The writer and director Anthony Minghella died last week at the age of fifty-four.  I felt I knew him well, although I knew no biographical information about him until I began reading his obituaries.  He was the type of director who imparted quite personal feelings and predilections to giant-scale movies based on prestigious novels–a rare thing to achieve.  He did this so successfully that one felt one understood his consciousness, his interests, and especially his empathy, simply by watching his work: his films delineate themselves but also delineate a kind of negative-space portrait of the man himself.  His life details and circumstances, once you learn them, surprise one not at all.  Minghella was one of five children of Italian parents, immigrants to the Isle of Wight who ran an ice cream factory.  He was a trained classical pianist, a playwright, a director of opera, and a producer and mentor to other filmmakers (with Sydney Pollack).  All this makes sense.

Minghella, like David Lean before him, was capable of producing what you could call a “poetic” or “epic” cinematic tone.  The words are insufficiently specific: but there is a sense of scale and romance to his sequences, a briskly moving grandeur.  The most obvious example of this is of course The English Patient, where he brilliantly captured the size of the novel. (The fact that it’s hard to pin down how he achieved this adds to the accomplishment.)  Shots of Juliette Binoche riding in a military jeep are the ones I remember from the movie–it had a quick pace in moving you towards its sentimental conclusion.  Cold Mountain, also, has that quality of epic speed, of what is essentially a melodramatic romance scaled up and quickened.  (Lean was interested in unrequited love; Minghella preferred the requited version.)

Minghella seemed to do his best work when adapting other people’s novels.  His debut and original screenplay, Truly, Madly, Deeply, while a heart-warming production, tends to fulfill its own wishes too fully, admitting sorrow into its contents but offering too much consolation.  This also seemed the trouble with his most recent film, also with an original screenplay, Breaking and Entering.  The movie is about love as a way of overcoming the class barriers that separate London’s middle-class architects from its downtrodden refugees.  It is as tendentious as that summary makes it sound.  A sociologist Minghella was not–he was far too big-hearted to want to make critique his primary mode.  (There is also a bit of that English attitude, musn’t grumble, to his general embrace of possibility over complaint.)

Yet, this very ability to enter into the spirit of things is the key to his finest film, The Talented Mr. Ripley–an underappreciated classic if ever there was one.  The novel, by Patricia Highsmith, has an icy, nihilistic pessimism that forms an astringent, bracing complement to Minghella’s natural warmth.  The combination of these two elements means Ripley is both sentimentally alluring and cruelly fatalistic.  The movie is a true modern tragedy, and I could go on for pages on its many bravura cuts, small symmetries, and chilling implications.

The movie is also particularly unified, from its editing to its  sound design to its beautiful motif of fractured glass.  It is, simply, inspired filmmaking, in which the talents of, for instance, a Walter Murch find material of enough depth to motivate his aesthetic choices.  And yet, it’s the story of a social climbing sociopath–strange, at first, to think that Minghella, for whom love is the answer, so fully animated this character.  But it’s Minghella’s (and Matt Damon’s) ability to find the core of suffering, anxiety, and desire inside Ripley–Minghella’s empathetic generosity towards even such an unsympathetic madman–that make the film special and powerful.  Here, Minghella treats the dangers, instead of the rewards, of love: obsession, mimicry, compulsion.

It’s through music that Minghella finds his way into Tom Ripley, who is a prissy kid from a background he’s ashamed of trying to break in to a circle of louche American rich kids in Italy.  Minghella takes Ripley’s love of classical music from Highsmith and makes it into the preference of a precocious geek–while the wealthy youth he admires and impersonates only listen to jazz, Ripley is a classicist who subscribes to the taste preferences of their parents.  He has picked up his odd, isolated fixations without the benefit of constant social feedback from group of friends, and so his later attempts to insinuate himself into Dickie Greenleaf’s circle involve acquiring knowledge of a music he has trouble connecting to–it’s quite a perfect metaphor for the strange insider-outsider dialectic in which Ripley is caught. 

By opposing jazz and classical music, Minghella suggests unhealthy cravings lying underneath the unrippled surface of the “cool” of neo-aristocratic children of the American business elite–a class whose lack of obvious anxiety telegraphs a certainty that the world was made for them.  (In struggling to crack their smooth surface, Ripley cracks himself.)  But Minghella does not withhold his sympathies from the other characters either: Jude Law, particularly, has never been better in a role.  Law, you’ll agree, is best as an object of the camera gaze, rather than a subject for the viewer to project onto–he is a screen beauty rather than a screen protagonist–and this is maybe the only film that properly exploits this quality of his.  (If you meet someone who says the movie got boring after Law’s character exits, you know: they are essentially narcissistic, just as those who think Ripley is Minghella’s one misfire are essentially sentimentalists.)

Even better is Minghella’s portrait, entirely without precedent in Highsmith’s novel, of the anxieties and fears of the women of this same class–while Law’s Dickie and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s unctuous Freddy Miles are all id, Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett play women beset by insecurity.  This comes not from weakness but, for instance in the case of Paltrow’s character, from correctly surmising what is going on, only to be ignored and treated as a hysteric by the patriarchs of the film.  It’s a bleak but accurate portrait of the ways purportedly “rationalist” men of the postwar era discount “hysterical” women’s experience. 

Minghella’s gift was the sensitivity to see and represent such things.  Most often, he put it to use in the service of epic but conventional melodramas of love–but when he mixed his special talent for empathy with as bleak a vision as Highsmith’s, the result was unique and forceful: an illuminating glimpse into a darkness, that is both revealing and cathartic.  Few films have ever looked at American class consciousness as unsparingly but feelingly.  It’s just a hugely important movie.

Minghella was able to marshal all the elements of filmmaking–composition, montage, sound, music–in a way that is becoming rare, now that the era in which movies were are greatest cultural monuments recedes.  Though his films are constructed beautifully, they do not luxuriate in their construction, which is the mark of the mature artist, in whose work craft submits to a larger design.  Like a writer with a particularly pleasing style, Minghella wrote great prose, in film terms.  For that, and for the achievement of Ripley, I followed him avidly and closely.  I’m very sorry he’s gone.

Other Dispatches.

…
Cat Dance Music
Jim Culleny

Dance!

Delphiniums winddance  
with phlox in Pat’s garden.
They sway in quiet concord,
rooted in motion.

Dancing’s a vital sign of endless youth;
even my grandmothers danced:
one danced to accordianed polkas;
corseted cantileverd bosom bouncing.
The other jigged across her chicken yard
with handfuls of eggs –having just left her hens
without yield– acting goofy for a camera.

I once danced with abandon
to big-holed 45s
spun by a DJ named Jocko
who sent four-part doowop through my radio:
the Prisonaires, the Cadillacs, the Moonglows…

When was the last time I danced with abandon?
How did I do that beautiful thing?

It’s best to dance with others, real gurus say.
It’s lonely dancing with a mirror,
leading and following in one motion,
thinking breaking it would be bad luck.

Our cats dance to deep cat vibrations always.
Alert as …cats to music far beyond our ears:
cat dance music.

Zorba knew. Have you seen
Quinn, the Greek, dance?
Felt life spring in rhythms?
Watched it prance on toes to a bouzouki
even in the embrace of despair?

Never. Never forget how to dance.
All innocents dance.
Only the troubled are still.

…

Edward B. Rackley

And your silence is all to no avail; today the blinding sun of torture is at its zenith; it lights up the whole country. Under that merciless glare, there is not a laugh that does not ring false, not a face that is not painted to hide fear or anger, not a single action that does not betray our disgust, and our complicity.

— Sartre, Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched Of The Earth

As the election year approaches, I find myself fantasizing about a very different political consciousness in this country. A state of mind where the majority of voters are appalled, outraged and shamed by our military practices and outcomes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Ashamed and outraged enough to mobilize in direct opposition to a geopolitical strategy that is digging our national grave by the day. To mobilize not just by voting for change next year, but acting now with concrete gestures of rejection and refusal powerful enough to bring the calculus driving this mad debacle to a shuddering, definitive halt.

I once enjoyed grim satisfaction at the prospect of a German war crimes indictment against Donald Rumsfeld, but—heavy sigh—it was not to be. Ozymandias, King of Kings… As public outlets to vent our outrage are dumbed-down and limited to bumper stickers and talk-show call-ins, Americans had insufficient occasion to behold the glory of a possible Rumsfeld indictment by an allied country. But is this due to fewer public for a to express outrage, or is our capacity to do so diminished, in retreat? I fear the latter. Why else do we not recoil in disgust at an administration gone too far?

In my recurring fantasy, Americans awake in toxic shock at an administration so far beyond the pale that each of us, asphyxiated and sputtering with rage, simultaneously grasps our complicity, our guilt by association. If nothing else appalls and shames us into action, passivity as complicity just might. In that Rorschach moment where silence and complicity meet, responsibility for national wrongs becomes ours, just as the parents of bullying, violent children know they too are to blame. Once the floodgates of popular rage are open, our leaders will remember to whom they are accountable.

Could this be more than a fantasy? Can a public narrative of outrage and shame born of complicity alter the course of a felonious state? We have done it before. Anti-slavery campaigns once used the slogan ‘Am I not a man and a brother’ to cast the victim as stranger, kin and racial equal, on the grounds of a shared humanity. Mass opposition to a more recent state-sanctioned abomination—segregation—saw it successfully overturned, but only after much public anguish, accusation and murder. The civil rights movement was ultimately successful for its unflinching solidarity and courage to confront injustice. For sympathetic whites, a sense of collective guilt also played a role.

101 Uses of Metaphysical Guilt

Following the Holocaust, the concept of solidarity emerged as an important theme in German social philosophy. Prior to Hannah Arendt’s 1963 analysis of evil in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Karl Jaspers addressed the relation of silence, inaction and complicity in Die Schuldfrage in 1946 (trans. The Question of German Guilt). Identifying passivity before human tragedy as complicity, Jaspers coined the phrase ‘metaphysical guilt’: as fellow humans, we are obligated to intervene on behalf of others whatever the risk. Not doing so makes me an accomplice; further, it is a betrayal human solidarity.

But is solidarity alone a sufficient course of action to avert human tragedy on the scale of slavery, of the Shoah? True to academic form, Jaspers offer no specific instruction, arguing only that we must in such instances “affirm our solidarity with the human being as such.”

Arendt accepted Jaspers’ concept of metaphysical guilt but dismissed solidarity—“comprehending a multitude”—as her thinking on the origins of totalitarianism began to crystallize. “But this solidarity, though it may be aroused by suffering, is not guided by it,” she wrote. “It comprehends the strong and the rich no less than the weak and the poor.” Solidarity with an incorporeal whole like ‘humanity’ or the ‘international proletariat’ was dehumanizing; a mode of ‘massification’ Arendt likened to the totalitarian vision.

In France, Jean-Paul Sartre applied metaphysical guilt as a social justice strategy. The subjugations of colonial occupation were a perversion of Europe’s humanist tradition parading as la mission civilatrice, or ‘white man’s burden’. Sartre likened European complicity with colonialism to Eichmann’s role in the Holocaust, and he berated his readers with guilt by association. Sartre expanded Jasper’s metaphysical guilt to include the legal sense of responsibility for crimes committed, and the emotional sense of remorse and burden of psychological anguish. Properly leveraged, Sartre believed this would catalyze international action to overthrow colonialism and rectify Europe’s ‘racist humanism’. Combined with guilt, public outrage could be infectious and possibly catalytic.

Part of a wider leftist bloc known as ‘Third Worldism’, Sartre hoped that colonized peoples would emerge as partners in overthrowing colonialism, debunking European humanism and forging a more inclusive, less Euroecentric version in the process. “It is enough that they show us what we have made of them,” he wrote, “for us to realize what we have made of ourselves.”

Overcoming a ‘racist humanism’

In order to sensitize Europeans to the hypocrisies and moral failures of its ‘civilizing mission’ in the colonies, Sartre hurled guilt and shame at his readers. In his Preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, he browbeat his compatriots: “You who are so liberal and so humane, who have such an exaggerated adoration of culture that it verges on affectation, you forget that you own colonies and that in them men are massacred in your name.” Popular ignorance of the sins of colonialism was tantamount to direct collaboration and culpability. The era of misinformation about the realities of colonial rule was over, Sartre proclaimed; he gave no quarter to moral bystanders: “Even to allow your mind to be diverted, however slightly, is as good as being an accomplice in the crime of colonialism.”

In Sartre’s dialectical reading of history, anti-colonial violence in the colonies presented European morality with the perfect adversary if Europe were to transcend the bankrupt humanism of its Enlightenment tradition. Predictably, for Sartre, Europe was “at death’s door.” Still, Sartre persisted, even measuring colonial subjects with a Eurocentric yardstick: “We were men at his expense, he makes himself man at ours: a different man; of higher quality.” But dialectical materialism is a western philosophical fiction; there are no ‘dialectical’ laws of nature, only interpretations.

In Sartre’s Third Worldism, the sense of co-responsibility for the injustices of colonialism digressed into a need to redeem northern sins, to exorcise collective guilt. Such an all-inclusive mea culpa, perhaps bold in its humanist ambitions, eclipsed the self-determination of colonized peoples by presuming that because Europeans were responsible colonialism, they necessarily controlled the means of its undoing … and their own redemption.

The Self-Love of Self-Loathing

The anti-colonial movement in Europe, led by Sartre, used metaphysical guilt to claim a collective interest for colonized peoples: liberation from racial oppression and northern economic exploitation. Still, for all its latent Eurocentrism, Sartre and the Third Worldist movement were a major agitating factor against French colonial policies at home and in Africa.

Sartre never reckoned that a thundering chorus of northern self-indictment would only drown out non-European voices in the causal arena of colonial politics. That a guilt-fueled, victim-centered humanism would not undo the consequences of colonialism, but was merely a warmed-over Eurocentrism du jour, did not occur to him.

The narcissism of Third Worldist solidarity with colonized peoples echoes a contemporary criticism of international charity, another mode of solidarity driven by metaphysical guilt and the appeal to ‘common humanity’: “Non-poor people who give aid to poor people have a marked tendency to see their aid as central to the poor people’s lives” (Alex de Waal, Famine that Kills).

So what does this mean for the prospect of guilt, outrage and change in the context of American foreign policy today? Solidarity and humanity may be comforting and cosmopolitan ideals, but they are anemic and anachronistic today. Although unfashionable among liberals, I find Carl Schmitt’s sardonic rebuttal of ‘humanity’ prescient and refreshing: “‘Humanity’ as such cannot fight a war because it has no enemies, at least none on this planet.” Schmitt means that any theatre of political action is defined by victims and perpetrators; nothing more, nothing less. ‘Terrorist’ is an ideological epithet, ‘defenders of freedom’ equally manipulative.

‘Humanity’ remains a comforting thought, particularly in my business–overseas disaster relief—where the needs of strangers matter to our program descriptions and fundraising drives. But I find the concept useless; it distracts from matters of individual culpability, which must be addressed if a country is to recover from conflict.

Rumsfeld, Rove, Cheney and crew (Bush is exempt—too few neurons firing to qualify as sentient or conscious)… these names alone suffice to provoke paroxysms of rage and, one assumes, action. Yet these men continue to skip, sing and frolic in our midst. Warlords gallivanting in a failed state like Somalia, I can understand. But wearing suits, appearing on television and exercising their expense accounts in our own airspace—it’s criminal. So where’s the outrage?

Justin E. H. Smith

To all those men of science who have occasion to attend a beheading: we have heard that the head remains conscious and agitated for up to thirty seconds after separation from the body. Won’t you kindly make an arrangement with the prisoner (and, as needed, the executioner), so as to measure its inevitable loss of vitality? You might agree with the head’s owner upon a system of signaling by blinks, at intervals of, say, five seconds, until such a time as the head can blink no more. We would not recommend that you get rough with the head and slap it about. This was tried by an earnest physician during the Reign of Terror, who only wanted to sustain the quickness and apperception of a woman’s severed caput for as long as he could by means of a few harsh blows to the cheeks. She was affronted, and gave him a bitter scowl, and would no doubt have lashed him harshly with her tongue, had she still lungs to bellow. Yet what, we would like to know, is so offensive about a few bracing and inquisitive strikes when one has, after all, just had one’s head sliced off?

We have heard talk of “free radicals” in the foodstuffs eaten by the great mass of common people, as in their maize chips, their fried poultry “nuggets,” and their “Bologna.” We would like to know how these radicals gained their freedom in the first place, and what precisely they aim to bring about in the people’s preferred snacks. How strong are the antioxidant forces? With which side does the palate sympathize? With which side the stomach? &c.

One of our Scientific Society’s members suffers from mighty head-aches, and has got stuck in his aching head the idea of travelling to Paris in order to undergo a trepan at the hands of the renowned barber-surgeon, Pierre Grossejambe, who is said to have drilled holes in the skulls of more than 200 patients. It is said that trepans were already performed by the ancient Egyptians and Chaldaeans, and that they are useful not just for relieving the pressure of the blood upon the head, but also for the having of mystical visions, most often just of lowly beetle- and ibis-headed divinities, but also, on occasion, of the true Lord and Creator of this our Universe. We would like to know why, if the benefits of trepanning are so great, this procedure remains forbidden in our land, and can only be performed openly in that country where, so it is said, tout est permis.

We have heard also of a “plague of corpulence” menacing the American people, of “all you can eat” restaurants they call variously “buffets,” “king’s tables,” “smorgas boards,” “smorgies,” and “sties,” where men and women the size of Nile river-horses will eat without pause from break-fast to dinner, and from dinner until supper-time. Is this plague a miasma of some sort, that has descended upon the New World and made its inhabitants sick with appetite? Or is this “plague” in fact only the deadly sin of gluttony?

It is reported that with the aid of convex lenses a sharp-eyed Hollander has discovered countless little animals in the male seed, which do propel themselves about, like so many tadpoles, by means of a long, whip-like tail. We would like to know whether these spermatic worms might play a role in the generation of animals and men, or whether they are not rather the product of putrefaction, like the worms that we see spontaneously generated in rotten meat, and in the interstices betwixt our teeth. We would also like to know how this Hollander obtained his seed sample, whether his wife was not implicated in its procuring, and whether in his view the abomination of Onan is not in some way cancelled out by the great contribution this “waste” of seed has made to the advancement of medical knowledge. 

We would sincerely like to know, in view of the tremendous recent advances in the science of embalming, why anyone would commission a statue to be raised of himself. Today, thanks to the ingenuity of our morticians, each man may become his own statue!

Should men eat eggs, or should they not? Will this matter never be settled?

We ourselves have, by use of tubes, and in front of a full auditorium, made the blood of a dog flow out of its body, and into that of another dog, and back again. This amazing spectacle went on for some time, until one of the dogs began to cry most pitiably, and a rather effeminate man in the audience, a certain “Mr. Frilly” who is no member of our Society and who generally prefers to pass his time writing in a journal at great length about his favorite condiments, himself cried out: for the love of God, have you no mercy, &c. We halted the experiment, but in any case what interests us most is the possibility of performing the same feat with two animals of different kinds, or with a man and an animal. This latter experiment might prove to have tremendous therapeutic benefits, as the blood of a docile and pacific lamb, for example, could be made to flow through the veins of a mad hospital patient unable to have his sanguinity subdued by the usual method of applying leeches. 

We have received news of the “science wars” raging in the universities of lands less advanced than ours. It appears one of the belligerent camps asserts that science is only a “narrative,” and is in no way superior to other folk practices, like musical theatre, or gin-rummy. Are these people mad? Could they perhaps use a drop of lamb’s blood in their veins too? And what could they know of science? Do they belong to Scientific Societies, such as ours? Or do they teach English literature, like The Red Badge of Courage, Oliver Twist, and Old Yeller? Please tell us: what do these people know of science?

—

Berlin, March 25, 2008

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith’s writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.