Alan Jacobs

Let’s talk about about the OG Babylon — not as it was, perhaps, but as we have envisioned it. For instance, let’s consider D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, his insanely ambitious film of 1916, made in part to counter the idea, shared by many viewers of Birth of a Nation (1915), that he himself advocated intolerance towards Black people. Griffith decided to interlace four stories from four different periods of history, each of which in his mind illustrates the sin of intolerance. In fact, only one of them, the story of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France (1572) seems to me to concern intolerance as such. The others are about power and moralism and various other matters, and are tied together (though not really) by a weird image of Lillian Gish rocking a cradle, with three women — the Fates, I guess — in the background. I often think of Pauline Kael’s view of this film as “the greatest extravaganza and the greatest folly in movie history, an epic celebration of the potentialities of the new medium”; “a great, desperate, innovative, ruinous film”; an abject failure and also the greatest film ever made. (She wrote that in 1968.)  

But let’s talk about Babylon. Griffith depicts Babylon at the end of the reign of Belshazzar, who is threatened by a possible Persian invasion but seems unaware of the danger. It’s a picture of Babylon that gets more complicated the more you think about it.

Belshazzar moves through his world in a kind of daze, as though intoxicated or drugged, but what intoxicates him is beauty: he is besotted with the Princess Beloved (pictured above), and the environment which he has built around him is one of constant singing and dancing, almost all of the dancing being done by women in diaphanous gowns (with nothing under them – this was pre-code Hollywood). Belshazzar is a devoté of Ishtar, goddess of love, which has aroused the jealousy of the priest of Bel-Marduk, the former chief God of the city. (I call this jealousy, and power-hunger, as opposed to “intolerance.”) He is kindly and generous, but also — well, decadent. And of course this is the defining image, in later culture, of Babylon. 

Belshazzar, then, enjoys the pleasurable privileges of rule but seems to be unaware of his kingly responsibilities. Now, to Griffith this is clearly preferable to the sheer bloodlust of the Persian king Cyrus, who, as he prepares his invasion and conquest, out-Herods Herod. Against this determined tyranny, the gentle eroticism of Belshazzar is helpless.

But here’s a key point: it’s possible to think very differently about the character of both Belshazzar and Cyrus than Griffith does, but in order to do that, we would need to consider some people who are completely absent from Griffith’s depiction. I refer, of course, to the Jews. They’ll be the subject of my next entry. 

There’s the Streisand Effect and now, I say, there’s the Elon Effect.

A friend wrote in response to my addition, at the end of my most recent newsletter, a quote from Robert Farrar Capon. My friend asked about how I see the relation between Capon’s picture of what we might call the absolutism of grace and, on the other hand, the call to the spiritual disciplines made by people like Dallas Willard and Richard Foster. Here’s my reply: 

I think you’re right to be attracted by both parties, because, properly understood, the two parties are talking about two very different things. Capon is talking about our ideas of finding favor with the Lord — about the universal human belief that we can and should earn our favor with the Lord, and that those of us who more successfully practice the various virtues will have more favor from the Lord that those who do less. (There’s a kind of implicit scarcity model at work here: God only has so much favor to go around, so we want to get more for ourselves, leaving less for our neighbors.) 

What Capon wants us to understand is that our favor with the Lord is completely the result of what Jesus has done for us on the cross. Completely. Because of what Christ has done for us, because of the favor that he has earned for us, then we can be confident that we will be received on the last day. (I’ve reason to believe we all will be received at Graceland.) We are therefore free and the question then becomes: What do we do with our freedom? 

And this I think is where the disciplines come in. We practice the various spiritual disciplines, not in order to earn God‘s favor, but in gratitude for having already received it. We practice them because we want to draw nearer to the God who has saved us, or let him draw nearer to us, and because we want to be like Jesus. We want it, we don’t have to do it in order to earn our salvation. Jesus already did that. So if we don’t practice those disciplines today, God isn’t frowning on us. And if we know he isn’t frowning on us, that “when we sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous,” then I think we have more incentive, not less, to do better tomorrow. It’s less terrifying because our salvation does not hinge on it. 

Back in my happy place. (Unfiltered, unadjusted image — the sky really does look like a painted stage set right now.)

I have only listened to two or three audiobooks in my life, but some recent struggles with eyestrain convinced me to try again. I just listened to Jenny Agutter reading Emma and … it’s fantastic. A perfect fit of reader and book.

Welcome to Babylon! I know you’re not all happy about it, but here’s something I’ve learned from experience: You’ll get used to it. Indeed, some of you will come to prefer life here to life in your native city — or what you think of, perhaps aspirationally, as your native city. And even if you don’t come to prefer it … well, you could do worse. Indeed you have done worse. 

But we’re talking about Babylon, aren’t we? And it’s my job to try to help you understand where you are and how you can flourish in what might seem to be unpropitious circumstances.

Let’s begin in what might seem an odd place: with a man named Aurelius Augustinus. He lived a long time ago, and you might think that his world had nothing to do with Babylon. He was born in North Africa — Roman North Africa. He was a Roman, not a Babylonian. Yet he didn’t see it that way. Not quite.

He wrote a book, a very big book called The City of God, that explored the long and messy relationship between what he called the City of God — that’s a long story — and the City of Man. And that’s where we come in. Because one avatar of the City of Man is Rome — and, Augustine says, another is Babylon. Again and again he describes Rome as “the second Babylon,” and Babylon as “the first Rome.” Babylon wasn’t the native city of the children of Israel, and Rome isn’t the native city of the people of God’s church — even When the Emperor is a Christian.

And yet — here’s the main thing I want you to understand — many Israelites flourished in Babylon, so much so that when they had the chance to return to the Holy Land they declined and stayed right where they were. And many Christians flourished in the “second Babylon,” Rome. How did this happen? That’s a big part of what we’re here to explore. So stay tuned!

There are people whose intelligence I admire, whose decency I respect, but with whom I feel ill at ease: I censor my remarks to avoid being misunderstood, to avoid seeming cynical, to avoid wounding them by some frivolous word. They do not live at peace with the comical. I do not blame them for it; their agelasty [literally “laughlessness”] is deeply embedded in them, and they cannot help it. But neither can I help it and, while I do not detest them, I give them a wide berth. 

— Milan Kundera, The Curtain 

I saw Oppenheimer. It was okay. The Close Encounters installation in the hallway of the Alamo Drafthouse was cool.

So the wonderful Dulwich Picture Gallery is beginning a renovation that will add a … big shoebox to their garden. Will architects ever get tired of designing minimally decorated boxes? It’s been going on for nearly a century now….

I’ll be off to Austin this afternoon to see Oppenheimer, and while I know the Alamo Drafthouse will present it beautifully, I do dream a little about seeing it in IMAX. Take a look at this video about how the technicians at the Science Museum in London splice together the fifty-three reels of the IMAX version of the film — weighing almost 600 pounds — to prepare it for viewing.

Over the past few months I’ve occasionally made oblique references to a book I’m working on. That book is tentatively titled Unanswered Questions: The Art of Terrence Malick. It will be an exploration of the whole arc of Malick’s career as a filmmaker, though its structure will not be linear. A linear structure, working chronologically through all the movies, would not be a very Malickian way of doing business, would it? That said, the book will begin with a moment from Malick’s first movie, Badlands (1973) — this moment: 

But it will quickly move on from there to later films, then back to earlier ones … you’ll see when the time comes what my initial perception is, and how it will shape everything that comes later. (One hint: it involves Ralph Waldo Emerson.) 

I won’t be writing about the project here, because that would reduce the likelihood of my eventually placing it with a publisher — and this is a book that I’m genuinely unsure I will be able to place. Books about movies are less common than they used to be, for reasons not totally clear, though some people think that real movie fans are more likely to invest their money in social Blu-Ray editions of their favorites, complete with commentaries and other special features, than in books. And this one will not have a conventional structure, so … well, we’ll see, in time. And this will take time: I won’t be able to finish it until Malick’s next film appears, and I don’t know when that will be. In the meantime, I want to write as much as I can, while remaining aware of the possibility that this great-work-to-come will change my mind about many things.  

In the meantime I will be posting here about movies in general. Watching and thinking about other movies has helped me better to understand Malick, who makes movies unlike anyone else’s — he has his own distinctive cinematic grammar and syntax and vocabulary, and I find that by having a clearer sense of the movie languages he is departing from, I am better able to describe what he’s up to. (I once saw an interview with Christopher Nolan in which he commented that on the basis of a 30-second clip you can with absolute confidence identify a movie as Malick’s — though he went on to say that if you ask him to explain how he recognizes it as Malick he can’t do it. I’m hoping to achieve more explanatory power.)  

Anyway, check out the “movies” tag for more. But probably not much more about Malick.  

This isn’t quite right: Auden would never have been named Poet Laureate even if his comic/pornographic poem about a blow job hadn’t existed. He was widely loathed in England, as I explain early in this piece, because he stayed in the U.S., where he had arrived in January 1939, when war broke out in September. And then in 1946 he became an American citizen, which surely would have ruled out any such honor. (Imagine someone writing poems for British public occasions who wasn’t a subject of the Queen!) Any commentary on the “filthy” poem was just one more whack on a long-dead horse. 

All that said, Auden would’ve loved being Poet Laureate. He enjoyed to an extreme degree writing poems for particular occasions — when giving his inaugural address as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, in 1956, he said, “I should be feeling less uneasy at this moment than I do, if the duties of the Professor of Poetry were to produce, as occasion should demand, an epithalamium for the nuptials of a Reader in Romance Languages, an elegy on a deceased Canon of Christ Church, a May-day Masque for Somerville or an election ballad for his successor. I should at least be working in the medium to which I am accustomed.” He often said that any real poet could write a good poem on any subject when asked. Only amateurs and incompetents have to wait for “inspiration.” 

Here’s something people often don't notice about Sunset Boulevard: Norma Desmond isn’t old. Several elements in the film are designed to make us think she’s elderly: the decrepit old mansion she lives in, her old butler, the comments people make on the Paramount set she visits — “Is she still alive?” But then the screenplay (a work of genius, primarily by Charles Brackett and the film’s director, Billy Wilder) starts to undermine the impression it has taken pains to produce. On that movie set, Cecil B. DeMille, playing himself, reminds people that he’s old enough to be her father. Joe Gillis (William Holden) comments that she’s “middle-aged,” and then, in their climactic confrontation, reminds her that she’s fifty years old. 

And Gloria Swanson was indeed fifty when the movie came out — 49 when it was made. DeMille was 69 and Erich von Stroheim 65, but one of the other superannuated silent-movie stars we meet in the course of the picture, Buster Keaton, was just 55. The point here is a powerful one: that the coming of sound to motion pictures utterly transformed the industry, and did so overnight, so that one year’s matinée idols were the next years’ forgotten ancestors. 

This could of course also be a comment on a Hollywood youth culture — never cast anyone over thirty — but I don’t think that’s the case here. Swanson was just five years older than Cary Grant, seven years older than Katherine Hepburn, both of whom would continue to be superstars for years and years. Her misfortune was that she became big too soon — just before the Great Divide introduced by sound. (“I am big — it’s the pictures that got small.”) 

Let’s compare that situation to our own moment. Swanson was born in 1899; her career as a star was essentially over before she turned 30, so let’s say by 1929; this movie was released in 1950. Imagine a version of Sunset Boulevard coming out today, featuring an actress whose career had followed a similar trajectory to Norma Desmond’s. Let’s see, we’d need an actress born around 1972, so: Jennifer Garner. Gwyneth Paltrow. Thandiwe Newton. Any of those strike you as plausible candidates for Norma Desmond? (“Gwyneth Paltrow — is she still alive?”) Sandra Bullock of course would be too old for the part, as would Marisa Tomei and Jennifer Aniston. One might also take a look at the widely varying ages of the actresses who have played Norma Desmond in the musical version of the story. 

Now, how about the even more archaic 55-year-old Buster Keaton? That would call for … let’s see … Will Smith, Hugh Jackman, or Daniel Craig. Tom Cruise? Way too elderly. But maybe he could play the Erich von Stroheim role. (Incidentally: early in his career Jackman played Joe Gillis in a Melbourne staging of the musical.)  

All of this we can explain with reference to general improvements in health care, exercise regimes, and cosmetic medicine. But there’s another element that’s more curious.

So let’s make a different comparison. One of Swanson’s most successful films was Sadie Thompson (1928) — a movie released 22 years before Sunset Boulevard. To the moviegoers of 1950 that was effectively the Jurassic era. But let’s think about films made in 2001: Monsters Inc. A Beautiful Mind. Shrek. The Royal Tenenbaums. Mulholland Drive — and The Fellowship of the Ring. All movies that are, to one degree or another, a part of the contemporary conversation. Not Jurassic; not even Neolithic. 

What does this difference tell us? Certainly that the silent-to-sound transition was devastating to the cultural currency of everything made in the silent era. But it also suggests that we of 2023 aren’t necessarily the most present-minded Americans ever. We might have a longer cultural memory, at least in some media and in some genres, than we give ourselves credit for. And surely there’s a big technological reason for that: the availability of movies, almost any movies we might want, in our homes — something that I’m especially thankful for right about now, since it enabled me to watch Sunset Boulevard last night, on the whim of the moment. 

My old friend Noah Millman, who writes and directs:

I love actors, and I want to see them continue to get jobs. More so, I love actors as actors, and I dread the prospect of a future where their deeply human activity is replaced by a machine that feels nothing, when feeling is so essential to what it is an actor does. I had a marvelous time working with all my actors on my recent film, very much including the background actors (of which I had quite a few). Those background actors were a non-trivial part of my budget, and I believe they were worth every penny because they brought themselves to their tiny roles, and those selves mattered, and mattered in ways I couldn’t have anticipated without their presence in person, on set. In their absence, we’re left with just the director’s solitary self fiddling with knobs on a machine, doing precisely what he thinks he wants, and never learning that something else was possible. The essentially collaborative and hence surprising aspect of filmmaking will, I suspect, progressively be drained away in the brave new world aborning, and we’re going to feel that loss in ways that we can’t yet fully comprehend.

David Thomson: “The most daring novelty in Citizen Kane was not its deep-focus photography, overlapping sound, or flashback structure (though those things are truly difficult). The greater challenge was in saying, Don’t expect one viewing to settle this — or even several. For the mystery here is the most precious thing. Unknowability is close to where this film is leading. For 1941, that was not just daring or innovative; it was close to a denial of the entertainment medium.”