The Rifle in Your Hand: Confronting Audience and Adaptation in Response to “Jarhead,” Part II
15 November 2005
In my short time writing about film and my lifetime talking about it, I have tried as best I can to never compare a film to the book on which it was based. At least when reviewing it. "Oh, the book was better," the adage has come to say, and in the words of comedian Jim Gaffigan, "You know what I liked about the movie? No reading."
I make this forward claim because, as art forms, film and literature are about as similar as an elephant is similar to a freight train. They both move, and when they are moving, you do not want to be in their way (rather, you should be on board for the ride). But beyond that, they do not have much in common.
So which between literature and film is the elephant – the living, breathing, emotive force – and which the train – requiring an engineer, a gauge, a railyard, a traffic controller, a crew of maintenance men, and, indeed, a passenger to move anywhere (but when it moves, does it ever move)?
A discussion of the book-to-film film review is timely for two reasons: "Pride and Prejudice" and "Harry Potter." Both literary phenomenons. Both (re)appearing on screen soon. In fact, "Pride and Prejudice" (Joe Wright, 2005) is already out.
Jane Austen’s novels have at best a tenuous relationship with American cinema. While they have been a mainstay of the BBC – "Pride and Prejudice" first appearing on television in Britain in 1938 – they first surged in Hollywood in the late ‘90s thanks to financial backing from classically minded production houses like Columbia and Miramax; the latter, according to Peter Biskind’s book "Down and Dirty Pictures," "mined Jane Austen like a truffle-sniffing pig." Hence, "Persuasion" (Roger Michell, 1995), "Sense and Sensibility" (Ang Lee, 1995), "Emma" (Douglas MacGrath, 1996), and "Mansfield Park" (Patricia Rozema, 1999). To the moneymen who made them, these films were financial guarantees, thanks, it seems, to Austen’s presence in high school English classes across the nation. The films also had an outside shot at claiming critical recognition or Oscar nominations, mostly for their period-ness, notable among them Emma Thompson’s Oscar for best screenplay for "Sense and Sensibility."
In short, Jane Austen movies tend to serve as filler – "Masterpiece Theater-style, Oscar-grabbing" filler, says Biskind – plugging a production company’s financial and scheduling holes. The current "Pride and Prejudice" was made by London-based Working Title Films (a subsidiary of Universal) and released by Focus Features (independent films wing of Universal) on Nov. 11 alongside "Zathura" (Jon Favreau), "Derailed" (Mikael Hafstrom), and "Get Rich or Die Tryin’" (Jim Sheridan), for example. Wright’s film will get a wider release the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but, simply, November is a month of water tredders and disappointments before the contenders come out pre-Christmas. Focus’ real Oscar hopeful – Ang Lee’s much ballyhooed "Brokeback Mountain"(2005), winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival – will be released Dec. 9, against "The Chronicles of Narnia" (Andrew Adamson, 2005). Universal, meanwhile, will release Steven Spielberg’s next film, "Munich," two days before Christmas.
The point is, given the role of Austen films as surefire money winners – but not so sure that they can slip into a Christmas slot – how does one begin, at all, to talk about "Pride and Prejudice"s writing? Isn’t there something more at stake here than values of artistic representation: the commodification of classic literature? Must we only focus on how well the movie transposes the book?
Apparently, yes. "Joe Wright’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ is the best Jane Austen adaptation ever to hit the big screen," says Glenn Whipp’s four-star review in the Los Angeles Daily News. "Even the most rabid Janeites must allow that director Joe Wright, 33, has given Austen's novel a beguilingly youthful spin without compromising the novel's late-eighteenth-century manners," says Peter Travers in Rolling Stone (begging the question, does a director have to be young to be youthful?) On the other hand, Anthony Lane says in the New Yorker, "Any resemblance to scenes and characters created by Miss Austen is, of course, entirely coincidental."
I will not weigh in any more than I generally have on these critics’ claims, as I have not yet seen Wright’s film. I will instead turn the discussion to the other hot book-become-movie: "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (Mike Newell, 2005). The film is set to be released in a scant three days (so there goes "Pride and Prejudice"s Thanksgiving Day money) and I am preparing for the most vehement discussions of film choice versus book detail since... well, the last "Harry Potter" movie.
The night I saw "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" (Alfonso Cuaron, 2004) – incidentally, opening night, June 4 – I instantly considered it the best "Harry Potter" film made. In the discussions that followed – personally with friends, mentally with critics, globally with Harry Potter nation – I was inspired to write this argument the night of June 26, 2004, unpublished until now:
Cuaron has done something interesting with his treatment of Harry Potter: he has made it his own text, and not an illustrated version of the book. For if it is an illustrated Harry Potter we want, or a moving Spiderman or even and illustrated Troy, why do we not do the simplest thing imaginable? Why do we not open a book? Instead, what Cuaron has done is make a Harry Potter text unconcerned with Harry Potter. Die-hards do not like it because he rejects the very foundation on which they base his film's success: its commitment to Rowling's original. Instead, he makes Harry Potter his own story, creating characters with identities unsupported by the novel's pages, with locations unseen in Chris Columbus' first two films, and with a plot that indeed neglects to mention all of the little details; certainly, the importance of Padfoot and Prongs may have colored the film – as it colors the page – but it does not prevent the film from standing on its own terms. And the film has its own filmic terms that are part of cinema's language and foreign to Rowling's medium. I am, of course, referring to the repeated images of clocks, of the giant swinging pendulum, of faces in windows that foreshadow the ice of the Dementors, and, most cinematically, of his iris-based transitions, all which compact the film into a visual story as fluent and authored as the "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" that appears on the page. That Cuaron's visual story did not match the various viewers' mental pictures is where he goes wrong. But how could he go right? With such a Harry Potter culture, how could anyone go right? We live in a society of Harry Potter scholars, and those who went to Azkaban without having read the books went with friends who could fill in the details – often without being asked – and those who did not go at all are forced to hear about it from their Harry Potter friends who did.
In short, I could not believe that anyone would fault Cuaron’s film simply for being a film, with neither the space nor the kinds of narrative tools available to authors to delve deeply into the internal lives and minds of their characters. It is the opinion I still have of "Azkaban" and plan on applying to "Goblet of Fire." It is the stand I continue to make.
A film should not be – and in my mind, cannot be – weighted against the book on which it was based. They are different mediums, with different rules, devices, methods of creation, possibilities for exploration, histories, reputations, and, generally, audiences. The problem lies in the desire for filmmakers and producers to create films-for-profit based on highly coveted books and the resulting inability of the people who covet those books to forget the novel once the films’ first images roll.
Therefore, one should never say, "why didn’t the director add that detail?," " "in the book, it was this way, which made this make more sense," "you had to know this from the book to really get at that," and so on. The film – as well as the book – should be able to stand on its own. If the book cannot, it will never be made into a film. If the film cannot, it lacks the detail or the effectiveness of filmmakers. Thus, when it comes to reviewing, books and movies should never be mixed. The one is separate and dissimilar to the other. The elephant and the freight train.
With that lengthy discussion and disclaimer, I will now, in the next few paragraphs, break that rule. For a purpose: to get at a larger question, "why didn’t a film work?"
This question brings us back – finally, fitfully – to "Jarhead" (Sam Mendes, 2005). In part I of this series, I wrote that "Jarhead" did not work because it refused to take a stand, one way or the other, on pressing issues surrounding war. That review never mentions the book. This review will.
"Jarhead," Anthony Swofford’s first novel, was published in 2003 by Scribner. Immediately likened to such literary works as "Black Hawk Down," "A Rumor of War," "Catch-22," and "The Things They Carried," "Jarhead" became a bestseller and, according to the paperback edition’s cover, an international sensation. Swofford himself became, in the words of my creative writing mentor from Ohio State, Michelle Herman, "one of those hip, young writers."
I had the pleasure and the honor of hearing Swofford read at a "non-partisan," get-out-the-vote rally in Columbus, Ohio, prior to the Bush-Kerry election (the event was, in fact, wonderfully partisan. Try to guess which one). In keeping with the spirit of the event and the other readers – "hip, young authors" Dave Eggers, Stephen Elliott, Julie Orringer, Jim Shepard, and Vendela Vida – Swofford read a short story about his first experiences voting, deciding whether or not to chose the Republican candidate (Reagan) simply because Swofford planned to join the Marines. Swofford the man struck me as highly intelligent, wildly engaging, deviously articulate, and physically large. His writing I admired so much that I bought his book in the lobby during intermission. I immediately read it, cherished it (so much so that I gave it to my brother as a Christmas present). I considered it brilliant.
Fast forward a year and a month, and we have a film version of the book, which I consider less than brilliant.
I cannot deny that my admiration of the book exacerbated, perhaps, my disinclination for the movie, once I decided I did not like the movie. I can, however, write with complete honesty that I did as much as I could to enter the theater with an open and receptive mind. At that point, as Emerson says, "the picture waits for my verdict: it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise."
So, why didn’t the picture work when the book did?
First, the book undoubtedly takes a stand. "The warrior always fights for a sorry cause," Swofford wrote, in a passage I quote often now. "And if he lives, he tells stories."
Second – and more open to interpretation, deliberation, debate, and second-guessing – the narrative of the book is broken up; i.e. rather than writing chronologically, Swofford directs his reader throughout time, from Swofford’s home in California after he has left the Corps to a war zone Saudi desert to boot camp to the death of spotter Troy and the ensuing bar fight back to the desert and so forth. The result: clarity within an unclear progression. Swofford’s disenchantment and in some sense disinheritance with the Marine Corps develops in relation to his experiences in war, his responses as a result of the war and his training, and the characters that surround him in both situations. All of that is juxtaposed by chapter throughout the book.
Mendes’ film is told chronologically, from boot camp to sniper training to the desert and back home. The "back home," so pivotal to the book that the first chapter and several subsequent and lengthy chapters are devoted to it, constitutes no more than two minutes of montage literally an afterthought on to the end of the film. The montage’s only point, it seems, is to show the dead spotter Troy, and the film actually ends with a quote repeated from the film’s beginning, that the hands of the soldier who has held and fired a rifle never forget the feel of that rifle. Whatever point the montage was meant to make is therefore left ambiguous: is it good or bad that the soldier still feels the rifle?
As far as can be gleaned from still fresh production notes, Swofford himself had no hand in adapting "Jarhead" to the screen. Mendes and company instead relied on a script by veteran screenwriter William Broyles, Jr., whose previous adaptations include "The Polar Express" (Robert Zemeckis, 2004), "Planet of the Apes" (Tim Burton, 2001), and "Apollo 13" (Ron Howard, 1995).
Should Mendes and/or Broyles have kept "Jarhead" so much in the spirit of its original text that it keeps the same narrative format? Certainly not. As I have said, literature and film are two different arts. Where a book might be able to effectively juxtapose large jumps in time, a film might not.
Rather, the filmmakers have only the responsibility to stay true to the tenor of their base material, to make sure that the film makes the same statements as whatever arts piece was good enough to inspire the film to be made in the first place (unless, of course, the director purposefully wishes to change the themes of his material, at which point, the title should not be allowed to remain the same). One would think that coveting a book so much that investing $72 million (the budget of "Jarhead") to put it on screen for whatever reward – larger audience, broader artistic interpretation, monetary returns, gold statuettes – would dictate such artistic responsibility.
But perhaps not. "Jarhead" the movie did not work. It does not take a stand and, moreover, comes off as a sort of Cliffs Notes version of the book on screen, showing only the most gruesome or controversial highlights: the bashing of heads into the wall, pointing live weapons at fellow soldiers, extensive discussions of masturbation. The film did not have the soul or tenor of the material on which it was based. Nor did it have the same courage.
A final question, then: should "Jarhead" have been made into a movie at all? Would it have been better to leave well enough – indeed, financial and critical success – alone? That I will not answer, because as long as people finance several movies a year, and as long as those people want a return on their investment, the movie-going audience can be assured of one thing: it will always get Jane Austen in November.
Arthur Ryel-Lindsey » Comments:
The Rifle in Your Hand: Confronting Audience and Adaptation in Response to “Jarhead,” Part I
14 November 2005
Sam Mendes’ film "Jarhead," based on ex-Marine sniper Anthony Swofford’s chilling first hand account of the first Gulf War, will be liked by many of those who oppose either the current war in Iraq or war as diplomatic method in general. The problem: those who support the war will like it too.
This may seem like the marketing phenomenon of the century – a film with a controversial topic that offends nobody – but the effect is disastrous to a film that in all other respects was well made.
For "Jarhead" is, on its face, a flawed movie. It fails to answer the single most basic question artists must answer when it comes to asking an audience to view their constructed works: why is this story being told? To elaborate further: why has this movie – or painting or composition or building or stack of legos (why not?) – been made? What opinion are you putting across? Why should I bother to spend $8 and a few hours on your vision?
Certainly, the topic of "Jarhead" is timely. Certainly, it is a courageous script for Mendes to have undertaken. But when the film’s credits roll, actor Jake Gyllenhaal and company’s feckless eyes staring past those few audience members who stay for the credits while their names and roles burn along the bottom of the frame, making their images evoke mug shots, the film has not made a statement of any sort concerning war. Is it pro-war? Is it against?
The structure of the film does not bother to let its audience know. And with such a film, it cannot simply say "no comment" without being, in the end, a farce.
Indeed, a statement of "no comment" in a film like "Jarhead" pangs of a desire on the part of the filmmaker not to offend. The actual presence of this desire cannot be proved, of course, but even the whisper of such an attempt is death for the artist and for his art. Movies confronting issues like the need or nature of war – or religion or race or sexual identity (a hot topic in upcoming films this year) or any number of controversial themes which should be discussed in the art world – cannot be made with appeasement in mind. Rather, talented artists like Mendes should go at the topic whole-heartedly, without questioning whom he will offend but rather hoping someone will be offended, so that discussion will be open, in the mainstream, or – to borrow a term from law class – in the marketplace. What greater honor is there for a piece of artwork than for it to be talked about? An attempt at that sort of audience engagement would embody the courage Mendes only started to show when he took on "Jarhead" as a project. That would be good filmmaking. "Jarhead" is not that. It is, instead, a ruse. It will be cautiously accepted by most of the people who see it, then more amiably forgotten.
After all, by not taking a stand in any way concerning war, Mendes has allowed supporters on either side of the issue of the current or general war to point to select moments of the film to back their positions, rather like zealots and non-believers debating the moral issues using the same Bible or Constitutional scholars arguing the word choices of the founding fathers. If one wants to take the film as anti-war, he can point to the moment when Gyllenhaal’s Anthony Swofford, maddened by endless waiting and vicious grunt work, points his loaded gun at a fellow American soldier or the beautifully composed image of Swofford vomiting at the sight of a charred body in a bombed out crater (it does not sound beautiful, but, image-wise, it is). Pro-war viewers can point to an equal number of moments – like Swofford saying "I was hooked" or Jamie Foxx’s Staff Sgt. Siek’s speech about loving the Marine Corps, faithfully recreated in the film’s trailer – to give weight to their point of view.
In one scene, the Marines whoop and holler to the "Ride of the Valkyries" attack sequence from "Apocalypse Now," the film a cinematized evokation of war in the same way that "Jarhead" cinematizes war (though, with its sequences showing a baptism-by-fire comraderie and endless search for a faceless enemy, "Jarhead" recalls "Full Metal Jacket" more than it does "Apocalypse Now"). This would be pro-war.
In another, while the Marines are celebrating their victory and the chance to go home, a soldier says that he – or, in a sense, all the Marines – will never come back to Iraq. Not so fast. Anti-war.
Where, then, does the film (or Mendes) stand?
To be honest, the moments that side with war advocates come easier to mind than those that support war objectors. But, given the tone of the film – the bland and endless landscapes, the oppressive heat, the time eating away at the soldiers – it is hard to believe that pro-war is the side the film really wishes to take.
In terms of filmmaking, "Jarhead" is seamless and gorgeous. No surprise, given that "Jarhead"s film crew – including director Sam Mendes, director of photography Roger Deakins, editor Walter Murch, composer Thomas Newman, and production designer Dennis Gassner – is nothing less than an all-star team, with 19 Academy Award nominations and five statuettes collected between them (plus two with Jamie Foxx and Chris Cooper in the cast, and casting director Debra Zane is legendary too, just no Oscar category for that job). Deakins’ visuals – including the afore mentioned composition of Swofford in the bomb crater – are as beautiful and striking as they are precise, while Murch’s editing keeps the pace hot, heavy, and articulate. The only question mark in this crew’s artistic choices is Newman’s score, which at times comes off either too contemporary or out of place with the desert setting, but for his part, he does a good job countering Swofford’s question in a the film as a aircraft flies over blaring The Doors’ "Break on Through": "That’s Vietnam music. Can’t we get our own music?"
The cast’s performances are also excellent, and the most notable among them is a shining Peter Sarsgaard in his supporting role as Swofford’s spotter Troy. His breakdown the moment Swofford is prevented from taking a sniper shot would have been enough to earn him an Oscar nomination if "Jarhead" were a good enough movie to deserve it. In any case, watch out for this kid: the Washington University St. Louis grad is in several movies right now – "Jarhead," "The Dying Gaul" (Craig Lucas, 2005), "Flightplan" (Robert Schwentke, 2005), and "The Skeleton Key" (Iain Softley, 2005) – having just come off fine work in "Garden State" (2004) and "Kinsey" (2004), and he is only getting better.
But despite the better efforts of an enviable crew, "Jarhead" fails to impress. Rather than debate or support a war, it shows ineffectual cut shots of a moment in the not-too-distant past – the newsreel more than the broadcast’s voice over. The effort has been seen before, and recently: "Kingdom of Heaven" (Ridley Scott, 2005), fearing offense to segments of its audience, came off emotionally inept and artistically ambiguous. The same could be said of "Jarhead." Mendes’ film is bland, not uninformed but uninforming, and certainly a missed opportunity to create a discussion about the wars in the Middle East that is not already happening in the news.
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Photo Caption: Welcome to the Suck. In one of many provocative compositions by cinematographer Roger Deakins, Jarhead Anthony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) stares down the first blasts of Operation Desert Storm in Sam Mendes' film "Jarhead." From the Universal Studios Trailer.
Arthur Ryel-Lindsey » Comments:
Black and White and "Red" All Over: A Review of "Good Night, and Good Luck"
06 November 2005
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Edward R. Murrow
"A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy"
"See it Now" (CBS-TV)
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In an analysis that has since been labeled one of the great moments in American broadcast journalism, CBS reporter and anchorman Edward R. Murrow stared into the camera March 9, 1954 and challenged red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy. George Clooney’s new film, "Good Night, and Good Luck" dramatizes the events surrounding the historic broadcast, which, the film claims, played no small role in the Senate’s censoring of McCarthy only a few months later.
Clooney’s film is an attractive and engaging vision of American journalism in the fifties. More an ode to responsibleness and professionalism than a record of historical fact, "Good Night, and Good Luck" develops as a story the way any good news story does: with solid backgrounding, good research, clever writing, intensity within the material, and ultimately, with a surplus of hard-hitting truths. Clooney uses every frame of his film to captivate, motivate, and make each member of the audience wish that journalism like Murrow’s was still around (even if that member of the audience feels, outside the theater, that such journalism does exist).
Shot in black and white, entirely indoors and mostly in the CBS studios, "Good Night, and Good Luck" educes a behind-closed-doors attitude, as if the viewer were peaking through a crack – or in this case, through the several station windows in CBS’ studios – to peer momentarily at events that were certain to change the course of a nation even as they were happening. This atmosphere – hazy with the smoke of a half dozen chain-smoking newsmen – is played out at times to the luscious voice of jazz-singer Dianne Reeves, who made her first film appearance in "Good Night, and Good Luck" as an unnamed television variety act always, it seems, down the hall.
With a film shot in black and white, the audience might expect to see an overt photographic artistry or experimentation as much as a well told story: a visual play of the type done by Michael Chapman in "Raging Bull" or Roger Deakins in "The Man Who Wasn’t There" (both Academy Award nominated performances). But "Good Night"s journeyman cinematographer, Robert Elswit, gives in to none of that. Rather, the film’s fast camera movements (both panning and zooming), direct compositions, and generally straightforward lighting coalesce with the newsreel footage of the day, on which Clooney is entirely dependent: all of McCarthy’s ripostes in "Good Night" are newsreels of McCarthy himself. Clooney’s use of the real McCoy McCarthy is both a mimicry of Murrow’s 1954 broadcast, which mostly used scenes collected from McCarthy’s recorded speeches, and, for Elswit, an artistic conjunction: the viewer would never feel so close to the film’s action if they were shown in color or artistic on their face, as both would add an element of re-enactment that does not exist in the film as it is. Ironically, the black and white makes the film feel more present.
Adding to the film’s immediacy is David Strathairn’s performance as Edward R. Murrow. Sitting in the shadows in the back of the room as the CBS gang examine the Senate hearings led by McCarthy, or typing in the wee hours his speech for the pivotal broadcast – tie loose, shirt unbuttoned, but suspenders intact – Straithairn’s Murrow is the uneditorializing ‘50s beat journalist becoming, in a controversial moment, the courageous herald of a revolt. In a part that required gravitas of the kind that few journalists or actors can exhibit on screen, Strathairn delivers with unyielding precision and quiet, deadpan brilliance.
Assisting him on the sides is a ensemble cast of marvelous dimension playing relatively small roles: Clooney, Jeff Daniels, and Frank Langella. In a side story in the film that seems a laughable controversy today, Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson play husband and wife Joe and Shirley Wershba, who are forced to hide their marriage from colleagues because of CBS rules that prevent couples from being employed together. The eventual confrontation over the issue toward the end of "Good Night" is a suggestion that exclusivity is not just the mandate of a radical senator.
It has been suggested that "Good Night, and Good Luck" is more than just a historical examination, that its timing in exhibiting a portrait of a remarkable advocate-journalist while the media itself is under fire is uncanny. Clooney – the son of longtime Cincinnati broadcaster Nick Clooney – insists that his film is not a commentary. Instead, he has said, it is the result of him just being a Murrow fan. If that is the case, and if that case leads to such remarkable documents as "Good Night, and Good Luck," perhaps every A-list artist like Clooney should find a Murrow figure for inspiration.
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"Good Night, and Good Luck" (2005)
George Clooney, director
Clooney and Grant Heslov, writers
With David Strathairn, Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., and Patricia Clarkson
Synopsis: United States, early 1950s. In the climate of national fear created by Joseph McCarthy’s Senate investigations into the communist affiliations of public figures, broadcaster Edward R. Murrow finds a buried newspaper story about Milo Radulovich, an Air Force lieutenant discharged because of sealed evidence that members of his family were communist sympathizers. Despite pressure from Air Force officials and CBS’ corporate representatives, Murrow and his colleagues air an episode of their Tuesday-night newshow "See it Now" investigating the case and its questionable proceedings.
The quiet response to the piece – and the lull created by Murrow’s duller assignments – prompts the broadcaster and his executive producer Fred Friendly to go after McCarthy himself. The CBS team researches the footage of McCarthy’s speeches and Senate hearings before Murrow, with explicit reservations from CBS head William Paley, attacks McCarthy’s methods on-air. The result is a publicity battle between Murrow’s advocates and McCarthy’s supporters, until McCarthy, by Murrow’s invitation to issue a rebuttal on Murrow’s show, labels Murrow a figurehead of the Communist’s infiltration into the United States.
Murrow defends himself in a subsequent broadcast before the newspapers report that McCarthy will be investigated by the Army and censored by the Senate. Nevertheless, in a meeting between Murrow, Friendly, and Paley, CBS cancels "See it Now" and moves Murrow to a mid-day Sunday slot. As Murrow leaves the meeting, President Eisenhower delivers a televised speech on patriotic commitment and individual rights.
The film is framed by a late 1950s speech delivered by Murrow on the state of journalism and the need for more social awareness in the public.
Photo Caption: "Cleverest of the Jackel Pack." David Strathairn as the embattled newsman Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck." From the Warner Indpendent Trailer.
Links:
The transcript of Murrow’s March 9, 1954, broadcast, "A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy": http://www.honors.umd.edu/HONR269J/archive/Murrow540309.html
Murrow himself: http://www.otr.com/ra/murrow5.ram
"Good Night, and Good Luck" trailer (highly recommended, a brilliant trailer): http://www.apple.com/trailers/warner_independent_pictures/goodnightandgoodluck/trailer/
Arthur Ryel-Lindsey » Comments:
Epitaph II
03 November 2005
And then there was St. Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so
One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: Now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
~
And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
self-forgetful or in agony all the time
From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth
Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river,
'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays,
A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird,
And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.
"St. Kevin and the Blackbird"
by Seamus Heaney
Arthur Ryel-Lindsey » Comments:
