Good Things #2: Jaws

To understand Jaws, you need to see it in the theater. In the entire history of movies, there is no movie that translates worse to TV viewing. You need to see the vastness of the sea, you need feel its dangerous majesty and luminous glow. You need the shark to be ten feet in length, you need to see the screen flood with twenty feet of blood at every shark attack, you need to hear the screams and crunch of the victims, you need to see every detail of the beach and all the archetypal beach bums who populate it. And most importantly, you need an audience. You need someone to scream when the boy gets eaten. You need to feel the quiet when Quinn tells the story of the USS Indianapolis. And you need people to clap when the shark explodes.

Last week, I did something stupid. I went to the Senator to see a showing of Jaws. My friend Sean told me it was playing, and I hadn't been to a movie in two years. I figured it would be just a typical Senator showing, 35 people in a 40,000 sq. ft. theater of more than 700.

It was no such thing. A crowd of 250, barely a seat open if you wanted something in a center isle. Half weren't wearing masks, and a good 25% were teenagers. Realizing how many people were there was horrifying. I was so tempted to leave and I stayed largely in deference to my friend whom I hadn't seen in a year, slumping terrified in my seat.

But then the movie started. A stupid movie about a shark turned out to be soul food. It was oxygen, it was life. You don't know how much you need an experience like that until you have it, and who knows when we'll have it again if the delta variant gets worse?

Is Jaws great art... well who gives a shit? Seeing Jaws is an 'event', a movie designed to thrill a whole country all at once. It's perhaps the first true 'event movie' since Doctor Zhivago or The Sound of Music, and probably the greatest event movie that will ever be made. No matter what it's politics, other event movies like Gone with the Wind or Lawrence of Arabia take themselves so seriously, while Star Wars and Harry Potter are more franchises than events, at this point they're corporate cults meant to satisfy demands for content that's a guaranteed hit.

Jaws had all kinds of risible sequels, but it's a self-contained universe of a movie. A concept so flimsy that it has all the content you need for one single solitary movie. Yet Jaws milks flimsy content for exponentially more than anybody thought you could get out of a concept so dumb.

Only a movie this idiotic could be this close to perfection. Every detail of the movie rings true:

• Amity Island is clearly meant to be Martha's Vineyard off of Cape Cod. Look at the teenagers in the opening scene. They're all upper class preppies, privileged cool kids who spend their summers partying on the beach. Most of them probably go to boarding school, and they're all attractive, but not 'Hollywood attractive.' They all look like plausible Massachusetts residents. Everybody has a horse face or bad teeth, and half of them are as Irish looking as Kennedys.
• Every time Brody has to watch the water, clueless residents sit in his line of vision to talk to him for no good reason at all - trying to be polite and friendly as small-town Americans always are (or used to be...). Only master filmmaking can make you feel multiple emotions at once, and the sequences are simultaneously funny and terrifying. A girl Brody can't see screams, and then we realize it's just a guy flirtatiously lifting her up out of the water. Ten kids go into the water at once, and another guy sits in front of Brody's to make fun of Brody's fear of water. Brody's wife gives him a massage telling him he's too uptight, and that's the moment the shark reappears and eats a child. And then we see the child's mother, and we see right away, this woman is too old to have any more children. If this is her only one, her loss is total.
• Look at all the extras. Every small-town New England archetype is there. The old Victorian prude wearing pearls who seems perpetually scandalized, the tall WASP in the ugly sport coat and yellow shirt, the professional lady who wears a business pantsuit to town meetings, the loud working class boaters with the army jackets and baseball caps, the fat lady with such an excessive tan she looks like a prune, the short Portuguese fishermen, the fat Boston Irish guys with white hair and perpetually red faces, the young hippie woman painting the ocean, the mayor with the searsucker suit and bad toupee who looks straight out of a corrupt southern town. It's important to mention that these are not stereotypes, they're archetypes we're innately programmed by life experience to recognize. That's how the authenticity of fictional storytelling is built, and even if you want to use fiction to subvert stereotypes, you have to put those recognizable archetypes in place before you surprise us with how you change them.
• Misfortune in movies comes in threes. On 4th of July weekend, we have the ultimate expectation of a shark attack. Hundreds of extras, most of them kids. A shark appears in the ocean, everybody gets out of the water, but it's just two obnoxious kids with a costume shark fin, one of whom blames the other. Brody forces his son to go to the pond instead, and somehow the shark made his way over, kills a boater 20 feet away from Brody's son, and swims right past him. Spielberg follows that moment with a vast panoramic shot of the ocean. It's a little much to call it a Homeric implication of fate, but there is something about that moment that feels surprisingly deep for a movie about a shark munching on spoiled Americans.
• People complain about Spielberg's sentimentality, but nobody is better than Spielberg at portraying people's decency. Over and over again, Brody is presented with situations where he would be within his rights to tell other characters to go to hell; yet over and over again, he willingly accepts the blame for other people's incompetence. Even after the shark nearly kills Brody's own son, he doesn't beat up the mayor or even tell him to go fuck himself, he just gets the mayor to finally sign the order to close the beach.
• The very moment after Brody says 'shit' comes the first appearance of the shark. 81 minutes in, it's the very first curse word of the movie. Brody is finally relaxed enough to let his guard down, and that's the very moment the shark appears.
• When Quinn and Hooper compare shark scars, Brody unconsciously lifts up his shirt to reveal his own scar. The implication is clear that Brody was shot, and suddenly everything about his character makes sense. The actor, Roy Scheider, was the supporting character in The French Connection, the ultimate 70s New York cop thriller.
• The shark chase could easily be chaos, but Spielberg meticulously takes us through every detail of the hunt so that even if seeing it for the first time, we know exactly what the three shipmates of the Orca are doing. It's a virtuoso bit of filmmaking all the more miraculous for a 28 year old filmmaker making his second feature.

But then, there's Quinn. Quinn both belongs in a much more serious movie than Jaws, and is the ultimate reason the movie is so good. Half of what he says is almost gibberish, but you feel as though he's served with Captain Ahab. He might be schizophrenic or have an antisocial personality disorder, he might also be 10,000 years old. Hooper represents science and the wealthy leisure which allows people to study it. Quinn represents mystery, myth, man at nature's mercy, the sea as the mystical force we can never understand. You feel as though Quinn's made of salt water, and his monologue about serving on the USS Indianapolis is one of the great moments in any movie ever made. It's so manipulative, and yet it's exactly the sort of spooky sea yarn that old sailors tell young ones about watery demons of the deep.

Robert Shaw was an unlikely choice to play Quinn. Spielberg originally wanted Americans like Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden, but with no Shaw, there's no Quinn. Shaw was a classically trained Shakespearean actor and a playwright, he largely wrote the famous monologue that takes this movie from a popcorn thriller to something much deeper and darker. It's a time immemorial story like those from Jonah and the Whale or Odysseus and the Sun, only this time, it's about the bombing of Hiroshima. It's a story that sounds uncannily like divine vengeance.

The reason to see Jaws in 1975 is that it's the most thrillingly thrilling thriller in the thrilling history of thrillers. The reason to see it in 2021 is that it's so more than just expert craft. It may or may not be great art, but this stupid movie about a mechanical shark gnawing on swimmers has the vastness of the sea in it - injected with some of the same DNA as Moby Dick, The Odyssey, and Turner's sea paintings.

But whatever else it is, the plot is this: shark sees us as fried chicken, he eats a few of us, so we kill the shark.

Even if we've never seen it, it's so simple that we'd know the plot from just the title and the poster without even having the movie described to us. We want it to be stupid. We just want to watch people to get eaten real good, and then we want to watch the shark get killed real good. There are no giant worlds that yell at us to take popcorn fiction seriously like in Batman or Lord of the Rings. If we want to think, we can look under the hood, but we're not there for what's under the hood. Jaws is as close to perfection as the world gets because in spite of the vastness of the sea and its limitless depths, we really just want to watch sharks eat people.

Brief Political Comment About Republican Authoritarianism

 You can ask literally any close friend I've had for the last 20 years. I have been warning about the break in our system. It is so easy in our current system for Republicans to exploit it to the point that there is a one-party government with a cosmetic appearance of democracy. Republicans have been trying to do it since 1994, and with no dictatorship as an enemy, the plurality of Americans forget how horrible it can be, including the left-wing. The Republicans have the means to hijack the political system, and the only people in place to do anything about it, relatively moderate right-of-center or left-of-center meritocrats, are much too complacent to realize it. If you're a centrist, that generally means the system has worked for you, and you just generally assume the system will continue to work, the norms will stay norms, and progress will continue from generation to generation. But that's never how anything works, and for one person to take their success for granted, somebody else has to fail, and the person enduring failure will inevitably swear revenge.

Believe it or not, there are worse things than dictatorship. In the 19th century, the German and Austrian emperors secured rights for their citizens far better than democracies like America and England ever did. But nobody trusts the current Republican party to do it, and nobody can ever trust a party to handle global warming whose plurality denies it even exists.

What's scarier than dictatorship, what might be scarier even than global warming, is the wars that can result from dictatorship. Not the low level civil terror where a Republican nut with a gun shoots up a Whole Foods. The real thing: irreconcilable war between two countries with massive armies and weapons supplies. The world population is only growing, and resources will grow scarcer and scarcer as the planet gets hotter. If global warming hits as badly as it seems, war over resources is inevitable: total, irreconcilable war, no one spared, death all around, immigrants seen as fifth columns to be put in camps and potentially to death, whatever urban dwellers don't drown in rising sea level might be killed in civillian bombing, and whoever's left might just die from worse heat than ever before.

The current Republican party wouldn't care: it would be less people to compete for power against, less mouths to feed, less jobs to find, and the first cities to be bombed are the liberal enclaves who'd fight against their policies most strenuously. They'd reason, not incorrectly, that their base of support is all those places with low population density which would be mostly spared the worst. But eventually, they're not safe either. If food and oil and electricity run out, so do whole countries. The future of history is never particularly bright, and for every move of progress there is an equivalent regression. That's just the way of the world.

It's not likely that these are problems to be solved. But they can be survived. Even if the worst happens, and it's still quite possible it won't, some of us will still be here. The world moves on, history starts a new cycle, we regroup, life finds a new way, we move forward, and we live our lives anew.

Amen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/01/republican-plot-steal-2024-election/

Underrated Classical Music: Fierrabras

Exhibit A that Schubert may be Mozart's equal as the greatest of them all: Fierrabras. Here's Abbado doing Fierrabras. One of the finest achievements of his long career. Welser-Möst did an exceptional job with it in Zurich, but he can't possibly match what Abbado did here.

We think of Schubert's operas as lesser Schubert. Bullshit. He just didn't get enough funding to do it often. Fierrabras is a missing link between The Magic Flute and Der Freischütz. It has moments that could easily be Mozart, and others that could easily be Wagner. The music is exciting and beautiful, the plot isn't particularly stupid, this should be one of the most performed works in the entire repertoire, and it barely got performed at all until Claudio Abbado mounted it in 1980s Vienna. It's still barely performed anywhere else.

To any conductor, singer, and administrator reading this: MOUNT THIS OPERA! DROP EVERYTHING ELSE!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMwUFJfN1hs

Good Things #1: Uncle Vanya

Let's start this project of only writing about good things by noting that the pandemic was the single worst time for the performing arts in hundreds of years. No artist could make a living and for most of it, 2/3rds of artists were outright unemployed. It was a literal superdepression. Artists are a societal seizmograph, when you look at the history of art, again and again you see a harbinger of things to come for the world writ large. If 2/3rds of artists can be unemployed, so can you.

But one of the glorious bright spots of the pandemic (...) was that the overachieving artists who still can find work broadcasted their results over the internet for us all to see. Whether your taste is Neil Young or the Berlin Philharmonic, there they were for us in our time of greatest need, freely broadcasting food for the morale we need to slog through day after day. We felt less alone, less abandoned, less at the mercy of tragedy. Life had consolations again.

I don't know what it is about live performance that's so different from recording, but it's always preferable. We need community culture, we need to know that we experience the same entertainment with other people in the same place as at the same time, and we need to know that other people love what we love too. We need to know other people experience what we experience, and if we don't, we desperately seek them out and are willing to barter everything to get rid of that loneliness in incredibly counterproductive ways. We write off half the world as evil and we break friendships whose absence just makes us lonelier.

It's gotten harder and harder for Americans to get that community experience. First went music halls and vaudeville around the Great Depression, then went weekly attendance at movies around 1970, and now everything is a TV satellite or a streaming service. At best, the only way we know we're in a community is that everybody comments on the reviews and recaps on the internet. But 'recap culture' is yet another way we're all divided, as the internet gives us the means to attack each other's disagreements and assign character disparagement to our interlocutors.

There are much better ways to communicate with strangers than talking to them. When we see things together, we can take on faith that other people feel as we feel, and even if we have no proof of it, we go home feeling less lonely.

Like family, politics, medicine, and science, the internet is the solution to the problems it causes. It can make us all feel so terribly lonely, it's also the nearest thing to real life interaction and gets ever closer to the real thing. As chaos outside our homes gets ever more volatile, the internet will be more and more how we build communities - chaos largely caused by the internet.

In an era when community interaction is impossible without risking death itself, the internet is the only way to feel part of a greater community and experience something other than your own responsibilities. And that's why these performances were so magnificent. It's not a live experience, but it's the nearest thing to life and a lifeline to community; a statement of defiance that we can still go on, what we love will not disappear, and joy need not be put on hold.

There haven't been performances quite like this since World War II, when a bomb could drop and everybody in the theater would die together. The very danger of them makes them more exciting. It makes the performers search for more. It makes the audience more attentive. It makes everybody realize the urgency of that ecstatic truth you can only get from an artistic experience. It speaks to us and we see ourselves in the characters and moods as we've never seen ourselves before. The theater watches us, the music plays us, the movies film us.

And is there any work of art in the world more appropriate for life during a pandemic than Uncle Vanya?

Uncle Vanya is, for me, the greatest play ever written. it's not an objective statement, it's just a declaration of desperate love for a play with so much compassion that it floats to us from the proscenium in a state of grace. People say that Chekhov is depressing and gloomy, but even if you cry, and you will, how can something so empathetic and forgiving ever end with you emerging on anything but wings?

This, in 2020, is now the best production of the best play I've ever seen. The performance isn't perfect, nothing is, not even Chekhov, but even if some of the jokes can't possibly land in a performance without a live audience, translations and acting styles are so much better for Chekhov than they used to be. Chekhov is such the opposite of stuffy that no playwright could suffer more from the proper English and stilted elocution of Olivier or Anthony Hopkins. People used to play Chekhov's characters as though they were little different than Shakespearean kings, but English actors finally play his characters as though they're human beings.

Toby Jones (Claudius Templesmith in the Hunger Games) gives one of the greatest performances I've ever seen as Vanya. You feel every inch of his malice, his laziness, his capacity for self-destruction, and Jones makes you understand that beneath it all is a sensitive human who deserves our compassion even with all his baggage or perhaps because of it. The rest of the cast is with him every step of the way.

What is Uncle Vanya about? It's about people doing nothing at all. It's about aimless people who know they should have purpose and meaning, and know how easily they could find it, yet can't bring themselves to take even the first step. It has so much compassion for people who are suffering, but it never lets them off the hook either. It's about unrequited love, pride and humiliation, scapegoating and responsibility, faithfulness and infidelity, the intermingling of lust and contempt. It's ultimately about a community and how they grow and shrink together, and how the very people we're most bonded to are the ones with the most power to hurt and heal each other.

Uncle Vanya is not a perfect play, no play is. It takes an act and a half to truly get into gear - really a full hour. But as is the play itself's message, there are untold rewards in being bored. So long as you're eventually riveted, boredom is always to a purpose. The purpose here is to make us feel the languor, the anxiety, the suffering. We have to feel everything these characters feel, and we have to feel in our guts why they explode the way they do.

Chekhov has an exceedingly rare ability that you only find in the very greatest artists. Every line of his writing can simultaneously express every human emotion of which you can think - sadness, joy, humor, disgust, apathy, wonder, despair, hope, pity, contempt - at the exact same time. Not even Shakespeare can do that. The fights in Chekhov aren’t really fights, because people bicker over things for which there is no reason to bicker. Character to fly into rage for no reason at all, every line can call up decades-long resentments, words and actions ensue that everybody regrets. But then everybody makes their peace, and life continues just as it did before, until the next argument.

This is how life unfolds for 99.999% of the human race. We're not the masters of our destinies and life steers us far more often than we steer life. Life unfolds in an accidental way for which we cannot possibly plan and it hurts us all very deeply when our plans come to so little. Like us all, each of these characters knows too many disappointments, lots of boredom, and joy much too occasionally. But come what may for each, life goes on. We're still here, and that's the ultimate cause to celebrate.

Chekhov called Uncle Vanya a comedy, which may be the joke itself. It’s not a comedy in the modern sense since there aren’t all that many laughs (though there are some). And it’s not a comedy in any antiquated sense either since things don’t end particularly happily. Lots of issues are raised, gales of turbulence ensue, but nothing changes. He also entitled the play Uncle Vanya in spite of the fact that Uncle Vanya is not the main character. Like so many of the greatest narratives, there is no main character. There is only a community - listening to and ignoring each other, their moral aims growing noble and shrinking into small-mindedness from moment to moment, but always together, always impacting each other, and always themselves. The reason it's called Uncle Vanya is because he's the uncle of Sonya, the play's moral center, who lives a life just as ignoble and degrading as her uncle's - full of unrequited love, pointless work and pointless poverty, a monotonous life of low expectations. But unlike Vanya, she does not give up hope, and at the end of the play, she gives the speech to her uncle which is the most moving passage in any work of art I've ever experienced:

"What can we do? We have to live. We have days and days ahead of us. Endless evenings and we'll bare it all with good grace. We'll do our work, and we'll support everyone who relies on us, and we'll continue to do it until we're old, and we'll accept our dying and we'll say, yes we suffered, yes there were times when we wept and times we could hardly keep going, and God will smile on us. And you and I will see, Uncle Vanya, we'll see that life is radiant and beautiful and dignified, and we'll look back on those unhappy moments and we'll feel nothing but compassion and we'll smile - and we'll take our rest. I believe that Vanya, I do! We'll hear the angels. The sky will be full of diamonds and we'll see all the evil in the world, and the suffering and the pain, all engulfed by the mercy that's going to fill up the whole world. And our lives will be as sweet and gentle as a caress. I believe it. I do. And I know, Uncle Vanya, that you have yet to see happiness in this life. I know. But just you wait. And then you'll see. We'll rest. We'll rest."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1hH9PJwoqk

Underrated Classical Music: Concertate Il Suono by Marc-Andre Dalbavie

I remember being fascinated by this piece when I heard a broadcast of it in high school (I think Boulez was conducting - probably Cleveland but maybe Chicago).

On the one hand, this is spatial music, clearly influenced by Stockhausen and Nono. Like all spatial music, it's impossible to properly hear on most speakers (though one could certainly make the argument that almost all music is impossible to properly hear on any recording), on the other hand, there is something about the mystery of this work that, rarer in the Darmstadt-adjacent worlds than anybody wanted to admit, has the imagination to justify its mountain of dogma. It has a few dry spots, but this is a truly compelling piece of music.

It's weird to consider that the last generation of 'high modernists' are now 'old composers.' George Benjamin is over 60, Wolfgang Rihm is nearly 70, Oliver Knussen is dead, Tristan Murail is nearly 75, Gerard Grisey's been dead for over twenty years, and Georg Friedrich Haas is now known more for his kink experiments than his musical ones. I'm old enough to remember when they were considered young.

No aesthetic death has ever been more deserved than high modernism, which literally drove hundreds of thousands out from the concert hall forever and bullied the remains to bruising, but it certainly had its compelling moments. It's sort of astounding to think that in 2021, you can still hear music that carries some of the authentic spiritual charge of Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Berg. The irony is that to present us with that spirit in 2021 is antithetical to its revolutionary spirit, and was just as antithetical fifty years ago. Modernism stood for the new, the revelatory, the assimilation of ever developing forms of refinement to increase the rawness of our experience. And yet there are hundreds of old academic composers still chewing the old fat of serialism, atonality, spectralism, aleatoricism, spatialism, and conceptualism with cosmetic spins on old formulas as absorbing to the attention span as a rearrangement of the Titanic's deck chairs. It's a complete anathema to the purpose of modernism, and in our an era when populist influenced music with political messages dominates, the entire aesthetic of modernism seems quaint and tame. The intimidating bullies of 25 years ago seem like cartoon characters responding to a world that hasn't existed for an entire lifetime.

There's so much modernist music to get through, and so much of it sucks.... but there are real, gems among it too. I'm very happy I happened on Concertante Il Suono when I was a teenager. I doubt I'd have had the patience to hear it otherwise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7bqRsXdPQ0&fbclid=IwAR3Ayx106gnhFev-CJyOQIB65laPfi1KaD1kp9Xxk7XoUsWxFWWRDROuY_U

Tales from the Old New Land - Paris 1899 - Scene 3 - Rough Draft

(Giant crowd gathered at Palais de Justice. Theodor Herzl dictates account of the crowd to servant. Lots of crowd noise and occasional chants of “Vive Dreyfus!” “Vive la liberte!” “Liberte, egalite, fraternite!” “a bas l’antisemitisme!”)

Herzl: Ja, schreib das auf Daniel. Das is Theodor Herzl reporting zu you live from der palais de justice in Paris. Die Dreyfusards are out in force heute as ein demonstration im support of ze Colonel Alfred Dreyfus whose zole crime is to have been a Jew in ein army which requires a scapegoat to absolve der real spy, Walsin Esterhazy. Zie Esterhazys are not commonly known in France for being die second most powerful familie in Das Austro-Hungarian Reich, aber die French military knows very well who ze Esterhazy family is. Sie know der grosse preis of imprisoning an Esterhazy, vich is vy die Deutschen recruited him as ihr spy. Andererseits, Dreyfus is ein military man who is also a Jew from Alsace und therefore immer considered a potential fifth column. Er has no close freunds, und is thought by many to only have a career due to influence of sein vater, Leopold Louis-Dreyfus, und ja, Herr Louis-Dreyfus is ze direkt ancestor of Elaine von Seinfeld. It seems zu have been widely hoped by das Militar zat Dreyfus vurde commit zuicide. Aber de same distanz which macht Dreyfus zo unliked has giben him eine strong constitution. After five jahrs, mostly in solitary confinement, Dreyfus is sustained by love of his Vaterland. Er believes himself a Franzoze, not a Jude, und zu be prosecuted by die militair is die grosste humiliation. Ve now go live to ze front of ze palais de justice zu hore was France’s most famous writer Emile Zola has to say about ze case of Herr Dreyfus…. Hast du das geschrieben Daniel?... Daniel?... Daniel did you write all that!

Daniel: Entschuldig mir Herr Herzl, my pen was out of ink.

(giant cheer)

Zola: J’accuse! (huge cheer and applause. Lasts 15 seconds)

Phillippe: Is that his whole speech?

Guillaume: I don't know.

Phillippe: France's greatest writer....

J’accuse Lt. Col. du Paty de Clam of being the diabolical creator of this miscarriage of justice - unwittingly, I would like to believe - and of defending this sorry deed, over the last three years, by all manner of ludricrous and evil machinations.

(applause and cheers)

J’accuse General Mercier of complicity, at least by mental weakness, in one of the greatest inequities of the century.

(applause and cheers)

J’accuse General Billot of having held in his hands absolute proof of Dreyfus’s innocence and covering it up, and making himself guilty of this crime against mankind and justice, as a political expedient and a way for the compromised General Staff to save face.

(applause and cheers)

J’accuse Gen. de Boisdeffre and Gen. Gonse of complicity in the same crime,.... (volume turned down and the rest done in the background)

the former, no doubt, out of religious prejudice, the latter perhaps out of that esprit de corps that has transformed the War Office into an unassailable holy ark.

(applause and cheers)

Phillppe: This is all a little trop isn’t it?

Guillaume: Je ne sais pas. If it’s true I think he’s making points worth making.

Zola: J’accuse Gen. de Pellieux and Major Ravary of conducting a villainous enquiry, by which I mean a monstrously biased one, as attested by the latter in a report that is an imperishable monument to naïve impudence.

Phillippe: He’s just so condescending to anyone who disagrees.

Guillaume: If you believe his evidence wouldn’t you be angry at people who disbelieved him?

Zola: J’accuse the three handwriting experts, Messrs. Belhomme, Varinard and Couard, of submitting reports that were deceitful and fraudulent, unless a medical examination finds them to be suffering from a condition that impairs their eyesight and judgement.

Phillippe: Je suis desole he’s just so full of himself!

Guillaume: D’accord! He’s Emile fiching Zola! Est-ce nouvelle?

Zola: J’accuse the War Office of using the press, particularly L’Eclair and L’Echo de Paris, to conduct an abominable campaign to mislead the general public and cover up their own wrongdoing.

Phillipe: I’m sorry I can’t listen to this merde any longer.

Guilaume: S’il te plait Guillaume it’s probably almost over.

Zola: Finally, J’accuse the first court martial of violating the law by convicting the accused on the basis of a document that was kept secret, and I accuse the second court martial of covering up this illegality, on orders, thus committing the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man.

Phillippe: We’re just supposed to believe this because he says so?! Bien sur all the fashionable people believe what Emile Zola tells them because they hate all the Francais who are not them!

Guillaume: But they hate us!

(conversation from here on over Emile Zola’s speech)

Phillippe: They hate us because we hate them!

Rachel (from a distance): Guillaume! Phillippe!

Guillaume: Rachel!

Phillippe: Ah, Rachel…

(comes over to them)

Rachel: It’s so nice to see you Phillippe! I’m so heureux you’re here supporting Colonel Dreyfus!

Phillippe: (dripping with sarcasm) Anything for la justice ma cherie.

Rachel: (doesn’t understand the sarcasm) I so wish there were other gentiles as committed to justice as you.

Phillippe: It is the cause to which I’ve devoted my life….

Rachel: Guillaume told me you would be a true ami. I now see that you’re an ally too.

Phillippe: Vraiment truth is everything.... La verite is everything la revolution fought for, and everything we are defending….

Guillaume: Pardon but I’m pretty sure they fought for liberte, egalite, fraternite…

Phillippe: (cutting him off) LA VERITE GUILLAUME! Ma cherie I see your fiancee is not as committed to la justice as we are!

Rachel: Guillaume is a very sweet man, Je suis sur he will understand l’importance d’equality very soon. Helas I must join up with ma mere. It is so nice to see you ici, Guillaume I will see you et ta mere tonight for drinks apres le diner?

Guillaume: Evidement.

Phillippe: Guillaume you did not tell me you were going to the Blochs!

Rachel: He is. S’il te plait Guillaume, I know you must go back to Orleans in a few days but would you do us the honor of joining?

Phillippe: It would be le plus grande honeur of my life.

Rachel: Merveilleuse! Je suis so excited! Au revoir!

Guillaume: Adieu Rachel! (concurrently) A ce soir!

(Rachel leaves)

Phillippe: I thought les Juifs were famous for their irony.

Guillaume: I told you, Rachel is not a typical Jew.

Tales from the Old New Land - Paris, 1899 - Scene 2 - Much Completer Rough Draft

  Therese: It’s your turn Lisette.

Lisette Charlap - Lady’s Maid to Rachel:

Benedic, Domine, nos et dona tua,

quae de largitate tua sumus sumpturi,

et concede, ut illis salubriter nutriti

tibi debitum obsequium praestare valeamus,

per Christum Dominum nostrum.

Everybody: Amen!

Therese the Housekeeper: I’m always amazed that you can say Amen as a Communist who hates us.

Frederic the tutor: (mischievously) I don’t hate you, but as a Socialiste it doesn’t cost me anything to worship idols.

Therese: How can you believe we’re idolatres? 

Frederic: Look at all the statues you bow down to in your eglises.

Therese: Ce ne sont pas gods.

Frederic: Evidement they’re gods!

Therese: They’re saints. 

Frederic: Saints, gods, cette tout pareil.

Therese: C’est ne pas la meme chose!

Frederic: No, at least the trinity is real gods, but the saints are like pagans. You prier to St. Joseph to help you replace your ceiling like he’s Vesta, and then you pray to St. Matthew to pay for it like he’s Juno. And I’ll tell you something else, back in 71... 

Lisette: Nous avons, we know. You were there when you communists shot the Archbishop. Unless you pulled the trigger yourself this time we don’t want to hear about it.

Louis the chef: I can at least have un legere appreciation for la socialisme, at least you care about the poor, even if your pauvre is everyone but Frenchman. 

Frederic: It’s Frenchman too!

Louis: Mais Frenchmen can’t get what they need if they have to share it with tout le monde.  

Frederic: Why shouldn’t we care about everyone? 

Louis: Because you’re a Frenchman! 

Frederic: I’m a Frenchman? How many times have you said that Jews can never be Frenchmen? 

Louis: Detende Frederic, there is not a single antisemite in the world who would think of you as a Jew for having a Jewish grandfather. 

Frederic: You’re an anti-semite.

Louis: Well you obviously are more Francais than Juif. 

Frederic: Papa said I look like mon grandpere when he was young.  

Louis: Well, maybe your grandfather wasn’t completely Jewish lui-meme, et qui sait, maybe there are a few Jews who are not devilish. 

(everybody laughs incredulously and claps) Bravo Louis! Voici le progress!

Louis: But your name is Waldteufel, doesn’t that mean ‘forest devil’ in German?

Frederic: And how would un Monsieur born Ludwig Rohmer know that?

(everyone laughs)

Louis: Dis nous. Does Waldteufel mean 'forest devil?"

Frederic: Tu sais tres bien!

Louis: Does it?

Frederic: Bien sur.

Louis: Voila! Even your name tells us your Jewish side is devilish. 

Frederic: (laughs) My name tells us I’m Alsatsian, like you. We have devilish names because the Germans forced us to take them.

Louis: They forced you to take devlish names because you’re devils. 

Lisette: Charmante. So now Frederic's a Juif!

Frederic: Just the quarter below the waist.

Therese: Vraiment? It's not...

Frederic: Non, c'est ne pas coupe. Mais tu sais qu'on dit sur about Jews beneath the waist.

Lisette: HA! Everyone knows Therese knows from experience.

Therese: (slaps Frederic's arm) Tu leur a d'it?!

Frederic: You're a very bad Catholic mais une femme tres cher....

Lisette: (interrupting) Laisse her alone Frederic, she's a much better Catholique que tu n'es Communiste or Juif.

Frederic: I'm neither now.

Therese: Bien. Juif, Communist, they both lead the attack against l’eglisse Catholique.

Frederic: They do?

Therese: Certainement! Everyone obeyed le Saint-Siege until the Jews came! 

Lisette: Why would la liberte de Juif be any raison for disobeying the Church?

Therese: D'Accord! How can it be anything else?

Frederic: Couldn’t it be la reciproque?

Louis: What does that mean?

Frederic: That la liberte makes Jews prosper.

Therese: Peut-etre liberte is corrupt! 

Louis: That's what l'Action Francaise understands! La liberte IS corrupt! It doesn’t matter qui est le dominant. Pendante mille ans Europe has always been ruled by domination, not un service, and we will have un dominateur again. 

Lisette: Louis you’re a Frenchman but you still think like a German. 

(everybody laughs)

Louis: Domination is natural. Equality is not un verite Chretienne.

Frederic: It isn’t? Your savior said ‘Blessed are le pauvre.’

Therese: In the Kingdom of Paradis! 

Lisette: Well maybe le saveur was wrong.

Therese: Lisette Charlappe ne blaspheme pas! 

Louis: (suspicious and sarcastic) Lisette Charlappe doesn’t seem like much of a Christian. 

Lisette: And you don’t seem like much of a cook. 

(everybody laughs)

Louis: (incensed but must pretend he's being sarcastic) Au diable! I’ve been cooking for Madame since I was a boy! And how do they remercie a moi? They force me to go to a goddamn ecole de cuisine. 

Frederic: They sent you to Le Cordon Bleu. It was a great honor. It’s l’ecole polytechnique for chefs!

Louis: Plus d'un demi-siecle ma famille make everything for Madame. Haut cuisine, Francais, Alsacianne, Provencal, Anglais, Russe, meme Juif! 

Lisette: Sacre Saint-Sebastien! He made a kugel once! 

Louis: (suspiciously) How do you know what a kugel is?

Lisette: I work for a Jewish family. You serve us the leftovers. 

Louis: (laughs) Et tu mange the leftovers just before you avaler Monsieur Robert... 

Lisette: BRULE L'ENFER! 

(she smashes her plate and chases Louis around the room. Everybody else laughs.)

Frederic: This is becoming a daily occurence.

Therese: C'est une embarras.

Frederic: I should think Lisette will eventually catch Louis and scratch out his eyes.

Therese: Louis will stab her with a sous knife first.

Frederic: We should make a wager on it.

Therese: I would never do anything so Juive.

Frederic: S'il te plait Therese, the Jews aren't so ba...

Therese: MADAME RACHEL!

(everyone stops and stands at attention)

Rachel: There seems to be a broken plate sur le flore. (picks it up)

Therese: Please madame, let me get that.

Rachel: Non, ce n'est pas un probleme.

Lisette and Louis: Merci Madame Rachel. Merci beaucoup Madame.

Rachel: Please forgive me Louis, I promised le Marquis I would show him how magnifique your kougelhopf is. I don't suppose there is a piece de l'autre nuit.

Louis: Malheureusement non Madame, but I will make another right away.

Rachel: Please don't trouble yourself Louis. Louis: Ce n'est pas un probleme. I will make another right away.

Rachel: (hesitates) I feel very bad about it but... (vacilates) Merci boucoup Louis.

Louis: C'est mon plaisir.

(Exit Louis)

Rachel: I really do feel bad. I'm sure he didn't want to do it.

Frederic: He's much better off baking gateau than he was here.

(Enter Orthodox Jew)

Lisette: Madame your fiancee is waiting for you so you should probably not wait ici.

Orthodox Jew: (Yiddish Accent) Lisette Kharlap?

Lisette: (beat, looks at him confused) Oui?

Orthodox Jew: Entshildig mir. Ikh hob a letter far you.

Lisette: Une lettre?

Orthodox Jew: Es ist zeyer important ya read it?

Lisette: Importante?

Orthodox Jew: It may answer some qvestions.

Lisette: Questions?

Rachel: Vous ette un juif!

Orthodox Jew: Ye. (vocal shrug) Ikh bin a Yid.

Rachel: Pourquoi would you have a letter pour Lisette?

Orthodox Jew: Es ist nicht mein bizness. Ikh nor hobn a letter to deliver fun der Rebbe Kharlap.

Rachel: Rebbe Charlappe?

Orthodox Jew: Ye. Fun Rouen.

Lisette and Rachel: Rouen?!

Orthodox Jew: Dos hot mir gezogt der Rebbe.

Frederic: Tu parle Francais?

Orthodox Jew: Oy. Nicht zo gut.

Frederic: Atoh medaber Ivris?

Orthodox Jew: A bisl. Es ist fun der Tanakh und nicht far redn.

Frederic: Sprechen sie deutsch?

Orthodox Jew: Neyn. Ikh red tsu dir oyf Yiddish un Deutsch ist nicht mein schfrakh.

Rachel: Je ne comprende pas.

Frederic: He's speaking to us in Yiddish.

Lisette: What is Yiddish.

Rachel: I've heard of la langue Juive but I've never heard it.

(Lisette opens letter)

Rachel: Lisette what does it say?

Lisette: (concerned) Madame I would like to be excused.

Rachel: But Lisette?

Lisette: (agitated) S'il vous plait Madame.

Rachel: (confused) But we have

Lisette: Madame I am begging you!

Rachel: Je suis desole Lisette. We have to preparer for la demonstration in the morning.

Lisette: (sighs and steels herself) Bien sur madame. I will be upstairs to pack in a half hour.

Rachel: Merci Lisette. I will join you an hour later.