Houston, Boston Baseball Cheating Scandal: Say It Ain't So, Joe

Watching Mookie Betts and the Boston Red Sox power their way to a World Series championship was a thrill, not of vicarious victory, because I knew I did nothing to share in that astounding performance, but simply a bliss of wonder that players could perform so magically.

Now all that has gone to ashes. 

I am actually in a position to understand how exactly this form of cheating poisons the achievement, invalidates it, actually.

I played little league baseball, but never in high school nor college but as an adult I played for nearly 20 years and I was addicted to batting cages, still am, actually.

Most batting cages have an 85 mph fast ball cage and this I (or anyone really) can learn to hit and drive consistently. It's a challenge, but you can be trained.

But I once found a cage where you could program a 90 mph fastball and you could program 3, 90 mph fastballs, then an 80 mph curve then a 90 mph fastball, then a 75 mph slider and so on.

I found I could hit a 90 mph fast ball about half the time if I set up 10 in a row, but I could hit this only half the time, even when I knew it was coming and never hit it on the nose. What really killed me was seeing a 90 mph fastball after an 80 mph pitch. The 90 mph fast ball looked like 120 mph and I never could come close to even making contact.

This showed me the importance of "mixing speeds" and why older pitchers who could no longer throw 95 mph fastballs could still be successful by "keeping the batters off balance" which really means, by completely destroying the batter's timing and brain cells by mixing speeds.

So now the scandal: The Houston Astros got a software program which allowed them to steal the catchers' signals to the pitchers and teamates in the dugout could see these translated signals and hit a trash can: one for a fastball, two for off speed, and the batter in the batter's box then knew what was coming and had a huge advantage.

Of course, the batter still had to hit the ball, but as I discovered in my high tech cage, even an amateur stood a good change of laying bat on ball if  he knew it was a fastball coming.

It's been argued: Well, baseball players have been stealing signs since the game began, but no.
Everyone knew, when there was a runner who reached second base, he would look in to the catcher and see the signals and try to relay this to his teammate at the plate. But the thing is, the catcher and pitcher knew this was going to happen and changed up signals, and this was never a very effective play for the batter.

What Houston did, and it won a World Series doing this, was radically different and more successful and the performance of Houston batters was demonstrably so much better when they were cheating, there is no doubt the cheating made the difference between victory and defeat.

And then, apparently, Alex Cora took the system from Houston to Boston and lo and behold: Red Sox players like Mookie had hitting success light years better than what they had ever done before.
I think this is true. I'll have to  Google Mookie before and after Alex Cora arrived with the software. I'd love to believe  Mookie was great even without the software cheat.
But what I've seen so far suggests Mookie and all the Red Sox got suddenly, significantly better with the software.
So far all I've found is that in 2017 before the software arrived Mookie batted .264 and hit 24 home runs. The next year Alex brought the cheat, and Mookie batted .364 and hit 32 home runs. 

Unlike the fabled Chicago White Sox scandal, every Houston player and later, every Boston player was in on it--except for the Boston pitchers who did not bat, or even sit in the dugouts.

So Mookie's fabulous year was a cheat, a sort of lie.  Same for every other player.

Talk about conspiracy theories--here's an actual conspiracy which altered outcomes.

To baseball's credit, the powers that be investigated and publicly disclosed the crime.

But, really, I don't think I'll be able to watch major league baseball again.
At least not the Red Sox or the Astros.

It will be interesting to see if Mookie can hit as well in LA, without the cheat, as he did in Boston.

Collective Memory: When History Becomes New

Channel surfing through my Amazon Prime choices I finally, in desperation, alighted upon "The Long Shadow," a documentary series by David Reynolds, a Cambridge don who has done his work on the history of World War 1, which, as he repeatedly points out, happened before he was born. This is an important point: there is history we live through, history that happened while there are still those alive who remember it, and then there is the rest of history.

David Reynolds

He dwells for the entire opening episode about how the way Brits and Germans and Americans remember World War One was different right after that war and was different 20 years later and was different again 50 years later.  

History is seen differently in the memories of different peoples and it morphs in the minds of the same population, as time progresses.

Right after World War 1, in Britain, it was the glorious, sacred war of sacrifice for King and country.  But within 10 years, as soldiers returned and accounts were taken, it became a story of futility, of senseless, meaningless slaughter, wrought by stupendously stupid generals who were not themselves in the trenches and by self absorbed monarchs who had no personal skin in the game. 

Kaiser Wilhelm

Because of the way WW1 was perceived by 1935 in England--much the way Americans now remember the quagmire, the stupidity of Vietnam--Brits were loathe to rise to the challenge of Mussolini and Hitler. A pox on all their houses; we got suckered into a war once, not again. While Brits were not alienated enough to reject monarchy outright, and were not persuaded to become communists, they agreed with the basic Lenin argument about war: A bayonet is a weapon with a worker on either end.

One thing Reynolds points out, which I had not realized somehow, that while Wilson's windy phrase, "We must make the world safe for democracy" was empty in many ways, it was a very essential message and truth in another sense.  
It's true Wilson's idea of democracy was a representative government for those who deserved to be represented, namely white males, preferably with a Princeton education, but we he went to Britain and was feted at Buckingham Palace with all the princes and dukes of British royalty in their elaborate costumes, Wilson arrived to dinner in a plain black suit, and, as Professor Reynolds remarks, "He must have brought to mind, 'Oh, here is Oliver Cromwell.'" 
I had to Google Cromwell, but I knew he was an anti monarchist, and in fact, he signed the death warrant for the execution of the king and he reigned over a parliament which replaced king with a representative body, of sorts.
Wilson, of course, was a Virginia aristocrat, a spiritual descendant of the Lost Cause, who rooted Blacks out of the federal government, disdained the idea of women voting, and was as close to Jefferson Davis in the White House as we have ever got (until, perhaps, Donald Trump) but he was no friend of the idea of monarchy and empire, and in this way he was something of a shock to the Brits.

No Blacks nor Women Need Apply

As Reynolds points out,  WW1 did change things in Europe. The disillusion with military governments ruled by monarchs was so deep and pervasive nine new republics emerged, one in Germany, briefly. But France, and much of the rest of Europe got parliaments and kings no longer could start wars over matters of offended royal pride.  

In England, after WW1, a new parliament was voted in by legions of newly enfranchised voters from the lower and middle classes, who could now vote and also by women, or at least women over the age of 30. (Why a 29 year old woman was denied the vote is not explained.)

So the memory of WW1 in England went from glory, to revulsion at the cupidity and stupidity and selfishness of the ruling class. And that meant England allowed Hitler to rise without challenging him before his particular version of spider wasp was able to eat Germany out from the inside. 

Archduke Ferdinand

Hitler, it must be remembered was not of the aristocratic German nobility, but was elected to office, albeit with a small plurality.

As much as I've recently read about WW1 lately, I had not seen it the way Reynolds, who is a man with a mind capable of seeing the same thing, but in a different way and he emphasizes how memory is plastic and molded to the current purpose but also how the stubborn facts of what really happened do matter.

Wilfred Owen

He points out that when WW1 was taught in schools by the mid 20th century, it was taught using the poems of the famous war poets, but one of the most famous, Wilfred Owen, is remembered in an edited form.  Owen, wrote of the cost, the horror the slaughter and his poems had all that, but they also had the thrill of battle and the idea that war might mean something. In fact, Owen chose to return to the trenches, although he did not have to go back, and he was killed there. When his brother, who managed his memory and his literary legacy published his poems, the brother edited out the pro war passages and made sure only the anti war stuff remained.  Another famous soldier poet, Siegfried Sassoon, met with Owen while Owen was weighing whether or not to go back to the trenches and implored him to stay home, away from the senseless carnage, but for Owen the carnage made sense.

Siegfried Sassoon

Owen and Sassoon's poems became part of a narrative of war as anything but glorious. Their work joined work from the other side--Eric Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front," from the German side, all of which suggested the masses, who died in waves of charges against machine guns and artillery had been duped into dying for a corrupt cause.

Revulsion against this notion ran deep in Britain--even to "Lady Chatterley's Lover" where a woman who was left behind safe at home had to deal with her crippled but imperious husband who returned from the war, paralyzed from the waist down, and Constance sees the mockery of those aristocratic British "values" as a hideous lie.

Paul kills Frenchman All Quiet on the Western Front

Listening to Reynold's description of Mussolini, who most Americans, if they know anything about him at all, remember as a clownish figure of strutting impotence, it is stunning how closely Mussolini resembles Donald Trump--they even look like products of the same litter.

History, as Reynolds presents it is a living thing, something which has shaped the lenses through which we see our world today. 

The Lost Cause (Slavery and Gone With the Wind)

Reynolds' argument is a twist on Faulkner's famous line, "The past is not dead. It is not even past."

But, in Faulkner's mind, the past is immutable, ever present, a living ghost standing right behind us; What Reynolds knows is that the past is like the rest of life: It is what we make it today. 

Let's All Vote on the Truth

Watching the movie "Exodus," made in 1960 brought me back to that person who exists now only in memory, my 12 year old self.  That twelfth summer of my life I read Leon Uris's novel and was swept away in romance, anger, redemption and hope. The story of the Holocaust, reinforced by newsreels showing the concentration camps, stories in Life magazine, TV shows showing the good hearted American troops liberating Auschwitz, all established the truth of the Holocaust in my mind.

Everyone around me agreed that had happened. Eisenhower had invited news photographers and movie makers into the camp because, as he explicitly said, he wanted nobody to ever be able to deny what these camps were. Eisenhower was a soldier and while I remember him as a tottering old grandfather, he must have know what soldiers know: there are always lies about war and why we go to war and what happens when we do. 

A version of the truth

The movie disappointed me, because it began after the Holocaust, as the Jews tried to escape Europe for a new start in Israel, and the best part of the novel was all the detail about the concentration camps, the "why" of the exodus. The movie focused on the "what" happened when they tried to get into what was then Palestine, and the "why" was treated only in speeches.

Ari Ben Caanan in the flesh

But now, reading a curious book called, "Eichmann Before Jerusalem" I am struck by the passages about the magazines, weeklies and newspapers run by Germans, Austrians and others in the immediate post war years 1945-1960, just about the time when we were seeing "Exodus" and "Catch-22" and "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Young Lions" and Life magazine and Time and documentaries about the Nuremberg trials in suburban America. In a publication called Der Weg, which was apparently a favorite of former Nazis, a very different story was promulgated and elaborated.

Eichmann on trial

By this telling, Hitler knew nothing of the death camps, isolated as he was and preoccupied with the war. The concentration camps were the idea of German Jews who were horrified by the tide of assimilation among German, Austrian Jews, and these Jews wanted a homeland in Palestine for world Jewry, and so they launched the Holocaust, using high Nazi officials like Eichmann, who may have secretly been a Jew himself--didn't he look Jewish? So the camps, the transportation network, the rounding up of Jews in France, the Netherlands, Poland and Germany were all a Jewish plot. And, by gum! It worked! Look at how the Jews got their homeland!

Oh, that Jewish plot!

These formulations reminded me of that tour guide at Fort Sumter, who insisted the Civil War was a war of Northern Aggression, and all about States Rights and not about slavery at all. In fact, he pointed out, the only slave owner in that room at Appomattox was Ulysses S. Grant, not Robert E. Lee. If that didn't prove it, well, then I don't know what would.

Grant was actually not that dressed up

Of course, a little googling undid this pundit: Lee in fact did not need to own slaves because his wife owned 189 slaves, who he ruthlessly pursued and punished whenever one or two managed to escape. Reading about Lee's treatment of his wife's (and in reality, his) slaves demolishes this image of the saintly Lee.  
As for Grant, he did own a slave once, but he could not abide the reality of slavery and freed that slave within one year.

The Trump of his day

There is another side to the Lost Cause which emerges fitfully--the practical imperatives wrought by keeping an army in the field. As the union army approached Richmond, every male capable of holding a gun was rounded up and thrown into the lines. The myth that the Union army was a rag tag bunch of Negroes, recent immigrants who were forced into service or who were hirelings bent on plunder while the Southern soldiers were all true believers defending their homeland looks pretty thin we you read the memoirs of James Longstreet, Lee's steadfast lieutenant general.

As vicious a slaver as ever was

Longstreet writes Lee repeatedly about the necessity of looting the gold in the Richmond bank and wherever in the South they can find it, to sustain the war effort as Southern brokers and farmers are unwilling to accept Confederate currency and the rich aristocrats who hold that gold have got it because of what the army is willing to do for them and they ought to be willing to give it to the army and if not, it should be "impressed," i.e. stolen.
When Jefferson Davis left Richmond, he left with wagon loads of gold.
And even before the final days, within the first years of the war, wagon loads of Confederate gold were being waylaid, stolen and diverted by Southern bandits and Confederate soldiers.
The "Lost Cause" is that soothing marketing which responds to all the bad press slavery has got over the years, depicting happy slaves (who just loved Scarlet O'Hara) and a wonderful world of chivalry, glory and gentility disrupted by mongrel bandits from the North envious of Southern cotton wealth. Slavery was simply a gentle custom which supported cotton farming. And the slaves were taken care of like children and way better off than they would have been being eaten by lions or starving in Africa.
Lincoln, of course, who actually lived in 1860 and had seen it all first hand, who did not want to make the war about slavery because he thought it was a losing argument, politically, even admitted the war had been about slavery all along, and he came clean in his 2nd Inaugural address:
"These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war."

History, of course, is one long argument. 
But how can an essential truth, that the Civil War was, ultimately, about freeing the slaves, even if a majority of the Union soldiers (and certainly their generals) were indifferent--the driving force raising the armies in the North was animated by abolitionism and without the abolitionists there would never, could never, have been a war at all--how could that truth be so widely denied and sustained, even today?
Because "The Lost Cause" appeals to people. It's a cotton candy truth, that tastes so good, even if it's basically sugar vapor and because there are enough sources of dissemination, it can be sustained in the population.

There is a difference between "historical truth" and "scientific truth."

There is that old joke about the prostitute who asks a client his name and he tells her "Santa Claus, if you want to believe it." And after they have sex, she tells him, "In a week or so you'll notice a rash. It's syphilis. But you can call it hives, if you want to believe it."

You can call it "hives"

Before microscopes and the concept of micro organisms, when the Black Plague hit Europe, the only explanation for it was "God's Will." And there was an institution in place--organized religion--which could promulgate this explanation. So God's vengeance against those who denied the Church's truths was the prevailing truth.

You cannot wish away the Black Death

Science, however, is about doubting, organizing experiments to prove things and developing technologies to see things which human senses and perception cannot immediately perceive. It was not until 1890 that a man trained by Louis Pasteur, Alexandre Yersin, was able to capture the causative organism of plague, to see it under the microscope and even to raise anti sera against it, to be used successfully in an outbreak in what is now Vietnam.  Until then, the truth was "God's wrath." Just because you want something to be true--that God punishes sinner with plague--does not actually make it true. That much science has provided us.

Trump would have executed these 5 innocent adolescents 

There are times when we vote on the truth because we do not have better options.
A man is accused of rape and murder and a jury hears the evidence presented against him and the  jury is persuaded because of testimony, because they don't like his looks or because they want to get back to their jobs and homes. 
But later, we get DNA testing and it turns out juries and courts often get it wrong and we get the Innocence Project.  And we are all made uncomfortable, because after all the elaborate rules of evidence, after the man or woman in the black robe, sitting up high on the polished wooden bench behind the impressive woodwork, pronounces sentence, it turns out they were all fools, all wrong and the real rapist/murderer is living free, while the wrong man is sent off to prison.

Mass marketing of truth does some weird things. Dennis Burkitt, a renowned epidemiologist, the first doctor to show that a virus could cause a malignancy--Burkitt's lymphoma--gave a famous lecture in London in 1973, in which he postulated that the reason bush people of Africa did not get colon cancer, dental carries, hemorrhoids or colonic diverticulae had to do with the large amount of fiber they ate in their diet. This got taken up by the American food industrial and marketing complex and measurements of "fiber" in various foods were made helter skelter and lo and behold! It turns out Fruit Loops have enough fiber to qualify as "high fiber" food and can be marketed as "heart healthy." Fruit Loops!

Hero of sorts

So what makes for "truth" in a mass society, with mass communications, social networks and a population which has never been rigorously instructed in how to determine the truth, i.e. on how to question the "truths" presented it? 

Volume, repetition and penetrance. 
Fox News, Trump Daily Tweets, Hannity, Limbaugh, Moscow Mitch McConnell. Republican 'talking points." Same tune, repeated often enough. Truth.

Trump's version of a war hero: Eddie Gallagher

Watching TV, listening to the radio, even when most of my stations are NPR--we have 4 NPR stations in New Hampshire--I still can estimate that 90% of what I hear is simply wrong.  Truth may be eternal in some ways, but it is rare. And it is not imperishable. You may think you know that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million, but if you hear often enough, from enough sources, that he won by a huge landslide, the biggest in history, eventually, you will believe it.

Woman Walks Ahead: Susanna White's Unseen Meteor

The Phantom, in fairness, needs to warn the reader of his soft spot for Indians, American Indians, or, as they are politically correctly called, "Native Americans," a term which gives the Phantom dyspepsia.

This means the Phantom has watched "Little Big Man" and Daniel Day Lewis in "Last of the Mohicans" and "Dances with Wolves" so often the CD's are beginning to complain, and sometimes simply refuse to play.

It should also be known the Phantom understands these representations of the American Indian and his culture are Hollywood's version.
Once, driving through the Four Corners area, across an Indian reservation, the Phantom encountered actual, present day American Indians who were either openly hostile to his presence or remarkably kind and welcoming, but in either case, were not at all the Hollywood Indian tribe he had previously come to know and love.

In college, the Phantom got into anthropology and loved ethnographs--descriptions of cultures by anthropologists who tried to see an alien culture through scientific eyes, which is to say, objectively, and anthropologists got into endless arguments about whether seeing another culture "objectively" is even possible.

Beyond that, the Phantom tried to read "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" but got so angry at the US government he could never finish it.

And whenever he can find that rare book which depicts what American Indians were actually up to, he has read and re read it: "Empire of the Summer Moon," (SC Gwynne) being one of the rare examples. 

Books like this surprise you, and feed you new knowledge: Did you know, for example, the Comanche language had no word for "surrender"?  This may explain why Comanches fought to the death every time.  The idea of surrender was simply so foreign to them, they could not wrap their head around it.  But when you think about it, the notion of surrender is somewhat peculiar: If you find yourself in a fight with a mountain lion or a buffalo, no one  is likely to "surrender." And the life of the Plains Indians was a struggle no different when they clashed with other human beings than when they hunted animals. It was always a fight to the death.

So when the Phantom started watching "Woman Walks Ahead," he was halfway won from the outset.

Another concession:  The Phantom watched this thing from his treadmill, which is how he watches most things now. (No sense just sitting in a chair when you could be moving.) Watching from the exercise bicycle allows the Phantom to hear all the dialogue without the noise of the treadmill, but this movie was a treadmill movie, so it's possible the Phantom was not in an ideal position to judge.

Catherine Weldon

On the other hand, if the movie could overcome the noise and distraction of the treadmill, it must have something going for it.

Briefly, the story follows a winsome woman portrait painter from Brooklyn, New York, Catherine Weldon, recently widowed, who decides to paint a portrait of Sitting Bull, who was among the chiefs leading Indians against Custer at the Little Big Horn.  She has felt herself under the thumb of male domination her whole life and this is her expedition to go forth boldly where others have feared to tread.

Along the way out West, she encounters leering men who assume a woman traveling alone must be of dubious morality and she fends off the clumsy and sometimes violent approaches by men on the railroad, and at the fort town on the Indian reservation. She finds the Indians better behaved, for the most part, than the white settlers who revile her as another one of those East Coast liberals who have never suffered at the hands of the savages.

Catherine Weldon's portrait of Sitting Bull

The writing is restrained, but forceful and her character is admirable without being strident. The case for the Indians is succinctly but effectively made.

But listen to the reviewer of the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis:
"Less as a historical record than a fish-out-water-romance. Albeit one that gets no more physical than a desperate cuddle."

Catherine Weldon 

The Phantom does not know much about Ms. Catsoulis, but he can see her problem here: She is assigned to see too many movies, and her first impulse is to categorize the movie and then to judge how well, within the confines of the genre chosen, the movie has succeeded.  She is offended that the standard expectation of a white woman falling in love with a noble savage does not result in a steamy bedroom, or in this case, tepee scene. This movie just will not behave. 

She is not the only reviewer unimpressed by a movie which refuses to do the standard thing. Rotten tomatoes is replete with reviewers who say things like:

"The good intentions it carries out to the plains don't make up for the tentative falseness at its center, a hero who could herself benefit from a portraitist's clear vision."
--The Village Voice

What is this reviewer talking about?  As if Catherine Weldon, the actual woman on whom this movie is based, must have had a clear vision before embarking on her expedition. Is that not what exploration is all about--not having a clear vision but being open to new experience?
And others, from "reputable" sources:

You leave Woman Walks Ahead thinking the truth would have made a much better movie. Full review

Peter Travers
Rolling Stone

The problem with Woman Walks Ahead is not that it doesn’t stick to the historical record — which most of us didn’t know anyway. It’s that what it does present is so blandly tasteful. Full review

David Edelstein
Vulture

The Phantom was left wondering: Did these reviewers see the same movie he did?

Each seems to try to hold this work of art to standards they think appropriate:

1. Biopic: Does it faithfully represent Ms. Weldon and her life and struggles?

2. Romance: Does she seduce Sitting Bull or he her and are the love scenes steamy enough?

3. Politically Correct Statement: Does it do what Dances With Wolves did in ennobling the Plains Indians?

Quanah Parker

The story of Ms. Weldon, as told by Wikipedia is far more florid, one might say, lurid, than the story in Woman Walks Ahead, but this movie is not a portrait of a life as Rembrandt may have done it, but more what Picasso or Van Gogh might have seen.

The essence of a woman who felt crushed by the strictures of being a woman in American society  comes through elegantly. As she says, clearly enough, her war is against being relegated to "insignificance." This is a woman who wants to make of her life something meaningful. Sitting Bull tells her she is the only person who can give her life meaning and who can know it when that happens.  Theirs is a romance not so much of the flesh but of spirit.

This is not "Dances With Wolves."  Clearly, its creators were very much aware of that movie and did not want to settle for simply a feminist version of John Dunbar.  Of course, there is the feature of an American white who sees something noble and worthwhile in the Indians, and who sees the unvarnished treachery, hate and racism of the white nation which aims to annihilate the Plains Indians.

Every morning, as he gets on the treadmill and begins surfing through the menues on Amazon Prime and Netflix, alighting on one movie or another, the Phantom is impressed by how many movies have been made, but more than that, he is stunned by how many truly awful movies get made.  Thus, the need for reviewers to sift through all this rotten chaff becomes apparent.

Someday, maybe artificial intelligence will do this.

But every once in a while, the Phantom stumbles across a movie spurned by the reviewers, who, it must be admitted, are often the classic "C" students, or, worse yet, the "A" students who got into Harvard, Yale or Princeton by being buttoned down and conventional.

When they run across something different, they dismiss.

These are the people who would have spurned Van Gogh, who would have never bought a painting by someone who was simply so much better than the other painters of his time, so much better than any reviewer, he simply floated above their mediocre brains in a stratosphere of his own.

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.