The Hunger Games

Perhaps no other culture in history was ever as saturated in games as our own. We watch professional athletes in elaborate spectacles and pay to wear their jerseys. We load games onto our phones and play them on our televisions. We participate in amateur and professional leagues for trophies or stories to tell each other after the games are finished, over food and drinks. Games, and play, have lasted perhaps as long as mankind has. We simulate the struggles of life, we learn its lessons, and we pass judgment on each other's worth according to our successes and failures at games. Unlike life, in which an ultimate verdict comes only at the end, games give us a verdict that can be changed with the next game.

Now comes "The Hunger Games," the movie of Suzanne Collins' dystopian young adult novel. It was not what I expected. In some ways, it is not like the book, in that it is not a classic, crowd-pleasing action movie with a rousing score and obvious laugh lines to goose the audience into laughs. This moody, intense thriller jettisons some of the clumsier elements of the book and occasionally leaves you with the impression it's hunting something bigger than ticket sales.

The story deals with Panem, a police state divided into districts which stages an elaborate, multi-media gladiatorial spectacle each year known as the Hunger Games. Children from each district are trained to fight to the death, with the winner receiving all the material wealth so sorely lacking among their countrymen. Taking us on this journey is Katniss Everdeen, a teenage girl who learns that even for those fighting against evil, evil wins a little each time it changes them.

The movie begins as the book does in the Appalachian setting of District 12, where poor families watch the men troop off to the mines each day while they barely survive in ramshackle houses. The setting reminds one of "Deliverance," except that these Ozarks seem to be ruled over not by backwoodsmen but by Big Brother. This is to be expected of course - "The Hunger Games" owes a debt to Orwell's "1984," and the movie's production design harkens back to Michael Radford's film of the novel. The washed out propaganda signs, the viewing screens, the uniformity of the police state all serve to remind us that Panem does not know freedom. But these early scenes also create the contrast which will serve the rest of the story - Katniss is a reminder of the simpler past, and is as yet uncorrupted by the city, and thus by the dictatorship.

All of this changes though, at Reaping - when the children are summoned for the choosing of a boy and girl to take part in the Hunger Games. From this point, the movie seizes on the dominant theme of the book: the feeling of helplessness in the face of tyranny. Police states are about control - controlling actions that are contrary to the state, controlling people who have their own ambitions, controlling emotions to keep everyone in line, even controlling thoughts such as love. Attachments, except those sanctioned by the state, can be deadly. We are told that by this time, the Hunger Games have gone on for three-quarters of a century, and the subjects display only resignation in the face of them. There is no escape sought, or expected. When participants are chosen from the children, the "lucky" ones are expected to step forward and be grateful for this slim chance at freedom. Some of the children have been trained for this moment, but as we learn later, they all have that same feeling of being merely a spectator at their own destruction. It is only when Katniss volunteers to save the life of her sister Prim that we see someone willing to seize their own moment.

Chosen at the same time is Peeta Mellark, a boy with conflicted emotions about Katniss, who immediately understands the dynamics of the Hunger Games. As they speed toward the capital for their preparation, it becomes obvious that the games are "a television show," in the words of their trainer Haymitch. The tributes are instant celebrities, served up for the spectators, and Peeta smiles because he senses it is the only way to survive. You must convince the people to like you, even though you will eventually have to commit murder.

But Katniss will not surrender to this idea. She sees the garish, over-the-top capital for what it is, a world of tin illusions that will not last. Katniss becomes a kind of Joan of Arc, resigned to her fate, unwilling to compromise with the evil around her, defiantly keeping her own fierce morality. All the elaborate costumes, the opulent rooms, the fine food and attention comes at too high a price for her. It will not last.

Hovering over the show is the power figure, the evil President Snow played by Donald Sutherland, looking like a cross between Mark Twain and a sinister Santa Claus. He informs us that the Games are a small helping of hope for the people, another way of keeping the masses in line. "Hope is the only thing stronger than fear," he says, but only so long as it is contained.

Another of the major themes of the book and movie is the pervasiveness of media, and we get this during Katniss' interview with the Hunger Games' master of ceremonies, Caesar Flickerman. (Panem is fairly run amok with Roman names, perhaps demanding to know if we are not entertained...). Director Gary Ross decides to shoot the scene almost from Katniss' shoulder, so that we experience it as she does. We are surprised when the audience laughs at her honest answers as though they are jokes, and we are pleasantly surprised, as she is, when they laugh. Soon, she too is intoxicated by the crowd and the attention, as we would be.

Then the games begin, and Katniss is at first concerned only with staying alive. The brutality of the games is softened somewhat by Ross' direction, relying on hand-held cameras and motion to let our minds imagine the murders in the arena. But when Katniss does finally kill, it is to protect and avenge. She will not surrender a part of herself in order to provide the necessary entertainment.

But she does change. Her attachment to Peeta grows as the rules are altered to allow them both to possibly live at the games' conclusion. Though the two have no way of knowing, they are inspiring the first stirrings of revolution. Peeta is injured, and Katniss must care for him, which further endears them to the crowd. But to each other? We are not sure the connection they feel is completely genuine, especially when Haymitch encourages Katniss in a note that she might plant a more entertaining kiss on Peeta for the benefit of sponsors.

There is no mention of religion in Panem, so we have no idea what Katniss and Peeta expect to happen to themselves when they nearly choose suicide over victory in the games. They only see death as a release, as a final act of defiance to the power that sent them to kill each other. It is the only choice left to the two, at least by their own moral code. When they are snatched back to prevent their victory, they learn a lesson, as does President Snow. In order to survive in a dictatorship, one is forced to lie, every day, as long as the dictatorship lives. Katniss and Peeta must maintain the fiction of their relationship for the near future in order to continue surviving. But their lives are a threat to the power of Snow, and as the camera follows him away from the adulation of the games, we know that in order for him to survive, he must eventually finish the task these games denied him. Evil can never rest as long as hope lives.

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11/22/63 by Stephen King

Only months after her husband was cut down by an assassin in Dallas, Jacqueline Kennedy sat with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. for a series of interviews. Knowing her comments would be sealed for several decades, she began freely recounting her husband’s political career and what she knew of the thought processes behind the great decisions of his presidency. The tapes of these conversations, sealed since 1964, were published last year. It was Caroline Kennedy’s responsibility to finally release her mother's memories.

“When does someone no longer belong to you,” she asked, “but belong to history?”

We often forget that history isn’t large impersonal forces, dates and names, but humans making decisions - be they short-sighted or far-reaching. The people of the past, and we of the present, have to live with the consequences. When we view their decisions years, decades, centuries later, we no longer see clearly the alternatives, or the pressures. Everything seems inevitable. As inevitable as a bullet, fired from a gun.

The premise of Stephen King’s “11/22/63” isn’t exactly new, but the result is one of the most satisfying long works in his prolific career. Imagining alternate realities to the Kennedy assassination has long been a parlor game for the Baby Boom generation. But Stephen King is content to create a fiction acknowledging the impersonal forces of individuals and the decisions and destinies of millions.

“11/22/63” follows Jake Epping, a Maine schoolteacher who is introduced by a dying acquaintance to a portal into the past. There the visitor from the present always arrives at the same date and same moment: September 9, 1958, at 11:58 a.m. Step through a second time, and you undo whatever you may have changed in the past. This allows for two things in the course of our story - the protagonist will have to spend a good deal of time assimilating into the past in order to change the outcome on Nov. 22, 1963, and whatever is changed can also be undone.

The story allows King to leaven in his usual ingredients - pop culture references, song lyrics, meetings with characters from previous King novels. It also allows him to create a nostalgic view of the past that we enjoy visiting. We can see the late fifties and early sixties in a way that invites us in. People, for the most part, are friendlier. The pace is more leisurely. Money goes a lot further. Even when things get dark, we enjoy the pulpy character of the darkness. This allows Jake, whom we accompany on the journey, to make the inevitable modern observations on the nature of the past.

Occasionally, the difficulties of the time are dealt with too easily. King mostly touches on the segregated nature of 1960s America in one scene that occupies two pages and dispenses with it in a way that seems too pat. It’s also easy to forget that in this simpler, easier time, people lived everyday under the tension of the Cold War, with the lurking idea that megatons of nuclear weapons were aimed at them and could be detonated at any moment, possibly even by mistake.

King also establishes a rule early on - the past is obdurate, Jake tells us. The more significant an event is, the more obstacles will emerge to block someone bent on forcing it in a different direction. When Jake does change the past, the results are sometimes bloody - and only marginally better or worse than the actual time he came from. Jake becomes a dark guardian angel, a man who realizes that at the end of his journey, he may very well have to kill a man to accomplish it, though he has no idea when he sets out that Oswald's murder will not be the only one required of him.

To carry out his mission, Jake assumes the identity of George Amberson and eventually finds his way to Texas to resume his career as a teacher in the past. The longer he stays there, the more he risks becoming involved in the past. His love affair with Sadie Dunhill is a sweet diversion, and in some ways a more subtle obstacle thrown up by the obdurate past. If Jake wants to thwart history, he is going to have to be willing to sacrifice something.

"11/22/63" allows King to indulge in one of his great themes - the nature of fate.

Many times in King's major works he comments on how much control his characters - and we as human beings have - over the way our lives will turn out. King often riffs on how the random acts of terror that dot our lives don't seem so much to be aberrations as the actual fabric of life, and that human beings seem in the grip of forces much larger than just emotions of the moment, much larger than just individual sin:

"For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see the world is barely there at all. Don't we all secretly know this? It's a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark."

In the course of Jake/George's odyssey, we see several images rubbed raw by their constant evocation in our collective memory - the Texas School Book Depository, the Grassy Knoll, the specter of the Vietnam War. Jake understands that he must undo Oswald's act - and much of the book deals with Jake determining whether Oswald was the actual assassin - because Kennedy's death set in motion the events after: Vietnam, Watergate, the cynicism of the present, the loss of American idealism etc. Jake isn't intent on preventing one horror, but all the ones that follow. As he says, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music."

In “Camelot and the Cultural Revolution,” James Piereson remarks on one consequence of that day in Dallas. Piereson states that the assassination changed the character of American liberalism, once it was revealed that Oswald was not a right-winger incensed by Kennedy‘s support of civil rights or his stance on Communism, but a misbegotten Marxist hungry for attention. It did so “by undermining the confidence of liberals in the future; and…by changing their perspective from one of possibility and practical reform to one of grief, loss, and frustrated hopes. It also compromised their faith in the nation because many concluded, against all factual evidence, that in some way the nation itself was responsible…A confident, practical, and forward-looking philosophy, with a heritage of genuine accomplishment, was thus turned into a pessimistic doctrine - and one with a decidedly negative view of American society and its institutions….It now seems clear that Kennedy’s assassination had the effect of draining much of that political energy out of the liberal movement.”

For Piereson, the political affiliation of Oswald is key to understanding the result. The initial belief of Kennedy supporters was that it was the climate of Dallas - a right-wing bastion in the heart of the segregated South - that had killed Kennedy. This view is stamped on virtually every page of William Manchester’s “The Death of a President,” where Dallas sometimes looms as a cross between some backwoods version of the Inferno and a Martian colony.

But the truth was that Oswald was a left-winger - an ex-Marine who renounced his citizenship and defected to the Soviet Union, disenchanted with American materialism and foreign policy. This, followed by Oswald’s immediate death, froze in many people’s minds the idea that Oswald was somehow not so much an assassin as a stand-in for whatever individual bogeyman could be made to stick in his place. In this climate of blame, the evitable result was the succeeding generations of conspiracy theories the event spawned, trying in vain to invest in Kennedy’s death a sense of meaning that was not there, if the official narrative - Oswald, a nobody, acted alone for quixotic reasons - turned out to be true.

King even quotes from Manchester’s explanation of why he did not believe the various theories:

“To employ what may seem an odd metaphor, there is an aesthetic principle at work here. If you put six million dead Jews on one side of a scale and on the other side put the Nazi regime - the greatest gang of criminals ever to seize control of a modern state - you would have a rough balance: greatest crime, greatest criminals. But if you put the murder of the President of the United States on one side of another scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something along with Oswald, something weightier. A photograph of H.L. Hunt handing Oswald a check for a million dollars would do the job nicely. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist.”

The key word there for future generations is that last “unfortunately.” Manchester, as with other chroniclers of the Kennedy years, desperately wished there was such evidence because it would bear out their worst suspicions about American political life, not to mention invest in Kennedy’s death the meaning that the event cries out for.

But King takes that absence of meaning and fills it with something else. His solution is simple and ingenious. A few months prior to the assassination, when time becomes even more precious, Jake/George is attacked and injured. During his time in the hospital, Jake is unable to remember the most basic facts about who he is, and what he has ahead of him. Suddenly all the conspiracies are rendered meaningless, all the minutiae of the story moot. It becomes a simple issue of a man in a tall building with a gun bent on murder, and another lonely, confused man bent on maiming history. He feels for Oswald "sorrow for a spoiled life. But you can feel sorry for a good dog that goes rabid, too. That doesn't stop you from putting him down."

By the book's end, Jake/George must decide whether he wants to continue his mission, and then whether he can live with the results. The book continues to delight, continues to entertain, continues to illuminate. Time, it seems, has its own guardians, and eventually Jake must learn to dance with them, and find a way to dance in the world that is left.

It is hard to read "11/22/63" without wondering how your own life might be different with just a few changes here and there. In June 1999, I wrote a newspaper story about a man from Gadsden, Alabama, Don Gentry, who served in the Marine Corps in the 1950s with Lee Harvey Oswald in Japan.

On the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, he was sitting in a barber shop when news came over the television that the president's possible assassin had been arrested in a theater. Gentry sat bolt-upright, dumbstruck, when he heard the name of the assassin. He told me his immediate impression, knowing what he knew about Oswald from the service, was that he probably did it. "You could have poured me out of that chair," he said.

It probably shouldn't surprise us that Don Gentry later became a preacher. He wondered how history might have been different if he had shared the Gospel with the man who later killed Kennedy. The impersonal forces of history can be very personal.

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The Many Dimensions of Star Wars

At midnight, May 19, 1999, I sat in a crowded theater like scores of Americans waiting for the lights to dim and the “first” installment of Star Wars to fill the screen. Sitting next to me was my wife of nearly two years. At home was our infant daughter, born almost one month to the day before. At that moment, I felt young and old, mindful of the past and hopeful for what the near future might bring.

None of this seemingly has anything to do with “The Phantom Menace,” but it has a lot to do with it. When I was seven years old, I saw the “first” Star Wars movie - Episode IV: A New Hope - in a different city, obviously at a different time. It would be another 12 years before I would meet my wife. The idea of having my own daughter was deep in the future. On that day, I was just a little boy who wanted his own light saber. Consequently, my reactions to both movies, like many others in the audience, were vastly different. With the re-release of “Episode I” in 3D, it’s probably worthwhile to revisit the opening chapter, now removed from the acclaim and vitriol that greeted it nearly 13 years ago.

“The Phantom Menace,” of course, is the beginning of the six-film story of the rise, fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker, the prophesied Chosen One, the boy/man who eventually becomes Darth Vader. In our first film, Anakin is a nine-year-old boy in a forgotten part of the galaxy, discovered seemingly by accident at the exact moment of an intergalactic disturbance. Something that was on my mind in that crowded theatre in 1999 was a passage I remembered from a story in Time Magazine quoting Steven Spielberg that the “first” Star Wars trilogy would be very different from the “second” - “more like a Greek tragedy.” “The Phantom Menace” therefore must give a sense of the tragedy to come.

Lucas does this by showing us Anakin in the beginning as an absolute innocent, a little sandy-haired slave who scampers across the screen shouting “Yippee!” For those of us whose young nightmares were inhabited by the seven-foot Sith Lord he grew into, the boy seems inconceivable. It would have been a much easier decision to introduce an older version - slightly more mature with a more visible hint of darkness. But Lucas gives us the boy consciously to highlight the tragedy which follows. He must give us a sense that a soul has been corrupted, and also that there is something within him later worth redeeming, let alone fertile ground where redemption is possible.

We also encounter Luke and Leia’s future mother, Queen Amidala, the embattled sovereign of something that is either a monarchy or a democracy or both. (The politics of the prequel trilogy somehow manage to be too complex and too simple at times.) She is older than Anakin but not too much so - she shows a motherly concern for him as the group leaves Anakin’s home planet in a scene meant to echo a later one between Luke and Leia in Episode IV. But she is closer to the action in a way that Anakin is not - at least, until the film’s end.

Watching the movie again, I was struck by how ambitious it is. In the course of two hours, we move among two civilizations on one planet, speed to another world and visit still another before returning to our entry point at Naboo. I was also struck by the speed with which all of this happens. In the first thirty minutes, we are introduced to the Jedi Knights, witness a planetary invasion, travel from an underwater city through the planet’s core, then take off into space and arrive eventually in a junk shop to meet the saga’s hero - and villain - in the person of our young budding pilot. This newfound speed was a surprise, since one of the first impressions I got watching the film that opening night years ago was of “dead spots” in the narrative - expository scenes that didn’t really advance the story. Those spots are still there, as though Lucas did not trust his audience enough to keep up.

Lucas made another decision with the prequel trilogy, which was to create a set of films to stand the originals on their heads. This results in a trilogy of much more subtle films than the saga of Luke Skywalker. Instead of the Galactic Empire, a perfect adversary in the first trilogy, (Torture! Murder! Planetary destruction!) it seems this time we have the Galactic Trade Federation, which invades Naboo with its droid army. However, we know next to nothing about them beyond their green viceroy, Nute Gunray and his Japanese-sounding speech patterns. What do they do? Why do they need a droid army? Or perhaps it is Darth Maul, the horned-tattooed, intimidating figure with the double-edged light saber we should fear? He barely has any dialogue at all and is only called on to glare menacingly when he is not fighting two Jedi at once.

That’s because the real villain, of course, is the “Phantom Menace” - hiding in plain sight, the Senator from Naboo, Palpatine, who secretly is Darth Sidious, the Dark Lord of the Sith. As we will learn later, the will of the Force has ordained that the Dark Side will soon gain ascendancy. The Dark Side clouds the vision of the Jedi, making them unable to see the calamity which awaits the Republic. Instead, they can only sense the danger that seems to surround the coming of Anakin. It is the death of Qui-Gon Jinn, Anakin’s would-be teacher, that forces the Jedi to take on the boy’s instruction. However, the death is a double tragedy, since we are left to wonder what the boy would have done under Qui-Gon’s tutelage. And though we only dimly realize it, the Old Republic’s days are numbered. All too soon, it will become the Empire.

But in recounting these plot points, it’s easy to see the essential problem with the prequel trilogy - we know where the story is headed. Lucas has actually attempted something new - he is depicting a fallen messiah, foretold by a vague prophecy. We should be shocked to learn the fate of this little boy, but we aren’t, because we know it already. Because of this, plot twists do not surprise us. If you were to watch all six films without knowing the story, the revelation that Palpatine is Darth Sidious should surprise your. That the sweet boy of Episode I will two movies later murder younglings in the Jedi Temple should shock us, but it doesn’t. Our big shock moment came when Darth Vader revealed to Luke who his father was, and that’s the part of the story we want to see now, not some kid blowing up a ship in what seems like a pale echo of his son’s later achievement.

The chief source of derision in “The Phantom Menace,” of course, turns up early on in the movie - Jar Jar Binks, a clumsy, flop-eared amphibian who accompanies Qui-Gon, Anakin and Obi-Wan Kenobi on the journey. Jar Jar perfectly illustrates the problems that the movie presents. My theory is that Lucas, knowing that Episode III would be extremely dark, invented Jar Jar as a light-hearted entry point into the story, counterbalancing the eventual fate of Anakin. And like the rest of the movie, Jar Jar is many things at once- a fully digital character, aimed at providing both slapstick and spoken humor through his speech patterns, a loveable chum with a funny walk for our heroes. He doesn’t just try to pull off one thing, but attempts all these at once, and one occasionally wonders if any one of these ambitions is ever fully satisfied. If we take the original movies as a model, he’s in the story to function as Chewbacca. But Chewbacca doesn’t have dialogue, and his comic relief is largely physical due to his size. Basking in the reflected light of Han Solo, Chewie is “cool.” By creating a slapstick foil who is a fool, Lucas disappoints his fans with a character who is not sufficiently cool.

And herein we have the source of our movie’s anguish. “Star Wars,” as a whole, accomplishes what all great, enduring fiction does - it creates a world that makes you want to inhabit it. But more than that - it made a whole generation of fans want to create their own extensions of it. Because George Lucas made the decision to begin the saga in the middle, he gave that generation of fans a free license to imagine the story that precedes the coming of Luke Skywalker. This explains the subsequent fan fiction, fan created movies, novels, video games, and the constant demand for them. Giving those same fans 16 years after the original trilogy to imagine the backstory gave them ample time to fall in love with their own stories, to claim ownership of the fantasy realm, and to disdain anything that might replace them. When considering this, it is little wonder they didn’t expect - or want - the story to be filled with the likes of Jar-Jar Binks. When one sees the hate “The Phantom Menace” spawned from fans who waited patiently for it, the result seems academic.

Which brings us back to where we started - the theater where all of us waited to see how our cherished story began. The newer film didn’t mean the same to us as its earlier manifestations because it came to us at a different time in our lives. Our fantasy suddenly had much larger frontiers, and we were left wanting something more familiar. In fact, one wonders what the verdict would have been if Lucas had made the films in order, from Episode I to VI. Would we be disappointed that Luke’s portion of the story wasn’t as suitably grand as the fall of his father, or that the rebellion is a much smaller affair than the earlier wars with thousands of computer generated armies? Would we lament the absence of the prequel trilogy’s more earnest characters, replaced by the cocky heroism of Han Solo and Lando Calrissian? Would some critic find fault with Anakin’s presence behind the dark mask, his brooding thoughts closed off to us, and his children weak imitations of the characters who came before?

In watching the 3-D version, a few things have changed. I’m 41 and my daughter, now 12, sat next to me this time. The 3D transfer was unremarkable and a little disappointing. The moments where I laughed seemed more out of obligation than inspiration. But as Obi-Wan Kenobi fought Darth Maul to the death, I felt myself once again transported, and would have happily sat down to watch whatever came next, no matter how well I knew the outcome. At least that reaction was still intact, virtually unchanged from its beginning in 1977. Such is the enduring power of the Force.

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Harry Potter and the Journey on the Silver Screen

There is a “through the looking glass” moment deep into the final hour of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II.” Moments after Lord Voldemort has slit his throat, the dying Professor Severus Snape urges Harry Potter to collect one of his tears. Harry needs to do this, as he will feed the tears to the Pensieve, a device which allows him to see the past, like a movie. We need this moment to understand all that his life has meant, not only to Snape, to the dead Professor Albus Dumbledore, to his archenemy Voldemort, but also to himself. We as the audience need this if we are to understand what may happen once Harry walks into the Forbidden Forest to face his nemesis, presumably for the last time. The movie becomes a movie about a movie which tells those in the movie what the movie has been about. A story, if it goes on long enough, ultimately begins to tell another story, which is itself a story about the story it sprang from.

We have grown together, the Boy Who Lived and his audience, first as readers and then as viewers. The last 10 years have brought eight installments of the Harry Potter series, the most successful “franchise” in the history of motion pictures. The Harry we were introduced to in the pages of the J.K. Rowling’s series is, in some ways, very different from the one Daniel Radcliffe embodies. And the movies have created something else, as they usually do, a country of their own out of the universe Hogwarts and the Death-Eaters inhabit.

It’s become commonplace to say that the first two Potter movies are the weakest of the lot. A frequently heard criticism is that they are slavish to the books and try too hard to satisfy the reader without creating a magic of their own. By the second movie, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” there are glaring “Ten points for Gryffindor!” moments that seem to beg for cutting. But the overall criticism, I think, is on the whole ungenerous - the filmmakers were still trying to figure out what they had. By the time the first film made it to the screen, there were only four of the seven promised books available. It was important to establish the world, especially if they didn’t know where the story was going to end.

Looking back on those first two movies, directed by Chris Columbus, the sets and costumes once Harry enters the magical world evoke memories of Dickens and Victorian England, or an England at home with our cultural knowledge. We may not know exactly what “Oliver Twist” is about, but we recognize the capes and hats and long tailed coats of an earlier age. We understand the charm of a hearth, and appreciate how it can just as easily be the portal to another place.

With the third film, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” the tone changes to something else. Most critics favor this installment, directed by Alfonso Cauron, over the others. It’s worth remembering that “Azkaban” is the only film which does not feature Voldemort as a character. In it, the (perceived) threat is from the escapee, Sirius Black. But the children are teenagers now, and a little wiser after a few brushes with death. This is still mainly a child’s story, but there are hints of what is to come.

Rowling’s “Goblet of Fire” is much longer than its predecessors, much more sprawling in its imagination, and the beginning of the series’ slide into a sometimes stifling darkness. This is not a criticism - too often stories opt for a rose-colored threat which can easily be dispatched, rendering their heroes hardly worth celebrating. But here is another point where the movies differ from the books - the appearance of a fully-embodied Lord Voldemort, back from the grave, played perfectly by Ralph Fiennes. The movies give us, I think, a better Voldemort than the books.

The two books where Voldemort figures heavily - “Chamber of Secrets” and “Half-Blood Prince” - show us that Voldemort is a much more vivid character when we discover his backstory than the hissing murderer who pursues Harry in the present. When Fiennes appears, his Voldemort has a grand malevolent intelligence which convinces us that Harry could perish before the story is over. For that matter, Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry is nicer, more obedient, less rebellious and less arrogant than the Harry of the books. The absence of these qualities is necessary - after all, this is still a Hollywood production. We like less-complicated heroes on the screen.

The Voldemort appearance at the end of “Goblet of Fire” helps that episode immensely, as it is the weakest of the eight pictures. Because the story had so many diversions, (Harry and Ron, the Tri-Wizards Tournament, Mad-Eye Moody) the filmmakers had a hard time keeping a cohesive narrative. They righted themselves with “Order of the Phoenix,” the shortest film from the longest book. The appearance of director David Yates also signaled another change in tone. The next three Potter movies slide us out of the Victorian magical background and into something that looks more like the modern world. The Ministry of Magic, an immense set, give us something that looks like an office building, creating the bureaucracy of spells. Harry, Ron and Hermione are becoming adults, and the magic of their childhood is becoming darker, more threatening, and closer to reality.

In “The Half-Blood Prince” and the first part of the final installment, Yates gives us quiet moments instead of the busy music of the earlier films. He trusts the material to work the magic, and instead of a childish fantasy, we begin to see some of the larger themes of Rowling’s work. Those themes arrive full-blown in the final film, where we are once again in the magical world of the first two films, full-blown action, wands and wizards flying past us as Harry learns what his journey means.

When Harry dips Snape’s tear into the well of memories, he sees that Dumbledore has been in effect “using him,” knowing he would have to die in order for Voldemort to be destroyed. But death in Harry Potter’s world, as it can be in ours, is not totally the end if one inspires love. Dumbledore has been preserving Harry’s life, but so has Snape, so long the bane of Harry’s existence. Thankfully, the movies did not attempt to water down this part of Rowling’s story, which is almost Biblical in its subtlety and power. We, like Harry, are shaped at a distance by the power which watches over our lives. The power that protects does not always shield us from danger, and the spirit which corrects and humbles is not always against us. In the figures of Snape and Dumbledore, the “two bravest men” Harry ever knew, we see a picture of the double qualities of Providence, protecting and preparing us for the eventually journey to the Forbidden Forest.

On the page, Rowling’s coda showing Harry at the train station to see his own child off to Hogwarts reads awkwardly at first, as though she was unwilling to lead the story finally end. But on the screen, it fits. We are reminded of how we first encountered Harry, as children, our bundles ready for a journey that will take us into a world prepared for us, where we will learn through hard lessons the best parts of ourselves.

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The Aeneid by Virgil - Translated by Robert Fagles

Perhaps the most affecting portion of Virgil’s great masterwork on the founding of Rome is its namesake’s visit to the Underworld, which comes at the midpoint of the story.

After a trip to Sicily to honor the memory of Anchises, his father, Aeneas ventures to the land of the dead to see the man one more time. It is there that Virgil shows us the wandering souls of the dead - ‘numberless races, nations of souls/like bees in meadowlands on a cloudless summer day/that settle on flowers, riots of color, swarming round/the lilies’ lustrous sheen, and the whole field comes alive/with a humming murmur.”

Here is not only a trope from the ancient world - a hero among the living momentarily steps across the curtain to visit the departed, safe himself from the sting of death - but the poetic inspiration for Dante’s Divine Comedy, which will employ Virgil as a guide for its first two-thirds. Here are the heartbroken who have gained the knowledge that Virgil lacks. His father, by virtue of this home, reveals to his son the glories of Rome that will follow Aeneas once he leaves to fulfill his destiny.

Robert Fagles’ translation of “The Aeneid” is a worthy successor to his excellent translations of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” Most of what I could say about these three works has been said many, many times. Though “The Odyssey” is the more well-known story and the most easily copied, the “The Iliad” is a more satisfying story on a much broader canvas. While Odysseus is the obvious star of the later work, there are so many personalities in “The Iliad” beyond just the angry Achilles that one can quickly lose, regain and lose himself again in its rich maze of action and character.

But both of Homer’s works were meant to be performed, declaimed, shouted even. There is an academic polish, a host of page-bound flourishes in “The Aeneid” that mark it as different in tone and spectacle. Though Virgil was obviously following the style of the two earlier epics, “The Aeneid” is its own animal. Though it takes up the story from the Trojan War and involves the Olympian gods in the affairs of men, there are several voices present here which were absent earlier.

Anchises’ prophecy, for example, points to “The Aeneid’s” main difference - the sense of destiny. That exists in the Homerian epics as well, but not the extent as Virgil’s work. Where Homer was concerned with the fate of individuals, the warriors who bled outside Ilium and on the waters back to Ithica, “The Aeneid” is chiefly concerned with the empire that will flow from the point of Aeneas’ sword. There is about his shoulders the flourish of history, the sense of fate.

“Others, I have no doubt,
Will forge the bronze to breath with suppler lines,
Draw from the block of marble features quick to life,
Please their cases better, chart with their rods the stars
That climb the sky and foretell the times they rise.
But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power
The peoples of the earth - these will be your arts:
To put your stamp on the works and ways of peace,
To spare the defeated, break the proud in war.”

When the Fire God forges Aeneas’ shield, we are told he takes delight in the images he forges there - images that for Virgil are Rome’s glorious past, but for Aeneas will be their future - but even the Fire God knows nothing of what these events mean. He only knows that these images give him pleasure.

While Virgil wants his readers to feel the swell of martial pride at the thought of Roman arms, he also takes another cue from Homer - the terrible cost of war. At the end, when Aeneas has conquered a portion of Italy, he stands over the defeated Turnus, who yearns for his life. Aeneas shows him no mercy and stabs him with his sword after he sees Turnus is wearing the belt of the dead Pallas. The foe is sent to join Anchises in the realm of the dead. Aeneas has a nation to build.

It is hard to tell, two thousand years later, whether Virgil is decrying the same war he is glamorizing in his lines. Some of this confusion may be simply to what our modern ears expect to hear, and some of it may be the dimly perceived reminder that even destiny entails death and pain.

We get from Virgil a sense that there is ultimately meaning - for all time - in the struggles of Aeneas and his men. They are the inheritors of a proud tradition from Troy, while the home that they knew is gone forever. Their quest to build a new home, and their fortitude in doing so builds a great empire.

What we don’t know however, much like anyone who feels a personal sense of destiny, is what is to become of us and our dreams. It is Aeneas’ memory of the whispered prophecies of his father in the land of the dead which drive him onward. Like Orpheus coming back from a similar trip, his steps are deliberate, but he looks forward rather than back, because he knows nothing will bring back the home he knew. It is not worth the effort. Instead, there is only the kingdom that has been prepared for him, a kingdom for the taking.

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Of Salesmen, Living and Dead

On Tuesday, December 8, 2008, the Wall Street trader Bernard Madoff had a meeting with his brother Peter, in which it is believed he revealed for the first time the extent of his billion-dollar, multi-decade Ponzi scheme. Over the previous months, it had become increasing clear to Madoff that the economic cataclysm of the previous September and October had taken him down as well, and it was time, reluctantly, to come clean on the biggest fraud in American financial history.

In Diana B. Henriques book, “The Wizard of Lies,” she writes of the moment when Peter came to learn that most of his and his brother‘s professional lives had been built on lies. It is more likely, she says, that Peter’s mind just stopped and tried “ to rewind an entire lifetime in a split second, to get back to something real and true.”

Madoff was a salesman, who made an illegitimate fortune on an uneasy mountain of mendacity. He sold himself, in the classic American fashion, by appearing to succeed.

In David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic “Glengarry Glen Ross,” we are introduced to an office full of men who would be Madoffs, if they had had a few more connections. In the course of one evening, five real estate salesman are introduced to the realities of success and failure.

Levene is an aging salesman in his fifties, assuring his boss Williamson that he has been hot in the past and will be again if he is simply given better leads toward clients. Shelley “The Machine” Levene will take on the world, if he can get just one good sale in the midst of a bad streak. He attempts to bribe his way back to success, which is better than his colleague Moss, who decides it’s better just to steal the leads and give them to a rival for the promise of a better job.

Commenting on this indirectly is Roma, a charismatic salesman who desperately wants to close a deal with Lingk, a man whose wife has understandable second thoughts about the soundness of her husband’s newly purchased land deal.

Interspersed among the various and florid profanities of Mamet’s excellent dialogue is a depiction of the desperation of men whose worth comes from their ability to legitimately rob others through their personal magnetism. Levene is haunted by his past, and what he perceives is his lost ability to beguile someone out of their money. Moss is frustrated by the inability of his office to see his potential, or the potential of the market. Even in Levene’s desperation and Moss’ woebegoneness is a shared arrogance.

“What is our life?” Roma asks Lingk, in the act of seducing him into a deal. “It’s either looking forward or looking back.” Roma looks forward. He is momentarily frustrated by Lingk’s cold feet, but there will always be another sale. He has none of Levene or Moss’ angst.

Mamet’s salesmen share a common bond with the most famous salesman in American drama, Willy Loman. Arthur Miller, in his memoir “Timebends,” recalls that he wrote “Death of a Salesman” just after the end of the Second World War and the start of what he calls a new American Empire. “I wanted to set before the new captains and the so smugly confident kings the corpse of a believer,” he said, a “pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.”

Willy Loman is that man, disintegrating even as he spouts the repeated platitudes of a lifetime, extolling the rewards of personal likability, connections and moxie, even as he contradicts himself in the next breath. It is mildly amusing that Miller saw Loman as an American and not universal character, which he absolutely is. In him is the pent-up bitterness not of capitalism, but of stubborn humanity requiring a positive score at the end of life, hoping for some validation to the slights and shattered dreams. “A man has got to add up to something,” Willy tells the ghostly memory of his brother Ben.

Mamet’s Roma, railing at his boss Williamson, roars out the question, “Whoever told you you could work with men?” Again and again, in both plays, there is the invocation of the characters’ masculinity, that a man who strives must be respected. It is Willy’s wife Linda who gives the memorable command that “attention must be paid” to Willy, because he is a human being and he is exhausted by a life of seemingly vain toil. And Linda’s presence amongst the men of the play identifies her with their dilemma as well, because all of Miller’s characters live by a personal sense of honor. Just as Willy has given his life for his business, so Linda has given hers in defending and defining and deifying her husband. All of that toil must amount to something, because it defines her too.

Levene though, is a man, and he eventually must pay for his desperation. Roma, who observed that Levene wasn’t really a machine, but a man and thus part of a dying breed, still wants Levene’s stuff, his commissions, as he is carted off. Whatever legacy he had will not survive even a day. Willy’s crime, in the eyes of his son Biff, is the unfaithfulness he was guilty of years before. All of his borrowed wisdom and surface integrity was shown to be a façade. If this is an unfair judgment, we sense in Willy that his mental deterioration is his own verdict, that he too believes he has failed fundamentally. Willy has a Pyrrhic afterlife following his suicide, his memory a pall over his two sons and wife, his debts paid but little remaining.

Miller’s assault on the senselessness of acquisition and ambition is of a different plane than Mamet’s examination of human greed, mostly because Miller is writing a grand tragedy, and Mamet has created a melodrama. Miller wants to show capitalism’s moral bankruptcy, that it is a tragedy worthy of humanity’s collective tears when one small man dies the desperate death of a Willy Loman. Mamet shows a capitalism where survival is all-important, and exploitation is merely self-preservation.

Roma, in his sales pitch, gets at this, giving an altar call to both the spiritually needy and the greedy: “There’s an absolute morality? May be. And then what? If you think there is, then be that thing. Bad people go to hell? I don’t think so. If you think that, act that way. A hell exists on earth? Yes. I won’t live in it. That’s me.”

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Doubt by John Patrick Shanley

In Scene VII of John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt," Father Flynn admits to Sister James that he fabricated a story he told in a sermon on gossip. "What happens in life is beyond interpretation," he tells her. "The truth makes for a bad sermon. It tends to be confusing and have no clear conclusion."

"Doubt," which was later expanded into an excellent movie, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for drama in no small part because it adheres to these words.

Father Flynn's is the first voice to confront us, giving us a short sermon on doubt. We immediately like him because his voice is familiar and modern, even though the play's action takes place in 1964. He reassures us that to doubt makes us part of a larger community, struggling to make sense of all around us. Doubt obscures the truth we strain to see, but it bids us on further, changing who we are in the process. The community hearing these words beyond the church likes their easy comfort. There is no reason to take tough stands and make hard choices. Salvation is free and easy, just as God is.

We then encounter Sister James, a bright, enthusiastic teacher with the Sisters of Charity in the Bronx. She is speaking to the school principal, Sister Aloysius. We like Sister James also, because of her sunny enthusiasm and zeal for her students. She is eager and loving and quick to forgive and forget, just as God is.

Zeal describes Sister Aloysius also - but zeal of a different sort. We don't necessarily like her. In a few words of dialogue, she comes off as judgmental, unnecessarily rigid, callously traditional and authoritarian. She warns Sister James not to let students use ballpoint pens as it destroys their penmanship. She chides her for "performing" rather than teaching. And she criticizes her as overly innocent, not only to her students but to the dangers around them. "Innocence is a form of laziness," Sister Aloysius says.

There is something in us that does not like Sister Aloysius, but this feeling diminishes the longer she talks. She is vigilant, just as God is, because the world is not on our side. We recognize her as the stereotypical Catholic school nun who rules over her charges with an angry kind of devotion and puts the smell of brimstone in their nostrils. But the longer she talks, the more we perceive why she is this way. She tells Sister James to think less about herself and observe what is around her. This is sound Christian advice - after all, the sisters are there to serve. In doing so, we can perceive what follows in two different ways.

Time passes, and Sister James returns to indirectly report what Sister Aloysius suspected - Father Flynn may have had inappropriate contact with Donald Muller, the school's only black child. Did Sister James perceive something because Sister Aloysius inspired her to, or did she actually see something she wants to discount because of how she feels about the sister?

The backdrop of "Doubt" - the Catholic sex abuse scandals of the last decade - gives us reason to draw conclusions from the action. But Shanley's characters cannot be so easily pegged, nor is this play simply yet another indictment of the Catholic Church. Flynn may indeed be innocent, but there is something in his quickly offended manner that feels guilty. Sister Aloysius may be a martinet with a vendetta against a priest she sees as overly accommodating, but we are willing to go along with the behavior if she is right about Father Flynn's guilt. We want to think the best of Sister James as she struggles between the two poles of opposition, but we see her partially in the same light as Sister Aloysius, and in the same way we see ourselves. Sometimes doing the right thing is not as important to us as appearing to do the right thing. The stakes in this - the life of a child - can easily be ignored so long as our lives continue and our self-images remain. It is this climate that allowed many guilty priests to survive in parishes for so long, with so many lives destroyed.

But Shanley doesn't construct an easy dragon for vanquishing, on either side of this contest. Just consider, for a moment, how "Doubt" could have ended. If Father Flynn, for example, had been proven to be guilty, then Sister Aloysius' determination would have been justified in our eyes. We might have drawn a conclusion that her traditional ways are superior to the more modern teaching and social styles of Flynn and James. If Father Flynn had been proven innocent, then we would see Sister Aloysius as the play's villain, the forces of openness and virtue having triumphed over the church's long catalog of overzealous homegrown persecutors.

But the play is about doubt, which means that neither outcome will happen. Indeed, no real accusation is ever fully stated. The worst intimation is that Flynn gave Donald wine. When Sister Aloysius confronts Flynn about what may have happened, he responds, "What exactly are you accusing me of?" This is to be expected, and it may be calculated on Flynn's part. He could be goading the sister to either make an accusation or retreat, gambling perhaps that she will retreat. She instead reminds him that she hasn't accused him of anything, but merely asked him what happened. The accusation is one he perceives - but he is right in assuming there is one.

The audience will side one way or another, but they will see that perhaps a traditional nun, no matter how dictatorial, may have been that way for a reason. They may see that a man accused cannot necessarily prove himself innocent without losing something, or everything, in the process. They will see that choosing sides is never so easy as rallying to a cause against this or that irredeemable force.

Shanley throws another wild card into the works with the entrance of Donald's mother into the play, who is summoned for a conference with Sister Aloysius. Nothing is ever spelled out, but Donald's mother is clear on one thing - Donald is different. Does this mean he is receptive to what Sister Aloysius believes are Flynn's homosexual advances? We aren't sure. We do know that Donald is different enough to spark angry beatings at the hands of his father. The mother tells Sister Aloysius plainly that she is willing to put up with whatever attention Father Flynn gives, because it will only last until the school term is up. Donald needs this education. She is willing to ignore the rest. As with much of this play, we suspect what is going on- but we don't know for sure.

This adds another layer - not of race, though Donald's blackness adds to the tension. Father Flynn is a man, and still in a position of authority in 1964. (It is interesting that this play takes place just before the Sexual Revolution.) Sister Aloysius, Sister James and Donald's mother have to navigate their powerlessness. Even Sister Aloysius must be circumspect in how she proceeds with her accusations, knowing that they could be easily ignored by her male superiors within the church. Donald's mother doesn't care about the sister's concern - she will side with her son "and those who are good to him," meaning Father Flynn.

The mother also offers this judgment: "You can't hold a child responsible for what God gave him to be." In the current environment, this sounds like an defense of what we perceive is Donald's homosexuality. But what of Father Flynn? Did God make him a child predator? Is he a child predator? What is Donald? We are never sure. Even this statement, which appears to be a defense, cannot be digested whole.

Shanley is not content to give us an ending with Father Flynn quietly removed from the parish. Indeed, he is promoted, and even the rock solid Sister Aloysius is left to doubt whether her suspicions were ever correct.

But there is also the layer of faith to all of this. We must never forget these characters are devout and carry on their lives in a community of belief. Does Father Flynn's promotion mean that God has protected him from a false accusation, or is this ironic comment on the protection the church provided predatory priests for decades? Does the fact that such things happen give us serious doubts about the justice of God, or even His existence? That feeling of emptiness, where something has occurred but we are not sure of its exact nature, readmits us to the community of doubt where we began the play. There is no last word, Shanley says, not even in a church, an indeterminate distance short of Heaven.

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