Abbott/Cockburn/Hansel&Gretel

Sometimes the recreations of the culinary, architectural, furniture, and fashion styles of the 1940s/1950s in Megan Abbott’s Die a Little are so viscerally vivid that they seem not only overdone but also obviously produced by someone who never lived in that era; in other words, they are clearly the work of an aficionado, their vividness the product of (over)enthusiastic and detailed research. What stops the recreations from being merely kitsch, however, is that their overdone nature mirrors precisely Alice Steele’s overinvestment in normality, her desperate attempt to make her new life and her new identity work. Their vividness also comes from the fact that so many of these details are centered around Alice and observed from Lora’s perspective, who examines everything that Alice does and makes minutely to try and understand who Alice really is. In my previous post, I mentioned that there is a strong Chandlerian flavor to Abbott’s work, but with a twist. Consistent with her interest in reinventing how women are represented in noir fiction, Abbott takes Chandler’s persistent emphasis on intense emotional relationships between men (Marlowe and General Sternwood, Marlowe and Terry Lennox) and transforms it into a series of equally intense relationships between women. Despite Lora’s almost incestuous closeness with her brother and her complicated relationship with her lover Mike Standish, the most complex relationships in the book are those between Lora and Lois Slattery, the murder victim with whom Alice identifies and on whose behalf she seeks justice, and, of course, between Lora and Alice. Simultaneously attracted and repelled by her sister in law, Lora ultimately succeeds in ‘protecting’ her brother from Alice but by the end of the novel Lora knows that she has been just as, if not more, impacted by knowing Alice than her brother. And after such (self) knowledge, what happens next? That’s the unanswered question that dominates the conclusion of Die A Little.

I also read the next fifty pages of Alexander Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture. Given the range of his interests and accomplishments, it’s easy to forget that Cockburn’s primary professional identity was that of journalist. This fact comes across in this book both in the form of his frequent tributes to fellow journalists, but also in his criticisms of various betrayals of journalistic ideals. Not surprisingly, Cockburn reserves special venom for Rupert Murdoch, who he sees as particularly dangerous given the extent of his power. Summarizing the argument of Bruce Page, Murdoch’s biographer in The Murdoch Archipelago,  Cockburn writes “Page’s core thesis is that Murdoch offers his target governments a privatized version of a state propaganda service, manipulated without scruple and with no regard for truth.” Writing these words in 2003 had special meaning for Cockburn in the sense that the American media were in the process of constructing a textbook example of privatized state propaganda by noisily supporting Bush’s case for the invasion of Iraq on the basis of the supposed presence of WMDs: “Of course 2003 was a year in which the governments, the intelligence services, the military bureaucracies, the intellectual whoremongers and whores of two countries, America and Britain, displayed themselves as brazen and incompetent liars as they maneuvered towards war on Iraq.” Defenses of journalistic ethics in these days of boundless cynicism may seem quaint at best, pointless at worst. Cockburn reminds us that the stakes are as high as ever.

I also watched Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013),  another one of those films that critics hate and audiences absolutely love. Its worldwide gross of $200 million against production costs of $50 million guarantee that a sequel will be along soon. Its premise is simplicity itself: the adult versions of Hansel and Gretel, having learned valuable vocational lessons from their childhood witch-killing experiences, are now professional witch-hunters. Hired by a small town to recover their missing children, they destroy a coven of witches led by Famke Janssen, who seems to enjoy herself much more here than she does playing the strait-laced Phoenix in the X-Men films. It is striking, however, that even a film like this, that relies so heavily on the audience’s guilt-free consumption of gory special effects still feels the need to draw a distinction between ‘good’ (white) witches and ‘bad’ (dark) witches. Presumably, this is the director hedging his bets; once the badness of the bad witches is established, we can presumably sit back and enjoy the ensuing slaughter. It is probably churlish, therefore, to introduce this list of people executed for witchcraft, which runs from the 13^th to the 18^th centuries, and which includes Ursulina De Jesus, a Brazilian woman executed in 1754 after being accused of removing her husband's virility. She was burned to death.