[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Interesting piece: John Locke, Icon of Liberty.
Unhappy Injection
We have a double winner!
In an undated book-of-the-month-club brochure found in a second-hand copy of John P. Marquand’s 1943 So Little Time, Henry Seidel Canby walks off with both the Unhelpful-Metaphor Award and the Prose-That-Should-Never-Have-Been-Written Award:
Mr. Marquand is the Sinclair Lewis of a slightly younger generation, which does not mean that he resembles Sinclair Lewis except in the kind of services he renders in American literature. Let us say that Lewis put vinegar and the vitamin X of satire into the fiction of the 1920’s; while Marquand sprinkles what seems to be sugar, but is actually salt, on the viands of the 1940’s, and injects the vitamin Y of irony into the veins of his readers.
Ah, must we say that?
Chick Habit
So I saw Grindhouse last night. SPOILERS AHEAD!
There’s been a lot of debate as to whether Rodriguez’s or Tarantino’s half is better; I gather that many viewers have found the Tarantino half talky and slow-moving. By my vote, however, the Tarantino half is far and away the better of the two halves. But those who liked it less were accurately tracking a fact: the Tarantino half just isn’t a grindhouse-type movie. It’s a Tarantino movie based on a grindhousesque plot device, which is another matter entirely. And Tarantino movies generally are mostly talk with a few vivid but brief incidents of violence. (Okay, that’s not true of Kill Bill, but it’s certainly true of Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown.)
The Tarantino half, Death Proof, is thus a striking contrast with the nonstop gorefest of Rodriguez’s half, Planet Terror; this was the Rodriguez of From Dusk Till Dawn (even down to the Mexican pyramid at the end) – an endless stream of adolescent grossouts with no emotional center or connection. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I’m not denying that the Rodriguez half was fun. It’s just what it set out to be – a parody of zombie movies – and that sort of film doesn’t necessarily need to be anything but wacky and superficial. I didn’t much care which characters lived and which died – but so what? Planet Terror is the kind of feature you’re supposed to make if you’re contributing to a project like Grindhouse; it’s in the same spirit as the fake trailers (arguably it’s one of the fake trailers). Tarantino is the one who broke the rules by making a real movie.
Death Proof, unlike Planet Terror, is not a parody of anything. Like I said, it’s a Tarantino movie – a lot simpler in story structure than his other movies (it’s even told in straightforward linear sequence, which must have gone against his grain), but a Tarantino movie nonetheless. Tarantino movies are about people; they’re character-driven and dialogue-driven. And in Death Proof you definitely care who lives and who dies. And so I have to ask: what the hell is it doing in this movie, unequally yoked together with Planet Terror? Planet Terror followed by Death Proof is like a bowl of cheetos followed by a gourmet meal. And I worry that Death Proof will miss some of the audience it deserves (box office returns have reportedly been disappointing thus far) because people assume that Grindhouse is all cheetos.
Death Proof also has an interesting feminist edge. What? A slasher pic that begins with the camera lingering lasciviously on women’s body parts, and goes on later in the film to graphic depictions of those bodies being brutally bludgeoned and ripped apart? How could that kind of movie have a feminist edge? Well, it does. And not merely because the surviving women turn the tables on the killer at the end – lots of slasher pics end that way, it’s a convention of the genre, and it doesn’t make those into feminist movies, to put it mildly. Now I can understand why some viewers might think the same applies to Death Proof. But what differentiates Death Proof from the typical slasher pic, to my mind, is the spirit in which it makes use of these conventions, and indeed the way it subverts those conventions in such a way as not simply to defeat but to deflate the male predator. In most slasher pics the slasher is terrifying up to the last minute, and is just barely defeated; the slasher’s stature is thus never truly undermined. The slasher pic may end on a note of relief, but rarely on a note of elated female empowerment; ’tis otherwise here. (One might even see the ending as a Randian/Tolkienian message here about the true nature of evil as “smutty and small”.) This is also a film about female solidarity (well, um, except when they leave the cheerleader girl behind – I’m not sure what to make of that scene), so I reckon it’s no coincidence that the final turning-the-tables is carried off by women working together, rather than, as in most slasher pics, either a lone woman or a man and woman together.
There are scenes that invite us to regard the two halves of Grindhouse as happening in the same universe: a number of characters from Planet Terror make cameo appearances in Death Proof (and are clearly intended to be the same people), while one of the victims in Death Proof is briefly mentioned in Planet Terror as recently deceased. (I’m also pretty sure I saw a to-do list with “Kill Bill” on it in the background of one scene, though I’ll probably have to wait for the DVD to be sure. And this is definitely a must-get DVD – a number of scenes featured in televised trailers and previews, including but not limited to the two infamous “missing reels,” turn out to have been cut from the theatrical print for reasons of length, and will presumably be available only on DVD – unless you see it in overseas release where it’s being shown as two separate films. But I digress.) Anyway, these attempts to tie the two films into the same universe just don’t matter; there’s no way you can watch the final scene of Death Proof and think “wow, and just a few days later this town was invaded by zombies.” Back before the concept of “Elseworlds,” DC Comics used to run occasional stories outside of regular continuity – stories in which Superman married Lois Lane (before he really did), or lost his powers, or whatever – and these were somewhat paradoxically called “imaginary stories,” meaning they were fictional even within the framework of the comic. Planet Terror is an imaginary story, dammit!
One of Tarantino’s trademarks is the creative selection of pre-existing music; he’s really the chief successor of Kubrick here. The choice of April March’s quirky cover of “Chick Habit” for the closing credits is brilliant; the music is high-energy madness and the lyrics (much more apt, more clever, and more savage than the French original) apply perfectly. Here’s the song; and check out the original French version here and here. Here’s a lyrics comparison:
| French lyrics | My literal translation | Cool movie translation |
|---|---|---|
| Laisse tomber les filles laisse tomber les filles un jour c’est toi qu’on laissera laisse tomber les filles laisse tomber les filles un jour c’est toi qui pleurera Oui j’ai pleuré mais ce jour là Laisse tomber les filles On ne joue pas impugnément La chance abandonne Laisse tomber les filles Non pour te plaindre il n’y aura |
Drop the girls drop the girls one day it’s you who’ll get left drop the girls drop the girls one day it’s you who’s going to cry Yes I have cried but on that day Drop the girls One does not play with impunity Fortune abandons Drop the girls No, to pity you there’ll be |
Hang up the chick habit hang it up daddy or you’ll be alone in a quick hang up the chick habit hang it up daddy or you’ll never get another fix I’m telling you it’s not a trick Hang up the chick habit Oh how your bubble’s gonna burst Now your ears are ringing |
Suffer A Witch
In 1937, anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (father of the less awkwardly named contemporary journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard) published his famous monograph Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, in which he claimed that the beliefs of the Azande (a tribe of north central Africa) concerning witchcraft were logically contradictory. Given the Azande’s beliefs about how witchcraft is inherited, together with their beliefs about which members of the tribe actually are witches, it logically follows, Evans-Pritchard assures us, that every member of the tribe is a witch. Yet the Azande do not draw this conclusion, even when it is pointed out to them: “Azande see the sense of the argument but they do not accept its conclusions, and it would involve the whole notion of witchcraft in contradiction were they to do so. … They saw the objection when I raised it but they were not incommoded by it.”
In the years since, philosophers and social scientists have debated ad nauseam how to interpret these facts (assuming they are facts – one would hope that further anthropological studies have been done to confirm or disconfirm Evans-Pritchard’s claims, but if so I haven’t heard about them). Are the Azande incompetent practitioners of logical inference? Or are they, perhaps, competent practitioners of some alternative logic, perhaps a three-valued logic? Or are their pronouncements about witchcraft best understood as something other than straightforward declarative statements about a language-independent reality, making the application of logic somehow irrelevant? (See Mark Risjord’s Woodcutters and Witchcraft: Rationality and Interpretive Change in the Social Sciences for discussion of the options.)
What I find puzzling about this debate is that it proceeds on the assumption that in (purportedly) manifesting this inconsistency in belief, the Azande are showing themselves to be importantly different from us in some way that requires special explanation. But in fact nothing is more common than for people to see the force of an argument and yet reject the conclusion, on the grounds that the conclusion is so contrary to their basic worldview that they assume there must be something wrong with the argument even if they can’t see what.
Consider how people – especially non-philosophers – react to philosophical paradoxes like the Liar, or the Sorites, or one of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion. Or consider how atheists react when confronted with the ontological argument, or how theists react when confronted with the argument from evil. Or, again, how statists react when confronted with the contradictions in statist morality (e.g., taking property without the owner’s permission is wrong, taxation involves taking property without the owner’s permission, yet taxation is not wrong), or as slaveholders formerly reacted when confronted with the analogous contradictions in slaveholding morality, or as Socrates’ interlocutors reacted when he exposed their inconsistent triads. In all these cases, there’s a tendency to assume that the argument is a sophism, that given its unacceptable conclusion it must have some flaw justifying its dismissal, even if this flaw can’t easily be identified or articulated. In Pericles’ words: “At your age we were clever hands at such quibbles ourselves.”
As these examples suggest, this reaction is sometimes justified and sometimes not. In the case of philosophical paradoxes, I agree with Moore’s argument that we are perfectly justified in rejecting the case for a crazy conclusion even when we can’t pinpoint where it goes wrong. We don’t, e.g., have to solve the Liar Paradox before we’re entitled to keep on using the concepts of truth and falsity. (Though I do think lack of curiosity about what’s wrong with the argument is an intellectual vice.) But there are other cases, like the slavery and statism ones, where the reaction was not justified. And that raises the question of how to distinguish propositions that really are fundamental data of common sense from those that merely strike us as fundamental data of common sense.
That’s a thorny philosophical question which I don’t intend to tackle in this post. My present target is smaller game: I merely wish to suggest that if the Azande did in fact a) hold the beliefs Evans-Pritchard describes, b) understand his argument, and c) reject his conclusion, we needn’t ascribe to them anything bizarre or unusual to explain this. Why not instead assume that they, just like us, tend (whether justifiably or unjustifiably) to dismiss, as probably flawed in some yet-to-be-identified way, arguments for conclusions that run against their basic worldview.
As Mises wrote:
Explorers and missionaries report that in Africa and Polynesia primitive man stops short at his earliest perception of things and never reasons if he can in any way avoid it. European and American educators sometimes report the same of their students. With regard to the Mossi on the Niger Levy-Bruhl quotes a missionary’s observation: “Conversation with them turns only upon women, food, and (in the rainy season) the crops.” What other subjects did many contemporaries and neighbors of Newton, Kant, and Levy-Bruhl prefer? … No facts provided by ethnology or history contradict the assertion that the logical structure of mind is uniform with all men of all races, ages, and countries.
By His Command
I was ruminating as to why the Fifth Cylon didn’t show up at the same time as the other four. Possible answer: because he or she wasn’t on Galactica at the time.
That might mean the Fifth Cylon is elsewhere in the fleet. Or it might mean it’s someone we’ve never met. But the third possibility is that it’s someone who was previously on the ship but died – only to be resurrected in some Fiver tank somewhere.
And in that case it really needs to be Billy Keikeya.
And he really needs to be the Imperious frakkin’ Leader.
Mutterrecht
Okay, I can’t believe I’m actually blogging about the Anna Nicole Smith case, but I do want to make one point.
There seems to be a universal presumption that whichever guy turns out to be the biological father of her baby (FWIW, the DNA experts now say it’s Larry Birkhead) is rightfully entitled to custody.
Why? Inasmuch as the child comes into existence inside the mother, sole custody must initially belong to the mother. She can decide to share custody once the child is born, but – assuming the inalienability of self-ownership – she can’t surrender any part of her custody prior to the child’s birth, for the same reason that you can’t sell your blood while it’s still in your veins: so long as control over X is inextricably associated with control over Y, one can’t give up the former if the latter is inalienable. The biological father thus has no enforceable rights beyond what the mother chooses to grant him. (He may have various moral claims, depending on circumstances, but that’s another matter.) He surrendered all claim to his sperm and its issue when he deposited it in someone else’s body. (What about implicit contracts? I don’t rule those out – but such contracts can only involve the transfer of alienable rights. So at most an implicit contract could require the mother to compensate the father financially if she denies him shared custody. Or so it seems to me.)
Thus the medical determination of the child’s paternity is not the decisive issue. What would be much more relevant would be to know which man Smith would have preferred to receive custody. Now I gather that there’s some controversy about the answer to that question too; still, that seems to me the more important question to ask.