 1. About a year ago I determined to read Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire. I had been collecting them piecemeal for a while--watching Amazon for sales on the Kindle editions (being overseas has made me an unapologetic ebook reader) and--having finally started reading Vidal's fiction after years of devotion to his essays--it seemed, in that distant January, a good idea to read his magnum opus. And so I read them--in publication order, not chronological, which means that I started with Washington D.C. (1967) and read Lincoln (1984) and 1876 (1976) in reversed order, since I was interested in seeing how Vidal slowly came to the realization that he had a series on his hands. 2. I am breaking no new ground when I say that the best books in this series are the three chronologically-earliest: Burr, Lincoln, and 1876. This is because all three are based either around a single figure or around a limited span of time. Later books--Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990) and The Golden Age (2000)--grow progressively less disciplined, more sprawling. Washington D.C.--the first book written but occupying the same time-frame as The Golden Age--is an odd fit in the series since it is entirely focused on fictional characters. 3. I say The Golden Age is less disciplined, but that's only partly true. The first half of the novel, like the three best books in the series, is tightly focused around a single person--FDR--and leads to a single event--the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But that event occurs about in the middle of the book and then Vidal lets the narrative wander off into descriptions of the arts scene in New York following the War (largely enjoyable) and characters monologuing on the national security state (largely unenjoyable). 4. Late in his life, Vidal grew increasingly conspiracy-minded, and that shows in the final books of the series--particularly The Golden Age which is centered around the (to my understanding, historically doubtful) claim that FDR not only allowed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but maneuvered them so that attacking Pearl Harbor was their only choice. As with most conspiracy theories, this whole narrative requires more government machinery and more secrecy from more people than is practical--besides setting up FDR as the most brilliant mind of the century, something I suspect Vidal (who preferred Eleanor) did not intend. 5. But the thing about conspiracy theories is that they make terrific narratives. Consider JFK, which is absolute nonsense but which is also a wholly engrossing thriller. The same thing is true of The Golden Age. Vidal's allegations may be nonsense, but they make for a terrific story.
6. Vidal is very canny here, by the way; in the afterward he asserts the total truth of his claims, but within the novel he hedges it with multiple contradictory perspectives--leaves in doubt exactly how much FDR actually did. 7. Regarding the other books: I place Lincoln pretty high, recognizing its quality, I don't actually care for it as much as some folks seem to (certainly not as much as Harold Bloom did). It is the first of the books (besides Washington D.C.) to be told in third person and Vidal's handling of point of view seems somewhat shaky. It's also the book that's least concerned with his fictional descendants of Aaron Burr, which might have something to do with its feeling of fitting oddly with the rest of the series. 8. Except for Burr and Lincoln, pretty much all of the books could be thought of as variations on the international theme in American literature. I am not original when I say that 1876 simply reverses the direction of the narrative, with innocent (ish) Europeans finding an already-corrupt America. The thing is, I can't remember where I read that; probably in Altman or Neilson. Vidal did speak kindly of Henry James (as did James Baldwin) and you can see the Jamesian fingerprints on these books from Empire onward. 9. Narratives of Empire is Vidal's preferred title for the series; his publishers apparently preferred The American Chronicles--and one can guess why. Either series-name is fairly portentous and the reader could be forgiven for not expecting humor. But these are pretty funny books; one book opens with William Randolph Hearst breaking a chair. So there's physical comedy--there's also the humor of the "typical American" approach to things rubbing up against the always-delightful Caroline Sanford, who first appears in Empire and proceeds to carry the series away under her arm. 10. Personal ranking: Burr 1876 The Golden Age Lincoln Washington D.C. Empire Hollywood Yes, I was fairly down on The Golden Age above, but that first half really sings and I'm interested anyway in postwar culture, so.... Next up for me is The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr. And then I have to decide if I want to tackle another long-and-slow reading project (probably finally committing to The Dream of the Red Chamber or else girding my loins for Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series).
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 Over the course of last weekend I celebrated my birthday in bed—not, alas, for any of the numerous pleasant reasons one could imagine but because I managed somehow to throw my back out of alignment. It still isn’t quite back to its proper shape, which is why I’m composing this series of thoughts on my phone rather than at a computer (ain’t technology grand?) As I noted in my post on television in 2020, I consider the Showtime adaptation of The Good Lord Bird to be, not just very good, but very possibly great. My perception may be skewed by how powerfully the last episode moved me; there were moments in there not unlike religious rapture. It’s a devastating production, and much of that power derives from Hawke’s blazing performance. And so, as all faithful readers must, I turned to the book to try to pick out exactly how much of the series’ power derived from the source material. It is not, as it turns out, an easy question to answer. The miniseries does follow the novel with shocking precision—naturally, I suppose, given that both derive from real history. Still, given the habit of other recent television adaptations of taking the basic idea and broad plot beats and spinning an independent story (American Gods, for instance, or Lovecraft Country), it was a strange experience to realize that I was reading on the page scenes that I had already seen, more or less exactly, onscreen. The difference turns out to be one of emphasis. The TV series presents a John Brown who is recognizably descended from Captain Ahab—driven by an inner light that seems mad to everyone around him, driven even to his own destruction and that of his followers. One can imagine Harold Bloom encountering this John Brown and expanding on his idea of the American religion as one that recognizes the hidden minder divinity. In the novel, Brown is—not that. There are places, particularly toward the end, where something resembling the television version peeps through. But the John Brown of television is Ethan Hawke’s own creation; he warps the narrative around himself much as Brando warps the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. If anything, the true progenitor of The Good Lord Bird (and here I find myself talking like Bloom) is not Moby-Dick but Huckleberry Finn. Both novels are irreverent comedies about serious matters told from the perspective of an adult remembering his antebellum childhood. The Onion seems to derive from Huck Finn his self-awareness and wry eye for hypocrisy but he adds a crucial element of sexual confusion (or desire, which at thirteen or fourteen is the same thing.) The central gag of the novel—that Henry “the Onion” has been mistaken for a girl and chooses to continue as one to appease first John Brown and then various white pro-slavers—would seem to be a gloss on the episode in Twain where Huck disguises himself as a girl and is unable to pull it off. The Onion does pull it off, partly because (as the novel asserts) white people can’t tell the difference anyway. But underneath his girls’ clothes the Onion is a straight man, or beginning to be one, and McBride is much more frank than the series in discussing exactly what that entails in the way of physiological responses. Here I might suggest that McBride missed a chance: the existence of “sissies” is known and discussed and even (barely) tolerated, but the Onion is resolutely not a sissy (and indeed the framing narrative suggests that he’s something of a scoundrel.) One might wonder how the narrative would play if he were; certainly, the implication is that John Brown would treat him no differently, but what about our perception of events? Perhaps it doesn’t matter, because either option falls into a theme of hidden truth vs appearance. The Onion looks like a girl but is really a boy. John Brown looks like a madman but is really a saint (is really, even, in some strange way, God himself, if Onion’s late-novel revelation can be taken at face value.) The raid on Harper’s Ferry looks like a failure, but in its aftermath Brown is able to do more for the cause of abolition than ever before. These tensions bring to mind a Pauline paradox: that strength is perfected in weakness. This inversion is central to certain forms of Christianity, though not exclusively. It’s also an inversion central to the novel’s conclusion. There is, after all, no way out of the historical fact that John Brown died and that his body, as the song informs us, lies a-mouldering in his grave. And yet there is the parable of the Good Lord Bird:  This faith of Brown’s is counterfactual and countercultural. It is a faith in a hidden truth that will at last be revealed (and has already been revealed to the mad prophet.) This is where we get back to mad old Ahab and his search to uncover the hidden truths of creation. McBride’s Brown is not on the level of Melville’s Ahab, but both of them are driven not just by a desire for revelation but by a desire to reveal—to be the revelator. Guided by an inner voice (which Brown calls God and Ahab accepts as himself), both men rage against a world that is built on injustice and cruelty. Ahab rages and fails and is magnificent and godlike in his failure. McBride’s John Brown rages and succeeds, becoming at least (as W. E. B. DuBois suggested of the real John Brown) a kind of American Christ. He is transfigured from madman to messiah (the truest messiahs are the most mad) and converted in the final lines of the novel into the Good Lord Bird itself:  Somehow in the midst of all this I’ve come back to Brown, even though I started out insisting that he is not as central to the narrative as he is in the television series. Perhaps this says more about me than the book, since all criticism is a species of autobiography. In the novel, all of this is conveyed through the Onion’s voice, which takes the pretentiousness down a peg or two; Henry is (or, rather, Henry remembering himself is) a shrewd observer, locating weaknesses in Brown and in other figures such as Frederick Douglass (who, if anything, comes off rather worse than he does in the show.) It’s a voice that destabilizes judgment (like Huck Finn’s) and gropes its way to righteousness—assuming any of this is true, since McBride buries the whole thing under two layers of narration.
Perhaps, then, it is this voice that transfigures Brown and is the true agent of revelation. Another wheel inside of the wheel—another hidden truth: the voice of the people becomes the voice of God. It’s apocalypse all the way down. At any rate, those are some rambling thoughts on The Good Lord Bird. I didn’t expect it to go that direction (I don’t plan these posts), so take it as one possible pathway rather than a detailed argument. I’m back to Vidal now, finishing up his final novel in the Narratives of Empire, and after that—I’m not sure, but I have The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr. ready to go, so I’ll probably tuck into that.  1. This is a movie about Ludwig II of Bavaria. Even if you haven't heard of Ludwig, you've certainly been influenced by him: his castle Neuschwanstein provided the model for Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom and he was a patron of Richard Wagner. I had almost certainly heard of him before, but I was most recently interested in him because I played Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within, an FMV adventure game from Sierra. 2. Gabriel Knight is a series of supernatural mysteries. The first one has to do with voodoo and is...problematic, even though the game itself is solid. The Beast Within is less problematic, unless you regard gay-metaphor lycanthropy as problematic. 3. Ludwig is obliquely alluded to in The Waste Land: Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Lake Starnberg is the location where Ludwig died by drowning (possibly? suicide?)--the first of Eliot's deaths by water. 4. Ludwig was also gay--and this, too, ties into The Waste Land in some way that I've not totally unpacked. A few lines later and Eliot introduces hyacinths, named for the male lover of Apollo, and much later Mr. Eugenides will proposition a (male?) narrator with an offer of a weekend at the Metropole. Thus, Ludwig unites three factors (Wagner, drowning, and homosexuality) that are woven throughout Eliot's poem. 5. Visconti's previous movie was Death in Venice, which I've been meaning to watch but haven't quite yet. My understanding is that it also deals with homoerotic desire of some sort and also features a lead who visibly decays onscreen, as Ludwig does here.  6. At any rate, Visconti plays it slow with the revelation of Ludwig's sexual orientation, teasing us at first with the possibility of an unrequited romance with his cousin Elisabeth. However, she notes (with a nice, subtle bit of psychology) that what he really wants is an impossible love; the implication is that he is looking for a woman he can be in love with without needing to go beyond a chaste kiss. Finally, though, Ludwig makes a move on one of his servants and from then on there's no question from him or anyone else (in fact, once we know for certain that he is gay, it seems like everyone in the movie remembers that they always knew). 7. Eventually, Ludwig does try to marry but winds up cancelling and spending his time isolated in his castle[s] with a band of young, handsome male servants. Meanwhile, he slowly decays--his teeth go black, his hair goes wild--while everyone around him stays noticeably the same age (including his younger brother Otto, who never looks much older than nineteen). I could try to make something out of this, like an observation about how we never see people immediately around us getting older, but I think it's more likely that Visconti just didn't care about aging his cast. 8. This movie is long at almost exactly four hours. The Irishman is only 3 1/3. Like The Irishman, the time--once invested--does not seem wasted; the length lulls the viewer into this decadent story about a fairytale prince and his tragic end (does he commit suicide? Or is there something else going on?). 9. Wagner shows up, but he seems often more like a cunning fraud than a genius. I do feel a bit cheated on this score; Ludwig's reputation now rests almost entirely on his castles and his patronage of Wagner, and while neither of these are given a lot of attention, I do rather feel like we should be allowed to experience some of Wagner's genius instead of taking it for granted. Or maybe I just wanted to see some Wagner (I'm going to be watching some Wagner soonish). 10. Ludwig never attempts to solve the mystery of Ludwig's life. Was he mad? Was he a dreamer crushed by a cruel world? Was he a decadent aristocrat? All three? None of the above? You could make a case for each of these based on the evidence in the film. As Ludwig himself observes, he desires to be an enigma even to himself. Ludwig honors that wish.  This past week has been devoted to grading, which is why my 2021 resolution to actually use this website went by the wayside. But I'm back. 2020 was wild, right? I went back to America for a three week vacation and wound up cooling my heels for nine months, which means I got a bit of reading done, some writing (hopefully I'll have more to say about that some time this year), and a whole lot of television watching. I finally saw Star Trek: Deep Space Nine at long last, and yeah, I kind of love that small-town space soap. But today I want to list and comment on some new television I saw this year. Yes, there are spoilers. Five Shows I Loved The Plot Against America HBO had a very good year, with many new shows ranging from very good to excellent. This is on the "excellent" end. Based on Philip Roth's novel, Plot is set in an alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh becomes president, with disastrous results for American Jews. Since circa-WWII America is kind of my beat (give or take twenty years), I was obviously part of the show's target audience. The show ends more ambiguously than the Roth novel, as befits a show released in an election year that seemed to replicate some of the tensions at work in pre-WWII America. The New Pope Technically a second season of The Young Pope (or maybe a sequel series). This show is strange, as might be expected. I loved The Young Pope back when it first landed, and the news of a sequel series featuring John Malkovich excited me more than I can say. And I wasn't disappointed: this show is as weird, disturbing, and hilarious as the original show: Marvelous. We Are Who We Are Ok, this is admittedly a mild cheat since I've not seen the last episode, but what I've seen is enough to convince me this show belongs here. Directed by Call Me By Your Name's Luca Guadagnino, We Are Who We Are replicates several of the themes explored in the movie: adolescent sexuality, queer coming-of-age, problematic age gaps.... But where Call Me By Your Name focused sharply on a single narrative, this show spins out four or so different stories--thematically related, but often working independently of each other. The show's centerpiece, however, is Jack Dylan Grazer--previously best known from It and Shazam! Grazer is remarkable: his performance is twitchy and annoying and real. He certainly isn't entirely likeable, but no teenage boy is. It's an extraordinary performance and I'm interested to see what Grazer does next. The Reagans Not the 2003 James Brolin tv movie. This is a documentary miniseries from Matt Tyrnauer, the director of Where's My Roy Cohn, which I've not seen, and Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood, which I have. If you've followed Rick Perlstein's quadrilogy on the rise of right-wing Republicanism in the Twentieth Century, you probably know most of this, since Reagan is a constant presence from nearly the beginning. But the documentary offers the perspective of friends and foes (and offspring) of Ronald Reagan, painting the picture of a tremendously complicated man--which is not to say that it's a friendly portrait. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to come away from this documentary with any conclusion other than that Reagan was a disaster with good PR, making his inclusion in top ten lists of "best presidents" incredibly bemusing. The Good Lord Bird This is actually cheating, since it's a 2020 show that I only finished recently, but it has to be on this list because it is very probably the greatest (in the strongest sense of that word) show of last year. It follows the story of John Brown, climaxing in his disastrous raid on Harper's Ferry--a story that hasn't been dramatized on film since, apparently, the 1940 movie Santa Fe Trail, a movie I remember watching as a child chiefly because of Raymond Massey's depiction of Brown: (Rewatching this clip just now I noticed that Ronald Reagan is George Armstrong Custer in this movie)
The Good Lord Bird is not so pious about Brown as Santa Fe Trail (neither is Santa Fe Trail, frankly, which I vaguely remember as being fairly mixed on the subject), and Ethan Hawke's Brown is not nearly so put-together as Massey's. But in Hawke's portrayal, Brown becomes a sort of divinely-inspired Captain Ahab. It's a powerful performance--and overwhelming one--one that very nearly throws the whole show out of balance (it's also a kind of coming-of-age for the young Henry "Onion" Shackleford--his experience is the one we follow exclusively, so that when he's not around we aren't either--but perhaps we are overwhelmed by Brown because he is overwhelmed by Brown). There are cameos from Frederick Douglass (Daveed Diggs) and Harriet Tubman (Zainab Jah), but these figures--no less giants, historically, than Brown--come across as diminished; they are not played with the insane fervor that Hawke pours into his performance. This is unfortunate, because Douglass no less than Brown--and Tubman no less than either--was a towering figure. They will, I suppose, have to wait a little longer before they're given their due onscreen. (I have not see Harriet yet, so perhaps?) One Show that Surprised Me Perry Mason I did not expect much of Perry Mason. Everything I had heard about it--it was a prequel, Mason would be a detective, etc--gave me pause. And some of the interviews with the screenwriters depicted them as perplexed by, or even contemptuous of, the character. So I watched out of a sense of duty, not particularly caring for anything I saw (what's the point of changing Mason's job if the central dynamic of the show is going to stay lawyer-secretary-detective?). And then, halfway through the show, everything clicked. Mason--yes, I admit it, enriched by what we saw before--stepped into his traditional role; his core group coalesced around him, subtly updated (Della is a lesbian, Paul is Black, Hamilton Burger is Della's gay best friend who is angling for the job of DA, of course). Where earlier alterations seemed ham-fisted, these changes worked--mostly because they open up possibilities for storytelling within the traditional framework rather than scrapping the framework altogether. By the last episode I was openly cheering their not-subtle nods toward the first Mason novel. I've rarely been so thoroughly won over by a tv series. Two Shows that Disappointed Me Penny Dreadful: City of Angels This is a strange case because I actually was onboard for nearly the entire run of the show. I liked the style, I liked the setting, I liked the characters--all of it. And then the final episode dropped and delivered more or less nothing. I'm disappointed it was canceled, because there's really some potential here. But I'm not surprised. Lovecraft Country This one actually hurts a bit. Call it the reverse Perry Mason. I was enthusiastically touting this show for half its run. After all, a Lovecraft-inspired period piece that deals with the Black experience in America (or, let us not be too determinative, one version of the Black experience)--this is not something that comes along every day. And that early run of episodes demonstrated a flexibility and a sense of humor and, yes, a sexiness that made it very appealing viewing. And then-- Look, I'm not insistent that protagonists be likeable or even good people. Making Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) a war criminal was certainly a choice that could work; giving him encounters with the supernatural that predate the show might make nonsense of the first episode, but even that is workable, maybe. The problem is that none of this is even remotely dealt with; it's not like these revelations about Atticus are supposed to change our perception of him. If anything, the episode wants us to forget almost immediately that he's a war criminal because reasons. And it just soured me on the show. After that episode things get cluttered, anyway. The finale is an incoherent mess that--again--doesn't seem to know exactly what it wants us to feel at a given moment. I really wanted to love this show--and did, for the first half--but it let me down badly. One Show I Hated Hollywood Holy cow, was this show garbage. |
AuthorNathanael T. Booth. All views are my own. Archives
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