The Invisible Counterpoint

A Polish zoologist and his wife maintain a zoo which is utopia, realized. The people who work there are blissfully satisfied and happy. The caged animals aren't distraught but rather, very satisfied. These animals have been very well attended to, and have developed so healthily for it that they almost seem proud to display what is distinctively excellent about them for viewers to enjoy. But there is a shadow coming--Nazis! The Nazis literally blow apart much of this happy configuration. Many of the animals die. But the zookeeper's wife is a prize any Nazi officer would covet, and the Nazi's chief zoologist is interested in claiming her for his own. So if there can be some pretence that would allow for her and her husband to keep their zoo in piece rather than be destroyed for war supplies, he's willing to concede it. The zookeeper and his wife want to try and use their zoo to house as many Jews as they can. They approach the stately quarters of Hitler's zoologi...

Immediately after  seeing  the film, I worked over whether or not the movie works as something the alt-right would produce to alienate us from the left. Mostly the film does work this way  -- as a sort of, de facto, Breitbart production -- I decided, though it's not entirely slam-dunk. There is no disparagement evident for the crew of the space station being a multicultural mix, for instance. Race is not invisible in the film; it feels conspicuous at times, like when the Japanese crew member is shown looking at his black wife on video conference; but the film maker, wherever he was actually raised, seems like someone who was a longtime habitat of a multicultural milieu, some place like London, and likes things that way. But the film cannot convince only as macabre relating to our current fascination with the possibility of life on Mars -- what it no doubt pretends to be doing -- because the idea of “threat” does not permeate this interest at all, whereas it absolut...

I think there are two key moments in the movie when Emma Watson offers us the pleasure in seeing what the latest, most self-empowered female Disney character, is capable of. Early in the film she is assisting her father, whose trade is as a clockmaker, and presents him, twice, with exactly the part he next requires... but ahead of him realizing that this is the exact piece he is searching for. She, at this point, is leading him... and could presumably just as well be doing what he is doing, if such was her foremost interest. Basically this is a doctor-nurse situation where the routine, "nurse -- scalpel!," is played out to invert the patriarchal paradigm and presume genuine authority to the "nurse," but without the labour strife or mean gotcha: here, the father couldn't care less is his daughter was one hundred years ahead of him in ability and he, mostly put in the position of assisting her. He knows she's got him beat in many, many ways, and is just d...

The problem for a feminist, revisionist "Beauty and the Beast" is that no one character more causes us to shake our established preferences... to work toward a different finish than we were comfortably expecting, than the arrogant patriarch villain, Gaston. Belle reads as many books as she can get her hands on, but she represents the stage of moral perfection we liberals are all ostensibly at these days, so she's not about to throw any surprises our way, any new-fangled ideas on how to behave she got from reading some of her books: she'll only confirm what we know about ourselves. She'll school any number of characters on how properly to behave, implicitly school them to rise to her level, but (of course) she'll also embrace others' cultural preferences and eat and drink as they themselves would -- get dirty with them, in a sense, to help not only not shame but also bring equivalency to their relationship: "it's not only for you to learn to b...

In Lord of the Rings -- the movie -- two young hobbits meet extremely powerful denizens of the ancient world -- the Ents -- and actually trick them into joining a fight they had decided against joining. It's easily their most self-activated moment in the series -- they weren't operating under anyone's instructions; there was no way to know whether Gandalf would have approved of their actions or not. They simply had a vision of their own world coming tumbling down as a result of the Ents' decision, and, infuriated, decided to further test the Ents on how resolved they would be in their detached independence if they saw with their own eyes the devastation Saruman the wizard had already incurred on Middle Earth. In the books, Tolkien tries to inscribe both hobbits at the finish of their adventures, as not really having changed all that much. But if such was declared at the end of the movie series, it would read false -- "no," we would say, "we saw so...

Charles Xavier was perhaps most happy when he had a mansion full of engaged, happy students, moving every day a further stitch away from their often insanely troubling pasts. But of course, at least in the movies, it wasn't the like of the robust kid Cyclops that garnered his most intense interest (in John Byrne's comic version, it was), but rather the students that never lost the "viper" in them, those who might lash out at him and wound him emotionally, like Mystique and Wolverine. So perhaps there was a sense that the other students were mostly a joyous blur that could take his mind off things -- when he saw them they were a rush of Christmas gifts amply piled up under a Christmas tree -- while the ones who could get under his skin were the students who had his interest and respect because they couldn't be distracted or lead away from recognizing that not all was right with him. In this assessment of the Xavier-school-for-mutants reality, that Charles was ...

Nocturnal Animals There is no point in living if you can't quit the feeling you shamed yourself by being weak when you could have been strong to terror -- this is the point of "Nocturnal Animals." In fact, if you die immediately after showing you're not such a hapless fluff after all, just showing you could be strong before your worst tormentor is such a victory that that ostensibly sad fate of your body being slowly besmirched into dust, cast amongst the other wilderness rocks and stones, really doesn't matter so much. Presumably you die with your memories of you as a strong drawn sword, smacking down the threatening dragon, basically determining the nature of your spirit in the hereafter: this is what you surely mostly were deep down the whole time, even if it took this particular moment to buck it out into the open. Okay, I suppose I can sorta accept that... there's nothing like seeing yourself finally as a perpetrator when you've seen yourself ...