A Certain Slant of Light

When I started my Depression era tramps reading, sovay recommended the 1933 pre-Code film Wild Boys of the Road as must-see viewing.

This is absolutely accurate. Wild Boys of the Road is dynamite, and I wish it were better known. It tells the story of two ordinary high school students, Tommy and Eddie, who drive onto the scene in Eddie’s rattletrap car painted, all over with twenties-style slogans: “Four wheels, no brakes,” “Out hunting: mostly teddies.” (Teddies were a kind of women’s underwear at the time.)

But their carefree days are numbered: Eddie’s widowed mother is already struggling, so that Eddie doesn’t even have the entry fee to the dance (Eddie sneaks in cross-dressed in his girlfriend’s hat and coat, as girls don’t need to pay), and Tommy soon learns that his father has lost his job. Unable to find work in their hometown and eager to ease the burden on their beleaguered parents, the two boys impulsively decide to jump a train out of town - and quickly meet Sally, a girl tramp, who is traveling to Chicago to meet her aunt.

Sally is a bright-eyed, freckle-faced youngster, more or less what would happen if Anne of Green Gables had to ride the rails. When she first meets the boys, they think she’s just stolen their sandwiches, and Sally gives Tommy a bloody nose, which of course makes them fast friends as soon as Tommy realizes she is (a) a girl, so they have to stop fighting, and (b) not a sandwich thief.

Unfortunately, Sally’s aunt gets arrested for prostitution almost as soon as the kids reach her apartment, so they have to hit the road again (Eddie pauses to carry along a chocolate cake).

They quickly fall in with a big group of kid tramps, and the camaraderie among the kids keeps the picture from ever seeming like sheer misery porn, but nonetheless it's clear their lives are grim. A railroad guard rapes one of the girl tramps; the rest of the kids band together to fling the man off the train to his death. Eddie loses a leg when he falls across a train track and the train runs over it. Even when the kids have a bit of luck, like setting up a sort of village in a bunch of unused concrete pipes, the police chase them out with firehoses. The man who owns the pipes gave the kids permission to live there - but the city thinks they’re a nuisance, “wild boys of the road” as a headline puts it, treating them as vicious young hoodlums when really they’re just kids whose families have fallen on hard times.

The main characters are played by actual teenagers, and so, I suspect, are most of the other kid tramps in the movie. The movie is a strong argument in favor of having actual teenagers play teens, instead of having them played by twenty-somethings: their misfortunes hit differently when you can very clearly see these characters are baby-faced round-cheeked wide-eyed kids.

Continuing with my general Taylor Swift theme this week, I watched Lana Wilson’s Miss Americana, which I’ve been meaning to see since it came out… gosh, only last January? What a long, long, long year this has been.

Anyway, this is a documentary that is a retrospective about Swift’s career to date and her growth as a person. She comments that her desire to please people was a driving force in her early career (the intoxicating experience of applause, etc), and this is a quality that’s really present in the interview clips that she shows - what’s interesting is that it’s not visible in her songs, like those served as vents for unacceptable feelings of rage, pain, jealousy, etc. Anything a girl is not supposed to express because it’s not “nice.”

Swift mentions working to “deprogram the misogyny in my brain” - “there is no such thing as a bitch, there is no such thing as a slut,” women are not one-dimensional cutouts but complicated, messy people. “We don’t want to be condemned for being multifaceted.”

And it strikes me that one way to read her body of work is that it starts with an exploration of her own multifaceted nature, and there’s been a process since then of working to extend that understanding that same emotional messiness in other people. (This documentary is pre-folklore, but I think this is really visible in folklore, which is far less autobiographical than many of Swift’s other albums - there are still songs that feel autobiographical, but also songs about exploring other people’s lives and perspectives.)

Another thing that the documentary led me to reflect on, particularly because Swift started her career so young - she was only sixteen when she hit the big time - is that when tabloids scream about female celebrities being OUT OF CONTROL!!!!, often the celebrities in question are performing totally age-appropriate figuring-themselves-out behavior.

There seems to be a cultural expectation, which hasn’t changed all that since Jane Austen was condemning teenage Lydia for being too flighty, that women should be totally grown up more or less the moment they hit sexual maturity. In fact, I think in some ways the emphasis on strong women has actually exacerbated it, because “I don’t know who I am or what I want because I am sixteen/nineteen/twenty-two” is not a particularly strong look. I realize that there’s been some attempt to redefine strong to mean real! three-dimensional! messy! But, let’s be real, if you have to actually explain that when you say strong you don’t actually MEAN strong… maybe you should just say “real, three-dimensional, messy” instead.

I also realized as I was watching this that I somehow missed Swift’s 2019 album Lover. How??? But then I realized that it came out in August 2019 when I was in the thick of writing Honeytrap and more or less living in the winter of 1959-1960, so that explains it.

I didn’t intend to reread the entirety of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, just the first section “Et in Arcadia Ego,” the part of the book that focuses on Charles Ryder’s friendship with Sebastian Flyte before it all goes to pot and Sebastian descends into alcoholism. However, once I’d begun, I couldn’t stop, and read all the way through to the bitter end, and somehow have begun rewatching the 1981 miniseries with Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews.

I may end up rewatching the 2008 movie version, too, even though my recollection is that the filmmakers really wanted Charles Ryder to be straight and only in love with one Flyte, Julia, while Sebastian pined away for Charles in the wings, and this unrequited love possibly drove Sebastian to alcoholism? Which is not what happens in the book at all; possibly the only problem book Sebastian doesn’t have is unrequited love. In fact, if anyone is pining, it’s Charles for Sebastian. However, I don’t seem to have written a review of the film at the time, so possibly I’m not remembering quite right.

I’ve returned to this story again and again and am always incredibly moved by it and then end up unable to say anything about it; even the Brideshead reviews I managed to write are sorely lacking, like this one I managed to cough up nearly a year after watching the miniseries in January 2017: “I meant to post about it ever since because I loved it so much, but I never did get around to it. It starts off golden and beautiful (“Et In Arcadia Ego” is the name of the first episode, and never has anything been more aptly named) and becomes incredibly sad.”

For “I never did get around to it” please read “My intense feelings about this story paralyzed not only my critical faculties but in fact my entire ability to put anything into words at all.”

It is so beautiful! And so sad! The lost golden pleasures of youth, the love that is so deep and powerful and yet not enough to save the friend, the lost friend who drifts out of your life and never comes back, their absence aching like a sore tooth, an unresolved loose end even when the story comes full circle, and Charles Ryder returns again to Brideshead, sadder, perhaps wiser?, trudging on it seems in sheer exhaustion. And yet he does go on.

...also, it is just super gay. Of course I noticed this the first time I read it, but rereading it this time with more knowledge of English queercoding at the time, oh my GOD it is SO GAY. Waugh never actually comes right out and says “AND THEN CHARLES AND SEBASTIAN BANGED,” but!!! they love each other so much!!! and that’s what makes it so tragic. If you COULD save someone through the power of love, Charles would have done it. That saying about setting yourself on fire to keep someone else warm? That is what Charles does his final term at Oxford for Sebastian, and it’s not enough.

Charles tells Lady Marchmain, and clearly believes, that if she’d just let Sebastian live with him as planned, Charles would be able to keep Sebastian’s drinking in check. The first time I read the book I more or less believed this too (and it’s even possible that Waugh intends us to believe it), but this time around, an older and life-battered reader, I recognize wishful thinking when I see it. That might perhaps have slowed Sebastian’s descent, but unless Sebastian decided he wanted to stop drinking, nothing would have stopped it (and even that might not have sufficed) - and Sebastian never decides that.

The first time I read the book, I found Sebastian’s intransigency irritating; pretty much my only comment on the book was “I don’t think I’m supposed to find Sebastian’s self-pitying decline into alcoholism quite as annoying as I do.” And I do see that, I do still wish that he wanted to get better. Even if Sebastian ultimately failed, it would be so much easier on Charles and on his little sister Cordelia and indeed on his whole family if he tried and failed instead of not trying at all.

But I think I’ve come to see, now, that sometimes the wanting itself is not within our power; it’s like that quote (Google tells me it’s from Schopenhauer), “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” If someone doesn’t want to get better, they can’t make themselves want that, even if on some level they wish they did want it - and the tragedy of Sebastian is that he knows he ought to want it and even, intermittently, does want it, when he sees how he is hurting Charles or Cordelia. But in the end the pull of oblivion is stronger.

...Also there is a LOT of Catholicism in this book. It all whooshed over my head the first time I read it, and I still don’t particularly grasp it; pagan that I am, I think Charles has a point when he complains that all the Church seems to do for the Flytes is make them miserable, and if they let it go they would be not only happier but kinder and all around more capable of goodness. However, maybe next time I read the book, the Catholicism will all pop into place for me and I’ll understand what Waugh is saying… although I still may not agree with it.

I try to watch at least one women-directed film each month, and in October I slipped it in under the wire with Amy Heckerling’s Vamps, in which Alicia Silverstone and Krysten Ritter play vampire buddies trying to keep up with modern times in New York City. Stacy (Ritter) was turned in 1992; Goody (Silverstone) was turned in 1841, which she tries to hide from Stacy, although you’d think Stacy might make a guess based on that name.

I have a confession to make: I didn’t particularly enjoy Heckerling’s Clueless, and while I’ve put that down to the fact that I watched it as a judgmental teenager and therefore might enjoy it more now, watching Vamps makes me think that maybe Heckerling and I just don’t gel. (Although I did like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, so who knows?)

It’s not that I disliked Vamps, but a vampire story that focuses on the difficulty of keeping up with the times while appearing agelessly young (and also features Dan Stevens) is so much my jam that I ought to have loved it, and instead it was just okay. It didn’t lean into the history thing quite as much as I wanted, and those parts focused mainly on the difficulty of keeping up with technological changes/slang without much more than a glance at changing social attitudes.

...Also, if slang is going to be a big focus, and you’ve got a character who became undead in 1840, then by God you’ve got the chance to trot out some really gloriously weird and dated slang and the movie just SQUANDERS it. Especially frustrating because the slang is so prominent in both Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless, so you'd think Heckerling would be just the director for this, and yet... there's a tossed off bit of 1920s flapper slang that doesn't really sound that odd, and not much else. And you could go so hard with flapper slang if you wanted! (The 19th century had some crackerjack slang too, but I think more people would be in on the joke if you did flapper slang.)

Ali Weinstein's documentary Mermaids braids together the stories of many different people in the United States who dress up as (and often identify strongly with) mermaids: professional mermaids who swim at the Florida resort Weeki Wachee or in an aquarium above a bar in Sacramento, California, a semi-professional mermaid who does birthday parties with the assistance of her mother (who has also gotten into the mermaid thing, and bought herself a tail), and amateur mermaids, like the members of a mermaid meet-up in California who hang out on the beach.

(I would die to stumble upon a mermaid beach meet-up, that sounds like the most magical thing.)

The documentary as a whole has an air of magic around it, although it does deal with some rough material: some of the people profiled are drawn to mermaids as basically a coping mechanism for trauma, like a woman in Harlem whose identification with mermaids began as a result of her childhood sexual abuse, or a transwoman in California who struggled for years to accept herself and found help in this struggle through mermaids.

But generally the actual mermaid part generally seems to be an overwhelmingly positive experience for everyone. Even the Weeki Wachee mermaids, who went into mermaiding as a job rather than a calling, reported on the feeling of joy and freedom that they felt underwater. (Of course, there’s doubtless some reporting bias here: if you’re talking to the Weeki Wachee mermaids who still go to Weeki Wachi reunions decades later, naturally you’ll catch the most enthusiastic ones!)

And it struck me, also, how beautiful everyone looked in their mermaid costumes, even if they were overweight or old or otherwise didn’t fit general American conceptions of beauty. Maybe everyone just looks lovely underwater; or maybe it was just that they were all so happy to be floating free.

The Babushkas of Chernobyl is a 2015 documentary about the old women who live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone - that is, the area in Ukraine and Belarus that is officially unsafe for human habitation on account of high levels of radiation. (It’s not 100% clear to me if only women returned to the exclusion zone after the disaster, or if the men who went died faster, leaving the area overwhelmingly inhabited by women.)

Honestly I expected this to be rather grim. After all, these women have all had such hard lives: in their youth they suffered the one-two punch of the famine of the 1930s followed by World War II; and forty years later, just as they’re embarking on retirement and old age, there’s the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and they were forced out of the villages where they’ve lived their entire lives despite war and famine. And then they come back to live out their days in their poisoned homes.

But in fact the documentary is unexpectedly charming, in a post-apocalyptic cottagecore kind of way. Yes, absolutely, these gorgeous mushrooms that the babushkas are so lovingly gathering are undoubtedly raising their radiation levels… but on the other hand, when you’re ninety years old surely you get to live however you want, and these women clearly feel they’re living their best lives. When you haven’t got much time left on earth, why not live out your days as a hunter-gatherer-gardener in a lush, fertile, largely depopulated forest mainly inhabited by wolves?

Are you afraid of the wolves? one of the filmmakers asks one of the babushkas. “I’m not afraid of anything, darling,” the babushka replies. A still image of this moment is the reason I watched the movie in the first place: even in the still photograph, you can tell that she means it. She’s seen everything and come out the other side of fear.

I didn’t see Beauty and the Beast till I was grown up, but it’s become one of my favorite Disney movies. It just has so many fine qualities, among them:

The beautiful animation! I love the opening sequence, where they give us the Beast’s backstory through stained glass windows, and the amazing bonkers energy of the entire “Be Our Guest” sequence - a flashback to the wild and woolly world of the early days of Disney animation, when anything went.

The servants who have turned into furniture! I think my very favorite is actually the dog who is now a hassock, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Chip and Mrs. Potts too. And I like the final battle even more now that I’ve seen Bedknobs and Broomsticks, because this is the second movie in which Angela Lansbury (who voices Mrs. Potts) holds off invaders with the aid of usually-inanimate objects.

The music! Who among us hasn’t felt like racing through a field singing “I want much more than this provincial life”?

Which brings us, of course, to Belle, who is a delight, not only because she is a bookworm and I am also a bookworm, although that certainly contributes, but also because she’s indomitable. How many people could steadfastly refuse to have dinner with a terrifying Beast who just locked up her father, then took Belle in his place? And not many people would have the face to snap at the Beast after he roars while having his wound cleaned: “If you’d hold still, it wouldn’t hurt as much!”

(In The Queens in Animation, I learned that this detail was the brainchild of Brenda Chapman: she figured that if someone was roaring at her, she’d snap back.)

Another thing that struck me on this rewatch is that the Beast is a baby. Well, not literally, but the rose is set to wither on his twenty-first birthday, which means that he’s a twenty-year-old who has spent some indeterminate but lengthy amount of time trapped in this castle with no company but his servants. It makes his moodiness more understandable and more likely to change over time now that he has a companion who won’t put up with his bullshit.

At one point Lumiere tells Belle that the servants haven’t had any guests to attend to in ten years, which would mean that the Beast was cursed on his eleventh birthday… except we’ve got that portrait of the Beast as a man, and definitely not a ten-year-old boy… so after some discussion, Julie and I concluded that Lumiere was exaggerating and/or speaking impressionistically. One year in the Beast’s cursed castle probably feels like a decade, just like one month in 2020 feels like approximately forever.

“Lamp Life” is a Disney/Pixar short directed by Valerie LaPointe, available only on Disney+, which tells the story of Bo Peep’s life after she disappeared following Toy Story, only to reappear in Toy Story 4. I watched it mostly because as a result of the women film directors project I have developed a Female Director Radar that is often accurate at twenty paces (in this case I saw the thumbnail on Disney+ and said “I bet” and lo, I was right), and I wanted something short to watch over dinner.

It’s sort of forgettable, honestly, although it probably doesn’t help that I haven’t seen Toy Story 4. Mostly the short left me concerned that the movie does not explain Bo Peep’s reappearance at all, but drops Bo Peep right back into the action with nary a word about where she’s been or why she’s now... a ninja? At least, that was the impression I got from the preview.

I think this new, badass characterization is meant to be a corrective to the fact that she’s basically offered up as a two-dimensional love interest in the first film, but the fact that they pack all this backstory into a short rather than putting it in the movie itself is emblematic of the fact that the filmmakers still don’t really care about her.

Somehow or other, I managed to miss Oliver & Company all the years while I was growing up, so I saw it for the very first time this year. How can this be? (Well, honestly, when I was young I tended to assume the Disney movies we had on VHS were the only ones that existed.)

It’s a charming movie. Who could not love young Oliver, abandoned in a cardboard box by the side of the road, or the charming scamp of a Dodger and Dodger’s gang of rough but good-hearted dogs? Even Fagin, who in this adaptation of Oliver Twist becomes a lovable loser, beloved by his canine gang of thieves even as he struggles to protect them and himself from the evil businessman Sykes and his two murderous Doberman Pinschers?

In fact, the movie bears a weirdly close resemblance to the original novel for a Disney adaptation, which is especially odd given that the movie transposes the action from early Victorian London to 1980s New York and also makes most of the main characters cats and dogs. And also seems more aware than Dickens ever was that the Artful Dodger, for all that he’s a criminal, is one of the most compelling characters in the story…

Okay, the adaptation is not actually that close, but it bears a distinct resemblance to the original in a way that, for instance, The Black Cauldron and The Hunchback of Notre Dame really don’t. The book and the movie share the same central concern - the suffering of poor orphans in a heartless world run by the rich - and solve it the same way: our particular poor orphan gets adopted by a rich family, but his good fortune can’t even extend to include his gang. In the book, the Artful Dodger’s facing transportation to Australia; in the movie, the Dodger and his gang ride away triumphant, reprising Dodger’s anthem “Why Should I Worry?” (one of the great Disney songs) as they ride away atop cars and buses on New York’s crowded streets, as proud as figureheads.

I have gotten WAY behind on my Disney animated movie rewatch reviews. The last one I wrote about was The Fox and the Hound, and we’re now all the way up to Beauty and the Beast. (Fun fact: Beauty and the Beast was the first Disney film to have a female screenwriter since Dorothy Ann Black contributed to the screenplay for Snow White, although Snow White had eight screenwriters so don’t get too excited.)

But before I talk about Beauty and the Beast, I should get caught up on all those movies I haven’t written about. Today: The Black Cauldron!

There have been certain films that I haven’t cared for in this rewatch - I’m probably never going to be a big Dumbo fan - but The Black Cauldron is the only film so far that I’ve thought was not only not to my taste, but also just not very good. (I’m sorry, Black Cauldron fans.) I felt this way for two reasons:

1. The animation is very busy in a way that detracts from the story. Lots of Disney animation is detailed: my favorite example of this is all the many clocks in Gepetto’s workshop, which are so intricately detailed that there’s actually a sequence that just shows them strutting their stuff, as if each clock is a nightclub act. But that detail enriches the world and serves the story, whereas a lot of the detail in Black Cauldron just feels like… do the rocks really need to be more detailed than Taran and Eilonwy? Do they really?

2. I realize that complaining that Disney changed the original story when they adapted it is basically a lost cause, but they changed the ending in this case in a way that I think totally undermines it. In… does anyone care about spoilers for a forty year old book? for Well, ( Spoiler cut just in case )