A glimpse into perfection

You have to die a few times before starting to live

Nirvana

Not much chance, completely cut loose from purpose, he was a young man riding a bus through North Carolina on the way to somewhere and it began to snow and the bus stopped at a little café in the hills and the passengers entered. He sat at the counter with the others, he ordered and the food arrived. The meal was particularly good and the coffee. The waitress was unlike the women he had known. She was unaffected, there was a natural humour which came from her. The fry cook said crazy things. The dishwasher in back, laughed, a good clean pleasant laugh. The young man watched the snow through the windows. He wanted to stay in that café forever. The curious feeling swam through him that everything was beautiful there, that it would always stay beautiful there. Then the bus driver told the passengers that it was time to board. The young man thought, I'll just stay here, I'll just stay here. But then he rose and followed the others onto the bus. He found his seat and looked at the café through the bus window. Then the bus moved off, down a curve, downward, out of the hills. The young man looked straight forward. He heard the other passengers speaking of other things, or they were reading or trying to sleep. They had not noticed the magic. The young man put his head to one side, closed his eyes, pretended to sleep. There was nothing else to do. Just to listen to the sound of the engine, the sound of the tires in the snow.

Hobbit

Why J.R.R. Tolkien’s Enduring Popularity Is a Cause for Hope in Our Popular Culture

By David P. Goldman 

Peter Jackson’s first of three “Hobbit” films took a thrashing from the critics, who disliked the effect produced by the new 48-frames-per-second projection system. This makes everything a bit too clear, a bit too smooth, such that sets and costumes seemed artificial to some. It is off-putting at first. Halfway through the film, though, I suddenly thought, “This is the way I saw the world when I was a child!” There are many wonderful things about Jackson’s film, of which the choice of Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins stands at the top of my list; unlike the listless Elijah Wood, a boy playing the role of the middle-aged Frodo in the “Rings” trilogy, Freeman is a grown-up. He is a master of English understatement but also an actor of great range, and he carries the film brilliantly. As in the “Rings” trilogy, the sets and settings are marvelous. Especially gratifying was the inclusion of many of Tolkien’s poems with affecting settings by Howard Shore.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s enduring popularity is cause for hope in popular culture. He did not write fantasy so much as roman à clef about the past and future of the West. His Hobbits are the English standing against totalitarian aggression — the two towers of Berlin and Moscow — with decency and courage. “Alone among 20th century novelists, J.R.R. Tolkien concerned himself with the mortality not of individuals but of peoples. The young soldier-scholar of World War I viewed the uncertain fate of European nations through the mirror of the Dark Ages, when the life of small peoples hung by a thread. In the midst of today’s Great Extinction of cultures, and at the onset of civilizational war, Tolkien evokes an uncanny resonance among today’s readers,” I wrote when the first of the Rings films appeared. I am no maven where Christian literature is concerned, but Tolkien’s theological depth impressed me:

The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture

Screening Liberty

By JORDAN BLOOM

It’s easy to flip through television channels today and see a wasteland, from the redneck voyeurism of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” to forgettable crime shows and bad suburban comedies. Critics gush over the latest high-budget network drama, while the real heavyweight ratings battle is duked out between the likes of Merv Griffin, Judge Judy, and Dr. Phil. There’s a temptation to view television, as well as most movies, as too compromised to commercial pressure to be a legitimate artistic medium.

The critical establishment generally adopts some version of this pose. As Paul Cantor puts it in his new book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, critics inside and out of the academy tend to “treat culture as a realm of unfreedom, dwelling on the constraints under which would-be creative people necessarily operate.” Or worse, they hold the view—inherited from poststructuralists or the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School—that pop culture is actively deceptive, giving people a false sense of satisfaction while “producing forms of debased entertainment to numb the American people into submission to their capitalist masters.”

All that is what Cantor—by day a Shakespeare scholar at the University of Virginia—seeks to refute. In addition to his literary scholarship, he’s harbored an enduring interest in Austrian Economics and libertarian thought, ever since as a young man he attended lectures by Ludwig von Mises in New York City. His latest project has been to draw these literary and libertarian pursuits together, first producing a book on television entitledGilligan Unbound and then co-writing the more highbrow Literature and the Economics of Liberty. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture is the next step, an episodic libertarian history of film and television.

The captain's fallacy

Kids: Smarter Than Adults

by J. Tucker 

It's happened yet again: I found another movie presumably made for kids that easily beats many of this season's predictable box-office yawners. The movie this time is The Pirates! Band of Misfits. It is the story of a socially complex group of failed pirates -- people doing their best to make a life for themselves outside official channels -- and their captain's search for fame in the "Pirate of the Year" pageant. 

This supposed kids movie is packed with subtleties, ironic humor, more struggles, and passing references to pop culture. It deals with big and important themes like friendship, betrayal, fame, and the love of money. It deftly handles politics, with an evil Queen Victoria and her loot. 

It asks fundamental questions such as is it really stealing if you take it away from the government? It touches on hard questions of vocation and personality, and the difficulties of balancing the love for one's work and the need for material provision. 

The humor even deals with a some sophisticated understanding of probability theory, such as when the captain says concerning the pageant:

"Every time I've entered, I've failed to win. So I must have a really good chance this time!" 

Kids seem understand the captain's fallacy. Do adults? 

Breaking Bad: the best thing on the box

The moral descent of a drug-dealing chemistry teacher with cancer has been turned into sublime TV

by Emmet Livingstone 

To all you TV illiterates out there who have not yet seen Breaking Bad, hang your heads in shame. To the chosen few who are in the know, pause for a moment and share among yourselves a self-congratulatory chuckle. You are witnessing the acme of the golden age of television.

Criminally overlooked by the Emmys and British broadcasters alike, AMC’s drama charts the rise of the drab Walter ‘Walt’ White, a high-school chemistry teacher and study in mundane underachievement. On learning that he is suffering from an aggressive form of lung cancer, he turns to manufacturing crystal meth to secure his family’s financial future, finding his role releases him from the kind of mouldering suburban rot we all dread. In an era of easy TV thrills, a series opening with the midlife crisis of a grizzly depressive should be commended. The series’ genius lies not in the originality of its conception, however, but in the depths to which it explores the capacity for evil and its rancorous taint.

The Dark Knight

Evil and Human Liberty

by Jeffrey Tucker

The problem of evil is a big theme for a movie, and certainly for a movie based on a comic book, but Batman: The Dark Knight deals with it expertly, and with a message that offers profound support to the idea of human liberty.

It does so in two ways: it supports the view that human beings are capable of cooperating toward the social good, and it shows the unpredictable level of evil that state intervention unleashes. Yes, I know it sounds implausible, but please hear me out.

Occupy Gotham?

The Dark Knight Rises

By Zach Foster

One of the remarkable things about this Batman series is the way Hollywood — a bastion of tired, often-rehashed, leftist propaganda — has unwittingly allowed an obscenely wealthy capitalist who lives a decadent bourgeois lifestyle (when not fighting crime) to be the hero! It was noted somewhere that Murray Rothbard was a fan of the James Bond films partly because Bond was unrepentantly bourgeois and knew how to live it up in style. I think Rothbard — who has forgotten more about Austro-libertarianism than I could ever hope to learn in my lifetime — would have liked Christian Bale's portrayal of Bruce Wayne, neither afraid to make large investments nor afraid to be seen driving the ladies around in his European sports cars.

Hiding behind government handouts

Not so melancholic about destroying the planet

By Philip Cross

It was widely noted that the films screened at the recent Cannes film festival were a tad pessimistic about the future of mankind. Over half of the 22 official films dealt with some form of systemic collapse, mixed with a heavy dose of vengeance, clearly the psychological hangover from the 2008 financial crash. Since artists supposedly are well attuned to emerging trends in society, this bodes ill for the world’s ability to cope with its lingering economic turmoil. Of course, most artists don’t know diddly about economics, as reflected in the exalted status they extend to the proverbial “starving artist.” Try selling the ideal of a “starving economist” to my chosen profession.

Much of this artistic pessimism derives from the film Melancholia by Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, a legend in the industry despite (or because of) never being a commercial success in North America. He laid out the apocalyptic anti-business vision that other filmmakers are now following.

The Short List

Elia Kazan Reconsidered

By Bruce Edward Walker

The short list of best American film directors will forever include Elia Kazan, whose cinematic efforts include many good films, several great ones, and a couple of immense quality that have fallen through the cracks due to poor timing, comparison to his other landmark accomplishments, or perhaps critical negligence. Identified by none other than Stanley Kubrick as “without question, the best director we have in America,” Kazan rebounded from the public relations disaster of testifying as a friendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, where he gave up the names of eight former associates with whom he shared Communist Party affiliations nearly 20 years earlier. Whatever his regrets and explanations, they were never sufficient to assuage the left’s anger, and many used his testimony as a cause célèbre, choosing to sit on their hands rather than applaud when Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award in 1998.

By 1952 Kazan’s film resume already boasted early noirs (Boomerang!, 1947;Panic in the Streets, 1950); his auspicious Hollywood debut, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945); an Irish-American bildungsroman; Pinky (1949), a film about racial relations; and an Academy Award for Best Director for 1947’sGentleman’s Agreement, which dealt with the prevalence of anti-Semitism. Another film, Sea of Grass (1947), was his only misfire of the period—featuring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in what is certainly their only unwatchable onscreen collaboration.

A Coriolanus in Our Future?

A side of Shakespeare the classroom never prepared us for 

By Joe Sobran

A little tired of politics? Of course you are. We all are. Well, I have a treat for you: Shakespeare’s least-known great play, Coriolanus, the story of a brave and honest (though not always amiable) man who hates politics with all his heart. It’s a tragedy fraught with magnetic eloquence and unexpected lessons for our own time.
I discovered it in 1962, when I was 16, through Richard Burton’s thrilling recording of it. Long before he became famous for, well, other stuff, Burton had made the role his own on the stage, and this recording is still the gem of my large collection. Vocally, nobody, not even the great Olivier, could have topped Burton’s astoundingly resonant performance (which Olivier himself saluted as “definitive”). Listen to it once, and I guarantee you’ll never forget it. The play reveals a side of Shakespeare the classroom never prepared us for. Sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child? Warbling his native woodnotes wild? Not hardly.

You Know Harry

The Third Man 

by Joseph Sobran

For my money, the greatest movie ever made is The Third Man, first released 60 years ago and re-released with restored footage (11 minutes had been cut from the U.S. version). Usually praised as a "classic thriller," it's much more than that: it's a study of evil that bears repeated viewings.

Rarely has a film been blessed by such a perfect combination of direction (Carol Reed), script (Graham Greene), cinematography (Robert Krasker), music (Anton Karas), and excellent casting, right down to the creepy minor characters.

Cynicism and Boundaries

All's Fair in Politics and Celebrity
by Theodore Dalrymple 

If, as the French historian, Pierre Nora, recently put it in a newspaper article, the whole of human history is a crime against humanity, how is one to assess the significance of a single criminal act? And yet the human mind is so framed that it is inclined to see in such a single act all the deceit, evil and delight in cruelty of which Man is capable. One death, said Stalin, is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.

The report of a single dreadful crime is enough to plunge one into despair about the possibilities of human nature. For example, I read recently in a British newspaper a report of a man who picked up an achondroplastic dwarf in a pub and slammed him down on the ground so violently that the dwarf is now paralysed from the waist down and will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Whether or not the final injury was intended by the assailant (was it worse if he did or he didn’t intend it?), the act was of insensitivity so gross that it makes one shudder. Of what would such an assailant not be capable? How is it possible for a human being even to conceive of such conduct as a possibility, for the thought of it to cross his mind, let alone for him not to know that it was inexcusably wrong?

The Strength of Human Materials

The New Generation

The posthumous tale of a Russian professor’s nightmarish encounter with a former student

By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

They were writing the Strength of Materials exam.

Anatoly Pavlovich Vozdvizhensky, an engineer and associate professor in the Faculty of Civil Engineering, could see that his student Konoplyov’s face was very flushed.  He had broken into a sweat and had missed his turn to come up to the examiner’s desk. Then, with a heavy gait, he approached and quietly asked for a different set of questions. Anatoly Pavlovich gazed at the sweaty face beneath a low forehead and met the desperate, imploring look in his bright eyes—and he gave him some new questions.

A dose of sobriety for every besotted age

The End of the World: H. G. Wells

by  Thomas F. Bertonneau 

The End of the World is an apocalyptic myth that first becomes prominent in religious speculation in the period of Late Antiquity. St. John’s Apocalypse, included as the last book of the New Testament, is the best-known item in the genre, with its elaborate visions of Armageddon and the Last Judgment. Persistently, however, since the French Revolution, the myth of the End of the World has secularized itself, expressing its eschatological anxiety in terms of entirely this-worldly events. In the Twentieth Century, the End of the World became a staple of “scientific romance” or science fiction, where it often concerned the perfection of destructive instrumentality. In England beginning in the 1870s, the foreign invasion story became popular. In George Tomkyns Chesney’s many times reprinted Battle of Dorking (1871), Kaiser Wilhelm I, not content with the defeat of France at Sedan, pushes on through Belgium and the Netherlands, crosses the Channel, and reduces Britain to vassalage. Sometimes the invasion involved the so-called Yellow Peril, an onslaught, in some non-specific near future, by militarized hordes of Chinese or Japanese, who overwhelm Europe.

The End of the World typically presents itself in a literalist manner, with the physical obliteration of the globe and humanity. The antecedents in this case go as far back as the first half of the Nineteenth Century, especially to the American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849). Best known as the inventor of the detective story, Poe also established the broad outlines the science fiction story. Poe’s “Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” (1839), the earliest tale of a cosmic collision that destroys humanity, climaxes in a planetary conflagration when, the chemistry of the comet’s tail having removed all nitrogen from earth’s airy mixture, the remaining oxygen-rich atmosphere induces all organic matter to burst into flame. Astronomer and science journalist Camille Flammarion (1842 – 1925) expanded on Poe’s innovation in his novel Le fin du monde (1893) where once again a cosmic interloper brings death to the earth, destroying it in a direct collision. Abel Gance loosely adapted Flammarion’s novel to the silver screen in 1931. Both Poe’s short story and Flammarion’s novel include descriptions of future, decadent civilizations, in thrall to which much of human nature has already gone extinct even before the physical cataclysm occurs.

The greatest interest of the End of the World in fiction comes, in fact, not from the cosmic, but rather from the sociological, political, and civilizational variants of the trope. A world-obliterating impact leaves no survivors and ceases to be pathetic in the instant when it occurs; but social, political, and civilizational catastrophes reserve a few survivors, who attest to their experience and add, perhaps, to humanity’s small store of wisdom. None was better at this type of End-of-the-World story than Herbert George Wells (1866 – 1946). He made an early success of such a tale in The Time Machine (1895) and his very last book, The Mind at the End of its Tether(1946), is the oddest and most disturbing End-of-the-World story of all, except that Wells insists that it is the not a story but the apocalyptic truth.

I. Wells wrote two planetary collision stories, borrowing the idea from Poe’s “Conversation.” These are “The Star”(1897) and In the Days of the Comet (1906). In “The Star” – where Wells achieves an impartial, objectively analytical tone that he would refine in his novel-length catastrophe stories – the real disaster is human complacency, as it would be again in many of the same author’s “scientific romances.” Even in the civilized nations, Wells asserts, people rarely develop their awareness beyond the demands of routine and immediacy; while petty worries eat up its quotient of starveling intelligence, the typical modern mind altogether lacks a cosmic sense. When the astronomer Ogilvy calls attention to a “retardation” in the orbital velocity of the eighth planet, “such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were unaware of the existence of Neptune, nor… did the subsequent discovery of a faint, remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause any very great excitement.” Even after the interloper, in colliding with Neptune, becomes visible in daylight, effulgent and growing, the putatively educated regard the phenomenon blandly as a stellar novelty without implication for their lives. The most backward and superstitious people, by contrast, invest the “fiery signs” with due portentousness. In Europe and America only the perspicacious few grasp the likelihood that, “Man has lived in vain.” Otherwise, as Wells writes, “shops... opened and closed at the proper hours” and “use and wont still ruled the world.”

The celestial body’s inevitable near-encounter with Earth solicits the full range of cataclysm in massivetsunamis, conflagration of the atmosphere, deluge, and seismic tremor, all of which leave a small stunned nucleus of survivors huddling in the wreckage. Wells hints at “a new brotherhood,” emerging from the shock and ruin of an altered geography, which organizes “the saving of laws and books and machines.” This too would become a standard Wellsian trope. “The Star” ends with a sudden, unexpected shift of perspective. Martian astronomers assess the event as “astonishing” in consideration of “what little damage the earth… has sustained.” “The Star” tells objectively of a catastrophe cosmic on the one hand and intellectual on the other. The intellectual debacle interests Wells more than the cosmic one. The Wellsian brand of Darwinism focuses much less on physiological than it does on psychological, ethical, and technical adaptation, as narrowly biological as Wells could nevertheless sometimes be. Stultified minds fail to grasp either the scale or the peril of universal forces.

The magnificent opening paragraph of The War of the Worlds (1897) enjoys notoriety – from its partial rehearsal in the several, filmed versions of the scenario – to the extent that commenting on it strikes the writer as presumptive. Nevertheless, the same opening paragraph develops motifs from “The Star,” particularly “use and wont,” in such a way as to invite a renewal of consideration. Logicians urge that argument from analogy offends against forensic procedure, but Wells would have it that the main ingredient of complacency, which he again condemns, is the failure to consider analogies. The whole of Wells’ paragraph operates analogically. Wells invokes “intelligences greater than man’s,” mentalities “vast, cool and unsympathetic,” by which men have been “scrutinized and studied almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.” That men “with infinite complacency” felt “assurance” in what Wells calls “their empire over matter,” belongs, as the narrator says, to the class of “mental habits… of departed days.”

From the history of the European empires The War’s discourse draws in various items of unavoidable pertinence. The narrator, writing from a vantage point six years after the Martian attempt, details the onslaught’s effects in Britain, but far from wringing his hands in resentful anger he seems actually to mitigate the enemy’s blameworthiness: “Before we judge [the Martians] too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races.” The Tasmanians come under discussion, who, “in spite of their human likeness, were swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants.” Mars being a world “far gone in its cooling” while the earth “is still teaming with life,” and life being everywhere “an incessant struggle for existence,” the Martians acted logically to avoid “the destruction that generation after generation creeps upon them.” The failure of the Martian attempt to wrest earth and its resources prompts the invaders to turn their attention elsewhere. “Lessing has advanced excellent reasons,” writes the narrator in the Epilogue, “for supposing that the Martians have actually succeeded in effecting a landing on Venus.”

The main interest for most readers in The War of the Worlds consists in Wells’ vivid descriptions of mechanized warfare between a British military that fights with the armaments of the Boer and Spanish-American Wars and an attacking force whose weaponry marks a quantum leap in applied science. The “heat ray” anticipates the beam weapons that modern armories still have not perfected, while the “black smoke” uncannily prefigures the poison gas that belligerents would unleash during the trench-warfare of 1914-1918. The Martians dominate the battlefield. Occasionally, a crack British gun crew or an astute dreadnaught commander scores a tactical victory. The fragility of the British social fabric, however, almost as much as Martian technical superiority, supplies the invader with his most effective instrument of war. Once the Martians emerge from their initial “pit” at Horsell Common near Woking, Surrey, panic spreads infectiously. “The most extraordinary thing to my mind,” writes the narrator, “was the dovetailing of the commonplace habits of our social order with the first beginnings of the series of events that was to topple that order headlong.”


Information becomes a casualty. The sudden paucity of news, disrupting use and wont, in turn exacerbates the rising hysteria, which in its own turn propels the disintegration of social order. In London, with trains gone missing and the railway timetables now useless, a great exodus on foot begins, which quickly degenerates into mob-behavior and lawlessness. The narrator’s brother, a medical student in London, witnesses the rapid descent into chaos. He records “a roaring wave of fear that swept through the greatest city in the world… the stream of flight rising swiftly to a torrent, lashing in a foaming tumult around the railway stations, banked up into a horrible struggle about the shipping in the Thames, and hurrying by every available channel northward and eastward.” In the company of two fleeing women, the brother resorts to a revolver to fight off criminal opportunists. Near the suburb of Edgeware, “the main road was a boiling stream of people”; a bit farther, they encounter “a whole population in movement,” whose constituents wear “fear and pain on their faces.” Martian vulnerability to terrestrial infections stops the attack, a kind of secular Providence.

In the Epilogue, the narrator remarks, “Whether we expect another invasion or not, our views of the human future must be greatly modified by these events,” which “have robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence.” Wells is once again playing with analogies. Self-absorption and unfounded certainty prevented humanity from foreseeing the Martian attack; self-absorption and unfounded certainty prevented the Martians from foreseeing their sanitary incompatibility with the earth’s bacterial environment. Humanity found lucky redemption from the mentality of use and wont – ofcomplacency – that made it prey to the Martians in theMartian complacency that prevented the invaders from imagining untoward conditions on a new world.

II. A good academic parlor game would be to pose the question, what English-language novel of the first quarter of the Twentieth Century innovatively takes its plot from Homer’s Odyssey while updating the action in a modern setting? Or one might ask, also of the professoriate during cocktail hour, what thinker first articulated the principle of escalation, usually attributed to Herman Kahn, and who, before 1910, described an aerial terror-attack on New York City? The bafflement of the literature and political science faculties would likely be complete because today almost no one reads one of the most popular British writers of the first half of the just-completed century. These questions implicate Wells’ prophetic vision of global strategic conflict, The War in the Air (1906). Whereas in The War of the Worlds, the hostile agency, actually inhuman, arrives on earth from another planet, in The War in the Air, dear old humanity rises to the role of its own devil. In particular, haphazard adoptions of new technology put unforeseen strains on social, political, and economic arrangements that reflect the folkways of an earlier age. Old habits, stubbornly maintained, prove inadequate to developing circumstances until a type of cultural schizophrenia occurs. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” as a noteworthy Irish poet with a prophetic turn of mind would later write. Wells was quite as vatic and clairvoyant as any poet.

The first sentence of The War in the Air is, “This here progress… it keeps on.” Tom Smallways, the protagonist’s elder brother, mutters the thought, a bit of non-committal, vaguely skeptical commentary from a bewildered soul representing a vestige of feudal mentality that has not, and perhaps cannot, keep up with changes in the mode of life. Bert Smallways, Wells’ working-class substitute for a Homeric hero, grasps his brother’s limitation dimly.

It's All About Them

The Melancholia of the middle classes

 

Lars von Trier’s new film brilliantly teases out the link between the rot of the bourgeois mind and the rise of apocalyptic fantasies.

By Brendan O’Neill

It is an unwritten law of modern moviemaking that the more realistic-looking the apocalypse becomes, the less believable it is. Films like The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 may have bombarded our eyes with a CGI-fuelled glimpse into the end of days, but they were far too daft to make an impact on our hearts and minds. Never had watching the obliteration of mankind felt so tepidly unmoving.

Melancholia, directed by Dogme badboy turned darling of the European arthouse, Lars von Trier, is different. It eschews the big-bucks bulldozing of major cities in favour of showing the apocalypse play out amongst a dysfunctional upper middle-class family in a remote mansion in some unnamed country. And, as bizarre as it may sound, the end result is a properly gripping drama, which tells us a hundred times more about contemporary apocalypitis, about our End Times obsession, than any Hollywood film has managed.

The genius of Melancholia is that it draws a direct link between the soullessness of the modern bourgeois existence and the flourishing of fantasies about the end of the world. Indeed, the apocalypse in the movie is inseparable from the existential disarray of its assorted vulgar characters. It seems almost to be a physical manifestation of the intellectual and bodily lethargy of the lead character in particular - Justine (Kirsten Dunst), a pretty, well-off, cushily employed woman who has just got hitched to a man who looks like one of the hunks from True Blood (Alexander Skarsgård), yet who is inexplicably unhappy. As everyone keeps saying to her, with increasing levels of bemusement, ‘You should be happy’.

In Part 1 of the film, titled ‘Justine’, we watch as Justine survives being the bride in the bourgeois wedding from hell. Skating perilously close to parody, von Trier gives us a mad collection of posh creeps and sexual weirdos. Justine’s dad, for example, played by John Hurt, is obsessed with buxom women called Betty. It’s hard to work out who’s the most obnoxious character: Justine; her mother, played by Charlotte Rampling, who is so wantonly icy she makes the Ice Queen of Narnia look like St Bernadette; or Justine’s brother-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland), who I think is meant to symbolise Capitalism, because all he talks about his how much filthy lucre he has.

It is during Justine’s loveless wedding that we first see Melancholia, a planet that has been hidden behind the sun for eons but which is now on the move. At first, the characters mistake the faint red entity in the nighttime sky for a star, but as the film progresses we discover that it is in fact a planet, vastly bigger than Earth, and heading our way. It’s no coincidence that this celestial object makes itself visible on the evening of Justine’s nuptials - because its progress, even the name that mankind will shortly give it, mirrors her own state of mind. Just as Justine’s loss of joie de vivre is puzzling, so is the sudden appearance of this long-lost gigantic orb.

Part 2 of the film, titled ‘Claire’, focuses on Justine’s sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg). A smart and optimistic sort, and the mother of a young son, Claire wants to live, and thus sees the potential collision between Melancholia and Earth as something terrible. Justine, by contrast, welcomes it, even discovering a new lease of life, one perversely based on her fervent hope that all life might soon be extinguished. ‘Life on Earth is evil’, she tells Claire, as casually as… well, as casually as your average environmentalist will these days denounce the hubris of humankind. Melancholia seems to grow or shrink, move closer to or farther from Earth, depending on whose mood is stronger: hopeful Claire’s or bitter Justine’s.

In intimately tying up End Times with the moodiness of a spoilt rich girl who is massively down in the dumps and seems to be developing ME (that’s what her lethargy mostly brings to mind), von Trier taps into a profound truth about modern-day apocalyptic miserabilism: its origins lie less in real likely events than in the rot of the bourgeois mind and body politic.

All of today’s frequent fretting about the demise of days - or ‘global warming’, ‘peak oil’, ‘the tipping point’, to give it some of its deceptively secularist monikers - likewise springs from the existential crises of influential sections of society. It is decadent, self-pitying bourgeois thinkers and activists, middle-class miserabilists, real-life Justines, who have fashioned the idea that we are heading towards certain doom, and in every single instance it is their own inner turmoil that has led them to embrace such fiery fantasies. Just as Melancholia seems to bulge and hum in tune with Justine’s moral self-immolation, so today’s warnings about climatic catastrophe always reveal tonnes more about campaigners’ narcissistic angst than they do about what will happen to Earth and us in 2020 or 2050 or whenever.

Sometimes, the sons and daughters of the well-off and well-connected will unwittingly let slip that their apocalypitis is All About Them. So the unfathomably wealthy green David de Rothschild says he first got serious about climate-change campaigning during a jolly to the North Pole, when ‘I felt like nothing more than a speck of dust on the endless horizon’. Franny Armstrong, director of the green ‘documentary’ The Age of Stupid, admits that for someone like her, ‘a member of the MTV generation’, it’s almost a relief that climate change has helped to make life ‘so much more meaningful than what was planned’. Recently, a bevy of implacably middle-class young hacks were taken on a freebie trip to the Arctic by a green group, and all of them dutifully filed newspaper columns about their Damascene conversions to green apocalypse-fretting, because ‘there’s nothing like a glacier crumbling into the sea in front of your eyes’ to remind you that the end of the world is nigh, intoned one.

Just as von Trier’s wayward planet of Melancholia seems to mould itself around Justine’s moods, so today’s climate-change hysteria always seems to encapsulate at-sea rich kids’ feeling that life is losing its point and their view of people (Other People, that is) as dirty and dangerous. In one of the more controversial scenes in the movie, Justine writhes naked and with undisguised glee in the nighttime light cast by Melancholia upon Earth. But is that really such a weird image at a time when, day in, day out, we’re snowballed with eco-porn about coming floods and storms of locusts written by people who clearly get some kind of kick from doom-dredging? It is tres amusant that Europe’s cultural elite is heaping praise upon von Trier’s film (even if much of it is deserved), because this movie looks to me like a sometimes stinging exploration of the cultural elite’s own superbly narcissistic habit of magicking up ‘coming apocalypses’ which always seem perfectly to reflect their own fears and prejudices and desperation for some Day of Judgement momentum in their increasingly purposeless lives.

The final 10 minutes of Melancholia contain some of the best special effects I’ve ever seen, way more subtle yet far more believable than the end-of-world fare dished up in apocalyporno films like 2012. The intense noise and oppressive growth of Melancholia (the cinema I was in felt like it was shaking) will nearly convince you that life as we know it has just ended - and that it’s all down to a bourgeois princess’s desire for doom, her loathing of ‘life on Earth’.

Out of Control

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Travesty

By P. Hitchen

In a minute, I will say why the new film of  'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' is absolutely unforgivably awful, giving full details. But first I will give some background (and those who don’t want to have the plot spoiled can safely leave off reading here).

When John le Carre (David Cornwell) first began to write about the secret world, I was among millions who were overwhelmed by the power of his writing.

These books were thrillers, but also thrillingly potent ‘state of the nation’ novels about the decay of a country , the doubts of its governing class, the illusions of greatness which still clouded the minds of so many.

He knew exactly how his people spoke. He was a trained listener, and his conversations in dusty Whitehall attics, basements registries, safe-houses, committee rooms and clubs are so spot on that you can hear them in your head (though I should add that he cannot do male-female relationships).

I reckon he gained his amazing powers of observation during the alarming, chaotic, hilarious and tragic childhood which he more-or-less describes in ‘A Perfect Spy’, which I suspect is as near to his autobiography as we are going to get.

I have always loved his use of the word ‘actually’ in conversation. He had spotted that when a British public servant employed this word, he was (actually) saying ‘Oh, shut up, you blasted fool’.  It has gone now, and Mr Cornwell’s continued use of this device in some later books rings false, rather like the extraordinarily formal speeches which P.D.James gives some of her modern characters.

In those days, when someone ended a statement with ‘actually’,  it was a very bad sign, as it is now when an American official addresses you as ‘Sir!’ (when this happens, freeze).

His bottomless scorn for deluded sorts who could not see how much we had declined is savagely expressed in ‘The Looking Glass War’, a book so sad and full of rage that is painful to read decades after its targets retired and went to their graves.

‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold’, likewise drawn from the life, explores the matching cynicism of East and West, and first introduces us to Cornwell’s conviction that a country’s spy services are microcosms of its whole society, and that there is an alarming equivalence between the secret services of East and West. There’s some truth in this. Much of the Cold War was a choreographed dance in which both sides told their peoples that things were worse than they were. But it was not as true as Mr Cornwell thinks it is, in my view. It is this conviction which has gradually turned him into a rather silly anti-American and which has made several of his more recent books disappointing and flat. I still buy and read them. But only once.

Whereas I could not say how many times I have read ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’, or seen the superb film which was based on it. Or ‘The Looking-Glass War’. As for what is in some ways my favourite, ‘A Small Town in Germany’, if I had a long journey to undertake, I’d pick up my tatty old copy of it and read it with joy yet again - holding my breath as the long-jammed lift ascends from the basement with its cargo of unwanted memories. It’s not in the Smiley sequence and is only marginally about spying. But it is marvellous about British embassies, diplomatic dinners, British decline, the aristocracy, the failed hopes of 1945 and the black German past. Mr Cornwell is that very rare thing in modern Britain, someone who knows and likes Germany and understands it. I often wonder if he privately thinks this book is his masterpiece.

Without feathers

Midnight in Woodyland

by Christian Toto

If you thought Woody Allen waxed poetic about New York City on film, wait until you settle into your seat to see Midnight in Paris.

Allen’s latest effort, hastily dubbed a return to form by his gooey admirers, is a love letter to the City of Light. It also sees fit to mock Republicans, tea partiers, and anyone who thinks having a mistress might be unethical.

Watching a new Allen movie is akin to seeing the artist’s psyche laid bare. We know too much about the off-screen Allen, from his morally repugnant romance with then-girlfriend Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter to his support for admitted child rapist Roman Polanski.

It puts his movies in a less flattering light. And, frankly, Allen’s current projects can’t measure up to his older, better films.

In Midnight in Paris, Owen Wilson plays a flustered screenwriter named Gil visiting Paris with his fiancee, Inez (Rachel McAdams).

Gil is entranced by everything Paris has to offer, but he really longs to be in the Paris of the 1920s, a time when some of the greatest writers in history roamed the streets.

“I’m a Hollywood hack who never gave literature a real shot until now,” he wails.

One drunken night, a vintage car drives up to Gil and its passengers insist he hop in. A few minutes later Gil is hobnobbing with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and swapping stories with Ernest Hemingway.

Gil’s initial shock of being next to his literary idols quickly turns to merriment. Why question the time space continuum when you can pester Hemingway for writing tips?

The next day Gil finds himself back in modern day Paris along with his unpleasant fiancée, but every night he makes an excuse to revisit the city block where that magical car escorted him back in time. And, sure enough, the car keeps reappearing right on schedule.

But can Paris’ romanticized past deliver a meaningful future for Gil? And will he find true love with Picasso’s current squeeze (Marion Cotillard, who delivers the most enchanting performance in the movie)?

Midnight in Paris begins like a tourist video, with Allen rotating a series of static shots of the city in action. Yawn. The pedestrian start would be entirely forgivable if that old Allen spark were soon to follow.

From Marcel Duchamp to what ?

Where Have All the Paintings 

Gone?

"A cleaner (janitor) at a London gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emanual Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm gallery on Wednesday morning."

by Leo Segedin 

Anyone who has read about or visited exhibitions which survey the latest trends in contemporary art, or who has read reviews of recent gallery exhibitions in NY art galleries in the New Yorker, might conclude that artists are no longer making paintings. If the 2008 Whitney Museum's Biennial - advertised as "the most important survey of the state of contemporary art in the United States today" - is any indication, paintings now exist only as part of installations. Installations in this exhibition were made of such materials as plywood, mirrors, Plexiglas, metallic paper, drywall, and found fabric. Since as late as the middle 1960s, a national exhibit would have consisted of almost nothing but oil paintings and, perhaps, a few carved, cast or constructed sculptures made of wood, stone or metal, obviously, great changes have occurred in the contemporary art world during the last four decades.
Here are descriptions of some of the artworks in the 2008 Whitney Biennial from an article by Gillian Sneed reviewing the exhibition.

Patrick Hill's constructivist Between, Beneath, Through, Against combines constructivist slabs of glass and concrete embedded with fabric, while the wood, Plexiglas, and metallic paper constructions of Alice Konitz recall Bauhaus furniture design. William Cordova's wood beam structure based on the footprint of the house where two Black Panthers leaders were killed in a Chicago police raid in 1969. Lisa Sigal's The Day Before yesterday and the Day After Tomorrow composed of drywall, wallpaper, house paint and plaster combine painting, sculpture and installation practices Mike Rottenberg's a kind of rickety wooden chicken coop structure containing several monitors playing Cheese, a film synthesizing Rapunzel with farm imagery including long-haired milk maids, goats, cows, chickens and other farm animals.