I Years before the onslaught of a madness that was to incapacitate him, voiding his intellect like the snapping of a high wire of isolation and brilliance, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book by the name of The Gay Science featuring the parable of the madman leaping into the marketplace, bearing a lantern in the morning hours. Its echoes, reverberating through the decades to come, would sound across the wasteland of the twentieth century whose cruelty…
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“That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him.” —Albert Einstein Joseph Heller published his epochal novel sixteen years after the end of World War II, having afforded himself a humane interval during which all the horrific bloodshed, nationalism, and bloodthirsty ideologies could fructify in the dust of the greatest boneyard that had ever existed. The euphoric and irreverent heights of…
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The director of such films as My Dinner with Andre and Au Revoir les Enfants, Louis Malle coaxes from his provocative film, Lacombe, Lucien, what was absent from the others: an enigma of a primary character that remains inscrutable and hollow until the epilogue of the last scene revealing that this character is to be executed by a tribunal of the French Resistance. This is Lucien Lacombe, who has taken to rattling off his last…
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A cult classic that has only ripened since its release in 1998, a loony Chandler-noir featuring cannabis, White Russians, and a surfeit of bowling imagery, The Big Lebowski is an unforgettable comedy whose parts are greater than the whole (which is a whirling mishmash of action, absurdity, and subterfuge). These parts, outshining alone the film as a single impression, make up its many glorious moments, its satire and absurdity, its casual self-amusement, and its straight-faced…
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“One day, when in the opinion of the world one has long been educated, one discovers oneself: that is where the task of the thinker begins; now the time has come to invoke his aid—not as an educator but as one who has educated himself and thus has experience.” –Friedrich Nietzsche Like many of those suffering through the dry, endless, prosaic hours of the classroom, I struggled during the years of my education to pay…
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The meeting of Bob and Charlotte is the meeting of two people, straying, despondent, groping in the desert of an existence, and disoriented by the foreignness of a culture emphasizing that they are adrift. Tokyo as the setting of the story brings out the loneliness of Bob and Charlotte, a swirling storm distilling its center, which is both the characters and the hotel refuge above the city; accentuating their loneliness and ennui, the culture shock…
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The number of books in the world is staggering, absorbing countless reams of paper bearing tiny black marks like a gargantuan wading ice floe covered with gnats. One could say that every year—an arbitrary but serviceable interval of time—most of this congeries of bound paper (totaling almost 130 million books as of 2010) is shuffled toward what littérateur and Everyman alike designate as oblivion. The vast majority of books are, of necessity, hurtling meteorites striking…
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In his snarky and incisive polemic satirizing the American class system, Class, Paul Fussell provides a tour-de-force panorama of what most Americans, especially those marinating in our current postmodern zeitgeist, would never acknowledge in polite company: that although all citizens in this Western democracy are equal under the law, possessing rights to life, liberty, and property, they are nonetheless different and thus unequal, inferior and superior as determined by the myriad attributes that humans can…
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In the wintry world of the Klondike, located in the Yukon territory of northwestern Canada, an influx of prospectors searching for gold brought timeless fame to what was to become the mecca of many pioneers: The Klondike Gold Rush. Competing for immeasurable riches, pioneers and prospectors alike embodied the dueling instincts of avarice and survival, living on the border of fabulous riches and utter squalor. Deriving its setting and incidents from the Klondike Gold Rush…
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As an unprecedented success overtaking Titanic at the Japanese box office and becoming the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, winning worldwide acclaim and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Spirited Away has since solidified its stature as the preeminent Japanese animated film—an amalgam of dreamlike Japanese myth that has surpassed what is Japanese, exhibiting a timeless universality. The story is that of a girl, Chihiro, who follows her parents into what seems to be…
