Today I read the
next fifty pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet
Dell. Just when I thought this novel could not get any worse, Emily
Thornhill, while getting ready to cover the Powers trial in Clarksburg, VA,
adopts Mason, a street urchin who tries to rob her, and sets about converting
him in Ragged Dick fashion. One new set of clothes and a system of values later
and presto! Mason is Emily’s research assistant. Happily, Emily still had time
to have sex by a deserted skating rink with her bank manager lover William,
having thankfully had the foresight, as Phillips tell us, to leave her
underwear in her hotel room beforehand. I’m going to have a celebratory drink
once I get to the end of this novel.
Fortunately, I
also read the first half of a remarkable book, The Landscape of Murder, by Antonio Olmos http://thelandscapeofmurder.wordpress.com/.
In 2011 and 2012 a total of 210 murders took place in London. Olmos decided to
take photos of each one of the murder scenes, usually a few days after the
murder took place. Although this project has some obvious surface similarities
to the crime scene photographs of Weegee in the 1930s and 1940s collected in
his book Naked City http://gothamist.com/2012/01/04/grisly_crime_scene_photos_from_1930.php#photo-1
I think a better
comparison is the work done by the Los Angeles Times’ Homicide Report http://projects.latimes.com/homicide/about/.
Like the Homicide Report, an important aspect of what Olmos is doing is to
represent those acts of violence that the rest of the media ignores or just
barely acknowledges. Even if just for a moment, Olmos’ camera and the
accompanying text tell the story of a death and in doing so they invest it with
the meaning of a memorial that will endure. Deliberately undramatic, these
photographs capture the dreadful banality of murder, the fact that the
disenfranchised and poor tend to be disproportionately impacted by it, and the
attempts by friends and family to mark the scene of death with tributes to the
person who has been taken from them. This book is essential reading.
I also watched Catching Fire, the second movie in the Hunger Games trilogy starring Jennifer
Lawrence. Watching this movie was a salutary reminder of the fact that the
meaning of a film can depend on whom you watch it with. In this case, I watched
Catching Fire with my older daughter,
who is a huge Hunger Games and
Jennifer Lawrence fan. She loved the movie, while I thought it wasn’t as good
as the first one, being much less invested in character and more in symbols. My
point, however, is that my daughter’s investment in Lawrence’s character, and
in particular the extent to which that character represents female empowerment
for my daughter, gave me a new perspective on the hoary question of whether
films of this kind have any politically progressive potential. The answer, as
always, is ‘It depends.’ In this case, it depended on who I watched the film
with, and the conversation my daughter and I had afterward about the movie.
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