What Makes Dr Zhivago Great?

Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago"  is a book rooted in a time and in the ideas of that time, but it is also a bodice ripper romance, which, in a sense, maybe a cheaper sense, makes it timeless.

Julie Christie

From the point of view of the judges of the Nobel Prize committee, it was, no doubt,  the political substrate, not the romance, which caught their attention. Published during the repressive Soviet times in 1954, it was banned because it criticized the idea that the Revolution was anything other than the advent of the new age of righteousness. 
There is a lovely scene in the 1965 David Lean film, in which Zhivago arrives home from the war to his family's mansion in Moscow, to find it occupied by 15 families and a sanctimonious woman who is the Party official in charge, who informs Zhivago his house now provides for all these families, where before it housed only one, in a clear rebuke to Zhivago's privilege--and by Soviet standards, outrageous selfishness. Zhivago, home from the war where he has suffered for Russia more than anyone in the house, smiles disarmingly and says, yes, he can see this is a far more equitable arrangement, and the Party woman finds herself defanged.

That is one of many memorable scenes in the David Lean version of Zhivago.

Reading now, Paternak's novel, it is striking how many scenes which were understated and undramatic, which were rendered with a soft irony in the book,  were made more powerful and memorable by Lean.

There is no law that making a movie, even of a "great" or beloved work, requires a faithful reproduction of the book. Movies are different. Their pleasures are different, and the requirements for success are different in movies than in print.

And times change the way a story is rendered and received.

The 2002 TV miniseries version starring the 17 year old Keira Knightly as Lara is different in its rendering of Lara as a willing participant  in her ravishing by Kamarovsky.  She is, at first, repulsed by the idea of an affair with this 40 something man, even if he is as handsome as Sam Neill, but she is pushed toward him by her mother, who needs Kamarovsky's money. But Knightly's Lara find herself attracted by his power, his social status, his suave manners.  She tells him she is willing to have sex with him, and he protests nothing could be further from his mind, but she says, "That is what this is all about, isn't it?"
A few scenes earlier, you see her asking a friend, with typical teen age eagerness, what sex is like. She is clearly curious and excited by the idea of sex. And, for a time, she is inflamed by sex with Kamarovsky. But she ultimately realizes, she is just one of many of his conquests, despite his insistence he is obsessed with her. 

All this leads to the scene where Lara appears at the fancy ball, also attended by Yuri Zhivago and his fiance`, Tonya.  In the book, Lara arrives, dances with another young man, tries to remember why this young man's name is familiar and you only learn of her shooting at Kamarovsky offstage.  Yuri sees her and recognizes her from his previous meetings, and is drawn to her, but as a physician, he makes himself attend the man who was grazed by Lara's bullet. 

In David Lean's rendition, the scene is unforgettable, powerful, and Lara is a force who sweeps the audience away, as she does Yuri. I saw that scene as a high school boy and remember it like it was yesterday.  

Knightly

In the Keira Knightly version, which is truer to Pasternak than Lean's, Lara faints after her shot, and is overwhelmed. 

Oddly, even the set up to this scene is more memorable and powerful in Lean's version.  The gun is delivered to Lara by Pasha, when he arrives at her house wounded by a Cossack's saber stroke, and she is horrified by the gun. Pasha makes her keep it for him and it is this gun she uses at the ball. In Knightley's version, she scoops up the gun at the demonstration and tucks it away, and Pasha has no idea, and the audience is barely aware, so the dramatic build up is lost.

Knightley's Lara tells Pasha about her affair with Kamarovsky on their wedding night and he tells her it wasn't her fault, that he used his social power and money to force her into the affair. Pasha's argument is Lara is not a bad person; she was simply caught up in this unequal power structure. This 2002 rendition was made well before "#MeToo." 
But Lara will not accept this easy out: No, she says. I liked it at first, until I didn't and came to hate him.  This is actually closer to the Pasternak version. It is only when Lara sees Kamarovsky flirting with another young woman at the ball, just as he pursued her, that she raises her pistol.

When Lara finally meets Zhivago in the war time hospital, Pasternak again avoids the dramatic and Zhivago thinks of revealing his memory of her pistol shot at the ball but decides it will embarrass her. But in the Knightley version, Lara laughs at Zhivago's revelation and says she was a poor shot and shot the wrong man. This is actually a nice moment and it makes Lara, in the 21st century, more interesting than the 20th century Lara, who is hemmed in by prevailing more`s. Lean goes for the more powerful effect: Lara is somewhat ashamed when Zhivago recounts that moment, and says she must have looked so ragged and uncouth,  but Zhivago tells her, "You made us all feel very small." 

The major theme of the poet vs the Soviet is much more front and center in Lean and certainly, it dominates the book.  Zhivago is dangerous and hunted in the Soviet state because he insists on the value of the individual, but the Soviet experiment demands the sacrifice of  individual feeling and desire to the needs of the common good. 

What drives all three versions, of course, is the conflict Zhivago feels about his desire and love for Lara (individual need) with his obligation and affection for his wife and child (demands of society). 

Stalin famously said, "An individual's death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." 

That is what Zhivago is all about. 

The Assistant: Silent Argument from Kitty Green

"The Assistant" is a splendid film which has no car chase, explosions or even a plot with a problem which demands an onscreen solution.

In his inept review in "Variety" Peter Debruge offered all sorts of ways the movie could have been improved, which would have made it more conventional: Give the protagonist an impossible mission from her venal boss and watch her go after that, which would give the flick a beginning, middle and end. 

Of course, the would be film auteur, Mr. Debruge, entirely missed the point.

This is a film in which, as I heard my fellow theater goers say on the way out, nothing much happened. 

They, too, missed it.

Quite a lot happens, but it happens in the mind of Jane, the assistant, a just out of college, 20 something, who hopes to someday be a movie producer, but is starting with an entry level job, for which the ultimate in smarmy HR man tells her he has 400 applicants just salivating to get her position.

The movie is, of course, about Harvey Weinstein, or someone like him, and is an ode to #METOO , which, ordinarily, would have putt me off from even attending, as I have recoiled against the essence of #METOO, which is accusation without process, accusation equals conviction, which says simply, "Believe the Woman." 

But something else happens here. Jane is not the victim of her boss, who is never shown on screen, not in any direct way. He does not throw her on the casting couch and tear off her clothes. She, in fact, is tasked with disinfecting the couch, with scrubbing out semen stains the next morning, with delivering to one of that couch's beautiful women a valuable earring she left behind.

The problem, never stated, is with Jane's sense of visceral sense of morality. She is like the cook at the concentration camp, who prepares meals for the guards and the commandant's family, but who never pulls a trigger or even actually sees the gas chambers--she simply sees the trucks rolling in with the gas containers and the smoke going up from the chimneys.

Which is not to say the rapacious boss here is on any level committing crimes as awful as mass murder.  His crimes are pretty tame stuff compared to those of the Final Solution. But he does share that one trait: he is doing something which requires complicity from those who work for him, a staff of dozens who all look the other way.

It's more like that scene from "The Young Lions" where a young American tourist, a woman on vacation in the German alps, traveling alone, has dinner and beers in a picturesque inn,  and goes up to bed, where she finds a villager, a young swain, has climbed into her bed, expecting her to engage, and all she can think about is all those rosy cheeked villagers downstairs, knowing he has climbed up those stairs to rape her, or to get his satisfaction, depending on how it's presented.

The pervasive complicity.

Complicity is not always presented in such stark terms. Anyone who ever read "Once Upon A Secret" Mimi Alford's memoir of her "affair" with John F. Kennedy, will know this. 
"Affair" is not quite the right word, as Alford relates it.  JFK spotted her among a tour of college kids at the White House and sent for her later. JFK never kissed her. He gave her a private "tour" of the residential part of the White House, when Jackie was away, and while his pals drank cocktails, guarding the entry, he led her to a canopied bed, and pressed her against it and had sex with her. For months thereafter, he sent a Presidential airplane to pick her up from Wheaton College and whisked her off to the White House. She was her girl toy, clearly, but to her he was Lancelot. 

Significantly, in "The Assistant" the one fully explicated statement of case comes from the HR man, who is all mellifluous voice, sympathy, warmth, oily compassion.  He asks Jane what she actually knows, what she has witnessed, the very questions which would be asked in court. 

And the fact is, she has seen the woman go into the room with casting couch, but she has never actually seen what happens there. She has taken the ingenue from Idaho, a girl/woman the boss has met when she waitressed his table and then he invited her to New York City, for a job in the big time. She has been, "in film" she tells Jane because her father served food to the film crew in Boise, when they were on location, and then the big man picked her out and flew her to New York, and she is headed to the hotel, where the big man will meet her for an assignation and the next day she'll start as another one of his "assistants" in the outer office. She signs contracts with, one can imagine, lots of non disclosure clauses. 

Old Enough?

The looks of this girl/woman are perfect. As Jane says, "She's just so young!"  But the HR guy says, she's old enough. She's an adult. Well, technically, but she is said to be from Idaho for a reason. If you're from Idaho, you are ipso facto, unsophisticated.

But she is not so unsophisticated she is unaware she is trading sex for advancement. That much is clear the next day when she shows up at the office.

The Pro

We see only four women who have made that bargain during the movie, and the other three are clearly old enough to know what they are doing.  
So we have willing, consensual adults. In a canny casting feat, the first woman we see is a woman who radiates sexual sophistication. She awaits her appointment with a knowing, professional expression. She is there to do business.

Then there is the ingenue waif from Idaho, who has just found out what it really means to be given a "job" in the organization. She may seem a little dazed after her bedtime experience with the big man, but she is still game. 

And the last is somewhere in between, a woman, not a girl, but still, in her video, you see someone who is half way in between the other two.

Halfway there

But for Jane, it just all feels wrong. It is a promise of sex for stardom, but the stardom will never happen.  

One woman, a woman higher up in management, remarks to Jane in an elevator, "She'll get more out of him than he will from her."  
But you know that's just what that woman tells herself to be able to sleep better. It is, in fact, what every woman must believe as she heads toward that casting couch.

A lot depends on our perception, which is shaped in a significant measure, by how people look. The Idaho ingenue just looks so fresh and unspoiled. With the simple visual look of her all we need is her pathetic remark that she's "been in film" to understand how thoroughly out of her element she is. She is a lamb ready for slaughter.

Harvey Weinstein just looks so dissolute. You know none of the women he threw on the casting couch could have had any response to him but revulsion, but they went through with it, because they were ambitious.

"The Assistant" is a film of great discipline and intelligence. 
To my mind, the real title is "Complicit." 

If you go into it with the idea you are going to learn something, rather than be entertained, you'll come away thinking about it for days. 

Images Ad Lib

For those of us who have trouble keeping our mouths shut--you know who you are--the power of a photograph has special allure.

Without words, without explanation, or with just minimal explanation, a whole world opens up.

Decades ago, in Montgomery County, Maryland, some psychologists were trying to figure out whether the standard IQ tests and SAT tests were missing something. The reasons for this are lost to the Phantom, but he clearly remembers the test was not multiple choice and required essay answers.

Most of the questions had a photograph or a painting or a political cartoon with a space for the student write an essay below it, explaining that image.

But one panel was blank, just a white framed space. 
Most of the exam takers wrote this must be a typo, a misprint and moved on to the next question, but some wrote answers about this is a panel--about being lost in a snowstorm, or this is what the world looks like to the blind or this is a flash of light at Hiroshima as the bomb went off.

The students who skipped that panel tended to have high SAT scores. The ones who spent ten minutes writing about that blank page often did not have high SAT scores. Some did not finish the exam because they got so enthralled with that blank page and just went on and on. (You can imagine what the SAT scores of these enthusiasts were.)

For a truly humbling version of this experience, go to the last page of the New Yorker, where they ask you to provide a caption for the un-captioned cartoons and try to write one and then, a week later, check back to see the three best. 

Here, for the reader's consideration, are images, some from the Phantom's camera, one from a friend, one from Twitter...

Cancer patient

Death Row turkeys

Hampton Falls, NH

Hidden Pasture Road, Hampton Falls
                                            

Musician
                                     

                                  


Iceland
                                   

Back porch, Hampton, NH

                                  

                                           
Vietnam

                                          

Warming

 Klimt

Rte 1A North Hampton NH

Home 

                                           

                                          

Stealing Good

"But I prefer a man who lives
And gives expensive jewels
A kiss on the hand may be quite continental
But diamonds are a girl's best friend
A kiss may be grand but it won't pay the rental
On your humble flat, or help you at the automat
Men grow cold as girls grow old
And we all lose our charms in the end
But square cut or pear shaped
These rocks don't lose their shape
Diamonds are a girl's best friend!"

--Styne and Robin


Breakfast at Tiffany's was published in 1958

Good bye to Berlin was published in 1939.

Peyton Place was published in 1956.

To Kill A Mockingbird was published in 1960.

Truman Capote is lionized for creating the indelible, shocking and totally original Holly Golightly.

Christopher Isherwood is barely known, in America, and his 19 year old Sally Bowles, who pursues men for their money, hoping they will make her into a movie star, or at least a very rich mistress, is known only as she is portrayed by Liza Minelli (and before her by Julie Harris) on screen and stage.

The stories of both pseudo ingenues are told through the voice of a male narrator who is slightly, occasionally in love with the young woman he describes, but who never has that love consummated or even, really, reciprocated. 

Bowles is a self absorbed, utterly self defined character, who doesn't care what an older generation or a proper society might think of her, as long as she gets what she wants: movie stardom, or at least wealth, but preferably both wealth and fame. She has, of course, no idea how to attain these goals and, as Isherwood observes, she makes only desultory efforts in any direction which might procure them, e.g. auditioning for roles. The most she does to put herself forward is to perform at the night club, and she is more of a curiosity there than an talent.

Holly Golighty follows the same path, hunting down rich men, a shameless gold digger, in hopes of getting her hooks in deeply enough to insure her a life of luxury; Holly is almost as clueless as Bowles, having decided whatever she is doing with men will lead to more permanent wealth than it is actually ever likely to do. 

Both women eventually latch on to men who they think they are exploiting but who are actually exploiting them. Their methods, mores and ultimate outcome are nearly identical.

Both are the women "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" was written about, but neither is an original; they are copies.  Marilyn Monroe gave voice to the credo in the 1953 song but Carol Channing had sung it on Broadway years earlier. And that was based on a book written in 1925 by Anita Loos, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" about a flapper who absorbed America's materialistic culture, more concerned with collecting hard assets than marriage licenses. 

Before this, before "the Code" thwarted Hollywood's ability to tell truth to the American public, a series of women appeared on screen in the May West mold, women who were frank about sex, about what they wanted and why. 

"Peyton Place" features the rape of a teen age girl by her step father and the quandary of the town doctor, who decides to go ahead and perform the abortion he reasons is the best way to deal with all this.  He is put on trial for this act of moral rectitude.

"To Kill A Mockingbird" features the trial prompted by the sexual act of an adolescent girl and the Black man accused of raping her, when in fact, it is clear it was her step father who did the deed.

Step fathers are the convenient villain. Real fathers would have been too much for America of the 1950's-60's to absorb. Statutory rape was one thing, but incest quite another. 

Grace Metalious

Grace Metalious, a woman from New Hampshire nobody in literary circles had ever heard of, was rebuked as a smut dealer; Harper Lee, working in New York publishing, friend of Truman Capote, was lionized as the great literary talent of her day for her book published 4 years after Peyton Place.

Harper Lee

We Live In An Age of Miracles

This past Saturday, my son's friend plunged into the surf at the Jersey shore and lost his wedding ring. His fingers responded to the cold water with cold shrinkage and the force of the waves did the rest.

But this man was born in the mid 1980's and he did not accept this loss as irretrievable. 

He went on Reddit, from his cell phone, and found a man who, in retirement, has made it his hobby to find things on beaches with his metal detector.

So the young man went on Google maps and sent the location of the beach where he lost the ring and the retiree went out on the beach, the next morning, Sunday, with his metal scanner machine and found the ring.

Presumably, the ring will get back to its owner by some lower tech means, like the U.S. Postal Service.

But here we are, and a ring, A RING, could be found amid all the grains of sand on that beach, while the owner was back in New York City, by a man on a New Jersey beach linked to the problem by a satellite, and using an electronic device.

What a marvelous age we live in. 

Sexuality, Gender, Desire, Behavior and the Incubus Physician

At age 22, having suffered through the nasty gauntlet game thrown down by the American university system and landed in the promised land of medical school, the Phantom found himself at an institution in New York City which just happened to be a the center of a Brave New World of scientific inquiry, the New York Hospital, Cornell University Medical Center located on the chic upper East Side of Manhattan, overlooking the East River estuary, housed in sparkling white buildings fashioned after a papal palace, and home to a biochemistry laboratory run by a dyspeptic old guy who could run blood through his beakers and test tubes and analyzers and dissect out the hormones which get made from cholesterol and sent down the assembly line of human adrenal glands, ovaries and testicles and made into sex hormones, hormones which support blood pressure and a hormone essential to life, cortisol.

In one of those fortuitous constellations of history, a group of remarkable women happened to reside in the pediatric endocrinology department of this same institution and these female physicians were forced to confront the problem of babies who were delivered with "ambiguous genitalia" that is, the happy mother looks down between her legs as the obstetrician grasps the newborn and she asks, "Boy or girl?" and the unfortunate, baffled obstetrician sputters, "A healthy baby!" 

The problem is the baby has equipment which is not clearly male or female.

These women carried the baby's blood down to the curmudgeon in his lab and asked him to analyze the baby's hormones. They did this because they knew that the shape and nature of a baby's external genitalia, that is whether it is a recognizable penis or clitoris, a scrotal sac with testes or labia all this is shaped and driven and formed by hormones and these kids clearly had deranged hormones.

These women, Dr. Breslow and Maria New and later, Julianne Imperato McGuinley, also knew that the hormone levels were in turn determined by chromosomes and by genes located in those chromosomes. 

So they knew that there was a role for genes, for the enzymes produced by these genes, by the hormones produced by these enzymes and that all this resulted in anatomy.

They also learned that the hormonal environment in some way conditioned the brains of infants and children.  They saw the most rare and exotic patients who had derangements in the hormone production assembly lines. 

And they presented these cases to the medical students assembled in a sweaty classroom theater, along with the diagrams of the biochemical pathways.

For most of the 90 students of this class, the lectures were a snoozer, but for the Phantom it was instant karma. Dr. Breslow described the case of a fourteen year old girl, who had never been much interested in playing with dolls, who preferred running around with boys who turned out to be something more than a tomboy.
She had shown no signs of going into puberty and had been brought to the pediatric endocrine clinic and it turned out she lacked an enzyme, a form of 17 hydroxylase, and because of that, she had not been able to make  enough testosterone in utero, when a sort of "first puberty"  and thus her external genitalia did not form along male lines. When the second puberty at age 11 to 13 was supposed to happen, she could not make much estrogen either. She had XY sex chromosomes and she had an underdeveloped phallus which was thought to be a clitoris but was actually a rudimentary penis.

She had been able to make enough varieties of male hormones in utero to condition her brain to a certain male proclivity, but not enough to masculinize her primordial penis or scrotum and her testes had not descended.

So there you had it: testosterone had not played its role in fashioning anatomy, but it had played a role in the brain, in behavior, thus the "tomboy" behavior.

The Phantom asked what the doctor intended on doing and she said the child would continue to be raised as a girl, given estrogens, have her testes surgically removed. This caused enough stirring among the Phantom's male colleagues, who seemed to arouse themselves from their stupor and one objected, "But he's a boy!" 

"Why do you say that?" asked Dr. Breslow.
"He's got testes, XY and a penis!"

It was then Dr. Breslow leaned over her podium and raised her little finger to the confrontational medical student, and she uttered the words the Phantom has never forgot: "If you have a penis the size of my distal digit, you are never going to function as a male. We can fashion a vagina, bring up her estrogen levels to normal and she can have a life. You want to sacrifice all that for a set of XY chromosomes?"

The Phantom was hooked.  The confluence of biochemistry, brain, sexual organs, the beauty of it all was electrifying 

He tried to be reasonable. Endocrinology was a field of low remuneration. It had nothing to offer but fascination.

But he had seen the dawning of a whole new understanding. 
The same department later identified 5 alpha reductase deficiency.
They established a clinic for what is now called "complete androgen insensitivity syndrome" which the Phantom attended every chance he got. 

There was a research ward for these patients, which the Phantom haunted. 

The Phantom was not much welcomed by the women of the pediatric endocrine department, and he tried other specialties, but some years after he left the New York Hospital, he felt the gravitational pull back to the world of hormones. 

It was the path less traveled, but some planets exert so much gravitational pull, they are inescapable. You simply go into orbit and enjoy the ride. 

Drinking the Kool Aide of American Elitism

I am the mother of two sons who are both Princetonians. My older son had the good judgment and great fortune to marry a classmate of his, but he could have married anyone. My younger son is a junior and the universe of women he can marry is limitless. Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated. It's amazing how forgiving men can be about a woman's lack of erudition, if she is exceptionally pretty. Smart women can't (shouldn't) marry men who aren't at least their intellectual equal. As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again — you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you
--Susan Patton, Princeton, Class of 1977

Just back from Alaska, which got me thinking about the Ivy League, the New York Times wedding announcements (advertisements of self proclaimed virtuosity), the East Coast, Silicon Valley, Bill Gates, and Daniel Okrant's, "The Guarded Gate" about the early 20th century, when the elites from Supreme Court justices to Eleanor Roosevelt, agreed that WASPs were the superior race, and with the help of the Ku Klux Klan, managed to get a law passed to deny entry to lower orders of the human race, like Jews, Italians, Poles and Slavs and to favor immigration from the British Isles, excluding Ireland. 

In Alaska, folks never ask where you went to school, and, in fact, they give every appearance of judging people on what they can discern from talking with them. 

I went through some towns where there was only one gas pump (not one gas station--one gas pump). Juneau, the capital, has no road connecting it to the outside world; if you want to get to Juneau, you have to take a sea plane or a boat. 

Russians lived in Alaska when it was Russian

A sign outside a Hertz car rental showed that Hawaii is closer than Washington, DC for folks in Sitka. 

Bill Gates, who may be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, spent only a year at Harvard. I haven't read a biography or memoir to give me insight into the man, but I do know that Harvard points to Zuckerberg and Gates as evidence Harvard knows how to assess talent and potential.  But is it not just as likely Gates and Zuckerberg chose Harvard, knowing they could go anywhere, and having spent a year there, realized Harvard, its faculty, its students had nothing important to offer?

Tony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy, Immunology and Infectious Disease, scandalized the faculty of Cornell Medical Center, The New York Hospital, when, at his investiture, having completed his year as Chief Resident in the Department of Medicine, with the grey beards of the Ivy League faculty mucky mucks gathered around, he was handed a set of the keys to the kingdom, admitting privileges to the hospital and appointment to the clinical faculty, and he said, "Thanks, but no thanks."

A Richter Scale 7 earthquake could not have shaken the foundations that white marble, faux papal palace on East 68th Street more. 

How could he turn down that honor? 

Fauci has never denied the story that when pressed by his friends, he had explained, "Some day I'm going to be either very rich or very famous. But if I stay at Cornell, I will be neither."

I'm betting Gates and Zuckerberg said the same thing to themselves about Harvard.

The fact is, institutions of the dominant tribe try to sell the Kool Aide that they have a process, a drink,  to convey the power, the glory.   But this idea of the cream rising to the top (to mix a metaphor) is simply a lie used to perpetuate power among some and to deny it to those strivers from below.

For that, it is salutatory to escape the ivy covered walls and to look at those in power, in their fine gowns, and to see through the cover on the emperor to the  naked truth below. 

PS: 
Bonus points: Can you deconstruct Ms. Patton's problem here?
Hint: Begin with it's amazing how little intelligence matters in a woman (to men)  if she is pretty.
Extra credit reading: Eugenics 101, "Guarding the Gate"
Extra hint:

Susan Patton