Cornered by Culture, September 2024: C'est fini
This is the final edition of Cornered by Culture. I decided this format puts unnecessary constraints on the reviews that I write, and doesn't always align with the pace at which I engage with media. And so... for one last time, culture has got us cornered...
Music: Велика ріка Хєнь-Юань by Цукор Біла Смерть
This is a Ukrainian song; in English its name roughly translates to "The Great Hen-Yuan River by Sugar White Death". Цукор Біла Смерть made avant-garde, folk-inspired music, much of which sounds dissonant or confusing to me; but a couple of their songs have great melodies and a potent, haunted beauty. This is one those latter songs. It reminds me of the period between winter and spring, which could be anywhere from February to April depending on where you live, when you can smell the dirt in the breeze. Everything is still dead, but maybe one day the weather is slightly warm and damp. How else could you describe a song, if not by these odd kinds of analogies?
I've heard a couple other Ukrainian (neo)folk songs that are endowed with a similarly haunted quality as of The Great Hen-Yuan River: there's Bez Nazvy by Svitlana Nianio (who was a member of Цукор Біла Смерть), and Verbovaya Doshchenka from the movie Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Sergei Parajanov. A Hawk and a Hacksaw made a good rendition of the latter.
Literature: The Wife of Bath's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer
Okay, so what if I haven't finished all of the Canterbury Tales yet? Apparently The Wife of Bath's Tale is one of the best in the collection, so it merits a review of its own.
Middle English is a strange language: to my modern ears, it sounds hearty and lyrical, but at the same time quite silly. For example, the Canterbury Tales open with these famous lines:
Whan that Aprille with his schowres swooteWhen read aloud, it flows and flutters, perfectly suited to iambic metre, and you can't help but marvel at Chaucer's vertuosite. Yet at the same time, there are funny vowel changes ("swoote") and antiquated constructions ("so priketh hem nature") which have an undeniable comedic effect.
The drought of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathud every veyne in suich licour
Of which vertue engendred is the flour:
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Enspirud hath in every holte and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge soune
Hath in the ram his halfe cours y-ronne--
And smale fowles maken melodie,
That slepen al night with open yhe,
So priketh hem nature in here corages.
I think the Wife of Bath's Tale remains so popular because it discusses a subject of perennial interest--the ethics of marriage and romance. It doesn't matter whether you're a feminist professor who dresses like Steve Jobs, a tech worker who listens to podcasts, or just a normal guy; everyone has an opinion on this topic.
The surface-level message of the Wife's tale is that relationships go well when the man lets the woman have all authority. This idea may have been influenced by the troubadours, who did tend to fawn over noblewomen in a rather submissive way. Maybe I use the internet too much, but in modern terms you could say the Wife's tale is one of simps, incels, and e-girls, and we are all participants in its wretched conversation.
I am burning out and have nothing more to say. A final excerpt that needs no explanation; just enjoy it:
In olde dayes of the kyng Arthour,
Of which that Britouns speken gret honour,
Al was this lond fulfilled of fayrie;
The elf queen with hir joly compaignye
Daunced fuloft in many a grene mede.
This was the old oppynyoun, as I rede--
I speke of many hundrid yer ago:
But now can no man see noon elves mo,
For now the grete charite and prayeres
Of lymytours, and other holy freres,
That sechen every lond and every streem
As thik as motis in the sonne beem,
Blessynge halles, chambres, kichenes, boures,
Citees, burghes, castels hihe, and toures;
Thropes, bernes, shepnes, and dayeries,
That makith that ther ben no fayeries.
Kino: Days of Heaven (1978) by Terrence Malick
One of the many unusual parts of Terrence Malick's biography is that he studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford and translated one of Heidegger's works into English. Though I haven't read Heidegger myself, I've heard that much of his philosophy concerns the roots of culture and the effects of industrialization. Those themes play a prominent role in the setting of Malick's 1978 film, so perhaps his academic background influenced this masterpiece of cinema.
The first time I watched this movie was YEARS AGO, when I was younger, and I didn't understand it at all: I just remember some of the visuals unnerved me, particularly the scene with the locusts. The movie is ostensibly a work of historical fiction, but various factors bring it into the realm of magical realism or fantasy. There are shots of the vast Great Plains in saturated amber and blue, with an omnipresent house that sits like a sparrow atop a low hill. Themes of transience appear in various forms: many of the characters are seasonal laborers, we see the setting through all its different seasons, and in a broader context, the ecosystem of the Great Plains coexists with farming machines; these were the brief decades during which industry completed its conquest of nature. The machines themselves appear strange, perhaps because technology advanced at such a rapid pace back then that models changed year after year, without much standardization, spawning a bestiary's worth of unique and otherworldly designs. There are also giant grain elevators and player pianos, which have similar visual effect.
A more concrete example of the fantastical nature of this film can be found in a wedding scene around 35 minutes in. For some reason--I heard it was due to time or budget restrictions--the props behind the altar bore writing in a strange-looking alphabet. The first time I watched this I assumed it was the Deseret alphabet, used at some point by the Mormons. The writing actually turns out to be Ojibwe, which in any case is completely out of place given the story's setting in the Texas panhandle. Details like this drive the film closer to fantasy and anachronism.
At the risk of being too referential, the narrative style reminded me of how Chekhov wrote some of his stories, particularly Peasants. Days of Heaven is narrated by a kind of urchin, who speaks in an eerily prosaic way about the hard facts of life, and in a very close parallel to the aforementioned Chekhov story, references apocalyptic prophecies during a montage of their train going out west through deserted grasslands.
The film's plot was pretty simple, so it would have been inconsequential as a book. But as a movie... It's clear that certain stories are much better suited to a particular form of media, whether that be verse, poetry, song, film, or whatever.
I'm tired of writing as if this is some kind of essay for school. To cut short another paragraph or so of useless rambling, this is one of my favorite movies.