On Mike Leigh on Gilbert & Sullivan.

Before my mom and I went out to see "Topsy-Turvy" in ... January 2000? ... I never went to the movies, but afterwards I finally realized both that people were still making things worth watching and that other people's attempts to sort through it all could be of serious help to me in deliberation, not just to follow what was going on. Even if I hadn't remembered it clearly I would have remembered it very fondly. Therefore, having seen in the Journal that Criterion was putting out a sparkly new disc, h&I checked it out some time ago. I loved it when I first saw it, but I got a lot more out of it this time. More than ten years have passed, and I did not remember the sequence of events; but the scenes and themes I remembered were subtler and much more closely integrated than I had first experienced. I've only seen one other Mike Leigh film, because I can't deal with depressing movies, which seems to be his forte, but both of these are special, individual, wonderful movies, and I'll have to take the plunge into the harsher works some time.

What "Topsy-Turvy" gets right is double.

(1) In re: William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan, it forgives them individually their unpleasantness and -- harder in narrative art -- their unhappiness, and it convincingly depicts a relationship between two men who as people could hardly be less in sympathy, who don't much like or -- except qua artists -- respect each other, yet whose tense and volatile working relationship produces works (leaving aside entirely their very high quality) of miraculous collaborative coherence.

(2) With regard to everyone else, it accepts them. It is clear and harsh on their failings -- Grossmith and ... whichever character plays the Mikado (the actor's named Timothy Spall, I think. Oh, the character's Richard Temple) sarcastically wave away Durward Lely's anti-imperialist comments, Lely throws a fit when asked to perform without a corset under his Japanese robe,* Jessie Bond and Leonora Braham date as cynically as a Caitlin Flanagan nightmare, practically everyone is using alcohol or drugs and showing other signs of not quite keeping it together, there are the usual prigs and sycophants. They aren't exemplars of Victorian hypocrisy and they aren't emblems of universal human character types. They're just people we recognize well enough that we only need a few glimpses of each.

As to G&S ... Sullivan is the very type of the anguished Victorian hypocrite. He courts respectability and the aura of high art with an energy and insecurity second only to that he exhausts on gambling, lewd music hall entertainments, prostitutes, and occasionally but vigorously his girlfriend. The only things that rouse him from his harrumphing fog are a woman on the couch and a good review in the paper. Gilbert is a quiet, bourgeois family man, in love with his wife but unable to be satisfied with love, any more than he is satisfied with his success. The outstandingly good reviews of "The Mikado"'s premiere, which send Sullivan into a frenzy of delight, seem only to confirm his mistrust of others' opinions. He is workmanlike and Sullivan acts like a Romantic artistic genius, even though it is Gilbert who recognizes that the work they are producing will last; Sullivan's anxiety to be recognized for his "serious" work still permits him an ecstatic satisfaction in popular acclaim, but Gilbert is like a lifelong astronaut whose tickertape parade only highlights his hollowness when not working. Sullivan lives with the atemporal, unplanned intensity and volatility of a child; Gilbert with a caretaker's weary wariness.

All their interactions are awkward. Each thinks he is constantly sacrificing his own ideas upon the altar of the other's genius. Except that when Gilbert reads his new manuscript to Sullivan -- with a furrowed brow and a dark, dry tone -- Sullivan is overtaken by innocent joy. His pretentious side is far enough in check that the child laughs and laughs at the adult's pretensions skewered, gleeful to see arbitrary conventions exposed as unworthy the attention that in his ordinary life he lovingly and anxiously bestows. When he is by himself it is not obvious that Sullivan would enjoy Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, or if he was inclined to enjoy them that he would allow or admit it. When he is laughing at Gilbert's jokes we can suddenly see that his perennially last-minute inspirations come late because he is just that type of person, but come as inspirations because Gilbert brings to him something he loves and can't find in himself without help.

Of course Gilbert comes across as more sympathetic. Gilbert is more sympathetic. He lived soberly and responsibly and lovingly to his wife (not to his estranged mother), without buying into the particular moral and social system of his time and place. A shockingly high proportion of his wit remains clever, and, more shockingly still, some decent proportion passes the further test of -- well -- saying something. He's endlessly quotable and really something of a philosopher -- anyway, a brilliantly attractive formulator of unsound arguments (see: the entire plot of "Patience"). Sullivan is harder. We don't have his words, and by all the evidence he wasn't that great a person. (Who is?) It's hard to come to see them as people making evitable decisions amongst alternative possibilities. At three or four I was horrified to learn that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers hadn't actually been in love. When we get past that, the next step is to focus on the bitterness and failure below the surface -- to treat every pretty face as a mask. It's common enough to stop there. The power of "Topsy-Turvy" grows from its rejection of that dichotomy.


* His prettyboy affect is especially amusing to those of us who, looking back, recognize the actor, Kevin McKidd, as the rough, angular, temperamental soldier struggling towards the middle class that he played in the blood-and-sandals-and-camp-and-soap HBO series "Rome," the pattern for subsequent TV historical melodrama series stuffed and overstuffed with blood and nudity -- a further amusement by contrast with Leigh's technical restraint and imaginative interest in bringing us to the Victorians, rather than showing us the Romans as ourselves.

On feline cognition.

H&I are catsitting two lovely Siamese cats for a few weeks this summer, and I'm fascinated by their brains. They have incredibly vivid and distinct personalities -- A is shy and B is proud, A is neurotic and B is prickly, A looks to B for guidance, A has more bursts of friendliness than B ... But not complex. Just a few character traits on display, the way babies are placid or anxious, inquisitive or content, bold or shy.

Here's the major difference: cats think they are totally aware of all the relevant factors in their situation, and even that they're pretty much in control. That's why cats are happy and babies aren't, because babies keep learning that there's more they can't understand, and keep learning how helpless they are. Breaks your heart either way, really, babies or cats, semi-conscious or delusively blissful lack of control.

Lots of adult humans have pretty clearly laid down their tents in one or the other camp, too, when it comes to that.

On the applicability of philosophy to "real life" so-called.

I am methodologically a moderate skeptic, an enthusiast by temperament. I do not believe in philosophical conclusions that are sepable from the process by which one has attained them (for if the question can be answered so simply, it's hard to see that we needed philosophy for it, really). I have no qualms about ascribing falsity and many about ascribing truth -- though fewest of the three to ascribing insight. My beloved Stoics had some crazy views -- I don't hesitate much about applying that term, either -- but much understanding.

Epictetus tells us that life is a game precisely in the respect that seems to distinguish the two, namely that in a game the outcome is not very important while adherence to the rules is imperative -- since inconsistent adherence means playing the game ill, or, at some point on the spectrum, ceasing to play the game at all. Now we are used to thinking that life is not like this. We are used to thinking that whether you win or lose within the game of life has quite a bit of importance to us the agents concerned, and should have. Clearly it makes a difference to one whether one's aorta bursts or not, and whether operations on our hearts are successful or not. ("Successful" -- it's built in already there.) Yes, this matters. But Epictetus (following his Stoic forebears) tries to show why it needn't matter in the way we might antecedently have assumed. This involves lots of high philosophy, naturally enough -- axiology (=consideration of what value is and of what is valuable), theology and metaphysics to ground value, logic including epistemology (as they divided it) to keep us from error and guide us towards understanding on the way. It is all very fascinating and largely the subject of my dissertation and not at all suitable for this sort or level of explanation.

Instead let me assume it all, and hint at some consequences.

Epictetus argues that if this is so, then we haven't anything to regret when we act correctly yet fail to attain our objective. This is so because nothing has been lost by our losing it that could determine whether our lives are happy or not -- I think by "happy" he very nearly means "meaningful, in such a way as to be worth living." So: failing to get a job does not eliminate the chance for a meaningful life. Dying destroys us, but not our lives, not the sense we'd learned to make of things. Losing a child, even, cannot mean losing all the worth one might ever have attained to -- though I would imagine it makes most things look very unworthy of the time we give to them.

Is this true? I wouldn't know how to answer that question. Certainly Epictetus relies on false beliefs to get to it, and not incidentally, not separably. Certainly the Stoic view is so radical as to be hard to understand. (What would it mean for a life to disappear yet for its happiness to match a god's?) Certainly such points can be hackneyed to death with the large axe, or is that a carriage, of Hollywood fairy tale treacle. All I can add is that learning to think of the ways in which merely doing something right in itself constitutes succeeding at it, no matter how all occasions do conspire against us, i.e., how external features cooperate with our efforts -- that exercise, that learning, that reflective choice to change perspective -- is not a matter of books, but of how books can change and shape our lives.

On finishing a paper.

They say that parents report unhappiness at just about every moment during the day, but complete satisfaction and even joy at the end of the day. Writing a paper is just the opposite: no matter how often one is pleased by the expression of a thought or delighted by a turn of phrase, at the end of the day misery and exhaustion.

I have thoughts about the importance of time and of the "shape" or trajectory of experience for thinking about happiness (it comes into the final section of my dissertation, on the self-sufficiency of happiness), but I'll leave them for later.