The Lubitsch Touch

If all the art and literature of the twentieth century, a century that took itself so seriously (though its record for slaughter is hard to match), were dropped into a dumpster, it wouldn’t be worth one work by Michelangelo or Botticelli.  Do you mind if I say that?
Here in our own nervous century we swim in a sea of cultural trash, illuminated by video games that excite the shooters, by pornography that has changed the shape of the human body (it's hairless now, as in fifth-century Greece and the Italian Renaissance; the dicks, even in quiescence, dwarf their predecessors; the breasts, which were out of control for a while, have again become natural), and by the preachings of the evangelists of Success, who promise us transformations (regard their tweets) beyond even the come shots that conclude the ritual sequence of postures in the videos, the actress licking her lips in anticipation.
And yet we ourselves are disembodied, and function with avatars like Mardi Gras masks on sticks.  We are discouraged from actual sex, and urged to cultivate narcissism and the internet, which are strangely aligned.  And indeed, one has learned to fear women who kick-box, or have tattoos.  

Beauty, that royal danger, that puritan's foe, is out of style. Our movie stars exhibit only a serviceable regularity of feature, often not even that, and appear in morality tales as predictable as the postures of the porn stars.
Action films have dwindled into displays of animation; even James Bond has become a cartoon.  And a film by Quentin Tarantino or Tim Burton can ruin the evening.

Love is out of style.  "Alliances" are in style.  Business plans are in style.  Brad Pitt made an entire film about the success of a business plan.  So elevating.  But that's where we are.  People fall in love with business plans.
One wonders what one does like about cinemah, and why one wants to make films, and when I’m in that mood I always think of Ernst Lubitsch.  Now, nobody can make a film like Lubitsch, let’s get that straight, but one can be inspired by him to make something as light as a soufflé, as subtle as a secret, as funny as a fart.

If only.

My favorite Lubitsch movie, Trouble in Paradise, is about a master thief who, in a Venice hotel (Grand Canal Venice, not LA Venice), robs someone in another room.  Then, resuming his pose as a baron, he hosts a dinner in his own suite for a countess he plans to seduce.  “And you see that moon, waiter?  I want to see that moon in the champagne.”  The waiter writes it down: “Moon in champagne.”  When the lady arrives, she and Gaston (his name is Gaston) pick each other’s pockets, discover that they’re both thieves, and fall in love.  And we fall in love with them falling in love.
But don’t expect a “cool” hero.  Suave, yes.  Charming, wow.  But not cool.  “Cool” is eminently a Puritan virtue.  (See Catholics and Puritans.)  Max Weber tells us that during the English Civil War the Puritans, because of their unemotional determination, were able to ride in strict formation, in cool formation, toward the undisciplined Cavaliers, Musketeer types who relied on gallantry and beer.

Henry James says of Daisy Miller’s first reaction to Winterbourne that she “had never seen anything so cool”—the first instance I know of the modern usage, and if I hear it much more I’m going to lose mine.  The attitude is one of detachment and distance, and becomes virulent in the fifties, Elvis and Marlon sneering at it all.  They are outsiders; the first line of Camus’s L'Etranger (The Outsider) is “Mother died today.  Or maybe it was yesterday.”
The opposite thing is best exemplified by the courtier John Denham, who in that same Civil War pleaded for the life of George Wither, a Puritan, “on the ground that, so long as Wither lived, he himself could not be accounted the worst poet in England.”
Gaston is not cool; he is operatic.  His every speech is animated by passion, and he is splendidly overplayed by Herbert Marshall, who lost a leg in World War I, which has to be disguised in the wide shots.  He was nevertheless an accomplished ladies’ man, and along with Peter Lorre and George Sanders, he’s my favorite actor.
 "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored...
I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."
A Paris radio news report on one of Gaston’s spectacular thefts is followed by a commercial for Colet Perfume—“Cleopatra was a famous tantalizer, But she did it with her little atomizer!”—and now we’re on Madame Colet herself, the young widow who owns the company and refuses to cut salaries in spite of the Depression (we’re in 1932).  Such a smooth transition.

At the opera Gaston steals her jeweled purse (we never see these thefts happen; action for Lubitsch is vulgar), and when she offers a reward for the purse larger than he could get by selling it, he simply returns it—and plans to steal her money.  But they fall in love.  And we fall in love with them falling in love.  So now he loves two women.  And that’s the plot.
It moves incredibly fast.  I’ve watched it and watched it and watched it to figure out how it moves so fast.  The credit sequence of The Outlaw Josey Wales moves fast; I’m scarcely a Clint Eastwood guy but I must say it’s a tight little film in itself.  Trouble in Paradise, though, is a whole movie.

Partly it's that Lubitsch delights in ellipsis, which of course is always good for the budget.  I can think of three of his films in which scenes are played out in mime beyond glass.  In Trouble in Paradise a whole evening of seduction is done with voices over an Art Deco clock marking the hours.  Peter Lawford goes into a room to punch Charles Boyer (this is in Cluny Brown), and comes out having lent him money.

What any artist worth the name wants is to avoid Saying Things.  An artist wants to show you something, make you feel something, not Say Something.  If you’re experiencing a piece of art that’s trying to Tell You Something, you’re in the wrong hands.  And yet, who can avoid it?  In Shakespeare the characters, even the speeches, have lives of their own—they Say Things—but Shakespeare himself is nowhere to be found.  We others, however, speak with our own voices, and commit the sin of Saying Things.

What did Lubitsch Say?  He said, there’s no Mr. Perfect or Ms. Right.  He said, if your wife sleeps with somebody else it’s no big deal.  He said, why make an enemy?  He said (or rather the little boy in Heaven Can Wait said), if you want to win a girl you have to have lots of beetles.  He said sex, he said alcohol, he said big cigars, all with the utmost refinement.  And he said the over-refinement of being in love, from which all sweet ironies spring. 
In 1917 he made a short based on a Strauss operetta: A Berlin bon viveur who goes out drinking and dancing every night gets a subpoena to report to jail for a day "for disgraceful behavior". But when the cops come for him his wife's lover has to pretend to be him to save her reputation, and the lover does the time.  Meanwhile she disguises herself and goes to the party, and her husband picks her up!  Then the revelation, and from now on he takes her out drinking and dancing with him.

In Heaven Can Wait a rich young man falls in love with a woman and marries her, and continues to have the other women he wants.  He has it all.  Lubitsch loves to show people having it all—ain't it awful?  And when he's old and dying a beautiful nurse goes into his room and, well, closes the door.  As he tells the Devil (for he has not bothered to report to heaven) "Who could ask for a more beautiful death?"  And here, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, death imitates art: Lubitsch himself died in the arms of a call girl.
Interesting detail: his wife (the character's, not Lubitsch's) leaves him for her parents’ house is in Kansas, and these parents don’t speak to each other; their black servant conveys messages from one end of the breakfast table to the other, and with perfect humor and dignity.  You don’t get much of that in 1942, but that’s Lubitsch.
Clarence Muse
While we’re on the permissiveness that gives such taste to his sauce, he has a Wildean indulgence for embezzlers, and much in common with Wilde, whose people are always finding out that they're not "good"—loveable, but not good.  But this is where Lubitsch begins, not where he ends.  (In fact he made a silent version of Lady Windermere's Fan.)  They both loved everything about being a gentleman, except being a gentleman.

Something in him loves larceny.  In Ninotchka some Russian rubes come to Paris to sell jewels that had once belonged to the Grand-Duchess-in-exile, who's already in Paris, and who keeps a man (Melvyn Douglas), who calls on the boys: “Well, gentlemen, what about my proposition?”  “What proposition?”  “I just said, let's have some lunch!”  Cut to hookers and champagne, and the deal is developing.  In A Royal Scandal Catherine the Great (Tallulah Bankhead) confronts her embarrassed chancellor over his  embezzling: a little I can understand, she says, “but take it easy!”
We might have wished to say the same to our own chancellors, from Wall Street to Athens.

“Everybody and his Aunt Nellie,” as Audrey says in Charade, has a theory of “the Lubitsch touch,” and I have mine.  When Maurice Chevalier died, Lawrence Durrell described his appeal as “tender insolence,” and this says it.  Chevalier came to his Hollywood prominence in Lubitsch’s movies, and embodied the Lubitsch spirit, as did the screenwriter Samson Raphaelson.  I like to think that both of them took fire from Lubitsch.  Perhaps I’m oversimplifying.

Lubitsch's insolence pairs a superior tenderness with a daring attitude to pleasure.  In his own piece on Lubitsch, Peter Bogdanovich connects innocence to sophistication, and I like that; the true sophisticate is a naïf.

And oh, how Lubitsch was imitated!  He founded a whole genre, the screwball comedy.  Everybody tried to be Lubitsch.  His protégé Billy Wilder kept a sign up in his office: HOW WOULD LUBITSCH DO IT?

Pointless.  Wilder himself was too intellectual.  Everything in Jean-Luc Godard—the semiotics, the study of the image qua image, the postmodern mind split off from its referents—it's all there in Wilder.  And that’s the trouble.  Some Like It Hot is a gorgeous film, worth seeing just for Tony Curtis’s Cary Grant imitation.  But in much of Wilder's work the intellectual baggage is heavy.  Intellect is not refinement; intellect can be acquired.  (None of us know what we look like; these things are hidden from us; we can only appreciate them in others.)  And except for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which is all intellect, after Irma la Douce Wilder's films became crass.

Trouble in Paradise is a poem.  The effort is always to make poems.

I was about to say that To Be or Not to Be, about actors playing Nazis to escape Nazis, is my second-favorite Lubitsch, but then I thought of his The Merry Widow, another operetta (this one with sound), that's like drinking champagne—light, bubbly, intoxicating.  I hate decisions.   

In The Merry Widow Chevalier plays a womanizer-as-national-hero, and in his courtroom speech he pleads guilty: "Any man who can dance through life with hundreds of women, and is willing to walk through life with one—should be hanged!"  The peasants leap up and applaud.  On the other hand, To Be or Not to Be is a winter film; it gives me a cozy feeling that I also get in Some Like It Hot—a strange kind of warmth, I don’t know what it is, that can only happen in black-and white movies.
And it has Carole Lombard, my favorite actress along with Irene Dunne and Margaret Rutherford.  Beautiful as she was, Lombard never took herself seriously.  She said of her great love Clark Gable, “If his pee-pee was one inch shorter they’d be calling him the Queen of Hollywood.”
Sample dialogue with Jack Benny: “It’s becoming ridiculous the way you grab attention—whenever I start to tell a story you finish it, if I go on a diet you lose the weight, if I have a cold you cough, and if we should ever have a baby I’m not so sure I’d be the mother.”  “I’d be satisfied to be the father.”

A distaste for schmaltz is one of Lubitsch’s two great freedoms.  In-love-ness, OK, but you won’t find any of the sentimentalities that inform lesser filmmakers—childhood (invented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau), Christmas (invented by Charles Dickens) or America (invented by Frank Capra).
And he has a Shakespearian freedom from dogma that was singular in the last century: no Freud, no Marx.  Knowledge of psychoanalysis didn’t become general until the 50s, so he was able to spoof it in That Uncertain Feeling without being very deep about it. 

But Marx was the flavor of the 30s—all the kids were communists, real members of the Party, it was the thing, and of course in the 50s McCarthy ambushed them.  Stalin was a hero, Roosevelt was inaugurating revolutionary social programs, and even the future Nixonite John Ford made The Grapes of Wrath.  Not Lubitsch.  When Gaston confronts an outraged Trotskyite he ticks him off in Russian.  (Ah, how the super-hero has changed: for Lubitsch he was someone who followed opera, knew eighteenth-century furniture and spoke several languages.)

When the rubes in Ninotchka fail to make the deal, Ninotchka herself, an unsmiling puritan from the collective, comes to Paris and encounters Melvyn.  Love, baby.  “GARBO LAUGHS!” said the posters.  But the Countess blackmails her back to Moscow and to the Commissar, played, in an inspired piece of casting, by Bela Lugosi.
 Dracula in Lenin drag
To be a communist was to commit the sin of seriousness—bad manners.  But though Lubitsch presented himself as frivolous and easy-going—"the playboy," Graham Geene called him—he had the strength to resist, nay to mock, that whole zeitgeist.  Frank Capra was still selling a socialist vision in the Why We Fight series, and the Germans were attacking our Soviet allies, but even in wartime Lubitsch didn’t join the parade.

Peter Lawford (a young fool), at the outbreak of war: "I'm going to write another letter to The Times."  Boyer (indulging him): "Good!"  "No—no, I'll join the RAF!"  "Better!  Join the RAF!  Rise above The Times!"

Now look, Freud and Marx were brilliant men who gave their lives to trying to help people.  But enough!

And I love high spirits.  My own comic novels are inspired by P.G. Wodehouse.  I’ve wandered elsewhere, but I’d rather do comedy than anything else.  And in film, Lubitsch is the master.

You may, if you wish, leave comments here.
And in the spirit of Lubitsch,
Chocolate and Champagne

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.





Posted by 12 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Germans

“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”—Otto von Bismarck

The Germans.  Always a problem.

Under the Celts, Europe was one country.  Under the Romans, under the Church, under Napoleon, under Hitler, Europe was one country.  And now, under Merkel, Europe is, for the moment, one country.

When the Celts had it, it stretched from Ireland to what is now Turkey, and it’s still basically Celtic.  The Germans—Angles, Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Goths, etc.—later settled on the Celts as ruling classes, and gene-testing is revealing that the “English,” for example, are mostly Celts, as the "French" have always believed themselves.   This is in addition to the pockets of more or less “pure” Celts that survive in the British Isles, Brittany, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland and Venice, which is not an exhaustive list.

The Romans brought North Africa and the Middle East into the mix, as later did Napoleon and Hitler.  But the Romans excluded Ireland, the Picts—and Germany.  Stay on your side of the Rhine, they told the Germans, and when they raided into Gaul the Romans retaliated by raiding into Germania (with a hard “G”), which was as far as the Romans cared, or dared, to go.
Attila
The Germans were never Romanized.  That’s why they’re like that.  And when they (or rather we—see My Racial Profile) got the upper hand, it all fell apart.

Charlemagne almost put it back together, and he did push into Germania.  But to be legitimate he had to be crowned in Rome by Pope Leo, who used him like a rook on a chess board, and influenced politics from Britain to Constantinople.  That's where the power lay, and where it stayed: seven centuries later Vasari tells us that Michelangelo “spoke to the Pope as the King of France would not have dared to speak to the Pope.”
Germania became a collection of principalities, and it is remarkable, to me at least, that this brilliant people produced no literary masterpiece for so much of the modern period.  Martin Luther was a model of German prose (“Sin bravely,” he said; I have that on a T-shirt), but he died in 1546, and until Goethe nothing literary happened, at least nothing exportable.  There had been Winckelmann, but Goethe had to tell me about Winckelmann; I’d never have known. 

Meanwhile, of course, they were writing the world’s music, if I may take the liberty of including Austria in Germania, as Charlemagne did.  Austria had been Romanized; maybe that explains something.

They are a wonderfully clean people, Germans.  In Duck You Sucker, Sergio Leone introduces a German military advisor in Mexico by showing him in his seat on a train brushing his teeth.  Exactly.  In bed with a German you can, and do, go anywhere; in bed with a French or a British person you must proceed with caution.
They do not, however, queue up.  If you’re in line for the ski lift and one or more Germans come down the slope they’ll butt right in at the front and have to shouted at and waved away.  When, in Casablanca, Carl tells Rick that he gave the Germans the best table, “knowing they would take it anyway,” he’s not making rah-rah war talk, he's referring to this tendency of theirs to arrogate.
Here’s a better example: when the Nazis were advancing on Paris Clare Boothe Luce was staying at the Ritz, and as they approached, the hotel emptied out.  But she, intrepid reporter (she invented Life magazine), stayed on till she was the last one, and the concierge came up and told her to leave: “The Germans are coming!” he said.  She got out her notepad: “How do you know?”  “They have reservations!”
Ah, but now it gets heavy.  Now we must touch The Subject.  When I was a film professor a German colleague said, “Do you think the world will ever forgive the Germans?”

I didn’t have to ask for what.  I treated this as thinking out loud, and ignored it.  When he persisted I said, “No,” as curtly as I could. 

“Why not?”  

“For four reasons,” I said, trying to scare him off.

Didn’t work.  He wanted to suffer.  “What's the first?”

“Morality,” I said.  “So vague.  What we did to the Indians, what we did to Dresden, what we did to the Italian villages we bombed—Churchill said if we lose this war they’ll try us for war crimes.  But there was a case for it.  You could argue for it.  You could discuss it.  The truth about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that we were experimenting to see what the effects would be on human flesh.  Harry Truman said we did it to shorten the war and save lives, but we could have done that by blowing up Mount Fujiyama or giving them a show in Tokyo Bay.  Still, there was a case for it.  You could argue for it.  But with the camps you gave us clarity, a relief from the ambiguity we waffle around in, something black and white.  We're not likely to let that go.”

I trusted that would suffice.  But no.  “What’s the second reason?” he said.

“It was a terrible thing you did,” I shrugged.  “Why should we forgive you?”  (“You,” notice.  I knew he was standing in for his people.)

He nodded.  “The third?”

“You’ll never forgive yourselves.  Why should we forgive you?”

On the surface he was digesting all this.  “And the fourth?”

“Well, when you say the world, you don’t mean Asia or Africa.  They’re not interested—they’ve got their own histories.  You mean us—the Germanic peoples, including the blond Visigothic aristocracies lording it over the Indians in “Latin” America.  We’re Germans.  You embarrassed the family.  And in family life there’s no forgiving or forgetting.”

Now he was depressed.  I felt bad.  “On the other hand,” I said, “one of the great achievements of humankind was landing on the moon, and that was accomplished by a former SS man.”
Another German friend (I know a lot of Germans; they’re going to love this piece) is a painter, an Expressionist.  (Most German artists are Expressionists; it has something to do with horror.)  He was middle-aged before he went to his father and said, “How could you do that?”  I don’t know what the answer was.  Maybe there was none.  Maybe it was unrepeatable.  What could it be?  But the sense of a curse lingers, on the people and on the land.

And Angela Merkel works under that curse.  When France and Germany conceived the Euro-dream in 1951 it was to make sure Germany wouldn’t attack France again.  Simple as that.  The aim of the Union is to put an end to war in Europe, which a glance at history will show is continual here.  Simple as that.  But once again, Germany dominates. 

The trouble is, Europeans can’t do anything.  It's endemic.  British incompetence is as monumental as it is dignified, from the top down.  A Canadian woman who transferred to the London branch of her company confessed to me, “You just want to push them!”

A Frenchwoman, lounging topless by the Greek sea, said to me, “You Americans [for her I was willing to be an American], you act [inviting me, as it were, to action]; we French are dreamers.”  Quite right.  Don’t ever try to get anything done in France. 

When Portugal and Spain and France and England were young barbaric countries they conquered empires.  Those war lords Ferdinand and Isabella were burning down university towns in the suave Muslim civilization of the time, even as they were sending Columbus off to augment their holdings.  But that was then.  These days it takes a Napoleon or a Hitler to actually do something, and of course the results aren’t always ideal. 

A friend of mine—actually he’s not a friend of mine, I’m not even speaking to the son-of-a-bitch—anyway, he’s a yacht skipper.  You rent your yacht for a vacation and he brings the crew and sails it where you want to go, and when you’re out there and something goes wrong, he fixes it with tape and a coat hanger and gets on with it.  But the German clients are standing there with the manual in their hands.  “Yah, but zis iss not za right vay!  Ziss is not—”  They’re by-the-book people, Germans, and they’re trying to force their considerable will on the anarchic non-work-ethic Greeks.  The Greeks have never heard of the book.  (See Greece versus the Puritans.)

One of the problems with Merkel—one, I say, of the problems with Merkel— is that she grew up in East Germany, resisting Soviet thoughts, yes yes, I know, but the eastward look was her horizon.  The Euro-dream is a West-German dream, not a Merkel dream.  She has not explained to her voters that if they break the Mediterranean countries there’ll be no market for what they make, and the Greeks, as a matter of patriotism, are already refusing to buy anything made in Germany.  Nor has she mentioned that if they don’t pump their precious money into those countries their own euros won’t be worth much anymore.
M'ma!
The Greeks suspect the Germans, who, it must be conceded, rarely do anything without a plan, of forcing them to privatize their companies and sell them cheap so Germans can buy them; and to cut salaries so the new owners will have a low-rate labor force.

And the Greeks, rather than ruin themselves at German command, are playing for time—one of the things they do best.  “Wait,” they love to say.  “I don’t want to wait,” shouts the Nordic, and the German in me sympathizes.   “Wait,” they say. 

Now they will lean their chins in their hands and watch the German economy crumble.  Then we’ll see where we are.




Posted by 24 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Some Notes on God

 

1. Is God vulnerable?

 

Apparently.  To feel is to be vulnerable, is it not?  To suffer?

The noise of humanity irritated the Mesopotamian gods so miserably that they wiped it out with a flood, the one on which the Genesis version is based.  Then they ran to their father Anu to shelter them from it.  Fraidy-cats.  Then they suffered remorse for having caused it.  They felt it all.

Isis was vulnerable to love and loss, and her brother-husband Osiris to deception, to assassination and—if you consider it a vulnerability—to rebirth.

The Greek gods, who Homer said "dwell in bliss," nevertheless suffered jealousy, envy, anger, fear, indignation, ugliness, deformity, lameness, castration, and ultimately death.  So much for bliss. 

And they suffered pleasure, if you consider that a vulnerability.

The Nordic gods were subject to the same things, and of course to twilight.

The Judaeo-Christian-Muslim God was notoriously jealous, and with some reason: scholars are telling us all those names of his were actually of other gods, lots of them.  He suffered anger, rage, vengefulness and, we can only conclude, a sense of obligation to put on our own vulnerability, sweat blood in terror, and submit to torture from which death could only be a relief.  It’s a beautiful story, “The notion,” as T.S. Eliot says, “of some infinitely gentle, Infinitely suffering thing.”

If only it weren’t so mixed up with hellfire and sexual prohibition.  “As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on,” says William Blake, “so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.”  Hence the hypocrisy of the diaper: the Romans didn’t nail anybody up in his underwear.  Even Salvador Dalí paints it on.  Only Michelangelo gives us a nude Christ.

It is debated whether Jesus spoke and read Greek, which had been the lingua franca of the Eastern Empire since Alexander; moreover, the flight into Egypt must have brought the Holy Family to the Jewish community in Alexandria, the world’s intellectual capital, and the logical place for Jesus to pick up enough to wow the Temple priests with at the age of twelve—not that logic has to be involved.  Certainly he talks more like Socrates than like Moses.

And like Socrates, he may just be a character in a book.  The four most important people in Western culture—Homer (for Alexander wanted to be Achilles, and Caesar wanted to be Alexander), Socrates, Jesus and Shakespeare—may never have existed.

"Homer"
May be as misnomer
For several otherwise out-of-work guys
Half his size.

Dalí once remarked that he adored weakness, which he found consonant with modern physics, and that he painted anti-matter angels.  Perhaps we could imagine an anti-matter God, who submits himself to his cosmos like any artist to his work, and then what happens happens.  The price for freedom, after all, is vulnerability.

But let’s not get carried away.  Ignorance—and here’s an adage I can sign—is bliss.  Who knows what's behind the curtain?  On Isis’s statue the inscription said, "I am all that was, is and will be, and no mortal has yet lifted my veil."

  

2) Is God evil?

 

There’s a case for it.  The shadow side of our culture is Gnosticism, the belief that we ourselves are sparks of the original God, held prisoner here by a second-rate god, a Demiurge, psychotic and inferior, who split off from Godhead and trapped us.  Vulnerability again: apparently it’s eternal.

When you get the gnosis, the knowledge, from a redeemer or just by waking up, you can never lose the sense that you are God, and the sky-god isn’t.

It’s been with us since the first century, the idea that the Demiurge put us in a garden and told us we could do anything we wanted except eat the fruit of a certain tree.  Well, what else could we do?  Then he came looking for us—very creepy: “Who told you you were naked?”  In this version the serpent is the redeemer, the ancient symbol of wisdom.

Then "God" wiped us out with a flood, after which he promised he wouldn’t do that any more; next time he’d do it by fire.  Thanks a lot.  (Which Planet of the Apes movie is it where the people worship an atom bomb as a manifestation of God?  It's what James Baldwin called The Fire Next Time.)

But there are lots of versions.  The texts were suppressed, and until recently the only source we had on them was the Church Fathers, who summarized them to condemn them.  The thing went underground and spread to Islam, where the Sufis adopted it, and were horribly beaten down.  The great Persian poet Rumi was a Gnostic.

In the middle ages Gnosticism emerged in Kabbalah.  And from Islam it came, through both the Muslim-occupied Balkans and Muslim-occupied Spain, to northern Italy and the south of France, where it appeared as Catharism ("Purism"): the Cathars were vegetarians, egalitarians, feminists—the whole trip—and embodied a heresy so threatening that the Pope sent a crusade against them.

The leader of the crusade, Simon de Montfort (I’m quoting the Wikipedia) "ordered his troops to gouge out the eyes of 100 prisoners, cut off their noses and lips, then send them back to the towers led by a prisoner with one remaining eye."  It didn’t work, so they slaughtered them and burned down their cities.  The Cistercian abbot who led the attack on Béziers was asked how to distinguish Cathars from Christians.  "Kill them all," he said.  "God will know his own."

Courtly love comes down to us from poems written at that time, and in that place, and imitated ever since.  We’re still in the habit of letting ladies go first, though we no longer hold their chairs while they sit or take our hats off in their presence, possibly because we’re not wearing hats.

And though the exaltation of women was a civilizing force in those barbaric times, it’s no exaggeration to say that the women’s revolution has been against courtly love.

The schism between the Orthodox east and the Catholic west happened before these events, so courtly love never took hold in Greece.  Here in anarchic Athens, where people park their cars on the sidewalk and there’s often room for only one person to pass at a time, women smile at me when I step back for them (I can’t help it): it tells them I'm from the West, and Greeks love foreigners.

But here’s the thing: many people believe that courtly-love literature was not about lovers and their high unattainable ladies, but about the poet yearning for his high unattainable self, his godhead.  Saying it in code is better than having your eyes gouged out.

Notice that the lover never "attains" his beloved—that’s one of the rules.  In the north of France, where it took the form of romance, Tristan and Isolde don’t have sex; they sleep with a sword between them: their job is to yearn.  And it’s that way down to Wagner, down to pop songs.

Dante seems to have sensed the spiritual meaning.  His sonnets to Beatrice are the strongest courtly-love poems I know; and it’s she who, in the Commedia, leads him up to the light.
God as gay

In Paradise Lost Milton, who knew the ancient languages—and the Fathers by heart—puts the Gnostic arguments in Satan’s mouth.  Milton, as Blake says, "was a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it."  It’s Milton’s Satan who inspires English Romanticism.  In Byron’s Cain, Cain is a hero who defies the illegitimate God and commits murder, fuck you.  "I have a great mind to believe in Christianity," said Byron, "for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned."  Shelley despises the world he finds himself in, and even gentle Wordsworth adapts Satan’s speeches to his own sense of self.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
          The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
              Hath had elsewhere its setting,
                And cometh from afar:
              Not in entire forgetfulness,
              And not in utter nakedness,
          But trailing clouds of glory do we come
              From God, who is our home.

Well, that’s the sweet way of saying it.  You get your sweet Gnostics, like Emerson, and you get your bitter Gnostics, like Samuel Beckett, who thinks even after we die the torture continues.  Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is not just the black guy in white society; he's the unseen self.

Blake wondered what kind of God could make the tiger: "Did he who made the lamb make thee?"  (I have lambs and tigers in my own heart, it doesn’t seem that remarkable.)  Queegueg says the same thing in Moby-Dick which, along with Peter Pan and Under the Volcano, is the great Gnostic novel: when a shark he thought dead snaps at him he says, "Queequeg no care what god made him shark, wedder Feejee God or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin."  And we get it again with the enormous fat crocodile in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line: who made that thing?

Ingmar Bergman gave us a vision of God as a rapacious spider, and Stanley Kubrick had the Gnostic paranoia (see Some Thoughts on Stanley Kubrick).  David Lynch combines that with Presbyterianism, an easy fit: Romanticism is not only Gnosticism, it's post-Christian Presbyterianism; that is to say it's dualistic—it rejects the world.  (For more on dualism, see Catholics and Puritans.)
"That is God...a shout in the street."

Classicists like Joyce and Dalí don't care for that.  In 1943 Dalí wrote, "Hitler wants war, not in order to win, as most people think, but to lose.  He is romantic, and an integral masochist, and exactly as in Wagner’s operas it has to end for him, the hero, as tragically as possible.  The end to which Hitler aspires is to feel his enemy’s boot crushing his face, which for that matter is unmistakably marked by disaster."
I wonder what he'd say about Merkel.

Nevertheless our own time is heavy with Gnostics.  In Peter Weir’s Fearless Jeff Bridges looks up at the sky and says, "You want to kill me, but you can’t."  In Weir's Dead Poets Society those boys who stand up on their desks at the end are assuming their full stature by defying the Demiurge—who is really rather a nice guy, isn’t he?  And in his The Truman Show the Demiurge is a reality-TV producer who keeps Truman in a false world. 

For the young, of course, there’s The Matrix: God as computer.

The discovery of the Gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi in 1945 had something to do with this mood: for the first time we had the real texts, and a different kind of Jesus, a stay-light-on-your-feet Jesus.  The Copts are the ancient guardians of this tradition.

But it's always with us, texts or no.  In its debased form it’s the content of all those Twitter messages, LinkedIn messages, inspiration messages, you-can-do-it messages.  Here’s a profile I just saw: "Beyond Your Fear Is A Whole New You!  We all have fear about something in our lives. Whether it is rejection, loss, failure or a number of any other emotions that are like anchors dragging behind us and holding us back from doing what...."  There are more redeemers out there than people who give a rat’s ass.

But that’s the way we see things these days.  Emersonianism is America.  "Yes we can!"  Harold Bloom says most Americans are Gnostics without knowing it. 

But what a paranoid vision!  And it’s a dogma!  I hate dogma.  There’s a difference, after all, between belief and faith. (See also Thinking about God, by Doctor Robert MacLean, PhD,)

Nor can I square it with my enjoyment of the world; Gnosticism is scarcely what you’d call earthy.  Mine is a precarious position, yes, but as my alter ego says in The Cad, "if you're not making a fool of yourself, you're not alive."  We speak from experience there, Toby and I.

And who says it has to be squared?  "Commonsense is square," said Vladimir Nabokov, "whereas all the most essential visions and values of life are beautifully round."

Socrates, whether he existed or not, said "The best theory of the gods is no theory at all."   

Enigma, then, is God's real name.  And the world's.  And yours.

 

3) Are you God?


Probably.  But don’t think about that now, you’ve got the rent to pay.


Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox, and YouTube, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.


“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”―F. Scott
Posted by 12 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)