Gotham Diary:
Lemme Outta Here!
20 August 2013
On Sunday, we saw Blue Jasmine. It came to the theatre across the street while we were out on Fire Island, so we didn’t have to go out of our way. We just had to show up in time. We went to the first show on Sunday morning. The line for tickets, as we approached, was a bad sign, but there turned out to be no competition for good seats, because most people wanted to see The Butler. (As do I.)
I remember when Crimes and Misdemeanors came out, nearly twenty-five years ago, and how shocking it was that someone was murdered in a Woody Allen movie. By a hitman! Blue Jasmine goes one step further. Although unmistakably a Woody Allen project, it is a star vehicle for Cate Blanchett. She makes the movie. I don’t want to suggest that Mr Allen lost control of it somehow; on the contrary, I think that he finally worked up the courage to let a brilliant actor run with her part. In most Woody Allen movies — the ones that I can think of off the top of my head — the pretty girl (Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow) or beautiful woman (Charlotte Rampling, Marion Cotillard) is a muse of sorts; her role is to bewitch the male lead. There is no male lead in Blue Jasmine. The film is something of a solo turn, a one-woman show. Or, rather, maybe, a two-person show, with just you and her. You alone with her.
Blue Jasmine is said to be a mash-up of Streetcar Named Desire and “the Ruth Madoff story.” It’s clear that both of these elements provided working inspiration for the project. However, the roots of Blue Jasmine lie in Medea. In a moment of extreme humiliation, a woman commits an unspeakable act of vengeance, and, this being an update, develops a serious mental disorder as a consequence, because she cannot live with what she has done. Her attempts to deny it inevitably explode in her face. Also in keeping with the modernization of the tale, there is nothing initially attractive, except for her appearance, about this woman. Monstrous in her collapse, she was narcissistic to begin with. She belongs in a secluded convent, one where the mortification of the flesh is rigorous but the habits are elegant. Sadly for her, there haven’t been many such places since 1789.
Why care about someone so heartlessly self-involved, so useless to society? Because she is played so rivetingly by Cate Blanchett, of course — and the encounter is not prolonged beyond the two-hour mark. There is also the operation of Woody Allen’s magic. He lets you think that you’re watching a mash-up of Streetcar and “Ruth Madoff” right up until the moment when you expect the Bernie Madoff character (played by Alec Baldwin) to blurt out the bad news about his balance sheets. But that’s not what he does — he blurts out something very different. And there has never been the whisper of a suggestion that Ruth Madoff did what Jasmine does in response. It is only at this very late moment that the true nature of the story is revealed. You’re left with the grim pleasure of reconsidering everything that you’ve seen.
Everyone else in Blue Jasmine is very good, but, in his usual fashion, Mr Allen confines his actors within their commedia dell’arte roles. Sally Hawkins is the happy-go-lucky girl with a very short memory. Andrew Dice Clay and Bobby Cannavale are big dogs from New Jersey. Michael Stuhlbarg’s dentist is a joke with a nightmarish punchline. Peter Sarsgaard is the one member of the cast who manages to tweak Woody Allen’s formula so as to put himself in control, by making himself as empty as the privileged trust-funder whom he plays. Like Ewan McGregor, Mr Sarsgaard brings a Zen-like perversity to acting, and even here, his character, though duped, turns out have lots of sharp, pointy teeth. (It would have better if they’d cut his tantrum, which somewhat spoils the effect.) I don’t mean to be complaining. It’s not a defect, in the end, that Ms Blanchett burns on a different plane. On the contrary, it feels like something altogether new and wonderful, and we have to go back and watch all the other Woody Allen movies for inklings and intimations.
***
At lunch — I went out to stop myself from checking Facebook every three minutes for pioneer news, and was rewarded upon my return with newly-published photographs of a climbing road presumably west of Rapid City, presumably posted by my still-intact daughter — I read Nicholson Baker’s dandy essay in the current edition of Harper’s, “The Case Against Algebra II.” More about that later. What sizzled in my brain as I read the piece was this question: why are Bill and Melinda Gates and Arne Duncan so keen on teaching of a perfectly useless and even more perfectly (pardon my French) sadistic course?
My answer makes no sense, comes completely from out in left field, &c&c. But bear with. George Packer, the Unwinding is still on my mind (and so is your book).
The people who advocate Algebra II speak it, because Algebra II is the language of organized money.
From the Pearson text that Baker quotes:
If a is a real number for which the denominator of a rational function f(x) is zero, then a is not in the domain of f(x). The graph of f(x) is not continuous as x=a and the function has a point of discontinuity at x=a.
This is an unnecessary way of pointing out the obvious: no number can be divided by zero. There is no need whatever for the dehumanizing crapage of the text!
Remember: with organized money, as with organized crime, it is the money (or the crime) that does the organizing, not the human agents. The human agents are simply among its victims, helplessly driven by the money in their pockets to provide it with means of expansion, by flooding them with the existential horror of someone else’s competitive advantage. Organized money requires its victims — its avatars, you might say — to regard the world in terms such as x=a. In real life, of course, nothing equals anything else. Only money balances out.
Algebra II, as a requirement for admission to the best schools, weeds out the cranks who aren’t cut out for organized money.