On Christopher Hitchens

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

–Hopkins, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child”

Except for the youngsters, it can’t really be Hitchens people are mourning.  One wants to say (one wants to adopt Hitchens’s characteristic ultra-Anglo phrasings) that it is rather the whole “low, dishonest decade,” to quote a poet he actually liked rather than a Catholic priest.

I grew up on Hitchens.  Along with Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Susan Sontag, John Leonard, Salman Rushdie, George Orwell, Gore Vidal, and James Wood, he taught me–and not only me–what it was to write in and for the world, to be a writer, as opposed to a scholar or a poet: to have an audience with whom you could conspire to assume certain things and to whom you could explain serious but recondite matters in a slightly heightened and knowing voice, to make sophisticated jokes that had the intimacy of a confidence, to take for granted a living relation between the demotic and the elevated, the concrete and the abstract.  It wasn’t what he wrote that matters; what he wrote is mostly negligible and probably won’t survive very long.  But the register in which he wrote is one of the imperishable glories of liberal civilization, and I can almost understand his extremism in the defense of it.

Being 19 years old when the Twin Towers fell, I had to come of political age in the dark heart of the Bush years.  9/11 had the opposite effect on me as it so memorably had on Hitchens.  Eight or nine days after the attack, I joined a ragtag group of no more than 100 dirty hippies (I’ve never been of this persuasion) in marching self-righteously around the Cathedral of Learning chanting witless slogans from John Lennon songs in protest of whatever it was (we weren’t sure yet) Bush would do to Afghanistan.  And I don’t take this action back, nor do I regret it, despite the naivete of all that went along with it.

But there were problems and inconsistencies.  I had and have no sympathy whatsoever for bin Laden and his gang–they were (probably) a rogue U.S. intelligence paramilitary jockeying for position rather than any kind of tribune of the oppressed.  But before they attacked Manhattan, I had heard from only one source that something had to be done about Afghanistan, and that source was the Campus Women’s Organization.  How could this not give me pause when Laura Bush claimed that America’s war was on behalf of women?  There was something oddly left, then, about Hitchens’s supposed defection to the right, which many of us meditated on frequently, having enjoyed, just months before 9/11, his brief against Kissinger as serialized in Harper’s.  (Add to my youthful puzzlement that in the same months before 9/11 I was being taught to read James Joyce–a not-inconsiderable teaching–by Hitchens’s close friend, Colin MacCabe.)

By the time Hitchens sharpened his pen to make war on Iraq, I was as against America’s wars as could be (even to the point of undertaking activism, which doesn’t suit me), all the while dimly wondering if the man didn’t sort of have a point.  A decade later, I have concluded that he probably did.  The army of Enlightenment is one and indivisible.  There may have been strategic differences between Afghanistan and Iraq (Obama’s celebrated distinction between smart wars and dumb wars captures this), but a moral difference?  I suspect not.  A communist, it’s been said, is just a liberal in a hurry.  So is a neoconservative.  But what is the destination, and is it worth traveling there, down the bombed-out road, past the stream poisoned with depleted uranium, within earshot of the screams of the tortured?  To find out, you’d have to read better and more profound writers than Hitchens.

But Hitchens, though by no means a great writer, should be read, by the young anyway.  He followed his logic where it led and accepted the consequences of his position.  That makes him worth more than most of the academic leftists or think-tank rightists who were at different times his colleagues.  His ethic of non-compromise, something valuable and necessary and altogether missing from postmodernity, is reflected in the irresistible worldliness of his prose, to which I here pay tribute.

Nothing is more despicable to me than a tone in political writing of perennial surprise, full of false modesty, theatrical qualifiers, italicked revelations, startled quips, and moralizing sighs.  Such a style is nothing short of an insult to those who have always known what this world was (“the less deceived,” to quote the inevitable Larkin).  But this wide-eyed, wounded-bird sarcasm is the way everybody writes now: can a contemporary internet liberal write a sentence that doesn’t both absolutely moralize and yet also begin with an “Um”?  In the face of such passive-aggression, I’ll take Hitchens’s genuine aggression.  But, and at the risk of sounding unworldly, I’d have hoped for a better choice.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

A very bad movie, in an all-too-typical way.  Wikipedia summarizes the plot:

The film focuses on Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), a young woman who flees from an abusive cult in the Catskill Mountains that is led by an enigmatic leader, Patrick (John Hawkes). Lucy (Sarah Paulson), Martha’s older sister, receives a call from a pay phone one day from Martha, asking her to come and get her. Martha, who has been missing for two years, slowly begins to assimilate into her sister’s family, but her increasing paranoia leads her to believe that Patrick and his cult may still be watching her every move.

This summary leaves out only two elements of the film: 1. the cult’s actions, according to Martha’s memories at least, center around Patrick’s rape of its female members and also include the systematic robbery and sometimes murder of wealthy families who live nearby its farm; 2. Martha’s sister has married a well-off British architect, and most of Martha’s post-cult conflicts are with him as he preaches to her a gospel of success, while she clings to a belief seemingly instilled into her by the cult, namely, an anti-materialist approach to life.

At the level of form, the film is cliched in its arthouse aesthetics: interminable takes, little to no score, clipped dialogue punctuated by long silences, incidental sound played way up, and all of the above in service to the all-important “telling detail” (“Admire how the director captures that tiny droplet of urine running down her leg!”).

This formal approach effectively empties the film of any content.  Drama requires conflict, and there is conflict neither between the characters themselves nor between the confident director and the meaningless material.  The director’s gaze is too cool to allow us to see him as anything other than the easy and a priori master of all he surveys.  As for the characters, they have no conflict because they stand for nothing.  For example: we are never told in any detail what the cult believes.  Its leader, Patrick, makes vague New Agey  speeches that don’t add up to much.  Though Patrick is bookish, the audience is allowed to see the cover of exactly one book in his possession; said book, in a shameful act of near-slander on the part of the filmmakers, is written by Ivan Illich, as if the Catholic anarchist philosopher is just the thing for a murdering rapist to read!  In any case, once we see that Patrick is little more than a cruel criminal, a one-dimensional villain, the beliefs of the cult become morally and politically irrelevant, since no beliefs could justify rape and murder.

This neutralization of the cult at the level of theme makes the film a defense of the status quo in ways its makers probably did not intend (though who knows?).  When Martha’s brother-in-law smugly rails at her for having no career goals and for not being interested in money, the film offers no countervailing ethics.  At first, looking at the early shots of Lucy and her husband’s vast and loveless vacation home, empty and bare-walled according to the spartan aesthetics of haute design, I thought that the film would present the cult as a locus of competing values.  But once the cult is shown to be merely the predatory gang of a deranged thug, the audience has little choice but to identify with the good bourgeois couple or else to identify the film as propaganda on its behalf.  This film thus neatly reverses the entirely superior Melancholia in forcing us to side with the well-adjusted and wealthy sister.

There is another reading of Martha Marcy May Marlene that makes itself available, though, one enabled by the cool camera eye and its pitiless and incuriously clinical long takes.  We could regard the whole narrative as nothing more than the object of our distant, unmoved, complacent, anthropological gaze.  We may be invited to snicker with superiority at the actions of all the characters, since we, sane as we are, are above action, above thought, above even feeling.  Perhaps the best response to the behavior of everyone depicted in this narrative, killer and killed, fanatic and criminal, lost girl and rich boy, is to make a series of sarcastic and knowing quips.  Maybe the only audience filmmakers can imagine for an art-movie these days is one comprised of–to borrow a term–gawkers.

Tumbling with the Times

In our curatorial age, what can one do but join in?  Quotations, images, audiovisuals and aphorisms will now be found at grandhotelabyss.tumblr.com.  Longer essays will continue to appear here, at whatever rate I feel I can manage.