Tuesday, January 30, 2018

It's Not Even Past #8 - Jimmy Stewart and Nebbishes

There is no way to do justice to Hollywood as a subject. It's the dominant cultural force of the 20th century, perhaps even more dominant than the internet in our time. It showed billions of people how perceive one another, how to talk to one another, how to dress, how to behave, how to fuck. We're just too close to Hollywood to see it in full. We could do a dozen podcasts in a row and only skim the barest surface of it. Its effect on our lives impacts each of us in millions of ways of which we'll never be aware and it will take at least another fifty or a hundred years to get any small sense of its real impact on human history. 

What we can do, or at least begin to, is to get a sense of individual movies and its place in human history. I want to concentrate on two movies today from very different periods of human life. One is a classic Hollywood movie from Ernst Lubitsch, the Hollywood director who would probably be my choice for the best director of the first generation of talkies, and by importing to America the values of bourgeois Europe he was forced as a Jew to leave behind, almost single-handedly defined the values of Hollywood that we still think of as its values in our day. The second is a movie by the director who did his damndest to extend the values of Old Hollywood the furthest into our time, for good and bad, and who has stubbornly, resolutely, carried the values of mid-century American romance, values that seem increasingly warped in our day, to the very bitter end of his career. Of course I'm talking about Woody Allen, that twisted, depraved, sad dinosaur who could never have hobbled on for twenty years past when he mattered at all to America if people did not have memories of what a giant he was in American discourse he seemed like forty years ago. 

There are a lot of once famous studio directors who probably won't matter in a hundred years nearly as much as we still think they do. A famous director of the studio era like John Ford made a few undisputed masterpieces like The Searchers, or a movie like How Green Was My Valley that I seem to be the only person to think is an undisputable masterwork, but even many of the famous among his 150 movies, like Stagecoach or My Darling Clementine, don't seem to me to hold up nearly so well. The archetypal American Western, particularly, relies on notions of masculinity and patriotism that should be obvious have an enormous amount in common with authoritarianism. Even for its own time, it appealed to the worst instincts of America rather than the best, and made Americans with more progressive values uneasy. And when you compare the Ford's production-code hobbled action sequences to the later action in directors influenced by John Ford like Spielberg and Scorsese, there's obviously no comparison in the excitement. And let's not even get started on Frank Capra.  

The Western is the most obvious example of a genre in Hollywood ever coined, but Hollywood coined many genres, and every genre has its problems. Genre itself is limiting. Genre, by definition, gains its impact through cliches. The very nature of a genre is that there is a specific audience whom you are feeding a series of cliches without particularly challenging them with anything subversive, a series of cliches that with one small variant to create its individuality. Hollywood wasn't build to challenge people, it was built by giving the viewers what they want. This isn't to say that there aren't lots of examples of genre that are durable and lasting art which subverts its genre's cliches in all kinds of meaningful ways, but there are less of them than genre devotees imagine.  

The average human being is more intelligent than an idiot, less intelligent than a smart person. One out of three are reasonably clever, one out of five or six are genuinely smart, so that means that there are roughly fifty or sixty million smart people in America. In the same way, one out of five or six Hollywood movies was of real quality, so it's amazing that in a place as seemingly dumb as Hollywood made so many great movies. But the question becomes, how many of those movies will still attract attention once millions of people stop caring about the movies completely the way they've stopped caring for written poetry or classical music. I'm sure that movies by directors of personalities to large to ever be contained by any genre will be watched by somebody for hundreds of years, but whatever the dramatic art form, genre fiction is usually the first to be thrown overboard, because without the popular zeitgeist surrounding it, it is impossible to convey what was so unique about them to later generations, who have their own genre entertainment that addresses the excitements of their own day much better, and will therefore be of more anthropological value than artistic. That's not to say that this is the fate of all popular genre fiction, but it is the fate of most of it. 

But contrary to the Western, which celebrated conservative and manly virtues like honor and glory while pushing women and minorities to a status barely above props, the screwball comedy was the aesthetically progressive genre for its time - I dare say, it was progressive even by the standards of 2000. A screwball comedy is a very particular kind of romantic comedy in which a man and a woman who clash enormously are thrown into impossible situations together, and eventually fall in love. It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, The Lady Eve, Only Angels Have Wings, these were just some of the more famous ones - and for my money His Girl Friday still has to stand as the greatest romantic comedy ever made. But what's important to note about screwball comedies is that it's the only genre where the leading lady was guaranteed equal time to the leading man, half the best lines, and, at least by the standards of 1940, a three-dimensional character with a free will of her own. 


The best of the screwball comedy directors, perhaps the best of all those classic Hollywood directors nobody talks about anymore, was Ernst Lubitsch, who in the span of five years made Ninotchka, Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not To Be, and Heaven Can Wait. Lubitsch was a Jew from Berlin who started in Max Reinhardt's German Theater, and became perhaps the most venerated director of the late 1930s. Practically everything that we think of as Classic Hollywood originates with Lubitsch, and what strikes us now is that the greatness of his movies consists of qualities so completely un-American. The Chicago Tribune critic Michael Wilmington describes Lubitsch's style as:

"At once elegant and ribald, sophisticated and earthy, urbane and bemused, frivolous yet profound. They were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well."

When was America ever amused by sex? And in the 30's and 40's? It's almost unthinkable. But there, over and over again, it is in Ernst Lubitsch's movies, and audiences ate it up. 

Ninotchka clip (up to 1:49)

What's missing without the video images in this clip from Ninotchka is Greta Garbo's look of supreme, almost autistic, indifference and Melvyn Douglas's look of absolute enchantment when she implies that his type of man will soon face a firing squad. What's amazing about the Screwball comedy, and why it is completely unique in American life is that, in a manner completely revolutionary for its time and progressive for any period in the 20th century, it views the battle of the sexes as a battle of equals. Two people who don't like each other going to the ends of the earth to one up each other until they realize that the other person is the only person in the entire world clever enough for them. By any terminology in our day, the man usually behaves predatorily, and the woman, well, the woman is always somehow comes to the conclusion that the man is the right man for her in the end. This is Hollywood after all, and around the ninety minute marker, the conclusion has to be tied in a neat little bow, no matter how artificial it seems. The man is always a schmuck, the woman is always has to be resigned to be ill-treated, they get together in the last ninety seconds of the movie, and if they know what's good for them, they break up ninety seconds after the movie's over. 

His Girl Friday clip (up to 2:48)

The implication of sex in screwball comedy is everywhere, the whiff of it, of sex as something deliriously irrational, chaotic, that leads people only into a hot mess, but something to which they are addicted like a drug because without it, where would rich people find any kind of excitement in their lives?

But in order to see love as a comedy, you have to look the other way at so many things that would be considered incredibly dark behavior by men toward women in our day: every flavor of patronizing, all manor of stalking, some violence, a playing field that by any objective standard men objectively define, yet because the only weapons available to women at the time are subtle ones, men believe that women define the playing field because things never go according to the man's plan. Even in the most equal of circumstances, sex and love is too chaotic for anything to ever go according to plan. 

What's astonishingly progressive about Screwball Comedy is that this was the place when, finally, hundreds of millions of men and women saw works of art in which women were something resembling equal partners in the journey of romantic adventure. No form of cultural entertainment ever did more to make men see that women were not just ivory ideals of their desire to control, but partners with needs of their own who, by liberating them from the prisons of male entitlement, could add immeasurably to the fulfillment of their jailers. It was a comic look at the battle of the sexes that did everything in its power to minimize the threat to women - making male jealousy and rage appear comic rather than lethal. But the reason it hit a nerve is because, just as there is incredible suffering and trauma in the irrationality of love, there is also comedy. Love is too large to be contained by any emotion,  there is not a single couple in the world that does not sometimes feel hate each other. But what makes relationships worth pursuing within the crucible of love is when people do not give into their worst impulses in those moments of crisis, and therefore grow together into more meaningful lives. And that is, on the other hand, what is conservative about Screwball Comedy - there is no real growth in screwball comedy, just pure irrationality, the characters are clowns, nihilistic embodiments of human irrationality. 

But within screwball comedy, there are also two basic types of male protagonist. One, we'll call Cary Grant, one we'll call Jimmy Stewart. The Philadelphia Story, the screwball comedy in which they both appear and somewhat compete for the affections of Katherine Hepburn, begins with Cary Grant mashing Katherine Hepburn's face and throwing her to the floor - and this is played for laughs. But Jimmy Stewart would never do anything so brutal, he's a sweet man, perpetually misunderstood, almost delicate, and usually when referring to Jimmy Stewart, one uses the current term that's become derogatory, and call him the 'nice guy.' Jimmy Stewart is the picture of mid-century decency, both everything that was right with it and wrong with it. And that's why Alfred Hitchcock could use Jimmy Stewart's persona to such perceptive effect in Vertigo, which posits that beneath the George Bailey persona is a man who believes he's owed control of the woman in his life. 

But in The Shop Around the Corner, remade sixty years later as You've Got Mail, Jimmy Stewart is once again, the delicate, almost feminine, flower of a man who earns our sympathy simply by being Jimmy Stewart, while his love interest, played by Margaret Sullivan, is clearly written as snooty, stuck up, and generally a piece of work. They work together and hate each other, but at night they unknowingly write passionate letters to one another, both of them idealizing a potential soulmate they think they've never met in real life. 

Just listen to this scene.  (up to 0:56)

Jimmy Stewart's character had just been fired, unjustly, from the shop where they both worked and developed a strong dislike for each other. He, furthermore, had just been told that Margaret Sullivan's character was in fact the woman he'd been corresponding with over the last six months, with whom he was deeply in love and she with him, though she didn't know it yet. But even if she doesn't much care for this man and he says something that might be construed as hitting on her, this is nevertheless quite something to say to a man who'd just undergone wrongful termination. On the other hand, perhaps she thinks he followed her to the restaurant, in which case her contempt is at least understandable. But even if her contempt is understandable in that view, the fault is not in her but Lubitsch's script. Jimmy Stewart circa 1940 would never talk to anyone like that. We're to understand that Jimmy Stewart is the nice guy, and Margaret Sullivan is the bitch. 

For the last forty minutes or so of the movie, Jimmy Stewart knows that she's his faithful correspondent, and she has no idea. It's left as a given that she will instantly change from slighting to smitten, and she'll realize that Jimmy Stewart is in fact Jimmy Stewart and not a would-be Clark Gable, and all of that hatred explained in a way that doesn't really work by her admission at the end of the movie that she was mean to him because she was attracted to him, (to 3:12). It's left to Jimmy Stewart to do the thinking for both of them, even though in real life, it was Margaret Sullivan's championing to producers to which Jimmy Stewart owed his entire career.

I have no doubt that the vast majority of American women in 1940 thought the way Margaret Sullivan does in this movie - that men and women both thought marriage a kind of partnership of equals, even if there was no objective evidence to show it. Men were the masters of the world, while women were the masters of the home, and however intelligent and creative some woman obviously were, the man in the relationship is the one expected to figure things out. But posterity is merciless, it shows how the preconceived notion of every era before it was wrong. This is why The Shop Around the Corner is merely a good movie and not a great one. Jimmy Stewart's character genuinely earns the pathos this movie demands he deserves, but forget any ethical concern, it simply finds Jimmy Stewart's plight much more interesting than Margaret Sullivan's, so there's no counterweight, and just as mid-20th century notions of a comic battle of the sexes seems grotesquely outmoded today, so do many works of art which espouse them. 

So now we have to talk, for good or bad, about the director who carried the mid-century battle of the sexes into the late 20th century, in an era when it was no longer a revolutionary or progressive force, but showing serious signs of starting to be an outdated, conservative force in American life. 

While nobody should cheerfully opine on the unpleasantness of Woody Allen's personal life, it's impossible to bring him up without escaping some kind of comment on it. Basically, any chance that Woody Allen should be believed about his behavior with Dylan Farrow was erased the moment he, for any intent and purpose, married his other daughter. Any number of potential misdeeds on the side of Mia Farrow pales in comparison to this obvious fact of Woody Allen's life in which he demonstrated, conclusively, that he is a tornado of narcissism who can justify the many black recesses of his personality to his conscience. Whatever his merits as an artist, all of his artistry, all of his observations about life and morality, have to be seen under the rubric that he used his seemingly profound thoughts as a justification to marry his daughter. 

How can anybody view Manhattan now without seeing it as a long justification for statutory rape? At the end of the movie, Allen's character makes a list of the reasons life is worth living - and ends with the smile of his character's 17 year old girlfriend. Earlier this year, when I was teaching a Jewish literature course, I came upon what was, for me, a shocking discovery, a similar list from the once-famous Viennese essayist and aphorist Peter Altenberg. The romantic, and inherently Jewish, intellectuality of Altenberg's Vienna had to have been a huge influence on Woody Allen's vision of New York, but since not many people read Altenberg anymore, it can't be not much known is that Altenberg was also notorious for his relations with underage girls. The whole movie now seems like a justification in which Allen says that surely an impulse that comes to a person in so beautiful and romantic a paradise as upper-class intellectual New York can't possibly be wrong. And yet, look at Woody Allen's life. He seems to have caused nothing but pain to the people whose lives he impacted most. In the same way, there is no way to look at the at least slightly Dostoevskian movies like Crimes and Misdemeanors, or Match Point, without seeing a justification in its murders for the way Allen molested his daughters. His movies are, in many ways, replies to the heavier influences on him like Dostoevsky and Bergman, but for all the seeming light comedy in Woody Allen, Dostoevsky and Bergman take us through hell to show us that there ultimately are universal values and hope, but in Woody Allen's universe, there is only a bleak and somewhat cowardly nihilism, that justifies its worst impulses by claiming that life is hell without showing us even a glimpse of that hell. In every movie he made from Annie Hall onward, Woody Allen's character seems to repeat the same refrain that life is pain and suffering, and yet his characters inevitably seem to have it pretty good. In Woody Allen's New York, there is very little of New York but the privilege of the Upper sides - an unending carnival of restaurants, jazz music, society soirées, and romance with intelligent women who deserve better than Woody Allen. If other New York directors who show us visions of hell, like Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee, espoused a philosophy that life is hell, it would have much more credibility than it does when coming from Woody Allen, but they don't. Taxi Driver and Raging Bull end with at least a kind of moral redemption, screwed up as that redemption might be, while Do The Right Thing and 25th Hour are righteously indignant for people who suffer, because Spike Lee clearly believes that people deserve better than they get. 

Much has been made in recent years about the misogyny of Woody Allen's movies, and given his behavior, it's impossible to refute the charge in any meaningful way. But it would be neglectful to not note how long Woody Allen existed in people's minds as the ultimate woman's director. His movies are a feast of women, a gallery of women whose individual quirks are inherently memorable in a manner that only great actresses could ever make come to life. So let's talk about Hannah and Her Sisters, which I happened upon last night while flipping through channels. 

I've seen Hannah and Her Sisters many times over the years, and compared to Manhattan or Crimes and Misdemeanors, it's at least less creepy. But even there, we see a disturbing glimpse into Woody Allen's upper-class life, a world of the upper class intellectuals that, thirty-two years later, seems already dead, and like it deserved to die. We see Woody filming a series of tableuxs of family life in Mia Farrow's Manhattan apartment, a tornado of activity with a huge and raucous family life going all around, while a silent African-American servant in a maid uniform quietly seems to make it all happen. We see Soon-Yi Previn as a child, fifteen years old and frankly looking younger, and who knows what was happening there. We see Mia's once famous mother, Maureen O'Sullivan, playing Hannah's mother. And most uncomfortably of all, we see Mia Farrow clearly playing a kind of version of herself, in which she yells at her sister for having written a script about her personal life. Hannah is perhaps a sanitized version of Mia Farrow in which this mother of so many children is played as an unceasingly giving saint, while everybody sins around her. But it can't be doubted, there is something astonishing manipulative about Woody's vision that those of us like me, who write from our personal lives, would do well to avoid much more often than I have so far. 

In reality, Mia Farrow also had many sisters, more than she even has in the movie. But when you look at pictures of her family, Tisa Farrow, her younger sister, is almost a dead ringer for Barbara Hershey's character, the luminously beautiful Lee who constantly falls for older men. The resemblance in pictures is so strong that, even though it's complete speculation on my part, it's hard given Woody Allen's history of misdeeds to think that Woody might not be talking about yet another misdeed toward the Farrow family in this movie in which his real identity is not to the character he plays, but rather to Michael Caine's adulterer. (up to 2:36) No matter how well Woody's characters set up their rationales in the camouflage of good intentions, they always end up giving into their worst urges. Michael Caine's character wants to be delicate, yet he kisses his sister-in-law in a manner that might cross the line into assault. 

Clearly Allen and Farrow had some kind of fashionably progressive arrangement in which Allen lived apart from the family, and there have always been whispers of affairs on both ends, but if my admittedly specious speculation is true, then this is another movie in which Woody Allen rubbed the noses of the people who loved him in his misdeeds, and then manipulated Farrow and her mother to the point that they are re-enacting it, accomplices in their own humiliation. 

Woody always stole from the best. Hannah and Her Sisters derives the part of its structure centered around holiday family gatherings from Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, which is for me probably one of the five greatest movies ever made and unflinching about child abuse in a manner to which Allen would never come even close. But the narrative chapters is based on Lucchino Visconti's scarcely less good Rocco and His Brothers. And then, of course, there's Chekhov's Three Sisters. But time and again, Woody Allen uses the camouflage of ineptitude to hide the fact that he is clearly lethally effective at achieving whatever objective he sets for himself. The nebbish he always portrayed would never be able to make a movie every year for fifty years, the real Woody Allen, as a very dear friend of mine once pointed out to me, is usually found in his other, stronger, male characters. 

Woody Allen has not been relevant to American life in the quarter-century since his spectacular break from Mia Farrow. Perhaps indirectly, he addressed the accusations in Deconstructing Harry, and it's probably his last movie that comes anywhere close to great, and since then has petered off into irrelevance. In the years ever since, Martin Scorsese, nearly ten years younger but who started making movies around the same time, has become the unquestioned King of American art film. Both of them owe everything to forbears in Classic Hollywood. But Scorsese's movies unflinchingly portray the darkness in the souls of mankind without any concealment or vanity. But more and more, we see that Woody Allen's movies are little but vanity and concealment. He began as a comedian, but as the output of his career grew artier, it also grew ever more more narcissistic and self-justifying. 

The greatest weakness of Martin Scorsese is that he's comically inept at portraying women, but Scorsese turned his weakness into a strength, showing the darkness of how his men imprisoned the women in their lives and in doing so, build a prison for themselves. Woody Allen's great strength as a director, just like the great strength of Hollywood itself, was his empathic portrayal of women. But it is empathy rather than sympathy, because until very recently, empathy meant to understand other people while being value neutral about whether to help them. Except perhaps in Annie Hall, Woody Allen gave little indication of being a man who wanted to help women, he just wanted women to help him without much reciprocity. It is not the sympathy of a partner, but the empathy of a predator. Modern romantic comedy begins with Woody Allen, it will probably end with him too. Woody Allen's movies owe everything to the model of classic Hollywood, the quick shooting and release, the long takes, the emphasis on dialogue over visuals, the realism of his settings balanced by the preference for portraying upper-class sophistication over life as most people have to live it. But Scorsese took the right-wing conception of manly Hollywood with its delusions of glory and stood it on its head, showing how John Wayne-like masculinity is a harrowing prison. Woody Allen took Jimmy Stewart Hollywood, the archetypal sensitive guy, and unwittingly showed that he's an outdated, narcissistic creep. 

It's Not Even Past #8 - Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan - First 60%


There is no way to do justice to Hollywood as a subject. It's the dominant cultural force of the 20th century, perhaps even more dominant than the internet in our time. It showed billions of people how perceive one another, how to talk to one another, how to dress, how to behave, how to fuck. We're just too close to Hollywood to see it in full. We could do a dozen podcasts in a row and only skim the barest surface of it. Its effect on our lives impacts each of us in millions of ways of which we'll never be aware and it will take at least another fifty or a hundred years to get any small sense of its real impact on human history. 

What we can do, or at least begin to, is to get a sense of individual movies and its place in human history. I want to concentrate on two movies today from very different periods of human life. One is a classic Hollywood movie from Ernst Lubitsch, the Hollywood director who would probably be my choice for the best director of the first generation of talkies, and by importing to America the values of bourgeois Europe he was forced as a Jew to leave behind, almost single-handedly defined the values of Hollywood that we still think of as its values in our day. The second is a movie by the director who did his damndest to extend the values of Old Hollywood the furthest into our time, for good and bad, and who has stubbornly, resolutely, carried the values of mid-century American romance, values that seem increasingly warped in our day, to the very bitter end of his career. Of course I'm talking about Woody Allen, that twisted, depraved, sad dinosaur who could never have hobbled on for twenty years past when he mattered at all to America if people did not have memories of what a giant he was in American discourse he seemed like forty years ago. 

There are a lot of once famous studio directors who probably won't matter in a hundred years nearly as much as we still think they do. A famous director of the studio era like John Ford made a few undisputed masterpieces like The Searchers, or a movie like How Green Was My Valley that I seem to be the only person to think is an undisputable masterwork, but even many of the famous among his 150 movies, like Stagecoach or My Darling Clementine, don't seem to me to hold up nearly so well. The archetypal American Western, particularly, relies on notions of masculinity and patriotism that should be obvious have an enormous amount in common with authoritarianism. Even for its own time, it appealed to the worst instincts of America rather than the best, and made Americans with more progressive values uneasy. And when you compare the Ford's production-code hobbled action sequences to the later action in directors influenced by John Ford like Spielberg and Scorsese, there's obviously no comparison in the excitement. And let's not even get started on Frank Capra.  

The Western is the most obvious example of a genre in Hollywood ever coined, but Hollywood coined many genres, and every genre has its problems. Genre itself is limiting. Genre, by definition, gains its impact through cliches. The very nature of a genre is that there is a specific audience whom you are feeding a series of cliches without particularly challenging them with anything subversive, a series of cliches that with one small variant to create its individuality. Hollywood wasn't build to challenge people, it was built by giving the viewers what they want. This isn't to say that there aren't lots of examples of genre that are durable and lasting art which subverts its genre's cliches in all kinds of meaningful ways, but there are less of them than genre devotees imagine.  

The average human being is more intelligent than an idiot, less intelligent than a smart person. One out of three are reasonably clever, one out of five or six are genuinely smart, so that means that there are roughly fifty or sixty million smart people in America. In the same way, one out of five or six Hollywood movies was of real quality, so it's amazing that in a place as seemingly dumb as Hollywood made so many great movies. But the question becomes, how many of those movies will still attract attention once millions of people stop caring about the movies completely the way they've stopped caring for written poetry or classical music. I'm sure that movies by directors of personalities to large to ever be contained by any genre will be watched by somebody for hundreds of years, but whatever the dramatic art form, genre fiction is usually the first to be thrown overboard, because without the popular zeitgeist surrounding it, it is impossible to convey what was so unique about them to later generations, who have their own genre entertainment that addresses the excitements of their own day much better, and will therefore be of more anthropological value than artistic. That's not to say that this is the fate of all popular genre fiction, but it is the fate of most of it. 

But contrary to the Western, which celebrated conservative and manly virtues like honor and glory while pushing women and minorities to a status barely above props, the screwball comedy was the aesthetically progressive genre for its time - I dare say, it was progressive even by the standards of 2000. A screwball comedy is a very particular kind of romantic comedy in which a man and a woman who clash enormously are thrown into impossible situations together, and eventually fall in love. It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, The Lady Eve, Only Angels Have Wings, these were just some of the more famous ones - and for my money His Girl Friday still has to stand as the greatest romantic comedy ever made. But what's important to note about screwball comedies is that it's the only genre where the leading lady was guaranteed equal time to the leading man, half the best lines, and, at least by the standards of 1940, a three-dimensional character with a free will of her own. 


The best of the screwball comedy directors, perhaps the best of all those classic Hollywood directors nobody talks about anymore, was Ernst Lubitsch, who in the span of five years made Ninotchka, Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not To Be, and Heaven Can Wait. Lubitsch was a Jew from Berlin who started in Max Reinhardt's German Theater, and became perhaps the most venerated director of the late 1930s. Practically everything that we think of as Classic Hollywood originates with Lubitsch, and what strikes us now is that the greatness of his movies consists of qualities so completely un-American. The Chicago Tribune critic Michael Wilmington describes Lubitsch's style as:

"At once elegant and ribald, sophisticated and earthy, urbane and bemused, frivolous yet profound. They were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well."

When was America ever amused by sex? And in the 30's and 40's? It's almost unthinkable. But there, over and over again, it is in Ernst Lubitsch's movies, and audiences ate it up. 

Ninotchka clip (up to 1:49)

What's missing without the video images in this clip from Ninotchka is Greta Garbo's look of supreme, almost autistic, indifference and Melvyn Douglas's look of absolute enchantment when she implies that his type of man will soon face a firing squad. What's amazing about the Screwball comedy, and why it is completely unique in American life is that, in a manner completely revolutionary for its time and progressive for any period in the 20th century, it views the battle of the sexes as a battle of equals. Two people who don't like each other going to the ends of the earth to one up each other until they realize that the other person is the only person in the entire world clever enough for them. By any terminology in our day, the man usually behaves predatorily, and the woman, well, the woman is always somehow comes to the conclusion that the man is the right man for her in the end. This is Hollywood after all, and around the ninety minute marker, the conclusion has to be tied in a neat little bow, no matter how artificial it seems. The man is always a schmuck, the woman is always has to be resigned to be ill-treated, they get together in the last ninety seconds of the movie, and if they know what's good for them, they break up ninety seconds after the movie's over. 

His Girl Friday clip (up to 2:48)

The implication of sex in screwball comedy is everywhere, the whiff of it, of sex as something deliriously irrational, chaotic, that leads people only into a hot mess, but something to which they are addicted like a drug because without it, where would rich people find any kind of excitement in their lives?

But in order to see love as a comedy, you have to look the other way at so many things that would be considered incredibly dark behavior by men toward women in our day: every flavor of patronizing, all manor of stalking, some violence, a playing field that by any objective standard men objectively define, yet because the only weapons available to women at the time are subtle ones, men believe that women define the playing field because things never go according to the man's plan. Even in the most equal of circumstances, sex and love is too chaotic for anything to ever go according to plan. 

What's astonishingly progressive about Screwball Comedy is that this was the place when, finally, hundreds of millions of men and women saw works of art in which women were something resembling equal partners in the journey of romantic adventure. No form of cultural entertainment ever did more to make men see that women were not just ivory ideals of their desire to control, but partners with needs of their own who, by liberating them from the prisons of male entitlement, could add immeasurably to the fulfillment of their jailers. It was a comic look at the battle of the sexes that did everything in its power to minimize the threat to women - making male jealousy and rage appear comic rather than lethal. But the reason it hit a nerve is because, just as there is incredible suffering and trauma in the irrationality of love, there is also comedy. Love is too large to be contained by any emotion,  there is not a single couple in the world that does not sometimes feel hate each other. But what makes relationships worth pursuing within the crucible of love is when people do not give into their worst impulses in those moments of crisis, and therefore grow together into more meaningful lives. And that is, on the other hand, what is conservative about Screwball Comedy - there is no real growth in screwball comedy, just pure irrationality, the characters are clowns, nihilistic embodiments of human irrationality. 

But within screwball comedy, there are also two basic types of male protagonist. One, we'll call Cary Grant, one we'll call Jimmy Stewart. The Philadelphia Story, the screwball comedy in which they both appear and somewhat compete for the affections of Katherine Hepburn, begins with Cary Grant mashing Katherine Hepburn's face and throwing her to the floor - and this is played for laughs. But Jimmy Stewart would never do anything so brutal, he's a sweet man, perpetually misunderstood, almost delicate, and usually when referring to Jimmy Stewart, one uses the current term that's become derogatory, and call him the 'nice guy.' Jimmy Stewart is the picture of mid-century decency, both everything that was right with it and wrong with it. And that's why Alfred Hitchcock could use Jimmy Stewart's persona to such perceptive effect in Vertigo, which posits that beneath the George Bailey persona is a man who believes he's owed control of the woman in his life. 

But in The Shop Around the Corner, remade sixty years later as You've Got Mail, Jimmy Stewart is once again, the delicate, almost feminine, flower of a man who earns our sympathy simply by being Jimmy Stewart, while his love interest, played by Margaret Sullivan, is clearly written as snooty, stuck up, and generally a piece of work. They work together and hate each other, but at night they unknowingly write passionate letters to one another, both of them idealizing a potential soulmate they think they've never met in real life. 

Just listen to this scene.  (up to 0:49)

Jimmy Stewart's character had just been fired, unjustly, from the shop where they both worked and developed a strong dislike for each other. He, furthermore, had just been told that Margaret Sullivan's character was in fact the woman he'd been corresponding with over the last six months, with whom he was deeply in love and she with him, though she didn't know it yet. But even if she doesn't much care for this man and he says something that might be construed as hitting on her, this is nevertheless quite something to say to a man who'd just undergone wrongful termination. On the other hand, perhaps she thinks he followed her to the restaurant, in which case her contempt is at least understandable. But even if her contempt is understandable in that view, the fault is not in her but Lubitsch's script. Jimmy Stewart circa 1940 would never talk to anyone like that. We're to understand that Jimmy Stewart is the nice guy, and Margaret Sullivan is the bitch. 

For the last forty minutes or so of the movie, Jimmy Stewart knows that she's his faithful correspondent, and she has no idea. It's left as a given that she will instantly change from slighting to smitten, and she'll realize that Jimmy Stewart is in fact Jimmy Stewart and not a would-be Clark Gable, and all of that hatred explained in a way that doesn't really work by her admission at the end of the movie that she was mean to him because she was attracted to him, (to 3:12). It's left to Jimmy Stewart to do the thinking for both of them, even though in real life, it was Margaret Sullivan's championing to producers to which Jimmy Stewart owed his entire career.

I have no doubt that the vast majority of American women in 1940 thought the way Margaret Sullivan does in this movie - that men and women both thought marriage a kind of partnership of equals, even if there was no objective evidence to show it. Men were the masters of the world, while women were the masters of the home, and however intelligent and creative some woman obviously were, the man in the relationship is the one expected to figure things out. But posterity is merciless, it shows how the preconceived notion of every era before it was wrong. This is why The Shop Around the Corner is merely a good movie and not a great one. Jimmy Stewart's character genuinely earns the pathos this movie demands he deserves, but forget any ethical concern, it simply finds Jimmy Stewart's plight much more interesting than Margaret Sullivan's, so there's no counterweight, and just as mid-20th century notions of a comic battle of the sexes seems grotesquely outmoded today, so do many works of art which espouse them. 


So now let's talk 

Saturday, January 27, 2018

It's Not Even Past #8 - Half of it, Extremely Disorganized


Ernst Lubitsch: Jimmy Stewart vs. Margaret Sullivan


There are a lot of once famous studio directors who probably won't matter in a hundred years nearly as much as we still think they do. A famous director of the studio era like John Ford might have made a few undisputed masterpieces like The Searchers, or a movie like How Green Was My Valley that I seem to be the only person to think is an undisputable masterwork, but even many of the famous among his 150 movies, like Stagecoach or My Darling Clementine, don't seem to me to hold up nearly so well. The archetypal American Western, particularly, relies on notions of masculinity and patriotism that should be obvious have an enormous amount in common with authoritarianism. Even for its own time, it appealed to the worst instincts of America rather than the best. And when you compare the excitement of Ford's action sequences to the later action in directors influenced by John Ford like Spielberg and Scorsese, there's obviously no comparison. 

Every genre in Hollywood ever coined has its problems, the very nature of a genre is that there is a specific audience whom you are feeding what they want without challenging them. Hollywood wasn't build to challenge people, it was built by giving the viewers what they want. 

The average human being is more intelligent than an idiot, less intelligent than a smart person. One out of three are reasonably clever, one out of five or six are genuinely smart, so that means that there are roughly fifty or sixty million smart people in America. In the same way, one out of five or six Hollywood movies was of real quality, so it's amazing that in a place as seemingly dumb as Hollywood made so many great movies. How many of those movies will still attract attention once people stop caring about the movies completely the way they've stopped caring for written poetry or classical music. I'm sure that movies by directors of personalities to large to ever be contained by any genre will be watched by somebody for hundreds of years, but whatever the dramatic art form, genre fiction is usually the first to be thrown overboard, because without the popular zeitgeist surrounding it, it is impossible to convey what was so unique about them to later generations, who have their own genre entertainment that addresses the excitements of their own day much better, and will therefore be of more anthropological value than artistic. That's not to say that this is the fate of all popular genre fiction, but it is the fate of most of it. 

But contrary to the Western, which celebrated manly virtues like honor and glory while pushing women and Native Americans to a status barely above props, the screwball comedy was the aesthetically progressive genre for its time - I dare say, it was progressive even by the standards of 2000. A screwball comedy is a very particular kind of romantic comedy in which a man and a woman who don't like each other are thrown into impossible situations together, and eventually fall in love. It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, The Lady Eve, these were just some of the more famous ones - and for my money His Girl Friday still has to stand as the greatest romantic comedy ever made. But what's important to note about screwball comedies is that it's the only genre where the leading lady was guaranteed equal time to the leading man, half the best lines, and, at least by the standards of 1940, a three-dimensional character with a free will of her own. 

The best of the screwball comedy directors, perhaps the best of all those classic Hollywood directors nobody talks about anymore, was Ernst Lubitsch, who in the span of five years made Ninotchka, Shop Around the Corner, To Be or Not To Be, and Heaven Can Wait. Lubitsch was a Jew from Berlin who started in Max Reinhardt's German Theater, and became perhaps the most venerated director of his time. Practically everything that we think of as Classic Hollywood originates with Lubitsch, and what strikes us now is that the greatness of his movies consists of qualities so un-American. The Chicago Tribune critic Michael Wilmington describes Lubitsch's style as:

"At once elegant and ribald, sophisticated and earthy, urbane and bemused, frivolous yet profound. They were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well."

When was America ever amused by sex? And in the 30's and 40's? It's almost unthinkable. But there, over and over again, it is in Ernst Lubitsch's movies. 

Ninotchka clip (up to 1:49)

What's missing without the video images in this clip from Ninotchka is Greta Garbo's look of supreme indifference and Melvyn Douglas's look of absolute enchantment when she implies that his type of man will soon face a firing squad. What's amazing about the Screwball comedy, and why it is completely unique in American life is that, in a manner completely revolutionary for its time and progressive for any period in the 20th century, it views the battle of the sexes as a battle of equals. Two people who don't like each other going to the ends of the earth to one up each other until they realize that the other person is the only person in the entire world clever enough for them. By any terminology in our day, the man usually behaves predatorily, and the woman, well, the woman is always somehow comes to the conclusion that the man is the right man for her in the end. This is Hollywood after all, and around the ninety minute marker, the conclusion has to be tied in a neat little bow, no matter how artificial it seems. The man is always a schmuck, the woman is always has to be resigned to be ill-treated, they get together in the last ninety seconds of the movie, and if they know what's good for them, they break up ninety seconds after the movie's over. 

His Girl Friday clip (up to 2:48)

The implication of sex in screwball comedy is everywhere, the whiff of it, of sex as something deliriously irrational, chaotic, that leads people only into a hot mess, but something to which they are addicted like a drug because without it, where would rich people find any kind of excitement in their lives?

But in order to see love as a comedy, you have to look the other way at so many things that would be considered incredibly dark behavior by men toward women: violence, all manor of stalking, every flavor of patronizing, a playing field that men objectively define, yet believe that women define, not because women do, but because sex and love is too chaotic for anything to ever go according to plan. There is always comedy in the irrationality of love, but you have to believe that the consequences of love not going to plan are extremely light to see it as comedy rather than an unending series of emotional traumas. The reason Screwball Comedy still works is that there is not a single couple in the world that does not feel the impulses toward hating those they love, but it sees these dark behaviors of men as something inevitable.

Are they inevitable? Well, I do believe that the impulses toward them are certainly inevitable, but civilization always depends on every person within it not giving in to their worst impulses at the moments that matter. 

-----



But there are the screwball comedies with Cary Grant, and then there are the ones with Jimmy Stewart. The Philadelphia Story, the comedy in which they both compete for Katherine Hepburn, begins with Cary Grant mashing Katherine Hepburns face and throwing her to the floor - and this is played for laughs. But Jimmy Stewart would never do anything so brutal, he's a sweet man, perpetually misunderstood, almost delicate, and usually when referring to Jimmy Stewart, one uses the current term that's become derogatory, and call him the 'nice guy.' Jimmy Stewart is the picture of mid-century decency, and that's why Alfred Hitchcock could use his persona to such perceptive effect in Vertigo, which posits that beneath the George Bailey veneer is a man who believes he's owed control of the woman in his life. 

But in The Shop Around the Corner, remade sixty years later as You've Got Mail, Jimmy Stewart is once again, the delicate feminine flower wrongly deposited into a man's body, while his love interest, played by Margaret Sullivan, is written as snooty, stuck up, and generally a piece of work. 

Just listen to this scene.  (up to 0:49)

Jimmy Stewart's character had just been fired, unjustly, from the shop where they both worked and developed a strong dislike for each other. He, furthermore, had just been told that Margaret Sullivan's character was in fact the woman he'd been corresponding with over the last six months, with whom he was deeply in love and she with him, though she didn't know it yet. But even if she doesn't much care for this man, this is quite something to say to a man who'd just undergone wrongful termination. On the other hand, perhaps she thinks he followed her to the restaurant, in which case her contempt is at least understandable. But even if her contempt is understandable in that view, Jimmy Stewart circa 1940 would never talk to anyone like that. We're to understand that he's the nice guy, and she's the bitch. 

For the last forty minutes or so of the movie, Jimmy Stewart knows that she's his faithful correspondent, and she has no idea. It's left as a given that she will instantly change from slighting to smitten, with an awkward admission that she was mean to him because she was attracted to him, and she'll realize that Jimmy Stewart is in fact Jimmy Stewart and not a would-be Clark Gable  (to 3:12). It's left to Jimmy Stewart to do the thinking for both of them, even though in real life, it was Margaret Sullivan's championing to producers that Jimmy Stewart owed his entire career.

I have no doubt that the vast majority of American women in 1940 thought the way Margaret Sullivan does in this movie - that men and women both thought marriage a kind of partnership of equals, even if there was no objective evidence to show it. Men were the masters of the world, while women were the masters of the home, and however intelligent some woman obviously were, the man in the relationship is the one expected to figure things out. But posterity is merciless, it shows how the preconceived notion of every era before it were wrong. This is why The Shop Around the Corner is merely a good movie and not a great one. Jimmy Stewart's character genuinely earns the pathos this movie demands he deserves, but forget any ethical concern, it simply finds Jimmy Stewart's plight much more interesting than Margaret Sullivan's, so there's no counterweight, and just as mid-20th century notions of the battle of the sexes seem outmoded, so do many works of art which espouse them. 

It's always difficult in these radicalized times to not append any label upon yourself that doesn't have the refracting 'ist.' But as I do this podcast more, what I realize is that the point of it is precisely not to editorialize on politics, but simply to try and record cultural movements as they are, and as best one can, to try to understand why people come to the conclusions they do, and while not to view it through the now-ideologized term, empathy, at least view them with sympathy. One famous musician put it like this: be aristocrats in art, but democrats in life, and as best one can, don't judge people too harshly for coming to a different point of view than yours. It's not just that it's uncharitable, it's also boring. Inveighing against the excesses of ideological movements is not just incredibly tiresome for the listener, it's also tiresome for the talker. What I've come to realize as I've just barely matured is that it's much, much more intellectually satisfying to trace people's thoughts to their roots and do one's best to understand why people believe what they believe. Whether or not I agree or disagree is, in some sense at least, immaterial to the subject at hand, and the more I do this, I realize that the by keeping the editorial voice to a minimum about politics, the more extremely I can editorialize when it comes to works of art, which I think is i a hundred times more interesting than politics on its most exciting day. We live in an age when everything is interpreted through the distorting lens of ideology, so rather, as so many people today do, than making political movements the lens through which we judge art, let's make art the lens through which we judge politics and the world. We'll talk next week about how the Battle of the Sexes has changed in Modern Hollywood. 

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

It's Not Even Past #7 - Machiavelli and Groucho - A Cut Version

So we've adopted an every week format which I pretentiously call 'dualities' to frame the discussion we'll have. The reason I call them 'dualities' is because I believe that more than anything else, it's the divided self, the tensions between our ideals and our realities, that create new thoughts. Perhaps these thoughts are no better than the thoughts before, perhaps they inadvertently create their own dualities, or perhaps these dualities lead us right back to where we were before. Sometimes there are not two sides to every issue, but three or four, necessitating trialities or quadralities, and sometimes there is only one side to an issue because any argument against it people have come up with so far is bullshit, and those are therefore monalities. But for the moment, this tension between polls seems like the best way to frame our discussions. 

So here are the dualities for this week - just two: 

The Two Machaivellis
Groucho vs. Margaret Dumont

So first:

The Two Machiavellis

As I was planning this week's podcast, recorded both in Baltimore and San Francisco, I realized that I didn't have quite enough material for a third podcast on Machiavelli, but I had a little bit of material left over that would frame the discussion for the next few weeks discussion a little too perfectly. It's probably the subject that any podcast about politics or history inevitably has to get to at this moment of American life - the battle of the sexes, and particularly how it's been framed as a battle by Hollywood. 

So I want to do that by talking, this week and next week about two classic movies which you could have seen in the last few weeks around Baltimore, and then, in the weeks after, movies of the most recent release dates. But before we do that, if you'll indulge me two passages from the penultimate chapter of The Prince, short ones you might be stunned by how perfectly Machiavelli frames our discussion in future weeks. 


"... not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half our actions, but that she leaves us still to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less.
I compare her to one of those raging rivers, which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil from place to place; everything flies before it, all yield to its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it; and yet, though its nature be such, it does not follow that men, when the weather becomes fair, shall not make provision, both with defenses and barriers, in such a manner that, rising again, the waters may pass away by canal, and their force be neither so unrestrained nor so dangerous. So it happens with fortune, who shows her power where valor has not prepared to resist her, and thither she turns her forces where she knows that barriers and forces have not been raised to constrain her.....
This is the Machiavelli whom I think is of genuine use to the world. Yes, he thinks like a mafioso, but at the turn of the fifteenth century, thinking like a mafioso was an astonishingly forward-thinking notion. Everybody was being ruthless anyway, so you might as well redirect your ruthlessness toward the long-term goal of stability. 

Machiavelli always refers to fortune as a feminine thing - likening fortune to an ebbing a flowing river. This ebb and flow of a river, the slipperiness of the bank, the violent floods that bring about rebirth, the drinkability that gives life to people, animals, and plants, seem to have a kind of feminine connotation in mythology. On the other hand, seas - with their undrinkable saltiness which never seem to move from one place, their wrathful storms, their waves that move consistently and tides that are predictable - seem to be portrayed as masculine gods. Think of Poseidon, or Lyr in Celtic Mythology, or the Dragon Kings of the Four Seas in Chinese mythology. But Celtic mythology has at least four different river goddesses, Indian mythology has at least three. Satis was, at least in late Ancient Egypt, the Egyptian nile goddess, who brought about the annual flooding of the Nile, and therefore the destruction that enables rebirth. Or just remember how in the Grapes of Wrath, Mama Joad likens a woman's view of life to an ebbing and flowing river? This masculine/feminine duality with seas and rivers is obviously not consistent; the most obvious example is Poseidon, who seems to be the CEO of all bodies of water, and Greek mythology is intricate and androgynous enough that there are masculine gods of everything, and just as many goddesses of everything too. But in just all these mythologies, the male water gods seem to have more power than the women, each of whom seems to control but one river while Poseidon and Lyr get every sea, everywhere. Apparently even in ancient times, there was a 23% pay gap. 

But this archetypal, and by modern ears, stereotypical, world of myth is where Machiavelli draws his feminine metaphor for fortune. And Machiavelli's readers would know that Fortuna is the Roman goddess of fortune, luck, and fate. By modern standards, the description here is a little bit sexist, but not stunningly so by modern ears:
So it happens with fortune, who shows her power where valor has not prepared to resist her, and thither she turns her forces where she knows that barriers and forces have not been raised to constrain her.
This is a little sexist. This is a sentence that likens women to the manipulative temptress who tries to break through your defenses, but at least this quote is not about a man breaking through a woman's defenses, so I'm not sure this would qualify as sexist by anything but the standards of anything but the 21st century. The reason to talk so much about Machiavelli is because, in some ways, he is a moralist whose words we ought to heed in our own time. Machiavelli is helpful to us today not because he advised against evil and morality, but because by advising a kind of indifference to traditional morality, because a greater, long-term morality was at stake that could provide greater dividends of peace in the future. Machiavelli was, in some ways at least, the first thinker to realize that the greatest danger to the world, then as now, was fanaticism; the moral certainty that you are right and that what you believe is the incontrovertible truth and therefore everyone who disagrees with you is morally inferior to you. Machiavelli says, don't focus on what seems immediately right, focus on what is practical. Before Machiavelli, discussions of politics were grounded in the Greeks, who focused not on the practicalities of governance but on ascertaining what's the ideal forms of government. Only in Machiavelli do we see a politician instructed to delay gratification, to put his ideals or pleasures as a long-term goal rather than something that can be achieved immediately; and it can't be a complete coincidence that Machiavelli came up with his ideas in the same period that mankind finally began what in our lifetime seems like a permanent advance out of the dark ages. 

But then there is the other Machiavelli whom we've not talked about too much in the last two weeks, the much more famous Machiavelli who still shocks the world with his ruthlessness, whose medievalism can never be doubted, and who says, and I quote:
For my part I consider that it is better to be adventurous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you wish to keep her under it is necessary to beat and ill-use her; and it is seen that she allows herself to be mastered by the adventurous rather than by those who go to work more coldly. She is, therefore, always, woman-like, a lover of young men, because they are less cautious, more violent, and with more audacity command her.
This passage is shocking today. The idea that it is necessary to 'beat' women is incredibly shocking, but still more shocking is the euphemistic 'ill use', because in thinking about it for less than a second, we can pretty much guess what kind of 'ill use' Machiavelli meant. And don't think that this was completely un-shocking at the time, when laws of honor were supposed to prohibit such conduct in courtly circles, or at least let people be in denial when ladies of high birth were treated that way.

So here we are, five hundred years later, faced in our time with the extremely uncomfortable truth for many of us various forms of liberals that for the better part of this half-millenium, these liberal notions of individual rights and security were still only meant to accommodate a very small class of people, and the state of everybody else was still barely any better than animals, and perhaps treated worse than animals because of how much utility their lords could derive from their productivity. Does this invalidate liberalism, does this make liberalism an antiquated notion? Many people would argue that it does, that liberalism is a sham that allows injustice to be perpetrated from century to century when what we need is solutions now before more people die and suffer. Nothing tried yet has nearly so productive a track record, but you'd have to be willfully blind to understand people's lack of patience with liberalism's gradual and always shifting and ebbing reforms, or even their insistence that liberalism all just a superstructure or a myth meant to blind people to the reality of how people suffer from it. So this brings us to our second duality:

Margaret Dumont vs. Groucho

I think it was while I watched President Groucho Marx bounce a ball against his desk while the cabinet of Fredonia look on for an indefinite amount of time that I became convinced that Duck Soup is the most eerily prescient movie ever made for our historical moment. Here is aclip from a truly fantastic video log everybody should bookmark, One Hundred Years of Cinema (up to 9:32), listen to how it describes Groucho in this movie. I would try to say all this myself, but he captures it so perfectly that I could never do it half so well. 

There was a New Yorker cartoon last year that showed,... I forget which Founding Fathers, but two of them, and one said to the other, "What if a potential tyrant rises up, but no one can stop him because it's kind of funny."

So Donald Trump turned out to be exactly as authoritarian in outlook as we feared, but our saving grace is that he also turned out to be the dumbest man on the planet. Our American system knows exactly how to deal with demagoguery, but it presupposes that the demagogue is an intelligent, educated man duping a public less intelligent than he. The founders had no conception of how to get rid of a man-child puppet of another dictatorship who while he's in a bad mood might order a nuclear attack while his Chief of Staff is asleep.

The Marx Brothers were actual brothers, and one really gets the sense in the routines of all three of them, particularly in the silent Harpo, that their routines are just extensions of the ways they annoyed each other as children. At the time, the mirror scene between Groucho and Harpo was thought of as revolutionary, but it's hard to believe that every person didn't do something like the mirror routine at some point in their childhoods. 

Or think of the scenes when Harpo drives the Street Vendor crazy by switching his hat when the vendor isn't looking; and think to yourself how many times childhood friends or siblings would try to pull that trick on you when you were ten. Harpo is a silent clown, but more importantly, he's basically an overgrown child whose routines are literally to annoy the people around him until they go absolutely insane.

Groucho on the other hand, is, like our President, stuck in adolescence - and while he does it 1000x better than just about any teenager, he's the class clown always cracking wise. And like our President, the usual subject of his jokes are women, whom he seems to hate and fear almost savagely.  

( Some Groucho) - stop at 1:49

Next to Groucho, 
in a dozen movies, stands Margeret Dumont, the wealthy old dowager - more than three inches taller than Groucho when in heels, supremely confident, sublimely pompous, and unfathomably stupid, standing next to Groucho in every Marx Brothers movie purely to be the object of Groucho's abuse and show us that there is no just world in which a wealthy idiot like her is considered an aristocrat while this Oscar Wilde who seems to have glommed onto her from a street corner is considered an upstart. And so was the way of the world in 1933 when it was correctly seen as a given that the Margeret Dumonts of the world were in such an unassailable position that they could absorb every gibe and taunt and scoff and sneer, because her mind was so slow that she couldn't even process half of them, and even if she got them, what did it matter, she was blue blooded and rich. Groucho might have been a man, but he was the child of immigrants, from a poor and low-class background, and Jewish. Did it matter in 1933 that the Grouchos of the world used the one invincible weapon they'd have at their disposal to even the playing field a bit against the Margaret Dumonts?

(Another Groucho Clip) - up to 1:58

Taking Groucho Marx to task for his ribbing of women is a bit like taking Roosevelt to task for the Japanese internment camps,  Both are true, both are figures were of roughly equal importance to the world around 1940, and pointing this out neglects that between them, FDR and Groucho might have done more to break open the doors to more equitable social classes than any two men in world history - including those who shared their names...

The year of Duck Soup is 1933, the same year that Hitler came to power, and of all the volleys in the Jewish invasion of world culture, the Marx Brothers were, are, and probably will always be our single most important. In the same way that race, sex, and gender permeates nearly everything in our zeitgeist, 1933 was permeated with questions of social class, and the Marx Brothers were an atomic bomb that went off in the world's sense of propriety. It was also five years after sound came to Hollywood, and no film director, not even Howard Hawks or Billy Wilder, could pace his scenes at the fever pitch of Groucho riffing one zinger after another. Groucho had some of the greatest American writers and comics of his time pitching in on writing his dialogue - former household names like George S. Kauffmann and S J Perelman, but Groucho was just as quick on his feet as his writers. Here's what's probably the most famous ad-libbed line in television history:

Before Groucho, the list of unmentionables in polite society was a hundred times longer. No doubt the excess propriety of high society evolved because the world required a way of freeing itself from the grime and shit of that appallingly vulgar thing - nature, to which we animals once were slaves. But after the industrial revolution, when the world became fully mechanized, we could begin to reclaim the natural rawness we'd relinquished amid all of that refinement. When vulgarity can have as much wit as Groucho Marx, it becomes clear that Groucho is the natural aristocrat while Margaret Dumont is the natural peasant. 

It's not like the Marx Brothers came up with the idea of lowly street hustlers tearing high society to pieces, but no one tore into high society as savagely as Groucho did. And so many of the rituals of high society were based on a show of excessive deference you made to women and their virtue. Groucho Marx clearly did not believe in virtue or deference, eighty-five years before President Trump, Groucho was America's linguistic id, saying all the destructive things aloud which popped into his head, which was obviously much smarter than Donald Trump ever was. The Marx Brothers 
were primal agents of chaos, who's very existence seemed to be to blow up well-ordered high societies. And if Groucho Marx could be celebrated for saying things that were not necessarily mentioned in polite company, so then could his millions of admirers. 

But eighty-five years later, it's impossible to look around and not realize that the same populist urge which tore down the prison in which respectability trapped us now threatens to tear down respectability itself. The world now is so populist in every way - political and cultural, that the most immediate enemy to us is no longer excessive reverence but precisely its opposite, excessive irreverence. And just as the world was once obsessed with elite notions of social class, either ascending to a higher class or abolishing all notions of social class, the world today is obsessed with its polar opposite, equality. Whether it was made this way by Karl Marx or Groucho Marx, the field of play is now seen as so level, the differences in people's inherent merits so slight, that even though it's true that all men and women are created equal and owed the same inalienable rights, we can't be surprised that these rights result in hatred and fury since people disagree so vociferously about what those inalienable rights should be. In America, the Right says that these inalienable rights are economic and religious, the Left says these rights are related to social justice. The Right thinks we should have the right to be free from government interference on our economy, the Left thinks we should have the right to expect our government to provide us with prosperity. The Left thinks government has no right to interfere about whom we marry or whether or not women get abortions, the Right thinks the government has every right to interfere on such questions. 

The traditional right wing of America has always thought, as traditional right wingers always have, that politeness and decency should place limits on the sentiments we're allowed to express. Any sentiment that questions traditional authority: family, government, the Church, sex, is something they would rather not permit. As with any other era, it's an impossible standard to uphold, but all the moreso in our era when information spreads so rapidly. We now live in an era so revolutionary that it's the Left who believes that politeness and decency should place limits on the sentiments we're allowed to express. The sentiments that are off-limits are no longer the sentiments that question traditional authority, but the sentiments which uphold them: race, gender, sexuality. Is this a good or a bad development? Like any ideology, it holds us to an impossible standard, but that's almost immaterial to the point at hand. Think of how greatly the world has changed since Richard Nixon who hid his evil deeds behind a veneer of excessive reverence for tradition. In the forty nine years since President Nixon's inauguration, the Left so thoroughly won their battle to liberate us from the constraints of tradition that the idea that we should be free to express whatever sentiment we wish, no matter how objectionable, is now a conservative argument, not a liberal one. The American Right is so unrecognizably changed from its traditional trappings that they can unhesitatingly support and champion a man who openly celebrates his arrogance and duplicity and greed and lust. 

We now living in a world in which debates on political correctness have reached such an unbelievable fever pitch that Donald Trump has been elected purely because of his persona as a man who will say the things everybody is thinking but afraid to say. Groucho's character in Duck Soup, Rufus T. Firefly was meant to be an irreverent parody of right-wing authoritarian rulers who hide behind excessive reverence, but he's now a prediction. 

The debate over political correctness is now charged as perhaps never before, but as a term, it's used almost exclusively by the people allegedly opposed to it. The term goes all the way back to the Soviet Union in the 1920's, when it was a term of approval. "Is he politically correct?" was a way of asking if a person towed the party line. Whether used by the hard Left as a term of pride, or the hard-right as a term of derision, the term was always a bit of a red herring, designed to smash apart the effectiveness of other party lines so as to promote your own. When the term 'politically correct' was used as a cudgel by Donald Trump or Ann Coulter or Alan Bloom before them, it was rarely ever used in American discourse as anything but a means to batter down a a different form of political correctness you can better install your own. For real liberals, the Left's insistence on political correctness has always been a genuine problem - but compared to so many other problems, not least the political correctness of the Right, it's been roughly #150 down the list of problems in American life. 

But even if quote-unquote 'political correctness' has always been so far down our long list of problems, the question still remains: if with all the events and protests and rancor of the last two years, the best that's happened is that Hollywood and journalism are just a little bit safer from slimy sexists, and the worst that's happened is that Donald Trump is President, we all have to ask ourselves if this new exclusionism is worth a price tag that often seems astronomical and like we've only begun to start paying. Whatever the truth of that matter, the Obama Presidency was possible because of a large part of America embraced a candidate whose message was that we are a United States of America. This country may have come out of the Obama years more divided than ever before, but by extending the hand just long enough to get a few moderates on our side, our President saved us from a second Great Depression, passed near-universal Health Care, made Gay Marriage a national right, made hate crimes a federal offense, protected 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation and helped them get work permits. We are the ones we've been waiting for is one of the greatest sentences any President has ever uttered, and its meanings are almost infinite. It's not just a call to radical action, it's a call to embrace people different from you, to win them over, to give a little to them so that they can give you a lot, and to forgive those opponents who show even the smallest amount of contrition, so that we can attain as much of which we yearn for as is humanly possible, rather than cling to ideals whose cause we would set back by not taking what we can get. This is the difference between the radically inclusive Obama-era pragmatism, and the status-quo exclusionism of Trump-and-Sanders-era radicalism. 

So who can deny that we're now in a new era? In an era when the most obvious enemy was the people who suppress your speech, it's easy to know who the villain is. But in our 'fake news' era when so many enemies want to make speech so free that you hear nothing but a chaos of voices so that you cling only to the voices that sound in concert with yours, it's much harder to know who the villain is, and you at least begin to entertain the idea that people who demand few curtailments on liberty in the name of equality might be on your side...