A Note about Fairy Tales, Hansel and Gretel

Hansel and Gretel is such an excellent tale that I'm sad to see the new film inspired by the German folk-tale has the names of the title reversed.  I haven't looked at the trailer for the new film and I don't know what angle they are going to work in the picture, so I don't want to speculate needlessly.  However, I can guess, but I will restrain my worse impulses.

The original tale is well known, but one thing that the reversal brought to mind was the role of love in that story.  Most modern versions sanitize it for consumption, a process begun by the Grimm Brothers themselves.  There is an absolutely astonishing website maintained by Professor D. L. Ashliman, Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Pittsburgh, which continues to maintain his amazing online collection of folk-tales, including a comparative version of the beloved Grimm tale here that places the 1812 edition (in English translation) side by side with the final version to be published under the auspices of the Grimms.  The original 1812 version has the Mother the source of suffering, later she will be transformed into a step-mother.  A change that seems more successful and at least more comfortable.  The tale may have originated in ancient times or in one of the periods of famine in German medieval history.  In any case, the tale is one of several that combines various elements, abandoned children, children outsmarting their parents, a cannibalistic witch, and burning your enemy in their own oven.  All good stuff as far as I'm concerned.  The tale has been pegged as disturbing, but my sister and I eat it up as a child.  Watching my own two children grow up together, they love it as well, and there is something of brotherly and sisterly love in it that needs to be emphasized.

Hansel upon hearing his father and step-mother discuss their plans to abandon their children, takes the initiative to preserve himself and his sister from deceit, betrayal, and sure death.  He cleverly comes up with a means of finding his way home, stones in the first attempt, and bread-crumbs in the second, when his ability to gather stones is thwarted by the step-mother.  Hansel, is both intelligent and resourceful, but he still a child.  His plans fail because of his limited perspective, but they are born out of bravery and a love for his sister.  His bravery and intelligence are still susceptible to human failings, and as they are weakened by lack of food and wandering in the forest the witch's house at first seems a godsend.  But anything that is so easy, and so easily obtained is always a warning to the prudent.  The witch's kindness quickly turns into a dangerous situation as she reveals her true nature.  Gretel now becomes the more resourceful and her love and gratitude for her brother and his sacrifice motivate her as they together find an expedient to preserve Hansel in the face of the witch's desire to fatten him up and eat him.  There is an understanding that in the out-world Hansel has the typical traits of male bravery and intelligence, but they are not enough, likewise, Gretel embraces the interior hearth centered world to take center stage and hoists the witch on her own petard.  Deception is turned against the witch as the means of salvation in this horrific scenario.

A mutual interlocking set of skills and loves, centered around the natural biological and evolutionary traits of the male and female push against the child-like limitations of body and mind and yet are triumphant because they are grounded in love and in virtue.  The final demise of the witch and the death or disappearance of the step-mother leads us to believe they are more than coincidental, although the fullest implication is the destruction of children, their neglect, and their abandonment are a form of cannibalization.  The female that would sacrifice her child for herself is a monster.  Instead, let us have the love that risks and sacrifices in the face of destruction for those we love and for the stranger.

Knives Out - Where American Decadence is Carved Up

Rian Johnson, the man that killed Star Wars has a new film, a film that the critics and audiences have endorsed, but I think not really understood.  It is an uneven romp with some clever moments, a great casts, and lots of fun, and it has a morality tale at its center as all good murder mysteries do.  Go see it, it is worth watching, so much for the review, let's talk about the picture.

If, and I think this is true, the tough-guy detective is the modern urban replacement for the cowboy hero, then he is also the modern embodiment for American morality.  In Knives Out Johnson has crafted a very old-fashioned story even as he has planted his tongue firmly in his cheek.  This allows him, knowingly or not to make a rather powerful point about American politics.  Politics in the big sense of the word not the horse race and horse trading kind.  It is an interesting film because Johnson seems to want to say things that, I suspect, that get tangled up with his own political convictions (of the smaller kind).   Well, the truth will out, indeed it comes crashing down like a V-2 rocket, as his detective Blanc would understand. 

Americans are decadent.  Our politically squabbles, seem so powerful, and our distrust so great, yet when you look at what we say we desire and believe, at least for the great majority of Americans, we really have little to argue over.  Like the Thrombey family though, the small differences, our jealousies, and our fears about our patrimony are driving us further apart because we have no context of love and community to mediate our passions.  We see our ancestors and immediate predecessors of the prior generation as having failed us, either enabled us, spoiled us, or boxed us in to the point of neutering us.  The World War II generation and before are seen as the real builders and achievers but have let their control and protection render us incapable of striking out on our own, all the while we boast about having achieved it all on our own initiative.  The younger generation are so self-absorbed that politics becomes mere theater, either social justice performance art or alt-right racist masturbation.  Only people of great age have any competency but are morbidly hanging on to power, whether it is the head of the family, Harlan Thromby played by Christopher Plummer or his grounds-keeper/security guard Mr. Proofroc, played by M. Emmet Walsh.  In fact, for all there flaws, only the working class members of the staff show any intelligence or decency, although only one, Marta Caberar (played with innocence and intensity by Ana de Armas) is truly virtuous and decent.  Her immigrant mother (illegal/undocumented) is the motivation for much of what she does, as she works to support or at least help support her and her younger sister.  In the end the family estate will go to her.  The family treat her as a prop, a pet, or a prole but they nation will go to her, the hard working, honest immigrant who deserves it.  However, in order for her to be able to obtain and maintain it against the only truly intelligent member of the family, she will need the help of the police and a private detective in a clear homage to Hercule Poirot.  However this benediction bearing white boy of the south, various derided as a KFC detective or Foghorn-leghorn idiot is able to pull together the millennial ineffectiveness of the profession African-American and White Yankee police to save the day.  In this film at least, the Yankee, the African-American, and the Southern now are all old America, the Yuppie, Millennial, Boomer, nexus is the bane of the nation.  It is interesting that the representative of "old America" and yet usually seen as "outside" of modern day America.  The film shows a deep amount of influences from literature (not just mystery and crime genres) and film history.  In a sense the pastiche quality gives it a kind of depth, and Johnson seems to be well versed in film history and in American literature in a way that is rare today.  Although, playing by the rules with virtue comes with the likelihood of failure there is redemption, something Marta's pious Catholic mother would understand.

The film is not without it's issues and it's camp has some issues with tone and balance, and the literary and film references are a bit much and a bit conflated and convoluted at times, but part of that adds to the fun.  After all is Thromby an homage to the family issues in Dombey and Son, or a reference to thrombosis or both?  Is Marta - like Martha of the New Testament or the German film about love and labor Mostly Marta, is her last name a reference to the goat-herding or just is she bad-tempered as the adjective form is used colloquially?  Is that moment when Daniel Craig's hits the floor to look at mud a direct invocation of Jeremy Brett's in The Devils Foot, to footage of Muder, She Wrote, and Clue the board game - too many, too thick...well, it doesn't matter.  The real dynamics of our national family are in trouble because we are decadent as the Thromby's but without the pious and virtuous and hardworking traits of Marta, leavened with kindness, we will loss the family estate, even if it came from a Pakistani in the 1980's, well, enough because now I'm starting to ramble.

Jonah Goldberg, et al., I never really knew ya...

     It seems of late that all the major conservative pundits I've admired over the years have turned into a tribe of audience hating grumps that make the Muppet's sarcastic duo of Statler and Waldorf look like a supportive therapy team.  David French, Claire Berlinski, Jonah Goldberg, and Jay Nordlinger among others want to un-elect the American people, especially most American conservatives and replace them with, hell, I don't know, a bunch of French grammar lovers, Canadian opera-goers, a team of former Reagan speechwriters?  I'm not really sure.  There is no sense in anything they say of late about our political landscape and daily life that seem to reflect the reality of American politics and social reality, and nothing but contempt from them with those who thoughtfully disagree with them.  Is there plenty of room for criticism of the American right these days, sure, and there is perhaps more ugliness and racism lurking on the right than many of supposed (as revealed in the Age of Trump), however, I think some of it has been hyped and exaggerated, by those on the right who find it a convenient way to define their opposition to this moment in our history; but were not talking about condemning that, which would both be facile, easy, and justifiable.  No, there is just an incomprehension of what has happened and an inability to grasp it, let alone understand it.  The result is their ideas and insights have become strangely flat, circular, and uninteresting.  It saddens me personally, because all of them them helped me grow intellectually in my early 20's to early 30's, but a decade on, I find them increasingly dull, infuriating, insufferable, or just plain whiny.  At least when talking shop, when Jay talks about dissidents or music, or Claire about life in France, or French discusses legal issues there is still the old sparkle and insight, but beyond that and it is a few steps away from either crazy-town (Berlinski), boredom (French/Goldberg), or petulance (Nordlinger).  Now, I know that they still have their acolytes, and they still are finding people who agree with them and are trying to build that into a new audience, but that is something profound in itself, no? 

I write this because it saddens me and angers me, and confounds me.  Is it all part of the Alice in Wonderland topsy-turviness of our new national discourse, or just the moving on of punditry.  The failure of these good guys and girls to help the nation I think is a tragedy, but maybe we have limited insights and not much to offer.  Part of it is the right has been shaken by several earth-quakes since 2000 and in these 20's no new consensus has emerged as we adapt to the hellscape before us.  As Jonah's NRO column today posited, if things are so good, why are we so unhappy as a nation?  Indeed, that is the question.  In part, the right is unsettled, and there is no consensus, and we crave that sense of unity and marching together, as much as people always have, right, left, or center, or whatever more three dimensional model we should all now embrace.  Everyone changes, pundits, society, and readers, so perhaps it should be no surprise, but when the whole tribe of Abu-ben-Adem goes one way and the readership goes another, well, maybe there is something to ponder?

Perhaps the ideas they unleashed had a life of their own, and like all teachers, they are astonished to discover that many of their pupils took away the wrong lessons from the material they put in front of them.  You can't control how people take your ideas and combine them with their own and their experiences to make new meanings and make decisions from that synthesis.  Pupils often look at their teachers with fondness, not because we learned what they wanted us to learn, but because they gave us the tools to see the world and make sense of it for ourselves.  Strange times, when people working together in thinking about something critically find themselves estranged even as we still mostly agree about core principals, but here I think is the interesting thing, that needs pondered a new.  What core principals were really at work, and that needs to be returned to because now I'm starting to ramble.