(500) Days of Summer

There's a scene that comes about halfway into Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and very early in the romance between its main characters, Joel and Clementine.  After a less than ideal first meeting, Joel visits Clementine at her workplace in search of a second chance, and though she's willing, she also matter-of-factly lays down the ground rules of their fledgling relationship.  "Too many guys think I'm a concept or I complete them or I'm going to make them alive," Clementine tells Joel, "but I'm just a fucked-up girl who is looking for my own peace of mind."  A beat, and then the two shift character, into the Joel who is deleting his memories of Clementine following the failure of their relationship, and the Clementine in his head, who acts as his tour guide in a nonlinear reenactment of it.  Ruefully, Joel admits that he didn't heed Clementine's warning.  "I still thought you were going to save me.  Even after that."

Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer, from a script by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Webber, recalls Eternal Sunshine in several important ways.  Like Kaufman's film, it is nonlinear story about a romance, told after its failure, but lacking Eternal Sunshine's SFnal component, it holds out no similar hope for a happy ending for Tom, a wannabe architect who writes greeting cards, and Summer, the girl who, over the course of 500 days, he meets, falls desperately in love with, dates for several months, is dumped by, and spends several more months getting over.  Perhaps the most important similarity between the two films, however, is that Tom is exactly one of those men Clementine is wary, and weary, of--the kind of who wants the woman in his life to be an adventure and a way of imbuing it with meaning.  But then, (500) Days, and Tom, seem to be an amalgamation of so many other romantic comedies and their heroes.  Like High Fidelity's Rob, Tom is a man who thinks that compatibility in pop culture likes and dislikes is the same as compatibility of personalities (and perhaps even that those likes and dislikes are a meaningful way of evaluating a person).  He's got a bit of Nice Guy about him--his reluctance to acknowledge his feelings for Summer, even when asked point blank, very quickly transitions from charmingly insecure to cowardly and manipulative--and not a small amount of Apatovian man-child.

All of which is to say that (500) Days of Summer is a great deal more unromantic than even its premise and title suggest, and much more than it seems to think it is.  It seems almost unkind to criticize a film as eager to charm as this one, but that charm is rooted in the assumption that we, the viewers, will be rooting for Tom and Summer to make it work, to find a loophole in the ending we're promised by the film's beginning.  This was not my experience.  Almost from their first meeting, it was clear to me that Summer and Tom were poorly suited to one another, and maybe to relationships in general, not only because of the sheer tonnage of neuroses, insecurities, and immaturity that weigh Tom down throughout most of the film, but because Summer is such a complete blank, to him, it seems, almost as much as to us.  In the bleak months following their breakup, Tom is advised to get over Summer by following Lawrence Durrell's edict (attributed to Henry Miller) of turning her into art.  It's left to us to judge to what degree we should take this as a meta-statement on the film (just as we need to decide how seriously to take the film's opening titles, which promise that any resemblance between its characters and reality is a coincidence, "Especially you Jenny Beckman.  Bitch."), but the fact remains that Summer is much more a work of art, a construct, than a person.  Tom, we're told, has been conditioned by pop culture to anticipate The One, and the magical, true love that will accompany her.  What matters to him in his relationship with Summer is not who she is, but how that relationship conforms to his image of what love should be like.  When Summer brings him to her apartment for the first time and tells him intimate, personal stories about herself, the voiceover drowns her out, telling us how thrilled Tom is to be at this crucial relationship milestone.  What's important isn't what Summer is telling him about herself.  It's that her stories are capped by what the voiceover calls the six magic words: "I've never told anybody that before."

Nor do we ever get a sense of the nature and tenor of the relationship between Tom and Summer.  Even before they become involved, Summer warns Tom that she doesn't believe in love and doesn't want a boyfriend, and no matter how intimate they become she insists that they are merely friends.  It's never clear whether she's given him fair warning, or mixed signals.  In their last meeting, after her marriage to a man she met shortly after breaking up with Tom, Summer tells him that with her new husband, she knew almost immediately "what I was never sure of with you."  Which puts an entirely different spin on the relationship--it's not that Summer didn't believe in love, but that she simply didn't love Tom.  So which is it?  Is Summer selfish ("you always do what you want," Tom tells her in that last meeting) or just someone who knows what she wants?  Is she a user, leading Tom on even though she knows she doesn't love him, or just a fucked-up girl looking for her own piece of mind?  We never find out, and don't seem to have been expected to care, and neither, it appears, does Tom.  The film's title turns out to be much less of a pun than it at first seems.  Summer isn't a person so much as she's a season, a phase, an experience Tom needs to go through.

And hence the failure of the film's attempts to charm, despite throwing every clever storytelling device imaginable at the screen--its nonlinear structure, a counter that ticks back and forth between the 500 days, a voiceover that seems to be imitating Jim Dale's work on Pushing Daisies, a musical scene, a pseudo-documentary, a medley of 70s art-house film parodies expressing Tom's misery after the breakup, fantasy sequences, split-screens, and Tom's wise-cracking ten year old sister, who imparts her worldly wisdom, and the film's morals, to her clueless brother.  Romantic comedies work because they provide us with the vicarious thrill of infatuation, making us party to what in real life is a private enchantment that often leaves outsiders befuddled.  As Tom puts it, during a burst of greeting card creativity he experiences when things are still going well with Summer, "I Love Us"--it's the entity that the characters create together, the back and forth between them, that is at the heart of a good romantic comedy's appeal.  But there is no Us in (500) Days of Summer, no sense that Tom and Summer have created something that transcends the two of them as individuals.  We see a few cute scenes between them in its early days, a few rather tepid fights towards its end (despite Summer saying, when she breaks up with Tom, that they fight all the time), but almost nothing of the actual substance of their relationship, and almost no sense of what Tom-and-Summer were like.  Without that invitation into the relationship, the vicarious effect of most romantic comedies isn't achieved, and Tom and Summer come off the way real couples do when they, to take examples from the film, sing to each other on their cellphones from adjoining rooms, or compete to see who can yell 'penis' the loudest in a public park--annoying and self-absorbed.

There is, of course, another way of looking at (500) Days of Summer, and that is that for all that he recalls the heroes of many romantic comedies, at his core Tom has more in common with their heroines--the ones who are hopelessly romantic and desperate to find The One, who can't imagine themselves happy without a man, can't believe that any man will want them, and are too caught up in their obsession with romance to notice the men who bring it into their lives.  Summer, meanwhile, plays the commitment-phobic, emotionally withdrawn Wrong Man--a reversal that the film stresses in one of its earliest scenes, in which Summer explains that she's breaking up with Tom because they've been fighting like Sid and Nancy, then clarifies that in this analogy, she's Sid.  When Summer reveals, in her last meeting with Tom, that she never loved him, what comes to mind is Sally Albright, wailing after making a similar discovery about a man who wouldn't commit to her: "All this time I thought he didn't want to get married.  But the truth is, he didn't want to marry me!"  If you read the film this way, the fact that Summer isn't really a person becomes less important, because what Tom needs to get over isn't the individual woman but the idea that he needs a woman to be happy, and that fulfillment and a sense of self-worth can only be achieved in the arms of a soulmate.

Even this more satisfying take on the film, however, isn't completely so, because despite the role reversal at its heart, (500) Days of Summer still trades in many of the gendered tropes and assumptions of its genre, making for an uneasy mixture.  Summer may not be a person, but she is a weighty presence in the film--far too weighty for someone whose sole purpose is to be the means of achieving the main character's personal growth.  As opposed to, say, High Fidelity, which uses Rob's ex-girlfriends to achieve a similar goal and, like (500) Days, sketches those female characters very thinly as a result, (500) Days tries to romanticize Summer.  There is a sense that the writers can't help but shift their focus to her, can't keep from making her as charming and adorable as they can.  Instead of showing us Tom's infatuation with Summer and using it to illuminate him, they try to make us share that infatuation, and let Tom get lost in the shuffle.  More disturbingly, there is the fact that making ciphers out of female characters, treating them like saviors or villains, but never real people, is something that traditional romantic comedies do quite often.  (500) Days is using an allegedly anti-sexist role reversal to justify employing sexist tropes.

The biggest problem, however, with reading (500) Days of Summer as Tom's coming of age story is that at the end of the film he hasn't really done so.  He's more confident, better able to deal with rejection, and taking steps to improve his life on his own rather than waiting for a woman to give it meaning--great strides all, but despite all of them Tom still hasn't let go of his binary concept of love.  In the wake of his breakup with Summer, Tom, like so many other foolish and self-absorbed characters before him, decides that love must not exist, that it is a fantasy dreamed up by greeting card writers like himself.  In their last meeting, the now-married Summer tries to dissuade him of this cynicism.  It's not that love doesn't exist and that the search for The One is pointless, she tells him.  It's just that she wasn't The One.  Which is fine as far as it goes, but what neither Tom nor Summer seem to have considered is that it's possible for love to exist and still be entirely unlike what pop songs and, yes, romantic comedies, make it out to be.  For all that he's learned, Tom still doesn't realize that love is so much more complicated than his concept of it, and requires, among other things, treating its object as a person rather than a concept.

The relationship between Eternal Sunshine's Joel and Clementine flounders because once the first flush of infatuation fades, they can't deal with the real, messy person they find themselves entangled with, and their decision at the end of the film to try again holds out some hope for success because both acknowledge the inevitability of this disenchantment, and vow to find out what lies beyond it (though in his original script, Kaufman famously undermined this hopeful ending by revealing that Joel and Clementine spend the rest of their lives failing at their romance, erasing their memories of each other, and trying again).  Tom, who never reaches that stage in his relationship with Summer, doesn't seem to have realized that it exists, so that when his story ends on what it seems to think is a similar note--Tom meets a new girl (rather sickeningly named Autumn) and the counter that's accompanied his relationship with Summer drops to (1)--it's hard to feel as hopeful as we do at the end of Eternal Sunshine.  For all his hard-earned wisdom, there's no indication that Tom has learned not to think of women as concepts, merely that some concepts might not complete him.  That's by no means an unusual conclusion for a romantic comedy--the traditional, female-centric often end on this note (though this is also one of the reasons that the genre is generally considered to be such a critical and artistic wasteland)--but (500) Days of Summer has positioned itself as this year's off-beat, intelligent romantic comedy, and it is disappointing to discover that at its heart, it isn't so different from the Hollywood product to which it pretends to offer an alternative.

Recent Reading Roundup 23

It's been a long time since I did one of these, so long that some of the books I read in the interim have already faded so much in my memory that I can't comment meaningfully on them.  Here are my thoughts on the ones that have lingered.

1. Sunnyside by Glen David Gold - Gold's long-awaited follow-up to the enormously enjoyable Carter Beats the Devil features the same careful attention to period detail, and the same seemingly effortless evocation of early 20th century Americana, but it is also so shapeless, so caught up in the desire to make Meaningful Statements, that it becomes the exact opposite of Carter--a genuine chore to read.  Like Carter, Sunnyside is a When It Changed novel, this time focusing on film, and particularly film star celebrity, rather than television.  But whereas Carter made a relatively modest statement--that the invention of television changed the face of public entertainment, in the process putting acts like the superstar magician out of business--Sunnyside tries to tie the growth of Hollywood and the celebrity culture into just about every major event of the beginning of the twentieth century, including World War I, arguing that the emergence of people who are famous simply for being famous was also the death knell of the old, aristocratic world order.  At best, it's an oversimplified argument, and when Gold uses it draw connections between Charlie Chaplin's early film career and World War I, the novel--which starts out with the same verve and sense of fun that made Carter Beats the Devil such a joy to read--collapses in on itself.  It certainly doesn't help that the characters are uniformly unpleasant, most especially Chaplin, the heart of the novel, whom Gold portrays as a narcissistic user.
   


2. Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory - Gregory's debut novel, after several years as a well-respected short story writer (his "The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm" was one of my favorite short stories from 2008), takes place in a world in which spirit possession is a fact of life.  With seemingly no rhyme or reason, random people are possessed, not by demons, but by archetypes--The Truth, who punishes liars, The Kamikaze, who possesses Japanese men and compels them to crash planes, The Captain, who appears on battlefields to lead troops to victory.  What's best about this novel is its worldbuilding--Gregory's fashioning of an alternate history influenced by possessions (Eisenhower is killed by The Kamikaze, O.J. Simpson doesn't live to be acquitted) and of the ways in which human society has changed to accommodate the possibility of possession, deal with those who have been possessed, and try to explain the nature and cause of possession.
   
   Less successful is the novel's plot, which centers around and is narrated by Del Pierce, a thirtyish man still struggling to recover from his possession as a child by The Hellion, a trickster spirit which takes young boys and forces them to commit dangerous and destructive mischief.  After years of shaky mental health, aimless wandering, and a haphazard job history, Del begins to feel genuinely unbalanced, and fears that he has somehow trapped the Hellion, and that the demon is trying to get out and take over him again.  The novel's focus on a mentally unstable main character whose exposure to the supernatural has led to a lifetime of inadequacies and disappointments brings to mind Sean Stewart's Perfect Circle, but Pandemonium lacks that novel's admirable resistance to settling into the thriller plot, and soon introduces a paramilitary group convinced that the possessing entities are aliens, and a secret society trying to understand the demons by studying Jung's Red Book, both of which tend to obscure Del himself.  Not helping matters is the fact that Del's journey throughout the novel consists mainly of learning the truth about his possession as a child, but as I had guessed that truth very early in the novel I quickly grew impatient with the characters and how long they were taking to realize it.  I was much more interested in the questions it raised about personality and personhood and the nature of the possessing demons, which Gregory, by delaying the novel's main revelation, left himself very little time to explore.  This is, obviously, to blame Pandemonium for not being the novel I wanted to read, but that's a risk an author takes when they hinge their entire plot on a single revelation, and in my case that risk didn't pan out.
   


3. Warlock by Oakley Hall - Perhaps the simplest way to describe Hall's 1958 Western is that it is Deadwood in book form--a sprawling, beautifully written, unflinching examination of the myths and realities of the American West.  The town of Warlock has been plagued by outlaws and ruffians, who have repeatedly driven out or killed the representatives of the law provided by a distant and uncaring territorial government.  The town's merchants and prominent citizens decide to hire a gunslinger, Clay Blaisedell, to act as Marshall and bring order to Warlock.  From this simple and familiar premise Hall crafts an enormous and complicated tapestry of characters and points of view, all chewing on and providing different perspective on the novel's central question--what, if anything, gives Blaisedell the right to kill?  It would be a vast oversimplification to say that good and evil are not clearly delineated in Warlock.  Rather, Hall turns a searching but sympathetic eye on each and every one of his characters--Blaisedell, the town's deputy John Gannon, a former member of the gang menacing the town, the merchants who hired Blaisedell in an attempt to bring Warlock into the civilized world, the local judge, who rants and raves that Blaisedell's presence represents a refutation of civilization and the rule of law, and yet has no effective law to offer in his stead, Blaisedell's friend, the cynical, dangerous saloon owner Tom Morgan, Kate Dollar, a former prostitute who blames Morgan for pitting Blaisedell against her lover, the local miners, who are striking for safer conditions (and whose leaders the merchants try to persuade Blaisedell to run out of town), and even the outlaws themselves.  Warlock is about many things, but perhaps most importantly, it is about the allure and horror of violence and bloodshed, the way that the gunslinger, be he Marshall or outlaw, is simultaneously a hero and a villain, and the near impossible complexity of the attempt to craft a peaceful, lawful society through force of arms.  But this is only one of its many themes and pleasures.  If you're feeling Deadwood withdrawal, or just in the market for an engrossing read, I highly recommend Warlock.
   


4. Just After Sunset by Stephen King - In the introduction to his most recent short story collection, King talks about falling out of the habit of writing short fiction, and becoming reacquainted with the form during his stint as guest editor for Best American Short Stories, in the wake of which he decided to try his hand at writing them again.  Which leaves me with two possible explanations for how disappointed I was by Just After Sunset, despite being a fan of King's, and particularly of his short fiction, for many years: either King still hasn't gotten back into the short story groove (and is still so famous and bankable that no one is willing to force him back into it) or I've outgrown his writerly ticks.  Most of the stories in this collection are slow and familiar, but what manages to obscure even the occasional successful moment in an otherwise failed story--the central romance in "Willa," in which the main characters have been waiting for what seems like forever for a train to replace their stalled one; the apocalyptics ending of the vignette "Graduation Afternoon," in which a townie girl grits her teeth through her upper class boyfriend's graduation party--is King's reliance on folksy speech patterns.  It used to be that, if nothing else, you could count on a Stephen King story to sound real, as if an actual person was talking to you (or to someone else), their every word choice a reflection of their personality and a reason to keep reading.  In Just After Sunset, King seems to have lost his voice(s).  His narrators and protagonists sound contrived, even fake--aiming at the folksiness of his previous novels and short stories, and failing so badly at the attempt that they sound ridiculous.  Only two stories manage to survive this failure of voice--"Mute," which veers away from the something-nasty-in-the-woodshed template that seems to underly most of the stories in the collection, and delivers a magnificently nasty punch in its final revelation, and "A Very Tight Place," in which King gets, quite literally, down in the dirt when he traps his protagonist inside an abandoned port-a-potty and describes, with obvious relish, the visceral horror of his attempts to escape.
   


5. Eclipse 3, edited by Jonathan Strahan - The third installment in the controversy-ridden original story anthology series represents a departure from the previous two volumes on almost every level--the tenor of the stories, the authors, even the (quite lovely) cover design.  In his introduction, Strahan explains the shift, in a rather roundabout way, by describing Eclipse 2 as science fiction oriented.  The implication, one takes it, is that Eclipse 3 is fantasy oriented, but both characterizations strike me as inaccurate.  There are science fiction stories in Eclipse 3 just as there were fantasy stories in Eclipse 2, and the difference between the two volumes seems to have more to do with the type of genre story they feature.  If Eclipse 2 leaned towards the purely generic, pulp-inspired end of both genres, the stories in Eclipse 3 are more literary (the significance of the fact that Eclipse 2 was dominated by male writers whereas 3's table of contents is dominated by women is left as an exercise for the reader).  I was underwhelmed by Eclipse 2, and Eclipse 3 reveals that it's not the type of stories that was my problem so much as Strahan's editorial taste.  My reaction to both volumes is, in fact, almost identical--there are a few stories I like very much, one or two decent ones, and a whole mass of pieces I genuinely disliked.  The standouts are Karen Joy Fowler's "The Pelican Bar," which very nearly outdoes "What I Didn't See" for flimsy generic connections, but is nevertheless quite harrowing in its descriptions of the protagonist's hellish experiences in a reeducation camp for wayward teens, and Maureen F. McHugh's "Useless Things," a stately, plotless but evocative piece about life in the wake of economic and environmental collapse.  The best story in the anthology is Nicola Griffith's "It Takes Two," in which a female executive for a high tech company struggling to overcome the boys' club atmosphere in her profession ends up hacking her brain to get ahead in business.  Despite a shaky premise, "It Takes Two" is a meaty story that comments intelligently on several thorny issues.  The remaining stories, however, are so disappointing, veering too often towards tweeness and sentimentalism, that I'm genuinely torn about whether to continue with this series, which for the second time around has delivered much too low a ratio of good stories to bad ones, but also includes what I suspect will be a couple of my favorite stories of the year.  I guess we'll have to see how the Eclipse 4 table of contents shapes up.
   


6. The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt - We end as we began, with a historical novel about America the first half of the twentieth century.  Hunt's slim, dreamy novel about the last days in the life of the inventor Nikola Tesla seems like the polar opposite of Gold's Sunnyside.  Instead of a sprawling cast and huge stakes this is a very intimate story, with only a few characters--Tesla himself, Louisa, a young chambermaid in his hotel, and her immediate family--and hardly a plot in sight.  Instead, Hunt moves back and forth between the major events of Tesla's life--his arrival in America, his adversarial relationship with Thomas Edison, fading into obscurity even as his greatest invention, alternating current, becomes the industry standard, consumed with obsessions both fantastical and merely too forward-thinking for their time--and intersperses them with Louisa's personal crises.  For all their differences, however, The Invention of Everything Else is ultimately as shapeless and unsatisfying as Sunnyside.  Hunt seems to have done her research, but her overwhelming focus on her characters' interiority leaves her with hardly any space to develop a sense of period--1943 reads just like 1893, and given the non-linearity of Tesla's narrative I was often at a loss to guess when a particular scene was set.  This might not have been a problem if the characters themselves weren't so unbelievable, but I struggled to accept any of them--not just Tesla, who in Hunt's hands is literally a mad scientist who concocts plans to talk to Mars and resurrect the dead, but also Louisa--as actual people rather than mouthpieces for a rather stultifying melange of cod-philosophy and surrealist images.  There are a few moments of genuine emotion in the novel--a short interlude describing Louisa's parents' courtship and her father's experiences during World War I, a trip to the beach Louisa takes with a suitor--but for the most part The Invention of Everything Else gave me nothing to grab onto.
   

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2009 Edition, Part 4

My God, it will not end.  Progress report: Community and The Good Wife remain very good.  Stargate: Universe seems to be using the loosest possible interpretation of 'plot' (it would be nice to think that the two episodes in which the characters gloomily contemplate their imminent demise as the ship flies straight towards a star, only for its automated systems to save them at the last minute, represent the nadir of the show's storytelling, but as we're only seven episodes in that seems unlikely) while expending most of its energy on soapy shenanigans.  But since most of the characters are underdeveloped, the relationships between the main castmembers are nearly nonexistent, and the writers show little or no flair for enjoyably trashy, Melrose Place-style plotting, it's hard to care about X's affair with Y and A's unrequited crush on B.  The show seems determined to alienate the franchise's core fanbase without doing enough to capture a new one.

• White Collar - Yet another entry in the subgenre of charming, effervescent crimesolving dramedies whose main appeal is their characters and humor (see also Monk, Psych, Leverage), White Collar stars Matt Bomer (the criminally underused Bryce Larkin on Chuck) as a master forger and art thief, and Tim DeKay (Jonesy from Carnivalé) as the FBI agent who catches him and then recruits him to work in the white collar crime division. Frothy enterprises of this variety are usually a pretty delicate balancing act--the plots have to be tight enough to obscure their silliness; the character interactions compelling but not too deep or angsty--and White Collar doesn't seem to have found that sweet spot.  The three episodes I've seen have been slack, and though Bomer and DeKay play well off each other, most of their meaningful interactions are with other characters with whom they have less crackle and pop.  Also disappointing is the fact that, though the pilot featured two interesting female characters--a wealthy society matron whom Bomer's character charms into giving him a swanky place to stay, and a lesbian FBI agent (whose preference neatly obviated the sexual tension between the top-billed single female character and the single male lead which often seems obligatory in shows of this type)--in subsequent episodes these have been, respectively, disappeared and replaced.  Though I'm glad to see The Middleman's Natalie Morales getting work, her job in the first episode of the season seems to have been to wear three different revealing outfits, and in the second, to moon over Bomer's character.  Which is a shame, because even within the restrictions of its deliberately shallow format, White Collar's pilot gestured at issues of class and wealth--both Bomer and DeKay's characters are middle or working class people moving in upper class circles, and they have very different attitudes towards the finer things in life--and with Leverage already starting to go off the boil, I was in the market for a new show of this type.


• Emma - Again, not a fall pilot, but the BBC's latest adaptation of the Jane Austen novel.  Between the already quite good Gwyneth Paltrow film adaptation, the still-painful memories of the abysmal "Jane Austen Season," a series of cut-rate, uninspired adaptations of several other Austen novels from a few years ago, and the fact that writer Sandy Welch's most prominent work is a mediocre version of Jane Eyre from 2006, I had very low hopes for this miniseries, but it turned out to be a pleasant surprise.  It's not perfect, by any means, and especially when considered as an adaptation--though Emma is by no means an uneventful novel, four hours seems to have been too long for Welch, mainly because she has drastically reduced Harriet's presence in the story. This alteration seems to be a consequence of Welch's take on the novel, which in her hands becomes a meditation on the warring desires to make a home for oneself and go out to see the world--Emma representing the former, and Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax the latter.  This is, to say the least, a rather strange approach to take with a Jane Austen novel.  With the possible exception of Persuasion, it would be impossible to describe any of them as ambivalent on this point, and Emma, which begins with its heroine already the mistress of an estate and ends with her husband leaving his home to join her there, is perhaps the most decisive in extolling the virtues of domesticity.  The more Welch stresses this theme, the more she seems to have imposed her own story (one not too dissimilar to the one she told with Jane Eyre) on the original work.
  
  Still, taken as a work in its own right, the miniseries offers many pleasures.  Despite her shift in emphasis, Welch hits many of the novel's key scenes beautifully (though not, sadly, its most crucial one, Emma's cruel joke at Miss Bates's expense).  After two decades of near-constant Austen adaptation, I've built up a gallery of my favorite character portrayals, some of which crop up even in otherwise dreadful adaptations--the younger Bennet sisters in Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice, Olivia Williams as Jane Fairfax in the Kate Beckinsale Emma--to which we can now add Johnny Lee Miller's turn as Mr. Knightley (all the more notable when one considers that, with the honorable exceptions of Colin Firth's Mr. Darcy and Ciaran Hinds's Captain Wentworth, Austen's male leads tend to fare rather poorly in adaptations, often fading into the wallpaper).  Miller plays Knightley as an appealing blend of self-assurance and self-doubt.  In the early parts of the miniseries, his abrasive intelligence is proudly on display, but as the story draws on we see his growing awareness that the same qualities that made him an excellent foil for Emma in his capacity as her surrogate older brother might be entirely unappealing in a potential lover.  His simultaneous dismissal of the fashionable, flattering young men he views as his rivals for Emma's affections, and growing envy of them as he realizes how ill-suited he is to their manner of courtship, is very well played.  Miller has fantastic chemistry with Romola Garai, who plays Emma, and Welch furnishes the two with several magnificent arguments, either embellished from conversations in the novel or invented, which show that chemistry off.  Garai herself, though she doesn't quite unseat Gwyneth Paltrow, is very good as Emma, and my main complaint against her is that between her blonde hair, wide mouth, and tendency to smile broadly and bug her eyes, she kept reminding me of how Katee Sackhoff used to play Starbuck in her more lighthearted moments, which as you can imagine is a strange association to make when watching a Regency romance.  On the whole, then, Welch's Emma is far from definitive, but it is nevertheless worth a look both for its reflections on the novel and as a piece of entertainment.


• V - In a word, yawn.  Like the now-defunct Eastwick, V is a show with a shocking secret that everyone already knows (which is why spoiler campaigns like this are so utterly pointless), but whereas Eastwick tried to compensate for this predictability by cramming its pilot full of events and character introductions, V's premiere is slow and slack, hitting the story's salient points (the aliens have arrived; they're creepily perfect; they're really man-eating lizards) with so little verve and conviction that it feels less like a reboot of the original series and more like a lifeless imitation of it.  Given how familiar the story is, it would probably have been impossible for the remake's writers to replicate the original series's eeriness and slowly mounting horror (I say this as someone who watched the original V as a young child, though I know that those who have returned to it as adults have generally come away disappointed), but they don't seem to be aiming for any other tone, and their insistence on following the original's plot makes no sense in light of the changes they've made to its premise.  The main character is an FBI agent, who at the end of the pilot has a foolproof way of identifying stealth aliens and definitive proof that they have secretly been on Earth for many years.  And yet instead of going to her superiors with what she knows, she forms a resistance group with an admittedly very cute priest.  A potentially even greater flaw is the fact that as this lead character, Elizabeth Mitchell has all the charisma and range of expression of a cucumber.  If it didn't seem more than likely that V will prove a dud, I'd wish that Mitchell had switched roles with FlashForward's Sonya Walger, who is clearly better suited to the task of acting as a counterweight to Morena Baccarin's fantastically creepy alien leader.
  
  On a side-note, the show's writers and actors can protest all they like, but if they're not deliberately writing V as anti-Obama propaganda, they're using so many of its tools and buzzwords (which are, as Fred Clarke repeatedly tells us, also the tools and buzzwords of evangelical rapture-nuts) as to make no difference.  For pity's sake, the pilot could not have stressed that the evil aliens' evil plan for evil world domination begins with universal healthcare any more if there had been title cards to that effect.  Which, when you think of it, is a neat trick, because at the same time that they're telling us that peacemakers who urge humanity to embrace its nobler urges are actually wannabe tyrants secretly plotting our demise, the writers are also announcing that all the recent expressions of humanity's worst urges--war, genocide, terrorism, racial and religious strife--have happened at those same aliens' instigation.  So we don't have to listen to those pesky peacemakers, because really, we're rather peaceful ourselves, when left to our own devices?  Makes perfect sense.
  

Thank Goodness for Small Favors

TV site CliqueClack interviews Defying Gravity creator James Pariott about his plans for the now-defunct series's future, and his revelations about the planned storyline for the character Nadia--a no-nonsense, unemotional, extremely sexually aggressive German woman--put even the most fail-tastic of science fiction shows to shame:

Nadia — She had quite the odd hallucinations, didn’t she? Who was that man she kept seeing, and why did he look so much like Nadia? As Parriott revealed to me, some fans of the show got it right in their guess that she was, in fact, a hermaphrodite when she was born. The choice was made for her when she was 11, by her parents, which sex she’d ultimately become. So that man we’re seeing is actually what Nadia would have been, had they chosen to raise her — or him — as a man.

Now, here’s the wild kicker. All those DNA changes that are happening with the crew, caused by Beta and the other artifacts? Well, they would eventually wind up causing Nadia to gradually turn into a man.

Parrriott also said that it was planned for Nadia to really have a more significant presence in season two. “If you see the way we wrote her, she sort of had that male sexuality about her, that ‘fuck ‘em and forget ‘em’ mentality. So we wanted to write her sort of as a male character in a female body.”

As you may recall, I wasn't terrifically impressed with Defying Gravity to begin with, and in its later episodes the show lost what little charm it had when it downplayed its trashy soap opera aspects in favor of a dull and drawn out SFnal story, but I wasn't actually glad, even thankful, for its cancellation, until I read this.  Honestly, I'm willing to forgive this entire crappy fall pilot season just for knowing that there is no chance in hell that this abominable storyline will ever see the light of day.

Future History, Repeated

In my post about The Children's Book, I suggested that historical fiction might be broadly defined as fiction that takes place in a time and setting not directly experienced by its author.  Within that definition one can distinguish between different kind of historical novels according to how close they come to recorded history, to the people and events in the history books.  A historical novel can center entirely or for the most part around fictional people living ordinary (for their time) lives in the past (The Little Stranger, Sacred Hunger, Possession).  Or it can describe fictional people being caught up in momentous events (Octavian Nothing, Year of Wonders, The Children's Book).  Or it can place fictional characters at the epicenter of the great changes of their time, sometimes rubbing shoulders with historical figures, sometimes taking their place (Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles, The Baroque Cycle).  Or it can dispense with fictional characters and plots altogether, and simply fictionalize the recorded events of the past.

Hilary Mantel's ecstatically-received, Booker-winning Wolf Hall is of the latter type.  It follows the rising fortunes of Thomas Cromwell, counselor to Henry VIII and one of the chief architects of the English Reformation, from the downfall of his patron Cardinal Wolsey to that of his enemy Sir Thomas More.  It's the kind of historical novel I tend to view with distrust, which tries to make stories out of recorded events and characters out of real people.  I've written before about my unease with works that try to fictionalize reality.  A person's life, be it ever so important and full of event, is not a story, with structure, themes, and most importantly, a point, and to reduce it to one is to diminish it, and that person, in some ineffable but very real way.  And whereas works like The Other Boleyn Girl or the television series The Tudors reshape the events of history into a genre that wears its unreality on its sleeve--respectively, a romantic melodrama and a trash soap opera--and thus defuse that inevitable diminishing, Wolf Hall is told with a straight face, as a naturalistic novel that purports not only to describe events as they were but to describe Cromwell as he was.  It thus borrows significance from history even as it embroiders it and twists it into a shape that suits Mantel's purposes.

It's a difficulty that Mantel herself seems aware of.  Some way into the novel, Cromwell travels to France with Henry's entourage, and has an audience with the French king, Francis I.  As the two discuss their hopes for more friendly relations between their countries, Francis breezily observes "Who now remembers Agincourt?"

[Cromwell] almost laughs.  'It is true,' he says.  'A generation or two, or three... four... and these things are nothing.'

It's a startling exchange, and it takes a few moments to realize just why it's startling--because the event that will make Agincourt immortal won't happen for nearly 70 years, when a playwright trying to curry favor with a queen not yet born will write a piece of hagiography about her ancestor, and tie Agincourt to a piece of writing so sublime that it will come to epitomize valor, leadership, and courage on the field of battle.  To put it another way, very few of us remember Agincourt as it was, or the significance that Cromwell and Francis I attach to it, but very many of us remember the spin Shakespeare put on it in a piece of historical fiction.  The story, so long as it's sufficiently well told, is much more powerful than the fact, something that Cromwell is very much aware of, seeing as much of his service to Henry involves passing laws and proclamations that change the nature of reality and rewrite the past, turning a legal wife into a mistress, a legitimate daughter into a bastard, a pope into a bishop and a king into the head of the church.  "It's the living that turn and chase the dead," Cromwell thinks at the end of the novel.  "The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives."

There has, of course, been much rewriting of the lives of the movers and shakers of the English Reformation, and as much as it is (an attempt at) a straight retelling of that history, Wolf Hall is response to these retellings.  The general consensus they--and most particularly Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, to which Wolf Hall often seems like a direct response--have reached about Cromwell is that he was a grasping, unprincipled man, willing to adopt any creed and mouth any ideology in order to get ahead, as opposed to Thomas More's staunch adherence to his beliefs, which eventually lead to his death.  In Mantel's hands, More becomes dogmatic and intractable, his ironclad belief the root cause of his pitiless pursuit, torture, and brutal execution of anti-Catholic heretics, whereas, as Dan Hartland points out, Mantel makes a virtue out of Cromwell's lack of conviction:

Those around Cromwell are characterised by an allegiance to a system: More’s Catholicism, Norfolk’s feudalism, Wolsey’s royalism. Cromwell, on the other hand, has an almost Nietzschean approach. “I distrust all systematizers, ” wrote the philosopher, “and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” Mantel’s Cromwell likewise believes in personal respect and education, a fully humanist perspective which sets him at odds with the medievalised England to which he is born. Mantel sees his meritocratic rise – from smith’s son to soldier, trader to merchant, lawyer to Lord Chancellor – as a symbol of the birth of our modern age.

I would go even further and say that Mantel makes a virtue out of Cromwell's lack of integrity and sense of personal dignity as well (the latter is presumably linked to his humble origins, which leave him, unlike the nobles around him, indifferent to his family's honor).  Several times over the course of the novel, Cromwell visits prisoners condemned for their words--the heretic John Frith, condemned by More; the self-proclaimed prophetess Elizabeth Barton, who had threatened Henry with divine retribution for casting off Catherine of Aragon and marrying Anne Boleyn; and finally, More himself.  Each time, he counsels the prisoners to lie, recant, and compromise their principles in order to save themselves.  "I would advise anyone to get a few more weeks of life, by any means they can," he tells Barton, advising her to 'plead her belly' in order to delay her execution, and the final conflict of the novel, between Cromwell and More, hinges on More's refusal to compromise his immortal soul by swearing an oath acknowledging Henry as the head of the church in England and the legality of his marriage to Anne.  What in A Man for All Seasons was treated as the crowning glory of More's saintliness is, in Wolf Hall, described as the epitome of his arrogance and self-regard, with Cromwell, instead of the devil trying to tempt More away from righteousness, portrayed as a humanistic angel trying to save More from himself.

But Wolf Hall doesn't simply depict Cromwell as a modern person, but as a modern literary character.  If Mantel is storying history, she's doing so in the style of the 20th century stream of consciousness novel, and her study of Cromwell reveals a very familiar type of person--complicated and conflicted, never entirely possessed by a single emotion or completely certain of his feelings.  The novel's storying of history of overlaid by an almost impressionistic journey through Cromwell's past and present, and his concerns are larger than the affairs of state he's tasked with--securing the future of his children and wards, mourning for his wife and daughters, cultivating relationships with the heretics, freethinkers, and the merchants who are remaking Europe, slowly and imperceptibly wresting power away from the feudal lords.  Mantel's Cromwell may not hold to a system or a creed, but he does have a goal--a stronger, more prosperous England, whose wealth is held by its government rather than by Rome, and whose people, high-born and low, aren't held back by tradition and superstition.

So Wolf Hall does three things--it retells the story of the early years of the English Reformation; it is a character study of Thomas Cromwell as a modern humanist; and it is a meta-commentary on historical fiction and how it can come to supersede historical facts.  Each of these elements is extremely well done, and the novel, despite its brick-like appearance, is such an engrossing read that I very nearly swallowed it whole.  But I find myself falling short of the rapturous praise it's received in other quarters, and I think this is because these three elements end up warring with each other.  Cromwell is the heart of the novel, but how seriously can we take Mantel's hagiography of him when even she's poking holes at it?  And if we were tempted to read Wolf Hall as the character study of a fictionalized Cromwell, there is its careful, almost meticulous attention to detail, to even the smallest events of the period, to contend with, which insists that we take it seriously as a realistic and accurate representation of its era.

I'm not quite as down on the novel as Dan Hartland, who, despite enjoying it, concludes that Mantel goes too far in portraying Cromwell as an accidental politician, and ultimately makes him almost a Mary Sue, but I do feel manipulated by her use of history.  Wolf Hall ends with More's execution, which might be said to be the apex of Cromwell's career--his last and most powerful enemy vanquished, his immediate goals--the marriage of Henry and Anne Boleyn, the divestment of England's ties to Rome--achieved, but rather conveniently leaves off the actual, more bitter, ending to his story.  Mantel has said that she plans to write a sequel to Wolf Hall covering Cromwell's downfall, but it's hard not to feel that she cut the story off when she did not because she wanted to write a duology but because it would have been so much harder for her to spin as sympathetic and humanistic the events of the last five years of Cromwell's life, in which the very mechanisms he put in place to stave off the corruption of the church end up enabling the corruption of the state, and the same tools he used to get rid of Catherine and cement Henry's power will be turned against Anne and finally himself, turning a faithful wife and a loyal counselor into traitors.  Whether or not the sequel was in Mantel's mind when she sat down to write Wolf Hall, the fact remains that, taken on its own, it makes for a confusing statement--simultaneously relying on history, and our familiarity with it, for its significance, and expecting us to ignore those bits of history it finds inconvenient.

Wolf Hall is the third of this year's Booker nominees I've read, following The Little Stranger and The Children's Book, which I believe is a personal record (still on my to be read stack is Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, but I'm not particularly drawn to either of the remaining nominees).  Each of these historical novels is an accomplished, engrossing, albeit seriously flawed read, but if I had to pick a favorite, I would probably give the Byatt the slightest of edges over the Mantel, not so much for being a better book but for treating history in a way that I'm more comfortable with.  As I wrote at the time, Byatt doesn't so much story history as report it, and as problematic and frustrating as this approach can be, it did at least draw a line between the fact and fiction that kept me from being knocked out of the story, as I repeatedly was during my reading of Wolf Hall, by the realization that, for all her acknowledgment of the unreliability of any fictional representation of the past, Mantel was selling as historical fact a bit of mythology.  It is, of course, inevitable that any work of historical fiction will twist and shape the facts of history to fit its own story, but I prefer a work that acknowledges this inevitability to one that pays lip service to it, but also expects us to forget it.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

GUNN: How do you avoid reality?
VIRGINIA: Money.  It cures everything but boredom and food cures boredom, so there you go.

Angel, "Happy Anniversary"

Several weeks ago, Publishers Weekly's science fiction blog got bent out of shape over the New York Times review of Lev Grossman's The Magicians, in which reviewer Michael Agger made statements like "Fantasy novels involve magic and are a little bit like magic themselves.  To work, they require of their readers a willingness to be fooled, to be gulled into a world of walking trees and talking lions.  They affect us most powerfully as teenagers, but then most of us move on to sterner, staider stuff."  Such generalizations, insisted blogger Josh Jasper, were "so demeaning towards the genre as to stand out" from even the Grey Lady's general inability to grok it, and represented the belief that "Fantasy novels are suitable for entertaining uncultured teenagers, and require sneering at to make sure adults don't revert."  Reading the review, I couldn't see the reason for Jasper's ire.  It seemed obvious that Agger was using the term fantasy interchangeably with Narnia-esque, children's fantasy novels.  A silly, ignorant error, to be sure, and disappointing coming from a reviewer for such a respected publication, but if one performed a mental search-and-replace on his review it--and the generalizations it made about the genre--turned out to be thoroughly unobjectionable.  It was only once I read The Magicians that I realized that Agger's assumption that all of fantasy is contained within the seven volumes of Narnia is shared by the novel's characters, and perhaps even its author.

The Magicians is told from the point of view of a young man with the unlikely, storybook name of Quentin Coldwater.  A seventeen year old overachiever from Park Slope, Brooklyn, Quentin is diverted from his path to the Ivy League by an invitation to interview at Brakebills, the American college of magic.  The next four years and 300 pages of Quentin's life are spent at Brakebills, where he intersperses magical studies with the standard tropes of the college novel--drinking, sex, ill-advised pranks, his first hesitant and mostly unsuccessful attempts at relating to others as an adult, desperate attempts at reinvention.  He falls in love with a shy, brilliant magician named Alice, and together they join an exclusive clique called The Physical Kids (named for their magical discipline, though these are rather vaguely described, and it's probably best to think of the different disciplines as Grossman's analogue to the Hogwarts houses).  Together, these mundane and magical experiences make up an episodic, aimless narrative, but the former are amusing and on occasion even witty (of a classmate who conceives an enmity for Quentin: "He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog."), and the latter include the novel's most inventive, evocative passages:

Quentin was vaguely aware that, though he'd lost the lion's share of his cognitive capacity in the transformation, he'd also picked up a couple of new senses.  One had to do with air: he could perceive wind speed and direction and air temperature ac clearly as whorls of smoke in a wind tunnel.  The sky now appeared to him as a three-dimensional map of currents and eddies, friendly rising heat plumes and dense dangerous sinks of cool air.  He could feel the prickle of distant cumulus clouds swapping bursts of positive and negative electrical charge.  Quentin's sense of direction had sharpened, too, to the point where it felt like he had a finely engineered compass floating in oil, perfectly balanced, at the center of his brain.

This is all very enjoyable, in a plotless, low-key sort of way (though it does raise the question of how the author of a novel this shapeless feels justified in crowing about the triumph of plot), but really, what is the point?  Mixing Harry Potter with the college novel turns out to produce just that--two tastes that create nothing new between them.  In the end, one has to conclude that it's the juxtaposition of the children's fantasy and the college setting that is the point, the novel's central gimmick, and that we're meant to be astonished at a Hogwarts-like setting that is bereft of high-flown adventure.  It's an absence that seems to astonish the characters, most of whom are fans of the Fillory novels by Christopher Plover, a Narnia analogue about English children who travel to a fantasy world, and who explicitly state and implicitly behave as though they think Brakebills is Fillory, and that in entering it they have signed up for adventure.

Magic, the characters seem to assume, is not only going to solve all of their problems, but imbue their lives with narrative.  A magical world, to them, is a world in which they are the protagonists of a Fillory-like story--straightforward, and divided into easily achievable good and instantly recognizable evil.  To a fantasy reader, this is a perplexing attitude, until one realizes that none of the novel's characters are fantasy readers.  When Alice and Quentin join the Physical Kids, they have to force their way into the group's clubhouse to prove their worthiness, and are told that "It used to be that you could say 'friend' in Elvish and it would let you in … Now too many people have read Tolkien."  But it's painfully clear that beyond Tolkien, Rowling, and Plover, no one at the school--or at least not within Quentin's group--has read any further into fantasy.  It's almost amazing how much of the novel would have been obviated if someone had handed these poor kids some China Miéville, or Susanna Clarke, or even George R.R. Martin.  The lack of any awareness of fantasy from the New Weird onwards begs the question of whether it's Grossman himself who is ignorant of the many authors who have pitted the magical against the mundane, or whether he's posited an alternate universe in which these authors don't exist so that he can make his own stab at the subject unimpeded.  Either way, the comparison is unkind.

The business of the novel begins in its second half, in which Quentin and Alice graduate from Brakebills and move to New York with the other Physical Kids, become miserable with boredom, and, as we knew they must, find a doorway into Fillory.  As is so often the case, what seemed funny and charming in college becomes aggravating and off-putting in the real world, and The Magicians's quality drops precipitously in this half of the story.  The disaffected aimlessness that was if not appealing then at least understandable at school turns into full-blown nihilism once there are no longer any demands on Quentin's time, and he and his friends occupy themselves with drinking and party games as they continue to wait for magic to inject narrative into their lives.  Many reviewers have compared The Magicians to a fusion between Harry Potter and Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and it's in the post-Brakebills chapters of the novel that it becomes apparent how poorly the story about the lost wizard raised among mundanes maps onto the story of the out of place, working class young man who is sucked into an exclusive clique of rich students at an expensive private college.

Much of Quentin's initial attraction to Brakebills can be traced to its opulent, richly appointed campus.  To Quentin, Brakebills's luxury--which, as it does in the Harry Potter novels, takes on a decidedly 19th century cast--denotes solidity, as opposed to the mundane world's shabbiness, and it is deeply important to him.  His most vibrant impressions of Brakebills when he first comes to it is of its well-kept, exclusive beauty--the manicured lawn, the airy classroom in which he takes his entrance exam, the beautiful dorm room he's assigned--"The outer wall was stone; the inner was taken up with dark wooden cabinets and cubbies.  There was a Victorian-looking writing desk and a mirror.  His bed was tucked into a wooden alcove.  There were small vertical windows all along the outer wall.  He had to admit it was a highly satisfactory room."--and when he goes home on vacation, he finds that "his parents' house was unbearable to him now.  After his little curved tower-top room, how could he go back to his dingy old bedroom in Brooklyn with its crumbly white paint and its iron bars on the window and its view of a tiny walled-in dirt patch?"

What's often left unsaid in fantasy worlds of the Hogwarts or Brakebills ilk is that the reason we no longer have these kinds of opulent, hand-crafted settings is that they were originally available only to a select few, and only because of the efforts of a much larger underclass.  The mass-produced, automated ugliness that Quentin recoils from is the 20th century's answer to the disappearance of this underclass as more and more of its members began demanding to be the ones who had their baths drawn rather than the ones doing the drawing.  When fantasy novels, especially ones that posit the existence of a secret magical elite, deliver this kind of opulence to their characters free of charge, what they're actually doing is using magic as a substitute for wealth and class.  So that when Quentin expresses his desire for the solidity and beauty of Brakebills, it's hard not to see him as the middle class kid desperately trying to hold on to his position in a rich people's enclave.  Except that Quentin is in fact quite well off, and only disdains his parents' Park Slope apartment and later their McMansion in the Boston suburbs because to him these represent a shabby imitation of Brakebills's luxury.  He wants his wealth made, not manufactured--"[the curtains] were coarse-woven, but it wasn't the familiar, depressing, fake-authentic coarseness of high-end Earth housewares, which merely imitated the real coarseness of fabrics that were woven by hand out of genuine necessity."  Quentin, in other words, is a rich kid who wants to be super-rich.

It's not exactly a sympathetic desire, but it is an understandable one.  It's Grossman's choice to overlay the Secret History aspect of his novel--in which the desire for Brakebills is the desire for money and social status--with the Narnia reading--in which the desire for Brakebills is the desire for meaning and adventure--that causes problems, because it paints Quentin as the sort of person who is shocked, shocked to discover that in the absence of either the financial impetus or the drive to make something of himself, he is bored and miserable.  It means that the latter half of the novel is made up almost entirely of the characters complaining that magic, for which read money, hasn't made them happy.   It means that the characters mistake for deep, existential, untreatable misery what is probably nothing more than boredom.

When they arrive at Fillory, Quentin's friend Janet bitterly complains to Ember, the land's Aslan-figure, that "We human beings are unhappy all the time.  We hate ourselves and we hate each other and sometimes we wish You or Whoever had never created us or this shit-ass world."  This, apparently, is something we're supposed to take seriously--these rich, powerful, beautiful young people complaining about their terrible lot in life, and concluding that because magic hasn't made them happy, those who don't have magic must live lives of unalloyed misery only briefly alleviated by commercial entertainment and internet porn.  The possibility that people might be happier, and more likely to find meaning in their lives, in the absence of the kind of magic that equals money, never seems to occur to them.  No, the characters conclude, the fault must be in the world--"Why now, when it was actually happening, did the seductions of Fillory feel so crude and unwanted?  Its groping hands so clumsy?  He thought he'd left this feeling behind long ago in Brookly, or at least at Brakebills.  How could it have followed him here, of all places?  … Or maybe this time was different, maybe there really was something off here.  Maybe the hollowness was in Fillory, not in him?"

It is only Alice, the smartest and coolest character in the novel (though her coolness is somewhat called into question by her choice to spend so much of her time around these pointless, boring people) who recognizes that nothing will make Quentin happy--not Brakebills, not Fillory, not her love.  That he will always be on the lookout for that unattainable perfection against which his good fortune seems worthless.  If Grossman had ended the novel on this recognition, it might have been an interesting, if overly familiar, work.  Instead, he makes the inexplicable choice to reward Quentin.  After suffering a terrible loss in Fillory, Quentin returns to New York and leaves magic behind--for which read takes a made-up job at a magician-owned company and spends his days surfing the net and his weekends distracting himself with "the multifarious meaningless entertainments and distractions with which the real world supplied [him]."  In other words, he's learned nothing.  He looks at the world--full of people working, striving, building, learning, working towards something--and instead of learning from them, concludes that they are all even more miserable than he is.  It would be funny if it weren't so tragic, and tragic if Grossman's solution to this predicament weren't so infuriating.  The remaining Physical Kids track Quentin down and offer him another trip to Fillory, to take their place as kings and queens, and after some deliberation, Quentin accepts.  The novel ends on this acceptance, and seems to expect us to read it as a happy ending despite the fact that neither Quentin nor Fillory have changed, and that the most likely outcome is that, once again, Fillory won't measure up to Quentin's expectations.

The more I think about The Magicians, the more inclined I am to compare it not to Harry Potter or any of a million novels about undergraduate or graduate ennui, but to M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart, a novel which is so completely The Magicians's polar opposite that if their authors were ever brought together the universe might cease to exist.  Like The Magicians, The Course of the Heart is the story of people desperate to inject meaning and narrative into their lives, a desire which Harrison treats with furious disdain and, at the same time, terrible sorrow.  Like Grossman, he concludes that a life without magic is empty and meaningless, but that magic isn't sufficient to imbue it with meaning, and though I had nearly as much trouble with this worldview when Harrison expressed it as when Grossman did, I can at least respect Harrison for having the courage of his convictions.  He depicts genuine misery and ugliness as opposed to wealth that isn't quite opulent enough.  His fantasy world is a world of genuine, terrifying wonder, not a sanitized, easily comprehensible children's world with walking trees and talking lions.  Most of all, he has the guts to take his premise to its logical conclusion, to end his story with the misery his world promises, whereas Grossman chickens out at the last minute, and ends on a cowardly, childish note.  The Magicians turns out to be precisely the kind of fantasy Michael Agger mistakes the whole of the genre for in his New York Times review--safe, predictable, something that adults should outgrow.  Far more than Agger's review, it is what's demeaning to the genre. 

Killer Kids(' Books): Two Novels

2008 was the year of the YA novel.  You could see it on the Hugo ballot, on bestseller lists, and on the blogosphere.  On a personal level, I see it in the fact that I'm still catching up to the year's crop, starting with a book that received ecstatic and effusive praise from many of my friends and most respected reviewers, Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go.  To name but a few, Niall Harrison, Dan Hartland, and Adam Roberts have all raved about it, and Martin Lewis called it "the best effing science fiction novel I've read all year."  Taken together, these reviews build up a heavy burden of expectations that few novels could gracefully shoulder, and even as I was turning The Knife of Never Letting Go's first page I was preparing myself for the inevitable disappointment.  My reaction to the novel, however, turns out to be more complicated. Knife is a compelling, engrossing read.  I wolfed it down in a single sitting, and found myself genuinely affected by its characters and set pieces.  Still, I'm reluctant to call it good, and leaning more towards adjectives like 'successful' and 'effective'--by which I mean successfully and effectively manipulative--and the novel's themes and premise trouble me with their presumably unintentional implications.

Knife is narrated by Todd, the last boy in Prentisstown and, as far as he knows, on the whole of New World, a planet colonized by humans twenty years ago, whose native inhabitants (again, as Todd has been taught) unleashed a virus that killed all the human women, gave animals the ability to talk, and turned all men into projective telepaths.  Todd has spent his entire life being bombarded by Noise, the violent, chaotic morass of thoughts, feelings, fears and fantasies projected by the men around him.  Readers with even a little bit of experience reading YA fiction will not have needed the caveats planted in the preceding sentences to guess that some or all of Todd's understanding of his world is mistaken, and Knife's opening does promise the slow investigation of their world so beloved of YA protagonists, as Todd, feeling surly and discontented--by the loneliness of being the only boy in a town of men who consider him beneath their notice; by the manhood that will be thrust upon him by his fast-approaching 13th birthday, after which he will be forced to put away childish things; by the general uselessness of his dog Manchee, whose gift of speech is employed mostly in discussions of poo and things to chase [1]--seeks a brief reprieve by venturing to a nearby swamp to pick fruit and finds something else, a hole in the planet's blanket of Noise.  Nonplussed, Todd returns home (on the way giving us a tour of Prentisstown and introducing us to its atmosphere of misery and barely-suppressed fear and violence, and to its most prominent citizens, the deranged preacher Aaron and the charismatic Mayor Prentiss, who together hold the town in their thrall) and tells his guardians, Cillian and Ben, about his encounter.  In a traditionally structured YA novel, the adults would either scoff at Todd's claims or dismiss them in a manner so cagey and suspicious as to immediately confirm them, but Cillian and Ben merely blanch and spring into action--"[they] take a look at each other and then back at me.  "You have to leave Prentisstown," Ben says."

And with that, it's off to the races, the novel's pace ratcheting up to the maximum and not letting up until its cliffhanger ending.  But then, the whole of Knife is made up of cliffhangers.  Returning to the swamp, Todd finds the source of the quiet he experienced there--a girl, called Viola, the sole survivor of a scout ship for a new group of colonists, who, astonishingly to Todd, has no Noise.  Together, they flee the Mayor and Aaron, but each escape to safety turns out to be the equivalent of the penultimate scene in a slasher film, in which the presumed dead or outdistanced antagonist surprises the heroes as they finally allow themselves to rest.  The relentlessness with which these false bottom endings keep coming is probably Ness's most impressive accomplishment with Knife.  It pulls the reader along, making the novel almost impossible to put down, and leaves us, at the novel's end, feeling nearly as exhausted and wrung-out as Todd and Viola, and, naturally enough, panting for the next installment in their story.  At the same time, however, I'm not sure whether Ness should be applauded for so blatantly manipulating the readers' emotions by any means necessary, using the cheapest tools in his toolbox with all the subtlety of sledgehammers.  It works, of course, but how admirable is it to get a rise out of readers by, for example, endangering the cute talking dog?

Still, perhaps what's really most impressive about Knife is that despite its breakneck pace and cliché-ridden plot, Ness manages to actually say something with the novel.  In interviews, Ness has likened Noise to the din of media and information with which the modern world bombards us, but the involuntary exposure of a person's raw, churning id and subconscious strikes me as a very poor analogy for the processed, calculated information we encounter on TV, in newspapers, and even online, where the most confessional of LiveJournals is ultimately an attempt by its author to present a certain face to the world.  More successful, however, is Ness's use of Noise as a means of exploring, furthering, and hindering gender relations.  The metaphor is not at all subtle--Todd has grown up among men whose every thought has been laid bare before him.  Viola is incomprehensible to him because he can't imagine how she thinks--is even, when they first meet, doubtful whether she thinks at all, whether she isn't simply empty of all thought and personality, a void, a nothingness (as I said, not subtle).  Over the course of the novel, in the brief interstices between escaping one menace and discovering and fleeing another, Todd and Viola get to know each other the old-fashioned way, and Todd learns just how many of the truths he's been raised with--about women, about his family, about Prentisstown, about New World--have been lies.

A more successful metaphor, but also one that leaves me feeling distinctly uncomfortable, in that it seems to turn The Knife of Never Letting Go into the equivalent of those well-intentioned science fiction stories that try to speak out against racism by using aliens as stand-in for people of color.  It's all very well and good that Ness has written a story that encourages its readers to learn to understand the Other, but despite the misogynistic cliché, women aren't actually an alien species.  The premise of Knife, however, makes of them something even more foreign and incomprehensible than that--New World's native inhabitants, after all, produce Noise, and even animals speak.  Only women are so foreign that they require careful study before their personhood is even acknowledged.  Feminism, we're told, is the radical notion that women are people, but when Todd first meets Viola he knows her for a girl even though he's never seen one before because there is something ineffably different about her--"Something about her shape, something about her smell, something I don't know but it's there and she's a girl."  The otherness of women persists throughout the novel, and what Todd learns through his acquaintance with Viola isn't to reject that notion (which in fact he can't, because in Ness' world women truly are Other), but to find ways to overcome it--upon his departure from Prentisstown, Cillian and Ben give Todd his mother's diary, but Todd, a poor reader, can't make heads or tails out of it until he asks Viola to read it to him (again, not a subtle metaphor)--and in so doing validates the 'men are from Mars, women are from Venus' worldview that is baked into the novel's premise.

Part of the reason, I think, that The Knife of Never Letting Go makes such troubling statements about women and the relationships between men and women is that it isn't really concerned with either.  Knife is, ultimately, a novel about masculinity and what it means to be a man--albeit one that, unlike Fight Club or Black Man, defines masculinity, in part, through its attitude to women.  The other component of the definition of manhood Todd must struggle with is violence.  A man, Todd has been taught from childhood, can kill.  Killing may, in fact, be the very definition of manhood, and Todd, who repeatedly flinches from striking the killing blow against his and Viola's pursuers, must ask himself whether he can be a man, whether he can fashion his own definition of manhood, and whether he can take a life without buying into Prentisstown's definition of it.  Though it is, on the whole, successful, there are two problems with Ness's treatment of this issue.  The first is that Todd does kill someone halfway through the novel, an alien whom he and Viola encounter after a near escape, and whom Todd kills out of misdirected anger and fear even though the alien posed no threat to them.  The Prentisstown men Todd meets later on insist that this act isn't enough to make Todd a killer and thus a man, and though I do take the point that killing an alien whom one has been taught to hate and fear is easier than killing someone you think of as a person, coupled with the novel's Western/frontier story trappings this attitude has an uncomfortable whiff of 'not including Indians and Chinamen' about it.

The other problem with equating murder and manhood is, of course, how completely it leaves women out of the picture.  The notion that women might feel bloodlust, and that they might wonder how those feelings and the choice to act on them affect their femininity and humanity, is not even considered until a few pages from the end of the novel, and though that consideration seems definitive--Viola takes a life--the novel's repeated emphasis on the inextricable link between manhood and killing, and the nature of the murder--Viola kills only after Todd has repeatedly refused to do so because he doesn't want to become a Prentisstown man--have the effect of flattening the very question of what violence means to her.  The implication is that Viola is allowed to kill because killing doesn't affect her definition of herself the way it would Todd.  Which, to be fair, is not an attitude originated by Ness--unlike the concept of Noise and the disconnect it imposes between men and women, the notion that women don't have the same relationship to violence that men do is entirely familiar from the real world--but the novel's premise imposes such a disconnect from Viola's internal monologue that we never get to delve any further into the question.  Even her telling Todd that she wanted to kill her victim feels more like a statement about Viola than about womanhood, whereas Todd's bloodlust is of course a reflection of his masculinity.

It seems likely that Knife's sequel, which among other things splits the narrative between Todd and Viola, will address at least some of the issues I've raised here.  Nevertheless, on a thematic level Knife feels like a self-contained argument.  It's the story of how Todd develops his own definition of manhood, rejecting violence as a component of his self-definition and seeking to understand the other.  That's a worthy message, and Ness delivers it with delicacy and assuredness, making it clear how wide the gap is between Todd's convictions and the actions his circumstances force him into, and how quickly the world erodes his innocence and makes him complicit in horrors.  But it's also a message, and a definition of manhood, arrived at through a comprehensive othering of women, and which implicitly defines womanhood as not-manhood.

It seemed logical to follow my reading of The Knife of Never Letting Go with Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, another novel about children forced into violent actions with several interesting differences from the Ness, most notably the fact that the narrator is female and her companion is male.  Katniss Everdeeen lives in a dystopian future, in which the wealthy, decadent capital of her nation maintains its dominance over the twelve districts that serve it and produce for it by pitting them against each other.  Each year, two tributes, a boy and a girl, are selected from each district, and forced to fight against each other and tributes from other districts in the titular games.  The last child standing wins their district glory and wealth.  Katniss, a skilled hunter and tracker, hails from the impoverished district 12, a mining district whose inhabitants often go hungry, and has been her mother and younger sister Prim's protector and breadwinner since the death of her father, putting food on the table by poaching in the nearby woods with her friend Gale.  When Prim is selected as this year's tribute, Katniss volunteers to take her place, and is joined by Peeta Mellark, a baker's son [2] for whom Katniss has distinctly mixed feelings, resenting the relative ease and safety of his life in a slightly-closer-to-middle-class family, but also remembering fondly the time he gave her some bread when she and her family were on the verge of starvation.

As it turns out, The Hunger Games is Knife's reverse image in more respects than just the genders of their protagonists.  Both novels talk about gender roles, about violence, and about the effect that modern media has on society and individuals--in The Hunger Games this is the structure of the games themselves, which are broadcast live to the capital and the twelve districts like a Running Man-style reality TV program, and which are won less through the competitor's martial skills than through their ability to charm the audience and thus win wealthy 'sponsors' who will send them much-needed supplies.  But if Knife is unpersuasive as a metaphor for modern technology and has interesting, if problematic, things to say about gender and violence, Hunger Games is the reverse.

Gender seems to be a non-issue in this novel.  Collins seems content to have posited a reversal of gender roles--Katniss is the stereotypical tomboy, accustomed to hardship and physical exertion, abrasive and confrontational, uncomfortable with weakness and caretaking (though her mother and sister are skilled healers, Katniss can't deal with the sight of injury), and, unbeknownst to her, a heartbreaking beauty, whereas Peeta is gentle, thoughtful, and self-aware--and doesn't explore this reversal, how it's seen by Katniss and Peeta or the people around them, in the body of the novel.  Similarly, there's very little exploration of the morality of Katniss and Peeta's predicament, and Collins repeatedly avoids confronting them with a scenario in which they must kill an innocent in order to survive.  She does so by positing the existence of 'Career tributes,' children from wealthy districts who have been training for the games, and have volunteered for them in order to win glory.  These are uniformly depicted as vicious and sadistic, and do most of the killing in the novel, either picking one another off or killing the other, 'good' children from the poor districts.  The latter murders, of course, justify the Careers' own deaths, and on those rare occasions when Katniss or Peeta kill it's usually one of these characters [3], and often one whom we have witnessed brutally killing a more sympathetic contestant.

Where The Hunger Games shines, though, is in its portrayal of reality TV.  Not since Series 7: The Contenders has a work of fiction so perfectly skewered that genre's obsession with 'real' emotion and 'real' interpersonal drama.  Desperate for the attention that will win them sponsors and a chance to win the game, Peeta and Katniss come up with just to right faces to present to the voracious Hunger Games audience.  They will pretend that Peeta has been secretly in love with Katniss for years, and that Katniss has just found out about his feelings under these tragic circumstances.  The two immediately become audience favorites, and as they enact their doomed romance first in the pre-game interviews and presentations and later in the game arena, the swell of audience sympathy forces a rule change that will allow them both to win the game, if they can survive it.  Katniss and Peeta end up performing for their lives--buying a hot meal with a kiss, medicine with an intimate conversation.  Even the most inexperienced reader will have guessed that Peeta is not faking his feelings, and that Katniss's performance of growing infatuation isn't entirely that, but the brilliance of The Hunger Games is that it depicts the corrosive effect that selling their love to the audience has on Katniss and Peeta's romance.  How can you be certain of your feelings for someone when you're not only stuck in a life and death situation with them, but when the difference between life and death is determined by your ability to successfully sham the right kind of feelings for them?

As interesting as Collins's treatment of this issue is, it isn't enough to make the novel, which on the whole leaves me rather cold.  Like The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Hunger Games is manipulative, but neither successfully nor effectively so.  If Ness's manipulations pulled me into his novel despite my better judgment, Collins's knock me out of hers.  The difference, I think, is that while both authors are manipulative, only Collins uses manipulation to make life easier for herself and her characters, to elide and smooth over the difficult aspects of her story.  When Todd abandons Manchee, even as the uncomprehending dog calls him back, in order to save Viola, it's a manipulation, but one that forces us to question his choice even though we know that a girl's life is worth more than a dog's.  When Katniss befriends a young contestant named Rue, whom the narrative repeatedly compares to Prim, only for a Career to kill Rue, it's a manipulation, but one that makes it easier for us to countenance Katniss killing Rue's murderer.  When Aaron repeatedly tracks Todd and Viola down, reappearing each time, more physically damaged and more deranged, like a fundamentalist Freddy Krueger, it's a manipulation, but one that puts us at odds with Todd, who grows increasingly reluctant to take a life even as we begin baying for Aaron's blood.  When the Careers brutally murder each other and the weaker players, it's a manipulation intended to justify their deaths at Katniss and Peeta's hands.  The first person narrative is a manipulation in both novels, locking us into the point of view of a person with only a limited understanding of the world, but whereas Todd's incomprehension is all-encompassing and often quite frustrating, Katniss's is localized.  For the most part, she's a smart, observant, savvy person--much better, for example, at recognizing the messages being sent to her by her team outside the game arena through the gifts they send her, and tailoring her and Peeta's behavior accordingly.  But somehow, when it comes to realizing the reality of Peeta's feelings for her, she's a dunce [4], and the novel persists in telling us that she's emotionally illiterate even as her first person narrative spews pop psychology such as "Most of [my life] has been consumed with the acquisition of food.  Take that away and I'm not really sure who I am, what my identity is."

Perhaps the biggest problem with The Hunger Games's manipulativeness is that manipulation is actually the subject of the novel, that even as it encourages us to sneer at the games' audience who are lapping up Peeta and Katniss's manufactured romance, it expects us to buy into the real romance, despite the fact that they are the same thing.  "I think the real excitement for the audience was watching you fall for [Peeta,]" Katniss is told in her victory interview, and there's supposed to be a rich irony in our knowledge that the infatuation was completely staged.  But the readers are also supposed to have been excited by watching the 'real' Katniss develop 'real' feelings for Peeta, and the novel seems entirely unaware of the disconnect between the two reactions it's aiming for.  It helps a little that Peeta and Katniss end the novel at odds, for the first time genuinely shamming affection instead of pretending to fake feelings they really feel, but it seems pretty obvious that this is merely a temporary setback, that future novels in the series will see the two crazy kids making it work. As impressive as I found Collins's reality TV satire, it is entirely undermined by her insistence on framing her novel as a love story.

At the end of The Hunger Games, I had a pretty good idea of where Katniss's story was headed--a difficult reintegration into her old life, a tortured choice between Peeta and Gale, perhaps rebellion against the capital and the Hunger Games system--but not a great deal of interest in continuing to follow it.  The Knife of Never Letting Go, meanwhile, has captured me.  Despite my serious reservations about it (and the fact that there isn't a single aspect of the novel that is as perfectly handled as Collins's reflection of reality TV in The Hunger Games), it is at least an uncompromising novel, one that, unlike The Hunger Games, shies away from easy answers and crowd-pleasing solutions.  I have no idea what's in store for Todd and Viola, but whatever it is I'm sure it'll be terrifying, and force them both to make difficult and uncomfortable choices,  and for that reason if no other I'm interested in continuing to follow their story.  Neither The Hunger Games nor The Knife of Never Letting Go are a perfect way to wrap up the year of the YA adult novel (and anyway I still have Kristin Cashore's Graceling to go) but Ness's novel, at least, will keep me following the field in 2009 and 2010.

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[1] Knife was published in 2008 and written some time beforehand, so the associations with Up are presumably a coincidence, but it doesn't help that one of the first things Manchee says is "Squirrel!" and that he and Todd encounter a large, food-obsessed, flightless bird.

[2] I can only imagine the despair of the Hebrew translator who has to craft something not-hilarious out of the combination 'Peeta the baker's son.'

[3] Actually, Peeta kills two non-Careers, but these death are minimized--one is inadvertent, the other happens off-screen, and its victim was already mortally wounded by the Careers.  At any rate, his feelings on the subject are never explored.

[4] As annoying as Katniss's calculated dimness is, it does perhaps say something about the different requirements from male and female YA protagonists.  Todd, who is not too bright, stubborn, illiterate, and often quite unpleasant, needs only a prodigious force of will to make him a sympathetic protagonist.  Katniss is smart, strong, cunning, compassionate, determined, and beautiful, presumably in order to achieve the same effect.

Inglourious Basterds: The Israeli Response

This post was inspired by Matt, who in the comments to my post about why I wouldn't be watching Quentin Tarantino's Holocaust action film, Inglourious Basterds, wondered what the Israeli critical and popular response to the film would be.  Which struck me as an interesting question, and hence this post.  All quotes are my translation from the Hebrew originals, and all links go to Hebrew sites.

The Tel Aviv weekly entertainment guide Achbar HaIr (City Mouse) publishes the Reviewers' Table, which ranks all films screening in the city according to the average star rating they received from nine different sources, including the three Hebrew language daily papers (Yediot Acharonot, Maariv, and Haaretz), the two Tel Aviv guides (Achbar HaIr and Time Out Tel Aviv), the two national TV and film guides (Pnai Plus and Rating), the free daily paper Israel Today and the military radio station Galei Tzahal.  English and Russian daily papers are not represented (though the Jerusalem Post, at least, has a film reviewer) and neither is the Arab press.  Inglourious Basterds opened in Israel on September 17th (Israeli film distributors release films on Thursdays to take advantage of the Friday-Saturday weekend).  In that week's Reviewers' Table it was ranked 13th out of 31, with eight sources reporting.  Five weeks later, it is 11th out of 25, and one of only seven films to receive a review from all nine sources.  (For the sake of calibration, the top three rated films on the Reviewers' Table are the Israeli crime drama Ajami, which has also been submitted for consideration for the best foreign film Oscar, the Turkish film Three Monkeys, and Pixar's Up.  The bottom three films are Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, The Time Traveler's Wife, and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.)  With an average rating of three stars, Inglourious Basterds can be said to be a respectable critical success, but that rating conceals wide divisions between the film's individual reviewers.

Probably the most negative take on the film comes from Meir Shnitzer, writing for the daily newspaper Maariv, who compares Tarantino to Holocaust denier David Irving and, perhaps more reasonably, criticizes him for making the Nazi Jew-hunter the film's most memorable, charismatic character.

It is no surprise that Basterds relies on the cancellation of history and the glorification of evil.  The two pillars of Tarantino's work have always been the abolition and even vilification of morality and the presentation of evil as the only viable moral choice.  Since the beginning of his film career, Tarantino has consistently divorced morality from its human context through his ever-present contention that mere human existence is insufficient to define reality, and that fictional cinema (most especially trash films) is the only and perhaps most objective indicator of the existence of any sort of reality.  ... In the absence of reality and with morality abolished, Tarantino is left--as in all his other films--with a reflective world, in which he toys with the lexicon of the slasher film.  Which is why he finds it easier to make of Basterds a sort of mirror-reality in which the Nazi is civilized, polite, charming, and loyal unto death, and the Jews are barbarians who scalp and break skulls like some sort of nightmarish jungle monsters.  A reversal of which David Irving might have been proud.

 It should go without saying that Shnitzer's extreme take on the film does not represent the Israeli consensus, and was greeted with dismay and not a little bit of ridicule in the local film sites I frequent, where he and fellow reviewer Nachman Ingbar (who gave Inglourious Basterds 2.5 stars) are often derided for their conservative, old-fashioned tastes.  Interestingly, the third corner of what is widely considered to be the Old Guard triangle, Haaretz reviewer Uri Klein, gave Inglourious Basterds a four-star rave, in a long, thought-out review to which my too-brief quotation does not do justice.  Inglourious Basterds, Klein writes "exposes the ideological mechanism which drives war cinema, and by exposing it crosses all possible lines into the absurd."

The film, especially in its first chapter, imports elements of the Western, but has there been an American war film, up to and including Oliver Stone's Platoon and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, which didn't incorporate components of the genre which has laid the foundation for the ongoing struggle between history and mythology in American society and culture, and which more than any other genre is concerned with the fundamental values of American society and their accumulating, changing meaning?  Is there, in this context, any point in criticizing Tarantino for historical inaccuracy and narrative implausibility?  The main complaint which can be laid against the film is that it doesn't criticize the mechanism it exposes.  On the other hand, the very act of exposure is itself a criticism.

Most of all, what makes Inglourious Basterds a problematic piece is of course its Jewish aspect.  There will naturally be those who argue that the film represents a minimization of the Holocaust (a word which is never uttered in the film), that it is exploitative and even carries an unpleasant whiff of fascism, and these accusations are hard to counter.  There are in the film, especially near its end, moments which deal with Jewishness in a manner that makes the soul shudder.  But in a way--and I am aware that what I am about to say may be inflammatory--what Tarantino does in Inglourious Basterds seems to me more valid and more decent than what Spielberg did in Schindler's List.

I prefer Tarantino's cinematic worldview to that of Spielberg, who genuinely believes that cinema can recreate the past, be that past the invasion of Normandy or Auschwitz.  Unlike Spielberg, Tarantino believes in the fabrication of an alternate cinematic reality, which divorces realism in favor of the imaginary and the symbolic.  There is no scene in Tarantino's film like the one in Schindler's List in which Spielberg's cameras enter the gas chambers (which turn out not to be gas chambers); and there is also no scene in Inglourious Basterds which revels in its own prettiness, like the one in which Schindler watches the little girl in the red coat walk towards her doom.

(Much as I appreciate Klein's take on the film, I have to quibble with the equivalence he draws, and which he ascribes to Tarantino, between war films and Holocaust films.  I also wonder how much credence to give his assertion that Inglourious Basterds, a film about the Jewish Holocaust, is an interrogation of American mythmaking and American bloodlust.  At best, Klein is indulging in a bit of American-bashing, a popular pastime of Israeli thinkers and non-thinkers alike.  At worst, Tarantino has committed cultural appropriation in the first degree.)

Achbar HaIr's own Avner Shavit (possibly the youngest film reviewer currently working for a major publication), joins in Klein's excoriation of straight-up Holocaust films:

The truth is that [Tarantino] is on our side: not only because, like a typical Yankee who has been raised on stories about Ari Ben Canaan, Moshe Dayan, and other Mossad agents, he describes the Jew as the only one capable of kicking the bad guy's ass for humanity's sake, but because the film doesn't mock the Holocaust so much as it mocks the attempt to represent it in film.

Inglourious Basterds is therefore a great deal less "dangerous" than all of those allegedly respectable and erudite films made on the subject, from Life is Beautiful to The Reader, which have been so happily embraced by the establishment.  After all, what did these films do but reduce the Holocaust to a single, tiny happy ending, depict the German people as victims and the Nazis as caricatures, and erase historical truth for the sake of artistry?  In other words, they turned the Holocaust into fiction, but without declaring it ahead of time and admitting it at the end.  And here comes Tarantino and announces from the get-go: the second world war is, as far as I'm concerned, a fantasy, whose existence began in my fevered brain and ends on the silver screen.  There is no other way of doing it; that's the movies.

Meanwhile, reviewer and film blogger Yair Raveh is torn, admiring the film, which he calls "[Tarantino]'s greatest display of virtuoso cinema since his debut, Resevoir Dogs," and praises for being an extraordinarily well-made piece of filmmaking, but also recoiling from its topic and treatment of it:

The film's heroes are Jews, but it is so bloodthirsty, so violent, so eager for vengeance, so filled with pleasure at the prospect of rage and brutality and agonizing death, that it is hard not to feel that deep and hidden in his heart of hearts--or perhaps not so deep and not so hidden--[Tarantino] identifies more with the Nazis.  [He] has made a film that has Jews in it, but no Jewishness.  Unless you find the idea of Jewish shahids [literally, religious martyrs; most commonly used to describe suicide bombers and other terrorists] during the Holocaust Jewish.  ... [Inglourious Basterds] is rich in cinema, but poor in humanity.  It isn't merely monstrous; it is--like its antagonist--cold as ice.

This is, to my mind, the money quote of the review, but it should be noted that it doesn't represent Raveh's ultimate conclusion.  The flip side of this response, he goes on to write, is that Inglourious Basterds is "almost criminally enjoyable," and he then proceeds to have a lot of fun identifying Tarantino's various influences and quotes and discussing its prevailing themes.  In the end, like Klein and Shavit, Raveh concludes that Inglourious Basterds "does say something meaningful about the Holocaust, or at least its representation in film."

Raveh was also good enough to report the film's box office take on his blog.  Five weeks into its Israeli run, Inglourious Basterds was still at the top of the charts, selling 15,000 tickets over the weekend and bringing its total to 200,000.  This may not sound like a lot, but 300,000 ticket sales is considered a smash hit in Israel, and because the Israeli film business still works on the long tail model (unlike the US in which the focus has shifted to achieving record-breaking opening weekend sales, after which most films' take drops precipitously), it's possible that Inglourious Basterds will continue to sell steadily for several weeks more.  Furthermore, despite the existence of a loud and vibrant Tarantino fanbase in Israel (my contemporaries, really--there was a period of several months in high school in which every conversation was guaranteed to contain at least one quote from Pulp Fiction), the profile of the average Israeli filmgoer does not match the target audience of a Quentin Tarantino film.  Films become hits in Israel if they appeal to young children and their parents or to the middle aged art-house crowd (Pedro Almodovar's films are always big sellers), and effects laden action extravaganzas often flop (Star Trek, and even Transformers 2 only sold 100,000 tickets).  That Inglourious Basterds is such a success would seem to indicate that its appeal reaches beyond Tarantino's fanbase, and that it has drawn the more youthful demographic away from their file-sharing programs and into the movie theater.

The anti-climactic conclusion of this overview is that the Israeli response to Inglourious Basterds has been, as I guessed in response to Matt's comment "[not] significantly different from the rest of the world - a lot of enthusiastic fans, and a few dissenters."  If anything, the sense I got from many of the film's more positive reviews was of a determination not to be offended, not to reach for, as Shmulik Duvdevani writes in his review in the news site Ynet, "the arsenal of demagogic weaponry" which is often the Israeli's first recourse when encountering foreign treatments of the Holocaust, and not to indulge in "self-righteous attacks."  Or it might simply be that the film's appeal is much simpler.  As the irreverent independent film site Fisheye (now sadly defunct after nine years; the Inglourious Basterds review was one of the last posted) writes: "It could be that despite the great skill devoted to its making, [Inglourious Basterds] lacks the weight and consistency that could have made it a truly whole work, but guys, they're scalpin' Nazis!"