CONSERVATIVE TASTES: Losing Sight of History
Bowman, James
OT THAT ANYONE COULD BE SURPRISED atthefeminist production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington this fall,...
...Why should it matter, too, if Joni Mitchell'snewalbummarketsunderthebrandnameof Rudyard Kipling a version of that poet's best known poemthattransformsitintoabanality...
...You get a nicely book-ended illustration of the process of remaking the past as the present by a comparison of the original version of 3:10 to Yuma from 1957 and James Mangold's remake half a century on...
...Branagh had the bright idea of hiring Michael Caine, the youngerofthetwoactorsinthefilmof35yearsago,toplay the part played by Laurence Olivier in that version.Thatshouldreassureanydoubtersthatthisisthe genuinearticle!Closeenough,anyway...
...It was a play almost shockingly unrelated to anything that could possibly have been of concern to its author...
...Soon, perhaps, that will be true of everybody...
...Or, rather, we won't see it because we won't even know that history was there in the first place...
...Therefore,theirShrewisanexerciseinexploiting the Shakespeare brand in order to market their own viewoftheworld.KennethBranagh'sdireAsYouLike It, which turned up on HBO last summer, did the same...
...People don't do those sorts of things, any more than they converse with gods and giants...
...Oh, people will know it in theory, perhaps, but they will have got so far out of the habit oftryingtoimaginethemselvesbackintotheworldof their great-grandparents that stories of their curious customs and habits will appear to them as fairy tales do to us, or the Greek myths...
...Why should it matter, then, if it never occurred to Shakespeare to have his Petruchio show up to marry his Katherine wearing a wedding dress...
...Nobodybelievedthatupuntilourowntime,butthen almost nobody in our time really cares about what people believed before it, except to condemn them for believing it and to congratulate himself for not believing it...
...All these weepy violins and plangent pianos...
...Joni substitutes for the sexist language the following: If you can fill the journey of a minute With sixty seconds worth of wonder and delight Then the Earth is yours and everything that's in it, But more than that I know you'll be all right-You'll be all right 'cause you've got the fight You've got the insight You've got the fight You've got the insight There are no unforgiving minutes where Joni comes from, presumably, only wonder and delight in C O N S E R V A T I V ET A S T E S Losing Sight of History 6 6 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7 Nby James Bowman more than full measure--in which case it may occur to some of her listeners to wonder for what purpose her sexlessinterlocutorneedsthat"nerveandsinew"mentionedearlier,thatresolutionnecessaryto"Holdon...
...I've got to, that's all," he replies, just like Gary Cooper in High Noon from five years earlier...
...His recent book is Honor: A History (Encounter Books...
...Shaffer to create it in the firstplace.Insomeways,thisisarelief.Shaffer'sbanging on about the British class system as he did was quite fashionable at the time--the play dates from 1970, the film from 1972--but it was out of date even then and is of course much more so now...
...Why should it matter if the Shakespearean edifice has been knocked down solely in order to provide thematerialsforMs.Taichman'sorMr.Branagh'sjerrybuilt structures...
...These girls are controlled by men and money is at the very center of the whole thing and thatisadisgustingthing.Andthatisatruthofalot of women in the world to this day," Woodard says...
...But these ladies care nothing for that...
...Neither he nor Cooper uses the word "honor," because honor had become morally and culturally tainted over the previous 30 or40years,buthonoriswhattheyweretalkingabout:thehonorofhavingstoodsteadfast againstadeterminedfoenomatterhowgreat the danger or, in the end, how certain it was to cost him his life...
...Thetowndrunkgavehislifebecause he thought people should be able to live in peace and decency together...
...Such people look at the past and its cultural artifacts and they can only see themselves reflected in them...
...James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The American Spectator's movie and culture critic...
...People will as soon believethattheabductionofHelenofTroycausedthe epoch-makingTrojanwarasthattheassassinationof the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand caused the equally epoch-making World War I. It just won't be credible...
...MOVIE REMAKES are an instructive lesson in howthiscolonizationofthepastbythepresent works...
...Here'showthedirectorandthefemalestarofthe Shakespeare Theatre's Shrew, Rebecca Bayla Taichman and Charlayne Woodard, conceived of the play, according to the Washington Post: TheirKateisinarage"fromsomedeep-seatedhurt andbetrayal"--herfatheris,inasense,preparedto auctionoffhismotherlessdaughterstoprospective grooms...
...Branagh has another example for us in his re-make of Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth...
...If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son...
...Or so wrote Kipling...
...The 1957 version is a simple moral tale of a man who didn'tseekoutheroismbut,driventoundertakeadangerousbutnecessaryjobthatnooneelsewantedtodo byadesperateneedformoney,hethenrealizesthathe has taken on more than he bargained for and cares about something else more than the money, however desperatehisandhisfamily'sneed.Thekeylinecomes when the situation looks darkest and Leora Dana as Mrs.DanEvansasksherhusband(VanHeflin),"What areyougoingtodiefor?$200?Why...
...A few years ago, Francis Fukuyama wrote--rather prematurely, as most people now think--about "the end of history," but soon we may see history's real end...
...All this retrospective emotion...
...Now it is simply not possible that this view of the matter could have been Shakespeare's--or, probably, that of anybody who lived for at least two centuries after his time...
...And, in the 1957 version, Dan's honorabledeedelicitsanansweringonefromevensohardenedavillainasBenWade(GlennFord).Noneofthis survivesinthe2007version,whichismorallyaswell as dramatically incoherent and as wedded as Ken Burns is to the idea that the only art that matters lies in the portrayal of strong and unbridled feeling...
...Once again, it is the Sleuth brand he is interested in, not in anything that led Mr...
...No,KenBurns is only interested in why Ken Burns thinks itwasanecessarywar--andincongratulating himself and his subjects for having the right feelings about it now...
...OT THAT ANYONE COULD BE SURPRISED atthefeminist production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington this fall, but ithasgotmewonderingifanyonewillremember, inanothergenerationorso,thatpeopleusedtobe different from the way they are now--or the way they will be by that time...
...Kate,sheadds,"seestheunfairnessintheworld,so she decides I'm not playing this game...
...In any case, all that has been taken out, along with nearly everything else Shaffer put into it except the bare bones of the plot, and another playwright, Harold Pinter, employedtore-writeitandputhisown,unmistakable stamponthething.Besidesthetitle,thereislittleelse to certify the brand's authenticity, but Mr...
...Then she meetsPetruchioandseesthatthismanisnotafraid ofher...rightaway,wonderful...
...He wants the Shakespeare brand because it sells tickets.Peoplethinkthatwhattheygetunderthatname is"culture"and,therefore,thatitmustbegoodforthem as well as entertaining...
...J A M E SB O W M A N N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7 T H E A M E R I C A N S P E C T A T O R 6 7 3:10 to Yuma...
...On the contrary, their feminist reimagining of his work is inspired precisely by the fact that the play as he wrote it is "irredeemably sex-ist...
...They see no virtue in trying to recover what Shakespeare thought...
...All historians will be like Ken Burns, who showed us earlier this fall that even the brand name of World War II is susceptible to being put on something barelyrelatedtotheoriginaleventandexploitedforcommercialgain.Marketed--andhow!--ashistory,hisTV series The War ran for 15 seemingly interminable hours in September and October on PBS and was almost without interest in the past as it was before it wasthepast,whichistosay,inthepoliticalormilitary realities of World War II, or the cultural reasons why people thought at the time thatitwas"anecessarywar...
...All this scolding of people long dead for their racial and sexual attitudes...
...Rather, it provided an excuse for Ken to show how clever he is by transporting the Forest of Arden to medieval Japan, filling it with his thespian friends, and telling them to be entertaining...
...Can I do less...
...It's another imposition of the present upon the past, another manifestationofourincreasinginabilitytoseeanythingamong thegenerationswhohavelivedbeforeusbutless-perfect versions of ourselves...
Vol. 40 • November 2007 • No. 9
