Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films

Latest Episodes:

Time and Taboo in “Back to the Future” (1985) May 16, 2023

Show notes

In the parking lot of the Twin Pines Mall, Doc Brown plans to use his Delorean time machine to head 25 years into the future and see, as he puts it, “the progress of mankind.” But like the license plate on the Delorean, Doc is out of time. Through his absent-mindedness—and angering some terrorists—Doc has failed to provide a future into which he or his friend Marty McFly can progress. Meanwhile, Marty’s own options and possibilities have been foreclosed by the mistakes of his parents, whose inaction and passivity have failed to secure happy lives for themselves or their children. Out of time and without a viable future, Marty’s only way forward is back. Wes & Erin discuss the 1985 film, “Back to the Future,” and how securing the provisions for one’s own future depends on two modes of confrontation: one in the present and one with the past. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: In the parking lot of the Twin Pines Mall. Doc Brown plans to use his DeLorean time machine to head 25 years into the future and see, as he puts it, the progress of mankind. But like the license plate on the DeLorean, Doc is out of time. Through his absentmindedness and angering some terrorists, Doc has failed to provide a future into which he or his friend Marty McFly can progress. Meanwhile, Marty's own options and possibilities have been foreclosed by the mistakes of his parents, whose inaction and passivity have failed to secure happy lives for themselves or their children. Out of time. And without a viable future, Marty's only way forward is back. On today's episode, we're discussing the 1985 film Back to the Future and how securing the provisions for one's own future depends on two modes of confrontation, one in the present and one with the past. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I've been thinking a lot about the story of Marty's parents meeting, and it always struck me that it was similar to how my parents met. My mom's car actually broke down in front of my dad's house, and that was how they met. And so I was thinking a lot about just about cars in this movie, the significance of cars in the film and how that might point us in a lot of different directions in terms of where we might start our discussion. It seems to me that cars are a really significant part of American culture and this idea of American freedom in particular. They're really tied into sort of California's culture, and they seem to be. Besides being a method of time travel, they seem to be a really important mechanism in terms of how the plot is operating. So I thought we might start there. 1:58 Wes: Yeah, it's funny. I think the originally they were going to use for the time machine, they were going to use something like a refrigerator that you crawled into or some other stationary object. But they were worried that that would influence kids to crawl into refrigerators and attempt to go backward in time. 2:18 Erin: So isn't a refrigerator how. What's a refrigerator in terms of surviving nuclear fallout? What's that from? 2:25 Wes: Yes, I know what you're talking about. I can't remember the movie, but the 2:29 Erin: Brendan Fraser thing is just in a bomb shelter. But I'm trying to think of what movie someone survives in a fridge. The listeners will tell us, or we'll remember it as soon as we stop Recording. 2:40 Wes: I'm glad that they ended up going with the car. Cause of course, as you're hinting at symbolically it's a far richer and culturally it's far richer and it's more dramatic and there's lots of good reasons. But you know, the automobile, right, it fits in well with someone who's a teenager. And I think, right, he aspires to get that, I don't know what you call it, that truck, right. In the beginning of the movie, he's aspire. Is it a 4×4 or some sort of Toyota truck or outdoorsy type vehicle that he actually does end up getting in the end. And the car problem is really like the first plot point in the movie's external line of action. So, you know, you could have made it, in a way, the basis for a story. What it represents for teenagers, right, is newfound freedom. Then there's the sex aspect, being able to pick up women. What does the phrase pick up even come from? And go to the point or whatever they park, whatever they call it in the movie. And then the car that Marty is gonna go, he wants to go to the cabin by the lake with his girlfriend, right? And that car that he's hoping to do that with is wrecked in the beginning because his father is so spineless that he lets Biff, major antagonist of the movie, borrow the car. The bully, you know, the car is. In this case, the wrecked car as a stand in is closely connected to the spinelessness of the father, which at an emotional level is the big problem of the movie, right. 4:08 Erin: It's also something connected to Lorraine and to Lorraine's father as well, right? Because. Well, one of the first things she says in the film is about her dislike of Marty's girlfriend and the fact that when she was young she didn't call boys and she certainly wouldn't sit in a parked car with a boy. 4:26 Wes: Such a hypocrite. And I know, as parents always are sexually. But anyway, with regard to the sexual mores of the youth. But yeah, sorry, go ahead. 4:35 Erin: Right. No, but you know, the significance of sitting in a parked car will take on a really, really sinister association when Biff tries to, you know, basically to rape her in the parked car. You know, so there's the freedom that the car provides, which has been co opted by Biff. It's sort of stalled by Biff twice, right? So we have the totaled car at the beginning and then we have, you know, Biff assaulting Lorraine in the parked car and sort of like impeding her progress towards George and her, the future that she seems to be destined for. But I'm also wondering about Lorraine's father hitting supposed to be George and then hits Marty and what that might mean and what the passivity of that first meeting suggests. Like, obviously, there had to be some sort of plot mechanism in which George is introduced to Lorraine, in which Lorraine can feel sort of sorry for him, which will occasion their getting married in the first place. And so I think the fact that George is, like, run over by somebody else's car is a perfect image for that. And I'm also wondering if it's, to a certain extent, also an expression of some of the sort of incestuous themes that'll come up in the film. This is just occurring to me now, just the fact that the father is the one that has to initiate the relationship between his daughter and George and that the father seems to have the actual agency in that relationship. And both George and, to a lesser extent, Lorraine are just sort of agents or pawns in this sort of larger passive bringing together that will be flipped on its head or restored or righted, rather, when Marty intervenes and forces George to pursue her more actively. 6:19 Wes: Hmm. I'm just thinking about it. This is something I hadn't thought about. I mean, the incest part I've thought about a lot, and I feel like I'm going to be plagiarizing my own essay that I wrote many, many years ago on this as I talk about it. But, yeah, this part about the father, Lorraine's father, hitting Marty with the car and that being the thing that leads to their union, it's really interesting to me because the father's function is usually to be an impediment to that. Right. To be part of the daughter's selective mating strategy and to help her weed out the losers. But instead he runs over the loser and does the one thing that's gonna make her like a guy like that. Right. 6:59 Erin: Well, I think there's something to that as well. Right. You know, the fact that the father accidentally hits George. I mean, he does hit him with the car. And so there is something aggressive. Right. Like trying to take out the male suitor, which occasions, you know, the bringing together of the couple. Right. The fact that, you know, Lorraine is maybe going against the father's unconscious wishes. 7:21 Wes: It's too disorganized to be effective. Yeah. So it's more aggressive in a way, but also not focused and organized enough to be a real deterrent. Right. So ironically, it does the opposite of the thing that it should Be, you know, if he had killed him, he would have prevented a catastrophe, that marriage. The father's intervening role is importantly connected to incest in psychoanalysis. The father is the one who prevents incest from happening through threat of retaliation, through threat of castration. So what does that mean in more practical, less dramatic terms? It means that as part of the maturational process, there's some sort of detachment, separation and individuation that happens. It takes us away from our connection to the maternal and the mother or whatever primary caretaker is serving that role and forces us in a different direction. And that direction is towards the development of certain psychical capacities like a conscience, like aspirations, right? Our libidinal ties, our attachments, our energies get redirected towards those other objects, right? And not just towards the person who's going to feed us and take care of us. So that's part of maturation and theoretically part of the way that works is to realize that the mother is, is not just a feeder and a caretaker, a baby raising machine, but she has her own interests and desires. And that's partly what the father of the phallus represents. Her attentions are not just towards the child, they are elsewhere. And ultimately, as we get older, we have to realize, you know, our mother is actually just a person and imperfect and does lots of messed up things. And part of it is because she has her own interests and desires out side of us. So the father is part of that and the father. So the presence of the father intercedes and comes in between what might otherwise just be an incestuous relationship in the broad sense of someone never being able to separate from the mother, from wanting to have her entirely for himself or herself, and to have that forever, to not grow up. So when you have a spineless father like George, there are incestuous implications because the father can't play that role, he can't come in between. And again, father in a very abstract sense, like a paternal principle culture is also father teachers. Your mother, you know, can play the role of a paternal principle and does in certain ways. But it's just that interceding paternal principle that would lead you to the process of identification, to the building of a superego, conscience and ego, ideal aspirations to turns your libido in different directions. And if you don't have something that's strong enough, right, to attract you like a lightning rod that says, okay, I'm going to. My goal is no longer just to be taken care of, but now I want to do, I want to become a great Guitarist, like with Marty, right. If there's not something that can draw you in that direction, like a stronger father or something that intercedes strongly, then you get arrested development. You could get a maturational problem. And then the more complicated part of that is. And I'm sorry, I'm going on that length, but the more complicated part of that is aspirations and ambition can get wrapped up in. They seem in some way to be an escape from incest and an escape from the maternal, but they can get wrapped up in it symbolically in a way that interferes with them. So they can become grandiose. In other words, they can become symbolic of being with the mother, of being godlike. Right. You know, so in very grandiose people with grandiose psychological pathologies, people might think they're Jesus or God or this or that. That's ambition in a way, taken to the extreme. And, you know, we all have, I think, a bit of it at times. And what it does is it activates an incest taboo again, in the broad sense. And so it inhibits us. So the more grandiose we are and the more grandiose our ambitions and the more tied that is to the concept of love, the more inhibited we get about actually accomplishing them. And that's the position of Marty in the beginning of the movie, right? He's got a. An inhibition about guitar, about succeeding with that particular ambition. And then he's got some external obstacles to being with his girlfriend, his mother. Right. 11:39 Erin: So anyway, sorry, just so I'm clear, how does that inhibition activate the taboo? Like, how does that grandiosity return you to the mother? 11:47 Wes: Because it is reminiscent of. Of a perfect condition where one is no longer dependent. So the ideal state, right, is to be one's own parents or to be parentless, to be completely self sufficient. And the idea is that it kind of feels that way. Speculative. This is very speculative. But in the beginning there's such a symbiotic relationship with the mother. I mean, in the beginning you're in the womb and then you're in this very close, know, being taken care of type of relationship, which is, if it goes well enough, is very ideal in a sense. So the grandiose ambitions can give you the feeling of. And this is sort of what it means to be in a manic state as well. It can give you the feeling of reuniting or take you back to the feeling of being in that perfect Garden of Eden, basically. So being godlike. So there's the hubris element, transcending the disappointment, you know, the ordinariness of life and the disappointingness of our love objects. And so the, you know, the one's ambition becomes the ultimate love object. And if you can accomplish it, it can be perfect in a way that other people can't be perfect. The very thing that's supposed to take us away, you know, aspirations and a conscience. The conscience. We have a moral code and we want to be good. Where there's energy and gratification out of that, even if it's self denying, there's an element of gratification, it's compensatory. So we get told as children, you can't do this, you can't do that. And that's frustrating. But then the payoff is gratification in the idea that we're being good. But in either case, in the case of conscience or in aspirations, the very thing that's supposed to lead us away from the childhood situation can in a very subversive way, actually symbolically keep us attached to it. So that's the dilemma. 13:42 Erin: So, I mean, that's all super interesting. I was thinking a lot about the role of Lorraine's parents in this. Maybe according to the definition that you're providing here, you know, the fact that Marty only has to go back one generation indicates something positive about Lorraine's parents, even though they don't seem to be immediately, you know, particularly enlightened or even in spite of the intervention of the father, having several different potential meanings. I'm thinking about the fact that like Marty's problems seem to originate just with his parents. And so there's an Edenic quality, I think, to California and to the fact that to go back 30 years in terms of the town that he lives in is really to…

Full show notes at the publisher

The Violence of Redemption in John Donne’s “Batter My Heart” (Holy Sonnet 14) Apr 10, 2023

Show notes

In “Holy Sonnet 14,” John Donne would like his “three person’d God” to break instead of knock, blow instead of breathe, and burn instead of shine. This vision of redemption is about remaking rather than reform. And it seems to be motivated by a sense that neither reason nor the typical rhetoric of faith are not enough to bridge the mortal and the divine—what’s needed is God’s violent intervention. Wes & Erin discuss Donne’s surprising and paradoxical use of war and rape as metaphors for salvation. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:08 Wes: In Holy Sonnet 14, John Donne would like his three person God to break instead of knock, blow instead of breathe, and burn instead of shine. This vision of redemption is about remaking rather than reform. And it seems to be motivated by a sense that reason and the typical rhetoric of faith are not enough to bridge the mortal and the divine. What's needed is God's violent intervention. In this episode, we discuss Donne's surprising and paradoxical use of war and rape as metaphors for this intervention. This is Wes Alwan. 0:41 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to subtext. 0:49 Wes: So Erin, when he says batter my heart, is he talking about battery or is he talking about deep frying? 0:55 Erin: I think. I think it's deep frying. That seems to be the conceit that's running through this whole poem, is that he's just gotten a job at McDonald's and he wants God to save him. 1:07 Wes: Batter my heart and season it with 13 spices. I'll deliver it to you on a platter, my love. What we're getting at, I think we're reacting to the violence of the poem. The way I summarize this poem to someone who's telling about it, I just said, you know, it's kind of like he's asking God to rape him, basically. 1:30 Erin: Yeah, I think that's totally right. 1:32 Wes: So that's one way to overcome one's doubts, I guess, is to have God. 1:37 Erin: That's interesting what you say about doubt, because I'm wondering if doubt even comes into the poem. So you see this as a poem that has doubt in it. I never even considered that it's my 1:48 Wes: interpolation or the only thing really to go on. Right, is that he's betrothed to the enemy, which I take to be Satan. That's one of the questions of the poem. What is it that separates him from God? Or however you want to put it in such a way that God's being Mr. Nice Guy, right? He doesn't want the Mr. Rogers version of God breathing, shining, mending. He needs something more forceful still. The question is why? 2:13 Erin: That's interesting. I can see that reading now, being betrothed to the enemy and the enemy being Satan. I usually think that belief in Satan is the first thing to go. It's the first step on the way to unbelief if you're raised within that tradition. So the fact that he believes himself betrothed to Satan tells me that he's in thrall of sin. But it could also be doubt, too. I'M also seeing that reason is captive proves weak or untrue. So that could mean doubt as well. I didn't see that reading the fact that reason is weak or untrue, I saw as being to stand up against the sin that he feels is overwhelming him, that you wouldn't be smart enough to combat these instances of sin when they arrive, or that reason would even betray you, and that you would be using your reason to sort of justify your sinfulness. So it's betrayed you to say, even though it's supposed to be this gift from God, it's actively working against you. 3:03 Wes: I think the talk of doubt, it runs against the being betrothed to the enemy. Suggests that he believes. Right. It's just that he believes that he's caught up in the other forces. And then the rest of it's about chastity and freedom. So this has something to do with impulsiveness, his own sinfulness and impulsiveness and perhaps sexual impulsiveness and maybe aggression goes in there as well as sex and aggression. So God's metaphorical sex and aggression is the only thing that can save him from his worldly sex and aggression and impulsivity. He's asking God to become the carrier of the impulsivity that he wants to get rid of from himself. Do you want to read it before we go further? 3:42 Erin: Sure. Holy Sonnet 14. Batter My Heart 3 Personed God for you as yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend, that I may rise and stand o'erthrow me and bend your force to break, blow, burn and make me new. I like an usurped town to another due, labor to admit you, but oh, to no end reason your viceroy in me me should defend, but is captived and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you and would be loved Fain but am betrothed unto your enemy. Divorce me untie or break that knot again. Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, shall never be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. 4:28 Wes: Very nice. So a three persons God. 4:31 Erin: Yeah, I was wondering about that to 4:34 Wes: begin with, you know, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the three spices that go in the batter. 4:39 Erin: Yep. 4:40 Wes: Just kidding. The use of the word person there, right. Makes it more corporeal maybe than where you used to or maybe not. But it's almost like there's a hydra like effect. I think the very, you know, from the very beginning, it's kind of a surprising image. I don't know. What do you think about that? 4:56 Erin: I was thinking through this a really long time because I was just wondering why three? Why three? I mean, why emphasize the triune God here? And I noticed that the first six lines or so have that spondaic foot in the middle, so that we get three stresses in a row in the middle of the line. So it's as if there's like three, you know, three knocks that happen in the middle of each of those first lines, which gives it that really explosive kind of power. And the more I thought about that and that battering or knocking, the more I thought that, you know, if his heart is a door and they're battering it, you would need more than one person to break down a door, wouldn't you? Or you'd need more than one person to batter it down with a battering ram, I think. So he needs three people, it seems, to stand up to his sin or to stand up to Satan. Like there's a kind of strength in numbers here, maybe that's being implied. 5:43 Wes: Yeah, I mean, he is thinking the Trinity, right? It makes me wonder. So he's come up with this nice, you know, as you were saying, these three stresses in the middle. Knock, breathe, shine, and later on, break, blow, burn. And then of course there's in each case a fourth thing, which is the effect, you know, maybe the effect of the fusion of those things. So God does these different things. Knocks, breathes, shines, and then men's. And I suppose that the knock, breathe, shine, right, has to do with each different person in the three persons, God. So it makes me think about the genesis of the poem which came first. Did he come up with that nice idea of knock, breathe, shine, right? And then think, okay, let me backward engineer the first line. But anyway, whatever the case, it's rhythmically interesting. And then also. So what are knocking, breathing and shining? Knocking is politely knocking at the door to announce his presence, his existence. So that's like the first awareness of God being a child and being told there's God showing up to church early on. One's first memories of church or something like that. And then there's the other two, by 6:51 Erin: the way, for the stresses too. I'm reading that three stress from the very first line. So heart, three personed God. So I'm reading those three stresses there. And then also the triple stress on stand, o'erthrow me to batter my heart. 7:04 Wes: I mean, I'm three personed God. I'm still reading that as iambic. 7:07 Erin: So batter is reverse foot. It is Iambic pentameter. But of course, there could be variation. In fact, there should be some variation if you don't want it to be right. So batter my heart three personed God. So I'm reading my heart as an iambic foot and three personed. So three per would be a spondaic foot. So you'd have heart, three personed God. 7:29 Wes: Yeah. Okay. 7:30 Erin: And then the same in that I may rise and stand because of that caesura, o'erthrow gets a kind of. Both halves of that word get equal weight. So we have stand, o'erthrow me. That's another line that has that three in a row. 7:46 Wes: So we get three per. So that's the spondaic, unstressed soned. And then God again. And then the second line, knock, breathe, shine. Yep, all stressed. 7:57 Erin: Then rise and stand, o'erthrow me. So stand, o'erthrow. And then in the fourth line, break, blow, burn, of course. And then I think that's where we. And I, like an usurped town, to. That's where we get the change in rhythm there. So the first quatrain, I should say, I think maybe at the beginning, I thought it was the first, or said generously, was the first six lines, but it's really the first four. But I think that there are a lot of changes in rhythm that then happen or continue to happen throughout the poem. It keeps kind of shifting. And of course, the biggest tonal shift comes with the octave turning into the sestet. It's worth mentioning again that this is another combination of the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean, or the Italian and the English sonnet. So just as death be not proud, so we have A, B, B, A, A, B, B, A, C, D, C, D, E, E. So we have the traditional Petrarchan octave, and then we have the break with the sestet. But then it ends on that Shakespearean couplet to tie it all together. So back to knocking. The other thing I really see there, of course, I'm reading this really biblically. I spent a lot of time with my Bible over the past couple days reminding myself of some of these references. And of course, knocking is Christ the bridegroom knocking on the door of the bedchamber. So from the very beginning, we have a little bit of that sexual implication, right, with the church or the soul, even, like I think was traditionally conceived of as being feminine because of the fact that there was a lot of this kind of like, male female imagery in a sort of. Not in a literal sense, but in, like, a supernatural kind of sense. Just as A metaphor. And so Christ was always the bridegroom and his church, the bride in this metaphor. And so the soul was conceived of as being like, feminine for that reason that Christ is the masculine bridegroom that woos the soul is the feminine bride. So the knocking on the bedchamber is a reference to several things. There's connections to revelation there, but also to the Song of Songs, famously erotic poem in the Old Testament, which the early church fathers and most Christian traditions interpret either both as a love poem, which it is, but also as a metaphor for Christ seducing the soul, the sinner. And so that kind of gentleness. Or the bridegroom knocking on the door already has this decidedly not rapey but romantic implication from the very beginning. And a gentle knocking as you're saying 10:14 Wes: Jesus is a nice guy. 10:16 Erin: Yeah. So Jesus has a lot of different roles. 10:19 Wes: Right. 10:19 Erin: So he can also be. Mean is the wrong word. Right. Because that implies that, like, he's doing something wrong, but justly, he could be the just punisher as well, like mighty king. All these things are images of God that are baked into the Old Testament as well. So here he's being gentle, which is part of it too. 10:34 Wes: Yeah. This makes me think this is out of order, but maybe I'm just trying to read this too rigidly with lining things up with the Trinity, but knocking with Jesus and breathing with the Holy Spirit and maybe inspiration shining with the glory of God. 10:48 Erin: Yeah. I was wondering that myself, because I was like, okay, knock seems like a reference to Christ, but then shine, we have this idea that it's connected with the sun, S U N, which would then be a homophone for S O N. So maybe knock is supposed to be God the Father, but not sure. 11:04 Wes: I was thinking. Yeah. That probably each of these, you could make an argument for each of them lining up with the different parts of the Trinity. Maybe it's informative to compare them to what they're going to turn into. Breaking, blowing and burning. Knocking will become breaking down the door. Breathing, which again, to me, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, but connotes inspiration, breathing into. Probably there are other ways to read that too. Whereas blowing is no longer. Well, let's compare breathing and blowing. Breathing gets inside you. And blowing is external. It's like something internal versus external force in a way. And then shining versus burning. So shining puts light and warmth over things and there's glory in it and articulates and clarifies the world. And burning, of course, is destructive. So you get these verbs which are Associated with establishing some sort of relationship, some sort of connection between two beings, the divine and the. The mortal. And it's non destructive. And the second one is just entirely. Seems to be entirely destructive, but also external. If you're inspired, if. Right. In the first case, you can become a believer, you have a sort of internal or have faith, there would be some internal spiritual or psychological change in one's attitude. In the second case, it turns that into something seemingly, at least metaphorically external. 12:29 Erin: Mm. 12:30 Wes: You are forced. And it's no longer a matter of faith, Although it could be. Maybe that's what faith looks like under this model. Right. Something. Maybe force is the. Is the way that's the argument on the face of it. Right. Is that this nice guy stuff is not good enough. If you're really gonna get to me, I need this force. So Very, very interesting. 12:52 Erin: Yeah. I was thinking, like, blowing into somehow. But you're right, it is external. I'm thinking of Lear. The more I sat with this, being knocked around on the heath, the idea that this is external. I really like knowing Donne's upbringing in Catholicism and his relatively late conversion. So he was educated in Catholic teaching and all of that. And then even when he became an Anglican. Right. It was what we would recognize today as being like, extremely high Anglican, you know, Catholic. Catholic light. So the Catholic understanding of God's influence in our soul, of grace's influence in our soul, is something that really does. To the extent that we can say sort of metaphorically speaking or even, you know, sort of creatively speaking, that the soul has some form of physicality or some form of reality which is. You know, I'm using physicality loosely here. Right. But the extent to which it's maybe visible to God, the extent to which it's somehow present within us. You know, Catholics believe that through the sacraments, through sanctifying grace, our souls are literally changed. They're in some way evidently changed in the sight of God. So this idea of remaking one's inner self or this idea of like, a physical change being enacted on the body is actually a pretty good met…

Full show notes at the publisher

Mortal Pretensions in John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” (Holy Sonnet 10) Mar 13, 2023

Show notes

A recusant Catholic turned Protestant, a rake turned priest, a scholar, lawyer, politician, soldier, secretary, sermonizer, and of course, a poet— John Donne’s biography contains so many scuttled identities and discrete lives, perhaps its no wonder that his great subjects were mortality and death. His Holy Sonnets, likely composed between 1609 and 1610, and published posthumously in 1633, are a collection of 19 poems written after the sea change in Donne’s subject matter from the secular to the sacred. They reflect his anxiety over his conversion to Anglicanism and his eventual decision to enter the priesthood, and meditate on salvation, death, and the wages of sin. Erin & Wes discuss Sonnet 10 in this series, “Death Be Not Proud,” an address of Death personified, whose power gradually diminishes beneath the force of Donne’s dazzling poetic rhetoric. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:00 Erin: Hey everyone, just want to let you know that my other podcast, the Partially Examined Life, will be having a live show in New York City on April 15th at 7pm we will be discussing Dostoyevsky's the Brothers Karamazov. You can get tickets whether to come in person or live stream it on the web@PartiallyExaminedLife.com live. And on another note, for Subtext, we have a listener survey and it would be a big help to us if you fill it out. It only takes a few minutes and your feedback will help us improve the show and find new sponsors who actually interest you. By filling out the survey, you'll be entered to win a $500Amazon gift card. To fill out the survey, go to surveymonkey.com r airwave. 0:47 Wes: You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. A recusant Catholic turned Protestant, a rake turned priest, a scholar, lawyer, politician, soldier, secretary, sermonizer, and of course, a poet. John Donne's biography contains so many scuttled identities and discrete lives, perhaps it's no wonder that his great subjects were mortality and death. His Holy Sonnets, likely composed between 1609 and 1610 and published posthumously in 1633, are a collection of 19 poems written after the sea change in Donne's subject matter from the secular to the sacred reflect his anxiety over his conversion to Anglicanism and his eventual decision to enter the priesthood and meditate on salvation, death, and the wages of sin. Today we're discussing Sonnet 10 in this series, Death, Be Not Proud, an address of death personified whose power gradually diminishes beneath the force of Donne's dazzling poetic rhetoric. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So Wes, Donne is a great love poet, of course, but I would argue that I think he's a great poet of death. That might be his greatest subject matter. And when I put quotes around that term, great poet of death and put it into a Google search out of curiosity, I saw that Whitman is supposed to be the greatest poet of death. For my money, he's not even the great American poet of death. That would be Dickinson. But I don't know. I mean, I guess there are a lot of contenders for that title. And I was thinking a lot in preparing for this episode about the relationship between poetry and death, or at least things that are sort of death adjacent. Poetry and grief poetry and mourning, the elegy, of course, being one of the great poetic forms. So I'm curious who you think is great on death if you have an answer for that. And maybe why death is so present in so many poems as a way to start us off. 2:57 Erin: Well, the first person I thought of was Shakespeare. And then I was thinking, well, that's kind of an obvious and lame association. But then in thinking about poetry and death, I thought of the phrase undiscovered country. Right. Is that the right? 3:11 Wes: Mm. 3:12 Erin: And the way in which something that is puzzling and paradoxical and ineffable, a nothing can be grasped. I mean, on the one hand, there's the terror of death, the inevitability of death, the death of loved ones and life and sorts of things that make good subjects for poetic reflection. And I guess the question is what the point of that is. Maybe it's therapeutic or something. But then the other aspect is just that it's because it's something that can't be represented in any direct way as an experience. Right. You can describe a dead body, but it has to be gotten at in this more indirect, metaphorical way. So I think this type of subject, I guess, love and death are really the most. There's a lot of opportunity there, I guess, let's put it that way. 4:03 Wes: Right. I'm thinking a little about maybe about Keats as an anti death poet. I can't decide if someone is a death poet or an anti death poet. And I think maybe that tension reveals something like maybe anyone who writes about death is also in the act of writing about it, is staving it off, obviously. And I do think that love and death, or especially sex and death, are pretty closely linked. I think that, you know, this sort of emotional climax in a poem, or even like the beats inherent with each line and the turn back to the beginning that happens at the end of each line of a poem. It's very reminiscent to me of like, the climax contains within it, like the diminution or the demotion, demise itself. So we have these peaks and valleys, maybe a bit dramatic to say that those are sort of like, I don't know, flights of fancy or great vivacity or vitality, to use words, connected with life. And then the dying off of the end of the line or the dying at the end of the poem, as it were, is connected with a kind of death. So I think that waxing and waning, or that ecstasy followed by evacuation, you might say, is very close to love and sex. Of course, you know, these things very much mirror, I think, our experiences of not just of life's up and down kind of trajectory, but also the fact that we have at the end the eternal death waiting for us, not just the end of the line or the end of the poem that it kind of predicts. 5:40 Erin: I would add to that the use of metaphor, especially the metaphysical conceit. Right. Which Donne was accused of and criticized for. But this bringing together very different things is one as the metaphor for the other. And then maybe the introduction of paradox, too. But the use of metaphor, and we've talked about this a little bit on the show, but is in collapsing distinctions is evocative of merger, of the collapse of distinctions and things just kind of dissolving into oneness. Right. You could say that one could think of the whole world sort of being reduced in that way to these metaphorical commonalities and distinctions falling apart. And so there's merger, which is evocative of like an early symbiotic relationship with the mother, something prior to separation and individuation. And on the other side of that, there's the kind of dissolution of distinctions that you get in death. And the merger. Right. With the natural environment, with the body, at least. Right. And if you're religious, whatever it is that an afterlife means in that context, perhaps some kind of merger or union with God or heaven or something like that. 6:54 Wes: I am really interested in that. I'm also thinking just about the sort of merger of form and content, like, inherent in poetry or in the poetic line. And I just. The more I looked at the form on the page, you know, I was thinking about the sonnet as a kind of a coffin, right? Like a box. Something that's been famously commented on many times. Like Wordsworth has that great sonnet, nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room. This idea that the sonnet itself is this little membrane that keeps all its contents within it. And we have this merger too, within the sonnet of the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean forms that Donne is working with. Right. And which. Which is also like this mashup at this time is not particularly uncommon. And it's true of several of the Holy Sonnets, I think. But it takes advantage then of these two turns because of this mashup. So there's like. There's the turn in the. In the traditional place after the eighth line. But then there's also this turn right before or right in the final couplet in this very typically Shakespearean kind of mood, so that you have two climaxes in the po. It's self contained, it's box like, coffin like. But it also has a lot of movement within that. And A lot of different kinds of registers coming together. 8:13 Erin: Interesting. Do you want to read it? 8:15 Wes: Yeah. Okay. This is one of the many poems that I had my students recite in school. And sometimes I would have to hear this, like, four times a day. So I have this one memorized. All right, here we go. Death be not proud. Death be not proud Though some have called thee mighty and dreadful for thou art not so for those whom thou thinkst thou dost overthrow Die not, poor death, Nor yet canst thou kill me from rest and sleep which but thy pictures be much pleasure Then from thee much more must flow and soonest our best men with thee do go Rest of their bones and souls delivery. Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men and dost with poison, war and sickness dwell and poppy or charms can make us sleep as well and better than thy stroke. Why swell' st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally and death shall be no more. Death thou shalt die. 9:20 Erin: Very nice. Exactly the way I would have read it. So you get this personification of death, but also his addressing death directly and giving death a command. This is like this imperative mode. Was something Donne did, I guess, in several poems. And there's one with the sun. Right. Go away, go away sun. Is that what it's called? 9:48 Wes: Unruly, busy sun, son, go away, Come back another day. Busy something fool. Unruly sun, Busy, unruly fool. Die something. Anyway. Yeah. I love that poem. 10:02 Erin: Yeah. In this case, there's also the. There's the accusation of death being proud, which is a curious and unexpected accusation, I think. Right. It's not what we would think of as the first thing to dislike about death, even a personified death. So I think here it's hard for me not to think immediately of death as in the classically personified death. And the shroud and with the scythe and all that stuff. And going around touching people and bringing them off to. So that kind of personification of death. That death is a kind of meager creature, in a way. Silent. And if you pull back the cloak, just bones. And here the idea that his death has swollen and proud. And I suppose, the. So conscious of its own power, I guess, so over the psyches of human beings. So we go from our own. The pivot is from our fear of death to. Not directly to the idea of an afterlife for an eternity. But instead, the fear of death is counterposed with this attack on the pride of the personified. 11:17 Wes: I just love the fact that this imperative at the beginning is a negative Rather than a positive imperative. So just thinking about how crappy this poem would be if it was like, death, be humble. You know, something like that, right? Like, the negation, I think, identifies it, brings death down. It sort of removes, like, a kind of power there from the adjective that we want to assign to death. And it's sort of killing death, like it's killing our sort of beliefs about death. Even if they are, as you say, and I think they are unexpected beliefs that he's putting into our mouths a little bit. I think it's this very negation. The two nots that we get from the beginning are kind of already performing what's gonna happen in that last line. It's already kind of killing death a little bit with just the way that the phrases are structured. And I'm thinking, too, like, what you say about being proud and being puffed up and swollen, as death is called in the third to last line. That made me think about the fact that images of being puffed up, of being swollen, that are inherent in pride, are also, like, literally. I mean, I can't help thinking this just because Donne is such a bodily poet. But I'm thinking about, like, a swollen corpse. And since death in this poem, what's so weird about the movement of this poem, which we could obviously talk about, and maybe you agree, maybe you don't, in the end, it's transformed into something that isn't even death. Or it's repeatedly evacuated, displaced somehow, as in these negations. But by the end, I feel like it's been transformed maybe into something. And so that image of a swollen corpse is really interesting because that in itself is not death. That's like someone's body. It's death maybe working on that body in some way. Death is definitely acting on this body, but it's also, like, literally sort of replacing, like the. The only image that we can have of death is of its action on an actual human being. So the personification is sort of immediately being, in my mind, kind of twisted into a diminishment of death's force. Because really, the only way that we can conceptualize it as you're saying, is, like, to visualize the human being affected by that death. 13:28 Erin: That is spot on, in my view. I just did a little free writing, rewriting of the poem as an exercise. I thought, well, how would I attack death? And at one point I said, these agencies are life's agency, and you master only the effect. Slave to the lawfulness of matter and form, the way they wind down. I Suspected I would just reveal something about Donne's poem by doing that, which I think you just did, which is to say even the beginning, by personifying death, you've defeated death because you've created a creature, right? And everything happens within this terrain of life, and terrain of life, everything happens within that frame, right? So someone dying in a way, that's a thing of life, right? Those are biological forces and natural laws at work. And you know, and if you have to depict death as a kind of. To think about death, you have to depict it as a kind of creature or ghost in a way. But it's still. It's a humanoid form and it gives you some sense of the predominance of life or the greater power of life in a way. And then finally, I think the way you put it was effects, right? Death is the effect, but it's not an agency or a power in a way, right? The power is what happens within life. It's part of the rules of life, right? Which is that for whatever reason, reason, the imperative of a living thing is to die, whether of an old age or through an accident. But again, those are the forces of life at work, even in their own termination. And then the effect is death. And that lack of power sort of parallels the nothingness and the difficult even imagining. How do you personify something that is nothing, right? least as far as we can speculate within our own experience. Either one is. Believes in an afterlife and think that experience continues in some form, or one posits a nothingness that is inconceivable. So this complete cessation of experience, that's great. 15:31 Wes: You're even making me look at the second line. Perhaps I'm overreading, but those last three hard beats that are great art. Not so now I've just put a square around art. Not, you know, I know of course art is just the ant…

Full show notes at the publisher

Trauma and Repetition in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974) Feb 13, 2023

Show notes

Roman Polanksi’s 1974 film “Chinatown” seems to have little to do with its titular neighborhood, which is the setting for only one horrible and final scene. Chinatown functions instead to represent the traumatic moment that drives this story just because it is hidden from view—a place indecipherable even to the hard-boiled private investigator who has seen it all … the place he doesn’t go … the place that bothers him to talk about … the place where inaction and evasion are the only ways to avoid causing harm. Wes & Erin discuss what Chinatown has to do with “Chinatown,” and how the theme connects the seemingly disparate themes of police work, political corruption, water rights, and incest. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown seems to have little to do with its titular neighborhood, which is the setting for only one horrible and final scene. Chinatown functions instead to represent the traumatic moment that drives the story just because it is hidden from view, a place indecipherable even to the hard boiled private investigators who has seen it all. The place he doesn't go, the place that bothers him to talk about. The place where inaction and evasion are the only ways to avoid causing harm. Today we discuss what Chinatown has to do with Chinatown and how the film connects the seemingly disparate themes of police work, political corruption, water rights and incest. This is Wes Alwan. 0:56 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. 1:03 Wes: So, Erin, it's a movie that nothing really plot wise happens in Chinatown until the very end of the movie. And in the original screenplay, that's not in there. Polanski changed some things and said, well, we got to have a scene in Chinatown. If you're called the movie Chinatown, you gotta have at least one scene in Chinatown. And we learn almost nothing about Chinatown. The one thing we learn is that Jake Gittes, or as John Huston, Mr. Gitts, that he used to work there, something bad happened there, we learned. We just get hints of that. So why is it called Chinatown? 1:44 Erin: I was thinking about that a little bit too. And Jake's casual bigotry, which prevents us from really, or for me anyway, from really developing any firm sort of liking for him. I think we're in sympathy with him for quite a bit of the film. But he's crude and he tells that really nasty joke, which is really stupid. And so I think these things are supposed to trouble our sympathy with him. But anyway, so it seems for him to be a symbol of this kind of corruption, some sort of moral invasion, I suppose, which again, I tie to his sense of bigotry. The fact that he has to return there seems, because it's set up in the dialogue of the film, that he tried to help a woman there and he just ended up hurting her. And this seemed to be the scene of his original sin as a cop as far as the film is concerned. And so because of the circular nature of the film, perhaps it's inevitable that he ends up back there for this final confrontation and that history repeats itself. 2:47 Wes: It's history repeating itself. But if we knew more about that history, it could be a more poignant repetition in the end, right? I mean, It's a horrifying repetition. But if this movie were being made today, you would have seen some flashback at some point to the event to which this is referring. They wouldn't just let that go, and they wouldn't trust the audience to pick up on these little tidbits about what happened in Chinatown. This scene where they're. I forget if they're already in bed. Is this before they sleep together or after they've been chased out of the nursing home? Is that it? And they're having a talk, and Evelyn says, does this usually happen to you, Mr. Gittes? And he says, what's that, Mrs. Mulwray? Well, I'm only judging on the basis of one afternoon and an evening. But if that's how you go about your work, I'd say you're lucky to get through a whole day. By the way, when reading this screenplay, it actually comes across as more funny. It's a great film, but it's an even better screenplay in a way. And it makes me want. We can talk about that later. It makes me wonder about what Polanski was doing with this. But anyway. And he says, it hasn't happened to me in some time. And she's like, when was the last time? He's like, it was in Chinatown. He was working with the district attorney. And she goes, doing what? And he says, as little as possible. She says, the district attorney gives his men advice like that. He says, they do it in Chinatown. And then she says, it bothers you to talk about it. And then they start tending to his nose a bit. And then after that, she asks, so why does it bother you to talk about it? Chinatown, he says, bothers everybody that works there. But to me, it was. You can't always tell what's going on there. 4:30 Erin: Yeah, that's a really significant line, I think. 4:33 Wes: And then he says, I thought I was keeping someone from being hurt, and I actually ended up making sure they were hurt. This is, like, the one place where we get a bit of intimacy, human intimacy, and also transparency, and also some about what's going on underneath everything. Right. 4:50 Erin: Well, it seems that Chinatown is, you know, it's a state of confusion or a place in which things aren't as they seem, both for Jake and for us, because I think we're so often in Jake's position as the viewers. 5:02 Wes: Yeah, he's in every scene, actually. And everything is shot from his point of view. Polanski purposely did that. We see a lot of his back 5:09 Erin: and shoulders when we read the evidence, up to a certain Point exactly the way that he does. Especially because the movie has set both of us up. It set Jake up in his profession, and it sets as people who are watching him in his profession and people who've been to film noir before, to think that this is another straightforward case of adultery. I was really interested this time around in Jake as a character, why he's so rude to the Chinese workers in Mrs. Mulray's house. The gardener and one of the maids, he's nasty to them. And so it seems to me like this idea of Chinatown as a place of moral corruption for him. And, you know, and we never really quite understand why that is or what connection like Chinatown as an idea has with Chinatown as an actual place or Chinatown as a place where Chinese immigrants might live. And that seems to me to be like a really interesting complication in a character who I think we're supposed to like. And I just wonder what to make of that alongside the fact that he's able to weaponize antisemitism against the evil nursing home owner, so that he's sort of able to cleverly use to pull one over on the guy. So he has this awareness of that. But this Chinese bigotry is something that really this time around just troubled my perception of his character. 6:29 Wes: Yeah, I want to come back to that. Let's talk about his characterization and whether we're meant to like him. But just on the topic of Chinatown specifically, you're pointing out something I think is really important, which is that we're not really given any associations for Chinatown other than the fact that he used to work for the District Attorney there and the fact that something bad went down there, and the fact that it's supposed to represent some sort of inscrutability. When he says it bothers everybody who works there, you can't always tell what's going on there. That's one of the very few moments where you see much vulnerability from him. Right. And even the way Nicholson delivers that line, there's something poignant about it, but it doesn't tell us anything else. And of course, I'm sure many critic, many literary critic has talked about, well, the Orientalism of this idea that there's something inscrutable about Chinatown. I went looking for associations like what was Chinatown in LA in 1937? We know the, the film is set in 1937 because of a. You get a glimpse of that in the newspaper. But interestingly, Chinatown didn't exist in 1937. It had just been demolished. There's a two year period where it did not exist because it was demolished for some station or something. Before that, it was almost like a red light district. It was a very seedy, crime ridden type of place, apparently, or at least that was the reputation. And then what it was after that, I think it was really something quite different. I'm not sure. I didn't. I didn't get to that. But in this film, we really just know two things about it. We know Jake's association and then we know that the help live there. Right in the way Jake formulates it. Chinatown is basically where good deeds go to meet unintended consequences, right? He was trying to help someone. In that very attempt to help her or help this person, he got them hurt. Do we know it's a woman in this first case? 8:35 Erin: He says so explicitly at some point. 8:37 Wes: Okay. 8:38 Erin: I don't know if it's just a matter of a pronoun, but he does okay. 8:41 Wes: When it comes to inscrutability, despite the orientalism of that, it is true, right, that what it represents is a kind of unassimilated cultural pocket, or a partially assimilated cultural pocket. So something that is foreign even on home turf, something almost that's undigested, it's got a language that an investigator can't understand. It's hard to tell. Apparently what Jake means is it's hard to tell who's a criminal and who's not. And again, the reputation before the demolition was a kind of seedy red light district. And also it puts a policeman or an investigator in the position of almost being like a colonial occupying policeman, interestingly enough, on foreign ground. So as an investigator, you can't get plugged in to this in the same way. In a way, what an investigator is doing, it's partially social, right? So lieutenant homicide investigator for police department. Ideally, they're plugged into a community in some way so that people will talk to them or at least they have informants, right? They have the necessary relationships and there's even, you know, often some social connection to the. Whatever criminal element is there. So what someone doing that job in Chinatown faces is a culture that he basically can't navigate. So he's essentially flying blind as an investigator. It's hard to tell what's going on, as he puts it. The more interesting significance is the contrast between that and whatever crime is going on in this sort of immigrant neighborhood where there's essentially an underclass, right? You contrast that to the crime of the powers that be and of the founding fathers. This reminded me of the Godfather, where you have immigrants trying to make it in a new place. And in the Godfather, right. The idea is that the justice system as it stands can't do them justice, and so they invent their own. So there's organized crime, and I assume there's supposed to be organized crime in Chinatown that Jake found incomprehensible. The screenwriter Robert Towne actually called Chinatown the American nightmare, as opposed to the American dream. So the American dream. Right. Good intentions are supposed to get you everywhere. You work hard, you play by the rules, and you get ahead. A place like Chinatown, let's say, maybe puts the lie to that. And then there's the larger association to the fact that LA itself was kind of built upon this original sin of stealing water from the Owens Valley from ranchers. Basically, LA agents from LA pretended to be ranchers and farmers and purchased all the land and diverted the water. That really happened. That's not unusual. Right. So there's always this, like, for states, and there's this foundational violence at the origins of things. That's the way societies at some point in history got organized. And maybe it persists in some form. So the inevitable amount of corruption in the government and legal system. So that's what I wanted to put on the table, is just that contrast between crime within an immigrant community being policed by people like Jake, and then the corruptions of the powers that be, which he sort of inadvertently gets involved in investigating in the film. 12:11 Erin: It's occurring to me while you're talking the significance of Curly. I'm wondering about Curly's relationship with his wife and the fact that they seem to live in a nice neighborhood and have been relatively assimilated. It's one of the geniuses of the film that Curly returns to serve a purpose. 12:28 Wes: Mm. 12:29 Erin: You know, like in film noir, it might be typical to see a privatized office in action in the first act of the film, where you'd have, you know, someone coming in, maybe like a sample client before, you know, the main client comes in. And so we think that Curly is just a character set up to show us exactly what it is that Jake does and Jake's sort of manner with him. And so we think that it's pure exposition, I suppose. Though there are some great things in that opening scene that. 12:55 Wes: Yeah, don't eat the blinds. I just had them installed. 13:00 Erin: It's so good. You know, so there's a lot, of course, about sight in that first scene and other things that we can unpack a little bit later. But you don't really know anything about Curly and his background. And then when Jake goes to his house later and Curly serves that practical purpose and we see the wife with the black eye, it becomes obvious that Curly is Italian and that his wife is maybe not Italian. You know, she could be Italian, but she's blonde. And that I wonder now, in light of this conversation, if that interesting cultural difference. He drives up in a neighborhood which could be anywhere, right? It's obviously not in some kind of Little Italy or Chinatown or whatever, you know, it's more suburbanized. But then he walks in and it's like a multi generational household. And there's all this stuff going on in there, which makes it to me obvious that it's an Italian household. And also that his wife is potentially not Italian. And I'm wondering if that transgression, that adultery of the wife is somehow related to that ethnic difference. I feel like now there's something there. And it didn't occur to me until now. And I don't think I even said to myself out loud, oh, Curly must be Italian. I think it was just something that like was flickering in my subconscious as I, you know, as he walks into the house. It didn't, it didn't occur to me. So I really. This is really not even a half baked thought. I wonder about that and the connection with adultery in that relationship. 14:27 Wes: So it sounds like you're relating adultery to cultural difference. 14:31 Erin: I don't know, like no one gets married expecting their wife to commit adultery. It's not as though adultery is an accepted thing in any culture. But it seems as though this wife of Curly's is maybe out of place within this household and maybe even among her own children and her in laws who I think are also sitting around the t…

Full show notes at the publisher

Better and Bested in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Jan 16, 2023

Show notes

It’s a play full of contradictions, secrets, lies, and unspoken rules. It’s a play decidedly for adults, but about a child—an imaginary one, no less. It takes place on a college campus, but it is absent of students. And it’s about “fun and games” and “playing pretend,” but its games are harsh and shocking, and playing pretend involves vengeance and even murder. Wes & Erin discuss Mike Nichols’s 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, adapted from Edward Albee’s 1962 play, and ask what it has to say about the nature of game and play itself, as well as what might be generative on the one hand or contraceptive and inhibiting on the other about our relationships with our spouses, our parents, our children, and our work. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: It's a play full of contradictions, secrets, lies, and unspoken rules. It's a play decidedly for adults, but about a child, an imaginary one, no less. It takes place on a college campus, but it is absent of students. And it's about fun and games and playing pretend. But its games are harsh and shocking, and playing pretend involves vengeance and even murder. Today we're discussing Mike Nichols 1966 film, who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Adapted from Edward Albee's 1962 play, and asking what it has to say about the nature of game and play itself, as well as what might be generative on the one hand, or contraceptive and inhibiting on the other, about our relationships with our spouses, our parents, our children, and our work. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, as a way of getting started, I thought I would ask you, because I've been thinking about it, and I don't really have an answer, but I was wondering if you have an answer to the question, what is a game? What constitutes a game? 1:18 Wes: Hmm. It's a big question. 1:21 Erin: This is a really. I know it's a tough one. Obviously, enjoyment doesn't have a lot to do with it. 1:26 Wes: Can I define fun instead? Since it's fun and games? 1:30 Erin: Yeah, yeah, let's. Let's do fun first. 1:32 Wes: Let's do one of the words. I'm just kidding. 1:34 Erin: Oh, okay. 1:35 Wes: What is a game in this context? What is a game in general? It's funny because we're reading Wittgenstein from my other podcast. And so the idea of a game is something that's important to him, specifically the idea that language is a game. Certain rules, certain moves that you're allowed to make, and certain moves that you're not allowed to make. There's some sense in which it's moving away from the idea of just language, that, you know, it's playful and unhindered, but there's some sense in which it's guided by something, that there's stakes, that there's something to be lost in one, that there's such a thing as fair play. You know, I didn't actually give this a lot of thought in preparation, but I would say the one thing that occurs to me is supposedly there's a game or a set of games going on between Martha and George. And George thinks that by mentioning their imaginary child, Martha has violated the rules of the game, and so he's going to have to get her back, do what it seems in the end, it's more meant to be a cure. But anyway, what were you thinking with 2:39 Erin: regard to this in relation to your last point? I think, too, that she has violated the rules of their particular game, it seems. But then that kind of launches them into a different game. Or then it's like the wheels come off and they're playing a more vicious. They're taking the bumpers out of the gutter and playing just like raw bowling at that point. 2:58 Wes: Yeah, it seems no holds barred from the very beginning. Right. Where is the game in this? Where are the rules? 3:04 Erin: I'm wondering if that's a. I don't want to say a flaw metaphorically. I'm just kind of wondering if it's not quite as well defined as it could be in the text and in the film. I mean, I pretty much just watched the film because it basically is the play. I think that the play is a lot funnier than the film, or at least a bit funnier than the film. And this is something I read about in the very brief chapter in Mike Nichols biography by Mark Harris. I just quickly glanced at it this morning, and this is something that Mike Nichols, I guess, is on record saying that he decided to make the film less funny than the play adaptation. The play. They were getting like a big laugh every couple of minutes. And Nichols felt that because a film audience can't respond in the moment to laughter like that, that he would have to sort of drain it of some of the laughter and make it a more serious film. 3:55 Wes: I read the play as well after watching the film. So I had seen the film at least twice before, watching it again in preparation for the podcast. And those two times I was much younger and I was just mesmerized by it, by the wit, by the language, and my overall feeling was very positive. And then I saw it performed live once, and I think Kathleen Turner was playing Martha. 4:21 Erin: Oh, you saw that production. Okay. Yeah, I really wanted to see that when it was at the Long Wharf. 4:26 Wes: Yeah, I think that was in D.C. that I saw that. 4:29 Erin: Yeah, it was at the Long Wharf in New Haven for a brief stay. And it was in D.C. for a brief time. 4:34 Wes: Okay. 4:35 Erin: And I think it was in LA for a bit, too. But while it was in New Haven, I really wanted to see it and never got the chance. But I knew my cousin went to see it, said it was fantastic. 4:42 Wes: Yeah, it was really great. This time I was like, oh, my God, this is brutal. This is absolutely brutal. 4:50 Erin: Yeah, it's like a root canal of a film. It's an endurance test. 4:55 Wes: Remembered it that way. So I don't know what changed in me that it just. I still enjoyed it, of course, but it just was hard. Hard to watch. But one thing I will say is that I also read the play for the first time in preparation, just as. Instead of taking notes during the film or watching the film a second time and taking notes, I just read the play and took notes. And most of the play is in the film. I don't know how that works because the play apparently is three hours and the film is two hours and something. Maybe the film goes fast. I don't know how they fit most of the play into the film, but you can see how a lot of the lines in the play could be read in a softer way or in a way that's more tongue in cheek. Right. So that you could get a more playful relationship between Martha and George. And maybe that's the way stage productions generally go. So that could be it. It's hard to read the play after you've watched the film and not just hear Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor going at it in their specific way, which they do so well, but you can see how that softness might be introduced. But going back to your thing about the game and, you know, I think you were saying it's too. Maybe it's not well defined enough. The rules aren't well defined. 6:07 Erin: I think part of that is the genius of the play. It's the flexibility of the truth. Right. Just for my own part, I'll say that I read the play and saw the film in high school, and I think that was a very bad idea. I think I was much more concerned at 15 or 16 that this might be a relationship that was more common than, of course, than it actually is. 6:29 Wes: That's what the future holds. 6:30 Erin: Right. Right Now I realize how uncommon and crazy this is, and maybe we have lax divorce laws to thank for that. But anyway, of course, the Burtons were no strangers to those divorce laws. But anyway, yeah. I think watching it now, oddly enough, the thing that it reminded me of a lot this time around was Kiarostami's Certified Copy. I don't know if you've seen that film. 6:52 Wes: No. 6:53 Erin: Okay. It's with Juliette Binoche and a fabulous actor who's also an opera singer whose name escapes me right now. And I think that was his first film, too. But anyway, it's a very interesting film. And it's not anything like this in terms of tone, but it's A film about the relationship between these two people. And I don't want to spoil anything, but it's kind of not what you think it is. Or it sort of evolves or takes on different qualities over the course of the film. I really recommend this to our listeners. And I think. I don't know that other people have thought to make the connection between these two things. Or if it's just the fact that I really love Certified Copy. And it occurs to me right now, maybe there is more of a connection than I realize. But it's a film in which you think that these two people at the beginning are meeting for the first time. They just meet on screen, and you see them meet and then the relationship unfolds. But in fact, that may not be the case. And you're never quite sure about the nature of the relationship. And it goes in very strange directions and fascinating directions over the course of the film. And so I was just thinking about the ways in which Kiarostami might have had Virginia Woolf in mind and might have been indebted to that. What I'm trying to say is the fact that we don't quite know what game they're playing puts us, of course, in the position of. What is it? Nick and Honey. Even though we don't ever hear the name Nick in the play or. Sorry, in the film, in the play it's Nick. So it kind of puts us in their position right where we're kind of trying to figure this out as it's going along. I don't know how clear the rules of the game are to George and Martha themselves. And maybe the fact that we're not privy to that. It's not just putting us in the position of Nick and Honey, but it's also putting us in the position of being outsiders in their relationship, which is true, I think, of any relationship, that only the people in it knows how it functions. So I have two questions that arise from that, which is, is there a purgative element to game playing? And therefore, is the purgation that happens at the end or something like a purgation or catharsis? I think there's direct mention, at least in the sections of the play. Oh, exorcism, exorcism. So is there something purgative or is something exorcised at the end of the play? And can that coalesce with the idea of game playing? And can we say that there is a winner or a loser here? Because I was interested in that element of what you described. A game fundamentally as having, you know, winning and losing the stakes of the game. 9:12 Wes: The question of whether it's Purgative. You're reminding me of the time I was playing Settlers of Catan with my siblings and was getting taunted by one of them because there's a lot of trash talking when we play and it went too far and I stood up and I swept the pieces off the table, destroyed the game. So it can be purgative to dramatically end the game, which is a move that happens outside of the game. It was a move within Settlers of Catan that involves sweeping the pieces off the table. And so I think that for what's Purgative here, in the end, the two rules that we seem to know solidly as an audience are that it's not right for her to mention the imaginary child. And it's not actually, we know a few. It's not right for her to talk about the book thing. Whether that really happened to him or that's his fantasy is unclear. So we can talk about that later. But you can't talk about the imaginary child, you can't talk about the book, and then he's not allowed to kill the fantasy child. It would have to be a mutual decision. Unless the rule is that once she's crossed the line, he can legitimately cross the line. So you have me thinking about this question of Purgative now in terms of whether that. Does that happen in other sorts of games? Does that happen in the sorts of games that people play in relationships or just in social life in general, which are generally much less dramatic. Right. There's still self deception and illusion, but it's not like having an imaginary child or friend or something. Or does it always involve stepping out of the game and maybe into, so to speak, reality? Because there seems to be some association here between illusion and game playing. But anyway, as far as the rest of the rules go, it's really hard to figure out what the rules are because it shifts so much and their relationship is just all over the place, right? 11:05 Erin: Yeah. 11:06 Wes: One minute they're being nice, one minute they're being nasty. You don't know if they're being fake nice. You don't know if they're being fake nasty. All of it seems to be happening, but it's never clear when they're doing it. And it does all seem to be pre approved in a way or natural. Right. It just seems to be part of the course of things that they do this. So they're not surprising each other with their behavior very often. Even though it's surprising. 11:31 Erin: Yeah, to us. 11:32 Wes: So that's the purgative part. And then I think the other question. I'm not going to keep talking, but we can have this other question in mind as well as we go forward, 11:40 Erin: which was, is there a winner and is there a loser? 11:43 Wes: Right. Yeah. 11:44 Erin: You're making me think about a couple things. The idea that this is less a game and more something else. I don't know what, but perhaps a performance. Right. So you're making me think that they know the beats, they know the moves of the other person. It's kind of like an improvisation game, but with certain guardrails up. They seem to kind of generally know where the other person might go, but they're not sure at any particular moment which card they're going to draw. They each have, like, a set of. I'm really mixing my metaphors here, perhaps because it's really hard to define this, but they each seem to have a hand, you know, filled with, let's say, cards that have particular moves on them that they tend to make as individuals. And the other person doesn't necessarily know which card George or Martha is going to play at any given moment, but they kind of know what's in the other person's hand. So I'm wondering about the element of performance in that as well. And I'm also thinking maybe to just kind of set us up into a, you know, diving into the play here. I was thinking about this first moment quite a bit, the. What a dump. The Bette Davis impression. And I was thinking about that in relation to a game show. I don't play very many games. I'm not a game person. But oddly enough, I love certain game shows, especially classic game shows. And since I was a kid, I've loved watching what's My Line? And I, for some reason, have been on a. A little bit of a kick with that. And so for the past week or so that I've been home for Christmas break, I've been watching episodes of it with my family. And, well, I've kind of now gotten them hooked on it. And we've been watching, like, you know, maybe four or five episodes a night instead of watching a movie or something. So I've been thinking about. And…

Full show notes at the publisher

Pagan Poetics in “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens Dec 19, 2022

Show notes

Wallace Stevens was an ungainly insurance executive, but his poetry is serene and secularly reverential. In particular, his poem “Sunday Morning” seems to suggest that the rhythm of the natural world—if we give it enough rapt attention—is as good as any chant or prayer. But can a return to nature worship solve the problem of nihilism, once monotheism has been eclipsed by modernity? Are memory and desire as permanent heaven, and can the poet become their high priest? “Sunday Morning” is a poetic dialogue about these questions. And whether or not we’re satisfied with its conclusion that the world is nothing more than an “old chaos of the sun,” the poem itself is an orderly and beautiful form of communion. Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, MasterClass, where you can learn from the world’s best minds–anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. This holiday, give one annual membership and get one free by going to masterclass.com/subtext. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Wallace Stevens was an ungainly insurance executive, but his poetry is serene and secularly reverential. In particular, his poem Sunday Morning seems to suggest that the rhythm of the natural world, if we give it enough rapt attention, is as good as any chant or prayer. But can a return to nature worship solve the problem of nihilism? Once monotheism has been eclipsed by modernity, are memory and desire as permanent as heaven? And can the poet become their high priest? Sunday Morning is a poetic dialogue about these questions and whether or not we're satisfied with its conclusion, that the world is nothing more than an old chaos of the sun. The poem itself is an orderly and beautiful form of communion. This is Wes Alwan. 0:59 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. 1:04 Wes: So, Erin, to make ends meet, if you ended up getting a job, let's say as an insurance executive, maybe at the Hartford Accident Indemnity Company. It's a cool sounding name, right? 1:16 Erin: I had an internship there. 1:17 Wes: Are you serious? 1:19 Erin: No. 1:20 Wes: Oh, my God, how naive I am. All right, well, I guess it's within the realm of possibility. You are from Connecticut, but I was going to try to make a joke about being attentive to risk or something, but anyway, no. So if you get a lucrative job, let's say paying $350,000 a year in today's salary. Today's money. But then you also became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. I like the alliteration in that. Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Would you be tempted to quit your job or would you just, like Wallace Stevens, keep that job forever and ever? 1:57 Erin: I would keep the job because of my expensive interest in lifestyle. 2:06 Wes: Interest in money is stronger than my interest in poetry. 2:09 Erin: That's right. No, actually, realistically, I would 100% quit the job. I wouldn't be in a job like that in the first place. But it's kind of. Yeah, it's kind of amazing to think that he was maybe America's most practical. Certainly like the most practical modernist. Well, there was Williams, who was a doctor, but that's a lot different than being an insurance man. So I think that speaks to, like, the mystery at the heart of Steven's personality. I feel like I can't quite figure him out. I can't figure out the marriage. Certainly maybe I can, and I just don't want to figure it out like that. He was just like unhappy in his marriage and it was boring and he kind of didn't know what to do. Yeah, but, yeah, it's odd. 2:51 Wes: He's an interesting character because apparently he was very sto, too. So his boss once said, unless they told me he had a heart attack, I never would have known he had a heart. Ooh. So apparently he was quite a reserved person. Unless he was drinking, in which case he would get in fights with Frost and Hemingway. Once I actually got into a fist fight with Hemingway. These sorts of things happen while he's on vacation in Key West. But otherwise quite reserved. The kind of guy who composed poems on scraps of paper while walking to work. And then asked his secretary to type them up. He also turned down a. After he won the Pulitzer Prize, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard, which he turned down because it would have meant quitting that job. So the background that I got on him, I didn't ever get a firm. It must be somewhere, because he has journals and prose writings as well. I imagine somewhere he must have said why it is he kept the job. But you can kind of see it in his poetry. There's this sort of commitment to reality, maybe, let's say, and to the concrete. And he seems like the person who might have become unmoored without the day job, without being able to be locked down by that. Because there's also a very expansive quality to his poetry. And the tendency towards abstraction. And this weird balance between that expansive tendency and being anchored in sensuous detail and concrete detail. 4:24 Erin: I think that's really right. How I understand him is as a guy who just lived for his vacations. But, yeah, I think that tethering that you're describing is probably really apt. Michael Hofmann, the great poet critic who's one of my professors at University of Florida. He had, like, a really. Just an amazing character analysis of all of all the poets that we've read, of course, which, of course, is very much in evidence in his reviews. He's famously perceptive, but he thought of Stevens as being this, like, big, fat guy who loved life and loved. Like. Loved to eat and loved, you know, loved all those kinds of sensuous pleasures. So that makes him seem kind of jolly too. But there's, like, a dark side to that as well. But, yeah, you see that come out so much in Harmonium. And then you think, how could an insurance guy have written this? I don't know. It's crazy. 5:12 Wes: Yeah, exactly. So we should say for background. This was his first book, Harmonium, in which Sunday Morning appeared. It had appeared in Poetry, the journal poetry, in 1915, but didn't appear in a collection until 1923. And this is when Stevens was 44 years old. He had been writing poetry since he had been at Harvard and studied, I think, with William Carlos Williams. Is that right? No, studied with Santayana and apparently very influenced by Santayana's book, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. And then after he left Harvard, he was actually a writer in New York for a little while and then decided to do something practical. Went to law school and then ultimately got this job as an insurance executive, which he kept for the rest of his life. So, you know, I'm always fond of those late bloomer. It's not really Late bloomer story, but you'd always say, okay. He published his first book when he was 44 years old. So I guess he worked very consistently. And then he. Eventually he felt like he had enough to put together. The way he put it was he was picking a crisp salad from the garbage of the past. The way he put it to his editor when he put together Harmonium. 6:29 Erin: That's great. 6:31 Wes: There are a lot of great poems in that collection, including in the first publication, a pared down version of Sunday Morning with some stanzas missing and reordered by his editor, which is just, like, so shocking to think about. 6:44 Erin: I thought that was in Poetry. That was that Harriet Monroe. 6:48 Wes: You're right. 6:48 Erin: Yeah. 6:49 Wes: Wait. Yeah, the full thing appeared in Harmonium. Yeah. Sorry. Yes, that was the initial in Poetry. Right. Yeah. 6:55 Erin: Mm. 6:57 Wes: All right. So shall we get into Sunday Morning? 7:01 Erin: Let's do it. 7:02 Wes: We'll do our usual thing where we'll read a stanza and then talk about it. You want to start with the first one? 7:09 Erin: Sure. Sunday morning 1. Complacencies of the peignoir and late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair and the green freedom of a cockatoo upon a rug mingle to dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little and she feels the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe As a calm darkens among water lights. The pungent oranges and bright green wings seem things in some procession of the dead winding across wide water without sound. The day is like wide water without sound. Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet over the seas to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulcher. 7:53 Wes: Beautiful. My experience of his poetry is, and especially this poem is immersively beautiful. What's your overall? 8:02 Erin: Yeah, it's beautiful. And it sometimes sort of resists being pinned down, like there is a lot of abstraction, like you say, you know, it's not rhymed, but it still reminds me, like, so much of this poem, of course, is probably heavily influenced by Keats. And so these sections, I noticed that they have 15 lines in them. They're like a sonnet plus, you know, sonnet plus one line, which is really nice. And then that puts me in mind of Keats's To Autumn, in which I think we talked about this. He sort of has that, like, overstuffed sonnet in each one of the stanzas of that poem. And yet. 8:35 Wes: And the ending, sorry, will sound like a direct variation to Autumn. 8:38 Erin: Right, right, right. 8:40 Wes: Stanza with the poem. 8:41 Erin: Yeah. With the birds. Yeah. Yeah. But there's still, at the same time, like, it's not, I don't know, firecrackery to me, as some of Keats. Like, there's a placid. 8:50 Wes: Oh, yeah. 8:50 Erin: You know, and a dreaminess, which I think is fitting for the subject. This opens with just a woman sitting in a chair, and she's sort of chillaxing on a Sunday morning, and her mind wanders and we sort of wander with her. There's a feeling of calm and it's troubled, like wind on the water at certain points, but very smooth kind of sound. 9:14 Wes: Just the first word. I really love. If you could say, well, what are the great first words of poems as opposed to the great first lines of poems? This has got to be one of them. So complacency, in the plural and whatever satisfactions are associated with sleeping in late and being lazy on a Sunday. And in this case, of course, not going to church, which is very significant. Relaxing in the sun. And there's kind of a hint of class and luxury with the peignoir and leisure. But there's also, in the word complacency, there's another connotation which is just that there's some sort of impending danger. Right. If you get too complacent, you might get. What's the word you might get? Smacked. I don't know. You might be surprised by something. Yeah. 10:00 Erin: That's really nice. And also the kind of. I think it combines so many senses, because also in complacency, there's a sense of, like you say, the negative sense that something might creep up on you, but also a smugness or a kind of self satisfaction. And the whole poem is about trying to take satisfaction from just the self or from just the qualities that are being offered right here in this opening image and to fashion some kind of existence out of that or some kind of higher order, which is a troubling project. 10:35 Wes: Yeah. 10:36 Erin: Causes a lot of hedging. 10:38 Wes: Yeah. I mean, we can Say if we want where we're headed, the poem will tell you explicitly too. It's not a matter of interpretation, but we're headed towards the attempt to establish a post Christian neo pagan religion to find some sense of meaning in the wake of that. The other thing that really draws me into the poem are the very charming rendition of coffee and oranges and the cockatoo. The green freedom of the cockatoo where I think of. In light of thoughts about religion and sin and knowledge of good and evil. There's a connotation of naivete to the greenness and freedom associated with naivety. Right. Pre lapsarian, pre self consciousness in animals. And the image I have is of the cockatoo having its wings out but walking, which is an interesting image because it's a bird that's been uncaged and there's freedom in that. But it's not using its full freedom. It's not flying. It's not exerting itself. It's sort of stumbling around in a comic way. At least that's the way I. Way I've always imagined it. 11:38 Erin: That's nice. I really like that. Yeah, that's the way I've imagined it too. But I never thought about the idea of extended wings because you want to get that nice swath of green. So the wings would have to be a bit extended. That's nice. 11:50 Wes: You know. And then we wonder about her freedom in relation to that. Right. There's a freedom to this level of leisure and satisfaction, the complacencies. But then isn't there. What kind of freedom? Is she uncaged? Isn't she? So. 12:03 Erin: Yeah. And these colors, you know, the oranges in the sun are orange and the lighter orange maybe are yellow and the brown of the coffee and the green of the cockatoo. She's thinking she's not free of this compulsion maybe to think of herself as doing something wrong here by not going to church. And they all dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice. Do cockatoos make noises? I mean, they must like chirp and stuff like that. But they're not like parrots. 12:28 Wes: I was thinking about the same thing. Because the dissipation of the hush implies noise. Although I think it's visual noise and probably auditory noise as well. 12:37 Erin: Yeah. And it's sort of backwards. It's interesting. This florid color scheme is sort of matched by some kind of sound. Or maybe they're just really loud colors. Right. And what are they dissipating but silence. It's an interesting Usually silence is what dissipates in noise, but not the other way around. 12:53 Wes: Right? 12:54 Erin: Yeah. So there's something happy and exuberant about the image, erasing the sort of dour silence maybe. 13:02 Wes: Right. The hush involved in holiness. And of course, the ancient sacrifice, meaning Christ's crucifixion. Right. Mm. 13:12 Erin: It's as if the poem is narrating her a little bit, maybe. I mean, it's describing her, but also we get this holy hush of ancient sacrifice. And then, oh, she dreams a little and she feels the dark encroachment. 13:23 Wes: Right. 13:23 Erin: It's as if the poem has kind of punctured this or the scene, or maybe she has remembered it, been called back to what morning it is. And then she gets this flood of realization. Right. Oh, I'm not at church and now this old catastrophe is encroaching upon me. And so the old catastrophe is itself also the. The crucifixion. 13:45 Wes: Again, this sort of reminds me of Freud's there's no no in the unconscious. So she's thinking in a self satisfied way about how she doesn't need to be at church and this is all she needs. 13:56 Erin: Right, Right. 13:57 Wes: She's thinking about how she should be at a church and she's feeling guilty. 14:01 Erin: But yeah. And there's a kind of. I mean, there's so much doubling in this poem. But here already we get ancient sacrifice and old catastrophe. It's like it comes back around, you know, we're dissipating the ancient sacrifice. But yeah, like you say, we get it as a kind of a negative construction, like we're not thinking about this. And then again it…

Full show notes at the publisher

Production for Use in “His Girl Friday” Nov 21, 2022

Show notes

Before she settles down to life of homemaking, security, and insurance policies with Bruce Baldwin in Albany, star reporter Hildy Johnson has one more story to write for her ex-husband and ex-boss Walter Burns, editor of the Morning Post. Hildy must write up an interview with convicted killer Earl Williams that will grant him a last-minute reprieve on the basis of insanity. The ingenious angle she finds to prove he’s insane: Earl listened to so many soapbox speeches in the park about the socialist concept of “production for use” that when a gun was placed into his hands, he had to shoot it. Howard Hawks’s 1940 film “His Girl Friday” knits together two plots from two very different genres. One is a romantic comedy that intends to reunite its main couple in something like wedded bliss. The other is a dark drama of murder and corruption, complete with a gallows lurking just outside the window and a suicide attempt that takes place on screen. Yet Earl Williams and Hildy Johnson’s fates in their respective plots are twinned. Both are, in a sense, looking for their own reprieves. And Hildy has her own production-for-use dilemma. What was she made for—the life of a newspaperman, or the life of a housewife? To what kinds of production should we devote our own lives? What are we made for—risk and adventure or security and insurance? Wes & Erin discuss. Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, MasterClass, where you can learn from the world’s best minds–anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. This holiday, give one annual membership and get one free by going to masterclass.com/subtext. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: Before she settles down to a life of homemaking, security and insurance policies with Bruce Baldwin in Albany, star reporter Hildy Johnson has one more story to write for her ex husband and ex boss, Walter Burns, editor of the Morning Post. Hildy must write up an interview with convicted killer Earl Williams that will grant him a last minute reprieve on the basis of insanity. The ingenious angle she finds to prove he's insane. Earl listened to so many soapbox speeches in the park about the socialist concept of production for use that when a gun was placed into his hands, he had to shoot it. Howard Hawks's 1940 film His Girl Friday knits together two plots from two very different genres. One is a romantic comedy that intends to reunite its main couple in something like wedded bliss. The other is a dark drama of murder and corruption, complete with a gallows lurking just outside the window and a suicide attempt that takes place on screen. Yet Earl Williams and Hildy Johnson's fates in their respective plots are twinned. Both are, in a sense, looking for their own reprieves. And Hildy has her own production for use dilemma. What was she made for? The life of a newspaper man or the life of a housewife? To what kinds of production should we devote our own lives? What are we made for risk and adventure or security and insurance? These are the topics for today's discussion. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, I've been dying to talk about this film with you for a long time, partially because it's one of my top two favorite movies of all time, but also because I'm really curious to hear what you have to say about the sort of philosophy of the film and particularly this idea of production for use that the whole film to me seems to hinge on. Have you read a lot of Marxist ideas about production for use, or have you heard a lot of soapbox speeches in the park when you were wandering around at night during the Depression or 2:20 Wes: something like that before I tried to murder someone. 2:22 Erin: Right. 2:23 Wes: Well, I went to school where they make us read significant parts of Das Kapital. And then I kind of wrote my master's thesis in grad school on Marx and Nietzsche. So I'm supposed to know something about Marx. 2:39 Erin: You're kidding. But more on I knew Nietzsche, but I didn't know Marx was in the middle. 2:44 Wes: Yeah, my conception of ideology, so very focused, actually. And then we've also done for the Partially Examined Life, we've done some Marx. So I can't claim to be an expert on the economic side of things, actually. But I was glad in your introduction that you featured production for use. Because this is one of the things that I looked up and thought about and tried to make sense of in relation to the film, what it's doing thematically. 3:09 Erin: Well, please explain it to me, because my 50 or 60 or 70 times of watching this film, it's still kind of opaque. And I'm guessing that they're making very liberal use of the phrase production for use. That is not being used in a traditional Marxist or a strict Marxist sense. 3:25 Wes: It's pretty foundational to communism. The idea that is, instead of accumulating capital, instead of producing things for profit, they are produced directly in proportion to social need. If any listeners want to email us and correct me on any of this, go ahead. But so that, for instance, instead of having. Developing a surplus, going through economic cycles of boom and bust, right? There's too much supply or where there's too little supply. And maybe when there's too much supply, there's not demand for it, even though there are people who are in need because they simply can't afford it. Now, supposedly market forces, right, are supposed to adjust the pricing until it does become affordable. But anyway, the idea, I think it has something to do with the production of things in a capitalist society. It's not in proportion to what's actually necessary. It's more about producing profit and capital accumulation for capitalists. So the idea in the film is that Earl hears something about this and this was kind of an idea, I think, that was talked about by Eugene Debs, for instance. It's this kind of idea that you would hear about at the time in speeches. And so the idea is that Earl, and this is the idea that Hildy invents for him, that he's listened to a speech about production for use, someone on a soapbox in the park trying to convert people to socialism or communism and has had the idea that this means that if there's a gun, it's gotta be used, right? It's gotta be put to use. And so that's what he does when he realizes the analogy is, I can't keep bullets in the chamber and leave the gun unused. Maybe in the same way that it can't accumulate capital or store something up. Everything's gotta be expended relative to the moment, the concerns of the moment. So it's a really interesting parallel to draw because I Think, you know, as we talk. You already brought up in your introduction what it might mean socially. Right. For their relationship. 5:21 Erin: I'm just thinking, too, about the fact that Hildy, in the snippet of that interview, write up that the other reporters in the press room read aloud once she sort of vacated the typewriter for a while. Also draws the parallel to the Gallows. So the funny thing about Earl Williams reprieve is that it's subverting the Gallows own production for use, as defined by Hildy's interview. So she says something like, you know, the Gallows too, has its own production for use, and tomorrow morning, Earl Williams is set to be hanged. Which is a kind of a funny idea that seems like somehow related to almost a subversion of what you're talking about with the gun and its relationship to this idea of, like, bullets and capital. Like, the gun seems to be an item that's like, almost accidentally snuffs out in the expenditure of the bullets and sort of like keeping things moving through the market, if you will. Whereas the Gallows is like a total dead end and something that both Hildy and Earl Williams have their own respective gallows that they're trying to escape from. It's an odd comparison to draw, I think, because it seems to me to be like the end of production for use. You know, maybe the Gallows is like the most capitalistic structure in the film. 6:27 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. At that point, they're reading from her unfinished interview and this is worth quoting, and she's straight up lying. It's worth. 6:36 Erin: Yeah, for sure. 6:37 Wes: It's worth reminding yourselves of that. It's completely fabricated the story. But she's also tainted Earl to believe that it's his story. 6:45 Erin: But the very fact that he accepts this story also, though, kind of proves that he's insane, which proves the basis of her argument. So she is being honest in a deceitful way. 6:56 Wes: Right. And so into this little tortured mind came the idea that the gun had been produced for use, and use it he did. But the state has a production for use plan, too. It has a gallows. And at 7am Unless a miracle occurs that Gallows will be used to separate the soul of Earl Williams from his body, and out of Molly Malloy's life will go the one kindly soul she ever knew. This is kind of almost like a structural or systemic idea at this point, like, you know, reversing the causality. It's like we need Gallows because we have to have deterrence for capital crimes. Right. And we had A way to deal with criminals. But the idea is that if we make the gallows, inevitably they'll be used. Making them as part of creating the social environment in which they would have to be used. Or maybe we'll find people to use them on whether they're guilty or not. You know, that kind of idea, that the making of it somehow mandates the use of it, which is the idea that Earl had about his gun, which is. Which is not quite what production for use means for socialism. It's the perversion of that. So the underlying idea seems to have to do with. It's about whether we can keep things in reserve. So whether. If you have a gun, can you keep that power in reserve? Or does it need to be used as quickly as possible or something like that? Can you hold on to some kind of awful or violent power like that and have it truly wait until it's ready to be used? Or is it naturally going to be premature? Is its use naturally going to be premature or naturally going to be unjust? So there are perils to the accumulation of power, violent power, including the power of the state, which is founded on violent power. The ability to arrest people and imprison them and execute them. Power corrupts. Or will it naturally be to its unjust use? Or can it be accumulated and kept in reserve for the times when it is actually necessary? And so I think the same thing with capital, right? That the idea is that there's something, I think the capitalists would argue capital accumulation is a good thing. It helps create businesses and you hire employees and so on. But the counterargument is that it will necessarily create class divisions and unjust conditions. So the only way to prevent that. You can see how the parallel is kind of breaking down. But anyway, sure, but the way to prevent that is to prevent that accumulation of power or capital or whatever in the first place. To have the creation or the production and the use more tightly wedded to each other. So that there's just. Hey, when the occasion arises when I need something, it's supplied for me. And it's not building up in quantities that will allow exploitation to occur by the people who control those quantities or the people who have the power. 9:52 Erin: It's really interesting. The way that this relates to Hildy is purely on the basis of a kind of word association then, but not necessarily anything having to do with the logic behind this. But maybe the softest version of this concept is sort of like nothing should go to waste regardless of this sort of like power being stored up or Whatever. So insofar as it applies to Hildy, it's like having to do with the fact that her journalistic power is too great and not that it's going to be stored up in some. I mean, maybe it will be. And then she'll sort of like explode in newsprint all over Bruce after a few years in Albany. But just the idea that this is something that should be actively used, it shouldn't go to waste. This muscle shouldn't atrophy. It's something too precious or important, but not in a scary sort of punitive way, though it could be put to that use as well, I suppose. 10:41 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. And that's one of a number of layers to this. I think there's a positive case being made here for some sort of social version of production for use. And the way I see that is that what goes on for us socially. I'm thinking of production for use as a way of describing their banter. There's a kind of openness there, right. So they don't stir up their feelings and hide them and engage in romantic niceties and. Or even any sort of normal social politeness. Right. Their banter. And this is like Much Ado about Nothing. Their banter puts them in place of having certain emotions and then immediately discharging those in a certain way. Which is not to say that they're honest with each other, because there's all sorts of, on another level, deception going on. But they kind of know from the beginning of the film where things stand, right? He's made it clear that he wants her back and maybe that's her is tongue in cheek. He wants her to marry him again. Or does he want her back for the paper or does he want her back for themself? There are all sorts of questions, but their ongoing irritation with each other, right, all of that, in a way they wear on their sleeves. So that, to me, is production for use, as opposed to the other model is to keep secrets, to repress, to not be as forthcoming about one's feelings, which is pretty typical socially. Right. We engage in a lot of social deception and at the political level, that's happening with the governor and the mayor. And all the political machinations involve a similar thing at a political level, which is hiding information, keeping things hidden. And the press is supposed to undo that. They're trying to expose people. That's another production for use example. Instead of letting information capital accrue in secret to the benefit of the people who are in power, you expose it, you get the information out, you get it flowing, you get it into the social bloodstream, so to speak. 12:32 Erin: I love that idea. That's genius. 12:34 Wes: Thanks. That's why I do this podcast. Get your compliments. 12:40 Erin: That's fantastic. Well, no, but you're. I mean, sorry, you probably. 12:45 Wes: No, no, no, go ahead. 12:46 Erin: You know, in regards to the romantic element of this, you're exposing a kind of difference for me between the nature of this relationship and the one that we covered in the Awful Truth with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, where there's a lot of secrecy and, you know, and part of this exorcism of that remarriage plot is to have a kind of a new sense of openness and honesty with each other. And I think that this is related to a kind of class difference probably. Right. Like Grant and Dunne in that film are high society. And there's more feigning, there's more sort of like natural deception in polite ways of interacting with one another that Walter and Hildy can completely do without beca…

Full show notes at the publisher

Post-Doctoral Bedevilment in Christopher Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus” Oct 24, 2022

Show notes

Dr. Faustus expected more from his education. After a lifetime of study, his professional options—philosophy, medicine, law, and theology—all seem disappointingly ordinary. He is of course not the first to have this experience. At a societal level, the promise of knowledge is power, especially once it has become technology. At an individual level, what education seems to make us is an insignificant part of a formidable machine. For Faustus, the only way to make book learning great again is to extend it to the domain of black magic. And yet all this seems to earn him is an all-expenses-paid European vacation—notwithstanding the perk of having Mephistopheles as tour guide—to be followed by eternal damnation. What’s the point of selling your soul to the devil? How do we avoid subordinating our own search for meaning to the desire for power? Wes & Erin discuss Christopher Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Doctor Faustus expected more from his education. After a lifetime of study, his professional options, philosophy, medicine, law and theology. All seemed disappointingly ordinary. He is, of course, not the first to have this experience. At a societal level, the promise of knowledge is power. Especially once it has become technology. At an individual level, what education seems to make us is an insignificant part of a formidable machine. For Faustus, the only way to make book learning great again is to extend it to the domain of black magic. And yet, all this seems to earn him is an all expenses paid European vacation. Notwithstanding the perk of having Mephistopheles as tour guide to be followed by eternal damnation. What's the point of selling your soul to the devil? How do we avoid subordinating our own search for meaning to the desire for power? This is Wes Alwan. 1:03 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh. 1:04 Wes: And you're listening to Subtext. Okay, Erin, we're back. 1:11 Erin: We are back. 1:12 Wes: It's been a summer hiatus. Now we're ready to get going again. 1:17 Erin: It was hard to drag myself from the pool and talk about this. 1:21 Wes: That's right. It's been all shits and giggles all summer long. But, yeah, we were gonna do His Girl Friday. And then we started talking about Marlowe's Faustus. Because you were taking a course on it for school, and you really. I don't know if you loved Marlow in particular or that it was just the teacher. 1:43 Erin: I'm still in the middle of this class, so I feel like this is a sort of clandestine operation. Which is actually befitting of Marlowe. But the class is great. It's this Renaissance drama class. We're just focusing on Marlowe and Jonson. I did Dr. Faustus. I was really intrigued by it. And unfortunately, we had to move on in the class. So I thought this was a way to kind of prolong my ecstasy. The 24 years that I'm planning to devote to Dr. Faustus. So his Girl Friday will have to wait. But of course I will. I love His Girl Friday. 2:15 Wes: Well, it's important to have, I think, Dr. Faustus under our belt before we move on to His Girl Friday. 2:20 Erin: It actually probably is foundational. 2:23 Wes: Yeah. But it's funny. So, Marlow, I knew little about him, except that maybe the spying stuff. And also that he got stabbed in the eye. Right. He apparently tried to stab someone. He got stabbed with his own knife in his eye in a bar fight. And that wasn't the first bar fight he had been in. I think there was a Warrant out for his arrest at the time for being in a bar fight. And he was also known for being. He'd been accused of being a atheist and a blasphemer. The other thing I knew is that I, you know, I just glanced at the play and thought, well, why read Marlow when you could read Shakespeare? And just in the past, when I've looked at passages from the play, I wasn't that excited by it. And this time around, reading it, by comparison to Shakespeare and all the wordplay and what goes on in Shakespeare, it's definitely less exciting. And then I watched the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor performance, which is silly in many ways, but it's also quite gripping. Then little snippets of other performances, and then reread it while taking notes and then just reading passages to myself. I developed a much greater appreciation of Marlowe's talent doing all of that. 3:31 Erin: The class that I'm in is not very well populated, to say the least. And this professor that we're taking from is normally known for being, you know, the Shakespeare guy. So I think there was some disappointment when the course listing was released and he was focusing on Marlowe and Jonson. And I was kind of delighted by that. Not because I don't love Shakespeare, and not because there isn't so much in Shakespeare that still, of course, escapes me, that, you know, whole plays that I haven't read, obviously, or just the fact that there are just incredible riches there, even within the things that I had read. But I had this attitude like, you know what? This is great. As an opera lover, you go to the opera, and if they're doing La Bohème for the 120th time, you kind of want to shoot yourself. You know, I would rather see something different every once in a while. And so that was kind of the attitude I had going in. And then the first day of classes really intrigued me when the professor said something like, with Shakespeare, we get these problems of attribution because, you know, everyone's always trying to prove that somebody else really wrote certain plays because of the fact that Shakespeare has this incredibly kind of negative capability, which we've talked about in other episodes on Shakespeare plays, in which he sort of contains dozens of people inside of him. So the professor said, you know, Marlowe and Jonson, no one could ever mistake them for each other or any other playwright for their style. They're so particular in their style. And that, I think, just was really intriguing to me to read a playwright who is so himself from the same era, sort of like anti Shakespeare. It's something that's interesting to me right now in thinking about my own work. And what makes a style and what makes somebody individualistic and recognizable immediately. What makes someone even easily subject to parody? It's a concept that I'm interested in on a lot of different levels. 5:17 Wes: Or self parody. 5:19 Erin: Exactly. 5:20 Wes: Which is what I run up against frequently. 5:24 Erin: No, self parody is really revealing, I think. One's ability to do self parody, I think it's very rare. 5:29 Wes: Yeah. It's the unintentional self parody that I'm good at. So Marlowe has a particular, identifiable style. Is that the idea? Because he seems very vanilla to me. 5:41 Erin: Yeah. He has, I think, a set of subjects, maybe. I mean, this would be a conversation that would encompass more plays than Faustus and also probably more than I've read yet. I'm still in the thicket of the Marlowe section of this course, and so I'm still kind of trying to piece everything together. But Marlowe is the way that I've been led to understand him. He's someone who just doesn't give a crap about anything or anyone. He's out to get you. He will destroy you. The plays kind of destroy everything in their path. We read his play Tamburlaine. Basically, the plot is that Tamburlaine is this great conqueror. He comes into a kingdom and he's like, I'm gonna beat you. And the guy's like, no, I'm gonna beat you. I'm better than you. And then Tamburlaine just, like, whoops their ass and then moves on to the next place. And the same thing is repeated over and over and over again until he's just conquered, like, the entire world. Like, the trajectory of the play is just climax after climax after climax. And Tamburlaine as a figure is this kind of evil but sexy destroyer who you kind of, like, want to see just, like, stomp on the little Lego set that somebody has painstakingly erected and just like, bam, step all over it. And so the fact that he's this incredibly magnetic hero, but at the same time, you know, whether he's killing Muslims or Christians over the course of the play, the allegiances of an English, Elizabethan era audience would have been really turned upside down and over and over again watching something like that. That's kind of how I see it. Like, he's destroying theater as he is writing these plays. He's destroying our expectations of theater. He's destroying almost like a narrative arc of theater. He's destroyed. He's destroying And Faustus, destroying the concept of the morality play, which was sort of the chief play up until the Renaissance era, that was the chief genre. So I just finished reading the Jew of Malta and I still have a bit more to go with Marlowe, but that doesn't speak much to style, but it does to kind of an overarching vision of what Marlowe is doing. 7:47 Wes: And the morality play, I think it started out as the portrayal of biblical stories and then it developed into their characters representing, say, virtues and vices. And there's a less to be learned 8:01 Erin: from the play, really the beginning of theater in England. They're didactic, they're allegorical. So the whole point is the battle to save the soul. I think the term in class that was used was the psychomachia. Just like soul battle. Right. So really, really obvious, very silly character names. I think the most popular play or the origin of them all was Everyman. I think the character's name was Everyman. Right. And there are like characters like knowledge and good works and all that kind of thing. And I think that where that morality play got kind of turned inside out a little bit already is with the rise of Protestantism and specifically Calvinism, where this is like your chief form of entertainment. But then you have to kind of ask yourself, okay, who are these morality plays for at this point, when we no longer have this battle for the soul that's inherent in other denominations of Christianity, but within Calvinism, you know, you have either you're divinely elect and you're going to heaven no matter what. Right. Or you're a reprobate and you're going to hell. What's the point of these morality plays except as a kind of like self torture for the person watching it, wondering whether or not they're picking up on. They've been given, you know, as a member of the elect, the divine insight to pick up on the incredibly obvious allegory within the play and therefore sort of confirm their own sense that they are in fact a member of the elect. Or I don't know. I mean, it can't possibly convert a reprobate because they're a reprobate. 9:36 Wes: For partially examined life, we just read Erasmus and recorded on Erasmus. So his Praise of Folly was published in 1511 and he had a bit of a public fight with Luther over the concept of free will and Luther who? You've probably read some Luther, right? 9:53 Erin: Oh, yes, and Erasmus actually. 9:55 Wes: Okay. And Erasmus is great. So he's a Catholic who wants to reform the church from within. And he's much more humble and good natured and rhetorical and bent than Luther. And Luther is just a insane radical. So they had a. You're speaking my language about free will. And I looked at both of them and I'm like, oh my God. And you know, Erasmus is trying to be nice and Luther is like, you know, screw you. Very contemptuous, very arrogant. But what I was going to say about that is, you know, I got a sense of, you know, the debate over free will. Protestantism, I think. So for Lutheran, this leads into Calvinism. But the idea is that there's no free will and getting into heaven is not a matter of good works, it's a matter of faith. So religion becomes less about or not, maybe not at all about perfectibility and self improvement and one's virtues. It becomes about something else. And Erasmus is much more on the. In a way, there's a pagan strand to it. Right. Because there's a virtue ethics involved, but also it's sort of a more moderate version of Catholicism. Right. So pare down the excesses, the things that had been happening that, you know, it wasn't just Luther who was critical of them, but you know, with indulgences and this whole game of what you're going to do to save yourself or your loved ones from hell. 11:14 Erin: Oh, absolutely, yeah. It's sort of like weeding the materialistic garden, I would call it. This reliance on the material had really gotten out of hand with, you know, famous things like indulgences and blah, blah, blah. You know, indulgences exist, like that's still a concept within the Catholic Church, but you can't pay for them anymore. It's still an interesting. And you know, I mean, depending on your belief system, if you're a Catholic, it's an incredibly useful concept. And I don't mean to say that 11:39 Wes: flippantly, but this is more like the organized crime version. You know, it'd be a shame if something happened to your soul. Right, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna need 10% every month. But yeah, right. 11:52 Erin: With the unchecked power of the church and the sort of growing, the level to which these had become excesses and needed reform, which, as you suggest, you know, Erasmus and others. There was a movement in the church called the Counter Reformation which refuted the Reformation theology and also cleaned house from within, you know, because this was a problem that Catholics of course too recognized. At least Catholics of goodwill recognized that this had become a problem. But this reliance upon the material, right, like sacraments, just A general sort of mediation between you and the divine, which is very important to Catholicism on a certain level, became very upsetting for Protestants. They wanted to mark their division with Catholicism with a total lack of dependence on anything like, you know, the material or any kind of mediation. And so it included doing good works. Basically the idea that anything could get you to heaven of your own will. Or even just. Catholics don't believe this either. They don't believe that your own will can get you into heaven necessarily, but that rather you're working with God, you're accepting God's grace in order to perform goodwill. So it's not like you can, through your own might and strength, climb your way up the ladder to heaven. It's obviously in cooperation with God's grace that any good can be done. This is pretty standard Christian idea. 13:09 Wes: What are you thinking of? The word synergy? 13:12 Erin: Yes, synergy. 13:13 Wes: Right. 13:14 Erin: In synergy with God. Yes. 13:17 Wes: We can leverage the trying to think of what the corporate speak would be 13:21 Erin: the ad-language of how to sell thee. What I'm getting at is just this idea that within Calvinism you can't do anything good. You're either saved or you're not. And the process of discovering whether or not you're saved is through this really deep and intense, constant and very punishing self analysis and textual analysis of the Bible. Like if you can read the Bible properly, it's because God's given you the grace to rea…

Full show notes at the publisher

Fate and Blame in “Long Day’s Journey into Night” Sep 26, 2022

Show notes

Who is to blame for Mary Tyrone’s morphine addiction? Is it Mary herself? Is it Edmund, her younger son, after whose difficult birth Mary was first prescribed the drug? Is it Jamie, her older son, who caused the death of the brother that Edmund was born to replace? Is it the doctor who prescribed morphine too readily? Or is it James, Mary’s husband, who hired a third-rate doctor because he was too cheap to pay for his wife’s proper care? James, in turn, will have his own story to tell of familial suffering and a miserliness acquired from a childhood fear of the poorhouse. To ask who is to blame for Mary’s addiction, or for the alcoholism that seems to plague every other Tyrone, is to ask who or what is responsible for our own suffering. Are our woes self-created—or at least self-perpetuated? Or is suffering something visited upon us by caregivers, the legacies of nature or nurture that we are powerless to control? If so, whom do we have the right to accuse? Wes & Erin discuss. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: Who is to blame for Mary Tyrone's morphine addiction? Is it Mary herself? Is it Edmund, her younger son, after whose difficult birth Mary was first prescribed the drug? Is it Jamie, her older son, who caused the death of the brother that Edmund was born to replace? Is it the doctor who prescribed morphine all too readily? Or is it James, Mary's husband, who hired a third rate doctor because he was too cheap to pay for his wife's proper care? James, in turn will have his own story to tell of familial suffering and a miserliness acquired from a childhood fear of the poorhouse. To ask who is to blame for Mary's addiction or for the alcoholism that seems to plague every other Tyrone, is to ask who or what is responsible for our own suffering? Are our woes self created or at least self perpetuated? Or is suffering something visited upon us by character caregivers? The legacies of nature or nurture that we're powerless to control? If so, whom do we have the right to accuse? Today we're discussing Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, in one of the several editions that I own of this play, it turns out Harold Bloom wrote the intro in one of them. Bloom kind of surprises me in his assessment of the play, which he thinks is the greatest American play, but only kind of by default. There's a little reluctance. He says, okay, so if Eugene o' Neill is our greatest American playwright and this is his best play, then, well, I guess this is America's greatest play. And he seems to think that the power of the play lies in the stage directions, in the bits of business that o' Neill really writes quite a bit of in between the lines of dialogue. So I guess I'd kind of extrapolate from Bloom's point to say that maybe there are very few if any memorable single lines of dialogue in the play, which is sort of surprising. It's not like maybe Streetcar to use another play that we've talked about on the podcast, which has a couple of those really memorable moments, at least that the movie has made famous. So I guess I just kind of wonder if you agree with that, if you think that this is America's greatest play by default, and where you think what is great about this play if the lines aren't particularly memorable. 2:47 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting you say that. I had that thought that it's Very unplay, like dialogue in a way. Even though the speeches are often quite long. There's honestly not that much poetry to it, I guess, is the way to put it. Even though Eugene o', Neill, he was a poet and like Edmund, the play, I'm sure, as people know, is highly autobiographical. And many of the names have not been changed, although he's switched his name and made himself Edmund in the play and made the dead brother Eugene. And of course, this wasn't supposed to be published or performed. It wasn't supposed to be performed at all. Right. It wasn't supposed to be published until 25 years after his death, which his wife did not honor that request. So I honestly had trouble enjoying this, let's just put it that way, which surprised me. And I haven't read this since high school and all I remembered from high school is that there were people drinking in the play. It's just like, all right, there's going to be people drinking. So this surprised me. Nothing resonated from my memory. And as I read it, I just kind of felt sucked down into the quagmire of misery. And there's not much that's pleasurable to kind of redeem that you're just kind of stuck with these people and these very plain speeches. There are some impassioned, just a few, just a handful of impassioned, touching speeches in this, but a lot of it is just bickering. And it took me, it was a slog for me to get through it. 4:34 Erin: In all honesty, I felt that way too. I also hadn't read it since high school either, and I remember being ecstatic about it in high school, which I don't know what to attribute that to at this point. Maybe because it seemed like such a grown up play and I was probably about 14 when I read it. I think that the, you know, the strange thing about the lack of memorable dialogue too, is the fact that so much of the dialogue is repeated. So you would think that some lines would kind of, you know, raise their heads above the parapet and be memorable for that reason, because so many of the accusations are sort of traded or someone will say something that later, another character, it'll come out of their mouth. And yet I think maybe it's because it's also sort of plain spoken that even those repeated like, you recognize them, oh, someone said that before, but after the play's over, you can't say, oh, that's, you know, I remember that line. And so I think that ultimately the effect is, is just extremely cumulative. So the power of the play maybe comes in that sort of snowball result where at the end we feel weighed down and we feel like the powerlessness of the family to change and all that stuff. So I think that's part of it, too. Is that the slog of it, which is very purposeful, or must be. It doesn't really reward you until maybe the very. And then it's a funny kind of reward. Did you watch any adaptations of this? 6:02 Wes: I watched a little bit of the Katharine Hepburn, and I watched half of a Canadian 1996. It's the one I liked the best, by Wellington. 6:14 Erin: Oh, I knew you were gonna say that. That one bored me to tears. I had to turn it off. 6:18 Wes: I just thought it was the best in terms of acting. But I also. Yeah, it wasn't captivating, but neither was the written play. And I did watch bits of the Katharine Hepburn. And maybe if I had just let myself get into the Katharine Hepburn, it would have been more engaging if I'd given that more of a chance. 6:37 Erin: That's another reason, I think, why I was struck by the play as a kid was because I did watch the Katharine Hepburn version. And though I wish that Fredric March, who played it on Broadway, was playing James Tyrone in the film, I'm not a Ralph Richardson fan, particularly. I think Robards is great in it. And Kate is just. I think, from the very beginning, she's playing the character with so much tension that wasn't there for me in the Canadian production. So she's sort of immediately riveting. And I think it's a fantastic performance. One of her best. And it takes a lot of the boring stretches on the page and makes them really captivating. Maybe just because she's so captivating and she's so sort of oddly gorgeous in the film. You know, she looks both. You know, she looks super young in certain stretches and super old in others. She seems to be able to shapeshift or something. So that was really effective. And I think Mary is the. Obviously, that's the prime role. I saw a couple of clips also on YouTube of Laurie Metcalf, and I thought her interpretation would have been really interesting to see on the stage. 7:42 Wes: Which one is that? 7:44 Erin: It was just a stage production. And so the clips were of. They must have been used to either, like, they did a broadcast performance, the stage one, or it was just used to promote the play, something like that. But I thought her interpretation was really interesting. And then I saw the same thing with a Jessica Lange production, which I thought was much less Interesting. I could kind of predict what that was going to be like. 8:09 Wes: I saw a little bit of that. And then there's the one with Jack Lemmon and what's his face from House of Cards. 8:15 Erin: Yeah. Kevin Spacey. 8:16 Wes: Kevin Spacey. And that looked good. I just can't abide Jack Lemmon. 8:21 Erin: Sorry, what? 8:25 Wes: Yeah. 8:26 Erin: Wait, what? 8:26 Wes: I don't know, it's just. 8:28 Erin: But I thought you love Jack Lemmon because. Jack Lemmon. 8:31 Wes: When did I say that? 8:33 Erin: Oh, I don't know. Well, I thought you liked the Apartment and. 8:36 Wes: Well, the. The Apartment, Yeah, in the Apartment. But otherwise, if he's in a. When he's in plays. I don't know, I haven't. Like in Kenneth Branagh's the Hamlet. Can't abide him either. 8:48 Erin: Oh, wow. Well, that's. His other great role is the. What was it? 8:53 Wes: The guard. Right, the guard. Yeah. Yeah. He's. Yeah. It sounds like the cumulative effect for you was that you enjoyed the play by the end of it. 9:05 Erin: I'm also interested in this assumption that it is our darkest play, which is something that Bloom says in the intro as well. I mean, to compare it to Streetcar. There's certainly a lot of dysfunction in the play, of course, but there's also a lot of love in the play. And maybe I'm reading in the facts behind it. There's a certain self evident biographical element which if you know anything about Eugene o' Neill at all, you know this is about him. And if you know that Edmund is a proxy for Eugene o', Neill, then he obviously did beat tuberculosis and go on to write this play. Right. So there's a certain kind of triumph that's sort of embedded in that. And then there's the less evident biographical element which you would have to dive deeper into the biography to know. Which, okay, yes, Jamie drank himself to death, but I think the mother actually did beat her addiction to morphine. And I think that was in the play, takes place in 1912. I think the mother beat the addiction in 1914, something like that. And also for a good chunk of his adult life, o' Neill had a reasonably good relationship with his father. And of course, none of that is evident in the play itself. But I guess just the fact that these people do love each other, that is obvious to me. And they do sort of will the best for each other on a certain level. Of course, the tension in that is most obvious when they're sort of like telling Edmund he shouldn't be drinking because it's not good for him, and then they're Sort of like rewarding him with a drink at every turn, you know? So there's this disagreement about what is good for you. 10:39 Wes: There's no harm in it just as an appetizer before dinner or a tonic. 10:44 Erin: Right. It might improve your appetite in moderation. 10:47 Wes: Of course, if you do that 50 times during the day. 10:52 Erin: Yeah. 10:53 Wes: Then it's going to spoil your whiskey. Dinner during the night. 10:59 Erin: That's right. Then Edmund checks into the clinic or whatever and discovers that he has the world's only case of quadruple tb, tttt, 11:07 Wes: bbb, or who knows, you know, the alcohol may have destroyed it. 11:13 Erin: Yeah, that's right. That's right. It's like drinking Lysol anyway. So, I don't know. I mean, maybe that's kind of dumb of me to. To think that this isn't so dark, but I just. I think the end of Streetcar, you know, when Blanche is being carried off is a heck of a lot sadder and more disturbing ultimately, because nobody cared about her. I don't know. 11:38 Wes: Was Mary not lost at the very end of it? 11:42 Erin: Yeah, but they're really sad about that. I don't know. 11:47 Wes: I mean, she is. There are some Blanche like qualities to her. At least that's the for sure. The experience I had during this, though. One of the things that happens a lot during the play is the alternation between different states. You were kind of getting at this with the whole idea that there's a lot of love. So people are quickly alternating between on the one moment saying something affectionate and then on the other saying something really cruel or mean. And in Mary's case, you get some of that. And then you also get her alternating between states of being kind of detached and carefree, especially under the influence of morphine, and then being more openly distressed. And then you have her alternation between sitting at home and hating people and wanting to be alone, not wanting to be around anyone. And then as soon as they arrive saying, I was so lonely. It's such a good thing you're back. I had to hang out with horrible Cathleen just to not be lonely. So this is one of the things in the play that it's kind of crazy making. It's hard to experience is this alternation back and forth between affection and meanness. I mean, hey, at least they communicate as family, right? No one's unclear about where. It's not like it's all repressed underneath the surface. Everyone's saying what's going on in their head. 13:24 Erin: Yeah, it's like one big long family meeting. 13:27 Wes: Exactly. So for better or for worse, everything is very out in the open. On the other hand, something is in a fog, right? Fog is a major theme of the play, especially in Mary's case. But I think this applies to everyone. There's the attempt to not be seen. So Mary, she wants to be able to have her habit to do the drug, but to get everyone to ignore that. And she's constantly troubled by the idea that people aren't ignoring it or can't or they're suspicious of her. And you know, her big thing with the hair, which I guess her hair gets unkempt when she's using so she's worried about it falling down. And then that's sort of connected to her larger concerns about getting old and the ugliness of her hands and getting too fat and things like that. So her physical appearance is a tell in a way. It's a tell for her age and it's also a tell for her morphine use. And what she seems to prefer or demand of others is that they simply just not notice it, that there kind of be a fog in between the family members and people just refuse to say anything. So maybe that. And then of course there's the fog effect of the drug its on her psyche. It's like a family that just can't leave some things unsaid. And so you get this attempt to ameliorate the effect of that by introducing intoxicants. And for her it's morphine in particular. But you could apply this to the other guys as well. You know, what is it they're doing with the alcohol? Is that the cause of the family dynamic? I mean obviously it's not just the cause, but it's the effect of it as well. T…

Full show notes at the publisher

Work as Madness in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957) May 09, 2022

Show notes

In the beginning, Colonel Nicholson seems to be a stickler for principle, willing to die rather than have his officers do menial labor in a Japanese prison camp. In the end, his principles seem to be a cover for personal vanity. He is willing to put his officers to work building a bridge for his enemies, as long as it leaves him with a legacy. “The Bridge on the River Kwai” is a reflection on the meaning of work, and whether the ravages of time, if not war, imply that being happy in one’s work—to use a phrase repeated several times in the film—is nothing more than futility and madness. Is work the key to freedom, or is it inevitably a form of bondage? How do we distinguish the desire to be creative from the desire for prestige? When is destroying something more creative than building it? Thanks to our sponsors for this episode, Buck Mason and Athletic Greens AG1. To get a free t-shirt with your first Buck Mason order, head over to buckmason.com/subtext. To get a free one-year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 and free travel packs with your ﬁrst purchase of AG1, visit athleticgreens.com/subtext. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: In the beginning, Colonel Nicholson seems to be a stickler for principle, willing to die rather than have his officers do menial labor in a Japanese prison camp. In the end, his principles seem to be a cover for personal vanity. He's willing to put his officers to work building a bridge for his enemies as long as it leaves him with a legacy. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a reflection on the meaning of work and whether the ravages of time, if not war, imply that being happy in one's work, to use a phrase repeated several times in the film, is nothing more than futility and madness. Is work the key to freedom, or is it inevitably a form of bondage? How do we distinguish desire to be creative from the desire for prestige? When is destroying something more creative than building it? This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, have you been happy in your work? 1:14 Erin: Yeah. 1:17 Wes: What does that mean? I think that's the standout phrase for me in the movie. 1:21 Erin: You know, I'm so delighted that that's what. I've seen this movie several times, and this last time I was like, I think this might be about work and the nature of all work. And then I was like, no, that's crazy. So I think it's funny that you picked up on that. 1:38 Wes: All right, I think we're on the same page about that. 1:40 Erin: Am I happy in my work? I don't know. Is anyone? 1:43 Wes: Well, isn't work all madness in the end? 1:46 Erin: Well, for sure. 1:47 Wes: We'll find out in this episode. So it's interesting because there are four places in which the phrase be happy in your work or some variation of that occurs. And it starts with Saito talking to the newly arrived British soldiers and telling them, let me remind you of General Yamashita's motto, be happy in your work. And then he dismisses the soldiers. And of course, they don't flinch until Colonel Nicholson tells them to stand at ease. And then the next time, again, it's Saito when he is upset with the lack of progress on the bridge. And then he gives a kind of theory about it, a theory about why it's not progressing. And he explains that to all the soldiers. And he basically says, the officers are lazy and they think they're too good to share your burdens. And that is not just. Therefore, you are not happy in your work. Therefore, the bridge does not progress. So he makes this connection between being happy in your work and the justice of whether the officers are gonna share in that. And then the third time, he basically bribes them with Red Cross, you know, he calls them. Presents a token of regards for your efforts in the future. So let us be happy in our work. And then the final time, it's not Saito, it's Shears who says it. And he says it while they're cutting through the underbrush to go on their project to blow up the bridge. But they're walking with the female bearers and basically Joyce is hitting on one of them, calling her lovely. And Shears kind of walks by and says, be happy in your work. As you pointed out, I think this is about work. And there are different conceptions of work at work, including different conceptions in those instances. I think in the beginning, this idea, General Yamashita's motto, the idea is that they're going to keep busy. And that's one form of happiness. You're a slave, you've lost your honor. You're no longer a soldier. That's Saito's point of view. But you're gonna keep busy. And that's the beginning point. But then this concept of work evolves over or there are conflicting candidates for what it is to work over the course of the film. Right. 4:18 Erin: And one of them is the idea to sort of keep busy by being lazy or. 4:22 Wes: Exactly. 4:23 Erin: To actively work against the idea of work that someone is imposing upon you. Preferably by a way, to make it look like you're doing their form of meaning while you're also undermining it at the same time. So the wires get crossed there, you know? And then there's also the idea of sabotage as carried out by Shears and that little commando troupe and the commando mentality. Similarity to, like, play. I think there are a lot of parallels made between, like, oh, this is just a game to you, and so be happy in your work. Makes me think of work as being fulfilling, meaningful, fun. Making work enjoyable, maybe making it like a game, which is itself, I think, a parallel for war in the film too. Like the lack of seriousness involved in war or the play acting involved in war. So I think there are a lot of threads there. Like, one of the most interesting moments for me was when Shears is first going to the commando school. He's first been invited there. And there's that moment that I always kind of thought was silly where he gets attacked by that commando in training. And, of course, something similar to him had just happened to him in the jungle as he had escaped from the POW camp. And So I think for a long time I read that moment just as being indicative of Shears mental state that he's this tough guy on the outside. But obviously his recent experiences have had more effect on him than maybe he had realized or that the audience had realized. But, you know, looking at it again, I realized it was really clever for showing the extent to which so much of war is training for war and so much of training is this play acting among your fellow men. So you're casting them, like, in the role of the enemy and then sort of trying to sneak attack them, whatever. You know, I'm carrying out all these war games, right. And so those particularly slippery boundaries between, like, who is your enemy and who's your friend or who's your comrade, I think is related to this idea of work because they're joined by this play acting that's also inherent in this idea of sabotage and working against, like, appearing to be busy. I don't know how to tie those two things together, but I think they seem to be related somehow. 6:43 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. A bit is made of who people were in peacetime, like what they did. So, for instance, Warden was a professor at Oxford, right. And Joyce, the Canadian kid, was an accountant. And something is made of the fact that it was really boring and repetitious. He checked figures that had been checked several times before and would be checked several times after him. There's a lot in this movie that's evocative of the potential futility of work or whether it's meaningful. This is one of the things that Nicholson wonders. Is there anything I done had an effect? Will it be remembered? And so the way Joyce's participation. Because they're not Warden and his commanding officer. Not sure that Joyce is the right candidate, but the idea is that, well, he's going to be engaged in something which is much more interesting than accounting by going on this trip to blow up the bridge. But I wanted to bring that back to your idea about how sabotage fits into all of this. Right. And destruction. Because we have, you know, nominally, the creative work that's done in the film is done by Nicholson to create the bridge. And then, you know, at the end of it, he is very proud of what he's done and seemingly. Right. That's the constructive thing to do. But it works against the larger project of the organization in which he's participating, the British army and the Allies and the war effort. So it's madness in another sense, as the medical officer Clipton puts it. So you have someone like Warden who's been a professor, and he has this kind of interesting relationship to his plastic explosives. Right. It's like he's transferred his professorial curiosity into playing with explosives. So I was trying to make a connection. I think you were making a connection between sabotage and play. So there's an element of kind of delight and absorption that you see in Warden's relationship to this work, which is ultimately going to be destructive. And he's done it several times before, so he's taken down a few bridges. It turns out you have to know something about engineering to do that, too. Just like in the same way that you have to know something about engineering to put the bridge up. You have to know where to place the explosives to take it down. 9:12 Erin: Yeah. I'm thinking about the moment with the plastic explosive where doesn't he sort of like, pretend to throw it or. No, he throws it up in the air and then Holden, or Shears, rather catches it and is really nervous about it. Right. So like. 9:25 Wes: And then he. And then he says, you know, yeah, it doesn't explode unless it's been ignited. 9:29 Erin: Yeah. And again, there's this idea of play acting or mime. And I'm thinking of this maybe in relation to. I'm wondering if it's useful in relation to your point about these soldiers former lives to think about play acting and war, even, like, in relation to, say, the draft. Like, this is a situation in which most of the men, maybe not most, but many of the men that find themselves in this war have been cast in this role through no initiative of their own. And so I think there's something here, maybe about the fact that any soldier is miming at being a soldier, sort of play acting. Like, I think of the moment with Joyce in the jungle when he has that moment to kill that soldier and they look at each other and that soldier looks like he's about 15 years old or something. And then, of course, there's the moment where you see the pictures and the necklace that he's carrying with him after he's been killed. You know, that he's just this little kid, basically, or just this normal, sweet boy. Well, I don't know if he's sweet. Maybe he's not. 10:29 Wes: But anyway, he's the enemy, Erin. He's the enemy. 10:32 Erin: I know, I know. And so this idea that you have this former life that you really are, and then you put on the guise of the soldier, and some people fill that role better. Better than others. Shears, of course, has also been play acting within the play. Acting, Right. Because he's also given himself a higher rank in the power vacuum of the POW camp when he realized that it was to his benefit to do that. And so I wonder if what Nicholson doesn't understand about war is that the element of play acting inherent in all of it and the element of sabotage, miming, of acting like you're doing something and really doing something else. Nicholson, it seems to me, sees everything in such black and white terms or in such serious terms that he's not capable of understanding the sort of idea of play or flexibility that seems to be inherent in the job itself, in the job of this play acting and also in the idea of being successful at war. You have to kind of be able to adapt play with new circumstances, not just read the script as written, but sort of improv your way out of situations. And so his lack of ability to act or to take things less seriously maybe is what makes him mad, but also sane. You know, according to. Obviously, war is madness. So it's a strange bind he's supposed 12:04 Wes: to be acting on rigidly, on principle. And, you know, there's these scenes with Clipton where he says to Clipton, you have much to learn about the army in response to Major Clipton, the medical officer. Again, you know, to his kind of shock or surprise that Nicholson wants to build the bridge for the Japanese and to do it well. The way Clipton responds to him early on is. Or actually, no, this is a little bit later on when I think Clipton questions him for a second time after the bridge has already gotten going and it's going well. And Clipton asks Nicholson, what's going on with Saito? How's he doing with all of this? And Nicholson says, he's been most reasonable since we took over. And then Clipton says, well, I wonder what he's thinking. And Nicholson says, I haven't the foggiest, and sort of brushes that off. And then Clipton asks, are you convinced building this bridge is a good idea? And Nicholson gives this speech about. He says, don't you agree the men's morale is high, that discipline has been restored, that their condition has been improved, and so on. So he switches back and forth between this position of being rigidly principled and then worried about his men. So early on, it's just about the officers are not going to do any work. We're going to follow the Geneva Conventions, the letter of the law. His rationale for building the bridge is initially, there's this idea that because he was ordered to surrender, he would be disobeying orders not to Build the bridge for the Japanese, which is absurd. Completely absurd. 13:41 Erin: I don't think that's about the bridge. I think that was just about the idea of not escaping. 13:44 Wes: Yep, you're right. So that's about escaping. 13:46 Erin: But that plays into your point. 13:48 Wes: On the one hand, there's principle and following the letter of the law and on the other, which is something that Shears thinks is absurd and opposes. And on the other, there's this idea that he can prevent his men from becoming slaves. If they can work on the order of the officers they can avoid being slaves and take pride in what they're doing and prevent disorder in the camp. The reason I'm bringing all that up is that both of those, in a way, are undermined. Because in the end, it turns out that Nicholson does have his officers work when it's necessary because they can't get the bridge done without it. And then at the very end of the movie, he's willing to betray his own side. So what we learn there is that this hasn't really been about principle or about his men, exactly. It's just simply about all the other stuff which he talks about which is his desire to leave a legacy or to do something meaningful to make a difference. What I'm suggesting is that his focus on principles and all the rest of it seems to be a cover for vanity or for pride, let's say, for something personal, at least. I don…

Full show notes at the publisher

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected