You said the future happened
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newredshoes: Madeline Ashby, "Problems Plus Time: What Creates a Dystopia, Real or Imagined." I enjoyed this essay on G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and I disagree slightly with it; I like its use of the novel to examine the definition of a dystopia, but its interpretation of Auberon Quin as the prototype of a twenty-first-century troll-tyrant elides the thing that actually makes him dangerous, which is not that he's so self-centered, but that he has no center at all. When he's still an unimportant and preposterously frivolous government clerk, he is accurately gauged as "a man who cares for nothing but a joke," which is to say "a dangerous man." Unknowing moments away from his accession by lottery to the throne of England, he makes a rare serious statement, which foretells all the trouble to come and which no one heeds: "Be careful how you ask me to do anything outré, to imitate the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for twopence I'd do it . . . Be careful how you suggest things to me." Hence the meta-joke-which-isn't at the center of the novel which makes him inseparable from the start of his lethally absurd reign from the man who will take his folly seriously enough to turn it to tragedy and eucatastrophe, namely that Quin's total inspiration for reintroducing the pageantry and factionalism of feudalism to London is not some long-nurtured Miniver Cheevy-ish nostalgia for an England that never was, but a chance thwack in the ribs with a wooden sword which he receives from a child playing King of the Castle in the streets of Notting Hill, an encounter which he never imagines, any more than the foreseeable outcome of encouraging the farce of a childish war game at adult scale suggests itself to him until it's fighting and dying in his streets, will exercise an equal and opposite influence on the child who grows up to be Adam Wayne, the incorruptible Provost of Notting Hill driven to resist the injustices of urban renewal by force of arms, inspired by his childhood encounter with the King by whom he was gravely told always to fight for "your old inviolate Notting Hill." Their symbiosis creates civil war and empire, the Badon Hill-like finale, the ambiguous epilogue where the masks of the metaphysics come off and what matters is not how things began, but how they are believed in. Of my non-comprehensive experience of Chesterton's fiction, this novel is my favorite; I read it for the first time as a sophomore in college, having tracked it down from the epigraph of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996). I really think they were separated by at least a semester, but it occupies an adjacent space in my memory to Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which is fair because both novels feel as though they form part of the substrate of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). I like Auberon Quin, of course, which does not mean he isn't for much of the novel a frighteningly hollow kind of person, his jokes an expression far more of nihilism than humor. "I have walked along a street with the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence."
newredshoes: Madeline Ashby, "Problems Plus Time: What Creates a Dystopia, Real or Imagined." I enjoyed this essay on G. K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) and I disagree slightly with it; I like its use of the novel to examine the definition of a dystopia, but its interpretation of Auberon Quin as the prototype of a twenty-first-century troll-tyrant elides the thing that actually makes him dangerous, which is not that he's so self-centered, but that he has no center at all. When he's still an unimportant and preposterously frivolous government clerk, he is accurately gauged as "a man who cares for nothing but a joke," which is to say "a dangerous man." Unknowing moments away from his accession by lottery to the throne of England, he makes a rare serious statement, which foretells all the trouble to come and which no one heeds: "Be careful how you ask me to do anything outré, to imitate the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for twopence I'd do it . . . Be careful how you suggest things to me." Hence the meta-joke-which-isn't at the center of the novel which makes him inseparable from the start of his lethally absurd reign from the man who will take his folly seriously enough to turn it to tragedy and eucatastrophe, namely that Quin's total inspiration for reintroducing the pageantry and factionalism of feudalism to London is not some long-nurtured Miniver Cheevy-ish nostalgia for an England that never was, but a chance thwack in the ribs with a wooden sword which he receives from a child playing King of the Castle in the streets of Notting Hill, an encounter which he never imagines, any more than the foreseeable outcome of encouraging the farce of a childish war game at adult scale suggests itself to him until it's fighting and dying in his streets, will exercise an equal and opposite influence on the child who grows up to be Adam Wayne, the incorruptible Provost of Notting Hill driven to resist the injustices of urban renewal by force of arms, inspired by his childhood encounter with the King by whom he was gravely told always to fight for "your old inviolate Notting Hill." Their symbiosis creates civil war and empire, the Badon Hill-like finale, the ambiguous epilogue where the masks of the metaphysics come off and what matters is not how things began, but how they are believed in. Of my non-comprehensive experience of Chesterton's fiction, this novel is my favorite; I read it for the first time as a sophomore in college, having tracked it down from the epigraph of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (1996). I really think they were separated by at least a semester, but it occupies an adjacent space in my memory to Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), which is fair because both novels feel as though they form part of the substrate of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004). I like Auberon Quin, of course, which does not mean he isn't for much of the novel a frighteningly hollow kind of person, his jokes an expression far more of nihilism than humor. "I have walked along a street with the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence."
no subject
Those aliens out in space catching 1950s TV waves really need to hurry up and pop along with a copy of all the masses of Peter Cushing the BBC just carelessly failed to record or keep! I know, it does sound good.
And, as to the ending of the film, I must have been more tired and therefore deeply unco-ordinated, while flipping between three wiki entries all labelled The Winslow Boy than I realised, despite trying to check carefully which one I was on, but, thanks, I get it now. Basically what everyone was saying was that the 1999 is extremely faithful to the play with no additional court scenes or anything like that, but does incorporate the additional dialogue from the end of the 1948, which makes much more sense. (So, yes, Ronnie interrupts; yes, they have the in the gallery/on the floor challenge, but they also have that final exchange, although it ends not on him, but on the smile she gives after he's gone.)
One of the tumblr posts comments on it as a riff on Pride & Prejudice, which I hadn't thought about while watching, exactly (although tbf I was mainly thinking: Dear God, please don't stop working, thank you), but of course, and I feel like this film riffs on the 1995 P&P in three scenes particularly. (I'm very amused that one of them is the infamous wet shirt scene, only deeply, deeply Rattigan-restrained and obv with at least 2-3 layers of Edwardian clothing already present and correct, but even not thinking about much on the first watch I immediately picked up on the vibes of it being this film's equivalent of that moment.)
Anyway, it was very lovely, and I now know - very nearly 30 years after the fact - that I do like Rattigan a lot and not just The Browning Version. Talking Pictures shows the 1948 every so often, so I shall keep an eye out for it.
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You understand! They can share the rest of the burninated TV while they're at it.
the 1999 is extremely faithful to the play with no additional court scenes or anything like that, but does incorporate the additional dialogue from the end of the 1948, which makes much more sense. (So, yes, Ronnie interrupts; yes, they have the in the gallery/on the floor challenge, but they also have that final exchange, although it ends not on him, but on the smile she gives after he's gone.)
I like that a lot. It sounds like an optimal fusion of the two previous versions and reminds me of the way the 1938 film of Pygmalion bridges the original Shaw and My Fair Lady, only more successfully in that this ending sounds better than My Fair Lady.
(I'm very amused that one of them is the infamous wet shirt scene, only deeply, deeply Rattigan-restrained and obv with at least 2-3 layers of Edwardian clothing already present and correct, but even not thinking about much on the first watch I immediately picked up on the vibes of it being this film's equivalent of that moment.)
And that just sounds incredibly impressive.
Anyway, it was very lovely, and I now know - very nearly 30 years after the fact - that I do like Rattigan a lot and not just The Browning Version. Talking Pictures shows the 1948 every so often, so I shall keep an eye out for it.
I'm so glad! I will try to get hold of the 1999 Winslow Boy.
no subject
Funnily enough, I have just watched My Fair Lady for the first time, and, yeah, that is not an ending! (I watched it after my first Winslow Boy failed to do anything, I think. Or the second. The second, actually, lol...)