It's a screen version of the musical that played in NYC for a long time.
It's basically about a guy named Jean Valjean who steals a loaf of bread and is harassed for two decades by an inspector named Javert. Javert is played by Russell Crowe. He sings very well and shifts registers in a way that displays a new aspect of his talent (at least to me). Another standout is Anne Hathaway. She plays a factory girl who is forced into prostitution to try to pay for her daughter's livelihood.
After the French Revolution of 1792-4, France fell into a kind of dictatorship with the Directory of revolutionaries running things. It didn't work so well, and in 1810 Napoleon became emperor. Democracy didn't quite work out for the French. This is probably an aspect of the Catholicism in which a single figure gets to decide things. Protestantism is a seedbed of liberties, as Paz pointed out in Mexico, which Catholic countries don't have a model for.
Fascism and dictatorships haunted the Catholic countries. Mussolini in Italy. Franco in Spain. Hitler and Goebbels were Catholics. All over South America it's been dictators of left and right. It's only the Protestant countries that made a rapid and permanent transition to democracies.
In this film we see Jean Valjean caught up in a revolutionary France in the period of 1832. This was in a period called the July Monarchy. You see French troops gunning down revolutionaries who have risen up for largely economic reasons. For without the ability to feed themselves, they are at the mercy of various bosses who use the poor for sex and what amounts to slave labor. The legal system sanctions this.
We've had various attempts to change the economics of countries since at least the Protestant Revolution, which was largely economic in nature. Luther objected to paying into the Pope's fun chest. German princes backed him, again largely for economic reasons.
Communist systems began to spring up in the 1850s and they vied with democratic traditions. These were again largely economic in terms of their rationale.
National socialism was an attempt by Hitler and his minions to wrest economic control from the Jews. They wanted to kill the Jews, and steal their things, and then march through Europe stealing everything they could get, and redistributing it to Aryans.
Economics plays a huge part in all of this. Wealth is a strange thing, and isn't just the amount of money you have, but also your capabilities, your freedoms, your know-how. Each of us struggles to maximize this.
How do we get the maximum economic fairness to work throughout a system? In Les Miserables this plays no small part in the plot. But there is also a religious subtext in which the poor are aided by the church. Jean Valjean is helped by a friendly abbot. He's given a fortune in silver and gold plates. This makes Valjean a wealthy man who can afford to set up a factory. He then in turn employs hundreds. This strange economic idea seems to reach back into the "turn the other cheek" model that Christ discusses. If a man steals your shirt, give him your coat.
The Statue of Liberty was sent to America by French liberals who admired our democratic traditions and wanted such a system in France. We see the French struggling with this problem. Many of us admire French aesthetics and French surrealism, but don't admire the problems with anti-democratic traditions that come out of this. I could not understand Breton's rationale for dictatorship. Far better the Lutheran tradition of each having their own conscience, rather than submitting to a director. The notion of violent rebellion and strange hysterical rhetoric that arises from surrealism also bothers me. I think we should try to understand one another. A conversation is mostly listening. Everyone's life is a romantic opera.
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Korean Star Doona Bae On Sonmi-451 And Her Crossover Journey To 'Cloud Atlas'
You can read my brief review of Lincoln here.
I think that French surrealism has an anarchistic side.
Anarchism isn't simply a desire for "no order" but a resistance against all kinds of external control, or artificially imposed order.
Surrealism saw the breakdown of historic norms as a favorable outcome. They thought they could break through to deeper levels of truth through dreams, absurd representation, and disruptive behavior. Early modernism has strong surrealist and anarchist streams. I'm not sure that French surrealists were entirely "serious" in a political way about their aims. They were basically playing with a purpose. Doctrinaire surrealism can have a stultifying effect on apprehension. I find a lot of surreal art and literature clunky and unimaginative. Or just dull.
Can we impute some kind of political purpose to surrealism, aside from its trite communistic associations? I don't think so. National Socialism was in a sense a reaction to the emerging socialist trends of the the early part of the 20th Century. The rich and the gentry feared the advance of populist movements in Europe, and supported the industrialists and factory owners against the emerging middle-classes. Most of the real support for German National Socialism came from the upper crust, and the lower classes. World War II had the effect of discrediting the Far Right governments of the Axis Powers, but by the early Fifties, Communism was re-installed as the new bugaboo, and the justification for continued autocracies.
Too, the military build-up of the Cold War was backed by the same figures that had supported German, English, and Japanese imperialism. The common thread is the setting up of puppet demons to justify huge investments in armies and war materiel.
I see Bush II's "war on terror" as just a later version of the puppet enemy the war profiteers have always needed to pump up anxiety. But the fact is that you can't "fight" terrorists--they have no country, they have no claim on territory. Consequently, our "war" against them in Iraq and Afghanistan has had very little affect on their ability to re-align and re-set.
Al Queda could re-emerge within a year or so, wherever it decides to locate. Knocking off dictatorships has no effect on it; on the contrary, it merely re-sets the conditions under which it can be reintroduced in the future, by kindling resentment and distrust. I can't think of any reason, off-hand, why a new Osama bin Laden couldn't start up a new network in Northern Pakistan. What would prevent it? The Pakistanis and Afghans certainly wouldn't.
There is a fairly good book by Helena Lewis called Surrealism and Politics published in the 1980s. It treats the various social and political commitments of the surrealist orthodoxy from the beginnings until Breton's death in 1966. They begin with an alignment with Marxism in about 1926 that goes until about 1933. In 1933 they had a rupture with Stalin as Breton began early on to see that individual consent was not going to play a part in Stalinism. Breton met Trotsky in the 1940s in Mexico. They published a text together and Trotsky came out in favor of an art with freedom but he was soon thereafter killed with the icepick on Stalin's orders. Breton was one of the first to denounce Maoism. This was in the 1950s. He took the side of the Vietnamese too. Meanwhile they needed a group to align with and this was the anarchists around a journal called Clarte. There were many arguments throughout the decades which I can't trace here. But the final movement was a reliance on mysticism and the occult. Gurdjieff tarot prophecy even Carlos Castaneda types begann to appear. Anything but orthodox religion. All these squirrelly alternatives!
Against the orthodoxy of Breton was Soupault. He split off in 1926 and wrote novels and journalism for a living. Breton on the other hand sold art for a living. Soupault wrote weekly columns for various journals. He met Hitler in an elevator in Germany in 1933. He wanted to assassinate him. All the surrealists had been soldiers in WWI. Soupault sought a world government but detested Marxism and party politics. Still he fought Vichy and traveled extensively in America. He had an Ammerican woman living w him for twenty years. Soupault worked for Unesco and wrote papers on paper shortages around the world for instance. Politics was not his bag but he knew FDR. He was a close friend of WCW. He knew everyone including Catholic writers liked Bernanos. Soupault thought nationalism was the big problem.
Major artists flirted wwith surrealism. Dali for instance and Duchamp as wellas Picasso and others. Picasso liked the communists. Dali became a monarchist. Duchamp had no clear political orientation. Orthodox religion played little part for any of these writers. And very few were conservatives even later on. They were more or less children all theor lives. Few were decent dads although most had been through dada. I feel ot is time to posit a true Father in Heaven and real dads on earth. The id is not as cool as people think. Schopenhauer invents it and replaces God w it. It's the same thing as Nietzsche's will. I am totally against the valorization of the id. I want principles which I find in the ten commandments.
The surrealists did look back to Hugo and Zola among many others but the style was Robespirre and Danton as opposed to Madison and Locke. They also read Freud and Jung which got thos whple thing with the inconscious roiling. The id is desire in Schopenhauer. He had been reading in the Indian vedic tradition with the notion to silence desire is a good thing for peace. Nietzsche reverses that. It all gets very complicated bit Sade emerges for Breton as a major writer as he IS the id unleashed which these guys saw as revolutionary. It's a mess for women and children mind you. But even Simone Beauvoir accepts Sade as a major writer.
I find the designation of lunatic to be sufficient for Sade.
I want to return to the Protestant and Catholic tradition
For the surrealists they saw the church as working with the government to smash down the working class. Jh and Doris Day would have been with the workers. Franciscans too.
But we need some basic body of thought that is both functional and based on consent but which allows access to the marvelous. Is this not Lutheranism? I can't find anything better.
"whole" thing w the unconscious rolling is what I meant. It's hard to unravel surrealism and then realize what went wrong. Breton and Soupault and others had little formal education. They picked things up and ran with them. They picked up techniques of shock from the previous generation and tried to use these tactics in the service of the working class but they were also elitists and not good family men. They were so French. I am Nordic Lutheran and from small town America. I like Grant Wood more than Picasso. I like Marianne Moore better than Sade. I like Walter Mondale better than Robespierre or Danton. But I like weirdness. I like Bigfoot documentaries and weirwolves and vampyres and postage stamps from Tannu Tuva. I like marsupials and dreamtime and jellyfish and Moebius strips. But I want the government to work sensibly and I want business to be business.
i thought for sure i was contributing to this conversation in a substantial way but i guess not
i can't find anything better i can't believe i even read those words can't find anything better well you're just not looking hard enough pal you've got to put more effort into something call on the lutheran st pelagius and accodate work however you can however it can pan out to grace you just go right ahead
sola verbum
sola fides
sola gelato
i'm insulted duly
you will end up having a conversation with a robot
jh
I lifted comment moderation and will leave it like that for 24 hours.
I hope no one will abuse it and say that Ezra wasn't worth a pound, or that there should be less of Moore, or that St. Francis was a sissy.
Let's see how it goes. I'm going to the symphony.
welcome ladies and gentlemen to the national finals rodeo
Kirb:
Wife and I saw Les Miserables last night, at the local refurbished cinema in El Cerrito. They have tables among the seating, and we ate a pizza with beers during the show.
I hadn't realized that it was adapted from the musical. When I saw Russell Crowe on the marquee I thought for sure it must be an historical adventure film, but no such luck. Crowe singing? Wake me up!
Anyway, aside from the special effects, which were only so-so, I found it dragged a little bit. Somewhat over done in parts, especially the "whore" scene with Anne Hathaway, too much excess greasepaint and busy sludge on the screen.
Plus, the adaptation seemed designed to memorialize the Paris rebellion--the closing fantasy scene with a monumental heroic barricade was really too much.
The slum scenes seemed like the usual clichés which we've been shown in other movies, e.g., about 18th Century London--pickpockets and thieves and pigs splashing through big mud-puddles and painted ladies and rearing horses plunging down on defenseless crones etc. Agh.
I don't see how this movie inspired your diatribe against the contemporary poor, but I suppose it's a natural knee-jerk. The French have a much older and more eclectic cultural history than America did, so I think it's much more difficult to generalize about French corruption and confusion.
Our own history was an unique opportunity in history--a new young nation, homogeneous in several key ways, with the Enlightenment flowering, and educated white men with high ideals, geographically separate from the Old World, with time and the means to make new order.
It couldn't have happened anywhere else.
A great deal has changed since then. A lot of the given contexts have been transformed, and we can see now in what ways the Founders didn't foresee what would come to pass.
Curtis, my ideas about the movie dovetail with yours except I think that Crowe was a credible (not incredible, but credible) singer. The Hathaway scene at the beginning was turgid and too long, as you say.
That particular rebellion is long forgotten (it's called the June Rebellion). Hugo was apparently walking through Paris when he was caught up in it and nearly cut down with the bullets flying.
I have been in a Paris demonstration. This was in November 1986 in which several Algerians were mashed to pulp by the Paris police. The Education Minister said they didn't count since they weren't even good students. This minister's name was Devaquet. I still remember it, as I thought it was beyond crass.
We fail students sure but we can't beat them beyond recognition with nightsticks.
Glad you saw the film.
It holds up a bit better in the memory than during the actual experience. I don't think I beat up on the poor in this comment post. Did I?
I do think the structure of French society (after the Revolution in 1792 they had slipped back toward monarchy with Napoleon I crowning himself emperor -- usually it was a Pope or religious authority to do that, but Napoleon took it upon himself -- in 1810).
Then there were various kings.
The Statue of L was a gift by French Republicans who wanted a democracy, and admired ours. Tocqueville among others celebrated ours.
But they didn't get it until about 1860 or so.
The June Rebellion was in 1932.
It was crushed.
But Hugo was definitely on the side of the Republic.
They just didn't have enough Protestants to get the idea of the individual conscience to run through the hopeless masses.
There ARE Protestants in France, but they were often persecuted, so many of them left and went to Canada. Those who remain are in the industrialized northern areas around Lille and toward Alsace.
The English vocabulary is far stronger than the French for delineating democratic ideals. We had Locke and Smith and Keynes.
They had Robespierre and Hugo and surrealism.
We got lucky, but more than that, we had the Protestant heritage of the Pilgrims and John Adams and James Madison.
Pure luck?
Even some of our great poets such as Herbert had been reading Luther.
It is an important break.
They read Sade and Freud. They got Schadenfreude.
We got Carrie Nations!
Leon Kass discusses the Lincoln film here for about an hour. It's quite good in places.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiOW7QKbNlQ
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