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Aspects of Violence in There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, and Zodiac

My good friend Christopher Coake sent this link my way. An insightful article on the use of violence in all three of these films. Note, there are spoilers…

There Will Be Blood

I saw this movie this past weekend, and it is a stunning achievement. Let’s set aside Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance for later. I did not realize until the credits rolled at the end of the film that the movie was at least partly based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, which I have not read. However, I had throughout the movie noticed a particular focus on the negative aspects of both capitalism and religion, both of which I would expect to be the gun sights of Sinclair. Paul Thomas Anderson wrote the screenplay and directed the movie, and his adaptation is a masterpiece (even if I had not read the original, the film would stand alone…as is the case).

Daniel Day-Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, a man who creates an oil company. Paul Dano (also seen in Little Miss Sunshine as the son who takes a vow of silence) plays the pastor of the Church of the Third Revelation, a church whose property sits on land being mined by Plainview. The movie has several nods to past movies. I thought of Citizen Kane, Plainview being the capitalist who falls victim to wealth and ego. 2001: A Space Odyssey is also a jumping-off point. My friend Chris Coake (who also pointed out the 2001 connection) mentioned to me a Clockwork Orange connection. The nods do not cheapen the movie, however. Rather, the film is a masterpiece of acting, character, theme, and script.

The opening 20 minutes or so (I did not check my watch exactly) are full of grunts, sounds of work, and a single English sentence. This is a daring opening, one that uses the non-verbal to create character…something that Day-Lewis is an exemplar at.

Later in the movie, Plainview sits between the Church of the Third Revelation and the oil derrick. He scans both, weighs them and their worth, and then is interrupted. Eventually family works its way in and is smothered by the necessity of ego and wealth that drive Plainview. I do not want to give too much away, so my description is a bit scattered (apologies).

Day-Lewis, who I have long considered the best actor alive, confirms his status as an actor able to create character without words but with action. In one instance, he uses his lower lip, puffs it out, as a sign of anger and realization. Anderson rightly focuses on it, but Day-Lewis creates it. A second instance is the limp that Plainview develops. Early on, Plainview suffers a fall and breaks a leg. Throughout the movie as Plainview ages, a limp develops and becomes progressively worse. Additionally, Plainview becomes ever more unable to stand upright without a bit of time walking around. These small things contribute to our overall impression of Plainview’s character (they had a touch of humanity to him, which other actors might have missed and created a pure villain instead) as one of labor, who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and it shows in his walking with a limp and unable to stand up straight.

I could go on and on about the movie, its commentary, its filming, its acting, but I will leave it here. See it. That is far better than me writing about it.

I ramble, perhaps, too much. This is an extraordinary movie. Day-Lewis, thankfully, was pulled once again from his semi-retirement to act and Anderson makes full use of his talents.

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Day-Lewis in his acceptance of the SAG award for best actor in a drama, showed a modesty and depth of emotion I did not expect for that public relations moment. He discussed finding regeneration in other actors’ performances (a nod to Viggo Mortensen for his work in Eastern Promises by the way…and of the movies of I have seen this year my second nod for best actor) and dedicated his award to Heath Ledger. I particularly agree with Day-Lewis’s assessment of Ledger’s performance in Monster’s Ball.

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For an excellent review of the soundtrack for There Will Be Blood, check out Alex Ross’s article in The New Yorker.

Robert Frost Home Desecrated

Here is an article from The New York Times about a bunch of kids who vandalized a home in Vermont that Frost summered at from 1939 to 1963.

2008 Kort Story Contest

The Indiana Peace and Justice Center is pleased to announce its: 2008 Kort Story Contest

Says Korten:

“We humans live by stories. The key to making a choice for Earth Community is recognizing that the foundation of Empire’s power does not lie in its instruments of physical violence. It lies in Empire’s ability to control the stories by which we define ourselves and our possibilities, in order to perpetuate the myths on which the dominator relations of Empire depend. To change the human future, we must change our defining stories.”

More information about David Korten and his message can be gleaned from his book (The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community; BK Currents, 1996), and from YES! A Journal of Positive Futures www.yesmagazine.org

Throughout 2008, IPJC invites writers to send us essays, fiction, poetry, plays, etc., etc., that tell stories of people acting alone or in concert to resist the oppression of established power (what Korten calls “Empire”) and to create a new order based on people caring for one another and the planet (what he calls “Earth Community”).

Each month, one story will be picked for publication in the IPJC newsletter, and at the end of the year cash prizewinners will be selected from among the twelve stories published. First place $100, second place $60, and third place $40. Maximum length 2500 words (about 10 typewritten, double-spaced pages). Maximum submissions: 2 per writer. Please send your stories to: Kort Story Contest Indianapolis Peace & Justice Center 609 E. 29th St., Indpls., IN 46205 or by email Kort Story Contest. Manuscripts will not be returned.

For further information, contact C. Sue Craig or 317-546-6150; or Pat McGeever or 317-345-3124. For more information about IPJC: www.indypeaceandjustice.org .

John Barr in Poetry

Well, this is probably old news to many people, but I just encountered it. Once Christian Wiman took over editorship of the magazine and Ruth Lilly granted millions to the Poetry Foundation, I became very disillusioned with Poetry. The number of pages devoted to poetry was cut, while criticism, “letters” between poets, etc., were increased. And, in general, I saw the same poets over and over. Some of the poems were very good. Some were very bad. Whatever. I gave up on the journal, let my subscription end.

I entered the cocoon of poetry where I reside: Minimal interaction with the larger poetry community. Reading whatever poetry I wanted to. Positives and negatives to this. First, I’m free of any contemporaneous styles. Second, I never gathered an MFA (and I’m not begrudging MFA programs or some of the fine students in them), and thus I never made the necessary contacts that would help me get into journals more easily. Again, free to pursue my writing however I saw fit, owned by no one, owing no one anything. The negatives are that interaction with a larger poetry community can provide a check to dissolving in a wonderland completely disjointed from the concerns and rhythms of poetry. I, thus far, have found more good than bad in my situation.

All this is a long way of saying I missed this article when it first appeared. I’ll have more comments on it in the next post or so.

Neruda Songs

Of the music I purchased last year, several pieces were clear standouts. The Nonesuch release of John Adams, Road Movies, is one of those. Another was Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs performed by his late, great wife Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. This is a composition setting five of Pablo Neruda’s love songs for mezzo-soprano and a variety of instruments. These are wonderfully beautiful songs.

Osvaldo Golijov’s Oceana was another standout from 2007. The title piece is also some of Neruda’s poetry. Also on that album, Dawn Upshaw performs “How Slow the Wind,” a setting of three Emily Dickinson poems. On Golijov’s site, he is quoted as saying this about “How Slow the Wind”:

I had in mind one of those seconds in life that is frozen in the memory, forever-a sudden death, a single instant in which life turns upside down, different from the experience of death after a long agony.

Poetry has, of course, been used repeatedly for settings of songs: Auden by Britten, Tsvetaeva by Shostakovich, Michelangelo by Britten and Shostakovich, Neruda by Barber, Dickinson by Adams, Baudelaire by Debussy, Wilhelm Muller by Schubert, Li Yu by Kalevi Aho, etc.

The connection between poetry and music is ancient. Greeks poets performed their poetry to music. So it is no surprise that poetry is a source of inspiration for many composers. Interestingly, Barber took a snippet of James Agee to create the luscious and wonderful piece Knoxville: Summer of 1915. David Diamond used the text of the Gettsyburg Address for his This Sacred Ground. The lyricism of language, its very ability to create images and connections, has found strong advocates in music. Pop music strives to achieve the same thing (Bono may be the most talented lyricist operating today, and saying “lyricist” seems elitist and reductionist…except for the fact that he doesn’t, so far as I know, present them alone, without the context of music to assist in mood).

I have often claimed that poetry surrounds us; we simply do not hear it most of the time.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

From Martin Luther King’s Nobel Peace Prize lecture:

Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meaning can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.

Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement….No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do.

Legacy of Ashes

I just finished this history of the CIA by Tim Weiner. An appalling incompetence throughout the years of the agency, just more so after the end of the Cold War. The few striking successes outweighed by the failures.

Covert operations are by nature anti-democratic because of their reliance on deception. I’m not sure where the line is, but I do believe that such operations are necessary for the long term safeguarding of democracy (for example, the British has used unsavory tactics to neutralize the IRA – understanding that their actions were undemocratic but necessary for a peaceful Ulster). That said, when covert operations and intelligence become political tools, their usefulness and value must be questioned. Perhaps more frighteningly, when covert operations and intelligence become private and corporate, the future of independent thought and analysis…and perhaps freedom…are in jeopardy.

Just as the privatization of many aspects of the military concerns me, so to does the privatization of intelligence gathering, if not more so. Weiner’s book is not, in my opinion, particularly well written (newspaper style of writing in a long form can be tedious), its value far outweighs what it lacks in style.

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Listening to Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3. An amazing, beautiful work.

City Lights, Part 2 and Facebook

A friend asked what I had picked up at City Lights…here is the list:

C.H. Sisson: Selected Poems
John Logan: The Collected Poems
Jack Hirschman: Front Lines: Selected Poems
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: San Francisco Poems (how could I not pick up a copy of his poems
at his store)
Ted Berrigan: The Sonnets
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This is one of several videos Gina showed me. There are several, and they are very much like our two Yorkies. Fun to watch regardless.
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I’ve now joined Facebook. My profile is here.