ACROSS THE PACIFIC, 1942, directed by John Huston and Vincent Sherman.
Set at the eve of Pearl Harbor, Across the Pacific is a spy film starring: Humphrey Bogart as Richard (Rick) Leland, a disgraced navy captain turned patriot; Mary Astor as Alberta Marlow; and Sydney Greenstreet as Dr. Lorenz, a sociology professor loyal to the Japanese. Each with a different agenda, Marlow, Lorenz and Rick board a Japanese ship from Canada en route to China via the Panama Canal. The ship stops in New York, where Rick gives a military intelligence officer information about Lorenz. It is subsequently detained in Panama.
I preferred the sub-plots to the largely incomprehensible main plot, however.
Nefarious, oily and seemingly invincible, Greenstreet reprises his Maltese Falcon role. Likewise for Bogart who is again stoic, hard-working, and hard-talking. He exemplifies gritty humor when, sickened after too many drinks, he tells Astor, “Close the door when you leave.” “I want to die alone without a friend.” He is a philosopher for the little guy.
The film is sexy. Bogart and Astor waste no time in getting chummy. He often remarks on her scanty attire. When Greenstreet walks in on him searching Astor's belongings Bogart brushes it off by saying, “You’d be surprised how little girls wear these days.” Afterwards, Astor, suffering sunburn, has removed the shoulder straps of her swimsuit and covers her breasts only by clutching the garment over them. When she and Bogart kiss and the scene changes to a later time, the stark dichotomy is revealed between the explicitness of modern films and the understatement of classic ones like this.
The outstanding art direction makes me forget that the filming happens in a single Hollywood studio. When Bogart and Astor disembark in New York, black-coated people move at a New York pace. The pier is cold, hard and straight-edged, exemplified by the diagonally aligned magazines of a news kiosk. In one scene, light shining through venetian blinds falls diagonally on a wall as in an Edward Hopper interior.
Later, the Pan American Hotel in Panama has high ceilings, shaded interiors and arched doorways. As ice cubes tinkle, the shadows of swirling fans are seen on the walls.
When sinister goons come after Bogart, poetry takes precedence over realism as a pure ballet of action unfolds. Men in white suits and white hats shoot guns and throw knives against a backdrop of strongly contrasting light and shadow. Bogart (or his stunt man) pirouettes from rooftops like Jackie Chan, escaping attack while taking down the bad guys, all as if in a dance.
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I find big things easier to comprehend than little things. Since most people (in the Western world at any rate) are just the opposite, I’m always going against the grain. I can’t find any corroboration for my view that it is very easy to correct Earth’s climate and other critical woes if we think big enough. And it’s tempting to go off in a corner and leave the world to its dealings.
Despite what astronauts say about Earth’s unity, beauty and fragility when seen from afar, policy to give meaning to that vision is absent. The awe-stricken astronauts were working at the level of sensibility and feeling, and these are never the concern of policy.
After I wrote my first blog post (“How To Do Everything,” below) I heard about the book “Endgame” by Derrick Jensen, for which the author won The Press Action Person of the Year award. Although I’m puzzled by Jensen’s radical views and by the acclaim given him, what he wrote stopped me in my tracks. Could it be that I received no corroboration for my views because there was none to be found within the broad culture?
Among the premises in Endgame :
Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.
I reread my post, and the main fault I now find with it is the perhaps naïve assumption that it lies within the power of government to save the planet from the dire consequences wrought by industrial civilization. Ain’t gonna happen, most likely.
But I question whether direct acts of violence against civilization (as Jensen advocates) is the answer – these will most likely happen anyway -- or whether it is feasible, as an alternate strategy, to take peaceful but subversive actions to protect and restore the planet. As an example, what if it were feasible to cover dysfunctional paving everywhere (paving that does not use the sun’s energy to do anything useful) with vegetation (a simple, non-technologic solution to climate change)? It can’t be denied that looking at Earth as a seamless orb that depends on vegetation for its survival is something that civilization has proven hopeless at doing.
During the coming year I want to investigate, to my satisfaction, how or whether the broader society, driven by a revolution in the humanities and the arts, could potentially reverse this direction. (Examining the feasibility of a worldwide survey of land-use plans is one possible way to start.)
Can what is harmful in civilization be transcended through civilization itself?
Despite what astronauts say about Earth’s unity, beauty and fragility when seen from afar, policy to give meaning to that vision is absent. The awe-stricken astronauts were working at the level of sensibility and feeling, and these are never the concern of policy.
After I wrote my first blog post (“How To Do Everything,” below) I heard about the book “Endgame” by Derrick Jensen, for which the author won The Press Action Person of the Year award. Although I’m puzzled by Jensen’s radical views and by the acclaim given him, what he wrote stopped me in my tracks. Could it be that I received no corroboration for my views because there was none to be found within the broad culture?
Among the premises in Endgame :
Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.
I reread my post, and the main fault I now find with it is the perhaps naïve assumption that it lies within the power of government to save the planet from the dire consequences wrought by industrial civilization. Ain’t gonna happen, most likely.
But I question whether direct acts of violence against civilization (as Jensen advocates) is the answer – these will most likely happen anyway -- or whether it is feasible, as an alternate strategy, to take peaceful but subversive actions to protect and restore the planet. As an example, what if it were feasible to cover dysfunctional paving everywhere (paving that does not use the sun’s energy to do anything useful) with vegetation (a simple, non-technologic solution to climate change)? It can’t be denied that looking at Earth as a seamless orb that depends on vegetation for its survival is something that civilization has proven hopeless at doing.
During the coming year I want to investigate, to my satisfaction, how or whether the broader society, driven by a revolution in the humanities and the arts, could potentially reverse this direction. (Examining the feasibility of a worldwide survey of land-use plans is one possible way to start.)
Can what is harmful in civilization be transcended through civilization itself?
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