Stranger Things, Dark, and National Character: Preliminary Observations

Is there still such a thing as national character? There's national taste. Americans like underdogs and optimism; Germans like very tidy houses and Angst with a capital A. That's my impression, comparing Dark to Stranger Things. Vogue can claim all it wants that Dark is "Stranger Things for Grown-Ups," but actually these completely different shows probably appeal to the same audiences: folks with a taste for the creepy and the jump scare. The two shows have a single thing in common: parallel universes. Make that multiverses in Dark, but only because Germans tend to be complicated. Americans want to get stuff done and Germans want to get stuff done correctly (is there always a difference?) Here's my take on these series:

German: You need a chart to keep track of the characters and their time zones. It's always raining or radioactive--in case you didn't pick up the deep despair. Precision: Every Thirty-Three Years Something Happens Again. Papers will be Spread Out All Over the Living Room Floor While an Angst-Ridden Cop examines them--also, the photos of missing persons and related documents and obscure symbols will be stapled in a symmetrical design on the wall, complete with (literally) red threads. The wall will be lots, lots, neater than Dr. House's magic-markered comments on his whiteboard.

American: comic relief, oozing grade B move fifties science fiction creature sure to scare teens who never heard of Invasion of the Body Snatcher, Night of the Living Dead, or The Blob:




Then there's guilt. American: "It's not our fault! We're innocent! It's the big bad Russians!" Germans: "We feel guilt. We feel guilt. Though we ain't done nothing wrong, we feel guilt." Americans: That city on that hill we built clears us forever. Indians? What indians? I didn't learn about them in school." Germans: Holocaust, holocaust, holocaust. Atone, atone, atone. Philosophy. Americans: "We're here because we're here! Besides, God said so." Germans: "What is the meaning of life? Are we doomed to repeat the past? Fate is our fate is our existential fate is our dooom and gloooooom." Try googling "Stranger Things and Humor" and you'll find an array of items upon which to click. Not so when you google "Dark and Humor" or even "Netflix's Dark and Humor" or anything you can think of to indicate that you're trying to find something about the show, not dark humor in general.

Americans: Face your show with Bud. Germans: Face your show with beer. Real beer. Americans: understand that Germans are better at Angst and pessimism. Germans: understand that Americans favor humor and optimism. Yes, the stereotypes hold true . . . at least on these shows.

How Many Children Had Claire Underwood?

The author of the essay inspiring this one--L.C. Knights--titled his famous essay, "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" People like me who'd only glanced at it in graduate school went about for years imagining that he'd wondered about what kind of mother such a woman could be, since Lady Macbeth, when she's browbeating her husband into agreeing to murder King Duncan, utters these memorable lines:

I have given suck, and know 

How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this.

She's nursed a baby, and knows how lovely breastfeeding can be: the baby loves and trusts you, the mother. But, Lady Macbeth tells her cowering husband, if she'd sworn to slam the kid's head on the floor so hard that it cracked open and spilled out his brains, she'd have stuck to her word. Her husband, she's saying, is a wuss, since he's going back on his promise to stab that king--and stab while the king sleeps. Indeed, what kind of woman would, first of all, make such a promise, and then carry through on it?

Absolutely not the question L.C. Knights was asking in his 1933 essay, the title of which is intended as a rant against folks who were into praising Shakespeare's ability to create fabulous characters. Knights says Macbeth really a statement about evil. 

But why would that position preclude the title question? Oh, that title has a life all its own.

In any case, the answer to the question of what kind of woman would make, and follow through on, a promise to dash out her baby's brains is obvious: Claire Underwood. 

Or is it obvious? I imagine the baby kicking triumphantly inside her as Mom stabs Doug Stamper in the gut, twisting the knife in the wound so he'll bleed out fast. Would the girl grow up to be just like Mom? And what if she asked  insistently about her daddy? Developed into just the kind of investigative reporter Claire loves to have shot in the back of the head? Had the ethical command of Catherine Durant? What if Claire's baby took after some other branch of the family? Would Claire leave the kid alone if she sat around writing poems?

In other words, I wish the series would go on . . . and on. We finally finished season six last night. I wasn't surprised by the ending--I knew it would be, in Robin Wright's description, "operatic," and indeed it was. But I want the next scene. Kid with au pair all the time? Or kid being homeschooled by Mom and accompanying her to all political events? Yes, I can see Claire in a stylish nursing top, threatening somebody with something. My favorite moment was the look of shock on Petrov's face, and his question: "Are you a gangster?" Well, Duh, Petrov. 

Really. This show must go one. Just for one more season. Please. What kind of a mom will she be? Will the kid say, "Mommy, get me a brother?"

Independent? July 4, 2019: Five Tips for Survival

The only good news I have is personal: today's CT scan showed no return of cancer. But cancer consumed American democracy some time ago. We're watching season six of House of Cards, the level of corruption probably nowhere near what's actually happening with He Who Shall Not Be Named and Who Has No Right to the Oval Office. He who, I tell myself, has to be human enough to die some day, but only the good die young. By his standards, he is not yet old. Last July fourth, we were appalled by the separation of children from families at the U.S. border, and we are still appalled. I ask myself whether anything's gotten better since exactly one year ago today. And then I think of Claire Underwood. Who has so much more style than the serial rapist in the White House. Which makes her no less evil. I'm not a praying person, but I'm close to taking up the practice--can't hurt, right? If there's anything to celebrate, it's the following:

(1) Family
(2) Appreciating how much those kids at the border need theirs.
(3) Hope. There's always that.
(4) A robust red wine followed by a toast: "Still not my president"
(5) The idea that the United States is in there somewhere, still, beneath the present ruling class.

Linda Fairstein and The Persecuting Spirit

America has inherited “the persecuting spirit” that Nathanial Hawthorne attributed to his unrepentant ancestor, a judge at the Salem witch trials. That Puritan lust to punish a scapegoat, “the ecstasy of sanctimony,” Philip Roth called it, has come and gone throughout American history, examples including the McCarthy era, the herding of Japanese-Americans into internment camps in World War Two, and attacks on Arab-Americans after 9/11.

And now Linda Fairstein, tried and condemned in the court of Twitterdom: “The fact that Linda Fairstein writes crime novels for a living is proof that she has the capacity to make up stories in her mind as she did with the Central Park Five narrative,” someone tweets at #cancelLindaFairstein. So all novelists are cheaters and liars? Fairstein is “a devil!” cries another. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Fairstein was always known for being deeply concerned with justice, devoted to reforming the treatment of rape victims. Not as one so bent on success that she’d engineer the sacrifice of five young men in order to solidify her professional authority. Why are we forgetting that Eric Reynolds who is black and was the lead detective on the case, along with David N. Dinkins, who is black and the former mayor of New York, believed in the guilt of the Central Park Five? The claim that the boys had never said they were “wilding” but only “wilin’” or hanging out was unheard by many, including Dinkins, who proposed “anti-wilding” measures. Multiethnic witnesses were reeling from other assaults in Central park. The sadism of the jogger incident overshadowed all. The now-exonerated five present themselves as the contemporary version of the Scottsboro boys, the nine African-American teenagers, ages 13-20, falsely accused of raping a white woman on a train.

Is it even possible to watch DuVernay’s Netflix series without thinking of Eric Garner’s murder, of white supremacists waving tiki torches in Charlottesville, of black men and teenagers murdered for walking down the street? For sitting in their own homes? In the wake of these tragedies, how many people even consider the possibility that the NYPD investigation of the Central Park jogger may actually have been ethical?

DuVernay’s directorial failure in A Wrinkle in Time, rather than the success of either Selma or When They See Me, suggests some answers. DuVernay always said she planned to “blackify” Madeleine L’Engle’s classic, the idea being that non-white children could better identify with non-white heroes and heroines. The biracial actress playing Meg, Storm Reid, said she felt a responsibility to “uplift” and “empower little African-American girls” by playing a character written as white.

The notion that an African-American girl cannot identify with a white girl reveals an understanding of race as a given, something that cannot be transcended, rather than a product of culture, class and history. But when James Earl Jones played King Lear, he entered into the role as an English old king, not as an African-American. When the 19^th-century African-American actor Ira Aldridge played Shakespearean roles, he played them wearing whiteface. When a racist “Jump Jim Crow” minstrel show arrived as competition, Aldridge appropriated one of the show’s skits into his own act, parodying it. Deflating racist denigration, he offered the same advice as Mrs. Which in L’Engle’s novel:  that the only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly—not to lose one’s sense of humor. Moments of humor intensify the gravity of the contest between the forces of good and evil.

DuVernay’s adaptation of L’Engle’s novel misses the gravity as well as the humor, I believe because DuVernay’s vision of race and power is one-dimensional. The idea that black girls can better appreciate Meg Murry’s challenges when a black actress plays her is problematic. It’s like saying a straight actor can’t play a gay person. Du Vernay’s Meg is a black girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles because apparently black girls would be less able to relate to white girls growing up in a small New England town.

What if the essentialist conception of race that informs DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time plays a role in her demonizing of Linda Fairstein? Justitiae soror fides, or “Faith is the sister of justice,” one of the Latin phrases quoted by L’Engle in her novel, should be our guide: we should not lose faith in Linda Fairstein unless or until someone can demonstrate that she stands guilty of the crimes of which DuVernay’s Netflix production accuses her.