Monthly Archives: January 2019

Arts, Philosophy

(Philosophy) The Stoic: ‘Anger is bad fuel’

PASSIONS & EMOTIONS

“There is no more stupefying thing than anger, nothing more bent on its own strength. If successful, none more arrogant, if foiled, none more insane – since it’s not driven back by weariness even in defeat, when fortune removes its adversary it turns its teeth on itself.” – Seneca, On Anger, 3.1.5

AS the stoics have said on countless occasions, getting angry almost never solves anything. Usually, it makes things worse. We get upset, then the other person gets upset – now everyone is upset, and the problem is no closer to getting solved.

Many successful people will try to tell you that anger is a powerful fuel in their lives. The desire ‘to prove them all wrong’ or ‘shove it in their faces’ has made many a millionaire. The anger at being called fat or stupid has created fine physical specimens and brilliant minds. The anger at being rejected has motivated many to carve their own path.

But that’s shortsighted. Such stories ignore the pollution produced as a side effect and the wear and tear it puts on the engine. It ignores what happens when that initial anger runs out – and how now more and more must be generated to keep the machine going (until, eventually, the only source left is anger at oneself). ‘Hate is too great a burden to bear,’ Martin Luther King Jr. warned his fellow civil rights leaders in 1967, even though they had every reason to respond to hate with hate.

The same is true for anger – in fact, it’s true for most extreme emotions. They are toxic fuel. There’s plenty of it out in the world, no question, but never worth the costs that come along with it.

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Arts, Films

Film Review: Stan & Ollie (PG)

REVIEW

Intro: This bittersweet story of love, loss and friendship gets right to the heart of the real Laurel and Hardy

ACCORDING to the script writers and publicity material for Stan & Ollie, they claim that by watching it we should be able to laugh away the January blues.

Misleading, to say the least. This is undoubtedly a film of enormous charm, with matchingly superb performances from Steve Coogan (as Stan Laurel) and John C. Reilly (as Oliver Hardy). It isn’t, though – anywhere near it – the rib-tickling celebration of the silver screen’s greatest comedy double-act.

A critic will have noted that there are far more than a few chuckles in Stan & Ollie, but on the whole, it is rather maudlin, even melancholic of the original pair’s 1953 UK tour, the last time they worked together.

Their 1920s and 30s heyday are long behind them, and it has to be said they weren’t exactly warmly embraced by a country in the grip of post-war austerity. As they trudge from one barely half-full provincial theatre to the next, they are taunted everywhere – at least, as Jeff Pope’s screenplay tells us – by rhapsodies for the new kid on the block, Norman Wisdom.

The film begins, however, with a flashback to 1937, with the pair in their Hollywood pomp. Stan has just divorced for the second time and insists he won’t get married again. He’ll just find a woman he doesn’t like and buy her a house.

That’s an old gag, and a good one. But it might make you think for a second that maybe the drama would be compromised by a procession of faintly contrived one-liners.

You needn’t worry. With the experienced Pope as writer, and Jon S. Baird’s exceptional gifts as director, both audience and resurrection of characters are in safe hands.

By 1953, the double-act has foundered. This was primarily to do with Laurel’s Hollywood bust-up with powerful producer Hal Roach (Danny Huston). But almost at once comes the offer of a tour in Ulverston-born Stan’s native land. The somewhat more seductive suggestion was then made of a new British-funded movie project, based on the legend of Robin Hood.

The duo must learn to work together again. That was never going to be easy. Ollie’s failing health and the underlying tensions caused by the work he has done without Stan, their mutual respect and deep affection is subject to constant strain.

It also becomes clear, to Stan at least, that the Robin Hood picture dangled as an inducement for riches, probably isn’t going to happen. A prominent poster for Abbott And Costello Go To Mars offers another sinister reminder that times and tastes have changed.

This story of a brace of great-promising careers gently fizzling out is in danger of becoming just a little too forlorn, when, everyone – the audience as well as Laurel and Hardy – gets a boost like a surge of electricity with the arrival from America of their wives.

Happily, they have both found connubial bliss, and even more delightful, the casting of Mrs Laurel, a formidable Russian ex-dancer called Ida, and Mrs Hardy, the devoted Lucille, is as perfect a match as that of Coogan and Reilly.

The former is played, with glorious aplomb, by Nina Arianda. It does help that she gets some of the drama’s funniest lines, and a jolly running joke in her distaste for the oily impresario running the tour (Bernard Delfont, amusingly played by Rufus Jones). Nevertheless, underpinning both her character and Lucille’s (an equally fine performance by Shirley Henderson) is adoration and concern for their menfolk.

Indeed, on more than one level, Stan & Ollie is a love story. It’s about the love between husbands and wives, and about the love Laurel and Hardy engendered in their audiences, but mostly it’s about the love they had for each other. It’s made all the more poignant for being stretched to almost snapping point. Stan would never have made it without Ollie. He knows that he was one half of a whole.

As for the other half, many people would no doubt have loved to have seen Reilly winning a Golden Globe last week for his loveable, vulnerable turn as Ollie. Yet, in a way that would have been unfair on Coogan, who should also have been nominated and gives the best straight-acting performance of his career. But he has been duly included on last week’s BAFTAs shortlist announcement. That’s the least he deserves.

 

HE mimics well, of course, and captures almost perfectly Stan’s slightly nasal, mid-Atlantic vowels. The contrast between the performer and the man is impressively precise.

If there is a slight weakness it is within the stage routines – notably one involving a hard-boiled egg – which don’t adequately convey the pair’s comic genius. For those readers who grew up in the era watching Laurel and Hardy on Saturday morning television will hardly need telling why the duo were so joyously funny.

It is quite likely, then, that this heart-warming film is more likely to be cherished by those born in the mid-1960s, who will consider it a treat to watch.

Verdict: Charmingly tender

★★★★★

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Arts, Education, Philosophy, Research, Society

Oxford academic to launch ‘journal of controversial ideas’

ACADEMIA & RESEARCH

A “controversial ideas” journal where researchers can publish articles anonymously will be launched this year by an Oxford University academic.

The journal is in apparent response to a rise in researchers being criticised and silenced by those who disagree with them. The revelation came towards the end of last year by Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford.

“There is an increasing tendency that I see within academia and outside for people to try to suppress views they don’t like and treat them as wicked and unspeakable, rather than confront those views and refute them,” he said.

The phenomenon of attempting to shut down views you disagree with has become “very pronounced” among young people and those on the Left, he said, adding that academics also feared being censured by their university administrations.

He cited the example of Prof Nigel Biggar, a fellow Oxford academic, being “targeted” after he suggested that people should have “pride” about aspects of their imperialist past. More than 50 professors, lecturers and researchers signed an open letter expressing their “firm rejection” of his views. Prof Biggar later revealed that young academics were afraid of damaging their careers if they were seen with him.

Another example he gave was when the Oxford Students For Life group invited speakers to discuss the legislation surrounding abortion in Ireland. “They were shut down by a feminist group and unable to proceed,” Prof McMahan said.

A newly formed group of over 100 academics from UK universities has raised concerns about “the suppression of proper academic analysis and discussion of the social phenomenon of transgenderism”.

They said that members of their group had experienced campus protests, calls for dismissal in the press, harassment, foiled plots to bring about dismissal, no-platforming, and attempts to censure academic research and publications.

Francesca Minerva, a bioethicist at the University of Ghent in Belgium, approached Prof McMahan about setting up The Journal of Controversial Ideas after she received death threats due to her academic research.

She had to seek police protection following the publication of an article she co-authored in the Journal of Medical Ethics which defended the permissibility of early infanticide in a certain range of cases. Prof McMahan said that the new cross-disciplinary publication, which is due to launch this year, would be fully peer-reviewed in line with normal academic standards.

He said that he and Peter Singer, the prominent Australian philosopher, were assembling an editorial board that is made up of academics and distinguished people in their fields from across the political and religious spectrum.

OPINION

The publication of a new journal in which academics may write under pseudonyms, for fear of retribution, is truly alarming. The motive for the founding of this new Journal of Controversial Ideas is to avoid persecution by the universities that employ contributors.

This is not like a medieval inquisition; it is actually worse. In the High Middle Ages scholars publicly debated points of controversy – quodlibets, they were called – and no thesis was too outlandish to defend. Today we see closed-shop “academies”, in history or science, monstering anyone who dares to venture outside the fashionable consensus.

To suggest, for instance, that the British Empire had its good points and – bang – the solid weight of academe will likely fall on those making the claims. When even universities won’t favour free and open discussion, the resort to pseudonyms and anonymity convicts them of betrayal.

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