TheBlessingWay/KarlMarx/StarshipTroopers

Today I finished Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way. This closing section of the book solidifies the impression that McKee rather than Leaphorn is the novel’s protagonist. Although Leaphorn shows up just in time to technically save the day, it’s McKee that we stay with for most of the time. Order and rationality are restored by the end of the novel, a fact that marks The Blessing Way as a crime novel, but in this case with a different resonance, as the supernatural elements that dominated the first half of the book are all explained as a ruse to keep people away from a certain area—a plot device that unavoidably reminds me of an episode of Scooby Doo! In this regard, Hillerman seems to choose the white world of rationality rather than the Navajo world of the spirits. Ultimately, the thing that really sticks in my mind after finishing this novel is Hillerman’s gift at describing the desert landscape (which is very reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian). The landscape plays a huge role in this novel (both in terms of creating atmosphere and in terms of plot) and Hillerman spends a lot of time evoking it in all its sensuous detail.

I also read the next fifty pages of Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx. In this section of the book Sperber finishes his discussion of Capital and then moves on to discuss Marx’s private life. Ultimately, Sperber’s efforts to deflate the tendency to present Marx as a prophet of the contemporary result in a rather muted and anticlimactic assessment of Capital that doesn’t really do it justice. I think Sperber is right to say that Marx’s version of political economy is influenced heavily by the mainstream economics of the first half of the 19^th century, and that consequently the influence of Capital, which took a long time to be felt because of the lack of an English translation, was impacted by many of its ideas becoming quickly outdated. And yet, to state an obvious point, Capital is still massively influential, a fact that Sperber seems to take for granted rather than explaining. The sudden shift from a discussion of Capital to the personal details of Marx’s private life is quite jarring and one feels as if one is suddenly reading a Marxist version of People magazine! Sperber’s emphasis here is that Marx was in many ways a perfect bourgeois, and that this should not be seen as a criticism of Marx, but rather as yet more evidence of the extent to which he was absolutely a product of his time.

I also watched StarshipTroopers, a 1997 action movie by Paul Verhoeven that is bizarrely controversial. On the surface, it’s a standard sci-fi blockbuster about a future Earth’s armed forces battling bugs on another planet, but over the years (and just like its source material, Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel of the same name) it has been the focus of accusations that it uncritically celebrates militarism and is even fascistic. Verhoeven has defended the movie by arguing that it is a satire of fascism and militarism (which I think it is, albeit in a ham-fisted way) but the real puzzle for me is why this film has been singled out for this kind of criticism when you could easily apply the same critiques to dozens of other movies (and much more accurately, in many cases). Anyway, the digital effects are excellent, but the acting is for the most part excruciatingly bad. Caspar Van Dien and Denise Richards look (and act) like they’re made out of plastic rather than being real people. The honorable exception is Michael Ironside, with a wonderfully intense performance as a grizzled combat veteran. He’s the only character who looks like he has a life once the camera stops rolling.