Code of vengeance

McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2005.

I saw the movie before I read the book, and it's a good thing: the violence and intensifying threat of more violence is even more stunning in the book than the film. The latter is very faithful to the book, but cuts some of the goriest details. In the movie the central villain (Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh) is more peculiar, like an alien (i.e., extraterrestrial) or robot programmed to kill, whereas a couple of dialogues in the book that don't make it into the film make it clear that he is a quite ordinary human who has reacted more extremely than most of us to traumas. Though not explicit, he is almost surely -- like two of his victims -- a Vietnam vet, which explains his (and their) comfort and familiarity with lethal weapons, and there is a strong hint in his farewell speech to Carson Wells (just before he shoots him) that he has a compulsion, a peculiar personal code, to kill anyone who offends his sense of dignity. I.e., the first murder we see/read of was the result of somebody's having insulted him in a bar.

See my summary & comment here.

Uprooted

This week on my birthday, April 3, El País reported that Spain "will need 157,000 immigrant workers a year until 2020". This week in Madrid we saw two foreign films highlighting radically different aspects of the disruptive effects of global migration. The first was Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite (2007) -- literally, "On the Other Side" (oddly translated "On the Edge of Heaven" in the English version), a moving, ambiguous story about suffering and reconciliation of Turks in Germany and Germans in Turkey. There are no really evil people here, just people who hurt (and even kill) others without intending to. Akin extracts marvelous performances from his cast.

Auf der anderen Seite -- that is, on the other side is the evil system exploiting the desperation and vulnerabilities of migrants, exposed in Ken Loach's powerful fictionalized exposé, It's a Free World. Angie, a high-energy single mother who unfairly loses her job at a labor-contracting agency, decides to start her own agency and discovers, first, by playing fairly she can't win competing with the guys who operate illegally, and, secondly, that there are big rewards and little risk for going illegal herself -- hiring workers without papers and then, when convenient, faling to pay them. This is a classic tragedy, in which a victim of the exploiters who starts out with a lot of sympathy for the Poles, South Americans, Iranians and other foreign job-seekers, becomes herself a heartless exploiter of immigrant labor.

Loach has done a tremendous job. But there are still other "other sides" to this story, and we'll keep trying to relate them. Maybe there are some things we can do, as ordinary citizens pressuring governments and companies, to ease the constant churning of families from poorer to more promising lands.

(For more on immigration in Spain, see the many articles from El País at La inmigración en España.)

Changing history

Kate Coe wrote me today to point out an error in my note on Ralph Lauren and Jay Gatsby (actually a note about a witty article by Cathy Horyn in the NYT). I had written, "It seems that Ralph, not a noted reader, saw the 1974 movie and liked the clothes." (You'll have to click the "Archive" link to the left to find it; it was way back on Jan. 12.) I wasn't paying close enough attention when I read the article. As Kate points out, and Cathy Horyn had made clear, Ralph designed the clothes for the male leads in the 1974 movie.

I thought I could go back and correct it, and it looked like I could. "Blogger" let me open the old note, edit it and republish. But when I looked in the archive, it was still the original text, with its glaring error. I'm glad. Otherwise, we could be going back and back, never admitting to any error. It would be tempting to go back and insert prophecies of things that had already happened.

Speaking of prophecies, Andreas Ramos predicts that the attack on Iraq will come on the night of February 1, regardless of anything the UN or Saddam might do. The reason: It will be the first available moonless night, closely following Bush's Jan. 27 speech, and the air force will prefer bombing on a moonless night. GWB won't want to wait for the next one, March 3, because the desert will be too warm and the issue might be too cold. (Andreas has been fooling around with his astronomy software. He's also been looking at the weather reports in Dante's Inferno, to see if conditions were really as he reported them on those dates. So far, he says, they check out.)