Armistice Day 2020

 I haven't updated on November 11 in a couple years. The last time was the end of the war itself, ion fact, two years ago. I know I have not been blogging much lately. And the war is over.

I have been watching The Great War on youtube lately - a neat historical channel, hosted by Indie Neidell originally, that followed the war week by week, 100 years after the fact. I wish I had found that sooner, though I was doing a lot of reading, and taking actual classes, back when it started. Still - good stuff, and so is the World War Two channel Neidell hosts now.

Meanwhile, the word we live in is interesting enough. 100 years ago, the Spanish Flu was winding down, having killed millions, more than the whole war did. In 2020, COVID 19 is in full force still, killing 230,000 or more Americans already, many many more throughout the world, and still going strong. And the fool in the White house who has made this worse is still there - 

We did, in fact, vote his sorry ass out last week. Everything went about according to expectations - lots of votes cast, lots of absentee votes cast, Democrats much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, so the election night results looked grim. But the places counting absentee ballots after the in person ballots saw Biden's numbers just rise and rise and rise, and by the time they were done, he had taken most co the contested states - Pennsylvania, Georgia, as well as Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nebraska, by fairly healthy margins. Biden took the popular vote by a very healthy margin. Basically, it was a butt kicking. 

But weepy Donnie is still hanging on, raving about election fraud, promising to fight it in the courts, and sabotaging everything he can reach rather than admit the obvious. This is what you get when someone fails at everything they touch and no one calls them on it. It is also what you get when you have a fascist in the white house, supported by a party that knows it can't win elections if people vote. They have to steal the election, they sure as hell can't win it. The Republicans have won one National election since 1988. They have to commit to minority rule.

So here we are. Self-imposed chaos here in the USA. Trump doing his best John Breckinridge - if he can't win the vote, he'll commit treason. I don't know how this gets that far, of course. Trump is terrible at it, his allies are terrible at it - there is no way for him to actually win the election, and I doubt anyone will have the stomach to turn to arms to overturn it. But it's ugly, none the less.

All right. End with the Great War again. This time, Metallica's One, a song, from a book and movie about the war, about all wars - and about the blacklist, while we're at it. Dalton Trumbo writing as much about his own time being silence as about the results of the war, I think. A good way to remember this remembrance day.

The End of the War to End All Wars

100 years ago today, 11/11/1918 at 11:11 AM (Paris time) an Armistice ending the Great War went into effect. The fighting stopped; the guns fell silent. (There's a Vonnegut quote going around today, about the moment the war ended: "I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God.")

The war did not end, officially - that took a couple more years, and when it happened, the resulting treaty went a long way to starting the next, even worse war. The fighting did not stop - there was still a war in Russia, involving most of the countries fighting WWI; that war only got worse in the next couple years. Even on the last day of the war, typically for WWI, the combatants were scrambling for position, and another 2,738 men were killed and 10,000 odd wounded. But the utter catastrophe that was the Great War ended.

The War to End All Wars did not, in fact, end wars; the war to Make the World Safe for Democracy, did not, in fact, make the world safe for democracy. People did try, though - not very effectively, probably because the unchecked power politics that started the mess continued without interruption. England and France made Germany pay; they worked to isolate the new Soviet Russia; they remade the maps of Europe and the Middle East without very effective consultation with the people they were redistributing, and usually to serve their own interests; they paid no mind to the interests of their colonies, and divided up German colonies (as "mandates" rather than outright possessions, but that's not the strongest distinction in history.)

But that doesn't diminish the importance of this day. (It might betray the importance of this day, though.) The war ended: soldiers went home, families were reunited, countries had the chance to recover, the places where the war raged could try to rebuild. And people did try to do something about this thing that had just happened. The Great War was a massive trauma - psychologically as well as physically. The war broke the world, which had seemed to reach a kind of comfortable stasis in 1914 - at least in western Europe and places like the USA - that was gone, any expectation of uninterrupted progress and improvement was gone - it felt like the end of the world. And (as I've harped on before) there was nothing here to take comfort from, except the fact that it ended.

And that leaves this day as the one good thing about that war. It made it a symbol of the desire for peace, the work of making peace. It is the symbol of remembering the horrible things men do to one another; the horrible things, as well, our machines to do us. The horrors were documented, film and photography, and famous poetry and art - there is a reason governments try to suppress those images: it does not pay to think too much about what a bullet can do to a body. Let alone gas....

I have let my First World War posts slip lately - there are lots of things in the war and around the war to write about, and I wish I were still as energetic about them as I had been. We live with the consequences of this war, maybe more than any other war; we live with the failure to actually build on the end fo this war. (We did far better after the next one, though I fear a lot of that was directly related to the fact that the winners were divided into two camps almost as hostile as the two sides had ever been. So we rebuilt Germany and Japan to thwart the Soviets - cynical reasons, maybe, but we did it, and it worked. At least for Germany and Japan.) I have been stunned, living in this country, the last two years - thinking about "making the world safe for democracy" is a bitter thing to swallow in a country where democracy has been so eroded in the last couple years. Maybe that will change, as we slowly bring things right in the USA - I don't know. WE can still vote, though; when we vote, we can still take power. Maybe we can fix it.

And maybe, we can look at the one good thing from World War I: the fact that after after 4 years of evil and destruction, we managed to stop.

Armistice Day, 2017

I've already managed my World War I post this week, getting the Russians in there along with Third Ypres. But today is Armistice Day and it is good to remember it, and to remember why this day was remembered as a day to bring abut the end of war. The horrors of Passchendaele sum up the horrors of WWI quite succinctly, and those horrors are a distillation of the horrors of all wars. We should keep it in mind, and we should try to stop this stuff from happening.

Here is a documentary about the battle of Passchendaele:



And a bit of Iron Maiden, to mark the time:

Remembrance

Armistice day is on us again. 98 years since the war to end all wars ended, and the world immediately began preparations for the next war. It's a hard week to find anything good to say. World War I isn't the central event of American history the way it is in modern European history - the Civil War is. But we're still fighting the Civil War - Trump ran and won as much against the results of the Civil War as anything else. When both the Civil War and WWI ended, the losers set about instantly to try to undo the results, and refight the wars if they need to. This country still hasn't accepted the results of the Civil War...

All right. This is about Armistice Day - Veteran's day in the US - we can, should, honor veterans today, but we should also keep the spirit of early remembrances of the day, and the hope that somehow, this horrible cataclysm might move people to work against wars. Remember the sacrifices, remember the sheer horror of The Great War, and try to do something to stop it from happening, over and over again.

And, today - remember Leonard Cohen. This year - it's parade of good and great people dying (as well as a few monsters) just never seems to stop. Cohen was another of those musicians with a long, deep career and a massive body of work that I dipped into almost at random, never quite embracing the whole thing - but loving the parts I knew. So - we're heavy on the early stuff below, because I had them going obsessively there for a while... He's also someone who's songs could absolutely transform a movie: McCabe & Mrs. Miller is the most obvious, but everybody knows in Exotica was a jolt as well... He will be missed; and reading this new, this week, is a fucking stab in the gut...

So: video - start with Cohen doing his part for Remembrance day, from last year - reciting In Flanders Fields:



And songs - the ones that got me, and kept me the longest. Suzanne:



Bird on a Wire:



The Stranger, from McCabe and Mrs Miller (the title sequence):



And the Partisan:

Armistice Day, With Robert Graves

Today is Armistice Day, a holiday established to mark the end of the Great War, the War to End All Wars. We shouldn't forget the most important message of this day: Never Again. It's a message the world has failed utterly to understand. We Americans, who for a time seemed to keep it in mind, except when we were attacked, have forgotten it, fighting a number of wars for no purpose and to no good end. Vietnam and the Second Iraq war were particularly disastrous - killing thousands, causing immense domestic strife and harm, having ongoing repercussions. (Though oddly, 40 years along, Vietnam's legacy isn't quite so bad - we get along with them now. We had the decency to lose, I suppose, and somehow were able to get past that loss, and move toward decent relations with Southeast Asia. Though that just tends to indicate that the war was a waste - we would have ended up friends anyway, maybe. When you look at the devastation that war brought - to Vietnam, to Cambodia - and the amount of harm it did to us, the ways it stranded Johnson's political achievements, delivering the country to Nixon and evil - it is a horrible thing.) And Iraq? we're back to talking about boots on the ground in the Middle East - insanity... Though here - blaming George Bush and co. is well justified - they took bad things and made them far worse - but in so many ways, the ongoing strife in the middle east is just a reminder that 11/11/18 was just a ceasefire in one theater of the Great War. The war didn't really stop in the middle east - it kept going, the results of the war warping and twisting around each other, and forming new conflicts, which go on to this day.

Ugh.

It's important, then, to remember that today is a sad day - a day of mourning for the men sacrificed in war, for what war did to them. A day of atonement for all the young men we have killed (all us countries.)

So - from one who was there, Robert Graves. First, an arty video set to the poem, The Assault Heroic:



And then - getting to the point in a hurry: the Dead Boche:



And text: The Assault Heroic:

Down in the mud I lay,
Tired out by my long day
Of five damned days and nights,
Five sleepless days and nights, ...
Dream-snatched, and set me where
The dungeon of Despair
Looms over Desolate Sea,
Frowning and threatening me
With aspect high and steep—
A most malignant keep.
My foes that lay within
Shouted and made a din,
Hooted and grinned and cried:
"Today we've killed your pride;
Today your ardour ends.
We've murdered all your friends;
We've undermined by stealth
Your happiness and your health.
We've taken away your hope;
Now you may droop and mope
To misery and to Death."
But with my spear of Faith,
Stout as an oaken rafter,
With my round shield of laughter,
With my sharp, tongue-like sword
That speaks a bitter word,
I stood beneath the wall
And there defied them all.
The stones they cast I caught
And alchemized with thought
Into such lumps of gold
As dreaming misers hold.
The boiling oil they threw
Fell in a shower of dew,
Refreshing me; the spears
Flew harmless by my ears,
Struck quivering in the sod;
There, like the prophet's rod,
Put leaves out, took firm root,
And bore me instant fruit.
My foes were all astounded,
Dumbstricken and confounded,
Gaping in a long row;
They dared not thrust nor throw.
Thus, then, I climbed a steep
Buttress and won the keep,
And laughed and proudly blew
My horn, "Stand to! Stand to!
Wake up, sir! Here's a new
Attack! Stand to! Stand to!"

A Dead Boche:

TO you who'd read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I'll say (you've heard it said before)
"War's Hell!" and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

Armistice Day 2014

Today is Armistice Day again. The 100th anniversary of the Great War is on us - I am taking a class, and so have been reading, thinking and writing about WWI all fall. Today, 100 years ago, November 11, 1914, was just another day. Part of the first battle of Ypres - in fact, it was part of what would turn out to be the last German push of that battle. The Germans attacked near the town of Nonnebosschen; they broke through he British lines, but were stopped by reserves. Both armies were pretty well wiped out by then - Wikipedia's account notes that Haig's I Corps had lost 90% of its officers and 83% of its enlisted men by then - and after this, there wasn't much fight left in anyone. When the attack on Nonnebosschen failed, the Germans backed off - began transferring men to the Eastern front - and winter came in.

That's 1914. The end of the Battle of Ypres basically locked both sides in place - this is where they all finally dug in for real, when trench warfare took over the whole western front. There would be a few months of relative calm at the end of 1914 into 1915, before both sides started trying to figure out how to get through trench lines. We will have four more years to see how that would go.

And 4 years in the future, it would end. The Germans would be fought to the point of collapse; the German government would collapse (after the Russians collapsed); the Allies would still be functional - so they got to win. But this isn't about winning.

No one really won anything in World War I. Millions of people were killed, and who gained? Japan, probably; the Bolsheviks; Serbia, I suppose, got what they wanted (despite being invaded and wrecked and nearly obliterated by the war). There were some interesting secondary effects, like women's suffrage, which appeared in many countries after the war - probably not a coincidence. But the thing itself, even by the standards of warfare, was a pointless and depressing affair from beginning to end. Marking its ending thus becomes something of a symbol for the hope that humans could learn from it, figure out the futility of war. It's something of a vain hope, but a worthwhile hope anyway.

A news story about the commemoration of the First Battle of Ypres:

Armistice Day

We are getting close to the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I - next year... It is, I think, the defining moment in modern history - even WWII plays as a kind of sequel - bigger, more horrible, though also, maybe, more "successful" in remaking the world in a slightly better form. In some places. Kinda, sorta… I imagine, next year, I will try to follow along with it, as I have been doing with the Civil War's 150th anniversary - it is, I think, to modern Europe what the Civil War is to the United States.

And now - on this day, again, we should remember the end of the first one: the bad war - the war to end all wars, that spawned a dozen more wars. We should remember, and think about what war is.

I will turn it over to Wilfred Owen. Here, first, his most famous poem - Dulce et Decorum Est (here, with annotations):



And here is Kenneth Branagh reading Anthem for Doomed Youth:



the texts:

Wilfred Owen
Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

and:

Anthem for Doomed Youth
BY WILFRED OWEN

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

November 11

Another Armistice Day is almost gone - a holiday I'm inclined to remember, in its original incarnation. World War I is finally over - the Germans making their last war reparation payment this October - but it's effects haven't gone away. Iraq, most of the trouble in the Middle East, that all goes back to World War I, and it's going nowhere. And as a war, the war itself - it still stands out for its raw horror and insanity and sheer pointlessness. I mentioned last year that a disproportionate number of the best anti-war films were set in WWI - it's hard to imagine any other kind of film about that war. (There were a few, between the wars, in the build up to the second world war - but that is about all.) And it is hard to think about World War I and not think about the plain insanity of war itself. To spend any time thinking seriously about World War I is to turn anti-war.

I spent some time a month or so ago reading about the war - reading about battles. I can't say I've studied it all that much - I grew up a history nerd, a war nerd, reading insatiably about the Civil War, WWII, Indian Wars, the Revolution - not so much about WWI though. And that probably for good reason - there's no way to turn the Great War into anything particularly engaging. There's nothing exciting or heroic about it - even more than that, there's barely any narrative about it. After the first year, it's just murder. Other wars have their moral element, political issues behind the fighting - slavery in the Civil War, the holocaust, and Nazi and Japanese aggression in WWII - WWI just has two groups of more or less unsavory governments fighting over obscure principals or power. And maybe even more than that - the nature of combat in WWI took away the sense of personal investment you can get from WWII history. It's an odd thing, but I probably turned pacifist from reading Audie Murphy - the realization that by the end of the book, all his friends have been shot - hit me. The effect depended, though, on the personalization of those soldiers - on the way they were killed or hurt one by one, over time, individually... something at odds with much of what I have read about the First World War. Killing came in waves, in masses. 20,000 soldiers in a day. (Though by the second world war, people were killing 100,000 civilians in a night; in a second; it's not like WWII lacks in evil.) The scale of WWI's combat - well over a million men shot in several battles, that moved the lines - what? a mile or two? in three months? that would be lost a couple months later? It's hard to wrap your mind around it, the number of men involved, the amount of effort that had to be expended on killing them.

Those are the qualities that make it such a prime source for anti-war films, I think. The madness of it; the lack of moral and political distinctions between the sides; the tendency to swallow heroism and individuality whole (where the fighting is concerned.) I celebrated the day (if "celebrated" is the word) by watching Paths of Glory - which gets at some of this. The arbitrariness of the executions is as good a symbol as any of the complete arbitrariness of the entire war. Those three deaths had no more or less impact on the war than all the others. The mind-boggling stupidity and viciousness of the tactics and strategy of the war are hard to believe, even. But there it is... Kubrick manages a bit of a neat trick there - personalizing the men who died - zeroing in on three of them, while maintaining the sense of randomness in their deaths. They have no chance - their actions are meaningless. They are swallowed whole, but they were alive...



So - to remember - Veterans of all wars, the people stuck in the middle of these things, though they almost never have anything to do with the reasons for being there... and veterans of that war, the war that should have ended all wars, but failed at that as much as it failed at everything else - not ending all wars, but breeding war and horror in its wake. All right.

Start with an interview with the last American veteran, Frank Buckles:



And some vintage footage - here, Ypres, 1914:



The Battle of the Somme:



and gas attack footage:

The Great War Remembered

I think Veteran's Day might be my favorite holiday - or, not favorite, not exactly that - but the one I find most - moving? It's certainly the one "serious" holiday I seem to post about every year. It may be that it has retained much more of its "true meaning" than any others - Memorial Day or Labor Day are markers of the seasons, excuses to have a cookout - they're underlying meanings are, not forgotten, but moved back in the mix. Veteran's Day - barely celebrated anymore (though I think one of the reasons it holds onto some of its power is that when it is celebrated, it's celebrated on the Day Itself - the Monday holidays tend to lose their specificity over time) - means almost nothing except what it means.

Though I suppose what it means is open to dispute. I agree with Jim Henley - that what it means to me is mostly Armistice Day. I much prefer to treat Memorial Day as a day to remember the dead; Armistice Day should be precise. It should be about 11/11/1918, the end of the Great War - WWI needs to be remembered, in itself. That war seems to have a special place in the disasters of this world - it represents a sharp and clear rift in the human experience, and unlike most such events, there is nothing whatsoever one can find in it to take comfort from. It isn't hope dashed or desires thwarted, it's stupidity, callousness, arrogance and mass murder. It was not set off by any great causes - it represented no special evil that had to be stopped (neither side can claim to have been fighting for the good) - nothing good came out of it. The opposite....

It is odd: I studied history in college, and understood the importance of the war, its place in political history,,, but it's only been later that I've felt the full impact of it. I've kept on taking classes, but, since college, mostly film, lit, art classes, or intellectual history... And this just constantly underlines the ways WWI was a break from what came before. Studying German film - how can you miss it? it's everywhere in their films; it shaped their whole culture, obviously. But it shaped everyone - spawned new movements, shaped the art of the 1920s and beyond - and defines how that postwar art is a complete break from before.

The world changed, in almost unprocessable ways, between about 1870 and 1925. (A point I've noted before.) It's a different world after WWI - the maps are different, the idea of what human beings are was different - how we represented ourselves was different. And the end of the war - euphoric as it may have been on November 11, 1918 - didn't resolve anything. The peace turned out as bad as the war - given the fact that the peace led directly to WWII, and even larger even more horrible event - the peace may have been worse than the war. So maybe today is best seen as a chance to mourn for a lost chance - the Armistice should have ended the war, should have found a way to make something good of the horror, to find a way not to do it again. But they botched it....

So it seems good to remember it, the war, the people who served in it. To remember the possibility of peace that came with the end of the war - as well as the failure to achieve peace. Remembering World War One, specifically, is an almost necessarily anti-war act. I have noticed this in films: it's an old adage that it is impossible to make an anti-war war film - war is too cinematic, too exciting. And that's more true than not - but I've noticed that most of the best really anti-war war films are WWI films - Paths of Glory; Johnny Got His Gun; All Quiet on the Western Front; Gallipoli, to name a few. It's a war that is very very difficult to romanticize, to find any redemption in. Even heroism is almost impossible in the trenches - all you can do is die or wait to die. WWII - has villains; wars like Vietnam - it's too hard not to take sides, anti-war films there become anti-Vietnam war films. The closest I can think of to the tone of WWI films might be some post-WWII Japanese films - like Fires on the Plain or the Human Condition, or even, at times, Letters from Iwo Jima. Those films probably get their effects by showing the common soldier's suffering and sense of betrayal alongside the knowledge that they are not fighting for anything worthwhile. The postwar Japanese films that reject Japan's cause in the war while retaining sympathy for the soldiers in the war gets closer to the deep pessimism of World War One films...

I'm rambling a bit. I'll leave with one more note - the last three surviving veterans of the war: Claude Stanley, John Babcock and Frank Buckles. Good work, gentlemen...

Armistice Day

Let us again celebrate the (temporary) (incomplete) end of The Great War. 4 years of pointless murder that continued to poison the world for the rest of the century. (Our current war in Iraq is a descendant of the pure line.) By most standards, it is hard to surpass WWI for sheer empty horror. It remade the world (not necessarily for the better), and remade the human mind, again - not necessarily for the better... Though as a naked lunch moment, it probably did its share of good, revealing the pervasive corruption in the world before the war. It's hard to claim innocence in anything after 1914, or to trust anyone who pretends to innocence. It's a war steeped in sadness, with no sense of accomplishment or even relief about it.

Eric Bogle's song does justice to the horrors and pointlessness of it all. Here are the Pogues, since that's the version I have lived with for 20+ years, and because someone has put together a nice video for the song.

Two Films and Remembrance

Checking in with a couple links and a movie or two... First - Armistice Day is over, but there are a few more hours of Veteran's day - there's a great post on the Great War on Making Light, with links to film footage and much more, and a nice link from Lawyers Guns and Money to a list of the remaining surviving veterans of the war to end all wars. There's much to be said for Farley's comments about the specificity of this holiday: WWI was a pretty sharp and decisive break with something - you can trace a direct line from damn near anything that's happened since back to it. From modern art to WWII to the end of colonialism to horror movies...

...including prohibition, and after prohibition, the "war on drugs" in all it's stupid variations... and thus, American gangsterism, the tradition of American crime fiction, and the Coen Brothers! And Sidney Lumet... two new takes on that venerable genre came out this weekend... Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is a new version of the ever popular heist gone wrong picture - in this case, Philip Seymour Hoffman (as a dope fiend embezzler) lures Ethan Hawke (as his loser little brother) into an ill advised scheme to rob a mom and pop jewelry store... heh heh heh... I hope it doesn't spoil anything to say it goes spectacularly wrong. It's a fine little film - it reminded me somewhat of Exiled: a pure genre picture, made for the pure pleasure of going through all the paces of the genre - not quite up to Johnny To's technical chops, but similarly blessed with first rate actors biting into meaty roles... None of it adds up to a thing, except the plain pleasure fo the style, the genre, the craft of it, which we are invited to share without illusions...

No Country for Old Men starts somewhere like that: a genre tale told with full attention to the specific pleasures of the genre itself. But it keeps going. First - because the Coen brothers have filmmaking chops that surpass Johnny To - partly since they bring the same command to everything, not just the set pieces, but even on the merits: they are better story tellers - much of this film is virtually silent: men running, chasing, searching, sometimes fighting... dialogue when it comes up is almost incidental (especially in the first half) - though it can pack a punch... The story itself is as generic as anything in the Lumet film: a schmoe finds a suitcase of money, various bad guys are looking for it, he has to lam, the bad guys come after him (and each other), a trail of bodies ensues. Good enough and well told on the face of it, it slides toward something more as it goes... Peter Keough at the Phoenix talks about Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, magnificent, while sporting an unfortunate late 70s page boy haircut) as Death, and the film as being about Death: which is just about right. The film is, basically, a hideous and intolerable allegory about Death: random, inescapable, the end of every story. It is to their credit that they do this, incorporate a walking symbol into the film, and make him fit, make the story work on its own terms. And - because they find new ways to tell the story: they can surprise you, even when you know what's coming, and how, they find a way to tell it that can take you unawares. It's impressive work. They've had a bit of a down run lately - I like The Man Who Wasn't There a good deal less than a lot of people - and no one defends their next two films. This is a nice return - maybe not up to their best films (Fargo, The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou? - that's a damned impressive stretch; plus Raising Arizona, I say) - but close.