A heart's not open until it's broken

I wish I could report that I returned from Providence and promptly caught up on sleep, but in fact the last two days have been extraordinarily sleepless thanks to the progression of earth-shaking crack-of-dawn construction on the other half of the duplex. The concrete for the new front walk was finally poured today, so I have a fragile hope that tomorrow there will be no reason for jackhammers or bandsaws or heavy chunks of concrete crashing like stage thunder into the aluminum bed of a pickup truck, but I'm sure there is some last loud finishing touch I haven't thought of. Nonetheless, the combination of near-total sleep deprivation, spatch encouraging me to bed early last night, and only having to deal with a cement mixer this morning added up to something like eight hours of sleep and I'll take it.

Everything I've dreamed for about a week straight has been nightmare, but last night I got one of those dreams that should come with program notes when you wake up: modern art, small-town avant-garde, nuclear anxiety, a museum heist, a switchbacking plot of which I can remember just fragments and a prevailing tone somewhere between courtroom drama and caper; my taste remains consistent across dreams and fiction because the character I remember most clearly is the local lawyer who looked like a cross between John Lithgow and Alastair Sim in a three-piece suit and an overcoat that was last fashionable during a world war, flat on his back on his office floor among a future avalanche of books and briefs, exclaiming with great happiness and no pretense of sobriety, "I love this state! Even a mediocre lawyer can win a case!" (I think we were in upstate New York. I have no idea how this was legally relevant. It was a good thing that he had won the case, and he hadn't had it handed to him, but no one else had expected him to pull it off, either.) I was not surprised when he turned out to have a terminal illness; it's harder to make TB plausible these days. The fictional modern art was full of bright blocks and black spaces and somehow looked like excerpts from a narrative while not actually being figurative at all.

Please enjoy some links.

1. I discovered Connie Wang's "I've Written About Cultural Appropriation For 10 Years. Here's What I Got Wrong" and eshusplayground's "The thing I hate most about Good Jew vs Bad Jew is that it denies Jews the ability to respond to complex issues Jewishly" right around the same time last night and they chimed similarly for me. Everyone wants a simple, satisfying, one-size-fits-all response to ethical quandaries. That doesn't make one exist. That doesn't make the quandaries not worth talking through.

2. Courtesy of a friend who is not on Dreamwidth: "The Fading Battlefields of World War I." One of the many unforgivable side effects of this current presidency is the way that, at least in the U.S., the commemoration of World War I has been lost in the shuffle of general horror and chaos. It was not a blip in the twentieth century. It was a defining event and its dead are worth remembering. There will never be another centennial; the new century seems bent on reenactment, not recognition. This government is not interested in honoring rather than desecrating the past.

3. Courtesy of another friend who is not on Dreamwidth: the scanned original edition of Hope Mirrlees' Paris: A Poem (1919). Eliot never included sheet music among his modernist fragments.

If through his sluggish watery sleep come dreams
They are the blue ghosts of king-fishers.

4. Lost Under Heaven's "Bunny's Blues" joins the growing list of witchcraft music videos which started when rushthatspeaks sent me Fever Ray's "If I Had a Heart," "Seven," and "When I Grow Up." For the record, that is a hell of a set to put in your brain all at once.

5. Courtesy of brigdh: seagrass mermaids.

I will be spending this Saturday participating in representative democracy at the Massachusetts State Democratic Convention, where the contested nominees will include the Democratic candidate for state governor. Forward the ethical artichoke.

The 442nd was quite an outfit

It was borne in upon me last year that while I have seen World War II-era Hollywood films depict even Nazi Germans with nuance, I have never yet seen one extend a corresponding empathy to the Japanese. I keep looking. I still haven't. But I have seen something almost as interesting and it turned up tonight in the third act of an extremely B-noir, which just goes to show something about the human condition.

In the interests of full disclosure, I watched Richard Fleischer's The Clay Pigeon (1949) because I had never heard of it and it was short. It is an RKO programmer par excellence; it runs 63 minutes, its biggest names are character actors, its plot is highly susceptible to fridge logic, and the nicest thing you can call its budget is "economical." Bill Williams stars as Jim Fletcher, a baby-faced veteran who wakes from a two-year coma in Long Beach Naval Hospital with a bad case of amnesia and an even worse charge of treason; his fellow patients hate him, the staff treat him with efficient chill, and he's facing a court-martial as soon as he can be safely moved, even though the facts of his supposed crime are a sickening blank. The last thing he remembers is the Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan where he was one of a trio of American servicemen known as "the Three Musketeers," inseparable even in the face of starvation and torture—except that one of them was betrayed to his death and one of his bosom buddies did the snitching. Camp rumor fingered Jim. Once the survivors were stateside, the Office of Naval Intelligence listened. So like any responsible noir protagonist, Jim breaks himself out of hospital and strikes out for Los Angeles where he hopes to uncover the truth and clear his name with the under-the-table assistance of one of his old Navy friends (Richard Quine, better known to me as a director) and the eventually stauncher support of his alleged victim's widow (Barbara Hale, married to Williams offscreen), trying all the while to figure out who's behind the attempts on his life when turning him over to the authorities would put him just as permanently out of commission and what a sadistic Japanese prison guard (Richard Loo, who essayed this role often in wartime) is doing in a California chop suey joint mixed up with wads of greenbacks and a bunch of all-American hoods. Cinematographer Robert De Grasse gets to flex his lenses at night, showcasing a tense encounter on a highway and a high-speed climax on a train, and I like the trick of washing out the contrast on Jim's traumatic, surfacing memories so that they appear thin-edged and unreal, burned-in shadows re-run on a distant screen. Location shooting is intermittent but effective, especially some views of L.A.'s China City before it burned down for good in 1949. Blink near the end and you will miss the wrap-up, which could be composed of dropped threads from some other postwar noir entirely. For the record, I believe the U.S. counterfeited Japanese notes during WWII, not the other way around.

There is one gem of a scene among all this fast-paced psycho-mishegos, however, and it begins as soon as Jim on the run from Loo's Tokoyama and a couple of his gangster pals ducks up the back stairs of a shabby apartment building and slips behind the first unlocked door he can find. It turns out to belong to Helen Minoto (Marya Marco, about whom I can find no information), a startled but not frightened woman about his own age with a tired graceful face that does not open to Jim when he apologizes and swears it's not the police after him, but she turns that same self-possession on the three men that demand to search her apartment without showing their badges and they are forced to leave empty-handed. She must know who her unexpected guest is. He's a high-profile criminal, a traitor with front-page coverage. His reputation has preceded him before. But this straight-shouldered, clear-voiced woman saw something in him to trust; she shrugs off his thanks like his apologies, turning back to her clean laundry as if she did nothing more for him than give him directions or tell him the time. "You said you were in trouble; I believed you. I knew they weren't the police." Perhaps what she saw in him was the war. Her young son bears his father's name like a memory. A photograph of her husband in uniform stands proudly beside a certificate for the Distinguished Service Cross, awarded in 1944 to Sergeant John Minoto of the 442nd Infantry Division. Abashed by this reminder of sacrifice beyond anything asked of him, Jim tentatively offers, "The 442nd was quite an outfit," and Helen's voice warms and deepens for the first time as she answers, "Yes, it was." She sees him out; he resumes his cat-and-mouse with an old nemesis and his own past. Their time together lasts five minutes at most and I have been thinking about it more than anything else in the movie. I did not think the achievements or even the existence of the 442nd had been acknowledged on film until Robert Pirosh's Go for Broke! (1951). I am also impressed by the attempt to depict a Japanese-American woman who is neither totally assimilated nor exoticized; on top of her name, Helen has no stereotypical accent and dresses no differently than a working-class white housewife, but there are some obviously Japanese touches to her small, clean apartment with its curtained-off kitchenette and bedroom—some cards and pictures, a wall scroll, some of the dishes—and her self-containment is not inscrutable, merely appropriate to a woman making a life for herself and her child. The screenplay by Carl Foreman has already, lightly mocked the idea of the "mysterious Orient." I recognize her presence is a necessary counterweight in a mystery that rests on Japanese wartime atrocity, but it is also something I am just glad to see. The camera did not have to hold so steadily on the record of Sergeant Minoto's heroism or his wife's matter-of-fact strength and it did.

I really don't want to oversell this movie. It has all the problems detailed earlier plus the inevitable romance between Jim and Hale's Martha Gregory, which never convinced me despite their real-life connection; he holds a gun on her too many times in the first act for me to have much faith in her second-act pivot from slap to kiss, to say nothing of the romantic comedy of their fade-out clinch on the other side of a frosted glass door. The closest it gets to the moral complexity so vital to film noir is the scene with the Minotos and the difficulty with which Quine's Ted Niles explains to Martha the crime of which Jim is accused, for which her husband died: "Look, we were always hungry. The food they gave us wasn't fit for dogs. And they gave us just enough of that to keep—some of—us alive. So the boys'd steal extra rations from the storehouse. Share them. Mark was the leader. Then somebody squealed. Maybe for food or privileges or . . . They said it was Jim. The war did funny things to some of us, Martha." Otherwise there's so little danger of our hero turning out to be a war criminal that his inability to remember the truth of his time in Cabanatuan feels like a delaying tactic, making sure no revelations are sprung on the audience until the most dramatically apt moment. The payoff is at least not stupid when it arrives, but it's not a shock, either. If you want an actually good movie about guilt and collaboration, watch Act of Violence (1948). If you want an actually good movie directed by Richard Fleischer, watch The Narrow Margin (1952) and then write me fix-it for the character played by Marie Windsor. While you're at it, write me the movie about Helen Minoto. This citation brought to you by my faithful backers at Patreon.