Lateo.net - Flux RSS en pagaille (pour en ajouter : @ moi)

🔒
❌ À propos de FreshRSS
Il y a de nouveaux articles disponibles, cliquez pour rafraîchir la page.
À partir d’avant-hierThe American Conservative

The Age of Sail at TAC

Par : Jude Russo

Christmas came early at The American Conservative this year. We have invited accusations of self-indulgence for commissioning not one, but three pieces commemorating the 20th anniversary of a movie very dear to our hearts, Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. We hope you will enjoy Peter Tonguette on the movie’s commercial failure, Santi Ruiz on the men (many of them very young) who beat Napoleon, and Peter Hitchens on the British Navy and what he does not like about the movie.

The post The Age of Sail at TAC appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Great Film That Wasn’t

Culture

A Great Film That Wasn’t

Master and Commander: Far Side of the World is slavish to reality in trivialities, and pure fantasy in much greater, more complicated matters.

Author Patrick O'Brian

How I long for a good new movie. I can only watch the good old ones so many times. Rather than wear them out in my mind, I must leave longer and longer gaps between viewings. I have had this yearning for many years now, and it is not often fulfilled. How I hoped, 20 years ago, that the attempt to film Patrick O’Brian’s Napoleonic War novels would fill the chasm. But oh, how it did not do so.  

Somebody the other day described the British Empire as an irritating appendage to the Royal Navy, and this is very much how I view the history of my country. Having been introduced, at an early age, to what was then Her Majesty’s Navy, I have seen every other human institution in the world as its inferior. A certain kind of quiet and unassuming courage was involved, exemplified in 1940 by Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee, horribly maimed by a German shell on the open bridge of his destroyer in a snowstorm. Asked at this awkward moment for his orders to the rest of his flotilla, he replied briskly “Continue to engage the enemy,” and then unobtrusively died. 

This goes with a certain kind of profound but understated humor, and all takes place aboard ships of great power, romance, and beauty—now mainly vanished—which I count myself very lucky to have seen at all. This I owe to my late father, a schoolteacher’s son who more or less ran away to sea to escape a comfortable but constrained life of suburban Strict Baptist piety and sabbath silence. The Navy was his life for more than 30 years, much of it at sea very far from home. We had his sword in the house—made by Messrs Wilkinson, who later turned to the more profitable manufacture of razor blades—with its gritty sharkskin hilt, designed to stop it slipping in the hand even when covered in the enemy’s blood. It takes hold of you, that sort of thing. 

I am still puzzled but delighted by an experience I had during a visit to a Royal Navy frigate at sea, perhaps 30 years ago. I had been winched down from a helicopter onto the heaving deck, and entertained kindly but not excessively by the officers in the wardroom before taking to my bunk. In the small hours I woke to the gentle, busy sounds of a warship at sea. The watch was changing and I heard, very softly over the public address loudspeakers, the words “Call to hands!”—a phrase I knew I had never heard before in my life but which I also somehow knew I had heard a thousand times. Why should we not inherit memory?  

So when my late brother Christopher (who I think shared with me a reverence for the Navy) urged me to read Patrick O’Brian’s books about Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin, I was immediately drawn into what became a sort of modern Odyssey.  

Jack Aubrey is a genius afloat and a fool on land. He is repeatedly saved from his landward folly by Stephen, a part Irish, part Catalan Catholic, brilliant thinker, scornful of Bonaparte’s despotism, and an intrepid spy. Stephen, endearingly, remains permanently baffled and exasperated by the Navy’s mad language of futtocks and clews, grog and duff—and a particular kind of splice too rude to mention. (They still use this peculiar tongue. I have an outdated smattering of it to this day.) He is also an adventurous medical man quite uninhibited by normal rules of propriety—on one occasion he greets an old acquaintance loudly and in public with the words “How is your penis?” Alas, the news is not good. 

I know, absolutely, what they both look like, and how their voices sound. I can without difficulty picture Jack Aubrey’s face, though it is some time since I have read the books. It is not the face of Russell Crowe, who played him 20 years ago in Peter Weir’s peculiar and unsatisfactory film, which was I think meant to be the first of several.

Why do I not like it? 

It is partly that, for the reader, the imaginary Jack Aubrey is too well drawn to be played by any living man. That is not just his smile, nor his laugh, nor his way of command, nor his majestic power of thought when in peril or battle.  

It is partly that, as with so many films, vast resources have been used to get the buttons of the uniforms, the curl of the whiskers and the rigging exactly as they would have been 200 years ago. But simple matters of language and custom are sloppily ignored. At one point it is necessary for the ship’s company to pray, and the Captain must lead them. And he intones a version of the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father, who art in heaven”) that modern ignoramuses think is archaic enough to serve for a film about the past. But educated Englishmen know it to be a pestilent modern innovation. If they had to have prayers, they might at least have had him say the majestic 17th-century “Navy Prayer,” which thrillingly begins “O eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens and rulest the raging of the sea; who hast compassed the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end…” If you think it too long or too hard, watch again that great Naval film In Which We Serve (whose title is taken from that same prayer) and watch Noel Coward, as Captain Kinross, recite it to his ship’s company without hesitation or embarrassment in a scene set in 1939. 

But these are, I suppose, quibbles. Had I been asked to sculpt a film from these books, I would have begun it with Jack Aubrey’s stealthy, ruthless, and bloody rescue of Stephen Maturin from his French captors and torturers in Port Mahon, Minorca. This would have made an astonishingly potent opening scene and alerted the audience to the fact that we have, in these stories, much more than just another sea saga of creaking rigging and booming cannons. The rescue occurs in the book HMS Surprise, but it immediately introduces the watcher to Stephen Maturin’s secret life as a spy, and could easily enough be grafted onto many of the other books.   

But my deeper objection is to a grave and mistaken attempt to alter a major element of the books. The title of the 2003 film is Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. And The Far Side of the World is the title of a book to which a lot of the film is closely related—except for one thing. It pits Aubrey in a conflict with the United States Navy, which is harrying British whalers. This important moment in British and American Naval History is also dealt with in an earlier book, The Fortune of War, in which Aubrey takes a slight role in the great 1813 duel off Boston between the USS Chesapeake and HMS Shannon

These two ships, beautiful, evenly-matched, both with brave and chivalrous captains, fought briefly and savagely and the Americans lost. The War of 1812 might easily have been the first of many between America and Englnd. The soppy view of permanent Anglo-American brotherhood is entirely wrong, ignoring as it does Washington’s stinging fury when Britain built commerce raiders for the Confederacy, and their growing naval rivalry before and after the 1914–18 war. During a voyage to London in December 1918, Woodrow Wilson told his aides that if Britain did not come to terms over sea power, America would “build the biggest Navy in the world, matching theirs and exceeding it…and if they would not limit it, there would come another and more terrible and bloody war and England would be wiped off the face of the map.” 

The historian Adam Tooze revealed recently that growing naval confrontation between these two supposed shoulder-to-shoulder eternal friends was so bitter that “by the end of March 1919 relations between the naval officers of the two sides had degenerated to such an extent that the admirals threatened war and had to be restrained from assaulting each other.” My father’s attitude towards the U.S. Navy was never especially generous (I used to wonder why) and he perhaps recalled the Suez crisis during which the then head of the USN, Admiral Arleigh Burke, discussed open warfare between the two nations with the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. 

Dulles wondered out loud if there was any way to stop Britain’s Fleet from launching its attack on Egypt in 1956. Admiral Burke later recalled (in a recorded conversation which can still be listened to by visitors to his archive at Princeton’s gloriously named Mudd Library): “And I said, “Mr. Secretary, there is only one way to stop them. We can stop them. But we will blast the hell out of them.” He went on to explain, “The only way you can stop them is to shoot. And we can do that. We can defeat them—the British and the French and the Egyptians and the Israelis—the whole goddam works of them we can knock off, if you want. But that’s the only way to do it.”

This was the greatest war that never quite happened, and The Far Side of the World describes its distant origins. But the film-makers foolishly thought that the public, British or American, were not ready for the truth about the relations between the two greatest naval powers that ever existed. And so they invented a skirmish that never existed, in fiction or fact, with France. Again, they ensured authenticity in trivial matters, but avoided it in the important things. 

What a great film they could have made but didn’t. I shall just have to watch In Which We Serve yet again, and cry yet again when Celia Johnson (yet again) makes her great speech about the tribulations of Navy wives, and think of my mother.  

The post A Great Film That Wasn’t appeared first on The American Conservative.

Mastery and Command

Par : Santi Ruiz
Culture

Mastery and Command

Peter Weir’s cult classic suggests that something is lost in a world without hierarchy.

Hmssurprise

When Robert Peel was appointed Under-Secretary for war and the colonies for Great Britain in 1810, in the middle of the greatest war it had seen, he was only twenty-two. On his appointment, he received a letter from his dean at Christ Church Oxford. “Work very hard and unremittingly,” it said. “Work, as I used to say sometimes, like a tiger, or like a dragon, if dragons work more and harder than tigers. Do not be afraid of killing yourself.”

The Napoleonic Wars were won by young men entrusted with incredible amounts of responsibility, and callow youths did work themselves to death as clerks in the offices of Whitehall. William Pitt the Younger died at the age of 46 after years of sickness, leached of his health by serving in the role of wartime prime minister for fully half his life. His departments were staffed and led by as many 20-year-olds as 60- and 70-year olds.

In Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, we see the other ways young men won the war, in gory detail. The elfin 13-year-old midshipman William “Lord” Blakeney has his arm amputated, of course sans anesthesia. The film is about homosociality in all its guts and glory, from the friendship between Dr. Stephen Maturin and Captain Jack Aubrey that undergirds it, to the closed-ranks the ship’s crew present to the unlucky Midshipman Hollum, an eventual suicide.

Master and Commander, which celebrates its 20th anniversary today, was not a smash box office hit (it came in second in 2003’s Christmas season, to Elf). But it has reemerged as a cult classic, a phenomenon for which observers advance different explanations. In March, GQ asked “Why Are So Many Guys Obsessed With Master and Commander?” and sourced a cluster of predominantly New York leftist men to explain their affections. 

GQ’s writer hastens to point out that the movie is “beloved by a certain type of guy (gender neutral)” and that “any nostalgia for the traditionalism in the movie is less reactionary and more about the healthy male bonding between the characters.” This is not really true. There’s plenty of unhealthy men with unhealthy relationships: see the bullying of a colleague into killing himself. But there is “healthy” male bonding in the movie and the original novels by Patrick O’Brian. 

Aubrey and Maturin are a fully realized friendship, a kind of Frodo-Sam pairing in which the guys don’t just suffer together but actually commune. That relationship keeps the novels and movie from being just a genre fiction jaunt. The novels themselves, fans will inform you, are formally titled the Aubrey-Maturin series. (I have read 11 of the novels, enough to be considered a grade A nerd but not enough to claim real expertise.) 

That series is more expository than the movie, and has a particular appeal to the autistic and their fellow-travelers. O’Brian has a habit of using the landlubber Maturin as a foil for the explanation of nautical facts and mechanisms. By contrast, the heavily memed title screen of the film contains all the necessary exposition: Oceans Are Now Battlefields. Critics in 2003 poked at it for a plot that landed “On the Far Side of Credibility,” as the New York Times’ Jason Epstein put it.

Even critics like Epstein appreciated how accurately the film captured details of the period and the nature of war on a ship at sea: the long stretches of grinding maintenance tasks, mending rope or sails, punctuated by achingly slow pursuits. 

Those tasks were mirrored by massive systems of regimented production on the homefront. As Roger Knight puts it in his excellent history Britain Against Napoleon, “The foundations of military victory lay in…the diligence of shipbuilders and the makers of ropes.” Care in craft played an essential role in military success. The underground water storage tanks built at Gibraltar during the war for the British Navy were still in use in this century.

But Master and Commander is a compelling dude movie principally because it presents a world of organized, coordinated busyness among the members of a tight-knit warband. Like the ancient Indo-European comitatus, the crew of HMS Surprise is tied to its leader by an explicit oath of fealty. Under the leadership of someone like Russell Crowe’s Aubrey, that warband can be incredibly effective, and that leadership turns the terrible drudgery of work on the open sea into something fulfilling. Zones of action that hold out the promise of coordinated, task-oriented grand achievement will always be attractive to young men: space, the ocean, Silicon Valley.

The Napoleonic wars, in their naval form, were won by thousands of these cadres, toiling away beyond civilized life. Regimented systems of command and control, combined with communication difficulties, put tremendous pressure on relatively green leaders to make decisions that could be justified to the Admiralty. 

The lives of the men fictionalized in Master and Commander were profoundly unfree. Their paths were often set before they’d reached puberty, or forced upon them by press gangs. What contemporary viewers envy them is not their diet, or the health of their teeth, or their romantic lives. It’s the doing things together, the pulling toward the same goal and experiencing glory in doing so. The forms of communal life that permit that don’t tend to be presented to teens and late zoomers; they’re counseled to spend as much of their time as possible learning about the world and themselves before committing to a particular path. Master and Commander suggests that the constraint of being under authority, in its best form, might be something valuable.

The post Mastery and Command appeared first on The American Conservative.

Run Up the Colors

Culture

Run Up the Colors 

 Master and Commander’s box office failure was a harbinger of the cultural decline to come.

Fox_Baja_Studios_at_night_2002_21107757482_d0e65fca03

I like to think that I first saw Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World under near ideal circumstances—ideal to both appreciate the film’s numerous qualities as entertainment and edification, and to grasp why the film failed to engage audiences 20 years ago.

My first experience with the film was at a press screening shortly before its wide release in November 2003. I was already an admirer of the source material, the sequence of novels by Patrick O’Brian that rousingly and amusingly recounted the exploits of, and kinship between, Royal Navy captain Jack Aubrey (played, in the film, by Russell Crowe) and his surgeon, musical companion, and all-around sounding board, Dr. Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany). As Weir’s almost two-and-a-half-hour film unfolded, I might have nitpicked over a characterization here or a line of dialogue there, but on balance, I felt that the much-honored director of Picnic at Hanging Rock, Witness, and The Mosquito Coast had, unsurprisingly, gotten the big things right: the joyous sense of duty that spurs Aubrey, the studious curiosity that propels Maturin, the hardship of life at sea, the agony and necessity of war, and, above all, the irresistible romance of an age in which Lord Nelson was a figure men and boys longed to emulate.

In those comparatively innocent days, I did not stop to think that these elements were particularly unusual, let alone controversial. The film was based on a widely popular literary franchise—I knew people who swore by O’Brian’s novels—and it was produced by three of the largest studios in Hollywood: 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, and Miramax. This was not a niche release; its makers assumed the existence of an audience who would comprehend its celebration of gallant gentlemen in service to king and country.

As far as I was concerned, the first sign that the producers had misjudged the mood in the room came from the reaction of some of my fellow critics after that press screening two decades ago. In the lobby afterwards, I expressed my enthusiasm for the film to a few colleagues; one responded, in a flippant tone I still remember, that the movie had left him cold—that it lacked passion or excitement or some such thing. “So what?” or “What’s the big deal?” was the gist of his response. I was flabbergasted: Even if he had not liked the movie, he should not have dismissed it so cavalierly—as though courage, honor, and brotherhood, all values trumpeted by the movie, were something to shrug one’s shoulders at.

As it turned out, my colleague’s reaction foreshadowed the reception the movie got among the general public. The movie, which cost $150 million to produce, was a sluggish box-office performer: on its way to grossing about $93 million in the U.S., it spent weeks on the charts languishing behind such undistinguished titles as Elf, The Cat in the Hat, and The Haunted Mansion. Here was a leading indicator of the infantilization of American society: An Aubrey-Maturin movie could not beat out movies aimed at six-year-olds. 

In all fairness, the movie went on to make $118 million internationally. Yet it was not enough to induce Fox to make any of the sequels that the movie—with its hopeful inclusion of a subtitle that suggested further Master and Commander adventures, on the order of Master and Commander: The Surgeon’s Mate or Master and Commander: The Letter of Marque—seemed to promise. 

It wasn’t that the movie was hated or detested. It simply was not understood. Perhaps it was even beyond the understanding of the American public at that time. It cannot have been the intellectual capacity or educational shortcomings of moviegoers—surely the Napoleonic Wars are no more exotic than the historical settings of popular series like Bridgerton, Dangerous Liaisons, or Outlander. Instead it was a lack of instinctual feel for the values enunciated by Weir and company. 

Even at the time, it did not go unnoticed by me that this film, with its realistic, nuanced, but ultimately accepting attitude about men at war, was released during the first year of the Iraq War. Conservatives have by and large made peace with the opposition to Bush’s war, but the cultural damage done by the antiwar left—the Cindy Sheehans, Noam Chomskys, and Michael Moores—proved lasting. They were opposed to a specific conflict, but they also guaranteed that any subsequent conflict would be judged suspect. And, as we have seen with the perpetual attempts of the woke to rewrite American history, past historical conflicts are fair game, too. 

Master and Commander is a picture reconciled both to the inevitability of warfare—in the context of the story, Aubrey, Maturin, and the rest of the souls on the HMS Surprise are instruments of the British Empire attempting to halt the tyrannical Napoleon—as well as the necessity of the military apparatus. The film delights in the vernacular of sailors—“beat to quarters” and “run up the colors” and the rest—and accepts, sadly but stoically, the costs incurred by those sailors. During the opening battle, we are shocked to hear, for the first time, of the need for sand in the surgeon’s quarters—to soak up and make less slippery the blood that has already begun to pool on the floor from procedures. Young Max Pirkis played a boy midshipman whose arm, shredded by that first battle, must be amputated by Maturin. Aubrey receives word on the lad’s condition with a mix of calm and empathy: “His father would have understood. He knew the life. His mother, however—.” Crowe played Aubrey as a gentle giant: a dogged taskmaster and ruthless tactician who nonetheless is unstinting in rewarding his men with extra rum or more rations. 

Although Aubrey’s fixation with the Acheron is at one point questioned by Maturin, the captain’s command is never doubted. No ship—“this little wooden world,” Aubrey calls it—can function with dissent. When a carpenter’s mate glaringly insults Midshipman Hollom (Lee Ingleby), Maturin rages—at the carpenter’s mate for his disrespect, but also at Hollom for failing to inspire leadership and encouraging mutinous behavior. Unable to summon the required qualities within himself, Hollom commits suicide, an episode Weir films with the same delicacy as the suicide of the aspiring actor in Dead Poets Society. Yet Weir does not use the episode to call into question the institution of the Royal Navy itself. After Hollom’s death, Aubrey invites the men to pray for forgiveness for the way they treated him; later, after many lives are lost following a battle, he leads the men in a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer—heard, in a rather extraordinary indulgence on the part of secular Hollywood, in full.

Looking at the movie again now, I was struck by countless moments that were likely to have been incomprehensible to audiences two decades ago and would not even be attempted today. Maturin’s interest in collecting specimens of exotic beasts on the Galapagos Islands would surely draw accusations of colonialism; Aubrey’s fearsome command, tempered though it is by genuine compassion, would undoubtedly be just another example of toxic masculinity. 

The industry rewarded Master and Commander with two Oscars out of 10 nominations, but the cake was baked by the indifferent audience. There would be no sequel, and the gifted, well-liked Weir—who films the fixing up of the Surprise after it has started to bear battle scars with the same respectful attentiveness as the barn-raising scene in Witness—only made one more movie, 2010’s The Way Back

At the end of the film, Aubrey and Maturin once more make music as a pair—one on cello, the other on violin—as the Surprise sails off for another confrontation. The image of the ship disappearing into the distance is a metaphor for this movie and the ethos that underlies it: both gone forevermore. 

The post Run Up the Colors appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Case for the Washington Football Team

Par : Nic Rowan
Culture

The Case for the Washington Football Team

Washington, D.C. is not the city it was 70 years ago, or even 30 years ago.

Nov,14,,2021;,Landover,,Md,Usa;,Washington,Football,Team,Taylor

Last week, Magic Johnson, one of the new owners holding a minority stake in the Washington Commanders, said that the capital’s football team may well be renamed again in the next few years. 

“Everything’s on the table, right? Especially after this year. We’ll see where we are with the name,” Johnson told NBC. “We’re going to spend this year understanding what we have in place. The name of the team will come up eventually.”

The franchise’s majority owner, Josh Harris, has also discussed the potential for a name change. While he said that his top priority for the team is winning—a welcome change from the previous owner—he also indicated that he cares about pleasing the fans. And a name change would be a big part of achieving that goal. Within 24 hours of the NFL’s approval of Harris’s purchase, he received multiple requests from fans begging for him to ditch the Commanders’ name. 

Most people, of course, want to revert back to the Redskins. After more than 20 years of controversy, capped by a painful, protracted transition to the new name, the Redskins is still the name by which most Washingtonians call their team. The evidence of its longevity is everywhere: The logo is still plastered on many city playgrounds, as well as the old highway signs indicating the exit for RFK Stadium (whose closure in favor of an all-but inaccessible suburban monstrosity is another sore spot). The Redskins have a powerful pull, not just on the grandpas who wear burgundy and gold polos to church on Sunday, but also on the college kids down the street from my house, who, every weekend in the fall, play beer pong on a table painted to look like the Joe Gibbs–era FedEx Field.   

I am sympathetic to these longings, but, when I consider the proposition practically, I don’t see it becoming reality. Washington, D.C. is not the city it was 70 years ago when the team’s founder, George Preston Marshall, successfully marketed the Redskins as the “team of the South,” bringing with him all the baggage that appellation entailed. It’s not even the city it was a little more than 30 years ago, when, under Jack Kent Cooke’s ownership, the Redskins won their last Super Bowl. In that era, the ’Skins still played in RFK, a formidable inner-city stadium with a dirt field, crumbling locker rooms, and grandstands so small that fans practically participated in the games themselves. 

There’s no going back to that time. These days, D.C. is a big, professionalized town, populated more or less permanently by transplants uninterested in the locals’ backward old ways. Even if, by some miracle, the new owners did toss the Commanders name and revive the Redskins, I suspect it would be in some ersatz, unsatisfying manner. The diminishment would leave fans wishing they had let the dead bury the dead.

Instead, I propose that Josh Harris et al. do something truly bold. The Redskins aren’t coming back, and the Commanders can’t stay. Barring another pathetic attempt at a rebrand (Would anyone really accept the Pigskins? the Redtails? the Red Hogs?) that leaves us with one option, and I think it is the best one: The Washington Football Team.

That name, which we enjoyed only for two years, was not so much chosen as it was bestowed on the team. The strange conflation of a summer’s worth of racial unrest and credible allegations of sexual impropriety in July 2020 finally forced Dan Snyder’s hand, and he dropped the Redskins name. But since the beginning of football season was just weeks away—and Snyder’s legal team didn’t have the wherewithal to secure the rights to another name—he was forced to settle on what most people decried as a bland placeholder.

But even at the time, I saw things differently. Washington Football Team is a simple statement of fact—a plainspoken advertisement for itself, like all great American brands. And the fashion in which it fell upon the city was oracular: the name neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign. (And for die-hard Redskins fans, it was a tabula rasa. When someone said The Team, with a certain emphasis, you knew exactly what he meant.) And the name probably would have stuck around, too, after Taylor Heinicke’s miracle play in the 2021 Wildcard playoff game, had he led the team to victory and ended Tom Brady’s career early. How I wish he did! The thrill of a real win—the team’s first in the playoffs since 2005—would have been enough to make the placeholder permanent. 

It wasn’t meant to be then. But now, with new ownership, there’s time again to make amends. “If one cannot attain to a high standard,” Shirley Hazzard wrote of her time at the United Nations, “the least one can do is to be disappointed in oneself.” That maxim could be applied to Washington and its football team as well. The past 20 years have been a mess of mismanagement, resentment, and wrecked quarterbacks. We’ve been given ample time to be disappointed in our shortcomings. Now it’s time to get back to basics: Washington. Football. Team.

Correction: An earlier version of this article said that the last Redskins Super Bowl was over 40 years ago. It was in fact in 1992, over 30 years ago.

The post The Case for the Washington Football Team appeared first on The American Conservative.

❌