Changing Their Minds
I watch "Not a Pretty Picture"; plus: Joseph Roth vs. right and left, and more
Creatures, it’s been a minute. I have been suddenly and delightfully busy with my day job. I’ve still been reading and even sometimes watching things, though, and that’s what you’re here for. A friend once asked how I get past the mental weirdness of keeping a journal, and I said that I enjoy crafting it; she asked whom I was doing all that craftwork for, and I said, “The readers.” I think she found this self-aggrandizing!
Anyway, I’ve recently read Joseph Roth’s Right and Left, which is scathing and cynical—everybody does political things for sordid reasons of ego. Everybody is shallow and hollow, and judgmental. They say political things as a way to avoid taking difficult political actions. I found that part incisive and did not like seeing myself in that picture. It’s well-wrought but sort of shocking from Roth, who usually seems so… open to what there is to love in folly. It’s from 1929 so hey, prescient. In the Hoffmann translation and bound with The Legend of the Holy Drinker, Roth’s final work and imho more characteristic—tragic and borderline sentimental, but in a good way.
Speaking of politics, I note that your Catholic diocese is likely coordinating immigration support right now, and you can call them and find out what they need. Catholic Charities does a lot of it, you may have heard about that. I thought about writing a whole thing about this but for now I’ll just say that our completely broken immigration system has left someone I know at risk and it’s awful to fear that someone will be separated from family and imprisoned for the crime of seeking the life my forebears sought here. We can talk about what kind of immigration system makes sense, but none of that is what the MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW placards were about, and none of that is what’s happening as we send people who served this country back to the regime they fought against, and prevent unaccompanied children from reuniting with their families who are here.
I will never forget the client at the pregnancy center whose husband was being held by ICE in New Jersey. She made me promise to pray for them: “Pray every day.” So every day I keep N. and her family in prayer and sure, why not, I ask you to do the same.
Pic unrelated
“Not a Pretty Picture”
Just a short note to say that I watched this experimental film from 1976 and I recommend it. Director Martha Coolidge recreates the night she was raped, with her younger self played by an actress who was also raped in high school. She cuts between the resulting film and scenes showing the filming itself, with the actors discussing how to play the largely-unscripted scenes based on their own experiences and what they’ve been taught about rape.
It’s the 1970s, so nobody has any idea of where the boundaries are—nobody worries that doing this whole project might retraumatize anybody, nobody thinks about whether they should really say what’s on their minds. And that means that the actors of both sexes are painfully candid as they voice the basically pro-rape ideas they were taught, and to some extent still believe: “Girls don’t like it at first, but they get into it if you keep going”; “If I didn’t want something to happen, why did I go there?” (my paraphrases—I’m not gonna go back and get the quotes.)
There are all kinds of startling moments in the filmmaking: the production design of the abandoned loft where the rape happens; the arc of one kid’s body as he goes in to kiss his date, the flutter of the lead actress’s hands as she prepares physically and emotionally to step through a hole in the wall; the moment when the director puts her hand to her mouth. This is a powerful aesthetic experience as well as an urgent moral one. It’s not a lecture, but something more persuasive: a chance to speak plainly what you’ve only heard as euphemism, and discover how it sounds when you have to say it to somebody else’s face. Maybe that’s the only thing that ever changes anybody’s mind.
Discovered via Victor Morton.
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I wrote about political violence on film for Reason magazine:
Revolution in 35mm is the rare political history that can refuse to resolve its contradictions without giving you the impression that it's cheating. Some of the movies it examines present political violence with commitment (several of the filmmakers had experience as, or worked closely with, left-wing and partisan fighters), others with irony. Violence in these pictures can provoke pleasure or doubt, catharsis or analysis. Filmed violence can be a call to real violence, or a substitute for it, or a vaccine against it, or a dream of it—and often several of those at once. Underlying these oppositions there's a deeper and sadder one: the opposing magnetic pulls, which few political films resist, of either propaganda or despair.
and about getting “Synod-Pilled” for Arc:
Everything about the Synod on Synodality, which opened in 2023, left me baffled and cynical. Official church lit explained that “[s]ynodality denotes the particular style that qualifies the life and mission of the Church, expressing her nature as the People of God journeying together and gathering in assembly, summoned by the Lord Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit to proclaim the Gospel.” This is the kind of thing you write on the test when you weren’t listening the day they covered the material. …Also, it sounds silly. Sid Caesar presents Your Synod of Synods!
The Synod has a faux crayon logo, is what I’m saying.
…But the synod on synodality closed in November, and I’m surprised to find my position completely changed. I dug it! Synodality is good, and we should do more of it! I have, in fact, learned something from this goofily-named gathering of the God guys.
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Links Losers Like
Leah at Other Feminisms on assisted suicide. I also appreciated very much, from the comments, the line: “to deprive someone of caring for me is to deprive them of the gifts I received when giving care”
Via Leah, how to build a “friend compound”—at least if you’re in California. May other places take up the challenge!
My dad has a new book, and went on a podcast to talk about “the failure of Constitutional theory.” People who are generally interested in the whole Alisdair MacIntyre “virtue emerges from a practice, not a theory” shtik might find judging Constitutional cases a worthwhile example. This interview specifically struck me as esp good on the point that proponents of Constitutional theories, e.g. originalism in its various forms, argue that one major purpose of a theory is to constrain judges so that they don’t just write their own policy preferences into law—but no theory actually fulfills this function. For more on this whole subject you can check out “Supreme Betrayal,” the currently somewhat existentialist podcast my dad does with his best friend.
The snowplow names of Wichita, KS are a record of American civilization. Aaron Brrrr. Every day I’m Shovelin’. I Can Street Clearly Now. Clearopathra!
Photo of illegals turned back at our borders used under a Creative Commons license (via). Probably only a third of them were murdered by Nazis!