The Culture Enthusiast

Sources:  1 to 4 Creators by Paul Johnson

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Since we were talking about guilty pleasures the other day I feel obliged to disclose my YouTube guilty pleasure: European Parliament videos. I could watch them for hours, they are just too exciting.

That's why I was bound to love The Iron Lady and include Margaret Thatcher videos on my Youtube playlist. The latter definitely happen, the first is... uncertain. 

I mean, how would liberal Hollywood portray one of the most conservative politicians of the 20th century? You kind of expect some biased portrayal there.

Amazingly, there wasn't much in the movie that seemed directed at damaging Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady did focus too much on her later years, dedicating a lot of time to her dementia and hallucinations. It is a pity her years as Prime Minister weren't covered more extensively, but that is not criticizing or degrading her.

I also liked Meryl Streep's performance which is excellent as always. Notice the movie mentions that Thatcher practiced improving her voice and Meryl's voice in does change accordingly.  

And there are so many excellent lines in it that we become more and more interested in her. Hallucinations aside, the way she - in her old age - talks to her doctor is impressive.

But there's one thing I can’t let it slide. The "die washing up a tea cup" scene. 

In this particular scene, she loses an election and later receives a marriage proposal. Below is part of the dialogue and, no worries, there are no spoilers: 

It’s sad to say but that was when I stopped reading detective novels. Then I got to college and my intolerance towards guilty pleasure books became worse. Books were supposed to be serious, challenging and well... difficult. No detective stories, no best sellers, no “but this is Madonna's favorite author right now!”.

I still think this “Literature major” way of thinking is ok, as long as you don’t substitute guilty pleasure reading for other, worse, cultural guilty pleasures.

And that’s exactly what I did. 

I was so scared while reading Macbeth I couldn’t read it at night. I also couldn’t read the other books on my list because  they are too demanding to be read half an hour before bed.

So, I watched Tv. But I realized a little guilty pleasure reading was better than hours of The Office.

Sure, I wouldn’t be learning as much from my detective stories as I would from Dostoyevsky or an Art history book but I’d definitely be learning more than from sitcoms.

Now, I’m not saying let’s all indulge in our guilty pleasures for life. There are some pretty bad books out there, books that are incredibly popular, mind you.

It’s all a matter of choosing the better of two evils. We need some entertainment and it’s better getting it from a good book than from Tv shows.

However, not every book we read must be entertaining. Even though pleasurable books are exciting and page turners, we must remember we’ll miss out on a lot if we stick only to books that are fun and easy to read.

I now read my Nero Wolfe novels before bed, but you can also alternate between one serious reading and a guilty pleasure one.

I’ve learned that even guilty pleasure books can help you increase your vocabulary and improve your grammar. Plus if you choose well they can also expand your horizons and stimulate your imagination. Why shouldn't books also serve as fun and intelligent entertainment?

What do you think of guilty pleasure reading? What are your favorite guilty pleasure books?

Image via FYReading

Surrealist painter René Magritte once wrote in a letter to André Bosmans that: 

“All the abstract paintings reveal only abstract painting, and absolutely nothing else. (…) I cannot share an interest in what abstract painting is able to say, which was summed up once and for all by the first abstract painting.”1

Well, if it isn't the pot calling the kettle black...

I partly agree with his dissatisfaction with abstract paintings because, in general, I don't like them very much. (Exceptions made to Jackson Pollock and maybe Cy Twombly).

But it’s funny how Magritte dismiss abstract paintings, since his paintings are somewhat abstract themselves. Not in the sense that they are not figurative, because they are. 

More in the sense that they are so mysterious and enigmatic. His paintings, though not abstract per se, look more like abstract ideas than figurative paintings.

Personal Values by Rene Magritte, 1952

Do you remember his random explanation for one of his paintings? 

I bet he thought his works are able "to say" many things, but I know for a fact that for many people they are baffling and unintelligible. It might be easier to understand and like Jackson Pollock's paintings than Magritte's. 

How do you fell about Abstract Art?

Source: “Magritte: the true art of painting.” By Harry Torczyner

I have to be honest here: Macbeth scared the hell out of me.

The witches, the ghosts, the brutal murders, the madness, the blood... Visualizing the three witches saying "Fair is foul and foul is fair" gave me goosebumps. I'm not sure which is more horrifying, the witches or the doublespeak.

Now, many of Shakespeare's plays have violence. Othello strangles Desdemona, Cornwall plucks out Gloucester's eyes in King Lear. Why is Macbeth much more shocking?

In King Lear and Othello, for example, we have a distinct separation between villains and heroes. Who's the villain in Macbeth?

In the beginning of the play, Macbeth is a brave soldier, a "worthy gentleman" in the eyes of the king. Along come three witches that say he'll become Thane of Cawdor and later on king. They also say Macbeth's friend, Banquo, will be the father of kings.

Macbeth and his wife then set out to murder the king and more and more they became the villains of the play. Who is the villain that made them fall, the witches?

They have no personal motivation to destroy Macbeth, so there's no way you can stop them - they're evil for evil's sake.

They didn't force Macbeth to do anything, they used much less convincing and manipulation than Iago, for example. Bottom line: he did all those terrible things knowing they were wrong because of his "vaulting ambition".

And ambition is a key word. Macbeth, like most Shakespeare’s plays, is open to misinterpretations solely because of the reversal of values we see in our modern culture. 


Following this train of thought we might conclude that he would also have the power to go back to being a good man. He could repent and stop murdering people, but that would mean abandoning his lust for power and abiding to two judgments: earthly and divine. 

He had the option of going back, but he didn't. Not only because this is very difficult but because he still thought he could succeed. "And you all know security is mortal's chiefest enemy". Eventually he becomes so used to evil that all he has left is despair and the nihilistic notion that "life's but a walking shadow".

Macbeth being both the hero and the villain is something unique. Shakespeare seems to put Macbeth between the pagan world of Greek tragedies and the neo-pagan world of our contemporary culture. 

Take Oedipus for example. Oedipus was also a murderer. But the poor guy had absolutely no choice. He killed his father and married his mother without knowing it. He thought he was defending himself and marrying a queen. 

So why did he fall? Because the gods said so. The end of the play is the fulfillment of the oracle's prophecy. 

And then there’s Macbeth. The witches didn't establish he would be king, they have little power over human events, they could be just as well lying. Macbeth knew murdering the king to get his place is wrong. Doing this doesn't go according to some pre-established divine plan, on the contrary, the murder goes against it.

Maybe this is why this play is so scary. We see just how easy it is for a brave and noble man to become a villain. Most Shakespeare plays show that the corruption of the best is the worst of all. Macbeth shows that the best can bring corruption to themselves.

What do you think of Macbeth? What called your attention the most?

This was the first book I read for the Classic's Club Reading Challenge. In November, I'll talk about Elizabeth Barret Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Certain essential facts in the story are not simply small, unimportant, historical mistakes. For example, children were not taken to concentration camps to work alongside adults. Another movie that deals with the Holocaust, Life is beautiful, has a child in a camp, but he was hiding from the Nazis all the time and not working there. 

It even crossed my mind that Shmuel might not be real, that he was Bruno’s imaginary friend. If this was the case, I think the story would have been much more interesting.

Here's something else that bothered me: Bruno was gone for hours every day and nobody noticed. There was an armed guard with a dog in the front entrance, but there wasn't so much as a lock in the back door that led to the camp. And the most appalling of all: if an 8 year-old managed to crawl under the fence in minutes, how come nobody else in the camp did it?

All this may seem irrelevant and maybe I’m being picky. But some of these mistakes, like saying even children could escape the camp, are actually insulting. These mistakes also create two problems.

For one, they make the story seem too implausible in itself. The way the movie portrays the camps makes it difficult to believe that a prisoner would manage to talk to an outsider for several days or that a child would  manage to enter the camp at will.

Secondly, the movie is about WWII. All these details create confusion about the real events that occurred. The prisoners didn't escape because the fences were electrified in real camps, which isn't shown in the movie.


To make matters worse, the movie and the book in which it was based are aimed at teenagers. Young readers don't have enough historical background to spot these inconsistencies and might take everything in the movie as real.

But don't take it from me, because I'm no expert in WWII. A Rabbi wrote a review of this movie and he says he lent the book to one of his friends who is an Auschwitz survivor. According to the Rabbi, his friend "wept, and begged me tell everyone that this book is not just a lie and not just a fairytale, but a profanation."

Remember the other day we were talking about The Producers? Many people consider this comedy to be insulting, because the Holocaust is not a subject that should be dealt lightly. I understand this but I believe movies like The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas are the ones that deal with the Holocaust lightly.

The initial concept of the movie is indeed very original and promising: to tell the story of the Holocaust as seen through the naive eyes of an 8 year-old boy. But the movie's merits stop there.

Is "The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas" still good, despite its inconsistencies? 

UPDATE: While I was checking some college information for my sister, I found an article in an educational website talking about movies that can help students learn. One of the movies was The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas and the article says that this movie "helps discuss the concept of eugenics and exemplifies Nazi concentration camps." (Source in Portuguese)

Now, of course there’s nothing new to create. But that shouldn’t be an excuse for lame art, should it?

Take Batman Forever for example.

I never noticed this before but there’s a scene in Batman Forever which is incredibly similar to one in The Dark Knight. The general outline of both scenes is this: the villain wants to destroy Batman by playing with his real identity. The villain takes the woman Bruce Wayne loves and the man Batman depends on and puts them in mortal danger. One of them will die, it's up to Batman (or Bruce Wayne) to decide who to save.

Now, look at the different results achieved but Joel Schumacher and Christopher Nolan.

Click on the image to view to scene or click here. You'll go to Youtube, but I'll be here waiting ;)

The Riddler wears a shiny body suit and acts as if he’s a game show host, offering some comic relief to a tense moment. The scene is also made lighter by the fact that Batman doesn't lose his temper and doesn't threat the villains physically, he actually defeats the Riddler in his own game: with a riddle.

Plus, I love the little joke about Jim Carrey when The Riddler says “Was that over the top? I can never tell.” 

The Joker's scene, on the other hand, is much more serious and realistic. The setting is a police station and the witnesses are detectives and not other weird villains. The Joker doesn't use surreal traps like those cylindrical cages, he pragmatically puts the victims on "250 52nd street and Avenue X at Cicero".

The scene is much more tense: not only Batman gets really angry and violent but that doesn't seem to have any effect on the Joker, who says his strength won't get him anywhere. What can he do, then?

But there's an interesting similarity. In both cases it is said that Batman is a "freak". 

We could debate over which scene is better but I would say both of them are incredibly successful in the sense they achieved what they set out to do. Moreover, these are my two favorite Batman movies and I could never choose between them.

The thing is: the story is more or less the same but the results are different. The solutions didn't involve a parody or ironic references.

Movies like these tell me that it is still possible to be creative without necessarily being original. The throwing of the towel that is “there are no more stories to tell” might be just an excuse for bad movies. The scope of human experience may be limited but our ability to explore it is not.

How important is originality? Are both scenes are well made or is Batman Forever over the top?

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