Bi-coastal Pronvincialism

Dara writes:

I got some very good feedback on a recent post about Target from a woman in Alabama. She reminded me that New Yorkers can be very provincial; Ms. Herbitter averred that while compared to the MoMA Design Store Target might not be much, compared to Wal-Mart it is manna from heaven.

While we New Yorkers can navel-gaze, we can also forget the rest of the country and zoom right on out to California. One example of our coastal myopia is the writing of Kim Severson for the "Dining" section of The New York Times. Her role seems to be bringing dispatches from California; no wonder: until recently she was a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle. Don't we have enough voices from CA?

This past week, Ms. Severson wrote about a fire that destroyed a beloved Northern California inn. The caption below the photograph of the inn read as follows:

"RUSTICITY Manka’s Inverness Lodge was known for its quirky menu."

For a moment I thought I was going to read about a quaint little restaurant of which I would not have otherwise known. Instead, Ms. Severson informs her readers that

"Manka’s fed actors like Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt and writers like Isabel Allende and Robert Haas."

Indeed, the day of the fire, actors Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal were guests at Manka's. The thing is this: if I want to encounter Jake Gyllenhaal, I can nibble chicken paillard at the over-discovered Manhattan restaurant Pastis (as I recently did and sat next to him). If I want to read about food and scenery a bit more extraordinary, I might need to look beyond food writers whose main pipeline is the next Jet Blue flight to Oakland.

Movies: Letters from Iwo Jima

Dara writes:

Clint Eastwood's new film "Letters from Iwo Jima" is not a date movie. James proposed it as such. I should qualify by saying he and I are both interested in traveling to Japan, which interest provided extra motivation for shelling out the $11, especially when we primarily Netflix films nowadays.

"Letters" is the flip side of Eastwood's recent film "Flags of Our Fathers." Both movies depict the battle on the island of Iwo Jima during the Second World War. While "Flags" shows the American story behind the iconic image of our men raising the flag on the top of Mount Suribachi, "Letters" shows the hell the Japanese soldiers endured while they fought to their deaths.

The movie reveals what the roughly 20,000 Japanese soldiers do to prepare for the Americans to arrive on Iwo Jima, and then what happens when the Marines land. The island is inhospitable, and the General leading the troops learns quickly that no reinforcements will be sent. His soldiers know the cause is lost but must follow their military tradition of dying honorably, either at the enemy's or their own hands. This result is extremely punishing. Bombing takes up much of the movie. Many soldiers take their own lives, which is devastating. I left the movie down and pained.

Mr. Eastwood's film succeeds on several levels. He develops his characters quite well, so that we feel for them. Ken Watanabe plays General Kuribayashi. He is dignified and innovative, but many soldiers suspect his modern methods. The ancillary characters shine. The scrappy kid who doesn't want to be there, Saigo, is our hero. Shimizu, whom Saigo suspects of being a spy, is in fact, as we learn through flashbacks that round out the lives of several characters, completely honorably. And Nishi, a former Olympian, is tragically handsome. Daring and gorgeous, he is the most vulnerable of the men; he cries when his horse dies and befriends a wounded Marine, with whom he can speak of American film stars.

The deaths of many of these characters moved me to tears. The look of the movie is stupefying. Much of the action takes place in the caves the soldiers dug into Mount Suribachi to avoid attack. As a result the light is dim and gloomy. Mr. Eastwood allows us to feel as never before for the Japanese side; even though I kept saying to myself, "they sided with Hitler!," I could not help but feel for these men. (Of course, a similar movie about the hidden lives of the SS could never be staged, for obvious reasons. I wonder what certain Chinese viewers, against whose ancestors the Japanese committed atrocities, might think of this film.)

Mr. Eastwood's film falters, too. It is too long by a bit. One only needs to see so much bombing to get the point. In many scenes, nothing happens. I suppose the filmmaker captures the amount of waiting that war entails, but must the audience wait, too? Maybe. No war film, I suppose, completely escapes sentimentality. In one scene, when the soldier whom Nishi has befriended dies, Nishi reads a letter clutched in the dead soldier's hand. The soldier's mother has penned the note, and for some reason, when Nishi reads it, all the Japanese men surrounding him stand, as if to attention. The note ends, "Do what is right, because it is right." Nishi then sends his men to battle with those last thoughts as their rallying cry. This feels contrived, but the sentiment strains further when Saigo says to Shimizu (I'm paraphrasing), "I thought all Americans were savages, but that soldier's mother's words, they could have come from my own mother." Oh, really, Mr. Eastwood? Is that similarity between sides what you want us to feel?

I questioned seeing the movie when I left. I felt dogged and drained. I thought about our current world and how Mr. Eastwood might have been making a point about jingoism. General Kuribayashi and his men, almost all 20,000 of them, fight to death even though they know they have lost. Such nationalistic blindness has been ingrained. I hope we do not have such blinders on.

Postscript: "Letters" brings to four the number of movies I have seen in the theater this year. The others being "Borat," "The Devil Wears Prada," and "Sophie Scholl," about a young woman who resisted the Nazis. I am not sure if "Thank You for Smoking" counts, since I walked out of it. I actually didn't think it was so terrible, but James and I saw it squeezed in next to my parents in a tiny theater in Connecticut. We were about to get married and I think more than a satiric film we needed strong cocktails.

Jeffrey Hart: out-take

James writes:

Over at The New Criterion, I remark on some of the websites that have directed readers to this weblog and to my profile of Jeffrey Hart. Here I also provide links to more about what I've written about Hart over the past year. These notes formed the first draft of my article.

I am pleased to add Powerline to the list of weblogs that have taken note of Hart, and now the Alumni Magazine profile. Blogger Scott Johnson is a former student of Hart's, and his post is a dissenting opinion to Hart's recent direction.

Scott's post reminded me that an interesting paragraph about Hart's own time as an undergraduate didn't make it in the final piece. Here it is:

Over fifty years ago, Hart was enrolled in a course at Dartmouth that had a profound effect on his life. The professor was Eugen Rosenstock-Hussey, a Christian existentialist.

"He complicated my naturalism. I was interested both in animals in the naturalist sense, and naturalism as a philosophy. He said, you cannot live empirically. You live forward in time. You don't know how it is going to come out. You don't know how your career is going to turn out, or if it's the right career. Or marriage. Or whatever. Life is always a movement into the unknown. One of his repeated mantras was 'history must be told.' You are constantly creating new institutions, and your guide must be history. You see that here with co-ed, for example. Dartmouth a very different school than it was when I came here in 1947. Dartmouth is MUCH improved now. I probably would have stayed at Dartmouth today."

I still think about him and I'm going to write about him. I'm going to write a memoir called 'Snapshots From Heaven' and he's going to figure in one "Snapshot."