TV Quote of the Day (Ron of ‘Parks And Recreation,’ on Blueberry Wine)

“I don't drink alcohol from that portion of the color spectrum.”—Ron Swanson (played by Nick Offerman), on blueberry wine, in Parks And Recreation, Season 6, Episode 19, “Flu Season 2,” air date April 10, 2014, teleplay by Dave King and Megan Amram, directed by Nick Offerman

After seven years, Parks and Recreation aired its series finale last night. It might have been a bit hard for the Democratic-leaning Amy Poehler to contemplate, but, as this Daily Beast post from Asawin Suebsaeng noted, it was a subsidiary character, Ron Swanson. who became a libertarian hero of sorts. Credit to Ms. Poehler and her show’s scriptwriters for making him comic but not a caricature. (Not that I agree with his brand of politics, but it’s good to see more than one political point of view get an airing on television.)

Johnny-come-lately as I am, at some point, I’ll have to find a channel where the series goes into syndication so I can catch the episodes that I missed.

Quote of the Day (Julianne Moore, Showing Her Self-Discipline)

“I have to finish stuff. I need to get things done. I can't relax until I've done the work I know I need to do."—Actress Julianne Moore, quoted in Stephen Galloway, “There Is Nothing But Chaos,” The Hollywood Reporter, Feb. 6, 2015

For many filmgoers like me, Julianne Moore first served notice that she would be a force to be reckoned in a scene-stealing supporter role in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992). Subsequently, she would be nominated for Academy Awards Boogie Nights (1997), The End of the Affair (1999), The Hours (2002), and Far from Heaven (2002), though she could also have been up for consideration by her fellow actors for any one of a number of other roles.

Her long-expected Oscar for Still Alice on Sunday night caps an extraordinary career. Her fierce self-discipline promises that, despite the wall that many actresses hit in an age-obsessed Hollywood, moviegoers will still see marvelous work from her in the years ahead.

'Shades of Grey' Turned Shades of Green

“A real-life Christian Grey, the man set free from all restraint, would probably be a pure satyr like the sex-partying Dominique Strauss-Kahn or the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, with his private-jet harems and the conviction for soliciting a 14-year-old. But in the fantasy, the synthesis, he’s a guy who will first dominate you but ultimately love you — providing that, like Anastasia Steele, you’re careful to sign a rigorously detailed contract detailing just how much domination you’ll accept.”— Ross Douthat, “The Caligulan Thrill,” The New York Times, Feb. 15, 2015

Last year, I asked a longtime friend what she had been reading lately. The friend, a former schoolteacher and college English major, answered, “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

I was a bit startled but curious about the experience: “So, how was the book?”

“Book?” she responded, giggling. “I finished all three books!”

A good thing we were on a long-distance call, or my friend would have been stunned by how quickly my jaw hit the floor.

My guess is that she was one of the theatergoers who propelled the film adaptation to blockbuster status in just its opening weekend. Its combined U.S. and international revenue already puts it within striking distance of $200 million at the box office. Fifty Shades of Grey has now turned into Millions of Shades of Green--greenbacks, if you will.

The ground for this cinematic experience had, in fact, been carefully prepared for a while, with more than 139.7 million viewers of the trailer for the film by February 2015. Since its first showing, it had become the most viewed trailer of 2014, according to an article in WSJ.com.

Across the pond, the British have called E.L. James’ trilogy "mummy porn." The French termed it porn de menagere (housewife porn)—or, in that dismissive manner used by waiters, merde.

I might as well make clear where I stand immediately. I have not seen the film, so I can’t comment on the plot, dialogue, acting, cinematography, and all the other things that film critics hold so dear. (Though, from what I have heard, none of the above has the slightest role in the movie’s roaring success.)

I can say, though, that I have a real aversion to pain—and, conversely, that I wouldn’t want to inflict it on others. Nor do I have any interest in seeing or reading anything that treats this as something other than sexual violence.

Ross Douthat’s column in The New York Times identifies as intrinsic to the relationship between Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele the uneasy balance of money and power that has so dominated American political debate since the stock market crash of 2008. But it also hints at the nature of the fantasy that has made this trilogy and movie so intoxicating to so many women. It’s that male authority figure who will “first dominate you but ultimately love you.”

The introduction of sadomasochism into a mainstream Hollywood movie might be a new (and, I would argue, disturbing) element, but nearly all commentators have completely missed the link to an earlier element of popular culture. Douthat calls this figure a “synthesis,” but it would be more nearly correct to refer to this type as “the reformed rake.”

You don’t have to look far for an example of this in the movies. A quarter century ago, another film featured a young woman in a dubious relationship. Pretty Woman vaulted Julia Roberts onto Hollywood’s A list, in a Cinderella tale if there ever was one: a fundamentally good-hearted prostitute who wins the heart of a wealthy client—and, in the process, makes this corporate raider rethink his own outlook.

The title of the original script hints at the darkness below this 1990 rom-com: $3,000, Vivian’s fee for servicing Edward—enough, this drug-addicted call girl hopes, to fund a trip to Disneyland. That script ended not with her in his arms, but thrown out of his car—a rather more realistic vision of the life of a working girl, but surely not one that would earn the film $463 million in worldwide gross revenues.

The notion of the reformed rake is, in fact, as old as the English novel. Anglican minister Samuel Richardson, dismayed over the ha bit of young city females of reading romances, came up with a work that, in all its simple-minded morality and lack of skill, has tortured English majors ever since: the 1740 epistolary novel, Pamela. (The subtitle, Virtue Rewarded, indicates that, were the minister alive today, he would pay no attention whatsoever to spoiler alerts.)

I’ll spare you the drudgery of reading through this godawful book. A beautiful, innocent woman, just coming into adulthood, finds herself the prey of a filthy-rich guy—except that, instead of a Master of the Universe, it’s a British landed aristocrat. But she finds that he really is good at heart, and the book ends with the two united.

Hmmmm…where have I heard something like this recently?

Fifty Shades of Grey, even without, as its detractors note, a thought in its head, is also blessedly free of the pretension that has permeated other Hollywood fare on decadence. Exhibit A: Quills, the 2000 Philip Kaufman movie starring Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet, which views the Marquis de Sade (here locked up in an insane asylum) as an indomitable (if randy) defender of artistic freedom, a kind of forerunner of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt saving America from the Republicans impeaching Bill Clinton.

Like Hollywood, France seems to be increasingly leaning toward touching up the skeleton of the old duke of decadence. An article in the February 2015 issue of Smithsonian Magazine indicates that he is now “hailed by some as a literary genius and martyr for freedom.”

But the trouble, when you begin to see the past as a distant mirror of the present, is how much you distort perceptions of both. To view the marquis as simply a highly prolific scribbler of erotica means to ignore crimes against women that Susan Brownmiller aptly termed Against Our Will. Rape, incest and pedophilia against the weakest in society continue to be rightly frowned on, two centuries after his death. It’s the shortest of steps from a 21^st-century young businessman with a penchant for using a whip with his woman to someone with the darkest, most aggressively violent impulses.

Quote of the Day (Billy Wilder, on a Sure-Fire Way to Win an Oscar)

[To a cameraman on one of his pictures] “Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.”—Oscar-winning screenwriter-director Billy Wilder (The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment), quoted in Peter Archer, The Quotable Intellectual: 1,417 Bon Mots, Ripostes, and Witticisms for Aspiring Academics, Armchair Philosophers and Anyone Else Who Wants to Sound Really Smart (2010)

Song Lyric of the Day (Joni Mitchell, on Wanting to ‘Come In From the Cold’)

“With just a touch of our fingers

 I could make our circuitry explode

 All we ever wanted

 Was just to come in from the cold.”— Joni Mitchell, “Come In From The Cold,” from the Night Ride Home CD (1991)

The refrain for this song leaped into my mind over the last few days, as the wind-chill factor (a meteorological measure invented, I’m positive, to make us feel more miserable than we already do in winter) in the New York area plunged to depths not seen in 20 years.

The other day, my eight-block morning walk to work felt like I risked hypothermia with every step. The chill was so bad that at one point, I faced a critical decision just crossing a street. The oncoming cars were speeding too close to comfort. On the other hand, if I simply waited patiently and sensibly where I was, I risked freezing in place. I chose the latter. Lucky that an EMS crew didn’t have to carve me out of the spot where I stood.

Extremes of cold bring in emotional, if not literal, matters of life and death for perhaps the most influential female singer-songwriter of the 20^th century, Joni Mitchell. Her standard “River,” set in the days before Christmas, contrasts the surface joy of the holiday with the narrator’s quiet misery over having driven away her lover.

While not as concentrated or melodic, “Come In From The Cold” may be, in its seven-minute length, as well as its zigzag between past and present, desire and distance, more daring. It comes from her Night Ride Home CD, hailed upon its release as something of a return to her early folk-rock form.

It looks back at the fiery passions of youth, for sexual and political freedom, in the face of a cold, constricting adult society. Now, well into middle age, the narrator wonders how much, when all is said and done, was really achieved, while still acknowledging that these same yearnings, against all odds, persist.

In keeping with the setting, the song skates smoothly from past to present. Mitchell begins with a short snapshot of a time and place: “Back in 1957/We had to dance a foot apart.” She would have been 14 at the time, an extended period, she recalled for an interview with Carl Swanson in New York Magazine earlier this month, when she “stopped playing piano. I stopped going to church. Around that time, I broke with the school system. I broke with everything.”

Many people would recognize that world from long ago. The lines say everything about an environment in which, Mitchell would think later, she would be judged harshly as a college student for bearing a child out of wedlock.

The next two lines, in the way they compress adjectives into verbs, never specifically identify the setting. But given that she is a native of Alberta, Canada, and that she would have been a teenager at the time, it’s impossible not to associate it with her upbringing: “And they hawk-eyed us from the sidelines/Holding their rulers without a heart.” The adult world’s dismissal of girls like her was swift; nearly 35 years later, she more than returns the favor.

“The cold” is not just the climate of her native land, but a rigid landscape of  the mind—all the puritanical mores that interfere with self-fulfillment and bohemianism, much like the church functioning as a haven-that-isn’t-a-haven in The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreaming”: “You know the preacher likes the cold.”

Mitchell’s artistic obsession has been the conflict between freedom and the intimate ties that bind. Here, she recalls the heady days when she sought artistic (and romantic) fulfillment in the hippie singer-songwriters gathered in Laurel Canyon, with distinctly mixed results: “Freely I slaved away for something better/ And I was bought and sold.”

That is only the start of the paradoxes that animate the rest of the song: the oscillation between feeling “renewed” and “disabled,” between “statue” and  “flesh and blood,” between “some choice” and longing “to lose control,” between being “outa line” and “into no mind.”

In “Come In From The Cold,” Mitchell sorts out the summons and invitation of the title, which led to the dance of desire she never really ceased, despite relentless self-questioning, her entire adult life.

(The photo of Ms. Mitchell accompanying this post came from an Asylum Records ad from 1974.)