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Seeing Pixar's Up reminded me of the power of images to say what words cannot—and especially of the power of film to convey how fleeting and mysterious a lifespan is. Buried in this children's flick is one of the most moving sequences about grief and mourning I have ever seen in a film. Over in Slate, I've been writing about how hard it is to find expressions of grief or mourning that feel equivalent to the actual experience of bereavement. Up contains one of them. I actually had to leave in tears halfway through. The sequence comes at the opening (small spoiler alert) when the film tells the story of a boy and a girl who meet-cute through their love of old-style adventurers: We watch as the shy boy, adorned in aviation goggles, wanders into the clubhouse of an outspoken girl (also wearing goggles) and gets teased into falling in love (and falling from a shaky attic rafter after a botched attempt to be brave). The film then speeds through a montage of their life together, repeatedly returning to their dream of going to the sublime Paradise Falls in South America. It's a relatively modest fantasy that, like so many in life, is never achieved. They age, and then one day the wife grows ill; we glimpse as she spends the end of her days in bed looking at a book she made as a child, with Paradise Falls on the cover and pages dedicated to "Stuff I'm Going To Do." We presume these pages are empty, because those particular adventures never were had. There's another adventure that was never had: the adventure of having children; she had a miscarriage and, it seems, cannot bear more children. When she dies, she leaves behind a lonely husband bent on guarding the home they built together. Every day, he touches his hand to a handprint she made on their mailbox when they first moved in. Every day, he talks to her portrait on the wall. We witness the abiding intimacy of grief.
In a culture remarkably averse to facing the enduring reality of bereavement (and averse, too, to the depiction of what it's like to grow old), Up has done exactly what the overhyped Curious Case of Benjamin Button failed to accomplish. It's encapsulated the mystery and the monumentality of two tiny lives, and made you feel, in their disruption, the dislocation all of us will some day feel. It's not exactly uplifting, but it is inspiring.
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My favorite part of this week's crack up of the New York legislature is Governor Patterson's plea, "Think of the lobbyists!" My next favorite part is that Tom Golisano, the businessman who seems to have prodded two Democratic state senators into flipping to the GOP and instigating a Republican takeover, says he got mad at the Dems after a meeting at which Senate majority leader Malcolm Smith couldn't take his eyes off his BlackBerry. Ah, the BlackBerry brush off. I think I'd put that at the top of a list of digital age breaches of etiquette. As in:
1. Constant BlackBerry distraction during one-on-one meeting. Extra black mark if over lunch.
2. During meeting or lunch, answering call on cell phone, and talking for more than 30 seconds (unless it's your spouse or the babysitter).
3. Talking loudly on cell phone while everyone else in the room is trying to have a conversation. Which is what people do when they get together.
4. Typing audibly during phone call because you are, no not recording the every word of the person on the other end of the line, but answering someone else's e-mail.
5. On the phone, silently checking e-mail so that when the person you're talking to asks a question, a long pause ensues. At the end of which you have to say, "Ah, what did you just ask me?"
Other nominations?
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The crazy thing though, Hanna, about the fringe obsession with Obama and Jewish conspiracy is that it's happening even as the Jews who worried that Obama wouldn't show enough allegiance to Israel are worrying more. Before the election, Obama the candidate held the hands of the little old Jewish ladies with blue hair in Florida who want a president who will put Israel first no matter what—even when the Israeli government doesn't necessarily deserve that kind of fealty—and reassured them that he wouldn't move even the teeniest step away from Bush's Israel stance. (I won't call it pro-Israel, because I don't think it actually works out that way all the time.) And in the end a lot of those Jews in Florida and other states voted for him. Now Obama as president is riling Bibi Netanyahu and talking about Palestine in his big address to Muslims in Cairo and getting stern about Israel's settlements in the West Bank. So how do we explain that Obama's relationship with Jews is being caricatured as too close even as he makes some of them nervous? Maybe James von Brunn picked up sick signals that are even less grounded in reality than usual.
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What is it with Obama and the Jews? Ever since he chose Rahm Emanuel, the child of an Israeli, as his chief of staff, conspiracy theories have raged about Obama's connection to the Jews. Jeffrey Goldberg writes about the number of conspiracy nuts who insist that Tim Geithner, and not just "jew Summers" and "jew Bernanke" is a Jew. (He is not.) Even Obama's own pastor, Jeremiah Wright, blamed "them Jews" for not letting "him talk to me." Surely James von Brunn waited 88 years to act on his inane, murderous thoughts because until now, the connection never seemed so real.
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Ever since Hedda Nussbaum’s battered face appeared on the cover of tabloids in 1987, the wives of insane, violent men have faced a particularly cruel kind of scrutiny. Nussbaum called herself the victim of “intimate terrorism,” but the world judged her culpable for failing to protect her adopted 6-year-old daughter from her murderous husband. The BTK Killer had a wife and children. James von Brunn, the white supremacist who allegedly shot two people at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum yesterday, does too—or at least he did (one son committed suicide, his wife divorced him). They surfaced last night in the Daily News. His 32-year-old son Erik is a student at the University of Maryland, and defends his father: “I love my father,” he said. “Everything you need to know about him is on his Web site.” That such a website (it crashed yesterday, here are its remnants) could coincide with love, even in a son, is hard to stomach. The ex-wife, at least, kept her distance: "[It] ate him alive like a cancer," she said of Von Brunn’s hatred. "It's all he would talk about. When I questioned him, he would get angry and abusive.” She did not, however, alert the authorities.
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Lera Loeb, fashion blogger and self-described "mail-order bride," takes to the pages of Glamour to defend her relationship. Given the power a citizen can wield over a foreigner desperate for a green card, we're all familiar with stories of this kind that end badly. But Loeb's marriage is happy, and hers is a story about stigma; encounters with women who ask "Are you allowed to go out alone?" and "Do you have a curfew?" On a deeper level, it's a story about how marriages motivated by economic need—that is, most marriages in the history of mankind—become taboo when the meaning of marriage shifts to shared interests rather than shared production, love rather than poverty. The old model is somehow threatening, much as new forms of marriage are thought to devalue the institution.
There is an incredible scene in this paper (PDF) on immigrant brides by sociologist Pei-Chia Lan, in which a Taiwanese immigration officer sarcastically interrogates a Vietnamese woman coming into the country with her handicapped Taiwanese husband. “Do you actually love him, or are you just doing this for economic reasons?" the official taunts. "You only met him for two days [before getting engaged]! How romantic!" The official was in a position to decide whether this marriage was valid in the eyes of the state, and economic motivations were taken to be somehow faulty, even criminal. As Lan puts it, "The officer applied polarized dichotomies to characterize the intentions of marriage migrants—voluntary moves versus trafficking, marrying for love versus marrying for money, authentic romance versus bogus union ... These presumptive values devalue traditional marriages as an institutional arrangement of extended families for economic or political exchanges."
Loeb defies the dichotomies Lan lays out; she says she loves her husband, and she married him to get the hell out of the Ukraine. Can we accept that she is better off with the freedom to marry for the right of residency, and hope for love later?
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