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November 2019

Dark 2

Well. I don't really know what to make of this, and am not at all sure I should recommend it to others. But I think I will anyway. Because, whatever my reservations, I was thoroughly fascinated by it. One big warning, though: the story does not end, just as it did not end with series 1. There isn't even the sort of resolution with a few loose threads that satisfies the desire for an ending while pointing the way to a sequel. According to Wikipedia the third season is to be the last one, so I'm hoping that means the developers actually planned a coherent three-season plot which will have a reasonable ending.

The story only becomes more complex in series 2, and I have major doubts as to whether it makes sense. The pseudo-science makes even less sense than before: opening a barrel of nuclear waste might make those in the immediate vicinity pretty sick, but I really don't think there's any danger of it disrupting the very fabric of space-time. And the use of wormholes to serve as the equivalent of magic in sci-fi has gotten tiresome.

But the complex and confusing plot line is anchored by elemental human drama: parents, children, love, death, misunderstanding, mistakes, separation and reconciliation. Not really all that much of that last one, though, at this point. 

The contradictions inherent in the whole idea of time travel are handled more imaginatively here than in time-travel stories I've encountered. However, that seems to be a confession of ignorance on my part: suspecting that something called "the bootstrap paradox" was not invented by the writers of this series, I searched for it, and found that it goes back at least to a 1941 short story by Robert A. Heinlein. The basic idea is presented in the show as this: you take an object back in time and leave it there. So it exists in the present because it existed in the past. But since it was only in the past because you took it there, it was never created. At any rate, the movements in time are so many and so complex in Dark that the result is either a brilliant juggling act or a big mess. Either way, it's awfully well done--well-acted, well-written, well-produced.

Actually I'm concerned that something that happened in the last minute or so of this season may seal the "big mess" verdict. I'll find out when I watch series 3.


Un-movies, Un-music

I partly agree with what Martin Scorsese says in this NYT piece. In case the link doesn't work, here are a couple of excerpts:

I was asked a question about Marvel movies. I answered it. I said that I’ve tried to watch a few of them and that they’re not for me, that they seem to me to be closer to theme parks than they are to movies as I’ve known and loved them throughout my life, and that in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema.

The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare.

Most movies have always been junk; after all, the movie industry is an industry. I don't agree that there's any kind of a definite line between "entertainment" and "cinema." Or for that matter between "entertainment" and art of any kind. 

But the comic-book movies do seem to be something different from others. Not drama, not comedy, not horror, not thriller. Not even action, in a sense, because the action is un-human; a sub-genre of their own, really. I've seen a couple of them, and they are entertaining. But the elevation of spectacle over everything else really does make them closer to theme parks than to memorable art. The endless tie-ins to actual theme parks and all sorts of merchandise reinforce that. 

Come to that, I've never bought into the whole idea that comics of the Marvel-DC sort are some sort of profound pop-mythological art to which we should pay serious attention. Even as a child and a young teenager, I didn't have a huge interest in them. I read and enjoyed them when they came my way, usually at a friend's house, but I don't recall ever putting my very limited spending money into the purchase of one. 

This started me thinking about a similar phenomenon, a similar sort of disjuncture, but to me a more striking and decisive one. I don't hear much of today's popular music that is actually popular, but when I do it often strikes me as not being music at all. I don't mean that it's noise; I sort of like noise. I have not just a tolerance but a liking for an adept infusion of noise into music.I like Sonic Youth. I like Low's Double Negative album. I like Fennesz.

I mean that it seems like some sort of artificial quasi-music. When I hear it, my brain doesn't register it as "music" to be liked or disliked, but only as an aural phenomenon, and a very irritating one. It's the musical equivalent of Cheez-Whiz, which is described on the package label as a "processed cheese food product" or something like that. 

Example: the other day I saw a link to a new song "dropped" by the trio of Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, and Lana del Rey. Just out of curiosity, I played the YouTube video. I didn't get more than about 45 seconds into it. As something in the background in a public place, I guess I could have ignored it. Listened to attentively, I found it almost literally unbearable. I dislike absolutely everything about it. I especially dislike the singing style that's fashionable among a lot of these young women singers. And the pugnacious bragging lyrics, also fashionable. The typical music video sleaze is pretty much to be expected. Listen for yourself, if you like. I tried it again and this time didn't bail out till 1:45. 

It's ok if you scoff at my complaint as those of an old boomer who can't handle the kids these days. It doesn't actually have much to do with age. It has to do with whether Cheez-Whiz should be considered cheese or not.

I considered including a video by a young woman artist whom I actually like, though sometimes against my better judgment, but it's a little disturbing. Look for Myrkur on YouTube if you like (or on Spotify or whatever), but be warned that she's...challenging...in a way that these girls are not.


Dark (German TV series)

I'm not generally a fan of time-travel stories. They seem to follow the Terminator and Back to the Future patterns, in which someone travels into the past in order to make something happen or not happen in order to change something in the future, and that usually turns into a fairly straightforward adventure or comedy. But this one is richer and more fascinating than most, at least within my not-all-that-extensive experience. That usual pattern does become a factor but I think not until fairly near the end of the first 10-episode series. There is a whole lot more going on.

There are two seasons, and I've recently finished the first. It doesn't by any means end the story, and I'm a little concerned that the second will not do that, either, as a third (at least) is planned. But I'm definitely going to watch it.

Season one, at any rate, involves three points in a 66-year span: 1953, 1986, 2019. That's a 33-year interval, constituting a cycle in which the lunar and solar years are somehow in sync. I'm sorry, but I have not bothered to understand exactly how this works, and it probably doesn't matter. For purposes of the show's mythos, I think it's enough to know that this cycle has cosmic significance. 

The story begins in 2019 and involves, mainly, four families in a small German town. They are connected in complex ways in 2019, and as things develop we see that they have been connected for a long time. There is a constant interweaving of times and characters, of past and present. I'm not even going to attempt an overview. I haven't counted but among four families there must be several dozen people involved, and their interactions are complex even without the added confusion of people moving around in time. 

Moreover, what's going on--the time-travel stuff and various related matters--is conceptually complex (and of course includes some pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo which probably doesn't actually make sense). You may find it easier than I did, or more difficult, but for me it became exasperatingly hard to follow at times. But it was also interesting enough that I re-watched parts of it, just to try to understand what was happening.

It's also appropriately named: it's very dark. It's not really explicitly violent, but it involves the deaths of several children, and although their murders are not depicted, their bodies, with horrible injuries to their faces, are shown repeatedly. Also--this is pretty minor, but worth mentioning: the opening includes a brief but pretty explicit sex scene which has absolutely no artistic reason for being so. This is an annoying thing which I've noticed in several shows, which tells me that it's not an accident: start things off with a single attention-grabbing sex scene, and after that just tend to the story and don't do it again. Seems pretty cynical.

It is extremely well-done, and as I say I'm finding it fascinating. So this is a recommendation, but a qualified one, due to the dark subject matter and the complexity. (And yeah I know some people can't deal with subtitles.) This trailer will give you a pretty good feel for it, though it doesn't provide any very definite information. Many of the moments included here are not actually very important to the story. The trailer also allows you to hear part of the gorgeous and extremely appropriate song from the opening titles, which is the work of the German musician Apparat.

Apparently a lot of people are comparing it to Stranger Things, but I don't think that's especially accurate. I think that's probably just because a significant part of it occurs in 1986, providing plenty of opportunity for depicting '80s pop culture and fashion.


Anglicanorum Coetibus, Ten Years On

Here's a good assessment from Joanna Bogle at the Catholic Herald. Good, but in my opinion a bit more rosy than is warranted. And I'd say the headline is definitely too rosy:

It hasn’t been easy. But ten years on, the ordinariate is a success story.

I won't say the text contradicts that, but it certainly qualifies it. (And most likely the author did not write it.) Joanna Bogle is British and is writing mainly of the UK. Here she describes the phenomenon that apparently surprised a lot of people who thought that the development would be enthusiastically welcomed and that significant numbers of Anglicans would "come over":

A meeting of Forward in Faith, a network of orthodox Anglicans and the leading organisation on the scene, was quickly summoned. And that was when disappointment set in. The reaction of many was not what had been expected.

“We couldn’t believe it,” the ordinariate member recalls. “Speaker after speaker rose to say, ‘Oh, I don’t know … I don’t think this is for me,’ or words to that effect. Where some of us had assumed a general rejoicing and some practical plans on how to go ahead, there was just a flatness, a sort of bland rejection without any real reasons given.”

More or less the same kind of thing happened here. I was not altogether surprised, as I thought the number of interested Episcopalians and "Continuing Anglicans" was relatively small. It's not as if the heterodox drift (to put it mildly) of the Episcopal Church was a new thing. It was obvious and obviously well under way when I converted in 1981. Most people who were truly unhappy with those developments left years ago. As someone I know put it, "that pond is fished out."

And some big proportion of the Continuing folks seem to be very definitely Protestant. Or, if they think of themselves as Anglo-Catholic, are pretty well committed to the idea that they don't need to be in communion with Rome because they're already Catholic. Scratch these folks, and you'll usually get a distinct whiff of old-fashioned British disdain for "the Roman church." I suspect something of that is behind the "bland rejection without any real reasons" which Bogle describes.

(Here I will air one of my numerous pet peeves: the Anglicans who deny that there are any significant theological differences between them and Rome, yet when asked "So why not accept Rome's teaching?" immediately name a number of theological differences that they cannot accept. Either they're significant, or they're not.)

I don't follow these things very closely, but I'm told by those who do that the U.S. Ordinariate is doing better. Our local group, the Society of St. Gregory the Great, is hanging in there, not growing much but not in immediate danger of death, either. And the Ordinariate's cathedral, Our Lady of Walsingham in Houston, seems to be thriving. I was there a month or so ago and it was a pretty impressive experience. I had meant to do a blog post about it but haven't gotten around to it. There's more to the Walsingham story than Anglicanorum Coetibus, though: it came into being under John Paul II's Pastoral Provision in the early '80s, so it has relatively old and deep roots now.

As I see it, AC was about thirty years late. It is what the Pastoral Provision should have been; the PP was far more limited in scope than the Ordinariates. (See this for what the PP effected.) I think more Anglicans in this country would have come over if something like the Ordinariate had existed then. I almost said "too late," but that implies a hopeless situation. In this case "never too late" and "better late than never" apply. I think of us as nurturing a small and slow-growing plant which may grow into a great tree long after I'm gone. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but it certainly won't if we don't keep it alive now.

Thank you and God bless you, Benedict XVI.

ShrineOfOurLadyOfWalsinghamShrine of Our Lady of Walsingham at the Cathedral in Houston

 


The Innocents

I finally watched this 1961 movie, reputed to be the best adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, and also a pretty dang good movie on its own terms. I agree with both opinions. It is really very good. To my mind it's an unusual sort of success: the filmmakers took a very good book (ok, novella, whatever), made a film based on it which simultaneously took a lot of liberties and remained faithful, and produced something that is as good a film as the book is a book. 

Well, almost. I don't know how hard I'd defend that last statement. I mean, maybe it's not quite up there with the acknowledged masterpieces of cinema. But then the same could be said of the book in its category. If it were all we had of Henry James, he would not be considered a major writer of fiction. Anyway, it's an exception to what seems the usual patterns: good book to bad or inadequate movie; bad or mediocre book to good movie; good book to good but not very faithful movie. And of course bad book to bad movie is a perennial. But none of that is as true as it once was; movie-making has improved in a lot of ways since 1970 or so. 

The Innocents is actually based directly not on the novel itself but on a play by the same name, adapted from the novella by William Archibald, who, along with Truman Capote, is credited as screenwriter. The play seems to be Archibald's only other claim to fame. It would be interesting to compare the movie to the play, to get an idea of how much Capote contributed. I had forgotten till this moment that I read Other Voices, Other Rooms many years ago, and the scraps of memory that have returned make me think it would be worth revisiting. 

You can find the trailer on YouTube, but it's sort of trashy, so I don't think I'll post it. I notice several comments to the same effect. 

So, for the moment, ends my fascination with The Turn of the Screw (see this and this). I'm tempted to read it again but other authors, other books have claims on me. I still count myself in the "apparitionist" camp as regards the reality of what the governess sees, but, as I mentioned in the second of those posts, I grant that the arguments for the opposing view. I'm inclined to stay with my original view: that the ambiguity arises from the fact that Henry James wrote a Henry James ghost story, arguably subtle to a fault. Apparently he never said anything to indicate that the apparitions were not real, but of course that doesn't prove anything. 

*

While I'm at it: I also watched the Breaking Bad sequel, El Camino. I saw a review somewhere that described it as "inessential," which I guess is true, but that's ok, it's a very good story, as well-done as you would expect, considering that it was made by the same people who did the series. I would certainly recommend it to anyone who likes the series.

Also: I recently watched the fourth series of the British mystery show Shetland. And maybe it's just me, but I thought it was a cut above its previous series as well as most similar dramas, close to Broadchurch territory. You need to have seen at least the preceding series, though, to fully get some of the things that are going on. 


Chrysta Bell and David Lynch: This Train

Summary for Twin Peaks fans: I'm pretty sure you'll like this album.

I've been meaning to write about this for a while. Chrysta Bell is the singer/actress who played Agent Tammy Preston in the Twin Peaks sequel that appeared a couple of years ago. Twin Peaks: The Return was the official title, I think. As you may or may not recall, I was somewhat disappointed in it. And having read the Mark Frost book which provided a whole lot of backstory as well as a glimpse into the present of our beloved Twin Peaks characters, I was definitely disappointed that Agent Tammy was not given a more prominent role. 

Well, I can forgive that now. This album, a collaboration between Bell and Lynch, is great. 

A significant part of the appeal of the original Twin Peaks was the music, composed mainly by Angelo Badalamenti. The show produced an album, officially credited to the singer Julee Cruise who appeared in several episodes, called Floating Into the Night. It is one of my favorite albums; it was one of those featured in the "52 Albums" series we did here a few years ago, and you can read that appreciation here

So when I say that This Train is almost as good as Floating Into the Night, it's high praise. It's different, not at all an attempt to reprise the artistic success of Floating, definitely its own man, so to speak. It doesn't have the nostalgic quality, but it has something else that's just as strong. How to describe it? Darker, grimier, spookier, less sweet, less romantic, though not unromantic. But more mystical. 

Well, describing music is always difficult. If you like this song, you'll like the album.

Or at least most of the album. One or two songs, mainly "Swing With Me," are sexually focused in a way that doesn't help the album as a whole. And the last song, "The Truth Is," seems pretty out of place, a synth-pop song that's not bad in itself but is a bit disappointing as an album closer.