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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

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I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

-Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

The final lines of Great Expectations hit me much harder than I expected. It's a perfectly melancholy ending that you don't always get from Dickens, who sometimes likes to tie things off cleanly.

For most of the novel, Pip assumes he is being made a gentleman for high society. That is the great expectations that he's looking forward to. But this doesn't come to pass. In order to achieve some financial comfort he receives a position thanks to his friend Herbert. He must emigrate to Egypt for his job. He never marries. Estella, whom he has loved since childhood, entered into an abusive marriage, and Biddy, who seems like a better match for him, becomes engaged to his brother-in-law.

He lives a reasonable middle class life, but his dreams of family, wealth, and high society have fallen apart. Like most of us, he never achieves "greatness," but he does find some sort of happiness in his circumstances.

Ten years after leaving for Egypt, Pip returns home to visit his brother in law and decides to take a trip to the dilapidated Satis House where he first met Estella. He finds her there again, years after her husband has passed away. The novel ends with the above sentence.

I love novels that withhold what the protagonist desires. A story about a person trying to manage a life of setbacks and disappointments is much more compelling than if that character were to come into a surprise fortune. (In the case of Great Expectations, that surprise fortune is taken by the state).

And I absolutely love the ambiguity of that last sentence. Does Pip no longer see a shadow of parting from her because he expects them to be married? Does he not worry about leaving her because he knows that she is now free from the abuse of her husband? Is he satisfied that they are now good friends, and the possibility of romance is now gone?

Film adaptations have opted to interpret the final line as meaning the two will become engaged and married. It's a tidy ending, but if Dickens wanted to end the novel in such a way, he could have. He had for several other novels. I like to think that whatever happens, Pip has found some sort of contentment, whether or not that means he lives his life with Estella.

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I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

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I rewatched this one for the first time in decades recently, and I loved the goofy idea that Bill Paxton's character, conveniently also named Bill, can commune with the weather and has a sixth sense about tornadoes. What a fun movie with a stacked cast.

TWISTER (1996) dir. Jan de Bont

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The Constables and the Bow-street men from London...were about the house for a week or two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like authorities doing in other such cases. They took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract the ideas from the circumstances. Also, they stood about the door of the Jolly Bargemen, with knowing and reserved looks that filled the whole neighborhood with admiration; and they had a mysterious manner of taking their drink, that was almost as good as taking the culprit, But not quite, for they never did.

-Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

That's right, even Charles Dickens said ACAB.

This passage is from when Pip's sister is brutally attacked and becomes disable. The "Bow-street men" refers to plains clothed detective force whose office was in London on Bow Street. They often worked undercover (hence the lack of uniforms), but were also lent out to help out on serious cases outside of the city, which is why they are all the way out in Kent.

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That was a memorable day for me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think of how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

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I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

-Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

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My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up "by hand." Having at that time to find for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I suppose that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

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In the Victorian Era, to be "brought up by hand," means that Pip's sister raised him as an infant without nursing him. Instead, she spoon fed him or used a bottle. This method often resulted in higher infant mortality, which is why the neighbors are so impressed. Pip actually survived past infancy.

I love how darkly funny this passage is. Too often people miss how much humor there is in Victorian lit, but more than that, modern readers miss how dark and cynical that humor can be.

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Ghosts (Windows, Media Design Interactive, 1994)

The adventure game/spookipedia hybrid hosted by Christopher Lee. You can download it here, or download it pre-configured to fun on modern versions of Windows here.

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Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors. As a species, we have never encountered a cave, a door, or an entrance of any kind that we did not want to enter. We are never satisfied with only one way in. We will always try every possibility, even the blackest and most forbidding passages.

--Viet Thanh Nguyen The Sympathizer

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Trance (2013) - Dir. Danny Boyle

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This might be the sexiest scene in all of cinema. Of course it takes place in a book shop.

Dorothy Malone | The Big Sleep

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Before going on to direct Zone of Interest and winning an Oscar for Best International Feature, Jonathan Glazer got his start in commercials and music videos. Music videos used to be a common stepping stone to feature films, but with the demise of MTV, that's not the case anymore.

So, I thought it would be interesting to go through all twelve of his music videos, some of which I've seen before. ("Virtual Insanity" has to be his most famous, and if there's a music video canon, then it's on it). I've included one shot from each video.

Going through this work, it's interesting to see his use of light, especially blinding white light. He also plays around a lot with diagetic sound, letting it mix in with the music of even cut it off completely. It really makes me wish filmmakers had more testing grounds where they could build their craft these days.

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Cinematography by Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC: Sid and Nancy (1986) directed by Alex Cox

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The Beach (2000)--Dir. Danny Boyle

The Beach is just Lord of the Flies for Spring Breakers.

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Alice, Jan Švankmajer, 1988

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Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro - (1979)

I'm still on something of a Lupin kick and somehow I had never seen Hayao Miyazaki's first film, The Castle of Cagliostro. What's incredible is that even though he's early in his career and working with a pre-existing franchise, the movie includes plenty of scenes and images that Miyazaki would play with for the rest of his career.