THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
04/29/05 -- Vol. 23, No. 44 (Whole Number 1280)
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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Topics:
Heard in Passing (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE: Pro-Jewish or Anti-Jewish?
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Pulgasari and a Hard Road to the Stars (letters of comment
by George MacLachlan and Paul Chisholm)
WRITER OF O (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (THE NO. 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY,
COLLAPSE: HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED,
and INTRODUCING ANTHROPOLOGY) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Heard in Passing (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I was listening to the radio and they used a phrase that really
caught my attention. A Public Radio station was sponsored by a
funeral parlor that offered a complete line of services including
what they called "personalized pre-need funerals." What the heck
is a "personalized pre-need funeral?" It sounds like something
out of Edgar Allan Poe. I think I'm willing to wait until I
actually need the funeral, thank you. "Uh, yeah, we have sold
only one pre-need funeral. That one was personalised in the name
of Mr. James Hoffa." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE: Pro-Jewish or Anti-Jewish?
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Not long ago I reviewed the new version of THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
with Al Pacino. One of the aspects I discussed was the play
itself. Now this play has always been something of a problem.
Shakespeare made it a comedy, yet as time has passed the issues
it raises have become more serious. I seem to remember being
taught in school that the play itself was not anti-Jewish.
Shakespeare was every English teacher's hero and he was taught as
if he was perfect in every way. Shakespeare has to be perfect as
a writer. I am reminded of the line in THE PRODUCERS in which the
neo-Nazi (Kenneth Mars) says that though Hitler was a
housepainter, but he was a *great* housepainter. "He could paint
an entire apartment in ONE afternoon! TWO coats!"
Shakespeare shows us many positive aspects of Shylock. But I do
not think that I was convinced at the time and I still am not
convinced. As I said in my film review, "I think it would be a
pleasant fantasy that William Shakespeare did not intend THE
MERCHANT OF VENICE to be anti-Jewish and intentionally left
ambiguity in the play so that it could be interpreted positively.
In my opinion a reading of the play does not give that as the
intention of the playwright." That review prompted a discussion,
and the discussion prompted this article.
Do I think that Shakespeare hated or feared Jews? No. He
probably never even saw a Jew. But then I don't think that
D. W. Griffith hated or feared blacks either. But they were
convenient villains when Griffith made THE BIRTH OF A NATION and
having grown up in the South during the last quarter of the 19th
Century he heard few voices in that culture saying this
vilification was a bad thing. Long after the Second World War
ended films would have Nazis as villains. They were culturally
acceptable to use as villains and a writer was never wrong if he
said they were nasty and deceitful. They could be doing things
very unlike what the Nazis ever did and the films could be
misrepresenting them, but the viewers accepted it because they
felt, not inaccurately in my opinion, that the real Nazis deserved
much worse. They could be used as villains not out of the
writer's vitriolic hatred of Nazis but still the story could be
anti-Nazi. Similarly I don't think Shakespeare had a deep and
abiding hatred of Jews. I think that they were convenient
villains and there were no voices in England to defend them in
their absence.
The usual points that are made are the following:
1) Shakespeare gave Shylock sympathetic speeches.
2) Shylock is shown to be charitable in the play to the very
man who spat upon him.
3) At the end of the trial, Shylock is given a really onerous
punishment by the court to win the audience's sympathy.
Let me take these in that order.
Shylock is given sympathetic speeches. The most notable of them
is the "Hath not a Jew eyes..." It has been interpreted that
Shylock poses these rhetorical questions intending to show that
Jews are just as human as Christians and with the same emotions.
That is not, however, my reading. I think the order of events is
very important. If Shylock had given this speech asking for
clemency after the trial it would have had a very different
effect. Compare it to the effect of the speech at the end of
Fritz Lang's M. I think Shakespeare put that speech where he did
to make the audience say that perhaps Jews are not so bad after
all only to wipe that argument away in the trial. The effect is
to make the audience feel some sympathy for Shylock only to
discover the sympathy was misplaced. In LIFEBOAT Alfred Hitchcock
does the same thing. In spite of the audience's natural antipathy
to Germans in 1944, the German in the lifeboat seems genuinely
sympathetic. Then in the last reel that is all reversed. The
order of events is very important dramatically. If the audience
sees the German doing his dirty work first and then sees him
humanized, the effect is very different from first humanizing him
and then showing his villainy. If Shakespeare were defending
Shylock the humanizing text would have been after we see his
transgression. I think Shylock merely has a smooth tongue.
The speech is intended to be a beguiling argument, but it
cuts against Shylock also. If we are all the same, why does he
want to commit a vicious act against his brother? He professes
that we are all so similar and all the while he is trying to
kill. Notice that he will later and more transparently try to
beguile his judge with flattery to achieve his ends.
Shylock offers Antonio a free loan of money after Antonio spit on
him. Does this make him a sympathetic character? Perhaps it
does momentarily. My interpretation is that the loan was an
attractive trap with a good chance of giving Shylock power over
Antonio. In Shakespeare's time sea travel was a good deal more
uncertain than it is today. Antonio will not let himself believe
that there is a real risk, but crafty Shylock knows better and
cannot pass up a chance at for revenge. One has power over those
who owe him money.
As for the severity of Shylock's punishment, losing his fortune
and his daughter, I am not sure that Shakespeare intended this to
seem like an unjust punishment at all. Shylock has sought a
death. His punishment is, however, not death but simply to take
away his money, which he had used as a trap. And it is also to
bring his daughter to Christ, which supposedly rescued her soul.
First it is apparently not the court that punishes Shylock this
way; it is an act of fate or God. Shakespeare's audience would
have seen that as a merciful and good punishment in which Shylock
was disarmed and his daughter was rescued.
While I am not offended by Shakespeare's THE MERCHANT OF VENICE,
(well, maybe just a little) I would not say it should be dropped
from the repertoire of Shakespeare's plays performed. I
appreciate that it is a classic. It probably can never again be
performed in the same cultural context it ahd in Shakespeare's
day, it is still a good example of Shakespeare's style, and I
would defend it as free speech. But I would not go so far as
to make an effort to exonerate Shakespeare. I would say it is
anti-Jewish in the way that CASABLANCA is anti-Nazi and not the
way that JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG is. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Pulgasari and a Hard Road to the Stars (letters of comment
by George MacLachlan and Paul Chisholm)
Regarding Mark's comments on Pulgasari in the 04/22/05 issue,
George MacLachlan wrote, "I saw a brief news item about a week ago
(60 MINUTES?) about a female film star (I seem to recall she was
Japanese) who was kidnapped and taken to Korea to make films for
Kim Jong Il. I believe that her husband, a film producer was
also kidnapped to make films. They have since escaped and were
being interviewed for this story. Seems like this sick-ko (sp?)
Kim Jong Il goes out of his way to prove to the world what sort
of a nut case he is. The thought of him having nuclear
capability is frightening." [-gfm]
Mark responds, "That is the same story. The actress is Choe Eun
Hee, but I think she is Korean. Her husband, Shin Sang-ok, is
both a producer and a director
(http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0645661/bio). He directed
PULGARSARI. If you look up the earlier story in the MT VOID I
give more detail." As for nuclear capability, Mark notes, "Ah, this is
the age of
empowerment." [-mrl]
Regarding Mark's comments in the 04/22/05 issue on the plaque at
NASA commemorating the death of the Apollo I astronauts bearing
the phrase "It's a hard road to the stars," Paul Chisholm writes,
"I always thought that was a reference to 'Ad astra per aspera':
'to the stars through difficulty' (the official state motto of
Kansas, for what that's worth)." [-psrc]
Evelyn adds, "If that's the Kansas state motto, then the fact
that one of the major space museums of the world (the Kansas
Cosmosphere and Space Center) is located there is quite fitting.
In addition, for the Soveiet's Luna II program, five 'lunar
spheres' were built: two were launched with the payloads, one is
missing, and the other two both ended up in Kansas! One is in
the Cosmosphere; the other was presented to President Eisenhower
and is now in the Eisenhower Library. (The lunar spheres were
small globes of the moon made of plates engraved with 'CCCP'.)"
[-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: WRITER OF O (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
[This review originally appeared in the 01/28/05 issue of the MT
VOID, but since it is showing at the Film Forum in New York
starting 05/04/05, we are re-running the review.]
CAPSULE: This documentary is about the history and mystery of the
sadomasochistic novel THE STORY OF O. The information is now
stale news and the style of the documentary seems intentionally
dry. It is hard to imagine a film this bland about a sexual
bondage classic like THE STORY OF O. Even the dramatization of
scenes from the novel fail to engage the viewer. Rating: 0 (-4
to +4) or 4/10
Pola Rapaport, who wrote and directed WRITER OF O, was fascinated
by the book THE STORY OF O as a young girl. Like many other
people she found the book to be a hypnotic and erotic guilty
pleasure. As an adult she knew of the mystery of who was the
writer of this book who hid behind the penname Pauline Reage. In
later years the author was revealed to be Dominique Aury, a small
and quiet woman who did not want to reveal her identity until her
parents had died. Aury had a secret love affair with publisher
Jean Paulhan and had written the novel to cater to his sexual
tastes. Paulhan recognized the novel as one of highly seductive
sexuality and one that should not be kept to himself so published
it under a penname. The novel became an international publishing
sensation.
There was speculation as to who could have written this book and
frequently assumed to have been penned by a male author.
Finally, at the age of 89, Aury allowed her identity as the
author be revealed.
This documentary looks at the publishing history of the book and
of the mystery of who the author was. There are interviews with
Aury, who proved to be still very eloquent in spite of her
advanced years. The documentary also features dramatizations of
scenes from the novel.
The style of the documentary is curiously dry considering the
subject matter, but the publishing history is interesting if the
information is new. I rate WRITER OF O a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale
or 4/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Our book discussion chose Alexander McCall Smith's THE NO. 1
LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY (ISBN 1-4000-3477-9) for this month. It
was a nice, amiable book, interesting more for the setting
(Botswana) and characters than for any amazing detective work.
It was popular enough that people expressed an interest in
reading the next book for a future discussion. McCall Smith has
also written a series of novellas about "Professor Dr. Moritz-
Maria von Igelfeld", a professor of Romance Philology. (These
are published as individual books: PORTUGUESE IRREGULAR VERBS,
THE FINER POINTS OF SAUSAGE DOGS, and AT THE VILLA OF REDUCED
CIRCUMSTANCES.) They are more in the tradition of screwball
comedies, with such plots as von Iglefeld being confused with a
professor of veterinary medicine, Professor von Igelfold, and
invited to give a talk on daschunds in Arkansas, or being asked
to transport stolen relics with predictably disastrous results.
I read the first two--they're fast reads, but I'd recommend
sticking with his "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series.
Jared Diamond's COLLAPSE: HOW SOCIETIES CHOOSE TO FAIL OR SUCCEED
(ISBN 0-670-03337-5) is not as well structured as his earlier
book, GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL: THE FATES OF HUMAN SOCIETIES.
Diamond hops around quite a bit in both time and space in
COLLAPSE, and (perhaps more seriously) in what factors he
examines. So when he looks at past societies, he goes from
Easter Island (failed) to Pitcairn Island (failed) to the Anasazi
(failed) to the Mayas (failed) to Iceland (succeeded) to
Greenland (failed) to New Guinea (succeeded). There is no
chronological or geographic progression, nor is there a continuum
of factors here. (The five factors he cites and examines are
ecological damage by humans, climate change, hostile neighbors,
friendly neighbors, and a society's responses to problems.) He
also spends a lot of time discussing Montana's Bitterroot Valley
as an example of how a current society is responding to problems.
In addition to the lack of "flow", I thought Diamond spent a lot
of time repeating himself. I understand that he wanted to show
the similarities and differences in the various collapses, but I
found myself skipping chunks of material that I felt he had
already presented in earlier chapters. Diamond is not anti-big-
business, but he is an environmentalist. A lot of the later part
of the book discusses how what is good for the environment can be
good for business, but I can't say I left feeling wildly
optimistic.
Update: I had written my comments on Merryl Wyn Davies and
Piero's INTRODUCING ANTHROPOLOGY before completely finishing it,
so I have an addendum. Page 151 of the book talks about how
Margaret Mead's writings influenced Dr. Benjamin Spock and his
theories about how to raise children. Page 152 then reveals how
her "discoveries" were discredited when it was revealed that her
descriptions of how children and adolescents acted in Samoa were
actually based on talking to four adolescent girls who, it turns
out, were talking about their sexual *fantasies* rather than than
sexual *experiences*. And page 153 talks about her defenders and
has one character saying, "But, we argue, she nevertheless gained
into American culture through her studies." I assume Piero was
making a pun when he drew this character to look like Mr. Spock
from "Star Trek"--either that, or he was confused between Dr.
Spock and Mr. Spock. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
You're only young once, but you can be
immature forever.
--John Greier