THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
11/16/01 -- Vol. 20, No. 20
Big Cheese: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Little Cheese: Evelyn Leeper, evelyn.leeper@excite.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
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Topics:
Follow-up on last week's editorial (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)
THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Follow-up on last week's editorial (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)
More or less as I expected, there was a lot of mail about last
week's editorial. There are people who thought (and I would say
misread) my editorial to interpret it that I was defending
McCarthyism and Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. I thought that I
held back from actually doing that, but I said that I was leaving
open a path where I might end up having to defend one or the
other if my current quandary was not resolved. It is possible
that I was trying to say too much in too few words.
There are really two different ways of looking at issues. One is
to look at issues one at a time and deciding them one at a time.
This way each issue gets a lot of personal attention. That can
be good. It also can be bad. It gives one flexibility and
perhaps a feeling that one has decided each issue strictly on the
basis of its own merits. The problem is that one is very much
tempted to decide each issue on the basis of self-interest. One
can come away feeling that one has judged each issue, but that is
not really what has happened. Instead on each issue one has
decided selfishly. I have been told by someone that if the
government makes it possible for you to cheat on your income
taxes and does not check up on you, you really have a
responsibility to do so. After all it is not really fair for you
to have to follow the rules if other people are able to
circumvent them. In truth this guy wanted to cheat on his income
taxes and at the same time wanted to at least be able to claim
that he was living up to the highest principles. This same
person complained bitterly that the company we both worked for
was not treating him fairly and, in fact, was cheating him. I
wanted to tell him that if he made it possible for the company to
be unfair to him, the company had a responsibility to do so. I
am sure that he would have come back with a rationalization that
that sort of cheating was immoral. The truth is that while he
wanted to claim that he had principles, in fact he wanted to make
decisions in self-interest.
Now, of course, the other approach is to a set of rules about
what is moral and what is not that is independent of any specific
individual cases. You can call these what you want. They can be
principles or when the society sets them up they are called laws.
In an editorial a while back I said that rights are a form of
laborsaving device, so are principles and laws. A parked in
front of B's driveway. A feels that government should let him
put his car in any empty. B thinks he should be able to get his
car onto the street. It you operate purely pragmatically you
have some deciding to do. One could consider the two arguments
and choose whom one agrees with. If B is being a real pain and
presenting his argument with profanity and racial epithets and A
is being very polite and well-ordered, one would be tempted to
certainly consider A's argument and perhaps even decide he is in
the right. It certainly would require some consideration. The
law is a laborsaving device to determine that A is actually wrong
and B is actually right. One of the risks of having laws,
principles, etc. is that occasionally they mean you have to agree
with someone you do not want to agree with. Occasionally you
have to let the Nazi party march in Skokie.
One problem is that usually personal principles are understood
intuitively, but rarely set down in fixed legalese. What I was
saying last we with that intuitively I would like to think my
principles would defend the press that in large numbers
criticized McKinney's opportunism in trying to embarrass and
attack the United States and Israel. I would also like to think
my principles would condemn the press who would gang up on
outspoken liberal dissenters in the 1950s. But unifying those
two principles is not easy. I have been taught to believe that
in the 1950s the press was wrong to gang up on liberal dissenters
who openly opposed their government's policies. It is
fascinating how many of the same people defend so similar an
action by the press today without first resolving the
inconsistency. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: The Coen Brothers give us a crisp and well-filmed noir-
ish thriller. A quiet, second-chair barber tries blackmail to get
to a better life and sets in motion a chain of weird events. It
is a 40s crime film 55 years late and right on time. Rating: 8 (0
to 10), high +2 (-4 to +4)
"You know what you are? You're an enthusiast." The words come
late in THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE. They are spoken by teenage
pianist Birdy Abundas (played by Scarlett Johansson) to Ed Crane
(Billy-Bob Thornton). The words are as startling as a splash of
ice water on a hot summer day. Enthusiasm is just about the last
thing we would expect anyone would see in Ed. Ed is a man with
little obvious emotion. Life is what happens to Ed, a thing he
just rides, rather than something he actively lives and
participates in. When Ed enters a room with three other people in
it, he makes it approximately three people in the room. Ed is in
a loveless marriage to Doris (Coen Brothers regular Frances
McDormand) that just sort of happened to him. Ed is in a
monotonous and vaguely irritating job as the assistant in his
brother-in-law's barber shop. The job also just sort of happened
to him.
Ed is a quiet man whose passive face hides an intense desperation.
He cannot stand that his brother-in-law talks constantly all day
long. Ed knows his wife is having an affair with her boss (James
Gandolfini in a role not too different from Tony Soprano on
television) but, like the job in the barbershop, there is nothing
much that can be done to improve circumstances. Ed sees nothing
in his future but years of more quiet desperation. Then a
customer tells Ed about a new opportunity. For $10,000 Ed can get
into the new field of dry cleaning. But Ed doesn't have $10,000.
Perhaps he can cash in on his wife's infidelity. Ed decides to
blackmail his wife's boss. This starts a complex chain of events.
The script by Joel and Ethan Coen is complex with plenty of loose
ends that will be tied up by the end of the film. The pacing of
the film is as slow and deliberate as Ed is himself.
THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE is filmed in crisp black and white in the
styles of 1940s crime films, just slightly exaggerated. In the
best film noir traditions the camera plays with light and shadow.
In one scene a defense lawyer is show standing in the light from
the window so shadow on the upper part of his face forms a nearly
perfect image of an executioner's mask.
We see Billy-Bob Thornton looking as normal as I can ever remember
seeing him. That is the key to his role and to the title of the
film. He is a man you could pass on the street and never even
notice or remember you had seen him. A 1940s film would have put
someone like a Fred McMurray or perhaps a Jose Ferrer into a role
like this. These are actors who in spite of themselves would have
added some panache to the role and panache is just what the Coen
brothers were trying to avoid. Thornton plays the role as a man
as burned out and stale as the cigarette that dangles from his
lips. He is as easy to ignore as the ash on the barbershop floor.
THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE is a little slow and listless, but it is
a great film to watch and in the end the script is as clever as we
would expect from the Coen Brothers. I rate the film an 8 on the
0 to 10 scale and a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.
--Francois de la Rochefoucauld
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