Was Rudyard Kipling a “racist imperialist”? The question is not as easy to answer as some people think. His attitude toward the British Empire, for one, was complex.
The statue Silent Sam was pushed over by students at UNC at Chapel Hill on Monday night.
Oxford’s Tolkien exhibit, “Maker of Middle-earth,” is wonderful, but it’s also missing something, Holly Ordway argues: “The exhibit downplays Tolkien’s religious commitment so completely that it is well-nigh invisible.”
Michael Jackson’s Thriller is no longer the best-selling album of all time: “The Eagles’ Greatest Hits 1971-1975, a perennial seller since its initial release in Feb. 1976, has surpassed 38 million copies sold, according to the latest certification by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The Eagles knocked Jackson’s 1982 smash to No. 2 but the band also holds the No. 3 spot with the album Hotel California, also released in 1976. That album has been certified 26-times platinum, for sales and streams of more than 26 million copies.”
Lionel Shriver on the racism of identity politics: “The movement insists that what we are is more important than who we are; that our lives derive their meaning from our membership of groups; that what happens to us isn’t the product of our own decisions but of unequal power dynamics that are bigger than we are. Ergo, your complexion eclipses everything else about you.”
Paul Baumann revisits the life and work of Catholic novelist Paul Horgan.
Essay of the Day:
In Commentary, Nathan Shields takes a closer look at Ingmar Bergman’s attitude toward God in his films:
“Not so long ago, the name of Ingmar Bergman was nearly synonymous with cinema as an art form. In the decade separating Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) from Persona (1966), the Swedish director channeled his idiosyncratic doubts and obsessions into a series of increasingly anguished masterworks that seemed to his devotees, cast adrift amid the catastrophes and transformations of the postwar era, to capture their own dislocation and radical uncertainty.
“That decade forms the heart of a singular and prolific career spanning more than half a century, from Torment (1944) to Sarabande (2003). This year sees the centenary of his birth, and to mark the occasion New York City’s Film Forum showed more than 40 films—yet still fell short of his entire filmography, not to speak of his numerous plays, novels, and theatrical and operatic productions.
“Bergman’s films could be mythic allegories such as The Seventh Seal (1957), with its chess-playing personification of death, or mercilessly realistic studies of domestic discord such as his 1973 TV serial Scenes from a Marriage. What united them was not just a set of persistent obsessions—God, art, death, failure, self-deception—but the fierce urgency with which those themes were explored. Scenes from a Marriage has been credited with doubling the divorce rate in Sweden for the year after its release. This is the kind of story that, if not true, would have to be invented: Bergman had a bewitching capacity to make his dreams and terrors the viewer’s own.
“Yet this artist who captured the anxieties of his time was in many ways the remnant of another era. The genres on which he drew, from the medieval morality play of The Seventh Seal to the drawing-room tragedy of Cries and Whispers (1972), were closer to Wagner or Strindberg than to the films of his contemporaries. The critic Pauline Kael, a former admirer, was not altogether wrong when she derided Cries and Whispers as ‘a 19th-century European masterwork in a 20th-century art form.’
“What most befuddled critics about Bergman’s films, however, was not their form but their substance. It was evident that his movies of the early sixties were the work of a man losing his faith, but less clear what kind of faith. His religious struggles, played out in these films, radiated an acute moral suffering that critics were hard-pressed to understand. Lacking an appropriate analogue, they reached for what lay closest to hand. The Bergman vogue in the United States coincided with a French-existentialism craze, and to this day even sophisticated admirers use existentialist clichés to describe him. When he died in 2007, Time’s Richard Corliss eulogized his ‘indelible allegories of postwar man adrift without God.’
“In this they misread Bergman significantly. He was not consumed by the preoccupations of postwar existentialism (authenticity, absurdity, the dizziness of freedom) but rather by the concerns of the stringent, austere Lutheranism in which he was raised: sin, grace, and judgment.”
Photo: Asperitas Clouds Over New Zealand
Poem: Timothy Murphy, “Three Loves in Autumn”
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