The Books of My Life: Demons/Devils/The Possessed (Dostoyevsky)

 

One of the things I wanted to do in my retirement is read or reread the great “big book” classics of Russian literature. Though the best laid plans of Ron don’t always come out as he intended, I have been able to largely do what I intended to do over the last several years. 

Since I have more in the way of cultural capital now then I had when I initially read some of Russian literature it has been an interesting experience reading or rereading the hefty Russian classics in my elderly years. The "big books" of Russian literature I have recently been able to get through or to get through again include Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblamov, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Aleksander Fadeyev’s The Young Guard, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Karamazov Brothers, The Idiot, and The Adolescent. I enjoyed them all immensely. They are, I discovered and re-discovered, classics for good reasons.

Recently I finished the last of the Dostoyevsky “big books” I have long wanted to read, Demons/Devils/The Possessed. I read two translations of this superb book simultaneously, the Penguin edition translated by Robert Maguire and the Alma edition translated by Roger Cockrell. Both were excellent though I think I preferred the Cockrell translation if by a very small margin. 

There were things I preferred in each of these translations, I preferred the notes in the Maguire edition. I found the notes in the Maguire, which were much more extensive and explanatory than in the Cockrell, superior to those in the Cockrell translation by a large margin. I preferred the Cockrell for its placement of the “At Tikhon's" chapter where Dostoevsky wanted it before his editor told him it would not make it past the censor. Maguire puts it in an appendix. 

There were also things I did not like in each translation. I did not like the use of country bumpkinish in the Maguire translation. It seems too mannered and fake to me. I did not like the use of Western measurements like miles in the Cockrell translation. I prefer that the Russian originals. I suppose that is the cultural anthropologist in me.

Finally, one thing I did not like about both translations was the fact that both placed their translations of the French, which in some chapters is extensive, in the endnotes. They should have been, in my opinion, at the bottom of the page a la the Oxford World Classics Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Footnotes make it much easier to read for those of us who have little French (like me) or no competency in French at all.

The American Health Care Kiada: Rolling the Boulder Up that Hill for Infinity, Continued...

 

The United States health care system is the worst I have ever encountered and I lived for awhile in Russia. I was reminded of this empirical fact again recently when I wanted to transfer my rheumatological care from the Centre for Rheumatology in Albany to Albany Medical Centre.

Why did I want to transfer care? Well for several reasons. The Centre for Rheumatology uses an online portal system devised by the minions of one Jamie Dimon and it is awful. Why is it awful? Well the Centre did not do the obvious thing to do, namely ti set up a pay system through our already existing portal accounts. They set up one which we had to go through a series of puzzles to finally get to a level and a point to pay them for services rendered. When the Centre did try to do what should have been done in the first place (setting up a pay system allowing us to pay through the portal—and remember the portal has all the necessary information so we don’t have to go through a series of puzzles to get to a point when we can pay—it messed up the accounts system and sent us bills for services we had already paid for. In response I threw up my hands and decided to go back to my GP to get a referral to rheumatology at Albany Med.

Actually, this was the second referral to rheumatology at Albany Med my GP sent to them. She initially referred me to rheumatology at Albany Med but Albany Med denied the referral claiming that my insurance denied coverage. This had to be a mistake since my insurance (Medicare and employment pension) did not deny me coverage at the Centre for Rheumatology which I got a referral to because I did not want to deal with the bureaucracy at Albany Med anymore given the incompetence (something inherent to bureaucracies since humans are inevitably involved in the processes related to them). 

To make a long story even longer I was denied care for my fibromyalgia at Albany Med again but this time for a different reason than the insurance. Interestingly, I never received a call or a text message from Albany Med saying that that there was a message in my Albany Med portal saying that I was denied care for my infirmity. Given this I called to make an appointment for rheumatological care at Albany Med. The customer service operative I talked to told me that she had no referral so making an appointment was a no go. 

So, thanks to the bureaucratic unmerry-go round I contacted my GP’s office again assuming that the referral did not go through for some reason. Another referral was sent. The person helping me informed me through all this informed me of another relevant bureaucratic puzzle level in Albany Med referral process. All referrals to Albany Med, I was told, have to go through a central referral office which takes a look at them and passes them on if they pass go in the game of health care cartel life.

Anyway, I thought I have better look in my Albany Med portal to see if there was anything there. And there it was. There was a document relating to the referral sitting there waiting for me to read it. And read it I did. The document said that I needed to print out said document and bring it with me. 

There was a problem, however. I don’t have a printer. So, I called Albany Med was again. The person in rheumatology I was transferred to by Albany Med’s general customer service operative told me the referral had been denied. This time it had apparently been denied not for insurance reasons as before but it was denied because Albany Med’s rheumatology department does not treat patients with a diagnosis of fibromyalgia.

Why Albany Med could not have sent me a text message saying this or sent a message in my portal saying this instead of the download allowing me to avoid the download document prompt in the first place is beyond me. Well, on second thought, it is not beyond me. This is how bureaucracies, public or private, work. Computers and the internet have made it all worse. Their motto seems to be why save the “consumer” time and aggravation when you can have them go round and round in the unmerry-go-round that is bureaucracies?

The Books of My Life: The Perpetual Dream

 

Gerald Grant and David Reisman explore the variety of attempts to reform the liberal arts in American higher education since the 1920s in their award winning book The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Taking a page from Max Weber Grant and Reisman argue that these various attempts at reform (Grant and Reisman call them telic reforms or reforms pointing toward different endings for undergraduate education than those that dominated the world of undergraduate education at the time the book was written) can be conceptualised in terms of three broad ideal type forms: the neo-classical, the communal-expressive, and the activist-radical.

After defining what they mean by telic reforms Grant and Reisman flesh out their three ideal types of telic reforms in three subsequent chapters. In chapter three they explore the neo-classical great books programme at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland (and to a lesser extent at the campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico) with its we want to create the carriers and bearers of Western civilisation at its heart. In chapter four Grant and Reisman explore the communal-expressive ideal type of reform using Kresge College which was, at the time, part of the new University of California Santa Cruz, as its example. Kresge, according to Grant and Reisman, adopted their reform model of change me and I can change my world from social psychologist Carl Rogers. In chapter five Grant and Reisman explore the activist-radical type of telic reform using Audrey Cohen’s The College for Human Services (now the Metropolitan College of New York), as its prime example. The College for Human Services adopted a type of reform whose battle call was change the student and he or she can change the world making it a much better place in the process.

In later chapters Grant and Reisman explore similar reform attempts at and in other colleges and universities across the United States, all of which sought to bring engaged faculty and engaged students together in engaged and engaging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary colleges and universities. Chapter seven focuses on New College in Sarasota, Florida. Chapter eight focuses on the colleges at the University of California of Santa Cruz. Chapter nine focuses on the two new colleges, at the time, in the university system of the state of New Jersey, Ramapo College and Stockton State College (now Stockton University).

I quite enjoyed Grant's and Reisman’s book. I was somewhat familiar with attempts to reform American undergraduate higher education but The Perpetual Dream added immensely to my previous knowledge of attempts to reform American undergraduate education. There were a number of things I found interesting about the book. I think that Grant and Reisman were correct in arguing that one of the central things these reforms wanted to do was to create a sense of community. I liked that Grant and Reisman took a historical, sociological, and ethnographic approach to higher education reforms. I liked that The Perpetual Dream was in large part ethnographic in that Grant and Reisman individually and collectively spent time interviewing those at colleges and in schools undertaking telic reforms. 

One of the disappointments I had with the book is that Grant and Reisman aren't as explicit in tying these reforms to the economic, political, cultural, and demographic change the US was going through in the 20th century. That said, one gets the sense that Grant and Reisman are arguing that the ideal type reforms they explore were attempts to counter the anomie unleashed by modernity. In this context I found it interesting and, in hindsight, obvious, that money, economics, was central to these experiments in American higher education. Monies seem to be an eternal problem for experimenting colleges particularly of the private variety. They aren’t mainstream after all. They are more akin to institutionalised bohemias. Antioch College, for example, perhaps the example of the activist-radical type, seems to have been almost always be cash strapped. The Metropolitan College of New York is facing financial problems as I type. 

Political realities have also impacted the longevity of American reform colleges and reform within colleges and universities. Recently New College has been in the news thanks to the successful attempt of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his merry men to remake the college in their own politically and ideologically correct image. They want to make it, they have said, the HIllsdale College of the South. Hillsdale is a favoured college of some segments of the American right What is happening to New College reflects the broader reality that since the administration of Richard Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s the US has become increasingly dominated by neo-liberalism and right wing populism. Note of interest, one of the other telic colleges of the countercultural era, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, agreed to accept New College students who did not wish to attend the Hillsdale of the South. Paradoxically Hampshire has recently decided to close because of economic difficulties.

There were other things I found less troubling about the book. I found, for example, Grant’s and Reisman’s contention that unionisation efforts by faculty in American universities added a layer of centralisation and bureaucratisation to American colleges and universities spot on but wondered why they did not pay as much attention to something else that added centralisation and bureaucratisation to American universities, the increase in administrative staff. From the vantage point of 2026 it is clear that not only has there been an exponential increase in administrative bureaucrats in American universities since the time Grant and Reisman wrote, but that these bureaucrats, because they are addicted to federal dollars and the ties of research dollars to college and university rankings, are undercutting faculty co-governance and faculty freedom of speech and research. Perhaps the faculty unionisation efforts Grant and Reisman criticise, were a  necessary countervailing force even if it has proved to be ineffective in pushing back against increasing administrative authoritarianism in America's major research universities.

Grant and Reisman rightly note that the increasingly consumerist model of American higher education and its need for student consumers has impacted reform efforts. It is, as they also note, not easy to convince students who have an increasingly I go to school so I can get a job mentality that a liberal arts reform college or programme is worth their while. Needless to say, many of the business types that serve on college and university boards of governance have a similar "pragmatic" attitutde.

Finally, I was intrigued by the fact that one might possibly and profitably apply another Weberian proposition to the reform movements in American higher education, namely, Weber's conception of authority. Many if not most of these reform efforts began with a charismatic reform figure and, increasingly, over time, became tradition bound and bureaucratic after the charismatic figure leaves or dies. At St. John’s, for instance, Scott Buchanan eventually came to the conclusion that books, including books outside the Western canon, needed to be added to the great books reading list. By that time, however, he had left St. John’s and St. John’s curriculum had been fossilised and sanctified, had been, in other words, turned into a tradition by those who followed in his wake and any effort to change that tradition was seen as a profanation.

As Grant and Reisman note academic reform is a perpetual dream, something that never ends and something that is often grounded in and founded on utopian ideologies. In my academic life I have been privy to several attempts to reform the curriculum all of which involved the reinvention of the metaphoric wheel. When I was at the University of Albany, for instance, there was Project Renaissance, an attempt to develop a living-learning interdisciplinary programme for selected students at the University (Grant and Reisman ignore these living learning reform efforts). It was actually hardly interdisciplinary at all. It was comparative. When I was at RPI there was an attempt to create an interdisciplinary curriculum with classes of over one hundred students, something hardly likely, in my opinion, to create a sense of community let alone a helpful learning environment. That "reform" effort seems to have ended as well. And so it goes and so it will likely continue to go.

Theocratic Blues: Life During Wartime

 

Unlike many of you out there in InternetLand I  lived in a theocracy in the United States, yes the United States the country that supposedly has and has had a separation of religion and state, church and state. How did I manage that? Well once upon a time I once lived in a place where religion, in this instance the Christian religion, and politics, in this instance conservative and right wing populist politics, were intertwined.

When I say I lived in a theocracy I don’t mean that I lived in Saudi Arabia where Sunni Islam is intertwined with the monarchical Saudi state. Nor do I mean that I lived in Iran where Shia Islam is intertwined with the Iranian state. Nor do I mean that I lived in Russia where once again the Orthodox Church and the Russian state commingle. I mean that I lived in Mormon Utah.

When I lived in Utah between 1991 to 1993 some 72% plus of the state was Mormon. The legislature of the state of Utah was dominated by Latter-day Saints. Some 90% of Utah legislators were Mormon. While the Mormon population of Utah has declined since 1993, in 2021 it was around 60%, the number of Latter-day Saints in the state legislature has remained about the same, around 86% in 2021. The Mormon theocracy that dominated the Utah of the early 1990s, in other words, remains intact.

Many will tell you that when I lived in Utah Zion was not a theocracy. That would be, they point out and despite many who believe the contrary, unconstitutional. It would be a violation of the US Constitution, the founding document of the American state. And while I agree that Utah was not a Mormon theocracy officially, it was one in practise. In this it parallels nineteenth century America, an era when the United States was unofficially (and illegally) a theocracy.

I say that Mormon Utah was a theocracy for a number of reasons. I had, to backtrack a bit, moved to Provo, Utah to do research on Mormons (Provo is to Mormondom what the South is to the US religiously, it is, thanks to Brigham Young University,  the LDS Church run university, the buckle of the Mormon Bible Belt).  When I lived in Provo the city was around 95% LDS. BYU was around 97% LDS. BYU had rules that everyone, student, faculty, and staff alike, had to abide by. Men could not have hair below their ears or their necks. Beards were forbidden for males. Women could not have dresses or skirts that rose more than one inch above their knees. Alcohol was forbidden. Caffeinated beverages, whether coffee, tea, or soda pop, were verboten. Smoking was prohibited. Unmarried men or women could not live together in "sin" on campus or off.

Of course, one might wonder whether these rules were followed. After all couldn’t I get 3:2 beer at local grocery stores in Provo if I wanted? Couldn’t one go to Provo’s one pub? Couldn’t one get coffee and tea at one of the few local coffee houses? The answer, of course, is yes. I would point out, however, that according to information I heard though the samizdat mill the police force of Provo and the BYU Police, which could operate state wide, kept an eye out for BYU students who violated the “honour code”. The Provo cops supposedly even kept an eye out for students coming out of the lone pub. 

I would also note anecdotally (ethnographically) that when I was on campus everyone I saw was following the dress and grooming standards the Church commanded. I did run into “Jack Mormons”, those who were only nominally LDS, in Salt Lake City. I saw "Jack Mormons" who smoked. I saw some Jack Mormon males with long hair. I saw all this during one of my monthly visits there to bookstores (Sam Weller’s Zion’s Bookstore, in particular) and to Squatters, where one could get a beer for a reasonable price since they brewed their own (I sometimes, I have to admit, went to Temple Square after getting a beer buzz at Squatters and listened to the sister missionaries there; Gentle entertainment in Utah). I could do all this because Salt Lake City was only barely dominated by Mormons at the time and thus was, despite the presence of the Church bureaucracy there, a less theocratic place (less not absent) than Provo or the rural towns in the state where nearly everyone was LDS and nearly everyone practised what the Church preached (the plan of salvation or eternal progression, the ideology around which all Mormon practise flows).

I would describe the unofficial Mormon theocracy as a kindler and gentler version of a theocratic state. No one was burned at the stake when I was in Zion, No one was tortured on the rack. No one was killed for their beliefs of lack of beliefs. Mormondom, in other words, was different in these regards from Christian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant theocracies in Europe during the so-called Middle Ages (ironically Christians had been killed for their beliefs in the Roman Empire but then the group persecuted often replicates what happened to it in kind) and beyond. On the other hand, there were some of the feminist variety who taught at BYU who were fired. There were people, including Mormon historians, who were excommunicated from the Church. And there were individuals, Mormon historians, for instance, whose scholarly work and published presentations drew the ire of true believers who threatened them with bodily harm and even death via email and the telephone. Again, kindler and gentler theocracy.

I have been thinking about my life in theocratic Utah because the United States, thanks to right wing populist "Christian" nationalists who worship at the altar of the American state rather than the Christian god ignoring, in the process, almost every aspect of Jesus’ supposed Sermon on the Mount (so-called in one of its two versions), not to mention the prohibition against having gods other than YHWH, are on the verge of turning the United States again into a theocracy, though this time an official theocracy. One can reasonably argue that they have already established theocracies in certain US states. And that is scary given the history of religious intolerance.

It is scary because these theocrats are people convinced of their own absolute rightness. They, they believe, after all have god on their side. They are people who, because of this, are inherently intolerant and inherently fascist (fascism goes back to authoritarian monarchs who claimed that they were god or the representative of god; theocracy). They cannot be reasoned with because of this holier than thou attitude. Backed by Big Money, particularly from big oil sources, they are taking over school boards and cleansing school libraries of books which they regard as pornographic (meaning books characterised by sympathy toward gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, and other "outcasts") and which don't fit with their narrow and narrow minded ideology, and they are actively working for the firings of those who speak out against those they regard as saints (according to Reuters and the Guardian over 600 people were fired for freely speaking their piece about the theocratic and intolerant Charlie Kirk, for example). They are running for local offices, state offices, and federal offices. And they have an ally in that multi-divorced, bully, misogynist, arrogant, narcissist, and mentally ill bloke named Donald Trump. Their theocracy, I suspect, won’t be as kind and gentle as that of the Mormon Utah in which I lived. I only hope I can get out before the stone age horror begins yet again.

Is yet another Civil War in the American future? Should states like New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey form a union of their own? Should California, Oregon, and Washington do the same? Should all of these explore union with Canada, a nation, like any nation, with flaws but nowhere  near the flaws of the theocratising United States)? Should Margaret Atwood be considered a secular prophet? Time, as always, will tell.

The Books of My Life: Hollywood Cinema (Maltby)

 

In Hitchcock’s Films, Robin Wood's seminal study of several of the American films of director Alfred Hitchcock, Wood opens the book by asking what at the time, was a very important question, why should we, he asks, take Hitchcock seriously? Richard Maltby opens his book on  Hollywood cinema, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, second edition, 2003) by asking a similar question. Why should we take Hollywood seriously? While Wood argued for taking Hitchcock seriously to sceptics for whom Hitchcock could not be taken seriously because he worked in a commercial medium, 

Maltby, giving us a preview of coming historical, commercial, cultural, and theoretical attractions in the book, answers his own question about why we should take Hollywood seriously in his introduction to Hollywood Cinema. We should take it seriously because Hollywood is an industry, a corporation, an industry and corporation that sells dreams to willing consumers who wish to “purchase" its product.  In the rest of the book, which is divided into four parts,  "The Commercial Aesthetic", “Histories", “Conventions", and “Approaches", Maltby tells us what Hollywood is, a  dream factory which sells its commodity. It uses, Maltby argues, technological and cultural strategies to sell willing consumers pleasure. 

Hollywood, as Maltby notes in part one of the book, “The Commercial Aesthetic", was and largely still is, much like any other corporation that arose in the corporate era of American capitalism. It was and is a vertically integrated (capitalist pop linguists call this synergy today) managed corporation which is structured hierarchically and whose goal it is to turn a profit and make monies for its stockholders. It does this like any other modern corporation, it sells a commodity, pleasure, dreams, utopian fantasies. Genres, Maltby argues, such as the Western, with their conventions, stereotypes, and repetitive visual motifs, is one of the things Hollywood uses to sell pleasure and to essentially pre-sell films to waiting audiences who were familiar with genre repetitions and enjoy them and also enjoy the novelties Hollywood seeds into these genre repetitions.

In the “Histories” section of the book Maltby  takes readers on a journey from the Hollywood of the Classic era of 1910 to 1948 with its vertically integrated studios that produced, at least in its big studios, A pictures, B pictures, shorts, newsreels, cartoons, and distributed and exhibited their product, to the Paramount decision by the US Supreme Court, a decision that marks the end of the classic Hollywood era since it forced Hollywood to divest of its theatres and made it easier for other companies to distribute product. Next Maltby takes us to the era of the New Hollywood from 1948 to the 1980, a period characterised by roadshow films and spectaculars like Ben Hur and Jaws, and an increasing reliance on expensive advertising. Finally Maltby takes us to the era of the conglomerate Hollywood since 1980, with its, studios as distributors of largely high stake big budget spectacles, its big and spectacular advertising budgets, and its horizontal integration or “synergies”, an era that also brings us full circle back to the age of vertical integration. 

In the technology chapter of the “Histories” section Maltby takes aim at a prominent theoretical approach to film and Hollywood cinema since the 1950s, Bazinian realism. While Bazin argued that technological changes were the product of Hollywood’s seeking after increasing realism, Maltby instead argues that Hollywood realism, such as it was (movies cannot, as Maltby notes, be fully realistic given their manipulations of time, space, narrative, and performance) and is, was the product of technological developments that were not teleological but piecemeal and which ebbed and flowed. These technological innovations, Maltby argues, had to do one thing, they had to fit into the dominant industrial, hierarchical, and aesthetic practises of Hollywood. Technological changes such as sound, colour, widescreen, and digital forms, the four case studies Maltby offers, had, in other words, to intersect with preexisting and standardised, routinised, rationalised, and bureaucratised (all these, as Max Weber notes, were was central to mass business and American mass corporate capitalism) Hollywood genres, styles, and editing strategies. The moral of this story seems to be that the more Hollywood changed the more it had to stay the same. 

Next in the Politics chapters in the "Histories" section Maltby argues that Hollywood has generally preached the gospel of political neutrality. He also notes, however, that at certain times the social problem film, for example, has been significant in Hollywood. It was significant, as Maltby notes, during the New Deal and the post-World War II era, despite the McCarthy witch hunt. It was also important, as Maltby tells us, during World War II when Hollywood, just like the US, went to war with its allies including the USSR against the evil Axis nations. Finally, Maltby rightly notes that though Hollywood has typically sought the widest possible audiences for its films in order to maximise profits Hollywood is also embedded within a culture in which ideology, the fetishisation and universalisation of capitalist economic notions and notions of American exceptionalism, are present and universalised. 

Something else Maltby takes aim at in the “Histories” section of the book is auteur theory, the notion that there are film authors, mostly directors, who have worked within the Hollywood industrial and profit making machine. Emphasisng that Hollywood is a dream factory, Maltby raises questions about the auteurist theory that has dominated film theory into the 1970s and which has continued to prove a useful way of organising the study of Hollywood ever since. 

In the “Conventions’ section of Hollywood Cinema Maltby explores how Hollywood uses space, time, performance, and narrative to produce the product it wishes to sell to consumers. Maltby argues that Hollywood strategies like camera placement, the centring of shots, “invisible” editing, star personas, the emphasis on action, self-censorship, and reading movies between the lines, to note a few examples, are means that Hollywood uses to manipulate audiences into purchasing and watching their product often a second time. Along the way Maltby argues against the crystal ball textualist approach to film, one that assumes everything you need to know about a text is in the text (an odd kind of contextualism) noting that film is not a text; it moves.

In the final section of the book Maltby explores the history of criticism and scholarly analysis of Hollywood product. He divides this section of the book, Approaches, into two parts: Criticism and Theory. 

I was quite impressed with Malby’s book on Hollywood cinema. That said, and in the critical spirit of F.R. Leavis and Robin Wood I had several buts. I would like to have seen more discussion by Maltby of tone (melodrama, drama, tragedy, comedy, satire, parody) in Hollywood movies, aspects of the movies that are just as important as genre. In fact, I think many of what are thought of as genre forms are actually tonal forms. 

I did not find Maltby’s argument against auteurism, an old argument, by the way, one which parallels the main criticisms of auteurism during the 1950s and 1960s, namely, that Hollywood was too commercial to have an author, compelling. Hollywood, as Robin Wood notes, can be both a commercially oriented medium engaged in commerce and still have a few authors, like Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra, working within it. 

Maltby could have done a better job of exploring how Hollywood’s economies of scale have helped it become successful in overseas markets and how its restoration of control over exhibition in the United States has squeezed not only foreign movies out of the domestic market but domestic “independent” films out of the marketplace. Remaking foreign movies, of course, was and is also a strategy Hollywood has used to squeeze foreign movies out of the market (something Hollywood TV has sometimes done). 

I liked Maltby’s contention that different groups of spectators read Hollywood films differently, some read them more literally and fundamentalist like while others read them, as Hollywood also intended, between between the lines. Reading between the lines, however, requires a degree of cultural capital and different caches of cultural capital exist leading to different readings of these between the lines. Some spectators pay attention to mise-en-scene (cultural capital acquired via schooling) others pay almost exclusive attention to special effects (the effect of socialisation to the popcorn spectacle movie). Maltby could and should have paid more attention to the issue of cultural capital and the different degrees of cultural capital readers have.

Maltby could have done more exploration of qualitative and quantitative studies of how audiences actually read film texts. Speaking of how audiences “read” texts, while I liked Maltby’s discussion of the literal and “sophisticated” readings of the film Casablanca his reading of the readings of the film is too simplistic. Many readers of Casablanca today on YouTube, self proclaimed reactors, don’t know enough about World War II to grasp the propaganda, Rick as a metaphor for the US, in the film, while others literally hate Ilsa through much of the film because they do not pay attention to her gestures and her mention that she thought her husband Laszlo was dead. I should also note that many “readers” of Bringing Up Baby read the film literally and not between the lines and criticise it for being ‘unrealistic”. Many readers of the film, in other words, are embedded within ideologies of realism, something prominent in amateur film “criticism” these days, and aren’t “entertained” by Bringing up Baby's comic and intentional unrealism. Additionally, given the historical amnesia of many “readers” they don’t really comprehend how Hollywood movies were made for maximum consumption and could and were sometimes read against the Code since they aren’t really aware of the Code.

All that said Hollywood Cinema is one of, it not, the best English language introduction to Hollywood I have ever read. I agree wholeheartedly with Maltby that academic criticism has generally become not only too focused on aesthetics and dominated far too often by notions of political and ideological correctness. I wholeheartedly applaud Maltby for doing something too many of these academic critics don’t do; focusing on the industry, the dream factory, that produces films in order to make profits and the means (genre, narrative strategies, use of space, manipulation of time, performance strategies) it uses to produce films that appeal to audiences, mostly 14 to 25 year olds in the post-Jaws and Star Wars era. I agree with Maltby that Hollywood has tried to insulate itself from governmental interference in its affairs not only through lobbying efforts and through self-regulation but by making its films ambiguous enough to be appreciated and read in multiple ways by those who go to see see Hollywood films. And, as I said earlier, I liked, really liked, how Maltby argued that spectators were central to Hollywood’s strategies and that movies were made to be “read” literarily, akin to how religious fundamentalists read the Bible (if selectively) and more complexly by readers with more expansive degrees of cultural capital. I appreciate Maltby’s contention that Hollywood has sold the American dream and the notion of American exceptionalism to audiences at home and abroad. In general, I think Maltby deserves praise for his descriptive approach, his sociological, ethnological, historical, physiological, anatomical, and cognitive science approach to Hollywood cinema, something often lacking from both film criticism and film scholarship these days and, therefore, something which is much needed. Kudos. Very, very, highly recommended despite its sometimes too reductionist economic approach. It must always be remembered that the infrastructure that undergirds economic ideologies is cultural.

Life as Crisis Management: The Costco Kiada (aka, the Costco Muck-up)

 

I recently decided to join the Costco Club. I did it for several reasons. First, Costco is coming to where I live and I wanted to have a membership before it opens. Second, Costco had a bed I wanted, a bed brand the New York Times’s Wirecutter liked, and I needed a new twin instead of a full bed for myself. Third, if you joined and used a code you got a $45 dollar credit toward future purchases.

Anyway, I ordered the bed, got it, put it on my new Zinus bed frame and liked it (it is quite comfortable) and liked the experience I had with Costco. So I decided to use my $45 dollar credit and order two items amounting to over $800 dollars. 

I looked forward to receiving these items then I learned there was a problem. My order was cancelled. It took me 40 minutes with the chat associates to learn why. That, by the way, was an experience in and of itself. The first associate was going to transfer me to his supervisor but transferred me instead to a private home telephone number. The person who answered was not amused. The second associate eventually said that my shipping and billing addresses were different and that was why the order was cancelled. She said the latter had the address and the apartment number on the same line while the former had the exact same address with the apartment number on a second line instead. How horrible! No wonder the computer could not make sense of it. Computers we should always remember, thanks to their literalism, cannot see that two same addresses with a slight variation are the same.

So, I went to change my addresses. To go back a bit I do recall that when I ordered the two items that were cancelled that I noticed that the shipping address, according to the Costco website had a New England zip code. That was odd since I did not live in New England and Costco had sent my bed to the right address and billed the order to the correct credit card. So, I changed my shipping address before I ordered. When I went back to look at the addresses again after my forty minute chat and call with Costco customer service agents, I found that both the shipping and the billing were exactly the same. Still I changed them to the same address Costco, using USPS data no doubt, suggested. Will it work? Who knows.

Will I be ordering from Costco again? I don’t know. Possibly not. I can get the items I wanted locally and will likely do so within a few months. At least then I won’t have to screw around with stupid computers and stupid websites not to mention customer service agents.

Postscript: So, I chatted with a Costco representative to try to ascertain if my billing and shipping addresses were the same. This turned out, not surprisingly, to be Kafkaesque. Chat sent me to member services on the phone. Member services sent me to online. Online sent me to orders. All in all I spent an hour on the phone being passed from one customer service person to another who told me they could not help but someone else could. Could that someone else help me? Perhaps. Only time and ordering something will tell. Stay tuned.

Another Postscript: I cancelled my membership at Costco after learning that they did not take American Express of MasterCard credit cards. I tried to get their credit card, which they basically force you to do, but was denied despite already having three cards and a high credit score. They don't want me or my money (I was going to buy a Mac Neo from them but won't now) so I no longer want them. Bah humbug.

If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Musings on Movies, Evaluating Movies, and Cultural Capital

 

Last night I watched two movies on the over the air Movie channel: Prime Cut (1972) and End of the Game (1976). I had seen both films before, the former just a few weeks ago also on the Movie channel (with blurring of nudity and cleansing of language, both of which one can easily figure out), the latter fifty years ago with my dear friend Duane Stigen at a cinema in Middletown itself, Muncie, Indiana. Both Duane and I were students at Ball State University at the time.

My initial reaction to Prime Cut, a film directed by Michael Ritchie, was that I liked it. I am a dark comedy or black comedy kind of guy after all and Prime Cut is definitely a dark comedy. Prime Cut is a film which reflects American films increasing adventurousness in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. In fact, I am still amazed and stunned that a film this dark could have been made in the United States even outside of Hollywood, as this film was. 

Christ Petit, who did the entry for the Prime Cut in the Time Out Film Guide, describes the film, and rightly so, as a mash up of pulp gangster fiction and fairy tale with Lee Marvin as Nick Devlin, playing the white knight to Gene Hackman’s Mary Ann, the dark knight. It is a noirish fairy tale which reveals the darkness at the heart of America including middle America. The film is set in Kansas City and rural Kansas where Mary Ann's meat packing plant is. Mary Ann is not only selling cattle and pig meat at his meat factory. He is also selling female flesh to the rich. (Hello Jeffrey Epstein). There is no difference between selling cattle and pigs and female flesh, female commodities raised from youth in nearby orphanages, Mary Ann tells Devlin when hit man Devlin raises moral questions about what Mary Ann is doing.

Devlin and his fully armed crew, have been sent by his bosses—gangster capitalists—from Chicago to collect the dues ($500 grand) Mary Ann owes the Company. One of his first acts (Devlin as White Knight) after arriving at Mary Ann’s meat plant—he arrives as the sale of female flesh is in progress—is to save Poppy (Sissy Spacek), who asks for his help, from the clutches of Mary Ann, his hired gun hands, and the rich sellers checking out the female flesh for sale in the pens (Mary Ann as Black Knight). By the way, all the female flesh for sale in the pens, it appears, are named after flowers (a reference to their soon to be deflowering after purchase?).

Chris Petit also notes in his entry in the Time Out Film Guide that a couple of set pieces in Prime Cut mirror the work of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly his North by Northwest (1959), something that is certainly intentional. The first finds Devlin and his crew running for their lives through a busy all-American fair complete with the Lawrence, Kansas marching band and a mannequin cow filled with milk which can be put into cups by pressing on the simulated teat of the cow. The second finds Devlin and Poppy running for their lives as a terrifying and horrifying combine bears down on them. Both set pieces point up the fact that the White All-American types who are at the county fair are blissfully ignorant about not only what is happening at the fair but are largely blissfully ignorant about the darkness—the violence, the misogyny, the imperialism, the collateral damage, the forced prostitution, the heroin—at the heart of the US and, thanks to the US, around the world, including in Southeast Asia.

The second film, End of the Game (Der Richter und sein Henten), which was directed by Maximilian Schell and written by Frederich Durrenmatt and Schell, I did not like when I first saw it. In fact, I hated the film. I thought it was the worst film I had ever seen at the time. Looking back on it, one has to take my “evaluation” of the film with a very large grain of salt. There were a lot of things in the film which went right by my head. I was, after all, only a sophomore in college and most of the movies I had seen up to that point were mainstream Hollywood films. I had yet to see films made in Europe or Japan, though that would soon would thanks to my move to Indiana University, and I had yet to take film classes which introduced me to the workings of narrative in film, mise-en-scene in film, the use of music in film, editing in film, and the various styles of acting in film. That too would soon change thanks to film course offerings at IU.

Between 1976, when I first saw End of the Game, and 2026, when I saw it for the second time, I had changed a lot. I was, thanks to the cultural capital that comes with age, education, and experience, better able to get the references, some satirical, in the film, a detective movie that explores the darkness at the heart of German Switzerland. I was also able grasp and to better appreciate the several styles of acting in the film, the way the film was cut, the films limited Brechtianism, and the films' dark humour in the film. For all these reasons and more I quite liked End of the Game on second viewing.

I guess the moral of the story is that we humans can, though we often don't, change. Some of this change comes from growing up and opening ourselves up to learning. Thank the lord Beezus for universities, teachers, and books. Amen.