This reminds me of Roger Ebert's reexamination of the movie The Graduate recently. He occasionally looks back at movies he long ago reviewed and does another full review. Interesting, but I don't think he hits the nail on the head. I've heard of callow youth, but maybe this is callowed oldth?

Ebert's original review of The Graduate

Ebert's revisit of The Graduate

Some before and some after. After the czar dragged out his death sentence and then let him off just before his death, a shaken Doestoevsky wrote The Possessed. Perhaps a kind of thank-you note?

Since we're on Dostoevsky, I finished "Crime and Punishment" and "Notes from Underground" recently. Both were excellent, though I slightly preferred "Crime and Punishment." The story was extremely engaging. "Notes from Underground," on the other hand, had a good story, though it took him a while to get there, but it's strength seemed to be the philosophizing of the "Underground man" (the copy I took out from the library has about ~140 pages of assorted essays and analysis that I'm still working my way through.) And fwiw, I think most of his reputation as a philosopher is due to his novels, the best, or most famous at least, of which were composed after his stay in Siberia, I believe.

Also, I finished "World War Z" a little while ago. Not bad.

I agree with much of what Ebert says in his reevaluation; however, I think he gets the part about Mrs. Robinson wrong. She does seduce Benjamin out of lust. As much as anything, the movie is about middle-aged female desire, and I'm surprised (a bit) that Ebert doesn't get it.

Also, if there was a true rebel in Easy Rider, it was Jack Nicholson's character. I found the movie idiotic when I first saw it, and I'm afraid I couldn't stomach it today. I think today's audiences might react in much the same way to Easy Rider as we did to Reefer Madness.

Yep. Ebert missed it. Definitely it's about middle aged lust. Also true that Mrs. Robinson was the only true character in the movie. Benjamin was a bumbler who didn't know which end was up and Katherine Ross's character was all about individuation of the self from her mother. She's also pretty confused marrying some guy she has no real feelings for and just knuckling under to her parents who she's supposed to be rebelling against. She truly had no back bone. I like what Ebert said about them looking at each other without a word to say because they'd never had a real conversation. Sort of like people you know who get involved all based on an illusion in their head. When the bubble bursts later you find out if they really had anything at all to say to each other.

Those feelings and that confusion are a natural part of youth, though. This discussion makes me feel a little bit like I do when people say they're pissed off at the little boy in Grave of the Fireflies because he wasn't as wise as he could have been. Well no kidding - he was a child! Kids are *supposed* to be less than maximally efficient at such things. This doesn't make them bad people, only kids. And it most certainly doesn't make the movie a bad or in any way misguided one. Movies are sometimes about people's troubles and lack of understanding rather than triumphs and clarity. Life contains plenty of both.

I think Ebert forgets, or winds up with resentment toward, the "plastics" meme in the movie. The Graduate was a story about worlds colliding and people trying to make their way in them, and it concentrated on the young ones. It was a coming of age story, and those are always most explicitly about what has been said to be the real theme of all novels, "lost illusions." There's an inherent wastefulness and tragedy and missed opportunity in these stories, because they are about limited people -- young people -- coming into more complex tools without either the practical tools to cope in the adult world or the corruption and cynicism that make it easier for the rest of us to get by. And certainly without the mature understanding that some lucky adults have had time to wrestle from their own ordeals of coming out into the world and struggling to find some sort of even moral, financial, emotional, and sexual footing in it -- or just any place that holds still long enough to hang their hats and say they're done with it.

So is Benjamin a callow youth, or just ... a youth? They say you have to have no heart to be a republican when you're young and no brains to be a democrat when old. Ebert wrote one review from the catbird seat as an eminence grise, and the other while he still identified with the disturbing and frightening transitions the young protagonists of The Graduate faced. When resenting the confusion of youth and downplaying or denying its very real difficulties, one may well be resenting one's own frustration at remembered mistakes and wrong turns; perhaps Ebert is lashing out as much as or more at his own painfully remembered confusions, fears, and inadequacies as those of the movie's young characters.

I'd venture that the couple staring blankly into the future at the end is more representative of the average person facing adulthood -- or a serious relationship -- than most of us might feel comfortable thinking.

In adulthood, you build an edifice of rules and emotional security that seems quite precarious if looked at in just the right light. We are not easily able to tolerate that, so we tend not to look. Kids can often catch magicians red-handed in ways that adults cannot. Youth is always a threat to what comes after, and often greatly resented. That alone is part of the mystery of youth -- the anger of adult society toward it. I think we see an angry Ebert here.

Wow great post Blargster. Loved the reverse psychoanalysis and so true that while the older crowd is able to see everything with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight they don't have to see it as ruthlessly as they do. Its just they're dealing with their own issues and its easy to see the kids as callow and shallow.

blarg's always so insightful. i want to watch the graduate now

Blarg,

Gotta love the "eminence grise."

I once saw a Harold Lloyd movie in which he crashes into the church at the end of the movie in much the same fashion as Benjamin in The Graduate (I think). I've never been able to find any reference to this as a source, so perhaps my memory is addled.

Necessarily, though, we do see things much more differently as we grow older, as the preoccupations of youth fade. Fortunately, if our memories are good enough, we can perhaps remember that we weren't always wrong and, sometimes, those earlier judgments still hold true. I'm not sure I agree with you about Ebert. For me, anyway, it takes courage to look closely at those earlier beliefs, especially when, for someone like Ebert, those judgments have committed to paper.

As far as Fireflies goes, well, the boy never had a chance to attain the maturity he would have needed to make slightly better decisions. He did what he thought best and showed admirable maturity for one so young. At least, for a short time, his sister and he found an idyllic world by themselves in a small cave away from adults who showed an even greater lack of maturity and wisdom.

I think I picked the wrong phrase there. It gets in the neighborhood but isn't precisely what I wanted. Anyway I think people will probably understand what I mean.

On Ebert, he went back and examined the movie more than his old beliefs, I think. He should have asked himself more seriously why he felt that way, back in the day, and why the way he feels now is so different. It is natural to think that wherever we are at is the truest we have ever been. It protects the ego and makes some of the most painful kind of thought and self-reevaluation unnecessary. This is actually a huge ego trap, though, and I think he fell into it.

In rejecting his old understanding, he is affirming his present one. I think you can affirm the new without rejecting the old. It's not all black and white. Ebert casts his old thoughts -- and youth itself -- as though they were the black-hatted villains of this story. At the time the movie came out, the generation before him was doing precisely the same to its progeny. He doesn't seem to have taken a lesson from that, which is the loss of a great opportunity. Instead, he continues the cycle, no wiser now that he is on the other side of the equation than he was when he was starting to make his own way in the world. In this way, people can move from the ignorance and solipsism of one stage of life to the ignorance and solipsism of another without interruption and never have anything to pass on to the next generation.

Yup. The place he was running away from, his aunt's house, was also exploiting the food supply he brought them, feeding him watery gruel even though he brought the rice, while others ate the good stuff. He had reason to fear for his future survival with his manipulative, selfish and it seems to me abusive aunt. What he ran from wasn't as beneficent as it might seem to be in hindsight considering his fate. For all we know he might have starved there too. It's certainly telling that his aunt didn't go looking for him.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicles is on my night stand already. I will be looking into your other recommendations as well, although I am quite skeptical of Rushdie. When I was younger I started Satanic Verses to see what the controversy was about and couldn't get through it. This was when he had the bounty on his head over that book.

Most recently read "Defending Israel" (Martin Van Creveld) and "Navigating Perilous Waters" (Efraim Sneh), both strategic analyses of Israel's place in the Middle East and how its security interests can be best protected. Very interesting, if you're into Middle Eastern Studies/International Relations.

Next is "Culture and Carnage" (an historical study of why the West wins wats) and "Transforming War", Van Creveld's 1991 argument that the changing nature of military conflict is rendering Clausewitzian logic (the basis of Western strategic thought ad infinitum) almost irrelevant.

Anyone else interested in nonfiction on war and modern strategic thought?

I'm about a third of the way through World War Z. I can't decide if I really like it or think it's just kind of meh. It's hard to get behind because I'm generally a big fan of characters in good stories. We get some insight into characters but nothing enough to really build on. It's an interesting way of relating the story of the war though. Shrug, we'll see how much I get through tonight.

I like WWZ, but have decided to stop reading it, and get the audio book instead. Why? Because I like it a lot, but reckon it will be really fantastic as an audio book (from what I've read about the audio book).


I'll probably read it once I've listened to the audio book though, as it's an abridged version.

unhooked
How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both
by Laura Sessions Stepp

DB, I plan to listen to the audiobook after reading it. I'm not sure if I'll actually do that, but that's the tentative plan. I want the full story before the abridged story. But I think that I'll enjoy it. I loved listening to the radio version of "The Mist" after first reading it.

I sometimes am, though it doesn't have to be modern, and for some reasons older periods often intrigue me more. I recently read a volume collecting together the full volumes of Sun Tzu's Art of War, Napoleon's notes on war, Frederick the Great's instructions to his generals, Vegetius's On the Military Institutions of the Romans, and -- LOL, er what was it? I need my morning coffee? -- some other one, a French general of the 17th century who was really quite good. I've also read just a little here and there about ancient warfare. I subscribe to Military Heritage magazine and, er, there I go again ... what the heck is the name of the other one? ... I think it's just called Military History.

I've found a lot of really good articles in The New Yorker magazine. Many of them made the course of the war in Iraq very obvious long before the mainstream press was willing to talk seriously about the problems with that engagement.

But I can't say I really "study" it because I only read such things casually and not according to any particular plan to learn something specific.

I'd be interested in a trip report.

No, Blarg, you'd be interested in a trip.

That's right, I need names and address, phone numbers, damnit!

Book: Thomas Jefferson by R.B. Bernstein

Its a 200 page short biography of Thomas Jefferson. I'm finally not working 60 hour weeks, and can devote time to reading, instead of sleeping. So far its very good, it shows how his life looks very hypocritical, but after examining him, he is just highly educated, and wrote every thought down. He would write his thoughts in a letter or a diary, and later would find out more information on a subject and then correct himself and so forth. A very very intriguing man, with so many interesting views of life, religion, equality, government, and statesmanship. I'm only a bit of the way into the book, but it looks like it was written fairly well.

Thomas Jefferson by R.B. Bernstein

I loved the Satantic Verses and thought it was very entertaining and not at all difficult to get through. You may want to give it another shot.

I read a couple of his other books afterwards and didn't like them nearly as much.

I didn't bother reading the Ebert analysis. But I think that ending scene is perhaps the best of the movie.

At some point, I read somewhere a discussion of the last scene. My very vague recollection is that Mike Nichols (the director) just kept the camera going, without any direction to the actors. The effect is that you can see almost see the actors thinking, "what comes next," which nicely fits into what the characters could be wondering as well.

I'm currently reading a biography of Oppenheimer, and I'm becoming real interested in the America of the 1950s with illegal wire taps aplenty, show trials, McCarthyism and all that. I didn't want to start a new thread but does anyone have any suggestions of books concerning this period, and specifically about the illegal measures applied by the FBI under Hoover, McCarthy, or just the general stance of why we used illegal means to implicate people as being un-American?