selfdivider

I just woke up from a dream which I don’t want to talk about in much detail, except that the dream began with me looking at myself as a 3rd person, but by the end - when the dream had become traumatic, sad - I’d become so ensconced in my 1st personhood that it almost felt as though I had no body to refer to, but only a reeling… Geist, or something. The dream was terrible. It probably has to do with the fact that I watched 시간 (Time) before going to bed, a film by Kim Ki-duk, who had directed an excellent film called 빈집, which was released in the States as 3-Iron. This new film was not nearly as good as 3-Iron, despite some scenes of ludic brilliance. There’s an extended sequence involving a paper mask which is as disturbing and unnervingly funny as anything I’ve seen this year. The film, despite its many flaws, is a kind of a 21st century update of the ol’ identity-switcheroo game, and the various attendant metaphysical maladies which usually accompany such a game. A kind of a heavy-handed reworking, so to speak, of Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina Something like that, I guess. Although I’d have to say it’s more like a melodramatic, quasi-philosophical version of John Woo’s Face-off.

2007 has been a good year. I got to know my daughter better as she began to recognize the world and me, first of all. The year has been largely uneventful, which is more than I can ask for from life. I started this blog with no ambition in August, but met so many people, like you, who think and feel about the similar things. Thanks for reading. I’d thought that perhaps, with this pseudonymous identity that the blog affords me, I could write about crazy things, fuck-it-all But that hasn’t been the case, because I see myself better, more clearly here sometimes, than I’d otherwise be capable of seeing: the reverse of my nightmare which I just woke up from. This stanza from Eugenio Montale’s “Encounter” -

Maybe I’ll find a face again:
in the glancing light a movement leads me
to a sad bough craning from a jar
by a tavern door.
I reach for it, and feel
another life becoming mine, encumbered
with a form that was taken from me;
and it’s hair, not leaves, that winds
round my fingers like rings.

Do you do those New Year’s Resolution lists which you abide by until some drunken night(s) in February? I don’t. But I’m thinking that I’ll do a list this year. I’ll be kinder to people around me, for example. Love my darling wife better. Be a better dad. Stop procrastinating. Drink less. Exercise more… I’m tired already.

(Image, from Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia)

Somehow, going from one wiki article to another, I became curious about a film called The Greene Murder Case (1929), starring William Powell and Jean Arthur. The movie was based on a whodunit written by S. S. Van Dine, in which a detective named Philo Vance tries to figure out a series of murders which takes place in the Greene mansion in the Upper East Side, which he calls “the holocaust that consumed the Greene family.” I guess the Philo Vance novels were popular back in the day, as Van Dine wrote twenty or so novels based on the character. Anyways, it seems that the film version of The Greene Murder Case is not available on DVD or VHS, and I’m out of luck (although other Philo Vance films, like The Benson Murder Case and The Kennel Murder Case are available on DVD.)

The novel is available here on Australia’s Project Gutenberg site, and you’ll see that the prose is leaden, the dialog wooden, and the plot plodding. But the point of my interest lies in the final pages of the detective novel, wherein Philo Vance deduces that the murderer used Hans Gross’s Handbuch für Untersuchungsrichter to plan the murders of various members of the Greene family. Hans Gross is commonly regarded as the first to apply scientific methods in forensics to criminal investigation - he invented, for example, dactyloscopy, the science of interpreting finger prints. Basically, the last chunk of The Greene Murder Case is Philo Vance reading out loud from Gross’s various case studies from the Handbuch, complete with page numbers (!), to explain the motives and actions of the culprit. Yes, it’s pretty laughable.

But my primary interest was piqued by the fact that Franz Kafka studied with Hans Gross extensively when he was studying law at Prague University; it seems that Kafka really went out of his way to attend a lot of Gross’s lectures, and it’s likely that K’s legalistic and judicial sensibilities were in many ways influenced by the formative years he spent as Gross’s student. Even more interesting is the fact that Hans Gross’s son was Otto Gross, the anarchist psychoanalyst (he was one of Freud’s most prized students) and notorious drug user. He was also Kafka’s friend. Hans Gross had demanded that his son Otto be forcibly confined in a mental asylum, and it’s believed by some scholars that the beginning of Kafka’s The Trial was inspired by the episode. Weird, weird, weird…
I don’t know why this interests me so much, this tangential relationship between this cheap detective novel and Kafka. I spent much of yesterday thinking about it, even going as far as planning to visit the mansion in which they shot the film. I doubt anything further would come of this, and like most of my other strange fixations, this one will disappear, too, but I’m curious if any of you out there has watched the actual film. According to a few accounts, including the old NY Times review, the film was pretty middling. I’d still like to see the film version of The Greene Murder Case, though, even if just to see Jean Arthur in it. I like Jean Arthur a lot. In the film, she plays Ada Greene, the family’s adopted daughter from Germany. Another creepy coincidence: Jean Arthur’s real name was Gladys Georgianna Greene.

Ed Park at The Dizzies had a post on a Korean film called Madame Freedom last week. He was trying to verify a scene from one of Bong Joon Ho’s films, in which cops are watching a show called Inspector Chief, and found that the actor who is in Madame Freedom also starred in Inspector Chief. The weird thing is: in Ed’s excellent interview with Gina Kim, the director of Never Forever, Kim mentions Madame Freedom as one of her inspirations in making Never Forever. (Yet another reason to believe that every thing in this world is linked with every other thing in creepy creepy ways)

I’d seen Madame Freedom a few times when I lived in Korea. Back in the 80’s. The first time was on TV at my aunt’s house. I must have been about seven years old; my aunt told me not to watch it and I watched it anyway surreptitiously, feigning sleep while my aunt was yapping away with her friend on the phone. The film came out in 1956. The melodramatic story is rather formulaic according to today’s standards, but the film - the first commercial cinematic hit after the Korean War - would not only usher in the 1960’s, when Korean cinema experienced its first creative and commercial boom, but would also provide a template, for better or for worse, for future Korean films for decades.

Madame Freedom was directed by Han Hyung-mo, who had shot Korea’s first kiss scene in a film called Hand of Fate (1954); the innovation in Madame Freedom is that it’s the first Korean film to utilize crane shots. The film is an adaptation of Jung Bi-suk’s controversial novel, Madame Freedom, which was serialized in Seoul Newspaper (more on this later). In the story, the heroine, Oh Sun-young, who is the wife of a college professor, gets swept by the ballroom dance fever, which leads to illicit relationships with a college student, and her boss at work. She attempts to come back home, but is not accepted back by her husband.

Much was made about the licentious nature of Madame Freedom when it came out. The novel, when it was published in book form, sold 140,000 copies - the first work of fiction which had exceeded 100,000 in sales. After Jung’s novel came out, a prominent university professor named Hwang San-duk published his excoriation of the novel in University Daily Paper. Hwang accused Jung of falsifying and insulting the image of the Korean academics deliberately, for cheap and fast commercial success. He said any literature which stokes immoral sexual desire in people cannot be true literature (tough luck, Tolstoy and Flaubert), and likened Madame Freedom to Stalin’s or Chinese Communist armies invading the Korean intelligentsia. A feud between Hwang and Jung ensued in the papers, was highly publicized. It’s pretty clear that Hwang did not really read Jung’s novel carefully, as Jung’s novel - with all its limitations (it’s not so good, I’m afraid) - is principally an incendiary criticism of the politicians and public figures in the postwar Korea; the sexual nature of the main plot is in service of Jung’s social critique.

The film version of Madame Freedom, too, cannot be said to represent the best of Korean cinema of the age, artistically speaking. Yet what it did better than any other film was to capture the anxiety of the postwar Korean society. The Korean War was stalled in 1953. President Syngman Rhee, backed by the U.S. government, exercised a dictatorial command over the country (this is a common theme in the postwar Korean history, and a reason for much of the anti-American sentiments in Korea; the U.S.-backed Army general Chun Doo-hwan became Korea’s despotic president in the 80’s, and was responsible for the massacre of thousands of civilians and students through his coup d’etat, which I wrote about here.) The country’s economy was entirely dependent upon the U.S., even as Seoul and other main cities were rapidly modernizing.

This is the backdrop against which we encounter Madame Freedom’s heroine, Sun-young, the university professor’s wife. As I noted before, her fall from grace through extra-marital affairs is formulaic and trite. Yet it is significant - and this is the source of the film’s historical resonance - that the moment in which Sun-young transforms into an eroticized sexual object is precisely the moment when she becomes a manager at the shop which sells western wear. When she trades in her traditional, Korean hanbok for western clothes, bags, and necklaces, she sheds her identity as mother/wife and becomes a “free” woman. Her sexual instinct is awakened by her consumerist desires.

This translation of capitalist/consumerist desire into a sexual freedom occurs, also, in Tanizaki Junichiro’s novel written in diary form, The Key, which was published, coincidentally, in 1956, the year Madame Freedom came out in Seoul’s theaters. In Tanizaki’s novel, Ikuko, a housewife, becomes attracted to another man, and what signals her sexual freedom is also western wear: two-piece suits and pearl earrings, etc. Not to mention that what facilitates and enables sexual transgression is Ikuko’s frequent, dream-like fainting spells caused by that magic potion, that special sauce: Courvoisier cognac. Both Madame Freedom and The Key seem to criticize the hyper-modernizing force of western capitalism and its rationalistic order for eroding the older, familiar way of life.

Such a criticism, no doubt, was also made in American literature, especially at the turn of the twentieth century. Think of Lily Bart’s slow destruction by New York’s upper-class capitalism in Wharton’s House of Mirth. Dreiser’s heroines. So on and so forth. Yet what makes the western capitalism a darker, more sinister force in Madame Freedom (even more so than in Wharton’s or Dreiser’s accounts) is the fact that such a modernization represents not only an erosion of culture or a way of life, but a more pragmatically devastating loss of national identity, in the context of Korean history.

Korea was under Japan’s dark, colonial rule from 1908 until the end of WWII. The primary means by which Japan attempted to fully assimilate Korea into its nationhood was through a swift process of modernization. Cable cars and paved roads. By 1930’s the Jongro Boulevard was lined with Japanese department stores, like Mitsukoshi and Jojiya. (In an unforgettable, surreal story called “Wings” by Yi Sang, one of my favorite writers, the quietly oppressive and panoptic presence of the Japanese colonialist state is represented symbolically, only by the Mitsukoshi department store.) The Korean script of Hangul, too, was not an official script of the country until 1894, when the Korean Royal Court, heavily forced by Japan, issued a Royal Edict to make it an official script of Korea instead of Chinese script. Japan’s idea was to create a new, modern national identity for Korea, which it would co-opt and control for its own sake; Japan’s ultimate ambition was nothing less than to create its own version of Korea’s historiography, ethnography, and studies of Korean language and art, for its own strategic ends.

It is no wonder, then, that both the novelist and the director of Madame Freedom were highly wary and critical of the way Korea was hyper-modernizing, already hypnotized by the capitalistic process. Even Professor Hwang, who had engaged in a bitter feud with the novelist Jung over Madame Freedom, would publicly lament in retrospect, that the harmful process of westernization predicted by Jung’s novel was even more rapid and destructive in reality. So, in the end, Madame Freedom is an old-fashioned cautionary tale. The film closes when Sun-young’s husband closes the door on her, even as their son is calling out, crying, “mommy, mommy.” There is snow on the ground, and Sun-young has nowhere to go. Because of the stigma attached to her now, she can neither come back home nor get a new job. It’s a sad but visceral indictment on the “democratic” Korean society in the 50’s: the old world culture cannot keep pace with the capitalistic growth, cannot codify in time, leaving only victims in its wake. Perhaps they should show Madame Freedom in various countries our government is trying to newly democratize. Free twizzlers and popcorn.

So what if Daniel Day-Lewis looks uncommonly like Adam Sandler in the photo (It’s a film still from the upcoming There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.) There’s a profile of Day-Lewis in this week’s NY Times Sunday Mag, and it’s great. Every time I read about the guy, I’m convinced more and more that he’s a genius. Can you imagine any Hollywood actor talking about his upbringing this thoughtfully and incisively

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible. England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter. The great tradition of liberalism in England is essentially a sponge that absorbs all possibility of change. America looked different to me: the idea of America as a place of infinite possibilities was defined for me through the movies.

When complimented about his eloquence, he bristles, saying that he is moved by people who struggle to express themselves than by prettified eloquence. Then turns the common notion about American anti-intellectualism - personified by our own G. Dubya - on its head:

In America, the articulate use of language is often regarded with suspicion. Especially in the West. Look at the president. He could talk like an educated New Englander if he chose to. Instead, he holds his hands like a man who swings an ax. Bush understands, very astutely, that many of the people who are going to vote for him would regard him less highly if he knew how to put words together. He would no longer be one of them. In Europe, the tradition is one of oratory. But in America, a man’s man is never spendthrift with words.

Personally speaking, I think Day-Lewis is giving too much credit to Dubya. But maybe he knows that he is, as he says with a smile, that this American mistrust of intellectualism and eloquence is more appealing in movies than it is in politics, slyly nudging us to There Will Be Blood, a film in which he portrays a Charles Foster Kane/Edward Doheny-like oil baron, partly adapted from Upton Sinclair’s Oil! by P. T. Anderson. (Needless to say, this film will have a political resonance.) Asked about why he agreed to take on the role, he explains, not as an actor but as a reader, about the inevitability by which all great stories operate, pull us in -

I was deeply unsettled by the script. For me, that is a sure sign. If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you’ve already taken a step toward it… What finally takes over, what took over with this movie, is an illusion of inevitability. I think: Can this really be true Is this happening to me again Is there no way to avoid this?

Oh, the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk! Has it vanished by the way of extinct animals and New Coke Of course people would think of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Maybe Mahler’s symphonies for still others. In literature Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine or Proust or Tolstoy. What about the Gesamtkunstwerk of our own heroic century, you ask? Does it still exist? Yes. The R&B crooner-cum-sex criminal R Kelly’s multi-part Trapped in the Closet music videos represent a work of art so total and complex, that it merits a map according to the New York Times:

Readers keen on serendipities and coincidences might note that the name of the girl who cheats on the R Kelly narrator in Chapter 9 of Trapped In the Closet is Bridget; Bridget was Charles Lamb’s guise for his real sister Mary, as noted in my previous post. Not that this convergence means anything. It seems that the only reason R Kelly chose the name Bridget is that it rhymes with the man who’s hiding in the closet, who is a midget… midget… midget… midget. Anyhow, it seems that Andrew Kuo, who mapped out R Kelly’s saga, is a blogger who loves to chart and graph all kinds of trivial pop phenomena in eye-popping, cute colors. Thank you, Andrew, thanks a lot.

This Sunday’s NY Times looks really good. It has a profile of Ang Lee’s upcoming Lust, Caution, based on Eileen Chang’s short story with interesting observations from James Schamus, who adapted the story into film script. James Schamus will most likely appear in our Blue Notebooks interviews in the upcoming year, discussing Lust, Caution and other works he collaborated on with Ang Lee. It should be a great interview, considering Schamus is equally at home talking about Kant’s late philosophy in Critique of Judgement or John Ashbery’s poetry as he is in talking about the more pragmatic craft of filmmaking. Anyways, in the NY Times article, it almost sounds as if Ang Lee and James Schamus are pining for the NC-17 rating for their steamy picture. I’ll keep you posted.

Also, Mary Gordon, the subject of our interview a few months ago, has written a memoir of her mother called Circling My Mother, which receives a reverential review here. Oh, and the long profile of Saramago in the Sunday Mag. And Michael Lewis on New Orleans and the odds of calculating disasters.

Anne Carson’s latest book, Decreation, is obsessed with the notion of the Sublime, Antonioni and Monica Vitti, among other topics. Many of the essays and poems are not so good. Actually, at the prospect of being pilloried by Carson fanatics, I must say I found much of the book to be pretty bad. Maybe it’s the ambition of her project Carson uses terms like “sublimity” and “the sublime” pretty indiscriminately. The inherent problem lies in that she writes about Longinus’ notion of the sublime and Kant’s notion of it, and she doesn’t make much of a distinction between the two. In turn, a few of the pieces in Decreation are intriguing but fuzzy disasters that read like pensées written by some brilliant grad student from a humanity department in a college near you.

I don’t know why I’m being so caustic on this post! Because there are some delicious moments in Carson’s book. “Gnosticism VI” is perhaps one of my favorite poems I’ve read in the recent years (I’ll post on this poem later, maybe.) And her encapsulation of Antonioni’s L’Avventura seems to me to be a perfect evocation of the film:

L’Avventura: caught in the time of the island, scraping themselves back and forth over the rocks, men slant against the wind and her golden hair going horizontal in whips on the ecstatic sea, boats roar up, roar off, men stand gazing - and as for the scandal of our abandonment in a universe of “sudden trembling love”…

So on and so forth. Fantastic, no A universe of “sudden trembling love”… (I apologize for not keeping Carson’s line breaks, but I don’t know how to format line breaks on Wordpress!) I just thought to put the passage up since I’ve been reading too many mind-numbingly clerical summaries of L’Avventura, La Notte & L’Eclisse in the Antonioni obituaries everywhere. Carson’s description of certain moments and scenes from Antonioni’s films should be a good antidote for all of us.

And I realize I put up pictures of Monica Vitti when I should have posted Antonioni’s. It’s because I also know that I can never have space enough to write about my old Monica Vitti obsession. Besides, this statistical fact: although Antonioni is a beautiful man, seven out of ten people of reasonable level of sanity prefer looking at Monica Vitti to Antonioni, no matter their sexual orientation. I totally made that stat up because I’m insane.

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