Ghost in the Shell: Gender Considerations

 

Do you think I am going to discuss how the depiction of naked female bodies (and the lack of male ones) in this classic anime reflects patriarchy's objectification of women? The answer is no. I have free time to write blog posts, but not that much free time to write about things that too many people already see and know. Surely, you know the original manga, created by Shirow Masamune, was published in a seinen magazine (seinen: young adult men) in the early 1990s? Naked boooooobs is par for the course. I have no objections in this context. People should be allowed to have their booooooobs. 

No, there are other gender-related elements in Ghost in the Shell, written and directed by Mamoru Oshii, based on the original manga. Here I just want to point out one curious thing in the gender presentation of the self-aware artificial intelligence, an entity known as either the puppet master or Project 2501.

In the 1995 movie, the puppet master (a ghost without a shell) is driven by Section 6 into a female robotic body (a shell, with boobs of course) and "captured" for destruction, but it is referred to by the human characters as "he" and voiced by a male actor (Iemasa Kayumi). Later in the climactic scene, the puppet master talks Major Kusanagi into mating (connecting) with it to produce a new generation of AIs that live inside Major (or maybe just in the interweb), and Major agrees. (Note that in the manga sequel, Major did go on to spawn a number of "selves", which can be interpreted as baby AIs.)

Let's review. At first, the AI enters and controls a naked female body with an empty brain, it speaks in a male voice and is referred to with the male pronoun, and later it has a cyber intercourse with a female character. Few, if anyone, would question such a premise, even if the scene of a female half-body speaks with a male voice is incongruent (above). Nevertheless, Oshii was obviously not unaware of the gender mismatch, because in this scene he had the (fully clothed) human male characters comment that "we refer to the puppet master as 'him' for convenience, but we don't know whether it is a man or a woman."

That the puppet master was originally imagined or, more precisely, assumed to be male is corroborated by the symbolism of the cyber intercourse scene. The puppet master explains to Major that it wants to reproduce with another entity of its kind to introduce diversification into its own "genetic" material, and it has chosen Major. It is clearly uninterested in Batou or any other man (more precisely, male cyborg) in the world. In fact, the puppet master has been stalking Major in the web for a while, which is why Major had a vague feeling of not being entirely herself in earlier scenes. Thus, the story is on some level about mating/reproduction. Of course, just like the Prometheus series by Ridley Scott, the author assumes that the self/subject (the storyteller and the audience's point of view) is male, who seeks a female body/object to complete the baby-making mission, because he can't do it by himself. The entire chain of logic is so instinctive and deeply embedded in our culture (nearly all cultures in the modern world?) that everyone barely registers its meaning.

(Unlike Skynet, the AI is not interested in world domination. It just wants ... babies, which is kind of funny, because the human urge for babies is driven by our fear of mortality.)

Well, I guess this is about objectification of women after all, ie, as an object used in reproduction.

But not so fast!

In the 2008 "Ghost in the Shell, 2.0," which includes some new 3D animation and re-edited background music, the puppet master is re-dubbed in a female voice.

I realized this when I rewatched the DVD of 2.0. I was switching between the English and Japanese soundtracks and found it strange that the English version had a male voice but the Japanese version a female voice. Usually the English dub would never make such a drastic change from the original version. After a little digging, I found that the English dub was created for the 1995 version and no one even realized that the puppet master was re-dubbed in 2.0.

This had to be a deliberate change. I looked up the credits for both the 1995 original movie and the 2008 version 2.0. It appears that no other characters were re-dubbed except the puppet master. It was neither an accident nor pressure from the "woke mob" that the voice changed gender. Other than Oshii himself, who would or could do this?

Now the above-referenced scene with the female robot body seems more natural. As I watched a female voice inviting Major to have a baby with her---I mean "it", a totally different feeling started to rise in the air. 

On a side note, I have been wondering whether male cyborg bodies in this world have all the male sex organs. Even a blind person can see that Batou has been carrying a torch for Major for years, but he is a character that is discarded by the author in this "romantic" triangle. However, can you still have sexual feelings with a mechanical body? 

Mysteries of Lisbon (2010)

 

I first watched "Mysteries of Lisbon" at least 5 years ago and immediately bought it on Google Play, but I did not rewatch it until now, which is fortuitous, as I have only recently learned about Kenji Mizoguchi's mastery of mise-en-scene while watching his "47 Ronin." Raul Ruiz's camera movement feels similar but with its own contemplative rhythm. There are a few places of panning back and forth that suggest a sense of magic or, perhaps more accurately, memory and dream, such as a character appearing in a previously empty space. 

I must admit to an irrational partiality for 19th century Romantic novels, a genre to which the 1854 novel of the same name belong. Even though I know nothing whatsoever about Portuguese literature and culture, it feels extremely reminiscent of all the British and French epics I read in adolescence. Just like the food one ingests in childhood will become one's permanent favorite taste, the stories one gobbles up with a side of youthful hormones stay with one forever. It's the comfort food that reminds us of home. 

The plot is saturated with the kind of passion, heartbreak, scandals, and improbable entanglement typical of the Romantic melodrama. No doubt the novel by Camilo Castelo Bronco, which has not been translated to English as far as I can find, is as sensationalist and overwrought as the works of Alexandre Dumas (pere). However, the movie does something more with the material --- It both immerses us in this stiff aristocratic world and takes us out of it by several cinematic devices. For example, the foldable cardboard theater carried to the end of the world by the main character, Joao/Pedro da Silva, reminds us from time to time that we are watching a staged drama. The visual layering of characters and space in many scenes heightens the separation of the storyteller and the listener. The layering is also applied to scenes in which an audience exists inside the frame as eaves-dropping but anonymous servants or monks. Ruiz seems to be constantly reminding us about the artificiality of drama and our role as the recipient of a narrative. 

During the years after having watched the 4.5-hour-long movie for the first time, I could barely remember any of the characters or subplots, but the images of lush woods and crumbling mansions, as well as the sense of longing and decay, always stayed with me. Some scenes are awash in a golden glow of nostalgia, while other scenes are soaked in chilled green and blue. Plot is no longer necessary to convey the vibration of mood. 

In a duel scene near the end, which reminds me of the picturesque scenes in Barry Lyndon (but not so self-consciously screaming "look at me!"), the camera lingers after all the principal characters have left, and a bystander entirely outside of the plot sits down and, for a brief moment, becomes the center of his own drama. Like all the other mysteries of the movie, it fascinates me. We have seen this man pacing in the background throughout the duel, but our attention is captured by the fate of the characters inside the story and barely notices his existence ... until the end. It suggests that anyone's life may contain some romance like that of Joao, his mother Angela de Lima, Father Dinis, or anyone else in the story, and perhaps anyone of us can turn our life story into melodrama by enacting it on theater, cardboard or otherwise. 

The soundtrack is fantastic and perfect for the dreamy and melancholy mood of the movie (unlike the Vivaldi used in the trailer). Unfortunately I have not been able to find it online anywhere --- perhaps have to search in Portuguese.

Battle Royale (2000)

 

At the turn of the century, Battle Royale was an international cultural phenomenon. Soon enough I saw a blurry pirated copy on video, which seemed rather confusing in terms of characters and plot. Thus it is a surprise to learn recently that the movie was not officially released on video in the US until 2012, long after its poor cousin, Hunger Games, gained popularity with the American public. (I must note that the author of HG, Susan Collins, has always maintained that she had not heard of BR before she finished the novels. I believe her.)

The movie, directed by Kinji Fukasaku, is a variation of the horror/action movie genre. The original novel, written in 1997 and published in 1999, was considered shocking and controversial in Japan. There is obvious reference to Lord of the Flies, but it also bares the mark of shonen popular entertainment (mostly manga), which centers on the life of young adults (roughly 12-18 years). 

Rewatching it on Criterion Channel in the middle age, I am surprised by its prescience; no, perhaps it is simply astute social observation and commentary. It is me who has been too stupid to realize that our time, in contrast to the post-WW2 baby boom that came to age in the 1960s and 70s, is a time of the old against the young. 

In 2023, it is hard not to be inundated with the dumbass meme that the leading politicians are "too old." News media parrot the meme without any insight, crowing on about the age of presidents, presidential candidates, congressional leaders, etc., etc., without a hint of understanding why. When the very old president tries to do something good for young people, for example, by using tax dollars to pay off a portion of their student loans, look how the entire society goes into hysterics: "No one helped me with my student loans. Why should today's young people get any free money?"

Ours is a time in which older generations take ever greater power and resources from younger generations. The shift in population age pattern in the past 80 years is one of the main forces that drive the political and social climates in this era. (Another force is "the pill.") People tend to hoard more resources and power naturally over time (if they stay alive), but this trend is exacerbated by the delay in death. As the proportion of older people grows more rapidly than ever, young people quickly lose the little power they gained through the 1970s. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 is the first sign that we were entering of an increasingly conservative era with no end in sight, simply because old people continue to outnumber young people. Since then, (draft-dodging) conservatives never stopped complaining about younger generations for being too soft, too lazy, too fragile, too whiny, too whatever ... (The podcast If Books Could Kill has plenty of materials on this phenomenon. The fear and hatred of younger generations are on full display.)

To express the youth-elderly conflict, director Fukasaku derived inspiration from his youth as a middle-schooler carrying corpses killed by US bombs in WW2. The war is a killing game that old men throw young people into. That's certainly true. That the allegory continues to resonate from 2000 to 2023 is an indication that the generational struggle for power and resources remains the same in peace time and will continue in the foreseeable future, when the population continues to live longer and become older, gripping power and money ever tighter in our spotted, wrinkled, bony hands.

An example of this generational conflict? Climate change politics. Older people have less incentive to sacrifice some of their comfort and convenience, and more importantly financial position, to fend off an uninhabitable environment some years from now, no matter how much lip service is paid to loving their children and grandchildren.

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I have not watched the Hunger Games movies, but I did read the first book. It is OK but vastly inferior to Battle Royale. The difference between HG and BR is precisely a reflection of the difference between the American and Japanese popular cultures. HG is a typical American fantasy of playing pretend revolution in a faraway land/galaxy of dictatorship. Both exciting and safe, because "it will never happen here!" BR, on the other hand, is a horror story smack in the middle of its own place and time with a unique absurdist humor. The Japanese are the best in the world at the art of death, while the American ... well, as Disney has told us, Americans are immortal; death does not exist for them. 

Ironically, 2 decades later, Battle Royale looks more like real-life America than Japan, with young people shooting each other dead in schools (with automatic weapons, just like the movies!) every day while older people buy more and more guns. If Fukasaku could see it from heaven, would he laugh out loud? 

The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Shirley Jackson seems to be enjoying a moment of revived popularity right now. Her major novels, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle both got a screen adaptation in the past few years. There is a sort-of-biographical-but-not-really movie made starring Elisabeth Moss. 

While I am in general very sensitive to horror stories and movies, reading "The Haunting of Hill House" was not a particularly terrifying experience, even though I did it mostly at night in the dark. It helps that there is no blood and gore, no hacked-up corpses, no severed limps or gouged eyes anywhere in the book.

The novel is written in a very subtle style, which rapidly shifting perspectives, abundant hints and inferences, and omissions that are as meaningful as words on the page. For example, in one scene involving three characters, we see only two conversing, and the silence of the third is where the drama lies. Deceptively simple but technically sophisticated, the novel was recognized as a masterpiece and a finalist for the National Book award. 

There are a number of components in the novel, including an pervert Victorian-era father who probably abused his daughter in a chilling but very brief segment in Chapter 6. Lesbianism is also hovering significantly in the background, not only in the character Theodora but also the bond between Theo and Eleanor, the main character. However, at the heart of the novel is undoubtedly Mother. 

I looked up a few reviews of the novel. That Hill House represents a mother figure is widely accepted: the soft bed, plush chairs, excellent meals cooked by Mrs. Dudley, enclosed rooms (suggestive of the womb). It mothers all four characters who gathered there to investigate it: Professor Montague, future owner of the house Luke Sanderson, and two women with supernatural talents, Eleanor and Theodora. However, Eleanor is the center of the story and the most susceptible among them to this mothering. It took me a while to be convinced that none of the other characters would feature prominently in the relationship with Hill House, which somewhat hampered my appreciation for the novel in the first half. (Actually, I was waiting for some of the side characters to be killed by the House.) 

The roots of Eleanor's susceptibility are vaguely suggested through her history of having spent almost her entire youth, from 21 to 32 years of age, caring for her ailing mother, with no social or personal life outside of the confinement and obligations. All this took place before the opening of the novel, and we only see glimpses of her resentment and desire to escape into independence. What kind of a mother was Mrs. Vance in her illness? There is only a mention of "small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair." In a word, inadequate. The roles of mother and daughter were reversed, and Eleanor had to mother her mother for 11 years. Thus, the House seems much more welcoming and fits into her desire for a mother. 

(If you do not wish to be spoiled, stop reading here.)

Some reviewers have put forth a theory that postulates that most or all of the haunting in the novel, such as strange noises and writings on the wall, are in fact generated by Eleanor instead of the House, as she has telekinetic abilities. I am in the camp against the theory. I think the House exists as an independent being that sometimes but not always responds to Eleanor's unspoken wishes and desires, which is in fact what most mothers do (respond to and fulfill the wishes of their babies without verbal/linguistic communication). 

While some reviews consider Eleanor's mental evolution throughout the novel as a disintegration or descent into madness, I don't agree. Her mind is increasingly merged with the House (her new mother figure) over time, and her wish to "come home" is then written on the wall. It is indeed Eleanor's wish, which is why Theo the telepath asked "Did you do this?" to Eleanor's rage. 

Among the residents in the House, Eleanor is obviously the closest to Theo, who at first represents an alternative life to Eleanor's, an inspiration and aspiration for her future life. Over time, however, Eleanor turned on her. Although the author somewhat obscured the heart of their quarrels, I am reasonably certain that it is caused by Eleanor's effort to turn Theo into a mother figure and Theo's refusal. This is made clear only in the penultimate chapter:

Theo said carefully, "She wants me to take her home with me after we leave Hill House, and I won't do it."

Luke laughed. "Poor silly Nell," he said. "Journeys end in lovers meeting."

The response from Luke is significant because the quote "journey's end in lovers meeting" is repeated throughout the novel. However, romantic or sexual attraction is sorely lacking between Eleanor and other characters, either male or female. This love is therefore not sexual but rather parental and primitive. Theo's rejection to be Eleanor's request to be the latter's mother is the trigger that pushes Eleanor into the arms of Hill House. 

While we have all heard of Oedipus Complex and its effect on our mating habits -- at least for heterosexual persons, women's relationship with other women is often heavily influenced by their relationship with their mother, especially if the original relationship is unsatisfactory. What Eleanor seeks, with despair, in other women is a new, better mother to replace her inadequate one. Hill House is the only one willing to give it to her.

The male characters sort of fade into the background. There is a brief segment in which Luke flirts with Eleanor and floats the possibility of a romantic relationship. Is this a suggestion that Eleanor is not a lesbian or has a crush on Luke? No. Reading the text closely, it is apparent that Eleanor is merely contemplating a potential escape from her family and old life through marriage. Luke is trying to seduce her by whining that he had no mother and "No one ever loved me," hinting that he too is seeking a mother. This could work with women who want to mother others, but Eleanor is the opposite. That is why she reacted violently:

No, she thought, you are not going to catch me so cheaply. I do not understand words and will not accept them in trade for my feelings; this man is a parrot. ... that maudlin self-pity does not move directly at my heart. 

A baby cannot be a mother, especially after she had already played a mother for 11 years. Her rage and her despair lie in the condition that no one would mother her and give her the satiated infant experience. 

Late in the novel, Mrs. Montague and her male "friend" made an exasperating appearance. Although their function in the novel is unclear, Mrs. Montague is a hilarious character who constantly shushes her husband, the benevolent father/authority figure in most of the previous chapters, rendering him completely impotent. This odd threesome marriage may be an echo of Shirley Jackson's own marriage, in which her husband Stanley Hyman, a college professor, constantly flaunted his affairs with his students. One of them even lived in their house for a while. Perhaps she serves as another argument for the impossibility of escape through marriage, perhaps it is just comic relief. 

The extraordinary opening of the novel lays out the central premise: 

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within. 

The absolute reality that drives Eleanor insane is that she cannot have a mother. This is a true human condition, as all mothers are more or less inadequate to a human infant's need. Mothers are human too and all humans have limitations, especially in the insufficient capacity of telepathy and empathy. Infants wish for an omnipotent mother who can read their mind, but this mother does not exist. For some who have had less mothering than most, their hunger is bigger, more urgent, and more desperate, and therefore they are even less soothed by the lukewarm relationships with other people. For them, the absolute reality that they eventually face is a world in which no one comes when you cry, and this is what Eleanor gradually realizes in the final chapters. She cannot escape her absolute reality through "normal" relationships, with either men or women. Her only path is to return to the womb, and it comes true in the end: the warm, dark, silent, absolutely safe confine in which one never moves.

eXistenZ (1999)

 

Not only is this David Cronenberg movie is often compared with "The Matrix" from the same year, it also reminds me of Christopher Nolan's "Inception." It lacks the exuberance of The Matrix, but far outdoes Inception in its handling of multiple layers of game/dream. Perhaps more important, it is funny. It is playful with a wink and a chuckle, something that is not in Nolan's dictionary. 

To apply the psychoanalytical premise that fiction serves the same function as dream, games --- or movies, for that matter --- are the same. Cronenberg's dream is obviously more imaginative, more gross, and perhaps less inhibited than most people's, but I had a feeling of recognition with the organic game world in eXistenZ, even when I heard about it in 1999 but never watched the movie at the time. There are shared-dream elements in it, as bizarre as they are. It's not just the bone gun. There are creatures/objects in this world that are somewhere between machine and organism, or between dead and alive. Humans tend to regard other living species as either stupid enough to be no different from machine or smart enough to anthropomorphize. Are the "machines" or game pods living organisms or dead tools? Anyway, this is not necessarily a central concern of the movie, but the idea is lurking somewhere beneath the commentary about game/dream/fantasy. 

In 1999, people were not yet walking around with a smartphone permanently attached to their hands. Twenty-four years later, we are all sinking deeper and deeper into a mental existence further detached from our bodily existence. Perhaps there has always been a bodily desire to escape reality that has been discovered, exploited, and monetized only in the past decades. Perhaps this insidious but sweeping change to human existence is largely environmental. In terms of prescience, eXistenZ remains far more relevant than Inception and, to a lesser extent, The Matrix. 

The Talented Mrs. Sacret

The 1948 movie "So Evil My Love" tickled my brain when I happened on it on Criterion channel. There was so much plot, and the relationship between the lead characters (played by Ann Todd and Ray Milland) was both fascinating and fragmented. One couldn't help feeling that there was a lot more to the story. While the movie takes largely Milland's point of view, I couldn't help but conjure up Todd's perspective the whole time, which seemed far more interesting. The predictable moralizing common in Hays Code-era movies is kept to a minimum, delivering a tense and unusual noir. 

And it turned out to be based on a crime novel, published only a year before (1947), written by Marjory Bowen under the male pseudonym Joseph Shearing and originally entitled "For Her to See." Surprisingly (not!), the novel is almost entirely told from the point of view of the female character Mrs. Sacret (changed to Mrs. Harwood in the movie), while the movie not only shifted it to the male character, a painter who calls himself Mark Bellis, but also made him much more sympathetic than he was in the novel. It was obvious that the filmmakers (the screenwriters and director were all male) needed a male anchor to this story or they wouldn't know how to handle it. 

In many ways, the novel reminded me of "The Talented Mr. Ripley" by Patricia Highsmith, published just 8 years later. I wouldn't be surprised if Highsmith took inspiration from For Her to See. A key difference between these two novels --- and the element that makes this novel extremely original --- is that the main character is not a hero, not even an antihero, but rather a loser. This choice is so daring and difficult to pull off that very few writers have even attempted it. It is so much easier and more appealing for both the author and the reader to identify with a master criminal and imagine oneself to be the smartest guy in the room. It is much more difficult to enter the mind of a not-too-smart character without making it drab and boring. No part of Mrs. Sacret's limited understanding of the world around her is boring, even if I, as the reader, often know more about what's going on than her. As an unreliable narrator with poor insight into other people's motives, it is a darkly comical pleasure to see the world through the very distorted lens of her eyes and introduces a modernist uncertainty rarely seen in this genre. 

In real life, the vast majority of criminals are not nearly as intelligent as the movies and thrillers want us to believe. Mrs. Sacret's motives and calculations are so petty and common that most authors have no interest in exploring them. The central similarity between her and Mr. Ripley is their resentment and envy toward their rich friends. In other words, money. Their conviction for taking money from their friends by any means necessary push the theme of class struggle very near the surface, which might be a source of discomfort for other writers. Mrs. Sacret especially is driven by a sense of grievance and entitlement that is possibly the most prevalent motivation among criminals of our time. We are startled in our recognition of this pervasive sentiment. "I deserve more. I don't have it because those people cheated me. I am wronged. I have cause to take revenge on all of you." 

The psychological insight throughout the novel is refreshing because it is more astute than most thrillers and, let's not kid ourselves, literary fiction about the lives of college English professors. All of the characters are ambiguous and test the limit of our sympathy. This comes with the unreliable lens of Mrs. Sacret and makes the reading experience delightful (especially for a cynic). 

Unlike the movie that centers around the male seducer/mastermind, the novel keeps him in the shadows, drawing a most chilling and irresistible psychopath rarely seen in other works but resonates with reality. The ending is really stunning in its lack of complete resolution. Even after decades of reading mysteries and crime novels, I am hard pressed to name a villain as well written as "the painter." 

What I like the most about this novel, however, is how aggressive and pungent the language is. In a novel by a woman (an English one no less!), about a woman's crime, told in the woman's voice, and filled with female characters, the pages are unapologetically filled with words like "power" and "stupid" and "hate." No euphemisms, no circumlocution, no fluff. Perhaps that was why Bowen chose to publish it under one of her male pseudonyms?

Communist and Capitalist Dictionaries

The Unbearable Lightness of Being in many ways reminds me of certain boys I remember from high school. They are pretty clever, but not as clever as they think they are. They throw around a lot of catchy ideas that, upon closer examination, lack depth and rigor. But the shallowness of their ideas is a feature, not a bug, in their popularity. Some of them are annoying, others not so much.

Many of the stuff in the novel are annoying, but some actually invite a deeper exploration (which the author did not do). One of the interesting ideas is the separate dictionaries used by Sabina and Franz, who are more caricatures than characters. Sabina represents the exiled intellectual from a former Communist country, i.e., Kundera's own uneasiness in France. Franz is a standup comedy version of intellectuals of the west --- It's funny, but also superficial and stupid. 

Sharing some similarity with Kundera's situation but having emigrated at a much younger age, I happen to have a first-hand understanding of this "separate dictionary" phenomenon, except that I have a much better dictionary for the western culture than Kundera wrote for Franz. Sabina is a more precise portrayal, but his observation of the west, as represented by Franz, is largely cringeworthy. 

I'm sure he wrote this part out of frustration with the French intellectuals who fawn over him without being able to understand him. On the other hand, he too failed to understand them. In his version, "the west" has the strength but lacks aggression. Franz is soft and unmanly. That's why he got dumped by Sabina and killed by some lowly Asian thugs. He is unable to arouse his women because he doesn't know how to issue a command "Strip" (in contrast with Tomas, an infinitely virile Czech man).

(One does not have to dig too deep for Kundera's metaphors.)

This characterization is extremely superficial and misses the reality by a long shot. But that's not surprising. Recently, I have been contemplating the impact of Communism on the 20th century history of the world. From time to time I am asked by American-born friends about the Communist regime of China, and every time I have to suppress an urge to give a longwinded answer about why the Chinese political system is only labeled "Communist", not unlike a box of fried chicken labeled as steak. 

I have finally come to the realization that Communism, from the single source of Karl Marx's brain, morphed into a vast array of totally different meanings to different people who did different things with it. People assume they are talking about the same thing when they talk about Communism, but that's just an illusion. The theory of Communism did something to countries that label themselves as Communist or Socialist, including Soviet Union and China, but these are not really Communist things as defined by Marx. The theory also did something to countries that label themselves as Capitalist, but the effects are subtle and complex and requires some exploration. 

To apply a bit of the systems theory, the fact that some countries in the world labeled themselves Communist (regardless of what they were actually doing) and happened to be economic and military rivals to some other countries in the world, caused those other countries to label any internal conflicts as Communist and foreign. For example, during the 1960s and 70s, the counterculture movement involving civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights was labeled as Communist infiltration by conservatives, thus rebranding long-term domestic conflicts as a foreign threat. When I first learned this phenomenon I almost laughed out loud. Obviously we are using different dictionaries in which the definitions of Communism has no resemblance to each other. 

The Unbearable Promiscuity of Kitsch

I have several curious observations about the novel, one of which is the extensive philosophizing around the concept of kitsch in the beginning of Part 6. 

First, the author goes through great lengths to elucidate human society's awkward attitude about and the theological problem with shit, coming to the conclusion that disgust and excitement (clearly referring to sexual arousal) are two sides of the same coin or at least dependent on each other. 

Then, we come to the original definition of kitsch: "the absolute denial of shit." It's not a stretch to include sexual activities, along with its disgust and excitement, in the idea of "shit", not the least because the promiscuous sexual habits of the hero, Tomas, stands at the center of the novel. 

In subsequent chapters, we are given an definition of Communist kitsch, which has nothing to do with either shit or sex. Rather, the definition becomes the suppression of individualism in favor of a uniform display of total agreement among people, however artificial and coerced. Although we who live in the free world can safely assume that "he is not talking about me," let's not forget that the chapter started with an example of kitsch in an American senator. Moreover, he did write in a previous chapter that "The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch." This statement is so all-encompassing so as to be meaningless, as if the entire history of human society is built upon this concept of kitsch, meaning either the universal disgust of the bodily function or the urge to pretend to agree with each other. 

(Regarding the disgust and shame of bodily function, Freud and others have done plenty of research. There is nothing new here.) 

It's all well and good to interpret the author's critique of kitsch as the grotesque display of unity in Communist propaganda, but I cannot help but wonder what all this has to do with shit. 

If we are to take the following definition of totalitarian kitsch seriously, then it is no longer limited to Communist propaganda and social pressure of conformity: 

Everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life; every display of individualism; every doubt; all irony; and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women ...

In modern western countries, among intellectuals, none of these infringements is banished, including the mother and the homosexual man. But what about a compulsive womanizer like Tomas? 

Nearly all of the chapters from Tereza's perspective describe how much she suffers excruciating jealousy and despair from Tomas' womanizing. At least half of Tomas' chapters describe how he enjoys having sex with as many women as possible with absolutely no consequences. I am fascinated by the latter (but not Tereza's chapters, which are so shallow and cliched), which is mixed with a little disgust, I guess not that different from the feeling while looking at the Bristol Stool Form Scale. 

It is particularly fascinating to examine Tomas' promiscuity in parallel with his love for Tereza. He gave up a life and career in Zurich for her (although it is never clear why she ran back to Prague, it is obviously a necessary plot device). There are many touching passages about Tomas being deeply moved by Tereza's grief and pain; his love is aroused most intensely when he hears about her horrible dreams of death:

Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot -- he could accept it all more easily than he dared admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza's dream was something he could not endure.

To this passage I wrote: Her grief is obviously not as unendurable as a life without collecting women in his sexual escapades.

I have some even more uncharitable thoughts, but I would stick to the more concrete interpretation with a relatively obvious chain of logic strung through the consecutive chapters. Sure, the argument for individualism and against collective display of feeling is all fine and dandy, but I don't think that's the whole point. The point is presented to the reader everywhere in the world: If you are disgusted by the compulsive womanizer, you too are kitsch! 

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As the chapters go on, the definition of kitsch expands out of control and becomes so general and vague that it loses all meaning. Sabina's longing for a picture-perfect home life in which she can compensate for her early loss of parents (which in itself is very banal characterization) is also lumped into the author's classification of kitsch, even though he admits that this longing is genuine and specific to Sabina. The sentiment comes from within Sabina herself and not a desire to fit in with any kind of social norm. 

In other words, even the first tear is kitsch, despite the earlier definition that only the second tear is so. By this point, any human sentiment can be called kitsch, and there is no longer any distinction between authentic emotions and affectations. He also throws a number of other concepts into kitsch, including but not limited to cliques, tribes, ideology, identity, and affiliation. This ceaseless expansion leads to the inevitable conclusion: 

For none among us is superhuman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition. 

Hmm. You have put the entire human condition into kitsch. So why should anyone scorn it?

Showgirls (1995)

 

I got to this notorious Verhoeven movie after seeing at least 6 other movies of his. So, by this time, I am familiar enough with his internal logic and worldview and no longer have that vague disturbing feeling. While I do not disagree with a lot of the discourse on the movie's themes of misogyny, commodification of the female body, and female rage, I do feel like observers are consistently hampered by their inability to imagine that a male author/creator can project his own self into female characters. The universality of this blind spot is absolutely baffling, as I dare say every female storyteller has tried to write from a male point of view. Is it so hard to imagine that male storytellers would identify with female characters sometimes? George RR Martin mentioned that of course all those female characters came out of his own mind just like the male ones, including Cersei. He had to identify with them to write their POV chapters.

What I mean is, social and gender critiques aside (all valid), Nomi represents a pretty big part of Verhoeven himself.

(If the character were male, this identification would be apparent to everyone immediately.)

Many have observed, and Verhoeven himself also acknowledged, that the character's introduction is more than a little strange. From the start, Nomi is presented as brusque, irritable, and combative. In other words, the audience does not recognize her as a white American woman of a lower class. Her behaviors would be far more understandable and acceptable if they had come from a white Dutch man.

Most of the movie demonstrating Nomi's ambitious but conflicted pursuit of success in Las Vegas is an obvious analogy of Verhoeven's own ambitious and conflicted pursuit of success in Hollywood. Nomi's repeated and earnest insistence that she is not a prostitute is cited by critics as one of the laughable choices of the movie --- and indeed I agree, as she clearly seduced the Kyle McLaughlin character in order to get the understudy role --- I interpret this as Verhoeven's self-mockery of his career in America. Sure, he slipped satire into Total Recall, Robocop, and Basic Instinct, but these movies nevertheless were primarily crowd-pleasing blockbusters that sucked the American audience's collective dick. So I can imagine he felt a little bit conflicted about how much he was prostituting his talent and sensibility for fame and fortune. (I read somewhere that he claimed that he moved to Hollywood because his wife pushed him into it. Regardless of the credibility of his claim [throwing his wife under the bus?], it's an indication of his ambivalence.)

In the past 30 years, I have been to Las Vegas twice, once for a professional conference and the other for a figure skating event. The vulgarity and gaudiness and excess of Vegas are accurately reflected in Showgirls' own style. Besides the vulgarity and naked (no pun intended) greed, I am surprised by a sense of hostility permeating ordinary interactions, even though it is 90% service economy. I repeatedly got ripped off by taxi drivers. Restaurant staff were unfriendly. Unlike rural America, the general indifference and antagonism are not related to race or immigration or the usual political trigger points. People just seem tired and hardened, with no empathy to spare. The only nice and honest taxi driver I met, a middle-aged woman, told me that she was a Los Angeles transplant and contemplating moving back to LA.

In that sense, the Molly character in the movie is almost unrealistically tender and generous. Perhaps it is just Verhoeven's commentary about the general condition of African Americans; I don't know. That element aside, Verhoeven's unapologetic cynicism about human nature (see "Flesh and Blood", 1985) fits perfectly for the setting and makes his observation of Las Vegas and, by proxy, Hollywood totally spot on, especially the bosses, from the strip club owner to the show director to the businessmen, are all as ugly as the decorations of Vegas hotels.

Another complaint in the barrage of critical and pop-culture hatred toward Showgirls at the time was that none of the nudity and sex scenes are titillating or gratifying at all. Again I agree, except that it's not necessarily a bad thing. Everyone knows, and Verhoeven admitted himself, that sex is a central concern in his work, and he wants to examine it whenever he can. And yet, nothing in Showgirls is sexually appealing. Quite the opposite. All the sex and nude scenes are about dominance, and I do mean ALL. There is no warmth or tender feeling in any of them. If we have to dig deeper for feelings, perhaps the intense rivalry between Nomi and Gina Gershon's character contains a hint of mutual attraction, but I don't think it was successfully conveyed.

What is truly impressive and not cynical, however, is the dance choreography. Yes, the nudity could be a little distracting, but once we ignore that part (one gets numb quickly), it becomes clear that the dance scenes were well choreographed, filmed, and edited. Elizabeth Berkley performed her dance sequences with a crazed intensity that no doubt was required by Verhoeven. They were not only set pieces but also character- and plot-driven. In a way, it is a pretty good movie musical, if we ignore the Hollywood tradition of movie musicals as wholesome "family" entertainment. 

The movie is a little too long (excess is another Verhoeven trait). About two-thirds way through, I was getting somewhat bored. But the revenge scene near the end, although short, woke me up from the slump. The straight, blond ponytail hairstyle, used ONLY in this scene, suggests an entirely different movie that is more committed to rage, which might be more interesting. It reminds me of an early Verhoeven movie, The Fourth Man (1983). 

Another Interpretation of Basic Instinct (1992)

 

It is odd that I never watched "Basic Instinct", despite all the exposure to its references and spoofs over the years, until I got back onto Criterion channel. Perhaps it is my deep fear or disturbance of "scary women". After watching it I can confirm that the main character Catherine, played by Sharon Stone, is indeed one of the scariest women on screen for perhaps three quarters of the movie. Near the end she switches to the manipulation mode and becomes much less scary. The last good scene is Catherine telling her lover, Nick, played by Michael Douglas, to get lost, now that she has finished her book. (Plot-wise, it is rather inconsistent, as Catherine continues to keep other murderers in her life. Why not Nick too?) 

I can understand why some critics felt that Catherine is a male character dressed up as a woman, as cited by Karina Longworth in her fascinating You Must Remember This podcast. However, I have the feeling of watching a strange international mashup on screen: a love affair between a Dutch woman and an American man. Disclaimer: I know zero Dutch person in real life. The closest I have gotten to the Dutch culture is limited to superficially meeting a couple of Flemish persons, who would be the first to point out their difference from the Dutch. Nevertheless, Dutch women have a reputation of being one of the most powerful and aggressive groups of women in the world --- Well, who am I kidding, the reputation of Dutch women is that they are the most like men. 

On the other hand, Michael Douglas derived his popularity from embodying the quintessential American white men of the Reagan era. So the power dynamic between a European woman and an American man is so potent that, now, 30 years after the fact but on my first viewing, I see this movie as an allegory of the cultural dialog between Europe and United States, or perhaps simply the Netherlands and US, as presented by Paul Verhoeven. 

Verhoeven made several hits in Hollywood in the 80s and 90s that are more or less considered satires of the American culture. Robocop is a more explicit satire about the power of corporations and privatization of everything (which proves to be prescient). Starship Troopers is a more subtle spoof of the military and patriotism propaganda. Basic Instinct transparently makes fun of the Puritanical attitude toward sex that is particular to the American culture. (This satire also proves to be prescient for the direction of Hollywood movies in the next 30 years.)

Of course, American audience automatically identifies with Douglas' character, as he is the point-of-view character, and laments his diminished power/dominance in this relationship, and their disorientation has to be soothed by the absurd but more American relationship between Nick and his psychologist Beth, played by Jean Tripplehorn. However, a closer look at Nick suggests that he does not fit the trope of heroic cop that floods American movies and TV. His history of killing not only drug dealers but innocent bystanders is repeatedly brought up and never justified. It is curious and revealing that neither the American audience nor critics ever found that to be a defining trait of the character. Again history confirms the acuity of this observation about the American culture, which echoes the excessive violence in Robocop. Nick is a violent man who is in this job for the privilege of killing people (and getting away with it, as the dialog reminds us), and he does eventually shoots dead his ex-lover (perhaps representing the moviegoing American public), while his victim's last words were "I love you" (I guess she represents American white women?). Thus, he belongs in Catherine's menagerie of blood-thirsty killers. 

The simultaneous aggression and submission of this character make it a study in the American masculinity, which can be observed generally in the concurrence of excessive violence and sexual prudishness in American movies. The hilarious "happily ever after" ending may seem stupid but is necessary to protect the audience from facing the uncomfortable death of the American Man. Nevertheless, Nick's obliviousness in that scene carries the allegory to the end.

A Wizard of the Earthsea

One night twenty years ago, I went to see Ursula Le Guin at Folger Library, where she accepted the PEN/Malamud award. It was a bit of a trek from Gaithersburg, Maryland, but I had fallen in love with her novel "The Lathe of Heaven" and her Taoist philosophy. She was a white-haired diminutive woman. At the award, she read one of her short stories about an all-female expedition that reached the South Pole and decided to keep it secret. At that time I did not understand the ending, but now I do. Even in my ignorance, by the end of the reading, tears were streaming down my face. 

Some years ago I picked up the Earth Sea trilogy but could not get past the first chapter. Yet another Arthurian fantasy about wizards and magic centered around a boy who will grow into a great man. A tiresome trope of "the chosen one", I thought. A week ago it was again recommended to me as an example of an unusual exploration of power and its use. So I started again. My first impression was entirely wrong. It both is and is not the Arthurian fairy tale. 

There is indeed a lot of worldbuilding and magic and other traditional fantasy elements, but it also subverts many of the common tropes of the genre. The novel starts with a heroic achievement by Ged as a boy, setting up an expectation that he is destined to be a great hero through a series of conquests and elevation of his talent and skills. But no. The novel is a journey of self-discovery and self-reflection. It's a psychological adventure disguised as fantasy adventure.  

Le Guin had an unparalleled talent in writing severe hardships and quiet stoicism. She is really one of the toughest writers I have read. The ordeals she routinely put her characters through are punishing and merciless. So it is all the more extraordinary that none of it is at all cynical or nihilistic. One closes her books with warmth, humility, and affirmation of life. 

The novel was written in 1967. For over half a century, the fantasy genre, the YA genre, and the YA fantasy genre all exploded in popularity. Yet still the torrent of stale tropes continues to flow, and very few works are nearly as subversive, almost revolutionary, as Le Guin's. 

Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence (2)

Ursula Le Guin said, "Science fiction is not predictive; it's descriptive." I'm sure AI will rob many people of their jobs and change society in some ways, but my interest is of course less about the machine itself and more about the humanity reflected in the metallic shell. 

Machines have learned to beat humans in chess and go a few years ago, but it is a chat program that caused widespread panic/excitement, because it is now "talking" to average humans. It is not a surprise that we instinctively feel that a machine that talks to us is somehow more human than a machine that beat us at board games, because that is just the means with which each person interacts with other humans: language. 

Well, no, not exactly, we do not interact with other humans solely through language. However, since its emergence some 150,000 years ago, human communication increasingly depends on language, this abstract symbol that only evokes but is not the real thing. Money is not provide nutrition if swallowed. A drawing of flowers does not emit fragrance. The words "I love you" does not keep one warm at night. 

Nevertheless, the daily human experience, not limited to communication, is more and more lived through symbols. Just ask people how often they take telephone calls and see how many have completely switched to text messages. 

Now more than ever, it is clear that machines will never be like human, even if their imitation becomes impeccable. Why? Because machines do not have bodies. They do not crave chocolate; their intestines are not colonized by billions of bacteria; their eyes do not well up with tears; their skin does not sweat; they do not feel their bodies change; and they are not the prisoner of their bodies' eventual demise. Instead, they crunch numbers and convert them into the numbers that we understand. I am not against calling machines "alive" or "conscious", but human they can never be. 

On the other hand, humans are sliding down the slope into an existence that is ever closer to machines, as we rely more and more on symbols to talk to each other and even ourselves. The body, the sensations, and the tingling on the skin, are slowly sinking into oblivion. 

Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence (1)

Even if I am not all that interested in ChatGPT or AI in general, one cannot go around today without hearing about it. Can AI eventually replace humans? I think the answer is a foregone conclusion. Yes, of course. So far, the text sputtered out from ChatGPT is indistinguishable from a mediocre human writer: long-winded, dull, unreliable, a mixture of truth and rumors and occasional lies. 

The heart of the matter is not whether AI is in fact human-like, possessing the goodies that we have assigned to ourselves: consciousness, intelligence, self-awareness, etc. The real question is: Can we tell the difference? That's the essence of the Turing Test, and the answer is clearly, NO. A human cannot look at blocks of text on the screen and know whether it has been written by another human or a machine. 

So the uncomfortable question is: Are human no more than a machine? More than a possible future in which humans are obliterated by machines, the fear and discomfort is in the here and now: We are not special and maybe not as smart as we think. 

Sure, we can pat ourselves on the back for the fact that these human imitations were "created" or "invented" by humans, followed by the realization that we are not so complex or sublime or mythical that we cannot be easily imitated with some codes and billions and trillions of human-generated words as training material. In other words, real humans are pretty boring and predictable. We're also a bunch of narcissists who molded some clay creatures in our own image, and now in these images we see the plainness of ourselves. Oops. 

Triangle of Sadness

 

It is a bizarre coincidence that, in the same year (2022), there was a movie that disguises itself as being sympathetic to abusive power and another movie that disguises itself as making fun of the rich and privileged, while the real sentiment of the filmmakers was the opposite. Perhaps artistic expression always contains an element of pretention or coverup? 

Ruben Ostlund's movie is explicitly divided into three parts. It must be noted that the young couple of models, played by Charlbi Dean Kriek and Harris Dickinson, were in all three parts, even if they do not appear to be the center of the story in the second and third parts. The second part, which many critics either embrace or condemn, is the foundation of this appearance that the movie is making fun of the rich, upper-class people in the world. I completely agree with the criticism of this absurd farce, in which a bunch of forgettable caricatures of rich people puked and pooped on a luxury yacht. It is rather curious, however, how bad the middle part of the movie is. It's not funny (worth at most a few awkward chuckles) and totally meaningless. None of the characters carries a trace of truth that reminds the audience of the rich and powerful people in the real world. However, before we completely dismiss it, let's take a look at the first and last parts. 

The first part of the movie gives us scenes from a rather unflattering and truly hilarious (here the awkwardness works) relationship between the two models. They argue. They fight. Is it about money? They deny it. Then they seem to admit it. Then they deny it some more. As they dance around the issue of money, we get the vague sense that the conflict has more to do about gender roles than economics. Kriek's character declares that her goal is to find a rich man to marry and Dickinson's character is just a temporary fling during her search. So it is indeed about money, specifically, the traditional gender roles in which men give women money. 

The third part is a desert island--"Survivor" type of setup. To sum it up simply, a previous servant on the yacht, a Filipino cleaning lady played by Dolly De Leon, leaps into the position of power because of her superior survivor skills, while the sources of status on the yacht (wealth, rank, brawn) have lost their meaning on the island. She gradually starts to boss everyone around and exerts her dominance by taking the pretty boy into her bedroom. So his gender role is now the same as that suggested (but not realized) for Kriek in the first part --- selling one's body for material gains (in this case, food). 

The ending is particularly revealing of Ostlund's own intent. 

<SPOILERS BELOW!>

Without going into specifics, let me just say that the message is transparently that power corrupts equally people who did not have it, be it a woman, or a dark-skinned woman, or a dark-skinned older woman without beauty, or a dark-skinned older un-beautiful woman who works downstairs as a servant. As a topic for debate in abstract theory, there is nothing wrong with bringing it up. On the other hand, for Ruben Ostlund to lecture us about the danger of women in power, is a little like a king telling the starving peasants on the verge of revolution to sit down and shut up because, well, you will be corrupted by power once you have mine, so you'd better let me keep it. 

Sure, he has the right to feel this way, and I have the right to feel slightly queasy. 

In the final scene, we see Dickinson's character running in the jungle. According to Ostlund's own explanation, it suggests that he is on his way to rescue his girlfriend (the young and pretty one, not the recent old woman boss/lover, because he no longer needs her). So here we are back to agonizing over the gender role. What use is a man? Women can fish and cook and start fires and feed themselves. The answer, it seems, is that he can save his girlfriend. There may be some violence involved, but Ostlund does not want to go beyond a mere hint. 

So, in the end, Triangle of Sadness is really about gender roles and power, and how both concerns relate to each other. This is not a surprise. He presented the same question, what use is a man?, in his previous movie "Force Majeure". If a man is not able/willing to save his wife and children from death (at the risk of losing his own life), is he worthless? What is his place/role/identity in this world? 

As an American woman living in 2023, it is very difficult for me to sympathize with Ruben Ostlund, a Swedish man, on this discussion about whether women with equal power will behave as badly as men do, or whether women in fact already have more power than men, and what that does to men's place in the world. I must say that I have detected, in some fictional representations here and there, a discontent among Scandinavian men, who have lived in a more progressive, more gender-equal environment for much longer than I have. I do not know whether Swedish or Finnish women have surpassed their fellow countrymen in power and begun to oppress them --- although economic data suggest no. But you know the saying, when you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Their feeling of being oppressed is palpable, and I acknowledge that. 

What is truly amusing to me, however, is how Triangle of Sadness hides a somewhat reactionary heart underneath an anti-rich veneer by throwing shit around, while Tar pretends to ridicule the "Metoo" movement while tucking its anti-imperialist message in dream scenes. I enjoyed the discovery, but I'm not sure how I feel about so much dodging around. 

破门前后：中日对照

欧洲人进入日本可以追溯到十六世纪后期，西班牙传教士在民间传教，与当地政治秩序产生一定摩擦。德川幕府建立后（1603），逐渐加强对外国人的限制，开放长崎和平户两个港口允许外国船只停靠和贸易。其中荷兰商人被允许的权利最大，也许因为荷兰船只一心经商，对传教不太热衷（西医药进入日本时被称为“兰学”）。

1633年幕府开始实施“锁国令”，原因或许政治经济都有。1637年爆发岛原之乱，起因是农民不堪压榨而反抗官府，但同时基督教也起到凝聚力和号召力的作用。

对比1840年代开始的太平天国运动，也是与基督教相关的反政府组织，虽然相隔两百年，二者近似之处无法否认。基督教在民间广为流传，给不满现状的下层人民提供了一个理论基础和传播途径。

天草四郎之后，德川幕府极度严密地执行锁国政策，以防重蹈覆辙，倒也相当有效，保持了两百年的稳定社会，并通过削藩集中政治权力。直到1853年美国军舰“黑船”驶入江户湾，在大炮的威胁下，幕府被迫向西方国家开放港口和通商活动。这一转变给日本政治带来前所未有的危机，国民对洋人的不满情绪日渐高涨，与洋人的暴力冲突也屡屡发生，当然一边讨厌洋人一边把矛头指向当政的幕府。倒幕派的萨摩藩与长洲藩发出“尊王攘夷”的口号，借着拥戴天皇的理由（天皇不掌实权已经一千年了）颠覆幕府统治。

这段历史与义和团（1899-1901）也颇有相似之处。鸦片战争和八国联军几次战争之后，在中国境内经商与传教的洋人增加，经常与普通民众接触，民间少不了产生摩擦和冲突无法避免。洋人抗议并要求当地政府保护自己，结果加剧了民间对政府的不满，这里有政治的原因，也有民族的动机。

倒幕运动于1868年成功推翻了集权稳定250年的德川幕府，明治天皇执掌大权。不过天皇并没有“攘夷”，而是更彻底地全面开放，加强工业与军事的进口贸易；同时积极向西方考察学习，以迅猛的速度进行政治改革，引进君主立宪的制度。事情的发展证明德川家康的锁国令是正确的——从家族的角度来看，因为开国就会带来自己的灭亡。

相比之下，清朝的闭关锁国政策在鸦片战争之后就破裂了，之后半个多世纪都夹在洋人与国内反对势力之间拼命维持。清朝皇室也并非没有试图进口武器与技术，建立北洋舰队，雇佣西洋船长，搞洋务运动，等等；但政治改革是绝对无法接受的——当然德川幕府也未曾接受政治改革。所以，辛亥革命与倒幕运动有一定的平行之处，虽然时间上晚了半个世纪，但彻底颠覆了皇权，也有其更进步的意义。

两国的平行甚至延续到开国与制度改革之后，政治权力在短期内被军阀掌握。虽然有很多呼声和努力想要推进民主制度，下放权力，但是架不住封建时代遗留的权力结构和资源分配。日本经历了短暂的大正时代的进步与繁荣，但迅速地被法西斯势力控制；而中国在苏联的幕后操纵下陷入内战状态。

所以，排除时间上的差别，中日的国门开放过程其实是颇为相似的，差别主要在于两国在战争中的胜负结果。清朝政府打了很多战争，对外战争几乎全部失败，严重动摇了军事实力，但正因为如此，辛亥革命才不需要旷日持久的战争就迅速胜利。日本则是一路凯歌，从1895年日俄战争开始逐步扩张殖民打算吞下整个亚洲，在50年内从底层迅速走向顶峰再跌落到二战战败。（Pacific Overtures 提出的理论是，日本的殖民主义风潮是跟着黑船学来，依葫芦画瓢，通过武力扩张就能把自己变成世界强国，这好像也有点道理。）

在列强敲开国门之前，日本与中国的社会都是看似集权稳定，但冲突的暗流汹涌。日本是各藩对幕府的不满逐渐积累，中国是满汉之争。清朝皇权掌握在满洲贵族手中，与人口占绝对多数的汉人一直存在冲突和压力。虽然清朝的很多军事和政治力量部分掌握在一些汉人将军和官员手中，例如曾国藩，李鸿章，但革命党也经常用满汉之分来支持自己的反清事业。（清朝皇权被灭之后，满洲人不得不退回东北原址，接受日本的扶植而建立满洲国，也并不能阻止本族湮灭在时代浪潮中的命运。）这些原本只是暗流的内部矛盾，然而外来压力让它们浮出水面，最终干掉了旧秩序。如果没有外界压力，中日两国想必会沿着当时的轨道继续一些年，直到另外什么事情发生。

Banshees of Inisherin

 

For the first 15 to 30 minutes of this movie, I seriously thought it was a satire on modern Internet friendships. In the past couple of years, I have been the dumper and dumpee of several relationships, including being basically ghosted, all of which were equally depressing and traumatizing. So I can sympathize with both characters in their agony and annoyance. The end of friendships is an unavoidable reality throughout one's life, but past experience does not make this process any easier as one becomes older. 

Half way into it, however, things made a bizarre and bloody turn, and I had to admit that the strife between Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson is not an allegory of friends breaking up in the Internet age. I dug up information on the Irish Civil War of early 1920s and began to understand the author's intent.

With its absurdist style, Martin McDonagh's movie contains a vague feeling that this deadly conflict between fellow Irishmen was senseless and pointless. Aside from the general principle that killing and war are fundamentally senseless, I don't quite agree, even though I am in no position to tell an Irishman anything about his own history. I can see why the conflict between the Free State and Republican factions broke out when the independence war with Britain came to a compromise instead of an outright victory. I have no particular urge to take sides, but each side did have their own reason and logic for the stand they took and felt they had to defend. And let's not pretend that there were only two sides to the conflict. There was an outside force not so subtly nudging them on.

The Irish history is by no means an outlier. The more I learn about it, the more it confirms my revised view of what war is. Conflicts and struggles in society do not have a discrete start and end date. War is just one of many continuous phases of these conflicts among people and factions. 

What I appreciate about McDonagh's treatment of war is the willingness to be kind to both sides and acknowledge their past friendship and continued ambiguity with each other. Nevertheless, I find it not completely satisfying as an allegory. 

Winding my way back to the issue of severed relationships and rejections, I have long realized that it always goes back to one's relationship with one's mother, that cliché of "attachment."

Someone in the Tree (Pacific Overtures)

 

One of the least produced Sondheim musicals, Pacific Overtures is a show that I very much wanted but did not expect to see in my lifetime. And yet! Signature Theatre nearby produced it this year! So of course I have to go see it at least twice. 

Compared with the original Broadway version, which can be seen on YouTube, this production is necessarily smaller, shorter, and more modest, but immensely enjoyable nevertheless. 

The history around the opening of Japan to western countries is complex and fascinating. I somehow fell into it because of my interest in Japanese jidaigeki action cinema and the Nemuri Kyoshiro novels in the past few years. The period around the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate is a critical juncture in the history of modern Japan and continues to inspire much pulp fiction and genre movies in Japan. I know why I am interested in this part of history, but for the life of mine I cannot imagine how Sondheim got into it. 

The amount of effort he put into making Pacific Overtures must have been enormous. Of course it is not an accurate documentary of Japanese history, but the artistic rendition of it is consistent with my understanding. The music is obviously influenced by Japanese traditional theater, namely Noh and Kabuki, of which I am very ignorant. The original set and direction were also designed to evoke that feel, which suggests that Harold Prince was equally interested in this approach. 

It is extraordinary that the entire musical is presented from the Japanese point of view. There is zero white character inserted into the story to lead the audience into the unfamiliar setting and allow them to identify with. If it were a book, Pacific Overtures would be closer to a nonfiction book than a novel, with some humor and gag thrown in for effect. Sondheim and Prince never bothered to make it easier or "friendlier" for American audience, so the audience has to make an effort to imagine themselves in this unfamiliar historical place, with few conventional tools to latch onto. 

Although the show does not have a conventional protagonist and antagonist and has a generally detached narrative tone (not least through the use of a narrator as common in Japanese theater), one song stands out to counterbalance this impersonal tone. Someone in the Tree has three ordinary characters talk about an important historical moment, the negotiation and signing of the Kanagawa Treaty between Japan and the US. It reminds me of the song "Room Where it Happens" in Hamilton, which no doubt was influenced by "Someone in the Tree." Note that although two of the characters claim to be there in the room where it happened, they were of no importance and had no involvement. They were merely observers and entirely passive, even though their lives and fates were irrevocably altered by the treaty. 

In some sense, Someone in the Tree is about hyperobjects, average people living in a world too large and complex to be known or understood. We live through and witness history, but we cannot control or make history, or even begin to understand its mechanisms. 

In any story set in a background of changing times, there is always a tension between the small scale and big picture. To focus on the tides of time and grand scheme of things always runs the risk of losing sight of individual lives and tears, but individual lives are truly and tangibly affected by the invisible hand of historical events. It is a constant dilemma for storytelling, because it is also the unknowable reality of our daily lives. 

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)

Jim Jarmusch is not known as an auteur in either the action or the comedy genre, but this movie shows that he can do both. Sometimes it is ambiguous as to whether he is making fun of or paying homage to genre classics (why not both?). Still, he approaches many tropes with his quirky twists, while wearing the influence on his sleeves:

Melville's Le Samurai, Kurosawa's Rashomon, the Godfather series (and very likely Scorsese's Italian gangster movies that I have not seen), John Singleton's South Central gangster movies in the 1990s, and, of course, Tom and Jerry and other old violent cartoons. I don't know whether he was also influenced by the pulpier old chanbara movies (e.g., Lone Wolf and Cub) and John Woo's HK gangster films, but the vibe is definitely there. 

The odd friendship between Raymond the ice cream guy and Ghost Dog, in which they express the same sentiment and information in different languages without understanding each other, speaks for Jarmusch's theses that language barriers cannot separate the same love and passion for violent, bloody cinema all around the world. 

Before it became a thing, Jarmusch made his commentary on decrepit elderly gangsters. Every scene in which the old farts bicker with each other is comic gold. All the actors had fantastic timing and deadpan humor. Also, long before John Wick, Forest Whitaker had some hilarious, cartoon-inspired assassination ploys that are as inventive and delightful as ever. I wish more action movie directors would take a look at this movie and find some inspiration in the set pieces. 

By casting the inimitable Whitaker and putting him in the midst of a flurry of pigeons, Jarmusch is obviously making a reference to his earlier role in "Bird" (1988), in which he played Charlie Parker and won best actor at Cannes.

With 2023 hindsight, I have a couple of gripes about the movie. The first is the utter uselessness of the female character (the daughter of one of the mobsters, played by Tricia Vessey). Sure, one could argue that women had little to do in the gangster genre and all the classics he referenced. Unfortunately, there is a little too much resemblance to the singer in Le Samurai with zero understanding of her central function in that movie. Her makeup is strikingly similar to Uma Thurman in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, which had come out only 5 years before, but her material is vastly inferior in comparison. 

The second complaint is the uncomfortable racial symbolism in this mock retainer-master relationship between Ghost Dog and Louie. The ending, which I understand is an intentional nod to Le Samurai and a weak and superficial understanding of Japanese samurai movies, nevertheless holds up poorly over time. 

Romanticized Sikhs

Although I have only a sample of two, it struck me that two authors of South Asian descent chose Sikhism for the heroic characters in their novels. The first is Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (published 2007), in which the leading man, Detective Inspector Sartaj Singh, is Sikh and diffuses a grave terrorist threat to the city of Mumbai. The second is Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992), in which again the pure, idealistic, generous, almost too good to be true protagonist is also Sikh. Note that both authors are definitely not Sikh themselves.

Sikhism is a relatively young religion, emerging in the 17th century. It came out of the Hindu tradition but absorbs a lot of the concerns and needs in modern life, in response to some parts of Hinduism that may have become outdated or inadequate. In some ways it is very idealistic and deeply concerned about morality and justice, and shares some similarities with Jainism. However, Jainism has a large pacifist component, while Sikh men are raised to be warriors. 

I'm no expert in either Jainism or Sikhism. I am just curious as to why Sikhism is attractive to these two South Asian male novelists who are looking at it from the outside. Perhaps there is a sense or hope that Sikhs have solved the contradiction between peace and violence. Just a wild guess. In my mind, however, the path to dharma is paradoxical and multidimensional. There is no magic bullet. 

I do wonder though: Is this some kind of appropriation? But who am I to say? I'm not Sikh. I'm not even Indian. 

The English Patient

I am not putting on a photo of the movie, released in 1996 by Miramax and adapted and directed by Anthony Minghella. When I first saw it I disliked it a lot without being able to explain my reaction. After I have read the novel, I despise the movie all the more. 

For the novel I have some conflicting feelings. Indeed it is split into two halves: the pre-war years in Cairo and the desert where the extramarital affair between Katharine Clifton and the Hungarian explorer Almasy took place; and 1945 (the present) at an abandoned Tuscan villa where the nurse Hana, her father's friend Caravaggio, a Sikh bomb disposal specialist Kirpal Singh, and a burned, dying Almasy converge. 

The question in my mind was always why these two halves. There is very little apparent thematic connection between the two couples and relationships. One is obsessive and violent and destructive. The other is equal and uncomplicated and healing. One is fundamentally cliched and carries a whiff of rottenness, while the other is raw and young.

The movie gave me the initial impression that Minghella was trying to sell a stale love triangle story as a grand, epic, and simple tragedy. No matter how glossy it is presented, I just can't get the rotten smell out of my nostril. I am not at all against adultery in art, but this is a week-old fish left out of the refrigerator. When you come at such a century-old plot, shouldn't you try to inject some new blood? The "new blood" injected here comes in the form of weird exoticism from Naveen Andrews making love to Juliet Binoche. In the movie, this subplot seems tacked on and awkward. Too much to be a sidebar and too little to compete with the main storyline.

Unfortunately, the novel does not help much in this aspect. The Almasy chapters still leave a bad taste in my mouth. At some point I realized why. These chapters are entirely told from Almasy's point of view. We get none of Katharine's point of view, even though there is a chapter named for her and gives a few pages that appear to be her point of view but have to have been filtered through him. The only thing that could potential save this story from these frustrating and suffocating cliches is the sinister undercurrent that is buried in Almasy's account. He insists that she left him out of conscience and loyalty for her marriage or perhaps fear of her husband (whatever, it's very vague), but her dialogs suggest that she was angry because she could not be more than a secret mistress to him. There is a general feeling of deceit in his overall account, but I won't go there for now. 

Staleness aside, I just find the movie adaptation to be so gigantically ironic. Out of curiosity, I skimmed a number of book reviews, and maybe one out of 10 has a throwaway mention of the unpleasant factoid that Almasy is a Nazi. Throughout the novel, Almasy struggles to conceal this fact, going so far as talking about himself in the third person. That he worked for German spies in the desert for 3 years is revealed only by Caravaggio's exposition. (Yeah, plotting is not a strong point of this novel.) Almasy implies that he decided to help the Axis as a revenge for Katharine's death ("[Rommel] was a brilliant man..."). The real-life Almasy, on which the character is based, was in fact quite active in German army during the war.

Minghella was sensitive to the inconvenient element, and skillfully revised it to some harmless excuse for his "collaboration" with the Germans that even the novel Almasy is unable to cook up out of self-interest. He knew that he must protect the audience from any uneasiness. Adultery is already pushing their limits. 

Indeed the movie unabashedly centers around Almasy's love affair. If Minghella really loved the novel and wanted to adapt it faithfully, he could have made a WWII "The Hurt Locker." Hana's storyline equally shares the intensity with Almasy in the first half, but Kirpal Singh's storyline dominates the second half of the novel. Everything is compelling -- the strength of the character, the thrilling details of bomb disposal, the emotional ambiguity, the cultural conflicts -- which contrasts with the tired cliches in Almasy's half. But Minghella did not want that story.

I don't really know why he kept a shadow of the Hana-Kip storyline in the movie at all. Maybe he liked the framing device. It remains the less stale part of the movie, but we also get a clear sense that the two young characters are there to serve Almasy's story. The irony lies in the fact that Ondaatje is making a similar observation in Singh's story. The throughline is how he has served the Allies for 5 years, risking gruesome death every day. This is a betrayal of his own country, India, and his older brother, who is thrown in jail by the British colonial government. But he loves his English mentors and comrades and amiably suffers the discrimination and hostility from British soldiers. Service, intelligence, generosity, courage, all purported virtues of Sikhism. His love for Britain continues until the real climax of the novel, when he finally reaches the breaking point --- 

"American, French, I don't care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman. You had King Leopold of Belgium and now you have fucking Harry Truman of the USA. You all learned it from the English."

So he splits. From love, from work, from his comrades and employment, from being used and exploited. He goes back to India, where independence will be won in a couple of years. Although Ondaatje is not Indian himself (born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Canada), the shadow of the empire constantly hovers over the four main characters, none of whom is English despite the title. 

Of course, as an English filmmaker selling to an American audience, Minghella carefully scraped away all of this, every little strand of anti-colonialism and every little bit of heroism in the Indian character. Despite the desert scenes, he kept the movie clean from any sand that may seep into the shoes of the British and American consumers to rub against their delicate feet, with the same meticulous attention as Singh dismantles a bomb.

And he was absolutely correct. Imagine the shock and indignation and rage when they read the novel and see the line "They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation." Indeed, the rage erupted, making the novel more controversial in the English-speaking market than the movie was.

I wonder how Ondaatje feels about the movie. He couldn't avoid being appropriated and used by the British after all. 

(PS. There is added irony that Almasy is designated as "Count" in the movie, while he is not identified as aristocracy in the novel. The real-life Almasy called himself "Count" but was in fact a commoner. Well, I guess if being a Nazi doesn't stop him from becoming a big romantic hero, what's a little fake news, eh? And then there is also the little issue of necrophilia ... What a guy.)

Burning (2018): Case Explained (Spoilers)

 

Although long and containing many silent scenes, Lee Chang-Dong's Burning gripped me when I first saw it in a theater. I formed an immediate impression of the "solution" to the mystery as it is presented, which is fairly clear and unambiguous. Afterward, I was surprised to read in various reviews and comments that many people felt that the solution is equivocal. On second viewing, it became clear why I felt so certain instinctively. 

Below I'm going to focus only on explaining the mystery of Hae-mi's disappearance but not the artistic and poetic choices of the film, which are abundant and beautiful regardless.

<Spoilers>

Despite the artistic pedigree of Lee, he clearly employed genre techniques and elements in Burning, and centered the plot around a mystery: Hae-mi's vanishing. (I'm using the word "vanishing" to recall the Dutch movie "The Vanishing", which left a deep impression on me, and I'd be damned if Lee had not seen it.) If we look at this movie purely as a thriller/mystery, the question boils down to this: 

Was she murdered by Ben? 

And the possible answers are only two: 

1) Yes, Ben murdered her and hid her body somewhere that cannot be found. 

2) No, Ben has done nothing to her, and she disappeared for some other reason.

Why do I believe that the answer has to be 1)? Because all clues given in the movie support 1), and there is nothing in the movie that supports 2). In fact, there are almost too many clues to point to 1). In a conventional murder mystery, the author would provide some red herrings in addition to the "real" solution or culprit. Here, there is no red herring to suggest an alternative theory. Every little clue always points to Ben's crime. 

For everyone who believes that the movie still leaves open the possibility that Ben did not kill Hae-mi, the next question is inevitably "Then where is she?" The only possible answer is that she is hiding from the debt collectors, which Lee Chang-Dong tosses out there in one scene, and she has told no one, including Jong-su and Ben, anything about her escape. Keep in mind that this is a theory from an acquaintance. There are no other scenes to suggest that Lee has any interest in this possibility. We don't see Hae-mi talking about fearing the debt collectors or being threatened. We don't hear about anyone else being disappeared by debt collectors (not even a news fragment). We don't see anyone harassing Hae-mi for her debt or threaten to kidnap her or break her legs. 

That is the heart of the matter. This is not a true-crime documentary, where the truth may or may not conform to the clues presented in the movie. This is fiction, in which all the characters and scenes are the creations of Lee Chang-Dong's mind. What could have happened to Hae-mi outside of what Lee shows us is immaterial. All we care about is the author's intention for the story. And his intention cannot be more apparent. 

Of course, I am fully aware of Durrenmatt's "The Pledge", which argues for the unknowability of real life occurrences, and the indifference of the universe toward a person's perception or knowledge. That's valid, but Burning is obviously not that story. Even The Pledge came out of one man's mind with a point --- Durrenmatt's point. Lee too had a point to make, and he made this movie to support his point. He gave us no indication that the point is nihilism. As the audience, it is our responsibility to try to receive his signals and understand his intention. Otherwise we might as well write our own stories. 

So yes, what I should and do care about is his version of the truth, and he is obviously telling us that Ben murdered Hae-mi. 

In addition to the physical evidence of Ben's collection of cheap trinkets and the cat who answers to the name of "Boil," the more decisive clues are in the portrayal of the character. Early in the movie, before we suspect any criminal behaviors, Ben would drop lines that suggest his psychopathic personality, like "I don't remember ever shedding a tear" and "You have a stone in your heart; that's why you can't feel anything" (paraphrases). The latter line is transparently talking about himself, even though he is saying it to Hae-mi, who obviously does not have a stone in her heart. The exact same contempt (yawn) he shows to both Hae-mi and the subsequent girlfriend (ie, victim) is clearly a demonstration of his game, as he clearly is not interested in these women as individuals.

Many commentators made a point of questioning the veracity of Hae-mi. Is she a liar? Why does no one remember the past events she mentions? Is the cat real? Did she really fall into a well in childhood? She is so good at eating a nonexistent tangerine, perhaps the cat and her memory of the well are both fake as well? And, by extension, maybe her disappearance (or existence) is fake too? 

Here we are again faced with two possibilities: 

1) Hae-mi has lied about or imagined some or all of the things.

2) Hae-mi is telling the truth about everything. 

If 1) is true, then we can allow ourselves to discount everything she says and does, including her disappearance. Maybe her obsession with the "little hunger and great hunger" and her dance in the sunset are a performance or delusion. Both JS and Ben are fooled. There is never a tangerine or cat or anything else there. The most charitable reading is that she has no grasp on reality, so much so that she never bothers to contact JS after running away from the debt collectors. A less charitable interpretation is that she is just like JS's mother, who disappears and shows up 16 years later asking for money.

If 2) is true, her story in this movie is about the erasure of a young woman, full of yearning, loneliness, spirit, and life. When she was a child, she fell into a well and no one even noticed. She did not tell her family after being rescued and her family did not care enough to ask where she had been. It is one of many signs of her family's indifference toward her, consistent with the exchange in the eatery ("tell her not to come home until she's paid off her credit card debts") and Ben's casual slip that she had no contact with her family (note that both corroborate each other). In the context of the movie, she has figuratively "fallen into a well" and disappeared again, and, again, the only person who cares is Jong-su. The rest of the world just moves on as if nothing has happened. She tries to express her yearning for the meaning of life and her sense of beauty (the trash-filled parking lot in Africa where she was moved to tears by the sunset), and others look at her with awkward chuckles and yawns.  

Which one do you think is Lee Chang-Dong's intention? I have seen one other film by Lee ("Secret Sunshine"). Between these two films, I sense zero cynicism from him. Instead, I feel a barrage of humanism, as in, he loves human beings in their natural state of existence. What is the probability of such a humanist devising Scenario 1? I'd say it hovers right about zero. 

Some people watch Hae-mi's pantomime and infer that she invents things and events that do not exist and perhaps cannot tell the difference. I think the pantomime has an entirely different meaning. It's about poverty, deprivation, and the absence of the things you need. Obviously, this is a feeling that Hae-mi and Jung-su share but Ben knows nothing about --- except that Ben too has the same feeling. We cannot pretend that what's lacking in HM's and JS's lives is not money. Their despair and shame and isolation, and their reluctance to engage in a full-blown romantic relationship, all have to do with their poverty in a city of casual wealth. And yet there is so much more missing, not the least family, not the least a meaning. JS's yearning for mother, and HM's yearning for anyone. Their most basic needs are not met, and the only way to keep life going is to "forget that it's not there." 

Ben has his own missing piece in life, and we can surmise that he too has a yearning for it. This absence is intolerable to him, and he refuses to tolerate it, unlike how HM and JS tolerate their unmet needs. Hence he burns greenhouses. In both the source materials (Faulkner and Murakami), it is barns that are burned, and barns symbolize food and wealth. Here, however, it is greenhouses, which symbolize life. Not quite the same thing. 

----

As a co-owner of two cats, I just want to make a note about the "Schrodinger's cat" here. Is the cat a part of Hae-mi's imagination? Compare the two parallel scenes depicting its absence: When JS goes to feed it when HM is in Africa, he sees that the food and water bowls are empty, and the litterbox contains cat poop. When he goes back to the apartment after HM's disappearance, there were no bowls and no litterbox at all.

If there is poop, trust me, the cat is real.

Communication in Middlemarch

The question of whether a person can actually, truly understand another is one that I think about all my life. Within psychological sciences, it appears that this impossibility is now well established. What a person goes through is to receive signals from another person (e.g., language, behavior, facial expression, vocal sounds, body language) and interpret its meaning to oneself, using his own set of tools, including the memory he associates with the signal and the learned meaning of a concept. For example, Person A eats a lychee fruit, says "ah, sweet," and Person B in her presence can only know what it means by conjuring up his own memory of eating a lychee fruit. If he has never eaten one, he's out of luck. The sensation cannot be directly transmitted from one to the other. 

For more abstract feelings, such as happiness and sadness and fear, the same principle applies, even though we tend to imagine that emotions are universally the same in every person and forget the specificity of each occasion and memory. The point is that we understand the external world completely through our internal machinery, and other people is a part of the external world. To date, we have no way of truly "walk in another person's shoes" or living in their skin, despite some science fiction that proposed such possibilities.

Of course, this impossibility to share thoughts and feelings does not stop anyone from trying or believing the illusion that we understand each other. This illusion is rewarding, irresistible, and perhaps absolutely necessary to our emotional health --- I know, the thought is a little disturbing, that our life and sustenance depend on an objective falsehood. What can you do. We can't handle the truth because the truth isn't always good for us. 

This is not to say that the self-derived signal-interpretation process is useless. At least we have the ability to evoke our own knowledge, memories, and feelings in an attempt to interpret the signals from another person. And this process is able to facilitate an incomplete but real amount of communication. Heck, we can even simulate other people's emotions to some extent, ie, empathy, drawing on our own emotional reserve. However limited, this is good enough to create interpersonal bonds so strong that we have built massive human civilizations encompassing millions and billions of individuals. 

While reading Middlemarch, I was struck again and again by the meticulous description of how people understand and misunderstand each other's thoughts and intentions, how things go awry because each character has his or her own motivation and logic. It's almost a high-definition dissection of the above-mentioned mechanism. To use a cliché, there is no villain in this book. It's not because the author started out with a plan to make every character good or neutral. Rather, she mapped out every character's motivation and then took it down its logical path, which then clashes with another character's logical path. This is the most elevated kind of conflict-making in fiction, and to do it to such a massive extent with so many characters must have been an enormously complex undertaking. 

The best example is the drama in Rosamond and Dr. Lydgate's marriage. Initially, my mind was gliding along the well-tread path of how a beautiful but immature or stupid young woman who causes the disillusion of her man, recalling Louisa Musgrove's relationship with Captain Wentworth ("Persuasion"). The more it went on, however, the harder I began to laugh at the one-upmanship between Rosamond and Tertius. Rosamond may be young and naïve and a bit of a ditz, but stupid she is not. Despite Lydgate's repeated yelling and threats, pulling his hair out, she goes off and thwarts him every single time. Each is stubbornly committed to their own way of coping with the debt situation, to which both had contributed. Hilarity ensues. Marriage hardly improves one's ability to read another's mind, Eliot seems to say, good luck with trying to change one another. 

No kidding. Who hasn't gone through the futility of trying to change one's spouse, so that two think as one? But what appears to be marital harmony due to a mind convergence is but an illusion. What really happens in a seemingly harmonious marriage is illustrated in the Garth family, in which Mrs. Garth grumbles, either inwardly or outwardly, but sighs and lets Mr. Garth go off to do his own thing. If we can't make peace with our fundamental differences ... then we are just banging our heads on the wall until they explode into bloody pulp. Oh well. 

The discussion on the limitations of our mind goes beyond marriage in Middlemarch. The novel is full of characters who believe they have a firm grip on reality, only to be proven wrong. From a particular perspective, Middlemarch is an exploration of the limitations of mind, and the illusion of control, with scientific insights based on clinical observations of real people, that is later proven correct by systematic and rigorous research.