"I don't understand… I tried to do my job, I follow the rules; and people hate me. Innocent people get hurt and other people, people who are not good, get to walk around doing whatever they want. It's not fair!"
Season 1, Episode 12
Nixon vs. Kennedy
Written by Lisa Albert, Andre & Maria Jacquemetton
"Scott Fitzgerald was, in his own words, 'a moralist at heart.' He wanted to 'preach at people,' and what he preached about most was the degeneracy of the wealthy. His concern, however, did not lie with the antisocial behaviors to which the rich are prone: acquiring their wealth through immoral means… Like many American moralists, Fitzgerald was more offended by pleasure than by vice, and he had a tendency to confound them. In The Great Gatsby, polo and golf are more morally suspect than murder. Fitzgerald despised the rich not for their iniquity per se but for the glamour of it…"
Kathryn Schulz
Bad Egg (article for New York Magazine)
The Frustrated CFO's comment:
A highly opinionated person has a difficult time restraining herself in the face of the inevitable hype evoked by the new adaptation of the "great American novel." And I'm not even talking about myself: Kathryn Schulz's strongly negative point of view resonated very positively with me. So, let me stick (or rather add) my two cents as well.
First of all, just like Ms. Schulz and a few other intelligent people, I always thought that, as a fictional novel, The Great Gatsby was a bad book. Moreover, the simplistic socio-economic generalizations of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writings, based on his own immediate upper-class surrounding, offend my intelligence. It's one thing when writers stick to what they know. Hey, if all of them were Philip K. Dicks, how would we know the difference? It's a completely different matter, however, when someone takes bits and pieces of his personal experience, severely impaired by alcohol and self-loathing, and tries to pass his cardboard characters and schematically constructed narrative as a "critical social history." That's a very dangerous, irresponsible, and self-serving undertaking. Was J.D. Rockefeller Jr., the conservationist, identical to Tom Buchanan? I don't think so. Yet, they both belonged to the same class, the same age group, they both went to Ivy League Schools, etc.
There is a reason why the book's popularity rose sharply after WWII: the social changes were ripening and the white rich people were despised by most, including their own heirs (Patty Hearst was not the only one, you know). In the eyes of the readers who caused the Baby Boom, the Fates have punished poor, infatuated Jay Gatsby for trying to be where he didn't belong, for wanting to become rich and impress Daisy into loving him, for betraying "moral values" in order to accomplish this self-imposed task.
But times have changed. What the majority of critics don't realize is that by now the novel has lost all of its social-scorn charge. The baby-boomers and their children, corrupted by the celebrity-obsessed media, LOVE wealth above everything else and ENVY, but do not disapprove of, the rich. A "self-made man" Jay Gatsby is not pitied, but revered. Who cares about shady deals, DUIs, and murders – it's all in the "job description" of climbing the ladder to the "top."
Here is another quote to illustrate the depth of our contemporaries' perversion:
"Every time I'm out, a drunken Wall Street guy comes up to me to say, 'You're the man.' It's depressing. Gordon Gekko was not a hero."
Michael Douglas
Only in this environment the unrestrained lavishness of Baz Luhrmann's production could be acceptable, and preferable, to the hordes of day-dreamesrs wasting their lives on fantasizing about becoming rich and famous overnight.
Now, go and Check out this entertaining post about what other directors might've done with this stale material.
Scientists studying the processes of human decision-making (the likes of psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer and physicist Leonard Mlodinow) build research institutes, conduct experiments, write books, and give lectures to support their argument that our subconsciousness, our "gut feelings," our intuition – whatever you prefer to call it, has a fundamental impact on the way we come to vital conclusions, resolve personal and professional problems, make split-second choices in high-pressure situations, and generally conduct ourselves on a daily basis. But do we really need this much theoretically-substantiated convincing?
Life provides us with tons of evidence everywhere we look. 99% of business decisions are based on some internal impulse (CFOs know it better than anyone). A private equity investor can read every word and weigh every digit of a 100-page incredibly rosy due diligence report and still say No to the prospective buy, because "something tells him" it's a bad lemon. The reason college dropouts like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Michael Dell became uber-successful businessmen is because they disregard the rules and follow their commercial instincts. The whole of the CIA analyzes volumes of intelligence data for years; then comes Carrie Mathison with the unequivocal trust in her own guts and points her finger out: "I love this ginger dude, but he is a fucking terrorist. I just know it."
Even after experiencing this phenomenon for decades myself, I am still surprised by the brain's ability to quickly come up with solutions to multi-faceted problems. Sometimes it seems that no mind's work goes into the formulation of a strategic move or an intricate design of a complex reporting system. How does it work inside my head? Is it intuition supported by vast professional expertise? Or does my brain sift very fast through the "evidence" in front of me, and if I took time to analyze the process I would be able to isolate each step of the neurological algorithm? And how is it that my hunches on whether an endeavor will be a success or a failure are most of the time spot-on? Hell, if I know!
The point is that most people experience the phenomenon of "unexplainable" knowledge and unsubstantiated trust into one's own intuition on a daily basis. How many times do you find yourself on either side of this exchange: "How did you know?"/ "I don't know, I just did." Or this one: "How did you figure this out?" "I don't know, it just came to me." Thousands? And we leave it at that: it's so common and acceptable, no further explanation is required.
In fact, we are so intimately familiar with the "gut feeling" that we unconditionally accept the concept of coming to conclusions through some obscure maze of subconscious clues as pure realism. Moreover, storytellers aspiring to create the ambiance of authenticity cannot ignore the intuitive nature of mental processes.
On the other hand, an impeccable logician with an ability of consciously processing numerous facts in a matter of seconds is usually seen as a phenom – in real life someone definitely "on the Spectrum," as they call it nowadays; or, in the creative realm, a stuff of legends, a mythological creature, a literary concoction, such as my beloved Sherlock Holmes. The unique abilities of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation are so fascinating, so magic-like that the detective extraordinaire has joined the ranks of undying archetypal characters (like Cyrano, or Peter Pan, or Romeo & Juliet) that get to be incarnated and reincarnated in different forms, substances, and environments.
Besides the numerous literary pastiches of Sherlock Holmes's "latter days" adventures, we are presently have no less than five (!) screen variations of the famed deducing genius:
1. Guy Ritchie's lavishly budgeted and heavily CGI-ed big-screen adaptations featuring the full spectrum of Conan Doyle characters, with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law topping the bill as Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Dr. Watson. The movies are set in the meticulously recreated places and times taken straight from the author's pages.
2. The BBC's fabulous teaser Sherlock with painfully short seasons consisting of 3 feature-length episodes each. While still sticking to the original names, characterizations, and even the titles of individual stories, the series transplants Sherlock Homes, Dr. Watson (still an Afghan War veteran – some things never change), the criminal mastermind Moriarty, the seductress Irene Adler, the faithful Mrs. Hudson, et al. to technology-saturated 21st century London.
3. The CBS's freshly-minted (2012) network-sized (24 episodes per season) series Elementary, which not only puts the former Dr. Watson through a sex change, converting John into Joan (as depicted by Lucy Liu), but also gives the brilliant detective a much bigger playground by sending him to New York.
4. Also on CBS (would you believe it?!) is The Mentalist, already renewed for the sixth season. Most viewers don't even realize that they are watching a Sherlock-Holmes re-interpretation, because the main character's name is Patrick Jane and the series is set in present-day California, but I assure you that's what it is. Mr. Jane possesses all the required attributes, solving murders and bringing criminals to justice in every episode by sheer use of his mental power, noticing the most nuanced details in human behavior and logically reconstructing chains of events. While his sidekick, CBI special agent Lisbon, is also a female and has nothing to do with medicine, the creators did give Patrick an archenemy of the Moriarty caliber – the omnipresent and all-corrupting Red John.
5. And finally, The Mentalist's comedic counterpart – USA Networks' Psych, also set in the modern time, also in California (yet further South), also featuring a police consultant, and also hidden behind different names. Yet, the main character Shawn Spenser's power to see clues are so heightened that it's demonstrated to the audience in a laser-vision fashion. There is a new twist on the sidekick here as well – he is a childhood friend and an African-American, but professionally he is much closer to the modern ways of healthcare than doctors are – he sells pharmaceuticals.
Regardless of the time backdrop, the scenery, or the given names, all these characters stem from the same original stock cooked up by his lordship in his study – the ultra-brainy and obsessively detailed observers, who use their abilities to solve heinous crimes.
And that's why for a Sherlock Holmes aficionado like I, Guy Ritchie's Victorian escapades, in a way, seem like a betrayal of the myth, historical accuracy notwithstanding. Yes, Holmes was excellent in the boxing ring, proficient in Bartitsu, and good with the revolver, but it's the knife of his mind that dissected all those crimes – a weapon so unbelievably sharp that Conan Doyle felt it necessary to explain some of its potency with addictions to various drugs.
Interestingly enough, both the contemporary science of "gut feelings" and the Victorian creator of a mental-power archetype, in spite of the polarity of their foci, have at least one notion in common: Weighing too many learned facts pertaining to diverse branches of knowledge frequently slows down the process of arriving to a right conclusion. According to Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes deliberately discarded from his memory the childhood lessons of Earth's rotation around the Sun. He explains that for someone who relies on the Art of Detection, it's far more reasonable to accept the self-centered naked eye observation that our source of light rises on the East and goes down on the West, thus giving an appearance of moving.
In his books, Gigerenzer provides numerous examples showing that, statistically, people who know more about a subject matter come up with wrong solutions more frequently than those who rely on limited knowledge and intuition. Sometimes I wonder whether Einstein would be able to have his Relativity epiphanies if he was very good at integral and differential math.
And I have to say that the only thing that prevents me from drowning in the sea of the bookish knowledge I've absorbed over the years of advanced studying, is my persistent skepticism and an incurable disregard of "academic" authority. It is quite possible that this mental arrogance (hey, it is what it is) is the reason I'm still able to come up with some good ideas. After all, capable CFOs are not phantasmagorical characters with computers instead of brains in their heads. We are humans and, therefore, we should be able, from time to time, to let go of the educational dogma and allow the subliminal impulses, the gut feelings to take over.
I was standing there at Terminal 5 yesterday, listening to Alt-J performing their 2012 Mercury Prize winning album An Awesome Wave live, cheering with the rest of the audience at the first notes of each song in recognition of their sublime quality. And once again a familiar notion formed inside my head. It happens to me every time I experience something that momentarily separates my being from all the negative garbage in my life. I think, "If I didn't keep on, I wouldn't have received this gift, I wouldn't have come to know these songs, I wouldn't be bobbing in rhythm right now."
I claw my way through the long stretches of hard life, full of frustration and disappointments, from one moment like this to another. This is what forces me to continue – the hope that there is another wonder ahead. And when they come, I use them as my self-therapy: I imprint the intimacy of the experience in my memory and let it carry me over the next hurdle.
It's like mantra: If I didn't endure I wouldn't have exited the Bullet train onto the platform of Shuzenji station and felt my rusty armor melting away; I wouldn't have seen that astonishing photo my daughter took a few months ago; I wouldn't have watched Radiohead, The Mars Volta, Tool do their on-stage magic; I wouldn't have heard Andrew Bird's heavenly sounds in the Guggenheim and in the Riverside Church; I wouldn't have read new Egan, Carson, Cunningham; I wouldn't have stood in the middle of the Red Forest breathing the ancient clarity… And I wouldn't have been at Terminal 5 yesterday.
So, here is my personal tip for everyone who, like me, is overwhelmed with frustration and prone to desperation: find something powerful that can make you forget about the dread, look for opportunities to experience it whenever you can, and hold on to the sensory memory of each occasion for as long as the shittiness of this life allows you. And let's hope that the gaps between the moments of joy will not get any longer then they already are.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank my daughter for treating her mother as an equal and sharing all kinds of awesomeness. And thank you very much, the dude from Bumblefuck, IL.
Ok, I honestly thought that my post about the foreign press conspiracy was the last thing I would ever write about Lena Dunham, HBO’s Girls, the unjustified and pervasive brouhaha surrounding them, etc. But I was never joking when I said that merit and objectivity were placed very high on my hierarchy of values. They are so important to me that I can even look at a pool of shit, notice a few specks of goodness there, and effortlessly say, “This is a pool of shit, but those couple of things are quite good.”
No, I didn’t change my mind about Dunham’s creations so far, especially the ones she’s done on her own, without any help from other writing and directing talents; nor did I recant my opinion about the hipsters of media who buzz her up to the sky. But that doesn’t prevent me from objectively acknowledging that the 8th episode of the second season, It’s Back, was a remarkable breakthrough.
For the very first time, the show elevated itself to the level of truly generational significance. Because, if anything unites people in their 20s across geographical borders, nationalities, social origins, monetary standings, physical appearances, intellectual abilities, and creative talents, it’s the unprecedented levels of anxiety, uncertainty, disorientation, and doubt (whether deeply hidden or worn right there on their faces) we have instilled in them.
Yes, WE, most of all the parents, but also teachers, employers, mentors, and public figures – we fucked them young bitches up with our twisted, contradictory, egomaniacal, and unfounded “guidance!” We tell them to pursue their dreams, yet want them to be financially self-sufficient. We tell them that they can achieve whatever they want if they try their best, while knowing very well that no amount of hard work and talent can compete with inroads based on personal connections. We tell them that a higher education leads to better employment, while openly complaining about our own jobs. We convince them that they are talented, unique, smart, and beautiful, yet cannot summon enough decency to show them the respect they actually deserve.
And so, here, in episode 8, we have a gallery of ALL the lead characters presented in nearly equal measure (already an outstanding feat for “Girls”), with their various manifestations of the generational malady:
Absent is Jessa, the eternal quitter, once again wandering away in search of the false thrills of a “real life” (beautifully written out in the previous episode into her already-showing pregnancy by the Six Feet Under alumnus Bruce Eric Kaplan).
The dashing, gifted, interesting, and earnest Adam, who theoretically should not have any qualms about getting a girl, admitting to his blind date (set up by the girl’s mother), that he is so nervous, he’s “sweating bullets.” And we just know that he will fuck it up eventually.
The heart-broken Charlie, who drops his guitar and channels his pain into creating an iPhone app inspired by the obsessive pain inside him. Yes, he cashes in on it and, by “society’s standards,” he seems to be on the top of the world, but his sad eyes say otherwise. Moreover, we know all about the longevity of these startups.
The awkward Shoshanna, torn between the die-hard concept that college is supposed to be “the best time of one’s life” (never mind all those NYU suicides) and the reality that she lives with an adult man whom she actually supports; scared that, whether successful or not, she will be just as lost as her friends after graduation.
The “adult” Ray himself, a self-proclaimed “homeless loser,” who is smart and possibly talented (in something), but is trapped in the reality that he cannot find a way into the world, in which he believes he belongs. Yet, he still feels that he has a right to give advice to his fellow struggler “to stop being a cartographer, and start being an explorer.”
Here is Marnie, standing in front of Ray, crushed by disillusion and failing to be “the most likely to succeed.” Pushed to the edge, she admits that all she wants to do is to sing… and turns out she has a beautiful instrument for it too. Who could possibly know? She was hiding it from everyone.
And there is Hannah… This is the first show on television that unflinchingly uncovered a true portrait of OCD, without providing any comically cutesy cushions for the audience – just a straight blow to the head in all its ugliness. This is what it’s really like – exhausting and debilitating, leaving you feeling powerless, reduced to a fucking puppet. This is also the first time someone showed with an admirable subtlety what it does to a girl when her loving father tells her: “You can’t be anorexic – I’ve seen you in a bathing suit.”
Considering the track record up to this point, it’s hard to believe that all of it was fitted into one episode. It was written by three people – Lena Dunham herself, Steven Rubinshteyn (who served as Ms. Dunham’s assistant for the two seasons), and Deborah Schoeneman (who worked as the story editor on the show). The rich material gave Jesse Peretz an opportunity to use his directorial skills for real.
And they did all this without any cheap tricks: no false dramatics, no incoherent story turns, no random bare breasts and asses. Instead, the episode was finally able to achieve a high degree of emotional nakedness.
Is this the beginning of a transformation? I hope so. Episode 9, On All Fours, (written by Dunham and Jenni Konner, directed by Dunham) is definitely an excellent follow up. I always said, that Lena Dunham is a capable person, who will get better as she learns from other talented people. But, on her own, she has a long way to go before she can truly live up to the hype around her. Will she learn humility and start giving credits where they are due? Who knows?
Interestingly enough, as reported by The Atlantic Wire on March 7th, the co-authors of the It’s Back episode are not invited into the third season’s writers’ room. Moreover, everyone in that room has been fired. Only a few older pros will be allowed to share credits with Ms. Dunnam in the third season: Apatow, Konner, Kaplan, Heyward. Maybe it will help Lena to hold on to her “so young, so brilliant” status longer? These people will always be older than her. You know who else is pegged to participate? Dunham’s parents. Reverse nepotism? Oh, well…
The Frustrated CFO 