by Edward Champion

Jane McGonigal’s Mind is Broken

A 3,000 word response to Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, outlining in detail Ms. McGonigal’s misunderstanding of psychology, human behavior, and intellectualism.

Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, landing with a Gladwellian thud of wily reductionism and indolent thinking, is the most irresponsible nonfiction book I am likely to read this year. This remarkably callow book, professing to be new in approach but merely retreading exhausted notions, offers the shaky premise that, because reality is difficult, video games exist to pick up the slack. Perhaps a foolish belief in games as magic beans for a hypothetical beanstalk (McGonigal is curiously obsessed with enormity throughout her book) is similar to a foolish belief in alien abduction, Scientology, fundamentalist religion, vaccines triggering autism, or the Loch Ness Monster. That’s really the only conclusion I can draw. Because McGonigal cannot make the case that a weekend of Halo 3 is any more purposeful than a weekend in Cabo San Lucas drinking margaritas and banging the brainless.

In the McGonigalian view, failure has to be “fun” and embarrassment needs to be “happy.” Fiero, an Italian adjective for being proud that was used as an epithet by Petrarch, is “the most primal rush we can experience” and, paragraphs later, “one of the most powerful neurochemical highs we can experience.” And if we can get our loved ones playing a virtual game called Chore Wars (instead of simply being adult and doing our housework), “our friends and family will define fiero moments for us every day.” Hang on a minute. Is it altogether healthy to forge relationships around inherent smugness? Isn’t this a bit Ayn Randian? Or, dare I say it, Riefenstahlian? “Through my optimism,” once said Leni Riefenstahl, “I naturally prefer and capture the beauty of life.”

In McGonigal’s world, one cannot simply go for a run. One needs to have an obnoxious Nike+ mini avatar (Nike’s answer to Clippy?) accompanying the exercise — a cuddly animated little bastard who smiles and trash talks for “vicarious reinforcement.” Except that vicarious reinforcement, popularized by a Canadian shrink named Albert Bandura, involves learning about behavioral consequences by observing other people (that would be those flesh-and-blood, carbon-based life forms called humans: your friends, family, enticing strangers, and so forth, all decidedly not computer-animated and all decidedly not a narcissistic reproduction of you). McGonigal’s elastic application fails to explain why a virtual creature sponsored by a multibillion dollar corporation interested in getting people running (and thus buying more shoes) is better at conveying behavioral consequences than flesh-and-blood friends (who like to run, generally out of an interest that has little to do with money). And I can guarantee McGonigal that a childish avatar isn’t going to make me run anytime soon. I do walk (ideally) five miles a day, three times a week. And it’s because I enjoy being attuned with the very reality that McGonigal claims is broken. The people you stop and talk with, the sights you observe, the friends you walk with. And so forth.

Different people have different approaches. One would think that McGonigal, having a PhD, would understand this basic truism. But then McGonigal, a New Geek type who wishes to cram her unlived perspective down our throats, really doesn’t grasp psychology very well. She quotes Maslow without comprehension and then writes, “Games are showing us exactly what we want out of life: more satisfying work, better hope of success, stronger social connectivity, and the chance to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.” But what McGonigal missed in Motivation was Maslow’s assurance that those who are self-actualized have “an unusual ability to detect the spurious, the fake, and the dishonest in personality, and, in general, to judge people correctly and efficiency” and that this efficiency in relation to reality “extended to many other areas in life.” Presumably, that would include video games. In other words, Maslow urged us not to put the cart before the horse, whereas McGonigal sees the video game as a crass cure-all.

These are only just a few indications that Reality is Broken is nothing less than the product of a consummate quack. Consider the book’s numerous “Fix” insets, offering “helpful” summaries of how we can fix the “broken” reality around us. These seem more designed for a self-help audience than anything even half-approaching scholarship:

FIX #6: EPIC SCALE — Compared with games, reality is trivial. Games make us a part of something bigger and give epic meaning to our actions.

I’m not sure what kind of drug experience McGonigal has had, but swap “games” for “mescaline” and you start to see the problem.

McGonigal uses the word “addictive” as a positive modifier. “What makes Tetris so addictive,” McGonigal writes, “is the intensity of the feedback it provides.” Wait a minute. Isn’t intensity a problem if we’re trying to contend with a mad influx of feedback? Later in the book: “By providing a goal-oriented, feedback-rich, obstacle-intensive environment for dancing, [Top Secret Dance Off, McGonigal’s project] makes dancing more motivating, fun, and addictive.” There’s a variation of “intense” and “feedback” again. Still, no clear answers on the “addictive” question. And isn’t it a bit self-serving and highly disingenuous to write in general marketing terms about your own game project? “Of course, we’ve also developed many external shortcuts to triggering our hardwired happiness systems: addictive drugs and alcohol….But none of these methods are sustainable or effective in the long term.” Wait a minute! If you’re applying “addictive” to something that isn’t sustainable, then is it safe to say that video games might prove just as unsustainable or ineffectual in the long term?

McGonigal can complain about the “moral debates over the addictive quality of games” all she wants (and, as a gamer who severely limits his gaming time precisely because of these addictive qualities, I’m likely to be on her side on this point), but if she doesn’t possess the smarts or the courage to be transparent about the medium’s more harmful aspects, then her mind is clearly broken and her book contributes nothing to a meaningful debate on whether or not video games are art, whether or not video games have real-world applications, and so forth.

Just how roseate is McGonigal? Rather tellingly, you won’t find “addiction,” “psychological disorder,” “failure,” “violence,” “aggression,” or “binge gaming” listed in the index. (You won’t find “emotion” either, but you will find “emotional activation.” Such is the programmer’s disease.) McGonigal is too much of a terrified doe to confront the very reality she wishes to condemn. That reality, for those who haven’t been paying attention (presumably McGonigal included) involves a Korean couple who proved so irresponsible that they let their child die while they played World of Warcraft. Or how about the South Korean teen who died from exhaustion after a twelve hour gaming binge? What about the mother who shook her three-month-old son to death because he had the temerity to interrupt a game of Farmville? Video games didn’t kill these children, but they certainly contributed. Given such stories, it is intellectually irresponsible for McGonigal to stick with the California sunshine that video games are a foolproof cure for the mind. I like raisins, but I wouldn’t be arrogant or foolish enough to suggest that everybody can find peace and harmony and “fiero” (“Boo yah, motherfucker, how you like me now! I ate me some raisins!”) by eating raisins. McGonigal’s myopic view is particularly troubling, since her book comes not long after Tom Bissell showed us the other side of the token in Game Over, writing bravely about his deadly cocaine-fueled descent into Grand Theft Auto IV.

“What the world needs now are more epic wins,” writes McGonigal in typical Pollyanna mode, “opportunities for ordinary people to do extraordinary things — like change or save someone’s life — every day.” By nearly every philosophical standard, this statement is laughable. A Grand Theft Auto IV player may very well find pride in biking up the highest virtual mountain from the city (as McGonigal cites). While this alleviates boredom and occupies time, is this really comparable with saving a person’s life? McGonigal brings up Joe Edelman’s Groundcrew, which McGonigal describes as “a wish panel for real people.” But in an interview with McGonigal, Edelman reveals that this represents little more than entitlement and narcissistic wish fulfillment:

A woman was at a dance rehearsal in a basement somewhere in Boston. She was completely exhausted, she couldn’t leave rehearsal, and she was dying for a latte so she could keep dancing. That’s the wish she posted on Groundcrew: “Help, I need a latte.”

Note the laughably hyperbolic language Edelman uses here. “Completely exhausted” instead of “tired.” “Dying” instead of “wanting.” “A latte so she could keep dancing.” Ever hear of water? Any real thinker would cut through this redolent nonsense, or at least question it. Then there’s the preposterous petit-bourgeoisie “help” — a word that I usually associate with someone in the process of being mugged or in need of spare change — that springs from these desires. And, Edelman continues, when some guy in Boston orders the latte, he walks into the basement and declares, “I have a latte!” “as if it were the most important thing in the world.”

McGonigal concedes, “Okay, so getting someone a latte isn’t exactly the most world-changing effort you could make,” before offering the one-sentence paragraph: “Or is it?” One rapidly understands that McGonigal, like a common newspaper hack about to be cut loose by the last editor willing to understand her, is trying to cram quotes into her thesis, rather than letting a thesis emerge naturally from her results.

“The normal way of getting a latte is a cold, economic exchange,” continues Edelman. “But this latte was different. This latte was love. This is about inventing a different way, a better way, of getting what we need, every day.”

The beer I had last night was lust. And the morning coffee is redemption. Please. Instead of challenging this statement (which reads more like marketing copy), or getting Edelman to expand upon what he means, McGonigal closes this section of the chapter. The latte, in McGonigal’s words, “perfectly represents the new kind of epic win.”

“Epic” is another modifier that McGonigal likes a great deal. She’s fond of bringing up meaningless achievements, such as the fact that, on April 2009, Halo 3 players scored 10 billion kills against the Covenant. “Ten billion kills wasn’t an incidental achievement, stumbled onto blindly by the gaming masses,” writes McGonigal. “Halo players made a concerted effort to get there.” You may as well jump up and down over the 30,000 Americans who killed themselves last year. Weren’t their suicides also “a concerted effort to get there?” Should we celebrate the fact that several trillion cigarette butts litter the streets worldwide every year? Simply the pollution is worthwhile because of its “epic” results. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. And on the subject of Halo, McGonigal also praises the Halo Museum of Humanity — a startlingly convincing shrine that provides “epic context for heroic action.” What McGonigal calls “epic context,” I call “slick marketing.” And I’ll even go further. Soviet propaganda posters certainly carry an allure, but we also know that the distinctive style was calculated to get citizens to believe in bad things.

McGonigal’s stunning lack of vision stretches into a soul-sucking need for constant self-affirmation:

Giving talks is exhausting, even when I enjoy it, I explained. It would be energizing to see some +1s pop up right on top of my Powerpoint slides as I worked my way through the deck.

There it is again: the word “exhausting” used in relation to a privileged life. You know what’s exhausting? Digging ditches for eight hours. Delivering UPS packages in a blizzard without a break. But let’s cut Calamity Jane a little slack. Positive reinforcement is certainly a good thing. But what McGonigal seems to be asking for here is nothing but positive reinforcement. After telling a SXSW crowd about desiring a “plus-one intellect for every smart thing I said during this talk,” she is flooded with emails. Some guy named Clay Johnson creates plusoneme.com. But of course, there’s no way to cap the praise or even offer a self-correcting -1. And what we end up having is a delusional McGonigal: “So far, I’m up to +25 innovation, because I asked my colleagues to plusoneme when I do something innovative at work.” Which leads one to ask why McGonigal requires all this cheerleading, or whether the +1s might actually be interfering with innovation. After all, doesn’t innovation sometimes come from presenting unpopular ideas? Doesn’t innovation sometimes come from challenging the status quo? Indeed, might not some personal discovery emerge by confronting reality and using it to enrich one’s life? The timorous McGonigal resorts to her precious little toys to find a “better” life.

“In the end, what makes a Foursquare social life better than your regular social life is the simple fact that to do well in Foursquare, you have to enjoy yourself more.” Note the assumption that living through Foursquare is better before the fact! The user just has to enjoy herself! McGonigal hasn’t considered privacy, much less how one’s appreciation and approach might change if one is angling to become the mayor of some dive bar. And her overbearing suppositions — which are the apotheosis of geek douchery — stand in sharp contrast to the dérive‘s possibilities:

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there….the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science, despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself, provides psychogeography with abundant data.

That “calculation of their possibilities” doesn’t involve technology at all. It’s the noggin taking in details and finding a magical way to take in the seemingly commonplace. But now Guy Debord’s “abundant data” is tabulated through Foursquare. The metrics Foursquare tabulates is “just data, a way to quantify what you’re already doing. What really makes Foursquare engaging is the challenge and reward system built around the data.” In other words, McGonigal leaves nothing to non-objective, non-metric possibility. The machine takes care of everything and it computes data around a highly limited social construct.

In order to turn a group of strangers into a community, you have to follow two basic steps: first, cultivate a shared interest among strangers and, second, give them the opportunity and means to interact with each other around that interest.

Aside from the fact that one doesn’t need a video game to create this type of needlessly limited community (why should people “interact”around a singular interest?), this is a troubling Kinsey-like approach to socialization. As anyone who has ever attended a science fiction convention knows, a common interest doesn’t necessarily ensure a lasting social bond. But don’t tell that to McGonigal, who confuses this grouping with communitas, “a powerful sense of togetherness, solidarity, and social connection. And it protects against loneliness and alienation.” Let’s see how well communitas worked out during the Blessed Sacrament procession, courtesy of Michael J. Sallnow’s Contesting the Sacred:

During the Blessing Sacrament procession, therefore, space becomes highly contested, as Hospitallers and pilgrims jockey for position. Since the brancardiers are heavily outnumbered, they rely on persuasion and their official status to defend the space which has been marked out by their senior officials. As the ceremony approaches its climax, the boundary between sick and healthy pilgrims becomes ever more difficult to maintain, as the faithful press forward to catch sight of the Host and of the clergy following the priest conferring the blessing. Such moments of intense religious fervour dramatically illustrate the uneasy co-existence of communitas and status, of solidarity and self-interest, which is so characteristic of the cult as a whole.

There’s a tremendous difference between buying a homeless man a meal (a tangible and immediate reward) and playing Free Rice — a game whereby the user answers questions (a virtual and unseen reward), with the promise of rice being delivered to a starving nation. I bring this up because, with Free Rice, McGonigal is willing to concede that “the grains are rice aren’t coming from the players — they’re coming from a small number of advertisers who agree to pay the cost of ten grains of bulk rice for every correct-answer page view.” Had McGonigal applied this rightfully skeptical eye towards games that are created with similar free market goals, then her book might have become an invaluable investigation on how games can extend beyond their present capitalistic concerns.

Jane McGonigal’s mind is broken. She is no more concerned with an honest approach to social change than a sleazy salesman who hopes you will buy his Ford Lariat. The Lariat will only get you ten miles to the gallon, but the salesman assures you that the experience is epic and will leave you with a feeling of fiero — unlike the Pontiac model.

UPDATE: Shortly after I posted a link to this essay to Twitter, Jane McGonigal responded (in a now deleted tweet) as follows.

I reiterate my tweet. I will happily challenge Ms. McGonigal to a public debate about her book. And because I’m so sad, I also welcome Ms. McGonigal’s lengthy refutation of my points — that is, if she has the guts or the chops.

UPDATE 2: To provide yet another example on how McGonigal’s idealism gets in the way of comprehending the available data, one can look no further than a recent “debate” in the Wall Street Journal. On January 25, 2011, McGonigal cited a recent Pediatrics study, claiming:

The study, conducted by the National Institute of Education in Singapore, found that gamers who played on average 30 hours a week or more were more likely to experience negative real-life impacts from their gaming, such as increased social anxiety or decreased school performance. But for gamers playing 20 or fewer hours a week, no such problems occurred. Once again, these results suggest that there is a fairly clear distinction between gaming enough to fuel our real lives and gaming so much that it interferes with real life.

But if one reads the PDF, one finds something altogether different:

Most researchers have assumed that would be similar to pathological gambling. The parallel seems justifiable, because both are assumed to be behavioral addictions that begin as entertainment that can stimulate emotional responses and dopamine release. People gamble or play video games for many reasons, including relaxation, competence, autonomy, and escape from daily concerns. Playing can produce “flow” states, in which the player is focused, has a sense of control, may lose a sense of time and place, and finds playing intrinsically rewarding. Playing is not pathologically initially but becomes pathological for some individuals when the activity becomes dysfunctional, harming the individual’s social, occupational, family, school, occupational, family, school, and psychological functioning.(Emphasis added.)

The study rightfully points out that its purpose is not to answer this debate, but “to provide new data that may be useful.” And the purpose of this essay is to point out that, if McGonigal were a responsible or a flexible thinker, she would take greater care with a word like “addiction” and address the scientific fact that pathological behavior emerges from video games (about 9% of gamers are pathological, according to the Pediatrics study), while simultaneously pointing to the benefits. A nuanced and adult approach offers a fairly clear distinction between a self-help huckster and a genuine thinker.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Paula Bomer

In this 30 minute radio interview, writer Paula Bomer discusses the differences between bad thought and bad action, Patricia Highsmith, and passive-aggressive editors who impugn you at readings.

Paula Bomer appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #375. She is most recently the author of Baby.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Pondering whether producers will declare him a “bad radio show host” for thinking terrible things.

Author: Paula Bomer

Subjects Discussed: Prethinking a story involving an uncomfortable situation, whether smashing a baby against a brick wall constitutes shock value, Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions, the stigma on maternal neglect, Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother, whether or not “mother” means good, differing childhoods in South Bend, Indiana, the Catholic idea of whether or not we are our thoughts, guilt and bad thoughts, the paragraph structure of “The Mother of His Children”, plot vs. consciousness, going places you’re not supposed to go, trying to keep terrible thoughts within a character’s head, Patricia Highsmith, Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith, implicating husbands, the relationship to thought and action, Mary Gaitskill’s “The Girl on the Plane,” potshots toward the rich, Jean Rhys as a main inspiration, characters as writers, Nathan Zuckerman, Bomer’s secret novels, writers who write about painters instead of writers but who really wish to write about writers, editors who have accused Ms. Bomer of being a “bad mother” to her face, agents who have declared Ms. Bomer of being offensive, brutal rejections, whether or not offending people matters, attempts to not go to the uncomfortable, Scott Smith, horror writers being nice people, the autobiographical qualities of “The Second Son,” trust and crushing emotion, Iris Owens’s After Claude, Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, brutal birth scenes, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles, Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, sexual frustration, and perverse imagery.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: You have this extraordinary moment where a mother wishes to smash her baby against a brick wall. I’m wondering to what extent you prethink a situation where you’re writing about an uncomfortable situation. Is there an inherent risk to some degree in exploring what might be argued as “shock value” behavior? How do these things come into your head? (laugh)

Bomer: Well, I had a lot of fun writing that story [“Baby”]. I think it’s one of the funnier ones. And that one was basically pure satire. But there’s also, like any good satire, there’s elements of truth and real emotion as well. And actually a lot of women have written about that exact same feeling in nonfiction books. So that was a bit of the inspiration. Anne Lamott wrote a book called Operating Instructions and Louise Erdrich wrote a book called The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year. And both of them discuss in nonfiction wanting to smack the baby or hit the baby, and having this real incredible moment of frustration. So it had been done before. But I think in the context of “Baby,” the title story, it’s not this lovely nonfiction book with nuances of other emotion. She’s not a very likable person. And so I think that giving her those thoughts make it even harder to take. Because she’s not very sympathetic.

Correspondent: Well, there’s certainly a stigma upon any kind of thought of neglect. Ayelet Waldman got into a lot of trouble with Bad Mother.

Bomer: Oh right!

Correspondent: “I would rather be with my husband than my children.” That kind of thing.

Bomer: Well, you know, when I — this was fifteen years ago; I have teenagers now. But still I remember. The pressure to be — there’s this strange idea that “mother” means “good.” And actually mother just means that you had a kid. And lots of people have kids. And it doesn’t automatically make you a good person.

Correspondent: The Manson Family!

Bomer: Yeah, right. (laughs) I was in the trenches of the playground and I was hoping that this was a time for people to be loving and supportive of each other. Because it’s an incredibly difficult time. You’re not sleeping. Your life has changed. So on and so forth. You have this incredible responsibility that gets sick a lot and cries. And yet in the playground, it was more like high school all over again. It was just really hard to find people who wanted to be understanding instead of pick at your weaknesses. And that might be a New York thing. I said in my Publishers Weekly interview. I’m from South Bend, Indiana and it’s a different childhood. And it’s a different way. New York. New Yorkers — sometimes, they just can’t turn it off. It’s always got to be like some competition. And even motherhood — like I said, I think it’s a corruption of a difficult but beautiful experience.

Correspondent: But not just motherhood. What constitutes abuse? Does a thought constitute abuse? Does a homicidal consideration of your born child constitute abuse?

Bomer: That’s funny. Because Giancarlo DiTrapano asked me something similar to that. And that’s a Catholic idea. That we are our thoughts. And I don’t think we are our thoughts. All sorts of things go through your head. And we are our behavior. So having a bad thought can make you feel terribly guilty. But I don’t think it makes you a bad person. Why I think that character is bad isn’t because she has a tough moment with her baby, but it’s because she’s so shallow. It’s a satirical Upper East Side mom. Even though I think she moved to Tribeca. Everything’s about one-upping someone else. Even having kids becomes a part of it.

Correspondent: Well, I’m glad that you mentioned whether a thought translates into an action. Because there is something very interesting you do in these stories. I want to point to two of them. In “The Mother of His Children,” the second paragraph could almost be the first paragraph the way it’s written when it describes Ted Stanton. But then you have the first paragraph, which is very consciousness-heavy, and that really is the story. And that is the motivation for it. You do something similar with “A Galloping Infection” where the first paragraph reads as if it’s the beginning of a noir story. With the wife’s body dragged out of the two bedroom house. And then you have the second paragraph that begins with the sentence, “He no longer would have to disappoint her.” My question is how you arrived at this bifurcation between plot and consciousness. It’s almost as if you’re suggesting with these stories that narrative can’t always capture these more unpleasant and seamy sides of consciousness.

Bomer: You mean narrative can’t capture it. You mean, the plot?

Correspondent: The plot. Yes.

Bomer: I like getting inside the heads of my characters. It’s not the only way to write. Okay, “Galloping Infection,” in particular, the man’s in shock. Because his wife dies. And I think anyone who’s experienced the death of a loved one — even though he also discusses his lack of love for her because relationships are complicated — but I kind of wanted to capture that shock. And so I think you really need to get inside someone’s head. Because the things that go through your head when someone dies — it’s funny. Some of the darker stories, I had a lot of fun writing. Like there’s another story about marital rape. “She Was Everything to Him,” which originally appeared in Fiction. And it’s not a funny story. Some of the stories are funny. But this one is not. And yet I was giggling the whole time I was writing it. Because I knew that I was doing something subversive. And it was fun. For me, it’s fun to go places where I’m not supposed to go. I’m too old and I don’t want to be a rebellious teenager anymore. So I get to be really wrong in my work. And it’s wonderful fun for me.

Correspondent: Wrong? I’m wondering…

Bomer: Bad. How’s that?

The Bat Segundo Show #375: Paula Bomer (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Magnificent Ambersons (Modern Library #100)

The first entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1.

(This is the first entry in the The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1.)

By all reports, Booth Tarkington was hot shit sometime in the early 20th century. It is quite possible that he was the kind of man who entered a room and announced with his very presence: “Do you know who I am?” How do we know this? Well, he won the Pulitzer Prize twice (for Ambersons and Alice Adams). He had family members who were politicians (his uncle, Newton Booth, was the eleventh Governor of California and a United States Senator) and Tarkington himself was elected to the Indiana State Legislature.

I have consulted a hagiography written by someone named Robert Cortes Holliday, a “biographer” who appears to be just as dead as Tarkington. Holliday informs us that Tarkington was very precocious as a child: “His oddities, one gathers, were even more odd than is usual with odd children.” Which begs the question of what “even more odd than is usual” meant in 1873. Did it mean that Tarkington was a pyromaniac? A toddler who tortured ants through a burning-glass? I shall leave these questions to the scholars. What’s particularly strange about this description is that Holliday, apparently grabbing direct quotes from the mack daddy himself, claims that Tarkington was “not precocious at all” after the age of four. Since most of us don’t really remember much before the age of three, there remains the vital question of whether Tarkington was the right man to remark upon his own precocity. A critic named Eleanor Booth Simmons (a Booth related to Booth Tarkington?) has this to say in the now forgotten periodical The Bookman: “Mr. Tarkington has that peculiar artistic sensitiveness which leads him, whether consciously or unconsciously, to meet each new subject with a new and subtle and fitting change of mood.”

All this talk of precocity and artistic sensitiveness led me quite naturally to Orson Welles. I must confess that before reading this book, I had not read Booth Tarkington before. I had obtained an ancient hardcover edition of Seventeen (with an impressive green cover!) at an estate sale, but hadn’t bothered to dig in. I had only been familiar with Orson Welles’s film version of The Magnificent Ambersons and, perhaps more prominently, the sad story behind it. RKO sent Orson Welles off to Brazil to work on another project. Since Welles relinquished his right to final cut, RKO took the opportunity to sandbag him, reshooting Welles’s ending to make it happier and removing about 40 minutes of material.

But I doubt very highly that the man who directed the Voodoo Macbeth (or RKO, for that matter) would have allowed any of those 40 minutes to mimic the remarkable racism contained within the novel:

“A cheerful darkey went by the house, loudly and tunelessly whistling some broken thoughts upon women, fried food and gin.”

Can Tarkington’s oddness and precocity before the age of four excuse such an ugly description? Probably not. There are some good reasons why Tarkington’s novels aren’t so easy to find. And in light of the present NewSouth scrubbing of “nigger” from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it’s important to remember that there were novelists like Tarkington who were much worse. The above description is hardly the least of Tarkington’s sins. Consider Ambersons‘s many “comedic” moments involving George Minafer’s servants.

George swore, and then swore again at the fat old darkey, Tom, for giggling at his swearing.

“Hoopee!” said old Tom. “Mus’ been some white lady use Mist’ Jawge mighty bad! White lady say, ‘No, suh, I ain’ go’n out ridin’ ‘ith Mist’ Jawge no mo’!’ Mist’ Jawge drive in. ‘Dam de dam worl’! Dam de dam hoss! Dam de dam nigga’! Dam de dam dam!’ Hoopee!”

Elsewhere in the novel, there’s “Old Sam,” who seems to share the same physical qualities and racist stereotyping as Tom. This leads me to wonder if Tarkington was so racist (precocious?) that he couldn’t even remember whether his servant was named Tom or Sam:

Old Sam, shuffling in with the breakfast tray, found the Major in his accustomed easy-chair by the fireplace—and yet even the old darkey could see instantly that the Major was not there.

It appeared that my initial foray into the Modern Library Reading Challenge was off to an inauspicious start. Particularly since none of this racism contributed much to the story.

Yet the novel gripped me. In much the same way that the equally racist D.W. Griffith film, The Birth of a Nation (released three years before the publication of Ambersons), had gripped me. George Amberson Minafer, the rich and spoiled young man foolish and inexperienced enough to believe that his family legacy will live on forever, is entertaining because his despicable nature is so widely tolerated. At the age of nine, Tarkington describes young Minafer as “a princely terror.” At the age of ten, Georgie tells a reverend to “go to hell.” Georgie is part Little Lord Fauntleroy, part Julian English. He’s hardly innocent of such boorish behavior. “Lawyers, bankers, politicians!” Georgie says early in the book, “What do they get out of life. I’d like to know! What do they ever know about real things? Where do they ever get?”

Georgie’s not entirely off-base with this hubris. As we see later in the novel, being on top of the emerging trends (namely the automobile) is the only way to make some serious money. The problem here is that Georgie wishes to assume a privileged life as a yachtsman rather than use his status to innovate or profit. So it’s quite hard for us to elicit much sympathy. Still, part of the novel’s fun comes from trying to understand why George’s douchery would be so wildly tolerated.

And, oh, dearest woman in the world, I know what your son is to you, and it frightens me! Let me explain a little: I don’t think he’ll change — at twenty-one or twenty-two so many things appear solid and permanent and terrible which forty sees are nothing but disappearing miasma. Forty can’t tell twenty about this; that’s the pity of it! Twenty can find out only by getting to be forty. And so we come to this, dear: Will you live your own life your way, or George’s way? I’m going a little further, because it would be fatal not to be wholly frank now. George will act toward you only as your long worship of him, your sacrifices — all the unseen little ones every day since he was born — will make him act. Dear, it breaks my heart for you, but what you have to oppose now is the history of your own selfless and perfect motherhood.

These sentiments (written in a letter) come from Eugene Morgan, the man who is meant to be with George’s mother, Isabel. Isabel feels utterly compelled to mother the hell out of Georgie. And, of course, George is naturally distrustful of Eugene — in part because he’s confused about Eugene’s daughter, Lucy Morgan, whom he doesn’t quite have the stomach to accept. (There are several embarrassing points throughout the book where George is reduced to stuttering. Even George’s proposal is cringe-worthy: “Lucy, I want — I want to ask you. Will you — will you — will you be engaged to me?”) Tarkington is smart enough to give us a few clues about why Isabel is so protective of her son. Back in the day, Isabel had a choice between two husbands: one who accidentally busted up a bass viol (Eugene) and the other who proved too safe and sane (Wilbur). Guess who Isabel married?

Wilbur, the natural bore keen on a very conservative approach to business, ends up kicking the bucket. Small wonder, one presumes, that Isabel ends up hot to trot for Eugene after the mistake has expired.

Is playing it safe the ultimate vice that Tarkington is exploring? In the novel’s first chapter, Tarkington offers a panorama of the manner in which an unnamed town has changed. We learn of vanished customs like “the all-day picnic in the woods” and a remarkable uptick in embroidering. We learn that houses were more commodious yet unpretentious, offering plentiful space and additional purpose for rooms. Much of this is quite interesting. Unfortunately, racism is also an ineluctable part of Tarkington’s vision:

Darkies always prefer to gossip in shouts instead of whispers; and they feel that profanity, unless it be vociferous, is almost worthless….They have passed, those darky hired-men of the Midland town; and the introspective horses they curried and brushed and whacked and amiably cursed — those good old horses switch their tails at flies no more. For all their seeming permanence they might as well have been buffaloes — or the buffalo laprobes that grew bald in patches and used to slide from the careless drivers’ knees and hang unconcerned, half way to the ground.

It’s safe to say that Tarkington, despite his astute eye for progress, wasn’t much of a progressive. This is especially strange, given Amberson‘s astute potshots against backwards thinking:

“I’m not sure he’s wrong about automobiles,” [Eugene] said. “With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization — that is, in spiritual civilization. It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men’s souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come, and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us expect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; Just how, though, I could hardly guess.”

If Tarkington was so on the money with technological change, why then was he so out to lunch with his racism? A Booth Tarkington fan site, responding to Thomas Mallon’s criticisms in 2004, writes, “Any charge that the Penrod books were actually racist would have to take into account the entire body of Tarkington’s work.”

Fair enough. James Rosenzweig, another literary adventurer reading his way through all the Pulitzer Prize winners, reports that Alice Adams is also racist — using similar stereotypes when writing about a cook and a waitress. And he reports that none of these stereotypes help to elucidate the family’s character. Jonathan Yardley’s introduction to Penrod observes additional stereotypes that are worse than either Ambersons or Alice Adams (“beings in one of those lower stages of evolution” and an orchestra erupting “like the lunatic shriek of a gin-maddened nigger”), and he concludes that “the reader of the early twenty-first century will pull up short at the appearance of offensive material, and some readers — understandably and legitimately — will simply refuse to continue reading.”

I don’t think any of Tarkington’s descriptions were ironic or satirical. A simile connoting a “gin-maddened nigger” is hardly necessary to advance the story. But I cannot deny that, despite my deep disgust at Tarkington’s stereotypes, there were large sections of The Magnificent Ambersons that captured my interest.

When an automobile unsettles the streets, I liked the way that Tarkington used antediluvian language to demonstrate how incongruous and monstrous it appears to George:

It was vaguely like a topless surry, but cumbrous with unwholesome excrescences fore and aft, while underneath were spinning leather belts and something that whirred and howled and seemed to stagger. The ride-stealers made no attempt to fasten their sleds to a contrivance so nonsensical and yet so fearsome. Instead, they gave over their sport and concentrated all their energies in their lungs, so that up and down the street the one cry that shrilled increasingly: “Git a hoss! Git a hoss! Git a hoss! Mister, why don’t you get a hoss?”

What’s interesting here is that Tarkington uses verbs instead of nouns to show us why George can’t quite parse the beastly motorized vehicle before him. The internal rhyme with the adverbs (“vaguely” and “surry,” “street” and “increasingly”) feels as if Tarkington, a man who was involved in theater while at Princeton, is about to confront the modernist revolution of short declarative sentences waiting in the wings.

Yet since we are forced to contend with both Tarkington’s racism and his natural gifts as a novelist, perhaps we have a truer sense of 1918’s ideological incoherence than the weak-kneed politically correct type hoping to scrub out the ugliness. Books like The Magnificent Ambersons are uncomfortable and test the disposition. Would Jonathan Franzen have ended up like this, if he had been born ninety years earlier? Would Franzen (bigshot social novelist of his time) have hated black people as much as Tarkington (bigshot social novelist of his time) did? Perhaps. Perhaps Faulkner’s maxim applies: a writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Next up: Donleavy’s The Ginger Man!

by Edward Champion

Review: The Green Hornet (2011)

This 2,500 word essay outlines how the geek has become aligned with marketing forces and why The Green Hornet and Seth Rogen must be thoroughly rejected for culture to survive.

A few weeks ago, Patton Oswalt wrote an essay for Wired in which he suggested that the time had come for geek culture to meet its maker. Oswalt bemoaned “Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells” and the sudden hip qualities of outsider geek culture, which had previously celebrated oddball nuggets hidden in plain sight, those precious tidbits misunderstood by all except a loyal few. The time had come, Oswalt wrote, to “make the present pop culture suck, at least for a little while.”

I’m not sure if I entirely agree with Oswalt’s thesis. The idea that culture has to kill itself, rather than adopt qualities that are playfully defiant, is something of a capitulation to the free market system. But that essay made the rounds for a few very good reasons. Oswalt was really writing about the ubiquity of everything. In antediluvian pre-Internet times, that alternative ending to Army of Darkness was once only available on a Japanese laserdisc. Now you can find it on YouTube. That obscure early Yello mix? Before CD burners, you tape traded. But now it’s on YouTube too. In fact, why not just download Yello’s entire discography from a torrent?

This omnipresence allows culture to thrive. And this is the reality from which we now operate. These developments may concern you if you feel a need to remain an outsider or if you wish to identify yourself by the obscurity of your tastes. As we have seen from some of the unintentionally hilarious anti-piracy videos making the rounds, these are market concerns rather than cultural concerns. And if you’re thinking about whether you’re inside or outside, chances are that you’re already part of the problem. Such capitalistic exigencies are now actively interfering with the advancement of culture. To offer one absurd example, we now live in a world in which Peter Serafinowicz, a hilarious comedian who deserves a bigger break and who may or may not be the Peter Sellers of our time, is now forced to steal his own movies in order to appear and perform in new material.

The ideal cultural state is simply liking what you like, without hip, square, geek, or cool dictating your existence. Labels aren’t how culture evolves. It isn’t how humans live and innovate.

Vile mainstream forces will always find ways to pluck, profit, and destroy original voices. The great irony is that they’re doing all this as their big box stores collapse and mass culture as a whole is fragmenting. Gone are the days where you’d find a Bloom County strip sitting incongruously next to Family Circus or a comedy program as wonderful as Monty Python’s Flying Circus getting aired on the BBC as a fluke. The people sitting atop the coffers aren’t going to let that happen again. Because for them, it’s about the short-term, the bottom line. Play by the rules. And just maybe, maybe you might have your personal project once you ensure that the investors buy the minimum six McMansions. Of course, by then, you’ll be a soulless burnout.

So the problem with variegated subcultures, whether geek or otherwise, is actually much worse than what Oswalt suggests. Much as we don’t want to talk about how the richest 1% horde a vast majority of the wealth and are willing to profit off of your inevitable bankruptcies and foreclosures, we don’t want to talk about the way New Geek culture has been co-opted by money and power.

Geek culture before the Internet was about people who genuinely liked Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, Skinny Puppy, and other “fringe” items, but who weren’t recognized by the mainstream for their tastes. Acts that operated in such conditions were a bit like small businesses. They couldn’t always make payroll, but they operated in the spirit of truth and passion. We see this today in independent bookstores that serve the community.

Unfortunately, the men with the money discovered (much as Werner Erhard and self-help gurus exploited the emotionally sensitive back in the 1970s) that they could profit off of the geek demographic and exploit them with Bernaysian glee. And you’ll now find these profit-oriented types — who like money but don’t really like culture — attending ComicCon and E3 to poach talent and control geek spin (or hiring people to do so; the E3 Booth Babes are among the most vile and misogynist approaches). There is now a great effort to woo anyone who is perceived as a tastemaker. Someone who has a blog or a prominent Twitter following.

This is hardly a prototypical move. Back in 1993, OK Soda was a desperate effort by the Coca-Cola Company to court the Generation X demographic. Coca-Cola hired alternative cartoonists. As Charles Burns recently told Martyn Pedler in an interview: “I kind of know what they were after – but I don’t know what they were thinking. They were going for this kind of ironic humor, for the 20-something audience. Instead of having that iconic Coca-Cola logo, the can would be different every few months or so.”

But the results backfired dramatically. Nevertheless, the corporate forces become self-aware and more ambitious after that hilarious little episode.

As the Internet began its great leap forward in the mid-1990s, marketing people located “geeks” who were mostly illiterate with an online audience. Even during these We’re Not Really Living in a Recession times, movie people fly unethical hacks like Harry Knowles off to junkets. And they invade legitimate geek space on the Internet — much of it generated in an initial burst of genuine geekdom until the inevitable question of money spoils everything.

Most of these efforts to network are an extension of advertising and crass PR. B-list celebrities reply on Twitter and “friendship” becomes just another word for something left to cash in on. And, hey, while you’re at it, why not collect private data and track their tastes so that we can refine the profit machine? I mean, the fucking fools are giving it to you!

The New Geeks who are part of this despicable capitalistic food chain often never stop to think that they may just be getting used. Or if they do know that they are getting used, they welcome being in close proximity to people they revere. And that collective dynamic of geeks quietly getting together to find culture that others can’t understand becomes drastically altered. For like anybody suddenly handed the keys to the executive washroom with little explanation, they want to use this power. They don’t want to sell out; they want to buy in. And it’s often for so little.

What these New Geeks never stop to consider is that maybe their legitimate tastes might actually be used to fuck with the money men or to stand for some corresponding set of virtues that don’t involve this geek groupthink. Their previous cultural tastes, now derivative courtesy of the natural expiration dates that come with every cultural cycle, suddenly become part of a new mainstream homogeneity that exists perhaps most predominantly in endless comic book movies. Rehash after rehash after rehash.

Take Matthew Vaughn, a sleazy filmmaker who worked tremendously hard to bamboozle undiscerning movers and shakers within the online geek cluster for Kick-Ass, a self-financed movie that needed to dictate how the audience had to feel. Blast The Dickies’s “Banana Splits” when Hit-Girl begins killing people so that you can understand with the “La La Las” that it’s meant to be ironic. Have Nicolas Cage rehash his backstory in a sarcastic tone. Don’t give the audience anything close to an ambiguous or an organic moment. Because we’re trying to make a shitload of money here.

Lest I be accused by the fawning fanboys as someone who is out-of-touch with mass entertainment, compare Vaughn’s approach with Michael Davis’s marvelous action movie, Shoot ‘Em Up. Shoot ‘Em Up is tremendously enjoyable. It wallows in corny puns, a wonderfully over-the-top gunfight that takes place in coitus, and the gloriously flamboyant moment of Clive Owen spanking a mother in retaliation. These moments don’t dictate; wild associations are thrown out for the audience to interpret and enjoy. Because of this, Shoot ‘Em Up is, unlike Kick-Ass, legitimate low-class art, and I love every damn minute of it.

I won’t go as far as Roger Ebert and claim that Kick-Ass was “morally reprehensible.” That’s a reactionary stance. The fact of the matter is that Kick-Ass bored the fuck out of me. It was no different from some overwrought movie made by cokeheads. Vaughn’s film was so motivated by appearing to be clever that it lacked the courage to inhabit a nascent spirit or pursue the truly bugfuck. It was a film that preferred to pander to its audience rather than trust its subconscious. Shoot ‘Em Up, by contrast, featured ridiculous gunfights that were inspired by Rube Goldberg-like invention and simply trusted its gut. A protagonist who subsists off of carrots? Check. Paul Giamatti playing an Elmer Fudd-like antagonist who takes calls from his wife? Check. Shoot ‘Em Up‘s willingness to pursue such wild ideas is, I suspect, one of the reasons it will be remembered as fondly as John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China is today. And the difference between Shoot ‘Em Up and Kick-Ass fleshes out Oswalt’s thesis. The former is a movie made from sheer passion that is hidden in plain sight; the latter is a movie that wishes to calculate its geek demographic.

* * *

The Green Hornet is your typical New Geek superhero movie. This is a vastly vile film written by joyless twentysomething cretins. It contains few pleasures. It is deeply misogynistic and ageist in the way that it ridicules a 36-year-old woman played by Cameron Diaz for entering the job market in her “twilight.” It is also astonishingly revisionist in the way that it has altered the 28-year-old Seth Rogen, a naturally fat man who has slimmed himself down for the role. In manipulating Rogen’s innate physicality, the filmmakers have made him look a good decade older than his years. It doesn’t help that Rogen has the thespic range of a thimble. Yet it’s hard to feel much sympathy for this starving baboon. For he was one of the two hacks who wrote this piece of shit.

The Green Hornet is a movie upholding the capitalist con. The 3-D was clearly decided upon at the last minute. Aside from a bottlecap flicked into the air by Kato — a cap looking as chintzy as some penny squished through a souvenir machine — there is very little in this movie that couldn’t be confined to 2-D. It doesn’t help that Britt Reid, the man who becomes the Green Hornet, is an incredibly obnoxious and tremendously stupid character. I’m all for assholes on film. Vince Vaughn (the good Vaughn to Matthew’s evil one) has eked out an interesting career playing assholes. But if the asshole doesn’t have dimension (such as Kevin Spacey’s Buddy Ackerman in Swimming with Sharks) or if you don’t make him a funny side character (such as J.K. Simmons’s J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movies; just enough screen time to make an impact), then there’s no purpose in serving up the asshole on screen.

You know that you have a problematic movie on your hands when the most interesting scenes don’t involve the title character. Take a moment featuring an unbilled James Franco playing an emerging crystal-dealing nightclub owner trash-talking Christoph Waltz’s Chudnofsky, the movie’s main villain. Chudonfsky says to the nighclub owner, “I’ve wanted my entire life to achieve the goal to be in charge of all the crime in Los Angeles.” The nightclub owner replies that the crime world now operates upon charisma, not hard work. We see how one line announces Chudnofsky’s motivation. And Franco’s response establishes an interesting thematic question for the movie to pursue. Will Britt Reid be able to eke out a crimefighting existence through charisma or hard work? Will the movie invert or demolish this dichotomy?

The problem, of course, is that Reid has neither quality. He’s merely an obnoxious buffoon with money who has to reiterate what’s going on to the audience every time there’s an action scene (“Hey, they’re really organized,” “This is cool,” “Whoa,” and other Mathew Vaughn-like ADR dictating to the New Geek audience what is clearly happening on the screen before them; the filmmakers clearly view the audience with great contempt). So the movie immediately becomes pointless. Yes, Reid has his manservant Kato (Jay Chou) to help him out. Kato makes a coffee with a colorful swirl pattern on the top, designs cool vehicles equipped with puncturing tires and machine guns, and knows marital arts. And when Reid becomes The Green Hornet, it is Kato who does all the work. The movie is too incompetent to establish an interesting conflict between Reid and Kato. For example, if Kato is so smart and Reid is cockblocking Kato’s efforts to woo Lenore Case (the female doormat I mentioned above played by Cameron Diaz), wouldn’t the film be more interesting if Kato began exploiting Reid by getting him to do his bidding? If you’re a smart Asian man in the 21st century, there’s no real incentive to be a white boy’s bitch unless you’re getting paid or he’s getting played.

But I’ve only been discussing the crude formulaic problems. Let us be clear. Seth Rogen is an avaricious man no different from a middle-aged investment banker. He only wants your money. The Green Hornet is Seth Rogen’s subprime loan. Read the goddam agreement. He has even persuaded the great Michel Gondry to sell out. Gondry may offer Kato-Vision, but it’s hardly worth the effort. Frankly, it’s astonishing that a man who was smart enough to collaborate with Charlie Kaufman (twice!) would settle for tenth-rate material.

What Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg have done is take an interesting character that wowed audiences on the radio (an audio collection of the original program is available here to make your comparisons) — something fun and magical that was “hidden in plain sight” — and turned it into a lifeless and derivative movie very much designed for the New Geeks. Already, the New Geeks have scarfed down The Green Hornet like starving dogs burrowing their vanquished muzzles into open cans of Alpo. “It was charming, very funny, and worthy of repeated viewings,” writes The Beat in an uncritical, sycophantic, and embargo-breaking review that reads like someone at PW was given a big bag of cash. The New Geek hacks at Cinema Blend offer “5 Reasons You Should Be Excited About The Green Hornet,” as if there couldn’t possibly be a single reason to reject the hype.

If mainstream audiences reject The Green Hornet this weekend (as they did last summer with the more distinctive and less compromising Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), then the New Geek influence may at long last walk the death march. About fucking time. No self-respecting geek of any stripe has any business aligning herself with a sexist, racist, and patriarchal set of values. Seth Rogen is not the geek’s friend. He is a fleeting figure and slobby sellout to be thoroughly rejected. He is a loathsome “talent” hiding in plain sight.

by Edward Champion

Review: Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish (2010)

Regardless of my Jewish state (or lack thereof), it is hard to say no to a movie titled Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish.

“It was drek,” said the critic braying in the vestibule. She was a shrew of advanced years, the type who hasn’t laughed since the 20th century often encountered in Manhattan. She was the unwanted accessory that comes with the screening room installation kit. I didn’t know if I should try and return her to the manufacturer. Surely there was some lonely and unsmiling Tarkovsky lover who would require her. But this was not my screening room and this was not my call. I decided to stay silent.

I was baffled. Drek? Yes, Eve Annenberg’s Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish (part of this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival) was a mess, a movie with too many competing instincts. It was a film that didn’t know whether it wanted to be a study in cultural fusion, a willowy melodrama, or a comedic investigation into the many notions of Jewish identity. But then I am not of the people. I do read a lot of Jewish writers, have many Jewish friends, and am interested in Jewishness. I do seem to attract a lot of Jewish men at social gatherings, perhaps because I listen or perhaps because I have the tendency to say things that are apparently profane. Not long ago, on one of my recent interborough walks, I was alarmed when some kids called me a kyke for having the temerity to read, walk, and maintain an unruly beard (all at the same time!) as I made my way into the Meatpacking District. I suspect all this explains why I laughed a good deal over Treslove’s predicament – not Jewish, but very “Jewish” – in Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question.

Regardless of my Jewish state (or lack thereof), it is hard to say no to a movie titled Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish. The grand irony of Shakespeare being appropriated for the Jewish theater was too irresistible, particularly when one considers how Jewish culture has been appropriated. (Just consider how many Jewish songwriters have composed Christmas carols!)

I had brought along someone who was Jewish to atone for my lack of Jewishness and to prevent any mishaps. You see, the last time I had attended a New York Jewish Film Festival screening, I had been reprimanded by a publicist for violating some disclaimer in microscopic type. I had decided that I would read the press screening invite more carefully and not say a word, although I did end up cracking a few jokes to someone. (You see how easy it is for me to resist even my own imperative! I am my own apostate!)

None of this tells you much about the film. If you have a sense of humor and an open mind, I suspect that you won’t call it drek. But the film stands more of a chance (admittedly slim) with a Reform crowd than a Conservative one. For the movie contains numerous Orthodox characters who have been banned from the community. And I suspect that some of the audience will feel as if they have been banned if they laugh with the movie. Consider this belligerent blog post from The Circus Tent, which berates the characters for being “haunted by the fact that they weren’t allowed to wear metal-framed glasses nor have buckles on their belts. It shows you what their intellectual capacity consists of. The fact that they would be chosen to translate the works of Willy Shake shows us what kind of knowledge of Yiddish the directors of the project have.”

Well, that’s the point. There are some sections of the movie that appear to have been filmed in a desperate rush, with handheld cameras and muddled sound. Other parts of the movie contain a modest degree of polish, the film appearing to be comfortably financed and in an early stage of production. Then there are the portions of the film, involving some on-the-fly CGI, where the film tries too hard to be professional. For me, these wildly inconsistent visuals imbued the operation with a homespun charm. After all, if you are making a movie about the creation of dramaturgy, shouldn’t the results feel as disparate as the rehearsals? As if to pound the point home, Annenberg includes a dude who shows up at random intervals film to sprinkle literal magic into the operation. And haven’t we all seen this gentleman?

I have no command of Yiddish, so I can’t share The Circus Tent guy’s indignation. But I do hope that he’s settled down by now. In defense of the woman who damned the film as drek, I will say that some of the Shakespearean recreations aren’t inventive enough. Friar Lawrence becomes Rabbi Lawrence. The Capulets and Montagues are distinguished by peyot. Swapping the party at the end of the first act to a purim party is a mildly creative choice. But this schematic approach, while initially entertaining and probably funny on paper, becomes tedious. Still, I very much enjoyed the sacrilegious moments of Hasidic Jews engaged in a knife fight that nobody feels inclined to break up. I almost expected them to sing “from your first brit milah to your last dying day.” I should also point out that the film is quite friendly to non-Jewish viewers, providing Ken Loach-like subtitles for Jewish words. Some are obvious (“nitter” for example); others I did not know. I also enjoyed the moments where our Jewish heroes attempted to negotiate everyday situations (such as the collection of luggage) based solely upon their trust in the community. Alas, another man’s word is not enough for an unsmiling official.

Perhaps I liked the film more than I should have because its Jewish characters – apostates living in the back of a Budget Rent-A-Car truck – were outsiders with a healthy calmness while doing very bad things. Saying a prayer before shooting up almost defeats the purpose of a seedy escape. And if I learned that somebody had maxed out my credit cards for a luxury hotel room, I would likely be more apoplectic. There’s probably a heavy-handed moral here somewhere. But if partaking in art keeps the universe calm, then that’s hardly a sentiment to get angry about.