Diversions

How, then, is Kay fighting off the boredom? For entertainment we have watched a few movies and some television, played some Scrabble, perused the Internet, and read part of Carmilla, by Sheridan Le Fanu, one of Kay’s favorite authors. Yankee Doodle Dandy and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes were our two movie choices. The first was our apt selection for the Fourth, and thoroughly entertaining, though it lacks much in the way of dramatic arc to carry it through its length. This is understandable, though. Made in the early days of World War II, and screened for its subject George M. Cohan in the weeks before his death, it plays more like a revue, or perhaps like a feature-length tribute for a life-time achievement Oscar, or, I suppose, Tony. It is certainly a piece of propaganda, though I don’t mean that slightingly, because the things it elides – Cohan’s first marriage and divorce, the deaths of his mother and sister, his objections to a Broadway labor agreement – do not counter its essential argument that America is a great place and worthy of praise even by those who struggle to rise to the top. The last elision probably does counter that argument, in the eyes of some, and probably makes him a villain, and perhaps it objectively does so – I’ve not investigated the details – but as an actor and a producer, Cohan knew both sides of the argument and seems to have lost a lot for his stand, including much of his acting career. In any event, whether my ambivalence about unions is correct in this case, the movie contains some great dance numbers, some stirring patriotic songs, and Cagney’s charisma. It’s worth seeing.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was exactly what we needed the day we watched it, I believe Wednesday. We needed silly escapism, and that’s what we got, though daft and mercenary never reach so near the sublime as they do in Marilyn Monroe’s Lorelei Lee. The IMDB quote list for the movie doesn’t seem to have the ones I laughed at the most, though of course now I’d have to re-watch the movie to remember them. These, though, will do:

Daft (said of a diamond tiara):
“You DO wear it on your head. I just LOVE finding new places to wear diamonds.”

Mercenary (in conversation with the father of her fiancé):
Esmond Sr.: Have you got the nerve to tell me you don't want to marry my son for his money?
Lorelei Lee: It's true.
Esmond Sr.: Then what do you want to marry him for?
Lorelei Lee: I want to marry him for YOUR money.

What I also found interesting about the film was the dirty sensibilities that were there for those who wanted to find them, censors be damned, such as the sly one-liner uttered by an Olympic athlete when asked which girl – Monroe or Jane Russell – he’d save from a sinking ship: “those girls couldn’t drown,” reminding me of my father’s advice to lay hold of Dolly Parton should I ever find myself on a leaky vessel with her. These sneaky one-liners seem to have been all over certain films of that time, along with an absolute fascination with adultery: cf. The Seven Year Itch (1955), The Apartment (1960), and A Guide for the Married Man (1967). While adultery is almost always rejected in these films, they seem like a foreboding, a straining against the reins, that makes the advent of the Seventies and Eighties unsurprising. The one-liners I enjoy – I was raised on dirty jokes and can find nothing wrong with them, within some limits; the clear interest in adultery I regard with less comfort and no sympathy.

The only other observation I have on the film is this: Marilyn Monroe is a clearly superior screen bimbo to poor Jayne Mansfield, depressingly similar as were the eventual denouements of their lives.

Alllusions

I assume that the allusion of the title of No Country for Old Men is to W. B. Yeats’s poem, “Sailing to Byzantium”:

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Though I would have liked to master Yeats during college, that ambition went the way of many things I would have liked to do but apparently didn’t want to do enough, for I never did come to understand in any comprehensive or terribly deep way his symbols.

That said, the poem seems somewhat inappropriate for the film, as it speaks of an alluring and golden world of youth, a mythological metropolis, an Eden of sensuality that is glimpsed in the Cohen film only by its absence from the landscapes or the characters’ hearts. The Tommy Lee Jones character, Sheriff Bell (the sound that begins the plot of “The Pardoner’s Tale,” (some four hundred lines after the formal beginning) come to think of it, is the ringing of bells) is surely, “An aged man … but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick,” his body surrounded by “dying animals,” and bound to be one itself. But his soul does not clap its hands and sing, seems not to know how to begin to find what it used to be. It is no country for old men, but all he has as models are the old men, all of them now gone. Sheriff Bell hears the alarums of war, hears the knell of death, and has not the lust or life or sight of Heaven or Faery or whatever it was that Yeats saw still and desired, even as he was writing his Last Poems:

Politics

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

Thanks, by the way, to a man named Schmoo for reprinting this poem, one of my favorite by Yeats. I am in bed next to my sleeping wife and didn’t want to get up to find the book, then have to type it out. A few varied Google searches brought me to Schmoo, and thus the poem gets printed a second time online. (Hmm – Last Poems probably means a publishing date of 1939, which means it’s been 69 years, which might mean it still belongs to someone – so, if I should not have this posted, please let me know and I’ll remove it.) Sorry for the haphazard ending to the post.

Notes on No Country for Old Men

This consists of notes on No Country for Old Men. A real prose post, more coherent and dedicated to full sentences I hope, is planned for later. The following is compiled with the help of my wife, whom we'll call Kay Hawking for now, in both thinking and remember things thought. It should perhaps be emphasized that we've not read the novel, and watched only the "Sheriff's Diary" among the extras. And I suppose a Spoiler Alert is demanded precisely in this spot, though it's an amorphous enough film that it's hard to say precisely what one might spoil.

Money under a tree: "The Pardoner’s Tale" – love of money is the root of all evil – is it for Anton's evil? Why is he so enraged at competition?

How does everybody find Llewellyn?

Magical realism

Texas gothic

Evil as a unexplainable force

Multiple unanswered questions: money? death of wife? motives? death of sherrif? meaning of dream? Woody Harrelson?

Eden and the fall of man: "What you’re dealing with is nothing new," says the cripple.

Air weapon is dehumanizing – modern version of reaper’s scythe – no big difference between crops and cattle – both raised for killing – Beckett’s giving birth astride a grave.

Twist of fate – flip of coin, but wife puts it on his choice, but he says I got here just the same way as the coin did.

How much choice do we have and how much is out of our control?

"Signs and wonders."

God would come to me, but he didn’t; I wouldn’t either if I knew me; you don’t know what he’s thinking

Failure? Should he have graduated to some level of expertise/some faith in or knowledge of the universe. The “gameboard” has changed and so he is not an expert but more of a rookie than ever before.

Retirement cliché turned on its head or at least emptied – nothing happens, which seems like a failure. His death seems prophesied by tale of ancestor who died on his porch and by dream, but nothing happens after first, and movie ends after second.

Goes into hotel room after Llewellyn dies, after he visits the morgue? Why is killer in room – where is he? How does sheriff not find him? He’s probably there because he’s looking for money. What ever happens to the money? Was probably not in vent because vent is round shaped behind grate. Was lock blown out originally? Probably not, because Mexicans killed him it seems, and so killer comes to look for money.