A Certain Slant of Light

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.

asakiyume and I watched the miniseries about Madam C. J. Walker, Self-Made, sometime near the beginning of social distancing - as time has lost all meaning, I can't be more accurate than that - and I've been procrastinating about writing it up ever since, because it falls in that in-between area where I neither loved it nor hated it, and therefore it's hard to write about.

Madam C. J. Walker's haircare company for black women got its start in Indianapolis, which means that she was on the list of famous Hoosiers when I did Indiana history in fourth grade: Madam C. J. Walker was the first self-made African-American female millionaire. The title of the miniseries refers both her status as a self-made millionaire, but also to the way that her product allowed black women (and Madam C. J. Walker herself) to fashion their own identities, their own selves.

I loved one conceit that ran through the first three episodes (they dropped it in the fourth and final episode, for some reason), where the show took some aspect of African-American history/pop culture from the early twentieth century - boxing, the New Negro Woman (a light-skinned black woman riding a bicycle, Gibson-Girl style), a chorus line - and used it as a sort of extra-diegetic commentary on what's going on in the episode. Madam C. J. Walker is not literally having a boxing match with her business rival: it's a representation of how their conflict is playing out in her mind.

I love it when movies or TV shows play with their formats like this, and I've never seen a show do something quite like this before, with this visual representation of the character's thoughts and feelings that also gives us extra insight into the cultural background and historical milieu the story is set in.

The costumes and sets are also beautiful, and it was fun to see a sumptuous costume drama with an all-black cast. (There are a few incidental white people, but IIRC all the main characters are black.)

I think the main drawback of the series is that I did not love the amount of time it spent on the divorce plotline. Madam C. J. Walker and her husband did historically divorce, so the show had to deal with it one way or another. I just don't personally enjoy stories about divorces, so I wish they had spent less time on it, and maybe more time finding Madam C. J. Walker's daughter Lelia a girlfriend who sticks with her... but again they may have been hamstrung by history in this department.

The room is lit with a soft golden light; the camera is in soft focus. Young women in white Victorian undergarments frolic before the camera, which is set too close for us to catch more than glimpses of their faces.

"Is this softcore Victorian porn?" Julie asked.

This is actually the beginning of the new BBC adaptation of Little Women. It has not devolved into softcore Victorian porn - yet, at least; we've only watched the first of three episodes - although it does devote a certain amount of time to the March sisters in their undergarments. I would accuse it of being male-gazey, but both the writer (Heidi Thomas) and the director (Vanessa Caswill) are women, so I guess I'm just going to have to call it baffling.

A lot of the adaptation choices are baffling. Some of the issues may come out right over the next two episodes, so I will restrain myself right now to two complaints.

First: they got Marmee all wrong. She's supposed to be a pillar of loving strength, and instead she's weepy and irritable and ineffective. When Jo attacks Amy after discovering that Amy has burned her book, Marmee flees the room. Marmee would never flee when her girls needed her!

The second problem is Amy herself, and in particular, the miniseries' handling of the scene where Amy burns Jo's treasured manuscript because Jo refuses to take her to a play. In the book, this is the impulsive action of a vengeful and perhaps slightly spoiled child, who is filled with remorse once she sees how badly she's hurt Jo. In the miniseries...

Well, first of all, in the miniseries Amy's actress is in her twenties. We may be supposed to believe that she's twelve, but even in pigtails she doesn't look a day younger than seventeen. She's older, so the action seems even more monstrous, and the direction really leans that monstrousness.

We don't just hear about the book-burning after the fact: we see her feed it into Hannah's stove page by page, her face gleaming demonically in the firelight. When Jo discovers that her manuscript has been burned, Amy slinks - positively slinks, like a sexy cartoon villainous - across the room to gloat about her evil deed. "I told you that you'd be sorry," she says, deeply satisfied with herself. Marmee eventually gets Amy to apologize, but it's grudging and fake, and when Jo refuses to accept it, Amy flounces down the stairs with her nose in the air.

Marmee's attempt to talk Jo into instant forgiveness is hard to take at the best of times, but in this adaptation, it makes absolutely no sense. Why should Jo forgive Amy when Amy feels no remorse?

Are they trying to make Amy a psychopath? If that's what they're aiming for, I guess they succeeded, but I'm not sure how they're going to make the Amy/Laurie endgame palatable when Psychopath Amy March would undoubtedly ruin Laurie's life. And Amy/Laurie is already a difficult sell for many people. Why make this harder than it has to be?

I suspect that Alias Grace is Netflix’s answer to Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale: in response to an acclaimed series based on a Margaret Atwood novel of future feminist dystopia, they’ve adapted a Margaret Atwood novel about that other feminist dystopia: the past.

Or, at least, for an Irish-born servant girl with no connections, no means, and no luck, mid-nineteenth century Ontario comes very close to it. Grace Marks hasn’t caught a break since the day she was born: her father is an abusive drunk, her mother died at sea when the family immigrated to Canada, and the happiest time of her life are the months after she takes her first job in service, when she shares a room with a spirited servant girl, Mary Whitney.

Until Mary Whitney falls pregnant by the son of the house, who refuses to acknowledge the child, and dies in a botched back alley abortion.

After that Grace’s life spirals downhill till she lands where we find her at the start of the series: locked in a penitentiary, convicted of murdering a later employer and his housekeeper. There are doubts about her guilt, however - she claims that she has no memory of the murders - so a group of philanthropists have hired a doctor, a specialist the nascent field of psychology, in hope that his findings will help win her a pardon.

This, then, is the frame story: Grace is telling her life story to Dr. Simon Jordan. He hopes to win her trust through his sympathetic interest in her story, which may cause her to drop this pretense of amnesia and at last tell the truth - or possibly allow her to break through the amnesia that has hitherto veiled her memory - or… something. It’s the 1850s and psychology is still wild and wooly terrain.

I was a little afraid that he was going to be yet another abusive man, and I just didn’t think I could take another when Grace’s life is already littered with them. But although he entertains some romantic fantasies about Grace he never makes an actual move - and as Grace says, if we could be executed for thoughts, we would all be hanged.

It’s Grace, however, who is the star of the show: Grace and the long, long thoughts that she’s thought in prison. She’s uneducated but clever, and with the things she does know - about quilts, and the Bible, and housework - she’s got a strikingly unusual way of looking at the world, and it’s always fascinating to see what she’ll say next.

I also loved Grace’s friendship with saucy Mary Whitney, whom Grace often quotes (or claims to quote) when she wants to say something that is not exactly modest or proper - but nonetheless true.

(I don’t know how much of this is the screenplay and how much comes direct from Margaret Atwood, but this is an excellent example of historical fiction where the social justice message that has been successfully translated into the language of the time, which is something I love when it’s done well and can’t abide when it’s been done badly or, worse, not even attempted.)

( Spoilers )

In short - I think I’m going to have to read the book. Once I’ve had some time to recover from the miniseries.

My brother and I just finished watching Band of Brothers, which we've been talking about watching for... oh, six months now... but I guess the news that I'm moving out lit a fire under him, because we've watched the ten episodes in about three weeks.

(This may not sound impressive, but it's very fast for us.)

And it's interesting. It's a good show, although in a very different way than I would call most of the shows that I watch good. When we started watching it, my brother commented, "I've seen this ten times and I still can't pick out all the guys," and I think that's deliberate. The hero of the story is not any of the particular guys (although Dick Winters' story serves as a sort of guidepost for those of us who are used to more individualized storytelling), but the company itself, Easy Company in the 101st Airborne.

Many of the episodes have a particular character who serves as the lens for that episode (I found the episode about Eugene Roe's experience as a medic particularly affecting). But it's not concerned with character arcs in the traditional sense; a character will get an episode and then slip back into the background for the rest of the show, without much follow-up on their personal arc.

I'm not sure I would have watched the whole thing without someone to say "Look! We know that guy, that's Bull Randleman!" (or whoever). But it's very well-made and I'm glad I saw it.

I'm also impressed by the relatively low gore quotient. Here you've got a show set in some pretty bloody fighting, like Bastogne (where the 101st Airborne was encircled by Nazi bombardment), and there is blood, of course, and a couple of really tragic death scenes, but the camera didn't linger lovingly on the gore or seek out every opportunity to wedge some more blood and guts in there. I feel like there's been a definite move in the pro-gore direction in the fifteen years since this was made and I wish we could go back.

This is one of my reservations about watching The Pacific, which Chuck wants us to do next. It was filmed in 2010, well after the Gore Renaissance was underway, so who knows how much blood and guts and intestines there'll be? And also I've heard that The Pacific is less cohesive than Band of Brothers, which is already only cohesive in its own somewhat peculiar way. So we'll see.

Has anyone else seen The Buccaneers? It's a 1995 BBC miniseries, not about pirates at all, but based on Edith Wharton's novel about four American girls who went to England to snag noble husbands, succeeded, and then - this being Wharton - suffered. Everyone suffers a lot in Wharton, particularly people silly enough to get married.

But actually the series is far less dour than that makes it sound: the girls seem far less emotionally isolated than Wharton characters often are, and they try to look out for each other. (I particularly liked Annabel's relationship with her governess-turned-friend Miss Testvalley, because Annabel's so horrified by the idea of getting a governess and then completely adores her.) Unfortunately none of them are experienced enough to recognize the warning signs that a man, despite being a nobleman, is actually a terrible match.

The nineties had plenty of historical fiction with ham-handed feminist critiques of the past (often put in the mouth of our spunky tomboy heroine), so I was pleasantly surprised by the delicate hand The Buccaneers took toward criticizing the social structures that trap our heroines. They very much go for show-don't-tell, which I think works so much better than inserting social commentary: there's less chance for the show to create an explicit comparison between the past and now, which is not only usually obnoxiously self-congratulatory, but also breaks the sense of immersion.

And this is a show that's worth getting immersed in, because the sets and the food (oh my goodness the food) and the costumes are all lovely. Conchita gets the best dresses, but all four girls get some stunners, and they also spend a great deal of time walking through bucolic countryside having picnics etc. etc.

I'm actually super curious to read the book now, never mind that reading Wharton is generally something I regret. I'm just so curious to see what, if anything, the TV series changed from the book. BBC miniseries are usually fairly faithful, but the girls all get endings that are, if not happy, at least not hopelessly miserable, and that just seems so un-Wharton.

But maybe it's just that without Wharton's narrative voice to tell us that these events are actually steeped in despair, it's easier to read it as partially positive when characters make compromises that net them some if not all of what they want. The events are the same, but the presentation is different. For instance, Virginia's tentative reconciliation with her husband seems vaguely hopeful in the miniseries, but a different creator could easily cast it as a collapse into despair: she forgives, yet again, the philanderer who married her for her money, because she is unable to envision any better future.

...Actually, I've just gone to look it up on Wikipedia, and it appears that Wharton didn't finish the novel before she died. Therefore the series creators had the chance to give everyone decent endings, and took it with both hands.

Day 17 - Favorite mini series.

I’ve already written about this! Desperate Romantics, all the way.

But my second-favorite miniseries is probably the 2009 BBC Emma, with Romola Garai and Jonny Lee Miller, which is simply perfect in every possible way. It is, in the first place, just beautiful: the costumes are stunning, as are the sets, as are the actors (the young lady playing Harriet is absolutely lovely).

It’s so beautiful that it might be worth watching even if it was awful, but in fact it’s amazing. The miniseries gets Emma, which (as Emma Approved and the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma both demonstrate) is a difficult task. Emma is neither an incompetent Machiavellian nor an airhead; she’s a competent, intelligent, and often kind social leader, whose very real abilities have given her a slightly overblown self-regard. She’s usually right, but she’s come to believe that she’s always right, and therefore never considers the possibility that she might make a mistake.

And Romola Garai plays this to perfection. It’s easy to see why everyone in her circle adores Emma. Not only is she funny and vivacious, the life of every party, but she smooths the conversation over rough patches and makes sure everyone has a nice time. One of those people is invariably her fussbudget father, which makes it an even more impressive feat.

(Emma’s relationship with her father is one of the highlights of this miniseries. He realizes, at least on some level, that Emma has grown up so well as much despite him as because of him and his overprotective instincts - there is a really touching scene where he apologizes to her for his failures. But Emma realizes that his limitations are not his fault, and loves him back despite his flaws.)

That’s why the scene at Box Hill where Emma is unkind to Miss Bates is so startling, because this is not at all how she usually behaves. Frank Churchill is clearly a bad influence (I like him less and less over time; I realize he needs to maintain some distance from Jane to keep their engagement secret, but there was no need for him to encourage Emma’s suppositions that Jane had a dalliance with Mr. Dixon, or to pick at Jane like he does. I don’t think he means harm; he just doesn’t seem to quite realize that other people have feelings that might be hurt by his high spirits.)

I suspect this is what makes Mr. Knightley so unusually sharp with her in the Box Hill scene: he’s envious of Frank Churchill’s influence, which he thinks goes deeper than it does.

Jonny Lee Miller’s performance as Mr. Knightley is also outstanding. His dialogue is mostly drawn from the book, but whereas in the book he often seems scolding - if not a father figure, then certainly an older-brotherly one - Miller’s liveliness, his frustration, the fact that he usually speaks to Emma as an equal arguing with her rather than an elder scolding her, all make him seem like a good match for her despite their age gap. They’re like the dueling protagonists in one of the better-made screwball comedies, all rapid delivery and sparkling wit.

I suspect that the director of North and South spent a lot of time shouting, “Smolder, Thornton, smolder!” Because Thornton, cotton mill owner and romantic lead, smolders like a champion through most of the miniseries. He also broods and glowers and generally makes attractively grim faces.

This adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is a sort of confirmation of the theory that second-rate novels make first-rate adaptations. Almost all the changes the adaptation makes are improvements: they smooth over the rough patches of the plot while mostly retaining the novel’s characterizations. (They also add a scene where Margaret visits to the Great Exhibition of 1851, probably purely on the grounds that world’s fairs are cool. I heartily approve.)

I am curious, though, why the filmmakers decided to roughen up Mr. Thornton’s already rough edges even more. They introduce him beating up a worker he caught smoking in his cotton mill, a brutal scene that doesn’t occur in the book at all. He’s not being presciently anti-smoking. Cotton mills, which had cotton fluff floating in the air like snow, had a tendency to go up in blazes if people smoked in them, so I can see why Mr. Thornton would be so fanatical about it...but nonetheless it’s an odd choice to introduce the romantic hero by having him beat bloody an underling who can’t fight back.

The filmmakers also rather drama up the ending, but I tend to think that’s an improvement - not least because their version cut out all reference to Mrs. Thornton.

Mrs. Thornton is Mr. Thornton’s mother. She has virtues, like a steely will and a firm and flinty honesty, and I should probably appreciate them more than I do; but I just can’t. She’s just so mean! She doesn’t love anything or anyone except her son, not even her daughter, Fanny. Fanny is, admittedly, a bit of a brat, but how could she be anything else after a lifetime trying desperately to wring a few drops of attention from a mother who obviously favors her brother?

I got Tipping the Velvet confused with Fingersmith, which probably rather spoiled my enjoyment of the former miniseries. I went in expecting thieves, double-crossing, a plot, and, you know, a romance, and was distinctly cranky at the lack of any of that.

Okay, actually, Tipping the Velvet has quite a lot of romances, or at least a lot of sex. The story follows Nan Astley’s picaresque romantic adventures through lesbian Victorian London, as she falls in love, suffers a catastrophic break-up, falls into prostitution, and finally converts to socialism, which incidentally lands her a super awesome socialist girlfriend, Flo.

I was in favor of them in the sense that Flo was clearly better for Nan than any of Nan’s other girlfriends, but nonetheless they seemed rather poorly matched. Flo is serious, hard-working, concerned about others: the kind of person who sits up late discussing social theory with her brother.

Nan, on the other hand, has not hitherto shown any interest in anyone but herself and has no apparent talents as a thinker or a conversationalist. Despite the fact that she’s our protagonist and provides the voiceover, I never felt that I got a good handle on her as a character. What are her dreams and goals; what’s the point of her picaresque quest?

However, I think part of the problem is that I’m just not fond of picaresque stories, particularly ones like Tipping the Velvet which follow a single character rather than a duo or a merry band. A lone picaresque protagonist needs to be awfully interesting to carry the narrative without strong relationships with secondary characters, and Nan was at once too self-centered and too empty to fit the bill.

I am beginning to worry that Code Name Verity has ruined me for all other World War II related media. I couldn’t get into Bomb Girls at all (I know, what is wrong with me?) and while I liked The Bletchley Circle, it didn’t blow me away. And I wanted it to blow me away. It is a period piece! about women! solving crimes!!!, and therefore it is like they made it for me personally!

I did enjoy it, I just...I wanted it to blow me away. And it didn’t.

I thought it would have been better if...( Spoilers for the end )