State of the Union Isn't About Today. It Just Feels That Way!

 

 

 

 

State of the Union (1948)

Directed by Frank Capra

MGM, 124 minutes, Not-rated.

★★★ ½

 

State of the Union feels strangely contemporary. More’s the pity. This Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn vehicle is about a populist Republican presidential candidate who becomes a tool for a tawdry cabal bent upon self-enrichment. Relax, no one was anticipating the events of 2020s. First of all, this is a Frank Capra-directed film. Capra was a conservative and, for a time, sympathetic to both Franco and Mussolini. Most of his films champion the proverbial “little guy,” but what’s on the screen is more about fair play than partisanship. Within film history, Capra is the quintessential master of the screwball comedy (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, It Happened One Night, It’s a Wonderful Life, etc.)

 

As if often the case, the bloodiest politics took place off the screen. It wasn’t supposed to be a Tracy/Hepburn movie. Capra originally wanted Claudine Colbert (It Happened One Night) as his female lead, but the two quarreled and Colbert walked away from the project. Hepburn, an ultra-liberal, took her place and couldn’t stomach Adolph Menjou, a right-winger who outed radicals during the post-World War II Red Scare assault on Hollywood. Hepburn was upper-crust Connecticut civil to Menjou, frosty but proper. Ultimately, the film was a satirical take on the politics of its day, not ours.

 

Capra’s film was based on a 1945 Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name written by Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay. In 1945, Franklin Roosevelt began his fourth term as president–a subsequent Constitutional amendment limited presidents to two terms–but Roosevelt died in April 1945, with Vice President Harry Truman assuming the White House. By the time the movie was released, World War II had been won and smart money said Republican candidate Thomas Dewey would defeat Truman in the 1948 presidential release. It was such a given that several newspapers announced that Dewey won; Truman actually took the popular vote by 4% and the electoral vote by a 303 to 189 margin.

 

State of the Union begins with publisher Sam Thorndyke–modeled after William Randolph Hearst or Frank Gannett–about to die. His daughter Kay (Angela Lansbury) vows to take revenge on liberals (read Democrats) per her father’s wishes. She doesn’t bother to tell him that she’s having an affair with married aircraft manufacturer Grant Matthews (Tracy). Grant has folksy opinions galore. He utters nostrums with such conviction that they sound convincing even when they are short (or devoid) of detail. At times even his estranged wife Mary (Hepburn) is semi-convinced, though she doesn’t take it seriously when he considers running for president. Mary does not yet know that Kay Thorndyke is putting those ideas in his head. One wonders if Grant knows he’s being set up to become Kay’s puppet.

 

Grant comes off as for forgotten Americans and borrows other Roosevelt tactics such as fireside chats and appearing with his son Georgie, perhaps a substitute for FDR’s dog Fala. Kay uses her newspaper empire to sandbag GOP frontrunners such as Dewey, Robert Taft, Douglas MacArthur, and others. She also uses secret threats to align business interests with Grant’s burgeoning campaign.

 

The problem with the Matthews bandwagon is that Grant believes his own speeches about taking on both Big Labor and Big Business, bipartisanship, and his various promises to the proverbial “average” Americans (waiters, bellhops, his barber, and blue-collar workers). Kay’s next step is to manipulate Grant with campaign strategists such as Spike McManus (Van Johnson) and Jim Conover (Menjou). Kay even convinces Grant to go back to Mary and put their affair on hold until after the election. But when Mary gets wise, all strategy and counter-strategy passes to the women.

 

This being a Capra film in the era of the Hollywood Code, you can anticipate a “cat fight,” to use the sexist parlance of the day. Nor was Capra bashful about pouring on the schmaltz, and he simply didn’t do bleak endings. In other words, there’s little reason to think of State of the Union as serious political commentary. If there is a weightier moral to the film, it is that American politics have been an act of performed theatrics for a long time (as in, from the founding through 2025).

 

A final note, if one of the minor characters looks fainty “witchy,” it’s because she is Margaret Hamilton from The Wizard of Oz.

 

Rob Weir

 

What We Can Know

 

 

 

What We Can Know (2025)

By Ian McEwan

Alfred A. Knopf, 299 pages.

★★★★

 

I’ve heard people complain that the fiction market is saturated with lightweight junk. If you hunger for literary fiction, Ian McEwan might be your pheasant under glass, if you can stomach a bit of futurism. McEwan writes for a sophisticated audience that wants stylish and intelligent prose, not just a “good read.”

 

His latest, What We Can Know is set in both 2014 and 2119. The dual fulcrum in each time period is poet Francis Blundy and his wife Vivien. At a party not-so-modestly dubbed the “Second Immortal Party–the first in 1817 introduced John Keats to such luminaries as William Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb–Blundy reads his latest work. “A Corona for Vivien” is devilishly difficult poem. Coronas usually hail an honored person via a string of joined 14-line sonnets, 3 quatrains with alternating stressed and unstressed rhyme patterns followed by a rhyming couplet. In a typical corona, 7 sonnets are joined with the last line of the first sonnet becoming the first line of the second, etc. Blundy allegedly strung together 15 sonnets, a staggering 210 lines. One can only imagine that Blundy really loved Vivien. But according to records, Blundy presented Vivien with the original and then it disappeared. It was said to be brilliant and mentioned Francis in the same breath as T.S. Eliot. His corona became the most famous poem that nobody ever saw! For a literary scholar, locating it would be like finding the Holy Grail.

 

In 2119, British scholar Thomas Metcalfe teaches American history 1990-2030. The latter date is significant. A combination of climate collapse, dictatorial leaders, and nuclear blasts have altered the planet dramatically. Metcalfe and his on/off lover Rose seek to solve the problem of Blundy’s missing corona. Thomas thinks important clues are in the Bodleian Library where he and Rose teach. That would the Bodleian at Oxford University Snowdonia; the old Oxford campus is under water and the United Kingdom is an archipelago of disconnected slices of land. Most of the world’s digital archives are controlled by Nigeria, as are communications systems. Forget fancy dinners; the drastically reduced populace gets most of its nutrients from protein bars. The humanities are in crisis, though Thomas archly observes, “The humanities are always in crisis. I no longer believe this is an institutional matter–it’s the nature of intellectual life …. Thinking is always in crisis.” Ouch!

 

McEwan has written a mash up of Waterworld, a murder mystery, a (metaphorical) ghost story, and tales whose message is what goes around comes around. McEwan’s title encapsulates this. Can we know if there was there a corona in the first place? Metcalfe is a romantic who never considers the possibility that Blundy should have been named Bluffer. He romanticizes his area of study and imagines the 21^st century as inherently more creative and free than the 22^nd. At one point he enumerates the things that once existed that are now gone, a list that runs the gamut from music festivals and gardening to stupid sports (football comes to his mind), and tasty food. He is shocked by students who think he’s an old fogey who excused 21^st century people for screwing up the planet. Thomas and Rose find clues alright, but what really happened? What was Vivien like? Did she return Blundy’s affection? Are they replicating the lives of their quarry?

 

As a historian, it struck me that McEwan was writing about the dilemma of my profession. Consider Pompeii, which experienced what its citizens would have viewed a global catastrophe. If it is the nature of the humanities to be in crisis, is it not the nature of historical clues to lie hidden? Pompeii was lost until an accidental discovery in 1599 and wasn’t excavated until 1748. We didn’t even know the city’s name until 1763, and to this day new finds tell us more. What is lost in a disaster? We know precious little about social relations. What partners were faithful and which were libidinous? Who was gay? Who hated their neighbors? But the reason we write history is that not everything is lost. McEwan cleverly gives us an alt.version of Francis and Vivien to ponder.

 

McEwan may be guilty of being needlessly oblique. He definitely privileges style over narrative, a practice that will infuriate those who dislike ambiguity. What can we know? Like history, we sometimes paint with broad strokes to hide details that we don’t know.

 

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

History and Myth at Rocamadour

 

 

Rocamadour is a tiny place, but one full of wonder. It perennially shows up on lists of the most beautiful villages in France. It is indeed a village–just 604 residents–but it has a dramatic setting and a rich history. In some ways it’s more like a small Italian town in Tuscany in that part of it occupies a hilltop. Quite an imposing one. Tour buses wend their way to a small parking lot at the summit. From there you can walk through a parklet devoted to the 14 Stations of the Cross devoted to the life and passion of Christ. Even if you’re a scowling heathen you can appreciate the devotion and artwork of believers.

 

The view from the top is enough to inspire religious fervor. Rocamadour is crowned by a 12^th century château. That building isn’t open to view, but you can walk about the defensive ramparts. One wonders how often they needed to rely upon them as this part of Rocamadour is built into the cleft of a limestone cliff that sits nearly 500 feet above the Alzou, a tributary of the Dordogne River. If you time your trip correctly you can view the Alzou Valley cloaked in fog in the morning and appreciate the panorama when it burns off by the afternoon.

 

If you’re not a mountain goat you can take a lift to the bottom, but I recommend you strap on your knee braces and brave the 216 stairs of Le Grand Escalier as there are important things to see on the journey down. Plus, you can take solace the medieval pilgrims climbed up those stairs on their knees. Despite its small population Rocamadour holds an oversized importance in French medieval history. Its name derives from Saint Amadour–the name is linked linguistically to amor, French for love–who might or might not deserve sainthood depending on what variety of Catholic you ask. He was either a devout hermit from sometime in the first century AD, or a complete invention. What we know for sure is that in 1162 an unmarked grave was found near the entrance to the 12^th century Our Lady (Notre Dame) Chapel that looked quite old, though the body therein had not deteriorated. It was declared to be the body of Amadour who was venerated as a saint. (FYI, the 1969 Vatican II council removed some 200 saints’ feast days from the calendar as it could not be verified they actually existed. Try telling that to someone wearing a St. Christopher medal!)

 

Whether Amadour existed or not is just one of Rocamadour’s mysteries. Pilgrims have been coming there since the 10^th century because of miracles–I warned you in an earlier post it would come up again–associated with its version of the Black Madonna (above). In this case, it is a statue inside the church carved from walnut of Mary and the infant Jesus. Rocamadour was also on the road to Compostella and a veritable parade of medieval luminaries: kings, queens (including Eleanor of Aquitaine), and holy men.

 

Both St. Dominic and St. Bernard of Clairvaux visited and wasn’t often the founder of the Dominicans and reformer of the Benedictines and founder of the Knights Templar set up shop in the same place. The Black Virgin carving is said to be over a thousand years old. Who carved it? Some say Zacchaeus, a tax collector disciple of Jesus. His wife was Veronica who supposedly wiped Jesus’ face on his route to his crucifixion and left his facial imprint on the cloth. You might recognize that as the famed Veronica’s Veil. Still others claim the Black Madonna was carved by Amadour, whom Mary commanded to live as a hermit. Why a Black Virgin? No one is quite sure. Is it because Mary and Jesus were darker-skinned Semites, soot from candles, the age of the artifact, or…? Will someone please call Sherlock Holmes?

 

As if all of this weren’t enough, Rocamadour is also connected to Charlemagne (748-814 AD). There are few medieval literary works more famous than the epic poem La Chanson de Roland, which appeared in the 11^th century. It tells of a trap set by enemies at the Roncevaux Pass in 778 AD. An advance guard led by Roland held the pass long enough for Roland to blow a horn warning Charlemagne of danger. History or myth?  Were the attackers Basques, Saracen Muslims from Arabia, or from Spain? Who wrote the poem? Sense a theme here? To add another romantic flourish, visitors are shown cleft in the rock from which iron protrudes. It’s said that an angel gave Roland a sword called Durandal, said to be the sharpest blade in existence. Roland was able to hold off scores of Saracens until Charlemagne counterattacked. Imagine Western history had Charlemagne died at the age of 20.

 

Whew! If you make it down to the main street of the village after all that, it’s lined with small shops, artisan ware, restaurants, and places to sample fois de gras (non, merci), its famed goat cheese (oui, s’il vous plait), and wine (encore, encore!). Then it’s time to board the toy-like Quercy Rocamadour train, which just barely fits through the town gate to be shuttled back to the top.

 

Rob Weir