philosophy in film

Tom Ripley. Yep, that Tom Ripley. The talented one. Only situated now in the world as it was back in 1960. But still no less cunning and duplicitous. There’s nothing he will not stoop to in order to secure his own advantage. Nothing.

After all, why, as a result of the fortuity that is birth should one guy have access to millions while another so much less fortunate in that regard has to struggle to make ends meet month in and month out. How moral can that be? For example, in the grand scheme of things? And Phillipe did fuck Tom out of $5,000 dollars. Back then a small fortune. Besides, he sometimes treats him like shit. Like a pet dog. Or a servant.

Some things are just much easier to rationalize than others.

He even makes it all into a game of sorts. He all but lays out his plan to kill Philippe and assume his identity. Philippe plays along. Right up to the point where Tom sticks a knife in his chest.

But now he has to pull off the rest of it: his voice, signature, passport etc… And some folks are not as easily fooled as others. For example, Freddy.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers had to fake the ending.

IMDb

Author Patricia Highsmith, on whose novel “Plein soleil” was based, expressed satisfaction with the film, which she called “very beautiful to the eye and interesting for the intellect,” and with Alain Delon’s performance as Tom Ripley. She was, however, disappointed with the film’s ending, calling it “a terrible concession to so-called public morality.”

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Noon
trailer: youtu.be/IZ3Yr58P1UM

PURPLE NOON [Plein Soleil] 1960
Written and directed René Clément

Described as, “NOT your grandmother’s Scrabble game.” Not even close. This is a film about competitive Scrabble. In other words, the folks here are obsessed not only with the game itself but with perfecting ways in which to win the North American Championship.

Like, say, memorizing all the words the folks in charge of these things allow to be used in competitive play.

These guys spend hours and hours and hours and hours doing this thing.

But this sort of film really wouldn’t work unless the filmmakers zeroed in on the really weird players. There is just something about them that has less to do with Scrabble than the way their brains are wired…wired, well, different from ours.

So are the words used. You can peruse the game boards at the competitive level and barely recognize any of them. Weird and obscure words that really do exist but are hardly ever actually used in the course of, say, living your life.

Also, these matches are timed. You start out with 25 minutes. Go past that and your points start to tumble.

And don’t ever expect to get rich here. Back in 2004 when the documentary came out the biggest prize at the biggest tournament of them all was $25,000. Though you did get to appear on the Today show. Most of the lesser tournaments pay out at less than a $1,000. Still, one can only try to imagine what these guys would put themselves through if the top prizes were closer to 6 figures.

The thing about Scrabble of course is the mysterious realtionship between skill and luck. There are all sorts of things you can do to get better at it. But if you keep drawing shitty tiles you ain’t going to win.

Bingo!

Here are the current Scrabble game records if you want to dive into it headfirst yourself:
scrabbleplayers.org/w/Records

IMDb

The last line in the credits reads “This film is rated 1900” - a reference to the National Scrabble Association rating system (1700 and above is considered an expert rating; typically only elite players get to 1900 and up).

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Wars
trailer: youtu.be/kL4UfA6wUuw

WORD WARS: TILES AND TRIBULATIONS ON THE SCRABBLE CIRCUIT [2004]
Directed by Eric Chaikin, Julian Petrillo

[b]Scrabble player: You see, in this game you can beat God if you have the right tiles.

…

Narrator: The game you are about to see is not your grandmother’s Scrabble. Unless your grandmother knows all the Q without U words and can anagram Eric Clapton into narcoleptic.

…

Joel: With me I do have to see the letters. But I visualize them floating around in a jumble in front of me…like just out in the air. Then they somehow just sort themselves out. Am I a genius? No, I don’t think I am. I have just developed one skill beyond what most people would dream of. But it is not a skill that most people would pay you to develop.

…

Stefan: With a lot of these Scrabble players when they say they haven’t been studying it means they have been doing nothing but studying. They’ve got like different places in their brain where they study British words and the American words. It’s an almost unbelievably impossible task.

…

Marlon: Word meanings are absolutely useless in the Scrabble environment. When I was going through writing down the words I did not know, I started with definitions but when you begin to read the definitions if you are sane at all it will drive you slowly insane.

…

Jan Dixon: There has never been more than 6 women in the top 50 players, and there has been as few as 3. The theory is that the men are always a little more competitive, a little bit more of their ego is riding on it. A lot men, if they’ve got that strong ego and they can’t maintain that level, they quit playing.

…

Joe: In 1978 the Scrabble dictionary was published for the first time. It dawned on me that if I get in on this it is going to be really big. I can go to the top. I took a job as a night watchman and started to study Scrabble 4 or 5 hours a night. So when I won I felt the universe was telling me what to do and I was doing it.

…

Matt: People are so pathetic. I mean I want to have a good life but beyond that I don’t give a fuck what happens to this planet. I mean blowing up is too good for this planet. People should just suffer, suffer, suffer. I’m still trying to work it out so that I’ll be the one causing most of the suffering.

…

John Williams [director of the National Scrabble Association]: To end controversies the official Scrabble words dictionary was created. Originally using the top five dictionaries of North America. The offensive word controversy – the “cleansing of the dictionary” – was the worst experience I have gone through…A Holocaust survivor was playing Scrabble. He happened to notice the word “Jew” as a verb and just went berzerk.

…

John Williams: What about “dickhead”? What about “putz”? Then we got to words like “tup”. Tup means to have intercourse with a sheep. I was in a meeting with Hasbro and someone said he was looking in the list of words and I noticed the word tup was in there. I said that it meant for a ram to have intercourse with a sheep not a couple of farm boys.[/b]

Solution? They created two dictionaries. One for the “family” and the other for tournament play.

[b]Marlon: “Bemeant”? That has no goddamn business being a word.

…

Marlon [after exchanging five tiles – A,A,A,E,A – for five new ones – A,A,A,E,I]: Shit happens? Is that the answer, shit happens? Why does it have to happen to me, the broke motherfucker.[/b]

If he had won the game he would have been contending for the $25,000. Instead, he finished 8th and won $800.

There are white women who will talk about their hair. And then there are black women who will talk about their hair. Not necessarily the same thing at all.

But let’s be blunt. In today’s world lots and lots and lots of black women want to be able to talk about their hair as though they were white women. Or so that is what Chris Rock sometimes seems to be saying here.

Just try to imagine the reaction in the United States of America if next week Michelle Obama went out in public sporting a great big Afro? Come on, we all know that ain’t gonna happen. Or we are pretty darn certain it won’t.

Almost all celebrity black woman have “white hair”. And they spend a small fortune [and endless hours] maintaining it week in and week out.

For me, all this revolves around the “beauty industry”, which I deem to be part and parcel of a shallow, narcissistic culture in which the focus is always on the surface of things. It’s all bullshit to me. But black women seem to have been particularly suckered into all this. Over and again there seem to be women here who practically go bankrupt paying for their hair.

I think in part the message here is just that: that black women have been sold a bill of goods about their hair. That, in other words, they have been duped into buying into the idea that their own natural hair is inferiour to “white” hair. The racism here is just kind of hard to miss. But then there is the simply surreal journey of hair from India to, say, Los Angeles. You have to see it to believe it. From God to gold. Yet Indian hair itself comes from folks of color. Their faces are brown but their hair is white!

Or maybe it’s just me and my own prejudices about hair. Personally, I can’t stand the so-called “big hair look”. And it’s everywhere here.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Hair_(film
trailer: youtu.be/1m-4qxz08So

GOOD HAIR [2009]
Directed by Jeff Stilson

[b]Chris Rock: These are my daughters, Lola and Zahra, the most beautiful girls in the world. And even though I tell them they’re beautiful every single day, sometimes it’s just not enough. Just yesterday, Lola came into the house crying and said, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” Gee, I wonder how she came up with that idea?

…

Nia Long: Well, there’s always this sort of pressure within the black community, like, “Oh, if you have good hair, you’re prettier or better than the brown-skin girl that wears the Afro or the dreads or the natural hairstyle.” The whiter, the brighter the better. And that’s a thing that causes great disscension within the black community and with black women.

…

Bernard Brooner: With certain products blacks index triple what the white market does. We’re 12% of the population, but we buy 80% of the hair.

…

Scott Julion [hair stylist]: If you went under the counter in a black woman’s bathroom, she’s got about thirty or forty bottles of different things.

…

Chris: Relaxer. The closest thing we have to a nap antidote. For all you white people out there that don’t know what it is, you name a black woman, any black woman, no matter how famous or infamous, they’ve either had their hair relaxed, or they are having their hair relaxed now. And a lot of black men too.

…

Chris: How old were you when you first got your relaxer?
Maya Angelou: Oh god. I was about seventy.
Chris: Seventy? You went your whole life…
Maya: Not my whole life, I’m still alive!

…

The “burn” of the “creamy crack”:

T-Pain: The burn of a perm is, I think, the most excruciating burn. I think it is hotter than fire.
Al Sharpton: Especially the first time. I mean, the first time you feel like your whole skull is on fire, and why are you doing this?
Ice-T: If you have maybe a pimple or something in your scalp, and that stuff gets in, it’ll start to burn. But usually if you’re trying to relax your hair, it’s kind of like a torture session. It’s like you want it to be as straight as possible, so you feel it burning, but you be like, “Just a little longer. Just a little longer. Just a little longer. WASH IT OUT!”
Dr. Maclin-Carroll: The burning of the skin, the stripping, you know, the oozing, the weeping, all the things that go along with stripping that superficial epidermis off the skin.
Andre Harrell: You can get a burn and scabs around your head because it is suppose to take the knottiness out of your hair…but if you leave it in too long you just get nappy scab. You are left just walking around twisted with these scabs on the front of your head.[/b]

Then Chris finds a chemist to tell the world just how ghastly sodium hydroxide can be to the human body. Both inside and out.

[b]The tumbling tumbleweave:

Ice-T: I think the horrific part of the hair thing was when I started to find out, you know, what they was doing. You know, because it was a mystery early, and then I was like, okay, if it’s a wig, do they take it off? They’re like, No. How’s it stay on then, glue? Sometimes, they said, and then they sew it. They sew it to what I asked? It was like a secret society…[/b]

And these women can sit in the chair at the beauty parlor for 6 to 8 hours. And the cost? From $1,000 to $5,000 or more.

[b]Actor: I’m famous for switching my weaves once every month 'cause I get bored.
Chris: Is that $18,000 a year?
Actor: Yeah, about that.

…

Woman [to Chris]: Throughout my life I’ve spent over $150,000 on weaves.

…

Chris [at the Bronner Hair Show]: It may be all about looking good for the hair show contestants, but it’s all about cash for the 1,800 hair booth vendors.

…

Chris [at the show]: You guys are the heads of the Black Owned Beauty Supplier Association.
BOBSA head: Most of the black owned suppliers have already sold their companies to various white owned companies like Revlon and L’Oreal.
Chris: Do black people own anything in this room?
BOBSA head: We are a cluster of black manufacturers. And these two rows and this row here are black entrepreneurs.
Chris: So in this whole convention, only two rows are owned by black people? Most of it is…what?
BOBSA head: Most of it is, I think, Asian.
Chris: Is it hard for black people to get into the black hair business?
BOBSA head: Yes, yes. It is very hard.[/b]

Apparently there are only 4 “out of hundreds of companies” in the hair business that are owned by blacks.

Black man: In the black community, the hairdressers are superstars. They are bigger than doctors, lawyers.

Said without a shred of irony.

[b]Chris: In trying to understand the world of black hair, I’ve been all over the world, and I’ve talked to all sorts of people. I’ve seen sodium hydroxide in its rawest form and in the heads of four year old girls. I’ve seen some people pay thousands of dollars for hair and others give it away to God. I’ve learned that the black hair industry generates billions of dollars…mostly for white people and Asians. I’ve talked to the best hairdressers in the country and watched a thrilling hair competition. I’ve seen black women work hard in their own businesses to give other black women straight hair. So what do I tell my daughters? I tell them that the stuff on top of their heads is nowhere near as important as the stuff inside their heads.

…

Ice-T: I just think that women shouldn’t point fingers at other women for whatever they’re doing to enhance their bodies. Other than that, do whatever makes you feel good, because, trust me, if a woman ain’t happy with herself, she going to bring nothing but pain to every-fuckin’-body around her.[/b]

And of course the beauty industry has nothing at all to do with influencing how she comes to think about that.

Before Manifest Destiny finally routed the Indian populations, putting them on reservations there was the American Revolution. But before that came the French and Indian wars. That was the war between England and France to decide who would decide the final fate of the indigenous populations. The French however were very much outnumbered by the British. So they set about forming alliances with the Indians. But the complications went beyond that. There were the American colonists [settlers] with loyalties to the Britsh Crown but loyalties also to their own land…their own famlies. And then there were conflicts that existed within the native tribes…and between the tribes. And the so-called “independents” like Hawkeye. But then the rest is history. As history did in fact unfold.

Of course some folks won’t really have a dog in this fight. And even though the last of the Mohicans is a native American, his son is a white man – and he is the star of the show. A white man raised by the red man. And while this story is based on actual historical events I’m not really sure how literally we can take this part.

But what we see clearly is the manner in which each individual derives his or her conviction and motivation from the rationalizations entangled in the lives they have lived. Philosophy here is just a leap from one side to the other. And where it lands is on one pile of assumptions rather than another. Race, gender, ethnicity, class. And honor among gentleman. Just some of the artificial barriers we set up between us. Rationalizations used to disguise the fact that in the end it is basically a reflection of political economy. Gobbling up with bigger slices of the pie. And who gets to and who does not. “Might is right” as it were.

IMDb

[b]By most accounts, there were on average at least 20 takes for each set-up. Such lengthy shootings (and the ensuing costs) would account for 20th Century Fox sending a Rep to do nothing except stand behind Mann and say, “That’s enough Michael, move on.”

Daniel Day-Lewis is well known for going to extremes in preparation for his roles. For this film he lived in the wilderness where his character might have lived, hunting and fishing and living off the land for several months prior to shooting.

Many long nights were spent filming the siege scenes. Due to the expansive area involved, loudspeakers were installed around the battlefield and fort so directions could be easily given to the hundreds of cast and crew. One night after many long hours, Mann was heard to shout over the speakers, “What’s that orange light? Turn out that orange light!” After a pause another voice (an A.D.?) came over the speakers stating, “That’s the SUN, Michael.”[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_o … (1992_film
trailer: youtu.be/aMZtQhhS14w

THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS [1992]
Directed by Michael Mann

[b]British Officer: You call yourself a patriot, and loyal subject to the Crown?
Hawkeye: I do not call myself subject to much at all.

…

Heyward: I didn’t experience anything so surprising from Bristol to Albany as what I witnessed here today.
Webb: And what is that?
Heyward: The Crown “negotiating” the terms of service?
Webb: I know. One has to give Americans “reasons” and make agreements to get them to do anything at all. Tiring, isn’t it? But that’s the way of it here.
Heyward (tightly): I thought British policy is ‘Make the World…England’, sir.

…

Webb: Kindly inform Major Heyward that he has little to fear from this General Marquis de Montcalm in the first place; and scant need of a colonial militia in the second because the French haven’t the nature for war. Their Gallic laziness combines with their Latinate voluptuousness with the result that they would rather eat and make love with their faces than fight.

…

Heyward: You there, Scout! We must rest soon, the women are tired.
Magua: No, two leagues, better water. We stop there.
Heyward: No, we’ll stop in the glade just ahead. When the ladies are rested, we will proceed. Do you understand?
Magua [speaking Huron]: Magua understands that the white man is a dog to his women. When they are tired, he puts down his tomahawk to feed their laziness.
Heyward: Excuse me, what did you say?
Magua: Magua said…I understand English, very well.

…

Heyward: There is a war on. How is it you are headed west?
Hawkeye: Well, we kinda face to the north and real subtle-like turn left.

…

Heyward: I thought all our colonial scouts were in the militia. The militia is fighting the French in the north.
Hawkeye: I ain’t your scout. And we sure ain’t in no damn militia.

…

Cora: Though they are strangers, they are at least entitled to a Christian burial!
Hawkeye (shaking his head): Let us go, miss.
Cora: I will not. I have seen the face of war before, Mr. Poe, but never war made on women and children. And almost as cruel is your indifference.
Hawkeye: Miss Munro. They are not strangers…And they stay as they lay!

…

Cora: Why didn’t you bury those people?
Hawkeye: Anyone lookin’ to pick up our trail, would see it as a sign of our passing …
Cora: You knew them.
[he looks at her and nods]
Cora (stiffly): You were acting for our benefit. And I apologize. I misunderstood you.
Hawkeye: Well that is to be expected. My father warned me…
Cora: Your “father”?
Hawkeye: Chingachgook. He warned me about people like you. He said do not try to make them understand you. That is because they are a breed apart and they make no sense…

…

Cora: Why were those people living in this defenseless place?
Hawkeye: After seven years indentured service in Virginia, they headed out here 'cause the frontier’s the only land available to poor people. Out here, they’re beholden to none. Not living by another’s leave.

…

Hawkeye: John Cameron’s cabin. We come upon it last night. Burned out. Everyone murdered. And it was Ottawa. They’re allied to the French.
Munro: Yes, Mr. Poe? So?
Hawkeye: It was a war party. It means they’re on the attack up and down the frontier. People here – Mohawks, settlers – have family out there.

…

Heyward: Things were done. Nobody was spared.
Munro: Those considerations are subordinate to the interests of the Crown. A terrible feature of war here. Just keep your eye on our duty: to defeat France.[/b]

Everyone has to fit him or herself into this tangled web of ways and means, means and ends. But, for some, everything will always be personal.

[b]Cora: Justice? If that’s justice than the sooner French guns blow the English out of America the better it will be for the people here!
Munro: You do not know what you’re saying, girl!
Cora: Yes I do, I know exactly what what I’m saying, and if it is sedition, than I am guilty of sedition too!

…

Cora [to Hawkeye]: The whole world is on fire, isn’t it?

…

Chingachgook: The frontier moves with the sun and pushes the Red Man of these wilderness forests in front of it until one day there will be nowhere left. Then our race will be no more, or be not us.
Hawkeye: That is my father’s sadness talking.
Chingachgook: No, it is true. The frontier place is for people like my white son and his woman and their children. And one day there will be no more frontier. And men like you will go too, like the Mohicans. And new people will come, work, struggle. Some will make their life. But once, we were here. [/b]

Almost as though he could see right into the future. And how noble.

He is a monk. But he is also an iconoclast. And since he is a character created by Umberto Eco you can expect him to probe the boundaries of religion [and God] from a considerably more astute intellectual vantage point. Recognizing however that even the most subtle of minds will always get stuck here. There is, after all, only so far into these mysteries that the mind can go. And, so far, that seems to include every mind there has ever been. Meaning of course every mind that I have come across.

It is the case that throughout the history of the Catholic church [and all of the others I suspect] there has always been this debate regarding the role that wealth plays [or ought not to play] in its teachings. Even today there are rumors of the new Pope going out at night among the flock and givng money to the poor. But let’s face it, the preponderance of ecclesiastics have more than made their peace with their capitalist brethren. Wealth is simply rationalized.

But back then capitalism was still just on the horizon.

And then there is the role of reason. Obviously, with respect to God one could be charged with being too reasonable. And especially back then. But throughout the march of history that line is always shifting back and forth. As was apparently the line regarding…laughter? It seems the Good Book is bereft of instances where Christ had laughed. But, as Willam is quick to point out, it does not strictly forbid it either. In other words, for all we know Christ may well have chuckled from time to time. Just don’t suggest this out loud.

As for the sins of the flesh? Oh yeah.

Look for Aristotle’s Second Book of Poetics. If you can find it.

IMDb

[b]“The Girl” (Valentina Vargas) is the only female character in the film.

For the wordless scene in which the girl seduces Adso, Jean-Jacques Annaud didn’t explain to Christian Slater what his co-star Valentina Vargas would be doing so as to elicit a more authentic performance from him.

Jean-Jacques Annaud admitted to casting the ugliest actors he could get because he wanted the characters to appear “real”, based on the men in the village where he lived.

Nowadays, according to the director, the only place where manuscripts and books are made with the same techniques and materials depicted in the movie is the abbey of Praglia on Padua (Veneto, Italy). It takes 6 months to a year to create a single page. When filming on the Eberbach monastery, the German police was assigned to protect the manuscripts and books used on the movie. Even with these measures, a key page was stolen; it’s the one that appears on a close up on the desk of the missing monk, showing a capital “B”. The shot used in the movie was made a year after this incident, the time that it took to make a new page, two weeks before the release.

Bernardo Gui is a historical person who was indeed an inquisitor at the time the story is set - he was quite a hard-working one too, sentencing some 900 people and executing at least 42 of them during his 15 years in office. The real Bernardo Gui, however, was not killed as depicted in the movie - he died four years after the events of the film, in 1331, at the castle of Laroux.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose_(film
trailer: youtu.be/7-yYJgpQ-CE

THE NAME OF THE ROSE [1986]
Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud

[b]William [to Adso]: That is Ubertino de Casale…one of the great spiritual leaders of our Order. Come. Many revere him as a living saint…but others would have him burnt as a heretic. His book on the poverty of the clergy is not favorite reading in the papal palaces. So, now he lives in hiding, like an outlaw.

…

William [watching peasants clamor among the trash thrown from the Abbey]: Another generous donation by the Church to the poor.

…

Adso: Suicide? Do you think that this is a place abandoned by God?
William: Have you ever known a place where God would have felt at home?

…

Adso: And what was the word you both kept mentioning?
William: Penitenziagite.
Adso: What does it mean?
William: It means that the hunchback undoubtedly was once a heretic. Penitenziagite was a rallying cry of the dolcinites.
Adso: Dolcinites? Who were they, master?
William: Those who believed in the poverty of Christ.
Adso: So do we Franciscans.
William: But they also declared that everyone must be poor, so they slaughtered the rich. Ha! You see, Adso, the step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief.
Adso [looking at the Hunchback]: Well, then, could he not have killed the translator?
William: No. No, fat bishops and wealthy priests were more to the taste of the dolcinites, hardly a specialist of Aristotle.

…

Jorge: Laughter is a devilish wind which deforms, uh, the lineaments of the face and makes men look like monkeys.
William: Monkeys do not laugh. Laughter is particular to men.
Jorge: As is sin. Christ never laughed.
William: Can we be so sure?
Jorge: There is nothing in the Scriptures to say that he did.
William: And there’s nothing in the Scriptures to say that he did not.

…

Adso: Master? Have you ever been in love?
William: In love? Yeah, many times.
Adso: You were?
William: Yes, of course. Aristotle, Ovid, Vergil, Thomas Aquinas…
Adso: No, no, no. I meant with a…
William: Oh. Ah. Are you not confusing love with lust?
Adso: Am I? I don’t know. I want only her own good. I want her to be happy. I want to save her from her poverty.
William: Oh, dear.

…

William [after finding the secret room of books in the tower]: How many more rooms? Ah! How many more books? No one should be forbidden to consult these books freely.
Adso: Perhaps they are thought to be too precious, too fragile.
William: No, it’s not that, Adso. It’s because they often contain a wisdom that is different from ours and ideas that could encourage us to doubt the infallability of the word of God… And doubt, Adso, is the enemy of faith.

…

William: She is already burnt flesh, Adso. Bernardo Gui has spoken: she is a witch.
Adso: But that’s not true, and you know it!
William: I know. I also know that anyone who disputes the verdict of an Inquisitor is guilty of heresy.

…

William: I too was an Inquisitor, but in the early days, when the Inquisition strove to guide, not to punish. And once I had to preside at a trial of a man whose only crime was to have translated a Greek book that conflicted with the Holy Scriptures. Bernardo Gui wanted him condemned as a heretic; I - acquitted the man. Then Bernardo Gui accused me of heresy, for having defended him. I appealed to the Pope. I - I was put in prison, tortured, and… and I recanted.
Adso: What happened then?
William: The man was burned at the stake and I am still alive.

…

The Pope’s representative: Beloved brethren of the Franciscan Order…our Holy Father, the Pope, has authorized me and these, his faithful servants, to speak on his behalf. The question’s not whether Christ was poor but whether the Church should be poor! You, Franciscans, wish to see the clergy renounce its possessions and surrender its richness. The abbeys dissipate their sacred treasures and hand over their fertile acres to the serfs. Thereby depriving the Church of the resources needed to combat unbelievers and wage war on the infidel.[/b]

See…anything can be ratonalized.

William: My venerable brother, there are many books that speak of comedy. Why does this one fill you with such fear?
Jorge: Because it’s by Aristotle.
William [chasing after Jorge who runs with the Second Book of Poetics by Aristotle intending to destroy it]: But what is so alarming about laughter?
Jorge: Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no faith because without fear of the Devil, there is no more need of God.
William: But you will not eliminate laughter by eliminating that book.
Jorge: No, to be sure, laughter will remain the common man’s recreation. But what will happen if, because of this book, learned men were to pronounce it admissable to laugh at everything? Can we laugh at God? The world would relapse into chaos! Therefore, I seal that which was not to be said.

Of course the state’s executioner will be an ordinary man. That makes the story all the more intriguing. The gap between the quotidian and the extraordinary. Things he does from day to day [ho hum] and the things he does on special occasions [snap!]

It also points out the obvious: that any one of us could do it. It only takes a particular sequence of events to unfold in a particular way.

But, let’s face it, while some would do the task and then tell themselves "it’s just a job”, others would relish in it. Over and over again putting another man [and the occasional woman] to death. And being paid to do it! To hear them whimper and plead…frightened out of their wits!!

Pierrepoint however wants only to carry on in the grand tradition of his father and his uncle. Or so it seems. And did he ever. He hung 608 men and women. But that includes the surge of war criminals. 50 a week for a while there. Then he comes back home a local hero. The man who hung the beast of Belsen. But the political winds are changing. And not in his favor.

He was the executioner of Ruth Ellis. She was the subject of the film Dance With a Stranger above. But did he really have to hang his best friend? And did it really unfold as portrayed here?

You can’t help but wonder: What must it be like to know the exact moment that you are going to die? And to know this for hours or days in advance.

IMDb

[b]Despite the title Pierrepoint was not Britain’s last hangman. He retired in the mid 1950s, shortly after executing Ruth Ellis. Britain never had a “last hangman”, as the last two executions before suspension of capital punishment were carried out in different cities at the same time. As the last two people executed were both guilty of the murder of John West, it was decided to carry out sentence at the same time in Aug 1964. In Nov 1965, people were still being sentenced to death.

As per the promo material, and the DVD insert, this film is “based on a true story,” however, it might be more appropriate to describe the film as “based on true events,” since the story is rather liberal with the actual facts of Pierrepont’s, and other character’s lives and circumstances. Big picture, true, small picture, not terribly accurate or precise.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierrepoint_(film
trailer: youtu.be/cPHSw2X22Eg

PIERREPOINT - THE LAST HANGMAN [2005]
Directed by Adrian Shergold

[b]Warden: So what do we do? We exploit it! We get him in here and dropped before he’s had time to recover from the shock, before he can struggle or fight, and before he even knows what’s happening. No sense in prolonging the agony, for him or for you.

…

Warden: The heavier the man, the shorter the drop you give him. The weaker the neck, the shorter the drop. Get it wrong and you’ll pull his head off. Pierrepoint. Male, 24 years old, five foot six, 160 pounds in his clothes.
Pierrepoint: Occupation?
Warden: Manual laborer.
Pierrepoint: A good strong neck. Table says six foot three. I’d give him six eleven.
Warden: So would I. Good.

…

Charlie: Eight hours, 20 minutes, Albert. That’s all the time he has left. Ticking away. He gets involved with some old tart. She pushes him over the edge. He winds up in here waiting for us to come knocking on his door…I wonder if he is looking at his watch.

…

Warden: Fourteeen and a half seconds, Pierrepoint. Quite satisfactory.
Pierrepoint: Thank you, sir. I do try to take pride in my work.

…

Assistant: She did say something didn’t she?
Pierrepoint: Aye. She asked for her God. That’s nothing to do with me. It’s between her and her executioner. When I walk into that cell, I leave Albert Pierrepoint outside. I never mix the two. You have to be clear about the two. People are always wondering whether it’s possible to take a life and it not affect you. Written bloody books on it.
Assistant: What do they say?
Pierrepoint: I don’t know. It’s not me taking their life, is it? It’s the government who wants these people executed, not you or me. That’s the way I see it. I never concern myself with what they’ve done. It doesn’t matter to me.[/b]

You want surreal? All the while he is saying this, he is shown disrobing a woman he just hung. Then he is shown washing her naked body. She is still hanging by the rope with the hood around her head.

[b]Assistant: Why can’t they let the mortuary do this part?
Pierrepoint [while attending to Dorothea Waddingham’s lifeless body]: They wouldn’t take care of her. She paid the price; she’s innocent now.

…

Pierrepoint [to his new assistant]: I’m gonna bust 13 seconds tomorrow, Georgie. That was me father’s average.[/b]

He does: seven and a half seconds.

[b]Assistant at war crimes executions: Lining someone up in your sights, pulling the trigger, well, that’s one thing. But standing with them on the gallows, both knowing what’s going to happen…I think it’s the knowing that is the worst part of it. The absolute certainty that they are going to die. Seeing it in their eyes. Still, it’s like you said. It’s not really us in here, is it?
Pierrepoint: Aye, that’s right, lad.
Assistant: Time for a brew?
Pierrepoint: No, we don’t want to fall behind.

…

Pierrepoint: Do you want to know what I did today? I hanged Tish. James Henry Corbitt, that was his name. You know, we never knew that. He murdered Jessie, you know. One night, he followed her to Liverpool, cheap hotel, his hands around her throat. If he can’t have her, nobody can. Another sad, sordid little story, like all the rest of them. And I just put a rope around his neck and hanged him for it.
[pause]
Pierrepoint: Well, say something. Don’t you want to know about it?
Annie: No.
Pierrepoint: Don’t you want to know what he looked like, what he said? Don’t you want to know what it felt like to take a friend and do that to him?
Annie [shaking her head]: No, what I was going to say was…er…I thought we could start doing flowers, keep a bunch of flowers behind the bar. And…and…what do you think?
Pierrepoint: I’ve done for him, Annie. Don’t you understand? I’ve killed him, and for what? For money. Dirty, bloody money! I looked into his eyes, Annie.
Annie: Stop it, please.
Pierrepoint: He saw me. He thanked me.
Annie: Stop it! We don’t talk about it, Albert. That’s what we said! That’s what we always agreed!
Pierrepoint [exploding]: WELL, I WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT NOW!!
[he opens his ledger of death]
Pierrepoint: Look, here. Of course it was me. It’s been me all along. I’ve done for them. Me. At least they killed in jealousy, haste or passion. What about me? What can I say? I’ve murdered the bloody lot of them. Look. Hundreds of them. Hundreds and hundreds of them…

…

Title card: “The fruit of my experience has this bitter aftertaste…Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.” Albert Pierrepoint, 1974[/b]

As though that were just a small and insignificant thing?

I don’t believe in angels. Not in America or anywhere else. But I know there are any number of folks who don’t…but wish they could. For eample, folks who don’t but have become afflicted with AIDS. And, in particular, back in the 1980s. Back then it was surely one of the most ghastly death sentences that one could ever be burdened with. Lots of folks were afraid to be in the same room with anyone diagnosed as HIV positive…and they had barely begun to acquire and accumulate the medications we have today. So, sure, if you could believe in angels and all that is attached to them, it might give you some consolation, some hope for the future.

In this film, as Harper Pitt points out, “weird stuff happens.” But they are all just devices used to explore the dawn of the AIDS epidemic in an age when reactionaries ruled the roost in Washington. AIDS and Ronald Reagan. Does that ring a bell?

One thing becomes crystal clear. There was no crystal clarity back then when folks were actually coming down with this terrifying new reality in the world. It is was the literal embodiment of the agony of choice in the face of uncertainty. An utterly existential quandary regarding how one ought to live one’s life. It’s the difference between being a deontologist in theory [here for example] and fitting that into the excruciating ambiguities of actual human experience. There are some truly gut wrenching exchanges here throughout the film.

Still, how much more powerful it might have been without all the silly angels and ghosts and ancestors from the past. What really was the point of all that? Part Biblical bullshit and part New Age mumbo jumbo. Maybe it’s all just the butt of a joke but I could have done without it.

The ending was straight out of the liberal lexicon. I can almost appreciate why some reactionaries respond to it as they do.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_in_ … miniseries
trailer: youtu.be/yd5hWnJGsTc

ANGELS IN AMERICA [2003]
Directed by Mike Nichols

[b]Harper [to Mr. Lies]: People are like planets, you need a thick skin.

…

Prior: KS, baby. Lesion number one. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death. I’m a lesionaire. Foreign lesion. The American lesion. Lesionaire’s disease.
Louis: Stop.
Prior: My troubles are lesion.
Louis: Will you stop!
Prior: Don’t you think I’m handling this well? I’m going to die.

…

Louis: Rabbi, what does the Holy Writ say about someone who abandons someone he loves at a time of great need?
Rabbi: Why would a person do such a thing?
Louis: Because he has to. Maybe this person can’t incorporate sickness into his sense of how things are supposed to go. Maybe vomit and sores and disease really frighten him. Maybe he isn’t so good with death.

…

Prior [in drag]: One wants. But one so seldom gets what one wants. Does one? No. One does not. One gets fucked over. One dies at 30. Robbed of decades of majesty.
[throws down his wig]
Prior: Fuck this shit! I look like a corpse. A corpsette. Oh my queen; you know you’ve hit rock-bottom when even drag is a drag.

…

Harper: Who are you? What are you doing in my hallucination?
Prior: Who are you? And I’m not in your hallucination, you’re in my dream.

…

Harper: It’s terrible. Mormons are not supposed to be addicted to anything. I’m a Mormon.
Prior: I’m a homosexual.
Harper: Oh. In my church, we don’t believe in homosexuals.
Prior: In my church, we don’t believe in Mormons.

…

Harper: I don’t understand this. If I didn’t ever see you before, and I don’t think I did, then I don’t think you should be here in this hallucination because in my experience the mind which is where hallucinations come from shouldn’t be able to make anything up that wasn’t there to start with that didn’t enter it from experience from the real world. Imagination can’t create anything new can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions. Am I making sense right now?
Prior: Given the circumstances, yes.
Harper: So when we think we’ve escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.

…

Harper: Sometimes you can see things like how sick you are. Do you see anything about me?
Prior: Yes, you are amazingly unhappy.
Harper: Big deal, you meet a valium addict, you figure out she’s unhappy…that doesn’t count. I want something else. Something surprising.
Prior: Something suprising?
Harper: Yes
Prior: Your husband’s a homo.

…

Mr. Lies [to Harper]: Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.

…

Prior: I usually say, “Fuck the truth,” but mostly, the truth fucks you.

…

Harper: I burned dinner.
Joe: I’m sorry.
Harper: Not my dinner, my dinner was fine. Your dinner. I put it back in the oven and turned everything up as high as it could go and I watched 'til it burned black. It’s still hot, very hot, want it?
Joe: You didn’t have to do that.
Harper: I know, it just seemed like the kinda thing a mentally-deranged sex-starved pill-popping housewife would do.

…

Harper [to Joe]: Are you a homo?

…

Louis: Jews don’t have any clear textual guide to the afterlife. I mean even that it exists…For us it’s not the verdict that count, it’s the act of judgment. That’s why I can never be a lawyer. In court, all that matters is the verdict…It’s the shaping of the law that matters, not its execution. It should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity, gathered, arranged and considered which matters in the end. Not some stamp of salvation or damnation which disperses all the complexity in some satisfying little decision.[/b]

Try to even imagine a legal system derived from all that. And Louis personifies the cold, calculating intellectual. The pedant. The abstractionist.

[b]Louis: Do you love me?
Prior: Yes.
Louis: What if I walked out on this? Would you hate me forever?
Prior [thinks about it, looks at Louis, leans over to kiss him]: Yes.

…

Roy Cohn: AIDS. Homosexual. Gay. Lesbian. You think these are names that tell you who a person sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that.
Henry: No?
Roy Cohn: No. Like all labels they tell you one thing, and one thing only: Where does an individual so identified fit into the food chain, the pecking order? Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will come to the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, a homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men, but really this is wrong. A homosexual is somebody who, in 15 years of trying cannot get a pissant anit-discrimination bill through the city council. A homosexual is somebody who knows nobody and who nobody knows. Who has zero clout. Does this sound like me Henry?

…

Joe: I think we ought to pray. Ask God for help. Ask him together.
Harper: God won’t talk to me. I have to make up people to talk to me.
Joe: You have to keep asking.
Harper: I forgot the question?.. Oh, yeah. God, is my husband a homo?
Joe: Stop it! Stop it! I’m warning you! Does it make any difference that I might be one thing deep within? No matter how wrong or ugly that thing is so long as I have fought with everything I have to kill it? What do you want from me? What do you want from me Harper, more than that? For God’s sake, there’s nothing left. I’m a shell. There’s nothing left to kill. As long as my behaviour is what I know it has to be, decent, correct that alone in the eyes of God.
Harper: No, no, not that. That’s Utah talk, Mormon talk. I hate it, Joe. Tell me, say it.
Joe: All I will say is that I’m a very good man who has worked very hard to become good and you wanna destroy that. You wanna destroy me but I am not gonna let you do that.

…

Harper: I’m gonna have a baby.
Joe Pitt: Liar!
Harper: You liar!.. A baby born addicted to pills. A baby who does not dream but who hallucinates, who stares up at us with big mirror eyes and who does not know who we are.
Joe: Are you really?
Harper: No… Yes… No… Yes… Get away from me. Now we both have a secret.

…

Roy Cohn [to Henry]: I have sex with men. But unlike nearly every other man of whom this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to the White House and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand.

…

Martin Heller: We have a new agenda, and finally, a new leader. They got back the Senate but we have the courts. By the 90s the Supreme Court will be solid Republican appointees, and the federal bench, Republican judges like landmines everywhere. Everywhere they turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Landmine. We’ll get our way on just about everything. Abortion, defense, Central America, family values, a live investment climate…It’s really the end of liberalism, Joe. The end of New Deal socialism. The end of ipso facto secular humanism. The dawning of a genuinely American political personality…modeled on Ronald Wilson Reagan.

…

Martin Heller [to Joe]: It’s the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.
Roy Cohn: Amen.
Martin Heller: But you can almost always live with the consequences.

…

Joe [to Harper coming out of the closet]: My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life. I think I believed that when I met you, I could save you. You, at least, if not myself.

…

Prior [after Louis abandons him]: I hurt all over. I wish I were dead.

…

Louis: I’m dying.
Belize: You’re not dying. You just wish you were.

…

Belize: Look at that heavy sky out there.
Louis: Purple.
Belize: Purple? What kind of a homosexual are you anyway? That’s not purple, Mary, that color out there…is mauve.

…

Roy [explaning to Joe why he wanted Ethel Rosenberg to get the death sentence]: I would have pulled the switch if they let me. Why? Because I hate traitors. I have communists. Was it legal? Fuck legal. Not nice? Fuck nice. The Nation says I’m not nice? Fuck the Nation. Do you wanna be nice? Or you wanna be effective?

…

Prior: I had a wet dream.
Belize: Mmm. The Calvin Klein underwear man?
Prior: No, it was a woman.
Belize: Are you turnin’ straight on me?
Prior: An…unconventional woman!
Belize: Grace Jones?

…

Roy Cohn [referring to his heart]: Tough little muscle. Never bleeds.

…

Belize: This didn’t come from me and I don’t like you but let me tell you a thing or two. They have radiation for you tomorrow, for the sarcoma lesions and you don’t want to let them do that. Radiation will kill your T cells and you don’t have any you can afford to lose. So you tell the doctors no thanks. He won’t want to listen. Persuade him or he’ll kill you.
Roy Cohn: You’re just a fucking nurse. Why should I listen to you over my very qualified, very expensive Wasp doctor?
Belize: He’s not queer, I am.
Roy Cohn: You said thing or two. That’s one.
Belize: I don’t know what strings you pulled to get in on the AZT trials. But watch out for the double blind. They’ll want you to sign something that says they can give you M & Ms instead of the real drug. You’ll die, but they’ll get the kind of statistics they can publish in The New England Journal of Medicine. And you can’t sue them because you signed. If you don’t sign, no pills. So if you have any strings left, pull them. Everyone is put through the double blind and with this time’s against you. You can’t fuck around with placebos.
Roy Cohn: You hate me?
Belize: Yes.
Roy Cohn: So why are you telling me this?
Belize: I wish I knew.
Toy Cohn: You’re a butterfingers spook-faggot nurse. I think you have little reason to wanna help me.
Belize: Consider it solidarity. One faggot to another.

…

Prior [to Belize after another friend dies from AIDS]: That ludicrous spectacle in there. Just a parody of the funeral of someone who really counted. We don’t. Faggots. We’re just a bad dream the real world is having. And the real world’s waking up.

…

Roy Cohn: The worse thing about being sick in America is that you’re booted out of the parade. Americans have no use for the sick.

…

Louis [to Joe]: The Republican Party. The Republican Party…I mean I hate the Democrats too…but the Republicans…half religious zealots wanting to control every breath every citizen takes and half ego anarchist, libertarian cowboys shrilling for no government.

…

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending. That’s how people change.

…

Belize: You know what your problem is, Louis? Your problem is you’re so full of piping hot crap the mention of your name draws flies.

…

Belize: I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. Nothing but a bunch of big ideas and stories and people dying, and then people like you. The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word “free” to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me.

…

Prior [regarding Joe’s mother]: This is my ex-lover’s lover’s Mormon mother.
Doctor: Even in New York in the '80s, that is strange.

…

Ethel Rosenberg [to a dying Roy Cohn]: I came here to forgive, but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Knowing that I would get to see you die, more terribly than I did. And you are. Cause you’re dying in shit, Roy. Defeated.
[leans in]
Ethel Rosenberg: And you could kill me…but you couldn’t ever defeat me…you never won. And when you die, all anyone will say is, “Better that he had never lived at all.”

…

Roy Cohn: Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you. Don’t be afraid; people are so afraid; don’t be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone… Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.

…

Prior: I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
Hannah: Well that’s a stupid thing to do.

…

Harper: In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.[/b]

A film where all the action revolves around people conversing. So you either find what they are talking about interesting or are somehow able to relate it to your own life. And up to a point you have to either like the characters or dislike them and still find them compelling enough to invest your time in.

Some will and some won’t. And some [like me] are never really able to make up their mind.

The age-old question: What do women want and/or what do men want? Followed closely by what they probably don’t want?

Or the dope question: Is a dope dealer wasting his life? Shouldn’t he be doing something more productive like, say, making “relevant” films?

But then the discussion shifts to…rape. As in did Jon rape Amy back in high school? For example, was it really rape?

Sometimes these things come down to the unequivocal truth. He either did or he did not. But other times they come down to how each person remembers or interprets the event. And sometimes these interpretations become entangled in ulterior motives…or in politics…or in all manner of ambiguity.

I can just imagine all the conflicting reactions to this. And the bottom line is that other than the two of them no one knows what really happened at all. And, again, even then it only comes down to what they think happened…what they remember happening. Or maybe it just comes down to him feeling coerced to apologize ten years later about something he does think he did: rape her.

IMDb

The set is not an actual motel room, as many viewers assumed, but carefully constructed (and designed by Stephen Beatrice) on a sound stage and including many remarkable details, such as the curtain being cut around the air conditioner, and stains on the wall that betray missing pictures.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_(film
trailer: youtu.be/R0TDvYBW41U

TAPE [2001]
Directed by Richard Linklater

[b]Vince [of Leah]: She thinks I have violent tendencies.
Jon: Oh, boy.
Vince: Jon, I never touched her.
Jon: I never said you did.
Vince: Well, she thinks I have, uh, “unresolved issues, which occasionally manifest themselves in potentially violent ways.”
Jon: She’s probably scared.
Vin:ce Oh god, of what? I never threatened her!
Jon: You sometimes present a threatening appearance.
Vince: Dude…we have been going together for three years.
Jon: So what?
Vince: So…I mean, you’d think she would be used to it by now.
Jon: Women these days have no reason to hang around potentially violent guys. It’s not an attractive quality anymore. Too many guys out there with “resolved” violent tendencies.
Vince: Oh, so I’m out of fashion?

…

Jon: Vince, your idea of manhood is putting on Eddie Cochrane and screwing your girl.
Vince: Hey, I’m a simple man.
Jon: Well, it’s not like that anymore. Women want other things.
Vince: Yeah, well, what do they want?
Jon: I don’t know, guys who don’t put their fists through windows, who don’t throw phones across the room…who don’t stalk their girlfriends across 16 states.

…

Jon: Private dope delivery to ex-hippies does not a mature man make, Vince. It’s no different than standing on the corner and selling to teenagers.
Vince: Why are you lecturing me?
Jon: Hey, I’m not lecturing anybody. I’m just pointing a few things out. I think you can do better.
Vince: Better than what?
Jon: Better than–better than pissing your life away.

…

Jon: What is that thing with your bag?

…

Jon: You think I should apologize to her?
Vince: Yeah, why not?
Jon: Look, it wasn’t even date rape. It was something that got a little out of hand.
Vince: I thought you weren’t sure what date rape was.
Jon: I’m sorry, okay?
Vince: Don’t apologize to me.
Jon: I’m not. I’m-- what I’m trying to say…is that 10 years ago, I did something…wrong. And that when I think about it now, the person who did that seems like a complete stranger to me. This dumb, drunk high school senior who thought she was being prudish… and needed some coercion. It was bad. I regret it. But it was a far cry from rape. And I don’t think she’d call it that either.

…

Jon: I remember it because it was a pivotal thing for me. It was one of the first times in my life that I looked at myself objectively and made a conscious decision to try to avoid becoming a certain type of person.

…

Amy: People change. They end up having nothing to say to each other even if they were best friends years before.

…

Amy: So tell me again what you think happened?
Jon: I think…I think I raped you.
Amy: Oh my God! No, you didn’t rape me.
Jon: Yes, I did.
Amy: No, you didn’t.
Jon: Are you trying to make fun of this?
Amy: No.
Jon: Amy, I know what happened.
Amy: Apparently not.
Jon: Yes, I do.
Amy: Says who?
Jon: Me!
Amy: Why?
Jon: Because I just admitted it.
Amy: On what, on the tape?
Jon: Yeah.
Amy: What’s on it?
Jon: It’s me confessing what I did.
Amy: That doesn’t prove you did it.
Jon: Why not?
Amy: Because if no one’s accusing you of anything, there’s no reason to confess. [/b]

How important is it to note that television quiz shows were once [and maybe still are] rigged? Talk about a matter of opinion. And that in part is what this film explores. The extent of their sincerity may be in question, but the folks behind the production of the show in question here [and no doubt others] never really could figure out what the big deal was. It was just television, for Christ sakes. Show business. Geez, did anyone blow a gasket because professional wrestling was bogus? After all, the whole point of commercial television was to enterain the audience. And that simply meant scripting the drama. Just like on all the other shows.

Did they believe this? Yeah, I think some of them were genuinely baffled by the brouhaha…the boos.

But one thing is for sure. This had crony capitalism written all over it. Once the rumors of a fix started to spread, the producers contacted their political partners who pulled the right strings in the judiciary and it was all quashed. And had it not been for the actual integrity and persistence of Dick Goodwin, I suspect I wouldn’t be here typing this. There might still have been a scandal but nothing like the one that unfolded here.

This is also in part about class. But even folks who have it feel the tug from the culture to buy things. And that takes cash. So if someone wants to shovel cash to you under the table that’s, well, tough to resist. Especially for a charming and reasonably handsome intellectual who makes $86 a week. But more important still is the fame he’ll acquire. These programs were the original reality shows. A man or woman could go from virtual obscurity to national celebrity overnight. Even get his picture on the cover of Time magazine.

And then there’s Herb Stempel…

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiz_Show_(film
trailer: youtu.be/oOSnYt9k4kM

QUIZ SHOW [1994]
Directed by Robert Redford

[b]Woman [watching Herb Stempel blabber on and on]: Now there’s a face for radio.

…

Account Guy: Stempel is an underdog. You know, people root for that. It’s a New York thing.
Martin Rittenhome [president of Geritol]: Queens is not New York!

…

Kitner: He’s not hurting sales, is he?
Account guy: Martin just doesn’t think he works.
Kitner: Why?
Account guy: Look, I don’t know. I guess the sponsor wants a guy on Twenty-One… who looks like he could get a table at Twenty One.
Kitner: You just tell him I said Stempel has an everyman quality. You know that whole American dream thing? You, too, can be rich?
Account guy: If the ratings stay high.
Kitner: Very funny.
Account guy: I’m just passing it along, sir.

…

Charlie: Have you ever watched one of these, uh, quiz shows, Dad? The $64,000 Question or, or Twenty-One?
Mark: For $64,000, I hope they ask you the meaning of life.

…

Herb: Things are gonna change around here, boy.
Toby: What does that mean, everything’s gonna change? What’s gonna change, Herbert?
Herb: Everything’s gonna change. For us. Hey, what the hell were you thinkin’? Toby, that box is the biggest thing… since Gutenberg invented the printing press. And I’m the biggest thing on it.

…

Enright: How much do they pay instructors up at Columbia?
Charles: Eighty-six dollars a week.
Enright: Do you have any idea how much Bozo the Clown makes?

…

Enright: What if we were to put you on the show? Put you on Twenty-One, and ask you questions that you know. Say the questions that he answered correctly on the test this morning.
Charles: I, I, I don’t follow you. I, I thought the questions were in a bank vault.
Enright: In a way, they are. You wanna win, don’t ya?
Charles: W-Well, I think I’d really rather try to beat him honestly.
Enright: What’s dishonest? When Gregory Peck parachutes behind enemy lines…do you think that’s really Gregory Peck? That book that Eisenhower wrote, a ghost writer wrote it. Nobody cares. It’s not like we’d be giving you the answers. Just 'cause we know you know, you still know. Right. It’s not like you’re putting me on the show, or Al and pretending to be some sort of intellectual. I mean, you have put in years of study and erudition.
Charles: I mean, I-- I-I’m just trying to imagine what, uh, kant would make of this.
Freedman: I don’t think he’d have a problem with it.

…

Enright: Look, don’t start believing your own bullshit, all right? You wouldn’t know the name of Paul Revere’s horse if he took a crap on your lawn.
Herb: She.
Enright: What?
Herb: It was a mare, remember?
Enright: Look, you lose when I tell you to lose.
Herb: But why now?
Enright: It’s an arrangement. It’s always been an arrangement.

…

Charles: Dan, Dan…so pure it floats?

…

Enright [to Herb]: You gave your winnings money to a bookie who skipped town?!

…

Herb: You get me that panel show, or I’m gonna bring you down with me, ya lousy, lyin’ prick! You and Charles Van fuckin’ Doren.
Enright: No, you’re not.
Herb: I’ll just tell everyone that it’s a fraud. That’ll warm 'em up. The fix is in this week on Twenty-One! The cover of Time? His mug shot will be on the cover of Time!

…

Dick: We’re gonna put television on trial. Television! Everybody in the country’ll know about it.
FCC chairman: What do you have?
Dick: There’s somethin’ there. Mr Chairman, I’ll find it.
FCC chairman: The networks? The pharmaceutical industry? Cosmetics? That’s big game, son. You don’t go huntin’ in your underwear.

…

Charles: Al, I’ve been thinking. Maybe you shouldn’t give me the answers anymore.
Freedman: Now, what do you want to do that for, Professor? Charlie, you’re doin’ the right thing, really. Everybody’s makin’ money.
Charles: Well, what if you just gave me the questions…and I could look up the answers on my own? I mean, don’t you think that would be, well, less egregious?

…

Freedman: You met Herb Stempel. Does he seem stable to you?
Gick: Well, I definitely have an inkling of what you’re talking about. He told me this whole story about how when a Jew is on the show…he always loses to a Gentile, and then the Gentile wins more money.
Enright: Right. I mean, who could dream up a scheme like that? A symptom of his Van Doren fixation.
Dick: The thing of it is, I looked it up. It’s true.

…

Herb: The point is Van Doren got the answers.
Dick: He did not get the answers. If anything, he gave them the answers.
Herb: I know he got the answers!
Dick: Ah, bullshit, Herb. How do you know he got the answers?
Herb: Because I got the answers!

…

Toby: You never told me you got the answers.
Herb: I knew the answers to a good part of the questions anyhow. The ones I didn’t, they fed me.
Toby: It’s dishonest.
Herb: Let me tell you about honest. You know what my father used to tell me? ‘‘Work hard and you’ll get ahead.’’ Was that honest? Look at Geritol. ‘‘Geritol cures tired blood.’’ And I’m the one who’s supposed to be ashamed.
Toby: You never said that you were getting the answers.
Herb: Let them believe whatever they want. What do I care? What do I care if a bunch of saps…
Toby: I was one of those saps, Herbert.

…

Dick: Twenty-One is rigged and I can prove it…I have Enright cold and that means I have you.
Kitner: Really?
Dick: Really.
Kitner: Then how come you’re the one who’s sweating?

…

Dave Garroway [after Charles boots himself off the show]: I was wondering, what are you gonna do now? Eventually this sad day had to come, but we don’t wanna lose you, Charlie. So, at the Today Show, we decided why not make Charlie…our special cultural correspondent to the people and to the school children of America. How does $50,000 a year sound to you, Professor?
Charles: Wow. Wow. Um, well, I, uh-- I was hoping to, um, to get back to my teaching.
Dave Garroway: Well, this is the largest classroom in the world, Professor: television. So, if you will, just sign right here on the dotted line.
Dick [watching from the studio, aloud to himself]: Charlie, walk away. Come on. You don’t need it.

…

Dick: Hey, you don’t have to be a genius to connect the dots.
Charles: Well, don’t connect them through me.
Dick: Hey, don’t treat me like some member of your goddamn fan club. Are you telling me everybody got the answers but you?
Charles: You’re so persistent, Dick. You know, I really envy that.
Dick: Was it just the money, Charlie?
Charles: You’ll forgive me, but anyone who thinks money is ever “just money” couldn’t have much of it.
Dick: Charlie, you wanna insult me, fine, but you can’t envy me at the same time.

…

Enright: You know, you got these crackpots coming out of the woodwork, you’re snooping around asking questions. You don’t have a shred of concrete evidence.
Dick: Dan, let me tell you something. In this envelope are all the questions that James Snodgrass was asked on Twenty One. The odd thing about this envelope is that he appeared on the show January 13th, if you recall. Yet, he somehow mailed this to himself on January 11th via registered mail. I’d say that’s pretty goddamn concrete, wouldn’t you?

…

Herb: You want to know what? If I do nothing else I will convince them that Hebert Stempel knows what won the God-damned Academy Award for best God-damned picture of 1955; that’s what I’m gonna accomplish.

…

Charles: I haven’t been subpoenaed. And I can’t think of anything that’d sound guiltier than a…a man who hasn’t been accused of anything protesting his innocence.
Kitner: Now, Charlie, speculation in our society has a way of becoming fact. Television is a public trust. We can’t afford even a hint of a scandal in our company.
Charles: Well, I’d rather not do it. I’m sorry.
Kitner: Haven’t we been good to you? Haven’t we treated you like part of our family? We have great expectations for you, Charlie. I know you’re gonna do the right thing.

…

Dick: [of Charles] There’s absolutely no need to drag the man into the spotlight.
Sandra [his wife]: You dragged Herb Stempel into the spotlight.
Dick: Stempel? The man has to be dragged from the spotlight with his teeth marks still on it!
Ssandra: Yeah, well, nobody forced Charles Van Doren to go in front of million people, either.
Dick: Sandra, this is not McCarthyism. We are not here to expose for the sake of exposing.
Sandra: You are ten times the man Charles Van Doren is, Dick. Ten times the brain, and ten times the human being. Meanwhile, you’re bending over backwards for him. You are like the Uncle Tom of the Jews.
Dick: I’m glad it’s so easy for you to destroy a man’s life. I’ll have to keep that in mind.
Sandra: The quiz show hearings without Van Doren is like doing Hamlet without Hamlet.

…

Rittenhome: That show, Twenty-One, cost me $3.5 million a year, year in, year out. Sales went up 50% when Van Doren was on. Fifty percent. So the very idea that I was unaware of every detail or aspect of that show’s operation…well, frankly, it’s, it’s very insulting.
Dick: So you knew.
Rittenhome: It’s not about what I know. It’s about what you know.
Dick: You don’t know what I know.
Rittenhome: You know that Dan Enright ran a crooked quiz show.
Dick: Oh, he never informed you?
Rittenhome: Did he? Let’s see what he says. Dan? Look, Dan Enright wants a future in television. Okay? What you have to understand is that the public has a very short memory. But corporations, they never forget.
Dick: He’s not that stupid. He knows he’s through.
Rittenhome: Oh, no. He’ll be back. NBC’s gonna go on. Geritol’s gonna go on. It makes me wonder what you hope to accomplish with all this. Even the quiz shows’ll be back. Why fix them? Think about it, will ya? You could do exactly the same thing by just making the questions easier. See, the audience didn’t tune in to watch some amazing display of intellectual ability. They just wanted to watch the money.
Dick: Imagine if they could watch you.[/b]

What if they could? The fix is in. The real one. The one behind the curtains. Enright will fall on the sword.

[b]Dick [to Charles]: I asked myself, “why would he do this, he knows I’ll come after him?” Then it occurred to me. He knows I’ll come after him.

…

Mark [to Charles]: Cheating on a quiz show? That’s sort of like plagiarizing a comic strip.

…

Charles: Dad, I can’t simply just tell them the truth.
Mark: Can’t tell them the truth? Why on earth not?
Charles: Because it’s complicated.
Mark: Complicated? Charlie, from what I understand, it’s just a bunch of frauds showing off an erudition they really didn’t have. All you have to do is…
Charles: The problem is, Dad, is that it seems I was one of those frauds.
Mark [perplexed]: What?
Charles: They gave me the answers.
Mark: They gave you the answers…they gave you the answers?!
Charles: Well, no… no, at first they’d ask me questions they already knew I knew the answers to. We ran through those, and I really didn’t want them to give me the answers, so they gave me the questions and I’d look up the answers on my own, as if that were any different. Well, we ran through those in a couple of weeks and I just didn’t have the time, finally, and it just seemed silly, so…
Mark: They gave you all that money to answer questions they knew you knew…

…

Mark: I’m sorry, Charlie. I’m an old man, it’s all a little difficult for me to comprehend!
Charles: It’s television, Dad. It’s…it’s just…just television…
Mark: You make it sound like you didn’t have a choice!
Charles: What was I supposed to do at that point, disillusion the whole goddamn country?
Mark: Charlie, you took the money!
Charles: Yes, yes, I took the money!
Mark: Is that what this was about?
Charles: No… no, um, I don’t know…
Mark: It was a goddamn quiz show, Charlie.
Charles: An ill-favored thing, sir…
Mark: This is not the time to play games!
Charles: At mine own, it was mine!
Mark: Your name is mine!

…

Reporter: Charlie, did you know you’ve been fired by NBC?
Charles: No, no. I didn’t know that.
Reporter: Professor, uh, are you, uh, proud of your son?
Mark: I’ve always been proud of Charlie. The important thing now is for Charlie to get back to his teaching.
Reporter: Did you know that the Columbia Trustees are meeting right now? They’re going to ask for Charlie’s resignation. Professor Van Doren, you spent your whole career at Columbia. What’s your reaction to that? Professor Van Doren?

…

Dick [reacting tp Enright’s testimony]: I thought we were gonna get television. The truth is… television is gonna get us.

…

Enright [testifying]: The sponsor makes out, the network makes out…the contestants see money they probably would never see in a lifetime…and the public is entertained. So who gets hurt?

…

Congressional oversight committee chairman: Do you see a need for government regulation in this are?
Freedman: It’s not like the quiz shows are a public utility, sir. It’s entertainment. We’re not exactly hardened criminals here. We’re in show business.[/b]

Like the song says: If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. Here though that get’s complicated. In fact, complications abound every which way they turn. Either on the straight and the narrow or off the beaten path. Love and lust don’t often make those distinctions. But then either way they get all tangled up in…complications.

For some there couldn’t be a better way to earn a living. And for others there couldn’t be one worse. They both seem to like it. It’s just that it ain’t the same when you’re doing it for someone else. So they share the same dream: to have their own place. But that cost money. But lucky for them that they need it or they would never have met. Or maybe unlucky for them.

Anyway, they share a lot of things in common. Had the same barely-scraping-by outdoorsy working class backgrounds. About as close to cowboys as most are likely to get in this day and age. Even if they only do it partime…and occasionally with sheep. And they had to endure all the same hardships…shared all the same experiences. Seen each other naked from time to time. And they both look like, well, Hollywood movie stars.

One thing comes true loud and clear. These guys really did come to love each. Sex was just part of the way they expressed it. But that get’s all tangled up in the options they either do or don’t have. Same with the wives. But then ain’t that basically true for all of us? On the other hand, you can count on one hand the options two men in the closet had for sharing the love they felt back then…smack dab in the middle of some of the reddest most reactionary states in the union.

IMDb

[b]Michelle Williams requested that her two male leads kiss in front of her to help her get to the right emotional place for her character, Alma. As she was involved with Ledger in real life, too, she felt that such a thing would help with her portrayal. She had to goad both men as their first few attempts were far too half-hearted for her liking.

Heath Ledger declined to go to the one month cowboy camp that had been organized as he had grown up on farms in Western Australia. Jake Gyllenhaal was required to attend, however, as he needed “roughing up”.

One of Daniel Day-Lewis’ favorite films. He cites the reason for this as being Heath Ledger’s performance. After Ledger’s death Day-Lewis dedicated his SAG award for There Will Be Blood (2007) to Ledger’s memory mentioning in particular the final scene in Ennis’ trailer being “as moving as anything I have ever seen”.

There was an audible gasp at the Academy Awards when presenter Jack Nicholson read out Crash (2004) as 2005’s Best Film over this film, much fancied. Nicholson himself admitted to being shocked as he too had voted for Ang Lee’s film.

Ang Lee struggled continually with the sheep during the shoot. Apparently sheep don’t drink from running water, only ponds and dams. Ang tried all day to get the sheep to drink from a stream, but they wouldn’t oblige.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brokeback_Mountain
trailer: youtu.be/-xuugq7fito

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN [2005]
Directed by Ang Lee

[b]Ennis: We’re supposed to guard the sheep, Jack, not eat them.

…

Jack: My momma, she believes in the Pentecost.
Ennis: What exactly is the Pentecost? I mean, my folks, they was Methodists.
Jack: The Pentecost… I don’t… I don’t know what the Pentecost is. I guess it means the world ends and guys like you and me march off to hell.

…

Ennis: This is a one-shot thing we got goin’ on here.
Jack: It’s nobody’s business but ours.
Ennis: You know I ain’t queer.
Jack: Me neither.

…

Joe Aguirre: You boys sure found a way to make the time pass up there. Twist, you guys wasn’t gettin’ paid to leave the dogs babysittin’ the sheep while you stem the rose.

…

Alma: You know, your friend could come inside, have a cup of coffee…
Ennis: He’s from Texas.
Alma: Texans don’t drink coffee?

…

Jack: Is there anything interesting up there in heaven?
Ennis: Well, I was just sending up a prayer of thanks.
Jack: For what?
Ennis: For you forgettin’ to bring that harmonica.

…

Jack: Ya know it could be like this, just like this always.
Ennis: Yeah, how do you figure that?

…

Ennis [to Jack]: Now you shut up about Alma. This ain’t her fault. Bottom line is…we’re around each other an’ this thing, it grabs hold of us again at the wrong place at the wrong time and we’re dead.

…

Ennis: There were these two old guys ranched up together down home, Earl and Rich. They was the joke of town, even though they were pretty tough old birds. Anyway, they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They took a tire iron to him, spurred him up and drug him around by his dick till it pulled off.
Jack: You seen this?
Ennis: Yeah, I was, what, nine years old? My daddy, he made sure me and my brother seen it. Hell, for all I know, he done the job. Two guys livin’ together? No way.

…

Ennis: Now, we can get together…once in a while, way the hell out in the middle of nowhere, but…
Jack: Once in a while? Every four fuckin’ years?
Ennis: If you can’t fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it.
Jack: For how long?
Ennis: For as long as we can ride it. There ain’t no reins on this one.[/b]

This was 50 years ago. And a long, long way from New York or San Francisco.

[b]Alma: As far behind as we are on the bills, it makes me nervous not to use any sort of precaution.
Ennis: If you don’t want no more o’ my kids, I’ll be happy to just leave you alone.
Alma [pauses]: I’d have 'em if you’d support 'em.

…

Alma: You know, I used to wonder how come you never brought any trouts home. You always said you caught plenty, and you know how me and the girls like fish. So one night I got your reel case open…night before you went on one of your little trips – price tag still on it after five years – and I tied a note to the end of the line. It said, “Hello, Ennis, bring some fish home. Love, Alma.” And then you come back lookin’ all perky and said you’d caught a bunch of brownies and you ate them up. Do you remember? I looked in the case first chance I got and there was my note still tied there. That line hadn’t touched water in its life.
Ennis: That don’t mean nothin’, Alma.
Alma: Don’t try to fool me no more, Ennis, I know what it means. Jack Twist.

…

Ennis: You ever get the feelin’… I don’t know, er… when you’re in town and someone looks at you all suspicious, like he knows? And then you go out on the pavement and everyone looks like they know too?
Jack [casually]: Well… maybe you oughta get out of there, you know? Find yourself someplace different. Maybe Texas.
Ennis [sarcastically]: Texas? Sure, maybe you can convince Alma to let you and Lureen to adopt the girls. And we can just live together herding sheep. And it’ll rain money from LD Newsome and whiskey’ll flow in the streams - Jack, that’s real smart.
Jack: Go to hell, Ennis. If you wanna live your miserable fuckin’ life, then go right ahead.

…

Jack [to Ennis]: Lureen’s good at makin’ hard deals in the machine business, but as far as our marriage goes, we could do it over the phone.

…

Jack: You know friend, this is a god damn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation. You used to come away easy. Now it’s like seein’ the Pope.
Ennis: Jack, I gotta work. Huh? Them earlier days I just quit the job. You forget what it’s like bein’ broke all the time. You ever hear of child support? I’ll tell you this, I can’t quit this one. And I can’t get the time off. It was hard enough gettin’ this time.

…

Ennis (approaches till he’s in Jack’s face.): Well, have you been to Mexico, Jack? ‘Cause I hear what they got in Mexico for boys like you.
Jack: Hell yes, I been to Mexico. Is that a fuckin’ problem?
Ennis: I’m gonna tell you this one time, Jack fuckin’ Twist. And I ain’t foolin’. What I don’t know, all them things that I don’t know, could get you killed if I come to know them. I ain’t jokin’.
Jack: Yeah well, try this one, and I’ll say it just once.
Ennis: Go ahead.
Jack: Tell you what, we coulda had a good life together, fuckin’ real good life, had us a place of our own. But you didn’t want it, Ennis! So what we got now is Brokeback Mountain. Everything’s built on that. That’s all we got, boy, fuckin’ all, so I hope you know that if you don’t never know the rest.
Ennis: God damn it.
Jack: You count the damn few times that we have been together in nearly 20 years. Measure the short fuckin’ leash you keep me on, and then you ask me about Mexico and you tell me you’ll kill me for needin’ somethin’ I don’t hardly never get. You got no idea how bad it gets. And I’m not you. I can’t make it on a coupla high-altitude fucks once or twice a year. You are too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you.
Ennis (stricken, weeping): Then why don’t you? Why don’t you let me be, huh? It’s because of you, Jack, that I’m like this. I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.
(Jack attempts to hug Ennis but is pushed away)
Ennis: Get the fuck off me!

…

Lureen [to Ennis]: He always said he wanted his ashes scattered on Brokeback Mountain, but I wasn’t sure where that was. I thought Brokeback Mountain might be around where he grew up. Knowing Jack, it was probably some pretend place, where bluebirds sing and there’s a whiskey spring…[/b]

Lena Mathers is easily one of the most fascinating and repulsive characters you are ever likely to bump into up on the screen. She might be described as a schizophrenic, amoral nihilist with a June Cleaver complex.

Here is someone who as a child is stuck out in the middle of nowhere. Her family and friends are born and bred for the Heartland but she is aiming for something better. So she decides to reinvent herself. She decides to become as far removed from that as it is possible to go. She trades in her drop dead gorgeous looks for a far more sophisticated and cultured persona. Then she sets out to trade that in for a man.

And this poor son of a bitch has hell to pay when he starts to question his own part. His part being Ward Cleaver, apparently.

This one has dasein written all over it. But it explores the frame of mind of someone who becomes more fully aware of just how our identities do become fabricated in the past. And not by us. But in doing so they come to figure out how in turn they can also be refabricated into the future. Then the only question [here] is this: just how fucking nuts is she?

Here’s the thing about Lena. She has come to understand her own identity in a particular way. It seems reasonable to her to think of identity in this manner. She can’t just think of it in another way instead. But here it also becomes apparent that Lena is malevolent. Even malicious to those who try to rescript the narrative.

Now, try to imagine that she is not malevolent and malicious. They almost never create characters like that though.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Lover_(1994_film
trailer: youtu.be/gxpgBhVzT5s

DREAM LOVER [1993]
Written and directed by Nicholas Kazan

[b]Ray: Can I come up, I mean just for five minutes?
Lena: It wouldn’t take five minutes.

…

Lena [to Ray]: Look, just cause I’m halfway pretty guys look in my eyes and think they know me. Like I’m their fantasy. I’m just a regular screwed-up person. So when you say I’m beautiful it’s like you’re not seeing me at all.
Ray: Yes I am.
Lena: No.
Ray: “Only God, my dear, can love you for yourself alone and not your yellow hair.” Yeats.
[Lena smiles]

…

Ray: Two years.
Lena: I never thought…it would be possible for me to have such a normal life. I mean doesn’t life feel at times like a very strange dream?

…

Ray: Have I met Debby?
Lena: No, but she’s great. It’s her husband. He’s an unusual combination. He’s a psychopath and he’s boring.

…

Larry [to Ray who is worried that Lena might be seeing another man]: Sometimes everything’s a clue, and what you think is paranoia is actually heightened awareness.

…

Ray [showing a photo]: Do you know her?
Buddy: Sissy. Hope she’s nothin’ to you.
Ray: She’s my wife.
Buddy: Figures. Did she run off and leave you?
Ray: No.
Buddy: Well, give it time.
Ray: Is that what she did to you?
Buddy: She did things to me I can’t even pronounce.

…

Ray [to Lena]: I’m in the CIA?

…

Ray: But if the things that you tell me aren’t true, then what is true, Lena? Who are you?
Lena: I’m your wife.

…

Ray: You’re parent seem like perfectly decent people. Why’d you hide them?
Lena: They’re stuck. In Texas, in poverty. Can’t you feel it. This weight dragging me down. If I’d stayed there I would have married that guy Buddy. I would’ve had his kids, would have drunk beer every night till I got fat, ugly and bored. So I invented myself. I made up Lena Mathers and I became her. They say you replace every molecule in your body every seven years. I changed my name eight years ago. No more Thelma Sneeder. Aren’t you going to give me credit for it? Doesn’t it seem brave that I became this completely different person.
Ray: It makes me look at you in a completely different way.
Lena: Me or you? Isn’t the real question, who are you? Are you really Ray Reardon, or is that the name your parents hung on you? Oh, you’ve always been a good boy. You’ve always gone along with who Ray was supposed to be, done what Ray was supposed to do, but who are you?[/b]

See what I mean? It’s a fascinating way to look at life…at the roles you play in it. But you can clearly see all sorts of ways that can be abused.

[b]Ray [to Lena]: No matter who you were, and no matter who you are, and no matter who you will be, I’m going to love you.

…

Lena [to Ray]: Debby.

…

Ray: You hired a temp to be your friend?
Lena: A person’s supposed to have friend, right? Everyone has friends.

…

Lena: You see, it wans’t just that I became Lena and Lena happened to meet you. I chose you. I first saw you five years ago in New York. I saw you at a party. I saw you and somehow I knew.
Ray: So you pretended to…
Lena: Just a few things. Just the outside. It’s like putting on new clothes or a new perfume.
Ray: Personality is a perfume?
Lena: Sure. Perfume is something you use to attract somebody but it’s not the thing you fall in love with…is it?
Ray [bewildered]: I don’t know.
Lena: Is this the end?
Ray: I can’t keep opening my heart to you and getting…
Lena: Isn’t that what love is? I don’t mean passion. Love. Isn’t an act of faith loving someone despite having to put up with things which are intolerable. Opening your heart again and again?

…

Ray: You threw away the bill.
Lena: What bill?
Ray: HOTEL CHANTECLEER EVERY FUCKING WEDNESDAY!
Lena: I threw it away.

…

Ray: What about the kids? Are they mine? Do you know?
Lena: Of course I do.
Ray: Whose are they? I loved them and I raised them.
Lena: Yes, you have. But I’m still not going to tell you.
[he punches her][/b]

And then just like that everything changes. She’s got him. At least for now. But there’s a flaw in her plan.

[b]Ray: What if I fly into a rage and attack you?
Lena: You’re sedated.
Ray: I am? I don’t feel sedated.
Lena: That’s because you’re crazy.

…

Lena: I just want to say that in spite of everything, I love you. I really, truly love you. You’ve seen who I really am…more than anybody ever. And you kept on loving me.
Ray: You’re a psychopath.
Lena [sighing]: Probably. A psychopath can still love somebody, can’t they?

…

Lena: I came because of a bullshit call from Elaine. There’s a flaw in my plan?
Ray: Speaking of plans, are really going to New Zealand with Larry?
Lena: Larry? When I’m done with him, he’ll wish he was you.

…

Lena: You still don’t have the faintest clue who I am or what I do.
Ray: Likewise. I’ve been sleepwalking my whole life and you’ve woken me up, and I feel alive now.
Lena: You’re fucked.
Ray: Yes, but I’m alive and inspired. You saw your plan with such clarity, such ruthlessness. And you deserve to know the flaw in your plan. You were so good at it. And you might want to do it again.
Lena: Okay, tell me.
Ray: Kiss me first. Kiss me and I’ll tell. Only it has to be a real kiss…something to remember.

…

Lena: You don’t have the guts. What about the consequences?
Ray: There are no consequences. That’s the flaw in your plan. I’m crazy. You’ve driven me crazy.
Lena: That was the whole idea.
Ray: Well, crazy people aren’t responsible. Crazy people aren’t legally responsible.[/b]

You know what comes next. Of course what he hadn’t counted on is that, in order to defeat her, he had to become her.

The head and the heart. So near yet so far. Sometimes, as Woody Allen once quipped, they refuse to speak at all. To each other, in other words. We find ourselves being tugged emotionally towards those we know in our head we must keep at a distance. And to explore the dynamics of this is often futile. We simply cannot know the lives that others live.

But then we begin to grasp how the feelings we have for others are predicated by and large on who we have come to think they are. And who they think they are may well be the genuine embodiment of introspection. They are sincere in their beliefs. Beliefs that you [and many others] find repulsive. Does that make it better or worse?

This is about love. Easily one of the most complex exchanges we can engage in. Either intellectually or emotionally. All the more so here because their lives are at a distance in so many ways…ways neither of them are really able to come to grips with. Michael in particular. Gender, age, class, education, experience.

And then the war…

An entirely new kind of present. And it will reconfigure forevermore [and for millions upon millions] the relationship between the past and the future. But the past and the present are experienced differently by each of us. It all gets tangled up in perspective, in options, in the past before that, in conflicting narratives about the future.

It’s a strange world. He knows she is guilty of being a part of a terrible crime but not in the manner in which she allows herself to be accused. She is convicted of being in charge only because she is too ashamed to admit to the court that she is illiterate. The others get four years. She gets life. He knows all this but says nothing to the court. Why? Then the audio books, the letters he refuses to respond to.

And then she is to be released. But then she doesn’t make it. Through of her own volition. In part because of Michael’s reaction.

This is a tough one. There is what she did. There is the manner in which she rationalized it. And there are the judgments from the rest of them.

IMDb

Before Hanna commits suicide by hanging in her prison cell, the books that Michael read to her are used as a platform.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reader_(2008_film
trailer: youtu.be/Kfn0Tilajps

THE READER [2008]
Directed by Stephen Daldry

[b]Hanna [to Michael]: So. That’s why you came back.

…

Teacher: The notion of secrecy is central to western literature. You may say, the whole idea of character is defined by people holding specific information which for various reasons, sometimes perverse, sometimes noble, they are determined not to disclose.

…

Michael: I didn’t mean to upset you.
Hanna: You don’t have the power to upset me. You don’t matter enough to upset me.[/b]

She doesn’t mean it.

[b]Michael [to Hanna]: I don’t know what to say. I’ve never been with a woman. We’ve been together four weeks and I can’t live without you. I can’t. Even the thought of it kills me.

…

Hanna [to Michael]: We’re changing the order we do things. Read to me first, kid. Then we make love.

…

Michael [reading to Hanna]: “Lady Chatterley felt his naked flesh against her as he came into her. For a moment he was still inside her…”
Hanna: This is disgusting. Where did you get this?
Michael: I borrowed it from someone at school.
Hanna: Well, you should be ashamed.
[pauses]
Hanna: Go on[/b]

Part two. It’s a whole different movie.

[b]Judge: Your name is Hanna Schmitz?
Hanna: Yes.
Judge: Can you speak louder please?
Hanna: My name is Hanna Schmitz.
[it is then that Michael realizes it is his Hanna.]
Judge: Thank you. You were born on October 21st, 1922? At Hermannstadt. And you’re now 43 years old?
Hanna: Yes.
Judge: You joined the SS in 1943?
Hanna: Yes. I was working at Siemens when I heard the SS was recruiting.
Judge: Did you know the kind of work you’d be expected to do?
Hanna: They were looking for guards. I applied for a job.
Judge: And you worked first at Auschwitz?
Hanna: Yes.
Judge: Until 1944. Then you were moved to a smaller camp near Cracow?
Hanna: Yes.
Judge: You then helped move prisoners west in the winter of 1944…in the so-called death marches.

…

Professor Rohl: Societies think they operate by something called morality, but they don’t. They operate by something called law. You’re not guilty merely by working at Auschwitz. 8000 people worked at Auschwitz. Precisely 19 have been convicted, and only 6 of murder. To prove murder you have to prove intent. That’s the law. The question is never “Was it wrong”, but “Was it legal”. And not by our laws, no. By the laws at the time.

…

Judge: Did you not realise you were sending these women to their deaths?
Hanna: Yes but there were new arrivals, new women were arriving all the time, so of course we had to move some of the old ones on.
Judge: I’m not sure you understand…
Hanna: We couldn’t keep everyone. There wasn’t room.
Judge: No, but what I’m saying: let me rephrase: to make room, you were picking women out and saying `You you and you have to be sent back to be killed.’
Hanna: Well, what would you have done? [/b]

Even from the perspective of an SS guard there is the reality of options. To make room for new arrivals some will be killed. Some must be killed. If Hanna had not made the selection the selection is still made. No one is spared once the policy is in place…and then enforced.

[b]Ilana Mather [testifying in court]: Each of the guards would choose a certain number of women. Hanna Schmitz chose differently.
Judge: In what way differently?
Ilana Mather: She had favourites. Girls, mostly young. We all remarked on it, she gave them food and places to sleep. In the evening, she asked them to join her. We all thought - well, you can imagine what we thought. Then we found out - she was making these women read aloud to her. They were reading to her. At first we thought this guard…this guard is more sensitive… she’s more human…she’s kinder. Often she chose the weak, the sick, she picked them out, she seemed to be protecting them almost. But then she dispatched them. Is that kinder?

…

Dieter: Six women locked three hundred Jews in a church, and let them burn. What is there to understand? Tell me, I’m asking: what is there to understand? I started out believing in this trial, I thought it was great, now I think it’s just a diversion. You choose six women, you put them on trial, you say They were the evil ones, they were the guilty ones'. Brilliant! Because one of the victims happened to write a book! That's why they're on trial and nobody else. Do you know how many camps there were in Europe? People go on about how much did everyone know? Who knew?’ What did they know?' That isn't the question. The question is How could you let it happen?’ And - better - `Why didn’t you kill yourself when you found out?’ Thousands! That’s how many. There were thousands of camps. Everyone knew!!

…

Professor Rohl: You have been skipping seminars.
Michael: I have a piece of information, concerning one of the defendants. Something they are not admitting.
Professor Rohl: What information? You don’t need to tell me. It’s perfectly clear you have a moral obligation to disclose it to the court.
Michael: It happens this information is favorable to the defendant. It can help her case. It may even affect the outcome, certainly the sentencing.
Professor Rohl: So?
Michael: There’s a problem. The defendant herself is determined to keep this information secret.
Professor Rohl: What are her reasons?
Michael: Because she’s ashamed.
Professor Rohl: Ashamed of what? Have you spoken to her?
Michael: Of course not.
Professor Rohl: Why “of course not”?
Michael: I can’t. I can’t do that. I can’t talk to her.
Professor Rohl: What we feel isn’t important. It’s utterly unimportant. The only question is what we do. If people like you don’t learn from what happened to people like me, then what the hell is the point of anything?

…

Hanna [as an old woman, to Michael]: It doesn’t matter what I feel. It doesn’t matter what I think. The dead are still dead.

…

Ilana: People ask all the time what I learned in the camps. But the camps weren’t therapy. What do you think these places were? Universities? We didn’t go there to learn. One becomes very clear about these things. What are you asking for? Forgiveness for her? Or do you just want to feel better yourself? My advice, go to the theatre, if you want catharsis. Please. Go to literature. Don’t go to the camps. Nothing comes out of the camps. Nothing.

…

Julia [seeing a name on a gravestone]: Hanna Schmitz. Who was she?
Michael: That’s what I wanted to tell you. That’s why we’re here
Julia: So tell me.
Michael [going back]: I was fifteen. I was coming home from school. I was feeling ill. And a woman helped me…[/b]

The personal is political. And at no time was that point being driven home more forcefully than in 1968. And the years just before and after. And it was only a matter of time before the cinema began taking its cues from this. And then coming up with cues of its own. On and off the screen. How does that really work though?

And, sure, it is always going to include the chunks of feckless naivete that is idealism. Especially for a brother and a sister who live largely in a made-up world. They spout all the right political slogans and embrace the revolution swirling about them out in the world. But they are not really a part of it at all.

The New Wave. In Europe. For music it began in the 1980s. For film, it began in the 1960s. Whatever the hell “new wave” really means.

And more about sex and love. Sometimes between the three of them. And sometimes between the two of them. Between the brother and sister. Between the brother and sister and their newfound friend.

What does it mean to go too far though?

In any event, back in 1968, if you put three passionaite and opinionated young people together alone in a house for days on end [with this sort of sexual dynamic] there is bound to be friction. And because they discuss so many different subjects [politics, the arts, the war, religion] the friction may not be contained. It might boil over into [or create] its own reality. How else to explain Isabelle turning on the gas.

IMDb

[b]First film since Orgazmo (1997) that was released theatrically in the US with a NC-17 rating. Even with its NC-17 rating, major theater circuits like Regal and AMC agreed to show this film.

There were scenes in the script depicting much more blatant sexual relations between the characters of Matthew and Theo, but they were not filmed. Director Bernardo Bertolucci said, “The gay sex was in the first script, but I had a feeling that it was just too much stuff. It became redundant.” Actor Michael Pitt said in an interview, “It was in the script and it’s what I’d signed to do. But they said we weren’t going to do that.”

Director Bernardo Bertolucci was so impressed how the actors so naturally acted naked, he penned an uncredited lengthy extra scene in the script where all three main actors are overtly nude. It ended up on the cutting room floor.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreamers_(film
trailer: youtu.be/YU1brBVMBkM

THE DREAMERS [2003]
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

[b]Matthew [voiceover]: The first time I saw a movie at the cinématèque française I thought, “Only the French… only the French would house a cinema inside a palace.” The movie was Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor. Its images were so powerful, it was like being hypnotized. I was 20 years old. It was the late '60 s and I’d come to Paris for a year to study French. But it was here that I got my real education. I became a member of what in those days was kind of a free masonry. A free masonry of cinephiles…what we’d call “film buffs.”

…

Matthew [voiceover]: I was one of the insatiables. The ones you’d always find sitting closest to the screen. Why do we sit so close? Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first. When they were still new, still fresh. Before they cleared the hurdles of the rows behind us. Before they’d been relayed back from row to row, spectator to spectator; until worn out, secondhand, the size of a postage stamp, it returned to the projectionist’s cabin. Maybe, too, the screen was really a screen. It screened us… from the world.

…

Matthew [voiceover]: I could hear my heart pounding. I don’t know if it was because I’djust been chased by the police… or because I was already in love with my new friends. As we walked, we talked and talked and talked about politics, about movies, and about why the French could never come close to producing a good rock band.

…

George [father]: When we look around us, what is it we see? Complete chaos. Yet viewed from above…viewed, as it were, by God… everything suddenly fits together. My children believe that their demonstrations and sit-ins and happenings…what, they believe that these possess the capacity… not only to provoke society, but also to transform it.
Theo: What is it you’re saying? If Langlois is dismissed, we shouldn’t do anything? If immigrants are deported, if students are beaten up, we shouldn’t do anything?
George: What I’m saying is that a little lucidity would not go amiss.
Theo: So, uh, everyone’s wrong but you? In France, in Italy, Germany, America?
George: Listen to me, Theo. Before you can change the world… you must realize you yourself are part of it. You cannot stand outside looking in.
Theo: You’re the one who stands outside. You’re the one who refused to sign a petition against the Vietnam War.
George: Poets don’t sign petitions. They sign poems.
Theo: A petition is a poem.
George: Yes! And a poem is a petition. Thank you, but I’m not gaga yet. I don’t need you to remind me of my own work!
Theo: That’s right. A petition is a poem, a poem is a petition. Those are the most famous lines you ever wrote. And now look at you. [/b]

So, who won? Well, anyway, we know who pays all the bills.

[b]Theo: Do you want to use my toothbrush?
Matthew: Uh, no.

…

Theo [reading from a book]: “The difference between Keaton and Chaplin…is the difference between prose and poetry…between the aristocrat and the tramp…between eccentricity and mysticism… between man as a machine and man as animal.” Not bad, huh?
Matthew: That’s good. Except for me, there’s no comparison.
Theo: Why? 'Cause Chaplin’s incomparable?
Matthew: No. Because Keaton is incomparable.
Theo: Keaton?! You think Keaton’s greater than Chaplin?
Matthew: Absolutely I do. In the first place, you can’t deny that Keaton’s funnier than Chaplin.
Theo: Yes, I can.
Matthew: You don’t think that Keaton is funnier than Chaplin?
Theo: I don’t think anyone’s funnier than Chaplin.
Matthew: Keaton is! Even when he’s not doing anything, he’s funny. And he looks like Godard. Keaton is a real filmmaker. Chaplin, all he cares about is his own performance… his own ego.
Theo: That’s bullshit. You Americans understand fuck-all about your own culture!

…

Theo: Listen, when Chaplin wanted to have a beautiful shot, he knew how. Better than Keaton, better than anybody. You remember the last shot of City Lights? He looks at the flower girl, she looks at him… and don’t forget, she’d been blind… so she was seeing him for the very first time. It’s as if, through her eyes, we also see him for the very first time. Charlie Chaplin, Charlot, the most famous man in the world… and it’s as if we’ve never really seen him before.

…

Theo and Isabelle [in the manner of Freaks]: We accept you, one of us! One of us! One of us!

…

Theo: Don’t you have any brothers or sisters?
Matthew: I have two older sisters.
Theo: Didn’t you ever want to strangle them?
Matthew: Of course I did! But I never masturbated in front of them, and I never… They never forced me to do anything I never wanted to do.
Theo: You think Isabelle forced me, do you?

…

Isabelle [finding her photograph wrapped around his nearly erect penis]: Oh how sweet of you Mathew to keep my image next to your heart.

…

Matthew: I thought you had many lovers. I mean when I saw you for the first time, at the Cinématheque, you and Theo, you looked so cool, so sophisticated. Like a movie star.
Isabelle: I was. I was acting, Matthew

…

Matthew [about Theo]: Has he never been inside of you?
Isabelle: He’s always inside of me.

…

Theo: Clapton is God, Mathew.
Matthew: I don’t believe in God, but if I did, he would be a black, left-handed guitarist. This is not Chaplin and Keaton. This is Clapton and Hendrix.
Theo: Matthew, Clapton reinvented the electric guitar.
Matthew: Clapton plugs in a guitar, he plugs in an electric guitar and he plays it like an acoustic guitar. Hendrix plugs in an electric guitar, he plays it with his teeth. There are soldiers in the Vietnam War right now. Who are they listening to? Clapton? No, they’re listening to Hendrix. The guy who tells the truth.

…

Isabelle [to Matthew]: My parents fucked once in their lives. That’s why we’re twins, they didn’t want to make it twice.

…

Matthew: I don’t want to be loved very much. I want to be loved.
Isabelle: You know what someone once said? “There’s no such thing as love. There are only proofs of love.” Are you ready to give us proof of your love?

…

Isabelle: It’s just a game!
Matthew: A game, Isabelle? A game? Think about it. Think about it. Is this something you do to each other? You want to shave my pubic hair? You want me to be a little boy for you? A little prepubescent Theo at six, who you can play games with? You can touch peepee. I’ll show you mine. You show me yours. Come on! Come on!
Theo: Just calm down. We hear you.
Matthew: Theo, think about it. Think. You sleep in the same bed together, every night. You bathe together. You pee in the john together. You play these little games. I wish you could step out of yourselves and just look.
Isabelle: Why? Why are you so cruel?
Matthew: Because I love you.
Isabelle: You have a strange way of showing it.
Matthew: No, I love…I really love you. Both of you. And I admire you. And I look at you, and I listen to you and I think…you’re never gonna grow. You won’t grow like this. You won’t. Not as long as you keep clinging to each other the way that you do.

…

Matthew [voiceover]: When I looked at the TV screen I remembered the battle of the Cinemateque. Except this time the demonstrators weren’t film buffs. They weren’t even just students any longer. It was hard to figure out what was happening…but it looked like shops had closed their doors, factories had gone on strike. And it was beginning to spread all over Paris.

…

Isabelle [to Matthew]: Theo and I never watch television. We’re purists.

…

Theo [reading aloud from a book]: A revolution isn’t a gala dinner. It cannot be created like a book, a drawing or a tapestry. It cannot unfold with such elegance, tranquility and delicacy. Or such sweetness, affability. Courtesy, restraint and generosity. A revolution is an uprising, a violent act by which one class overthrows another.[/b]

And that’s it for him: words in a book. To wit:

[b]Theo: You’re a big movie buff, right?
Matthew: Oui.
Theo: Then why don’t you think of Mao as a great director…making a movie with a cast of millions. All those millions of Red Guards marching together into the future with the Little Red Book in their hands. Books, not guns. Culture, not violence. Can’t you see what a beautiful, epic movie that would make?
Matthew: I guess, but it’s easy to say, “Books, not guns.” But it’s not true. It’s not books. It’s “book.” A book. Just one book.
Theo: Shut up. You sound just like my father.
Matthew: No, no. No, listen to me. The Red Guards that you admire…they all carry the same book…they all sing the same songs… they all parrot the same slogans. So in this big, epic movie everybody is an extra. That’s scary to me. That gives me the creeps. I’m sorry to say it, but for me there is a distinct contradiction. If you really believed what you were saying you’d be out there.
Theo: Where?
Matthew: Out there, on the street.
Theo: I don’t know what you mean.
Matthew: Yes, you do. There’s something going on out there. Something that feels like it could be really important. Something that feels like things could change. Even I get that. But you’re not out there. You’re inside, with me, drinking expensive wine, talking about film. Talking about Maoism. Why?
Theo: Okay. That’s enough.
Matthew: No, tell me why. Ask yourself why.
Theo: That’s enough!

…

Matthew: I think you prefer when the world “together” means not “a million,” but just two.

…

Matthew: Listen to me for a second, okay, Theo? Violence is what they do. It is not what we do.
[Matthew points to his head]
Matthew: We use this. We use this.
[he kisses Isabelle]
Matthew: We do this.
[he kisses Theo]
Theo: Stop it!
Matthew: Isabelle. Come on. Isabe…[/b]

Oh the fucking irony. Gas in the house. Gas on the streets. And a check from Papa.

This is the world we live in. Children [orphans here] with almost nothing having to rely on the money their benefactor might be able to wrangle from some billionaire thousands of miles away. In other words, a world where the suffering endured by all chilren afflicted with poverty could easily be vanquished if only those who run the world had the political will to vanquish it. Especially since God doesn’t seem inclined to.

Not that the point here is to focus on extraneous stuff like that. It’s got a more important aim: to explore the trial and tribulations swirling about a family bursting at the seams with affluence.

But Jacob [who runs the orphanage on the brink of bankruptcy in the Indian hellhole] comes from that world. The two worlds could not be farther removed. Or given the context of our global economy more closely linked. But this is a whole different relationship between the personal and the political.

Over and over and over again people find themselves in predicaments like this. They confront “goods” that are at odds and they must somehow stuff the life that they live into the least calamitous leap. Someone will be hurt [even devastated] no matter what is done. And so they choose one set of consequences rather than the other. Or they somehow manage to bring the two goods into an alignment of sorts. But here they must have the cooperation of others who refuse any commitment other than “the right thing to do”. Or one in which this involves only what is in it for them.

Meanwhile Pramod and all the orphans back in that Indian hellhole? Their calamities seem to pale by comparison. After all, the check has already been written.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Wedding
trailer: youtu.be/-lKCRdGXCeM

AFTER THE WEDDING [Efter Brylluppet] 2006
Directed by Susanne Bier

[b]Pramod: Are there only rich people where you are going?
Jacob: Yes. But some have more than others.
Pramod: If I was rich, I’d be happy.
Jacob: I know you would, Pramod, but people there are very ignorant.
Pramod: You hate all the rich, Mr Jacob. Is it because the houses are far apart that people are far apart?
Jacob: Yes.

…

Christian: Jorgen’s fantastic. He’s brilliant, really brilliant. People often fear him, but I don’t.
Jacob: Good.
Christian: He’s worth over a billion but started out flat broke…but you can’t tell.
Jacob: That he started flat broke?
Christian: No, no.
[nervous laughter]

…

Jorgen: You have a video that can give me a sense of what goes on in the orphanage?
Jacob: It will take more than a video to show you that.
Jorgen: Meaning?
Jacob: Bombay has over a million child prostitutes. Four or five times that suffer from malnutrition. Then there are those who die every day from minor illnesses, minor infections that could be cured for tiny sums if only the government had the will.[/b]

Jorgen is quickly bored with all this though. But then the fuss here is over paternity. For some this can be the really really important thing.

[b]Helene: We thought he was dead. We didn’t think he existed.
Anna: You’re still lying.
Helene: Im not lying. Jorgen tried to find him in India lots of times. Jacob was a big, immature child! He fucked everything with a pulse. He was drinking himself to death. He did drugs. He had grand ideas, but did nothing. He probably means well, but you can’t trust him. He wants to save everyone, but…
Anna: I don’t care if he fucked a goat. I have a right to know who my father is.

…

Jacob: 12 million dollars?
Jorgen: 12 million dollars. That will cover a whole year for 65,000 children. Including room, board, school and administration. 65,000 children. That’s more than are born in Denmark in a year.

…

Jacob: Jorgen’s offer is very generous but he keeps dragging it out. I want to know what’s going on. If it’s one of your games, I want it to stop.
Helene: Stop being paranoid. You don’t have to be poor to have good intentions. There are people with money and ideals.
Jacob: Really? I’d like to meet one.

…

Jacob: Dare I ask how you’ve been?
Helene: For the past twenty years? Well, you know…ups and downs.

…

Anna [to Christian]: We should go to India.

…

Helene: You can’t die!
Jorgen: We don’t get to decide that.

…

Jacob: You don’t know shit about me!
Jorgen: I know all about you. You’re a good person. Naive, but well-intentioned. Except for water projects and some schools in Banglagore not one of your projects has succeeded in the last 15 years. You’re good at finding people to help, but not at financing it. Your orphanage has to close. All your sweet little kids will be out on the street again.
Jacob: You fat pig. Is it fun playing God you fat pig?![/b]

All of what Jorgen says may be true, but the bottom line remains the same: the world that we live in. A world of obscene inequality and corrupt governments bursting at the seams with the stench of crony capitalism.

[Jorgen is rich, powerful and, at 48, about to die]:
Jorgen [in the throes of despair]: I’m so damned pathetic. I don’t want to…I don’t want to die! I don’t, Helene. I don’t want to, damnit! I don’t want to die! I don’t! Damnit! God damn it! I don’t want to die, Helene. Why…?

That’s the thing about having it all though. Death has just got to be all the more agonizing. Especially for those who die this relatively young.

Now this is nihilism as most folks imagine it.

And some folks acquire this frame of mind on account it seems to come flowing out naturally…flowing out of a combination of the world they live in and how they just sort of came to think about it spontaneously. In other words, it’s not like they spent days on end actually thinking about the meaning of life…or went on trips to the library to see how all of the great minds thought about it. It simply made sense to. You know, “given how things are”.

Then there are those [like some here] who do spend a lot of time thinking “intellectually” about what life means, who do start in on comparing what they think with what others think; and then become bent on figuring out the most rational way to decide this “logically”.

Not many characters like the latter here though. In fact not a one. The minds here are just smaller. From towns somewhere in the middle of nowhere in other words.

Something like this: youtu.be/iir_xAbt-ak

Actually, the “real life killer” that Kit’s based on was a hell of a lot more dangerous.

From IMDb FAQ:
Did the couple who were forced into the bunker die?
It is never revealed whether they were shot or not. Although, in real life both of them were shot and stabbed multiple times. The woman was brutally raped, as well.

IMDb

[b]The ‘Bandlands’ plot and lead characters of Kit and Holly are based on Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, who in 1958 embarked on a murder spree that horrified the country.

The film’s tag line (“In 1959 a lot of people were killing time. Kit and Holly were killing people”) inspired the Zodiac Killer (who’d been lying low for some years) to write a letter to the newspaper denouncing their flippant attitude to violence in society by running such an ad.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badlands_(film
trailer: youtu.be/qKykxE7CBbc

BADLANDS [1973]
Written and directed by Terrence Malick

[b]Holly [voiceover]: My Mother died of pneumonia when I was just a kid. My Father kept their wedding cake in the freezer for ten whole years. After the funeral he gave it to the yard man. He tried to act cheerful but he could never be consoled by the little stranger he found in his house.

…

Holly [voiceover]: Little did I realise that what began in the alleys and back ways of this quiet town would end in the Badlands of Montana.

…

Man: Heard the news, Kit?
Kit: No.
Man: Been in all the headlines.
Kit: What’s that?
Man: You’ve been fired.

…

Holly [voiceover]: Then sure enough Dad found out I been running around behind his back. He was madder than I ever seen him. His punishment for deceiving him: he went and shot my dog. He made me take extra music lessons everyday after school, and wait there 'till he came to pick me up. He said that if the piano didn’t keep me off the streets, maybe the clarinet would.

…

Kit [recording a message]: My girl Holly and I decided to kill ourselves. The same way I did her Daddy. Big decision, you know. Uh, the reasons are obvious. I don’t have time to go into it right now. But, one thing though, he was provoking me when I popped him. Well that’s what it was like. Pop. I’m sorry. I mean, nobody’s coming out of this thing happy. Especially not us. I can’t deny we’ve had fun though.

…

Holly [voiceover]: One day, while taking a look at some vistas in Dad’s stereopticon, it hit me that I was just this little girl, born in Texas, whose father was a sign painter, who only had just so many years to live. It sent a chill down my spine and I thought where would I be this very moment, if Kit had never met me? Or killed anybody…this very moment…if my mom had never met my dad…if she had never died. And what’s the man I’ll marry gonna look like? What’s he doing right this minute? Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn’t know me? Does it show on his face? For days afterwards I lived in dread. Sometimes I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, and this never happened.

…

Holly [a while after Kit shot Cato]: How is he?
Kit: I got him in the stomach.
Holly: Is he upset?
Kit: He didn’t say nothing to me about it.

…

Girl: What’s going to happen to Jack and me?
Holly: You have to ask Kit. He says frog, I jump.

…

Holly [voiceover]: Suddenly, I was thrown into a state of shock…Kit was the most trigger happy person I’d ever met. He claimed that as long as you’re playing for keeps and the law is coming at you, it’s considered okay to shoot all witnesses. You had to take the consequences, though, and not whine about it later.

…

Holly [voiceover]: He never seemed like a violent person before…It all goes to show how you can know a person and not really know him at all.

…

Holly [voiceover]: The whole country was out looking for us, for who knew where Kit would strike next? Sidewalks were deserted. Stores closed their doors and drew their blinds. Posses and vigilante committees were set up from Texas to North Dakota. Children rode back and forth to school under heavy guard. A famous detective was brought in from Boston. He could find no clues…My clarinet teacher said I probably wasn’t responsible, but others said I was. Then, on Thursday, the Governor of Oklahoma sent out the National Guard to stand watch at the Federal Reserve Bank in Tulsa when word got out that Kit meant to rob it…It was like the Russians had invaded.

…

Kit [recording a message to the kids of the world]: Listen to your parents and teachers. They got a line on most things, so don’t treat em like enemies. There’s always an outside chance you can learn something. Try to keep an open mind. Try to understand the viewpoints of others. Consider the minority opinion. But try to get along with the majority of opinion once it’s accepted. Of course Holly and I have had fun, even if it has been rushed. And uh, so far we’re doing fine, hadn’t got caught. Excuse the grammar.

…

Holly [voiceover]: We lived in utter loneliness, neither here nor there. Kit said that solitude was a better word, cause it meant more exactly what I wanted to say. Whatever the expression, I told him we couldn’t go on living this way

…

Deputy: Kit…Kit, I’ve got a question for you. You like people?
Kit: They’re okay.
Deputy: Then why’d you do it?
Kit: I don’t know. Always wanted to be a criminal, I guess. Just not this big a one…Takes all kinds though.

…

Kit: Don’t worry, now. I’m gonna’ get you off these charges. There’s a whole lot of other boys out there waitin’ for you. And you’re gonna’ have a lot of fun… Boy, we rang the bell, didn’t we? I’ll say this, though. That guy with the deaf maid? He’s just lucky he’s not dead, too. Of course, uh, too bad about your dad…
Holly: Yeah.
Kit: We’re gonna’ have to sit down and talk about that sometime.

…

Holly [voiceover]: Kit and I were taken back to South Dakota. They kept him in solitary, so he didn’t have a chance to get acquainted with the other inmates, though he was sure they’d like him, especially the murderers. Myself, I got off with probation and a lot of nasty looks. Later I married the son of the lawyer who defended me. Kit went to sleep in the courtroom while his confession was being read, and he was sentenced to die in the electric chair. On a warm spring night, six months later, after donating his body to science, he did.

…

Kit: Sir… Where’d you get that hat?
Trooper: State.
Kit: Boy, I’d like to buy me one of those.
Trooper: You’re quite an individual, Kit.
Kit: Think they’ll take that into consideration?[/b]

Sleep now. And wouldn’t it be great if that’s all it took?

Another tall-tale from the minds of those who channel science and fiction into a world that makes you think about things you may not have thought much about before. In others words, how many different ways might there be to order a “reality”? Think The Matrix. Thus:

A number of pieces of the set, including those used for the rooftop chase, were sold to the production of The Matrix at the end of shooting. IMDb

I’ve always loved “dark” movies. Movies, in other words, that unfold almost entirely in the dead of night. The darker the better. Dark City I figured was one of them. Oh indeed.

The plot? Well, from Star Trek to this there is always something about human beings that intrigues the aliens. We seem to have these cluttered, chaotic [ofttimes barbaric] lives that are not really all that…logical. It has something to do with “freedom” and how, to the human soul, that is the most precious thing. At least to the humans that count. The aliens may be light years ahead of us intellectually, techologically but they can never quite hope to grasp the richness of our emotional lives. Besides, we prize individuality above all things. They of course are able only to think in terms of the “greater good of all”. The difference between, oh, I don’t know, capitalism and socialism?..conservatives and liberals?

And by the way, ever been to Shell Beach? Ever “tuned” there?

IMDb

[b]New Line Cinema forced Alex Proyas to include the opening narration by Kiefer Sutherland, which Proyas objected to, saying it was unnecessary. The narration gives away several key plot twists and consequently many fans of the film prefer to watch it with the sound turned off during the narration until Sutherland looks at his pocket watch. Unsurprisingly, the director’s cut omits this opening narration.

This film deals with ‘Last Thursdayism’, a philosophy described in a satiric comment by 20th-century historian Bertrand Russell, referring to the “Omphalos” papers (1857) of Philip Gosse. Last Thursdayism says that the world (with us and our own basic memories included) could have been created recently, even last Thursday, but we cannot demonstrate such a thing because the world would have been created to look like an older world. [/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film
trailer: youtu.be/QfFrb3Gmods

DARK CITY [1998]
Directed by Alex Proyas

Dr. Schreber: You are confused, aren’t you? Frightened. That’s all right. I can help you.
John: Who is this?
Dr. Schreber: I’m a doctor. You must listen to me. You have lost your memory. There was an experiment. Something went wrong. Your memory was erased. Do you understand me?
John: No, I don’t understand. What’s going on here?

Here we go then, fumbling about the task of grasping something analogous to “reality”.

[b]Dr. Schreber: If he were to contact you Mrs. Murdock, you must call me immediately. Wherever your husband is now, he is searching for…himself.

…

Bumstead: So Husselbeck, what kind of killer do you think stops to save a dying fish?

…

Eddie: Thinking in circles. There’s no way out. I’ve been over this entire city.
Bunstead: You’re scaring your wife to death, Eddie.
Eddie: She’s not my wife. I don’t know who she is or who any of us are. See, I’ve been trying to remember things-- clearly remember things from my past. But the more I try to think back, the more it all starts to unravel. None of it seems real. It’s like I’ve just been dreaming this life, and when I finally wake up, I’ll be somebody else, somebody totally different.
Bumstead: You saw something, didn’t you, Eddie. Something to do with the case.
Eddie: There is no case! There never was!

…

John: When was the last time you remember doing something during the day?
Bumstead: What do you mean?
John: I just mean during the day. Daylight. When was the last time you remember seeing it? And I’m not talking about some distant, half-forgotten childhood memory. I mean like yesterday. Last week. Can you come up with a single memory? You can’t, can you? You know something, I don’t think the sun even… exists…in this place. 'Cause I’ve been up for hours, and hours, and hours, and the night never ends here.

…

Mr. Wall: Do not fret, Anna. I will give you some more pretty things soon.
Emma: I’m not Anna.
Mr. Wall: You will be soon.

…

Dr. Schreber: First there was darkness. Then came the strangers. They abducted us and brought us here. This city, everyone in it… is their experiment. They mix and match our memories as they see fit, trying to divine what makes us unique. One day, a man might be an inspector. The next, someone entirely different. When they want to study a murderer, for instance, they simply imprint one of their citizens with a new personality. Arrange a family for him, friends, an entire history… even a lost wallet. Then they observe the results. Will a man, given the history of a killer, continue in that vein? Or are we, in fact, more than the sum of our memories? This business of you being a killer was a sad coincidence. You have had dozens of lives before now. You happened to wake up… while I was imprinting you with this one.
Bumstead: Why are they doing this?
Dr. Schreber: It is our capacity for individuality, our souls… that makes us different from them. They think they’ll find the human soul… if they understand how our memories work. They have collective memories. They share one group mind. They’re dying. Their race is on the brink of extinction. [/b]

Deep, man. But how deep is it? I mean, doesn’t this narrative sound an awful lot like the Federation vs. the Klingons? Or was it the Romulans? To wit: “I” [far more superior] vs. “we” [far more ignoble].

[b]John: What about my past? What about my childhood? Shell Beach. Uncle Karl. What about this? This notebook was blank when I found it.
Dr. Schreber: You still don’t understand, John. You were never a boy. Not in this place. Your history is an illusion, a fabrication, as it is with all of us.

…

Dr. Schreber: There is no ocean, John. There is nothing beyond the city. The only place home exists…is in your head.

…

Mr Hand: I’m dying, John. Your imprint is not agreeable with my kind. But I wanted to know what it was like. How you feel.
John: You know how I was supposed to feel. That person isn’t me. Never was. You wanted to know what it was that makes us human.
[John points to his own head]
John: Well, you’re not going to find it in here. You went looking in the wrong place.[/b]

In other words, people are all heart…and soul.

Of all things, this is a film from the director of Oldboy, Lady Vengeance and Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance. Why of all things? I don’t know. That’s just how it struck me. It is, after all, his first English language film.

There are some people we find fascinating whether they are drop dead gorgeous or not. But only a fool would suggest that has no place at all in our calculations. Though with regard to things like this, I have often concluded that [as with most men] I am a fool.

The Stokers are a fascinating family. Very attractive. Very wealthy. Very cultured. Very strange. There’s just no point then in bringing politics into it. Or, rather, that won’t be my point here. In fact, the family veritably reeks of the portentous mysteries to come. Uncle Charlie, in particular. Where exactly does he fit into the world? I mean, when he gets out of the institution. But wherever that is you just know it is going to pale next to wherever India decides she fits in.

And that’s enough for me. Or it is now. Some parents really shouldn’t have children. Some children really don’t need parents. And, in that context, these three were made for each other.

This was the final film for director/producer Tony Scott. After production, he committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in Los Angeles.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoker_(film
trailer: youtu.be/MXaanQkzrXU

STOKER [2013]
Directed by Chan-wook Park

[b]India [voiceover]: My ears hear what others cannot hear; small faraway things people cannot normally see are visible to me. These senses are the fruits of a lifetime of longing, longing to be rescued, to be completed. Just as the skirt needs the wind to billow, I’m not formed by things that are of myself alone. I wear my father’s belt tied around my mother’s blouse, and shoes which are from my uncle. This is me. Just as a flower does not choose its color, we are not responsible for what we have come to be. Only once you realize this do you become free, and to become adult is to become free.

…

Mrs. McGarrick: India, you are as white as a sheet. Is there something wrong?
India: Yes. My father is dead.

…

Charles: Do you want to know why you feel at a disadvantage around me?
India: Because I didn’t even know that you existed until today?

…

India: You know, in Victorian times, a widow was expected to mourn her husband for two years. At least.
Evelyn [her mother]: India…
India: In Ancient China, they built a straw hut beside the grave and she lived there for three years doing nothing.

…

Evelyn: Where did you learn to cook like this, Charlie?
Charles: Madame Jacquin. She ran a Michelin-starred restaurant outside of Toulouse called L’Instituion. She always used to say: “There’s nothing a man could master that a woman couldn’t make.”
India: What do you mean?
Evelyn: It sounds better in French.

…

India: What do you want from me?
Charles: To be friends.
India: We don’t need to be friends. We’re family.

…

India: Have you ever seen a picture of yourself, taken when you didn’t know you were being photographed, from an angle that you don’t usually see when you look in a mirror, and you think: “That’s me… that’s also me.” Do you know what I’m talking about?
Whip: I think I do. So you are surprised at yourself? Does that mean you are not afraid of being touched anymore?
India: Please don’t spoil it.[/b]

Of course he does though.

[b]India: I saw you in the dining room today.
Evelyn: I don’t know what you think you saw but nothing happened. You were so still I never even heard you there.
India: Dad taught me that. Hunting. To wait. In silence.

…

India [to Evelyn]: I always thought Dad liked hunting. But tonight I realized he did it for me. He used to say, “Sometimes you need to do something bad to stop you from doing something worse.”

…

Charles: If course I still love you Richard, I just have to love to a little bit less now.

…

Evelyn: You know, I’ve often wondered why it is we have children in the first place. And the conclusion I’ve come to is at some point in our lives we realize things are screwed up beyond repair. So we decide to start again. Wipe the slate clean. Start fresh. And then we have children. Little carbon copies we can turn to and say, “You will do what I could not. You will succeed where I have failed.” Because we want someone to get it right this time. But not me…
[more vehemently]
Evelyn: Personally speaking, I can’t wait to watch life tear you apart.

…

Evelyn: India, who are you? You were supposed to love me, weren’t you?

…

Charles [to Evelyn]: People disappear…all the time.

…

Sheriff: In a hurry? Know how fast you were doing?
[India speaks to him in Italian]
Sheriff: Pardon?
India [translating for him]: Effectively fast, Mister Sheriff.
Sheriff: Effective for what?
India: To get your attention.[/b]

First things first: Is this based on a true story? Consider:

IMDb
The film is based on a memoir by Slavomir Rawicz depicting his escape from a Siberian gulag and subsequent 4000-mile walk to freedom in India. Incredibly popular, it sold over 500,000 copies and is credited with inspiring many explorers. However, in 2006 the BBC unearthed records (including some written by Rawicz himself) that showed he had been released by the USSR in 1942. In 2009 another former Polish soldier, Witold Glinski, claimed that the book was really an account of his own escape. However this claim too has been seriously challenged.

True or not, we know that historically events similar to this have in fact unfolded. People did escape the camps. And, in so doing, made it so far and endured so much. So the first thing many of us will wonder is this: What about me? What would I be able to endure in order to survive? But it might be no less true for those who remained in the camps. Think of the death camps during the Holocaust. Suffering on a staggering scale. Some had what it took to make all the way out. Some did not. In the gulags, there seemed to be three main factors: How much suffering actually had to be endured. The capacity of any particular human body to endure it. The hope one is able to sustain that an end is in sight.

And if you do manage to escape the camp, there are two more main factors: Do you have the capacity to enforce your agenda? Valka has a knife. Do you have the capacity to survive in the wilderness? Janusz spent much of his life living in the forest.

The rest revolves largely around luck and the will to survive. As for morality, here everything eventually gets reduced down to life and death.

But mostly it is still all entangled in dasein.

In one sense the “gist” of this film is captured in a song by the Waterboys–Red Army Blues: youtu.be/Aupn-91BNwU. The terrible finality of the dictatorial mind when one becomes an “enemy of the people”. The danger then is totalitarianism.

IMDb

When Janusz and the others spot the tattoo of Lenin and Stalin on Valka’s chest, he angrily replies that they were great men. Such tattoos were in fact employed by criminals in the false hope that they wouldn’t be shot there as it was supposed to be illegal to deface an image of either Lenin or Stalin; although it is well-known that the executions were conducted via shooting in the back of the head.

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Back
trailer: youtu.be/87kezJTpyMI

THE WAY BACK [2010]
Directed by Peter Weir

[b]Title card: In 1941 three men walked out of the Himalayas into India. They had survived a 4,000 mile walk to freedom. This film is dedicated to them.

Title card: September, 1939. Hitler invades Poland from the West. Several days later Stalin invades from the East. They divide the country between them.

…

[Interrogator presents a pen for Janusz to sign confession]
Janusz: No.
Interrogator: Bring in the witness.
[Janusz’s Wife is brought in]
Interrogator: Do you know this man? His name?
Janusz’s Wife: Janusz Wieszczek.
Interrogator: Witness, what’s your relationship with this man?
Janusz’s Wife [crying]: I am his wife.
Interrogator: Accused, do you confirm this?
Janusz: Yes.
Interrogator: Witness, what do you have to say about the accused?
Janusz’s Wife [agonizing]: From his conversation, I have come to know he is critical of the Party, especially the leader of the Soviet people, Comrade Stalin.
Janusz: What have they done to you?!

And so it goes. On and on. The way the world works. Or can work. They tortured him. He wouldn’t sign. So they tortured his wife. He signed.

[b]Camp Commandant: Enemies of the people, look about you and understand…it’s not our guns or dogs or wire that form your prison. Siberia is your prison. All five million square miles of it.

…

Smith [to Janusz]: Kindness. That will kill you here.

…

Khabarov [to Janusz]: I like you Poles. Your burning sense of injustice, the yearning for freedom.

…

Khabarov: I was an actor. In my last picture, I played an aristocrat. They arrested me when the film was released. It was claimed I was elevating the status of the old nobility.
Janusz: So you got ten years for a performance in a film.
Khabarov: I’ve had better notices.

…

Smith: Might as well have shot us yesterday. We’re for the mines.

…

Snith: It can’t be done alone. If you are really serious about making a run for it I’m with you.
Janusz: I thought you were a loner.
Snith: It can’t be done alone. Besides, you have a…a weakness. You could be useful to me.
Janusz: And what is that?
Smith: Kindness. If anything happens to me, I’m counting on you carrying me.

…

Smith: You should be grateful you are here at all.
Valka: Grateful is for dogs.

…

Janusz [to Valka]: We are not the criminals. We are escaping from the criminals.

…

Smith: You said you lived on a farm near Warsaw. But the Soviets didn’t get that far. That was German terriotory. Your parents weren’t murdered, were they?
Irena: What?
[but the expression of her face tells it all]
Smith: You made all that up. Look, we’ve all done terrible things to survive. But don’t ever lie to me again. We’ve had enough of lies.

…

Janusz: Why would an American move to Russia for God sakes?
Irena: The Depression.

…

Zoran [eyeing Lenin and Stalin tattooed on Valka’s chest]: Valka, why do you have assholes tattooed on your chest? I mean, they should be on your ass so that you can sit on them everytime you take a shit.
Valka: You think it’s funny? They are great men. Don’t you know what “Stalin” means, funny man? Means man-of-steel. He takes from rich, and gives to poor.
Zoran: Yes, of course he does. Then he takes both of them, and puts them in Gulag for 25 years.

…

Valka: Prison is okay. Debt is bad. But there are many prisons, they don’t find me.
Zoran: What about America?
Valka: Oh, it’s not for me, freedom. I wouldn’t know what to do with it, I swear to God.

…

Irena [looking at a marker on the Mongolian border]: Mister! They’re Communists.
Janusz: So it’s here too.
Smith: This changes everything.

…

Smith: In the camps, some saw death as freedom.
Janusz: Then why didn’t you just kill yourself?
Smith: Survival was a kind of protest. Being alive was my punishment.
Janusz: Punishment for what?
Smith: I brought David to Russia.
Janusz: And now no one can forgive you. And you can’t forgive yourself.

…

Smith: Irena told me that they tortured your wife and that she informed on you.
Janusz: Yes.
Smith: They did the same thing to my son, David. And then they shot him in the head.
Janusz: My wife is alive. She lived…and was released. That much I know. But she will never be able to forgive herself for what she’s done. You see, only I can do that. She will be torturing herself just like you. So you see I have to get back. I have to get back.

…

Indian man: Where have you come from?
Janusz: Siberia.
Indian man: Siberia? And how did you come, sir?
Janusz: We walked.
Indian man: Walked?[/b]

I’ve always been curious about folks who live way up [or out] in the sticks…folks who aren’t exactly like you and I. Except for the parts where they are. Curious because in this day and age of satelite TV and the ubiquitous communications technology more and more of “our world” is going to trickle in. And how will that impact on how they see “their world”? Sort of like down in the Amazon when it dawns on the aboriginal tribes that there is a whole other way of thinking about things in a whole other world very much at odds with their own. Just not with gaps nearly as drastic of course. After all, it’s not like they don’t have public education, government and “the law” here. But there are still a lot of “customs” and “local ways of doing things” that are now increasingly bucking up against [or starting to unravel in] the modern world. Especially the stuff revolving around “value judgments”…or “gender roles”. Or the part about blood kin sticking together against “them”.

Only here that gets complcated. Especially when you’re poor. And in being a young woman the options can start to trickle down real fast. But this is also a world where a sister teaches her younger siblings [11 and 6] how to use a shotgun because that’s the way it is. Let’s just say Ree is fiercely resourceful.

Of course being poor is why Jessup started in on “cooking” in the first place. Only he ain’t Heisenberg. Different script entirely here. But the relationships are pretty much the same: dope, money, the law, dead bodies, the law again.

Still, I guess you could call the ending here a happy one. Considering.

IMDb

[b]The title comes from an old Appalachian expression - “like a dog digging after a winter’s bone” - indicating someone who, like Ree Dolly, is on a search or quest for something and will not give it up.

Many of the stars (including Isaiah Stone, Ashlee Thompson, and William White) and most of the extras are from the Forsyth, MO area, and had never acted before.

Sergeant Russell Schalk, who played the Army recruiter, is a real-life recruiter and combat veteran of the 1st Cavalry Division. Jennifer Lawrence asked him questions in character, and he responded as if he were talking to an actual recruit. [/b]

FAQ at IMDb imdb.com/title/tt1399683/faq?ref_=tt_faq_sm
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter’s_Bone
trailer: youtu.be/bE_X2pDRXyY

WINTER’S BONE [2010]
Written in part and directed by Debra Granik

Sheriff: Where you all come into this is, he put this house here, and your timber acres, up for his bond.
Ree: He what now?
Sheriff: Jessup signed over everything. Now, if he doesn’t show up for trial, see, the way this deal works is, you all is gonna lose this place. You got some place to go?
Ree: I’ll find him.

Jessup, you see, was “cooking” again. He got caught. By both sides you might say.

[b]Sonny: Maybe they’ll share some of that with us.
Ree: That could be.
Sonny: Maybe we should ask.
Ree: Never ask for what oughta be offered.

…

Sonya: We seen the law was out here this afternoon. Everything all right?
Ree: He’s huntin’ for Dad.
Sonya: You know where he’s at?
Ree: No.
Sonya: You sure about that?
Ree: Yes.
Sonya: All right, well I guess you din’t have nothing to tell him then, did you?
Ree: I wouldn’t tell him nothing if I did.
Sonya: Honey, we know that.

…

Victoria: You know all those people, Teardrop. You could ask.
Teardrop: Shut up.
Victoria: None of them’s gonna be in a great big hurry to tangle with you.
Teardrop: I told you to shut up once already, with my mouth.[/b]

You know what that means.

[b]Thump’s wife: Thump knows you’re in the valley child, with Megan, and at Little Arthur’s. He knows what you want to ask, and he don’t want to hear it.
Ree: And that’s it? He ain’t gonna say nothin’ to me?
Thump’s wife: If you’re listening child, you got your answer.
Ree: So I guess come to nut-cutting, blood don’t really mean shit to the big man.

…

Sonny [after Ree guts a squirrel]: Do we eat these parts?
Ree [grimly]: Not yet…

…

Teardrop: Those pills helping your mama’s mood any?
Ree: She keeps takin’ ‘em. But they aint workin’.

…

Ree: Mom, look at me.
[her whacked out Mom stares out vacantly]
Ree: There’s things happening and I don’t know what to do. Can you please help me this one time? Mom. Mom, look at me. Teardrop thinks I should sell the woods, Mom. Should I sell?
[Mom says nothing]
Ree: Please help me this one time.
[long, agonizing pause]
Ree: I don’t know what to do.

…

Ree: This fella with the money have a name?
Bail Bondsman: Shit no. Probably left that in his other pants.

…

Megan: What are we ever gonna do with you, baby girl?
Ree: Kill me I guess.
Megan: That idea’s been said already. Got any others?
Ree: Help me. Ain’t nobody’s said that idea yet, have they?

…

Thump: You got something to say child, you best say it now.
Ree [who is all of 17 years old]: I got two kids that can’t feed themselves yet. My mom’s sick, and she’s always gonna be sick. Pretty soon the law’s a coming and taking our house and throwing us out to live in the fields like dogs. If Dad has done wrong, Dad has paid, and whoever killed him I don’t need to know all that. But I can’t forever carry them kids and my mom without that house.

…

Ree [in the graveyard]: What the hell are we doing?
Teardrop: Looking for humps that ain’t settled.

…

Teardrop [to Sheriff Baskin]: Is this gonna be our time?

…

Ree: What I really can’t stand is the way I feel ashamed… for dad.
Teardrop: Well, he loved y’all. That’s where he went weak.

…

Ree: You always have scared me.
Teardrop: That’s cuz you’re smart.

…

Ree [to Sheriff Baskin]: They’re his. Those are my dad’s hands.

…

Sheriff Baskin: I didn’t shoot the other night cuz you were there in the truck. He never backed me down.
Ree: It looked to me like he did.
Sheriff Baskin: Don’t you let me hear that’s a story gettin’ around.
Ree: I don’t talk about you men. Ever.

…

Teardrop: I know who.
Ree: What?
Teardrop: Jessup. I know who.

…

Sonny: Does that money mean you’re leaving?
Ree: I ain’t leaving you guys. Why do you think that?
Sonny: We heard you talking about the Army. Are you wanting to leave us?
Ree: I’d be lost without the weight of you two on my back. I ain’t goin’ anywhere. [/b]

All over the globe – for one shitty reason or another – children find themselves the victims of one or another adult clusterfuck. Sometimes they are the intended target and sometimes they just stumble into one quite by accident.

Of course sometimes children are the victims of other children. But the holes they tumble into here are generally no where near as deep as the ones that we dig for them.

Here the hole is a literal one. Michele lifts up the lid and down in the hole is a child. He is obviously being kept there. Now all we need to know is why.

Michele tries to imagine all the reasons this boy would be down in the. But the truth he doesn’t come close to. Not at first. And even when he discovers part of the truth he isn’t able to fathom the whole truth. Or the part those around him play in it.

What’s important is that the tale unfolds largely from the perspective of the child. You wonder why he does what he does and not what you would do instead. But the child’s imagination comes into play here. He fits the pieces together differently from how an adult might do so. He also comes up with a different ending,

IMDb

[b]This film was loosely based on a true story of a kidnapped boy from Milan and the novella written about the incident.

Salvatores interviewed nearly 600 boys for the part of Filippo, ultimately settling for novice Giuseppe Cristiano, the son of a Fiat car worker.

One scene breaks the realism in the movie: Michele is approaching the hole, and we can hear loud music and sounds of birds. When he climbs a fence, he yells “Shut up” (or something like that), and both the music and the birds stop at once, and the scene continues in silence.[/b]

at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I’m_Not_Scared
trailer: youtu.be/atLGsOg6lBY

I’M NOT SCARED [Io Non Ho Paura] 2003
Directed by Gabriele Salvatores

[b]Michele: A cave filled with gold and gems!

…

Michele [peering down into the hole]: Are you a child?

…

Michele [aloud to himself writing down a story]: “Dad and mom are expecting a baby. But instead, two are born, one blonde, one brunette. The brunette is normal, the blonde is crazy. When she nurses him, he bites her and draws blood. The mom doesn’t want him anymore and tells the dad to kill him. The dad takes him up to a tall mountain but he can’t stab him because it’s a sin. So he digs a hole and puts him in it. He brings him water and food so he won’t die. So…he…won’t…die.”[/b]

Nope, that’s not it.

[b]Filippo [boy in the hole to Michele]: Are you my Guardian Angel?

…

Filippo: Dead.
Michele: What?
Filippo: I’m dead.
Michele: Dead?
Filippo: I’m dead! I’m dead! I’m dead!

…

Sergio: Here it is!
News broadcaster on TV: Throughout the whole region the search continues for little Filippo, kidnapped in Milan. We will now air Luisa Carducci’s appeal to the kidnappers.
Pino [Michele’s father]: What the fuck does she want?
Filippo’s mother: I’m Filippo’s mother. I’m speaking to my son’s kidnappers. I beg you, don’t hurt him. He’s a good boy, well mannered, and very shy. The sum requested is steep, even for our family.
Sergio: She’ll cough up the money.
Filippo’s mother: You threatened to cut off his ear. I beg you not to do it. And please tell Filippo that his mother and father love him very much.
Sergio: We’ll cut off two ears! Two!![/b]

Why the “steep” ransom demand? Well, practically the whole village is involved! But now Michele knows why Filippe is in the hole. But then again not really.

[b]Michele [down in the hole]: You’re Filippo aren’t you? Your mom says she loves you and misses you. She said it on TV yesterday, and she said not to worry.
Filippo: My mother is dead! So is my dad and grandma, they’re all dead and live in holes!

…

Michele: Your mom said that she and you dad love you very much.
Filippo: Then why don’t they come and get me?
Michele: I don’t know.
Filippo: And why am I here?
Michele [shaking his head sadly]: I don’t know.

…

Mother [to Michele who now knows that she knows about Filippe]: Listen to me. Promise me that when you’re big you will leave this place.

…

Pino [to Michele]: If you go back there, they will shoot him…and it will be your fault. Forget about him. He is not there.
[then more to himself]
Pino: Christ, what a mess!

…

Michele [to his father]: Why did you put him in there? I don’t get it.
Pino [groping for words]: There are things that seem wrong when you…Don’t think about it. Just forget about it all.

…

Michele: Mama, he’s dead, isn’t he?
[she slaps him]
Mother: No one’s dead!
[then gentler]
You’re too young…[/b]