Man, apocalypse sells. I’d say that dystopia was all the rage in movies, teevee, and books, but that would be underselling it. There is no other topic. I’m an old hand at it. Long before R.E.M., we had this sort of thing:
Of course everyone tries their hand at the Nostradamus thing, and misses by a mile. It’s comical to watch things like Blade Runner and see how rainy Los Angeles was going to get. Everyone will have umbrellas with lights in the handles, and flying cars, but no one seems to have a cell phone in the future, do they? Deckard’s putting coins in a payphone between flying car rides. In general, the bigger the budget for a movie, the farther off they get from the way things actually turned out. Smarter fictionistas place their space operas a thousand years in the future, so they can keep on with their silly versions of dystopia.
Eric Blair and Aldous Huxley pretty much covered all the ground required. We’d be amused or stomped into submission, one way or the other. Maybe both. They’re old hat, now. The new imaginary dystopias have women being forced to have babies, or men forced to sleep for a hundred years to reach the next interstellar gas station, because there’s no gas on Earth, natch. That’s a hardy perennial.
So the planet will be too hot or too cold, or both, or filled with the undead, or the recently dead, or the ancient dead, doing undead-like things. Reverse vampires will fight lizard people for control over the precious soylent green reserve. Whatever. It’s all kinda tedious.
The reason authors get the future so wrong is because they’re laboring under massive misconceptions about the present. Fruit of the poison tree, as it were. If they truly understood the way the world worked today, and went from there, they might have a shot. But women “forced to have babies” must be an amusing topic for a landlord who accepts Section 8 for their apartments. And the weather never does seem to have the gumption to wipe us all out. There was a wall of ice a mile high not too long ago where I’m typing this from. Weather never does seem to cooperate, coming or going.
Nuclear problems are a fave, of course. We’re all going to glow in the dark anytime now. We were promised atomic cataclysms morning, noon and night since Oppenheimer finally got ahold of Von Neumann on the blower and invented the things, but we ended up with Russians and Ukes riding dirt bikes at each other and using shotguns to shoot drones with hand grenades zip-tied to them. Oh well.
So I’ll put on my thinking cap, and stick my neck out. What’s dystopia going to look like? That’s easy. I don’t need a crystal ball, or even an imagination. I just need to visit a nursing home to ask the last people who can remember the 1950s in the Estados Unidos what life was like back in the day, and go from there:
Then I’ll ask them what a dystopia is gonna look like. I’m sure they’ll answer, unanimously: Dude, you’re living in it:
The word is about, there’s something evolving
Whatever may come, the world keeps revolving
They say the next big thing is here
That the revolution’s near
But to me, it seems quite clear
That it’s all just a little bit of history repeating
Waves of interest wash over the shores of Henry VIII and his bairns from time to time. It’s been mostly grrrl power entertainments lately, especially in the Elizabethan line. They’re a hard pass from me. Hell, Kenneth Branagh, who should know better, made Lizzy’s favorite playwright Shakespeare a drama queen literally, instead of just figuratively, in All Is True, the most obversely named movie I’ve ever encountered. Oh, yes, and it’s Shakespeare’s daughter who has all the talent. Ho hum.
But Henry Tudor the serial marrier is a fascinating topic, and moviemakers and teevee drones circle back to him like dogs to their recycled breakfasts. I think I’ve seen most all of them at one time or another, including old warhorses like The Private Lives of Henry VIII and Young Bess, with Charles Laughton nibbling ably at the Hampton Court scenery.
The latest (for me) assault on the topic was Wolf Hall, a decidedly uneven affair. Hack writer Hilary Mantel uses the same sort of approach to making a well-worn topic fresh that All Is True employs: it’s hard to write well, so I’ll write the polar opposite of well to get attention. I’m sort of staggered by the attempt in Wolf Hall to make Thomas Cromwell the saintly hero of the piece, and a sex machine to boot, and Thomas More the villain among a gaggle of villains. That’s quite a hill to die on after Robert Bolt has been on the case.
You can tell it’s a female take on the subject, because Tommy Cromwell is simply pursuing the deaths of umpteen men and women in a fit of pique over an oblique insult. Mark Rylance brings something fresh to the proceedings, and his subdued, nearly catatonic delivery suits the position of a court drone, scribbling away furiously and courting favor to make his way into the world of the beautiful people. He’s supposed to be smarter than all of them, of course. But then again, the captain of the football team never cares much if you got an A in algebra. He might eventually hire you to do algebra things he can’t be bothered with, but you’re never going to be on the team.
But it’s the portrayal of Hank in Wolf Hall that really bugs me. A skinny, slopeshouldered mopey Henry, alternatingly whispering and mumbling, goes beyond the beyonds in dramaturgy about a real person we know something about. One who looks like he’s still yelling in oil paintings of him.
So, who did it better? Who made Harry into the force onscreen that he was in real life? Let’s count down the top three, shall we?
3. Richard Burton in Anne of a Thousand Days
It was 1969, and if you needed someone to roar onscreen, Burton was your man. Peter O’Toole could yell with the best of them, but Burton could outsnarl anybody. Henry, the eighth of that name, was reportedly a charismatic dude, in addition to reminding people who was in charge by shortening them a bit when they blotted their copybooks. Burton showed an excellent hail fellow well met side to his Henry with his entourage, backslapping and joshing with everybody, but he’d turn on a dime if you crossed him.
Anne the three-year wonder has many of the usual suspects in the cast. Anthony Quayle is miscast as Wolseley, but does his best. Michael Hordern, as daddy Boleyn, steals a few scenes while selling his daughters down the Thames River. Genevieve Bujold, as Anne, gives as good as she gets, and holds her own while locked in the Panavision tiger cage with Burton, which isn’t easy. John Colicos, who was both a Klingon and a Cylon butt-buddy at one time or another, plays about the creepiest Thomas Cromwell ever.
2. Robert Shaw in A Man for All Seasons
A Man for All Seasons was a big hit in 1966. It won six Oscars, including Best Picture, screenplay, Best Actor for Paul Scofield, and it made fifteen times its production cost. The cast was uniformly excellent, and Wendy Hiller as Alice More and Robert Shaw as Hal were nominated for two more Oscars, but I guess they got tired of handing statues to good British actors and gave one to Walter Matthau, of all people, instead.
Shaw would seem to be an odd choice to play Henry, but it paid off. He showed the mercurial nature of Henry to a tee, playing the clown, the friend, the statesman, and the bully, sometimes all in the same breath. You can see Scofield’s More trying to say as little as possible, because he knew to slip up meant a hatchet haircut. It’s funny, but the clip shows Shaw raging a bit, and then calming down, trying to find the right key to More’s lock. Right after the byplay shown in the clip, Henry loses his shit completely, and they hear him two zip codes over. Scofield either acts stunned, or maybe was actually stunned, by Shaw’s outburst. That’s a Henry we can get behind. Mostly because it’s not safe to be in front of him.
1. Keith Michell in the Six Wives of Henry the Eighth
Keith Michell played young Henry, middle aged Henry, and old Henry in this six-part TV series, and was completely believable as all of them. The series is somewhat uneven, since each episode was written by a different playwright. But the unevenness only spans from good to great.It’s basically a stage play, but then again, so was A Man for All Seasons. The TV budget sets and costumes don’t distract you from the action, which is mostly of the two heads talking variety.
Michell was an unusual choice to play Henry. He styled himself a song and dance man, and there are excruciating videos of him singing things like Mack the Knife with Julie Andrews extant on the internet. He does the bowler hat and cane thing and lumbers about like Herman Munster. Who knew his potential to appear larger than life? Someone did, and he delivered the Henry all others should be measured by.
You can vote for your favorite Henry in the comments, but please, no wagering.
That’s pretty impressive. No, I’m not referring to building a house with a giant toothpaste tube full of mortar. You know, right after building a space village starship dock around the building site, and a giant factory to pre-fab anything that sticks out of the walls. When I said it was impressive, I was referring to anyone willing to move in and try to dust a concrete house with corrugated walls. Or hang a picture or something.
All the problems of construction that involve actual construction were solved decades, if not centuries ago. It’s vanishingly straightforward to build a lot of inexpensive houses quickly.
I’ve had a hand in building everything from a birdhouse to a football stadium. I’ve never had anything in my way but the government, and the occasional boulder in the cellar hole.
A monolithic pour, all concrete house is nothing new, either.
Florida’s full of concrete houses, I gather, built from CMUs (concrete blocks), which the guys in the second video no doubt could also handle just as nimbly. It’s pretty easy and fast for a few guys to build a single story house’s walls out of concrete block, and they don’t need a crane and a Cray computer to do it. I’ve done it for a wood frame house in a day or two, working along with only two other guys. And I could barely pull my weight back then.
You can always spot the “Tell” in these “new method to build a house in a day” schemes. They manage four walls in a day, or maybe two, after twenty weeks of preparation, using enough equipment to build the Hoover Dam. Then they call it “a house.” Four walls is not a house, guys. Well, I guess it’s a house, you know, except for the foundation it sits on and the utilities and the floors and the roof and the finishes and electricals and the plumbing and the HVAC, spangled with 24 building inspections, plus the occasional required bribe or gangster threat if you’re working in a city.
You can’t order a house from Amazon, built by Apple, no matter how hard you wish for it, kids. I suggest that you learn how to bang a few nails, and get busy.
Well, now that you know how to run a Roman army, let’s figure out how you’re going to get that army where it’s going. Luckily, someone named Sasha Trubetskoy has made a subway-style map of all the major Roman roads, circa 125 anno domini. And it’s very, very cool:
You can click on it to embiggen it. I would. I did. It’s fascinating. It took a whole lot of work to assemble this. There’s lots of info about how he did it at the link. He makes some interesting deductions about the road network, too:
How long would it actually take to travel this network? That depends a lot on what method of transport you are using, which depends on how much money you have. Another big factor is the season – each time of year poses its own challenges. In the summer, it would take you about two months to walk on foot from Rome to Byzantium. If you had a horse, it would only take you a month.
Roman roads were no joke. Some of them are still in use. This is a very serious transportation network that indicates the the Roman Empire was worthy of its name. The Mediterranean was a Roman lake, and most of Europe was a Roman parking lot. And if you add in a recipe for pizza, they ended up conquering the world.
Every once in a while, I wish we had some money. It’s usually when you encounter something so out-of-the-ordinary that you want to go see it or do it. I ain’t talking about going to Dizzyland or eating in a totally different Olive Garden in another time zone. I mean something rare and wonderful. Like this restaurant in Salzburg, Austria:
OK, so a Mozart dinner concert is pretty neat in and of itself. We love us some Mozart. The musicians and singers seem several cuts above your average house band. But maybe the most piquant detail about the joint is Wolfie himself ate there, or at least had a plate in front of him while he guzzled booze and nuzzled opera singers. Hell, Christopher Columbus ate there. The place has been in constant operation since, no fooling, 803. That is not a typo. Not 1803. Eight-hundred-and-three.
How do we know this? Because Charlemagne’s best buddy Alcuin of York mentioned St. Peter’s Stiftskeller in his notes. It’s named St. Peter’s because it’s inside the walls of St. Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg.
I’ve eaten in restaurants where it seemed like the french fries had been under a heat lamp for 1200 years before they served them to me, but I’ve never heard of a restaurant that old, still in operation, anywhere in the world.
The facility has been expanded since its inception. The hall where they try to saw all the way through the violas was added in 1903, for instance:
So, if we had ridiculous money, we jet off to Salzburg and order the most expensive thing on the menu, probably by accident because my German is very, very rusty. We’d listen to Mozart, maybe sitting in the same chair that Mozart did, although not in the same room, I’ll grant you. I’d look for lots of wine stains to be sure it was the right one. But for the life of me, I don’t know where my wife is going to get an outfit like Mina Harker in the picture there.
Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim was an interesting fellow. He was born in Sangerville, Maine in 1840. He eventually moved to England, and eventually became a British citizen. During his fairly long life, he invented and perfected all sorts of things. A pocket menthol inhaler (he suffered from bronchitis a lot), a curling iron, a machine for placing eyelets in clothes and shoes and whatnot, a watch demagnetizer, some sort of thingamabob to keep ships from rolling at sea, a coffee substitute, and what was probably the first automatic fire sprinkler. He made a pretty cool amusement park ride, a kind of merry-go-round with tethered cars that simulated flight. The ride is still in use at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and has been copied a zillion times, including by Disney. He tinkered around with actual flying machines, too. But just between you and me, I don’t think steam was the way to go, there, Hiram.
He also claimed to have invented the lightbulb, and got in a legal beef with Edison over it, and lost bigly. Eventually Edison invented the movie camera, and lucky for us, that allows us to see Hiram’s really big invention: The machine gun.
The video has been colorized, and someone has added some rat-a-tat sound effects, but that’s the man himself, demonstrating the first truly automatic weapon. Just spray and pray.
Then, at 0:48, he demonstrates something else with substantially more oomph. I’m not sure exactly what it is, or Hiram’s relationship to it. It looks like the deck gun on a military vessel. Whatever it is, I bet it could punch some holes in some things.
Hiram smiles, and takes a bow at the end. It’s easy to see why he’s so cheerful. He was stone deaf by that point. He was married at least twice, maybe without a divorce in between, and various women sued him for bigamy and child support for out-of-wedlock kids he supposedly sired. A man with good hearing usually limits himself to a single woman. A deaf fellow can handle almost any number of them.
I read a lot of history when I was a kid. I can’t remember most of it at this point. I’m pretty sure that William the Conqueror invaded Australia in 1923, but was driven back by the kangaroos, but I might be misremembering the details. And I couldn’t tell you the exact date when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor. So I appreciate an opportunity to brush up on non-current events.
I’ve been reading a biography of Hannibal recently for some reason. It’s kinda interesting to wonder what would have happened if he had finished off the Romans when he had the chance. He kicked their ass plenty, but the Roman Empire was one of those societies that only had to win once. You could beat them ten straight times, but Jove help you if they won the eleventh bout. Just ask anyone from Carthage, Hannibal’s hometown, how that worked out. Bring a shovel.
Anyway, I’ve read lots about the Romans. This video has more information in it than any ten books I’ve read. And the video game illustrations are wonderful.
The police as an institution are so thoroughly ingrained in the public’s mind that it’s easy to overlook the fact that a professional police force is a fairly recent development. Before professional policing, there were many ad-hoc assemblies of people with varying amounts of authority, organized and paid for by this or that individual or organization, and ultimately relying on nothing more than overwhelming force to perform their duties.
Sir Robert Peel came up with the idea of an official police force in England in the early 19th century. The nickname “Bobbies” is a riff on Peel’s first name. So an official, organized police force is only about two-hundred years old. America more or less followed along with the organization of police in the same way as Merry Olde.
There were ancient laws in England that instructed every freeman to have certain weapons on hand and use them when called upon to serve king and country. That goes back to Henry II. Constables were appointed to call out the citizenry when required to restore order, and watchmen have been looking out for crooks, fires, stolen property, lost dogs, and various other breaches of public security for a millennium. Eventually sheriffs were sworn in to keep jails, collect taxes, and generally keep order over larger areas of the country. This office caught on in the American west, as well, giving birth to lots of good movies, and to Jamaica, where Reggae confessions eventually became popular.
The old ways led to mobs of criminals or disgruntled citizens clashing with loosely and quickly organized mobs of authorities. Civil disorder, whether due to outright criminality or not, was crushed with extreme prejudice, as they say, and only rarely with a detour to any judge when a tree was handier. Peel thought things could be improved if the general public thought that a policeman was just like them, only professionally interested in keeping order continuously. In other words, a policeman is just supposed to do what any good citizen would do in his place, but pay attention to nothing else while the general public got on with their lives.
Robert Peel came up with what he called “General Instructions” given to all policeman in London starting in 1829. Here they are:
To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
That sounds pretty good to me. However, it doesn’t sound even 1% like the approach to policing of any current police force I know of in the United States.
That’s a bit of a rhetorical question, but it’s not an exaggeration. Hollywood obviously doesn’t like the American Revolution, and has signaled its disdain for the whole affair by studiously avoiding the topic for 110 years or so.
Let’s examine the statistics. In the 1910s, there were six movies made about the American Revolution. They had to interrupt the revolution to hold up cards explaining what everyone was saying, of course. But those six movies are the most for any decade since then, with the exception of the 1950s, who tied the score.
After the teens:
1920s: 4
1930s: 4, including Daniel Boone, which is about Indian fighting, not killing Britishers
1940s: 1. No, really; one. With Cary Grant, of all people, in a sort of Peyton Revolutionary Place
1950s: 6 again, none notable really. Daniel Boone is back, with Lon Chaney of all people busting Daniel’s balls with feathers in his hair. Leon Trotsky’s Bessarabian nephew (I’m not making this up, I swear) Samuel Bronston filmed John Paul Jones in Spain of all places, starring Robert Stack of all people, and lost his shirt. Andrew Loog Oldham liked the movie poster, though, and told the bass player in Led Zeppelin, John Baldwin, he’d be hipper if he changed his name to John Paul Jones for some reason.
1960s: Basically none. For a decade where about twenty-zillion movies were made. There was one French-Italian production called La Fayette. I don’t think George Washington was that fond of spaghetti and meatballs, however, or snails for that matter, so I don’t get the connection
1970s: 3, I guess, but only technically. The first, Paths of War, is an Italian comedy of all things. The plot summary shows just how confused Italians can be about any topic you could name:
In 1858 in Italy, in Sicily, Franco and Ciccio defend the Bourbon army to prevent the unification of Italy built by Giuseppe Garibaldi. However, when the troops of Garibaldi defeated the Bourbons, Franco and Ciccio escape, taking refuge in a box, which is delivered in America. In the Far West, Franco and Ciccio find themselves involved in the American War of Independence against the Apache Indians. They, camouflage, disguise themselves first by warlike Americans, and then by Indian holy men, being able to save their skin.
Franco and Ciccio sound like they went to American public schools, with a timeline like that. Anyway, the decade wasn’t done with messin’ with us. There was 1776, a musical comedy about the Revolution, if you can wrap your head around that. In his review, Vincent Canby of the New York Times, said that “the lyrics sound as if they’d been written by someone high on root beer…” I don’t quite know how to approach that observation, so we’ll move on. The only other Revolution movies listed is a videotaped adaptation of a Broadway play shown as a Hallmark Hall of Fame special, so not really a movie. But Christopher Walken is listed as a Hessian in it, which must have been a trip.
1980s: 2. Revolution, starring Al Pacino, is chockablock full of unintentional comedy. Not since Tony Curtis was saying things like Yonder is duh cassel ov my faddah had we been treated to Bronx accents in such unBronxy settings. The only other movie about the Revolution was made by the Brigham Young University School of Fine Arts. Not exactly a David O. Selznick production, there.
1990s: Zero, unless you call The Little Patriot one. I’m not sure if I do, because I can’t find anything about it online, except notes about the director in Danish, which I’m allergic to.
2000s: 3. Mel Gibson starred in a slasher film about the Revolution, The Patriot, and proved there was at least a quarter of a billion dollars in the topic, as long as you brained enough Britishers with a hatchet during the festivities. The other two are so obscure that they might well be slides of someone’s vacation in Maryland.
2010s: 4, I guess. The only one with a link on the Wikiup is listed as an “American Christian historical action-adventure film.” I don’t know how to break it to the Wikiup editors, but everything to do with the United States up until a few years ago was American Christian history. Maybe that’s why Hollywood isn’t interested. The other three movies don’t merit links on the Wiki, but I found a screen cap from one. Enjoy:
These stalwart ’76ers appear to be trying to figure out which end the shooty bits come out of, and what time lunch is served. We’ll leave it at that.
2020s: 1. I think. There’s one listed, called The Battle of Camden, but I can’t find it much about it. Its IMDB file says the Top Cast includes Jezibell Anat, who seems to be a belly dancer. I’m not sure how that would tie in with the Battle of Camden, but it’s no stranger than casting Tony Curtis in The Vikings, is it?
Let’s try World War I movies to cleanse our palates. Believe me, I’m not going to try to count World War II movies. I don’t have that kind of stamina and an abacus with that many beads. But The Great War? Nobody born after Nixon got de-selected can even tell you what that one was about. I doubt most of the combatants could. But still, I count 202 entries on the Wikiup for WWI.
So Hollywood is very, very interested in wars. It’s interested in every sort of war involving Americans, and plenty that didn’t. But ipso facto they don’t care about the revolutionary war. My opinion might not be science, but it sure is at least some sort of arithmetic.
Perhaps I know why. I was in a used bookstore last year. We buy old hardcover versions of classics, mostly. Not much after the 1930s. Anyway, we were standing at the checkout and the heavy-set woman behind the counter with the owlish glasses and the tats was looking askance at our selections, and picked up one of our Graham Greene books about the Caribbean.
“My daughter just came back from vacation down near there. She said to me, ‘Mom, the money is so much more colorful down there, and has more interesting people on it’.” Then the clerk said to us, “Our money just has boring old dead white guys on it, amirite?”
I looked in my wallet. There was Alexander Hamilton. Ah yes. A bastard orphan born on the island of Nevis, taken in by a merchant who paid his way to New York for an education. He served as an artillery officer in the Revolutionary War, was the aide to General Washington, and was a delegate to the Continental Congress. On his days off from practicing law and writing 51 of the 85 installments of The Federalist Papers, he founded the Bank of New York, which currently has $45.7 trillion in assets somewhere around the place, I imagine it’s hard to remember where you put all that stuff. He was the first Secretary of the Treasury, which is only fair as it was his idea to have one. He helped abolish the international slave trade, and President Adams made him a major general in the army to keep him busy. Then he was shot to death in a duel with the third vice-president of the United States.
Yep. Boring.
Tag: history
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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