Connections

Alfred North Whitehead once wrote: "Our knowledge of the particular facts of the world around us is gained from our sensations. We see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel hot and cold, and push, and rub, and ache, and tingle. These are just our own personal sensations: my toothache cannot be your toothache, and my sight cannot be your sight."

What mathematics does, Whitehead explained, is create a public world that's the same for everybody. Mathematics imagines a world "as one connected set of things which underlies all the perceptions of all people. There is not one world of things for my sensations and another for yours, but one world in which we both exist."

Can film criticism, or any kind of criticism for that matter, discover one world that underlies all of the perceptions of all people? And does it matter if it can or not?

Mathematics is essential to the science of bombs, and vaccines, and medicines. It makes architecture and engineering possible. That these things matter is obvious. But do things like films and what we make of them matter in the same way? And to whom do they matter?

Tom Wolfe famously pointed out that without the theories of Rosenberg and Greenberg -- Red Mountain and Green Mountain -- le monde, the little world of artists, dealers and collectors in the Fifties and Sixties, was unable to see. Until you grasped the theories, you saw something all right, but not the "real" paintings. So what? Rosenberg and Greenberg didn't even have the same theory about what they were looking at. They weren't even seeing the same things.

Physicists sometimes think of light as particles. Sometimes they think of light as waves. Neither particles nor waves by themselves explain all there is to know about light, but taken together they do. And that matters. Because the bomb blows up.

What matters about criticism is that it should be useful somehow. A modest goal for a critic might be to make something accessible to a viewer, or listener, or reader, that wouldn't be accessible to them without the critique. And my thought is we should do that without going overboard about the importance of the work we're talking about. We should talk about art the way we talk about mushrooms on our lawns, keeping our heads straight when we swim, finding our way home after a night on the town, or whether we prefer one-egg or two-egg omelettes.

The only things I can make accessible to anyone is what I see, hear and think when I watch a film.

Memorial Day

Vietnam Is Where I Found My Family

By Ann Bryan Mariano

"Sometimes an officer would say, 'What the hell is a woman doing here?' and I'd shrug nonchalantly. 'My editor sent me to cover the fighting.' There were struggles with the military over where I could and couldn't go, and what I could and couldn't do. I tried never to back down and usually my dogged persistence prevailed.

"Soldiers offered me pistols or knives, believing that I should have some kind of weapon. Even though I was from Texas, guns made me uncomfortable. I was given a snub-nosed .38 pistol as a farewell gift from an officer in the 1st Cavalry who was returning home to the States. He was sure I'd need to shoot my way out of a Vietcong ambush one day, but of course I never did. I was afraid if I had to shoot anything it would be my own foot.

"I was opposed to the war when I arrived in Vietnam and left as a true pacifist, more convinced than ever that humanity had to find peaceful ways of resolving conflict. Being in the field proved to me that while there are many cases of individual courage and heroism among soldiers, there is nothing about war itself that is heroic. The suffering and deaths of soldiers and casualties among the Vietnamese civilian population were staggering. I had no doubt that America's involvement was tragic and doomed to fail. There was nothing to prepare me for the death and devastation I saw."

Ann Bryan Mariano was in Vietnam from 1966 to 1971, reporting for The Overseas Weekly, a privately-owned newspaper for military stationed overseas. According to Women's eNews, she is currently suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and wrote her essay with the help of friends and family. "Alzheimer’s disease blows through my memory like wind through a Buddhist sand painting. Vietnam is still the most beautiful country I have ever seen. But images once so fixed in my mind are now dancing ghosts."

Ann Bryan
 
I knew Ann in Frankfurt around the time she left for Vietnam. I remember she took along a little red cocktail dress and a pair of red heels as a matter of principle, and it pissed off most of my fellow male reporters at the Overseas Weekly that she was the first Weekly reporter into Vietnam. Even so, the reports she filed from Vietnam were read with grudging respect. I don't know why I thought of the Overseas Weekly today, and, finding a slim archive on line, noticed Ann's name in the masthead and googled my way to her story. I can't really imagine what Alzheimer's disease is like, but I hope Ann still catches glimpses of herself in Frankfurt the way I remember her. She was a good friend who put up with my arrogance and refused to believe I wasn't a serious newsman long after that was clear to everyone else at the Weekly. She taught me the phrase: "I can't even stand the way he ties his shoes," nursed me through pneumonia and sold me her Borgward when she left for Vietnam. I had a letter and a scarab she sent from India, and another letter from Vietnam, but I lost them and I never heard from her again.