Mank, Women and Context

After viewing the new David Fincher film Mank last weekend, I texted this to my buddy:

“The thing that bothered me was the drastic age differential between the men and the women.  I didn’t believe for one second that Mank was in his forties or even in his thirties in the flashbacks.  And his wife looked like she was about 22 years old, so when she talked about them having been married for 20 years, I almost chuckled.”

I may have almost chuckled, but it’s no laughing matter, as highlighted in the Andrea Towers article for The Wrap.  To take nothing away from the fine acting performances of Tuppence Middleton, Lily Collins or Amanda Seyfried, there is a legitimate complaint against Hollywood casting younger women in roles that would be more appropriately acted by older women.  Gary Oldman is thirty years older than Middleton, despite their characters having been the same age in real life.  Why not have Sara Mankowitz played by a 40-something actress?  It harkens back to 1950s Hollywood, when Audrey Hepburn was cast as a love interest alongside actors like Cary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart (ew!), what I imagine was the result of older male casting directors projecting their own desires.  Hollywood may have taken a few steps toward a more egalitarian industry, but it still has a long way to go.

Mank also inspired a discussion with my adult children, and we took opposite sides of the argument.  I argued that while I enjoyed Mank, it was the very helpful to have the context of having seen Citizen Kane and knowing some of the background of the players involved.  My son argued that if you need context to enjoy and understand a movie, then it’s not a good movie; that it fails in its essential role of being a stand-alone piece of art.  Yes, context may enhance a film’s enjoyment and understanding, but it shouldn’t be required.

But I wonder about this.  After all, could one really understand a Civil War drama like Glory without having some knowledge of American history and the role that slavery has played in shaping it?  Or more recently, I wonder how Once Upon a Time in Hollywood played to young people who knew nothing of the Manson murders.  They must have been moderately baffled when the film focused so long on Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate, only to have it lead absolutely nowhere.  For me, knowing the real life tragedy had my stomach knotting up at the film’s climax.  For others, it must have seemed like a trifle, a comic thriller.  This perhaps strengthens my son’s argument, because context may have helped the film, but it wasn’t required.  But I have to believe that Tarantino made the film fully expecting his audience to be informed about the Manson murders.

Even non-historical movies benefit from some measure of context, and it’s why cross-dressing comedies like Tootsie or Some Like it Hot might not play as well today as they did at the time.  Or why today John Wayne’s character in The Searchers seems outrageously cruel, though at the time his treatment of an American Indian woman was treated as comedy.  Or circling back to women and how they’ve been portrayed in Hollywood, many comedies of yesterday fall flat today unless you have some acceptance of the more subservient role women played in decades past.

As for Mank, it gets off on its name-dropping moments, and I think without some knowledge of the past the film must be a rather laborious affair. Some of the name-drops are offered more as a wink to a knowing audience than as necessary ingredients to the film’s storytelling, but they tend to unnecessarily muddy the waters. This is in contract to, say, the way music references enhance character in High Fidelity rather than bogging the film down.  Mank falls short for this reason.  It’s a good film.  It is not a great film.

The Dreaded Crossword Puzzle

Wordplay is not my bag.  While I can construct a decent sentence and write a compelling story, anything involving cleverness bewilders me.  I find riddles and puns baffling.  Asking me to finish a complex limerick is like asking a dog to play the piano.  Hell, even vocabulary is a challenge for me.  It’s okay.  I’m not complaining or being hard on myself.  I’m just providing some background for my next illogical pursuit. 

The dreaded crossword puzzle.

At least five different times in my life I’ve delved into crossword puzzles and tried to understand them.  It’s a skill I want to have.  I see people who are no smarter that I – my mother, for instance – filling out the New York Times puzzle each day, and I want what they have.  I want to be clever, to be given a clue with a question mark and see right away that when I’m asked, “Chicago balloonists’ needs?” that I should consider “ill winds” as the answer.  I want to discern that the clue “Ghostbusters and The Police” is asking for “trios.”  I want to understand that “Lucky strikes” is a clue for the word “ores.” 

This stuff kills me.  I like facts.  I like names and dates.  And even though I find vocabulary daunting, I’m okay if a crossword puzzle gives me a clue of, say, “hostile” for a synonym of, say, “truculent.”  I may not get it right away.  Hell, I may not get it at all.  But at least I know what they’re asking for and what’s expected of me.   There have been times when I’ve looked up the answer to a crossword clue and I’ll have no idea what it means.  Others are just infuriating to me.  One puzzle I tried to complete had the clue, “bum.”  The initial “just the facts, ma’am” side of me thought, “hobo.”  Ah, but then my newly-discovered clever side of me thought, “borrow,” as in, “Can I bum a cigarette?”  But before I could pat myself on the back, I – after struggling mightily and getting nowhere – discovered that the answer was “no good.”  So the clue wasn’t a noun and it wasn’t a verb.  It was a fricking ADJECTIVE!  As in, “You got a bum deal.” 

Son of a…!

Last October I ordered a book of Monday New York Times puzzles.  As a new puzzler, I was just learning the rules, so even Mondays were a challenge.  I had to learn the consistency in tenses between clue and answer, that Sp. can mean Spanish, that an abbreviation in the clue means an abbreviation in the answer, and that “with, to Maurice” is asking for the French word for “with” (which I do not know, but at least I now know what’s being asked!).  It took a little time.  I also learned to spot various themes of the puzzles, such as shaded grey areas that contain anagrams of the same letters, or circled letters that spell a phrase (such as a diagonal patter going up that spells “what goes up” followed by a diagonal pattern going down that spells “must come down.”).  That sort of thing.

After getting through a bunch of Monday puzzles, I visited my daughter in California, who, after spending some of her winter holiday filling out crossword puzzles with me, decided to purchase her own book of two-hundred puzzles.  But this one was a book of Tuesday puzzles, and she regretted her purchase instantly, laboring just to get half a puzzle completed.  I, having gotten through a chunk of my Monday puzzles, traded my half-finished book of Mondays for her book of Tuesdays, as I thought I was ready to graduate to the next level.

Not so fast.

It’s now September and I’m on puzzle 196.  I didn’t achieve my first perfect puzzle until 166 and I’ve only completed one since then!  So yeah, to date I have completed two – THAT’S TWO!! – puzzles that were 100 percent correct.  On many, many others I was just one or two letters off, sometimes due to carelessness, sometimes because I had to guess about things like the first name of Spiner of “Star Trek T.N.G.”  Is it Brett or Brent?  I guessed Brett, which was wrong.  That stuff I can live with.  Either you know it or you don’t, unless you manage to work your way to the correct answer through another clue/answer.

As for the wordplay stuff, I’m getting better.  Slowly.  Just last night I was given the clue, “It’s taken by witnesses” and was able to come up with “stand.”  I know.  It’s not earth-shattering.  It’s not even clever.  But this was a big accomplishment for me.  More impressive was my solving a bunch of clues in a puzzle a few days ago:

Thesis topic for sex ed?   “Quickie study”
Cameras taking pictures of permanent markets?”  “Sharpie shooters”
Pompom on a skullcap?  “Beanie sprout”

Pretty good, eh?  I mean, this was HUGE for me!  I’m slowly learning to think just a bit outside the box.  I’m not always able to open it, but I’ve at least cut through the twine and packing tape.

One of the answers to last night’s puzzle was the ubiquitous “ewes.”  What on earth did puzzle makers do before this word, OR before Oprah Winfrey, Sammy Sosa, Nora Ephron, Yoko Ono and Uma Thurman were celebrities?  Not a puzzle goes by when I’m not filling in one of those names.  I’ve also learned that an eagle’s nest is called an aerie, that the river in Florence, Italy is the Arno, that the volcano in Sicily is Mount Etna, and that the Greek letter for H is Eta.  Also, that the Concorde was an SST and that a common camera lens is an SLR.

So yeah, I’ve absorbed a little bit of trivia that may come in handy in no particular place in my life except crossword puzzles. 

I’m getting better, but I’m not ready for Wednesdays just yet.  I may never be.  For my Tuesday puzzles I think I’m at a 20/60/20 breakdown.  Twenty percent I get close to solving or maybe actually solve.  60 percent I need to look up a word or two to solve.  And twenty percent I have no fricking clue what the puzzle maker was smoking when he came up with this sadistic game, perhaps as a way of taking out all of his worldly anger and frustration on pathetic puzzle-solver wannabes by having the nerve to categorize his puzzle as a “Tuesday” and not a “Thursday.”  To him, I say, you win.  You’ve proven that I’m a dunce.  Nicely done.

In the meantime, I – a glutton for punishment – have purchased another book of two hundred Tuesday puzzles.  Wish me and my self-esteem luck.

Enter Empty-Nesterdom

I’ve recently joked with some friends of mine: “I’ll be an empty-nester in September.  When you see a flare, come with a few beers and rescue me.”

This Friday my wife and I enter Empty-Nesterdom.  For the first time since December of 1996, when a bout of nausea prompted us to stop by CVS for a quick pregnancy test, we will no longer devote a large percentage of thought and energy to our children.  At least not all the time.  Granted, our son’s increasingly independent lifestyle over the last number of years has gradually given my wife and me more time on our own, and we’ve slowly grown accustomed to what life might look like on the other side, but I’d be lying if I said that I don’t have a degree of trepidation about the future.  None of our kids will be an easy drive away, and one isn’t even an easy flight away.  We won’t be able to plan a spontaneous lunch or walk with our kids.  Every visit will have to be crosschecked against multiple calendars and planned in advance.  When our twin girls left for school five years ago, we ended up seeing one of them once a semester (Kentucky) and the other once a year (California).  Cincinnati will similarly limit our visits, and we may go for long periods of time without seeing any of them.

Although my three kids are doing pretty well, I’ve found that having adult children leads to a different sort of parental anxiety, because adult children have adult problems.  Gone are the days when their spirits could be lifted merely by me picking them up and jumping up and down.  God, I loved those days.  I love these days too for sure.  It’s just more uncertain, and I of course have little to no control of the situation.  Last week I looked over a 401k rollover procedure for my daughter, and I was happy to actually contribute something of value.   I love it when there’s a right answer to a problem. 

Mostly, though, it’s not so simple.  A while back, the psychotherapist and author Lori Gottlieb wrote a great article in The Atlantic called “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy.”  It’s nearly a decade old now, but the revelations still ring true: that as parents we’ve overprotected our children to the extent that they experience difficulty in their twenties and thirties, so unable are they to handle challenges, to be resilient in the face of difficulties.  The article is well-summarized by the following sentence: “…many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment, with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.”

This was written in 2011 when the worries of much of the world paled in comparison to what young people face today.  We’re asking an awful lot of young adults to handle the adversities of COVID-19, a sinking economy, isolation, cancelled school, melting icecaps, political divisiveness, mean-spirited leaders, hateful mob mentality gone rampant online, and a whole host of other concerns, when we as adults set them up for failure to overcome life’s great challenges.

I’d like to think that my wife and I didn’t fall into the overprotective parenting trap, but I’m sure I’m fooling myself.  I’m sure I sent one to many emails to their teachers over the years and had my kids check in too often when they were out.  Ultimately, we probably did okay, but I believe that my children are up to the task of weathering life’s great challenges likely in spite of their upbringing rather than because of it.  It’s not going to be easy, but I believe that they’ll be among those who navigate these treacherous times, not with perfection, but with perseverance.

But a larger question looms: will my wife and I be up to the task?  Will we find balance, meaning and determination absent the diversion of active parenting? 

Stay tuned.

Is "Defund" the Best Word Choice?

Words have meanings.  If the words you’re using mean something other than the message you’re trying to convey then you’re likely going to anger and confuse people.  If I were an umpire at a baseball game and cried “Safe!” when a runner slid into home plate, the runner would have every reason to believe that he was, in fact, safe.  But if I were to qualify my remark and say, “When I say safe, I actually mean you were really close to being safe, but you’re actually out,” a shouting match would ensue.

Similarly, a word being used in the recent racial protests is leading to anger and confusion: defund. 

Here is what I know.  Defund doesn’t mean reallocate or restructure.  It means to stop funding.  I’ve been told otherwise by several people, but saying it doesn’t make it so.  I scanned the internet for definitions just in case I was missing something, and here’s what I found.

From merriam-webster.com:
to withdraw funding from.

From Dictionary.Cambridge.org:
to stop providing the money to pay for something.

From TheFreeDictionary.com:
to stop the flow of funds to.

These definitions are consistent and clear.  So why are people telling me that it doesn’t mean what I think it means?  Matthew Yglasias provides part of the answer at Vox.org, whose article does a nice job of explaining the phrase “defund the police.”  He writes that although “in congressional budget-speak, to ‘defund’ something normally means to reduce appropriations to zero dollars, thus eliminating it” that in practice “the ‘defund’ slogan dances ambiguously between abolition-type schemes and just saying officials should spend less money on policing at the margins.”

But if you’re trying to convince people to support your cause, ambiguity is the last thing you want.  I personally wish protesters would change the slogan, but I guess “Reallocate a portion of resources from the police to mental health initiatives” is a bit cumbersome.  My fear is this: a movement that has very legitimate concerns and goals is unable to attract a large number of voters because “defund” doesn’t mean what they want it to mean.  Perhaps a different tactic is in order. 

Or, more likely, perhaps in a year the word “defund” will have an additional definition added when searching online dictionaries:

Defund:
1)  to stop the flow of funds to.
2)  to take a portion of funds from.

Two Passover Lessons during the Pandemic

My family’s Passover Seder last week was certainly like none I’d attended before, but even with people joining us remotely via Zoom while hunkered down in their various apartments, the essential elements of our Seder remained the same, and a few particularly poignant lessons were elevated even further given humanity’s present plight.

Over the past few decades my family has used its own Haggadah, one originally created by our brother-in-law but then gradually transformed to grow along with our growing children.  We’d purchased half a dozen Haggadot over the years, and while all of them had their strengths, none of them did everything well, so rather than use a document that we weren’t happy with, we cherry picked those elements that spoke to us and inserted them into our own family Haggadah.  It’s since evolved into a somewhat permanent book now that our children are adults.

Passover has many themes, but there are two that especially speak to me each year, and in the midst of the global pandemic, their lessons ring even louder:  1) gratitude; and 2) how we may not be slaves, but we are often still enslaved.

GRATITUDE

I’ve written about his topic before, but Passover does such a good job of addressing one of humanity’s most precious gifts that I’d like to touch on it once more.  One Hebrew word that’s in every Haggadah is dayenu, which means roughly “It would have been enough for us.”  In the Seder we recite that many things God did to free the Israelites from Egypt, and after each one we say (or sing) “Dayenu.”  Sheila Peltz Weinberg offers a wonderful commentary on how dayenu can be applied to our lives today, and I’d like to share it here.  I believe this comes from New American Haggadah, a hugely flawed book that includes some absolutely wonderful writings by various contributors.  Weinberg writes:

Dayenu signifies deep acceptance and gratitude.  We acknowledge the present moment.  This acceptance allows us to move to the next moment and receive the waiting gift.  When we greet each moment with conditions, judgements and expectations – “well, this isn’t quite where we need to be” or “wait a second, this is not what we were promised” or “Hey, what’s coming next?” – out expectations keep us tense.  We are not free.  We are not available to receive the next moment.  Our fantasies about the past and our desire to control the future cut us off from the wonders of this moment.  They shut us in a prison of disappointment and suffering.  Dayenu is a great liberator.  It is a jot into the presence of awe, compassion, attentions, and freedom.

I love this commentary.  It addresses the state of being human so succinctly.  When we take stock in our blessings, we are happier and freer, and we can properly live in the moment. 

ENSLAVEMENT

The story of Passover is one of liberation from slavery, but even if we aren’t currently slaves, we humans find various ways to enslave ourselves, failing to live fully in the moment.  I believe I borrowed the following quote from a Haggadah and then substantially expanded it to include many additional ways that we create stress and conflict in our lives.  It speaks to me every time I read it:

We may no longer be slaves to Pharaoh, but are we slaves to other aspects of our lives? 

Are we slaves to our careers?  Slaves to addiction?  To anxiety?  To judging ourselves or others?  To self-indulgence or low self-esteem?  To comparing ourselves to our neighbors, friends and family?  Are we slaves to the past, refusing to let go of the times we’ve been wronged?  Slaves to fear?  Are we slaves to the latest gadget, the biggest, the fastest?  What about jealousy, fashion, sports, TV, computers or consumerism?  To our wardrobes?  Slaves to our lawns?  Home remodeling?  Social media?  Slaves to pride?  To self-pity?  Slaves to constantly striving for perfection?  Slaves to always having to be right or having to get the last word?  Slaves to making excuses for not doing what we know we should do?

Let us all strives to be slaves to nothing except gratitude, love, acceptance, contentment, kindness, justice, beauty, truth and tikkun olam, repairing the world one action at a time.

In the midst of sheltering in place for the past couple of weeks, I’ve observed families, and I like what I see.  I see people taking stock of their blessings, enjoying each other’s company, taking a breath, being kind to each other, slowing down and reaching out for those in need.  What’s happening worldwide is scary and – for many – debilitating, both financially and with terrible hospitalizations and deaths.  But for those of us who are lucky enough to remain healthy and have shelter and food, there is definitely a silver lining to our current situation. 

I feel like the lessons of Passover are more important than ever.  If we can express gratitude, live in the moment, and help those in need, we may find ourselves a happier society when we reach the other side of the pandemic. Hang in there, everbody!