Where are you Superman?

Waiting for Superman
Directed by Davis Guggenheim
(Paramount Vantage, 2010, 102 minutes)

''What we're against is proposals that divide people''.  So says Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, in response to a proposal from Washington D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee.  Rhee's controversial idea was to give teachers a choice between retaining their unrivalled job security and a modest pay rise, or forgoing it for the chance to earn dramatically higher wages based on performance.  As Davis Guggenheim, director and narrator of Waiting for Superman, tells us, local union leaders were so threatened by Rhee's proposal that they refused to allow their members to vote on it.

Guggenheim, director of Al Gore's global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, is not exactly a fire-breathing conservative.  He was also responsible for Barack Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention biographical film and his 30-minute television campaign advertorial.  But with Waiting for Superman, this director could hardly have delivered a more stunning indictment of education bureaucrats, teachers unions and, by extension, the Democratic Party.

Jonathan Alter of Newsweek (who wrote a flattering biography of Franklin Roosevelt and is generally sympathetic to Democratic presidents) says in the documentary that ''teachers unions are a menace'', and that the national Democratic Party is their ''wholly-owned subsidiary.''

Waiting for Superman combines devastating survey data and examination scores with an often emotional portrayal of five young Americans whose local schools are failing them, to paint a bleak picture of US public schools.

Since 1971, spending per student on education in the United States has increased from $4,300 to $9,000 in inflation-adjusted terms.  At the same time, test scores of American students have stagnated while the rest of the world surged ahead.  The proportion of American students judged ''proficient'' in reading and maths for their year level is appallingly low -- less than 40 per cent in most states, and as little as 12 per cent in the worst educational districts like Washington D.C.

The system of granting ''tenure'' -- which effectively guarantees a teacher's job for life -- as well as staunch resistance from unions to merit-based pay come under heavy fire in the movie.  In just one example of the damage inflicted by tenure, the state of Illinois has had only 38 school districts out of 876 ever successfully fire a tenured teacher.  Compared to other professions -- where one in fifty-six doctors and one in ninety-seven lawyers lose their right to practise, just one in every two and a half thousand teachers ever lose their jobs.

The challenges of firing incompetent or negligent teachers were demonstrated by New York State's notorious ''rubber room'', where more than 600 tenured teachers awaited disciplinary hearings on their full salaries and benefits.  In these fiscally-straitened times and at a cost of more than $100 million annually to taxpayers, the rubber room highlights the threat posed by education unions not just to quality education, but also to the fiscal solvency of state governments.

Statistics like these are particularly galling when considered against testimony from experts interviewed in the film.  One argues that the effect of sacking just the worst 6-10 per cent of teachers and replacing them with merely average ones would catapult the United States to the top of educational world rankings.

Waiting for Superman, however, is not all doom and gloom.  Against this depressing backdrop, the film also profiles educational entrepreneurs who offer some hope for American students from low-income backgrounds.

Geoffrey Canada is one such visionary.  Himself a product of a rough neighbourhood and raised by a single mother, he set out to reform education in the United States first as a teacher, then as an educational consultant.  But frustrated by continual barriers put up by education bureaucrats, and an unwillingness to tackle the problems caused by union obstinacy, Canada took charge of the Harlem Children's Zone, an all-encompassing social-welfare charity that includes charter schools.

Each of the children profiled in the film have applied for a charter school like Harlem Success Academy, one of seven charter schools in New York run by the Success Charter Network.  Charter School network KIPP (''Knowledge is Power''), also profiled in the documentary, now includes 99 schools which span across 20 states and Washington D.C.  Another, SEED in Washington D.C, was the first charter to open an urban boarding school.  All are hugely successful, and as a result demand for places far exceeds what they are able to offer.  Charter school legislation in the United States requires oversubscribed schools to hold a public lottery to select their students.

This process sets up the final shattering scenes of the movie, as each of the children learns their fate:  will their number be drawn out of the lottery, meaning they are accepted into an outstanding charter school, or will they be consigned to their local ''dropout factory''?

Although the film has generally been well received, it is has not been without criticisms.  Aside from what you would expect from vested interests, the strongest charge against Waiting for Superman is that it is light on solutions.  To an extent, this is true.  While the movie does an excellent job describing the problems the American education system faces, it resists being bogged down in the policy detail of potential solutions.  In just one example of this oversight, school vouchers -- a popular tool for facilitating school choice worldwide -- are not mentioned once in the movie.

Yet the villains and heroes in this story are made abundantly clear.  Solutions follow logically.  Unions who protect failing teachers at all costs, resist merit-pay and stifle innovation through their political patronage must be weakened.  Educational entrepreneurs who are building excellent schools need to be supported, freed from red-tape and left alone to do their work.

The film also trumpets an important finding from the data of successful charter schools:  the achievement gap can be bridged.  For years, many academics in the education field believed it was impossible, or at least extremely difficult to get the same results from kids from disadvantaged backgrounds as you could get from students from privileged upbringings.  Yet the best charter schools have demonstrated, that in just a few years, they can transform students who previously tested at the lowest levels of academic achievement to the highest.

It certainly isn't easy -- requiring longer school hours, highly paid and highly competent teachers, lofty expectations and an unapologetic focus on college as an end goal.  But what it does prove is that there is nothing inherently wrong with the children, just the system that adults are responsible for designing and running.

Some commentators have been quick to argue that the film offers limited valuable lessons for the Australian education system.  It may be true that it doesn't suffer from as many chronically underperforming schools as the United States, and educational choice is facilitated by generous government funding to private schools.  But we would be kidding ourselves if we think that our schools are immune from the problems facing the United States.  Perhaps the public availability of NAPLAN test data will influence Australian perception of school performance over the next few years.

An interesting post-script to the film is the fate of the hard-charging D.C Schools Commissioner Michelle Rhee.  Rhee, a Democrat, resigned from her office after the mayor that appointed her, Adrian Fenty, lost a hotly contested Democratic primary.  Fenty's opponent was heavily backed by the American Federation of Teachers, who spent more than $1 million in an effort to defeat the pro-reform mayor.

Since resigning, Rhee has founded Students First, a nationwide political advocacy group that aims to raise $1 billion to run campaigns in favour of education reform, and to counteract the influence of teachers' unions.  Rhee has also been working with Republican governors across the country who want to tap her expertise.

This underlines a political realignment currently taking place in the United States.  Many ideologically liberal activists and even Democratic Party officials are lining up closely with conservative educators who have long argued for expanded choice and reducing the role of the state in the provision of education.  Minority community leaders like Geoffrey Canada are articulating the message that, by not tackling vested interests in education, Democrats are failing to address the poverty cycle that engulfs the low-income and ethnic minority voters they claim to represent.  A film like Waiting for Superman by Davis Guggenheim, with his impeccable liberal pedigree, can only spur this realignment.

The minister as room-meat

Perhaps it takes comedy to expose the absurdities of modern government.

If you believe the recently released British comedy, In the Loop, modern government has nothing to do with governing.

In the Loop is a feature length spinoff of the cult BBC TV series The Thick of It.  The TV series follows the daily life of British MP and Minister for Social Affairs, Hugh Abbott, who spends most of his time ducking and weaving visits from the Prime Minister's Director of Communications, Malcolm Tucker.

But In the Loop is more than just an entertaining film.  In the Loop and The Thick of It are the rightful heirs to Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, delving into the nature of modern government and the absurdity of political decision making.

In the Loop follows the same basic theme of The Thick of It by providing a fly-on-the-wall account of the life of a British government minister and their staff but with different characters from the television series.  The only cross over characters are Tucker and his equally brutish and harsh offsider, Jamie, both whose sole objective is to intimidate as many people to their will through the use of cutting verbal abuse, and, in the case of Jamie, unrestrained physical violence against property.

In the Loop is set inside the inner workings of the British bureaucracy and the United States Department of State and their bilateral relationship in the lead up to a US-UK led invasion of an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

British Cabinet Minister, Simon Foster, is sent to Washington to sit in on a series of high level meetings with US Department of State Assistant Secretaries after a series of gaffe-prone interviews with the press makes it politically safer from him to be offshore.

But instead of playing the high level diplomatic role he seeks Foster finds himself used as a "meat" by American bureaucrats and an Army General to both support and oppose their cause for invasion.

While anti-war activists might shallowly interpret the script as a critique of the bumbling bilateral relationship that led to the War in Iraq, the genius of the film is a commentary on contemporary government.

As the size of government has increased, power has shifted from ministers and their departments to the new class of ministerial advisers who make many day-to-day decisions.

In the Loop parodies this shift, treating Ministers as nothing more than cannon fodder for the media.  Ministers limp along constantly in fear of being sacked for a bad decision that was made while they were unveiling a plaque on a school building in their constituency.

Malcolm Tucker, whose job it is to intimidate and control ministers at the behest of the prime minister, is a brilliant character whose lines seem to be built entirely around the rhythm of words beginning in "f" or "c".

But the success of the film comes from turning its camera on the American bureaucracy.  In the Loop brilliantly depicts the politically savvy, ambitious, character-driven American bureaucracy;  and differentiates it from its Westminster counterpart because of the political appointment of many of its senior Departmental officials.  We see their staff grovel looking for an advantage to climb up the next rung of the ladder.

Considering the seemingly unending creative capacity of American television stations it is surprising that it has taken a British film to dissect the absurdity of the behind-the-scenes operations of the American government.  A failed effort was already made to adapt The Thick of It for an American audience and hopefully this second effort succeeds.

And some of the most entertaining moments of the film come from when the two systems of government collide and the American senior bureaucrats and their underlings try to manipulate a British Minister and its government's unelected advisers, and vice versa.

But comedic brilliance is achieved when American Lieutenant General Miller and Assistant Secretary Linton Barwick independently seek to undermine and ridicule the authority of Tucker.

While the film only seeks to adapt a tried and tested formula used for television, In the Loop, is an intelligent parody and is hopefully only the first of many films that seek to entertainingly expose the folly of modern government.

Malcolm Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi) yells at Toby Wright
(played by Chris Addison) in the 2009 comedy, In The Loop

Individuals 1, Social class 0: How the Seven Up! series scored an own goal

You start off making serious documentaries trying to prove that social class pre-determines life.  Forty-two years later, you find yourself producing entertaining documentaries that compete at the up-market end of the reality television market.  Such could be argued is the fate of Michael Apted and Co., the producers of the Up series, the latest instalment of which, 49 Up, has recently been showing in Australian cinemas.

There are some strong political conclusions to be drawn from the series -- although probably not the ones that may have been expected when Seven Up! was filmed in 1963 and screened in 1964.

For those who are unaware of the series, it began when Granada TV's World in Action programme decided to test the Jesuit maxim "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man".  The Granada team interviewed 14 English seven-year-olds, asking them about their lives and their expectations for the future.  While the original programme was intended as a one-off, the producers have been back every seven years since to check on the subjects' lives.

Unfortunately, the series always suffered from a gender imbalance (ten boys and four girls) and from a lack of middle-class children.  The choice of children from societal extremes (14 per cent of British children were not living in orphanages in 1963) was clearly designed to add weight to the proposition that roles in Britain's class system were pre-ordained.  Too many middle-class, or even lower middle-class, children would only have blurred the message.

Having originally chosen only three broadly middle-class children, any hopes that they might make a remotely useful sociological contribution were destroyed long ago by the atypical lives of two of them.

Nick, the shy, glasses-wearing son of a Yorkshire farmer provided hopes of some balance not only by being at least arguably middle class, but also by being the only participant from a rural background.  However, he progressed from the one-room school he was attending at seven to studying science at Oxford by 21.  From his mid-twenties, he has been living in the United States, where he is an academic at the University of Wisconsin.

In 42 Up, Nick claimed that one of his goals was to become more famous for producing ground-breaking research than for being in the Up series!  By 49, these hopes have been somewhat dimmed, as his research outcomes did not match his hopes.  Between 42 and 49, he has also progressed from his first to his second marriage, a change which will have done nothing to dim the feelings of envy he must induce among less ambitious, stay-at-home Yorkshire farm boys.

While Nick's academic disappointments have come later in life, those of the Up series' most famous participant, Neil, came much earlier.  Having to settle for the University of Aberdeen rather than Oxbridge was the trigger for sending Neil on a downward spiral that saw him living in a London squat at 21, homeless in northern Scotland at 28, and living in a council house in the Shetlands at 35.  By 42, he seemed to have new purpose in his life, being active in local politics as a Liberal Democrat councillor.  He is still doing this at 49, but only after a radical geographic shift from London to north-west England.

If one of the working-class participants had ended up living Neil's destitute existence at 21, 28 and 35, all sorts of class-based conclusions could have been drawn.  As it was middle-class Neil, only individual-based ones were available.  To Neil's credit, these are the only ones he attempts to make.  Indeed, he has always been quite perceptive about himself and others, a fact best illustrated in 49 Up by his description of how a day at the cricket provided a suitable forum for a partial reconciliation with his father, with whom his relationship had been difficult for many years.

The final blow to any hopes of the Up series having anything profound to say about what happened to middle-class children of the 1960s was the decision by Neil's childhood friend, Peter, not to re-appear after his sour performance at 28.

However, the fact that there are no childhood middle-class participants living adult middle-class lives in Britain does not mean there are no middle-class participants in 49 Up.  There are.  Some of the working-class children of the 1960s have become middle-class adults in the twenty-first century, working as university administrators or owning villas in Spain.

Few could have imagined how capitalism has enabled the industrious working class to gain a standard of living that would have been unimaginable in 1964.  In fact, the current standards of material prosperity were probably even less imaginable in the Britain of the late 1970s, before Margaret Thatcher had retrieved the country from the path of complete economic destruction.

Even before she had become Prime Minister, Thatcher had come under attack in 21 Up.  The verbal assailant was Bruce, an upper-class boy who has always wanted to help the poor, while constantly failing to appreciate that capitalism offers the quickest route out of poverty.  In partial mitigation, he did at least endeavour to act on his "do-gooder" views, spending years working in underprivileged schools in London and the Third World.

Between 42 and 49, Bruce has been mugged by reality.  In 42 Up, he had recently married and now, having had a couple of children, he has decided that a life spent teaching at a nice private school and playing village cricket does have its advantages.  Perhaps surprisingly to some, he seems a much more pleasant person when he is focused on creating a good life for those in his immediate circle, rather than when he is trying to change the world.

To underline how one cannot help but view the film as a piece of entertainment, the fact that Bruce has become less painful has resulted in the mantle of least satisfying participant passing to Andrew.  This is somewhat unfair, since there is nothing at all objectionable about him, but being decent, pleasant, successful and happily married makes for somewhat dull footage.  As Andrew himself comments, he has learnt to conceal many of his views.  When asked about why he is guarded, he says he will be "guarded about being guarded".

Andrew is the only one of the three upper-class boys, filmed together at their preparatory school in 1964, who has appeared in every episode.  Charles, who has not appeared since 21, is somewhat ironically (and arguably hypocritically) himself a documentary film-maker.  Barrister John seems to appear in every second one, with 49 being an on-again year.

John's reappearance means that Apted has 12 of the original 14, although judging by some of the comments, there may be a couple more missing at 56.  Suzy says of her part in the series "I haven't enjoyed it in any way", while Jackie complains bitterly about her treatment by Apted at 42.  You can see the participants' point.  The series takes all the pressures that may apply to the rest of us attending a school reunion and multiplies them onto a far more public scale.

There is also the risk that the prospect of seven-yearly reviews could actually alter how the participants conduct their lives.  It is difficult to gauge whether this has happened, but what the series does demonstrate is that, while the occupations and aspirations of the participants are still clearly affected by the class in which they grew up, the degree of fulfilment and happiness in their lives is largely independent of their upbringing.

Further to this, the Up series also shows that political views can straddle class lines.  John, the upper-class barrister has been expressing strong political views since 14 and, at 49, still says that he is not too old to embark on a political career.  His political views have always seemed very close to those of working-class Tony.  They might read different newspapers, but certainly neither would read The Guardian.

Tony seemed a little down on form at 42, but is back to his cracking best at 49.  Regular viewers will recall how, at seven, the pint-sized East-Ender had dreams of becoming a jockey and at 14 seemed well on the way to achieving that feat.  However, at 21 the dream was over and he was doing "the knowledge" to become a London cabbie.  It was also at 21 that he came up with the memorable line about usually doing the "four f's" with a girl, but how in one case he had not been able to forget her.  He is still with this girl at 49 and, having spoken with brutal honesty at 42 about some of their past marital problems, the joys of grandchildren seem to have made their relationship stronger than at any time in the past couple of decades.

Tony's great appeal is that he has always taken responsibility for his own life.  One could not help admire, at 21, his ability to accept the fact that he was not going to be a jockey and move onto something else.  He admits his mistakes.  He has an entrepreneurial spark.  He provides for his family.  He is an interesting human being.

The only sad aspect of his life is that he no longer feels any affinity with the culture of the area in which he grew up.  For Tony, the traditional East End was poor, but its dominant philosophy was that if you worked hard, you could make a better life for yourself and your family.  He is clearly frustrated that, having put this philosophy into action, he feels that he has to pay too much tax to support others who wish to live lives in direct opposition to that philosophy.

There is no doubt that the removal of the need for self-reliance has imposed social damage on the working-class suburbs of Britain.  While the 90 per cent plus tax rates and the industrial anarchy of the 1960s and 1970s have been confined to the scrap heap, the British welfare state had become so well entrenched by then that it has proved almost impossible to wind back.  Fortunately, the prosperity that capitalism produces has been so great that it has been able to carry the burden of the welfare state.

Tony's views of what has happened to the culture of the East End are echoed in varying degrees by at least two of the three working-class East End girls.  University administrator Sue now lives in a nice home in what appears to be a nice middle-class suburb.  Apted asks Sue the quite reasonable question whether she now considers herself middle class, but he cannot help doing so in a tone which suggests this may be more an accusation of class treachery, rather than giving credit for the hard-work of a single mother.

Sue's happiness at 49 is clearly helped by being in a very happy relationship, and this lends further weight to what has become one of the key take-out messages from the Up series.  Forget social class; it is the personal sphere (health, marriage, family, etc.) that defines life as much as anything.  It is striking how hard a number of the working-class participants have worked to keep their families together.  Tony maintains that family is what really matters.  This sentiment is echoed by Paul and Symon, the boys from the orphanage, living quite different lives on opposite sides of the world (Paul providing particular interest to Australian viewers since moving to Melbourne between 7 and 14).  These two have had their ups and downs over the years but, considering the start they had in life, one has to say the positives have outweighed the negatives.

While Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Roger Ebert's view that the series rates in his top ten films of all time and is "an inspired, almost noble use, of the film medium" may be a little exaggerated, one must acknowledge that the Up series is outstanding.  It has always had imperfections, but it continues to draw viewers back, not because it has any message about social class or other determinist theories, but because we are interested in the participants as individuals and we want to see how individual personalities and the choices they make affect life outcomes.

As a bonus, we get to note the vast increase in the standard of living that capitalism has been able to deliver to working-class people across the Western world.

Harvesting Memories

Heritage Farming in Australia
Produced by and available from Alexander and Ann Sloane
Box 77, Yarrawonga, Vic 3730

This video consists of original film and commentary by the late Ian Sloane.  It describes farming experiences in the southern Riverina in the 1930s.  My grandfather farmer who left school in 1929 and who now lives mainly in the past found it fascinating.

In the 1930s he had a lot to learn about farming, but even more about government guidance.  In 1930 his letters were cancelled with a "Grow More Wheat" stamp.  So he did, and the price of wheat fell steadily and disastrously between sowing the wheat crop and reaping it.  This warped his belief in the wisdom of governments.

The video starts off with still pictures;  then in the 1930s Sloane bought a movie camera and started taking moving pictures of the way people actually farmed in those days.  Later he added voice descriptions explaining what they were doing and why.

He shows a team of six horses ploughing with a three-furrow mouldboard plough and says how pleasantly quiet it all was -- only a bit of rattle from the harness.  He should have mentioned the skylarks, which were wonderful.  I used a 10-horse team to pull a six-furrow stumpjump mouldboard plough.  It used to chatter a bit.  My grandfather was in love about then so his horses used to hear some romantic poetry, but they never let on.  Once you had taught the furrow horse her proper place, it wasn't hard work.

ROUGH GOING:

My grandfather had a steel-wheeled Fordson tractor similar to the one Sloane's neighbour worked.  It was rough going if the ground was hard.  He used to stop every hour to give it a spell as he had been trained to do with horses.

Sloane gives a clear picture of reaping wheat in the 1930s.  Cripes, it was really hard work -- none of this business of swanning around in air-conditioned comfort!  Sewing the bags while being savaged by flies, you slogged away to finish 200 a day for a pound in real money.  My grandfather will never forget the great day when he could afford a portable radio.  He particularly liked listening if there was a test match on.

The best part of the video is Sloane's description of expert haystack building.  My grandfather would like to be able to brag about his stacks, but they were notorious.  People said that they always seemed to lean a bit to the left.  Sloane shows an immense haystack with its thatch neatly trimmed with sheep shears and with proper galvanised iron mouse guards.  It stood there for 10 years and then opened up splendidly during the drought when it was really needed.  And I bet the Sloanes didn't ask for government help either.

So, get the video if you can.  If you are an old bloke like my grandfather it will revive many poignant memories and it will give you the chance to tell your progeny how hard you used to work in those days.  I doubt if they will be properly impressed;  more likely they will say, "Yes, the poor old chaps certainly worked hard with their hands, but what about their heads?"

The best thing Sloane's family did with his film was to put it in the tin trunk to let it mature.  Videos are a bit like diaries:  they get better as they get older.  Perhaps even my diary will mature with age.

Dances with Wolves and the end of the Western

Dances with Wolves
Writers:  Michael Blake (novel, screenplay)
Production Companies:  Tig Productions, Majestic Films International
Released Date:  19 October 1990

Dances with Wolves looks like being the major film of 1991.  It has scooped the awards, won the critical plaudits, and now is packing out the cinemas.  Yet while it belongs in the tradition of the Western, Dances with Wolves also violates that tradition.  There are lessons here about the continuing loss of confidence within our own culture.

As a Film Dances with Wolves does not bear much critical scrutiny.  There is some fine photography, but it is not memorable.  The portrait of Sioux Indian life is vivid and has enough anthropological detail to take it beyond the simple romanticised fantasy into which it threatens to degenerate, although whether it has much actual relationship to tribal Sioux customs and habits is doubtful.  The opening scenes promise an epic quality which the ensuing three hours fail to deliver.  The film is far too long, its dramatic rhythm unsteady and its ending flatly predictable.  As far as the tightness and intelligence of the internal referencing go, it is mediocre in comparison with another film of 1991, Peter Weir's deceptively profound, Green Card.

Dances with Wolves, like its Western forebears, lives off the mythology it taps.  In its case there is an inversion of the classics, which had their heroic individuals and their robust families bringing civilisation into the wilderness.  Dances with Wolves draws on the Romantic "noble savage" tradition in the European imagination:  the Indians are the virtuous, the Whites are the vicious.  Indeed, the Whites are very bad, with the exception of the hero, who goes native.  Out on the frontier the officers are either decadent or brutal, and the men rampaging sadistic delinquents without respect for anyone or anything.  In this inversion of myths, European civilisation becomes the jungle, in contrast to the Sioux, who are noble.

The Western Tradition

The tradition which Dances with Wolves picks up and inverts, that of the Western, has been dead now for three decades.  As film, its great period ran from 1939 to 1962, dominated by the works of the master, John Ford.  The limiting dates are those of his first major film, Stagecoach, and his own last Western, The Man who shot Liberty Valance.  There are other contributions to the great tradition;  Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) and George Stevens's Shane (1952) spring to mind.  But Ford dominates the canon and gives it its logic.  The seminal works are Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Wagon Master, Rio Grande, The Searchers, Two Rode Together and The Man who shot Liberty Valance.

There is a case to be made that the end of the Western marked the end of the West, or more specifically, the American attempt to found a civilisation beyond humanist Europe, with its own raison d'être, and through it a vitality that had long been dissipating in the Old World.

Within Ford's work there are three stages:  optimism, tragedy and pessimism, represented respectively in their purest forms by Rio Grande, The Searchers, and The Man who shot Liberty Valance.  The first stage is the classical one, with the victory of good over evil, the taming and settling of the wilderness, the creation of a place where communities and their families can flourish and prosper, and where honour and decency rule.  Ford goes further in Rio Grande, in the idealised community which is the US Cavalry.  There boys are initiated into a virtuous manhood, and men and women overcome the tensions and conflicts between them, come to understand each other, and become companions in marriage.  There is laughter and singing and dancing.  In fact, Ford's cavalry is the diametrical opposite to that depicted in Dances with Wolves.

Ford's deeper intention was to forge a legend that would give America a purpose, a reason for being, something more than the utilitarian struggle for survival.  That legend, drawn from the foundation of the country in pioneering the West, centred on tightly-knit community, within which there was companionship, individuals serving the collectivity as an end higher than themselves, directed by a code of honour, understood instinctively and obeyed unself-consciously.  He hoped, by painting a vivid heroic community, built by worthy forefathers, to anchor the towns and families of modern America.

The Western ends from within, with The Man who shot Liberty Valance.  Here Ford pitted the new, triumphant America against the old.  The new is education, democracy, law, irrigation, prosperous and secure towns -- in short, progress.  The old is violent and drunken, dark, rowdy, lawless, but with a robust community struggling to survive, a precarious order kept by the big men and their guns, represented in this film by the John Wayne figure.  The new is championed by an idealistic lawyer from New England, played by James Stewart.  The central female switches her affection from John Wayne to James Stewart, seduced by dreams of reason and enlightenment.  She is taught to read and write.  The problem is that the new town is lifeless:  the church bell is silent, the communal pubs and eating places are empty, the new editor is a shameless vulture -- in contrast with the old editor, an Irish drunk who spouted Shakespeare and, when inspired, could in his editorial "tear their hearts out".  The only thing with weight in the new.  town, with gravity, is the coffin of John Wayne, the dead authority of the old culture.

Ford's final judgment is that the culture of the Old West, based bn valour and community, on vital companionship, was fine and good, but what it led to, the prospering towns in the wilderness, had lost their soul.  The master spent his life attempting to forge the myth to make America legitimate, only to abandon it at the end.  Worse, The Man who shot Liberty Valance shows modern America as based upon a lie.  James Stewart builds his career as the champion of progress not on his reputation as a liberal, rational and enlightened man, but because it was he who had the courage and the gun-skills -- values of the old culture -- to shoot the demonic Liberty Valance.  Such is the legend, but it is false.  It was John Wayne who shot Liberty Valance.  Furthermore, in the film's last scene James Stewart realises that his wife has always loved John Wayne, the man with authority.  Not only has his own career been founded on a lie, but his wife ruined her life in marrying him, carried away by the ideal of progress.

Ford would have had some sympathy for the message of Dances with Wolves.  This would not primarily be because there is a good deal of truth to its picture of the ruthless manner in which the Indians were dispossessed.  Ford made his own penance to the Indians in his 1964 film, Cheyenne Autumn, a film, by the way, that does not work.  His sympathy would rather be for the more contemporary reason that, in the late 20th century, America has lost almost everything worth believing in -- his own cavalry a failed myth, the present largely aimless and falling apart like the symbolic representation of the anarchic white soldiers in Dances with Wolves, attached to nothing apart from their own wayward, egoistic pleasures.  Moreover, if a culture is to work, Ford stressed again and again in his own films, it must have as its core, the strong family -- How Green was my Valley (1941) was perhaps his own most forceful statement of this theme.  The picture of the Sioux in Dances with Wolves shows the centre of this Indian tribal culture to be the strong patriarchal family.

This is a little surprising.  The typical high art and literature of the last hundred years or so has been rancorous in its method of attacking the traditional authorities of Western culture.  Its heroes have been disturbed individuals, melancholy and talented, alone and introspective, misunderstood and maltreated by their society -- somewhat in the tradition of Hamlet and his less articulate modern descendants.  Dances with Wolves, although against the West, is quite different.  In its view the vital tribal society is key, the individual secondary.  Moreover the tribe is characterised by warrior hierarchy, able and powerful leadership, and strong but obedient and loyal women.  Furthermore, it is a culture in which an ethic of honour predominates.  Such a society is also a far cry from the group fantasy favoured in the 1960s and its aftermath, and taken up by many of our floundering churches, of the commune of equals sitting together in a circle, gazing meaningfully into each others' eyes, and straining futilely with forced smiles to prove the overwhelming niceness of human nature.

John Ford ended up rejecting America and its driving liberal myth, of progress predicated on reason, free-will and democracy.  He rejected it as empty, a society that had nothing left to believe in.  In old age he commented:  "Our ancestors would be bloody ashamed if they could see us today".  His own conservative ideal was not far from that of small-town America, a world of decent-living, hard-working Christian families.  It was just that he saw the animating and enabling conscience failing.  Without that conscience, bolstered by the bonds of honour and valour, by the challenges of hardship and necessity, as in his imagined Old West, he feared its civilisation would die.

The Pacifist Henry V

Henry V
Writers:  William Shakespeare (play), Kenneth Branagh (adaptation)
Production Companies:  British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in association with Curzon Film Distributors and Renaissance Films
Released Date:  6 October 1989

Shakespeare's tale of military heroism has been remodelled as a tale of moral equivalence.

British actor/ director Kenneth Branagh has made a film of Shakespeare's Henry V, and has turned it into an apologia for pacifism.  This fact has not prevented the reviewers in Australia's mainstream media from greeting the film with clamorous praise, in which it is hard to determine which factor warrants most embarrassment:  these critics' ignorance of Shakespeare;  their ignorance of 15th century history;  their ignorance of modern history;  or the Panglossian antics by which they have once again contrived to pretend for ideological reasons that a cinematic goose is a swan.

Though Shakespeare's tragedies may pulverise the soul even more, and though his comedies may contain more exalted literary beauty, his history plays constitute the section of his output which most clearly separates genuine Shakespeareans from bluffers.  These works' most obvious difficulty lies in their profusion of chronological, genealogical and political references.  Poetical sensibility and the possession of gonads may be enough to get the average adolescent through Romeo and Juliet;  he has not the smallest hope of getting through the history plays if he does not know why Thomas Mowbray was banished, what Salic Law was, why Archbishop Cranmer believed that Princess Elizabeth was the best thing since sliced bread, and so on.

Shakespeare's Values Scorned

Moreover, and still more maddeningly for the modern director, this abundance of detail cannot hide the magnificent unmodern simplicity of the history plays' themes.  Whichever set of characters is being depicted, the themes remain constant.  Though tyrannical rulers may be disastrous, wimpish rulers are always a hundred times more disastrous.  Rebellion is detestable, whoever carries it out.  Kings who marry French wives are asking for trouble.  Practising witch-craft is at all times hateful, and deserves death.  Cruelty on the battlefield can co-exist with feelings of the deepest mutual respect on the part of individual combatants.

It would be difficult to imagine any set of concepts less agreeable to the present-day liberal imagination.  Yet Shakespeare's England, if one may borrow a phrase from a later and more sanctimonious era, "held these truths to be self-evident".  It is no surprise to learn that socialist intellectuals have always been loud in their public detestation of the history plays, Henry V in particular.  Bernard Shaw said that "one can hardly forgive Shakespear [sic] for the worldly phase in which he tried to thrust such a Jingo hero as Harry [sic] V down our throats".  Shaw's Fabian disciple Granville Barker complained, more prissily, that Henry V was "so stodgily good, even a little (dare one say it?) vulgar ... I can imagine the lovers of his work losing hope in the Shakespeare of that year or two".  And for Orwell, Henry V was "a disgusting beefy brute".

How to reconcile contemporary audiences to jingoism:  this is the problem which the late 20th century Shakespeare director imagines he must solve, preferably without endangering his own credentials as a Sensitive Enlightened Warm Aware Guardian-reading Person.

The director's easiest way out is, of course, indiscriminate modern dress:  costuming Hotspur's followers as soccer hoodlums, Falstaffs gang as bikies, and so on.  It is to Kenneth Branagh's credit that he has eschewed that particular racket, at least.  For most of the film's first half-hour, one is led to believe that this, almost uniquely among Britain's recent Shakespeare productions, will actually be a performance intended for adult minds.  Alas, it duly becomes clear that what Branagh has substituted for standard directional puerility is equally pernicious and more oblique.

This first becomes obvious in the second Chorus, before Act II, which describes the new-found English enthusiasm for war against France:  "Now all the youth of England are on fire/ And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies".  Branagh has visually accompanied most of this Chorus by a slow camera-pan:  one that dwells on the squalid unofficial retirement village which those burbling old topers Bardolph, Pistol, Nym and Mistress Quickly now inhabit.  The message is unmistakable:  this decrepit Dad's Army is "the youth of England on fire".  Ha ha.  So much for English war-enthusiasm.  Pretty subtle, eh?  And there's plenty more subtlety where that came from.

Omissions and Distortions

Soon it becomes blatantly evident that whatever elements Branagh imagines may comprise a Shakespeare film, the use of Shakespeare's own text in any but the most desultory manner is not among them.  Whole scenes and whole characters are omitted;  secondary roles are repeatedly conflated (e.g. Orleans and Rambures, Grandpre and the Constable);  several other secondary roles, though not conflated, are abridged to the point of meaninglessness (e.g. Gower, Michael Williams, Westmoreland, the Boy).  Just to add to the confusion, portions of Henry IV involving Falstaff and Bardolph are inserted into the film, and even these segments are rewritten (the character Nym turns up in them, though he never appears in Shakespeare's Henry IV at all;  moreover, one of Falstaff's most famous lines has been changed to "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Harry[!]").  It is unclear what Branagh ever hoped to achieve with all this Sweeney Todd-like mutilation.  He cannot have been seeking intelligibility:  because not only do his chops and changes make nonsense of the play's motives, but the standard of his cast's diction varies to a ludicrous extent.  The best actors in this regard are Paul Scofield (who plays the French king) and Brian Blessed (who plays the Duke of Exeter);  the worst arc Judi Dench (Mistress Quickly) and Robert Stephens (Pistol).  With most of Pistol's speeches it is literally impossible to tell which language is being spoken.  What (for example) HSC students from a state school would make of his utterances is beyond conjecture.

Theoretically, a Shakespeare performance whose director shared Branagh's crazed fondness for the textual surgeon's knife -- and for letting several of his actors sound as if they have left their dentures at home -- could nevertheless attain a limited intellectual respectability by compensating for its carelessness towards the letter with some fidelity to the spirit.  Chez Branagh, no such luck.  He recently gave a disingenuous pointer to his true intentions by telling an interviewer of his desire to "move people to every possible extreme of emotion".  His finished product makes it abundantly plain which particular extreme of emotion viewers are to be moved to:  namely, pacifist repugnance.  We are to have it dinned into us one more time both that War Is Hell (some of us hardly needed a 26 year-old cinematic propagandist to teach us that),and that War Is Unnecessary.  The tactic by which Branagh hopes to persuade us of his latter belief is the time-honoured, not to say mildew-laden, doctrine of Moral Equivalence.

If this doctrine is to seem internally consistent, Branagh must argue that Our Side is as completely corrupted as, and so even more to blame than, Their Side.  Branagh therefore seizes the opportunity to rub his audience's noses in the alleged infamy of the English well before the battle itself occurs.  His cue for such an action is the hanging of Bardolph (Richard Briers), who has stolen a pax from a French church.  Bardolph's crime is thus blasphemous as well as larcenous;  Captain Fluellen (Ian Holm) refuses to intervene on Bardolph's behalf;  and Bardolph is duly sent to the gallows.  Shakespeare has already taken the trouble to make Fluellen a very sympathetic (if somewhat abrupt) figure, while Bardolph has been given no virtues at all except that of occasional fair-mindedness.  Bardolph then is no martyr;  and to emphasise the squalor of his deed, he is both sentenced and put to death off-stage.  Not, however, in the Branagh version.  First, the nature of Bardolph's theft is left unclear (how many filmgoers would know what a pax is, especially through Pistol's incoherent gargling?).  Second, Branagh ignores Shakespeare's revelation (Act 3 Scene 6) that King Henry knew nothing of the hanging until after it occurred:  Branagh makes Henry order Bardolph's hanging in the royal presence.  Third, Branagh has Bardolph hanged on-screen, with camera-work whose, gruesome detail it is, not unfair to call loving.  Nothing, not even the victim's frantic aitempt to lift the rope from around his neck, is left to the imagination.  The message is manifest:  This Is What Militarism Leads to.  And to italicise Branagh's rhetoric, the execution is carried out by the Duke of Exeter in person.  One wonders if even the greatest teachers on earth could repair the pedagogical deficiencies of any director who believes, that a mediaeval king's uncle moonlighted as a hangman.  (But then Exeter, Henry V's ablest and most articular supporter, inspires in Branagh a special resentment.  When he is shown entering the French palace, Branagh has him entering from behind:  so that, with his suit of dark armour, he looks like the baddie in Star Wars).

In the lead-up to the battle proper, Branagh never fails to show his colours.  Almost every time phrases like "a just cause" or "our cause if just" are spoken, there is a cut-away to the vacant-looking faces of the common soldiery (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, we know where "a just cause" will leave them, don't we).  Another Branagh trick is to have his camera alternate between the English troops' heraldic devices and those borne by the French;  pointing up the similarities of the former to the latter (Moral Equivalence rides again).  The battle itself is everything one would expect, and worse:  combatants are perpetually getting stuck in the mud, they are quite unrecognisable as Us or Them, they stab each other obsessively in the back.  Oh, yes, naturally it's filmed in slow motion.  When it is all over -- though not before Henry, in another magnificently anachronistic howler, has amid his screeching rage tried to beat up the French herald Montjoy --Henry carries the corpse of his slain cousin to its resting place while the camera, in approved Vietnam-movie style;  dwells for nearly 10 minutes on the bodies left behind.  The survivors are singing Non nobis domine, but Branagh has long beforehand left us in no doubt as to where the Catholic liturgy gets off in his book.  Fluellen is presented as a gibbering moron perpetually making the sign of the cross.  (Sneer on camera at Negro or Aboriginal religious observances, and the entire race relations industry will unite to destroy you;  sneer at Catholic observances, and you will be lauded to the skies).  The Duke of Burgundy's Act 5 speech, Shakespeareans will be totally unsurprised to learn,.  provides yet another opportunity for the camera to survey the thousands of war dead.  One could go on to list Branagh's other follies and platitudes -- the way that Henry V and Fluelleti hug each other like members of a victorious football team, the deliberate Basil Fawlty voice in which Henry proposes marriage to Princess Catherine -- but the reader may well consider himself to have supped full on horrors already.

Perhaps it is unfair to blame Branagh for all these horrors, when it is by no means sure that any British director would now be allowed to make a non-pacifist Henry V.  Britain is not only, as Orwell said, the only nation left without nationalism;  it has long since been a nation whose intellectuals are for the most part unencumbered by the smallest patriotic sentiment.  In practice it has not mattered whether these intellectuals call themselves Left or Right:  as the Falklands War revealed.  (The chorus of bellyaches from The Guardian and The New Statesman during :  that conflict were fully matched for cowardice by pro-Argentinian columnists at The Spectator).  If you want to make a film in Britain, you must despise Britain.  For Branagh, the idea of a country defending itself is laughable:  his attitude to Agincourt is "A plague o'both your houses".  One scarcely needs even a film director's inherently comical notions of historical fact to realise where this attitude would have left (say) Britain in 1940.  Yet there is not even the faintest suggestion that Branagh realises as much.  The rest of us can do nothing about his ignorance except protect ourselves -- and,, since his film will be HSC fodder, our offspring -- from its consequences.