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Paulo Coelho, 1988 |
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When I was thinking about becoming an English teacher, one item on my agenda was to have students try their hands at a number of different types of writing. Why should every single piece of writing a student produces in her academic career revolve around framing and defending a thesis? Back when I was in high school, sure, maybe the only people writing responses to narrative texts were a handful of professional critics writing articles for money and millions of students writing papers for grades. But we have the Internet now. Countless people are reviewing books and movies and TV shows and videogames and works in a wide assortment of other storytelling media, not because they’ve been assigned to, but because they genuinely do want to communicate their thoughts to the public. And rarely do they do so following the template of the five-paragraph scholastic essay. They might string together a series of insightful observations, or connect the stories to what’s going on in the world, or discuss the personal resonance the work held for the author of the review. So why not have students, yes, learn how to frame and defend a thesis, but also hone their skills at these more authentic types of writing? With this in mind, in 2019 I presented my sophomores with a framework for an observational essay markedly different from anything they’d been assigned before. I didn’t want them all writing about the same text, but I taught in a program that, due to equity considerations, placed strict limits on the amount of homework teachers could assign. I figured I could get away with requiring an investment of a couple of hours once in a semester, so instead of a book, I had each kid select a movie to write about—one from outside the United States, since the name of the class was “World Literature”. Oddly, the same few titles kept coming up over and over again, and not because everyone asked to do Harry Potter movies saying, “They’re British, right?”. Instead, I had a bunch of students who wanted to do Call Me by Your Name, and a bunch who wanted to do a French movie from 2011 called The Intouchables, and a bunch who wanted to do another French movie called I Am Not an Easy Man that didn’t even play in theaters. Why were these so popular, while the movies I might have expected to attract a lot of interest—Amélie, say, or something by Studio Ghibli—got relatively few takers? You probably already solved the mystery before I finished that sentence. It took me years to tumble to the solution, but once I did, it made so much sense that I literally slapped my forehead. That solution: the week I gave out the assignment, if you went to Netflix and pulled up “Foreign Films”, these titles were in the first row of results.
The following year we were in distance learning due to the covids, and state regulations actually required a certain amount of homework per day. My school eventually decided to flout these regulations, but at first, it looked like I had the green light to actually have students read whole books outside of class time. So I reran the movie assignment with books—again, from outside the United States. And once again, a few books were very popular. One was The Alchemist. Probably because it’s really short: under forty thousand words. I read lots of essays about The Alchemist. I had already been wary of the book when I saw that the cover of the first edition in English billed it as “A Fable about Following Your Dream”, and the essays did nothing to dispel the notion that this was the sort of book I would loathe: I found a lot of talk about how the protagonist “learns to listen to his heart” and discovers that “the journey is more important than the destination”, etc., etc. It sounded like the sort of book that you could pick up at Target packaged with a “Live, Laugh, Love” poster. But when I happened across it in a Little Free Library box, I figured I should check it out for myself. After all, it’s really short. And if nothing else, it would give me a more informed perspective on any future essays about The Alchemist I might find myself faced with.
Anyway, it pretty much is what it says on the tin. At first I didn’t loathe it as much as I expected to—it seemed like a reasonably pleasant, fairly conventional story, not a tissue of self-affirmative platitudes. But it soon devolves into something worse than even the latter. I might have been able to put aside all the talk about the importance of omens… or the bit where the protagonist learns how to become the wind by coming to understand the Language of the World (Capital Letters inclus)… or, with difficulty, the theology that shows up in increasingly heaping helpings as the book goes on. But dealing with all those things was a lot. And as for that theology? I don’t have much truck with religion, but one religious tradition that strikes me as wise is that which maintains that self is largely an illusion and that desire is the source of suffering. So it was pretty much anathema to me to discover that the message at the core of this book is “Don’t let anything distract you from chasing your greatest desire, because it turns out that the universe is all about YOU!”
I finished this book during my most recent trip to Portland, during which Ellie and I continued watching Audrey Hepburn films. Here are a couple more, plus a bonus title.
The Children’s Hour
Lillian Hellman, John Michael Hayes, and William Wyler, 1961
See, this is the sort of thing I was getting at in that pop-up note about Green Book in my Bohemian Rhapsody article. The Children’s Hour is about an evil brat who, furious at receiving mild discipline for being an evil brat, spreads a rumor that the two teachers in charge of her boarding school, played by Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine, are gay lovers. Within hours, every girl on the student roster has been pulled out of school by her parents, and the two women become pariahs in the town, unable to even venture out onto the patio of the school building without hostile rubberneckers driving by to gawk at them. And it’s not just the two of them who become pariahs: when the Hepburn character’s fiancé, a doctor, refuses to call off the wedding, he loses his job at the local hospital… but then the engagement eventually falls apart after he admits to wondering whether the rumors might be true. They’re not, but while the MacLaine character at first protests that she can’t understand why the evil brat would accuse her of something so “awful”, after some introspection she realizes that she actually does have romantic feelings toward the other teacher. So she kills herself. And The Children’s Hour couldn’t be made until 1961, because prior to that, the Hays Code wouldn’t allow even this sympathetic a portrayal of homosexuality.
Meanwhile, in Green Book, set just a year later, Don Shirley is caught having gay sex in a swimming pool at a YMCA in Macon, Georgia, and Tony Lip’s response is to shrug that “it’s a complicated world”. So, to the question of whether this attitude is authentic to the early 1960s or beamed in from 2018, the above is offered as a point of comparison.
Charade
Marc Behm, Peter Stone, and Stanley Donen, 1963
While The Children’s Hour was two hours of unrelenting misery, this thriller filled with gruesome murders also doubles as a snappy comedy, with clever dialogue and clever cinematic technique. The romance angle doesn’t really work at all, though. Apparently Cary Grant (in his late 50s) thought that being seen attempting to woo Audrey Hepburn (in her early 30s) would make him look creepy, so the filmmakers assured him that Hepburn’s character would be the romantic aggressor. The result is that she whips back and forth between (a) being genuinely terrified that he is trying to kill her and (b) treating him like Pepé le Pew treats a black cat, for no discernible reason. Then again, a character in The Alchemist declares that “No reason is needed for loving”, so perhaps fans of that book would have no trouble with this element of the film. On the flip side, they might sympathize with the villains, since all they’re trying to do is realize their own Personal Legends by being the one to grab the treasure.
Endless Night
Agatha Christie and Sidney Gilliat, 1972
When Charade hit the theaters, Beatlemania was raging, so when the Red Cross went looking for celebrities to attend a midnight screening of the film for charity, George Harrison was at the top of the list—and he agreed. But he needed a date, and the woman who asked him to attend had one in mind: her daughter, Disney star Hayley Mills. But it was just one date, and afterward the two went their separate ways. In 1972, eight years after their date, George Harrison was in between #1 albums, while Hayley Mills was starring in this adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s last novels, Endless Night.
It is atypical of Christie’s work. There’s not much of a mystery until a few minutes before the end; for most of the running time it’s basically a straight family drama about a working-class slacker who marries a phenomenally rich heiress, until one of the characters finally turns up dead. Even then, the authorities don’t suspect murder. The identity of the murderer is revealed not by a detective but by the film itself, which spontaneously cuts to him celebrating with his accomplice. Yet another character does discover a clue, but even that isn’t what actually cracks the case; rather, the discovery of this clue leads the murderer to have a psychotic break and kill again, this time in a way that can’t be misconstrued. So all in all it’s more of a “portrait of a murderer” sort of thing than a whodunnit, and while I can certainly see why Agatha Christie might have wanted to branch out after half a century of writing whodunnits, if the film is anything to go by, this new direction was perhaps not quite so much an area of strength for her as her old one. As it begins, you can almost hear her muttering “jazz odyssey”.
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