On The Road

For a while when I was in my early twenties, Cormac McCarthy was pretty much the only writer who mattered to me. There was something about his prose--the visceral and lyrical qualities both at once on the page, the contrasting tautness and then flow of the lines--that took hold of me. His writing displayed the control of language that I admired in Faulkner and Joyce and Hemingway, but in a context that brought new dimensions of meaning. McCarthy possessed what seemed to me a new kind of authenticity, a way of looking at the world without flinching. That was what I wanted to do in my writing.

I squandered a graduate career in creative writing laboring under his shadow. No one has suffered the anxiety of influence greater than I did in those days. At a certain point, I knew that I had to get out.

This was just after the publication of Cities of the Plain, a novel that seemed to exaggerate the worst qualities of McCarthy's prose--the way his lyricism tended to the overwritten and the overwrought. I cut out McCarthy cold turkey, and I never looked back.

Until now.

Used bookstore, April 27, 2008: a copy of The Road sitting on the new arrivals shelf. I pick it up out of curiosity. I read the first line. I'm hooked.

* * *

It's not that McCarthy was ever a bad writer, but he did stagnate more and more as the Border Trilogy wore on. The work that I never lost respect for was Blood Meridian, which portrays human beings--men, really--at their absolute worst: depraved, violent, thoughtless. No book ever rattled me as much as this one.

The Road makes a good counterpoint to Blood Meridian. Both novels are set in waste lands that are partly natural and partly of human design, but ultimately the work of some detached and very distant neoplatonic god that communicates marginally through elemental symbols: blood, stars, desolate and leafless trees, the lay of the landscape and the way the sun sets on it. (Or, in the case of The Road, the way the sun sets behind the clouds that perpetually cover it.) The difference that separates the landscapes of these two novels--one set in the past, the other in the not-so-distant future--is the presence of something in The Road that never shows up in Blood Meridian, and it is something that is evident in the very first line of The Road:

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him."

In the desolation and ash of a post-apocalyptic landscape (where the only things alive seem to be a few ragged, dingy human beings subsisting on what canned goods--or what other human beings--they can find) there persists something that could only be described as a deep and enduring love--though McCarthy himself would never use such a sentimentally laden word for it. Here at the end of the world, though, this is what we have.

The novel that follows is tense, brutal, dismaying at times--and desparate throughout--but it never loses as its focus this core bond between father and son. The protagonist of Blood Meridian, known only as "the kid," never seems to know anything that remotely resembles this kind of bond with anyone. The child present here knows it as the central fact of his life in a place where even insects and fungi seem to be dead.

In general, McCarthy has, by comparison to some of his earlier work, wisely toned down the prose in this novel. Occasionally, a line might make the reader wince as it collapses under its own heavily descriptive syntax, but a few such lines can be tolerated. We get a lot of clipped sentence fragments, most often images of the landscape: "Barren, silent, godless." Or this line, with a Hemingway-esque barrage of nouns and modifiers, lacking a finite verb: "Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind." In a field the travelers see "The corrugate shapes of old harrowtroughs still faintly visible." A stretch of ruined city appears: "Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered." Eventually, the sea washes up: "Cold. Desolate. Birdless." In other instances, the sentences roll on without the hindrance of punctuation.

The overall effect of the description is sometimes stirring: who would have thoughts to describe "hands" of wire, a phrasing that reminds us of a vanished human presence?--and "corrugate" for the fields, which not only enables the reader to see the contours of the fields but also gives off the suggestion of a hard, unyielding quality to a once-fertile landscape? That landscape still bears a trace of human design though the people who once worked the land are well beneath it now. McCarthy's descriptions of landscape depend at once upon specificity (in terms of imagery) and vagueness (never is a particular stretch of road or a ruined city or town ever mentioned by name, though the travelers have with them a tattered roadmap and they themselves know the names of everything). This dynamic between the revealed and the withheld is one that urges on a mythical, legendary quality--this is someplace but it could be any place. The same notion applies with names; just as the kid in Blood Meridian is never identified by name, neither father nor son ever utters the name of the other in these pages.

In all, the style here is typical McCarthy--poetic and sometimes overly poetic, dominated by imagery--and yet the pace of this novel (the plot of which is not much more than typical dystopian/sci-fi fare) is brisk. This book is a quick, compelling, and easy read--what they typically call a "page-turner."

McCarthy resurrects for this novel the motifs that have become typical of his ouvre, and it is a good bet that many of the readers out there who have made this book a bestseller have skipped over the more complicated and esoteric allusions. Religious symbolism figures largely and frequently takes on a gnostic or neoplatonic flair: we get shadows, caves, flickering light, a mysterious God who chooses not to reveal himself in any very direct way. There is a running theatre motif as well that reinforces the notion of an acted-out fiction, a discrepency between appearances and reality. Together these factors develop the epistemological notion that the underlying truths of the world are somewhere inaccessible to anyone who walks this earth. We get a sense of characters who are part of the landscape but can only wonder at their role within it, characters who simultaneously know something and don't know it, "Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must." The second-person address here implicates us as part of this universe, and it is this quality--this making readers aware that they inhabit the same world that McCarthy's characters do--that separates his work from cheap fantasy and makes reading it such a powerful and affecting experience.

Throughout the novel, the word "pilgrim" shows up on a regular basis to remind us that father and son here are not searching merely for material sustenance but for a deeper, more profound meaning as well. The book gives us a glimpse of this kind of meaning, the force that animates the world. Father and son find it in each other: the father "knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke." (It is poignantly worth noting that McCarthy, who seems patently emotionless in the few interviews he has agreed to, dedicated the novel to his young son, John Francis.) The child here bears a crude but ingrained bent for the rhetorical, and by the end of the book we are led to believe that he is, if not the son of God, at least a prophet with a vague resemblance, ready to spread the word.

Ultimately, the future apocalypse of The Road only disguises allegorically the condition of the present: the persistence of evil in the world, the fragility of life, the bond of kin, the mystery of the created world. How McCarthy, who has taken us from the Old West to a future age, will reveal that world to us yet again remains to be seen.

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses Revisited

An N.C. Wyeth illustration of a scene from Last of the Mohicans

Why on earth would anyone in the twenty-first century bother to read The Last of the Mohicans?

This is a question that resounded in my mind as I sat in my study slogging through the book. Why on earth was I reading it? In retrospect, I might say morbid curiosity, but that would be somewhat disingenuous, really. When I picked it up, I had some vaguely inspired notion that it might be fun. Some seventh grade memory of enjoying the book--and of being disturbed by the brutal deaths in it--had lingered with me, but as I read through the clunky narrative, all I could think of was Mark Twain's utterly hilarious critique, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses." Twain got it right; if for nothing else, you should read this book so that you can appreciate Twain's essay.

There are some entertaining action sequences, but nothing in the book can withstand more than marginal scrutiny. The faster one reads the book, the better it is; you can get a sense of things without getting bogged down in the sometimes nonsensical prose. For a novel that focuses so much on the role of the wilderness landscape, it can be awfully hard to get your bearings straight as you read. When Cooper's characters enter into a cave, watch out--you'll never be able to get the dimensions of the cave right in your mind or be able to figure out how it is that they seem to be able to see in the utter darkness of an unlit space. Somehow they do, though, without so much as stumbling over a single crooked stone.

The primary object of Twain's ridicule is something that plays a key element in the book: the preternaturally keen sensory awareness of the scout Hawkeye and his two Mohican friends, Chingachgook and Uncas. CSI has nothing on these guys. They can detect half of a day-old mocassin print in a dry creek bed and tell you the wearer's weight, height, eye color, and what he had for lunch the day before. From a bent blade of grass they can tell which direction their prey, the wily and unkempt Magua, is going and how fast he is traveling to get there. Hawkeye is always waxing philosophic on the Indian's natural abilities to understand the way of the forest. "Whoever comes into the woods to deal with the natives, must use Indian fashions, if he would wish to prosper in his undertakings," Hawkeye notes, but he is no slouch himself; he knows, too, that moss grows on the north side of a tree. This guy never gets lost. He's what you had before GPS.

To boot, we get a heap of taciturn Indians--some good, some bad--who seem custom made for the cigar store. We get fainting ladies, and it is with one of those damsels--easily more Walter Scott than early American realism--that we nevertheless find one of the more compelling themes, something that not only gives graduate students something to talk about in relation to this book but also makes it very American in a crucial and (if you can get past the patronizing and dimensionally limited tone) surprisingly progressive way. Cora, the older of the two daughters of Colonel Munro, is at least a sixteenth black. It's no secret that noble savage Uncas fancies doomed, sad Cora more than just a little bit, and it's true that he would make a worthy match to her stalwart temper. Had there not been elements of tragedy at the end of the novel we might have seen a for-its-time daring display of racial integration on the frontier of American possibility. We also see a hint of complexity in the principal villain, Magua, aka Le Renard Subtil, whose disgrace is in no small part a result of negative peer pressure from whites: "Was it the fault of Le Renard that his head was not made of rock?" he asks rhetorically--rhetoric being one of his specialties. "Who gave him the fire-water? who made him a villain? 'twas the palefaces, the people of your own color."

In fact, the collisions of race and culture in this novel--and the way Cooper embodies the attitudes of his times toward these topics--do make it worthy of study--to graduate students, at least, and to anyone who wants insight into the mindset of early 19th century Americans, or Europeans, for that matter, since Cooper was a bestseller at home and abroad. Unfortunately, that still doesn't make this book any easier to read.

Charlie and Other Roosters

1.

It was a Sunday morning last fall. We were walking downtown, Mass Street quiet and near empty. Edie in her stroller saw him first: perched on the bed-rail of a beaten Chevy pickup with his jaunty blue wings, russeted body, a dark green fan of tail feathers, red comb.

There was a man dropping off his wife or girlfriend at work at the hotel, or maybe he was meeting her on her morning break. They're locked in embrace beside the truck, but he sees us coming by, hears Edie talking, grins at us. He says, His name's Charlie--I've got him trained like a dog.

We stop so Edie can look at the rooster. The woman goes across the street to the hotel, back to work, and the man gets in his truck. Charlie sits next to him on the passenger seat on the way home.

2.

There's something about a rooster that begs for anthropomorphism of the beast fable/cartoon variety. There's a direct line from Chanticleer to Foghorn Leghorn.

Theprimary factor in this, it seems to me, is one that seems in fact counterintuitive. The rooster's appeal is so strong because of a trait that is not found in humans: that it is the male of the species and not the female that appears to be all gussied up with someplace to go. The male chicken is pretty--proud, regal, cocky to boot, a damned fine looking bird in general. The brashness of the colors at a glance is balanced out by the subtlety of the tones when you look at a particular part of the bird. The fine coloration and the sturdy posture are entirely undermined, though--turned comic, ridiculous--when you take into account the limp flap of a red comb that clashes with the refined beauty of the feathers.

No doubt the rooster's pride is not hurt by anything I could ever say, and indeed I have nothing but affection for the dapper little fellows. Chaunticleer is easily my favorite character in Chaucer's arsenal: he's Foghorn Leghorn before cartoon animation. It's the same thing, in essence: madcap tomfoolery with a moral lesson. When a whole village full of people, various random animals, and a hive of bees all chase Reynard the Fox (with Chanticleer caught in his jaws) through the woods, those of us who grew up with Looney Toons know that we have seen this kind of thing before.

Though Chanticleer has license that we do not--he has seven wives--his follies are human ones amplified. Pretty fellow, he is literally the most hen-pecked of us all.

On Vultures

Audubon's Turkey Vulture, Cathartes aura
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1.

It's spring, and the vultures are back.

Winter skies around here were characterized by bald eagles and red-tailed hawks, eagles by the water and hawks by field and trees, and of course the ubiquitous crow. The eagles high-tailed it out of here all at once when it started to warm up. The ranks of the hawks are diminished. Humble, homely, and massive, the turkey vulture with its gruesome red skull and vast silver-black wings will rule the sky by default between now and the first frost.

The crows seem puny by comparison.

2.

I work on the west side of town, the sprawl of suburban developments punctuated with open fields of yet-to-be-developed space and lined with gallery trees. In the winter, I can look out the window of my classroom to see hawks on the telephone line across the street. This time of year, I see vultures, right now as singularities, but later I'll see them in twos and threes. In the summer, on the highway between here and the outskirts of Kansas City, I will often see upwards of a dozen of them circling over the woods. I sometimes see a batch of them on the roof of a barn near my mom's house in Desoto, Kansas, huddled about in various states of disarray. By appearance, the vulture seems an untidy bird, its feathers always a little out of place, disheveled.

Like hawks, vultures appear to be expanding in number--either that or they are simply succumbing to the promise of greater amenities in the suburbs. Maybe they are just getting over their initial shyness around people--but that doesn't quite seem right because the vulture seems to be an entirely unselfconscious type of creature. A few years ago, I saw them only on the jagged edges of town, near open fields or woods. Twice already this year, I have seen vultures flying over my own neighborhood of Old West Lawrence, right in the middle of town.

On my way home from work, sometimes, I drive through their shadows. I crane my neck to the window following them. I've got to be more careful about this so that I don't end up on the menu anytime soon.

3.

A hawk in flight soars; it glides on currents of wind and climbs them. There is something sharper and tighter about a hawk's maneuvers than even those of an eagle. With its short, stout wings, the hawk works in a more confined space.

A vulture, in contrast to both, kites. It takes up vast amounts of sky. A vulture always looks a little flimsy despite its massiveness, its wings a little papery, blown about by the wind. The hawk seems always to be in control. The vulture seems always to be at the mercy of the skies, even though it is a much larger bird. If you've ever seen a novice skier lose control, careen too quickly down the slope, you've seen a vulture slide along with the wind, seemingly unable to brake.

Despite their reputation, I can't think of them as sinister. Bumbling, clumsy, graceless--but still, there's something about them that I like, something endearingly comic.

4.

The vulture is a mute species; it has no voice box. Unlike other birds, vultures compose no love songs; they communicate by huffing and wheezing. What cool means of seduction one vulture can offer another, I've no notion. Nor can I imagine what crises of self worth they must undergo now, listening to the spring birds with their gentle, intricate trills.

The vulture is generally gregarious, huddling with others of its kind in big bands in the tops of trees, splitting up into singles in mating season. Never altogether sad nor merry, that's how I imagine them most of the time.

Dutiful servants of nature, they've got a job to do, unglamorous but essential, like taking out the trash. Their literary equivalent is Prince Hamlet's gravedigger, and they serve a similar two-fold purpose: comic relief, disposal of the dead. Unlike other raptors, their eyesight is not so keen; they sense carrion by smell. Their talons don't have the vise-like gripping power that hunter birds possess. Vultures circle awkwardly, lazily, on updrafts until they scent something or until the wind batters them some other way. The green and verdant landscape opens up beneath them, for them, but they have no songs to sing in celebration of it.

Their heads are bare so that they can plunge them deep into the carcasses that others dare not devour.

5.

On the expansion theory, maybe the weather conditions have been good for them, or maybe there's less of a certain pollutant since the Farmland plant closed down on the other side of town. Maybe the stars are aligned, or maybe the moon or whatever goddess watches over them just said, go ahead.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Historical Spectacle

Queen Elizabeth I's short but powerful speech to her troops at Tilbury was, in many ways, both the highlight of her reign and one of the best political speeches of her era. The most compelling aspect of it is Elizabeth's understanding of her audience and her attempt to treat with them on common ground. In short, she shows them that she cares, that she appreciates their being there on the anticipated battlefield. How much this is genuine sentiment and how much it is merely geared to buck up soldiers facing a numerically superior force we will never know. Regardless, the speech still stands impressively more than four hundred years after the fact. Boldest of all here is the Queen's direct address of the issue of her gender: "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too." Elizabeth's task, no mean one, was to convince her soldiers that she, a woman, could lead them as well as--or better than--any man. That she ruled so long and so peacefully--comparatively, given the religious strife that had so torn the country during her lifetime--is a testament to her ability to win over the people.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age seeks to capture something of the woman-monarch's matchless charisma and to recreate the tense drama of this moment at Tilbury, when the emerging British empire is nearly at the mercy of the great Spanish Armada and the ten thousand troops it threatens to bring to England's shores. In addition to the opening address ("My loving people"), the film retains only one line of Elizabeth's speech, closely paraphrased: "I am resolved in the midst and heat of the battle to live or die amongst you all." Instead of the head-on tackling of gender dynamics and the repeated invocation of God, kingdom, and people--the three domains of the Renaissance world-view--we get references to the sails and guns of the enemy and a Crispin's Day-like promise either of glorious victory or of defeat equally glorious. On paper and in the film, Elizabeth's speech comes off as much more genuine and much less Machiavellian than good King Henry V's, though we must acknowledge that she was certainly not without her Machiavellian qualities. Her speech in the film, however, adds a greater dash of battlefield flavor than the original possessed. It urges the good fight while simultaneously foreshadowing the computer-generated spectacle at sea we are about to witness.

The staging of this speech in the film begins with the right approach--woman warrior in steel cuirass and viking-maiden braids--and then sells out language-wise in favor of boosting the plot dynamics. It's a disappointing moment for Elizabeth I enthusiasts, who might possibly have sat through the preceding hour and a half of film waiting specifically for the delivery of this speech, but obviously we are not the target demographic. Elizabeth really did wear a plate-armor breastplate, but the sails of the Spanish Armada were not likely to have been visible from Tilbury and they certainly did not run aground en masse on the English coast (the fleet was near Ireland when it sustained its heaviest losses). Elizabeth did not look out across the windy surf to see their burning wreckage, as she does in the film. Of course, historical accuracy has been sacrificed here for the sake of narrative momentum, but no matter--dramatists have been rewriting history since the birth of the written line. The problem here is how cheap it all sometimes seems.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is not a bad film, just a disappointing one. We might expect something better than what it has for us. What it does offer is an overview of the major themes of the middle parts of Elizabeth's reign, picking up where the first Cate Blanchett-driven Elizabeth film left off ten years ago, Elizabeth's status as monarch solidly established along with her commitment to the preservation of her own celibacy. Thus we start out firmly embroiled in the personal-political dynamic that informs the age of Elizabeth: in order to maintain power, Elizabeth must rule alone. Whereas male rulers, such as Elizabeth's own father, would literally kill for the opportunity to produce a male heir, Elizabeth seemed to have cared less about all of that. She knew that her legacy would be established solely by her own words and deeds.

The particular revisionist focus of this film involves the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism--or, as writ in this film, the conflict between liberal, enlightened religious tolerance and religious extremism. Clearly, this epic struggle has been played up in the film to resonate with modern viewers. Philip II of Spain represents the dark side of the religious spectrum, declaring essentially a holy war (that very phrase is used) against the English in response to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Little is made of economic or political objectives that may have motivated Spain to wage war against the English. Elizabeth is presented as the prototype of moderation in religion, and it is true that under her the Church of England emphasized adherence to outward shows of ceremony over inward matters of faith. In other words: show up for services on Sundays, but believe what you want to believe. Such a stance was a political expedient in a country in desperate need of reconciliation after decades of faith-based strife, but it also proved to be a key development in the birth of religious toleration. The only Catholics the queen seems to have persecuted were those who were trying to kill her--and fair is fair in that regard. But the tones taken on here in the examination of this conflict seem overly exaggerated without the full political context. That the war between England and Spain was more about religion than it was about empire--this is a hard sell. In The Golden Age, it's the past that gets sold out; the blunt imposition of our modern concerns overrides everything in order to give the viewer a chance to identify with the world of the film.

The primary element, though, at work in this film is personal and dramatic--at times melodramatic--and again it involves a fair degree of historical whitewashing. I am speaking here of the relationship between the queen and Sir Francis Drake. Historically, Drake was a pirate, an explorer, a shameless opportunist; he is frequently identified as an instigator of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Here, Drake (Clive Owen) is a roguishly handsome pirate with a heart of gold and a keen smile, an explorer, a bit of an opportunist in the Han Solo tradition but ultimately loyal to the queen, and there is no mention of the slave trade, only his interest in the native inhabitants of the Americas. The writers have also grafted elements of Sir Walter Raleigh into his story. His only betrayal is an affair of the heart; unable to love the Virgin Queen, though they do in fact fancy each other more than just a little bit, he makes it with her lady-in-waiting, Bess (Abbie Cornish), whom he marries in secret, thus landing himself in prison until the queen goes to him in her hour of need. Of course, he is the only one who can pilot the sixteenth century British version of the Millennium Falcon and lead the underdogs to victory against the evil empire.

All of this is fine, really, and I am mocking things a bit just because it is easy to do so. What makes this grand historical spectacle so hollow at times--what makes it seem cheap--is the wooden dialogue. Drake's lines, in particular, are often groaningly awful. "We mortals have many weaknesses," he wisely advises the queen when she faces a moment of self-doubt; "We feel too much. Hurt too much ... All too soon we die. But we do have the chance of love." Worse still, when Bess comes to visit him aboard his ship:

DRAKE: This is my life, Bess.
BESS: It seems to me a lonely life.
DRAKE: Sometimes. But it's the life I've chosen.

Such lines are chiseled to match the set of the jaw on Clive Owen's face, but they don't well make good script or, for that matter, match the tone of the period. Later, Drake tells Bess when she faces a crisis of loyalties, "We're all humans"--but this kind of understanding of the nature of humanity seems more a product of the golden age of Oprah than of the golden age of Elizabeth. At the very least, it relies on an understanding of what it means to be human that, if Harold Bloom is correct, wasn't invented until Shakespeare started writing in the decade that followed the defeat of the armada.

There are other objections we might raise here. I find it hard to believe that Elizabeth would have so many qualms as she does here about the execution of her cousin Mary (Samantha Morton), especially in an age of so many commonplace executions and the public posting of body parts. The proto-scientific but also Oprah-fied sage advice of Mary's personal wizard, Dr. John Dee (David Threlfall), is a little hard to stomach at times. Only Francis Walsingham (Geoffrey Rush), the queen's councillor and spymaster and an early purveyor of a gritty realpolitik, comes out with nary a scratch.

It is a difficult thing to merge history, which demands facticity and realism, with romance, which demands simplicity of perspective, and that is why so many historical novels and films fall flat, especially to contemporary audiences accustomed to a greater degree of realism. The fact of the matter, though, is that any life of Elizabeth I, like any life of the famous and equally inscrutible bard whose works she may have enjoyed later in her life, must by necessity be an imagined one. The lines she herself wrote were too crafted to reveal the inner nature of the woman, and little of real personality escapes the carefully designed (lead-based) facade of white face paint she wore. In this regard, however--in the realm of imagery--Elizabeth: The Golden Age achieves the great triumph that makes it worthwhile for the Elizabeth enthusiast. As Elizabeth, Cate Blanchett in white face is eerie, shocking, sometimes frightening, strangely beautiful but also hideous, like a figure in a wax museum come to life--like something out of a horror film but with all of the terror stripped away, leaving only wonder. The filmmakers do not go out of their way to exploit the parallel between the Virgin Queen and the Virgin Mother (how can they when depicting a Protestant society?), but it is there and ready for the taking. When Elizabeth appears, backlit and glowing amidst the gold figures in her chapel, she demands veneration. Later, holding Drake and Bess' infant child, we understand the appeal of this great ruler of men: "I have no master. Childless, I am mother to my people." We have no choice but to follow.

Diane Arbus and the Nudists

Much has been made of Diana Arbus' photographs of the mentally disabled: accusations of exploitation or at least insensitivity on her part. I might argue that her motives in taking the pictures are largely irrelevant--that the pictures stand on their own regardless of the photographer's intent--but I'm too distracted to join the fray. It's all the naked people who have my attention.

As nudes go, they're not much to look at at first. Accustomed to the plasticized and the airbrushed as we are, we might not know what to make of such real bodies. A few of them might be considered attractive, but that seems besides the point. Take a look through the collection in Revelations. The pitifully scrawny, the average, and the obese all have one thing in common: each of the individuals photographed is utterly, completely comfortable in his or her own skin. That's what makes them fascinating to see. If Adam and Eve really did eat the apple, it's news to them.

The bodies I speak of were photographed primarily at nudist colonies, the whole enterprise of which seems to be a recovery of that mythological time before the Fall. After all, it was Adam and Eve's awareness of their own nakedness that betrayed them: "Who told you that you were naked?" My favorite photograph in this series shows a husband and wife in late middle age, resplendent in their shoes, in their cabin at a nudist camp. The man is the perfect picture of scrawniness, with thick-framed spectacles. The woman is sprightly, a little bit of style and sass in her pose. In short, the two look happy.

Of course, Arbus also photographed strippers and transvestites. She chronicled all sorts of people. In a letter to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1963--the same year she shot photos in nudist camps--Arbus expressed the wish to document the "considerable ceremonies of our present." Of the present, she said, "its innumerable habits lie in wait for their meaning"--a statement that seems to suggest that the establishment of meaning is a retrospective act. There is, I suppose, no other way for a photographer to look at it.

Juno: A Father's Reaction

My dad never seemed to have much interest in what I did during my leisure time while I was in high school. Granted, he didn't need to--I was by any standards of classification a geek and a bookworm and by disposition practically incapable of getting into trouble--but he justified his laissez faire attitude by stating that there was only so much trouble his boys could get into. With the girls, though--that was another story.

Chauvanist as this attitude is, there's a truth to it that any feminist--pick your wave--has to admit. Girls can get into a particular kind of trouble that boys can't get into. Of course, both male and female parties need to be involved for this kind of trouble to occur, but the boy has the option of cut-and-run. The girl doesn't.

Enter Juno, with a unique twist on this theme: it's the girl who wants to cut-and-run (in her own particular coming-to-term way) and the boy who, though he might not know what he wants, doesn't want to cut out. The reason it has taken me so long to get around to seeing this film has to do precisely with the subject matter of the film: I, like the male lead in this film, got a girl pregnant. Unlike Michael Sera's sweet-natured and bumbling Paulie, I am older and married (though still bumbling), and the woman I got pregnant was my wife. In fact, I have gotten her pregnant twice, and the product of the first such undertaking is a two-year-old who makes going to see witty and charming films like Juno virtually impossible.

The younger product (who won't be born until June) went with us to the movie and must have absorbed it with interest, albeit indirectly. Based on post-film discussion, I'd say that the film fired off some powerful responses in my wife and that some of this response must have taken the form of hormonal transmission to the little bird inside her belly. It was, for us, a film that was poignant in ways that it could not be for many other viewers.

What struck me about the film wasn't really the kids, who were perfectly endearing and harmless in their own way, but the adults. In particular, the film has three relationships: Juno (Ellen Page, as if you haven't heard) and Paulie, Vanessa and Mark (the adoptive parents, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), and Juno's dad Mac and his wife Bren (J.K. Simmons and Allison Jannie). Juno and Paulie are convincing enough on screen but outside the world of the film rather improbable. Real teens aren't as witty as Juno and no one at any age (outside of Wes Anderson films) is capable of the blend of ironic-cool and naivete that Paulie embodies. (Paulie's a geek but cooler than he knows: he's totally retro and he plays guitar.) Despite their departure from the wholly realistic, Juno and Paulie are convincingly developed, which is what we expect out of good characterization. Vanessa and Mark, by contrast, are mostly foils for the younger couple: they're stereotypes of the suburban couple carried to an extreme, not entirely unrealistic but not entirely real, either. Nevertheless, the sting of the satire is there: Mark, the adult, who is supposed to be mature by virtue of his age and station, does the cut-and-run at the prospect of becoming a father; Vanessa, who has Pottery Barned to the max their house in the remote burbs, seems caught up in appearances, but her heart is golden. If the film has a message, it's that someone who wants to be a parent should be a parent, and that someone who doesn't shouldn't be.

The other relationship that sticks for me is not so much Mac and Bren as it is Mac and Juno. Mac's marriage to Bren is a second for Mac; Juno's mother cut-and-ran (thematic parallel observed) years ago. Toward the end of the film, Mac tells Juno (rather like the protagonist of a late Shakespearean play, one where the mother is seemingly nonexistent) that the relationship that will last is his fatherly love for her. This is a bit of a change from his initial response, when he tells Juno that he thought she was the kind of girl who knew when to say when. Mac's kinder words got to me because, like those Shakespeare plays, they say so much about what it means to be a parent. Mac faces the reality of a daughter in a predicament. I face the uncertainty of the very, very young/not-yet-born. I don't know what my kids are going to do. I'm hoping for the best, ready for anything.

A couple of months ago, Caitlin Flanagan, who writes thoughtful and challenging pieces for The Atlantic Monthly about issues affecting teenage girls, called Juno a "fairy tale" in an op-ed piece in The New York Times. I can sum up the fairy tale so: girl meets boy, girl gets pregnant, girl decides to give the child away, girl does so, and girl meets boy again and they go on with their happy, carefree teenage lives. Juno is a fairy tale then in depicting an improbable but ideal outcome that defies statistical fact in the lives of teenage girls, but not so in its depiction of the lives of adults. The fact of the matter is, nothing can prepare you for parenthood except the wish to be a parent, and Juno gets that right.