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| date | 2001-001-25:10:28 |
| Movies |
A few days ago I watched Dangerous Liaisons for the first time in many years, and it is at least as good as I remember it, despite a needlessly black ending. I wanted to see it again because it's about a man who plays games with love, and finds that they're a lot more serious than he thought. Love isn't to be toyed with, and sincerity will get you every time. John Malcovitch's character (I didn't get most of the names, and wouldn't be able to spell them if I had) is genuinely evil, as is Glenn Close's, and they both get what they deserve. He gets more--he gets the knowldge that he really did know pure true love, that what he had spent his life mocking and belittling was in fact a force so powerful it was going to destroy him. That it destroys his lover as well is a terribly stupid twist in the plot, needed presumeably as a sop to the spirit of the times in which the story was written. Many people believe that good is helpless when it comes in contact with evil, and the only way to defend against evil is to withdraw. This belief is false, and one of the things that I really like about this film is that Malcovitch's character sets out to corrupt Pfeiffer's character, but instead he is redeemed by her. Her shock and horror as he betrays her is nothing to the cummulative effect that her love as on him: he ultimately rejects everything he thought he believed in; superficiality, manipulation, cruelty, social status. He accepts his own death willingly because he knows that he has been false to himself for his entire life, and in the end false to that which is best within him: his love for her. Aside from the power of the plot, the cinematography is lovely--there's a nice shot of a chandelier being lit that is held for a few seconds in the first few minutes of the film that's composed so beautifully it really deserves to be a painting. Malcovitch is perfectly cast, although I could see Sigourney Weaver doing at least as good a job as Close as his evil cohort. |
| Reading |
I'm still slogging my way through Tom Jones, which could have used a copy editor with an endless supply of blue pencils. However, I'm past the half-way mark, have adjusted the pace of my reading to the pace of the book, and will probably finish in the next few weeks. The density of events in the plot seems to be increasing a bit, although I suspect improbabilities of Dickensian proportions are waiting in ambush. Early Greek Philosophy is a Penguin collection of writings of the pre-Socratics. I'm surprised by how little we know of many of them, and at the same time by how prescient Heraclitus seems to have been. He seems to have understood that change is part of identity, which neither Parmenides nor anyone who came after him seems to have done. Intellectual history in the West is often viewed as a conflict between Aristotle and Plato, but I think a case can be made for it being a conflict between Near Eastern empiricism versus Greek rationalism. The pre-Socratics were all Ionians, mostly from Milesus or thereabouts, on the mainland of Asia Minor, and presumably in contact with cultural influences from the inland cultures, despite the intervening mountains. Mesopotamian science, which gets called "the science of lists" sometimes, was heavy on careful observation of nature and codification in the form of lists of observed regularities. But the Mesopotamians were short on ontological commitment--they didn't develop grand schemes of the cosmos the way the Greeks did. The Greeks made tremendous progress beyond what the Mesopotamians did by engaging in more-or-less plausible ontological speculations, which allowed them to build powerful conceptual apparatii to aid and enhance their understanding of the world. The defect of this approach is the lamentable tendency of its practitioners to reify their abstrations, and claim that, for instance, atoms are more real than the things they constitute. While they enabled themselves to wander far from the narrow path of empiricism that the Mesopotamians trod, the Greeks and their successors (that would us) have more often than not wandered off the precipices of rationalism into the canyons of idealism. I think there are probably ways to avoid this. |