It has been almost 12 years since the release of one of the highest grossing films of all time – that being 2009’s Avatar, James Cameron’s sci-fi epic.
There has been a running meme for the last couple years that despite the first Avatar film’s wild success in the box office, it isn’t a memorable film. The characters aren’t memorable, the storyline is a copy and paste of 1990’s Dances With Wolves, and that its success hinged on the technological breakthroughs in CGI and 3D film that were a staple feature of the film.
In retrospect, the running joke isn’t far from the truth. Avatar is a film that hasn’t held up for casual viewers on its own merits, but rather through nostalgia of a time that has long passed – a time before the insanity of the last 10 years in the social and political scene, where most people were more concerned about the film’s core messages; that being a deeply environmentalist film, a critique on colonialism, and the insatiable appetite of human discovery wreaking havoc on innocent and more noble creatures.
While there are aspects of the original film I enjoy, such as the detailed world-building that Cameron is known for, and the cutting edge visual effects, it still failed to resonate with me the way it has with many other viewers.
The preaching was exhausting when I watched it the first time in 2009, and it is still exhausting today. I get it. Humans are bad, save the trees, the military industrial complex is so evil, etc, etc.While the second installment Avatar: The Way of Water certainly delves a little deeper into the lore and ups the stakes for the protagonists, it still carries the same bare-bones environmentalist sermon that has become all too exhausting in this day and age, especially when we have Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil cronies ruining fine art and causing general inconvenience to all those around them in our current reality.
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This is an excerpt from “Provenance”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
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Charles’ Personal Rule: A Stable or Tyrannised England?
Within discussions of England’s political history, the most famous moments are known and widely discussed – the Magna Carta of 1215, and the Cromwell Protectorate of the 1650s spring immediately to mind. However, the renewal of an almost-mediaeval style of monarchical absolutism, in the 1630s, has proven both overlooked and underappreciated as a period of historical interest. Indeed, Charles I’s rule without Parliament has faced an identity crisis amongst more recent historians – was it a period of stability or tyranny for the English people?
If we are to consider the Personal Rule as a period in enough depth, the years leading up to the dissolution of Charles’ Third Parliament (in 1629) must first be understood. Succeeding his father James I in 1625, Charles’ personal style and vision of monarchy would prove to be incompatible with the expectations of his Parliaments. Having enjoyed a strained but respectful relationship with James, MPs would come to question Charles’ authority and choice of advisors in the coming years. Indeed, it was Charles’ stubborn adherence to the Divine Right of King’s doctrine, writing once that “Princes are not bound to give account of their actions but to God alone”, that meant that he believed compromise to be defeat, and any pushback against him to be a sign of disloyalty.
Constitutional tensions between King and Parliament proved the most contentious of all issues, especially regarding the King’s role in taxation. At war with Spain between 1625 – 1630 (and having just dissolved the 1626 Parliament), Charles was lacking in funds. Thus, he turned to non-parliamentary forms of revenue, notably the Forced Loan (1627) – declaring a ‘national emergency’, Charles demanded that his subjects all make a gift of money to the Crown. Whilst theoretically optional, those who refused to pay were often imprisoned; a notable example would be the Five Knights’ Case, in which five knights were imprisoned for refusing to pay (with the court ruling in Charles’ favour). This would eventually culminate in Charles’ signing of the Petition of Right (1628), which protected the people from non-Parliamentary taxation, as well as other controversial powers that Charles chose to exercise, such as arrest without charge, martial law, and the billeting of troops.
The role played by George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, was also another major factor that contributed to Charles’ eventual dissolution of Parliaments in 1629. Having dominated the court of Charles’ father, Buckingham came to enjoy a similar level of unrivalled influence over Charles as his de facto Foreign Minister. It was, however, in his position as Lord High Admiral, that he further worsened Charles’ already-negative view of Parliament. Responsible for both major foreign policy disasters of Charles’ early reign (Cadiz in 1625, and La Rochelle in 1627, both of which achieved nothing and killed 5 to 10,000 men), he was deemed by the MP Edward Coke to be “the cause of all our miseries”. The duke’s influence over Charles’ religious views also proved highly controversial – at a time when anti-Calvinism was rising, with critics such as Richard Montague and his pamphlets, Buckingham encouraged the King to continue his support of the leading anti-Calvinist of the time, William Laud, at the York House Conference in 1626.
Heavily dependent on the counsel of Villiers until his assassination in 1628, it was in fact, Parliament’s threat to impeach the Duke, that encouraged Charles to agree to the Petition of Right. Fundamentally, Buckingham’s poor decision-making, in the end, meant serious criticism from MPs, and a King who believed this criticism to be Parliament overstepping the mark and questioning his choice of personnel.
Fundamentally by 1629, Charles viewed Parliament as a method of restricting his God-given powers, one that had attacked his decisions, provided him with essentially no subsidies, and forced him to accept the Petition of Right. Writing years later in 1635, the King claimed that he would do “anything to avoid having another Parliament”. Amongst historians, the significance of this final dissolution is fiercely debated: some, such as Angela Anderson, don’t see the move as unusual; there were 7 years for example, between two of James’ Parliaments, 1614 and 1621 – at this point in English history, “Parliaments were not an essential part of daily government”. On the other hand, figures like Jonathan Scott viewed the principle of governing without Parliament officially as new – indeed, the decision was made official by a royal proclamation.
Now free of Parliamentary constraints, the first major issue Charles faced was his lack of funds. Lacking the usual taxation method and in desperate need of upgrading the English navy, the King revived ancient taxes and levies, the most notable being Ship Money. Originally a tax levied on coastal towns during wartime (to fund the building of fleets), Charles extended it to inland counties in 1635 and made it an annual tax in 1636. This inclusion of inland towns was construed as a new tax without parliamentary authorisation. For the nobility, Charles revived the Forest Laws (demanding landowners produce the deeds to their lands), as well as fines for breaching building regulations.
The public response to these new fiscal expedients was one of broad annoyance, but general compliance. Indeed, between 1634 and 1638, 90% of the expected Ship Money revenue was collected, providing the King with over £1m in annual revenue by 1637. Despite this, the Earl of Warwick questioned its legality, and the clerical leadership referred to all of Charles’ tactics as “cruel, unjust and tyrannical taxes upon his subjects”.However, the most notable case of opposition to Ship Money was the John Hampden case in 1637. A gentleman who refused to pay, Hampden argued that England wasn’t at war and that Ship Money writs gave subjects seven months to pay, enough time for Charles to call a new Parliament. Despite the Crown winning the case, it inspired greater widespread opposition to Ship Money, such as the 1639-40 ‘tax revolt’, involving non-cooperation from both citizens and tax officials. Opposing this view, however, stands Sharpe, who claimed that “before 1637, there is little evidence at least, that its [Ship Money’s] legality was widely questioned, and some suggestion that it was becoming more accepted”.
In terms of his religious views, both personally and his wider visions for the country, Charles had been an open supporter of Arminianism from as early as the mid-1620s – a movement within Protestantism that staunchly rejected the Calvinist teaching of predestination. As a result, the sweeping changes to English worship and Church government that the Personal Rule would oversee were unsurprisingly extremely controversial amongst his Calvinist subjects, in all areas of the kingdom. In considering Charles’ religious aims and their consequences, we must focus on the impact of one man, in particular, William Laud. Having given a sermon at the opening of Charles’ first Parliament in 1625, Laud spent the next near-decade climbing the ranks of the ecclesiastical ladder; he was made Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1626, of London in 1629, and eventually Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Now 60 years old, Laud was unwilling to compromise any of his planned reforms to the Church.
The overarching theme of Laudian reforms was ‘the Beauty of Holiness’, which had the aim of making churches beautiful and almost lavish places of worship (Calvinist churches, by contrast, were mostly plain, to not detract from worship). This was achieved through the restoration of stained-glass windows, statues, and carvings. Additionally, railings were added around altars, and priests began wearing vestments and bowing at the name of Jesus. However, the most controversial change to the church interior proved to be the communion table, which was moved from the middle of the room to by the wall at the East end, which was “seen to be utterly offensive by most English Protestants as, along with Laudian ceremonialism generally, it represented a substantial step towards Catholicism. The whole programme was seen as a popish plot”.
Under Laud, the power and influence wielded by the Church also increased significantly – a clear example would be the fact that Church courts were granted greater autonomy. Additionally, Church leaders became evermore present as ministers and officials within Charles’ government, with the Bishop of London, William Juxon, appointed as Lord Treasurer and First Lord of the Admiralty in 1636. Additionally, despite already having the full backing of the Crown, Laud was not one to accept dissent or criticism and, although the severity of his actions has been exaggerated by recent historians, they can be identified as being ruthless at times. The clearest example would be the torture and imprisonment of his most vocal critics in 1637: the religious radicals William Prynne, Henry Burton and John Bastwick.
However successful Laudian reforms may have been in England (and that statement is very much debatable), Laud’s attempt to enforce uniformity on the Church of Scotland in the latter half of the 1630s would see the emergence of a united Scottish opposition against Charles, and eventually armed conflict with the King, in the form of the Bishops’ Wars (1639 and 1640). This road to war was sparked by Charles’ introduction of a new Prayer Book in 1637, aimed at making English and Scottish religious practices more similar – this would prove beyond disastrous. Riots broke out across Edinburgh, the most notable being in St Giles’ Cathedral (where the bishop had to protect himself by pointing loaded pistols at the furious congregation. This displeasure culminated in the National Covenant in 1638 – a declaration of allegiance which bound together Scottish nationalism with the Calvinist faith.
Attempting to draw conclusions about Laudian religious reforms very many hinges on the fact that, in terms of his and Charles’ objectives, they very much overhauled the Calvinist systems of worship, the role of priests, and Church government, and the physical appearance of churches. The response from the public, however, ranging from silent resentment to full-scale war, displays how damaging these reforms were to Charles’ relationship with his subjects – coupled with the influence wielded by his wife Henrietta Maria, public fears about Catholicism very much damaged Charles’ image, and meant religion during the Personal Rule was arguably the most intense issue of the period. In judging Laud in the modern-day, the historical debate has been split: certain historians focus on his radical uprooting of the established system, with Patrick Collinson suggesting the Archbishop to have been “the greatest calamity ever visited upon by the Church of England”, whereas others view Laud and Charles as pursuing the entirely reasonable, a more orderly and uniform church.
Much like how the Personal Rule’s religious direction was very much defined by one individual, so was its political one, by Thomas Wentworth, later known as the Earl of Strafford. Serving as the Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1632 to 1640, he set out with the aims of ‘civilising’ the Irish population, increasing revenue for the Crown, and challenging Irish titles to land – all under the umbrella term of ‘Thorough’, which aspired to concentrate power, crackdown on oppositions figures, and essentially preserve the absolutist nature of Charles’ rule during the 1630s.
Regarding Wentworth’s aims toward Irish Catholics, Ian Gentles’ 2007 work The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms argues the friendships Wentworth maintained with Laud and also with John Bramhall, the Bishop of Derry, “were a sign of his determination to Protestantize and Anglicize Ireland”.Devoted to a Catholic crackdown as soon as he reached the shores, Wentworth would subsequently refuse to recognise the legitimacy of Catholic officeholders in 1634, and managed to reduce Catholic representation in Ireland’s Parliament, by a third between 1634 and 1640 – this, at a time where Catholics made up 90% of the country’s population. An even clearer indication of Wentworth’s hostility to Catholicism was his aggressive policy of land confiscation. Challenging Catholic property rights in Galway, Kilkenny and other counties, Wentworth would bully juries into returning a King-favourable verdict, and even those Catholics who were granted their land back (albeit only three-quarters), were now required to make regular payments to the Crown. Wentworth’s enforcing of Charles’ religious priorities was further evidenced by his reaction to those in Ireland who signed the National Covenant. The accused were hauled before the Court of Castle Chamber (Ireland’s equivalent to the Star Chamber) and forced to renounce ‘their abominable Covenant’ as ‘seditious and traitorous’.
Seemingly in keeping with figures from the Personal Rule, Wentworth was notably tyrannical in his governing style. Sir Piers Crosby and Lord Esmonde were convicted by the Court of Castle Chamber for libel for accusing Wentworth of being involved in the death of Esmond’s relative, and Lord Valentina was sentenced to death for “mutiny” – in fact, he’d merely insulted the Earl.
In considering Wentworth as a political figure, it is very easy to view him as merely another tyrannical brute, carrying out the orders of his King. Indeed, his time as Charles’ personal advisor (1639 onwards) certainly supports this view: he once told Charles that he was “loose and absolved from all rules of government” and was quick to advocate war with the Scots. However, Wentworth also saw great successes during his time in Ireland; he raised Crown revenue substantially by taking back Church lands and purged the Irish Sea of pirates. Fundamentally, by the time of his execution in May 1641, Wentworth possessed a reputation amongst Parliamentarians very much like that of the Duke of Buckingham; both men came to wield tremendous influence over Charles, as well as great offices and positions.
In the areas considered thus far, it appears opposition to the Personal Rule to have been a rare occurrence, especially in any organised or effective form. Indeed, Durston claims the decade of the 1630s to have seen “few overt signs of domestic conflict or crisis”, viewing the period as altogether stable and prosperous. However, whilst certainly limited, the small amount of resistance can be viewed as representing a far more widespread feeling of resentment amongst the English populace. Whilst many actions received little pushback from the masses, the gentry, much of whom were becoming increasingly disaffected with the Personal Rule’s direction, gathered in opposition. Most notably, John Pym, the Earl of Warwick, and other figures, collaborated with the Scots to launch a dissident propaganda campaign criticising the King, as well as encouraging local opposition (which saw some success, such as the mobilisation of the Yorkshire militia). Charles’ effective use of the Star Chamber, however, ensured opponents were swiftly dealt with, usually those who presented vocal opposition to royal decisions.
The historiographical debate surrounding the Personal Rule, and the Caroline Era more broadly, was and continues to be dominated by Whig historians, who view Charles as foolish, malicious, and power-hungry, and his rule without Parliament as destabilising, tyrannical and a threat to the people of England. A key proponent of this view is S.R. Gardiner who, believing the King to have been ‘duplicitous and delusional’, coined an alternative term to ‘Personal Rule’ – the Eleven Years’ Tyranny. This position has survived into the latter half of the 20th Century, with Charles having been labelled by Barry Coward as “the most incompetent monarch of England since Henry VI”, and by Ronald Hutton, as “the worst king we have had since the Middle Ages”.
Recent decades have seen, however, the attempted rehabilitation of Charles’ image by Revisionist historians, the most well-known, as well as most controversial, being Kevin Sharpe. Responsible for the landmark study of the period, The Personal Rule of Charles I, published in 1992, Sharpe came to be Charles’ most staunch modern defender. In his view, the 1630s, far from a period of tyrannical oppression and public rebellion, were a decade of “peace and reformation”. During Charles’ time as an absolute monarch, his lack of Parliamentary limits and regulations allowed him to achieve a great deal: Ship Money saw the Navy’s numbers strengthened, Laudian reforms mean a more ordered and regulated national church, and Wentworth dramatically raised Irish revenue for the Crown – all this, and much more, without any real organised or overt opposition figures or movements.
Understandably, the Sharpian view has received significant pushback, primarily for taking an overly optimistic view and selectively mentioning the Personal Rule’s positives. Encapsulating this criticism, David Smith wrote in 1998 that Sharpe’s “massively researched and beautifully sustained panorama of England during the 1630s … almost certainly underestimates the level of latent tension that existed by the end of the decade”.This has been built on by figures like Esther Cope: “while few explicitly challenged the government of Charles I on constitutional grounds, a greater number had experiences that made them anxious about the security of their heritage”.
It is worth noting however that, a year before his death in 2011, Sharpe came to consider the views of his fellow historians, acknowledging Charles’ lack of political understanding to have endangered the monarchy, and that, more seriously by the end of the 1630s, the Personal Rule was indeed facing mounting and undeniable criticism, from both Charles’ court and the public.
Sharpe’s unpopular perspective has been built upon by other historians, such as Mark Kishlansky. Publishing Charles I: An Abbreviated Life in 2014, Kishlansky viewed parliamentarian propaganda of the 1640s, as well as a consistent smear from historians over the centuries as having resulted in Charles being viewed “as an idiot at best and a tyrant at worst”, labelling him as “the most despised monarch in Britain’s historical memory”. Charles however, faced no real preparation for the throne – it was always his older brother Henry that was the heir apparent. Additionally, once King, Charles’ Parliaments were stubborn and uncooperative – by refusing to provide him with the necessary funding, for example, they forced Charles to enact the Forced Loan. Kishlansky does, however, concede the damage caused by Charles’ unmoving belief in the Divine Right of Kings: “he banked too heavily on the sheer force of majesty”.
Charles’ personality, ideology and early life fundamentally meant an icy relationship with Parliament, which grew into mutual distrust and the eventual dissolution. Fundamentally, the period of Personal Rule remains a highly debated topic within academic circles, with the recent arrival of Revisionism posing a challenge to the long-established negative view of the Caroline Era. Whether or not the King’s financial, religious, and political actions were met with a discontented populace or outright opposition, it remains the case that the identity crisis facing the period, that between tyranny or stability remains yet to be conclusively put to rest.
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Slavophilism: The Russian Model for Anglo Conservatives
‘The idea is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off’
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical InvestigationsWe are all Blairites now. It is a horrible thought, especially to those of us who despise the Blairite constitutional project: from gutting the Lords to the creation of the devolved assemblies, and the paradoxical tension between the move towards localism and the edictal erasure of British ways of life. The sad reality is that we live in Blairite Britain, more than we live in Thatcherite Britain.
Such a thought, as uncomfortable as it is, must be the starting point of all conservative discussions, whether they are concerned with strategy, identity, or even over what we aim to ‘conserve’, because we can only begin to know where to go by knowing where we are. David Foster Wallace once gave a talk to a graduating class in which he told the following story:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “morning boys, how’s the water?” and the two young fish swim on for a bit and eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “what the hell is water?”
The story is intended to remind us of a simple truth: that the most obvious realities are the hardest to talk about, because they are so essential and taken for granted in our daily lives. Blairism is the cultural water we swim in, and the current that drives us inexorably towards the next crisis we cannot resolve, because Blairism holds the conflictual beliefs that government should be in every part of our lives, but that it should be so completely and utterly impotent. Think about how difficult it is to do anything in modern Britain, but that you absolutely must do it whilst holding the hand of the government.
Regardless of Blairism’s inherent contradictions, we must not ignore the tide, even if only to swim against it. How do we do this? In Modern Culture, Sir Roger Scruton wrote that we cannot
return to a pre-Enlightenment world because the Enlightenment is so inherent to how we think about society, Man, government, culture and so on. Even those of us who are believers in faith must accept that the draperies were torn down; but only by realising they were torn down can you put them back up. So, rather than deny the legacies of the Enlightenment, Sir Roger says, we must accept that they are with us, and instead ‘live as if it matters eternally what we do: to obey the rites, the ceremonies and the customs that lend dignity to our actions and which lift them above the natural sphere’.
The philosophical movement that took this lesson to heart the most, in my opinion, was the Romantics. They did not pretend that the legacies of the Enlightenment were so easily eradicable nor so easily deniable; instead, they accepted that they lived in a changed world, but sought to use that change to re-suture man’s relationship with himself, to correct the deficiencies of the Enlightenment and the empty rationalism that it loved so irrationally.
The Romantic movement, by virtue of its own logic, was not universalist. The Enlightenment sought to be universal, to find laws and rules that governed Man in every circumstance and every place; but Romanticism, in reaction, favoured particularism, rootedness, and the cultural significance of place and people. In fact, so many of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century owed more to the Romantics than they did to the Enlightenment (but again, only in the sense that the Enlightenment showed us that all humans are deserving of dignity and respect, they just choose to express that dignity in varied ways).
One such example of Romanticism that has always fascinated me emerged in Russia in the 1830s, more than anything because I believe that Russia then holds a multitude of lessons for Britain now. Early-nineteenth century Russia experienced what could only be described as an existential crisis: the Napoleonic Wars had damaged Russia’s understanding of herself as the great military power of Eastern Europe, and brought many ideas of universal brotherhood into contact with a society that did not even have the intellectual framework to accommodate such thoughts. But the crisis went deeper: as much as one hundred and fifty years before, Russian society was shaken by external ideas, more than any invasion could have hoped for, under the Reforms of Tsar Peter the Great. The Petrine Era of Russia saw cultural changes from the top – governmental reforms, military reforms, and technological innovation, much of which modernised Russia and made her into a Great Power; but these changes did not go unquestioned. In fact, many of the influential groups in Russia rebelled, sometimes violently, as in the Moscow Rising of the Streltsy in 1698.
The legacy of Peter’s reforms, however, were not felt until much later. Of course, all major cultural and social changes take time to really be felt at all, but the ‘short eighteenth century’ was a time of such rapid and dislocating change – across all of Europe, but especially in Russia – that many generations found themselves intellectually and culturally cut adrift from those who came immediately before them. Peter, pursuing a programme of Westernisation insisted, for instance, that the Russian court speak French, a language thought of as ‘intellectual’ (with good reason); dress like the Prussian court; rationalised the military along the Western European lines; built an entirely new town on a North Italian design (St. Petersburg – of course); and, in one of my favourite little quirks of history, outlawed beards in that city’s borders.
Cultural issues grow like pearls grow – a single grain of sand works its way into a mollusk, and irritates the mollusk in such a way that bacteria and calcium grows around it. Cultural changes irritate the social fabric of the community it works into; but we don’t have bacteria to grow around it, we only have each other. Yet we can understand cultural issues in the same way as a pearl – an irritant works its way in, and we grow that irritant into a recognisable tangible entity, by coalescing around it and growing it in such a way that it becomes instantly recognisable.
This is what led to the Slavophiles. Petrine Russia thought it was undefeatable – and from the Great Northern War onwards, it very much was – until Napoleon came roaring in. But the Napeolonic Wars did two things for Russia, both with the same outcome; the first was importing many ideas into Russia that challenged the existing understanding of Russian political and social structures; the second was, in the same way Soviet soldiers pushed Nazi Germany back into Europe, Petrine soldiers followed Napoleon back into Europe. In both instances, educated Russian men saw the way Europeans lived, and realised that their society was not the improved form that their reforming leaders dreamt of.
Instead, the Slavophiles urged a return to pre-Petrine, Muscovite-style Russianism, an embracing of folk styles, food, clothing, language, and so on – not to petrify them into a living museum of nostalgia, but to rectify the mistakes of the previous century, and offer an alternative direction into the future.
And just as with a grain of sand in a pearl, the cultural dislocation of Peter’s reforms that had long irritated the reactionary elements of eighteenth-century Russia, was seized on by many of the early-nineteenth century intelligentsia as a means of explaining the situation in which they had found themselves. This fermented a series of backlashes, intellectual and cultural, that led to an explosion of political movements, such as the terrorists, the socialists, the populists (narodniki), and – most importantly – the Slavophiles. The Slavophiles looked at the state of Russia in the 1830s and considered the Petrine reforms to be an unmitigated failure: they had not kept Russia at pace with the rest of Europe; they had dislocated the cultural and social elites from the people over whom they ruled; and worst of all, they had severed the Russian people from their own past. Peter the Great had made the mistake of proto-enlightenment liberalism, that there were universal standards of humanity against which peoples’ behaviours, cultures and laws could be judged, and in doing so, he had not attempted to “reform” Russia’s venerable history, but deny its very existence, and begin from scratch.
Instead, the Slavophiles urged a return to pre-Petrine, Muscovite-style Russianism, an embracing of folk styles, food, clothing, language, and so on – not to petrify them into a living museum of nostalgia, but to rectify the mistakes of the previous century, and offer an alternative direction into the future. This precipitated many of the following century’s movements: for instance, the emphasis on the folk of Russia encouraged the nascent populism into radicalism; the embracing of the Russian commune form of land management gave Russian socialism a concrete model from which to work; and the idea of Russia taking an entirely unique path of development to Europe created the intellectual condition for Lenin and the communists to believe Russia could “leapfrog” past the bourgeois liberalism of the continent and move straight to socialism. This is not to say the Slavophiles were socialists – to even say so is to misunderstand the subtle relativism that denies such universalist theories in itself. Indeed, many Slavophiles were ardent absolute monarchists, with the famous Memorandum to the Tsar by Alexei Aksakov in 1831 claiming that Russia’s unique place in history stems from its Orthodox Christianity, the invitation by the Kievan Rus to the Varangians to rule them, and the steppes shaping the Russian mindset to one of boundless opportunism (something that Berdayev later used as a comparison to the American prairies and Manifest Destiny).
The consequences of the Slavophile movement might not be palatable, but their inspiration is something that Anglo conservatives need to pay attention to. Their movement began by an important moment of clarity: the political reforming project of the previous age had failed. It is no secret that the emerging conservatism in Britain despises the Blairite consensus, and in many ways that means we are already doing as the Slavophiles did: only by recognising that we are in Blairite Britain can we undo its disastrous effects. But we need to go further; we cannot simply throw our hands up and accept Blairism as the present condition of Britain, but we need to see it for what it truly is. It is a complete and utter separation of Britain from our past, a denial of that past’s validity, and an attempt to create a new political identity on entirely alien lines.
Moving into the future requires acceptance of the present circumstance; one of the silliest phrases is that the clock cannot be wound back, when the truth is, if the clock is showing the wrong time, it is imperative that you wind it back. And just as taking the wrong turn and continuing down the wrong path will only get you further from where you want to go, so too must you turn back. We are all Blairites now; and just as alcoholics have to admit they’ll never recover from their alcoholism, we have to admit we will likely never recover from Blairism, but will always “be” recovering.
But I do not want to be defeatist; the first step of recovery is acceptance. We need to accept that we live in Blairite Britain, and only then can we begin tearing it apart. We need to start ripping out its core parts: the communications act (2003); the equality act (2010); the Supreme Court; the devolved assemblies; the abolition of the hereditary aristocracy; the fox hunting ban; the smoking ban; in short, all of the components of a foreign way of life that have been foisted upon the British people by our own misguided maniacal reformers. It is time to go to war; but you can only do that if you accept the war is already going on.
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Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth: An Examination and Review
A new film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy, Joel Coen’s 2021 The Tragedy of Macbeth is the director’s first production without his brother Ethan’s involvement. Released in select theaters on December 25, 2021, and then on Apple TV on January 14, 2022, the production has received positive critical reviews as well as awards for screen adaptation and cinematography, with many others still pending.
As with any movie review, I encourage readers who plan to see the film to do so before reading my take. While spoilers probably aren’t an issue here, I would not want to unduly influence one’s experience of Coen’s take on the play. Overall, though much of the text is omitted, some scenes are rearranged, and some roles are reduced, and others expanded, I found the adaptation to be a generally faithful one that only improved with subsequent views. Of course, the substance of the play is in the performances of Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, but their presentation of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is enhanced by both the production and supporting performances.
Production: “where nothing, | But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile” —IV.3
The Tragedy of Macbeth’s best element is its focus on the psychology of the main characters, explored below. This focus succeeds in no small part due to its minimalist aesthetic. Filmed in black and white, the play utilizes light and shadow to downplay the external historical conflicts and emphasize the characters’ inner ones.
Though primarily shown by the performances, the psychological value conflicts of the characters are concretized by the adaptation’s intended aesthetic. In a 2020 Indiewire interview, composer and long-time-Coen collaborator Carter Burwell said that Joel Coen filmed The Tragedy of Macbeth on sound stages, rather than on location, to focus more on the abstract elements of the play. “It’s more like a psychological reality,” said Burwell. “That said, it doesn’t seem stage-like either. Joel has compared it to German Expressionist film. You’re in a psychological world, and it’s pretty clear right from the beginning the way he’s shot it.”
This is made clear from the first shots’ disorienting the sense of up and down through the use of clouds and fog, which continue as a key part of the staging throughout the adaptation. Furthermore, the bareness of Inverness Castle channels the focus to the key characters’ faces, while the use of odd camera angles, unreal shadows, and distorted distances reinforce how unnatural is the play’s central tragic action, if not to the downplayed world of Scotland, then certainly to the titular couple. Even when the scene leaves Inverness to show Ross and MacDuff discussing events near a ruined building at a crossroads (Act II.4), there is a sense that, besides the Old Man in the scene, Scotland is barren and empty.
The later shift to England, where Malcolm, MacDuff, and Ross plan to retake their homeland from now King Macbeth, further emphasizes this by being shot in an enclosed but bright and fertile wood. Although many of the historical elements of the scene are cut, including the contrast between Macbeth and Edward the Confessor and the mutual testing of mettle between Malcolm and MacDuff, the contrast in setting conveys the contrast between a country with a mad Macbeth at its head and the one that presumably would be under Malcolm. The effect was calming in a way I did not expect—an experience prepared by the consistency of the previous acts’ barren aesthetic.
Yet, even in the forested England, the narrow path wherein the scene takes place foreshadows the final scenes’ being shot in a narrow walkway between the parapets of Dunsinane, which gives the sense that, whether because of fate or choice rooted in character, the end of Macbeth’s tragic deed is inevitable. The explicit geographical distance between England and Scotland is obscured as the same wood becomes Birnam, and as, in the final scenes, the stone pillars of Dunsinane open into a background of forest. This, as well as the spectacular scene where the windows of the castle are blown inward by a storm of leaves, conveys the fact that Macbeth cannot remain isolated against the tragic justice brought by Malcom and MacDuff forever, and Washington’s performance, which I’ll explore presently, consistently shows that the usurper has known it all along.
This is a brilliant, if subtle, triumph of Coen’s adaptation: it presents Duncan’s murder and the subsequent fallout as a result less of deterministic fate and prophecy and more of Macbeth’s own actions and thoughts in response to it—which, themselves, become more determined (“predestined” because “wilfull”) as Macbeth further convinces himself that “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill” (III.2).
Performances: “To find the mind’s construction in the face” —I.4
Film adaptations of Shakespeare can run the risk of focusing too closely on the actors’ faces, which can make keeping up with the language a chore even for experienced readers (I’m still scarred from the “How all occasions” speech from Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet); however, this is rarely, if ever, the case here, where the actors’ and actresses’ pacing and facial expressions combine with the cinematography to carry the audience along. Yet, before I give Washington and McDormand their well-deserved praise, I would like to explore the supporting roles.
In Coen’s adaptation, King Duncan is a king at war, and Brendan Gleeson plays the role well with subsequent dourness. Unfortunately, this aspect of the interpretation was, in my opinion, one of its weakest. While the film generally aligns with the Shakespearean idea that a country under a usurper is disordered, the before-and-after of Duncan’s murder—which Coen chooses to show onscreen—is not clearly delineated enough to signal it as the tragic conflict that it is. Furthermore, though many of his lines are adulatory to Macbeth and his wife, Gleeson gives them with so somber a tone that one is left emotionally uninvested in Duncan by the time he is murdered.
Though this is consistent with the production’s overall austerity, it does not lend much to the unnaturalness of the king’s death. One feels Macbeth ought not kill him simply because he is called king (a fully right reason, in itself) rather than because of any real affection between Macbeth and his wife for the man, himself. However, though I have my qualms, this may have been the right choice for a production focused on the psychological elements of the plot; by downplaying the emotional connection between the Macbeths and Duncan (albeit itself profoundly psychological), Coen focuses on the effects of murder as an abstraction.
The scene after the murder and subsequent framing of the guards—the drunken porter scene—was the one I most looked forward to in the adaptation, as it is in every performance of Macbeth I see. The scene is the most apparent comic relief in the play, and it is placed in the moment where comic relief is paradoxically least appropriate and most needed (the subject of a planned future article). When I realized, between the first (ever) “Knock, knock! Who’s there?” and the second, that the drunk porter was none other than comic actor Stephen Root (Office Space, King of the Hill, Dodgeball), I knew the part was safe.
I was not disappointed. The drunken obliviousness of Root’s porter, coming from Inverness’s basement to let in MacDuff and Lennox, pontificating along the way on souls lately gone to perdition (unaware that his king has done the same just that night) before elaborating to the new guests upon the merits and pitfalls of drink, is outstanding. With the adaptation’s other removal of arguably inessential parts and lines, I’m relieved Coen kept as much of the role as he did.
One role that Coen expanded in ways I did not expect was that of Ross, played by Alex Hassell. By subsuming other minor roles into the character, Coen makes Ross into the unexpected thread that ties much of the plot together. He is still primarily a messenger, but, as with the Weird Sisters whose crow-like costuming his resembles, he becomes an ambiguous figure by the expansion, embodying his line to Lady MacDuff that “cruel are the times, when we are traitors | And do not know ourselves” (IV.2). In Hassell’s excellent performance, Ross seems to know himself quite well; it is we, the audience, who do not know him, despite his expanded screentime. By the end, Ross was one of my favorite aspects of Coen’s adaptation.
The best part of The Tragedy of Macbeth is, of course, the joint performance by Washington and McDormand of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The beginning of the film finds the pair later in life, with presumably few mountains left to climb. Washington plays Macbeth as a man tired and introverted, which he communicates by often pausing before reacting to dialogue, as if doing so is an afterthought. By the time McDormand comes onscreen in the first of the film’s many corridor scenes mentioned above, her reading and responding to the letter sent by Macbeth has been primed well enough for us to understand her mixed ambition yet exasperation—as if the greatest obstacle is not the actual regicide but her husband’s hesitancy.
Throughout The Tragedy of Macbeth their respective introspection and ambition reverse, with Washington eventually playing the confirmed tyrant and McDormand the woman internalized by madness. If anyone needed a reminder of Washington and McDormand’s respective abilities as actor and actress, one need only watch them portray the range of emotion and psychological depth contained in Shakespeare’s most infamous couple.
Conclusion: “With wit enough for thee”—IV.2
One way to judge a Shakespeare production is whether someone with little previous knowledge of the play and a moderate grasp of Shakespeare’s language would understand and become invested in the characters and story; I hazard one could do so with Coen’s adaptation. It does take liberties with scene placement, and the historical and religious elements are generally removed or reduced. However, although much of the psychology that Shakespeare includes in the other characters is cut, the minimalist production serves to highlight Washington and McDormand’s respective performances. The psychology of the two main characters—the backbone of the tragedy that so directly explores the nature of how thought and choice interact—is portrayed clearly and dynamically, and it is this that makes Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth an excellent and, in my opinion, ultimately true-to-the-text adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
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