Impressive and harrowing, or pleasant and anodyne: that's my choice of from films this weekend

We saw a strange pair of films this weekend. Neither of them particularly uplifting, but one was insightful, the other entertaining. Though to be merely “entertaining” is a sad indictment for one of the great directors of of the seventies and eighties, now long past his best.

First the insightful piece: Leviathan, a 2014 production by Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev. As soon as I say “Russian”, you naturally understand that we’re not talking anything “light-hearted”, let alone “amusing”. “Feel-good”? Forget it.

The film is set in a sadly reduced fishing village on the Barents Sea, where mild weather means that the puddles thaw. So picture spectacular views of wide open spaces, desolate and windswept, great sweeping views of cliffs and a sea that doesn’t begin to tempt you to take a dip, plenty of derelict boats and buildings suggestive of a long-past period, a golden age when people merely suffered from poverty and boredom but didn’t yet have to cope with the enlightened rule of Vladimir Putin.

Yep. Spectacular. And that's about as cheerful as it gets.

Putin's portrait hangs in the official buildings. There’s rather a good scene in which the main character, Nikolai, goes out with his supposed friends from the local police to do some target shooting, and the most senior cop produces a serious of portraits they can fire at: Lenin, Brezhnez, Gorbachev… None of the present regime, though: there isn’t yet sufficient “historical perspective.”

In this setting we’re regaled with a long tale (two hours twenty minutes) of betrayal, infidelity, oppression and corruption, against which there is no effective remedy, but only the temporary anaesthetic of vodka by the tumblerful. It’s a powerful tale, well told, but if you’re looking for a happy ending, look again.

It seems the Russian Minister of Culture didn’t like the film, which he felt gave a view of his country which he didn’t recognise. It seems the Ministry is proposing guidelines that prevent films being made that denigrate the national culture. That rather suggests Zvyagintsev got it about right.

This morning I heard US commentator Joseph Nye on BBC Radio 4 describing Russia as a “nation in decline”. I can imagine Putin’s Culture Ministry wouldn’t be keen on that view, and it’s certainly what comes across from the film: Nicolai declines rather more quickly but one can’t help feeling his country’s not far behind.

The other film? Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight. Normally I’d do everything in my power to avoid using the word “nice”, but this is certainly a “nice film.” Or more precisely a “nice little film.” Fine stereotypical characters, especially well-portrayed by Colin Firth as the hard-boiled rationalist who’s never going to be fooled (or will he be?) by Erica Leerhsen, the spiritualist fraud (or is she a fraud? You won’t find out till the end of the film – that’s how exciting it gets – but if you’re worried about the stress of the suspense, don’t be: believe me, you’ll cope with it.)

As an antidote to harrowing tales from the shores of the Barents Sea, Magic in the Moonlight works perfectly. Even as a pleasant hour and a half on a much warmer sea – it’s set on the Côte d’Azur – when you’re too tired for anything more challenging – or indeed more rewarding. Besides the film’s made by a great lover of jazz and set in the jazz age, so the music’s fun.

Pretty camerawork
And you'll never guess what happens between these two

As a piece worthy of the director of Annie Hall, Manhattan or even Mighty Aphrodite and Play it again, Sam, it leaves you wondering how far the mighty can fall.

Still, there are worse ways of passing the end of the evening. As for Leviathan, well it certainly won’t cheer you up, but it you like your magic realism gritty, it won’t disappoint either.

The scientific method: authoritative, impregnable. Even in the hands of humans

What gives science its authority is its ability to test ideas, in a way that can be repeated by other people, and based on prediction rather than on hindsight.

In a field like history, in which I worked for a while, one looks back on events and tries to come up with a plausible explanation for them. But plausibility isn’t proof, and there’s no clear way of distinguishing which of two or more plausible explanations is true (if any of them), which is why history is a subject of so much debate and revision.

For instance, today, on the 70th anniversary of the Dresden bombing, though we still feel horror at the number of deaths, we believe there were far fewer than Kurt Vonnegut mourned when he wrote Slaughterhouse Five. There are voices suggesting today that the bombing was even, perhaps, justified – including the voices of a number of survivors.

Dresden after the bombing of 13 February 1945

Science isn’t like that. A theory suggests that something must be a certain way, so we take a look – and it’s important that just anyone with the necessary skill and equipment can take a look – and if we find that things aren’t that way, the theory needs revising. If it is, we don’t necessarily accept the theory as true, but we feel we can perhaps keep using it as a helpful set of assumptions.

It’s true that there are some applications in the life sciences in particular, where we may be dealing with an individual’s reaction to a particular pathogen (or, to use a more technical term, a grubby little germ) and demanding that an observation be reproducible may be a tall order. However, generally, insisting on predictions that can be tested in reproducible experiments is a powerful methodology that has served us well.

One of the more famous such confirmations concerned Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (not sure whether the capital letters are absolutely obligatory, but they somehow seem deserved). He predicted that light would be bent by gravity around really massive objects. So when light coming to us from a distant star has to travel close to the sun, it would be bent towards it, and the star would look further away from it than it should be.

In normal conditions, you can’t check that: the light from the sun completely drowns out any star shining behind it. But in a total eclipse, the sun’s light goes and stars apparently close to it can be seen. It ought therefore to be possible to see their apparent position.

Arthur Eddington
Confirmed Einstein's theory. Which he admired

In 1919, Arthur Eddington organised two expeditions to carry out the necessary observations during that year’s total eclipse, one in Brazil, the other in West Africa. Their measurement of the apparent displacement of the stars didn’t just to confirm that the phenomenon was happening, but that it was happening to the degree that Einstein’s calculations suggested.

Staggering proof of the power of Einstein’s theory, greeted with great acclaim around the world.

Except. The bending of visible light is slight. And during a total eclipse all sorts of strange currents get going in the atmosphere, creating all manner of problems seeing through it. Many people looking at Eddington’s photographs can only ask: how on Earth can you really assert anything from pictures as muddy and uncertain as these?

Eddington's picture of the 1919 total eclipse (negative and positive)
They support precise measurements, do they? Seriously? 

Interestingly, measurements carried out since by telescopes outside the Earth’s atmosphere, or on radio waves where the phenomenon is far greater, have all confirmed Eddington’s findings. So we can breathe easy (well, as easy as the weird picture of the universe that emerges from General Relativity allows). Still, it does leave a bit of a question, doesn’t it? Did Eddington really see what he claimed he’d seen? Or was it just too convenient?

The scientific method: rigorous, systematic, impartial. And authoritative as a result.

But it has to be applied by men and women. Who aren’t always quite as rigorous and systematic as one might hope. And who might, perhaps, be a little partial to one particular theory – such as Einstein’s.

Still, Eddington has ultimately been vindicated. So who cares whether his results were reliable or not? Doesn’t matter, does it? 

Or does it?

Nicola Sturgeon: another voice raised for a (moderately) radical approach to our problems

Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, speaking in London today, called for an end to austerity policies and described their continuation as “morally unjustifiable and economically unsustainable.”

Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP:
A radicalism so mild it's barely radical. But it's still refreshing to hear

Consensus is attractive when the alternative is conflict, but much less so when it just means conformity. Especially when what we’re conforming to is principally a matter of fashion.

It has been fashionable in the leading economies since the 1970s or 1980s, to proclaim belief in the working of free markets with minimal regulation. That view tended to come in tandem with faith in trickle-down economics: a free market will allow highly entrepreneurial individuals to make a great deal of money; when they spend it, the resultant wealth will trickle down to the rest of society.

Many of the measures that had been put in place to control, in particular, the financial sector were dropped during the time of Thatcher and Reagan. Unleashed, the banks took increasing risks in order to amass unprecedented fortunes, until they took a risk too many and came unstuck in 2008. At which point, people who had spent decades decrying state intervention, turned to the state – more precisely to all taxpayers, including the poorest – to rescue them from the disaster they’d brought down on themselves.

Unfortunately, holding out their hands to the state didn’t mean that these leaders of economic thinking were prepared to dump the ideology which, particularly in its trickle down aspect, had made them inconceivably rich over a generation.

The success of trickle-down was measured by their wealth; its failure by the impoverishment of everyone else. As Will Hutton argues in his insightful piece in today’s Guardian, “wages have fallen, in real terms, by the greatest degree in more than half a century, inequality of income and wealth have risen to desperately high levels that may soon metastasise into a serious economic and social cancer.”

Sadly, in Europe we’ve been driven since the 2008 crash by such carcinogenic thinking. The consensus claims that austerity is the only way out of this crisis: reduce government deficits and debt by slashing public spending, and we shall cure our problems. As Hutton points out, all this is achieving is to create a society in which “millions of workers struggle in a harsh demimonde of temporary jobs and zero-hour contracts.”

And yet these ideas, the new fashion, merely replaced economic thinking which could really explain our problems. The theories of John Maynard Keynes showed that it isn’t by reducing expenditure that a government gets out of economic difficulty, but by making investments. That provides employment which increases the tax take from workers, and it stimulates the economy to grow by increasing demand – which also increases the tax take. So paradoxically, the government may well get its deficit down more quickly by spending more, not less.

But we’ve been living the Reagan-Thatcher consensus. Keynes is out. Austerity and trickle-down are in. And, sadly, conformity to that credo has extended way beyond the traditional conservative parties. Many in the Labour Party, not least Tony Blair and his one-time voice piece Peter Mandelson, who famously – infamously – once declared himself “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.”

Well, I’d be relaxed about it too, if getting filthy rich didn’t always happen on the backs of a lot of poor people getting a great deal poorer.

To stand for a different set of ideas, for Keynesian ideas, is regarded by the proponents of austerity as a dangerous reversion to old-style, wildly left-wing socialism. Which is odd, since whatever Keynes was, he wasn’t a socialist. He wanted capitalism better managed, as does Hutton.

Calling for better management of our capitalist economy is dangerously radical? 

Seriously?

Keynes: hardly a left-wing firebrand
But we need his approach back, and that has to come from the Left

Fortunately the conformity to this dire consensus hasn’t been total. Every now and then a voice speaks out against these failed and failing views. And, recently, sometimes those voices have been heard.

I spoke yesterday about Alexis Tsipras in Greece. Succeed or fail, at least he’s trying a different approach in a country driven to despair by the previous policy of austerity.

Now Nicola Sturgeon has also spoken out. She, like many of us, feels there’s nothing tremendously inspiring about a Labour Party promising to do the same as the Tories, but a bit less, and a bit less fast.

And yet what she’s proposing isn’t that radical: an increase in spending of £180bn over five years of a parliament. That represents less than two years of running the English NHS, spread over five. Not exactly revolutionary: like Hutton, like Keynes, she just wants capitalism to behave more fairly.

But compared to everyone else calling for more cuts, isn’t it refreshing?

How sad that it has to come from a party whose main aim is the independence of Scotland. That the great party of the left in England, the Labour Party, didn’t beat her to it.

Ed Milliband, Ed Balls: come on, if Sturgeon can do it, surely you too can speak out for a real alternative to the failed policies of the Tories?

Time for the left to raise its game

Striking words, I felt, at the weekend from Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian:

Labour… [looks]… like a team facing an open goal and poised to miss. They need to raise their game – and fast.

Yes, I thought. We had Ed Miliband at the latest Labour Conference, insisting on proving the quality of his memory by delivering his key speech without notes, and then suffering a total memory failure and forgetting to talk about the economy (not the least significant of issues, one feels). And last week we had his Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer incapable of naming a single Labour donor, except for “Bill… Bill somebody…”

Ed Miliband: it's time to set the electorate alight

They seem to be taking aim at the government, but hitting their own foot.

Five years of shambolic government has hugely increased national debt while imposing austerity to reduce it. Austerity that has only left us with healthcare in crisis, education near bankruptcy and a police force unable to deal with crime. That sounds like an open goal. But Labour seem unable to get the ball into the net, with the opinion polls showing the two main parties level pegging.

What is it about this leadership that seems to leave it as though frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car? Why can’t it find a note that inspires the electors? The message that persuades the swing voters we so badly need, that it deserves the chance to form a government?

I keep watching Greece. I know that Alexis Tsipras may fall flat on his face and Syriza may find itself incapable of getting the nation’s creditors to ease their draconian debt conditions. But right now, at least he’s inspiring, he’s taking bold action, re-employing people thrown onto the jobless queue without hope of a job, raising the minimum wage to help alleviate the pain of utter, jaw-breaking poverty.

He’s telling the international financial community that he values their ability to make huge sums rather less than the ability of those who are suffering the worst hardship to feed and heat themselves.

Why can’t the British Labour Party strike that kind of note? Instead it seems exclusively concerned with convincing the business community that it can do just as well under Labour as under the Tories. And yet we all know that the business community will vote massively for the Conservatives whatever Labour leaders say?

Today, to add insult to injury, we had Nigel Dodds of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, generally far closer to the Tories than to Labour, saying that contacts he’d had with some Labour backbenchers suggested they’d rather a coalition with his party than with the Scottish SNP. Even though the SNP is firmly anchored on the left. Dodds may be making this all up, of course, but in my bones I fear he isn’t.

Britain’s not in as dire a state as Greece. We don’t need to be as radical as Tsipras. But some radicalism, surely, we can dig out of somewhere? Something that distinguishes us from the Conservatives? Something our supporters can rally round?

I have to confess that I wasn’t being entirely honest in quoting Freedland. He wasn’t talking about Britain, but about Israel. Where another right-wing government has left an open goal for Labour to shoot at – and finds Labour unable to take the shot.

Now I live in Britain and I’m a member of the British Labour Party. So my main priority is to see the Cameron government go and Labour back in office. But I have to admit if there’s a nation in even greater need of ridding itself of a dire government, it has to be Israel – and it would do the entire world a huge favour by dumping Netanyahu.

But, hey, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get rid of our mini-Netanyahus over here too. That needs a Labour leadership that gets some fire in its belly and inspires the electorate. As Freedland puts it: that needs to raise its game – and fast.

Parenting. We do it so well. Simply by instinct.

“Will you cut that out?” yelled the exasperated mother from the swimming pool changing cubicle behind mine, her voice battling with the sound of the wailing child.

The injunction had the effect you’d expect. The child’s crying grew louder.

“Honestly, it’s always the same. You just have to go and spoil everything.”

A louder explosion of wailing.

“Every time. You just can’t stop yourself.”

A pause. Sobbing.

“Well, don’t think you’re going to have any friends. You’re just a horrible little girl. No one’s going to come over to see a horrible little girl like you. Clara isn’t coming.”

More sobs.

“And Caroline isn’t coming either. No, she isn’t. Why should she come and see such a horrible little girl?”

New outburst of wailing, with some barely distinguishable words.

“Sorry? No, you’re not sorry. Why would a horrible little girl be sorry?”

The wailing dies to sobs, to whimpers, to soft crying as the child regains control.

in a shaky voice: “I really am sorry, Mummy.”

“No you’re not. But you will be.”

The wailing starts up again.

The great test we all just naturally know how to pass

Life calls on many of us to do two key jobs, with little preparation.

For one of them, staff management, we are at least able to call on some training, such as it is, though it isn’t much: usually abstract with little bearing on everyday business life. It’s all Drucker and Maslow and countless other academics, but little to do with the team member who’s missed another deadline, but also happens to be a harassed mother let down by her childminder.

For our other great responsibility, parenting, we generally receive no training at all. Especially now that we no longer live in extended families, with grandparents and older siblings around to offer the gentle, tangential hint that there might be a better way of doing things. And occasionally a little help.

Bringing up a whole new generation, securing the longevity of our species, we do by the seat of our pants.

But then, as the exchange I overheard at the pool confirms, we’re just naturally born to do it well. As Bill Bailey would put it, we take it to it like a duck to a pancake roll.

Who needs training?

The remittance man: find him today in the Gulf

Dubai is a weird place. The words “where every prospect pleases and only man is vile” would apply to it perfectly, if only the prospects were more pleasing.

The first problem is that Dubai’s on the wrong end of a long slope. That means that dust constantly blows over the city from the desert behind it. The air’s never pleasant to breathe, and there’s a constant haze spoiling the view, such as it is.

The view is mostly man-made. And the theme is simple: build it big. So Dubai is all huge expanses of concrete upwards, and wide stretches of tarmac horizontally. Colossal buildings linked by fast roads with little or nothing done for pedestrians. And constantly humming through it all is a hymn to money. I’ve never seen such a collection of yachts in the harbour, so large, so luxurious, so completely immobile.

Dubai: where few prospects please
but the scent of money's everywhere

It’s the money that decides the human mix too. A mix which doesn’t mix: humanity in Dubai is rigidly divided by class, which in there means race.

At the top of the hierarchy the tiny number of Dubai citizens, none of whom I ever saw: presumably they move only from air-conditioned mansion to air-conditioned shop by air-conditioned, tinted-window car.

Next are what we casually refer to as Westerners: Americans, Europeans, Japanese.

Behind them come the underprivileged. First the citizens of former Soviet Republics: Russians, Kasakhs, and others from the region. They’re the waiters, the receptionists and the chambermaids. Or, so I’m told “chambermaids.”

And finally the huge army of Pakistanis, Nepalese and other South Asians, who form the queues each morning at the building sites, working for a pittance, in dangerous conditions, with minimal rights.

Migrant workers in Dubai
Exploited, endangered, enjoying few rights

This is reminiscent of nothing so much as the period of European colonialism. But with one difference: European colonialists were at the top of the tree, behaving with ugly arrogance. In Dubai they’re one level down and have to be a bit more careful, behaving with ugly obsequiousness.

A colourful figure from that colonial time has been reincarnated today, in a rather reduced version: the remittance man. This was the Black Sheep sent away, usually after some scandal at home, to a distant colony where his small remittance would allow his family and friends to ignore him.

You get quite a lot of that kind of character out in Dubai these days. Disreputable, slightly fly-blown, always looking for the scheme that’s going to make them rich. And some of them, suprisingly, manage.

I met one of them out there. Sam (that wasn’t his name and, as far as I know, it still isn’t) had been Chief Executive of a company he’d founded with a group of colleagues. They’d had an innovative idea in software development, and got a system out to market fast, giving them several years of impressive success. Sadly, however, when small companies find a clever notion, the big boys won’t be far behind. They have the resources to put huge teams onto them, and eventually turn out something more powerful, more effective and easier to support. Suddenly, the small company’s playing catch up.

What it needs is another smart idea, to get some edge over the big players again. But good ideas aren’t that common or simple to come up with. And Sam’s company didn’t.

His reaction was quite a common one: under pressure, he would disappear. He’d turn off his mobile and clear off somewhere that nobody could find him. Leaving his colleagues in disarray.

Eventually, they got tired of him and pushed him out of the Chief Executive position. But they didn’t sack him – indeed they left him with a massive salary and, of course, his shares.

Things continued to get worse, and he kept on disappearing. But, freed of even the responsibilities he ignored as Chief Exec, he’d disappear a lot further. He started heading off regularly to the Gulf. There he could enjoy the pink gin existence, with few questions asked, of the remittance man. All he had to do was attend a few meetings out there and report home about how good the prospects were.

That left him convinced that he was an important contributor to his company. I once had the privilege of working with another former Chief Executive like him: he once assured me “I feel I’m working at all times, whenever I’m thinking about the company.”

“So,” I asked him, “as long as you think about the company, you’re working even if you’re lying in the bath?”

Sadly, he explained to me that this was exactly how he saw things.

The beauty for Sam was that he could be out in the Gulf whenever things got tough at home. Eventually, his colleagues sold the company and even got a reasonable deal for it. Inevitably, in time, the new owners decided it was time for a new broom. Many of the old guard, the people who’d built the company and its products, were sacked.

But not Sam. He’d persuaded the owners that the Gulf was the place. The new Eldorado, the land adventurers from Europe sought to bring gold home. The Gulf was the place that could provide gold today, for a company that knew how to play its cards. Sam had persuaded the new owners that he was the man to play the cards. And he was out of the country when the axe fell on his colleagues.

How much gold has he brought home? I saw Sam out there six years ago. At that stage, after two years in the region, he had nothing but glittering promises. To my knowledge, today, after eight years, he’s still produced nothing.

Except for a good salary for himself. On top of the seven-figure sum he had for his shares.

It’s wonderful to see the old traditions being maintained. Fortune favours the guy who knows how to be out of the way at the right time, bluff the people in power, and sell snake oil at a high price.

Leaves you with a lovely warm feeling, doesn’t it?

Misty's diary: snow and misplaced faith in a domestic

Another entry from Misty’s diary. In which he records his disappointment at the limitations on the magical abilities of one of the domestics.

February 2015

Domestic number 2 thinks I’m pretty dumb. And he’s not entirely wrong: the problem is that I keep underestimating just how incompetent he is. Despite my repeated experience, I nurse expectations of him. Massively unrealistic expectations.

This came to a head the other day when we got that ghastly white stuff falling out of the sky. Domestic number 1 always gets excited about these terrible moments.

“At last,” she cries out, “snow. We can get the skis out again.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. Getting the skis out? They did that a couple of years ago. It was frankly embarrassing. They came up the street on skis, making complete berks of themselves. Who on earth skis in a town? If you have to do that kind of bloody silly thing, do it somewhere way out in the country. Somewhere nobody sensible can see you.

As for me, I loathe that miserable cold stuff. I work on my paws. I keep them clean, I keep them neat. Snow? Half a dozen steps and all my efforts are for nothing. What it does to fur, my dear, has to be seen to be believed. It really shouldn’t be allowed.

Cold. Wet. Miserable. And wreaks havoc on the paws

Well, the other day had been tough and I simply hadn’t noticed the snow. 

So when I saw Domestic number 2 by the door I trotted over quite optimistically. I’ve got him trained to spot when I want to go out, though it took some extra effort to get him to cut out the sarky comments. You know, quips like:

“What, too lazy to go out of the cat flap and climb the fence?”

Even when he used to make that kind of remark, he’d still open the door. However, I can frankly do without that kind of crack. So sadly it escalated into one of those teeth and tongue things: my teeth teaching control of his tongue.

But when I got to the door the other day, ready to dash out, what did I see? Bloody white stuff all over the place.

No joke.

So I shot back inside before he could push me out. Not that he usually dares – that’s a Domestic number 1 trick – but you never know when he might decide to try it on and risk the consequences.

Of course, he laughed. “Ah, not so keen now, then, are we? A bit cold on the delicate little paws?”

Like he goes out barefoot in the snow…

But, and this is a habit of his, it wasn’t long before he was back at the door.

He takes rubbish out a lot. You know, he’ll go out with a couple of cardboard boxes, walking straight past the empty plastic bottle. Then he’ll see the plastic bottle, and take that out. And then – oh, yes, the yoghurt carton he’d carefully left near the door so as not to forget it. You have to wonder whether he enjoys his little visits to the bins.

Still, I’m not complaining. It’s a chance to get out by the front door each time. And I treasure them.

So I went over to be let out again.

“What, really, you think the snow will have gone? In ten minutes?” 

It hadn’t and he enjoyed having a good snigger at my expense. Smug git.

But I wasn’t so stupid as to think it would just have gone of its own accord. My mistake was putting too much faith in him. Again. He’s the character who can conjure meat out of a tin, without even hunting. I mistakenly imagined getting rid of some nasty cold wet stuff would be child’s play. And I reckoned he’d have done it by then.

Seems not. Magicking food out of the fridge? No problem, apparently. But getting rid of cold wet stuff? Beyond his power. Like putting in cat flaps.

Ah well. I fall for it every time. I expect him to amaze me and, sadly, disappointingly, he always does. Leaving me looking a fool.

But all through his own incompetence.

A tough day. spent minding my own business.
And not noticing the snow