Transformation?

Is Donald Trump a throwback to a time when leaders were dictators, war was noble and women were property?  I think that is the wrong question.

What is happening in our country is not limited to Trump's candidacy. It is bigger. Think global. "The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture" — the last book by the sociologist Philip Slater — gave me the means to analyze and to realize what is at stake.

High praise? Try this…

“The Chrysalis Effect' is the most brilliant tour de force of this decade. It is, and will continue to be, the most powerful and original analysis of this century's planetary vertigo. Without exaggeration, Slater's path-breaking illumination of our global 'state of mind' can be compared only with the work of a Gibbon, or Toynbee or Plutarch. It's that profound and should be the most widely read book for years to come.”   ~Warren Bennis  

Dante's Lesson.

A year ago I stumbled onto Dan Brown’s Inferno.  To compare some of the quotes I opened a copy of Dante’s Inferno, not the video game, but the first book of the Commedia trilogy, and began to read the first lines:

“Midway along the journey of our life

I woke to find myself in some dark wood,

for I had wandered off from the straight path...”

Yes, I thought, I know what that’s like. 

I kept reading and did not stop until weeks later, after I had drudged with Dante through Hell, climbed with him up the mountain of Purgatory, and blasted through the heavens to see Paradise.

“How hard it is to tell what it was like,

this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn

(the thought of it brings back all my old fears),

a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer.

But if I would show the good that came of it

I must talk about things other than the good.”

Suddenly, it all made sense.

Munich

Democracy don’t rule the world

You’d better get that in your head

This world is ruled by violence

But I guess that’s better left unsaid

~Union Sundown / Bob Dylan

Steven Spielberg is sometimes condescendingly described as a "family filmmaker," as if family were not one of the more profound aspects of our experience. His instinct for the family dynamic has offered intimacy to many a big-budget premise-the struggling single mother in ET., the couple teetering on divorce in Close Encounters, Indiana Jones's Oedipal struggles. In the 1990s there seemed to come a tipping point: family was no longer a metaphor for the action, it was the action. This became explicit as Spielberg grew ambitious for larger clans-the African slaves of Amistad, the six million Jews memorialized in Schindler's List, the lost generation of American men in Saving Private Ryan. Depending on whom you talk to, this was either an extension of his emotional reach or a grandiose exercise in cinematic grandstanding.

I should lay my cards on the table: I think Spielberg is one of the great popular artists of our time, and I base this upon the stupidity/pleasure axis I apply to popular artists: how much pleasure they give versus how stupid one has to become to receive said pleasure. The answer with Spielberg is usually: "not that stupid." His films bring pleasure where they most engage. Of course, when reviewing Munich, the cards the critic lays down are expected to be of another kind. As it happens, the film itself is neither "pro-Israeli" nor "pro-Palestinian," but this is precisely why, in the opinion of many American reviewers, it is inherently aggressive toward Israel, under the logic that anything that isn't pro is, by definition, anti. There is no way out of that intellectual cul-de-sac, which is why the script does its best to avoid that road.

Munich is a film about a truly horrific terrorist attack and the response to that terrorist attack. It is not about moral equivalence. It is about what people will do for their families, for their clans, in order to protect and define them. It is about how far we will go in the service of the people we come from and the narratives we tell ourselves to justify what we have done. Those who have sympathies with either side will go away retaining their sympathies: that is the nature of the argument. And it is exactly this, the nature of the argument-what it does to those who are involved in it-and not the argument itself that Munich is interested in. Crucially, it is billed as "historical fiction," which will permit those who cling to their separate, mutually exclusive and antagonistic set of facts to call the film a "fantasy." This film has made groups on both sides uncomfortable because the truths it tells are of a kind that transcend facticity. Whichever family you belong to, national or personal, these truths are recognizable and difficult to dismiss.

Munich is an imagined reconstruction of a program of assassination that Mossad implemented against the organizers and surviving participants of the 1972 Munich massacre. If you are too young to remember that massacre, rent the documentary One Day in September, because Munich wastes no time setting up context. Unusually for Spielberg, he treats us as historical grown-ups (though not, as we shall see, geographical ones). At the heart of the movie is Avner, a young Israeli who loves his families, both small-his pregnant wife, Daphna and large: Israel itself. He is an inexperienced but dedicated soldier chosen by Mossad agent Ephraim to head up a ragtag team of four operatives: a brash, South African-horn getaway driver called Steve a Belgian toy maker turned explosives expert a German-Jewish document forger and a "cleanup" guy.  Together they roam through a series of 1970s European cities meticulously re-created, although too laboriously symbolized (in Spielberg's Paris, wherever you are, you can always see the Eiffel Tower), doing unto their enemies as their enemies have done unto them.

In the process we begin to understand the biblical imperative "an eye for an eye" as something more deadly than simple revenge: it is of the body. It permits us the indulgence of thinking with our blood. And Spielberg understands the blood thinkers in his audience: for every assassination of an Arab, we return-lest we forget to a grim flashback of that day in September, when eleven innocent Israeli athletes met their deaths in brutal and disgusting fashion. Flashbacks repeatedly punctuate the film's (slightly overlong) running time. We are not allowed to forget. But neither can we ignore what is happening to Avner as he progresses through his mission. Eric Bana gives a convincing portrayal of a man traveling far from who he is in order to defend who he is. His great asset is a subtle face that is not histrionic when conveying competing emotions. The scene where Avner is offered a double mazel tov-once for the arrival of his new baby, and once for the death of a target-is a startling example of this. Through Avner, Spielberg makes a reluctant audience recognize a natural and dangerous imperative in the blood, a fury we all share. "I did it for my family" is the most repeated line in this film. Its echo is silent, yet you can't help hearing it: what would you do for yours? The perverse nullity of the cycle of violence is made clear. Death is handed out to those who handed out death and from whose ashes new death dealers will rise. Children repeatedly wander into the line of fire. Normal human relations are warped or discarded. When Black September launches a letter-bomb campaign in response to Avner's assassinations, there is a twisted satisfaction. "Now we're in dialogue," says one Mossad agent. Forty years later we are familiar with this kind of dialogue and where it leads.

The technical achievements of the film are many. Most notable is the photography, which gives a subtle color palette to each city while lighting the whole like The Third Man, with bleached-out windows and skies that the actors shy away from, preferring the darker corners of the frame. The play of shadow and light looks like a church, a synagogue, a mosque. In the shadows, the cast debates the ethics of their situation and offer as many answers as there are speakers. If the audience recoils from South African Steve's assessment, "The only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood!" it understands Avner when he says, ''I'm not comfortable with confusion." It is easier to think with the blood. It is easier to be certain.

But how many of us know what to do with these two competing, equally true facts we hear exchanged between Ephraim and Avner: "Israelis will die if these men live.  You know this is true!” says Ephraim.  Avner replies, “There is no peace at the end of this.  You know this is true!”

RELIGION FOR ATHEISTS

Diderot, a doyen of the French Enlightenment, still believed that religion was essential for social unity.

Matthew Arnold feared the spread of godlessness among the Victorian working class. It could be countered, he thought, with a poeticised form of a Christianity in which he himself had long ceased to believe. The 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte, an out-and-out materialist, designed an ideal society complete with secular versions of God, priests, sacraments, prayer and feast days.

There is something deeply disingenuous about this whole tradition. "I don't believe myself, but it is politically prudent that you should" is the slogan of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. If the Almighty goes out of the window, how are social order and moral self-discipline to be maintained? It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that if God was dead, then so was Man – or at least the conception of humanity favoured by the guardians of social order. The problem was not so much that God had inconveniently expired; it was that men and women were cravenly pretending that he was still alive, and thus refusing to revolutionise their idea of themselves.

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion "sporadically useful, interesting and consoling", which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one's life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.

De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain.

Master Forger

In William Wyler’s film Roman Holiday, of 1953, the reporter Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck) tells Princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn) his address is Via Margutta 51. It is a real address, but how the location came to be used, no one seems to remember. Via Margutta 51 was next door to the last studio of one of the ablest art forger of all time, Alceo Dossena. In an early scene in the film, Peck uses the phone of a busy sculpture studio that is just below his flat. This could have been Dossena’s last workroom, and appropriately, Wyler filled it with hardworking sculptors.

Alceo Dossena died in 1937, leaving a vast legacy of statuary and reliefs that fooled many of the world’s art experts and museum buyers. At one time or another, his output was shown in major museums in Boston, New York, St. Louis, and Cleveland, to name but a few. Most of those works were documented in a slim volume, Alceo Dossena, Scultore, which was published in Rome in 1955, complete with photographs. At the time of his death, the total amount for “Dossenas” by Americans was estimated at between $1 million and $3 million-a figure that in today’s dollars would be very impressive.

Dossena was not the usual art forger. He made little money from his efforts, and none of his works were copies. He was in love with the past. “I am not a forger,” he once insisted, “(or) a swindler. I never copied works. I simply reconstructed them.” So convincing were his reconstructions, however, that dealers often could not resist selling them as the real thing. Dossena did his part in the deceptions. He excelled in giving an aged appearance to his works, never satisfied until each piece was just right. Sometimes, he used authentic materials. In creating Renaissance-style works in wood, for instance, Dossena reworked ancient polychrome painstakingly removed from old statues and picture frames. Up to the time of his death, he experimented with various methods of patination on stone, and, as one observer has exclaimed, “For some, Dossena may not have been a master artist, but there’s no doubt he was a master chemist.”

Dossena’s eye for detail was sometime his undoing. As inspiration for a “Renaissance tomb by the sculpture Mino da Fiesole,” he used among other things a print of Rossellino’s tomb of Beata Villana, in Florence, showing her sandal straps but not the soles. The feet of Dossena’s Maria Caterine Savelli are carved in just this way, with straps that attach to nothing.

The dealers added a blunder of their own, an inscription that read like an entry from a schoolboy Latin text: “At last the above-mentioned Maria Caterina Savelli died.” And the date of her death? 1430. Mino, the supposed artist for the tomb, was not born until 1429!

Why did Dossena make the fakes? There is no easy answer. Perhaps Dossena’s reward lay in hearing that experts attributed his works to Donatello, Vecchietta, or Mino da Fiesole. They were the fools, Dossena thought; he had never suggested such attributions.

Clive, here is MY favorite sight on Via Margutta.