(Carradine was one of those great acting patriarchs. You know him as the father of David Carradine, who played Quentin Tarantino’s Bill – the one who got Killed – as well as the protagonist of “Kung Fu” and, appropriately for this blog, Woody Guthrie in Bound for Glory.)

A few words on the film: I haven’t seen it in about a year, around the time I started writing this blog (I took some time off to produce a radio / web series about literature in Missouri.) But I’ve always loved that movie since I first watched it as a kid. I’ve always loved Jane Darwell’s super-emotive Ma Joad. I loved the way John Ford shot all the scenes with so much contrast and shadow. And John Carradine was one of the best parts of that film.

My dad was a preacher. He’s mostly retired now, but he still has a small congregation in a tiny town in the Bootheel of Missouri called Senath. The Bootheel is a desolate, empty, barren, flat patch of what used to be something close to farmland. These days they still grow crops there, but all the people are gone – all the farm families have been replaced by Con-Agra, Tyson Chicken and Monsanto. These companies are not humans, and I have never seen any evidence that they are run by humans. They remind me of the banks – more on that in the glorious Chapter 5, coming soon.

My dad once worked for Tyson Chicken. The company is known to us animal-rights activists as one of the most horrifyingly inhumane, cruel, hellish and abusive factory farms in the world – “torture mill” is an understatement, and watch this video if you don’t believe me: 

The employees there, often illiterate migrant farm workers (again, hold that thought as we move through the book), doubtless require some kind of moral and spiritual reassurance after committing the kind of atrocities they commit on a daily basis against living beings. This, as is my understanding, was my dad’s job.

So in one sense, he was a particularly disturbing cog in this machine. But he grew up a migrant farm worker himself. He picked cotton. One of seven brothers and sisters living in a tiny shack in the middle of a flat, barren Arkansas landscape, he traveled as far as Michigan and Florida every year. This was in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when migrant farm workers rarely graduated from high school.

More on that soon. What does Preacher Casy have to say in his introductory scene, and why do I so closely tie together him with my father, my images of that bleak landscape, and a sense of oppression, exploitation, and – ultimately – guilt?

We see him (Casy, not my father) sitting under a tree when we first meet him:

whistling solemnly the tune of “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” His extended foot swung slowly up and down in the tempo. It was not dance tempo. He stopping whistling and sang in an easy thin tenor: “Yes, sir, that’s my Saviour, / Je–sus is my Saviour, / Je–sus is my Saviour now. / On the level / ‘S not the devil, / Jesus is my Saviour now.”

The first thing we might notice is that Casy mixes the sacred with the profane; or rather, lets one drift into the other in a way that could be blasphemous or at least a little heretical. That’s definitely a big part of his character, but it’s right there on the surface. It’s his most obvious face to the world. Look at his first little speech, in which he reminisces about “ministering” to Joad years before:

You was always too busy pullin’ little girls’ pigtails when I give you the Holy Sperit. You was all wropped up in yankin’ that pigtail out by the roots. You maybe don’t recollect, but I do. The two of you come to Jesus at once ’cause of that pigtail yankin’. Baptized both of you in the irrigation ditch at once. Fightin’ and yellin’ like a couple a cats.

But Preacher Casy has more or less retired. Now and then he’ll still preach, “when the spirit moves him.” But it’s a different set of spirits that move him these days. While he’s undeniably a drunk, this is not the tale of a once-holy man who has fallen from grace, which we realize as he looks back wistfully on his professional days.

I use ta get the people jumpin’ an’ talkin’ in tongues, an’ glory-shoutin’ till they just fell down an’ passed out. An’ some I’d baptize to bring ‘em to. An’ then — you know what I’d do? I’d take one of them girls out in the grass, an’ I’d lay with her. Done it ever’ time. Then I’d feel bad, an’ I’d pray an’ pray, but it didn’t do no good. Come the nex’ time, them an’ me was full of the sperit, I’d do it again. I figgered there just wasn’t no hope for me, an’ I was a damned ol’ hypocrite. But I didn’t mean to be.

Oh, the guilt. Preacher Casy thinks he must be the first person to ever experience a temptation-related spiritual crisis. These days, tropes for men of God tend to focus on their ability to sin (for example, look at TV Tropes’ Religion section), as if it’s still shocking in 2012 that a human being who holds a leadership role within a church or religious sect could be fallible. Seeing as most people I know within my generation either 1) can only speak of religion with contempt, or 2) are those Facebook friends I never talk to who still live in the Bible Belt and have 16 kids and belong to some weird evangelical branch of Christianity I can’t even begin to understand, I think we may have a bit of a problem. But Preacher Casy is a lot more complicated than a series of cliches and tropes, no matter how you try to fit him into them.

In the end, though, here’s what I take out of this chapter. This speech is the introduction to what I will call Casyian theology: the populist, heretical idea that all people are sinners, and all people are holy.

I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus road. I figgered, ‘Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Sperit — the human sperit — the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.’ Now I sat there thinkin’ it, an’ all of a suddent — I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”

I did a Google Image Search looking for the most iconic pictures from the London riots. Every riot seems to produce a few. (I guess the assumption would be that photojournalists head into that kind of carnage with as much opportunistic glee as the looters, but the photojournalists I’ve known are mostly introspective types whose good reflexes may pay the bills but don’t seem to translate to enthusiasm for their subject matter.) What I found were a lot of fluorescent yellow jackets andhelmets. It looks like the real stars of the London riots are the police. This is a little strange. It’s not unusual for cops to turn up with frequency in riot photos (see GIS for “LA riots,” “Vancouver riots,” “Paris riots,” etc. I’m sure) but here they dominate to a disturbing degree. It’s hard to pick out an actual rioter. It almost looks like the narrative we’re being presented isn’t “exploited, discontented Tottenhamites rise up in an expression of collective anger” but “London’s bobbies on the move in 2011! Show great British can-do spirit! ‘Splendid,’ says Queen!”

We have one rather qualitative but visually convincing piece of evidence, then, that something is unusual about the way the media is framing the London riots. Let’s look at others. GlobalComment links to this MSNBC blog:

Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?

“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

The TV reporter from Britain’s ITV had no response. So the young man pressed his advantage. “Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard,  more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.

Rioting for the purpose of publicity? It happened. The real fighting may not be taking place on the streets of London (or Twitter, if you believe a bunch of hungry-eyed producers who think social media is an instant revenue generator) but in front of the camera – for screen time.

Now, maybe there were just a lot more cops on the street in London, than, say, in L.A. in 1992. But the theory I’ll be trying to test is this: there’s a very good reason we are supposed to see this conflict as photogenic cop vs. invisible rioter. Certain ways of framing a riot produce certain responses from the public. Counterculture-types assume the power class wants us all “dumb-eyed and complacent,” but that’s not really always true. I think it can be advantageous to showcase a riot or even spur mass groups of people into violence – depending on who’s doing the rioting. And so for the new few weeks, when I need a break from my Masters project on Missouri literature (yeah, seriously) I’ll take a look at some popular media narratives of rioting, protesting, or just stirring up trouble in the first world.

So we can all breathe easy now! See? The Village Voice just owned Ashton Kutcher (much in the same way that a pimp owns his 15-year-old prostitute!) A news organization that gets a sizeable chunk of its funding from its prostitution ads (and has been known to hawk underage prostitutes) did the math, and came to the conclusion that child prostitution just isn’t the problem it’s been made to be.

Village Voice Media, who laid off a ton of their best writers a few years ago, apparently found this story important enough to warrant months of investigative research and – does anyone care to guess how much money they spent on compiling nationwide data for underage sex offender arrests? just to write a massive long-form whose nut graf is basically “Isn’t Ashton Kutcher a jerk? Oh, and we’re pretty sure there aren’t THAT many children wrangled into sex slavery in America. Probably.”

They devoted their investigative team to building a nationwide map that looks like the kind of thing you’d see for a massive New York Times expose on cute puppy abuse by CEOs of national banks. In fact, this may be the first time I’ve seen this kind of journalistic tool used to actually argue that things AREN’T as bad as they seem (isn’t that kind of against the instinct of your average investigative reporter?) Here it is, the anti-Woodward and Bernstein – a massive investigative piece revealing LESS wrong-doing than the public was aware of. But that’s not all.

Their reporting is shoddy. Their 827-per-year number (the previous statistic was 100,000 to 300,000) is only the number of arrests per year, not the number of child prostitutes in America. While it’s likely that the previous number was way off, even if 10% of all underaged prostitutes are arrested once a year (ha!) that’s nearly 10,000 hopeless, helpless kids forced into sexual slavery. Not sure a shot at Ashton Kutcher warrants marginalizing them further. And the Voice conveniently limits their study to only 37 cities in America, writing off the children suffering in the rest of the country by saying, “Juveniles can go astray in rural Kansas,” implying that those other cities probably don’t have as much of a problem because they’re not big population centers – equivalent to some farm town in the middle of nowhere.

Atlanta isn’t rural Kansas. St. Louis isn’t rural Kansas. New Orleans (seriously, they didn’t include numbers from New Orleans) is most definitely not rural Kansas. But the Voice study does find room for Hartford, CT, Kansas City, MO, Honolulu, and that hotbed of sin, Salt Lake City. A little skewed, perhaps? Wait, that doesn’t seem right… Let’s look at the numbers closely. Could there be room for suspicion?

Yes, there could, and is. Because they blatantly, painfully lied in their story. They say this: “We examined arrests for juvenile prostitution in the nation’s 37 largest cities during a 10-year period.” They repeatedly say they used the nation’s 37 largest cities. At least three times.

Hartford, Connecticut, one of the cities they sampled, is the third-largest city in Connecticut. Its population as of 2010 is about 124,o00. Its metropolitan population is 1.1 million. And its average of one arrest per year conveniently brings their average number down. A lot.

Atlanta, Georgia has a population of 420,000 as of 2010. Its metropolitan population is 5.2 million. It is factually, undeniably much larger than Hartford, Connecticut. And we don’t know what their yearly average is, because the Voice didn’t include those numbers. Anyone want to take a guess whether Atlanta has more child prostitution than Hartford?

The study also includes Pittsburgh (334,000 people and one arrest per year) and Newark, NJ (277,000 people and one arrest per year.) Not bigger than Atlanta, but low enough numbers to skew data.

So why would VVM do this? Well, the pimping site they own, backpage.com, has “an anything goes reputation,” according to Ars Technica. Underage prostitutes slip through, and as one of the links mentioned, one of them later sued them. The organization has an obvious interest in crafting a certain image of child prostitution in America as not being a problem. Ashton Kutcher (and I’m really no fan of the guy) comes along and challenges that perception. VVM devotes tons of resources to creating a misleading story in retaliation. They’ve made the piece their top story in many, if not all, of their weekly markets across the country. This is, according to one of my anonymous sources (what? it’s a blog) within Village Voice Media, unprecedented.

This is a massive hit piece dishonestly designed to downplay the issue of child prostitution. It comes from an organization whose advertising revenue is based largely on the existence of prostitution and who have a track record of problems with child prostitution.

Doesn’t allowing your revenue stream to influence your editorial stance and your content go against every single journalistic ethic conceivable? Yes. Yes, it does. And, um, it might make it slightly worse when that revenue stream is child sex slavery. Just sayin’.

Anyway, I wanted to give you that treat before I go any further, because this is the turtle chapter.

When I was an undergrad taking a creative writing class, I had a professor go off on the turtle chapter. He complained about how slow it was, and how laborious. He said he wanted to make sure none of his students wrote like that. From what I remember of the class, they all wrote worse, myself included.

And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass. His hard legs and yellow-nailed feet threshed slowly through the…

It kind of goes on like that for a while. Let’s rejoin the narrative a page later.

… the neck crept out and the old humorous frowning eyes looked about and the legs and tail came out. The back legs went to work, straining like elephant legs, and the shell …

Okay, good enough. At one point, an ant crawls inside the turtle’s shell and the turtle flinches and crushes it. And then, after what is only a few paragraphs but feels like an eternity, a truck driver comes speeding along and tries to hit the turtle. He flips the turtle, who wriggles, rights himself and keeps going.

What does this mean? I don’t know. I’m not sure why it’s here. Maybe John Steinbeck had something in mind. Maybe the turtle was the spirit of the poor working class. No clue.

I have this book sitting in my bathroom (yes, Liz and I have a bookshelf in our bathroom, a pretty big one actually) that’s calling Working Days, and it’s the journal John Steinbeck kept while he was writing The Grapes of Wrath. I keep meaning to crack it open and find out what he was thinking when he wrote that chapter. It just seems so… Weird. Showy. Flawed. Maybe it is; just some massive gaping weak hole exposing his amateurity hanging out underneath all the genius around it. Maybe it’s the flaw in the ointment that illustrates that I’m wasting my time with a joke of a book, a great big bludgeoning piece of propaganda, when I could be reading something better.

I’ve never been good at orchestrating my reading with my life. I haven’t read much in the past few months, other than a few books by Japanese writers and lots of newspapers. I’m getting married in a few days, and I just decided to start Paradise Lost. Things keep getting thrown in my way. I pick up a new book, put it down in a couple days, and start something else. Maybe I’m like that turtle, getting spun over by passing trucks, wriggling, righting myself and keeping on going.

Or maybe I’m not and that’s stupid.

He's cleaner-looking here, because he's Henry Fonda.

Before Tom Joad even shows up, we get a throwaway line that almost sums up one of the main theses of The Grapes of Wrath:

In the restaurant the truck driver paid his bill and put his two nickels’ change in a slot machine. The whirling cylinders game him no score. ‘They fix ‘em so you can’t win nothing,’ he said to the waitress.

The futility of winning against “the system” is already apparent here. This is a story about maintaining your humanity in the face of that futility – and finding ways to win outside of the normal rules. But let’s talk about Tom.

The clothes of Tom Joad:

The man’s clothes were new – all of them, cheap and new. His gray cap was so new that the visor was still stiff and the button still on, not shapeless and bulged as it would be when it had served for a while all the various purposes of a cap – carrying sack, towel, handkerchief. His suit was of cheap gray hard-cloth and so new that there were creases in the trousers. His blue chambray shirt was stiff and smooth with filler. The coat was too big, the trousers too short, for he was a tall man. The coat shoulder peaks hung down on his arms, and even then the sleeves were too short and the front of the coat flapped loosely over his stomach. He wore a pair of new tan shoes of the kind called “army last,” hob-nailed and with half-circles like horseshoes to protect the edges of the heels from wear.”

A while back, one of the shoelaces on my worn-out old boots (the ones I wear everywhere, even to semi-formal occasions) broke. I strung the boot with one of Liz’s shoelaces, and as a result I now have what Liz calls “Tom Joad boots.” But reading this description, I realize Tom Joad wears nicer shoes than I do.

Of course, he just got out of prison. And not for some Jean Valjeany “stole a piece of bread” nonsense. Tom Joad straight-up  killed a guy.

‘Homicide,’ he said quickly. ‘That’s a big word – means I killed a guy. Seven years. I’m sprung in four for keepin’ my nose clean.’

I’m extremely interested in how various media represent the criminal – from the scary, usually-black TV news “perp” that terrifies white-bread suburbanites in their rec-rooms to the shadow of Robin Hood, that socialist icon who stretches through the centuries and can become Jesse James, Joe Hill, Bonnie and Clyde or anyone else in a pinch. One of my favorite songs, lately, because it’s eminently danceable, is the Clash’s “Bank Robber.”

'70s punk rockers are incredibly relevant to this depression-era novel.

Daddy was a bank robber
But he never hurt nobody
He just loved to live that way
And he loved to take your money

Isn’t that glorification of the criminal great? And one of the hallmarks of subversive socialism? And right here, at the very beginning of The Grapes of Wrath, we have a protagonist who is a hardened, unforgiven member of the criminal set. Remember what Debs said: “as long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.” If you want to understand, if you want to accept The Grapes of Wrath, you gotta be right there with Tom Joad. Steinbeck’s beautiful omniscient narrator is your guide, yes, but Joad is your reference point for the resilience of humanity.

Do you need an example? It’s right there in one of Tom’s first conversations.

The hitchhiker stood up and looked across through the windows. ‘Could ya give me a lift, mister?’
The drive looked quickly back at the restaurant for a second. ‘Didn’ you see the No riders sticker on the win’shield?’

‘Sure – I seen it. But sometimes a guy’ll be a good guy even if some rich bastard makes him carry a sticker.’

We know that Tom is a good guy – even though he’s a murderer and a criminal who just got out of jail. He’s a good guy because he’s not a “rich bastard” – which we should realize right away.

“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”

Not to compare John Steinbeck to T.S. Eliot or anything, because I’m pretty sure neither had anything to do with each other, but the first chapter of The Grapes of Wrath has more than a few moments that dance around some themes that appeared in The Waste Land. Yes, the two were separated by seventeen years and that gigantic romantic abyss of love and hate we call “between the wars,” but throughout those first couple pages of The Grapes of Wrath, there’s so much craving for rain I couldn’t help but find myself back

“where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.”

That ancient fertility ritual has ground to a halt. The rain has stopped in Oklahoma. And while that’s what really happened, there’s something so terribly Modernist about this opening.

“The dawn came, but no day. In the gray sky a red sun appeared, a dim red circle that gave a little light, like dusk; and as that day advanced, the dusk slipped back toward darkness, and the wind cried and whimpered over the fallen corn.”

We’re in Rats Alley now, that’s for sure. The men come out and silently study the corn. The women study the men. The children study the men and the women. The world has basically just ended, and these tough, terse old farmers and farmers’ wives and farmers’ children – I grew up around these people, although I wasn’t one of them – just watch it end, and think (Steinbeck ends the chapter “The men sat still – thinking – figuring.”) And then there’s that dust – settling like this was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or something. Post-apocalyptic already. Look – the stars are even gone.

“When the night came again it was black night, for the stars could not pierce the dust to get down, and the window lights could not even spread beyond their own yards. Now the dust was evenly mixed with the air, an emulsion of dust and air. Houses were shut tight, and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes. The people brushed it from their shoulders. Little lines of dust lay at the door sills.”

Because the world has ended, there’s no reason to rush anything. This book is going take things incredibly slow. But it’s such a vast narrative we’re looking at (where every other chapter or so isn’t about the Joad family but just the people) that we must accept a slow pace.

I’m not insanely knowledgeable about The Grapes of Wrath, or literature. I’m a journalist and my studies in literature are minor and mostly behind me. I don’t want to come across authoritative in writing this. This is a personal journal of rereading a book that showed me that even if the worst happens and the end of the world comes, when that boot is crushing down on your face and you have no money and you feel like you have no power, if you organize and solidify and band together with the other powerless people you can get by. It’s only when you give in and let the powerful people and the rich people have their way that you get destroyed.

The Grapes of Wrath is as essential reading for radicals as anything else, and far more radical than any other high school standard I can think of. This is a socialist book – maybe the socialist bible. Contained in it is a perfect socialist narrative as wonderfully carved as the Christian narrative of the New Testament. There are exquisitely carved weapons in this book to arm everyone in the world who feels powerless and poor and exploited. Just look past what you think The Grapes of Wrath is, and consider that it might be something else – one of the most dangerous and most powerful and most beautiful books in the world.

The internets have given us a few “sneezing trees” explanations. Maybe the bad guy, Charles Muntz built his secret South American headquarters on top of a fountain of youth, some geeks have speculated. That would explain why he looks younger than protagonist Carl Fredrickson – and why Carl starts gaining shocking agility once he shows up. The fact is, Pixar knew that its mostly young audience can’t and won’t complain about realism in a film where balloons lifting a house off its foundations and halfway across the world is the basic plot device. But as a semi-professional plot rationalizer, I’d like to offer my own alternative reading. One that resolves all Up‘s flights of fantasy.

It’s a Doctor Who story.

Yep. Carl Fredrickson is a Time Lord.

First off, and most obviously, the clothing is a dead giveaway.

I use a walker now. Walkers are cool.

That’s the eleventh doctor. There’s no denying it. Those are his clothes. That’s the Doctor wearing big thick glasses, yes, but Superman wears big thick glasses when he’s pretending to be human, too.

So why doesn’t he know he’s the Doctor? I’m assuming you’ve seen Human Nature / The Family of Blood, where David Tennant’s Doctor had to go incognito, even forgetting he himself was a human. Somewhere, hidden among the many, many knick-knacks of Carl’s house, I’m willing to bet there’s a fob watch. It doesn’t even have to be a watch, according to Doctor Who canon. Who knows – maybe it’s that bottle cap he’s been wearing “all this time?”

In my reading, Eleven has been forced to hide his own identity with a lifetime of implanted memories. Everything up until Carl hits his alarm clock in the morning – that beautiful, dreamlike 11-minute “prologue” of childhood, growing up and growing old – was produced to convince him he was really human.

And a flying house? Don’t we know that a TARDIS can be masked with a chameleon circuit? And haven’t we seen one just recently masked as a house? (In last season’s The Lodger.) Carl’s house sure seems to get from his nondescript American city to South America really quickly – after going through that mysterious “storm.” Could a house towed by balloons do that – or could a TARDIS?

As you reread Up as a Doctor Who story, all the inconsistencies start to fall away. It all seems to make sense a little more. For instance, the talking, semi-robotic dogs. Where have we seen that before?

Robo-SQUIRREL!

So why was he forced to hide his own identity (and the identity of his vessel) from himself? Well, he’s going up against a clever, suave, charismatic villain who has a “flying machine” of his own. Are there any famous clever, suave, charismatic villains in Doctor Who?

Although I'm glad that UP didn't have any foe yay moments between Carl Fredrickson and Charles Muntz.

The Doctor had to confront the Master, but he had to do it while hiding his own identity. So he arranged with a co-conspirator (possibly the eleventh doctor’s favorite co-conspirator, River Song, posing as Ellie in his memories), to find some way to encourage him to get to South America. The solution? Carl and Ellie “had always dreamed of going there.” That gave him all the impetus he needed to fly his “house” (TARDIS) to confront his “childhood hero” and save the world from the Master’s plan.

Which, doubtless, involved that mysterious bird of paradise, “Kevin.”

The whole thing was arranged ahead of time. The whole reason the Doctor and his companion, Russell, had to travel to South America was to capture Kevin and save him from the Master, who had been trying to find the bird for nearly a century. Wait, did I say bird?

They tell us right there in Up – there’s no record of any other bird like this. Most people don’t believe it exists. Could it be that “Kevin” isn’t a bird after all, but a stranded alien who holds the key to saving the world, or even the universe, from the Master’s evil plans?

“Now, wait a minute, Davis,” you’re saying. “You’re a complete, babbling loon. I mean, seriously, a dribbling idiot. Carl and Muntz, they’re well, old. Visibly old. Not visibly 27, which is how old our current doctor is. Granted, the Doctor is technically old, but he doesn’t look it.”

Exactly. He doesn’t look it – in live action. This is an animated movie. Where his appearance could be a little more impressionistic, and tooled toward his actual age, rather than how we perceive him.

And look – that explains that zeppelin fight! See, those aren’t elderly, frail men fighting – they’re virile, physically fit Time Lords at the peak of their powers, even if one or both of them don’t realize it. (And I’m not discounting the possibility that the Master has been fob-watched, too.)

By the way, “Charles Muntz,” eh? Hey, isn’t the Master known for using fake names with deceptive wordplay and anagrams to reveal who he really is? Okay. Well, let’s break his name down. What anagrams can we make from “Charles Muntz?”

MASTER LUNCHZ

Now, “Lunchz” isn’t very good spelling, it’s true. But the Master is known for being a pretty hungry guy, especially in “The End of Time.” And what’s the first thing Muntz did when Carl and Russell showed up at his secret lair? Fed them lunch.

But this is all just idle speculation. There’s only one person who knows if Up is really an eleventh doctor adventure, and that’s the film’s writer/director.

Pete Docter.

In Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, translated by Philip Gabriel, the teenage runaway protagonist has ended up in a library in southern Japan, where he meets the library’s owner, Miss Saeki, and her young assistant, the cerebral, angelic Oshima. Miss Saeki and Oshima are two of the most perfectly, exquisitely, heartbreakingly human creations I’ve ever read in fiction. After a particularly epic win scene shooting down two hateful “feminists” who called him a typical patriarchal male, Oshima tells Kafka this:

“I’ve experienced all kinds of discrimination,” Oshima says. “Only people who’ve been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I’m as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T.S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they’re doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don’t want to do. Like that lovely pair we just met.” He sighs and twirls the long slender pencil in his hand.

“Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas — none of them bother me. I don’t care what banner they raise. But what I can’t stand are hollow people. When I’m with them I just can’t bear it, and wind up saying things I shouldn’t. With those women — I should’ve just let it slide, or else called Miss Saeki and let her handle it. She would have given them a smile an smoothed things over. But I just can’t do that. I say things I shouldn’t, do things I shouldn’t do. I can’t control myself. That’s one of my weak points. Do you know why that’s a weak point of mine?”

“‘Cause if you take every single person who lacks much imagination seriously, there’s no end to it,” I say.

“That’s it,” Oshima says. He taps his temple lightly with the eraser end of the pencil. “But there’s one thing I want you to remember, Kafka. These are the kind of people who (spoiler) murdered Miss Saeki’s childhood sweetheart. Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. Of course it’s important to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. They’re a lost cause, and I don’t want anyone like that coming in here.”

Oshima points at the stacks with the tip of his pencil. What he means, of course, is the entire library.

“I wish I could just laugh off people like that, but I can’t.”

Alexander Payne (About Schmidt, Sideways)

Alexander Payne was one of two great directors to only make two films in the entire decade – and he’s been silent since 2004, which is really, really annoying. About Schmidt and Sideways were amazing road trip films, but Payne’s real love is looking at how the dynamic between men and women changes as we grow old. His first two movies, Citizen Ruth and Election, were sexual satires on the level of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but masquerading as ’90s comedies. With About Schmidt, he made Jack Nicholson a totally three-dimensional elderly widower – lonely, socially awkward and naïve – and put him on the road, where we cringed with him until he ran headfirst into Kathy Bates’s explosion of trashy Midwestern joy. Similarly, he took Sideways‘s two middle-aged wine snobs, with all their neuroses and hangups, and expanded their characters until the overlap with the women they courted and tried not to love turned ugly and beautiful. He’s been silent since then, although rumors of projects keep popping up.

Darren Aronofsky

There was a good movie to be had somewhere in The Fountain: a potentially winning romance that would be something like The Notebook meeting David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. But the shocking lack of soul Darren Aronofsky has displayed in his other dour, murky, overly stylized messes suggest it was stumbled upon accidentally. Like Nolan, Aronofsky’s movies are, for the most part, designed to elicit cries of “That’s soooo deep” from frat boys and people who listen to a lot of prog rock. For those of us who aren’t impressed by such cinematic self-gratification, films like Requiem for a Dream come across as hideously pompous. (Aronofsky’s two worst works, the unbelievably pretentious, embarrassingly bad low-budget Pi and the unbelievably pretentious, embarrassingly bad high-budget Black Swan, came on either side of the decade.)

Darren Aronofsky is the worst director of the decade to not get roasted on a regular basis. He has a lot in common with the much-despised M. Night Shyamalan – a bloated sense of self-importance, a tendency to rely heavily on pretty visuals when the storytelling gets weak – but even Shyamalan is capable of decent pacing and doesn’t cynically splatter the screen with tacky, clumsy gratuitous audience-gratification scenes that belong in soft-core porn.