Tag: Tony Blair

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Give Me Liberty and Give Me Love

So, Carole Lombard and Clark Gable got married on this day, 29 March, back in 1939. Ginger Rogers tied the proverbial knot with someone or other in 1929; dear Molly Sugden, whom most folks today know as Mrs. Slocombe, a woman closest to her pussy, was Being Served, be it well or ill, with a license to wed in 1958; and the to me unspeakable ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair proved that he had popped the question fruitfully by walking down the aisle with someone named Cherie. It is a time-honored institution, no doubt; and one that has protected many a woman before her sex was granted the right to vote; but it is concept I find difficult to honor and impossible to obey nonetheless (which explains my love for the first three quarters of the average screwball comedy, the genre in which Lombard excelled).

Republicans should be appalled by the very idea of such sanctioning from above—but they are generally too narrow-minded to realize or mind, having little regard for what lies outside the norm protected by law, the norm that is a mere construct of law.

Let’s face it, what has government to do with the union of two consenting adults, whether for the purpose of business, procreation, or recreation? It is, or ought to be, a legally binding contract that, even if is was got into romantically or else for reasons of stability intended for the safety of the issues that may (or very well may not) result from such a bond, and thus a matter of business, however romanticized.

As Francis Bacon put it, the

most ordinary cause of a single life, is liberty, especially in certain self-pleasing and humorous minds, which are so sensible of every restraint, as they will go near to think their girdles and garters, to be bonds and shackles. Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants; but not always best subjects; for they are light to run away; and almost all fugitives, are of that condition.

Even the most fleeting acquaintance with historical facts will tell you that marriage is chiefly a matter of politics and trade. Love does not require securities, even it it is often without granted rights and legal protection. Indeed, some of the strongest relationships and greatest partnerships were forged in the face of and as a response to oppression and persecution. I have little respect and less love for an institution which itself is not merely the product but the cause of oppression. Keep the rice and boil it!

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Orson and the Count: The Man Cast as The Shadow as the Man Who Cast None

The afternoon couldn’t be any less gloomy. The sky is of a deep blue, the air is fresh, and—until the health hazard that is Tony Blair gets his death wish to turn the West of Britain into a nuclear powerhouse (as if the radioactive Irish Sea weren’t enough of a warning against atomic energy)—a plain and reliable sign that nature, or what remains of it, is still providing an atmosphere in which even those among the ostensibly superior animals may thrive who are least protective of its balance.

Long gone are the days when peril could be apprehended with the naked eye, the days before pesticides made our apples look appealing and generals fought wars with missiles to keep their hands clean. Those were the days when shields and fortresses were things of iron and stone, rather than metaphors for our lack of security. The Middle Ages, in short.

Yet even during those presumably darker days, the invisible was more terrifying than any clear sign of danger, which is how superstitions, sanctioned or otherwise, could capture and enthrall our imagination. The untraceable was always ominous, and clarity suspicious. After all, even if threats eventually manifest themselves, the absence of any such ocular proof of safety or danger is valid only for the moment of looking; it is no insurance against impending peril or against the human failings of sight and oversights.

Every technological means of capturing danger and thereby defusing it gives rise to invisible counterterrors, to elusive weaponry, to secrecy and stealth. No artistic medium was more suited to tapping into those fears of the unseen than radio, the mass medium that, back in 1938, was capable of causing widespread terror by virtue of sound alone.

The man largely responsible for this terror attack—known as “The War of the Worlds”—was an ambitious 23-year-old whose voice was familiar to millions of American as that belonging to Lamont Cranston and his alter ego, The Shadow (introduced here). On this day, 11 July, in 1938, the theatrical Wunderkind took on another, rather more grand and prestigious radio project by mounting his Mercury Theater on the air.

Lurking underneath the cloak of artistic pretensions was the melodramatic excess that had made The Shadow such a radio triumph—the ghastly and lurid that generated chills more pleasant than any news from Europe, darkening in the shadow of fascism. The opening attraction of the now legendary Mercury Theater on the Air was an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which, during those days, was not yet the academically respectable narrative it today, despite Welles’s insistence that it could be found in “every representative library of classic English narratives.”

The Mercury‘s “Dracula” (recently podcast, with an excellent introduction by Jim Widner) is unabashed blood and thunder. And, despite its toning down of the novel’s overt sexuality and its counterbalancing installation of an intellectual woman like Mina Harker (played by Shadow sidekick Agnes Moorehead), this adaptation for radio is more in keeping with the original novel than any filmic adaptation. Tearing down the house with neo-Gothic hooey, Welles and fellow adaptor John Houseman retain some of the structure of Stoker’s novel, a story assembled from various manuscripts, gathered by those who join forces to make sure that Dracula is out for the count.

Like the novel, the radio adaptation emphasizes the use of modern technology (train and typewriter, telegram and phonograph) as weapons against an ancient curse, a past insisting on making its presence felt. It is a past so present that, ultimately, it can only be conquered by forces as old as itself: the solidarity of individuals rising against a despotic power and the reassuring solidity of a piece of wood driven through a heart of darkness.

The Mercury‘s “Dracula,” like its subsequent production of “The War of the Worlds” (discussed here), may be read as a comment on fascisms: the rallying of western democracy against the threat of a blood-sucking dictator to the east of them. It is a comforting romance, this triumph of unity—and of radio as a unifying force. Yet, as those under the influence of that instrument of are often unaware, the prominent figures casting shadows in our midst—more ingratiating and integrated than the lonesome Count—can be much more difficult to hold accountable, discount or counter.