromising the narrative.  Moreover, it has given the new owner, Disney, license to do the same.  The reason the canon remains unsettled is that its creator couldn't settle on one.

In reality, the original theatrical release is the true version - it set the world on fire and created a series of film so popular than fans would camp out in front of theaters in order to be the first in line to see them.

Everything since has been mediocre, graded on a curve because they no longer have to stand on their own merits, but are instead compared to others in the genre.  Basically, Star Wars has created its own ghetto, walling it off from mainstream audiences.

This is the problem with franchises - the bigger they get, the higher the entry costs becomes for new fans.

Put simply, a new prospective fan now has dozens of hours of catching up to do.  From 1977 to 1983, it was 'all too easy' to stay current.

All of which is to say that war over Star Wars has sadly overtaken the quality of the film and its superb sequels.  Adding to this tragedy is the bizarre decision by Disney to trash earlier films in order to excuse their abysmal offerings.

I suggest taking a break from the very online arguments and simply watching the originals as if for the first time, looking over the details, savoring the sound track, immersing oneself in the story.

It helps if you have a kid with you.

Yesterday I got the news that Donald Sutherland had died and while I've never thought of him as a favorite actor, I own a lot of films with him in them.

The most striking thing about him was his remarkable range and the way he could manipulate his features to fit his role.  He covered the whole spectrum from goofball to intense serial killer.

He was quite the hot property during the 1970s, from M*A*S*H to The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Eye of the Needle, to name just a few.

That's a bunch of iconic roles, and my daughter treasures him as Oddball, the eccentric tank commander from Kelly's Heroes.

I'm at an age where the actors who were in their prime during my youth are starting to pass away.  What makes it doubly sad is that there is no one coming up to replace them.  It's impossible to make a star-studded film like Kelly's Heroes today because there isn't a cast capable of supporting it.  Disney's flagship new show, The Acolyte, has hardly anyone of note, with its top-line actress being killed off in the first episode.  The next most famous person is a Korean actor who was in a foreign-language streaming series that most people never saw.

I can't think of anyone under 40 who is in any way comparable to Sutherland, which is a shame.

Nowhere is the demonic influence on secular society more clear than in the attempt to abolish or pervert all traditional relationships.  The radical trans movement seeks to annihilate motherhood as well as fatherhood as we have known them, and replaced them with arbitrary, pseudo-technical terms that obscure more than they describe.

Yet despite all this, the hard-wiring in our brains remains, and we still default to the norms of human history.

This came to mind while watching The Acolyte reviews.  During the third episode, there was a dispute between the "two mommies" and while they are supposed to be this superior, radically feminist relationship, it was basically a same-sex simulcrum of husband and wife.  The taller, more powerful woman loomed over the shorter one, using her presence to coerce compliance.  When the smaller woman asserted that she ought to take presence because "she carried them" (the children), the other retorted "I created them."  

That's a pretty masculine way of putting things, no?  It's also very strange to have motherhood - which lies at the very heart of the female experience - be denigrated in favor of an ersatz paternity.   Because the big chick held the Force turkey-baster, this made her the superior to the woman who spent nine months carrying twins, went through the painful process of birth, and trials of post-partum depression, and of course nursing them at her breast - which is no mean feat with twins.

The Youtuber Disparu (whose excellent videos I have been following), noted that this seems to be a reference to surrogate pregnancy, and how gays think nothing of the birth mothers because they've done their thing and got paid for it.

Indeed, one of the interesting developments has been a growing awareness that "surrogate mothers" are actually a form of human trafficking.  Women are paid to be impregnated, expected to carry the baby to term (perhaps gender-selected via IVF), and the child is taken from her at birth and bestowed on the purchasers.  I've seen triumphant videos posted on social media, which go viral among religious folks in particular.

It's fascinating how we have this massive health care industrial complex built around teaching best practices in pregnancy and child-rearing and yet none of that applies to preferred groups like homosexuals.

Consider how many red flags are involved in this process.  

First, we have the inherent immorality of the contract.  A woman is being paid to give birth and hand over a human being.  How this is not "involuntary servitude" I do not know.  The entire transaction is fraught with moral problems. Why is this woman doing this?  Is she compelled by circumstance?  Is she a lawful resident?  One can easily imagine trafficked women being forced into this role.

Now consider her mental state.  Instead of treasuring the movements of her growing child, she is instead painfully aware that she will not enjoy the tender moments after birth, holding, feeding, nurturing the child of her flesh.

Post-partum depression is practically guaranteed.  How can it not happen?  She has no solace of holding the child, just money.

Meanwhile the child will not form a proper maternal bond.  A key part of development (and comfort for both mother and child) is the closeness after birth.  The beating of the mother's heart is uniquely relaxing.  That is now gone.

Volumes of research show that breast-feeding is best for both mother and child, yet here it is categorically off the table.

I could go on.

In a consistent, rational world, the people who style themselves "women's advocates" would be up in arms over this, but of course they're celebrating the commodification of babies, just as the celebrate killing them in the womb.

As I said, it's demonic.

The truth is that fathers and mothers are complimentary, each bringing different gifts and fulfilling different needs.  A huge part of the societal strife and breakdown we are seeing comes from the unwillingness of elites to sustain these vital institutions.

On the plus side, the market failure of The Acolyte is encouraging.  Perhaps the tide is starting to turn.

I'm amusing myself by watching reviews of The Acolyte, a show I would never actually watch but which appears to serve as a marvelous punching bag.

Disney's latest Star Wars offering is really an exercise in self-parody, an exemplification of the South Park joke about "putting a chick in it and make it gay and lame."

Only three episodes have yet aired, but it very much seems to be a paint-by-numbers affair, where various ideological/demonic boxes are checked and plot, character development and consistency within the setting are recklessly disregarded.

I've seen people say that this will "kill" Star Wars, but the abysmally low viewership tells me that it is already dead.

The larger question is why Disney is permitting this to happen.  The company spent four billion dollars on the rights to Star Wars and has yet to make it back.  Apparently, The Acolyte cost $180 million to produce, a staggering $22.5 million per episode.  What this bought them is a viewing rate among their subscribers of 3%.

The pessimists among us ('black pilled" in the popular vernacular) assume that the woke oligarchs have limitless amounts of cash to throw at unwatchable propaganda films, but nothing made by human hands is too big to fail.

That's perhaps the most important element about the show - no one cares.  When the sequel movies and spin-offs were out, there was immense debate and discussion about them, but reviews seem to be relatively sparse and someone dilatory.  There's no sense of urgency because no one's watching.

I think it's likely that the viewership of the people watching the review will significantly exceed that of the show itself.  Certainly the reviews are less of a time investment, but also likely far more entertaining.

It's strange to think back to a time when I was so worked up over Star Wars that I wrote the Man of Destiny series to fix it.  Now, it just seems like a waste of time and energy.

Truly, Star Wars is dead to me.

Hollywood is apparently not done with strip-mining J.R.R. Tolkien's literary legacy.  A new film is supposedly in the works based on the life of...Gollum.

Which we already know.  I mean, it's in Lord of the Rings, book the book and both the movies.

This is the state of modern filmmaking: tell the same story again and again.  

Presumably audiences will keep coming back to watch something vaguely familiar, thus assuring a reasonable return on investment.

This is largely enabled by the consolidation that has taken place among studios, which are probably more in lockstep than they ever were in the days of the moguls.  Indeed, the signature feature of the Studio System was its innovation - all of the moguls were self-made men who were creating an industry from scratch.  The current executives are third- or fourth-generation legacy hires.

The good news is that this creates an unprecedented opportunity for independent artists to make some huge scores, and we saw this with Godzilla Minus One.

The bad news is that all media has been consolidated, and there is a concerted (and blatant) effort to restrict access to new content precisely because of the danger it poses.

I'm not sure how this will play out, but as with so many other institutions, my sense is that Hollywood will ultimately fall.  Like a vast ship incapable of course correction, it will inevitably crash.  Nothing is too big to fail.