The Weissensee Saga

I just finished the final episode of a four-season serial called, in English, The Weissensee Saga. It led me to break my vow not to stay up till 3 a.m. any longer, but to pace myself and recognize that I could actually postpone the pleasure of knowing what comes next, if I put my mind to it. The four seasons of six hour-long episodes each kept me going till 3 a.m. on at least three separate occasions. 24 hours of television don’t come without some wear and tear.

When I ended up in Berlin, in 1963, working for the U.S. Army Security Agency listening in on phone calls between East German functionaries, I was still in my early 20s and very wet behind the ears. I complained that the work was actually quite boring - listening to people fixing water mains or preparing to pick up people flying in from Moscow - but the truth is I felt I was at the very center of the world. The Berlin Wall had just gone up in 1961 and West Berlin was a virtual island. We loved the titillation of telling each other that the Russians could march in and kill us all at a moment’s notice. Here we were, saving Western Civilization, nose-to-nose with the Commies. There was no way I was not going to take myself too seriously.

The trouble with that narrative is that another narrative was making its way into my psyche at the same time. We sat, hour after hour, with earphones on, playing back the recorded phone calls on spools of tape, mining what we heard for information we thought might be of interest to the folks back home at Headquarters in Ft. Meade, in Maryland. Behind us were regular army sergeants with no understanding of what we were doing who tapped us regularly to clean toilets or rake leaves. Some were decent folk, but there were also the occasional mindless types who took pleasure in exercising their power to bully. And at the same time, the voices we heard speaking into our ears were by and large a congenial lot. They often digressed from their work to talk about birthday parties and their kids and grandkids. Real people. Didn’t fit the image of “dirty commies” at all.

Sometimes the contrast got scary. I realized at one point that I was actually looking at some serious cognitive dissonance, and what I might imagine as motivation to defect to the other side. Not really. These were all just disembodied voices and they were, at least theoretically, unaware of who we were and what we were all about. But there was stuff there to at least raise the possibility in our imaginations. And removing the concept of “dirty Commies” and replacing it with intelligent personable men and women naturally led to more curiosity of just who these people were and what motivated their loyalty to this socialist regime. I had read Marx and Engels and Lenin in a course called Contemporary Civilization in college, along with a study of fascism and other forms of totalitarianism. I was young and innocent, and my knowledge of Hannah Arendt was, at the time, abstract and totally bookish. Here, suddenly, I came to see how much of what I claimed to know and understand was due to the completely arbitrary accident of my birth. Listening to these earnest folk through my earphones, eight hours a day, did more than travel and encounter with ever new people and places to cause me to let go of the years of identity marking. I was a New Englander. A Protestant Christian. A young Republican becoming a young Democrat. An American of German and Scottish heritage. A disgruntled soldier. And it was all arbitrary. Here in this bubble, most of the world was outside and there was just me and the voices I got to recognize and begin to build biographies around.

Additionally, because we read the East German papers carefully every day in order to familiarize ourselves with the world these people were living in, I began to note the sometimes quite wide discrepancies between what got reported in the East and what got reported in the West, along with the slants, in each case. I still tended to believe what got into the Western press was true and what got into the Eastern press was propaganda, but there were times when the absence of certain information in the Western papers gave me pause. Why, I wondered, was nobody talking about these things? Why was I not getting the whole picture?

Ever so gradually, I opened up to the possibility that there might be something to the notion that “the truth,” elusive as that term was becoming, might lie, if not in the middle, at least at some point closer to the middle. I got my first awareness of how much in the West was driven by our strong endorsement of individualism. I would expand this view in later years, after making my home in Japan, with its “other-orientation” - the tendency to check in with others before going off half-cocked on one’s own. The binary of the individual, on the one hand, and the whole culture around heroes, from Superman and Batman and the Lone Ranger to Ayn Rand’s Übermensch entrepreneur, and the collective, on the other, became an endless tug-of-war, with no solution. One had to find a balance. Too much individualism and you got vulture capitalism; too much collectivism and you got a lack of initiative. And that awareness begged the question of morality and recasting the Christian message as a form of proto-communism. And that, in turn, suggested that the Christianity I was exposed to in America was heavily influenced by the cultural value of me-first individualism. The gap between the values espoused in the Sermon on the Mount and the values I saw practiced by American Christians began to strike me a woefully hypocritical. I left the church and never went back.

When the wall came down, I watched the excitement from my living room in Tokyo, tears streaming down my cheeks. All those years people who meant the world to me, my friend Achim and my Tante Frieda in Berlin, especially, lived with what they felt to be life upside down, a divided Germany that kept old friends and family from seeing each other and sharing lives in a normal fashion. The tears were in part because Achim and Tante Frieda had not lived to experience the change, but also because the thrill and the excitement of the people climbing the wall and tearing it to pieces with picks and in some cases by hand, was palatable. My French colleagues worried aloud about the possibility that Europe could once again fall under the spell of a bullying Germany. But I worried that the idealists of East Germany were about to be sucked into the triumphalism of the vulture capitalists. I had no love for the DDR, the (East) German Democratic Republic, because it was obvious it had devolved into a police state where one in eight citizens were in uniform, if memory serves me right. But I did understand the dream of the socialist idealists who wanted to build a world of equality, one in which nobody fell through the cracks. You know, kind of like the perfect world Christ spoke of.

And that brings me to the Weissensee Saga, the story of two families, the Kupfers and the Hausmanns. Hans Kupfer’s father suffered under the Nazi regime and he has been an ardent socialist from early on. He remains an idealist as he climbs through the ranks of the power structure, and is now, by the start of the series, a leading force in the Office of State Security (the Stasi). He’s a realist, and he knows he is surrounded by forces that are self-serving. These include his older son, Falk.  His younger son, Martin, shows little interest in political things and joins the police force. Hans’s wife, Marlene, is, like her husband, an idealist, and like her younger son, apolitical. Her life is dedicated to home and family, and she leaves the work of the state up to the men in her life.

The other family at the center of this story centers on Dunya Hausmann, a popular and successful cabaret singer. She too is an idealist, and soon begins to find fault with the corruption that has crept into the ruling cadre of the SED (Socialist Unity Party), the Socialists running the DDR. Gutsy and outspoken, she writes and performs protest songs that quickly get her into trouble. She has a daughter, Julia, who is very much on the same wave length as her mother.

The two families become connected when Julia gets stopped for a traffic violation by Martin Kupfer, and the two develop an immediate attraction for each other. Unbeknownst to them both, Martin’s father, Hans, and Julia’s mother, Dunya, were once romantically involved, and Hans’s feelings for Dunya have not disappeared, entirely. As time goes on, he uses his influence to keep Dunya - and later his son, Martin - out of trouble. This puts Hans at odds with the party hardliners, and eventually Falk is given more of the responsibilities once met by his father. As Falk rises in importance to the regime, he reveals himself to be totally ruthless, unafraid to use any means necessary to gain power and control over those he considers “enemies of the State,” i.e., anybody who opposes him. The full range of  one set of character types, hero and villain, idealist and sell-out, are portrayed by the Kupfer family and the physical and psychological destruction of those opposed to the regime can be seen in the Hausmann victims.  What emerges from these character portrayals is a nuanced and ultimately sympathetic picture of the cogs in the East German machine, no doubt aided by the fact that many of the actors were themselves East Germans and had direct personal experience with the characters and events they were portraying.

The series began filming in 2010 portraying events from 1980. The second series jumps to 1987. Julia has been imprisoned and given to understand that the baby she had in prison died at birth. Martin has broken off from his family and struggles in vain to find his way to Julia, who, he has been told, has been released to live in West Germany. Dunya has been blackmailed to work for the Stasi in order to keep her daughter safe while in prison. She participates in the lie that Julia is in West Germany. The third season takes us up to the fall of the wall in January 1989, the fourth to the introduction of the D-Mark, the first real step in the reunification of the two Germanys.

I don’t want to give away any more spoilers for those who might enjoy the soap opera-like events of endless ups and downs. The tension becomes extreme between those, particularly Falk, who are the prime movers of what came to be known as perhaps the world’s most effective police state, and those whose hopes for a socialist paradise are gradually whittled away, leaving them with little hope for the future. I found myself wanting to fling things at the TV screen when watching what Falk was able to get away with, how much he destroyed even his own family, and how complete was the failure of the socialist dream.

I understand the series met with great success in Germany (https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/20-years-on-germans-flock-to-cold-war-dallas-show-2095747.html ), drawing in five million viewers a night (16% of the total) and was viewed pretty much as an accurate picture of the reality of the Cold War division of the country into two opposing states. You can view it as history told with flesh-and-blood characters or simply as a gripping tension-filled soap opera. As with most series, you get tired of watching characters who do not evolve as people fast enough to make a happy story with a happy ending. And if you are primed, as I was, to see the fall of the wall as a mixed blessing, the elimination of the horrors of a police state but at the cost of a surrender to greed and self-centered behavior, you may find some of the events portrayed as unsettling. How accurate this image is of modern-day Germany, I leave for you to decide. There’s something about watching people struggle up close for ten years or more that makes it hard to let go. Which says a great deal, I think, about the quality of the acting. There are plot twists that made me want to strangle the writers. And some seriously off-putting character flaws.

Nonetheless, the acting is superb. And if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself wondering what those people are up to today and need to be reminded that they are fictional characters.

It helps, of course, that you can look up Katrin Sass, who plays Dunya Hausmann on YouTube and find the songs (and others) she sang along the way that got her into trouble.

Here are a couple:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6_DqpEx8Jk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXnl6vDLTLQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wzULH_8BZ8

You may remember Katrin Sass from the film Goodbye, Lenin, made in 2003. She played the mother who fell into a coma. When she awoke, the doctors told her son she couldn't stand any great shocks, so he worked day and night to keep the illusion alive that the DDR still existed. She died without ever learning that her socialist paradise had come to an end. Florian Lukas, is also in both films. He plays Martin Kupfer in Weissensee and the TV announcer in Goodbye, Lenin, who helps her son keep the deception going. 

Two different approaches to telling the story of Die Wende, ("The Turn" - the term Germans use to refer to the process of reunification and reconciliation); it's no small challenge to accomplish this without running the risk of making Westerners ("Wessies") into victors and Easterners ("Ossies") into losers. These two films, each in their own way, work to keep that from happening.

Missing Ed Devlin

Moth goes into a podiatrist's office. Doctor asks what the matter is. Moth says, "Doc, my life sucks. I'm having trouble at home, my kids don't even recognize me, my job is crap and I'm getting old." Podiatrist asks, "Can you trace this difficulty to anything in your past?" Moth says, "Yeah. I was abandoned as an egg, I had a very difficult larval stage, and now that I'm an adult, I can't seem to sort anything out." Podiatrist says, "Well, it seems to me that you need to see a psychiatrist, not a podiatrist. Why in the world did you come in here?" Moth replies, "The light was on."

My friend Ed Devlin died this week and I’m looking for ways to channel my memories as I try to get used to the idea that he’s gone. He was a great friend, one of the big five or six irreplaceable soulmates I have been blessed with on my trips around the sun.

Jehovah's Witness
training facility

The moth joke is not a non sequitur. I remember Ed first and foremost as a jokester, and it seemed like a good place to begin would be to share a sample of his wit, selected at random from among the many hundreds of illustrations of his sense of humor sent my way over the years.

I first met Ed at San Francisco State in the late 60s, when we were both in the M.A. TESL program (Teaching English as a Second Language). He also headed up the Liberian Language Project and I worked under him with a team of linguists and with two native speakers of Kru to analyze the grammar and set up an introductory course in the language for Peace Corps Volunteers. My first impression of him was of a sharp wit and a keen intelligence. What otherwise could well have turned into a heavy slog of pulling out syntax and vocabulary in a messy trial-and-error fashion became an exciting adventure, thanks in no small part to his affability. I felt cheated when the project came to an end.

With my M.A. in hand, I went off to Japan in March of 1970, to start my career as an ESL teacher. To my absolute delight, when I returned to the U.S. from Japan in the summer of 1974 and started teaching in the summer orientation program for foreign students at Stanford, I discovered Ed was working there as well. This time, we quickly became close friends.  

Because by this time I had built up a strong sense of connection with Japan, I was having trouble letting go and was trying to carve out a way to spend half my time in Tokyo and the other half in San Francisco. The great majority of Japanese students getting advanced degrees at Stanford were employed by either a government ministry or a large corporation like Toyota or Canon and Ed and I came up with the idea of getting their company sponsors to underwrite a three-month prep program in Tokyo before they left for the U.S., which the two of us would run. The naivety of the whole thing makes me blush today, but at the time it seemed like an idea worth trying.

Ed ran the ESL program at Monterey Peninsula College year round. I had not been able to find anything other than part-time jobs in the Bay Area since my return, so Ed suggested I come to Monterey. We’d get an apartment, I’d play housewife and he’d pay the rent, and we’d work up a proposal to take to the corporate sponsors in Tokyo. I jumped at the idea.

We made our way together to Tokyo and got an apartment in Nakano, near Shinjuku. With some introductions by former students I managed to set up appointments with the personnel directors of several of the companies who had sent students to Stanford as part of their career enhancement programs. Japanese salary men tended to stay with their companies for life in those days, so such investments in employees were routine. We were warmly received and hopeful we might get the project off the ground initially, but it wasn’t long before it became evident that no one would take the first step. The personnel managers all said they would go along if somebody else would sign on first. We came home empty-handed.

We managed nonetheless to have a great time in Tokyo, and Ed and I got to know each other much better with each passing day. “All this time,” he said to me once, “I always thought you had a superb sense of direction. But I'm on to you. You just move around so fast, and in all directions, and eventually it's inevitable that you hit upon your destination.” I loved the fact that somebody knew me well enough to be able to make that observation.

When we returned to California, Ed got me a job teaching part time at Monterey Peninsula College and I patched together a living with a couple of other bits and pieces, and we settled in for the duration while I tried to figure out where to go and what to do next, a story complicated by the fact that I had left behind in Japan a relationship that should have concluded, but didn’t. I had established a can’t live with him/ can’t live without him affair with Yochan, and with Ed’s connections at MPC, we were able to bring him over, as well. Yochan had virtually no English, but he was a superb communicator nonetheless, and Ed and Yochan hit it off beautifully. Yochan referred to me as “Mr. Hysteria” on occasion and asked Ed how it was that he could remain so calm when I would get so visibly hot under the collar. Ed picked up his shirt, showed Yochan a scar on his belly from a gall bladder operation. “Don’t blame Alan,” he said. “By getting things out, he will never have to worry about ulcers or stomach problems. Yochan took a minute to grasp Ed’s meaning, but soon joined me in understanding a side of Ed I hadn’t seen before, and perhaps a reason for his ability - or need - to keep the jokes coming.

By the third or fourth year of working part-time ESL jobs, with no job security, and very little income, my job at the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies led to a job offer with the United Nations in Saudi Arabia at four times my annual income. I left Ed and Yochan behind, choosing adventure over their company - and drawn by the thought of quadrupling my annual salary. Ed and I kept up an active correspondence while I was gone. I supplied him with stories of goats eating my carburetor cables and he kept me supplied with jokes and cartoons. An endless supply of puns, images of cake disasters, word play, limericks and other ways of playing with the English language. My only wish is that I had kept them all.

one of the simpler cake wrecks
Ed took delight in sending
my way

When the UN job in Saudi Arabia came to a close after a year (it was now 1977),  I returned to the house in Carmel I had shared with Ed, planning to take up the life I had left behind. But Yochan had gone back to Japan and a job opened up at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and that meant my second Monterey Peninsula sojourn (my first was my year at the Army Language School in 1962-3) came to a close. But not my working connection with Ed, it turned out. They were looking for a new director. I put Ed’s name in and he got the job and we were off and running as colleagues once more.

Life in Santa Cruz was a step up for me. I had wonderful colleagues and there was a large community of LGBT folks and my social life improved notably. Among those colleagues was a woman named Debbie Wright. I introduced her to Ed, they hit it off, and the next thing we were holding a wedding on the campus.

It was too good to last. Ed returned to Monterey, UC hired a total disaster of a replacement who ran the program into the ground, and the four of us senior teachers all scattered, Debbie to get a PhD at Santa Cruz, and me to a PhD program at Stanford.

Ed and I had a friendship that would endure, even when he and Debbie called their marriage off after something like sixteen years together. She got the house, but he chose not to fight her over it. He simply moved on, continued to work on building up the role junior colleges would play in the California higher education scheme, and expanded his work as a foreign student advisor by developing expertise in assessing foreign transcripts, a skill which led him to travel and publish on education in Eastern Europe - and, more importantly on the personal front, to meet Ann Koenig, who was working at the University of California, Berkeley, in admissions. Ann would share his work and his life through to the end. And would bring him ultimately to live with her in Berkeley, just minutes from my house. I couldn’t have asked for more, except that I had returned to live once more in Japan now and only saw them during the three months each year I spent in Berkeley.

Unfortunately, that experience, too, had a relatively short shelf-life. Ed and Ann had taken on jobs with a professional agency that worked on foreign student evaluation for American universities, and the company moved to Phoenix, taking them with them. It broke my heart, but we were now accustomed to a long-distance friendship and we stayed in close touch. Ann, fortunately, played the recorder at a professional level, and that brought her to Berkeley a couple times to perform, so she and Ed and I still had a way to get together, if only for very short spells at a time.

As the years went by Ed’s cognitive faculties began to fail and it became clear we were going to have to squeeze what we could out of the half century of friendship while we were still able.

Ann is now grieving Ed’s loss, as is a very large circle of friends to whom Ed brought so much laughter over the years.

You don't know when you meet somebody, no matter how well you hit it off, that you've begun a friendship that's going to endure for decades. You don't know if it will go smoothly, or if it will be filled with ups and downs.

I'm an opinionated person, and I tend to choose friends with strong wills and the inclination to articulate their views forcefully, so I am used to relationships that have their ups and downs. But Ed and I shared the better part of more than half a century together, with a remarkable lack of discord, considering how much of that time we spent in close proximity.I credit that to Ed's ways, his inclination to approach life as an absurdity, never to be taken too seriously. He could get annoyed at people, but he had a way of brushing things off before they got out of hand. It was a remarkable skill, and I learned much from watching him make his way in the world.

Some of the time he could be downright silly, and make me want to be silly, as well. In going through the many years of e-mail correspondence I have archived, I found this exchange from 2008.

Alan to Ed: Sanctuary mush for ze tipp.
Ed to Alan: Es elves, djuvalkom.

And this one, from about that same time: We had been discussing Andrew Sullivan. I sent him an article of Sullivan's and explained the mixed feelings I had about him:

I have a strange relationship with Andrew Sullivan.  (I say relationship, because I feel I know him.  He doesn't know me from a tree.)  For some time I decided he was THE gay Uncle Tom.  Then I got into his books seriously and was moved almost beyond endurance by some of the things he said.  He is a very powerful man with words.

Ed responded, revealing a side of him I was already quite familiar with, a complex jumble of confidence and humility:

Good article to read. I just wish I didn't have such an overwhelming feeling that anyone practicing a God-based religion is a deluded idiot, however nice and upright and charitable she or he may be. If you recall the film "Lawrence of Arabia" (nearly 50 years old now!), Lawrence puts a candle out with his thumb and finger; he is asked, "Doesn't that hurt?" and replies, "Yes, but the secret is not to mind that it hurts." 

So I co-exist less or more happily. I try to help in small ways. I don't get into arguments with simple people trained not to understand much. But there is still a hatred for the hurtful way things happen, even to those who hurt others without thinking. Time is on the side of the bad guys, as Martin Luther King wrote from the Birmingham jail, but he was a titan and I am not. Neverthess, by God or whatever, I admire the titans without reservation and will help them a little if I can. 

That was Ed in a nutshell. Never getting too big for his boots.

And helping whenever he could.

Nobody will ever replace him.

Some thoughts on American Independence Day 2020

Flag of the 2nd Connecticut Regiment in the
Revolutionary War

Happy 4th of July.

To read American history is to be amazed this country ever got started at all. We like to sing the praises of the "Give me liberty or give me death" heroes, but there's a whole lot of evidence that we had a bit of luck. Heroes on our side, for sure. And a noble uphill climb. But no shortage of bungling on the part of the British, either.

Britain's thirteen colonies in America went to war to gain independence from Britain on April 19, 1775, when the British marched into Lexington and Concord and fired "the shot that was heard around the world."  The war came officially to a close with the Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, just short of eight and a half years later. The First Continental Congress had organized to kvetch about the way British treated their subjects on the American Continent. They wanted equal rights as Englishmen. By the time of the Second Continental Congress, people were beginning to sense the Brits were not interested in what the complainers in the colonies were going on about, and already thinking of independence. Two months after the war started, in June of 1775,  the Congress asked George Washington to organize a continental army. It was clear this was going to be a long haul.

The American Continental Army was divided, for administrative purposes, into the Main Army and six regional departments: Eastern, Northern, Southern, Western, Highlands and Canadian.

Let me tell you about the Second Connecticut Regiment of the Continental Army.

The Second Connecticut Regiment was organized in the first four months of 1777 at Danbury and was made up of eight companies from Fairfield, Windham and Hartford counties (but not my own - Litchfield County).

It was assigned on April 3 of that year to the First Connecticut Brigade of the Highlands Department.

It was then reassigned to McDougall's Brigade two months later, on June 12.

It was then reassigned to the Second Connecticut Brigade three days later, on June 15.

It was then reassigned back to the First Connecticut Brigade one month later, on July 10.

It was then reassigned back to the Second Connecticut Brigade four months later on November 13.

In the following two years, it was first reorganized into nine companies, in July of 1779, then reassigned to the Continental Army on November 16 of that year and reassigned to the Highlands Department the following year, on November 27, 1780.

And that, meine Damen und Herren, is what's known as not having your shit together.

By 1781 Congress had gone bankrupt and could no longer pay the salaries of its soldiers. That didn't affect Commander Washington; he was working for free anyway, but it was a serious problem for the soldiers, most of whom were fighting for the money. A quarter of the army consisted of new Irish immigrants, and they carried with them resentments of British abuses in their home country, and welcomed the opportunity to go off and kill them some redcoats. Also in the army were some 6600 people of color who joined because they were promised, if they did, they would be released from slavery. That included as many as 20% of the Rhode Island Regiment - not because Rhode Island was a more enlightened place necessarily, but because it had the greatest number of slave traders at the time and thus more slaves to take advantage of.  For more on blacks in the Continental Army and the role Washington and other leaders played in the decision to enlist them, see here.  And here.

The third main group of this all-volunteer army consisted of German immigrants. Armies all over the world are made up of cannon-fodder types, and America was no different. If you've got poor people, you can always raise a volunteer army. Republicans of today should take note of the fact that the country came into being because an army consisting in large part of immigrants and people of color won its independence. And, to be fair, we should all take note of the fact that a good number of African slaves fought for the British as well. Seems they may have been less interested in building an independent America than in not being slaves anymore, for some reason. (That's sarcasm, in case you missed it.)

Because Congress was uncomfortable with the idea of a regular professional army, they had only short contracts and that meant there was a huge turnover, and Washington had his work cut out for him keeping it all together. He managed by some miracle to win several victories even after Congress had voted to cut funding for the army. (Sound familiar? OK, but this time they really had no choice.) Fortunately, the French were donating to the cause and shipped shoes and clothing over to take up some of the slack.

Actually, there were two military forces. In addition to the army, each colony provided a militia, also made up of volunteers. Not as reliable - there were lots of desertions - they complemented the army. And what would be the Second Amendment to the Constitution was intended to assure that these boys would have guns at the ready once the war was done and there would be no need for an American army anymore.

The Second Connecticut Regiment didn't make it all the way to the end of the war in September of 83. It was merged with the 9th Regiment on January 1 of 1781, and furloughed in June of 83, three months before war's end, and permanently disbanded two months after.

So why this focus on the Second Connecticut Regiment?

Because they have this snappy little march to be remembered by.

Or so I thought when I first started this little excursion. In time I discovered that the march was composed by David Wallace Reeves at some point in the middle of the 19th Century and the Second Connecticut Regiment in this case was a regiment of the Connecticut National Guard, if I am not mistaken.

No matter. It was a lot of fun catching up on my New England history. Got a lot of it back in the 1940s growing up in Connecticut. Nice to time travel back there, at least for a day.

And did you notice the "we" in the opening paragraph? I clearly identify with the American revolutionaries even though my ancestors at the time were either on the British side, or too busy harvesting potatoes in Lower Saxony in Germany to care all that much about what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. Isn't it curious how identity happens?

One last observation. While I go back to my New England roots and consider how ready I am to call this "my" history, consider what this day means to the descendants of the African Americans I  referred to in passing. If you haven't heard this already, here's another perspective, one presented by the great-great-great (and maybe another great) grandchildren of Frederick Douglas.

photo credits

flag

Gaspar Noé's Love 3D

Since the United States seems to be the world center of pornography, according to The Road to Grace, a website keeping track of porn statistics, and porn sites receive more regular traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined, I should perhaps not be surprised to discover that Netflix is now apparently offering porn among its regular movie listings. 

I sat down last night, scanned for new movies on Amazon Prime and Netflix and clicked on Love. Nice catchy title for a movie, don’t you think? Available on Netflix.

The film opens with a naked man and a naked woman lying on a bed masturbating each other. For real. Not a simulation. And we were off and running.

We soon learn that the man, Murphy, and the woman, Elektra, met in Paris, and are in a seriously dysfunctional relationship. He seeks sex where he can find it; she goads him on to explore ever new sexual adventures and then faults him when he follows her lead. He has the brain of a sexually immature teenager; she is probably best understood, simply, as a self-destructive neurotic. At some point they bring a 17-year-old neighbor, Omi, into their bed. In time, Murphy gets Omi pregnant, Elektra disappears, and the film consists of endless flashbacks of Murphy blaming Omi for his current miserable state and pining away for Elektra. At this point we learn that the entire story takes place on a single recent New Year's Day, and entirely in Murphy's mind. We also become aware that this is not a porn flick, if you define porn as having no purpose but to titilate, but a tale of two people you’d really have to work hard to like, a film made by someone who wants to make a movie about the emotional side of an essentially sexual relationship, and kind of succeeds. You kind of wish he'd chosen one that succeeds, not one that fails, to focus on.

What makes the film interesting is not only the discovery of the fact, in case you didn’t know this already, that endless images of people engaged in sex does not necessarily make what you’re watching porn, but also seeing how a filmmaker can play with your emotions. In this case, I’m talking about Argentine filmmaker Gaspar Noé and the emotions are annoyance which turns ultimately to pity. “Why do people make movies about such unsympathetic characters?” becomes “there but for the grace of God go I” as you watch the clueless shoot themselves in the foot.

Although new to Netflix, the film came out five years ago and was featured (in the “outsider” category) at Cannes, and has had time to get some pretty good reviews. One I recommend is by Simon Abrams on the Roger Ebert site if you’re still on the fence about wanting to see it. 

I reached a much simpler conclusion. It’s not as bad as you want to think it is. But don't watch it for the story; I can't see what satisfaction there is in watching clueless people behave badly. Watch it for the sex, if you like; it's quite erotic in parts. But be prepared to be struck with the awareness of how sex can just as often make you sad as it can make you happy.

photo credit