The Duel! The Duel!

 

It might be unbelievable but in fact I had no idea the book I borrowed last week from the library, The Complete Short Novels by Chekhov, contained a short novel titled "The Duel". Well, I mean, there are more than one duel in Chekhov's plays, so it's not surprising that one pops up in a novel, right? 

At one point while reading this short novel, I burst out laughing so loud that one could hear me from another room. First and foremost, Chekhov is a comedy writer. I'm not talking about the kind of gentle and sad smiles with lamentation often associated with him, although those are present too, occasionally. No, I'm talking about gags and jokes and mockery of human frailties. 

I gotta admit it, I love this kind of mockery, which exposes how pathetic our lives are and how little our struggles mean. The existential laugh. It seems to be a fairly common theme in Russian literature at the time --- the futility of the intellectual angst over how to save the Motherland and her peoples from poverty and backwardness and the crushing bureaucracy and corruption blah blah blah. Throughout the novel, Chekhov made references to Tolstoy and Turgenev, which also made me laugh. And yet, as much as the novel is steeped in the time and place and those specific problems, I find it much more relatable and relevant to me and our times than anything else. The pathetic lives and anguish of these characters are instantly recognizable in people around me, including in myself. I would even venture to say that there are numerically more people today around the world that are Chekhovian than in 1890s Russia. They, no, we, are all wailing into the void --- "What should I do with my life?!" 

Not that he provides a definitive answer, mind you, or a definitive non-answer, as he was too early for Modernism or Existentialism. The answer he gave is in the example of himself. On top of the piercing insight and the hilarious mockery, he remained kind and warm and able to empathize with pathetic losers that are us. Right now is a pretty bad time to maintain warm feelings about humanity (although when was it ever a good time?). I often wonder if our need for "society" is more of a hardwired instinct than a justified choice. Chekhov seems to be showing us one way of living: One can see the crap that is humanity and still choose to live without illusions and perhaps even love while carrying all the baggage. Why not? (No, the lesson is not to literally work like a dog to pay off your debts, unless that's what you want to do.)

Ever since I smelled a whiff of The Origin of Species in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, I now see it everywhere (LOL). There is a German character in The Duel who is constantly spewing social Darwinism. It's quite chilling to consider how prescient this character is (and he is German too!), but I can imagine that view might have been popular at that time, before we had the hindsight of the real horror it is capable of inflicting. Nevertheless, a man like Chekhov can instinctively see through this bullshit, no matter how smart or rational it appears to be.

Yes, that's why I love him, because Chekhov inoculates us against bullshit and despair.

Duels on Screen

After denigrating the actual practice of dueling, I have to admit, to my chagrin, that I love watching one-on-one duels in movies. 

Most martial arts movies would include both brawls and duels. Both types of fighting can be well choreographed and well shot, edited, and presented. Nevertheless, a duel usually takes center stage as the climax of a movie. 

From of a purely instinctual perspective, a martial arts movie is composed of a series of ever escalating fights, because that's what human audience consistently wants from a story. Escalation. The hero of the story, with whom we identify, encounters fights of increasing danger and difficulty. If the sequence is reversed into decreasing difficulty, we would invariably lose interest before the triumph arrives. 

There are of course movies that climax on the biggest brawl. The one that comes to mind is the 1925 Japanese silent movie Orochi, possibly the earliest chanbara film. Chang Cheh also liked to end his movies with brawls, followed by the hero's death. Nevertheless, in the genre of martial arts movies, duels clearly outnumber brawls. The reason is quite natural---brawls are impersonal and anonymous, in which our emotional attention is on only one person, while duels concentrate and heighten the drama between two key characters and are therefore personal. One can fit a lot more emotional content into a duel.  

Orochi (1925)

I was thinking about climactic duel scenes in general when I recently re-watched the kitchen fight scene in The Raid 2 (2014) between Iko Uwais and Cecep Arif Rahman. Having only two actors, both top Silat practitioners, do a one-on-one combat, provides a kind of clarity that was less than fully realized in The Raid 1 (2011). Note how this scene is brightly lit with long takes and mid-range full-body shots. Everything in the scene is devised to illustrate the art of Silat as well as the characters' emotional states in high-fidelity details. 

Two other classic duel scenes that I re-watch from time to time are Kill Zone (SPL, 2005), between Donnie Yen and Wu Jing, and Once Upon a Time in China 2 (1992), between Jet Li and Donnie Yen. (Oddly enough, both involve Yen.) 

One of the most classic dueling fights, however, is neither so vicious as those above nor even used in climax. It's right in the middle of Pedicab Driver, between Sammo Hung and Lau Kar-Leung (1989). It's brimming with humor and personality, truly one of my all-time favorite fight scenes. 

As we can see from these clips, the dueling format forces the action choreographer, actors, and cinematographer to do good work, as there is little room to hide incompetence, unlike shaky camera, quick editing, blurry brawls, and all the tricks to allow the stunt team to do most of the heavy lifting. Thus, these scenes build an intimacy between the audience and the dueling characters, in which the audience feels the bruises, cuts, and bleeding far more acutely than a brawl scene. 

Fathers and Sons and Science

Beyond all the commentary on generational relationships, what struck me from the beginning is the presentation of a "science nerd" at the center of this novel. There is some rather convincing details of medicine, heck, even more than any Chekhov I have read.

The medical student Bazarov, sitting in an awkward social position between aristocrats and peasants, is surprisingly modern. He could be a computer geek, a silicon valley dude, or a climate change scientist in today's novels: smart and blunt and egocentric, probably somewhere "on the spectrum." His wholesale rejection of "romanticism" and his cold rationality stood alone among the poetic and heroic characters of the time. The irony vibrating beneath the clashes between Bazarov and Pavel Petrovich sometimes threatens to become overt satire. Of course, Turgenev isn't necessarily endorsing a lack of all delicate feelings and social grace, but it is obvious that he feels, like Bazarov, an impatience with the sentimentality and histrionics in Russian literature.

I don't know whether Turgenev was aware of The Origin of Species, the book that shocked the world in 1859, but I have a suspicion that he had at least heard about it. He was fluent in English, German, and French and chose to stay out of Russia for many years. He was known to be skeptical toward religion, which was uncommon for his generation. Beyond the sympathetic portrayal of Bazarov, the novel is permeated with an attitude of mild distain for the traditional Russian culture and social conventions. Turgenev is looking at his motherland with the eye of an expatriate who has digested and excreted much of the nationalistic cool-aid. 

It was said that Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy did not get along with Turgenev in real life. Who would have guessed?!

Fathers and Sons and Duels

 

So I have finally gotten around to read Turgenev. The impetus was seeing on Kindle's list how short Fathers and Sons is --- Are you sure it is not a thousand pages?! Now I can claim to have read classical (translated) Russian literature without breaking a sweat. I can hardly believe it! 

OK I kid. That's a bit of exaggeration. I have read Chekhov's plays and they too were easily accessible to plebs like me. They even made me laugh. There is something similar between Turgenev and Chekhov. Perhaps it's the restrained sarcasm and satire, largely on the "Russian national character" itself. 

My feelings about Fathers and Sons aside, one episode in the novel gave me a real jolt. Around 80% of the novel, the main character, Bazarov, a medical student, was challenged to a duel by an aristocrat of an older generation (people who are now fashionably referred to as "Boomers") on a provincial estate. Turgenev narrated the episode with barely concealed contempt. Nevertheless it was a shock for me to realize that duels between men were commonly practiced and socially accepted less than 200 years ago. Well, you know, men from the civilized, educated class (unlike the unwashed illiterate peasants and craftsmen) would ceremonially fight and kill each other in public to resolve personal disputes ranging from extramarital affairs to political differences. 

I mulled over what it must have been like living in a society like that. It's not like I have never heard of duels before or was unaware that Pushkin was killed in a duel. I grew up reading Alexandre Dumas' adventure novels. As recent as a few years ago, the popular musical Hamilton depicted not one but two duels for blah blah blah reasons. It was a damned normal social interaction. Although the formalized and ritualized practice of duels was specific to European cultures, individual male humans have been brawling with each other since the dawn of society. Nevertheless, I have never thought about the general state of social norms for everyone else, if high-class men could kill each other legally in duels. Surely, women and lower class men in such a society would also have a more relaxed (? for lack of a better word) attitude about violence and death compared with today.

It is nearly impossible for a person to imagine living outside of his or her current life. The modern society, in which violence is heavily centralized and regulated, is only in existence for less than two centuries, and that process is shorter in some places than in others. I wonder whether that is long enough to habituate all men in a life without frequent and intimate bloodletting activities. A few days ago the internet is abuzz with a video of a man shooting and killing another man on his front yard in Lubbock, Texas.

In the grand scheme of history, a duration of one to two centuries is but a blip, probably insufficient to obliterate a ubiquitous culture of bloodthirst. What is the future of human violence? Will it go the way of legal duels, abandoned and forgotten, or will it revive itself in new methods and appearances? 

Fathers and Sons is a novel about a transitional time, when serfdom had just been abolished in 1861 (almost the same time as the slave emancipation in the US in 1863) and nobody knew what the hell was going to happen to the social order. The past is not dead and much of it is not even past, but still changes keep happening, casting human tendencies into their new incarnations. There is a pervasive feeling of despair and resignation in the 19th century Russian literature that the Russian people and the massive imperial bureaucracy would always remain the same, despite all the talks of ideals and reforms by the intelligentsia. The subsequent events have supported this feeling through today. Russia remains the same in spirit if not on the surface. 

Not only Russia, of course. 

Xenocide

 

I was so so about Ender's Game, really liked Speaker for the Dead, and the third book of this series, Xenocide, has left me with mixed feelings. 

Orson Scott Card is a sophisticated science fiction writer and has built a detailed and reasonably logical universe with 3 intelligent species as well as various technologies. Given that these novels were written during the early days of the internet, some of the connectivity-related elements are fairly prescient.  

There is an issue that has bothered me from the start, but it is not easy to pin down. On the surface level, the problem is the main character, Andrew Wiggin, who never seems human or possesses distinctive human qualities. Rather, he is the embodiment of the omnipotent fantasy, also known as a "superman" figure. Supporting characters are given human flaws and traits amidst family secrets, which worked better in Speaker for the Dead but becomes an intractable squabbling mess in Xenocide. It seems to suggest that the author is not incapable of delving into humanity but is clearly not all that interested in it.

The problem becomes clearer as we are introduced to a genetically enhanced subspecies of humanity on the planet Path, who are presumably Chinese. From the start, Orson Scott Card has always been more interested in superhumans than humans. In his world, a small group of individuals with superhuman intelligence determine the fates of a planet, many planets, the universe, and other species of organisms. The story is always centered around their superpowers, but we never see the consequences and implications of these superpowers to the masses on the ground level. Actually, the only consequences we see are consistently favorable to Ender. There is no animosity between the Hive Queen and her species' "ender"; in fact the text suggests that she loves him. It does not make sense but hey she's alien so I guess it's all OK then. 

The masses of humans and pequeninos are presented as stupid and mindless mobs who cannot be told the true causes of their extinction or survival. No, they are all too stupid to understand and must be kept in total ignorance for their own good. The masses are also presented as the evil bureaucracy of Starway Congress. Even though there is one character in Xenocide who appears to have risen from the proletariats to be of equal intelligence as "the chosen ones," she is later revealed to be also genetically destined to be superhuman. 

It appears that Orson Scott Card is very much aware of his elitism and reluctant to put it on full display. Nevertheless, the theme is that we have to trust in the benevolence of a small group of superhumans, who are superior to and the rightful rulers of the faceless masses. As such, the scale of these stories are both grand and puny, with handful of persons across the universe controlling the life and death of supposedly millions of people and nonhuman organisms, although they exist as more or less an abstract notion. In a way the sequels remain true to the video-game nature of the original Ender's Game. They are supposed to be about real lives and real stakes of the universe but remain on paper or in cyberspace, floating above the earth of each of the planets.

One could argue that the vast majority of people in the world believe themselves to be superior to others, or at least more special than others. Perhaps not as many indulge in his own world-savior fantasies, but the prevalence is particularly high in the sci-fi/fantasy circles. In that sense Orson Scott Card is not that special. And some readers no doubt identify with the god-like patriarch that is Ender. 

So the flip side of the superman power-trip fantasy is its patriarchal subtext. The most disturbing portrayal of an intelligent life form is a character known as Jane. She (yes, the character, who is a "ghost in the shell", is deliberately given a face of young Caucasian female) is the worst kind of male fantasy of an ideal female. The author has enough self-awareness to refrain from creating an all-submissive, boot-licking human female character with absolute devotion to one man, but he lets himself go all-out on the "artificial" female character, because he can always disclaim her humanity. Clever and, in a way, honest. The character itself (I would not call it "her," which is neither credibly human nor logically computational) though is pretty nauseating.

The Most Violent Movie I Have Seen (to date)

I don't watch horror movies at all, but even I can pick up the flavor of horror in "The Night Comes for Us" (2018). It is the sense of dread between the action scenes --- and there are many action scenes --- as well as the obviously low-budget but gloriously creative makeup and camera work around all the slashing and eviscerations, that hints at Timo Tjahjanto's horror movie credentials. 

I did watch The Raid 2 but not The Raid 1, so I was not entirely unprepared for the viciousness in fight scenes involving pencak silat. But still. Gareth Evans is not a horror director. 

According to Wikipedia, Tjahjanto wrote The Night Comes for Us as an homage to 1980s Hong Kong gangster movies. It's probably true, given the various references to the Triad, frequent use of axes, and the Chinese (albeit in Mandarin rather than Cantonese) dialogs randomly peppered throughout the movie. However, in 2018, even Chang Cheh's or John Woo's amounts of bloodletting are no longer sufficient --- blame it on inflation. 

This is the only movie that I am aware of, in which Joe Taslim and Iko Uwais not only share the screen but even fight each other. And what a fight it is. The latter half of the movie is stacked with three progressively more brutal fight scenes: Taslim's brawl in the warehouse, Julie Estelle versus two female assassins, and Taslim versus Uwais. Any of these three fight scenes is enough to be the climax for an average action movie, perhaps already excessive for an American action movie. The climax here is as eye-popping as any fight scene I have ever watched. There are many silat moves that even an ignoramus like me can appreciate. Both actors, with real chops, executed the choreography with impressive long takes and dangerous complexity. And there are numerous surprises, culminating on the stab in the ... oh I won't spoil it. Tjahjanto showed me something I have never seen before in other movies. Isn't that enough?

A Remarkable Person

In January 2000, I was briefly unemployed after the completion of my post-graduate internship. In fact, I was waiting for a job offer from the place where I did the internship, but that's beside the point. During the idle weeks, I sometimes walked to the library nearby for internet access. (Ah, the era of no smart phones.) 

On a cold day with melting snow on the ground, while using the library computer, an Asian American young man, of the same age as I was, standing next to me asked me whether I would meet him for coffee. I was not interested in a romantic relationship at the time, but I was too bored to turn down an opportunity to meet my curiosity half way. So we met for coffee once and talked. I remember much of what he told me. He was of Korean heritage but born in the US. He enlisted in the military out of high school, where he was diagnosed with depression and soon left it. He alluded to pressure from his parents for him to be "tough," which might have led to the disastrous experience. He continued to feel conflicted and confused. I listened with interest and sympathy, and suggested that he "should talk to someone," ie, to pursue psychotherapy. To be sure, I had not gone through any psychotherapy myself by that time, but I had an interest in psychology and some education in that area to sense that it could be beneficial to the young man. 

Before we parted --- never to see each other again --- he said, "You are a remarkable person."

Years later, I had my own encounter with psychotherapy, which led to some important, even transformative, growth in me. I continue to think of this young man from time to time. I hope he did pursue his own psychotherapy and achieve his version of emotional growth. There is a connection between me and the vulnerable and confused person on that day that seems to become stronger over time. 

And I continue to have complicated feelings about being a "remarkable" person, one of the central issues I explored long and hard, often with pain, during therapy. Like all of the issues we worked on, it never completely resolves and will always require exploration and reflection. Am I a remarkable person? Is he? Why and how? And, of course, the most important question, how does it make me feel? 

Sword Fight Problems in Star Wars

 

Let's be frank, OK? The sword fights in Star Wars are lame. There is no excuse for such poorly choreographed, poorly shot, poorly edited action scenes in one of the most expensive and highly grossed movie franchises. This is all the more lamentable, as George Lucas began making the series after watching loads of Japanese samurai movies, including but not limited to Akira Kurosawa's work. (There are perhaps as many elements "borrowed" from Kinji Fukasaku as Kurosawa, but that's another topic altogether.)  After studying the thrilling sword-fight sequences in Yojimbo and Sanjuro, all he came up with was the slow and clumsy lightsaber duels. Huh. 

I have been a SW fan since I was 10, but I also grew up with Jackie Chan movies --- imagine my disappointment when I saw the original trilogy for the first time. 

The subsequent SW movies had even less excuse. As so expertly dissected by Accented Cinema on YouTube, the sword fights in these movies became faster and more acrobatic (not saying much there) than the original trilogy, but they contained even less emotional impact and visual prowess. As SW movies got progressively worse in action choreography, other non-Asian movies (see Luc Besson, Wachowski brothers, the Bourne series) have absorbed Asian action cinema's many lessons, leading to what I consider the peak of the genre --- Atomic Blonde and the John Wick series made by David Leitch and Chad Stahelski and co, in which one can no longer distinguish the influences from Hong Kong Kung Fu movies to modern Korean and Thai movies. 

Back to Star Wars. Accented Cinema pointed out a number of deficiencies in the sword fight scenes, such as the lack of character and emotion, the lack of impact, the lack of stillness and tension, the lack of form, the lack of narrative clarity (who the hell is winning and how?), etc., etc. 

This leads to a long-term question I have been interested in -- How to make untrained actors look like real martial artists or action heroes. It's a filmmaking specialty that seems to be lost even in modern Hong Kong and Japanese movies. I don't want to write a Ph.D. dissertation on this topic (although I suspect I could), but two indispensable but vastly overlooked ingredients are:

• Footwork
• Stunt people

Why does everyone in SW, except Ray Park (playing Darth Maul, also a trained martial artist), look so clumsy and unconvincing as a Jedi warrior (aka alien samurai)? Because they don't move their feet and they don't know how. One quick way of telling apart the trained and untrained actors is to watch their feet. Well-trained actors have stability, balance, quickness, agility, and lightness in their feet. In comparison, untrained actors look heavy, slow, and clumsy, constantly tripping over themselves. This is why dancers can do fight choreography second to only Peking Opera actors. (Zhang Ziyi, for example, was trained as a dancer.)

Of course, sometimes a director can't turn an actor into Jackie Chan or Gene Kelly in a short time. But most of the time it is apparent that nobody is aware of the importance of lower body movement, which is the issue in every single SW movie. Without footwork, they look like lumbering, fumbling idiots flailing their arms and swords. 

The lack of good stunt cast is perhaps the most invisible but critical element in filming action scenes. From the Zatoichi to John Wick, no action hero can look good on screen without an army of skilled and selfless stunt cast to be beaten up and die with impeccable reaction and timing. This is why, in The Matrix, Keanu Reeves looked the best when he is fighting a herd of villains and the worst when he is fighting Laurence Fishburne one on one --- because neither has the training and experience to take a hit and fall realistically. This is why the experts like Sammo Hung, Yuen Woo-Ping, Jackie Chan, and Donnie Yen (and, I suspect, David Leitch and Chad Stahelski) have their own teams of stunt actors. The decline and demise of Hong Kong and Japanese action cinema can be directly traced to the dwindling supply of well-trained stunt actors. 

Stars come and go, but stunt actors are forever. 

The Trickster God

 

I cannot think of another mythological figure more complex and fascinating than Krishna. He is beloved, but why is he beloved? There are tricksters in various mythologies, one of the most famous being Loki. However, being deceptive and "tricky" is usually not an elevated trait for gods and runs the risk of being dismissed as a minor clown. 

I remain convinced that Krishna was not among the original characters in earlier versions of the Mahabharata. His role in the epic is that of a peripheral presence. His story is documented primarily in the appended Harivamsa. 

The complexity in this character is reflected in his color, the black, which contains all colors and all shades of humanity, including the idea of deception and illusion. 

Deception is a human trait that causes some degree of revulsion and disgust, and relatively modern and prescriptive religions are understandably reluctant to condone, much less exemplify, such an element. Yet it is elemental to humanity and induces a thrill and a recognition when we witness Krishna's tricks (for some, the thrill might lead to a moral outrage rather than admiration). 

How they made him both extremely human and thoroughly above humanity, both contradictory and harmonious, continues to puzzle the mind. It is a feat I have not seen in any other myth or religion. It might not be a cure but certainly a therapy for the dichotomized worldview brought on by monotheistic religions that lately came to dominate human societies. 

Good Jazz in Movies

I have complained about bad jazz in movies. I have also seen some movies in which the jazz is pretty good, but they tend to be biopics of famous musicians, such as Miles Davis ("Miles Ahead" 2015, an extremely forgettable movie) and Charlie Parker ("Bird" 1998). Almost 20 years ago, I went through a phase as a Spike Lee fan, and his "Mo' Better Blues" is very good. 

The recent movie "Sylvie's Love" is a rare example of having good jazz without being a jazz musician biopic. 

The male lead character Robert is a talented saxophone player, and the playing was pretty convincing in the movie --- I was shocked to discover that the actor, Nnamdi Asomugha, is not only not a musician but rather an ex-footballer. The depiction of jazz musician's life is, even if not necessarily very realistic, at least reasonable. There are scenes of band rehearsals and conflicts with the manager, of traveling and touring. We are even treated to the real decline of the popularity of jazz in the 1960s. 

The movie itself is not my cup of tea. I am perhaps constitutionally unsuited for swoony melodrama. Todd Haynes' similar tribute to Douglas Sirk, Far from Heaven, did nothing for me, either. I only care about the jazz-related elements. 

The most thrilling scene is where the female lead and title character, Sylvie (Tessa Thompson), talks to Robert about jazz giants like Monk and recommends new albums to him, even though she does not play jazz herself --- her own passion is television. It is the exchanges of two jazz-loving minds. 

The movie's writer and director, Eugene Ashe, is himself a musician. So it is not surprising that many of the details are authentic. Nevertheless, I wish there were more details in Robert's professional life in the movie. The final part of the movie (spoilers!) is a big letdown, unfortunately. There is no reason for Robert to make the stupid choice of leaving both Sylvie and music, two of his life's passion, just because he is no longer a star. OK, there are reasons for this: 1) the convention of melodrama that requires a stupid excuse to separate the lead characters in order to produce a tear-jerking finale, 2) the male chauvinistic notion that he has to make more money and be more successful than she is, and 3) the need for an ending in which the woman makes a sacrifice for him.

La Guerra E Finita

It was serendipitous that MHz Choice (a streaming service) started an Italian TV series called La Guerra E Finita last Tuesday, January 19, 2021. The series is based on a nonfiction book, The Selvino Children, about the experience of hundreds of Jewish underaged refugees, who had survived the Holocaust, on a Northern Italian estate, where they were cared for and educated, in the post-WWII years. They eventually emigrated to Israel. 

The title "The War is Over" and the mood of the characters, both adults and children, after their gruesome ordeals and traumas, are eerily resonant. 

I wonder about those average Italians. They lived with their Jewish neighbors for decades without strong resentment, suddenly got swept in Fascist power and propaganda, and became willing participants of the persecutions and violence against their old neighbors and friends. Then one day, suddenly, they were told, The war is over. You lost. 

I have seen many books and movies and TV series depicting the period before the rise of the Nazis, before the war, and during the war, all the way up to the end of the war. But this is the first time I think about what happened after the war in the minds of most average Italians or Germans. Most stories about the postwar period keep their eyes on the resistance fighters or those who simply disliked Fascism or Nazism, but the fact is that a very large proportion, perhaps a majority, of average Italian and German people, as well as Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, and French people agreed with the Nazis. One might suppose they were convinced by the forceful propaganda or they wanted to side with the power, or they were brainwashed. While pogroms occurred periodically throughout history, most areas did not have deep-seated or widespread racial hatred. Nevertheless, when Nazis came into power, many people joined them, and many more accepted the new ideology with little reflection or resistance. The new leaders say this is right (and they look so tough and strong!), so it must be right.

That's not an isolated phenomenon in human history. 

So, what happened to the believers and supporters when the war is over? Even if they had to claim that they were merely following orders, did they really change their mind? 

Recently I decided to re-read Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories". They were semi-fiction about the social conditions and people in Berlin in 1930 to 1933, until Hitler came to power. He wrote them before the war and, at the time, did not know that Nazis would eventually lose. The depictions of Nazi thugs and the police who sided with them were chilling, but not as chilling as how average Berliners, weighed down by economic distress and frustrations, gradually accepted Hitler as their rightful leader and somehow realized that they, too, hated Jews and communists. Nazism was going to make Germany great again. Hurry and get on the bandwagon. When the alternative is terror and death, conformance suddenly becomes voluntary and even heartfelt.

What happened to their moral compass when they lost the war and it was all over? How many abandoned or renounced their previous beliefs without difficulty? Surely it could not have been easy to deal with the cognitive whiplash in the post-war era. Did some think Nazism and racial hatred were not wrong, except it lost? Or did some believe that only the right side can win the war, and therefore "we" must have been wrong?

Perhaps the same questions can be asked of the American Civil War, in which the anti-slavery Union side won. But, it was less of a mystery what the people on the losing side had thought about all this, after the war was over. Their actions spoke louder than any words. History has recorded what both sides did in the next 150 years. People went on pretty much along the same ideology as they had before. Losing a war did not significantly changed their minds. The same ideas and feelings, including hatred, went on and on, perhaps even grew more intense, after the war was over. 

This realization is very different from the common view of turbulent events in history, such as wars and war-like periods (see also Stalin's Purge and the Cultural Revolution). We tend to assume that the end of such an event or period inevitably brings a fundamental change to people and society, including what they believe and how they behave. We are under the impression that people have changed when the war is over, because, look, the Holocaust has not occurred again, slavery has not returned, the same things are not repeated in history. But that's stupid. People remain largely unchanged, but the circumstances have. So their beliefs and ideology manifest in superficially different ways. History does repeat itself, but we just refuse to see it. 

Because the war is never completely over. "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Alone and Together in Jazz

From time to time jazz music is depicted in movies. The last time I complained about it was regarding "La La Land." Someone's comment that the new Pixar movie "Soul" is a "mutated La La Land" kind of gave me a zap and explains why I also dislike how jazz is depicted in this animation. 

The music in the movie is very nice, of course, except the climatic piano solo when the main character, Joe Gardner, achieved enlightenment. When that tinkly, empty, vanilla, forgettable, sugary pop tune came up, the unpleasant association with the theme music from "La La Land" came to mind. Riiiiiight. This is a character that lives, breathes, and oozes traditional jazz, and at the moment of his emotional epitome, you give me this ... thing? You've got to be kidding me. 

There are a few other jazz-related scenes that bother me. For example, the audition scene. Joe got into his own "zone" of playing piano and forgot about everyone around him including other members of the quartet. When he "woke up," the saxophonist and leader of the band, was so impressed with his playing that she gave him the job on the spot. 

I am not a musician of any kind, but I find this scene not only unrealistic but distasteful. I cannot imagine any musician, unless he is playing solo, would forget to listen. 

Yes, to listen. It is a skill almost as important as to play, or perhaps more important. 

The movie's standard of a good musician seems to be entirely individualistic, with no room left for collaboration. I don't need to be a musician to realize that it's absurd. I don't know anything about classical music, but it is obvious that a member of an orchestra has to watch the conductor and listen to his or her colleagues all the time. Has any musician ever played solo all his career?

Unlike classical music, jazz requires extensive improvisation. If band members do not listen to and respond to each other using their utmost attention, a jazz band would end up like the school band being ridiculed at the beginning of the movie --- a screeching mess. However, we see no collaboration whatsoever in the movie. Joe and the other band members hardly exchanged a look, much less a word, during the audition, before he was hired on the spot by the band leader and told to come back to perform that night. No rehearsals. No jam sessions. No preparation. What's worse, all it took for the band to deliver a fabulous performance on that night was for Joe to wear a good-looking blue suit. 

Well, OK, I guess it's not really a movie about jazz music or musicians, despite the soundtrack and the photographs of Nina Simone and Duke Ellington on the wall. 

Thinking about this some more, I realize that it is the underlying value system represented by the movie that bothers me the most. First, the filmmakers seem to imply that excellence does not require hard work. All you need is "flow" or being "in the zone" or, put it more plainly, having talent. Much has been written in educational psychology that American children are put in a disadvantage relative to Asian children, because they are taught almost all the time that talent and intelligence determine their success, while hard work is considered a shameful mark of being dumb. Only stupid children have to work hard, right?

Second, and perhaps more pertinent in today's world of global connectedness, is the extreme individualism. Or shall we call it the mythology of individualism? Michael Lewis observed in his book "The Undoing Project," which chronicles the history-making friendship and collaboration of Kahneman and Tversky in behavioral economics, that the American culture worships individual "heroes" and has zero recognition of or interest in collaboration of multiple persons or a group. What is curious is that the culture not only does not value collaboration, it no longer sees it. The only visible figures are individuals and their individual talent and achievement. 

Back to jazz. The freedom it affords individual band members to play and riff exists simultaneously with the requirement for the band to play together. Members of the best jazz ensembles embrace each other's performance with organic and telepathic togetherness. They stimulate and inspire each other to create something much larger than the sum of their individual contributions. That's why jazz is irresistible. 

I am by no means a jazz aficionado, but it is sad to see it being portrayed by people who care about jazz even less than I do.