Crisis of Masculinity in Art

  

Man Up! Visualizing Masculinity in 19^th-Century America

Addison Gallery of American Art

Phillips Academy, Andover, MA

{Click on image for larger viewing size}

All art galleries are closed right now. Rather than trying to entice you to get to an exhibit, I thought I’d post something that you can contemplate intellectually.

A recent Addison Gallery show was a bit misleading in its title, as many of the works were from the 20^th century. Nonetheless, its major point was well made and well taken. It’s no secret that American men have major issues. Men are far more likely to carry out acts of aggression/violence, lie, abuse alcohol and drugs, commit crimes, violate norms, transgress rules of civility, harm family members, objectify perceived social inferiors, underachieve academically, and act without empathy. This isn’t my opinion; it’s a problem that has been discussed since Antiquity and is standard discourse in contemporary sociology. You have but to Google “crisis of masculinity” to see what I mean.  

Is that crisis resultant from nature or nurture? Put another way, is it hardwired in the male Y chromosome, or is it a matter of how boys and men are socialized? No art show can resolve that fiery debate, but the Addison Gallery collection intrigues in that it suggests maybe we should pay a lot more attention to men’s roles in society. It is hard to become what cannot be imagined and, at least from the 19^th century on, men haven’t had a lot of choices to help them visualize a broader range of gender roles. More pernicious still, men have been raised to define themselves by what they do rather than who they are. That’s not mere semantics. Even positive virtues such as honesty and character are rooted in an individual ethos rather than social/community soil. That’s among the reason men’s psyches too often fracture when they lose their jobs. (Or have to spend too much time at home during a quarantine.)

Eakins

What’s striking about the Addison collection is how limited male options have been historically. Men can become soldiers and/or political leaders–like Samuel Waldo’s portrait of a determined-looking Andrew Jackson or nearby statues of figures such as Henry Clay–or intrepid sailors and fishermen risking life and limb, as Winslow Homer often documented. Power can also be expressed in the business or academic realm, as we see in Thomas Eakins’ portrait of physicist Henry Augustus Rowland. Notice the commanding presence of Rowland seated in a chair as others toil in the background. 

Muybridge

Bellows

Kuhn

Mainly men beat the crap out of each other and display their muscles. George Bellows boxing graphics and paintings are savage and raw; Eadweard Muybridge–a pioneer in photographing motion–showed that Bellows wasn’t exaggerating. Muybridge’s photo also suggests homoeroticism, but the very mention of that probably would have led to fisticuffs in the early 20th century. Rudolph Valentino, who was likely gay or bisexual, probably died from internal injuries suffered in such a fight. Paul Cadmus was irrefutably gay, but even his eroticized male bodies, such as those in “Horseplay,” emphasize powerful muscles. Ditto Walter Kuhn's "Acrobat."  

Hopper

Gropper

The Addison also challenges us to consider the double crisis experienced by men without defined roles. It’s hard to conjure a female parallel to Edward Hopper’s lonely paintings that ooze alienation.
William Gropper’s “Unemployed” is another poignant example. We observe men queuing for benefits before the gates of a closed factory in the distance, but the foreground consists of military recruitment posters, soapboxers, hucksters, beaten protestors, and a hooded Klansman with a rope awaiting a convenient scapegoat.

Empty Sleeve

 Perhaps the most striking of all is Winslow Homer’s print “Empty Sleeve.” A young man–certainly a Civil war veteran–sits beside a young woman who has the reins of the horse carriage. The man sits in the seat a woman would usually occupy, but her companion’s empty left sleeve makes him unable to command a horse team. That arm was no doubt removed by a battlefield surgeon and is a symbolic emasculation. To further that effect, note that the woman’s veil flies by his head, suggesting that the ex-solider has been both castrated and feminized.   

It is tempting to imagine these images as mere relics of an earlier age. Would that it were so, but there is a considerable body of sociological data that suggests there is much left undone. If recent history is any guide, we shall see elevated levels of the crisis of masculinity when we emerge from COVID-19 isolation.

Rob Weir

Three Unusual Films

Are you an adventurous movie viewer? Do you enjoy offbeat films? Here are three to try, all of which are available for download or online. I wouldn’t declare any of them masterpieces, but each is cut from a hard-to-sell bolt of fabric, which means they’re not what we see all the time.

A Girl Cut in Two (2007)

Directed by Claude Chabrol

Pan Europeene, 114 minutes, Not-rated (adult situations)

In French with subtitles

Claude Chabrol (1930-2010) was one of the last of the French New Wave directors. I doubt he’ll be remembered for La fille coupée en deux/A Girl Cut in Two, as structurally it’s one of the more conventional he ever made, but you will see echoes of the iconoclastic style of the New Wave. In particular, the New Wave wasn’t particularly interested in realism per se; more emphasis was placed on inner conflict and existential crises. This is important to remember, otherwise you might think Chabrol another Harvey Weinstein in his views of the distaff side.

Ludivine Sagnier stars as Gabrielle, the lovely young weather girl for a Lyons TV station. She is equal parts ambitious and naïve, the latter her Achilles heel. She becomes the simultaneous object of desire of Paul (Benoît Magimel), an overbearing son of privilege living off his private income, and Charles Saint-Denis (François Beléand), a famous writer. Paul has toys and money to burn in his pursuit of Gabrielle, he’s actually a shallow little shit. Though he’s much older, the sophisticated Charles is Gabrielle’s preferred sexual, intellectual, and psychological match. Three problems: He is married, has a kinky side, and also a track record of collecting then discarding young lovers–with the full knowledge and cooperation of his wife, Dona (Valeria Cavalli). Gabrielle is like a moth caught in a web with spiders converging on two sides.

This film takes a sanguinary turn evocative of Ragtime and contemporary “affluenza” cases. Some may bristle at Sagnier’s role as a girl trapped in a woman’s body–not to mention that her willingness to be demeaned for the right deal isn’t exactly feminism’s definition of women’s opportunity. Frankly, one wonders if any director would touch a script like this today. But think like a New Wave director. The film isn’t really a battle-of-the-sexes tale. It’s about hubris, with Gabrielle playing the part of Icarus in drag.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)

Directed by Joe Talbot

A24, 120 minutes, R (language, drugs, brief nudity)

This film was the darling of the 2019 Sundance festival and is the semi-autobiographical tale of director Joe Talbot’s friend, actor Jimmie Fails–emphasis on the term “semi.” It’s like a cross between Blindspotting and Downton Abbey and if that doesn’t pique your curiosity, nothing will!

It opens weird and stays there. We meet Jimmie and Montgomery (Jonathan Majors) waiting for a bus in the Hunters Point section of San Francisco that never comes, while a soapbox preacher raves about a conspiracy against black people. Jimmie and “Mont” are both well-spoken young men who mostly ignore the street corner trash talkers, though both are living with Mont’s blind grandfather (Danny Glover) and hope for a break. Jimmie’s dream keeps them both going. Whenever there’s no bus–Hunter’s Point is the area near where Candlestick Park used to be–they tandem ride Jimmie’s skateboard into the Fillmore section of the city where they maintain the exterior of a handsome Victorian home, despite the owners’ desire for them to go away. Jimmie can’t; he claims that his grandfather built it in 1947, but slipped out of black hands and into those of white gentrifiers. His dream is to one day reoccupy the family homestead.

As it happens, he and Mont will get such a chance. Imagine two young black men sitting in smoking jackets amidst Downton-like furnishings and befuddled white neighbors. Let me emphasize, though, that Fails and director Joe Talbot have not made a cheesy black kids-scare-the-white-bourgeois film. Nor are they simply messing with stereotypes by reversing customary black/white roles. The film is more serious and less obvious than that.

Actually, it’s often too layered for its own good. Talbot can’t quite decide if he’s making an idiosyncratic comedy, giving us a look at tragic black street life, engaging in a Spike Lee-like veiled rant, or appropriating white drama motifs. One can do all of these, of course, but it is a delicate balance and Talbot often totters. What this film does best is keep us continually off-guard and guessing about relationships, motivations, and expectations. Even the final scene is ambiguous–an ending, or a new beginning? This unorthodox film is akin to a grab bag filled with things both silly and sublime.   

The Man Without a Past  (2002)

Directed by Aki Kaurismäki

Bavaria Film Productions, 97 minutes, PG-13 (some violence)

In Finnish with English subtitles

I’ve saved the most peculiar film for last. There are a handful of directors–the Coen brothers, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, John Waters, Wes Anderson, Taika Waititi–whose movies are so singularly unconventional that even when they misfire, they intrigue. Add Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki to the list. It speaks volumes that The Man Without a Past is a favorite of Jim Jarmusch, the most outré director of our times. Think of it as a Finnish version of Mystery Train (in spirit, not content).

It’s often unclear in Man Without a Past whether it’s meant to be poignant or totally absurd. Spoiler alert: It’s both. A man arrives at the Helsinki train station at 4 am, makes his way to a park, falls asleep on a bench, and is violently robbed and beaten. He revives, but collapses in a rest room, is taken to a hospital, and is pronounced dead when his monitors flatline. Not quite! He again awakens and staggers away, only to collapse along the harbor in a section of the city so poor that folks are living in castoff cargo containers. He has no idea where he is, who he is, or why he’s in Helsinki.

This film is about outcasts, survivalists, indifferent bureaucrats, those who prey on the poor, and those who pray with them. Speaking of prayer, how about a romance between a hapless amnesiac and Irma (Kati Outinen) a female soldier in the Salvation Army? If that’s too plausible for you, how about Salvies’ musicians remade as a skiffle band? Our unknown principal (Markuu Peltola) adapts well to cargo container life and awkwardly pursues Irma, but he also endures one misadventure after another, each odder than the one before. Because he has no name or recoverable past, he stoically endures whatever comes his way.

Kaurismäki is absolutely Jarmusch-like in his approach. Reactions, conversation, and emotions are as sparse as the tundra and the pacing is deliberate. Stick with it. At first as it seems the film is going nowhere, bit it gets more absurd as it goes on. The humor is droll and dry. Its tone touching and sweet, but not of the sentimental fireworks-in-the-sky variety. By the time it ends, it’s a toss-up whether you’ve been in the presence of masked brilliance or advanced weirdness. But you’ll never again feel the same way about the Salvies.

Rob Weir

The Goldfinch: Great Book, So-So Movie

The Goldfinch (2019)

Directed by John Crowley

Warner Brothers, 149 minutes, R (drug use, language)

★★★

Movies often borrow from books, but literature is a problematic source. Even a short novel has more room to develop plots, back stories, and detail. A 300-page novel will take an average reader more than eight hours to finish; most script writers and film directors get 90 minutes to two hours to bring the same story to the screen. So what does one do with Donna Taart’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch, which checks in at nearly 800 pages? It doesn’t help that the book was polarizing; there were those—including me—who thought it riveting and others who and bailed before finishing.

If you see the phrase “Inspired by” at the beginning of a film, it usually means that liberties have been taken and that the book provides a seed from which the film blossomed; if it says “Adapted from,” most directors seek to be as faithful as they can to the printed word and excise as little as possible. Director John Crowley and script writer Peter Straughan opted for an adaptation of The Goldfinch. In retrospect, a reimagining might have been wiser. The Goldfinch was a major box office bomb last year. It’s not the turkey some critics considered it to be, but it is uneven. It’s worth a watch if: (a) you have actually read (and liked) the novel and (b) if you don’t expect a masterpiece.

The story unfolds when 13-year-old Theo Decker (Oakes Fegley) has dawdled and his flaky-but-chilly mother, Audrey, must walk him to his private school. They detour to the Metropolitan Museum of Art so that she can show Theo a painting. Theo is more interested in a girl he spies and decides to hang out near the gift shop while Audrey goes off to view another painting. Suddenly a terrorist bomb explodes and scores are killed, including Audrey and a man named Welty, who expires just as he places his partner’s business card into Theo’s palm. Amidst the rubble, dust, cacophony, and mayhem, Theo impulsively absconds with the picture Audrey wanted him to see: The Goldfinch, a 1654 painting from Carel Fabritus (1622-54), a Rembrandt student who was killed when a gunpowder magazine blew up in the Dutch city of Delft. (Taart did not invent Fabritus, the painting, or the explosion in Delft.)

This is merely the start of Theo’s journey. He is temporarily placed with the Barbour family: Chance, his moody socialite wife Samantha (Nicole Kidman), and their three children: Kitsey, Platt, and the geeky Andy, to whom Theo is kind though Andy is really annoying. Just when it looks as if Theo is about to be orphaned, his father Larry (Luke Wilson) appears to take him to Phoenix. Larry is every bit the small con man/big-time loser Theo’s mom said he was, and neither he nor his waitress girlfriend Xandra (Sarah Paulson) has an ounce of couth or a clue on how to raise a kid. Theo is cast adrift in a desert wasteland—a housing development that went bankrupt before completion. He is out of place in a public school and friendless, until he meets Boris (Finn Wolfhard), who might be either Russian, Ukrainian, or Hungarian—his tale changes. The two do what you might expect feral children to do: smoke, drink, do drugs, and commit petty larceny. Larry is a compulsive gambler so desperate for money that he tries to bilk Theo out of his trust fund and it’s implied that Boris’ father is a mobster. Theo and Boris plan to runaway to New York, but Boris gets cold feet and Theo sets off on his own.

Here is where Crowley makes a big decision and perhaps not a wise one. He has already pared to the bone Theo’s relationship with Welty’s business sidekick Hobie (Jeffrey Wright) and Pippa, the girl from the museum over whom Hobie has guardianship and Theo’s unattainable flame. Likewise, Theo’s friendship with Andy is glossed. Instead of continuing to telescope, Crowley chops. We next meet Theo as a young adult helping Hobie with his antiques and restoration shop in the Village. Somehow­—the novel explains it—Theo has been to college and looks and acts the part of a young entrepreneur. He still pines for Pippa, but is engaged to Kitsey Barbour and adored by her entire family. There’s nothing like a Boris sighting to stir the pot. What about the painting, you wonder? Yeah, there’s that and much more to resolve. By then, The Goldfinch is already working overtime.

It doesn’t help that the young actors portraying Theo and Boris are way more compelling than the adults who assume those roles (Ansel Elgort and Aneurin Barnard). There is also a jarring tonal shift: from character development to caper film. What the movie does best is raise questions about how much ugliness a life can endure before it corrupts the soul, but is a truncated adaptation needed to accomplish this?  One of the better reviews of The Goldfinch summed up the film nicely. If you’ve read the book, the movie will be eye candy; if you’ve not, you’ll probably be lost. Its best gift is to remind you why Donna Taart won the Pulitzer.

Rob Weir    

Nicholson, Dinklage, and Mulligan

Nicholson, Dinklage, and Mulligan. Sounds like a law firm. Actually, it’s the surnames of principals in three older films who render amazing performances. Download (or get DVDs of) the three films below.

Jack Nicholson has been playing the celebrity role for so long that he’s become a parody of himself and triggers gag reflexes. Once upon a time, though, he was a real actor hungering for a breakthrough. He made his first film in 1958, but his career was going nowhere until he was cast as drifter George Hanson in the 1969 film Easy Rider. That one is a time warp picture and should be viewed as such, but it landed Nicholson the first of 12 Oscar nominations. Three more nominations quickly followed–and he probably should have won for Chinatown– but Jack hoisted his first statue for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).

If you’ve never seen Cuckoo’s Nest, do so; if you have, see it again as it holds up well. It’s an adaptation of Ken Kesey’s eponymous novel, and one of the rare cases in which both book and film are masterful. Nicholson plays Randle Patrick McMurphy, a small-time punk with a long rap sheet who manages to stay out of prison by getting sent instead to a mental institution. Jack in a madhouse? They were made for each other. McMurphy isn’t nuts, just out of control, and he quickly surmises this is true for several fellow lunatics. Jack runs amok, but he misjudges Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) who keeps the lid on through a combination of cajolery and passive-aggressive blackmail. Cuckoo was nominated for 9 Oscars and won 5, including Best Picture, Best Actress (Fletcher), and Best Director (Milos Forman). Watch it also for wonderful performances from Will Sampson (“Chief”), Christopher Lloyd (Max), Brad Dourif (Billy), and Danny DeVito (Martini). This classic American film raises the question of who rules the asylum.

Hands up if you can’t imagine Game of Thrones without Peter Dinklage in the role of Tyrion Lannister. Dinklage is a Bennington College grad–something not many people know–and made his first film in 1995, but the one to watch is The Station Agent (2003). Not many people have seen it and that’s a crying shame. It’s the quintessential “small” film and that’s not a pun on Dinklage’s 4’5” frame. Some movies are slice-of-life efforts that don’t aspire to be splashy Hollywood productions. Dinklage is Finbar McBride, a quiet man who works in a model train shop owned by his friend Henry (Paul Benjamin). That is, until Henry drops dead at work and Fin is suddenly unemployed. He has no idea what to do next, until he finds that Henry has left him some property in a remote section of New Jersey. Fin arrives there to find that Henry has left him an abandoned railroad station house, his new home sweet home! Fin is a recluse who knows about trains but lacks social skills. He will eventually find himself drawn into the orbits of Joe, a verbose Cuban American food truck operator (Bobby Cannavale); Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), a klutzy divorcée artist; Emily (Michelle Williams), the town librarian; and Cleo (Raven Goodwin), an African American school girl who is curious about everything. Director Tom McCarthy, sometimes stumbles over whether the film is a comedy or a drama, but Dinklage alone turns this into a bittersweet offering that leaves us wanting more. Plus, it co-stars the vastly underrated Patricia Clarkson. Call this one small is beautiful and take that any way you wish.  

It’s no secret that Britain’s Carey Mulligan is the real deal, but take a look at An Education, a 2009 film directed by Lone Scherflig with a screenplay from Nick Hornby. You might know Hornby’s name from his coming-of-age novels. Lynn Barber actually wrote the autobiographical essay upon which An Education is based, but Hornby’s fingerprints are all over the film. Mulligan plays 16-year-old Jenny Mellor, a brilliant lass who is the apple of her English teacher Miss Stubbs’ (Olivia William) eye and is driven by her conventional (and clueless) lout of a father, Jack (Alfred Molina). Jenny is pegged by everyone as a golden girl, including awkward young Graham, who would dearly love to be her boyfriend. Then she meets David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard), who is considerably older than she. Yes, we’re talking Lolita territory here. David introduces her to his glamorous friends Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike) and takes her inside a world she could only imagine. David even charms Jack and his wife. You can probably surmise that Jack is not all that he appears to be. Mulligan was 24 when she made the film, but is utterly convincing as 16-year-old full of dreams and naiveté. She also radiant, a foreshadowing of the superb career she has subsequently built. Look for Emma Thompson and Sally Hawkins in cameo roles.

Rob Weir

The Good Liar Works Because of McKellen and Mirren

The Good Liar (2019)

Directed by Bill Condon

Warner Brothers, 109 minutes, R (violence, brief nudity)

✭✭✭✭

One of the small pleasures of movie-watching is coming across a film that only works because of its principals. The Good Liar is an acidic double-cross duet in the very best British style. It is made so by great actors who can cover holes in the plot, and it scarcely gets much better than Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren. 

We know from the outset that Roy Courtnay (McKellen) is a con man. He and his partner Vincent (Downton Abbey’s Jim Carter) run scams that separate fools from their money through elaborate fake identity and money-transfer scenarios. In fact, we first meet them as they are about to fleece Bryn (Mark Lewis Jones), a toffee-nosed high-flyer with more dosh than common sense. But Roy’s favorite swindle is draining accounts of rich widows. He even trawls dating Websites in search of prey. That’s how he meets Betty McLeish, a retired Oxford history professor. The first thing they learn about each other is that they both used fake names on the site.

Roy will draw from his usual bag of tricks to ingratiate his way in Betty’s home and life, but it seems as if old Roy might actually be falling for Betty–and vice versa. Her grandson Steven (Russell Tovey) tries to warn her that he not only smells a rat but has some evidence he dug up–he’s a Ph.D. student in history–but Betty tells him it’s none of his business. Roy is certainly spending Betty’s money, but he’s so charming that she hardly cares. What’s the use of money if you can’t blow it? Does Roy finally know a good thing when he sees it, or is he setting her up for an even bigger score?

The Good Liar is a who-do-you-believe film. It’s adapted from a Nicholas Searle novel, so there are only a couple of ways all of this can play out. Give director Bill Condon for knowing what he had and letting McKellen and Mirren make us believe in it. Would that he had been slightly more demanding of Jeffrey Hatcher’s screenplay, which is over stuffed and rockets us from place to place and jumps time periods. I haven’t read Searle, but I assume all of the film’s detail is in the book. The film, though, is decidedly a situation in which less would be more. There are times in which The Good Lair feels like a feast in which the food keeps coming even though we are stuffed. In this case, all we want the main course: McKellen and Mirren.

Luckily Condon pulls back at the right moment and lets them go at it. McKellen and Mirren are so skilled that they make us stop thinking about the implausibility of some of the background detail. In essence, they force us to suspend disbelief. Each plays a graying elder who lives each day as if each knows their current fling might be their last. They keep us off balance because they are old, but also because they are old pros. It’s eyes to the front when they are on screen at the same time. What details? We just want to know what will happen next.

It’s quite possible that The Good Liar really isn’t that good of a movie and that the ongoing pas de deux makes it better than it has any right being. My advice is to allow yourself to drown in this tart battle of the sexes. It could have easily been a stage show rather than a film, but does anything top the irony that we the audience are double-crossed in a film about double-crossing?

Rob Weir

They Shall Not Grow Old a Marvel on Many Levels

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)

Directed by Peter Jackson

Warner Brothers, 99 minutes, R (war violence)

★★★★★

We’re going to be quarantined for a while folks, no matter what the Orange Fraud in the White House thinks. I will be featuring films that are marked by greatness of some sort that make them must-see experiences. Not all are masterpieces, but each is remarkable in some way.

But let’s start with one that is a masterpiece: the technically brilliant and deeply moving They Shall Not Grow Old. You know the director: Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame. They Shall Not Grow Old (TSNGO) is a genre-breaking non-fiction film that’s non-linear and loosely structured. Jackson and his crew salvaged World War I footage, meticulously restored it, and overlaid it with moldering archival audio interviews.

Consider a famous song, and I don’t mean “Mademoiselle from Armentières.”  Pete Seeger first penned “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” in 1956; his friend Joe Hickerson added several verses in 1960. It may well be the most famous antiwar song in Western history. Here’s a link if you need to refresh your memory re: the lyrics. Note how the song moves from innocence to tragedy. Peter Jackson does the same thing in TSNGO without interjecting a single word of commentary. He also does a great service to history in honoring the men who went to war but, like Seeger’s song, Jackson doesn’t allow us to ignore the accompanying horrors.

World War I is as hard to justify as World War II is to disclaim. Perhaps you remember from an old history class the causes cited for World War I: militarism, imperialism, unstable alliances, wars in the Balkans, sclerotic leadership…. It is a litany of folly, not nobility. From it came 20 million deaths from the conflict and another 50 million from the Spanish flu pandemic unleashed upon compromised immune systems–not to mention the Bolshevik Revolution, millions of displaced persons, the collapses of aristocracy, and global assaults on civil liberties that planted the seeds for the rise of fascism. Seeger asked, when will we ever learn? Alas, it’s usually in retrospect (if at all).

Jackson performed a herculean task. He found more than 600 hours of audio interviews from more than 200 vets and another 100 hours of war footage. Try whittling that down to 99 minutes! The first 20 minutes of the film unspools as audiences might have seen it in a silent movie theater: in black and white and in a smaller format. Jackson’s only nods to modernity were repairing the footage and adding voice-overs. (Movies didn’t ‘talk’ until 1927.)

At first it seems that Jackson is valorizing the war. The voices tell of rushing to enlist and the images are of smiling young men at recruiting offices, crisp drilling, and cheering spectators as boats are loaded for France. Only when they arrive does the footage go to full screen and color. There was no color film at the time, but this isn’t a Turner Films colorization hack job; Jackson’s team carefully researched the era to show it as soldiers themselves would have experienced it.

Color has a dramatic effect. Grainy grey photos become lurid nightmares of blood and mud. Gung-ho attitudes also give way to deadly guns and runs–diarrhea and disease killed just as surely as bullets and bayonets. The filth of the trenches beggars the imagination. Consider a single uniform for the duration, muck-covered puttees, rotting horse flesh, strewn human corpses, clouds of flies, legions of lice, and the smell of open latrines. (Witness a row of naked backsides defecating over a single board suspended across a makeshift trench.)

Jackson occasionally stitched and timed photos to give brief bursts of motion to otherwise static images–basically a more sophisticated version of what your phone can do. As we move to battlefields, the narration is weightier. Contrary to histrionic movies, most soldiers didn’t rush pell-mell into no man’s land; they had to pick their way carefully through barbed wire, bomb craters, quicksand, minefields, and the dead. Jackson leavens the horror with humor. The British love of tea is self-lampooning when one witnesses it being drunk for jerry cans still reeking of petrol. More poignantly, class distinctions are on display the moment soldiers smile and we see the appalling dental hygiene of the poor.

One is left with the question of what good came of this. There was little jubilation when the guns went silent on November 11, 1918. For survivors, theirs was the reaction of the emotionally, physically, and psychologically wrung-out. Jackson pulls another sleight of hand by returning to small-frame black and white when troops return to a public that neither understood what they experienced, nor cared to hear about it. The “boys” were now “men,” and their habits, language, and grotesque wounds embarrassed much of the populace. “Tommy” did his duty, but then it was back to the bottom of the social heap.

There are no names attached to the voices we hear, nor are locations or dates given. This was partly done for continuity’s sake, but also because Jackson wanted to keep the focus on ordinary individuals. Each tale is simultaneously unique, but cut from similar cloth. Jackson further showed his sympathies for the average Tommy by restoring all of the footage and giving it to the Imperial War Museum. He took no fee for his own labors.

TSNGO is a double entendre. Millions never got a chance to grow old; those who made it home have both the bloom of their youth and the wilted flowers of their early manhood preserved for posterity. Thanks to Jackson and his amazing film editor Jabez Olssen, fading back and white photos from a now-forgotten war is there in color to remind you that you can look away, but the truth is still there. These are the faces and voices of war. If they make you uncomfortable, watch how you vote!

Rob Weir

The Golden Cage is Trashy Faux Feminism

The Golden Cage (2020)

By Camilla Läckberg

Alfred A. Knopf, 300 pages.

★

Where is the line between a steamy romance novel and soft porn? I’m not certain, but I’m sure that Camilla Läckberg (Jean Edith Camilla Eriksson) crossed it. Her newest novel, The Golden Cage, came with promo telling me that this Swedish crime fiction writer has written a dozen and a half novels that have been translated into 40 languages, so I guess her formula is working for her. It’s not working for me. I needed a shower after reading The Golden Cage and it wasn’t a cold one.

Many English speakers will recognize the title as a reference to living in a situation that inspires envy by outsiders but is actually a prison for those on the inside. Betty Friedan used it in her definitive feminist work The Feminine Mystique. More on Friedan in a moment.

Unless one is born into obscene wealth, most gilded cage occupants were once the envious ones on the outside. This is certainly the case for the novel’s putative heroine, Faye. She was actually born as Matilda, but assumed a new identity when she fled from a dark family secret in her native Fjälbacka, relocated to the anonymity of Stockholm, and reinvented herself. (Ironically, Läckberg lives in Fjälbacka.) In Stockholm Faye struggles at first, then acquires both a boyfriend and a BFF named Chris. The boyfriend has to go when Faye first feasts her eyes–and I’m being kind about the relevant body part–on Jack Adelheim, whom she identifies as both hot and a high flyer. Faye helps him build Compare, a marketing firm, and before you can say “knickers off,” they are filthy rich and the envy of their nouveau riche peers. It’s a dream life, but one that changes when Faye gives birth to Julienne and Jack becomes a workaholic and sexist pig. Faye abases herself to try to please Jack, but he’s soon addicted to porn and sleeping with half of Stockholm, before Faye discovers him with Ylva, a younger version of herself.

At this point, The Golden Cage becomes a revenge novel masquerading as feminist. Faye once again reinvents herself and launches a beauty product line named–you guessed it–Revenge. She draws investors from loads of women, including her landlord Kersten, who have one thing in common: Each has been screwed over by a man or two or more. At this juncture I should say that I “get” it. Millions of women have been abused (psychologically, physically, or both) by men and there’s no excusing it under the rubric of “the way things used to be.” Faye’s plan to avenge Jack’s sexism is, to say the least, unique.

All of this raises the question of whether this novel is feminist or just trashy. Jack is a truly despicable human being, but there is exactly one male character in the book who is anything more than a cardboard cutout chauvinist: Chris’ boyfriend Johan. There is also the question of what is morally justifiable. One theory claims there is no such thing as reverse sexism; another that says neither misogyny nor misandry is morally justifiable. If only these were the sole choices in Läckberg’s novel. Hers is a troubling amoral version of feminism, and almost none of how Läckberg extricates women from their golden cage is what Betty Friedan would have condoned.

The phrase “revenge is a dish best served cold” comes from Pierre Chordelos de Laclos in the novel whose English title is Dangerous Liaisons. Perhaps you’ve seen the wonderful 1988 film of that title, where the revenge is both frosty and complex. Now would be the time to say that Camilla Läckberg is no Pierre Chordelos de Laclos. A list of what The Golden Cage lacks would include wit, verisimilitude, and suspense. There is, however, crime. And let us not forget soft porn. Had I read the phrase “wet between the legs” one more time in relation to Faye, I might have hurled this book across the room despite the fact that it was loaded onto my iPad. In the opening line of my review I asked where the line is drawn between steamy romance and porn. Perhaps this novel reads better in Swedish but from where I sit, it’s not worth making distinctions. In English, The Golden Cage is trashy pyrite pulp.

Rob Weir