We’re back in the city, having returned on Saturday. Except for a couple of negligible appointments, we have no profound reason for being here: As Emily said, we needed a change.
Really, we could be anywhere given that the high point of each day is watching streaming videos, primarily on the Criterion Channel. As I suggested before, a primary focus is on silent movies—Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and, surprisingly, Buster Keaton, whose work I now see is terrific.
No silent star outperforms Chaplin, but, as a New Yorkerarticle recently suggested, you can make a case that Keaton had a more profound influence since he really exploited the film medium. Much of what Chaplin did, he could have done on a stage. Keaton, on the other hand, demonstrated the magic of film…with surprising jump cuts, bits of prestidigitation, and amazing energy. We’ve seen Sherlock Jr., Steamboat Bill Jr., and The General—and for our money, Sherlock Jr. was the most surprising and most humorous of these. The much ballyhooed The General, on the other hand, shares with Birth of a Nation an off-putting affinity for the Confederate cause in the Civil War.
As for Chaplin, I have seen and enjoyed Modern Times more than once, and recently saw the odd Limelight. The Criterion Channel has both The Kid and The Gold Rush, neither of which have I seen. I suspect The Kid is a bit sentimental—just like City Lights and Limelight, but that seems to go with the territory.
Other non-silent options range from Mike Leigh to Jean Cocteau, Ingmar Bergman and Jacques Rivette. Tonight we may well settle for Federico Fellini’s Amarcord.
In the mornings when we wake up now, the days are sunny and beautiful. One can almost imagine the coming of spring. But it isn’t here yet: Yesterday I went for a walk around Maidstone Park, and it was still quite breezy and cold.
I wasn’t alone there. There were perhaps three other walkers. And there was this funny thing I have seen before: Someone drove his/her jeep around the park’s circular drive while a plumpish dog, getting its exercise, loped along dutifully behind. I wondered how they trained the dog to do this—and whether on the first occasion, the dog worried that it was being abandoned.
Last night at 3 a.m. we were awakened by a thumping noise in another part of the house. There have been signs before that we have a mouse/mice. This time, they appeared to be playing soccer, kicking around an acorn. It went on for a time, until I got up and turned on some lights and walked out to the kitchen. I think they find their way up from the basement through the walls and into the kitchen. This morning I was relieved that I could find no further signs of a mousy visitation…no damage or nibbling of food packages.
We are planning to go back to NYC soon—not for any reason other than that we need a change. Bit by bit, the days are getting a little longer here, but it’s still very dark: One scarcely awakens before it’s time to go back to bed.
Mask mandates are gradually being lifted. The Times says that New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island today became the latest states to announce that they would do away with mask mandates. (Still, more than 200,000 new cases are announced each day and the country is reporting more than Covid 17,000 deaths each week, the most since last winter.) In the city, I will still wear my mask and keep social distance; Emily will probably limit her trips out of the apartment. I want to go up to Zabar’s for some kitchen stuff, maybe even buying an Instant Pot, which everyone else already has. It’s like a combination pressure cooker and slow cooker and could be useful in making stews and sauces. Anyway, it would be another gadget to faff around with, providing novelty during this empty time. I’m also interested in a cooking thermometer and some potholders that actually work, ours being pretty worn out.
It will be strange to go into stores or elsewhere and see people walking around maskless. Out here in the stores and at the recycling center, no one does that.
Dinner: risi e bisi and a green salad.
Entertainment: We have now subscribed to the wonderful Criterion Channel, which has perhaps 80% of the art films you have ever wanted to see. Now admittedly, many of these are a bit aged: Bergman, Goddard, Truffaut, Fassbinder, Varda, Rivette, Chabrol, etc. We’ve now watched three Charlie Chaplin flicks (two were silent shorts), and two Jacques Tati (he only made six films). It’s such an embarrassment of riches that one is tempted to change plans at the last minute. Tonight, we may watch something newer–Terence Davies’ 1992 flick The Long Day Closes plus something else. Only time will tell.
The beach was approached via a patch of jungle-like palm trees which grew, however, out of the inevitable sand. There was a footworn path which he followed. A few metal poles, perhaps from an abandoned children’s playground, stuck up out of the sand and were encrusted near the top with small white snails fastened tightly like barnacles. The metal was so hot, he could barely touch it….He went into the water, swam out until he felt slightly tired, then turned back. The water was shallow quite far out.
What a pleasure amid all this wintry weather to read about someplace warm. The above is from Patricia Highsmith’s 1993 novel The Tremor of Forgery, which is set at a beach resort town in Tunisia. Previously, I read Andrea Camilleri’s final Inspector Montalbano mystery, Riccardino, also set in a warm place, Sicily. I think I’ll keep up this trend through February, staving off the cold at least mentally.
Unlike Highsmith’s more famous works, The Tremor of Forgery is not diabolical, nor does it involve sociopathic characters. I keep waiting for such folks to appear, but 200 pages in, they have not.
In other reading, the current issue of The New Yorker (February 7) contains a review essay on “the Method,” the style of acting that became popular in the 1950s. I well remember television talk shows during which Johnny Carson or some such host would ask one of his celebrity guests to explain method acting. And of course they would try. What Alexandra Schwartz’ article reveals is that no one can really explain it: Its practitioners and teachers had as many doctrinal differences as psychotherapists or Marxist revolutionaries.
The whole thing began with Russian guru Konstantin Stanislavski, who set out to reform his country’s stage actors, who he thought were bombastic and stiff. New Yorker Lee Strasberg, a bookkeeper and theater aficionado, was exposed to Stanislavski’s handiwork via a New York performance of the Moscow Art Theatre. He enrolled in an acting school where Stanislavski disciples taught—and by 1930, Strasberg himself was delivering lectures on thespian-hood. Others, including Stella Adler, thought that Strasberg was imperious, “sick and schizophrenic.” So, she too, attracted acolytes and began teaching the craft…but of course differently from Strasberg.
Strasberg, famously, wanted his students to comb through their lives for deep emotional moments—and use these, when appropriate, on stage. Instead, Adler said they should just use their imaginations.
Schwartz doesn’t neglect two figures who she says really put the Method on the public map: Marlon Brando, an Adler student and actor now known to everyone who ever saw a movie, and Elia Kazan, who won fame as the director of On the Waterfront and as an anticommunist, name-naming witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Ultimately, the Method’s students were legion: James Dean (who Marlon Brando regarded as a copycat), Montgomery Clift, Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, Julie Harris, Anne Bancroft, and tons of others.
What begins as a revolution can become a conventional practice—and mere fodder for possibly apocryphal anecdotes. The 1976 film Marathon Man pitted two cinema legends—each an embodiment of a different approach to acting—against each other: the second-generation Method sensation Dustin Hoffman and the traditionalist legend Laurence Olivier. It is said that, to prepare for a scene in which he was to appear exhausted, Hoffman went out for a strenuous jog. Olivier found this curious, prompting Hoffman to ask what he did to get in character for a role. “I pretend,” Olivier is said to have responded.
Dinner: an Amy’s frozen pizza, salad, and the addictive tapioca pudding.
Entertainment: The Bertrand Tavernier movie The Clockmaker of St. Paul on Kanopy.
The weather people seem like nuclear-weapons-expert wannabes. Currently, according to AccuWeather, the National Weather Service is speaking of the snowy nor’easter that hit overnight as a “bomb cyclone.” Or, you might prefer “bombogenesis”—a good name for a heavy metal rock band!
THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE! Where is Premier Kissoff when we need him?
But take away the scary verbiage and it means that we’ve gotten around 10 inches of snow so far here on Long Island, more in New Jersey, and—especially since it’s still snowing—ultimately perhaps two feet in Boston.
O.K. Whatever.
At the moment, we have heat and electricity, unlike the unlucky 111,000 in parts of Massachusetts.
Serial crises and never-ending pandemic precautions have prompted me to jot down a timeline of our experiences since March of 2020. During the past two years, we have known lengthy periods of inactivity punctuated by bursts of frantic appointment-keeping.
Here’s what I mean.
Starting in March of 2020, we fled the COVID-overwhelmed city for Long Island…and stayed here for the next six months. Subsequent moments of high drama (yawn) involved arranging bi-weekly food deliveries and getting the local Internet-providing monopoly to hook us up with broadband service.
Then, we spent the month of September, 2020 back in the city. I saw three doctors and a dentist; Emily got two rounds of mammograms, saw two doctors, and took her computer for a virus checkup at Best Buy. We each got haircuts.
Late in September, we returned to Long Island where we spent the next four-and-a-half months…reading long books, streaming videos, doing online word puzzles, cooking, and eating.
Then in February of 2021, we went to the city again. It was at this point we each got our first COVID vaccinations, which we had arranged in a panic via the Walgreens website. (You’d go to NY State, Walgreens, and/or CVS websites early every day, then suddenly…you couldn’t believe it…there’d be an opening! QUICK, BEFORE IT GOES AWAY, make the appointment!) We stayed in Gotham for five weeks, each getting a second vaccination on March 12.
Back to East Hampton, where three more uneventful months elapsed—then back to the city again on June 15 for a frantic round of trips to dentists and doctors.
One medical drama overshadowed all others during this period: a painful, ever-worsening rash on Emily’s midsection. This got so bad that in one area it became an open wound. She tried various ointments and fixes, but nothing worked until her dermatologist gave her samples of a Tylenol-size, salmon-colored pill named Otezla. That was increasingly effective—but to which she appeared to be allergic. With no alternative, she stayed on it for months. And, not to be forgotten: Otezla is jaw-droppingly, mind-bendingly expensive…maybe $68,000 for a year if insurance doesn’t cover it. And for a while it seemed they might not cover it.
In August of 2021, there were compound crises. Late in the month, we ran back to the city to avoid Hurricane Henri, which the weather savants said was certain to hit Eastern Long Island! (It missed.) At the very end of the month (after Emily got her COVID booster shot), we ran back to Long Island to avoid Hurricane Ida, whose flooding made city streets into rivers.
This is beginning to remind me of a shaggy-dog Joseph Conrad story, “Youth,” which I described on this website back in October. Conrad’s ship, Judea, experiences disaster after punishing disaster on its way from England to Southeast Asia. Conrad recounts how the tumult of the cruel ocean “seemed to last for months, for years, for all eternity….”
Anyway, back to us. Three trips to and from the city in November and December put an end to our suffering for 2021. Much of our frenzy at that time was due to my former employer—now known as S&P Global—having canceled our dental insurance. So we had to get lots of treatments finished before the end of the year—multiple crowns, root canals, and gum fix-ups.
Back in November, we had the one social get-together of recent years, aside from our occasional meet-ups with niece Montana. We took the train up to long-time friend Amy’s Westchester apartment, where Jim Guyette (of Hormel strike fame) met us. We sat around and stuffed our un-masked faces for several hours. Momentarily, the worst of the pandemic seemed over. Would we do that again today, after the arrival of Omicron? Probably not.
Dinner: The spicy egg dish shakshuka, cold sesame noodles, and some salad.
Entertainment: the Netflix spy drama In From the Cold.
The noted Norwegian memoirist Karl Ove Knausgaard must have known it was a provocation to entitle his magnum opus My Struggle. And that act alone must have made it all but inevitable that Knausgaard would at some point have to ruminate a bit about the writer who previously employed that title—Adolf Hitler, author of Mein Kampf. (At one point Knausgaard calls it “literature’s only unmentionable book”—so of course he mentions it.)
Knausgaard writes hugely long works and so I won’t apologize for only now catching up to him. The 1157-page Book Six of My Struggle was published in 2018.
But you would think it would be almost impossible to say anything new about Adolf Hitler, so much has been written about him. Nonetheless, Knausgaard has extracted some information from Mein Kampf and elsewhere that is novel, to me at least.
Did you know that Adolf Hitler was homeless for a time? That he was a battered child, being regularly beaten up by his terrifying pig of a father, Alois Hitler? (Alois was illegitimate and went by his mother’s name Schicklgruber for a time, finally adopting his stepfather’s name of Hiedler, which the authorities misspelled as Hitler.)
Did you know that Adolf had only one real friend, August Kubizek, with whom he roomed for a time in Vienna?
And that Adolf was paralyzingly shy around members of the opposite sex? For years, he carried a torch for one girl, writing poems to her and even drawing up plans for a house in which he imagined they would live. Yet Hitler never even approached her or members of her family…he could never bring himself to speak to her.
Knausgaard offers startling but provocative comparisons. In his late teens, Kubizek tells us in his book The Young Hitler I Knew, Hitler was not fixated on politics but was instead so enthralled by high culture—painting, architecture, Viennese opera, and the symphony—that he could talk of little else. In this, he resembled his Vienna contemporary Stephan Zweig and that future successful novelist’s gang of buddies.
Moreover, if Hitler was a failure at his chosen profession of painting, he was hardly alone. Vincent Van Gogh, Knausgaard reminds us, failed to sell even one painting during his lifetime and must have experienced his time on earth as a deeply painful rejection.
So in many ways, one must conclude, Hitler was nothing special–not even a special failure.
During the year 1909, the nineteen year old Hitler was evicted by his landlady, had no possessions, went hungry, and slept on park benches. But, like Van Gogh, he was too “headstrong” to give up his vision of becoming an artist.
Three-time rejection by the art school of his choice and the period of destitution surely played a role in the making of the Führer. Knausgaard compares some of the writing about poverty in Mein Kampf to the reflections of Karl Marx and Jack London. Like Marx, Hitler faulted capitalism. But where Marx focused on the problem of class exploitation, Hitler located the key problem in the ethnic conflicts that resulted from the growing number of immigrants converging on Vienna. “In the Greater Germanic Reich of which he dreamed, there would be no division between burgher and aristocrat, but between German and non-German,” Knausgaard writes.
And before long, there was World War I, and for Hitler, four years in the trenches. Out of that experience, Hitler constructed a mythology of heroism and war.
Dinner: The Italian rice dish risi e bisi, broccoli, and avocado salad.
Entertainment: More episodes of the British mystery series Vera.
It was in the bleak January–and not a spark of life.
Friday, January 15
This week’s crisis: No propane, which we need to run our furnace, water heater, and kitchen stove. It seemed we might spend at least one very cold night without heat.
We have two large propane tanks out at the side of our house. I rarely look at the gauge, since the fuel company has always been very dutiful about refilling them. But when I looked on Tuesday, the gauge seemed to read 10%.
I telephoned the propane supplier in the afternoon, and they said that they had tried to reach us on December 19 (huh?) but failed. It seems the tanks have to be replaced every ten years or so, and that ours needed to be replaced. We couldn’t get a refill until that happened. They agreed to bring new tanks on Wednesday.
A bit later, hoping for the best, I began to prepare pasta for dinner…when the stove sputtered and the flames died.
So I called the supplier’s emergency number, where the representative insisted that I should go out to the tanks and read the gauge again. It seemed they couldn’t make an emergency delivery that evening unless the gauge read 5% or below. Otherwise, they’d have to levy a $150 charge for a delivery.
By this point it was after 6 p.m. and very dark. They seemed pretty unconcerned. Ah, capitalism…rugged individualism…every-man/being-for-xself-ism! There is no such thing as society, as Margaret Thatcher instructed us!
In any case, by around 8:30 an emergency delivery guy came. He was very cheerful and, employing a portable tank, he gave us a 20% tank refill. That much, he said, should last for a couple of days. The old tanks, he said, had been completely empty. (So, I guess, no extra charge for the delivery.)
Then, at 9 a.m. the next day (Thursday), the same easygoing dude reappeared with two new large propane tanks. Working all by himself, he unloaded them from his truck and, employing only a hand truck, moved them into position. These, he said, were 40% full. Another guy would come sometime in the next couple of days to give us even more gas, he said. And indeed, before the day was out, another delivery guy did come and fill the tanks.
So, crisis over—at least for now.
In each case, the cheerful guy inspected the stove, water heater, and furnace to make sure they were up and running.
But we experienced an anxiety-filled evening, all for nought. Why did no one tell us about the December 19 visit—when, as best I can tell, we were here—or of the necessity of replacing the propane tanks? Well, who knows? The company apparently intended for the old tanks to run down to nearly empty, so they’d be lighter weight and easier to lift and replace—but no one told us that either.
The lingering question: Just what else is about to hit us?
Along with many others, we have experienced plague, bitter cold, tornado-like winds, obstacles to getting food and fuel, medical crises, and more.
So far, looking over Job’s list of complaints, we have missed out on death and utter destruction. No plague of frogs or locusts. No forest fires here. Emily has had a rash…but no boils or leprosy. I have had arthritis afflicting various parts of my body…but I’m not yet a Granpappy Amos-like cripple.
And so far no nuclear winter, Love Canal- or Chernobyl-like eco-disasters.
Still—what next? Nights are still long and dark.
Dinner: turkey chili and a green salad.
Entertainment: The European animated flick The House, and possibly November Man with Pierce Brosnan.
Each of these phrases has been in the title of a book…each focusing, largely, on investing/speculation/investment bubbles. But the phrases could also refer to the mystifying actions of people—including the January 6 rioters—when they gather as a crowd.
Indeed, historians such as George Rudé have build reputations on the study of crowd behavior. Psychologists must have done the same sort of work, although I know nothing of their research.
But so much of the journalism focused on January 6 reflects the writer(s)’ preconception of right and wrong. A very long Times article today looks at the experiences and psychological damage sustained by Capitol police. Inevitably, that article carries the suggestion that the rioters were villainous or at least demented.
As far as I know, there has been very little in the way of clinical studies of the January 6 rioters. Some have now been prosecuted for crimes—and a few of these have recanted, saying they were deceived or some such. One Florida man, sentenced to five years in prison for his violent behavior, told the judge in his case that he was “really, really ashamed” of his behavior that day and that he would never attend a political rally again.
So just who misled him? Trump? Fox News? Other irresponsible media? Or the crowd itself?
A “mob” or crowd, we can understand, takes on a personality of its own, separate from the personalities of the individuals. Police of various nations have long employed agents provocateurs with the intent of getting a crowd to misbehave so that its members can be beaten up or prosecuted.
Does that work? Sometimes it must. But exactly what makes a crowd turn into a mob remains unclear. And at one moment, such a group might have a goal that could prove historically progressive, such as the sit-down strikes of 1930s and 1940s America that resulted in great gains for labor unions and ultimately gains in wages and benefits for the U.S. population as a whole. At another moment, as we know from innumerable movies and photos, a group can blame its unhappiness on the perceived actions of scapegoats—black people in the post-Civil War south or Jews in 1930s and ‘40s Germany and Austria.
One noteworthy anecdote comes to mind, drawn from French social philosopher André Gorz’ 1967 work A Strategy for Labor. Gorz described how managers at a European Vauxhall auto manufacturing plant conducted a survey in order to find out just what the facility’s workers thought of their work experience. The written survey, conducted one by one, revealed that the employees were hugely content. Later, though, the results of the survey were published—and workers gathered to discuss them. The group was outraged—how dare you say we are happy?!!—and immediately went out on strike.
Here, group psychology seems to move in a progressive direction. The group discusses things and takes action to right what the mass perceives to be a wrong. But for good or ill, once again, it seems people have different attitudes when they are individually isolated and when they gather as a group.
So, more study of the January 6 rioters—at least of those not members of organized fascist groups such as the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers—seems in order.
Dinner: Ropa vieja, black beans, rice, and green salad.
Entertainment: More Vera on Britbox and Reservation Dogs on Hulu.
He wears Hermes ties and handmade suits. He travels around by private jet, flying to the fancy resorts he “owns” (along with the banks) in exclusive areas of Florida, New Jersey, and Scotland. And, perhaps most mysterious of all, he gained notoriety on a nationally broadcast television show where he played a boss who delights in screaming at people “YOU’RE FIRED.”
I mean, could you conceivably root for someone whose reputation rests on giving everyday folks a very public heave-ho? Do you hate your fellow workers that much?
And yet it seems this is the guy who a great many white working men feel best represents their interests. They celebrate their loyalty, flaunting Trump stickers on their Dodge Ram pickup trucks.
The anniversary of the January 6 Washington, D.C. riots has brought the weirdness of the whole Trump phenomenon back into relief. Here you had 10,000 protesters, many of whom had traveled long distances across the country, ferociously intent on reinstating to the Presidency a guy you’d never see down at the barbershop or local bar, much less browsing the secondhand trousers at the Goodwill outlet. Five people died during the riot and 140 police officers were wounded. Subsequent to the events, 700 rioters have been brought up on charges including assault and use of deadly weapons.
And while the action was going on, Trump was watching it all on TV from his private dining room.
One of the rioters on January 6 carried a banner inscribed with a pitchfork. As if they were there in support of “Sockless” Jerry Simpson, a firebrand Populist Party leader of the 1890s. Trump isn’t even Huey Long, author of what historian T. Harry Williams has termed the Long tradition in Louisiana politics—“the idea that the state had an obligation to use its power to raise the lot of the masses.”
Huey Long said, “Every man a king.” Donald Trump said, “I’m the greatest.”
No, nowadays apparently all some voters care about is having someone who’ll throw tantrums, insult opponents and minority groups (especially women), and escort around a bevy of trophy wives and Barbie-doll daughters.
Please: Explain it to me.
Back to January, 2022.
This time, Mother Nature didn’t miss. Three days back, a storm dumped a foot of snow on D.C. and parts of Virginia and left hundreds of drivers stranded overnight on I-95. Long Island got away with a dusting.
Last night, we got hit…but it’s still no calamity. I’d say we got maybe seven inches, all very pretty. We have plenty of food and the heat’s working, so no need to fear.
Dinner: mushroom barley soup, corn muffins, green salad, and tapioca pudding.
Entertainment: we’re still binging on old episodes of the Britbox policier Vera. Last night, we also viewed the very wacky Bob Odenkirk (famed as Better Call Saul) vehicle, Girlfriend’s Day on Netflix. Hey, how many other shows feature unemployed greeting-card writers?
They say that household dust is, in some measure, made up of old human skin cells. Why then does the forced-air heating, which brings in air from the outdoors, lead to more dust on the floor?
And how can that person actually be out there today (temperature: 27 degrees) operating his leaf blower?
COVID just won’t go away, so we’re in for more weeks of isolation. Now, the disease has evolved into the Omicron variant—fast-spreading but it seems not as devastating as Delta. Still, no one can yet say just what the long-term effects of contracting even a milder version of the virus will be. Emily’s brother Vic tells us that his young daughter Maya, currently working out in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, has gotten it.
Strange to me, the Britbox streaming service has been featuring a number of filmed ghost stories during the Christmas season. Maybe the telling of ghost stories is a Yuletide tradition in Britain, realized most famously in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” In one of these videos, “The Stalls of Barchester” based on a story by M.R. James, an archdeacon is left alone in his large, spooky house when his sister/companion goes away to visit relatives. It happens to be the dead of winter, the most oppressive aspect of which, the cleric reflects, is not the cold but the dark. He hears squeaks on the stairs, howls from cats, and ghostly voices…But it’s the darkness that unnerves him most.
And that’s the thing I feel most out here in the country at mid-winter. No street lights and a limited number of neighbors means that it gets very dark indeed at night. I look forward to the dawn, which these days arrives after 7 a.m. I remember the first season of our COVID-related isolation came during the month of March (2020), when days were already getting longer bit by bit. What a relief that will be—but we’re months away.
Food remains a preoccupation. Cold weather encourages consumption of such heavy stuff as beef stew, ropa vieja, chicken potpie…and pudding-like desserts including pear clafoutis and tapioca. The last of these sinfully requires a measure of whole milk or even cream—yum.
Dinner: pasta with meatballs and tomato sauce and green salad.
Entertainment: Early episodes of the thriller Vera on Britbox.
A harsh contemporary satire–or a simple fall-from-grace story?
Friday, December 24
On a tobacco plantation in a remote corner of Italy lives a “marquessa,” her layabout son, an estate manager, and fifty or so “sharecroppers” who do all the work, unpaid. It is what might be thought of as a paternalistic, pre-capitalist setup—i.e., slavery.
Among the workers at “Inviolata” is Lazzaro, a perhaps simpleminded, ever-agreeable youth who labors tirelessly. Lazzaro becomes friends of a sort with the layabout Tancredi and introduces him to his primitive mountain hideaway, from which Tancredi sends word to his mom that he has been kidnapped and is in need of ransom.
Thus begins the Italian film Happy as Lazzaro, or Lazzaro Felice, directed by Alice Rohrwacher and now showing on Netflix.
The marquessa, Alfonsina De Luna, is wise to her son’s schemes, but the estate manager’s daughter is taken in—and uses her cellphone to telephone the authorities. When the police arrive, they announce that sharecropping has been outlawed for years! They disband the plantation, arrest the owner, round up the workers, and transport them in a truck to a nearby city.
The whole thing becomes fodder for a tabloid scandal—“The Great Swindle” perpetrated by the woman who becomes known as “the queen of cigarettes.” The newspapers announce that the former slaves have been relocated to more suitable accommodations. In fact, they are just set adrift to become homeless beggars and petty thieves.
Is the filmmaker a Marxist? Her fable seems to echo the ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, as the capitalist police have “pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound [the sharecroppers to their] ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest.” The former rural proletarians now live atomized lives lacking all sentimental illusions, amid pitiless urban blight.
No one seems to notice that Lazzaro has been left behind. During the police roundup, he plunges off a cliff. But magically, he doesn’t die; seemingly years later, he awakens and wanders on his own into the city, where he finds not only a group of his former worker-comrades (now living in a large, empty propane tank) but also Tancredi.
Late in the movie, Lazzaro goes into a bank to demand that the De Luna fortune be returned to the family. He has heard that bankers took away their wealth. The bank’s workaday patrons, ignorant of Lazzaro’s history and having internalized capitalist logic, fear that—armed as he is with a primitive slingshot—he may take away their money! They set upon him and kill him. Thus is order restored.
Lazzaro Felice was among the 2018 Palme d’Or competitors at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. But despite its light touch, the satire doesn’t really leave the viewer as Happy as Lazzaro: Its view of life without sentimental illusions is as harsh as reality.
Dinner: A Christmas Eve feast of roasted turkey breast, couscous, cranberries, and a pear clafoutis.
Entertainment: On Mubi, either Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Wife of a Spy or Jean-Luc Goddard’s Contempt.
