March 13

There are plots against people, aren't there?

I watched Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby over the past couple of nights -- somehow I had missed seeing it before. It is very skillfully done, but I think Danny Peary is right to call it "really an ugly film." Rosemary's ordeal is so private, help is so lacking or thwarted, that the movie is a truly paranoid, claustrophobic experience -- watching it is like being smothered with a pillow. The Exorcist is as atmospheric and scary, and has ugly dimensions, too, yet it's not quite so utterly hopeless; there are people who care, and there are things they can do (including give up their lives). The devil is routed at the end of The Exorcist, at least temporarily; at the end of Rosemary's Baby, his dominion is just beginning.

The movie looks backward and forward in interesting ways -- backward to Val Lewton's and Mark Robson's The Seventh Victim with its Greenwich Village satanists; forward not just to a slew of "spooky children" films but also to Alan J. Pakula's famous paranoid films of the Seventies (Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Rollover), for which it practically provides a template. In Pakula's universe as in Polanski's, you are being watched by many sets of eyes, almost no one you encounter can be trusted, and people who might help or at least tell you something are silenced or killed. This all looks back to the JFK assassination, of course, and although the connection of the Pakula films to paranoid politics is rather obvious, the connection of Rosemary's Baby to politics is no less strong. Those closest to you will sell their souls and sacrifice you in order to get ahead, and will enlist others (or be enlisted by them, it almost makes no difference). "There are plots against people, aren't there?" Rosemary helplessly asks one of her doctors; it is a post-1963 question (Ira Levin's novel came out in 1967, the movie in 1968).

One other small note on the film: William Castle produced (originally he wanted to direct), and his cameo appearance is not only funny as heck, but brilliantly staged. It's a great moment for buffs.

litlove at Tales from the Reading Room explains very unpretentiously and accurately why the work of French philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes matters:

So, most of all, we need to hang onto common sense, and the recognition of what is there, right in front of our eyes. Myths invite us to scoot over the surface very fast, towards our hopes, fears, desires and anxieties. To combat its insidious effects we need to take a step back, and to take a deflationary needle to the puffed up fantasies that fuel myth-making. Reality is mostly mundane, and simple, and about not knowing. It’s when we get carried away on a tidal wave of assumptions and ideas that the trouble begins. So Barthes wanted us to keep challenging our assumptions all the time, to keep fresh ideas revolving, to understand things could always be different or otherwise to the notions that took a stranglehold on our minds.

http://litlove.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/reading-workshop-iii/

There is nothing high-falutin about Barthes's basic message: You ought to look carefully at what the messages you receive are actually conveying. Don't be a sucker.

Along those lines, I was without a television or television service for a long time. Eventually I got a new 23-inch widescreen television because I grew tired of watching DVDs on my laptop. When I moved to Nevada, I resumed cable service because the TV/Internet package from the local provider was cheaper than the Internet alone (go figure). I was happy to have cable again so I could watch movies on Turner Classics, and the occasional documentary on PBS or The History Channel and its kin. But I'm also happy that I haven't fallen back into the habit of just mindlessly turning the set on, and part of the reason for that is, I don't want to expose myself to the ads. I'm convinced that more than 90% of the messages aimed at us in a given day are lies or exaggerations, and why should I want to add to their number? The corrosive effect of being so lied to is that for many people, "facts" simply don't matter anymore and don't settle arguments, as columnist Leonard Pitts explains:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-pitts_22edi.State.Edition1.2a4c81a.html

Miriam Burstein of the charming blog The Little Professor, a joy for all Victorianists, describes some courses she would like to teach, most of which I'd sign up for:

http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2010/03/imaginary-courses.html

Steve Donoghue loves books about marshs and tidelands, especially if they're on Cape Cod:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/03/the-house-on-nauset-marsh/

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/03/salt-tide/

Photographer Andreas Gursky, previously mentioned (and admired!) here at PMD, has a new show at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills (designed by no less than Richard Meier). The images on the gallery's website let you see how big Gursky's prints are in relation to the walls:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36652

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2010-03-04_andreas-gursky/#/images/1/

The Bosnia and Herzegovina Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo 2010 reminds me of the cool national pavilions that were built for the 1964 New York World's Fair, which I visited as a five or six-year-old:

http://www.archdaily.com/52311/bosnia-and-herzegovina-pavilion-for-shanghai-world-expo-2010/

Among notables born on this date are philosophers Michael Walzer and Mircea Eliade (Romania), scientist Joseph Priestley, journalist Janet Flanner, composers Hugo Wolf (Austria) and Wolfgang Rihm (Germany), film directors Henry Hathaway and Andre Techine, poets Giorgos Seferis (Greece), Jan Lechon (Poland), and Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine), novelists Hugh Walpole, W.O. Mitchell (Canada) and Yuri Andrukhovych (Ukraine), Russian painter Alexei von Jawlensky, German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, singer/songwriter Neil Sedaka, and actors William H. Macy, Dana Delany, and Annabeth Gish. I like a story that is told about Schinkel at his Wikipedia entry: that as a budding painter and architect at the age of 29, he saw a Caspar David Friedrich canvas at an exhibition and decided he couldn't top that, so decided to concentrate on architecture!