Dr. Metablog

Amnesia on Film: Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

Desperately Seeking Susan offers a cartoon version of amnesia. Pow, Roberta is knocked into a lamppost and doesn't know who she is. And then, a day later, pow again, she is knocked to the ground, bumps her head, and her memory returns intact. The film isn't interested in amnesia except as a plot device to facilitate the doppelganger relationship between Roberta and Susan. Roberta is a downtrodden cautious Fort Lee housewife; Susan is an anarchic adventuress. In the course of the film, each woman tries on the other's identity. Without a memory, but wearing Susan's clothes, Roberta "becomes" Susan, and Susan in turn invades Roberta's home and tries on her clothes, her pool, and her husband. At the end, Roberta has absorbed enough of Susan's pizzazz to leave her stifling husband and Susan has changed enough so that she can enjoy a moment with the boyfriend who has been desperately seeking her. It's an easy-to-watch film. Rosanna Arquette is lovely as a perpetual naif and Laurie Metcalf is superb as Roberta's short-tempered know-it-all sister-in-law. And it has more than one brilliant line of dialogue. "I thought you were dead."  "Naw, I was in New Jersey."  And my favorite: "How do you use the bird?"  -- which you have to have been there to understand and appreciate. An enjoyable film; unless you approach it with the idea that it has anything to do with real-life loss of memory.  

Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal

I remember that my first and until yesterday sole viewing of Bergman's The Seventh Seal took place in August of 1958 at one of those big old downtown Brooklyn movie palaces. I was in the company of Leigh Anderson and Alice Bruno, who might not remember the day -- or remember me, for that matter.

It was a memorable occasion because Bergman mattered, or so it seemed at the time. Like everyone in my age-cohort, I had grown up on westerns and crime and horror and musicals. I knew what to expect in a movie theatre. A beginning, a middle and an end, for one thing. A resolution. But then along came Fellini and Kurosawa and Bergman and the rules changed. It was exciting and puzzling and like other observant college kids, I was trying to figure it all out. Movies had been Saturday entertainment;  I did not know that thee could be "intellectual."

The Seventh Seal took me by surprise in all kinds of ways. It was episodic and the episodes didn't tie together into a linear narrative. Its emotional range -- from sexy to sordid to brutal to picturesque to ruminative -- was more than I could fathom or follow. It didn't have a Hollywood plot -- no one ended up with the money or the girl.  And then there were these long brooding silent shots in which the point lay in the cinematography (I word I didn't wouldn't learn for twenty years). I had no vocabulary to help me understand what I saw -- I didn't even know the word "allegory", or if I did, I didn't connect it with movies.

Last night, The Seventh Seal came around again, this time not in a palace but right there on the big hdtv.  I was hoping it would still be as magical as it was in the 1950s, but alas, not so. It seemed, I'm sorry to say, stagey and contrived and pretentious. The allegory -- the despairing knight's search for meaning in a godless universe -- came across, last night, as shallow. The discovery that there ain't a god out there does not shock this born and raised atheist, although I do feel for Bergman and all those others whom it cost so dearly to surrender the illusion.   

Amnesia on Film: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

As far as I can remember, and I've read the stories many times, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes never had to deal with amnesia, which in those days of reading and writing had not yet become the most routine of plot devices. The Holmes of Billy Wilder's movie runs into amnesia straight off the bat, when Gabrielle Valladon, a handsome though mighty bedraggled woman, appears at 221-B Baker Street apparently suffering a loss of memory precipitated by both a bump on the head and a near drowning in the Thames. But there's a gimmick within the gimmick: Mme. Valladon's amnesia is totally fraudulent. The lady is in "fact" a German spy pretending loss of memory in order to insinuate herself into Holmes' sympathies.

The audience falls for it, which is not a surprise, because we watchers have been indoctrinated to willingly and enthusiastically suspend our disbelief at the slightest hint of film's most common malady. But that Holmes should succumb -- well, that's a bit of a disappointment. Fictional Holmes would have been a lot more discerning, amnesia-wise, than filmic Holmes.

Amnesia on Film: And Now, Ladies and Gentlemen (2002)

There can't be a disease in fiction that demands more vigorous suspension of disbelief than movie amnesia. And Now, Ladies and Gentleman, a latter production of the great Claud Lelouch, pushes the  disbelievery to the breaking point. It asks us to accept not one but two identical and fanciful cases of the affliction. Both Valentin Valentin, played by Jeremy Irons, and Jane Lester, played by Patricia Kaas suffer from symmetrical "blackout" periods in which memory evaporates.

What, prithee, are the odds?

Duelling amnesias are mighty unlikely, but such is the premise of the film. Although I doubt that there's much in the scientific literature about the romantic potential of mutual amnesia, in this film the disease becomes a mild erotic stimulant. Why the heck not, I say.

 Inasmuch as no one but confirmed amnesiaphiles are ever going to see this film, let me spoil it at once by saying that both Valentin, a jewel thief, and Jane, a chantoosie, find themselves in Fez in Morocco. There they are healed, and after much ado, set out to circumnavigate the earth in a racing boat called Ladies and Gentlemen (hence the film's odd title). Valentin, a traditionalist, takes the orthodox medical route and goes to a local surgeon, who shows him and us an MRI generated picture of his brain disfigured by a great white splotch ("It's a wonder he can remember anything," says the Doc.) Valentin undergoes radical surgery but Jane, taking an easier route, is cured by making a pilgrimage to a local Moroccan saint. How  unjudgmental and egalitarian to equate medicine and mystery;  and also, by the way, how very nonsensical. 

The film is well made --  replete with all kinds of fancy effects and flashbacks and dream sequences. I love the idea of draining color from the characters' faces to signify that they have begun another of their symmetrical "blackouts." But aside from the amnesias, there's not much to wonder at, at least not if you've seen your share of caper/jewel thief films. 

I loved the exotic North African locales. I'm chagrined to report that I didn't recognize the wondrous Claudia Cardinale, who was 63 when the film was made. Claudia had been a great friend to my youthful imagination.

The amnesia that afflicts Valentin and Jane is, as far as I know, unique in that it comes and goes, appears and disappears. Less like an amnesia than an allergy -- here one moment, then gone. But as a plot device, constant.

Amnesia on Film: I Love You Again (1940)

The ol' amnesia gimmick plus "screwball" comedy plus W. S. Van Dyke plus Willam Powell and Myrna Loy equals "I Love You Again" (1940).

Workaholic, unfun Larry Wilson gets conked on the head and wakes up as an amusing grifter named George Cary. (Hollywood amnesia will do that to you, apparently -- completely revise your personality.) But in his new and at the same time prior state, Larry/Geoge has to come to terms with Larry's wife Kay, who wants a divorce from the melancholy cheapskate half of the compound hero. And yet It comes to pass that Kay  prefers the grifter.

Much forced hilarity ensues. 

Once again, amnesia proves to be the most malleable of maladies. Bop on the head, he's Larry; another boy, he's George. Amnesia is a gas, even to the pont that Myrna Loy, unhappy with what she's got, picks up a vase to re-transform William Powell into the way she wants him. Mechanical (not medical) amnesia anticipates Danny Kaye in The Court Jester: a snap of the finger he's a duellist; another snap and he's a clown.

It's obvious a) that amnesia easily combines with the Jekyll-Hyde doppelganger scenario, and b) that even by 1940, movie-amnesia could be a target of ridicule. 

Amnesia on Film: Unknown (2011)

Here's a case of double amnesia, in which a second case of the disease is overlain over the first (as usual, once the amnesia genie is activated, screenwriters cry havoc and let slip the dogs of anything goes).

Our hero, played by a tired Liam Neeson, awakes from a coma not remembering much but thinking he's Dr. Martin Harris, a geneticist. He has no identification, and no one knows him, even his young wife. Turns out, he's not Dr. Harris at all, but a professional assassin who has somehow forgotten that his alias is an alias. It takes an innocent new girlfriend and several car chases and some highly-choreographed fist fights before he comes to his senses. Once he realizes that he's a professional killer, however, he turns over a new leaf and becomes a Good Guy. He thwarts the intended assassination and with solemn steps and slow, begins a new moral life.

Here's the question that occurred to me:  a guy is a long-time, career assassin. He has an accident and forgets that he was a murderer. Then little by little he remembers. Is it probable that his personality would change and he would be reborn to innocence and good citizenship, I only ask because that's the red herring that Unknown's audience is asked to masticate? I myself don't buy it.

Neeson asks, over and over, "Who am I?"  In serious works of literature (cf. Lear's "Who is it that can tell me who I am'), such a question is tragic.  In amnesia movies, "Who am I" is not tragic but merely mcguffinic.

Amnesia on Film: Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

I imagine that the writers of Cowboys and Aliens had a grand old time inserting  into their screenplay as many as possible of both Westerns and sci-fi/horror cliches. They did very well: there's a loner cowboy with cigarillo and fists of steel, a domineering cattleman and his feckless son, a timid barkeep, a posse on horseback tracking abducted relatives a la The Searchers, a band of Chiricuara Apaches fighting for their own survival, innocent distressed maidens, etc., etc., and at the end, a hero riding off into the sunset. On the other side of the ledger, computer graphic aliens resembling the velociraptors in Jurassic Park (except for the slimy green blood) attacking us poor mortals, multiple abductions, and o my gosh even a little boy hiding from a creepy creature in a crevice in the rock, and then our intrepid James Bond-y macho hero sneaking into the spaceship to free the captives and dynamite the mother ship, my o my what a bounty.

And to these cliches, the unsatisfied writers added a bonus -- a dollop of movie amnesia. Why not? Jake Lonergan awakes in the desert not knowing who he is, why he is wounded, and without a clue as to why he has a futuristic bracelet soldered to his wrist. Like most movie amnesiacs, he remains fully functional and unimpaired. He's not the least bit agitated by his loss of memory. But then comes a truly embarrassing, semi-racist moment. The Indians, who as everyone knows are noble and in touch with the human soul in a way that we products of western civilization can never be, treat his amnesia with a frothy brew (perhaps mescaline, but who can tell?). Memory spontaneously returns; Jake remembers that he escaped from the mother ship, knows where it has been parked, and also knows about the secret entrance. And so to work.

Later on, the released abductees are all amnesiac, but they're cured instantly (the movie is long enough) without Apache influence.

So now we can add alien abduction to the long list of precipitants of movie amnesia.

This film could have been a gas except that its makers forgot about the comedy that's inherent in the title and in the conception. Too bad. As it stands, it's a solemn, noisy, elaborate, expensive, flimsy chimera. 

At one point in the quest, the posse comes across an enormous structure that looks like a paddle-wheeler right there in the middle of the desert. "There's no river within five hundred miles that can handle that thing." But they continue along, the boat is never mentioned again and plays no part in the story -- thereby proving that even screenwriters can suffer disabling bouts of amnesia.

Amnesia on Film: Clean Slate (1994)

I imagine that the "pitch" went something like this:

"Ok, we have the star, Dana Carvey, who's hot right now. He's a funny man. He's going to play a detective who watches The Maltese Falcon on the tv and thinks he's Humphrey Bogart. And there's a coin that's worth seven million dollars and a bunch of guys are after it. But here's the gimmick. Carvey has amnesia and he doesn't know that he has the coin. And then the real kicker -- not only does he have amnesia, but he has a kind of amnesia that starts over every time he goes to sleep, so he doesn't even know what he did yesterday.. Ain't that terrific?"

Well, it must have been terrific, because someone decided to put some money into the film, and someone managed to persuade James Earl Jones and Michael Gambon to take supporting roles in this bird-brained turkey.

Did anyone say, "Does amnesia work that way? Is there a kind of amnesia that begins again every morning."

If they did, I know what the answer would have been. "Who cares? This is not real amnesia, it's movie amnesia"  --which is, once again, the most malleable of maladies.

So here's a new genre, the amnesiac-gumshoe farce. A small, unpromising genre.

It's an unfunny movie that hovers between D (for dumb) minus and F (phony). I doubt anyone's ever heard of it, except for hardcore amnesia fans. And even they were disappointed. 

Amnesia on Film: Somewhere in the Night (1946)

Somewhere in the Night is an early Joseph Mankiewicz film noir with amnesia at its center. George Taylor, an injured ex-Marine played monochromatically by John Hodiak, returns from the South Pacific not knowing who he is are what he was --  except that he has a clue that he was on the shady side of the law. There's an involuted, convoluted and confusing plot that pushes all the noirish buttons: a chanteuse with a heart of gold and also a dame who's nothing but trouble, a missing briefcase stuffed with 2 million bucks, a funny farm where a witness to murder is imprisoned, a cynical police lieutenant, and even a polysyllabic European gangster who derives from both Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. Everything is recycled, and so is the amnesia. George Taylor might  just as well have been a returning veteran with a perfect memory, or been a gumshoe, or a shamus and the film would have been just as good (or just as bad). It's surprising that when the money is recovered and the villains are punished, George gets the girl but, contrary to precedent, doesn't recover his memory. The film simply forgets his affliction and leaves him hanging. Perhaps it's romantic -- after all, if you win the love of the lady, what does memory matter?  Or perhaps the amnesia is so trivial, so perfunctory, so much a gimmick, that it can be shunted aside. 

Although not a good flim, it's partially redeemed by Richard Conte's turn as a smarmy nightclub owner, Sheldon Leonard's two minutes as a dumb cuckold, and Harry Morgan's thirty seconds as a bath attendant. Those guys are genuine pros.

More on movie amnesia: Spellbound, Random Harvest, Shattered, Blind Horizon The Bourne Identity The Crooked Way

Seventeen Hours of Downton Abbey

I've now sometimes zoomed but sometimes plodded through seventeen hours of Downton Abbey. The series is lovely to look at but also at various times lugubrious, false, and shamelessly gimmicky -- but apparently I'm easily seduced. Let me confess: I fell for it, mostly, but always against my better judgment. Let's face it, the primitive parts of my brain simply overwhelmed my higher critical faculties. I laughed and cried, even when I knew that I was being cheated and manipulated. 

My favorite parts: Mr. Pamuk and his Nelson Rockefeller departure ("he came, and went)," which took me totally by surprise, as did Anna's and Lady Grantham's resourceful disposal of the corpse. Lady Sybil as a nurse, in part because she was doing useful work for the first time in her pampered life, and in part because she looked so fetching in the uniform. My favorite performers -- Maggie Smith, reprising her role in Gosford Park (a much superior great house fiction), and Mr Carson's eyebrows, perpetually raised in shock at modern shenanigans. 

The series is pure, undiluted soap. It is also, as they used to say in Variety, a "costumer." Query -- would I have spent seventeen hours watching a television program set in a mansion in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2012 in which a soldier returns paralyzed from the wars and miraculously regains his mobility, where terrible culinary disasters occur because the cook almost goes blind, where granny shows her goodwill by losing a flower show, in which the family is traumatized when a daughter runs off with the chauffeur, or where a presumably innocent servant is sentenced to death for the murder of his wayward wife. I don't think so. I would have said, "cornball soap opera" and clicked back to the NBA. Or to the advertisements for zirconite jewelry. And yet I went on. And on. And continued on even after Downton Abbey not only jumped the shark but vaulted the great white whale, Moby Dick himself, when it introduced into the plot a bout of supposed amnesia. Amnesia! Is there anything soapier.

Or perhaps my reluctant fascination proves that the traditional formulas retain their power. Here's a formula of comedy: "artificial difficulties overcome." In Downton Abbey, Lady Mary and Matthew are destined for one another, and every viewer knows it, even as steaming piles of artificial difficulties are strewn and heaped in their path. Shakespeare could slice through the impediments in two hours traffic on the stage, but here it's seventeen anguished hours until heir and heiress finally figure it out. And here's another formula of comedy: always bring it to conclusion with a feast and a dance. They did, and, sucker that I am, I was elated. Even though I saw the scam coming a mile down the o-so-picturesque road  

Amnesia on Film: Spellbound (1945)

In Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), man suffers traumatic shock, man loses memory, man relives experience and regains memory. It's garden-variety Hollywood amnesia, hortus hollywoodiensis. The amnesia is neither credible nor possible, but it doesn't matter, because it's the world of film, where the most malleable of mental afflictions takes whatever form is convenient for the writer or director or the presiding mogul.

John Ballantine, played by handsome young Gregory Peck is the amnesiac and the questions the movie poses are, when will he recover his memory, how much help he will require from luscious psychoanalyst Ingrid Bergman, and how many times he can he whine "I can't remember" and still get the girl. Bergman has a more complex problem: how to be a smart and also a real woman (always a problem in Hitchcock's wonderful world of misogyny). She makes use of that old dodge, a pair of glasses; when they're off, she's feminine, but when she dons them, she's intelligent. When did Hollywood decided that eyeglasses were a symbol for brains?

But if she has brains, why is she attracted to a man who doesn't know who he is but is convinced that he might be a murderer. It's as though the film itself doesn't take amnesia seriously and treats it as a plot-device rather than the distressing disorder that it would be to an actual sufferer.    

It's a silly but engaging movie, perhaps too much of an advertisement for psychoanalysis -- which it endorses without a shred of skepticism. I suspect that the psychoanalytic themes, which haven't fared at all well these seventy years, will eventually doom the movie to oblivion.

There are some tense echt-Hitchcock moments when it appears that the amnesiac might be dangerous, but Peck and Bergman are just too pretty to be killer and victim. 

Polanski and The Ghost Writer

The Ghost Writer, which I saw last night, is a very good "thriller." It's co-written and directed by Roman Polanski and therefore inevitably dwells upon the menace that lurks beneath quotidian events. Once again, Polanski offers us a naif  who gradually comes to realize that the world is under the control of dark, implacable, omnipresent forces of evil. In The Ghost Writer, it's the CIA -- a most convenient bugbear.  Just as soon as the unnamed ghost writer cracks the mystery, he's run down and killed in the street by a mysteriously summoned agency vehicle. Ewan McGregor is convincing as the naive ghost, Jim Broadbent is wonderfully malevolent as the string-puller behind the scenes, and Olivia Williams steals the show as the intelligent angry betrayed wife the English PM. But it's pure Polanski from start to finish.

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the reign of the usurping tyrant is preceded and succeeded by the benign and holy kings Duncan and Malcolm. In Polanski's 1977 Macbeth (in my opinion one of the few great Shakespeare movies), there's an appended anti-Shakespearean coda: Donalbain (Malcolm's younger brother) goes off to engage the witches. Polanski suggests that evil is not anomalous to the reign of Macbeth but eternal and, so to speak, normal. The witches who control men's fates are the medieval Scotland analogues of the CIA.  

In Polanski's best film, Chinatown, J. J. Gittes is the naif who gradually comes to discover that villainous Noah Cross controls all of Los Angeles. Semi-demonic Noah takes bullet but like the witches and the CIA, he can't be killed. In the original Robert Towne screenplay, Evelyn Mulwray had escaped with her daughter/sister, but Polanski altered the ending to emphasize Noah Cross's unassailable power. 

And then there's Rosemary's Baby (witches) and The Pianist (Nazis).

Polanski's point of view cannot be a surprise to anyone who is familiar with the story of his life. 

Amnesia on Film: Blind Horizon

For the record, Blind Horizon (2003) may be the most confusing, confused, and derivative film ever perpetrated. It's a failed memory-assassinate the president movie, a genre of which The Manchurian Candidate stands as head and font.

Blind Horizon offers one picturesque moment -- when a giant tanker truck decorated with a Confederate flag and carrying a load of gasoline spills across the highway and blows up. The truck could have driven through the monstrous holes in the plot with room to spare. In fact, it would have been more appropriate if the truck had been carrying a load of red herrings.

Once again, amnesia is whatever Hollywood says it is. In this case, the amnesiac remembers that there's going to be an attempt on the president's life, but he doesn't remember his own name, his occupation, or his fiancee -- an unlikely scenario. He has flashes of memory that are copied, almost exactly, from the Bourne series, which we must now anoint as the movie amnesia template of the future.     

Val Kilmer is wasted as the - wait, is he the would-be asssassin or is he the Federal agent trying to prevent the assassination? I never did quite figure it out. Neve Campbell is dark and mysterious and Amy Smart is blonde and perky -- that's the way women are packaged in this expensive turkey. If the writers (F. Paul Benz, Steve Tomlin) were allowed to choose between remembering this film, or amnesia, they should definitely go for the latter. 

Hypothesis: the amnesia mcguffin liberates the screenwriter from any allegiance to probability.

Fermat's Room; Goldbach's Conjecture.

I reached my peak with numbers when I was a child at P. S. 217 (under the tutelage of Mrs. McNulty).  Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division -- that's my area of expertise. Geometry, algebra, trig -- way too abstract for my pedestrian brain. Calculus and up -- not the least chance.

Arithmetic yes, mathematics no.

Sometimes I try to read popularizations of mathematical theory, but I rarely make it beyond the first few sentences. Once symbols start to appear, I'm done. Especially Greek letters (in parentheses). 

The consolation prize is that I'm better than most people at mental arithmetic. I can do sums and approximations and other stuff in my head.

Last night, we watched Fermat's Room. It's the kind of movie that is often called an "ingenious thriller."  It's also a member of a very small group of films that concern mathematics or mathematicians:  Good Will Hunting, Stand and Deliver, Antonia's Line, Straw Dogs. 

Fermat's Room focuses on a possible proof of Christian Goldbach's Conjecture. I suppose that I should have known about Herr Goldbach and his guess, but I confess to ignorance. Goldbach's conjecture dates to 1742 and is apparently one of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory. In brief, Goldbach theorized that every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. For example, 10 is equal to 3 plus 7, 20 to 17 plus 3 (or 13 plus 7), and 100 resolves into 47 plus 53. Although no one has found a number that doesn't work, the conjecture can't be proved -- or, at least, hasn't been proved because there are some very large numbers out there. In Fermat's Room, two of the characters claim to have proved the conjecture. And they are consequently at odds.

I had always thought of prime numbers as a kind of novelty or curiosity. But if primes are a component of all even numbers -- well, that's something.  Goldbach's idea raises the stature of primes in my perennially naive eyes -- in exactly the same way that the Fibonacci series became more important to me when I learned that the chambered nautilis is structured Fibonacci-wise.  

While watching the movie (which is a good one), I ran through the even numbers from 10 to 70.  Everything was in order. But why?

Later in the evening, I read that every even number can also be resolved into the sum of a semi-prime (which is the product of two primes) and a prime. So 100 equals 77 (7 time 11) and 23. I spent a restless  night summing, in my bed, semi-primes and primes from 10 to 100. All in order, once again.

Why should it be so?

Whether it should be, or not, it is.  I remember that I used to answer my children and my students with the response, "That's not a why question?" Goldbach's Conjecture is a fact, not a why.

It's like gravity. I understand that the apple falls to the ground and that the moon doesn't head out into space and that it's harder to walk uphill than downhill. But I still don't understand why. It works, and that's enough. For me.

Amnesia on Film: Mister Buddwing

This 1966 black-and-white oddity boasts a distinguished director (Delbert Mann, celebrated for Marty) and a group of excellent actresses (Jean Simmons, Katherine Ross, Angela Lansbury and Suzanne Pleshette). It's ambitious and sometimes imaginative. But frankly, even more than your run-of-the-mill amnesia movie, it's a mess.     

The amnesiac in this case is a young and puzzled James Garner, who comes to consciousness in Central Park (there are good historical shots of 1960s NYC throughout) and takes the nom d'oubli Sam Buddwing. We're not told how he found his way to a park bench but movie amnesia is so commonplace and so flexible that the audience has no difficulty going along for the ride. The rest of the film tracks Buddwing through various encounters until he recovers his memory with no more fuss than he lost it. 

Amnesia is merely a plot device and not the film's true focus. The theme seems to be "identity," which, if I remember, was a subject much in vogue in the 1960s. Buddwing says, more than once, "I don't know who I am." But so did all of us say the same thing, in those ancient days, even without the provocation of amnesia. Buddwing's specific problem, as it gradually reveals itself, is that he has made a series of "inauthentic" (as we used to say) choices. He should have composed the octet rather than have gone for the commercial money. He shouldn't have encouraged his wife to abort the baby. And he certainly should have prevented both himself and Grace (note signficant moniker!!) from drifting into infidelity and alcohol.

More "don'ts." The writer and director shouldn't have tried to imitate Ingmar Bergman (the excrescent scene with the beggar who thinks he's God is embarrassingly derivative). And they shouldn't have indulged all the Bergman-derived religiosity. When a prayer "O God, let her live" is followed immediately by a resurrection, it's not a film -- it's propaganda. Come to think of it, the creative team should also have put some distance between themselves and the Kafkaeque surreal. Moreover, they should not have allowed the film to slide into an easy, superficial allegorizing. Buddwing may say "I'm not everyman" -- but the film desperately hopes that he will be taken as such.  

Amnesia, it would appear, has the power to soften the brain of both writer and director. 

Act of Violence (1948)

Act of Violence (1948) says as much about the immediate post-war years (and my own first decade of life) as any film I know. In it, an ex-army-officer who survived a German POW camp has acquired a pretty wife and a sunny suburban California home, but he is guilt-ridden because while in the camp he betrayed his fellow prisoners. He's pursued by a revenge-obsessed former comrade. The film is not, for once, a melodrama.  Good and evil, innocence and experience intermingle in the main characters, and, most rewardingly, in the smaller parts. Mary Astor (otherwise Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon) turns in a brilliant performance as a tired, opportunistic but ultimately decent prostitute. In fact, women in this film (in addition to Mary Astor, Janet Leigh and Phyllis Thaxter) are for once as complex and cliche-free as the male leads (Van Heflin and the always pitch-perfect Robert Ryan).

The story-telling is flawless and economical, the mood is sombre and intense. The unsettling themes are the burden of the past, the menace of the future, trepidation at the unknown, and the expiation of guilt.  

Robert L. Richards, who wrote the spare screenplay, was fingered as a leftist and blacklisted. He lost his promising career, became a carpenter, and died, embittered, in exile. is it necessary to note that Act of Violence is a not the least bit subversive?  It's a genuinely patriotic film. Fred Zinnemann, the director, escaped from the Nazis but left both his parents behind. They were murdered in the camps. Zinnemann was therefore superbly positioned to bring to the screen an exploration of the "guilt of the survivor." 

The Next Three Days (2011)

We watched The Next Three Days because we admired Paul Haggis's two previous films -- Crash and In the Valley of Elah. This one is not quite as innovative, but it's worth watching and is definitely the second-best English teacher movie ever made in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Wonder Boys, based on the Michael Chabon novel, is more engaging and original).  The story, in brief, is that a woman is erroneously convicted of murder, her appeals fail, she's in for life, but her husband breaks her out of jail.

The plot is hard to swallow, and is told with so much intercutting of pursuers and pursued, red-herring clues, and car chases that it sometime seems like a Bourne adventure. But it's also an endearing family values film -- husband and wife and kid all cocooned up in the last scene.  Elizabeth Banks is beautiful and expressionless and Russell Crowe is merely expressionless, but they're sweetly devoted to one another. I fell for it, perhaps because I just don't see all that many togetherness thrillers.

In Hollywoodland, 90% of English teachers are rigid, authoritarian jerks who don't appreciate the brilliance of their eccentric students (who will grow up to become successful script-writers), and exactly 9% are charismatic and inspiring but a bit dangerous (Jean Brodie for example). Rare indeed is the English teacher who outwits the cops, kills a couple of the bad guys who get in his way, and makes it safely to Venezuela. Cop # 1 (with admiration): "This guy's a teacher?"  Cop # 2:  "Yeah, at a community college."

In the mandatory theme-enhancing classroom scene, our hero lectures on Don Quixote.  As in quixotic. Get it? 

Amnesia in Film: Shattered (1991)

The "neo-noir" film Shattered (1991) was directed by Wolfgang Petersen, who elicited a mumble-mouth performance by Tom Berenger and an incoherent one from Greta Scacchi. It's another in the endless parade of amnesia movies. In this variant, the central character, Dan Merrick, goes over the cliff in his Mercedes and emerges not only disfigured but, it seems, without the least knowledge of his own person or past. The film clearly demonstrates that movie amnesia can be just as flexible as a tricky plot demands. Amnesia in Shattered has nothing to do with the real human brain and its gesture to the facts of existence  is mighty perfunctory.     

DOCTOR (authoritative, bearded): "We call it psychogenic amnesia. Patient doesn't know his name, his family, his personal history. Everything else he remembers. The year, who's president. He can drive a car, he can function professionally, but anything personal is out of reach."

And now the gimmick (major spoiler coming up, so if you plan to see the movie [which I cannot recommend], please avert your innocent eyes). Not only does Dan Merrick not remember anything of his pre-accident past, he's not even Dan Merrick!  He's Judth Merrick's lover, Jack Stanton, transformed by plastic surgery into a simulacrum of Dan. And he doesn't have the least clue that he's someone else. 

There's a exceedingly complicated plot which involves voluntary and involuntary impersonations, a private investigator out of Cliche Central, two murders and three car crashes. The incredible upshot is that the villain (the temptress-wife) is killed and that Jack permanently assumes the role of Dan.    

Jack's amnesia is cured in the last scene, but not before it has been mysteriously promulgated among  his friends, acquaintances, and business associates, all of whom are utterly deceived by the plastic surgery and seem not to notice that there have also been changes to his voice, his walk, his manner, and his personality. These poor folks suffer from a devastating manifestation of Hollywoodish forgetfulness. It could be called "contact amnesia." An absurd idea, but not more absurd than the plot of Shattered. 

Erasmus Hall in All about Eve

 
"Phoebe," she calls herself, but in the script she's just "girl." It's the last scene of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's (Stuyvesant '24) All about Eve. "Phoebe" has sneaked into Eve Harrington's hotel room and has pretended to fall asleep. Eve accosts her and is about to call the police when the intruderess proclaims herself a fan of the actress. Here's their conversation:   

"GIRL You know the Eve Harrington clubs - that they've got in most of the girls' high schools?

EVE I've heard of them.

GIRL Ours was one of the first. Erasmus Hall. I'm the president.

EVE Erasmus Hall. That's in Brooklyn, isn't it?

GIRL Lots of actresses come from Brooklyn. Barbara Stanwyck, Susan Hayward - of course, they're just
movie stars."

Phoebe might also have mentioned that both Barbara Stanwyck (Ruby Stevens) and Susan Hayward (Edythe Marrener) were not only from Brooklyn, but also from Erasmus Hall High School. Why doesn't she say so? Or is being a native of Brooklyn disability enough? 

Phoebe might have added to her list and mentioned that Mae West was also an alumna of the same high school. Cheers to Erasmus Hall, mother of actresses -- even though Erasmus's Barbra Streisand '59 was still in braces and still in P. S. something or other when All about Eve was showing at the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue.

Supposed Erasmian "Phoebe" was played by the young actress Barbara Bates, who was highly credible as an upwardly mobile Brooklynite. Her small part includes an iconic moment when, in the film's last scene, she appears in full narcissistic glory, preening in front of a triptych of mirrors as she tries on Eve's clothes. She is reflected in multiple, infinitely regressing fragments. Bates, a native of Denver, Colorado, did not, alas, live up to her early promise, but soon after the completion of this film fell into bouts of insanity that came to an end only when she took her own life in 1959. 

But why Erasmus?  Because its graduates had achieved a reputation for fierce ambition?  Perhaps, but also because Erasmus (as Mankiewicz would well have known) was even more provincial -- as only the outer boroughs of New York can be provincial -- than Eve Harrington's childhood Wisconsin. "Phoebe" is another Eve and equally naive and countrified. She's a  doppelganger on deck, a secret sharer in ovo, a Mr Hyde in the making; she's also defensive, megamoniacal, ignorant, unsophisticated, slightly loony, and ruthless. And so it was a excellent decision to root her in EHHS, where 50% of the students would have had the exact same addled traits of character.   

 

 

How Long Has This Been Going On?

I have a favorite moment in Diner (1982), the first of Barry Levinson's quartet of Baltimore movies, and it's not the scene in which I made my silver-screen debut. It's when two of the working-class guys who hang out at the Fells Point hamburger joint find themselves taking a drive in the Maryland countryside. They happen upon a rich, well-tended young blonde woman riding an elegant horse (in her own spacious meadow). They stop the car try to chat her up but she's clearly out of their league. When she gallops off, one of the guys says to the other: "Do you ever get the feeling that there's something going on that we don't know about?"

I was thinking about that scene when I read that Moammar Ghaddafi's son Seif threw himself a birthday party at some spectacular resort in the West Indies and paid the pop singer Mariah Carey $1,000,000 smackerootis to sing four songs. You read it right -- one millions bucks. The article didin't say whether she had to pay for her own motel and continental breakfast and transportation but I'm going to guess that expenses were extra. 

I tried to calculate whether I had earned $1M in my working life. I can't remember and I don't have the records, but I know that I started at $3600 and  by 1966 I was already pulling down $7800. I think that in my first decade of employment I earned well under $100,000. Yeah, I know, them was different dollars -- but still.

A working guy who makes $40,000 would take 25 years to earn what Mariah Carey took home for twenty minutes of effort. 

But it's not what she earned so much as what he paid. The Ghaddafi clan of brutes, lunatics, oil-bloated twits, and kleptocrats has been looting the Libyans for forty years. No wonder that the family is willing to commit mass murder to hold on to their hoard. (In his defence, Seif claimed that it wasn't him; it was his brother Muatassim.) Here's a question: how many years does it take your run-of-the-mill Libyan to earn $1M? 

I think that the average Libyan would understand the point of view of the diner guys. There's something going on out there, and it ain't all good.

Amnesia in Films: Random Harvest (1942)

In Mervyn LeRoy's Random Harvest (1942), amnesia is not merely a plot gimmick. The amnesia of Charles Rainier, a shell-shocked World War I veteran, is the principal subject of the film. Rainier (Ronald Colman) begins in Condition A (amnesiac but solid citizen and loving husband) but is hit by a cab in Liverpool and transitions to Condition B (aristocratic, efficient, but passionless, and with no knowledge of the three years between the war and the cab). Will he remember the lost years and reintegrate the two parts of his hstory?  Well, yes, he does, but only with the decades-long assistance of his patient-Griselda wife Paula/Margaret (excellently played by the ageless Greer Garson). 

It's kind of a soap-opera-y film and I'm embarrassed to confess that it moved me. The last scene, in which Rainier finally remembers that he had long ago loved and married Margaret under her real name Paula, is a curious kind of anagnorisis. Although they've known each other for decades, true recognition comes suddenly and joyfully. And I bought it, much against my will. Dropped a reluctant tear. 

Because of the amnesia, Charles has two different lives, but he doesn't, as in other films, have two different personalities. He's kindly, steadfast, and rather boring in both states. The film offers little in the way of a theory of amnesia. "As one door opens, another closes" says a friendly but passive psychiatrist, whose expertise is validated only by his middle-European accent. 

In most films, diseases resemble their manifestations in real life. Amnesia, on the other hand, can be anything the screenwriter says it it is. It's a mighty elastic phenomenon, unmoored to medical experience or knowledge. However imagined, the total amnesia of characters in films is a great plot device. The audience is always in the know and therefore feels superior to the poor character/actor who stumbles toward an understanding of his own self. It's hard to believe that Shakespeare was able to write forty plays without ever resorting to amnesia. 

At a social event a few days ago I met a psychologist who works at the AFB in Colorado Springs with veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq. I asked her if she had ever encountered a case of amnesia. She said that many injured personnel can't remember the moments just before they were wounded, but that she'd never enountered a case of movie-style amnesia. Or heard of one. And, she added, trust me, I've dealt with many kinds of mental disturbances.

More Noir: Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)

Laura is a stylish noir mystery that maintains its fascination even after the passage of sixty years.  It is cleverly written and handsomely cinematographed but it also comes with some murky psychological baggage.  At the heart of the enigma lies Waldo Lydecker (played by Clifton Webb).  He's so head-over-heels in love and so ferociously jealous of Laura (the ingenue Gene Tierney) that he'll resort to anything, even murder, to keep her from other men.  The premise is good whodunit fare, but it would make more obvious sense if Lydecker weren't both old and gay.

Clifton Webb was fifty-five when the picture was made, but he looks and acts ten or fifteen years older.  He may be a bachelor, but he's not an eligible one. There's a story that Webb had a clause in his contract with Twentieth-Century Fox that barred the company from alluding to his homosexuality, but the prohibition, if it existed, didn't stop him from playing Lydecker with a pronounced gay affect. He's fussy, he's bitchy, he's a queen -- in short a stage homosexual in every aspect except that he's not obviously interested in men.  (Well, not overtly;  but it is a surprise when he exposes himself to the detective Mark McPherson [Dana Andrews] when he steps out of a bathtub and asks McPherson to throw him a robe.)

A clue to Lydecker's character occurs in the film's first scene.  He spies on Detective McPherson, who's wandering around Lydecker's apartment, browsing an extensive collection of fragile objets d'art.  McPherson goes to pick up a piece of glass and Lydecker calls out "Careful, that's very valuable" (I'm quoting from memory).  From this incident we learn two things:  that Lydecker is a collector of beautiful works of art, and that he's willing to let people look but not touch. This same two traits control Lydecker's relations to Laura: he cherishes her beauty and molds her in a Pygmalion-like way, but he's hyper-protective.  For him, she becomes an untouchable work of art (the portrait of Laura, on which the camera focuses so obsessively, is the metaphorical signifier of her place in his mental world).  His cool sexuality (he's perfectly content with twice-a-week dinners) and his age (he's more interested in fathering Laura than in making love to her) are less powerful than his pygmalionism. 

By transforming Laura into a work of art, Lydecker attempts to preserve her virginity.  He therefore shoos away her potential lovers.  He destroys the career of Jacoby, the painter, by writing a vitriolic attack on him;  he collects revealing information about the southern gigolo Carpenter (Vincent Price).  He competes with McPherson.  It's a neat turn that to do so he becomes a detective himself -- loitering in the snow outside Laura's apartment, eavesdropping behind a post in a night club, etc.  Eventually he comes to understand that he can't preserve Laura's "purity;" it's then that the film turns to violence.  After all is lost, he gives away the game when he says to McPherson, with visceral horror, "I suppose you'll have a disgustingly earthy relationship" [i.e. with Laura]. 

It's fascinating that McPherson, though he has all the outward marks of the macho gumshoe, is himself tepid about sexuality.  He lacks charisma, emotion, lust.  The film allows him and Laura only one slight awkward peck of a kiss. The detective is not a creature of passion, but he may be, like Lydecker, a lover of art;  it's revealed, climactically, that Laura's portrait will be auctioned and that McPherson has put in a bid on it.   

Amnesia in Films: The Bourne Identity

Jason Bourne has contracted the worst case of amnesia in movie history and it's going to last for at least four long films (three of them already released). Bourne's type of amnesia is very convenient for plotting because he doesn't know who he is but yet retains an astonishing range of martial and intellectual skills. He's a born-again innocent (a murderer with a newly minted heart of gold) who is shocked to discover that before he lost the marbles of memory, he was a professional murderer. He's rather charming in an idiot-savant-assassin way, but I suspect that his particular varieity of amnesia is not very well known to non-Hollywood neurologists.  

It's a curious idea -- that an individual can be cleansed of his previous sins by losing his memory.  And yet The Bourne Identity doesn't make much of this interesting moral question. "Who am I" is not investigated in the vocabulary of tragedy, as in Lear's "Who is it who can tell me who I am" but as in "what's my name, what's my address, what's my phone number." Pertinent questions, surely, but not profound ones. 

On the other hand, King Lear never climbed down the outside of a building, handholds in the cracks between blocks of marble, nor, as far as I can remember, did he plummet his Fiat down a series of flights of stone stairs while being chased by a posse of sirening motorcyclists .    

Amnesia in Film: The Crooked Way (1949)

Eddie Rice has served in World War II, won a silver star, but lost his memory to a piece of shrapnel buried in this brain (the x-ray is flashed onto the screen). It's an "organic" rather than "psychological" amnesia and therefore incurable. Released from a hospital, Eddie returns home to L. A. to find that he was once Eddie Riccardi and that he was a no-good, double-crossing hood, hated by both police and former gang members and also distrusted by his ex-wife. Eddie Rice is a Dr. Jekyll, but his pre-amnesia self was a Mr. Hyde. It's a curious and unexplained transformation -- from evil to good. There is almost no psychological continuity between his ante- and post-trauma personality.  Eddie the amnesiac is utterly untroubled to discover that he was once a monster. He extricates himself from the mob, jettisons his past, and starts a new life. His amnesia is a thing apart. 

The direction (by Robert Florey) and the noir cinematography are splendid. John Payne, a fine, underappreciated actor, (as Rice/Riccardi) cannot possibly convey the psychological complexity that should have been, but wasn't, written into the script.

"Rio Grande" (1950) Then and Now

Last night, on the big HDTV, with the collaboration of Netflix, and peering through our toes, we watched the John Ford cavalry movie "Rio Grande." I first saw this film in the year of its release (I was eleven years old) at the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue. 

In days of yore, it was the custom for the neighborhood urchins to take in a double bill on a rainy Saturday afternoon.  It was a good way for our harried mothers to dispose of us for four hours -- and on the cheap, inasmuch as the price of admission was only fourteen cents. 

"Rio Grande" was a perfect kind of urchin movie.  Good guys (cavalry) versus bad guys (Indians), lots of action, no overt sex.  It offered much too much singing, but the slow periods would have been enlivened by hoots, whistles, popcorn-throwing, banging the head of the kid in the seat in front of you with the heel of your hand, primitive pre-flirting, and chasing in the aisles.

In 1950, Maureen O'Hara (John Wayne's estranged wife), was puzzling if not inexplicable  -- merely an impediment to the action.  Sixty years later, she is beautiful, dignified, even majestic.  The poor Apaches, who for me and for my heedless comrades were nothing other than targets for cavalry bullets, are now unutterably tragic.  John Wayne was then an immensely heroic figure, but with the passing of years. he has become a rigid incompetent dope. 

The West, in those days, was part Monument Valley, part myth;  now I live in a West that has nothing to do with Coney Island Avenue, even less with John Ford.  

What We Watched in the Fifties: Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

I watched Rebel Without A Cause last night in a state of constant twitching puzzlement.  Why has this film become a cult classic?  How can we account for the iconic appeal of James Dean, who moves me not the least bit?  How did thirty-five-year-olds manage to pass for high school kids in 50s movies?  Why, in those ancient days, did every male seem to wear a tie and jacket round the clock?  

The movie seemed like a period piece, dug up from some archive  --  which is odd, because I was 16 and a high school student in 1955 when Rebel Without a Cause was released.  It should have spoken to me then, or now.  But didn't and doesn't, not a bit. 

The Eisenhower decade was the great age of suburban "juvenile delinquency," so-called.  What do these kids want?  They all have their expensive cars and the war is over.  The teen-agers, all of them, are utterly inarticulate.  They're also shockingly unfeeling.  When Buzz Gunderson dies in the "chickie run," he is not mourned, even for a femtosecond, and within a few hours, his girlfriend Judy has fallen in love with Buzz's rival, Jim Stark. 

Nor, in this film, is the adult generation is any more admirable -- the wives and mothers are shrews, the men grotesquely henpecked.  The film has a strong gay subtext throughout -- most apparent in the Jim Stark-Plato relationship.  I'm sure that I wouldn't have noticed it in 1955, but it kind of jumps at you nowadays. 

1950s juvenile delinquents came in two categories:  urban deprived and rich suburban alienated.  I was of neither one class nor the other.  True that we had to be constantly on our toes to keep clear of the one group, but the other (those depicted in this film) might just as well have been living on another planet.

A dangerous planet, as it turned out, for the makers of Rebel Without a Cause.  James Dean was already dead when the film was released, having been killed in an automobile accident.  Sal Mineo was murdered in 1976.  Natalie Wood, drunk, drowned in 1981.  Nick Adams died of a drug overdose in 1968.  The film's talented director, Nicholas Ray, discovered his wife, Gloria Grahame, in bed with his thirteen-year-old son, whom she later married.  Ray died prematurely of drugs and alcohol. 

Horse Feathers (1932) /Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

Goodness gracious! I should have known that the two films were distant cousins -- after all, Woody Allen's film (one of his very best, and certainly his most genial) ends with an extended tribute to Groucho in which everyone wears phony mustaches and pretends to puff on stogies. But not having taken a look at Horse Feathers in twenty or thirty years, I failed to realize how much Woody had borrowed. How could I have forgotten that Everyone Says I Love You extracts and transforms two songs from Horse Feathers: "I'm Through With Love" as well as its own title song. And of course it shares its liberated and episodic series-of-skits structure not only with Groucho but with all vaudevillians. Not to mention a willingness to throw logic to the winds or under the bus for the sake of a gag. Everyone Says I Love You is a lovely, gentle film (much more mild than its raucous unsubtle predecessor).

Its exhilarating choreography is very distinctly not indebted to anything in the earlier film.

Some ambitious scholar could write an illuminating essay on Woody's Marxism.  

Replacing Children In In America

I finally got around to watching In America, a film which won all sorts of awards in 2002 and which I ordered from Netflix after it appeared on someone's best films of the decade list.  It's a fine movie, especially if you enjoy piping your eye from dawn to dusk.  Always susceptible, I cried a full quart.  Samantha Morton, familiar from her role as Hattie in Sweet and Lowdown, is endowed with the most expressive face in the history of cinema, and the director of In America, Jim Sheridan, is smart enough to take advantage of her features.  

The story is not unfamiliar -- immigrants in America, culture-clash and assimilation, poverty and a bit of triumph at the end.  The film skirts dangerously close to cliche and occasionally falls over the precipice -- I'm sorry but I've seen too many movies in which an emotionally-stunted hero waits until the final frame before he breaks into tears.  

In America is at heart a drama about replacing the dead child.  Johnny and Sarah Sheridan lost a boy to a brain tumor and they've been off balance ever since.  They're not going to be whole until they make another baby.  Sarah's pregnancy is precarious and the parturition difficult, and in a contrived piece of hoakum, the baby doesn't begin to thrive until the suffering soul of a dying friend is mystically infused into her.

No thought is given (nor should it be) to the poor baby, whose whole life will be colored by her entrance into the world as savior and redeemer and who will be freighted with expectations that she will never be able to fulfill.  

Pretty Poison (1960); Tuesday Weld (1943- )

Pretty Poison was released in 1960 to excellent notices.  I remember addiing it to the must-see list.  But I didn't get around to it at the time, probably because the film wasn't widely distributed. But Pretty Poison stuck in my mind -- or rather it was the combination of Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld that excited my interest. During the VHS years I made another attempt to see the movie, but it was apparently stuck in some sort of royalty-and-ownership dispute and never made it onto tape. And then another twenty years elapsed and I tried again, this time typing the name into my Netflix queue, and, mirabile dictu, there it was.  So at last, after fifty years, a cd of Pretty Poison appeared in the mailbox. 

It's a fine film, well worth the wait. I don't know what I would have thought about it in 1960, but in 2010 it seems like a late variant of 1950s film noir and an important but unacknowledged waystation on the road from Double Indemnity to Body Heat. It offers a dangerous jeune fille fatale in the highschool cheerleader Mary Ann Stepanek, some great plot twists, and a creepy young man who's not as clever as he thinks (very similar to his lineal descendant, the fatuous lawyer Ned Racine). The photography, all sunlit and cheerful, disguises the noirish themes and keeps the audience off balance. The screenwriter, Lorenzo Semple Jr., was, if I remember correctly, just emerging from the McCarthy blacklist, which may be why the film stresses cold-war themes -- spies and sabotage and the like. Can it be accidental that, in the last year of the Eisenhower administration, a well-meaning but ineffective government employee as given the name Azenauer?  

When Tuesday Weld, scion of an ancient Massachusetts family performed in this film, I was taking courses in Cambridge, in Weld Hall. She does a great job -- and how could anyone not be struck by her great name. Tuesday Weld is linked, in my mind, not only to the Saltonstalls, Peabodys, and Lodges but also to Billy Sunday, Rick Monday, Joe Friday, January Jones, Fredric March, May West, June Jones, August Busch, Susan Sontag, Domenico Scarlatti and Jeudi Garland. 

English Teachers Are Such Jerks

English teachers are such colossal jerks, at least whenever they appear in movies.  A case in point is Smart People (2008), which is the second-best academic movie ever made in Pittsburgh (Wonder Boys is superior). Smart People offers us a Carnegie-Mellon Professor of English, played by a shambling Dennis Quaid, who is a depressed, angry, uncommunicative, and miserable being, and who insults and patronizes both his students and his family.  He's the perfect embodiment of traditional and persistent American anti-intellectual stereotypes.  Book-learning has turned him into a mere grammarian, a pedant, who must learn about "real life" from his rolling-stone, improvident, frequently-stoned but streetsmart brother.  Smart People is constructed around stereotypes that were exhausted when Shakespeare created Holofernes and Sir Hugh Evans more than four hundred years ago. 

I've known a lot of English teachers -- some good, some bad -- but I've yet to encounter the shallow stereotype.

English teachers make their way into a disproportionately large number of movies.  There are two reasons for this phenomenon.  The first is that the writer of the film wants to illustrate some thematic point, so he brings his characters into a classroom where a pompous old fart or fartess can provide some cheap laughs while explicating a poem or novel that is tangentially related to a point the film is trying to make.  The second reason is purely revengeful.  In films in which English teachers figure, there's often --almost always, in fact -- a young man whose writing is unappreciated by the narrow-minded professor.  In Smart People, he's the son of our own nasty hero, and his sparkling poem is published in the New Yorker while his indifferent father is still waiting to hear whether his critical-theory manuscript has been rejected yet once again.  This character -- the brilliant but unappreciated young poet or playwright or novelist -- stands in for the writer or director of the film, who is saying, in filmspeak, "look at me now, you colossal jerk. I'm making movies and you're still back in high school or at State U., grading freshman term papers. So there!!! That'll teach you to give me a C+."

By the way -- Smart People is an intelligent, well-written film.  I heartily recommend it.