Odd Man Out
Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out is a brilliant movie about … well, that’s the question. Some people say it’s a movie about the IRA, but that’s certainly wrong, and not because the name of the organization and the name of the city in which the action is set are never mentioned. This is obviously Belfast, and the organization whose members at the outset plan a heist is obviously the IRA. But within the world of the movie doesn’t matter what cause Johnny McQueen (James Mason) serves — it never matters, to the writer or director or characters or audience.
So what is it about? I think the movie explores how people try to understand the kind of story they’re in. And Reed wants to sow confusion on that score.
The movie’s look is pure noir — and as beautifully photographed a noir as you’ll ever see, by Robert Trasker, whose work here is even better than in The Third Man, which is saying a lot — and the plot seems for quite a while to come straight out of the desperate-manhunt playbook. But for the kids on the sidewalk who pretend to be Johnny McQueen, it’s a heroic-rebel-against-the-Man story. For some of the ordinary people drawn into the event, it’s a why-can’t-I-just-live-in-peace story. For the painter Lukey (Robert Newton) it’s a great-suffering-makes-great art story. For Kathleen Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan), it’s a star-crossed-lovers story. For the scavenger Shell (F. J. McCormick), it’s an opportunity-knocks-and-I-answer story. And so on down the line.
Everyone projects their own sense of the story onto Johnny, because after the first few minutes of the movie Johnny doesn’t act; he is acted upon. Wounded, sometimes unconscious, often delirious, he becomes a kind of package passed from person to person, a problem to be solved — a mirror into which people look and learn something about themselves. Whose side are they on? — a question to be asked with the understanding that in this fractured world there are always many sides.
Meanwhile, in his moments of mental clarity, Johnny tries to understand what his story is to him. And he ends in a very different place from the one in which he begins, even if the seeds of his ending are already planted by the time we first see him.
Ruskin revisited
What follows is a kind of sequel to the introduction to Ruskin I published several years ago.
Ruskin begins The Stones of Venice by identifying what he believes to have been the essential characteristics of Venetian society in its heyday – which is to say, the twelfth century through the fourteenth:
The most curious phenomenon in all Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life, and its deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only aroused by the touch of a secret spring. That spring was her commercial interest, — this the one motive of all her important political acts, or enduring national animosities. She could forgive insults to her honor, but never rivalship in her commerce; she calculated the glory of her conquests by their value, and estimated their justice by their facility.
Yet even as they calculated in this crassly financial way,
The habit of assigning to religion a direct influence over all his own actions, and all the affairs of his own daily life, is remarkable in every great Venetian during the times of the prosperity of the state; nor are instances wanting in which the private feeling of the citizens reaches the sphere of their policy, and even becomes the guide of its course where the scales of expediency are doubtfully balanced.
Ruskin goes on to say (somewhat wryly, I think) that this influence of private piety on public policy only happened when the leaders of Venice were rushed — whenever they had time to think they would suppress piety in favor of commercial self-interest.
Nevertheless, the piety of the great Venetians — and Ruskin believes it was sincere, that these men were not hypocrites but rather inconstant and/or skilled in compartmentalizing (as who among us is not?) — seemed to have the power to shape the city’s spirit and to sustain its prosperity, because “the decline of her political prosperity was exactly coincident with that of domestic and individual religion.” When that religion waned, so too did Venice’s political and commercial influence. Ruskin explains that precise correspondence between private piety and public success thus:
We find, on the one hand, a deep and constant tone of individual religion characterising the lives of the citizens of Venice in her greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all the familiar and immediate concerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the conduct even of their commercial transactions, and confessed by them with a simplicity of faith that may well put to shame the hesitation with which a man of the world at present admits (even if it be so in reality) that religious feeling has any influence over the minor branches of his conduct. And we find as the natural consequence of all this, a healthy serenity of mind and energy of will expressed in all their actions, and a habit of heroism which never fails them, even when the immediate motive of action ceases to be praiseworthy. With the fulness of this spirit the prosperity of the state is exactly correspondent, and with its failure her decline, and that with a closeness and precision which it will be one of the collateral objects of the following essay to demonstrate from such accidental evidence as the field of its inquiry presents.
And he pauses at this point in his exposition to suggest that this history might have some relevance to British subjects who have ears to hear. The idea that London is the New Venice is a muted but constant refrain in The Stones of Venice.
This account of politics and religion in Venice is quite interesting, but the thing that makes Ruskin Ruskin is where his thought now takes him: “I would next endeavor to give the reader some idea of the manner in which the testimony of Art bears upon these questions, and of the aspect which the arts themselves assume when they are regarded in their true connexion with the history of the state.” And this is what the rest of The Stones of Venice, all three big volumes of it, does: to explain how the art of Venice — its painting, its architecture, its ornaments and designs in every medium — reveals the rise, the health, the majesty, the decline, and the humiliation of the city of Venice. Which is, I think it’s fair to say, an astonishing project.
The question I keep asking myself — that I’ve been asking myself for years — is: How can I think in a genuinely Ruskinian way about our own time and place? What would that look like? What would be the … I dunno, the ingredients I guess? The only thing I know for sure — and this goes back to the last sentence of my earlier Ruskin essay — is that we must begin by attending to beauty, and to the absence of it, in our public life. But that’s an abstract answer to a question that demands specificity.
I’ve been reading the story of David in 1 and 2 Samuel, and in this history there is a character called Doeg the Edomite, but every single time I read his name I read it as Doug. Doug the Edomite.
Scott Alexander: “So the question — which I don’t see anyone on either side asking in a really curious way — is: which works better? Telling patients to think of their mental problems as misfiring brain circuits, then reprogramming/medicating those circuits? Or telling patients to think of their mental problems as demons, then exorcising those demons?”
Here’s Adam Roberts critiquing my annotations of Auden’s “Winds” – and offering a very thoughtful reading of that poem. I don’t agree that I’m wrong in every case, but I definitely missed Pausanias’s reference to Athena as goddess of winds. Grrrrr. (That’s the problem with publishing anything — you get to grind your teeth for all eternity over what you mess up.)
Journeys
Early in Terrence Malick’s masterpiece A Hidden Life (2019), Franz Jägerstätter and his wife Franziska (Fani) sit at the kitchen table in their Austrian farmhouse and reminisce about their first meeting. Fani thinks back to Franz’s arrival in the village, and as she does we cut to a shot, seen from behind and slightly above, of Franz on his motorcycle riding on a dirt path that weaves through the fields. The shot lasts five seconds.
Two-and-a-half hours of screen time later, as the story draws to its agonizing end, Franz sits in on a bench in the courtyard of a prison, awaiting his call into the room of execution. We see a closeup of his grieving face; his eyes fill with tears; his jaw works almost imperceptibly. And then: we suddenly return to Franz on his motorcycle, riding towards the village. Quietly celestial music shimmers. Through the fields he goes and goes; trees rise up alongside the road to obscure the sun. The motorcycle continues its silent voyage, to a beginning or an ending. This time, the shot lasts a full forty seconds.
The moment is, for this viewer anyway and for several other people I have talked to, deeply moving — but indescribably so. I have hinted at what it calls to my mind by saying that what had been, at the outset, a voyage to a new beginning becomes a voyage to an ending — but I also must say that for the faithful Christian death is to be understood as a new beginning also, one as definitive as our birth. I find myself thinking about the journey home, the nostos, about those paths we must take alone, about Eliot’s “In my end is my beginning,” about anticipation, about how this delaying of the inevitable feels not like a tease but an offer of grace, an opportunity to take a breath and process what is about to happen. A thousand resonant things, really, go through my mind.
I can describe all these sequentially, and I suppose that’s not a wholly worthless thing to do, but I do not have any words to capture what it feels like to sit in the movie theater and watch those forty seconds of a man on a motorcycle riding through mountain meadows. The simultaneity of it all, the instantaneous and complex interactions of mind and heart and sensorium.
And this is the problem I am confronting as I try to write about Malick’s movies: Everything I write seems, to me anyway, to diminish those great works of art. Perhaps I should feel this way when I write about music or fiction or poetry, but I don’t. I don’t even feel this way when I write about other movies. But every sentence I write about Malick seems false to me. I keep wanting to say, Forget all this crap I’m writing, just go see the damned movie!
Preview of a possible (but not certain) coming attraction….
If it keeps raining our live oaks may end up festooned with Spanish moss, like the ones in Louisiana.
Google’s new ad campaign: “Sure, our search results have been getting worse and worse, but they haven’t been getting worse fast enough – until now!“
a petty resentment
My paternal grandfather, Elisha Creel Jacobs, was for many years an engineer on the Frisco railroad. His standard route ran from our city, Birmingham, to Memphis and Kansas City — and then back home. Our house was about a mile from the big freight yard on the west side of Birmingham, so that commute was easy, but things got a little more complicated when he took the route that ran between Amory, Mississippi and Pensacola, Florida. Grandma needed the car while he was away, so she would drive him to Amory (or pick him up there at the end of a run) and I would go along for the ride. That was also an opportunity for us to visit his sister Lillie, who lived in Amory. She was a very sweet old lady who lived in an ancient rambling tree-shadowed house that smelled like her. I liked Aunt Lillie and her house.
When I was around ten, Gran was forced to retire after a horrifying accident: he had a stroke while driving to work and smashed up his car and his body, both beyond repair. Soon thereafter he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and I tried my best to help Grandma care for him. He was always very loving towards me, and as he lay dying, was oddly insistent that I be given the beautiful pocket watch he had received from the railroad on his retirement. I desperately wanted that watch, but my mother said that she’d keep it safe and give it to me when I got older.
Some years later, when my father got out of prison, he wanted to get drunk but had no money. So he fished out that watch, pawned it, and used the proceeds to go on a bender. Afterwards he couldn’t have redeemed it, even if he had had the money, because he didn’t remember where he had pawned it. And of all the bad things my father did to me, to all of us, many of them objectively worse than his stealing and pawning that watch, that’s the one I have had the hardest time forgiving him for.
My old friend Matt Milliner interviews my former student Amanda Iglesias about church architecture. Many remarkably provocative, generative thoughts from Amanda — and some stunning images too. I really hope she does make all this into a book!
Filling out some marketing questions for my biography of Paradise Lost. They want some potential “hooks” and I got ‘em. “We put a super-hot naked couple in a garden — you’ll never guess what happened next!” “This one weird trick will DESTROY the serpent in your garden – guaranteed!”
If Tuchel ends up at Man Utd — the drama queen of managers at the drama queen of clubs — I will be grabbing a big bowl of popcorn and enjoying the fireworks. ⚽️
I wrote about editing and the lack thereof.
