Escape from Tyranny

Originally Posted Friday, March 7, 2014

Is it childish to be nostalgic?  It seems I was born that way and have never grown out of it.  It is a malady that strikes many, I would say, as companies have grown up exploiting it.  The J. Peterman catalog still uses the quote from its original ad when their only product was a horsehair duster:

"People want things that are hard to find. Things that have romance, but a factual romance, about them."

 I would have to use the word "factual" in quotes to make it apply to my own sensibilities.  Factual, say, like a Bartle Bull novel.  I have a childish love that takes me romantically back to a recreated, artificially crafted time that represents maybe 1% of the reality.

Today sees the opening of Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel."  I've been sold since I watched the trailer a couple months ago.  Here is a scene from the movie narrated by Anderson himself.    The Time's reviewer, A.O. Scott, says:

"Mr. Anderson embraces this nostalgia — [a beautiful, fragile Central European civilization was all but demolished, surviving mainly as the ghostly object of nostalgic longing] — for a bygone modernity of railway compartments, telegrams and handmade luggage; of louche aristocrats, discreet bellhops and ruddy-faced workingmen; of painting and poetry and psychoanalysis — but he also tries to work through it, to capture some of the vitality and peculiarity of a vanished world."

 That is it, isn't it, this desire to capture a "vanished world."  It is impossible, we know, for it never existed, at least not in the way of representation.  But it was real and did exist in small, tangible ways.  There are remnants in stories and poems and paintings, and in bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam, old jewelry and pieces of clothing and the very handmade luggage of which Scott speaks.  It has to be as real as the Mastodon and its "vanished world."

Perhaps there is a Loch Ness Monster, too.

Scott's summary is that. . . "This movie makes a marvelous mockery of history, turning its horrors into a series of graceful jokes and mischievous gestures. You can call this escapism if you like. You can also think of it as revenge."

The revenge of which he speaks is against tyranny.  And therein lies the power and purpose, in part, of art--an escape from tyranny.

I received word this morning that an old friend is in the hospital.  They are running tests to see what's wrong.  I shall go and sit with him a bit.  I will need the movie as soon as I can see it so that I may avert my eyes from the tyranny a while longer.