One of the sillier assignments I was ever given was a seventh-grade instruction to write a sequel to O. Henry's "A Retrieved Reformation," deciding what happens after its safe-cracking protagonist, now straight, aliased, and respectably engaged to be married, reveals himself in rescuing a small child locked otherwise inaccessibly inside a bank vault. Fortunately this travesty was composed on a classroom computer and, with any luck, no longer exists in even the most illegible hard-disk form. A History of Violence (2005) is like a successful fantasia on this theme, with heavy echoes of Westerns and film noir—the lives we put behind us, which circumstances force out again; Viggo Mortensen inherits not a little from Robert Mitchum and Alan Ladd. I'm not sure it matters that I saw this film after last year's Eastern Promises, but I am glad finally to have seen them both; they share lines of family and allegiance and all senses of blood, worlds with their own inexorable gravity that pull underneath the surface of the everyday. Next up, if I keep going backward, is Spider (2002). Or I could just wait and see what Cronenberg does next.
I have had few genuinely bad teachers; I've been lucky. Tenth grade, my luck ran out. The same English teacher who destroyed my ability to read Sylvia Plath for seven years attempted the same service for Robert Frost, did not wreck A Tale of Two Cities and Kim only because Dickens and Kipling are well-nigh indestructible (and even so, she tried. No one should ever set as an essay for students an enumeration of the ways in which Sydney Carton is Christ), and all I remember of her lectures on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is that I annotated my copy of the play with small green-inked cartoons of a disgruntled Brutus and that Portia's voluntary wound in the thigh was probably not as psychosexually significant as the teacher tried to make out. In defense of literature, my mother rented and showed me A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and Julius Caesar (1953), thus introducing me to Ronald Colman, John Gielgud, and Marlon Brando all in one shot. The second of these was on TCM a few weeks ago, so with fond and curious memories I taped and watched it: I was not disappointed. As Marc Antony, Marlon Brando is like James Cagney in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), I don't know why he didn't do more Shakespeare. He looks like an athlete in marble and hits the famous speech like an orator's orator's lightning-strike; so much for getting away from politics, because Julius Caesar may be ultimately a story of spin. James Mason's Brutus is a passionate and troubled idealist, not a dupe, a dissembler, or a demagogue; his thoughts at Caesar's death are transparently painful, while afterward he gives a plainfaced defense of their conspiracy only to be upstaged by Antony with the bleeding corpse of Caesar in his arms. He has no stagecraft. John Gielgud as Cassius, meanwhile, has the empty eyes of an archaic bronze mask; he looks as though the glass has been taken out and shadows only left in, and only two or three times—his envious condemnation of Caesar, the assassination, the news of Portia's death—do we see him without his sardonic guise and probe of rhetoric, which in any case does not save him. He knows where to lean on his friend, but forgets that friendship can only be leaned on so far. Once the action shifts from political intrigue to the fields of Philippi, it's fascinating to watch Brutus come confidently into his own, at least until the apparition of Caesar resigns him to his fate, while Cassius dwindles waspishly, all rolling indignation and spite when accused of bribe-taking; Brutus laughs him off. Him we see lie maybe twice, once unsuccessfully to Portia about the conspiracy, once to the page whom he blames for his own shout of horror at ghostly Caesar, and both times it sits oddly on him. They are mirrored and shadowed well, the honorable man and the one who thinks too much. I suspect the slash potential in this version goes up to eleven, though I don't think I want to read it any more than an O. Henry sequel. Anyway, this is the version that put graffiti in Latin all over the Roman soundstages: I approve.
Did I mention that I was first shown Being There (1979) as part of a high school class in semiotics? That was not in tenth grade.
I have had few genuinely bad teachers; I've been lucky. Tenth grade, my luck ran out. The same English teacher who destroyed my ability to read Sylvia Plath for seven years attempted the same service for Robert Frost, did not wreck A Tale of Two Cities and Kim only because Dickens and Kipling are well-nigh indestructible (and even so, she tried. No one should ever set as an essay for students an enumeration of the ways in which Sydney Carton is Christ), and all I remember of her lectures on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is that I annotated my copy of the play with small green-inked cartoons of a disgruntled Brutus and that Portia's voluntary wound in the thigh was probably not as psychosexually significant as the teacher tried to make out. In defense of literature, my mother rented and showed me A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and Julius Caesar (1953), thus introducing me to Ronald Colman, John Gielgud, and Marlon Brando all in one shot. The second of these was on TCM a few weeks ago, so with fond and curious memories I taped and watched it: I was not disappointed. As Marc Antony, Marlon Brando is like James Cagney in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), I don't know why he didn't do more Shakespeare. He looks like an athlete in marble and hits the famous speech like an orator's orator's lightning-strike; so much for getting away from politics, because Julius Caesar may be ultimately a story of spin. James Mason's Brutus is a passionate and troubled idealist, not a dupe, a dissembler, or a demagogue; his thoughts at Caesar's death are transparently painful, while afterward he gives a plainfaced defense of their conspiracy only to be upstaged by Antony with the bleeding corpse of Caesar in his arms. He has no stagecraft. John Gielgud as Cassius, meanwhile, has the empty eyes of an archaic bronze mask; he looks as though the glass has been taken out and shadows only left in, and only two or three times—his envious condemnation of Caesar, the assassination, the news of Portia's death—do we see him without his sardonic guise and probe of rhetoric, which in any case does not save him. He knows where to lean on his friend, but forgets that friendship can only be leaned on so far. Once the action shifts from political intrigue to the fields of Philippi, it's fascinating to watch Brutus come confidently into his own, at least until the apparition of Caesar resigns him to his fate, while Cassius dwindles waspishly, all rolling indignation and spite when accused of bribe-taking; Brutus laughs him off. Him we see lie maybe twice, once unsuccessfully to Portia about the conspiracy, once to the page whom he blames for his own shout of horror at ghostly Caesar, and both times it sits oddly on him. They are mirrored and shadowed well, the honorable man and the one who thinks too much. I suspect the slash potential in this version goes up to eleven, though I don't think I want to read it any more than an O. Henry sequel. Anyway, this is the version that put graffiti in Latin all over the Roman soundstages: I approve.
Did I mention that I was first shown Being There (1979) as part of a high school class in semiotics? That was not in tenth grade.
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