Tag Archives: capitalism

Lady Ongar Goes to Market

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A while back I wrote about the gentlemanly ideal in Trollope. Specifically, I argued that, while the idea of a gentleman might be used as a way to criticize or undermine the ideals of capitalism, it also seemed inseparable from traditional prejudices, like anti-semitism. So in Trollope’s novel The Prime Minister, the evil capitalist who cares only for money is also a Jew. Capitalism may promote a corrosive individualism, but what’s corroded is in no small part traditional social arrangements and prejudices, such as those against Jews. From the perspective of Trollope’s novel, there doesn’t seem to be any way to retain a communal ethics without preserving a nativist and explicitly inegalitarian homogeneity.

Trollope’s novel The Claverings also contrasts capitalism with gentlemanliness, though to somewhat different effect. The action of the novel begins when Julia Brabazon jilts her lover, Harry Clavering, in order to marry a dissipated duke. Julia says, straight out, that she is marrying for money — a choice that she soon comes to see, and which the novel very much sees, as a sin. The business of the book becomes, to no small degree, that of punishing Julia for her mercantilism. This is accomplished by smearing her good name; the Duke dies within a year, but before doing so he falls out with his new wife, and spreads it about that she has been unfaithful to him. As a result, and thanks to the norms of the day, she is viewed as a fallen woman, and no one will speak to her. She is left almost entirely alone with her money, a pariah punished (albeit for the wrong crime) by social ostracism.
 

Lady Ongar and Harry Clavering by Mary Ellen Edwards
Harry Clavering and Lady Ongar by Mary Ellen Edwards

 

The market destroys Julia…but other characters aren’t so unfortunate. Julia’s first lover, Harry Clavering, for example, seems pretty much as perfidious as his ex — but instead of chastisement, the book bends over backwards and then some to make sure he gets everything he wants. After Julia leaves him, he makes another engagement to a bland angel-in-the-house type named Florence Burton — the daughter of a civil engineer, from whom Harry is learning his trade. Because Harry is poor, the marriage must be delayed for some time — and in the meanwhile, Julia returns with her husband dead and however many thousands and thousands of pounds in hand. Harry all but proposes to her again, effectively jilting Florence as he himself was jilted. But whereas the first jilting makes Julia miserable forever, the second barely slows Harry down. He soon decides to stay true to Florence, no one holds his vacillation against him — and then Trollope improbably uses a storm at sea to kill off all the people between Harry and a lucrative baronetcy. All of which is especially frustrating since, as Trollope admits at several points, Harry is a weak and characterless nonentity, whose main talent is making himself pleasing to women of greater worth than himself.

To some degree, it seems like Harry’s saving grace is in fact his very worthlessness; or, to put it another way, his very incapacity for measuring things through the market. While he sets himself on the path to becoming a civil engineer, it’s soon clear that he has little capacity for work or for pinching pennies. Though he himself is not wealthy, his family is related to nobility. Harry is good in a drawing room, and lovely to talk to, but everyone from his fiancees to his coworkers can see that the life of a capitalist go-getter will make him miserable, poor, and bitter. Indeed, Julia refused to marry him not just because she wanted money herself, but because she felt that without money he would be miserable himself.

It is, then, Harry’s hereditary laziness, the in-bred upper-class parasitism, which makes him a hero. His snobbish inability to provide for himself is why Providence (in the form of Trollope’s storm at sea) shines upon him. On the other hand, Julia’s pragmatism, and, indeed, her ability to withstand adversity (she stays by her husband’s side even while he is calumnating her and dying horribly of drink) is why Providence is against her. She is much the more attractive character of the two — she suffers and loves and fights against great odds, and with all her heart, while Harry’s emotions all seem filtered through a whining tremulous half-assedness. But it is the half-assedness of God’s landed Englishmen, while Julia’s capacity smells of thrifty bankers and brimstone.

There are other competent men of business in the novel; Thomas Burton, Harry’s eventual brother-in-law, is a hard-working civil engineer who has a happy family and is in nowise punished for his ambition or his efficiency. A man who turns his hand to the making of money is forgivable, at least, even if a woman is not.

Trollope has a great deal of sympathy for Julia as well; he takes care to insist that she has been wrongly accused, and even more care to have us feel her loneliness, her love, her remorse, and her pain. But for all that, she is punished, and punished (even by her own estimation) justly.

Which, as with The Prime Minister, leaves the modern reader with something of a dilemma. Trollope’s traditional world, with its rules of conduct, is able to condemn acquisitiveness and the logic of consumption and capitalism. But that criticism seems to be inextricable from traditional class hierarchies and (in this case) traditional gender roles. The Claverings rejects the cutthroat morality of the market, but in doing so, it has to plump for a world in which society and God ruthlessly work to maintain Harry Clavering in the style to which he is accustomed.

Of course, capitalism has its own lazy plutocrats, and the egalitarianism of hard work and opportunity is mostly a cynical myth. But is the myth more cynical, or more harmful, than the worship of tradition for tradition’s sake? If we reject the market, does that mean Lady Ongar has to lose and Harry Clavering has to win? There’s nothing quite like 500 pages of Trollope’s conservatism to make me feel like maybe modernity is worth keeping after all.

American Torture

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Eli Roth’s Hostel movies are notoriously violent and gory. They’re supposed to have inaugurated a new, updated version of horror cinema — torture porn, which is supposedly more explicit, more stomach-churning, and more sadistic than anything that came before.

So I was…not exactly startled, but maybe mildly disappointed/pleased to discover that the new boss is the same as the old boss. The Hostel films aren’t exponentially worse than any other horror film I’ve seen. They’re just basic slashers, with medieval torture devices as killing gimmicks. Effectively graphic, sure, but not moreso than Freddy’s macabre dreamscape liquefying, or even really than Jason’s trusty weapons, blunt or edged.

That’s not to say that Hostel has no new tricks up its bloody apron. On the contrary. Slashers are generally built around an axis of violence/revenge. You have some horrible all-powerful Thing, which systematically tortures and murders in an apotheosis of satisfying sadism. And then, in the second half, the poles are switched, hunter becomes hunted, and that big bad Thing is remorselessly brutalized. That’s why it makes sense to think of rape/revenge films as slashers; it’s the same basic dynamic, just with rape instead of murder (and/or, alternately, slashers can be seen as rape/revenge films with the murder substituting — often not especially subtly — for rape.)

As the rape/revenge comparison makes clear, slashers often get their energy from gender animosity. Everybody in slashers is being punished for something, but one of the most common acts which elicits punishment is sexual activity. This goes for guys too, but, of course, the audience and the male gaze being what they are, there’s generally a lot more interest in seeing the girl’s bare all…and then to have them punished either hypocritically for provoking desire, or more straightforwardly for not satisfying it. And after the punishing, you switch in the final half and identify with the female/victimized punished, who now gets to dismember the killer/rapist, so the audience can both revel in her sadistic accomplishment and enjoy the masochistic thrill of castration.

Gender isn’t the only lever that works here; slashers often instead (or also) use class animosity to power their fantasies of alternating sadism/masochism. So in The Hills Have Eyes, we watch the deformed feral reprobates battle the city folk. And, of course, the city folk get punished for being city folk, and the reprobates get punished for being reprobates, and the studio audience gets to hate/love both and revel in their pain/brutality.

Eli Roth is I’m sure perfectly aware of all these dynamics (I’d bet he’s read Carol Clover Men, Women, and Chainsaw just like I have.) And in Hostel, he very cleverly tweaks them. Rather than fitting the murder/revenge onto the primary binary man/woman, or rich/poor, he changes it up,and fits it onto the division American/foreigner — or perhaps more accurately, Westerner/Easterner. The movie insightfully realizes that the most loathsome, vile, and worthless people on the planet are American frat boys on tour…and it gleefully sets out to torture them to death. But it also and simultaneously taps into the all-American nightmare of the decadent Europe/East with its forbidden pleasures and unspeakable corruption. In short, Hostel is like a Henry James novel with severed fingers, screaming, and nudity.

The nudity and the sex is quite important, not just for its prurient value, but thematically. As I said, slashers usually revel in the animosities of gender…but they usually do it by making the women the victims (first…and then later the victimizer.) Roth, though, shuffles the roles. It’s the American backpackers (and their Scandinavian friend) who are presented first as sexual aggressors. For them, Europe — and especially that Hostel in Slovakia — is a pornutopia — a place to pull out their money and their balls and go to town (or, alternately, in the case of sensitive guy Josh, a place to whine on a shoulder about his lost love, and then pull out money, balls, etc.) The Westerners’ casual sense of entitlement — their belief that, yeah, Europe is basically a hole to stick their bits in — is both their downfall and what makes them deserve their downfall. Probably the best scene in the film is when backpacker Paxton (Jay Hernandez) staggers away from the eviscerated Josh to confront Natalya (Barbara Nedeljakova), one of those available girls, who, he now realizes, had set them up to begin with. “You bitch!” he screams at her, to which she responds, with great gusto, “I get a lot of money for you, and that makes you MY bitch.”

That’s the slasher in a nutshell; I’m your bitch, then you’re mine. The Americans rule the world and use their money to turn everyone into meat in their entertainment abattoir — but that makes them basically as dumb as their stupid trimmed foreskins, and this one woman, at least, has reversed both the entertainment and the abattoir on behalf of the whole damn world. Now, at last, for exorbitant prices, the shady middlemen will arrange for you to fuck those Americans up, down, and sideways, just as they’ve always, through those middlemen, done to you.

But inevitably those corrupt Europeans can’t get let off that easy. Paxton manages to escape, aided (more symbolically than diegetically) by the cross-cultural juju imparted by his knowledge of German. And it’s there, unfortunately, that the movie starts to be too clever for its own good — or maybe Roth’s cleverness just failed him. Either way, Roth’s set-up is so elaborate — what with the entire village involved in the conspiracy and wealthy out-of-towners coming in from all over Europe to get a literal piece of the other — that by the time we get to the end of the thing, it’s hard to figure out where the revenge fits in. Thus the director has to put his hand, and then a couple of feet on the scales of justice to make everything work out. And so, while fleeing, Paxton just so happens to see Natasha and her deceitful friend wander out in front of his car so he can run them over. Then, a little later, he coincidentally ends up in the same train as the creepy Dutch businessman who murdered his friend.

In a really satisfying (or bleak, same difference) revenge narrative, like “I Spit on My Graves” or “Straw Dogs,” or “Death Proof”, or even “Friday the 13th IV”, the violence/reverse violence is remorseless pendulum; the axe goes forward, the axe goes back, as sure as the world turning round its bloody sun. With Hostel, though, you can see the implement of destruction fall to the wayside, so that the director has to go pick it up, paint some gore on there, and hand it back to the befuddled protagonist. You never really believe that Paxton is a cold killer; he hasn’t found his inner resources, and/or lost his soul. He just happened to be the guy picked to be standing at the end, and the guy standing at the end has to take revenge. The plot and the genre conventions just never quite manage to reconcile themselves to each other.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the dynamics of globalization can be fit only uncomfortably on the slasher binaries. Men/women, upper class/lower class — those are old, old hatreds, graceful in their cthonic simplicity. Capitalism, though, is multipolar and diffuse. It isn’t here or there, but everywhere; there is no one bad guy, like Jason or Freddy, but a technology of pleasure which distributes sadism and desire to everyone and no one. Roth takes great pains to allow Paxton to kill the individuals who tormented him and his friends, but the supposed catharsis dissipates into clumsy anti-climax. The sexy girls may have suckered Paxton; the Dutch businessman may have murdered his friend, but the real enemy isn’t either sexy girls or businessman. The real enemy is the system that uses money to transform people into things — a system of such overwhelming power, with its tendrils in so many aspects of society (the hostel, the village, the police…the world?) that there’s never even a question of confronting it. The capitalism in Hostel corrodes it’s belief in its own rape/revenge empowerment fantasy — and without that faith in its genre, the end of the film comes across more adrift than driven.

Which is, perhaps, why Roth made an almost unheard of choice for an exploitation sequel, and substantially changed his formula. Oh, sure, the Hostel is still there, and the basic set up — the Slovakia setting, the torture, etc. etc., is all in place, and the victims are still three backpackers. In this case, though, the backpackers are women — which instantly rearranges many of the tensions of the last film. The three protagonists here are going to enjoy a spa, not to screw native girls. From an early scene where they’re menaced by creepy assholes on the way to Slovakia, they’re always presented as vulnerable and endangered, not as exploiters.

Moreover, Hostel II is at least as interested in the logistics of its torture auction, and in the torture-purchasers, as it is in the victims. Stuart and Todd, who buy the chance to torture our heroines, are a lot like the vacuous American fratboys in the first film — only these guys are far enough along in their careers that they can purchase more expensive meat.

By spending so much time showing us the mechanics of doom, Hostel II cheerfully chucks most of its suspense; we know what’s going to happen already, after all. The first film began as a callow road comedy and slid slowly towards horror; the second, though, teeters on farce from beginning to end. If the emblematic moment in the first movie is the scene where Natasha reveals to Paxton whose bitch is whose, the quintessential scene in the second film probably occurs when poor awkward Lorna (Heather Matarazzo) is strung up naked in the air over a bath ringed with candles. The hulking Eastern European guards go about with a bored efficiency positioning Lorna just right, lighting all those wicks, and then, with businesslike nonchalance, exiting stage right. Shortly thereafter, a woman comes in, strips naked, lies in the bath, and begins chopping at Lorna with a scythe so that she can bathe in her blood. The combination of banality and hyperbolic decadence isn’t even especially suspenseful; instead, it comes across more as a knowing, gleeful snicker. You want tits and torture brought directly to the comfort of your boring home? No problem; just wait a second while we hit the lights, put everything in place, and then saunter off camera….

Most of the torture scenes are like that; more Three Stooges than Hannibal Lecter. While menacing his victim, Todd accidentally unplugs his chain saw…then on a second try slips and accidentally cuts her face in half before he meant to, leading him to give up on the project altogether (since he refuses to finish the kill, violating his contract, the guards shrug and turn the dogs on him.)

Even the climactic Final Girl escape is a deliberate anti-climax. She triumphs not through smarts or strength (though she does exhibit both of those) but rather through sheer force of capital. Beth (Lauren German) is, as it turns out, really, really rich, and she simply extricates herself by dumping a ton of money in the lap of Sasha (Milan Kažko), the businessman in charge. In this case, the phallus of potency and power isn’t a gun or a knife; it’s cash, as Beth demonstrates decisively when, just before striding out of her cell, she snips off her tormenters balls — prompting all the scruffy guards to flinch as one.

That’s a pretty entertaining finish, and perhaps the film should have just ended there. Once again, though, Roth has to choose between being true to his capitalist vision and fulfilling his slasher tropes…and he chooses the second. Beth gets inducted into the evil fellowship of lucre, up to and including having to get the secret sign of the bloodhound tattooed on her butt. She’s an initate…and the first thing she does with her newfound status is to go out into the town and kills with her own hands willowy two-faced Axelle (Vera Jordanova) — the frenemy who tricked her into coming to the hostel in the first place.

That’s how slashers are supposed to resolve — with an eye for an eye. But in this context it just seems kind of dumb. I mean, why bother? Beth doesn’t become powerful by killing Axelle; she’s already — and even from the beginning — more powerful than anyone in the film. She can, as one of her friends says, buy the entire town, hostel and all. It wasn’t that, like most Final Girls, she was first weak and then found something within her that could be strong. On the contrary, though we didn’t know it, she always was the biggest one in the room tougher than Jason, more all-powerful than Freddy.

This isn’t, then, about Beth learning to be strong. Nor is it about Beth fighting off her killer and thereby becoming a killer herself. On the contrary, the issue is not her soul but her bank account. Personal, individual revenge in this context seems quaint. After all, if she wanted to, Beth could have just paid Sasha to take Axelle into the dungeon, and watched as some random penny-ante punter cut her to pieces. Hell, she could have paid the guards to do the same to Sasha; why not? She’s got the money.

Roth seems determined to ignore this insight. Like that weird Dutch businessman in the first film who eats salad with his trembling hands because he wants to feel “that connection with something that died for you,” Roth is wedded to that old-fashioned Old Testament slasher morality, where you take a life for a life, person to person. But sympathetic as he is to genre tradition, Roth’s films end up being about newer gods — gods that are only more fearsome because they never get their hands dirty.

Monthly Stumblings # 11: Andrea Bruno

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Sabato tregua (Saturday’s truce) by Andrea Bruno

Deregulated financial capitalism immersed Southern Europe in a deep social, economical, and political crisis. The euro’s cohesion is at stake at the moment while PIGS countries (hail racism!), especially Greece, see their sovereign debt credit ratings descend into garbage (PIGS countries are: Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain; in 2008 the acronym became PIIGS with the inclusion of Ireland). IMF imposed restrictions choke the economy provoking unemployment. On top of that grim scenario Globalization dislocated factories from the so-called first world to become sweatshops in the so-called third world (if you think that slavery doesn’t exist anymore, think again…). Entire communities were destroyed with millions of unemployed people from all over the world (add post-colonial and post-communist to post-industrial) flocking to the major cities in search of a life. This created huge social problems with riots in France, for instance. Riots in Greece are part of everyday life by now…

These are, in a nutshell, our difficult European times. Any artist worth his or her salt should acknowledge them one way or the other. That’s what Italian comics artist Andrea Bruno eloquently does…

Panel from Sabato tregua (see below). Canicola, 2009. Not paginated. 

Sabato tregua is a big format book (18,5 x 12 inches, give or take) reminding two other similar experiments: French Futuropolis’ 30 x 40 [cm] collection, U.S.A’s Raw, in its first series incarnation (both appeared during the eighties). It was published by the art collective from Bologna, Canicola (“Cannicula,” or the star Sirius which announces the hottest days of Summer). Andrea Bruno had the idea to revive this huge format; another book (Grano blu – blue wheat -, by the great Anke Feuchtenberger), was already published in the same format. In case that you’re wondering, Canicola’s books have a (not very accurate, sometimes…) English translation at the bottom of the page. In the image reproduced above the character that is off-panel, Mario, says (I transcribe from the book’s translation):

What are you doing here?

While Christine, says:

Did you know [that,] since the shoe factory closed[,] the population of this town has decreased by 40%[?]

And, then, she continues:

Once it was a workers’ town, now it’s a thieves’ town. When a robbery happens in the nearby towns, the police come[s] here immediately to start the[ir] search.

While Christine speaks there’s a three panel zoom in that ends in a medium shot. Conversely Mario’s face is hidden most of the time by melancholic shadows. The same thing happens to other characters, but it’s not only that: Andrea Bruno’s “dirty” style disintegrates the physical world to mirror the disintegration of post-industrial communities.

Sabato tregua: “Let’s go”: a melancholic view of the world under capitalism.

Another disintegration occurs to the story. Andrea Bruno says a few interesting things about this particular aspect of his work:

What do we mean by “linear discourse?” The storyline, the plot may not be the only way to unify a narrative? Maybe images, signs and moods can also become the parts that “sustain” a story and give it an identity. I try not to do “antinarrative” comics, but I don’t like to draw stories that tell it all.

Andrea Bruno presses ink soaked cardboards  to the surface of his drawings. He uses white paint almost as much as he draws and paints with black India ink. The result is a very distinctive graphic style in which chance plays a part, blobs are as important as lines and the white surfaces are as important as the black ones. White, as in Alberto Breccia’s drawings (the old master has to be cited), is pretty much an active part of Andrea Bruno’s drawings, not just negative zones…

Anni luce (light years), original art, Miomao Gallery, 2007. A car is burned during a riot. A violent technique to depict violent acts.

Wherever millions of famished immigrants go xenophobia and racism follows them. Here’s what Andrea Bruno has to say about it:

I try to suppress the surface of well being, of the main fashions and customs, to show landscapes and relationships reduced to the bone. The denunciation is not direct, it’s more in the presuppositions than in what I choose to show. I prefer the peripheral vision. Racism and inequality, in my comics, are not denunciated, but appear as ‘normal,’ so to speak.  The effect renders them, maybe, even more hateful.

Sabato tregua: “Mario, [are you] a friend [of the] niggers, now?”

Andrea Bruno appeared in English in Suat’s Rosetta # 2.

Not a Gentleman

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Theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in his book Dispatches From the Front, argues that Trollope’s work offers a challenge to the moral peril of modernity.

It is not hard to document the central place of constancy and forgiveness throughout Trollope’s work. That he saw these themes as central no doubt has much to do with his sense that the England he loved and cherished, the England of the genry and the honest workman, was in danger of being lost under the onslaught of the new commercial culture. Thus, in his Autobiography he says: “A certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.” The threat of such people, vividly portrayed in Lopez (The Prime Minister) and in Melmorre (The Way We Live Now), was not that they were unambiguously evil, but that they could so easily be mistaken for gentlemen. Even though Trollope was no doubt concerned with the passing of a certain social class, he was yet more deeply concerned with the accompanying threat to moral order. It is that concern which shapes his entire literary enterprise.

As this makes clear, Hauerwas shares Trollope’s concern about the threat of capitalism and liberalism to the moral order. For Hauerwas, the Enlightenment has abstracted moral principles from community and tradition. Thus, liberalism (in its broad sense, including Democrats, Republicans, libertarians, and more) organizes politics as the pragmatic magaerial effort to balance interest groups. “Freedom” and “equality” are seen as the most important virtues, and truth, honor, and everything else is abandoned in their name. Thus, Hauerwas argues:

I have found it hard to enter the debate about abortion since I do not believe the issue for Christians can be framed in “pro-life” or “pro-choice” terms. Such descriptions are attempts to win the political battle on the most minimum set of agreements — that is, that abortion is primarily about the sanctity of life or freedom of women. As a result, abortion is abstracted from those practices through which our lives are ordered that we might as a community be in a position to welcome children. It is a political necessity to make our moral discourse, and our lives, as thin as possible in the hopes of securing political agreement. As a result, the debate is but a shouting match between two interest groups.

Again, Hauerwas sees Trollope as offering a different vision of society — one based on honor, constancy, and forgiveness rather than lowest common denominator interest group squabbles. Trollope presents a vision of a community in which people strive, not for freedom and equality, but rather to be gentleman and Christians.

I have a fair bit of sympathy for this view. Capitalism is an acid; it dissolves social relations and community. It believes in nothing but desire — the freedom to desire, the equality of all desire, and the need for infinite space in which desire can expand. We’re all autonomous wanting machines, scrabbling for oil and sex and the money to buy both as our hydrocarbons and progeny scuttle across the globe, leaving nothing but extinction and advertising slogans in their wake.

So, if Trollope is the cure, then, hey, I’ll read Trollope.

I picked up The Prime Minister; coincidentally one of the books that Hauerwas discusses. Here’s the passage where the gentlemanly, virtuous Mr. Wharton, scion of the old class and old morality, confronts Ferdinand Lopez, the reckless capitalist adventurer, who wishes to marry Mr. Wharton’s daughter. Wharton is turning over, in his own mind, why he cannot allow his daughter to do so.

this man [that is, Lopez] who was now in [Mr. Wharton’s] presence and whom he continued to scan with the closest observation, was not what he called a gentleman. The foreign blood was proved, and that would suffice. As he looked at Lopez he thought that he detected Jewish signs…

As the book goes along, we learn that Lopez is, in fact, not a gentleman. His whole life is devoted to reckless speculation and the pursuit of money. Like capitalism itself, he has no sense of good and bad — and no sense of social fitness. In his egalitarian amorality, he envies those above him (rather than respecting them) and ruthlessly exploits those below (rather than protecting them.)

Lopez is, in other words, modernity incarnate. And modernity incarnate, for Trollope, is a Jew.

I’m a Jew myself, as it happens. There are Jews who see anti-Semitism everywhere in the media. I have to say, I’m not one of them. Jews are, as far as most Americans are concerned, white. Anti-semitism is pretty thoroughly despised…in part because Jews have so thoroughly assimilated, and in part because the U.S. fought a massive, successful war against anti-Semitism, and, partialy as a result (thanks Hitler!), anti-Semitism continues to be equated with absolute evil.

All of which is to say that Trollope’s anti-Semitism in itself doesn’t bother me so much. I don’t feel like I’m being oppressed. Lopez is an invidious stereotype, but it’s a stereotype that lost. I, for example, married a shiksa, and nobody in the shiksa’s family cared. Lopez hasn’t hurt me and can’t hurt me. In the book, all his plans may have failed and he may have offed himself in the interest of conveniencing the uptight Brits. But, in real life he got to keep the girl and have little baby Lopezes who no one could tell, or even wanted to tell, from the uptight baby Brits. Admittedly, Lopez had to go through the gas chambers first, which sucked…but all’s well that ends well.

What does bother me, though, is that I think there’s a real sense in which Trollope isn’t wrong about Lopez. I mean, clearly, he’s wrong that Jews are evil sneaking submen who don’t deserve to marry shiksas, because, in fact, Jews are awesome, and should marry whoever they want. But I think he’s right that the old moral order which Hauerwas defends, the anti-capitalist, cohesive morality he challenges, is, by its nature, anti-Semitic.

Hauerwas is aware that this is a problem…but he tries to get around it by suggesting in passing that Trollope has us identify with Lopez’s frustrations and by emphasizing that it is Lopez’s conduct that makes him not a gentleman, rather than the happenstance of circumcision.

None of which is very convincing. Mr. Warren identifies Lopez as not being a gentleman because Lopez is a foreigner and a Jew before he knows anything else about him. Indeed, he dislikes Lopez, as he says, precisely because “no one knows anything about him” — and no one knows anything about him because he’s a Jew without lineage or proper family.

And lo and behold, the rest of the novel goes about remorselessly demonstrating that Mr. Warren’s prejudices were correct. It’s true that Lopez does not act like a gentleman…but that conduct is not separable from his ancestry. On the contrary, the ancestry comes first, diagetically and I believe thematically.

Trollope does, as Hauerwas says, show the virtues of constancy, forgiveness, and gentlemanliness…virtues that Lopez and capitalism repudiate. But Trollope also shows that virtues of keeping to one’s own set and keeping away from the greasy foreigners. I can sneer at the Enlightenment and liberalism all I want, but the fact remains that it’s because of Enlightenment liberalism that I was able to marry my wife without a great deal of unpleasantness. Capitalism eats through moral truths and communities — but one of the communal moral truths it eats through is anti-Semitism.

Hauerwas seems to believe that we can get Trollope’s honorable cohesive, pre-capitalist community without that anti-Semitism, and, presumably, without the sexism or the homophobia. It’s an appealing vision…but if he wants to make me believe in it, he needs to do better than just pointing to Trollope. Because, lovely as Trollope is in many ways, I don’t think too many Lopezes are going to want to live in his world.


Nazi caricature of a Jewish banker

The Wire Roundtable: What’s Missing From This Picture?

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Others have already pointed out that The Wire isn’t as realistic as it seems. Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), for instance, is the hero of the American Monomyth. Here’s how the latter is summarized in the link above:

A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.

The Wire revises the myth thus: a community in hell (Bubbles – Andre Royo: “it’s a thin line between heaven and here.”) is threatened by some of hell’s inhabitants; normal institutions, paralyzed by red tape, political agendas, and business as usual, fail to contend with this threat; a self-aggrandizing supercop emerges to be afflicted by temptations and fails to carry out the redemptive task; bumping his head against the system the supercop recedes into obscurity.

That’s quite good. It revises the myth until it lies there, almost unrecognizable. Here’s my version though: in its mythology of being the only possible system (in the best of all possible worlds as Pangloss would say; at the end of history as Fukuyama would add), and in its sanctification of profit (the market will provide), global capitalism transferred labor to developing countries where the wages are low (Walden Bello):

The extreme international mobility of corporate capital coupled with the largely self-imposed national limits on labor organizing by the Northern labor unions (except when this served Washington’s Cold War political objectives) was a deadly formula that brought organized labor to its knees as corporate capital, virtually unopposed, transferred manufacturing jobs from the North to cheap-labor sites in the Third World.

Under these conditions a parallel economy thrives (mimicking the mainstream economy with its power struggles, cut-throat wars and iron clad hierarchies); those who are unprepared and uneducated, the poor, have no other option than to go underground; everything becomes simulacra in order to keep up appearances.

Hostage to the worlds of finance and economics politics is reduced to being a sport (I love the scene in which Carcetti campaigns in an elderly home: we can hear the crickets chirping because the seniors in there couldn’t care less for this kind of sport); the police are a political tool; the education system is a dead end (and the students know it – Howard “Bunny” Colvin – Robert Wisdom: “I mean, they’re not fools these kids. […] [T]hey see right through us.”). That’s why Marcia Donnelly (Tootsie Duvall), the Assistant Principal of Edward J. Tilghman Middle School says to Bubbles that Sherrod (Rashad Orange) is going to be “socially promoted” after missing school for three years. In the end, everybody knows that it doesn’t matter (those who do matter aren’t in that kind of school). Everybody has some reason to pretend that it does though. I’ll give the last word to David Simon:

Baltimore’s dying port unions, is a meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class, it is a deliberate argument that unencumbered capitalism is not a substitute for social policy, that on its own, without a social compact, raw capitalism is destined to serve the few at the expense of the many.

My problem with this statement is that David Simon should be saying it about the series as a whole. Why just season two? I hope that there isn’t a hint somewhere suggesting that, given the chance, black people would still prefer the world of the corners instead of being part of the mainstream economy.

Another instance where the creators of the series juggle dangerously with cliché is in season four (my favorite, pardon the personal note). The aforementioned season includes a kind of Teacher Movie. It’s true that, again, the writers do a good job of transcending the pernicious genre (the teacher, Roland “Mr. Prezbo” Pryzbylewski – Jim True-Frost – doesn’t win the trust of his most difficult students completely alone). But he also conveys what I call the flawed Sesame Street Syndrome (or SSS). That is, students can learn while playing. In the link above, the reporter, Nicholas Buglione, wrote:

Dr. Robert Helfenbein, an education professor at Indiana University who specializes in urban education issues, believes these films trivialize the learning process and present an erroneously simple solution to what’s really a far more complex problem: Closing the achievement gap in inner-city schools.

That goal can’t be achieved by any superhero teacher or caped crusader. It can only be achieved by closing the parallel gap between the wealthy and the poor.

The image above shows Bubbles pushing his peripatetic business. The original is a print on a t-shirt. I chose it because it is semiotically fascinating. On one end it’s the perfect symbol of the parallel economy I talked about above. On the other end it shows the absolute base of the social pyramid, the junkie that is everybody’s victim (I’m aware that Bubbles is a fictional character, mind). And yet… it’s in a t-shirt… for sale! Grammar mistakes and all!… Capitalism appropriates everything by selling everything.

What’s missing above is the real one.

In conclusion, the use of parallel montage gives the impression of a kaleidoscopic and complex view of the city. That’s not untrue, but it just gives us the street level (in today’s world of virtual politics, even the temples of infotainment and city hall are at street level). What really affects these people’s lives is happening elsewhere.