Jane Eyre: An Unloved Woman Redeeming An Unredeemable Man?

 How do you do, 

     I'm back after a hiatus. For the past few years, I was out due to an epiphany at how little time we have on this planet, especially with the recent COVID pandemic, that it seemed a waste to be making critical reviews of small matters. So, I never got into other blog entries I had plan to give while we were all staying home. That and my new job got in the way at times. But, now I decided to give another try at the blog again after a trip up to Washington DC and Middletown, Delaware, where in the latter I witnessed the musical Jane Eyre in the historic Everette Theatre. The production was brought to life by a local drama group under the name of God's Power & Light Company, itself doing many works involving Christianity and redemption. 

   At the time I beheld this play, it had been years since I read any novel by the Brontë  sisters (especially as I was abstaining from works of fiction for Lent this year) and it seemed this one was a good way to get reacquainted with it. The way they had the music performed was great, with the right sort of talent to each character. The show's leading lady, Genevieve Aucoin, made a great Jane, showcasing all the highs and lows of the character. Matching her was Douglas Biggs performing an ancient looking Mr. Rochester with the same dynamic drive of George C. Scott. The rest nailed it in many ways: those playing the abusers of Jane looking mean, the gentle ladies being all vain as peacocks, and St. John Rivers' actor coming off as a nice guy, not to mention the comedy provided by some of the extras. If there was a detraction, it would be the costumes as they seemed all over the place in historical period with little suggesting Regency Britain, though Ms Aucoin did resemble Charlotte Brontë herself in one of her costumes. But then again, most of us don't go to plays for accuracy, except for accuracy to the story. 

     Having gone off track, I must point out I am writing of course about the book, not the play, so we'll end it by saying the performance was great and enjoyable. It wasn't until I got home before I cracked it open and read it. 

     Jane Eyre is Charlotte Brontë's famous novel, published in 1847, while her sisters, Anne and Emily, were also writing (in case you didn't know, Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights). The Brontë sisters, and their brother Branwell, were the offspring of Maria and Patrick Brontë, a rector Haworth, located in West Riding of Yorkshire, in the UK, with Charlotte the oldest of the bunch (she had two older siblings who died in 1825). 

   You might think it unremarkable of a woman who turned thirty would write up a book, but in that time it was something novel. Most women didn't write novels in England at the time and many had to use male pseudonyms in order to get their works published. A few were rebelling against the sexist notion that only men were writers back when the Brontës were growing up. They were girls when Mary Wolstonecroft Shelley became famous with Frankenstein and Jane Austen wrote her romances. However, Shelley and Austen were the exceptions, while Elizabeth Gaskell and George Elliot, contemporaries of the Brontë sisters, was yet to be known. Even the romantic novel genre, known as the for women by women genre, was largely a male dominated world. 

    Charlotte, Anne, and Emily were basically rebelling against this world as they used their talents as writers to write up poems and stories. They each had their own style to their works, especially when you look at the novels. In a harsh light, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is a culminating and palpitating melodrama told by eyewitnesses, while Anne's Agnes Grey seems relatively thin and likely made at white heat. Charlotte's book seems sort of in between, while containing feminine sophistry and sophistication common in many mid-19th century romance novels. It was imitated here in the US by Augusta Jane Evans with her St. Elmo, with its own page after page of high strung dialogue and excessive verbiage that most modern readers have to navigate through. In Dawson's Creek, we hear a teacher's assistant in a college scene compare Louisa Alcott's Little Women to Jane Eyre, largely in the second half where Jo meets Professor Bhaer. Even The Sound of Music feels like a remake of Jane Eyre when you think about it, though it lacks the Gothic atmosphere. 

    Some of the verbiage mentioned was because novels were originally read by the elite of the day, whereas most people who could read simply read the Bible, the Almanac, or newspapers, as they had too much to do each day to read a novel. So, given the background, it's no wonder many books of the time would have such vocabulary terms and sentence structures that have fallen by the wayside in our every day dialogue. This also explains why the story is set among the upper middle class to the nobles in society with hardly anything added for the commoners, yet Jane Eyre also challenges world by having its protagonist start as a poor girl. 

   Like in Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre begins as an orphan, only she is taken in by a family earlier in the story, and she doesn't get the happy ending Oliver got. Essentially, she got mistreated before Anne Shirley was even born. First she is sent to live with the Reed family, which include an aunt, but is treated as something like garbage. Her cousin, John, makes fun of her, her Aunt Sarah is mean to her, and even the housekeeper is harsh, while her Uncle dies before the story begins. So, she is abused by her relatives, often accused of lying by her own aunt. 

    In three chapters, she is sent away to a boarding school, where the tyrannical Mr. Brocklehurst is told of Jane's nature by her aunt, which makes him bear down upon her. Brocklehurst comes across as a dogmatic, religious leader who believes more in discipline than in unconditional love, often coming down on the girls with no hesitation, and he uses religion as a tool for the same reason. So here, we get a sense that the idea of people using religion as a way to keep the masses in line is not as new as one might think. People actually subscribed to this in the past, especially in the Regency England. 

    In this way, Brocklehurst makes a nice contrast to Mr. Bumble: both mean guys, both fat, both run a place full of children, both a product of the Regency Generation. Yet, where Dickens' Bumble is fleshed out and gradually goes from chlorotic bully to henpecked husband and underling (essentially going from supposed villain to second fiddle compared to Fagin and Sikes), Brocklehurst has no development. He already has a wife and he has a family, who are better off than Jane and the girls. And he is gone after an expose is done on the outbreak of tuberculosis leads to many of his charges to die. At least, he gets an ending just like with Bumble, where the mighty have fallen. 

    Jane is then under the hand of Miss Maria Temple who clears her name of the charges Brocklehurst made against her, while also being abused by Miss Scatcherd, a mean sort of school teacher. Jane also befriends Helen Burns, the girl who changes her life. Helen is depicted a saintly girl who teaches others to turn the other cheek, something that Jane has problems with. Yet, she gradually becomes close as the latter is willing to go against the decrees and help her. Of course, such saintly characters in novels at the time are doomed to die, which is what happens to her before we reach chapter eleven. 

    So we fast forward in a few chapters. We see Jane again as a young woman (or teenager in modern terms), leaving Lowood to become governess in the Thornfield Hall, making this suddenly feel like The Sound of Music without the music. Of course, it's not The Sound of Music. We meet only one child, Adele, a French girl who is ward to Mr. Edward Rochester. 

   At this point, the novel takes on a Gothic atmosphere. You might get the image of Regency English countryside with green meadows blanketed by fog and rain. The house of Thornfield takes it up to eleven in the appearances of a castle (said to have been modeled after Haddon Hall). Even the name is a combination of "thorn" and "field", suggesting it a field of thorns, making one think those vines coiling around the castle in "The Sleeping Beauty," to keep the Prince from Princess Aurora. It comes with this, while having people speaking in hushed voices over matters, especially concerning Rochester, who gives off vibes of the Beast. In fact, the scenes in Thornfield give the impression of the fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast," though Rochester is still a man. He is beastly in his stern features and his lack of being open on his secrets. He has Adele for a ward, but shows no intention of marrying her (they used to do that back then), he lives alone in a large hall that has some darkness about it, he mistakes Jane as an elf upon meeting her, and he often is away for long periods of time, leaving the servants to look after Adele. We also see a chestnut tree get struck by lightning halfway through the novel, which becomes important to symbolism near the end. Also, there is that demonic laughter heard once in a while, along with screams. Once, a houseguest, Richard Mason, gets bitten, but nothing is done other than tending to his wounds. 

      In addition to what first time readers would assume is a vampire living in the mansion, but Jane is awoken in the middle of the night to a fire, finding Rochester almost about to be burned to death. Quick thinking on her part saves him and he sustained only a minor burn. From this point, he begins to soften somewhat to Jane. 

     Center point to Jane Eyre is the love story of Jane and Mr. Rochester. It is a kind of May-December romance, with the man being older than the woman, something that was also common in the time period. Of course, Rochester isn't an old man (especially not in modern sense). In the events of the book, he is described as being in his mid- to late thirties, which makes him about the same age as I (may I be excused for saying at the time of this blog entry I am thirty-seven years old). He doesn't show up until chapter twelve, falling off his horse, and thinking of Jane as an elf when it happens. So, they start out with jabs that make one think "will they or won't they." 

      Jane keeps up her ability to counter everything Rochester has in wits, even as she works for him. All the while, she goes back and forth on how she feels on him, knowing their stations. It's not that Jane is lowly to Rochester, but the fact she is simply a governess while Rochester is among the landed gentry, in addition to their age difference. Not to mention, Rochester goes about with an air of someone burning with passion, yet is held in check by both social aspects and a secret. One has to remember men like him would live in a world that saw respect to names important, as they had no titles to that name, but they owned a great deal of land and they had wealth, all of which was believed to be tied in with morals and behavior. This explains why he often sneaks away for activities, but the secret part comes in as the book progresses. 

     Edward Rochester is a type of male character we call the Byronic hero, named after Lord Byron, the Romantic English poet, whose works no doubt were read by the Brontes. A typical Byronic hero isn't the squeaky clean sort of guy, especially not those cardboard cut out heroes that so featured a lot in the earlier novels, like with Tom Jones, Candide, or Robinson Crusoe, or any of traditional heroes of the eighteenth century. These are men (sometimes women) who often exist outside of more social circles, often intellectuals, or simply people of refined taste, who also exhibit some character flaw or some trait that sometimes makes them less pleasant. Some fall under the category of anti-hero, which most are familiar with. They are the kind who often don't follow the rules of chivalry or do things people think are politically incorrect, and yet are still the good guys. Some are also evil, but not pure evil, which is enough to remind us we are all sinners. These later kinds of characters will undergo a redemption arc in the story and become the good guys in the end, often at the price of their social standing, their fortunes, their loved ones, or even their lives. 

       We've had plenty in pop culture. In Star Wars, the chief villain, Darth Vader, became re-written as a Byronic hero over time, especially once the prequels came. Same franchise had Kylo Ren / Ben Solo in the Disney trilogy. In both cases, each man is evil and becomes redeemed by an act of love. In Disney, the most popular of the fairy tale movies was Beauty and the Beast where Beast is our Byronic hero who becomes redeemed by love. Even Severus Snape in Harry Potter (who gets referenced in the introduction of the copy I read) is now seen that way as he redeems himself through his love of Lilly and dies a martyr against Lord Voldemort, after being such a jerk to Harry and his friends through most of the series. Before him, Sirius Black was a Byronic hero, but largely as he was an outcast through a crime he didn't commit and was also redeemed in death while friend and fellow Marauder Remus Lupin is beastly as a werewolf, but is made human by Tonks. The list goes on and everyone one of them has questionable qualities but ultimately a redeemable soul about them, that one can't help but want their redemption.  

     With Rochester, we see a Byronic hero with a noble man living secluded in his hall with his  servants and his ward, which brings to mind The Beast. In the original fairy tale, we see Beast who is what he is, yet becomes human again in the end through the love of Beauty. The Disney version expands on it as we see Beast learn to be more human and a gentleman, which pleases Belle and makes her see him as a man instead of a beast. Unlike Beast, of course, Rochester has no spell over him. He is only beastly in a symbolic sense. 

      He spends most of the time seeking passion in his life, which soon came to include Jane. And in Jane, he finds someone who is more than just a person on his payroll. Jane is basically an equal in smarts (though not in class), able to outwit him on numerous occasions. At the same time, Jane sees in Rochester the source of a home after being mistreated her whole life as an orphan. After going through such an environment, Jane had toughened up and could handle anything Rochester throws at her. 

     In her article for JSTOR, "Sorry, but Jane Eyre Isn't the Romance You Want It To Be," Erin Blackmore writes that Rochester would "fit right in with the modern “seduction community,” conducting a master class in negging as he reminds Jane of her inferiority, then compliments her wit."[1] This perfectly sums up the interactions in the meat of the novel, where from a critical point of view we see an older man playing mind games with a young woman, all because he can't or won't express himself. He does this most when he hosts a party that allows allegeable ladies of the region to come and present themselves. Among them is Blanche Ingram, who spends her scenes flirting with Rochester in an attempt to get him to marry her, while looking down her nose at people like Jane. Again, classism shows, thus preventing Jane Eyre from passing the Bechdel Test. As a product of the time, Blanche can't propose to Rochester. Instead, she must get him to propose to her, something feminists of today would find both a sign of how far we've come as well as showing one way women could have power in a male dominated society. 

    Brontë takes a moment to critique the "mercenary" marriages of the 1810s through the Ingrams. Blanche and her mother are seeking Rochester with no feelings of love or concern for his well being. They are thinking of marrying a rich bachelor to continue their privileged lifestyle. Thus, it sort of gets at what Jane Austen got into with her novels, which often had scenes of women being courted by men of wealth and means. One thing interesting is how Bronte has our heroine, a girl of limited means, be the saintly woman that is a better person, whereas the wealthy and sophisticated Blanche is snobbish, allowing for the Madonna-Whore complex to be brought up and subverted when applied to classes (ie, virtuous girl of limited means vs whorish rich lady). 

     Jane, of course, has a will of iron. She doesn't break to Blanche's snobbishness and she doesn't yield to Rochester's manipulation, but one time she does fall for his trick, when he is pretending to be a Roma woman seeking to tell fortunes. The last I don't think needs any more explanation. Will say that Jane does get jealous at the sight of Rochester with Blanche, but almost never says something about it until later. Eventually, Jane does break and lets Rochester know a few things as she struggles with the possibility of going somewhere else when Rochester announces his engagement to Blanche. "Do you think I am an automaton?" she asks, "a machine without feelings? ... Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless[sic] and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!"

    Unlike in Twilight (and by the way, Rochester's first name is also Edward), where Bella Swan already claims to be "unconditionally and irrevocably in love with [Edward Cullen]" [2] very quickly, Jane takes her time in expressing her sentiments of Rochester, who also takes time in telling her his feelings. It is striking that through all this, Jane actually falls for him when Rochester reveals the engagement a sham. Finally, it all breaks down and the words of love are spoken. We are halfway through when he finally tells her in the garden and asks her to marry him. 

     Very quickly, they set it up and it seems all is well, until Mason [the guy who got bitten] walks in. He reveals that, surprise surprise, Rochester is already married (dun! dun! dun!). Talk about something you'd see out of a rom com, or a sitcom. Well, unlike in those examples, Rochester admits he does have  a wife and he kept her hidden like Peter Pumpkineater, but not in a pumpkin. He takes everyone inside and shows them the upper floor and reveals his locked away wife, Bertha, as the source of the fire and the laughter. 

    Studies on the brain were still novel at the time, but Brontë hits on to the cognitive disorder that Bertha Rochester suffers. Instead of locking her in a mental institution, Rochester choses to keep her in his house, having a servant woman, who gets drunk often, watch over her. The reveal does get problematic in modern eyes for three points: one, a bit of contempt for the lower class is done in Grace Poole being the one who watches Bertha, yet is also a drunk and permits her loose, which should have gotten her fired; second, we find out Bertha is mixed raced, from a Creole family in Jamaica, implying the madness is connected to race; third, one might wonder why doesn't Rochester just get a divorce, especially as he never really treated her well before then. The third is explainable, in those days one couldn't get a divorce or an annulment just because someone is getting demented. It was still "till death do us part." Another thing to bring up is for those thinking professional help is needed, because mental institutions in the 1800s were basically prisons, unsanitary and run by people who didn't know what was going on, yet were just as cruel as the people Jane had met as a girl. Bertha was better off locked up in the attic by her husband as she could have gentle care. The fact her caretaker gets drunk on duty is barely stereotyping, as watching out for her would likely drive anyone to the bottle. It only gets questionable when one or another character makes it seem something of Mrs. Poole's nature. Finally, we come to race, some of which is hard to justify. In the early 1800s, race studies and cultural sensitivity were yet to come by and people actually thought behaviors were dictated by their ethnic background (hence why many books of the time are populated by stereotypes and assumptions). So, it was common at the time that people believed the madness she had was from impure breeding, which could have been prevented by the parents simply sticking to their kind, a line of thought now discredited (despite what some people might claim that white people are born racists). 

     The information we have on Bertha is she was wedded to Rochester by the Masons because they saw him as part of the "Good Race", implying it would be great for them. Rochester claims he thought he loved her, only to realize he didn't as she slowly descended into madness. One thing of note is we have no journals or writings of hers quoted, since she apparently lost the ability to speak, thus we are robbed of hearing of her tragic plight from her point of view, and instead we are told it all from the perspective of her husband, something most modern readers might critique Brontë on (especially so since she is a woman). In fact, Jean Rhys went so far as to fix that with a prequel, Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, where we learn more about Bertha and her tragic fall. 

      So, Rochester is already married while playing mind games to get Jane, but has he any redeeming qualities? His willingness to care for his wife in a time when the insane asylums would have been worse on her does make him redeemable. A lesser man would not only have kept her hidden, but denied her existence (in the modern century, a lesser man would have also gotten that divorce as soon as she was committed). For another, he comes clean about it rather than continue to live a lie. His taking in a ward is also commendable, showing that not all orphans are doomed to the boarding schools, the orphanage, the streets, or their graves, if one had the heart to take one in. In return for the reveal, Rochester's standing in the public seems down, with people like Blanche running for the hills, while Rochester cools things with Mason. Thankfully, Adele is not in the picture, but Jane is and she is left wondering if Rochester is redeemable as they return to square one.

      Rochester still wants to marry Jane, or make her his mistress, and they can live in France where no one knows them. While Jane forgives him for the lies, she draws the line at being married to a bigamist or becoming a mistress. Having nothing else but her good name, Jane choses instead to leave Rochester, something feminists would take delight in. I wouldn't be surprised if a modern rewrite of the book would rather end here than continue.

     But we are not done yet. After leaving Thornfield, Jane goes out on the streets, begging for her bread, and starving to death, thus showing the danger to independence. Stripped from the life of luxury and a place at the table with good food, she is now reduced to the beggar, just shy of taking up the oldest profession in the world. Thankfully, it doesn't come to that for she wouldn't even think of it. If she said no to being a rich man's mistress, she would say no to being a fallen woman. Yet, she gets sick and comes in the care of the Rivers siblings. Diana and Mary Rivers, along with their housemaid, and their brother, St. John, take Jane in, nurse her to health, and give her a place to stay. 

      As it turns out, they are cousins. This allows Jane to meet relatives who are kind enough to her. She also spends time with St. John, who basically spends most of his scenes talking to her as though she were a child. In the play I saw, he seemed like a genuine nice guy, but he comes across as condescending in the book. Just look at his statement when he proposes: "You shall be mine: I claim you—not for my pleasure, but for my Sovereign’s service." I don't think I know any missionary who would have said such a thing to woo a woman, but as a Catholic I don't know many missionaries with wives. I just think the whole thing has as much emotion as the grinding of gears in an automobile plant. 

     Then Jane learns her rich uncle died and left her with twenty thousand pounds Sterling, which in modern US dollars would be $2.24 million (even then, that was a lot of money). Now Jane has money added to her name and it gets St. John's attention. Wanting a share in this, and make her his own, he proposes to her and invites her to come with him to India as a missionary. Thankfully, Jane doesn't jump at it.

      No sooner does she get proposed to again, Jane hears someone calling her name. When she guesses it to be Rochester, she goes to Thornfield to see him. She gets there and finds the place burned down. She learned Bertha had gone mad and set the place afire, then jumped to her death. Rochester was able to get the servants to safety, but was left blind and maimed from the event. Thus, we see him again now as a broken, impotent, and melancholic man, now reduced in the eyes of many. He has lost his main home, his mad wife, his good standing, his vision, and a hand, as well as the beastly nature about him. Yet, he is also repentant and longing to be a better man after this episode. So, we get the sense that he is broken down and made humble, thus ready for the final piece of the redemption arc.

    So Jane goes to him in the garden and tells him she has returned. After missing her for so long, Rochester is delighted to see her again, but assumes she is married. Jane tells him she is an independent woman and she chose to come back to him willingly, and she intended to help him with love. Thus she is no longer answering to him, but is only coming out of her own will, which was revolutionary for the time. They do have another bout of wit, with him asking, "Am I hideous, Jane?" to which she answers, "Very sir; you always were, you know." The moment does seem like a cliché, but considering how Rochester changes at this point and doesn't hold it against Jane, who doesn't care that he is no longer the strong man he was, it does make for a happy ending in the two. When he proposes again, she says yes. 

      Of course, we follow with chapter thirty-eight, essentially the weakest in the narrative. It opens with Jane simply saying, "Reader, I married him." Such a statement can be read in a matter of fact tone and makes one wonder what was Brontë thinking when she wrote it. She could have had Jane say, "We were married shortly thereafter" or "We became man and wife at a later date, during which time Rochester was more or less like himself." But no, we get, "Reader, I married him." It's redeeming quality is the wording being structured to where the woman had dictated things, becoming more active than say, "Reader, he married me." In short, the woman has taken command in this one sentence.

    From there, it goes downhill with Jane uncharacteristically boasting of how closer she was to her husband than any other while speaking of what happened to the others. Earlier, she met with Mrs. Reed, who confessed to why she mistreated Jane and explained her son hung himself after getting into a bad life. She reveals St John later went to India and never married, yet his sisters did marry. Meanwhile, Jane and Rochester adopted Adele as their stepdaughter, then had a son, who arrived as one of Rochester's eyes recovers. At least the last was the one good part, but one can't help but think Brontë could have ended at chapter thirty-seven, but at the time most people wanted the characters to either get married or to die at the end. 

      That is the story that is in this almost six hundred paged novel (I got a friend who called reading it a feat). When it first was published, with Brontë using a man's name, critics were negative about it. Elizabeth Rigby called it "anti-Christian" and even American critics called it "immoral." The view softened after Brontë's death, with it appearing to be less of an irreligious work and more like an allegory of perseverance and forgiveness, plus the story of a saintly girl redeeming a beastly man. 

    Many things to take note is how it is in the Regency era, yet nowhere is Napoleon or the Prince Regent mentioned. Regardless, it was written in the 1840s, with the dawn of the Victorian era, thereby making the book a world in passing. The Industrial Revolution had transformed English society by the time Brontë set her pen to paper. Men like Rochester, whose wealth was accumulated by land, worked upon by servants, and passed down from father to son, were still around, but were soon replaced by men of business, those whose wealth came from profits, dug up in the mines, factories, or the office. First wave feminism was seen in England when Brontë wrote Jane Eyre, and soon the Brontës would have no reason to use male names when writing books. In a few generations, women could hold jobs in offices, become breadwinners, and even vote in politicians. The concept of the master race would become more noticeable and men like St. John Rivers would justify imperialism by calling it "white man's burden" (which is tempting to make Jane seem woke for her time by turning his proposal down). Above all, the Christian based morality that ran England for centuries was becoming increasingly superseded by a secular one. Even the Bible went from occupying the center piece of British society to being replaced now by novels like Jane Eyre and the scientific method. 

    Even the concept of a saintly girl redeeming a beastly man appears to be a retiring trope in the modern pop culture due to increased awareness in domestic abuse and such, with increasingly romance stories avoiding the trope all together. I do think abuse is an issue that needs to be dealt with. At the same time, what of those who want to reform? Are we to cast them aside like those who don't want to reform while we live in this new black and white world? And if a woman is strong enough to handle such actions and her strength and wit causes a man to change, what does that say of the scene? To me, it shows there is always a chance for change to everyone. What's needed is neither a push nor pull, but a will. 

     There are people out there in need of help like Mr. Rochester and the real life mad wives in the attic comes in other forms. It might be some addiction to substances, anger issues, a job that he can't leave and it won't let him go no matter how wicked it is, as well as larger issues like poverty and circumstances. Perhaps one reason I like how it ends is the thought of someone who will see the real you and let the world know that the good inside you can be drawn out. Think of it, meeting someone who loves unconditionally, won't let what is said of you dictate decisions, while encouraging you to give it your own, to see the beauty in this world, to see a light side to humanity, and tells you you are not alone. Jane Eyre does show the dark side of the world, with its cruelty, and even those in need of redemption can have a bad side to them. But if they didn't, what have they to be redeemed from? 

    Perhaps we all are like Rochester with the wrong ideas in the mind and in need to be brought down and humbled before we can see the beauty in this world. Some of us even need a real Jane Eyre, who is also seeking love after living a life without it. We can also give that love to real Jane Eyres, allowing them to know forgiveness sooner. If we could do all that, perhaps, the world would be a better place. 

    

[1] Blakemore, Erin. "Sorry, but Jane Eyre Isn't the Romance You Want It To Be" (2019) accessed 2023. https://daily.jstor.org/sorry-but-jane-eyre-isnt-the-perfect-romance-you-want-it-to-be/

[2] Meyer, Stephanie. Twilight. pg. 208 (2005).  

Why We Fight: Review and Commentary part 1.

   How do you do, 

   Why We Fight was a series of wartime propaganda made by the United States Signal Corps during World War II. It was produced by Frank Capra, largely in response to the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, and distributed by the War Activities Committee of the Motion Pictures Industry, plus 20th Century Fox. It was originally meant for the servicemen, but eventually was shown in the general public in theaters. It largely became a morale boost for the former, considering how the first one came out in 1942, when the Axis were still winning. 

   Today, some of the facts presented now seem hyped up or phony, considering how history has come a long way since the war, and the shifting in society has led to values dissonance  that likely wouldn't have led to these films to be produced in the current era (I mean, good luck trying something like this to convince people why Islamic terror is a threat to the world). But, instead of summing it all up in a single post, I'll go by each episode one at a time. 

---Prelude to War (1942) ---

  The first part begins with footage of American soldiers marching in a review while the march, "The Caissons Go Rolling Along" plays. A few seconds in, actor Walter Huston, father of actor and director John Huston, begins to narrate the film. 

    "Why are fighting now?" he asks. "Is it because of Pearl Harbor? ... Or is it because of Britain, France, China, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Poland, Holland, Greece, Belgium, Albania, Yugoslavia, or Russia?" As he is asking this, we see footage of the Pearl Harbor Attack, London Blitz, Fall of Paris, and so on. Then comes the big question, what has happened that has made American men go to war and fight in a world war?

     To answer is a quote from then Vice-President Henry Wallace: "This is a fight between a free world and a slave world." Wallace was quoted from a speech he gave at the Commodore Hotel in New York, on May 8, 1942, "Century of the Common Man."[1] In it, he references that usage from Abraham Lincoln's "House Divided" Speech.

     And which is the free and which is the slave? Obviously, the free world is the Western Hemisphere, as the film shows, or to be specific, North America, and to be even more specific, the United States. 

   Huston cites four ancient passages as the foundation for our liberties. First and last quotes seen are Exodus 20:17  and John 8:32 from the Bible (the first is also in the Torah). In between a quote from The Cow 2:213 from The Koran and Analects XV.24. The narrator, in a reverent tone, simply names them in order of appearance Moses, Muhammad, Confucius, and Christ, while the Christmas hymn "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" is faintly heard. Incidentally, the names cited in initials spell out  MMCC, which is Roman numerals for 2200. The purpose of that, I have no idea. 

    One thing pointed out to me in viewing this film is how the quotes are somewhat out of context. Confucius' line, often known as the Golden Rule, is easy to see as a warning to many: If you don't want to be enslaved, do not enslave others. However, he seems to mean more than just one action. Since I am not a scholar in Islam nor a Muslim, I am going to venture a guess the passage from The Koran is less about freedom and more about how prophets were brought forth to proclaim the gospel, as we say, only for it to be accepted by a small number of people, who then turned on each other with arguments and counterarguments.The shown "Thou shalt not covet that which is thy neighbors[sic]" is a shorter version to what is in the text: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's[sic] house: neither shalt thou desire his wife, nor his servant, nor his handmaid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his."[2] The commandment to not covet can apply to anything, including freedom, but can also apply to the neighbor's land. The passage from the Gospel of St. John is the most famous in the Western world, and is also the most likely to be taken in a different context. The actual verse goes, "And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."[3] It seems vague until you look at the previous line, "If you continue in my word, you shall be my disciples indeed." 

    Considering how large a percentage of American audiences are Christian, and even today still living on Judeo-Christian values, it's amazing how this often flies over peoples' heads, whereas few people heard of Confucius then and fewer actually read the Koran, apart from students of Orientalism. At the same time, looking into the context of the verses makes them all less likely the source of individual freedoms they were presented as. 

    From a doubtful interpretation from a simplistic history lesson, Huston tells us these four passages led to this one from the Declaration of Independence:

    "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal..."[4] 

    While pointing to America as the place of freedom with men of liberty, he includes Bolivar, the national hero of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, along with Garibaldi of Italy. But all the while, we hear more quotes to further show how America is the free world, along with imagery that delights the senses and excite the emotion: paintings, statues, and the Liberty Bell. 

    In contrast is the slave world, consisting of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan. Going in order of rise in power, they start with Italy, where Benito Mussolini is described as a "rebel rouser" who leads the Black Shirts on Rome. The Italians are said to cast their lot with him to face the problems of post-World War I chaos, as opposed to facing them in "a democratic way." The statement does ignore the fact the Kingdom of Italy had a government like that of Great Britain, at the time, but in a way Mussolini had taken power from the King. Huston then references Mussolini's past as a socialist when he says, "he planed to betray them...just as he had betrayed those earlier who first supported him." 

    Next is Adolf Hitler, described as a "more forceful demigod" setting his followers coming out of the Munich beer hall and into Berlin. Once more, facts are glossed over, with the tone of voice from Huston to mean that Germany was rightly defeated in World War I and her sufferings after were justified, while the Nazis are rightly showcased as elements of the Anti-Christ in offering help to the German people. 

    Japan is done third, which matches well with her joining the Axis last (in fact, the Axis Powers' official name was Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis -- the other countries that sided with them were basically satellite nations and not big enough to have their capitals mentioned -- by 1941). Japan's case is complex, but Huston focuses on the Japanese people's worship of their God Emperor, and in a cynical look claims certain power hungry individuals took over Japan by claiming they were carrying out his will. This becomes something fixed in the film, "Know Your Enemy: Japan," where it correctly points out the Japanese considered their emperor (tenno, in Japanese) is the son of the sun goddess. Here too, the Japanese are accused of letting their leaders control them in Anti-Christ undertones.

   In all three, the film shows how they took over: promising help in the chaos of the Great Depression, restoring the glory of the past, and making them masters of the world. The people are shown willingly letting it happen, forming together in crowds to cheer them on. Through trick editing, a soundbite is shown, but Huston would translate it as "Stop thinking and follow / believe in me," with a promise of a better tomorrow, to which people then cheer (Italians shout, "Duce, Duce!", Germans "Sieg Heil!", and Japanese "Banzai!"). The best way to describe it is like watching a MAGA rally and an Islamic terror group gathering, combined with the BLM demonstrations on the streets and Klan rallies near institutions, plus Mexicans doing their grito each Cinco de Mayo. All paganistic, all feeding into the primitive psyche of the human brain to go from a thinking, rational creature to a cheering, shouting, applauding mass of fanatics. 

   Not just the people, but the legislative bodies in charge of each are shown surrendering to the new order (one must remember that Nazi Germany was a republic, whereas Italy was a kingdom and Japan an empire). The orders then set themselves up as rulers of countries that were to rule over all. Huston notes how they each formed with names: Mussolini's boys are called Fascists, for their party is Fascism, the Germans formed National Socialism, or Nazis, while Japan is given different names, but all with the same meaning behind it. "A plain old fashioned militaristic imperialism," he called it, and they "...would get the prosperity, the rest would get the 'co'." This is one example of how in this time period people were willing to call a spade a spade or a rake a rake, regardless of how one or the other felt itself to be. Most people today might think of this as another case of pot calling the kettle black, considering how race relations were in the US at the time and the fact the US also owned territories in the Pacific (most of which were fought over during the war). 

   To further show the trio, we see the symbols and the uniforms (those Black Shirt uniforms do look like the inspiration to those of the Black Panthers in the sixties), in addition to their own gritos. As soon as they come to power, they take control of everything, from the radio to the cinema, to the press and the courtrooms. Opposition was crushed in brutal fashions. Huston gleefully notes how the sight of Fascists with knives could silence "the greatest intellect in the world." Later, we hear a mistranslation of a Nazi officer as "Whenever I hear anyone mention the word 'culture', the first thing I do is reach for my gun!" itself a quote from an anti-Weimar play. We see Nazis shooting people out like gangsters, Italians assassinating someone they kidnapped, and Japanese disposed of by manslaughter. "Finally, there is one obstacle left," he adds, the Church. 

   Of course, Japan wasn't a Christian country, while it seems Mussolini got along with the Catholic Church well enough (especially concerning the Lateran Treaty being made while he was in power, permitting the separation of the Vatican City as a sovereign nation), so the footage happens in Germany, where footage of those Gothic cathedrals are shown. We see the calm and tranquil atmosphere of a church, the hymns being sung, and people praying the rosary, only to be shocked awake by the narrator yelling, "Then God must go!" followed by bricks hurled through stain glass windows, revealing a picture of Hitler. The Nazis remove all traces of God from Germany by replacing crosses with swastikas, disbanding youth groups, sending clergy to concentration camps, and declaring Hitler to be "too big a man to be compared" to Christ. Since we all know of the sufferings of the Jews, it is in the back of our minds even if it's shown to a minimum. Worst affect of this is on the children, the film points out, where German boys and girls are shown doing a pledge to Hitler, basically a Nazi parody to American children reciting the Pledge each morning (though, today it would seem ironic for it also puts children briefly from the faith of their fathers to the faith of the state).

   We then see a series of scenes of children marching to the beat of the New Order's drums. It is heartbreaking to see all those boys and girls, all of whom were such good little children, being poisoned by the ideologies they marched to in the newsreels. Especially as the footage then transitions to grown men marching, showing us what they grow into. All marching in a series of what could be described as May Day for the Axis Powers (and remind one of those similar parades done in North Korea in the last decade, aired whenever they demanded nuclear enrichment). The footage ends with the people looking sober as the marchers go by, especially with an old man looking gloomy on as the narrator says, "That was the way of life - or rather, the way of death - in that other world."

    Will add the march beat used is enough to make one want to march. 

    Compare it to America, the film shows, where people faced their problems "in a democratic way." Here, the narrator shows us what America did in the post World War I world, such as signing treaties with other nations, including the naval reduction, which led to the scrapping of ships that were constructed during that war at the cost of millions. Meanwhile, the US Army was reduced to a standing force of 136,000 (which sounds minute compared to the current standing force). Americans are shown to be so wrapped up in peace and isolation, a poll by Pathe News is cited with interviews of average Americans to show it. Most of the interviewees were, of course, white men, mostly found around the Northeast, but two women are shown (a Southern lady who expresses ignorance of European affairs and a first generation maid who simply says "no" before slamming the window on the camera). Might be interesting to know what the African Americans and other minorities thought of a possible war in Europe, most likely opposition as well. 
    Other things are presented as counters to the Great Depression. CCC was invented to give a useful employment and social security for the benefit of those unable to work (before it became the bankrupt mess that it is now), as well as medicaid for old people and Federal Works program that improved the nation's infrastructure, such as the highways and the Hoover Dam (it doesn't mention the TVA as an example, which was one of those influences here in the South). At the same time, America did several goofs: refusing to join the League of Nations that President Wilson pushed for, setting up tariffs in the Depression that wound up hurting the economy and the working man, encouraging lawlessness with the Prohibition (which was repealed during the Depression). In a modern perspective, the added sins include reversing the efforts of the Civil War and Reconstruction by legalizing segregation, encouraging racial bigotry against blacks in wake of race riots and lynches as opposed to bringing justice for the victims, setting up immigration restrictions that kept many fleeing oppression from having sanctuary in America, and so on. That is, of course, what a modern viewer would think, whereas much of that wasn't universal in the forties. 
     Using the fictional John Q. Public to represent the American citizen, the narrator makes more contrast between the US and the Axis (specifically Nazi Germany). Among them was having more choices to vote, not worrying of having his books burned, going to church he favored on Sunday, and enjoying the sight of children playing (all sounding innocent to read, considering how some sarcastic cynics today would treat it). Of course, the narrator was listing out the naivety and isolationist mindset in a way that it doesn't come off as condescending, lecturing, demeaning, or self-righteous. Especially when comparing to the Axis, one finds such things as children becoming property of the state, especially bred for conquest in breeding camps. 

    Considering it a conspiracy, the narrator goes to the immediate outbreak of World War II. Using footage of Japan joining the Axis, we see Kurosou, smiling at Hitler whose hand he shakes. Then they are depicted carving up the world, which sound fantastic to look at (especially as the plans climax with the destruction of the United States), done by a second uncredited narrator. "All that remains is Shangra La," Huston concludes, "and they'd claim that too, if they knew where it was." That was in reference to FDR's made up base which the Doolittle planes came from before bombing Tokyo.  
    The film includes the idea that world conquest was arranged, as set down by Baron Tanaka, in the twenties, to something called the Tanaka Memorial. In post war days, this book has been revealed to be fraud, but it was treated as the Japanese Mein Kampf, just as the film treats "Bansai" as their "Sieg Heil." The film also demonizes the Japanese further by misquoting Admiral Yamamoto, claiming to be not content here or there, but marching into Washington and "dictating peace to the Americans in the White House." In reality, Yamamoto's statement went, "Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it would not be enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate terms of peace in the White House. I wonder if our politicians have the confidence to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices."[5] Considering the logistics working against Japan, the idea of "Conquering Jap[anese] Army marching down Pennsylvania Ave." does seemed to have been laughable in the eyes of Yamamoto. Still, the image of Axis soldiers invading the US after conquering the rest of the world is something that has stuck through with each subsequent generation. We can still recall many claiming we'd "all be speaking German" if it weren't for the American soldier uttered by a stand in to the WWII generation in pop culture. 

    Then the film accuses the Axis of spreading lies, anywhere from a lack of living space to no raw materials. All the while, we see Hitler calling for more babies and no birth control, Italian women who bore the most sons awarded, while Hitler's military budget being up to more than $80,000,000 (which would be billions in today's money). With such little resources, the Axis were able to build up large armies, navies, and air forces, as Huston tells us, while the democracies had paper thin militaries. 
    To show it, the film goes into the invasion of Manchuria, with September 18, 1931 cited as the starting date for the war (technically, starting date of the Second Sino-Japanese War, considered in the west to be separate from the European war, until 1941). The invasion is shown to be something started on false pretenses and used as an excuse for land theft similar to how people tend to view the Iraq War of 2003. The League condemns Japan, but nothing else comes. As the narrator adds, "the Japanese delegates...smiled, picked up their briefcases, and marched out of the League. Lower Manchuria was dead. Collective security was dead. The green light had been given to the aggressors." 
    After Manchuria, Japan invades China at Shanghai, with fierce fighting in the city, followed by the capture of Jehol. Here, the fight for China ends with it taken up in "The Battle of China." 

    After this, we see Italy invade Ethiopia simply to distract the Italians from the failures of their leader. Ethiopia is shown being backward compared to Italy, though their people are determined to resist as they did in 1895. Unlike the first try, Italy puts boots on the ground and defeats the Empire of Ethiopia. We see the Emperor appeal to the League, claiming that if nothing is done to save his country, "the west will perish." Thus, it's surreal sight to see a black monarch give criticism to a mostly white run League of Nations (lately, I can't help but compare it to The Phantom Menace when Queen Amidala appeals to the Senate). 
    Even with Japan and Italy taking over, the film shows how everyone still looked the other way, especially America's isolationist view. At the end of this film, and all the others to come, we have a quote from General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff: "...victory of the democracies can only be complete with the utter defeat of the war machines of Germany and Japan."

   

    "Prelude to War" is the start to the seven part series. It has thrills and suspense, really gripping the viewer. Like any propaganda, it falls into the old habit of othering, which it justifies by the fact we were at war. One could sum it up by saying, "the world is at risk because those Germans, those Japanese, and those Italians, are ganging up to take it over, take away our freedom and liberties, and the only way to stop them is a united front." Even with the atrocities done by Japan in the war, along with the Holocaust inflicted by the Nazis, the Othering of people is never good form, in war or in peace. 

1. "Henry Wallace - The Century of the Common Man" retrieved on American Rhetoric. americanrhetoric.com (accessed in 2020).

2. Exodus 20:17 (Douay-Rheims).

3. John 8:32 (Douay Rheims).

4. Declaration of Independence. 

5. Isoroku, Yamamoto, letter to Sasakawa Ryoichi, accessed from Wikiquote, 2020.

American Pie: Review and Commentary.

    How do you do, 

   American Pie seems to be the last kind of movie to review, but given that the film is twenty years old now, I thought of giving my two cents to it. Alone, the film is like some strange type of pie where it looks mouth watering from the start, until you slice it. Then you see strange, black goo where the filling ought to be. Then, when you taste it, it's awful. So much so that you throw the rest out and you spend the next period of time washing out your mouth. 

   That's a way of describing how one feels about this teen sex comedy, yet there is another side to it. The title comes from the song by Don McLean, first premiered in 1972, where he sings of the event we call "The Day the Music Died." This is in reference to Feb. 03, 1959, when during a winter tour the three rock stars, Buddy Holley, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper, were killed in a plane crash outside Clear Lake, Iowa. At the time of the movie's release, it had been forty years since the crash,and the song has been a classic. In fact, the same year American Pie came out, Weird Al did a parody called "The Saga Begins", only with a different subject matter. 

    The reason for bringing this is up is for the sake of trivia, because if you were to watch American Pie, you won't be seeing any plane crashing or hear the song played in the sound track. In fact, there is nothing much left of the song, other than the title. It's just like in Fantasia featuring Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite" without the Nutcracker. Recently, with the film now twenty, I am thinking that the title is something of a fluke. There does seem a certain bit of innocence in the first movie that is lacking in the sequels (but I still see the warts present as the review continues). I mean, this was to be the first of what seemed a trilogy, later a series of films, until it became basically the Millennium's National Lampoon. 

   The film has a basic plot: four teenage boys make a pact to lose their virginity by prom night. Those four good old boys drinking whiskey and rye, and singing "this'll be the day [we lose our V-cards]" are named Jim, Finch, Kevin, and Oz (nope, not the wizard). Right off the bat, you'd read that and think, how cliche: four teenage boys are planning to get laid at some point and there is going to be a comedy of errors leading up to it. There are indeed some issues with the plot, one of which is how it objectifies the girls into sex objects. It certainly takes the four boys plot from American Graffiti and gives it the blue pill, but I wonder what was the point in this? 

    Not only that, the pact doesn't happen for most of the first act, but it gives plenty of time for us to know the characters.  

   Jim, a lonely teenage broncin' buck, sans a pink carnation or a pick'em up truck, who kind of resembles Cory Matthews from Boy Meets World, is shown wanting it while also viewing some adult material. The opening scene has him watching something on the television, but due to the period of time, he can't see much. Hey, the joys of the pre-millennium technology. In those days, some of the channels couldn't be viewed unless you had a satellite dish or digital cable (those rich enough for those channels, of course, had a way of keeping them away from the kids). Those were the days!

    Back to Jim, his father decides a cheaper thing to do is to give him some nudie magazines, which to me is like teaching a kid not to smoke by making him smoke an entire carton of cigarettes. All it does is just make him addicted to that trash. Not only that, these days, Jim's father would have been in hot water for showing that smut to a minor, even if he did so on a computer. Later on, after catching Jim indulging in self-love with the pie (which is where the film gets its title), he covers it up first and then has an honest discussion with Jim about masturbation. In the former, I must say something. Jim's mom obviously worked long and hard on that pie and to see it trashed like that is an insult, while lying about it is even worse. Now she is going to have to make another, and then what? Both Jim and his dad will have to eat it as well, even if it turns out to not taste very good. As to the latter, it's actually much better, especially when he compares sex to a tennis game, with masturbation basically being like playing the game against a wall. Basically, it gets very boring after a while (and for plenty of people, addictive), and that it's not a game. Though the discussion doesn't bring up any religious issue to it, or even discusses the health affects or benefits, I think that scene has the most honest discussion out there in pop culture, whereas our puritanical culture would make movies and shows hide it with euphemistic terms. 

   The film does offer one affect of porn viewing and masturbation where Jim lacks the ability to walk up and talk to girls (though I am not certain any expert out there can offer evidence to support that, but we'll give the dog a bone on this one). I am aware that teenage boys often are going through puberty and are going to be awkward around women, and sometimes there are teenage boys who might not be attracted to girls but instead prefer their fellow men. Others are asexual. Still, I have noted that characters like Jim are always shown that way where they focus on a pretty girl and try to talk to her, but can't. Then, for a time, his porn becomes a clutch (after all, the popular line of thought is, why waste time and humiliate yourself by talking to real women when you can have your fantasies; the women in the pictures don't even have to give to consent for lusting because they don't even talk; and they won't age, unlike their real counterparts -- or make complaints of you bothering them or make it a legal matter, either). All the while, he focuses on a foreign exchange student named Nadia, played by Shannon Elizabeth. 

    Just to avoid rabbit trailing, I'll get to the other boys. Finch and Kevin, two typical nerd boys, with the latter as the leader of the group, who initiates the pact, and the former is something of a germaphobe, to the point that he doesn't use public restrooms. That last is understandable because, well most places like gas stations and rest stops rarely keep their restrooms clean (there are some exceptions, of course). Kevin also has a girlfriend named Vicky, with whom he wants to get to the next level, which puts a wedge between them briefly. 

    Case in point on the last, at a party at the Stiffler's, (name of that weirdo guy played by Sean William Scott, whose parents are always absent, leaving him to host parties where people get drunk and make out). When Kevin and Vicky are there, Kevin attempts to get to that level while Vicky is slow to try it. Vicky even talks with another girl, Jessica, who tells her that sex is not a rocket launch (I still fail to see the analogy). Vicky agrees, then gives her boyfriend what some people call "the blow." Of course, Vicky would want the favor returned, so Kevin tries to find something in the same manner. He contacts his older brother who tells him of the Book of Love (apparently, lots of boys wrote it, to answer the song's question) and he finds one routine that he tries on his girl, with great results. One joke in the scene has Vicky's father coming up to bring her to dinner and she yells out a response before he knocks on it. Apparently, to most people, there's "coming" and there's "cumming", and its the former the father thought he heard when she really said the latter. Personally, I don't know how that happened, especially as it's actually the Latin word cum, which is pronounced "coom", which means "with" (as in "Et cum te spiritu", meaning "And with your spirit."), but it's gotten into the English language somehow. Yet, on some television stations, Vicky's line is even altered to something like "be right there!"

     After that encounter, Vicky tells Kevin she loves him. Yet, Kevin can't say it to her, which upsets her. For a time, it seems they might break up, until, after another talk, Vicky finally goes to Kevin and tells him what he wants to hear, though she suggests after the prom. 

    As to Finch (apparently a reference to Atticus Finch), he bribes some girl to make him seem a stud, which makes him lock horns with Stiffler, who was seen vomiting after drinking some neglected beer that Kevin....know what, I'll just skip that part and say, don't just pick up any random drink when at a party. After all, there are worse things to wind up in drinks in those situations (which begs the question, why does Hollywood perpetuate the image of underage teenagers having parties with alcohol and no adult supervision? I mean, a bunch of poor, innocent teenage girls gathering in a house with like minded teenage boys, in a setting featuring drugs and booze, hosted by some pervert or strumpet, where someone can get drunk and taken advantage of? Not to sound crazy, but isn't that one of the things that's led to the MeToo movement in recent years?) So, while the Stiffler was looking down, the Finch stole his horny crown. To get at Finch, he puts lax into his coffee, prompting the whole random scene where Finch is running for home, yet winds up in the girls' room. The scene is grotesque and hardly necessary to me, other than the fact that it explains how Finch lost his chance at a prom date. 

    Finally, Oz, the one jock in the quartet, who does the lacrosse team along with Stiffler. Oz, unlike the stereotypical jock, doesn't have any arm candy, but decides to try out for the pact too. He does so by exploring the campus, eventually entering the choir and meeting Heather, leading to all sorts of jokes on his masculinity and orientation. Oz's arc becomes basically showing that he can be a real man without going into the macho sport athletic set, which seems to impress Heather, until she learns of his reputation and the pact. At one point, she dumps him while saying, "you're such a jock, no a jerk!" Then, after a speech from the coach, Oz decides to renounce the pact and that is when Heather agrees to go with him to prom. 

    Jim gets most of the comedy on him. Besides the thing with the pie, he continues longing for Nadia, who invites herself to his place for study. Turns out, it's so she could change after some event or another, and the boys decide to use this as an opportunity to film her, leading to the most well remembered image of the movie (Shannon Elizabeth taking off her clothes, down to her panties; as if to be Gen Y's answer to the swimsuit fantasy scene from Fast Times at Richmond High). It's also the most controversial. Here, a girl is changing clothes and her privacy is being disrespected, herself objectified, and her consent not even asked for. What's worse, not only are Jim and his friends seeing it, but so is Stiffler's little brother, a group of girls, some boy band with a monkey, and Sherman, the Jester on the Sidelines Minus a Cast, who instigated the plot. Apparently, Jim sent the link to everyone instead of choosing who to send it to (twenty years later, the hilarity of the scene only goes so far, considering we got websites that are about posting videos of people doing embarrassing things).

     So, it gets back to Jim who returns to find Nadia on the bed, getting comfortable (she does grab a shirt for modesty). Looking back on the strip-tease, I can't help but think with the way it was done she somehow knew she was being filmed. Instead of scolding him, like you would expect a girl to do (or some of the things today's women do), she turns the tables on Jim and has him do a strip tease for all to see. Afterward, he is in his boxers when he is invited to bed, then she has him touch her, prompting the one embarrassment that comes on teenage boys. Not once, but twice does this happen, making Jim the laughing stock of the school. Nadia is later sent home by her sponsors, leaving Jim without a date. 

     Enter Michelle, the band geek played by Allyson Hannigan, who starts her stories with "there was this one time at band camp...". You know, I have a sibling who went to band camp and she never began her stories that way. She never even says that in her video reviews. With nothing else, Jim decides to take to the prom the girl who sang the blues.

     So prom night arrives and there they all were "one place, a generation lost in space, with no time left to start again," which is about the only way to describe this point of senior year. It's here the antithesis of the pact, a red headed, freckled faced nerd, named Sherman, who calls himself the Sherminator (a portmanteau of Sherman and Terminator; a self-proclaimed "sophisticated sex robot sent back in time to change the life of some lady"), the boy who claimed to have done it with a girl earlier in the movie, is revealed to be false. The girl he supposedly done it with says they didn't do it and that it was all a bribe to make it seem that he has prowess. And as he watched her on the stage, his hands were "clinched in fists of rage," cause she mentions he has a habit of wetting himself, which happens then and there. No angel born in hell can break that kind of spell.
    This puts the four in a crossroads and for a moment it seemed nothing else will come of it. Even Jim is willing to say he has had it with sex while Oz has gone so far as to renounce it. Finch is down because he has no date. He even talks to a cynical girl named Jessica, who only gives him a flask full of booze. Heather seems in love with Oz because they were dancing in the gym real slow. Yet, all four still head to Stiffler's party after the prom, while we don't get any of the prom cliches (meaning we don't get to see a prom king and queen). It's here that Jim and Michele get to know each other more, with some strange stories exchanged. Then they retire to the bedroom, to partake in that sacrificial rite: during which Kevin finally says those three little words every girl wants to hear, Oz lets Heather decide when to do it and is rewarded for it, Jim gets the slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am from Michele (in what could foreshadow the sex scene from Breaking Dawn), and Finch goes down to the basement and runs into Stiffler's Mom. The first seems cliched, the second is unrealistic, and the third I have nothing good to say on. The last, I'll mention, because it becomes his revenge for the coffee spike as he seduces her, thus when Stiffler comes down, he finds his mom with Finch as the pact was consummated (and, I guess, Satan laughing with delight).
    Just like the song, the film ends on a low note. After using Jim, Michele just "smiled and turned away", leaving Jim to continue his video sex chat with Nadia. Finch also used Stiffler's Mom, believe it or not. Oz and Heather become a couple, despite winding up going to separate colleges come fall. Yet, after all the build up, Vicky decides to call it quits with Kevin, which was the worst of the four. They go to the sacred store...I mean, their favorite restaurant, where they have breakfast and make a toast to "the next step."

    American Pie isn't a feel good classic, not in the way most of the movies from 1999 are, especially given all that was mentioned. The plot is cliched, is mostly done for comedy but little development on the characters, and there is a lot of objectifying of girls in this movie. In American Pie, girls are only eye candy to be lusted over, to acquire in a sexual conquest, and any who says yes to a guy will make the guy feel great.
    Of course, several things do turn the sexism charges on its head. For one, Nadia is shown as the exotic foreigner to make four typical American boys drool over, yet she turns the tables on one of them by having him strip on camera as well. Heather and Vicky are another way of subverting it, considering how they let their men know when they are ready and are respected for it. The only problem with them I got is how the film presents the same old cliche that if the man says something the woman wants to hear, which is opposite of what he really wants, she'll immediately give it to him, revealing that her desires are mutual. I don't know what universe that kind of manipulation works, but in real life, Kevin and Oz would still be virgins on graduation as most girls tend to stick to their abstinence vow really well. Not only that, Vicky's arc is pointless when she breaks up with Kevin after they consummate their relationship, all the while we had become invested in them. Michelle, meanwhile, the one geeky girl who would likely not be chosen for a date, does what my girlfriend once said, "why invest in other people when it's gonna be over?" (something to that effect), by simply taking Jim's virginity and then leaving, all the while no relationship comes from that.
    The rest of the girls are only just extras who look pretty while standing around and letting guys hit on them. The one exception is Jessica, the cynical girl who can't wait to be in college, something I consider be just a trope of that snarky, teenager who thinks everything is false, never enjoys life, and often thinks things will be better once they are out of high school. She has no arc, other than lie for Finch and give Vicky some sex advice, and the sequels don't really know what to do with her, other than make her a no show in one, or a Lesbian in another.
   Sherman and Stiffler are also stereotypes, with one being the creepy nerd who annoys the other boys with his high IQ and bothers girls with his ugly looks, and the other being a jock who acts like the big man on campus (after seeing him in Road Trip and Dukes of Hazard, I can't help but think that seems the character Sean William Scott was made to play in the turn of the millennium; in all those films, he is showing going around with a grin on his face while attempting to get in a girl's pants or get at some guy). Come to think of it, that is just about all that is need to be said of those two, since they only exist for the sake of comedy or conflict.
     As a whole, there is a reek of sexism with American Pie, something that today's audiences might not want. At the same time, there is some innocence with the film that connects with the song in more than just the title. Don McLean wrote "American Pie" after seeing the tragedy in the plane crash that killed three rock stars, after which rock n roll was transformed: going into teen pop and folk music in the early sixties, psychedelic tunes and political songs of the late sixties, then the dark and edgy songs of the early seventies, all a far cry from the wholesome, feel good, Oldies that dominated the airwaves in the fifties. The same with the American Pie franchise after the first movie. They decided to give it a sequel after getting into the millennium, which reunited the cast (including Jim with Nadia), and brought back the same sex comedy. Then they got another, though they renamed it American Wedding, where after Jim realized he was into Michelle, they get married. After that, the franchise became like National Lampoon with a few made for TV movies, some that went straight to video, with the rehashed plot points and the same tired out sexism, before going back to the big screen in 2012 with American Reunion. Not one of the sequels has had the same magic as the first movie and not one has had the staying power, either (though American Pie 2 made more money than the first movie).
    That leads to the one contrast in that innocence loss. With rock n roll, the loss of innocence came with the music transforming over the course of a decade. With this movie franchise, the loss of innocence only came from reusing the same thing constantly until it got stale.
   Now, the song, inspired by an event now forty years old, may continue to be enjoyed still, even after only one artist attempt to make her own version. The film, meanwhile, hasn't aged well. It's become that embarrassing friend from high school who never grew up, or basically the cinema's version of Harvey Weinstein. True, at one time, people would have thought of him good and all, considering he gave us so many good movies in the nineties, and for liberals he campaigned against Trump in the 2016 elections. However, all that no longer matters after all the sexual abuse allegations are made to light. We can like the late forties to early sixties America, racist and sexist warts and all, even as we jam to "American Pie", but it's even harder to like a sex comedy like American Pie, regardless of the innocence it may carry. The mindset of the song's world had a balance, for with all the dark side of post-World War II America, there were a lot of good things in that era that were traded in for progress (though it's be rabbit trailing to list them all). The mindset of the movie, however, doesn't provide that balance. It's a secular film (American Wedding attempted to add religion by making Jim and his family Jewish, though I have found no evidence to support that revelation in its prequels), the view of teenagers in high school is slanted, the story is cliched, the sexism is rampant, etc. It is no wonder the older audience would have called it trash.
    Could it have been fixed in a remake? Not a word has been spoken. I know people would start in the characters. In the first film, we had a quartet of white boys who hook up with four white girls, something a lot of people today would want to change. I am sure if they remade this movie, they'd feature one of the boys and one of the girls as a person of color. They can also show how far we have come since 1999 and actually have a gay character in there, somewhere. Another radical move is change the premise from four boys vowing to get laid by prom into four girls making that vow (a kind of sex positive update on How to Marry a Millionaire). Either one of those updates would be the tip of the iceberg, but considering the content of the first movie being transferred to the remake, I doubt those updates would actually improve its quality.
   Perhaps its best to not keep making remakes and only keep American Pie around for aesthetic reasons only. In a sense, reboots of older films have their pluses, but often contribute to the robbing of innocence of a genre. In the end, considering how Ghostbusters fared, a remake, to paraphrase the song, will cause the children to scream, the lovers to cry, and the poets to dream, and not a kind word be spoken, and the older fans would take "the last train ride for the coast." To quote John Wayne, "That'll be the day, Pilgrim!" 

Undersea Adventure Overview.

   How do you do,

  (First, let's take a moment to remember the people in the Southern Atlantic coastline who are dealing with Dorian and pray for the safety and recovery efforts they will face.)

   After having a nostalgia blast with Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey, I decided to revisit another game of my childhood: Knowledge Adventure: Undersea Adventure.

   Knowledge Adventure was a series of computer game like programs issued in the late eighties, early nineties time frame, as a way to educate children, as well as be entertaining. Thus, the series was popular for people of all ages. The motto for the franchise was "Have Fun! Get Smart!"

  Admittedly, some of the programs they offered didn't age well. Space Adventure had a few things set for after 2000 which never happened (including people returning to the Moon in 2012). The knowledge of dinosaurs has come a long way since the release of the original Dinosaur Adventure (which was re-released later as Dinosaur Adventure 3D), while it seems the last was released on the sudden revival in dinosaur interest due to the release of Jurassic Park and Land Before Time. Other programs have held up over the years, such as Body Adventure 3D, to some extent, along with Bug Adventure, Kid's Zoo, and American Adventure (the preview shows the presidents morphing over the years, though dated now as it stopped with Bill Clinton). Topping the ones that holds well is Undersea Adventure, one of two of my favorites (the other being Dinosaur Adventure).

  Open the program on the CD or floppy disk, get into DOS in the process (in those days, some computer programs worked by getting off of Windows and into Disk Operating System, or DOS, where you had the annoying task of having to type out the program you wanted), and then you see the title screen with three electronic notes played. Then comes the video of the great white shark approaching, making one think he was in the cage see, before it goes to the other and then swims away (perfect for any too young to see Jaws). That was how the program opened.
   The game came in two versions, which I'll call the Alpha and the Beta versions. The Alpha version is the one I liked the most: it had the simplistic menu design where you are in a kind of cabin of a boat looking out. Each of the lay out items led to a particular item, such as the popcorn leading to the movies or the treasure chest to the 3D Undersea World.
   There are games involved: Can You Find Me?, What Do I Eat? and Who Am I? Each game is a trivial one where you match the food with an animal or a body part with an animal. Get all correct and you are treated to a CGI orca leaping out of the water (enough to cry out "Willy!")
    While the games are for fun, there is also the reference where you read articles about the flora and fauna of the oceans, most of which are based on Jacques Cousteau's exhaustive work, The Random House Atlas of the Oceans. There's even an introduction article on him that comes when one first enters the reference page. The reference page comes with category areas for fish, crustaceans, mollusks, marine mammals, marine reptiles, maps, the shore, and so on. Click on either of them and you go straight to one particular subject. There's also a series of red, yellow, and green buttons on either side of the picture that when pressed on results in all kinds of noises (some are just added for humor-sake). The one thing with the reference page that I couldn't figure out is how you could zoo out the globe to the point of being in space as with Space Adventure. 
    While the reference page has movies, you could watch them separately in the movie page. You can also go to the lab and see the inside of the shark, octopus, and lobster. There is also the story book, which is meant for the pre-school and kindergarten aged audience because a voice speaks out the words, and the writing is in a simplistic manner to allow things to be explained without going over one's head.
    These areas are not as impressive as the 3D Aquarium and Treasure Hunt, which use the 3D engine for movement with the mouse. The graphics are somewhat dated (being like that of Wolfenstein 3D, which came out a year earlier; yet was enough to make someone who played that game expect to see the bad guys pop out any second). In Aquarium, you start at the end of a hall and enter the atrium that resembles a flower. You then chose which of the rooms to enter. Unlike in Wolfenstein, the doors don't open and each time you go in, the music changes.
    You can see for yourself in this series of videos posted by KGrove94 on Youtube. The player in the videos is like me, and I am sure some of y'all who remember are, by starting at Coral Reef room first, then working one's way around from there. The music includes a presto obstinato for the atrium, followed a gentle sounding tune for Coral Reef and Exotic Fish rooms, pleasant harmony for the Marine Mammal and Open Ocean rooms, a somewhat Calypso beat for the Danger and Weird Fish room, while The Shore room has a tune of steel drums with the sound of waves crashing. The Aquarium is breath taking either way and is the only aquarium in the world that is open 24/7 and is all free admission (and you don't even have to beg your parents to set aside a time for a road trip to a real one).
    The set up is impressive and the dated graphics ignored, though it does seem a disappointment that each room only has pictures and never once can one see three dimensional creatures. Nor are the pictures moving. Instead, one clicks on the pictures and a text appears for a description, similar to seeing it on the side of a fish tank. One interesting bug is in both versions: you click on the wall of the Coral Reef room and the text for the Brain Coral appears. This never happens in the other rooms, something I can't explain.
    Treasure Hunt has the same set up, but this time you are greeted by a manatee named Splash (he claims he used to be a boy-a-tee, but then he grew up. 😄😄😄) You start out in an area with a center room and three halls leading to different room. Behind you is a poster of a shark, which you click and it disappears forever, enabling you to begin the game. First, you might be more conscious of the set up, so after Splash speaks, you would explore the three rooms: Kelp room, Coral room, and Surf room (Splash will sing "Surfin' USA" upon your exiting of that room). Each room has another manatee: one with a shorts, one with sunshades, and the third with a tie. In each room, you interact with an animal for some facts, each one talking as though to impersonate a celebrity (the nudibranch sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example). When you start the game, you go in with one minute worth of oxygen in the tank. You must find the treasure before it runs out, barring stops to interact with additional aquatic life along the way (though Splash says to avoid the predators).
    One thing noticed by anyone is how you come into contact with Splash and he vanishes. Why, I don't know. The beta version fixes this glitch, but since he is at the end of the game, we can assume he found a short cut.
    The beta version of the game is about the same with a few changes. The movies are expanded to have more videos, which all come with an annoying commentary at the start before the doors open to let you watch (you'd have to click to skip over it). It also gave new voices to the characters (making Splash sound younger and removing the celebrity impersonations) as well as adding a commentary to each picture in the aquarium (which only works on the illiterate and the visually impaired). Even the menu is made to resemble the inside of a submarine, which doesn't have the same personality as the alpha version. Other than that, it has no improvements on the graphics or anything else.

    Since the CDs don't work on my current computer, it is a disappointment to not bring it up again, plus it also seems unlikely to share the experience with any of my kids in the future. That is indeed a shame, because it really is a classic. So far, I am yet to hear of any HD versions or some newer releases made, one that not only updates some of the knowledge, but possibly show how far computer technology has come to enable a more realistic aquarium or treasure hunt.
     For someone who doesn't live near a coast, the viewing of the game videos is enough of a way to come close, as well as providing the nostalgia blast. 

The Nutcracker and the Mouseking: A Christmas Allegory

How do you do.

  For the upcoming Christmas Season, I decided to start the reviews on literature with one of my favorite Christmas tales, E.T.A Hoffmann's Nussknacker und Mauskoenig or The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. This has been long in the work and has nothing to do with the recent film adaptation that is in theaters now, but since everyone is watching I decide to get it posted this year.

 When you first hear of The Nutcracker, you might be thinking of the ballet by Russia's great composer, Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky. The ballet was from a late period in the composer's life, about a year before his death, best known to American listeners in the abridged style "Nutcracker Suite", on which a sequence from Disney's Fantasia is based on. Tchaikovsky reportedly disliked the piece and after 1892 it was rarely played[1], until in the middle of the last century with the frequent productions of the ballet itself. Because of the setting of the story being in Christmas eve, it's become part of the Christmas traditions just as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Clement Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicolas" had before it.
  Yet, before there was a Russian ballet, there was the fairy tale, and it was the work of two men: a German Romantic writer named Ernst Theodore Amadeus Hoffmann, aka E.T.A. Hoffman, and French novelist Alexandre Dumas, the man who gave us The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. I list it as the work of two men because the original story was written twice. The first was by Hoffman in 1816, done as a novella, while Alexandre Dumas rewrote it as The History of the Nutcracker twenty eight years later. The plot lines in the story are completely identical that one could accuse Dumas of plagiarism, yet a few changes in writing style are noticeable, the way Dumas looks into the Christmas Tree concept like that of an anthropologist observing natives in a ritual in contrast to Hoffman presenting Christkind tradition, and so on. So, we're basically looking over the same story if I reviewed the both at once.
   One noticeable difference is in the family, where Hoffman features the Stahlbaum family while Dumas renames them the Silberhaus. The first is said in genealogy.com to mean "steel tree", whereas the latter "silver house"[2]. And it's not too hard to see that plenty of German influences are in the ballet, such as the inclusion of "Grandfather Dance" in the libretto, itself a traditional German dance done to signal the end of a gathering (making its place as the end of the Christmas Party scene right).
   The heroine of The Nutcracker is not named Clara, unlike what the ballet has, but Marie Stahlbaum / Silberhaus. Marie is a variant of Mary, a French and German variant mostly (though The Sound of Music taught us German speakers could also use Maria). This name connection, as well as the way she holds the Nutcracker, invokes the image of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child. In a way of avoiding the actual motherhood, Drosselmeier, her eccentric godfather, gives Marie the Nutcracker doll that he made himself and she protects the doll like a mother protects her baby. Like any mother, she discovers that there are other things to come between her and her doll, which was originally to be shared with, but Herr Stahlbaum / Silberhaus deemed it to be in Marie's care. First case is when Fritz breaks the Nutcracker while trying to crack nuts. Later, she finds him being threatened by the mice.
  The theme of protective motherhood shows in the differences between Marie and her brother, Fritz, in treatment of the Nutcracker. Fritz, like any boy, just sees the Nutcracker as a toy to play with; another hussar to command. He even tries to crack a really hard nut with it and it breaks the jaw. Marie weeps over the injury of the Nutcracker while Fritz considers him not a good soldier. By every right, Fritz should have gotten a good spanking for that but he was lucky that time. Instead, his father makes him ashamed of his treatment of a soldier, since Fritz is in to toy soldiers. This protective mother stage goes to the Mouse King's advantage when he threatens to chew him up if she doesn't appease him with sweets. The Mouse King, of course, uses this for extortion.
  When Drosselmeier comes on the scene, we learn alot of the man from the start. Godpapa Drosselmeier, as he is called in the story, is Fritz and Marie's godfather, a special sort of relation in Marie's life: he is there to rear the children should their parents die, as according to his role when they were baptized. Drosselmeier is described as a little man with wrinkles in the face and some long hair, plus a black patch over his right eye. Looking at him, you would think of the Norse god Odin, trading in his wanderer robes for that of a clock maker. The appearances are just about the only connection to Norse mythology that Drosselmeier appears to have. His whole name is Christian Elias Drosselmeier. If you look at the name, you notice the two instances of "el" being used, especially in Elias.
    Drosselmeier is a strange sort. Though he is good natured and friendly, I couldn't help but notice he could be a jerk at times. When Fritz breaks the Nutcracker, he sides with the boy. Later, he scoffs at Marie figuring out who the Nutcracker really is, and tries to show her false. Yet, when he presents his nephew in the end. There are times that Drosselmeier is someone who knows more than what he is saying, which makes him the most unpredictable of the characters. 

   On Christmas Eve night, Marie sneaks into the toy room to check up on her nutcracker doll (stored with, along with other toys, a doll that is named Clara) and that is when the mice arrive. Mice were a common pest in Europe for centuries, along with their cousins, the rats. The reason is because mice and rats were considered carriers of the Plague (ironically, a family of rats is also called "plague"). Mice also like to get into food and will eat anything left out, as evidenced in the story where the mice bother the queen to have some lard. They also get in people's hair, nibble on exposed skin, crowd in clothes, and leave stains on floors and walls. So, based on this knowledge it's no surprise to see the mice as villains.
  The worst among them is as big as a hamster with the attitude of a shrew. He has no name but is called The Mouse King. Now, the ballet productions portray the Mouse King as a conventional mouse with a crown on his head, with the animated film The Nutcracker Prince making him seem rat like (perhaps playing off on Professor Ratigan from The Great Mouse Detective), but Hoffman's story describes him as a large mouse with seven heads. The image is also in Dumas' version. The seven headed rodent invokes the image of the Dragon and the Seven Headed Beast described in the Book of Revelations (both cases are described wearing a diadem on each head). The reason most productions didn't use the original image is practicality; you just can't create a seven headed mouse mask and put it on the body of a man, and they are yet to use today's puppetry like they are with King Kong. One thing scary is real life rodents in Germany have been recorded bounding together into a bigger menace, usually because they are stuck together by sticky substances. Rat kings, they are called, and they could consist of up to thirty-two rats stuck together as one body.
   Reading over the battle with the mice seems like that of a miniature version of Armageddon. The Mouse King is the Beast, Whore of Babylon, and Satan himself rolled into one while the Nutcracker and the dolls become the angels defending Earthly paradise from the Armies of Darkness. Mostly the toy soldiers, along with international dolls, while the girly dolls hide in the rear; yet I am positive in this day, you could have some of the most popular toys taking part in the action (even Barbie dolls taking on the mice). In the first battle, the mice appear to win near the end as the Nutcracker seems outwitted as a commander and then the toys get literally help from above. Marie throws a shoe at the mice who scatter and then everything goes black (The Nutcracker Prince takes it a step further by having the Mouse King land on his candle and run off screaming "MY TAIL'S ON FIRE!" and later winds up in the fire place, sort like the Devil tossed into the Lake of Fire).

   Another biblical allusion is presented in the story Drosselmeier tells to Marie and the children. The core of The Nutcracker is the story of a literal tough nut to crack, the Crackatook Nut, which is introduced as a cure to a curse. In the story, which is never used in the ballet, a king and queen of an unspecified kingdom have daughter named Pirlipat, presented as a beauty with good teeth. At least, she was until Dame Mouserinks comes on the scene.
   Dame Mouserinks, aka the Mouse Queen, starts out extolling the Queen for food, such as the lard used in making sausages, resulting in them not tasting well (it's strange how the King faints when he discovers "too little fat"). Once more, the fact mice were a problem in the past is illustrated and the King has it decreed they are to go. Drosselmeier is shown in the story working with the Court Astrologer in taking out the mice plague with mousetraps, with only the Mouse Queen escaping and vowing revenge.
  She does so by biting Pirlipat, turning her into an ugly thing. The King is angry and tells Drosselmeier to find a cure. When he couldn't, the King almost has him executed, but spares him at the urging of the Queen, sort of a play to scene of Bathsheba petitioning to King Solomon, only streamlined. Instead, when Drosselmeier brings up the Crackatook Nut, he is sent on a quest with the astrologer to find it.
   Besides the occult theme with magicians involved in the court, one thing that seemed queer is how the Princess is examined. Drosselmeier is said to take her apart as one would take apart a machine to examine for repairs, making one wonder if she were a girl or a puppet. It's likely a metaphor for a body examination, which makes it seem creepy (I don't think someone other than the court physician would be permitted to examine a princess' body like that). Anyhow, they realize they need not only the nut, but also someone who hasn't shaved yet and never worn boots, and the man turns out to be a youth who is also named Drosselmeier.
  The theme of virginity is shown in the younger man in various ways: he has not shaved yet nor has he worn boots. It's an interesting symbolism of virginity as shaving and wearing boots were considered the trademarks of manhood and boys generally don't do one or the other (it was once a rite of passage for a boy to put on a collar on the top of his shirt and cuffs at the end of sleeves, while also putting on trousers). Since I grew facial hair before age fifteen, it does seem strange for the youth to not be shaving at age fourteen, but some boys at that age have only peach fuzz. The boots part is understandable since such were hard to come by that could fit and fourteen is when boys go through growth spurts in the legs and feet that would make it hard to have the right size. Yeah, you might be wondering what do those things have to do with it? Let's say it's a cultural thing to compare male virginity to boyhood, since people believe men cannot be virgins.
   With this theme, this makes the younger Drosselmeier the one who can crack the nut. He cracks it and gives it to the Princess, sort of how in the Last Supper, Christ takes bread, breaks it, and gives it to His disciples. He then walks back seven steps (as if to mark the days of  the week, if not Creation). However, the Mouse Queen comes in once more to avenge her broken spell by biting him in the ankle, turning him into a Nutcracker, thus turning the Young Drosselmeier into a Christ figure (think Genesis 3:15), taking Pirlipat's curse away and upon himself. The Mouse Queen pays for the bite with her life, but upon transformation, the Nutcracker is rejected by the princess he cured, which brings to mind how the people of Israel rejected Christ. Instead of crucifixion, the Nutcracker, Drosselmeier, and the Astrologer are banished from the kingdom.
    Just now, I was thinking it over and see that the Blessed Trinity in the three men: in this case Uncle and Nephew play Father and Son, with the Astrologer as the Holy Spirit. Considering the Bible also has kings rejecting God, it should be no surprise when they are banished from the kingdom after the Princess is cured. It is also a sad twist, considering how Pirlipat fell for Young Drosselmeier on first meeting, when he was at his height, only to reject him when at his lowest. I should add on that that the Brothers Grimm were arranging their fairy tales around the same time Hoffmann was writing his. In a sense, Hoffmann had satired the Grimms' fairy tales where a beautiful and pure princess is paired with a handsome and noble prince, by showing beauty to not mean good. It's at that point, we return to the story proper.

  After the first battle with the mice, Marie's role as mother ends and she becomes less like the Virgin Mary and more a princess guarded by a prince. A psychologist would consider this progression a case of Freud's Oedipal attraction in reverse, where instead of the son being attracted to the mother figure it's the mother attracted to the child figure. The fact that the child is actually a man makes this sort of thing taken to another level. How is it a man? The Nutcracker comes to life that night (not in the Toy Story sense) and we hear of a story from Drosselmeier of how a nephew of his was turned into a Nutcracker. Marie figures it out and starts calling the Nutcracker by his name, even refraining from the Pieta pose that she had earlier. The Nutcracker tells her to stop sacrificing her things for him and requests a sword, which he uses against the Mouse King.
   At this point, I should point out that the story takes on a turn similar to most fairy tales and folk tales with dragons. The common image has them guarding things, and sometimes a princess, and the man would slay it to rescue the latter. In this case, the dragon is played by the Mouse King. Without us seeing it, he slays it, wakes up Marie, and takes her to Toyland. From this, we see the Brunhilde legends being referenced as well as "Sleeping Beauty" and "Snow White."
  Finally, Marie becomes the perfect bride. She is presented a fairy tale marriage when the Nutcracker takes her to his kingdom. She does wake up from this and goes to the Nutcracker to make a vow to be not like Princess Pirlipat. This vow results in the Nutcracker taking human form at last and Marie finds a handsome suitor presented to her by his uncle.This kind of transformation follows that of the Beast in Barbot de Villeneuve's fairy tale, "Beauty and the Beast" where the girl makes a solemn vow of love and it breaks the spell that was holding the man in another form. In this case, it's as a nutcracker doll.
   One final Biblical allusion comes when the Nutcracker takes Marie to the Doll Kingdom, shown as a magical world where toys and sweets live and every Christmas tree known grows. The set up of this fantastic world is meant to resemble Heaven, and Marie sees it twice. First the Nutcracker shows her the place after slaying the Mouse King. The second is after the Nutcracker becomes human again and takes her there upon hearing she would love him regardless.
   In the final chapter, Marie tells everyone of it but no one believes her. Her father even threatens to throw her toys away if anymore talks of it come. But, Marie keeps faith and says the magic word. In the end, all are happy. That ending is preferable to the Baryshnikov production of the ballet that ends with Clara back in the living room and wondering if the whole thing was just a dream.

 

Notes.

1. Fantasia. Disney Pictures. (1940) (Classicalmpr has an article on the movie's use of the suite in better detail).
2. genealogy.com. (accessed in 2018). 

Going Twenty: A Bug's Life

   How do you do, 

  It's winter and the "Going Twenty" phase will end now with Disney and Pixar's A Bug's Life. A Bug's Life was the successful follow up film of Pixar in wake of Toy Story, the film that struck it rich in being a completely computer animated movie. Toy Story appealed to all ages when it came out in 1995; adults enjoyed the intelligent story telling and dialogue while children were delighted by the film's fantasy and adventure elements. Toy Story was even rated among the top ten films of the year when it came out, and is on the list of 100 greatest American films of all time, along with Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the latter was a breakthrough in traditional hand drawn animation.
   While it was in production for the anticipated Toy Story 2, Pixar attempted another follow up in what was practically a tough act to follow. But, they pulled it off in 1998 with A Bug's Life, where the film centers on arthropods interacting. It wasn't a real technological leap of anything at all. The real breakthrough was Toy Story, which was to bring toys to life on the big screen with computers. Everything after that focused more on the story telling elements, just as Disney did in everything after Snow White. A Bug's Life permitted new ways to explore this new form of animation and allow Pixar to have a bigger scope to things, whereas Toy Story was the technological leap to get computer graphics in motion. That can explain why this movie has a better story than Toy Story. The projects to come also allowed writers to develop their characters more, considering how Toy Story largely centers around Woody and Buzz and have all the other toys in the background. In A Bug's Life, we have a protagonist in Flick, but we also have other characters with their own conflicts, their own plots, and their own resolutions.

   Of course, Pixar rarely does much original with its stories. A Bug's Life is basically a rewrite of The Three Amigos, which in turn uses plot elements from The Magnificent Seven, which is an Americanized version of The Seven Samurai. I wouldn't call it stealing from any of them; A Bug's Life is merely retelling an old story in a new way, which is itself not that old.
   In the days before writing, stories were told aloud and what was told got passed down to the next generation. Some were preserved the same all through the ages while others borrowed elements from the world and incorporated them into the narrative. Then came the invention of writing and stories could now be preserved in print. As people began to move around, they encountered other stories in other cultures and elements would sometimes be borrowed in making new stories. For example, Ancient Greece had Homer's epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, which inspired the Roman poet, Virgil, to write The Aeneid. Later, in the Middle Ages, you can find great works that use Christian influences and Biblical themes combined with tropes from a pre-Christian era and create something with it. It continued on: Blake took inspirations from John Milton's Paradise Lost, Dickens' A Christmas Carol is greatly influenced by Shakespeare's plays, and Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes uses the inverted species order that Jonathan Swift featured in his Gulliver's Travels (which also inspired Dr. Seuss' "The Butter Battle Book").
   A Bug's Life uses the same basic story line of the previous films, being that a village is terrorized by bandits and a group of heroes are called upon to protect it. In the Kurosawa film, the samurai are treated as the Japanese version of the Medieval knight in Europe, where they sacrifice their lives to protect people from evil, though the image is a romanticized version at best. In reality, the samurai of Feudal Japan were more like Luca Brazi of The Godfather than Sir Lancelot of the King Arthur legends, the strongmen in service of their lords. If we are to use Star Wars, since the Jedi are said to be inspired by samurai warriors, the real ones would lean more toward Darth Maul, Darth Vader, or even Kylo Ren more than they would as Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Luke Skywalker. Yet, the romantic image is what is used in the movie and is passed to the cowboys in The Magnificent Seven, another figure of a man who is often glamorized and romanticized in Hollywood as a symbol of chivalry. Considering from reading books about the Old West, the American cowboys were not modern day Sir Lancelots; they were mostly hired hands on ranches who drove cattle across trails and came to town after work where they sometimes got out of line with the law. The Magnificent Seven adds something of the Americans rescuing others trope where Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen enlist five others to help them beat Mexican bandits who terrorize a Mexican village. Of course, both it and the Japanese movie are depicted as tragedies in the fight as half of the group is cut down and both have someone lamenting that the helpless farmers were the actual winners.
  Fast forward to the eighties with The Three Amigos where some of the tropes that made The Magnificent Seven great in the sixties has been challenged and reevaluated. Revisionism on the Punitive Expedition brought on by Vietnam introduced the trope of the Anglo Americans getting into places he clearly doesn't belong and the tradition hero worship is nothing but the White Messiah trope. The Three Amigos is not very heavy handed on it, but it uses this by reducing the seven warriors down to three, and the plot twist is they are not really gun slinging heroes but simply actors brought in on false pretenses. When they meet the big bad, the cover is blown and the results are disgraceful, but in the end they decide between being phonies back home and phonies in another country it would be better to be the latter and they help the villagers win out.
   All that finds its way into A Bug's Life, replacing the Mexican banditos with grasshoppers, the villagers with a colony of ants, and the three Anglo American actors turned saviors into circus bugs. Another older story inspired the movie, of course.

   You may have heard of the fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper", how the grasshopper "fiddled" away summer while the ant and his pals worked in collecting the harvest. When winter came, the grasshopper is cold and hungry, and begs the ants for food and shelter, to which the ants refuse. Aesop's original message was harsh, which explains how retellings, including Disney's cartoon "The Grasshopper and the Ants" would feature a change in which the ants do welcome the grasshopper in who repents of his previous stance and earns his keep by entertaining the ants with his music. The fable is still used to illustrate the benefits of working to prepare for thin times during the thick and how idleness wastes away the thick times and leaves on unprepared.
   A Bug's Life appears to add another twist: suppose the children of the grasshopper took advantage of the hospitality of the children of the ants and set themselves up to rule over the latter. Now the ants stock up the food to offer as protection tokens to grasshoppers who claim to be their protection against other bugs. Thus, we have a connection to other three movies mentioned above.
   One thing that people have caught on during the years is the film's anti-authority message. When the grasshoppers question the need to return to the ants after having enough food, their leader, Hopper brings up that Flick, the hero, has stood up to him. So how does one ant matter to him? He illustrates it well in this scene. The grasshoppers hold a whole colony hostage and if their control ends, the grasshoppers could be overwhelmed. In short, it's all about power.
   The message of the conflict between Flick and Hopper is basically the people in power are vastly outnumbered, and often weak without support of the people, and the masses could overthrow them all, and they know it, so the powers that be will maintain their power using means of fear and keeping groups divided so as to avoid a united mob coming after them. One thing they fear most is when one person stands up to them, the entire population will, thus examples must be made to maintain that power. Consider historic examples, like the Nazis in Germany, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and you can see it done before; and some might think the same with the US today where certain elements are in charge and use fear mongering (and political correctness) to keep everyday Americans in line. Hopper understands that and will do everything to keep that power (one telling example is the way he threatens harm to his younger and less smart brother, Molt).

   In the end, the masses do revolt, and the circus bugs assist. Other subplots include Princess Dot wanting to be taken seriously, Flik's progressive ideas of invention while ants stubbornly hold to traditional ways, and the circus bugs' arc of redemption after losing their jobs happen as well. Plenty of the humor is the way how the circus bugs try to hype up and subvert stereotypes to their specie. For example, Francis the Ladybug can be relatable to those gender fluid sorts since we all assume ladybugs are female. The same with Rosie the Spider, a black widow (who jokingly talks of the deaths of her husband at one point) who is suppose to be a deadly arachnid and yet hangs with the others like it's no problem. Heimlich the Caterpillar even makes one think of the children's book "The Hungry Caterpillar" with his eating habits. Meanwhile, Manny is a praying mantis who is introduced in meditation (instead of praying) and P.T. Flea (named for P.T. Barnum, the guy they made a musical on) who owns a circus, both in reference to his namesake (and he even looks like Barnum) and the fact people have flea circuses.
   Other cases of artistic license are made. For one, real life ants have nests made mostly of female, technically, while males like Flik would have wings and exist mainly to mate with the Queen, whose daughters make up the workers. Flik is made a worker ant, and a male, and given a romantic subplot with Princess Atta, who becomes queen in the end. Others include the way they humanize insects by making them walk on two legs and have arms like people while spiders are generally depicted with six legs (sort of a way to make them out as monsters). Yet, pill bugs have more than six legs and are shown in the movie too. One thing that could have worked with the circus is if Rosie had a scorpion friend, the pill bugs replaced by a centipede and a millipede, and maybe a crab for the strong guy, then the circus would have all the groups of the Arthropod phylum represented. Of course, as most people are aware, not all arthropods are bugs.

   While the story is recycled, the film A Bug's Life has the legacy of making Pixar a household name, doing more so than Toy Story did. With its success, Pixar was able to create not only the sequel to Toy Story but also such hits as WALL-E, Up, and Cars. In each case, we see many motifs and tropes of older stories regenerated into new tales.
    It really is a fun movie to watch; even someone who is not into bugs would agree. 

Food For Thought: Armistice Centennial.

    How do you do, 

   In the United States, November 11 is Veteran's Day. It's that one time of the year where we honor the veterans of wars who had fallen in combat as well as the ones who are still among us today. Yet, it wasn't always called that. 

  One hundred years ago, this day, the Armistice that would end the fighting of World War I happened. It came into affect at 11:00 on this day, a century ago (by which point, nearly everyone in the Western Hemisphere was still asleep). For many, it seemed the war was completely over. Perhaps, the whole concept of war was over. Perhaps Man may be able to live in peace. At least, that is what we all felt as the Treaty of Versailles was being signed, a document intended for peace that instead led to another war. 

   Prior to November 11, 1918, there would have been millions of European men who were, like Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind, willing to be happily buried in their homes, knowing that they were in countries that ruled the world. In 1914, the Great War came. In between those years, those millions of young men watched as their childhood friends were cut to pieces by machine guns, tangled up in barbed wire, or suffer from trench fever. They saw real men die in agony when they shot them, yet tanks seemed unfeeling with their armor and airplanes appeared unstoppable since they could fly. All for what? Just to capture a few yards in some places, or a hill in another. And at sea, the submarine added another monster lurking below. 

   For each country involved, World War I had a different meaning. For Great Britain, both it and World War II marked the watershed moment in the power of the empire. For France, the war was a trying time for the Third Republic, considering as most of the battles were fought in France and her will was tested to the limits. France certainly came out intact and stronger than before (even if it seems it was all thrown away in World War II, France had earned the final victory in the end). Italy's time in the war does seem strange as she turned on her allies and tried to defeat them, only to lose for the most part. Then, the Centrals attack and send Italy running, which makes one think Italy lost this one, but the Italians did hold out on the Piave Line and their final battle was a victory (even if the troubles of post-war times led to Fascism). For Russia, Germany, and Austria, the war was marked with defeat, the dissolution of their empires, and chaotic aftermaths. As the Russian reader knows, the hardships of war kicked off the revolution, which led to the Communist take over and the rise of the Soviet Union. For Germany, the defeat also meant hardship and anger as she was blamed for it, and it would plant the seeds for the Nazis taking over. This doesn't mean nothing good can be said for them all, considering how the Germans were defending their home at the start and Russians defended theirs later on. And I also admire the determination of the Austro-Hungarian Army at Przemysl, where they withheld a siege for 133 days. 

  The war wasn't confined to Europe. The Middle East was involved, also, where the Ottoman Empire made its last stand. During the period Turkey was fighting, the tragedy known as the Armenian Genocide occurred, while the Anglo-Egyptian Army enter Jerusalem, something no Englishman had done since the Crusades, and the British-Indian Army went into Mesopotamia (which meant such places my generation know like Basra, Baghdad, and Karbala were fought over then), and one British soldier helped an Arab revolt. In the end, Turkey became a republic and maintained her sovereignty while her southern neighbors were occupied by the British and the French. The war was also fought in Africa, where even African soldiers fought each other and one German Army present surrender undefeated in the end. Asia saw Japan grab off the German settlement in China as well as the islands she would later fight the US in in World War II. In the Americas, the war was largely naval battles fought away without any engagements on either continent. So, that explains why it was a world war. 

    For the United States, World War I was what ended the tradition of focusing on our home waters. Before, the US was satisfied with staying out of international affairs, with a few exceptions. World War I changed it; it meant the US would be involved with world affairs besides the Western Hemisphere, and World War II would later consummate that, making it possible for the US to assume the role as the world police. And all the US did in the war was minimum compared to everyone else and we arrived late in the war. 

  One thing World War I did was it ended the romantic notion of war. There was a growing movement prior to it that was seen by many who felt that wars are too horrible to use in solving problems. It really took the Great War to really make it official, since there was no way to hide the trenches and the basket cases. Indeed, it is a fact that war was what halted Fascism and Imperialism and Communism in the past; it is a fact that it took a war in Southeast Asia to make US society, indeed all the Western Civilization, to change itself for the better or for worse; it is a fact that through war Saddam Hussein was twice defeated and Kuwaitis and Iraqis were free of his tyranny; it is a fact that war was the only way to stop ISIS and the Taliban; and it is a fact that without war humanity would never have evolved to its current state. But there is another side to this: it's something that General Sherman pointed out once.

   "War is cruelty, no use refining it," he said. He made it cruel enough that the Confederates were willing to surrender, and to some if we have plenty of Shermans around, it can make any wars that happen now be done with quicker. At the same time, wars also breed more evils while destroying one form of evil. Think of how the Twentieth Century would have been if World War I had ended sooner, or never happened. We have to think of the grieving widows that are spawned of wars, or the orphans, and we must think that in many religions there are those who pray that war would never happen in their lives. We have to think of the young men we send to the slaughter or leave maimed, or mentally scared for life when we start wars. Never mind if the earth is over populated, especially since it would take an apocalyptic sort of war to reduce it greatly and that would mean hardships for the survivors. 

   For that reason, most of us see that view of the peace feelers in 1918 and wonder at the naivety. Then again, who is to say someone a century from now would think the same of our current society. Since another war happened, the day we set aside to remember the Armistice is made Veteran's Day. In the past, the United States had Memorial Day (once called Decoration Day) as a way to give honor to servicemen. This was a product of the Civil War. After World War II, which with the First World War gave us two generations of veterans, we had a holiday set up for the living while Memorial Day leans more to the dead. 

    So, what are we to learn from this. Basically, to avoid counting our chickens before they hatched. In order to have peace, we would have to avoid making the same mistakes as before and not make additional antagonisms. Those vets from 1918, they saw that lesson learned even as they grew old and then ancient, even as they became shadowed by their sons who fought in World War II, and grandsons in some armed conflict of the late century (for the US, the Vietnam Conflict). So, in honor of those men who fell in the Great War, whatever nationality they may be, and for those who saw the end and have it lived it through, even to the last ones left alive, let us all take a moment to pause and make peace with the past. May they all rest in peace. 

    "Blessed are the peacekeepers for they will be called children of God."

                                                                               Matthew. 5:9.