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The old army game!
I am having a great deal of trouble adjusting to Daylight Savings. It doesn't help that yesterday felt like Friday and today doesn't feel like Sunday. My entire calendar feels scrambled. I am as blurry and as weary as if I've been awake for days. On the bright side, when I walked over to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gaudior and rushthatspeaks' this afternoon, it was finally warm enough that I shed coat, hat, jacket, scarf, and gloves along the way, and arrived in my shirtsleeves with everything else stuffed in a bag. And the weather report tells me the high for the day was 42°F. We have become way too accustomed to Fimbulwinter in this city.
These are notes rather than full reports, but I am tired and I don't want to lose the weekend. Saturday was my mother's birthday observed; we took her to the closing matinée of Theatre@First's The Mousetrap in the afternoon and then The Son of the Sheik (1926) at the Somerville in the evening, with live music by the Alloy Orchestra. The former was great; the mystery holds up to repeat viewing and someday I will even talk (under a cut-tag, in compliance with Christie's request) about why I like it so much.
Oh, what the hell. I like The Mousetrap because it completely trolls its audience. Christie had originated the genre of the country house mystery with The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, isolating a colorful group of suspects and letting the reader's suspicions run wild until the detective on the scene winnowed the guilty from the innocent with miraculous ingenuity at the denouement; by the time she expanded her short radio play Three Blind Mice into a full-length stage play in 1952, the conventions of the form were so familiar to the point of cliché that her characters could comment on them without danger of metafiction—"I always think explanations should be kept to the very end. That exciting last chapter, you know." And the play does adhere to many of the rules of the Golden Age mystery, if not, thank God, all ten of Ronald Knox's or twenty of S.S. Van Dine's "Commandments." It sets its scene and sticks to it (doesn't change setting, fixed number of characters), its solution does not depend on unexplained leaps of intuition or the intervention of the supernatural, it isn't hiding up its sleeve any information which the audience cannot divine, and it is possible to guess the identity of the criminal from strictly internal clues rather than genre savvy. The first act trots along like clockwork, introducing its cast who are nearly archetypes of crime fiction, from the earnest young couple to the pair of ambiguous strangers, the bluff military man, the mysterious foreigner, and the victim whom nobody is quite sorry to see dead, but that's a body on the carpet now and something must be done about it. Little things are odd, or off, or funny—the guesthouse is snowed in, the oddball guests are fractious, the inexperienced proprietors are anxious, no cars are getting in or out with the roads drifted five feet deep and therefore it is by the power of farce that just as the harried young couple are beginning to relax and reassure themselves that at least no one else will be arriving to stress them out tonight, a cheerful young sergeant pops his head in through the parlor window and wants to know if there's someplace he can stow his skis. Soon tensions see-saw, emotions run high, everyone has a secret, time is running out. But this is all par for the course, keeping the reader guessing; it's clockwork as a case is made for the plausible guilt of each character in turn and it's clockwork as the detective proposes to solve the uncertainty with a reconstruction of the crime and then the whole thing smashes into a wall of deconstruction and little springs and coils of audience expectations go flying. Or, as one of the young women sitting behind me on the first night gasped in what sounded like genuine bewildered betrayal, "But the detective is always the good guy!" The fact that this particular reveal can still surprise audiences, after more than half a century of film noir and multiple twist endings and disillusionment with systems of all sorts, makes me extraordinarily happy. It uses the form against itself. In a Golden Age mystery, in a country house mystery, in an Agatha Christie mystery, the detective is always the good guy. And you're going to believe some guy's a detective just because he says so?
If I have any complaints about the twist ending, it's that it relies on the frustrating mid-century device of confusing dissociative identity disorder with schizophrenia and then misrepresenting them both anyway—I still think it would be a more persuasive ending if the character were just very badly damaged and very angry and very good at lying. It was 1952 and that sort of thing happened to mental illness in fiction. It's still less terrible than Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), which is my high-water mark for OH GOD DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THE HUMAN BRAIN DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY? Anyway, Andy Lebrun sold the turn without accidental comedy or bathos, so major props to him. The play itself ends like Christie ran out of pages—it's the kind where a genuine and shattering tragedy has just taken place, but the script doesn't want to close on a downer, so it shifts registers to the comic-domestic as quickly as possible to restore the audience's sense of normality and risks giving them whiplash instead—but I hold that against it less somehow.
The latter slightly blew my mind. The plot of The Son of the Sheik is not important for the purposes of discussion. It contains several problematic elements and a lot of sand. What is important is that I had never seen Rudolph Valentino before. I had seen photos; I knew he was a matinée idol, a sex symbol, one of the first celebrities whose untimely death made them a cult figure. He is as beautiful as his portraits, and unusually—heavy-lidded, fine-boned, brooding symmetry opening suddenly into an unguarded smile. He has sexual chemistry with anything he turns his attention to, camera and leading lady not excluded. I'm not going to try to evaluate the authenticity of the costumes, but he looks terrific in them. He's also Douglas Fairbanks levels of athletic, doing most if not all of his own stunts himself,* and he can really act. He is nuanced, expressive, and plausible by contemporary standards as well as the stylization of silent film. The script requires him to reprise the part of the Sheik from the 1921 film as well as originate the role of his handsome, headstrong son—and differentiate them by twenty-five years as well as personality and social standing—and my father who is very good with faces thought it was two different actors. I'm willing to give him credit for the emotional arc of the film working at all, frankly. Valentino's death at age thirty-one wasn't a loss of potential; it was a loss of real talent. I would love to have seen what became of him in later years, if he negotiated the transition to talkies, retired, aged into a character actor, whatever: I was sorry no one got to find out. That was not what I was expecting when I got the tickets.
* I'm willing to grant that I couldn't see the rider's face in all long shots, but I'm certain about the chandelier swing and the leap onto the moving horse. The part of the fight choreography where he just picked up the one guy and threw him into the other guy was also memorable.
(After the movie was over, I followedderspatchel's text to the Mousetrap cast party and learned to play Superfight with an orange and red deck; it is the first party game in decades I can remember unequivocally enjoying. It offers an ideal blend of storytelling and kibitzing and players don't have to commit to anything more than a round if they feel like it, which suits my general tendency at parties to park myself near interesting conversations and open a book; the communal nature means it doesn't penalize players for not getting all the pop-culture references and I found the combinations of characters, attributes, and arguments consistently hilarious without the intermittent squick risk of Cards Against Humanity. Would play again, with many people. I don't say that just because I was undefeated champion for three rounds as a dominatrix wearing nothing but a strap-on with an infinitely extendable penis. I lost to Captain Kirk with some irrelevant attributes because I couldn't argue against the fact that Kirk always gets the girl of the week, and if she's a villain, defeats her into the bargain. Non-heteronormativity was restored a turn later when Kirk lost to a Baby Jesus who was literally flaming gay, incidentally providing me with an opportunity to explain "The Cherry Tree Carol" to the group. (Seriously, the kibitzing is built in.) The game was eventually won by Nikola Tesla armed with a gravity gun and operating at Level 90; he was undefeatable. This may be the only time I review a card game on this journal, but it really made an impression.)
The clocks sprang forward and my already shaky circadian rhythms didn't get the memo. I still managed to spend most of the afternoon and evening with Rush-That-Speaks, Gaudior, and a mutual cousin who probably doesn't have a livejournal; I stopped by the Somerville for an hour and a half first to catch W.C. Fields in Sally of the Sawdust (1925), which surprised me almost as much as The Son of the Sheik by providing an unexpected degree of emotional complexity for its comedy-melodrama and an equal amount of agency for its female protagonist. There is a scene in which Carol Dempster's Sally is trapped in a courtroom, faced with being sentenced to a home for wayward girls, calling piteously for her adoptive father who is miles away mixed up with some bootleggers and cannot save her. She pleads with the judge; she struggles with the bailiff; some constables have to help restrain her, because she is a slippery teenager who fights dirty; and just as the tension snaps to become either unbearable or stupid, Sally breaks free, shins up to the tall courthouse window, swings out of it, shins down the tree outside, and it takes an entire manhunt to bring her back. She doesn't let herself be groomed into someone she's not; she doesn't let herself be nobly renounced, either. Lanky, gawky, an agile clown and an animated dancer, Dempster is not conventionally beautiful and she's luminous. I am displeased that the internet tells me she didn't have much of a career because she wasn't Lillian Gish. Most people aren't Lillian Gish. I don't think it should be held against them.
I am out of critical faculties for the night. Please have a blowfish mermaid; everybody needs one.
gaudior and rushthatspeaks' this afternoon, it was finally warm enough that I shed coat, hat, jacket, scarf, and gloves along the way, and arrived in my shirtsleeves with everything else stuffed in a bag. And the weather report tells me the high for the day was 42°F. We have become way too accustomed to Fimbulwinter in this city.These are notes rather than full reports, but I am tired and I don't want to lose the weekend. Saturday was my mother's birthday observed; we took her to the closing matinée of Theatre@First's The Mousetrap in the afternoon and then The Son of the Sheik (1926) at the Somerville in the evening, with live music by the Alloy Orchestra. The former was great; the mystery holds up to repeat viewing and someday I will even talk (under a cut-tag, in compliance with Christie's request) about why I like it so much.
Oh, what the hell. I like The Mousetrap because it completely trolls its audience. Christie had originated the genre of the country house mystery with The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, isolating a colorful group of suspects and letting the reader's suspicions run wild until the detective on the scene winnowed the guilty from the innocent with miraculous ingenuity at the denouement; by the time she expanded her short radio play Three Blind Mice into a full-length stage play in 1952, the conventions of the form were so familiar to the point of cliché that her characters could comment on them without danger of metafiction—"I always think explanations should be kept to the very end. That exciting last chapter, you know." And the play does adhere to many of the rules of the Golden Age mystery, if not, thank God, all ten of Ronald Knox's or twenty of S.S. Van Dine's "Commandments." It sets its scene and sticks to it (doesn't change setting, fixed number of characters), its solution does not depend on unexplained leaps of intuition or the intervention of the supernatural, it isn't hiding up its sleeve any information which the audience cannot divine, and it is possible to guess the identity of the criminal from strictly internal clues rather than genre savvy. The first act trots along like clockwork, introducing its cast who are nearly archetypes of crime fiction, from the earnest young couple to the pair of ambiguous strangers, the bluff military man, the mysterious foreigner, and the victim whom nobody is quite sorry to see dead, but that's a body on the carpet now and something must be done about it. Little things are odd, or off, or funny—the guesthouse is snowed in, the oddball guests are fractious, the inexperienced proprietors are anxious, no cars are getting in or out with the roads drifted five feet deep and therefore it is by the power of farce that just as the harried young couple are beginning to relax and reassure themselves that at least no one else will be arriving to stress them out tonight, a cheerful young sergeant pops his head in through the parlor window and wants to know if there's someplace he can stow his skis. Soon tensions see-saw, emotions run high, everyone has a secret, time is running out. But this is all par for the course, keeping the reader guessing; it's clockwork as a case is made for the plausible guilt of each character in turn and it's clockwork as the detective proposes to solve the uncertainty with a reconstruction of the crime and then the whole thing smashes into a wall of deconstruction and little springs and coils of audience expectations go flying. Or, as one of the young women sitting behind me on the first night gasped in what sounded like genuine bewildered betrayal, "But the detective is always the good guy!" The fact that this particular reveal can still surprise audiences, after more than half a century of film noir and multiple twist endings and disillusionment with systems of all sorts, makes me extraordinarily happy. It uses the form against itself. In a Golden Age mystery, in a country house mystery, in an Agatha Christie mystery, the detective is always the good guy. And you're going to believe some guy's a detective just because he says so?
If I have any complaints about the twist ending, it's that it relies on the frustrating mid-century device of confusing dissociative identity disorder with schizophrenia and then misrepresenting them both anyway—I still think it would be a more persuasive ending if the character were just very badly damaged and very angry and very good at lying. It was 1952 and that sort of thing happened to mental illness in fiction. It's still less terrible than Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), which is my high-water mark for OH GOD DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THE HUMAN BRAIN DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY? Anyway, Andy Lebrun sold the turn without accidental comedy or bathos, so major props to him. The play itself ends like Christie ran out of pages—it's the kind where a genuine and shattering tragedy has just taken place, but the script doesn't want to close on a downer, so it shifts registers to the comic-domestic as quickly as possible to restore the audience's sense of normality and risks giving them whiplash instead—but I hold that against it less somehow.
The latter slightly blew my mind. The plot of The Son of the Sheik is not important for the purposes of discussion. It contains several problematic elements and a lot of sand. What is important is that I had never seen Rudolph Valentino before. I had seen photos; I knew he was a matinée idol, a sex symbol, one of the first celebrities whose untimely death made them a cult figure. He is as beautiful as his portraits, and unusually—heavy-lidded, fine-boned, brooding symmetry opening suddenly into an unguarded smile. He has sexual chemistry with anything he turns his attention to, camera and leading lady not excluded. I'm not going to try to evaluate the authenticity of the costumes, but he looks terrific in them. He's also Douglas Fairbanks levels of athletic, doing most if not all of his own stunts himself,* and he can really act. He is nuanced, expressive, and plausible by contemporary standards as well as the stylization of silent film. The script requires him to reprise the part of the Sheik from the 1921 film as well as originate the role of his handsome, headstrong son—and differentiate them by twenty-five years as well as personality and social standing—and my father who is very good with faces thought it was two different actors. I'm willing to give him credit for the emotional arc of the film working at all, frankly. Valentino's death at age thirty-one wasn't a loss of potential; it was a loss of real talent. I would love to have seen what became of him in later years, if he negotiated the transition to talkies, retired, aged into a character actor, whatever: I was sorry no one got to find out. That was not what I was expecting when I got the tickets.
* I'm willing to grant that I couldn't see the rider's face in all long shots, but I'm certain about the chandelier swing and the leap onto the moving horse. The part of the fight choreography where he just picked up the one guy and threw him into the other guy was also memorable.
(After the movie was over, I followed
derspatchel's text to the Mousetrap cast party and learned to play Superfight with an orange and red deck; it is the first party game in decades I can remember unequivocally enjoying. It offers an ideal blend of storytelling and kibitzing and players don't have to commit to anything more than a round if they feel like it, which suits my general tendency at parties to park myself near interesting conversations and open a book; the communal nature means it doesn't penalize players for not getting all the pop-culture references and I found the combinations of characters, attributes, and arguments consistently hilarious without the intermittent squick risk of Cards Against Humanity. Would play again, with many people. I don't say that just because I was undefeated champion for three rounds as a dominatrix wearing nothing but a strap-on with an infinitely extendable penis. I lost to Captain Kirk with some irrelevant attributes because I couldn't argue against the fact that Kirk always gets the girl of the week, and if she's a villain, defeats her into the bargain. Non-heteronormativity was restored a turn later when Kirk lost to a Baby Jesus who was literally flaming gay, incidentally providing me with an opportunity to explain "The Cherry Tree Carol" to the group. (Seriously, the kibitzing is built in.) The game was eventually won by Nikola Tesla armed with a gravity gun and operating at Level 90; he was undefeatable. This may be the only time I review a card game on this journal, but it really made an impression.)The clocks sprang forward and my already shaky circadian rhythms didn't get the memo. I still managed to spend most of the afternoon and evening with Rush-That-Speaks, Gaudior, and a mutual cousin who probably doesn't have a livejournal; I stopped by the Somerville for an hour and a half first to catch W.C. Fields in Sally of the Sawdust (1925), which surprised me almost as much as The Son of the Sheik by providing an unexpected degree of emotional complexity for its comedy-melodrama and an equal amount of agency for its female protagonist. There is a scene in which Carol Dempster's Sally is trapped in a courtroom, faced with being sentenced to a home for wayward girls, calling piteously for her adoptive father who is miles away mixed up with some bootleggers and cannot save her. She pleads with the judge; she struggles with the bailiff; some constables have to help restrain her, because she is a slippery teenager who fights dirty; and just as the tension snaps to become either unbearable or stupid, Sally breaks free, shins up to the tall courthouse window, swings out of it, shins down the tree outside, and it takes an entire manhunt to bring her back. She doesn't let herself be groomed into someone she's not; she doesn't let herself be nobly renounced, either. Lanky, gawky, an agile clown and an animated dancer, Dempster is not conventionally beautiful and she's luminous. I am displeased that the internet tells me she didn't have much of a career because she wasn't Lillian Gish. Most people aren't Lillian Gish. I don't think it should be held against them.
I am out of critical faculties for the night. Please have a blowfish mermaid; everybody needs one.
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My father became suspicious for similar reasons: the policeman was not acting like a policeman and everyone was taking him on trust. That part I believe perfectly. We're still societally conditioned to accept authority because it says so.
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"And Mary gathered cherries while Joseph stood around."
There was a question about the power of Baby Jesus versus full-grown Jesus, so I pulled out some apocryphal gospels to demonstrate that Jesus as a child was no one to mess with (NB: making friends goes better if you don't lose your temper and strike them dead; it's awkward) and "The Cherry Tree Carol" as evidence that Jesus in utero was already performing miracles. Some of the other players knew the stories and backed me up. We could probably have sung the carol if the room had been a little quieter.
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I was very glad to have been able to make it. Thank you!
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I recommend it if there's ever a production playing near you. It teeters on the verge of comedy by virtue of being the kind of deconstruction that it is, but it's actually not a spoof when the chips are down and it's a fabulous showcase for a bunch of character actors. I'd read the play years ago, but never seen it performed, and it turns out to be one of the pieces of theater that is infinitely better to watch than to imagine—aside from the performances, it really gains from the real-time interaction of the audience's expectations and assumptions; there's the knowing laughter and then there are the gasps. Also, it is just extremely fun.
"Ah, she dreamed of a GREEN BOX, and the murderer's nickname is GREENBACKS! I get it now!!!!"
Yes! That! Do the people who write those scripts never dream?