Here's Looking For An Explanation

While recently scanning the American Film Institute's list of top movie quotes of all times, I was not surprised to see the famous Bogart quote from Casablanca at the top of the list:

"Here's looking at you, kid."

Surely, just on quotability and ubiquity it deserves its' place on the list.

But I have always wondered: just what the hell does it mean, exactly?

We can of course infer affection and some kind of flattery in this quote, but "Here's looking at you, kid?" Does it mean, "Here's to your beauty?" like a toast of some kind? Or just literally "Here is looking at you," like, I am here looking at you...Huh?

How did the writer even come up with such an obscure thing to say?

You hear something so much sometimes it takes on meaning and you never stop for a minute to think about it.

Surely a classy lady like Ingrid Bergman always smelled great. Why not: "Here's sniffing at you, kid?" Nah, that doesn't make sense either...

Okay, maybe I am making too much of it, but by golly, if it is the greatest quote ever, shouldn't it at least make some kind of sense.

If not, I vote for "Zug-zug" from Ringo Starr's Caveman...

The Wisdom of Oz

1939...Europe steps into the abyss. Fascism in Germany has pushed its' expansionist intentions too far with the invasion of Poland, igniting a World War that will consume tens of millions of human lives before ending in the shroud of two nuclear attacks six years later. The Soviets are willing to play ball with Hitler at first; Stalin has his eye on expanding too, and the non-aggression pact with Hitler seemed like the best means to achieve this end...So too Imperial Japan..Fascist Italy. As Communist , Fascist, and Imperial forces around the world moved their machines into position to dominate the world, a Depression-weary and weakened US is torn in debate as to how to react to the apocalyptic scenarios raging on all sides. One American product that was produced out of this troubled time was to become one of the most beloved fantasy movies of all time, The Wizard of Oz.

One of the bad raps that fantasy has always been given is the term escapist. Well, surely if there was ever a time when folks needed a nice reprieve from reality, it was in 1939. And, too be sure, the wonderful songs and vibrant technicolor visions that Oz offered did transport its' viewers to a happier, funner place. But not a place not fraught with its own dangers, its own forces of darkness bent on possession and destruction of free peoples.

Really good fantasy works on a mythic level. It not only tells a good story, but it gives you a boon of some kind as well. It equips us with what we need in order to stay rooted in humanity and yet spiritually enlightened. The things that the main characters were searching for were the very things that American viewers were going to need to tap into: the Scarecrow wanted brains; the Tin Man wanted a heart, and The Cowardly Lion needed courage. All Dorothy wanted was to return to her home. In the war years that followed, it was the ingenuity, the humanity, the fearlessness, and the desire for peace that not only brought America through the greatest war the world has ever known, but brought it to world prominence when the dust settled.

Now, I am not asserting that it was because of Oz that America won the war. But I believe that the assertion that these things that the characters felt they desperately needed in order to cope were in their possession all along and were to found by searching within not without was a wonderfully empowering message to pluck up an anxious populace. And of course, the mantra of "there's no place like home" was enough to keep desperate soldiers in far-flung hell holes of war motivated to survive; to return to their mother lands.

2001...A still reeling from the 9/11 attacks America goes to the much anticipated first installment of The Lord of the Rings, "The Fellowship of the Ring." In a quiet scene between Frodo Baggins, a poetic, peace-loving hobbit and his friend and advisor wizard Gandalf the Grey, Frodo expresses his wishes that fate had not brought him to this frightening and dangerous place: deep in the bowels of an orc- infested mountain, an early step on a long, perilous, uncertain quest to take on a great evil. Gandalf responds in a way that spoke to all of us who felt like Frodo, wishing what happened had never happened. "So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." That beam of light came to us in a very dark time, and helped equip us for a new world, a new war, a new way of life.

2010...Shapes up to be a very uncertain time both domestically and abroad. Things have moved so quickly in the last year that it is difficult to foresee where we may be this time next year. Let's hope for some wisdom. Some heart. Some courage. And let's hope that our homes stay safe and strong. And let's hope for some good fantasy to help us steer into better times...

Speer's Destiny

I finished Spandau: The Secret Diaries the other day so I thought I'd throw a few thoughts on the book out there as I said I would in a prior post.

The book is a year by year diary of Albert Speer's 20 year stay in Berlin's Spandau Prison as sentenced by the Allied judges at the Nuremberg trials following the collapse of the Third Reich. It was truly a secret diary, as such personal writings were strictly forbidden by prison rules. Speer wrote on toilet paper, scraps from old calendars, whatever he could find and hide on his person (tucked in a place he knew no guard would want to search). He wrote to record his thoughts; to grapple with his guilt; to report on his experiences; and to try to keep a life-line to his non-prison self and his sanity. Many interesting memories and reflections about his experiences in Hitler's "court" come to him along the way, but to me the most interesting thing was the relationships that developed between the seven prisoners, all former Nazi bigwigs,
who went from planning on how to conquer and divide the world to struggling to come together to paint the prison halls or weed the gardens.

The other prisoners all regarded Speer as an outsider among outsiders for his open repentance for the Reich's crimes and excesses, and although there was some camaraderie that grew through hardship, for the most part Speer bore his punishment on his own . He developed an amusing relationship to Rudolf Hess, Hitler's one-time Deputy , who had been imprisoned since his ill-fated solo plane trip to Britain on a quest to forge a peace between the countries. Hess was clearly suffering from some forms of prison psychosis, but he also tried to "play" crazy , with frequent losses of memory and phantom gastric pains that prevented him from doing much work. He was thorny and wily, but there was a strange bond of respect that Speer and Hess had for each other that made them, particularly on Speer's part, protective and supporting of one another.

There were constant attempts by Speer's family, lawyers, and well-wishers to get him an early release. After many such dashing of hopes Speer became resigned that his lot was probably to die at Spandau. Late in his sentence he mused that the 20 year sentence, which struck him at the time as a great relief, was in some ways not as merciful as a death sentence would have been. Not for any abuse or mishandling in prison; but simply the complete eradication of the natural bonds with an aging family and world.

Still and all he got to enjoy aspects of his monastic life. He transformed a scrubby field into a wonderful garden with flowers, fruit trees and terraced walls. He walked constant rounds, imagining he was on a worldwide walking tour, using many of the books about different countries that he read as a touchstone for his imagination. He read many books about his various fascinations: architecture, art, history. He kept in touch with world events through available, albeit censored newspapers, and felt himself more and more disconnected from the world that ground on outside the prison walls.

He grappled with his own place in history; he, who started with dreams of being remembered for the buildings he made, was instead remembered as a war criminal with almost no surviving creations left standing. His biggest contribution to architecture, he noted with dark irony , was an illusion: the "cathedral of light", an effect he created at the Nuremberg party rally by shining the beams of numerous powerful searchlights into the sky creating the illusion of a gigantic hall that the party members held their rites within. I have included in this post a picture of a mock-up of the interior of the Great Hall that he had designed for Hitler's triumphal Berlin that was never to be. I noticed a weird illusion of Hitler's face within the design, see if you can see it.

At the end of the Diaries Speer is whisked off with his wife out of Spandau and to a new phase of his life. The literary contributions that he made in that last phase actually became his true legacy.

I couldn't help but feel that as horrible is that lost 20 years may have been for him, he certainly fared better in this prison where he read, gardened , walked, listened to symphonies and smoked his pipe, than he would have in, say, Huntsville prison. His experience is more what Jerry and George were probably thinking about on Seinfeld when they mused: "Prison...(wistfully)Someday..."

Close Encounters of the Third Reich

Lately I have been reading a couple of books by Albert Speer, Hitler's favorite architect and later Armaments Minister during WWII.

The first book I read was Inside the Third Reich, Speer's memoirs of his youth and his involvement in Hitler's inner circle until the end of the war and his imprisonment for war crimes in its aftermath.

I remember seeing a mini-series on TV in 1982 based on this book starring Rutger Hauer as Speer and Derek Jacobi as Hitler. It was a very well done drama, with many scenes that I have remembered for all of these years. Jacobi was a favorite of ours at the time due to his brilliant turn as the lead in Masterpiece Theater's I, Claudius. He did a pretty good job capturing Hitler's ability to weave many brilliant people into his own fevered dreams, but he has a distinctly Anglo aura about him that he was unable to disguise convincingly. Alec Guinness had a similar problem when he portrayed the Fuhrer in Hitler: The Last Ten Days. It always bothered me when Germans were portrayed with icy upper crust British accents. Of course, the best portrayal of Hitler on film thus far has to be Bruno Ganz in Downfall, who has the advantage of actually being German and performing auf Deutsch. He was very convincing as the erstwhile world conqueror, diminished to little more than a cornered rat , trapped in his bunker awaiting the End.

Both in the mini-series and the book, as fascinating as Speer himself is, the star of the show is , of course,Hitler; and as someone who once claimed to be the closest thing that the dictator ever had to a friend, Speer was uniquely positioned to give us a very up close and personal account of the man who took the world to the brink of Apocalypse.

The enigma of Hitler to us from the perspective of time and culture is the mystery of his appeal; not just to rabble rousers and beer hall brawlers, but to intellectuals, artists, scientists, professionals, grandmas, school kids and everyone else. The cliched question is still the prime mystery: How did the culture that produced Beethoven and Goethe embrace Nazism?

Speer is a good example of someone from the privileged class with a bright future who got caught up in Hitler's dream. From his memoirs one could gather that Hitler was given the keys to the kingdom because of two things he offered the German people at a very uncertain time in their history: Hope and Change.

Obviously you could make some pretty heavy duty analogies about now. It is no secret that cultures are at their most vulnerable at times of excessive ease and times of excessive strain. In times of ease the fat life becomes something expected and taken for granted. Things get soft and lackadaisical and right and wrong gets blurred. At times of strain, panic and despair lead to a search for strength and easy solutions. Hitler was a strong man, a father figure for a country that had been orphaned by its old order and left in disarray. He spoke boldly in terms so black and white and certain that all other politicians seemed like dithering bureaucrats more intent on pushing papers than pulling Germany out of the hole it was in. The mystery of his mass hypnotic appeal so often cited is I think a macrocosmic effect that can be experienced by anyone when put into a random group, co-workers on a project; jurors debating a case; even people stuck in a long bank line. An Alpha asserts himself, the group pulls into a societal order of deputies, conspirators, etc., and it is not until the group dissipates again that the whole experience can be looked back on for what it was.

Speer was an architect with a sharp mind and good connections. He was what Hitler had always wanted to be before he was a politician. He picked Speer to design the Future Reich of his dreams, with Grand Domes and Arches of Triumph, great temples to the Party and monuments to attest to the power of National Socialism. But he was what Dylan so poetically referred to as a "Dream Twister." Speer was pulled into Hitler's dream, thinking that his own dreams were being fulfilled. Speer made an interesting observation, saying that Hitler was like a malignant King Midas: instead of everything he touches turning into gold, he turns everything he touches into piles of corpses.

His portrait of Hitler was one of a man at times crude, at times inspiring, more often than not boring, and something of a dilettante regarding many subjects. He kept a distance from everyone in his role as Fuhrer, even Eva Braun , his secret consort.

It was not until the dream ended in catastrophe for Germany that Hitler's true face was seen by those around him; the losing Reich was not worthy of survival; it had to be razed and wiped off the face of the earth, having proved itself as being unworthy and unable to fulfill his desires for world domination and the eradication of Jewry. He was determined to not just commit suicide, but to take all of Germany with him, and Speer was fundamental in disregarding his leader's scorched earth policy, thus saving his country from a much greater destruction than the nightmare it faced in the dissolution of the Reich.

After Hitler's death and Germany's surrender, Speer was put on trial at Nuremberg, along with other surviving Nazi leaders. He fared better than many: 20 years in prison for his part in using slave labor in armaments factories.

The book I am currently reading is The Spandau Diaries about that 20 year imprisonment. I will report on it when I finish shortly.

Speer has many critics who accuse him of being self serving , trying to make himself more sympathetic in his memoirs, and less attached to the Final Solution aspect of Hitler's designs. They even say that his plea of guilty at the Nuremberg trials and denunciation of Hitler's policies were a mere ploy to save him from the hangman's noose, which it did. Several books have been written refuting different aspects of Speer's version of events. I am sure there is some truth to many of these accusations. All autobiographies must be read with a healthy dose of scepticism, after all, the author cannot be dispassionate about his subject. But all the same Speer is an interesting character, with an artistic and earnest eye for detail and examination. One gets the feeling that he truly grapples with trying to make sense of the maelstrom that surrounded him. His precise and probing mind is the crucible in which all the elements of what happened to him personally, and what happened to his country, and to our world are thrown, and Inside the Third Reich is an intriguing result.

The Guilted Age

Something has been gnawing at me for some time, and after reading a piece about the forthcoming James Cameron movie Avatar, I just have to say something...

It seems that the story of this film concerns a war between Earth and a distant moon that we are exploiting for our own material purposes.

So we are the bad guys...Again...

The guilt complex that we are foisting upon ourselves just for existing, and the consumptive requirements that existing necessarily bears has gotten way out of hand.

We are made to feel guilty for the food that we eat , ('we are overfishing the oceans! We are turning the planet into a desert with the deforestation that raising cattle for our hamburgers causes! The fertilizers we are using are running into the oceans and causing dead spots!) We are condemned for the use of fresh water, we are even vilified by ourselves for having to poop and the necessary need to deal with the poop once it is here. ('Bad baby! Stinky baby!' )

Our clothes are made by foreign slave labor...Everything we do pollutes...We are killing off everything on the planet by eating it, destroying its' habitat or trying to domesticate it too much. We have also polluted our upper atmosphere with tons of 'space junk'. Even methane producing farts are polluting and destroying us.

Do you remember being able to enjoy watching nature documentaries? I can't even bear to watch them anymore because rather than portraying the nature of the subject, the main theme of these shows is invariably how man is destroying what is left of these marvelous creatures.

Do you and your spouse want to have children? You greedy fools, you are adding to overpopulation and over consumption. ("You have thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled- the fear to bring babies into the world."-Bob Dylan, "Masters of War") . If you are selfish enough to exist, the only thing that you could possibly do that is worse is to die. Coffin burials are polluting, cremations add to ozone decay. If you allow yourself a 'green burial' it is a little better, your corpse can be thrown on a 'possum pile' along with the egg shells and old coffee grounds.

The bad guy in almost every movie, and certainly in every kid's movie, is a greedy capitalist pig who is trying to bulldoze over some little corner of heaven in order to set up his soulless money sucking industry. (All of these movies brought to you, hypocritically enough, by big soulless money sucking industries!) Is it any wonder that in the last elections half our country felt that moving to communistic or socialistic approaches to government was worth entertaining?

Now I am not here to soft pedal any of the challenges that we as a species face, God knows we need to be better stewards of the planet, if that is indeed our destiny. But for goodness sake, we need to preserve the planet so that we may better survive on it as consuming living organisms!

The Big Guilt Trip that we have been on since about 1965 or so has been so all encompassing as to obliterate the origins of its cause. It has almost become a mass delusion of self loathing , a priming in the human psyche to rationalize a species level suicide, rather than a warning to better ensure the survival of the species.

We are clearly a species on the decline...

When you think about the glory days of humankind, when it was called Mankind, and I am not being sexist here, our self image was quite different. The Greeks may have had a host of colorful deities that ran the show, but they were all organs of power on which Man could draw as he climbed the heights of cultural and educational enlightenment. With the warning against hubris keeping him in check, the future was not self annihilation but discovery and growth. The Greek Empire may not have lasted, but the Greek spirit and outlook influenced and shaped the world in the most profound way.

It is easy to have a very dark view of humanity in a general sense. Working in the service industry as I do, I get to see people of all different kinds acting in all different ways. When I have an encounter with a genuine asshole I get very down on "people", but then I run across a genuinely nice person who acts in an unsolicited kind way to another person and I am reminded that we are like a large organism consisting of good and bad cells that must coexist for the good of the whole. We must not allow the assholes to condemn the species to an unfair self-loathing. Rather than always focusing on our limitations, we would be better served to look at our potential, and not just in the light of our modern religion, Science, (which can be blamed for most of the malaise we are in), but in our capacity to make the world a better place with a better attitude towards things that make us better people treating each other in a better way: civilization. And no, I don't mean necessarily by feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, etc., etc., (fill in with more whiny liberal guilt trip crap). I mean, treat your kids like the potential great Humans they could be, treat the oldies with the respect that they deserve, respect the brainpower, the imagination, the common joy we all share in the things that make life worth living. I believe Art, rather than being a tool for propaganda or just keeping the bored entertained, can save the self-image of our species, and just maybe, save our species itself.

Artists, don't make us feel guilty for being alive. Make us feel alive!

Who knows, maybe Avatar will do just that.

We can only hope...

Curse of the Videotapes

Piles and piles of video tapes...Years of recordings from cable, dubs of movies, music videos, lots of miscellaneous junk of interest at one time or another. Not only do I have my own sizable stash of tape, but a huge archive of stuff that my late brother had meticulously recorded for his own purposes over the span of about 25 years is also in my care. Part of me (my better half, the wife) says throw it all away and don't look back. It has been collecting in the dusty cabinet in my garage, broiling away on these 100+ degree days of summer, making me wonder how long all this stuff can survive anyway. Then I start looking at the titles. So much cool stuff! Destroy these wonders? Never!

I borrowed my brother's dvd/vcr converter and set out on a quest...

One of my first compilations had to be a selection of some of the many great horror titles that we captured over the years. I started with a kind of sentimental choice. Terror In the Aisles is a compilation of scenes from various movies. It was released in the 80's with Donald Pleasance hosting. It was pre-Freddy, and had a interesting selection of scenes, not just from standard horror movies like Halloween , and The Thing, but some terrifying moments from suspenseful or action packed movies like NightHawks.

The next movie I dubbed was Curse of the Demon. This movie deserves a full write up, which I will work on ASAP.

I just wanted to set the table for the next few posts, where I will talk about some of these cool old movies.

I also wanted to say that if anyone has tried to post a comment on this blog lately, I apologize, I have not been snobbishly rejecting them, I have stupidly forgotten to update the email address to my new one that I got about four months ago! That should be fixed now, so let the show go on!

There's Something About JAWS

At my nine year old son's insistence we watched Jaws again the other night. It was the second time I watched this movie with him. We saw it together last summer as well. Jaws is definitely a summer movie.

I can't say how many times I have watched this movie; probably somewhere between 50 and 75 times, there is no way of knowing at this point.

I had some hesitation to watch it with my kid. We always enjoyed body surfing in the big waves of Port Aransas beaches together, and I didn't want to screw that up. I am still being vilified by my sister for having scared one of my niece's out of any desire to swim in salt water for having shown her merely the clip of the shark rising to Chief Brody's chum.

But Joey has a remarkably clear-eyed view when it comes to all things involving Nature, and has never suffered under any illusions about where humans are on the food chain. He is also a big fan of "riding the whoppers", the big waves, so it's all good.

Watching Jaws again made me think about the first time I saw it, when I was about Joey's age back in the summer of '75. My oldest brother Mike went to see it with some of his friends when it finally came around to our small town. It was already a huge sensation around the country and the airwaves were filled with Jawsmania. It is weird to think of it now, but back in those days we rarely got first-run movies on their opening week at our local theaters. Many movies never came around at all. And of course there was no video market then, so if you missed it, you missed it, at least until it came out in horribly edited versions on TV. You had to seek out the almost universally horrible movie adaptation paperbacks, called novelizations, or on some rare occasions, a Fotonovel, which was a video image cartoon version of the movie. Not to get too far off the main subject, I recall that the novelization of the Jaws/killer -giant -animal ripoff movie Grizzly, was much better than the actual movie which I finally got to watch on video years later, so not all novelizations were bad.

Anyhow, back to 1975 and my brother. He came home from watching Jaws brimming with excitement and inspiration. Sitting around in our bunk beds he regaled us with an amazing almost frame by frame narration of the tale, from the opening prowling music accompanied shark's eye view cruise through wormy beds of sea grass, to the last shot of the exhausted survivor's drifting onto an abandoned Amity beach. It was a virtuoso telling, many of the phrases he used to describe the story stick with me to this day, and I hear them in my mind whenever I watch the movie. I was deemed a little too young for the movie at that time, which in a way was a relief for me. Up to that time, the only movies I saw in the theater were Disney movies, or pioneer family movies like Against a Crooked Sky.

In the meantime there was Peter Benchley's novel to investigate. We found what looked like an old library copy of the book at a garage sale. It bore the familiar shark bearing up on a swimming girl cover, but instead of the awesome great white image of the movie poster, the shark more closely resembled a giant lemon with a mouth slit carved in it. This was the first book written specifically for adults that I ever read, and beyond the classically corny prose-"The great fish moved silently through the water-", there was plenty of potboiler sleaze involving lesbians,extramarital affairs, and the like. Considering I had been reading the Gold Key Comics adventures of Andy Panda and Little Lulu right before it, this was truly hot stuff.

Finally my turn came. Jawsmania had raged all summer long, and by popular demand, Jaws returned to the Palace theater late that summer for one more lap at the box office. This time after much begging, wheedling and cajoling I convinced my Mom to let me accompany my older brothers to the theater to see what all the hoopla was about. I remember my oldest brother Mike was wearing Ice Blue Aqua Velva when we went to see the movie, and the smell of this after shave still reminds me of the experience. Needless to say, I was overwhelmed by the experience. The shark of course was scary as hell, but what scared me the most was the grue of the shark's victims, particularly the remains of Ben Gardener, the hapless fisherman who met his end in a mysterious attack on his boat. I remember my brother Mike could send me running in fear, simply by chanting "the little head popping out of the hole!" I always wondered what happened there; had the shark attacked his boat and given Ben Gardener a heart attack? Did scavenging fish nibble out one of his eyes or did he lose it in the attack on his small vessel by the shark? I guess it doesn't really matter, but I always wondered. I was also always prone to brooding on little thoughts such as "Gee, that estuary victim whose severed leg drifted to the ocean floor put that shoe on that morning like any other not knowing it would be the last time he would do it."

Most of all I was sad for Quint. I remember viewers of the time always referred to Quint in a negative way, mostly based, I am sure, on his heavy macho attitude and initial berating of sensitive 70's guy Matt Hooper. I always saw Quint in a different way. He reminded me of my Dad, and certain old uncles, all veterans, all fishermen and/or hunters who had a personal relationship with the life and death struggle. It made them all a little crazy, (Quint was certainly a loon, his blustering blabbing at the wharf as they are setting out on the hunt was almost embarrassingly over the top), and it made them all a little scary. But there was something sad there, too, an unfinished business that they all pursued and that could only end one way. If Quint had a Death Wish, then he certainly got what he wanted. It was interesting how the book and movie differed. Hooper, who brought on his comeuppance in the book by bedding Brody's wife, was spared death in the movie , and was much more of typical "correct" hippy hero of the times. Brody, as the Everyman, survived, as he did in the book, but was given a much more heroic part to play by causing the shark's exploding death. The shark in the book had the really disappointing end by simply expiring of old age ,exhaustion , or harpoon stress at the last minute as it was about to consume Brody. I guess it was in keeping with the whole Moby Dick implacable force of nature thing, rather than a boffo popcorn movie ending, but it was still a bit of a letdown to end a novel with. This was one of cases where the movie version of a story was a vast improvement on it's original source material.

The fallout of such a huge cultural phenom continues to this day. I read (and loved) all of the myriad Mad magazine, Crazy, Cracked etc. parodies. When the sequel came out I read the Hank Searls novel and saw the movie. (Both disappointing.) From there on it got worse and worse as it usually does, and I skipped most of the other sequels until years later on a bored video rental whim.

The original film, now almost 35 years old, still packs a punch. The shark still looks pretty darn cool to me. All of the bizarre side characters in Amity are much beloved or behated icons on par with Mayberry's little world of small town folks. The Mayor's anchor suit still brings a smile to my face. (Does he wear that thing ALL of the time?) And it still brings me back to that awkward time when both book and movie formed a bridge from my childhood to my adolescence. The horror is all still there, although I now feel more of the parental terror that the Brody's and the Kintner's experienced than I did before.

I am sure it will hold up well over the next 50 to 75 viewings...