#especially in the context of the winter war and its aftermath

[actualartistgrill]

A normal guy with normal friends :)

[warrioreowynofrohan]

The Leithian Reread - Canto IX (Lúthien Defeats Sauron)

The first thing to remember for this canto is that Finrod and Beren have been imprisoned in Tol-in-Gaurhoth for a long time. For a long while I had the impression of them being there for maybe a couple weeks, and a wolf eating one of the companions every day or so. But it’s been much longer than that:

First, they were already captive when Lúthien asked Melian about what was happening to Beren. Then there’s any days before she told Daeron about her plan to go rescue Beren, and then all the time she was imprisoned in Hirilorn, including spinning and weaving her hair into the cloak. Then any time travelling until when she met Celegorm and Curufin, then the (deliverately slow) journey to Nargothrond, and then her imprisonment in Nargothrond. Moreover, Lúthien goes in Melian to ask about Beren at the start of autumn (“the summer turns...”), and at the start of the canto after this one, after she’s rescued Beren, it’s winter already. So Beren and Finrod were most likely captive in Tol-in-Gaurhoth for the better part of three months. That is a long, and very impressive, amount of time to hold out against Sauron.

So when Beren is thinking of giving in to save Finrod, and Finrod makes the mistake (in dissuading Beren from this course of action via the obvious point that there’s no way either of them are getting out alive) of saying his and Beren’s names aloud and being overheard by Sauron, it is probable that neuther of them are in a particularly lucid or rational frame of mind. They’re very close to the breaking point by now. (This is something else I only caught onto when it was pointed out by The Leithian Script.) Fortunately - and it can be attributed to nothing other than fortune, or Providence - Finrod does not state their goal outright when he states their names, or the Quest would likely have been doomed:

Nay more, I think

yet deeper of torment we should drink,

knew he that son of Barahir

and Felagund were captive here,

and even worse if he should know

the dreadful errand we did go.

Sauron shows surprisingly little interest in the fact that he’s captured Beren (‘Twere little loss if he were dead, the outlaw mortal) given that he’s the one Beren was fighting in Dorthonion/Taur-nu-Fuin and given that Beren has a price on his head the same level as the High King of the Noldor. But Beren’s guerilla career ended at least a year ago, and maybe the bounty has lapsed; or maybe he’s distracted by the greater prize. When Sauron speaks of inducing Nargothrond to ransom Felagund, he is probably thinking of similarly draconian terms to the ones he will offer to Gandalf at the Black Gate two Ages later.

And here we get the battle between Finrod and the werewolf (which is not, as memetically, him ‘biting a werewolf to death’, but throttling it; though the Silmarillion says “slew it with his hands and teeth”, so there’s some flexibility):

Lo! sudden there was rending sound

of chains that parted and unwound,

of meshes broken. Forth there leaped

upon the wolvish thing that crept

in shadow faithful Felagund,

careless of fang or venomed wound.

There in the dark they wrestled slow,

remorsely, snarling, to and fro,

teeth in flesh, gripe on throat,

fingers locked in shaggy coat.

And what kills Finrod isn’t only the wolf itself, but also the sheer power it takes to break the chains; it’s beyond his normal physical ability (even prior to being imprisoned and tortured for three months):

Here all my power I have spent

to break my bonds, and dreadful rent

of poisoned teeth is in my breast.

And I’m going to quote this next bit, even though I’ve quoted a fair bit already, because the transition from dark to light imagery, and the way the word choice, not just the meaning of the words but their sound communicates that, is exceptional:

Silences profounder than the tomb

of long-forgotten kings, neath years

and sands uncounted laid on biers

and buried everlasting-deep,

slow and unbroken round him creep.

The silences were sudden shivered

to silver fragments. Faint there quivered

a voice in sound that walls of rock,

enchanted hill, and bar and lock,

and powers of darkness pierced with light.

Note all the deep o and u sounds in the fist half - profound, tomb, long-forgotten, buried, slow, unbroken - and contrast with shivered to silver fragments. This is more than description, this is the sounds of the Lay outright creating the phenomenon that they describe. Remember Tolkien’s intense interest in how words sound even irrespective of meaning (‘cellar door is the most beautiful word in the English language’) - here he’s masterfully chosen words where both the meaning and the phonetics are in accord to create the dramatic transition from dark and silence to light and music. And The silences were sudden shivered to silver fragments is such a marvellous line in and of itself.

And Lúthien’s song spiritually transports Beren - a night of stars, nightingales, piping, and Lúthien dancing - a memory of the night they met. And this gives him back the strength to sing and to defy: old songs of battle in the North, of breathless deeds, of marching forth to dare uncounted odds and break great powers and towers, and strong walls shake; and over all the silver fire that once men named the Burning Briar, the Seven Stars that Varda set about the north, were burning yet, a light in darkness, hope in woe, the emblem vast of Morgoth’s foe.

This is the moment that Sam is thinking of in the Tower of Cirirth Ungol, when he sings and Frodo answers. They’d just been talking about Beren and the Great Jewel, on the steps of Cirith Ungol, and even the imagery is similar: nature, the stars, birdsong (though Sam goes for the homier finches rather than nightengales). And defiance even in a seemingly hopeless situation.

Sauron, like many others in thus story, underestimates Lúthien and is more amused and pleased than intimidated. When he finally realizes that Huan is killimg all his werewolves, he decides to manipulate prophecy and make himself into the most powerful wolf that has ever existed. Possible even more powerful than a pre-Silmaril Carcharoth, since the text says as wolf more great than e’er was seen from Angband’s gate to the burning south. Lúthien, nearly fainting from the wolf’s poisonous breath, uses her cloak and a whispered spell to throw it off balance, and Huan defeats it in a fight and keeps his grip on its throat even as Sauron shapeshifts.

And here’s the interesting bit. Sauron is almost about to abandon his physical form (nigh the foul spirit...shuddering strayed from its dark house) when Lúthien gets up and threatens him with precisely what he was already going to do. And she makes the threat of Morgoth’s reaction intimidating enough that he changes his mind, hands over they keys, and gives her the spell to destroy the fortress. Which, one would think, would be something Morgoth would be even less pleased with. This raises the question, for me, of whether Sauron ever went back to Angband (especially given that his failure to provide his master with prompt intel led to a humiliating defeat and the loss of a Silmaril) or whether he just spent the rest of the war hiding out in Taur-nu-Fuin. If so, it certainly adds some context to why he’d consider surrendering to Eonwë after the War of Wrath - even the times when Angband’s power was at its height wouldn’t have been very good ones for Sauron.

Lúthien casts down Tol-in-Gaurhoth and frees its captives, and then seeks Beren, who is so absorbed in mourning Finrod that he apparently doesn’t look up even when an entire fortress collapses around him. At this point, he would still recall Lúthien’s song and his own as something that happened in a dream, not reality. He finally looks up and sees her, and they are reunited in the pits of Tol-in-Gaurhoth.

If you want some fanfiction of this canto, Philosopher at Large, author of the Leithian Script, has also written some prose pieces. Betrayals, Renunciations covers the final days of Beren and Finrod in Tol-in-Gaurhoth, from the beginning of this chapter; Shadow and Silver covers the confrontation between Lúthien and Sauron, the destruction of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, the reunion, and the aftermath.

[him-e]

Do you think Jon or Arya's endings, with both of them essentially living out separate exiles, are likely to have been in the outline Martin provided HBO, or just endings that made sense to the writers in the context of the show versions of those characters? I'm torn with Jon especially, because it seems like he *could* end up effectively becoming a wildling, but it also seems weirdly mundane for a boy that died and came back.

I think they have both good chances to be part of Martin’s outline. I’m less certain of Arya’s ending, because I don’t think the books have laid an adequate foundation yet for her eventually leaving Winterfell again to explore the world. Re: Jon’s endgame, I have mixed feelings. It’s a bit too circular to suit me (and I hate circular storytelling), but I also think it absolutely fits George’s definition of “bittersweet” ending, as well as his deconstruction of heroic tropes and chosen one narratives. The fact that it “seems weirdly mundane for a boy that died and came back” is exactly why I feel it works. Jon already had a climatic, sacrificial death, if you think about it. And if I’m being honest I’ve always felt that the three heads of the dragon riding into the sunset the curtain of light in a suicidal mission to destroy the heart of winter, and never coming back but being forever remembered as the saviors of humanity, was a bit too standard high fantasy to really fit George’s narrative. That’s not what I would call bittersweet---it’s highkey epic. 

With this finale, on the other hand, you have the entire parabola of a hero: a secret prince who is raised as a bastard, joins the Night’s Watch, goes undercover as a Wildling, becomes lord commander, dies and resurrects; goes from war hero to king, from king to savior of humanity, from savior of humanity... to queenslayer and kinslayer, imprisoned and plagued by guilt, and eventually sentenced to go back to where he started---with the Free Folk, the people he initially was meant to defend the realm from, and now has to defend from the realm (because the realm corrupts, look what it did to him), and finally guide home.On the surface it’s a regression but it’s also him going back to where he actually had been at his happiest (even if at that time he was weighed down by too many oaths and unresolved business to notice), where he met his first love and what it meant to be free. Ironically, it’s the ending that fits most my own headcanon that Jon, Dany and Tyrion would all survive the WftD only to retire to a quiet place where they could heal, while the world would go on without them and slowly forget them, even. I wasn’t entirely sure of what they would need to heal from, when this idea formed in my mind. But the show provided an answer.

Overall, although this season was DEEPLY flawed, I could see George’s blueprint filtering through. In its basic concept, if not in the details and certainly not in the execution. It deals with the “what happens after the big heroic battle?” in the same brutally sincere and vaguely uncomfortable way I expect Martin to do. We thought the story ended with the WftD, we got a curveball instead. The main heroes survived relatively unscathed the battle against the Others, and then... Then they had to deal with what’s left. We thought the aftermath would simply be about mourning their losses and rebuilding, but instead it was about deep identity issues coming to a tragic climax for Dany, and the inability to cope with a world where the evil you know and have built your whole life around no longer exists for Jon. As I said many times, I don’t necessarily think the events will unfold in the books the way they did in the show---but the spirit, the intent, the main climatic and thematic beats behind this season, regardless of the execution, are something we should definitely look at when speculating about the books’ endgame. 

[gp-synergism-blog]

Gothic Film in the ‘40s: Doomed Romance and Murderous Melodrama

Posted by: Samm Deighan for Diabolique Magazine

Secret Beyond the Door (1947)

In many respects, the ‘40s were a strange time for horror films. With a few notable exceptions, like Le main du diable (1943) or Dead of Night (1945), the British and European nations avoided the genre thanks to the preoccupation of war. But that wasn’t the case with American cinema, which continued to churn out cheap, escapist fare in droves, ranging from comedies and musicals to horror films. In general though, genre efforts were comic or overtly campy; Universal, the country’s biggest producer of horror films, resorted primarily to sequels, remakes, and monster mash ups during the decade, or ludicrous low budget films centered on half-cocked mad scientists (roles often hoisted on a fading Bela Lugosi).

There are some exceptions: the emergence of grim-toned serial killer thrillers helmed by European emigres like Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Ulmer’s Bluebeard(1944), Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase (1945), or John Brahm’s Hangover Square(1945); the series of expressionistic moody horror film produced by auteur Val Lewton, such as Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943); and a handful of strange outliers like the eerie She-Wolf of London (1946) or the totally off-the-rails Peter Lorre vehicle, The Beast with Five Fingers (1946).

Thanks to the emergence of film noir and a new emphasis on psychological themes within suspense films, horror’s sibling — arguably even its precursor — the Gothic, was also a prominent cinematic force during the decade. One of the biggest producers of Gothic cinema came from the literary genre’s parent country, England. Initially this was a way to present some horror tropes and darker subject matter at a time when genre films were embargoed by a country at war, but Hollywood was undoubtedly attempting to compete with Britain’s strong trend of Gothic cinema: classic films like Thorold Dickinson’s original Gaslight (1940); a series of brooding Gothic romances starring a homicidal-looking James Mason, like The Night Has Eyes (1942), The Man in Grey(1943), The Seventh Veil (1945), and Fanny by Gaslight (1944); David Lean’s two best films and possibly the greatest Dickens adaptations ever made, Great Expectations(1946) and Oliver Twist (1948); and other excellent, yet forgotten literary adaptations like Uncle Silas (1947) and Queen of Spades (1949).

The American films, which not only responded to their British counterparts but helped shape the Gothic genre in their own right, tended towards three themes in particular (often combining them): doomed romance, dark family inheritances often connected to greed and madness, and the supernatural melodrama. Certainly, these film borrowed horror tropes, like the fear of the dark, nightmares, haunted houses, thick cobwebs, and fog-drenched cemeteries. The home was often set as the central location, a site of both domesticity and terror — speaking to the genre’s overall themes of social order, repressed sexuality, and death — and this location was of course of equal importance to horror films and the “woman’s film” of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Like the latter, these Gothic films often featured female protagonists and plots that revolved around a troubled romantic relationship or domestic turmoil.

Wuthering Heights (1939)

Two of the earliest examples, and certainly two films that kicked off the wave of Gothic romance films in America, are also two of the genre’s most enduring classics: William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939) and Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940). Based on Emily Brontë’s novel of the same name (one of my favorites), Wyler and celebrated screenwriter Ben Hecht (with script input from director and writer John Huston) transformed Wuthering Heights from a tale of multigenerational doom and bitterness set on the unforgiving moors into a more streamlined romantic tragedy about the love affair between Cathy (Merle Oberon) and Heathcliffe (Laurence Olivier) that completely removes the conclusion that focuses on their children. In the film, the couple are effectively separated by social constraints, poverty, a harsh upbringing, and the fact that Cathy is forced to choose between her wild, adopted brother Heathcliffe and her debonair neighbor, Edgar Linton (David Niven).

Wuthering Heights is actually less Gothic than the films it inspired, primarily because of the fact that Hollywood neutered many of Brontë’s themes. In The History of British Literature on Film, 1895-2015, Greg Semenza and Bob Hasenfratz wrote, “Hecht and Wyler together manage to transfer the narrative from its original literary genre (Gothic romance) and embed it in a film genre (the Hollywood romance, which would evolve into the so-called ‘women’s films’ of the 1940s)… [To accomplish this,] Hecht and Wyler needed to remove or tone down elements of the macabre, the novel’s suggestions of necrophilia in chapter 29, and its portrayal of Heathcliffe as a kind of Miltonic Satan” (185).

This results in sort of watered down versions of Cathy — who is selfish and cruel as a general rule in the novel — and, in particular, Heathcliffe, whose brutish behavior includes physical violence, spousal abuse, and a drawn out, well-plotted revenge that becomes his sole reason for living. It is thus in a somewhat different — and arguably both more terrifying and more romantic — context that the novel’s Heathcliffe declares to a dying Cathy, “Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you–haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe–I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always–take any form–drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (145).

Despite Hollywood’s intervention, the novel’s Gothic flavor was not scrubbed entirely and Wuthering Heights still includes themes of ghosts, haunting, and just the faintest touch of damnation, though it ends with a spectral reunion for Cathy and Heathcliffe, whose spirits set off together across the snow-covered moors. These elements of a studio meddling with a film’s source novel, doomed romance, and supernatural tones also appeared in the following year’s Rebecca, possibly the single most influential Gothic film from the period. This was actually Hitchcock’s first film on American shores after his emigration due to WWII, and his first major battle with a producer in the form of David O. Selznick.

Rebecca (1940)

Based on Daphne du Maurier’s novel of the same name, Rebecca marks the return of Laurence Olivier as brooding romantic hero Maxim de Winter, the love interest of an innocent young woman (Joan Fontaine) traveling through Europe as a paid companion. She and de Winter meet, fall in love, and are quickly married, though things take a dark turn when they move to his ancestral home in England, Manderlay, which is everywhere marked with the overwhelming presence of his former wife, Rebecca. The hostile housekeeper (Judith Anderson) is still obviously obsessed with her former mistress, Maxim begins to act strangely and has a few violent outbursts, and the new Mrs. de Winter begins to suspect that Rebecca’s death was the result of a homicidal act…

The wanton or mad wife was a feature not only of Rebecca, but of earlier Gothic fiction from Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre to “The Yellow Wallpaper.” In the same way that Cathy of Wuthering Heights is an example of the feminine resistance to a claustrophobic social structure, Rebecca is a similar figure, made monstrous by her refusal to conform. The dark secret that Maxim’s new wife learns is that Rebecca was privately promiscuous, agreeing only to appear to be the perfect wife in public after de Winter already married her. She pretends she is pregnant with another man’s child and tries to goad her husband into murdering her, seemingly out of sheer spite, but it is revealed that she was dying of cancer.

A surprisingly faithful adaptation of the novel, Rebecca presents the titular character’s death as a suicide, rather than a murder, thanks to the Production Code’s insistence that murderers had to be punished, contrary to the film’s apparent happy ending, and restricted the (now somewhat obvious) housekeeper’s lesbian infatuation for Rebecca. Despite these restrictions, Hitchcock managed to introduce some of the bold, controversial themes that would carry him through films like Marnie (1964). For Criterion, Robin Wood wrote, “it is in Rebecca that his unifying theme receives its first definitive statement: the masculinist drive to dominate, control, and (if necessary) punish women; the corresponding dread of powerful women, and especially of women who assert their sexual freedom, for what, above all, the male (in his position of dominant vulnerability, or vulnerable dominance) cannot tolerate is the sense that another male might be “better” than he was. Rebecca is killed because she defies the patriarchal order, the prohibition of infidelity.”

Wood also got to the crux of many of these early Gothic films (and the Romantic/romantic novels that inspired them) when he wrote, “The antagonism toward Maxim we feel today (in the aftermath of the Women’s Movement) is due at least in part to the casting of Olivier; without that antagonism something of the film’s continuing force and fascination would be weakened.” Heathcliffe and de Winter are similarly contradictory figures: romantic, but also repulsive, objects of love and fear in equal measures, they mirror the character type popularized in England by a young, brooding James Mason — an antagonistic, almost villainous (and sometimes actually so) male romantic lead — that would appear in a number of other titles throughout the decade.

Rebecca (1940)

In “‘At Last I Can Tell It to Someone!’: Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Film of the 1940s” for Cinema Journal, Diane Waldman wrote, “The plots of films like Rebecca, Suspicion, Gaslight, and their lesser-known counterparts like Undercurrent and Sleep My Love fall under the rubric of the Gothic designation: a young inexperienced woman meets a handsome older man to whom she is alternately attracted and repelled. After a whirlwind courtship (72 hours in Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door, two weeks is more typical), she marries him. After returning to the ancestral mansion of one of the pair, the heroine experiences a series of bizarre and uncanny incidents, open to ambiguous interpretation, revolving around the question of whether or not the Gothic male really loves her. She begins to suspect that he may be a murderer” (29-30).

As Waldman suggests, there are many films from the decade that fit into this type: notable examples include Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), where Joan Fontaine again stars as an innocent, wealthy young woman who marries an unscrupulous gambler (Cary Grant) who may be trying to kill her for her fortune; Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre (1943) yet again starred Fontaine as the innocent titular governess, who falls in love with her gloomy, yet charismatic employer, Mr. Rochester (Orson Welles); George Cukor’s remake of Gaslight (1944) starred Ingrid Bergman as a young singer driven slowly insane by her seemingly charming husband (Charles Boyer), who is only out to conceal a past crime; and so on.

Another interesting, somewhat unusual interpretations of this subgenre is Experiment Perilous (1944), helmed by a director also responsible for key film noir and horror titles such as Out of the Past, Cat People, and Curse of the Demon: Jacques Tourneur. Based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter and set in turn of the century New York, Experiment Perilous is a cross between Gothic melodrama and film noir and expands upon the loose plot of Gaslight, where a controlling husband (here played by Paul Lukas) is trying to drive his younger wife (the gorgeous Hedy Lamarr) insane. The film bucks the Gothic tradition of the ‘40s in the sense that the wife, Allida, is not the protagonist, but rather it is a psychiatrist, Dr. Bailey (George Brent). He encounters the couple because he befriended the husband’s sister (Olive Blakeney) on a train and when she passes away, he goes to pay his respects. While there, he he falls in love with Allida and refuses to believe her husband’s assertions that she is insane and must be kept prisoner in their home.

In some ways evocative of Hitchcock (a fateful train ride, a psychiatrist who falls in love with a patient and refuses to believe he or she is insane), Experiment Perilous is a neglected, curious film, and it’s interesting to imagine what it would have been if Cary Grant starred, as intended. It does mimic the elements of female paranoia found in films like Rebecca and Gaslight, in the sense that Allida believes she has a mysterious admirer and, as with the later Secret Beyond the Door, she’s tormented by the presence of a disturbed child; though Lamarr never plays to the level of hysteria usually found in this type of role and her performance is both understated and underrated.

Experiment Perilous (1944)

Tourneur was an expert at playing with moral ambiguities, a quality certainly expressed in Experiment Perilous, and the decision to follow the psychiatrist, rather than the wife, makes this a compelling mystery. Like Laura, The Woman in the Window, Vertigo, and other films, the mesmerizing portrait of a beautiful woman is responsible for the protagonist becoming morally compromised, and for most of the running time it’s not quite clear if Bailey is acting from a rational, medical premise, or a wholly irrational one motivated by sexual desire. Rife with strange diary entries, disturbing letters, stories of madness, death, and psychological decay, and a torrid family history are at the heart of the delightfully titled Experiment Perilous. Like many films in the genre, it concludes with a spectacular sequence where the house itself is in a state of chaos, the most striking symbol of which is a series of exploding fish tanks.

But arguably the most Gothic of all these films — and certainly my favorite — is Fritz Lang’s The Secret Beyond the Door (1947). On an adventure in Mexico, Celia (Joan Bennett), a young heiress, meets Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave), a dashing architect. They have a whirlwind romance before marrying, but on their honeymoon, Mark is frustrated by Celia’s locked bedroom door and takes off in the middle of the night, allegedly for business. Things worsen when they move to his mansion in New England, where she is horrified to learn that she is his second wife, his first died mysteriously, and he has a very strange family, including an odd secretary who covers her face with a scarf after it was disfigured in a fire; he also has serious financial problems. During a welcoming party, Mark shows their friends his hobby, personally designed rooms in the house that mimic the settings of famous murders. Repulsed, Celia also learns that there is one locked room that Mark keeps secret. As his behavior becomes increasingly cold and disturbed she comes to fear that he killed the first Mrs. Lamphere and is planning to kill her, too.

A blend of “Bluebeard,” Rebecca, and Jane Eyre, Secret Beyond the Door is quite an odd film. Though it relies on some frustrating Freudian plot devices and has a number of script issues, there is something truly magical and eerie about it and it deserves as far more elevated reputation. Though this falls in with the “woman’s films” popular at the time, Bennett’s Celia is far removed from the sort of innocent, earnest, and vulnerable characters played by Fontaine. Lang, and his one-time protege, screenwriter Silvia Richards, acknowledge that she has flaws of her own, as well as the strength, perseverance, and sheer sexual desire to pursue Mark, despite his potential psychosis.

This was Joan Bennett’s fourth film with Fritz Lang – after titles like Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), and Scarlet Street (1945) — and it was to be her last with the director. While her earlier characters were prostitutes, gold diggers, or arch-manipulators, Celia is more complex; she is essentially a spoiled heiress and socialite bored with her life of pleasure and looking to settle down, but used to getting her own way and not conforming to the needs of any particular man. (Gloria Grahame would go on to play slightly similar characters for Lang in films like The Big Heat and Human Desire.) In one of Celia’s introductory scenes, she’s witness to a deadly knife fight in a Mexican market. Instead of running in terror, she is clearly invigorated, if not openly aroused by the scene, despite the fact that a stray knife lands mere inches from her.

Secret Beyond the Door (1947)

Like some of Lang’s other films with Bennett, much of this film is spent in or near beds and the bedroom. The hidden bedroom also provides a rich symbolic subtext, one tied in to Mark’s murder-themed rooms, the titular secret room (where his first wife died), and the burning of the house at the film’s conclusion. Due to the involvement of the Production Code, sex is only implied, but modern audiences may miss this. It is at least relatively clear that Mark and Celia’s powerful attraction is a blend of sex and violence, affection and neurosis. As with Rebecca and Jane Eyre, it is implied that the fire — the act of burning down the house and the memory of the former love (or in Jane Eyre’scase, the actual woman) — has cleansing properties that restore Mark to sanity. It is revealed that though he did not commit an actual murder, the guilt of his first wife’s death, brought on by a broken heart, has driven him to madness and obsession.

This really is a marvelous film, thanks Lang’s return to German expressionism blended with Gothic literary themes. There is some absolutely lovely cinematography from Stanley Cortez that prefigured his similar work on Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. In particular, a woodland set – where Celia runs when she thinks Mark is going to murder her – is breathtaking, eerie, and nightmarish, and puts a marked emphasis on the fairy-tale influence. But the house is where the film really shines with lighting sources often reduced to candlelight, reflections in ornate mirrors, or the beam of a single flashlight. The camera absolutely worships Bennett, who is framed by long, dark hallways, foreboding corridors, and that staple of film noir, the winding staircase.

[daleisgreat]

Justice League

Despite today’s entry for 2017’s Justice League (trailer) happening nearly four years after its original theatrical release, it was imperative for me to revisit this film a month out from HBOMAX’s planned March 18th release of the director’s cut that has the added prefix, Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Where do I begin with the backstory on this one!? Glossing over the behind-the-scenes hoopla would be a disservice, especially for any of you readers checking this out many years after the fact who have no idea about how these two versions came to be. I will attempt to provide some degree of context before jumping into my take on Justice League, so please bear with me….or jump ahead a few paragraphs. Director Zack Snyder caught a lot of flak from ardent comic book fans for his darker takes and artistic direction on Superman and Batman in his two previous films, Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. I reviewed both films here already and was part of the minority who was a fan of the polarizing films. Fast forward a couple years later and Snyder wraps shooting Justice League, which is the big finale to the current arc of DC Comics movie canon much like how Avengers: Endgame was for the Marvel films. However, early in post-production Snyder suffers a family tragedy with his daughter committing suicide and has no choice but to leave his post on the film, but not before handing off post-production duties to Joss Whedon, the director behind the first two, uber-successful Avengers films.

Amidst all this controversy, the executives at Warner Bros. are receiving a ton of criticism of not wanting another lengthy, dark tome of a superhero film like Snyder’s previous efforts. I praised The Avengers and other MCU films on here before, and I love their style of filmmaking too, but one common trait among Marvel films is that they are generally more lighthearted with more gags and feel more like “soft” PG-13 experiences. Which is a good thing for those films because that was how they were envisioned from the beginning, but speculation was running wild going into Justice League’s 2017 theatrical release that Joss Whedon was under intense pressure from Warner Bros. executives to reshoot scenes to add in more family friendly humor, and lighten up the length and tone of the movie in post-production to appeal to the criticism. The result was a two hour movie that was not a hit with much of anyone. Snyder critics were not satisfied with the changes, and fans like myself of Snyder’s past films felt like his work and vision for the movie was compromised. Over the next few years, slow-but-steady support grew over social media to #releasethesnydercut of Justice League. I thought this social media movement was a pipe dream that would never seem like a possibility for Warner to dedicate those resources to allow Snyder to re-cut the movie. Eventually though, much of the original cast and crew, and more and more fans frequently kept that hashtag alive, which culminated several months ago when Warner Bros. announced that Zack Snyder’s Justice League will be releasing on its HBOMAX streaming service this coming March. Snyder’s version will be double in length at four hours, and HBOMAX was originally going to release it as four weekly episodic installments, but later switched it back to one whole film. I am grateful that Snyder is finally getting his chance to redeem himself and release the movie how he originally envisioned, and am hopeful he wins over fans and critics alike. Now with the director’s cut just over a month out, I wanted to make sure to watch 2017’s version of the film one more time before then so I can get a better grasp at what was switched up for the new cut. Are you still with me? Good, now let us proceed with breaking down Whedon’s take on Justice League.

This 2017 cut opens up with a flashback of kids doing a smartphone interview with Superman (Henry Cavill), fresh off the scene of duty which leads to an opening credits montage of the world still reeling from the death of Superman after his battle with Darkseid in Batman V Superman. This then jumps to Batman (Ben Affleck) failing at recruiting Aquaman (Jason Momoa) to join him for anticipating a new threat. That threat is the return of Steppenwolf (voiced by Ciarán Hinds), who is on a quest to regain his power by procuring three hidden “Mother Boxes.” Eventually Bats touches base with Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) to proselytize aid to combat Steppenwolf. That help comes in the form of Cyborg (Ray Fisher) and The Flash (Ezra Miller). Both heroes are introduced with having conflicts with their fathers, but eventually Wonder Woman convinces Cyborg to join up, and Batman has an entertaining scene with The Flash who fanboys out at Batman after he surprises Flash in his hideout. I am conflicted with Miller’s performance as Flash. I cannot help but feel he is the one who received the bulk of the re-shoot orders to add in some extra doses of levity throughout the film, because he repeatedly chimes in with one star struck idolizing gag after another throughout. A few of the jokes actually hit, but they are a bit much and I could not help but think I would have appreciated his act more if his zany would have been dialed back by about 60%. My gut tells me that was how Snyder originally directed him, so I will have to wait to see what his cut has in store. I cannot lie and admit I was like plenty of fans online wanting Grant Gustin to bring his pristine TV version of The Flash to the silver screen instead, but I understand Warner Bros. in wanting to keep the CW-TV canon and movie canon separate….but then they did that brief Gustin/Miller crossover last year on the TV series….and well, I have no idea what to make of it other than I was cracking up throughout their bizarre exchange, so I will just link you to the clip here to decide for yourselves.

A huge mid-film clash with Steppenwolf leads to Aquaman joining the team and Batman deciding it for the best to exploit the tech used on Cyborg to resurrect Superman….it does not seem right to type that out so matter-of-factly, and the buildup for this miraculous endeavor is shockingly swift and to the point. They accomplish this feat by digging up ‘ol Supes and bringing him to the magical waters that were used to resurrect Zod in the last film, and then apply one of the mystical Mother Boxes in conjunction with electrical energy from Flash’s speed to bring Superman back from the grave. It works, and the resulting fallout from a shaken-and-rampant Superman dueling with his new Super-pals was a delightful debacle to watch playout before Lois Lane (Amy Adams) shows up to reignite Superman’s humanity. Seeing those two reunite for a couple special scenes in the film was heartwarming, but also felt rushed with their brief screen time they share together, and I am hoping to see their dynamic explored more in the new cut. The final act sees the Justice League forming to take on Steppenwolf who now has the power of all three Mother Boxes on his side for an early advantage, until Superman shows up and instantly lays waste upon him and Steppenwolf instantly transforms from universal threat to a puny-putty-squad-esque-pushover. I am all for the Justice League prevailing, and I know Superman is invincible and all that, but I was stunned to see Steppenwolf instantly crumble to the ‘ol blue and red. I am hoping for a slightly more dramatic back-and-forth encounter in Snyder’s reimagining, but I will not hold out hope for the amount of CG work involved already in Whedon’s version and cannot imagine how much it would cost to completely alter the final battle for a more enticing experience. In the aftermath of Steppenwolf’s demise is the establishing of the building blocks of the Justice League’s headquarters in a charming hint of what is in store for this superhero team. Also make sure to stick around for both stingers, as the first has an awesome exchange between Flash and Superman to answer the long-debated fan question of which hero is faster, and then a stinger of the villains to come for the inevitable sequel.

There are eight extras totaling a little over an hour of bonus features to sift through. Of the eight pieces, there are three I recommend checking out the most: Road to Justice interviews many DC writers and artists who do an intriguing abridged history of key story arcs from the Justice League over the decades. Heart of Justice is a closer look at the historic core of the team in Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. Justice League: New Heroes conversely goes in-depth on Cyborg, Aquaman and Flash. If you need to get caught back up to speed on the DC films, than those three extras are a recommended primer worth checking out. Even with all my aforementioned qualms with Justice League above, I did not come out of it outright hating the film. If Flash’s humor would have been dialed back a couple degrees and just an extra 10-15 minutes added to some of the scenes that I felt were shortchanged, then I would have had a better outlook here instead. I know the average theater-goer despises 2+ hour films, and for the average theater-goer that is not a hardcore comic book fan, than this Whedon cut of the film should suit you just fine. However, I cannot get fully behind what feels like a sabotaged cut, and eagerly await to see what the four hour version from Zack Snyder has in store for me next month.

Other Random Backlog Movie Blogs 3 12 Angry Men (1957) 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown 21 Jump Street The Accountant Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie Atari: Game Over The Avengers: Age of Ultron The Avengers: Endgame The Avengers: Infinity War Batman: The Dark Knight Rises Batman: The Killing Joke Batman: Mask of the Phantasm Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice Bounty Hunters Cabin in the Woods Captain America: Civil War Captain America: The First Avenger Captain America: The Winter Soldier Christmas Eve The Clapper Clash of the Titans (1981) Clint Eastwood 11-pack Special The Condemned 2 Countdown Creed I & II Deck the Halls Detroit Rock City Die Hard Dredd The Eliminators The Equalizer Dirty Work Faster Fast and Furious I-VIII Field of Dreams Fight Club The Fighter For Love of the Game Good Will Hunting Gravity Grunt: The Wrestling Movie Guardians of the Galaxy Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 Hell Comes to Frogtown Hercules: Reborn Hitman I Like to Hurt People Indiana Jones 1-4 Ink The Interrogation Interstellar Jay and Silent Bob Reboot Jobs Joy Ride 1-3 Last Action Hero Major League Man of Steel Man on the Moon Man vs Snake Marine 3-6 Merry Friggin Christmas Metallica: Some Kind of Monster Mortal Kombat Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpions Revenge National Treasure National Treasure: Book of Secrets Nintendo Quest Not for Resale Payback (Director’s Cut) Pulp Fiction The Punisher (1989) The Ref The Replacements Reservoir Dogs Rocky I-VIII Running Films Part 1 Running Films Part 2 San Andreas ScoobyDoo Wrestlemania Mystery Scott Pilgrim vs the World The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Shoot em Up Slacker Skyscraper Small Town Santa Steve Jobs Source Code Star Trek I-XIII Sully Take Me Home Tonight TMNT The Tooth Fairy 1 & 2 UHF Veronica Mars Vision Quest The War Wild The Wizard Wonder Woman The Wrestler (2008) X-Men: Apocalypse X-Men: Days of Future Past

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How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Got its Own Pandemic from the Blip

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The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been besieged by supervillains, bombarded by extraterrestrial invaders and—in a deed so dastardly it’s unlikely to be topped—saw half the population of its entire universe dusted away. However, one thing that the continuity will not have to endure is the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, that is not to say that that the MCU won’t be defined by the aftermath of a worldwide-affected tragedy going into its Phase Four slate of films and television shows.

Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige reveals to Variety that parallels to the pandemic are, coincidentally, planned to permeate throughout the MCU by way of “The Blip,” which was the collective term attributed to what occurred after Thanos’s universe-halving Infinity Gauntlet snap in Avengers: Infinity War and Bruce Banner/Hulk’s reversive snap—using Tony Stark’s Nano Gauntlet—in Avengers: Endgame. Feige discusses how Marvel’s pre-pandemic plans to weave the Blip and its fallout throughout the MCU was given a sad bit of serendipity by way of the ongoing real-world tragedy of the pandemic, which is currently closing in on 2 million deaths worldwide.

Feige—who will soon juggle involvement with a mysterious Star Wars movie—explains of the long-gestating post-Blip plans, “[A]bout a year and a half ago, as we were developing all these things—maybe two years ago, I don’t remember—I started to say the Blip, the Thanos event that radically changed everything between Infinity War and Endgame, that gave this global universal galactic experience to people, would only serve us so well, that we need to just keep looking ahead and keep going into new places.” Expressing initial reservations about the MCU possibly repeating itself, Feige goes on to say, “I was wary of it becoming like the Battle of New York, which was the third act of Avengers one, which ended up being referenced as an event kind of constantly, and some times better than others. I was wary of that.”

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Indeed, the 11-year-spanning, unprecedentedly elaborate buildup to Avengers: Endgame was an investment ultimately rewarded by global audiences with a $2.8 billion take that made it the all-time box office topper. Seemingly, the only place to go after having reached such stratospheric heights is downward; something that made Feige hesitant about setting the next goal line of a universe-encompassing crisis (long-rumored to be an adaptation of iconic Marvel miniseries Secret Wars). Yet, as the pandemic ended up redefining the existence of just about everyone around the real world, its effect would naturally alter the context of Marvel’s post-Blip plans after numerous delays ended up pushing back the entire studio slate. Interestingly, the poetic parallels of the post-Blip MCU with the eventual pandemic were on display in advance back in 2019 with Scott Lang/Ant-Man’s visit to a massive memorial for snap victims in the beginning of Endgame and later that year in Spider-Man: Far from Home, in which expositional dialogue coined the very term, “The Blip,” revealing that Peter Parker (and most of his classmates), as part of the population of restored snap victims, has been retaking his junior year of high school five years later; a small example of the widespread surreal fallout we’ll eventually see throughout Phase Four.

“As we started getting into a global pandemic last March and April and May, we started to go, holy mackerel, the Blip this universal experience—this experience that affected every human on Earth—now has a direct parallel between what people who live in the MCU had encountered, and what all of us in the real world have encountered.” As Feige states, further explaining, “It has been quite interesting, as you will see, in a number of our upcoming projects, the parallels where it will very much seem like people are talking about the COVID pandemic. Within the context of the MCU, they’re talking about the Blip.”

This phenomenon will soon be exemplified when Phase Four of the MCU is ushered in by Disney+ series WandaVision (which premieres Friday, Jan. 15), representing a radical change from the studio’s original plan to have Scarlett Johansson-starring solo feature Black Widow kick things off in May 2020. Yet, the unconventional nature of both would-be Phase Four-launchers in Black Widow (a movie centered on a character who was last seen dead in Endgame) and WandaVision (a reality-altered TV series featuring a character in Vision who was killed in Infinity War and wasn’t restored by the Blip,) seemingly reflects Feige’s ambivalence about the MCU’s next steps, since they don’t seem destined to take any major continuity-defining steps for the overall franchise. In essence, they are safe starters for a Phase that is thus-far defined by uncertain logistical variables.

Nevertheless, Feige is ready to embrace the MCU’s impending accidental pandemic poeticism in a somber, but lemonade-out-of-lemons manner, stating, “[I]t really revitalized that notion [of the Blip] in a way that made it substantive. My nervousness was it just being an event that we reference constantly between things. I wanted it to have more meaning behind it. And if that meant leaving it behind and coming up with new things, that was it. Of course, we always come up with new things as well from the comics, but the real-world connotations are shockingly and somewhat depressingly relevant now between our worlds.”

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Feige is obviously remaining mum on any further potential pandemic parallels as the MCU moves toward more immediately-imminent 2021 Phase Four offerings such as TV series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (March 19), Sony-produced Spider-Man cold spinoff movie Morbius (March 19), the aforementioned Black Widow (May 7), TV series Loki (May) and Sony movie sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage (June 25), with many more to come. Yet, the quasi-pandemic energy of a post-Blip MCU might just forge profoundly personal connections with audiences, especially as the COVID vaccines continue their distribution and the world works on finally putting this chapter in the past.

The post How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Got its Own Pandemic from the Blip appeared first on Den of Geek.

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Evaluating Dutch Claims to Have Hacked Russia's 'Fancy Bear Hackers of the DNC'

Dutch Accounts of Plucky Intelligence Successes That Sound Too Good to Be True --  Because They Are...Why Would SVR Put a Top Secret Hacking Facility in the Most Touristy and Foreigner Foot Trafficked Part of Moscow Next to the Kremlin?

"In the Summer of 2015, Dutch intelligence services were the first to alert their American counterparts about the cyberintrusion of the Democratic National Committee by Cozy Bear, a hacking group believed to be tied to the Russian government. Intelligence hackers from Dutch AIVD (General Intelligence and Security Service) had penetrated the Cozy Bear computer servers as well as a security camera at the entrance of their working space, located in a university building adjacent to the Red Square in Moscow. Over the course of a few months, they saw how the Russians penetrated several U.S. institutions, including the State Department, the White House, and the DNC. On all these occasions, the Dutch alerted the U.S. intelligence services, Dutch tv programme Nieuwsuur and de Volkskrant, a prominent newspaper in The Netherlands, jointly report on Thursday. This account is based on interviews with a dozen political, diplomatic and intelligence sources in The Netherlands and the U.S. with direct knowledge of the matter. None of them wanted to speak on the record, given the classified details of the matter."  -- https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2213767-dutch-intelligence-first-to-alert-u-s-about-russian-hack-of-democratic-party.html

The 2 1/2 year old Dutch intel is released, as we've reported here at RogueMoney, at a time when the RussiaGate narrative is floundering back in the U.S. The FBI's declaration that it lost five months of texts between the FBI's ranking Russian counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and his lover, an attorney for the Bureau Lisa Page, have angered GOP members of Congress. The House Democrats led by the perpetually accusing but never proof of Russia collusion producing Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) are promising to release their own memo 'debunking' the four page document prepared by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and his Intel Committee staff. Schiff insists the four pager is full of inaccuracies and false accusations against the FBI, and has insisted together with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, citing the Dem-neocon #Hamilton68 agitprop project, that 'Russian bots' are promoting the #ReleasetheMemo hashtag. However even the Democrats propaganda  rag The Daily Beast had to admit, citing sources inside Twitter, that most of the hash tag's spread has been homegrown, the result of pissed off deplorables, tired of the media and Democrats #MuhRussia BS.

Employing #Hamilton68's 'so and so is retweeting something ergo they must be linked' standards of 'logic' is tempting, especially when observing #NeverTrump er neocon scumbags like Rick Wilson claiming other European intelligence services besides the Dutch have dirt on Trump and the Russians. In reality the St. Tatiana's Day 'coincidence' is likely more of a tell than the pressing need for the three letter agencies to deflect from the online and public groundswell to release the Nunes memo detailing DOJ/FBI FISA abuses -- actions which were justified to a FISA court in the name of countering Russian intelligence activities.

The Global Cold War 2 Context for the Latest 'Revelations' of Russian Hacking Perfidy

Although it's entirely possible that the publication date of the Dutch reporters was moved up in response to messages to their editors to bolster the (wildly flawed and to date never supported with declassified evidence) January 2017 U.S. intelligence assessment pushed by the Clapper/Brennan/Comey troika, the broader international context is growing Anglo-American deep state pressure on Russia ahead of the March 2018 elections and hosting of the World Cup. Since President Trump's decision announced several weeks ago to ship Javelin anti-tank missiles to the U.S./NATO propped up government in Ukraine, we've seen: 1) Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, usually thought of as a moderate on Russia in light of his oilman and business background in the country, declaring an open ended (and flagrantly illegal under international law) occupation of eastern Syria. While Russia was not explicitly named in the announcement, with the focus on countering Iranian influence in the country, the Cold War 2 implication is Washington demanding an occupation zone in the country opposite the Russian presence, as if Syria were Germany after WWII with to the victors going the spoils. Except unlike in the aftermath of that global conflict, Washington has no legal basis whatsoever for its troops presence in the country and its occupation plans remain greatly complicated by the military intervention of a third party, namely its soon to be former NATO ally in Turkey.

2) Tillerson in recent days insisting Moscow is to blame for the use of chlorine gas against civilians in eastern Ghouta near Damascus, despite no UN investigation as of yet concluding it was the Assad government and not Al-Qaeda or its 'moderate rebel' allies that released the toxic gas.

3) Ukraine passing a law revoking any special status for the Donbass, in explicit violation of the Minsk 2 accords it accepted to stop the humiliating retreat of its troops in winter 2015, with the encouragement of American special envoy Kurt Volker (himself a former aide to hardcore neocon Russophobic fanatic, Sen. John McCain). This trend, along with the U.S. having already armed the most vicious units of the Ukrainian volunteer battalions such as the Azov Battalion before the Javelin missiles were sent to the regular Ukrainian Army, is more of a gradual escalation than sudden shift in policy.

4) The British Army's chiefs justifying their desperate need for additional funds using the Russian threat, with Russian long range aviation bomber flights intercepted by the Royal Air Force dozens of miles from UK air space being covered hysterically by the jingoistic Fleet Street press.

"Today, Sen. Grassley reiterated his request to the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation of "ex"-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. Grassley, as well as Nunes, has a memorandum he is pressing to declassify and make public. Just as Russia-Gate sags, a push for outright war is escalating, instigated by the same British coup crowd, through neo-con/neo-liberal assets. In the latest expression, a new multi-nation entity was formed in Paris Jan. 23, used as a platform to bash Russia: the "International Partnership Against Impunity for the Use of Chemical Weapons." The Syrian government is accused of using chlorine gas this week. Unfortunately, U.S. Sec. of State Rex Tillerson got in on the act of false accusations, saying that Russia is "ultimately responsible" for chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Moreover, he said "Russia's failure to resolve the chemical weapons issue in Syria calls into question its relevance to the resolution of the overall crisis." It is noteworthy that Tillerson came to Paris direct from London, where last weekend, he met with the inner circles of geopolitics. You see the British hand in the White House over Syria; and in the record of the infamous Christopher Steele—British intelligence operative, involvement in Ukraine, and later, in Russia-Gate."  -- https://larouchepac.com/20180125/truth-oozes-out-russia-gate-fraud-escalate-defeat-british-coup

A British Hand Behind the 'Dutch' Operation That Supposedly Caught the Russians in the Act of Hacking the Democrats and Numerous Other U.S. Institutions?

The fact that the Dutch and British security services have been close for centuries, despite the Netherlands never being formally admitted into the post-war (former British Empire Anglophone nations) 5Eyes club, points to the U.K. being privy to any Dutch operation to catch the Fancy/Cozy Bears in the act if not having GCHQ help run it. It is also the British, not the Dutch, who would most feel the need to justify the intelligence behind the opening of the FBI's counterintelligence investigation against the Trump campaign, and 'debunk the myth' of its origins in the work of their own 'former' MI6 man, Christopher Steele. From a logical perspective, based on what we know about Russian opsec, even hacking teams using young hackers still attending classes at the Lomonosov Moscow State University would be very unlikely to be 'hidden in plain sight' just off Red Square. For a Hollywood movie the setting is perfect. But for keeping an SVR/GRU campaign to subvert the West through the dissemination of DNC materials that actually came to Wikileaks from disgruntled (if not one murdered) Bernie bro(s) secret, it makes little sense. Last but not least, the story is interesting for what it also omits: any revealing by the Dutch of how the SVR allegedly conveyed the data trove it stole to Wikileaks.