These past two months, I've not been very healthy ... the cold I had through October has just hung on week by week, and come last Saturday I was struck down by something so brutal that it knocked me off my feet for three days. I'm quite sure it was covid though the two home tests both came back negative. The weight on my lungs, though I felt little breathlessness, coupled with a weakness and chills that made minimal self-care nearly useless, says otherwise. I've recovered steadily these last three days, to where I now seem to have only a head cold. It's been unpleasant.
I want to write a post. I've done just a little writing of late: editing for the workplace and some on the wiki, all at a turtle's pace. I have an idea for a post but as of writing this sentence, it's naught but scattered pieces and thoughts. I think it'll be a swing and a miss, but here goes. Warning, spoilers.
The Hundred Foot Journey is a film released in 2014 about a family from Mumbai who are seeking a better life in France, where they hope to establish a restaurant. The story thread follows the young Hassan, whose fascination with food was emplaced by his mother, whose passing away violently at the film's start initiates the family's journey.
Though Hassan is a naturally gifted Indian chef, he at first becomes fascinated with French cooking techniques, the cooking of which he succeeds at through diligence and talent. Soon after, he learns to blend his heritage with French cuisine, achieving success and fame through the process that delivers him into the epicentre of Parisian haut cuisine and the "next big thing." The film's development of this narrative is careful, patient, intuitive and completely believable; this, I argue, from twenty years that I've spent in the food industry in light of the people I've met and worked with.
Nothing I've said so far could possibly spoil the film for anyone who enjoys food. There is much going on that I haven't mentioned, and won't ... but with one more spoiler, I wish to explain that this Parisian life turns out to be wholly unsatisfying for the character. The film manages this subtly; it would be easy for an individual without experience in food to believe that the end is all about family ... but the details of the film are quite clear.
The pursuit of new things, for the sake of novelty, is empty. Appearance for the sake of appearance is hollow and lifeless. Personal satisfaction cannot be found in doing "great things," because such things are transient. Once they've been done, once the celebration is passed, it's as though the great thing was never done, and the rest of one's life opens like a yawning abyss devoid of meaning. This is what Hassan realises. He ceases to pursue the new; he turns his back upon Paris. He returns to cooking good food, for the sake of the food being good. This is why I like the film.
Forgive my indulgence in this rhetoric. It's only that of late, I've progressively become aware of something that — though having encountered it many times before — has never been quite so clear as now. I ascribe this to a number of chance films I've seen over the last ten days, about which I've had time to think and consider.
Once upon a time there was an actress named Marlene Dietrich. The reader may have heard of her. Spanning over a portion of the 20th century, she was perhaps the most glamorous and intensely mysterious woman in the world, possessing qualities that allowed her a career that would defy comparison to any actress that's worked in the past thirty years. It's difficult to truly express what this meant. Dietrich's relationship to Germany in the 1940s, to millions of G.I.'s, to the presence of sexuality in film, would be difficult to grasp for anyone without some sort of personal experience with that time and the people who loved her.
This, I'm finding, is one of the more bizarre elements of growing older. To be clear, I have no personal memory of the time that Dietrich was a moving force in the world. I was born in 1964, well after her "heyday," and to me she was just another old star like Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart. But I was alive and conscious in the 1970s, when the mention of such persons was a common, everyday part of conversation. Were I to write this in 1971, there'd have been no need to explain who Dietrich was.
I have more to say about her, but first I want to address this phenomenon ... not as something negative or positive, but just as something that's impossible not to notice. One of the more fascinating things about the decline of fame isn't that people cease to be famous ... but that idioms and common references to things steadily dwindle away. This is hard to explain without having experienced it, but I'll try.
A couple weeks ago, listening to Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (published in 1951), a paragraph in the book referred to events in "Little America." Hearing that, I had to pause and remember what that meant. Naturally, the reader might think of the show on Apple TV, but this reference was to a part of Antarctica that was claimed by the United States during the mid-20th century as part of their scientific exploration and research efforts. In my youth, the region was mentioned as often as the moon with respect to science writing and fiction, as a place of great adventure, as somewhere so profoundly unreachable that it thrummed with romance.
But, until reading the book, I don't think I've heard the term used in more than 20 years. It's still in my head ... but for nearly everyone younger than 50, the term might just as well never existed. And that's just one of hundreds of such terms for every decade that's slipped into the past ... that, for me, are still progressively slipping into the past.
I'm not a "live-in-the-past" sort of person. I'm educated about the present too, as much as I can be ... which weirdly makes all the detritus from the past that much more strangely irrelevant. To pull a moment of thoroughly irrelevant garbage out on the spur of the moment, I saw the television episode of Murphy Brown where she had the kid, personally witnessing all the hullabaloo that went around on the news at the time, talked about it with people at the university and so on — and it's always funny to me when some youtuber dredges up an event like that, reads a few magazine articles and then purports to shove out a cruddily-researched stockumentary. I'm always stuck going in my head, "It wasn't like that at all," but what good would it be to say that? For one thing, as details of world history go, it's utterly irrelevant; for another, all history is changed.
Let's go back to Marlene Dietrich. By the 1950s, she was growing tired of the industry. She could choose any film she liked and if she graciously agreed to appear in a film, the film did well. But her discontent had become well-known; people talking about her would never fail to mention that they wished she'd work more. That is, people talking around me when I was a young kid, completely fascinated with watching old films, as I still am now. In her last decade with Hollywood, before returning to her cabaret roots, she chose to work for friends like Fritz Lang, Orson Welles or Stanley Kramer, masters of filmcraft in their day.
In 1951, she played a small part in an obscure film based on a Nevil Shute novel, No Highway in the Sky, working with Jimmy Stewart. The story is immaterial. Dietrich plays a famous film star, essentially herself, who has reason to believe the plane she's on is going to crash. This allows her to give this speech:
"The moment and each one is like, kind of a present isn't it? You know what I was thinking about just then? All the people who come to my funeral. That'll be quite an occasion ... there's my agent. Oh, he'll be so sad. He had five more years to go at ten per cent. And then there's Laureen Carin; oh, she'll cry the most. She'll give a beautiful performance. And then she'll try to get the part in the picture I was going to make. I suppose that's why I don't feel the way I thought I would. I would have stopped working quite a while ago if I could have figured out what to do with myself. I was married three times but it never came to anything. I wouldn't be surprised if it was all my fault. Maybe providence is trying to tell me something. Maybe it took a first class high dive into the middle of the Atlantic to make me quit."
What an odd vignette, from this star, to a largely British audience; the film was made at Denham Studios in Hampshire England, in a time when such films rarely jumped the pond. But of course Dietrich made many British films in the 1930s. Did she find it funny? There are a dozen self-referential moments in the film, as one might expect. It can be seen for free on youtube; I watched it for the first time last week.
"Greatness" is not what we think it is. For the great, as I said, it's something that happened ... not something that's happening. I don't want to haul out Sunset Boulevard here. There are literally thousands of real life examples, we don't need to reach for fictional ones. If you're old enough to remember the 1990s, sit for a moment and consider how many names you can dredge from your memory right now, you have no idea what they're doing, or even if they're alive. How many from the '80s? From the '70s? And if you've lived long enough, how many celebrities, sports figures or politicians can you remember taking for granted as recently as 9/11, who aren't dead, but might as well be?
Value in life is not found through greatness. It's found in the standard we hold ourselves to, and only that.
Well, I've had my say. I'll apply myself now to getting healthier and pursuing work on my game world. Someday, I hope I feel well enough to actually write my book.
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