The Burden of Proof

One of the most amusing aspects of the anti-Shakespeare cabal is, to me, how they assume that the burden of proof is somehow on the orthodox opinion. The idea that plays from Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors to King Lear and The Tempest were written by William Shakespeare is a very old one, with the first printed connection between him and the canon appearing in 1592. That’s 416 years and still running.

The first attempt to connect Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, with the canon came in 1920 when it was put forward by a man named Looney. That still puts the Man from Stratford up by 328 years. A sizable gap.

The burden of proof falls to them.

Can they show any facts that show that anyone other than William Shakespeare wrote those plays and poems? In the case of Shakespeare, as I have already shown, his name is attached to the plays and poems repeatedly in his lifetime and immediately following. That is fact. Combing the works for stray references that might be twisted to fit the facts of someone else’s life is not proof. If I worked hard enough, I could probably use that technique to “prove” that I wrote the plays.

Facts. Show me. The burden is yours.

Shakespeare v. Aristotle

Although we, here in the West, like to think that our intellectual history has progressed in an unbroken line since the ancient Greeks, the truth is that when Rome fell (although it was really more of a mudslide than a sudden collapse), it fell hard. And while the term Dark Ages as a description of the time that followed that fall might be a bit harsh, the intellectual lights of the European tradition did dim very noticeably. Ancient documents were lost, connections were broken, and much of the intellectual life of Europe retreated to monasteries and abbeys.

The ancient documents of Greece and Rome–or what was left of them, actually–returned to Europe thanks to Islam. The Moors in Spain communicated with their foes and trading partners, the European Christians, through the mediation of Sephardic Jews. Part of this communication involved translating the ancient texts of Aristotle and others that had been lost after the fall of Rome.

By this point, the Early Middle Ages were morphing into the High Middle Ages. Cities were reviving, smart people were coming out of hiding, and students began gathering and hiring teachers in what would become the first degree-granting universities of the time. And Aristotle was the Eckhart Tolle of his day.

I bring all this up because one of the prejudices that is the basis of the anti-Shakespeare cabal is that William Shakespeare could not have written those plays because he wasn’t well-educated enough. That, however, doesn’t bear with the facts, and, actually, the lack of a university education is indicated by the content of the plays and poems.

A university education in Elizabethan England was not the same as a university education is today. Universities supplied the world with clerics and lawyers, and there were no creative writing programs. The only part of a university education that would have had an effect on the writers of the time was the study of Aristotle, and, particularly, his work called Poetics.

In the work that survives, Aristotle talks a great deal about tragedy, and he sets down a number of rules for the writing of plays, a version of which became known as the Unities. According to this theory, a good tragedy will take place during one day, should have only one setting, and should stick to just one story with the fewest number of subplots possible. Ben Jonson–a university man–held these dear, but Shakespeare trampled all over them. He also mixed comedy and tragedy freely, an approach that shows more of an acquaintance with medieval mystery plays (and one was still being performed in Coventry, near Stratford-upon-Avon, in Shakespeare’s youth) than it does a university education.

Now that is not, in and of itself, proof of a lack of a university education, however, it supports even less the notion that the writer had spent time at either Oxford or Cambridge.

It is also amazing how many mistakes of history and geography were made by an author who, it’s alleged, had to be supremely well-educated and well-traveled. He gives Cleopatra a mechanical clock and landlocked Bohemia a coastline. Time and again in the plays, he reveals himself to know little of the foreign lands he writes about, but a great deal about

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Shakespeare should not be confused with James Joyce. His best qualities are not that he is either erudite or learned. His best qualities are his perceptiveness and his humanity. These qualities are tied to a native sense of the power and sweep of English that did not originate in a course on rhetoric. He is forever mixing his metaphors (“take arms against a sea of troubles”) and writing in ways that break all the formal rules. Shakespeare’s genius was born, not made, a volcano of talent that erupted brilliant plays with lousy endings, strange and difficult sonnets, two long poems of varying quality, and that hypnotic, exotic, wonderful poem, “The Phoenix and the Turtle.”

He paraphrased, he plagiarized, and he stole. He also transformed and illuminated. He was smart, but not scholarly, reasonably well-read for the period, but not bookish. Simply because the things that were common knowledge then (the figures of Greek and Roman mythology, for example) are now arcane is no reason to suppose that the author of the Shakespeare canon had any sort of extraordinary education. His greatest knowledge came not from books or even an Oxford don, but from the great and terrible vicissitudes of life.

I Blame Agatha Christie

Late last week, a few bits of the so-called “anti-Stratfordian” argument were put forth in the comments of my previous post. (For those who are not hep to such things, people who do not believe that William Shakespeare actually wrote the plays ascribed to him are, for some reason, called anti-Stratfordians. They should really be called anti-Shakespearians, if their beef is really with the man rather than the town of his birth and death, but more of that later.) Since the commenter referred to “[t]he parade of fantastic rationalizations dreamed up by the Shakespeare industry to defend their secular church,” I thought it might be appropriate to delve a little deeper into this question and to further delve into the way that people delude themselves into thinking they are being rational and logical when they are, in fact, not.

The trouble with the anti-Stratfordians is that they don’t take the facts and draw conclusions. They start with their conclusions and sift through the facts for anything they can find to justify those conclusions. That’s called rationalization.

The facts in question are these: A collection of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long poems, and sundry smaller poems exists. The named author on all these works–at the time of their production–is William Shakespeare. There was no controversy about this assignment of authorship during Master Shakespeare’s lifetime. Nor was there in the years immediately following his death. Nor was there upon the publication of a book that is known as the First Folio, an enormous and expensive volume that attempted to be the complete collected works of Shakespeare. There is a preface written by the editors of the volume, John Heminges and Henry Condell–both fellow shareholders in the acting company Shakespeare worked with–attesting to his authorship. There is also a dedicatory rhyme written by Ben Jonson, who was the era’s most prominent playwright. He also attests to Shakespeare’s authorship. There are also three poems–I always forget that they are there–by other poets attesting to Shakespeare’s authorship. None of this was questioned.

He was referred to as the author of the plays and poems in a number of documents still extant. He is insulted by Robert Greene in 1592. Greene’s publisher, Henry Chettle, almost immediately apologizes. Frances Meres writes a panegyric in 1598. He’s referred to in a piece of gossip in John Manningham’s diary and connected to the play Richard III. He is noted as the author of the plays in the rolls of the Master of the Revels, the functionary who oversaw the performance of the plays seen by both Elizabeth I and James I. A law student rhapsodized over Venus and Adonis and told of the fashion of sleeping with the poem under one’s pillow. It goes on and on.

And the number of flat out dismissals of his authorship at the time? Their number, to use Eric Idle’s inspired phrase, are nearly one.

More facts: the authorship of the plays was never questioned publicly until the 1850s, some some 240 years after the man’s death. A woman named Delia Bacon wrote a book that insinuated that Sir Francis Bacon (no relation, but small matters like that rarely stop the delusional) actually wrote the plays. She was later (although not that much later) committed to a mental institution. This is the founding genius of this cult.

No, the truth is that there is no contemporary fact that supports the notion that the plays were written by anyone other than William Shakespeare, and no way to look at the facts and to come to the conclusion that someone else had written them. But the anti-Stratfordians don’t go from fact to conclusion. That is too inconvenient. They start from an assumption, and a prejudiced and snobbish one at that. Their assumption is that no middle class git from the Midlands could have possibly written these wonderful works. Those who question the authorship of the plays are anti-Stratfordians because their prejudice is not against the man really, but against his provincial origins. (Despite mountains of evidence in the body of the plays and poems that point to their having been composed by someone of a provincial background.) Their favorite plays had to be written by someone with a title or a degree, and preferably both.

Genius, however, has a way of arising where it will arise and cares not for title or advantage. But I’ll get at that tomorrow, when I discuss Shakespeare v. Aristotle.

Rational

While writing about Shakespeare the other day, I started reflecting on the way that people will fight an onslaught of facts with the weapon of rationalization. This came to me, of course, because of the supposed “authorship question,” in which people routinely confuse rationalizations for rational thought. Facts are something to be refuted and got around, not the basis on which suppositions are made.

Take the current favorite in the authorship sweepstakes, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Now his “candidacy” (for a position that logic dictates is not even open) immediately comes acropper of one very inconvenient fact. He died in 1604 and Shakespeare kept spitting out plays until 1612 or 13. Now, rather than concede that his Lordship could not possibly have had anything to do with the writing of Shakespeare’s plays, they develop intricate theories to explain the discrepancy, theories that are not explanations, but rationalizations meant to try to circumvent the facts. Belief predates the rationalizations for that belief.

I’ve seen this phenomenon in other areas of life. An interest of mine that few who know me would suspect is my interest in the career of the Zodiac, a serial killer who suddenly became very prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. My interest in the case is personal. We lived in San Francisco at the time, and one of Zodiac’s victims, a cab driver named Paul Stine, was murdered four or five blocks from our house. I used to walk past the crime scene whenever I went to visit my friend, Mark. I realized that I needed to look into this when I came across a tawdry book called Zodiac by Robert Graysmith. Just seeing the title unnerved me slightly, and I almost came apart at the seams when I read a phrase in one of the letters the Zodiac sent to the San Francisco Chronicle: “and pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing off.” I had remembered it word-for-word over the span of over two decades.

Anyway, I say all that to say this. I made the mistake of getting involved in a messageboard that was frequented by amateur sleuths who wanted to discuss the case. What I found was an assortment of armed camps, groups of people who supported various “suspects” in the case, most of which had been gotten from the last chapter of Zodiac. There was also a small contingent that supported Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and one lone fellow who thought Bruce Davis, a member of the Manson Family, was the killer. There were also a couple of skeptics, which, for a small amount of time, included me.

The facts were meaningless for most of these folks. Eyewitness accounts were discredited. Hearsay evidence was highlighted. Theories involving elaborate disguises were proposed and tortured logic ruled the day. Eventually, ABC paid to have a DNA profile done from the back of one of the stamps on one of the letters, and the most popular suspect–a guy who died in 1992 named Arthur Allen–was cleared.

Now, you would think that DNA evidence clearing a man’s name would be sufficient, but it wasn’t. Truckloads of rationalizations were wheeled out and dumped all over everywhere. He must have divined, in 1969, that DNA testing would eventually be developed, and he must have gotten somebody else to lick the stamp, one theory read. Can you imagine the conversation that would have had to have happened? “Hey, Bob! Would you mind licking this stamp for me? I’ve just been eating crackers.”

When the facts don’t suit your purpose, alter them with a wild theory. I think this accounts for the plethora of conspiracy theories that abound these days. If the facts don’t support your personal fantasy, find a conspiracy. If your ideology keeps running aground on the craggy shore of reality, blame reality and trumpet your ideology louder.

We are the animal that believes. We bind ourselves together in tribes with beliefs. The mistake of the Enlightenment is that the people who developed the theories that made the Enlightenment run believed man to be rational, but he is not. He is a creature of belief. And when belief is challenged by rationality, man attacks it with his most convenient weapon, rationalization.

Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday

In A Thousand Clowns, the character of Murray Burns has what he calls his own personal holiday. That day is Irving R. Feldman’s birthday, and he keeps it sacred because Mr Feldman “is proprietor of perhaps the most distinguished kosher delicatessen in this neighborhood and as such I hold the day of his birth in reverence.” Ever since seeing A Thousand Clowns for the first time, I’ve liked the idea of having a personal holiday. I’ve always intended mine to be Shakespeare’s birthday, but it hasn’t usually worked out that I could take the day off.

I bring this up because today is celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthday.

I say, “celebrated,” because we don’t actually know the date of his birth. They didn’t keep those kinds of records back then, and even had they, the records in Stratford-upon-Avon from the Elizabethan era were lost in a fire a couple of hundred years ago. We do, however, have the records from the church, Holy Trinity Church. From these we know that he was baptized on April 26, 1564. In those days, babies were usually baptized within days of their birth, so that they would be covered in case of death, which happened quite a lot.

So, he may or may not have been born on April 23rd. However, since he died on April 23, 1616, society gives into the romance of coincidences and celebrates his birth and death on the same day. It’s economical when you really think about it. He was born in one house in Stratford and died in another a block or two away. He went a long way in between.

There are those who wish to believe that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote all those famous plays and poems, but they are wrong. Many of them are probably very nice people, good friends, and solid citizens, but they are wrong and decidedly wrong, and everything they think on the subject is predicated in a fallacy.

They like to refer to him as being illiterate, and yet we have several examples of his signature. Illiterates cannot sign their names, that’s part of what makes them illiterate. In fact, on his will, he signed “by me William Shakspeare” on the third page and the addition of those two tiny words dispels completely the idea that he was illiterate. Even a person who had mechanically learned to reproduce their own name (and I cannot think of a reason why someone in Elizabeth’s England would have developed such a practice) would not have inserted “by me.” As small as they are, it would have been beyond such a person.

He is called “uneducated” because there is no record of his having attended school. The reason for this, of course, is the fire that destroyed the attendance records of the King’s New School, where he almost certainly attended. There is no reason to suppose that he didn’t attend the King’s New School, since it was free and his father was one of the town’s leading citizens. There he would have studied heavily in Latin and come to know well the ancient authors whose works so often underpin the plays that followed, such as Plutarch and Ovid. A child of a town, such as Shakespeare, was much more likely to be familiar with “the whining school boy with his satchel” than any nobleman would have.

The thing that the so-called anti-Stratfordians never discuss, because they can’t, is Shakespeare’s treatment of common people and the amount of Warwickshire dialect and glover’s slang (his father made gloves) that appears throughout the plays and poems. They like to claim that no impudent commoner could have written about court life with such knowledge, but I find it much more astounding that an Earl could write

Lo! as a careful housewife runs to catch

One of her feather’d creatures broke away,

Sets down her babe and makes an swift dispatch

In pursuit of the thing she would have stay,

Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,

Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent

To follow that which flies before her face,

Not prizing her poor infant’s discontent;

So runn’st thou after that which flies from thee,

Whilst I thy babe chase thee afar behind;

But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,

And play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind:

So will I pray that thou mayst have thy ‘Will,’

If thou turn back, and my loud crying still.

Time-and-again, the imagery used is humble and every day. He speaks to us not from the manor house, but from the crowded streets and alleyways. Any fool can write a scene at court, and those scenes are notable for their full-blooded characters and fine oratory rather than their finely observed detail. Justice Shallow, though, he comes from life, as does Dogberry and Nick Bottom. And they are the sorts of characters only a commoner would have encountered.

I won’t go on, but I could. Shakespeare was born in Stratford and died in Stratford and wrote a bunch of plays and poems while he was on this Earth. And so we celebrate.

Skip and Don and Pete

The other night, while partaking of wings outside at a local wing shack, I listened to the play-by-play of the Atlanta Braves-Los Angeles Dodgers game as it was piped out of a TV behind me. From the time I first ventured to Atlanta in 1983, the play-by-play team had featured Skip Caray and Pete van Wieren. Don Sutton came along in 1989, and Joe Simpson joined in during the ’90s. None of these were heard during the call of the game the other night.

A couple of years ago, whichever conglomerate owns the Braves now decided that the announcers–with the exception of Joe Simpson–weren’t bland enough, so they overthrew the reigning order and instituted a new regime. Now, my point here is not to denigrate the current crew of announcers. I do not know them well, and they seemed to do a decent job of calling the game. They were brought in to be neutral and inoffensive, two counts on which they succeeded, and actually admirably so. But I missed the old days.

We got in the car to head home, and my wife put the game on the radio, and there were Skip Caray and Pete van Wieren. (Sutton was let go and has wound up working the Nationals games in Washington, which is one of the best reasons I can think of for living in the DC area.) And even though Skip’s voice was no longer what it had been, what had been tame on TV was now lively, and what had been bland was now fun.

There is nothing quite like a good call of a game, and it is getting increasingly difficult to hear one called with personality. I don’t think any team has ever had announcers with more personality, combined, though, than the Braves did with Caray, Sutton, and van Wieren. What a great trio, paired up in different combinations until Sutton and Caray were mysteriously separated earlier in this century. All three were knowledgeable and opinionated and articulate. They were (and are) fun to listen to, and the listener got the sense (false, I’m sure, but reassuring) that they had come to know them as people.

Baseball, of course, has become increasingly corporatized in recent years as salaries and the value of teams have skyrocketed. Unfortunately, one of baseball’s most attractive qualities traditionally has been the individuality that permeated it. Football was always the corporate game, with teams acting in concert. Wackiness and eccentricity were not allowed on the gridiron, but often bloomed on the baseball diamond.

This held true for the players (was there ever a football equivalent to Dizzy Dean?), the owners (Charley Finley, Bill Veeck, Ted Turner), fans, and announcers. The most eccentric basketball player I can think of was Marvin Barnes whose eccentricity involved getting apprehended in airports with firearms. There are no Bob Ueckers or Oil Can Boyds. Despite its basis as a business, baseball was always personal in a way that other sports weren’t. (Except maybe hockey, which is probably one of things I like about it.)

Baseball announcers shouldn’t be encouraged to be bland. Eccentricity, personality, and individuality should be the hallmarks of baseball announcers, not their curse. But this is a problem that we will continue to have while teams are owned by huge corporations, which is going to be the trend from here on out. The number of dollars involved are extraordinary, and the corporate atmosphere is timid and meek. Corporate vice presidents seek the mediocre, because their goal is to avoid controversy, which is something that Skip and Don and Pete were never good at.

I do know one thing, though. Whenever I watch the Braves on TV, I’ll make sure I have the volume low on the TV and the call of the game emanating from the radio.

What’s the Story?

In yesterday’s installment, I wrote some off-the-cuff remarks about JK Rowling and her lawsuit against a once-and-future sycophant over a claim of plagiarism. Now, this is a subject that I hadn’t thought about much, and, in fact, until yesterday, I didn’t even know that there was a lawsuit. As a result of this rushing in where angels daren’t dangle a tootsie, a pair of comments appeared from some Internet wraith calling him- or herself “Inside Info.” For all I know, it was Ms Rowling herself, and, if it was, I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance. Actually, even if it wasn’t, I’m still pleased to make Inside Info’s acquaintance.

Inside (if you don’t mind me putting this on a first name basis so quickly) presented the case for Ms Rowling in a fair and calm manner, which, in the slash and burn atmosphere of the Internet, was quite appreciated by me. I also appreciated Inside Info directing me back to the subtleties of life and for making me think of things in such a way that I got an idea for a story.

Now, let me state right up front that this will never be a story about JK Rowling, Steven Vander Ark, or their lawsuit. Nothing good could come from that, not for me, not for them. Trying to write about people in that way runs a significant risk of having characters slide into caricature, and the effect ends up being too heavy-handed and forced. And when I say that an idea for a story has presented itself, that does not mean that an entire plot came to me. It just means that I recognized a subject that interests me along with a couple of very vague elements that I plan to use in exploring that subject.

The entire idea that set me off is set out in the following paragraph that I wrote as part of my response to Inside’s second comment:

I fully understand the kind of celebrity that Mr Vander Ark attained in Harry Potter circles. They are the big wheels at the conferences, and it [is] easy for such people to begin to think too much of themselves. Some folks start to see themselves as stars when they are really pieces of tinsel reflecting the light of a star. It happens. Other people handle it better and keep things in perspective.

It is also founded in Inside’s reminder that public people are still affected by the personal.

I have no idea where this notion will take me and probably won’t for years to come. The story I am currently working on is one that I had the initial idea for in 1997, and it’s changed a lot in the intervening years. This one will too. For example, I doubt that it will involve a famous literary figure at all and will probably have something to do with two historians, one amateur and one professional. It will probably ultimately involve a lawsuit because the law is an area that interests me and that I work in comfortably. Particulars will change and the characters will grow out of the story and then, in turn, affect the direction that the story takes.

I don’t know if it was coincidence or fate that led me to read that story in The New York Times yesterday, but either way it led to good things for me. It brought me a new, friendly Internet wraith and a story. Not a bad day, all things considered.

He Cried. Are You Happy Now, JK Rowling?

You would think that someone with half of the world’s known money supply would be above such things, but JK Rowling and Warner Entertainment are in the process of suing a 50-year-old geek librarian for having the temerity to compile a Harry Potter encyclopedia.

The plaintiffs claim that the encyclopedia plagiarizes the Harry Potter books by quoting from them without adding enough new content to justify the borrowings. Apparently the redoubtable Ms Rowling also had plans of her own for producing a Harry Potter encyclopedia, and she feels that Steven Jan Vander Ark (to quote Dave Barry, I am not making that up; and please, Dave Barry, don’t sue me for quoting you like that) and his publisher are stepping on her well-groomed toes.

Mr. Vander Ark and some others already maintain the Harry Potter Lexicon website, which she had apparently approved of, and he was simply moving it to the next level. Why it’s okay as a website, but evil when translated into handy book form, I’m not sure. Why it is different from the large number of books that explain passages from Finnegan’s Wake, I’m also not sure, even adjusting for the quality of the writing and the depth of Ms Rowling’s pockets.

As to the question of plagiarism, one must ask whether it would be possible to publish a gloss on these books without quoting from them. I don’t personally see how, unless there are actual spells and incantations involved. American copyright law provides an exception to infringement for “fair use” of a text. And while Ms Rowling and Warner Entertainment assert that potential sales of the Potter books will be lost, it is difficult to imagine how. Would someone–a reasonable person, to use the typical legal standard–really forgo buying the Potter books after acquiring The Harry Potter Lexicon? If that’s true, wouldn’t it follow that the Merriam-Webster dictionary infringes on every work ever written in the English language? And if it does, can I join the suit?

Mr Vander Ark and people like him are the pilot fish to Ms Rowling’s Great White Shark. The relationship is symbiotic, and a person cannot attain the heights that Ms Rowling has without picking up a number of–hangers-on isn’t quite the right word–attendants. Their prosperity arises from hers and cannot take the place of hers. In my opinion, this suit is paranoiac and pointless, and she should have been above it.

Action

Here’s the sad thing about me. I really want to make a movie or two. Or four. No more than six. Really. And a TV miniseries. Other than that, I have no desire to be in show business. Just a handful of movies and a TV show. And maybe a fragrance. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

There are problems, of course. I don’t live in LA, I didn’t go to film school, and my parents never thought to name me M. Night Cassamas. The chances of me ever being able to make a film of any sort are remote at best. And yet that hunger still burns within me.

Over a dozen years ago, I directed a small, two-minute long piece for a video demo I worked on with two other guys. We had done an audio parody of those commercials they use to run for crazy houses you could put your teenager in. One of the other fellows had written it, and it was a pretty good piece. Well, as the video demo developed and enlarged, I had the idea of adding visuals to the audio piece. I put together a concept, and we shot it one Sunday in three locations. And while we were doing that–rehearsing, shooting, and scouting locations on the fly–I thought, “You know, I could do this every day for the rest of my life.”

I’ve never been more comfortable doing something in my entire life.

Unfortunately, making movies the way I would like to takes money. Lots of money. Great big canvas bags with dollars signs printed on the sides. Of course, I could make a pretty good movie for 1/100th or even 1/1000th of what the big time directors spend, but it is still a lot of money by my standards. And the more money you spend–up to a point–the better the final product will be.

It is, on its face, a pipedream. Still, it doesn’t hurt anyone to dream or to strive or to hope. Show business is a strange business, and movies get made for odd reasons, so maybe my chance will come. And if you happen to see any piles of canvas bags with dollar signs printed on them, grab one for me, will you?

The Rules of the Game

In 1939, Jean Renoir made his classic film, The Rules of the Game. It is, on its surface, a romantic farce concerning the sexual caprices of upper class Frenchmen of the time. And yet, done in the style of a trifle, it is rife with meaning and texture and depth.

I had seen it before, but watched it again last week, and it had a strange effect on me that I hadn’t remembered from before. In contrast to a melodrama, in which the antics of those onscreen provoke an immediate, sentimental response, I was able to get through the film dry-eyed. It was afterward that it started to effect me. I felt it in my core, as a kind of ache. It was disturbing in the way that real life is, as a shock and as a nervous event. Quite extraordinary.

It was a failure when it was released originally, and fights broke out at the initial screening. This is one of the differences between great films and the mediocre crap that most people waste their time seeing. When people leave the latest slasher film or maudlin adventure, even if they hated it, they rarely get in fist fights or try to set the theater on fire. Since the experience they had was inauthentic and bland, so is their response. They have learned nothing about the human experience or the problems of life, and have just spent a packet of money doing nothing for no particular reason.

The Rules of the Game inspired such reactions because it touched on very fundamental themes and concerns. It roused people’s passions rather than anesthetized them with explosions and special effects. The explosions occur inside your being rather than outside you in a two-dimensional image on a screen. This is what constitutes great art, whether in literature, film, music, or on canvas. The special effects happen inside you and are personal and not remote.

This is not to say that nothing happens in The Rules of the Game. Since it is based in French farce, there are husbands and wives and their lovers. There are secret meetings and mistaken assumptions and identities. There are even gunshots (in fact, gunshots–both distant and near–form almost a musical score under the story itself) and someone dies in an act that falls somewhere between murder and manslaughter.

This is not a movie for the faint of heart. One famous scene shows what today we would call a canned hunt in which wealthy people wait in blinds while rabbits and pheasants are herded out of the brush and into the open. Since this was filmed at a time before the animal rights movement, real rabbits and pheasants were really killed. It is a brutal and horrifying scene that prefigures the tragedy at the end. In most movies, death is remote and more a concept and a bit of pretend than anything else. This movie makes death real and does not glorify it, shows death in its horror and does not glamorize it. Needless death disgusts Renoir, and we sympathize not with the hunters in this scene, but with the hunted.

It is a brilliant and beautiful film, and the techniques used alone could fill a film lover’s day with bits and pieces to savor. It is a great film, in French with subtitles. It is about individuals and society and humankind. It speaks to those deep, dark, lonely places inside us all. My only complaint about the edition currently available is that it is not letterboxed. Perhaps the next one will be. Either way, it’s worth a look. Just trust me, it’s worth a look.