Movie break: Home is where the horror is: Kubrick’s The Shining (1980)

[Minor edits done 2/4/13.]

This is a very familiar film, and doesn’t need much commentary from me. Whether you’re about my age—I first saw it in the theater in 1980, and have seen it probably close to two dozen times since, in different venues—or you’re among the younger generations who have sampled it since, it seems a landmark in modern horror films. But it seems that received wisdom, or popular attitudes, about it can fall into two camps: those who admire it as a sort of high-water mark of a kind of (1970s) filmmaking (or as the tour de force sort of movie Stanley Kubrick could make); and those who feel it is almost self-parody, or has admirable qualities but also “unrelatable” qualities.

What most may galvanize people’s views about it lie in some of the same aspects: for instance, its bent toward a kind of clinical realism in watching a man have a psychological breakdown, eventually to turn into the stereotypical “ax murderer,” is what makes it fascinating; but the film’s detractors can include those who are appalled by domestic abuse and may be turned off, at best, by the same realistic depiction of a man nastily berating and, later, threatening his wife.

The film, of course, famously deviates from its source, Stephen King’s novel, in removing some of the more fantastic elements (such as shrubs that turned into moving animals), and ended up being a sort of realistic look at a “decompensating” man, with little reference to supernatural elements other than ghostly figures (like those of Lloyd the bartender, played by Joe Turkel, who worked with Kubrick in Paths of Glory [1957], and Delbert Grady, played by Philip Stone, who also worked with Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange [1971] and Barry Lyndon [1975]). The hotel, of course, is alleged to have a certain otherworldly spirit about it—the murders and such that occurred there make it an ominous source of energy that can lead newcomers to go astray.

But a lot of this, it would seem, was something Kubrick apparently wanted to have be equally interpretable as either “real supernatural” elements or as figments of Jack Torrance’s increasingly sick imagination. (The novelist Diane Johnson—ironic to consider as having worked on this—cowrote the screenplay with Kubrick.) As it happens, Kubrick had to concede to a need to have one ghost, that of Grady, be a deus ex machina that lets Jack out of the storage room into which Jack’s wife Wendy has locked him. This was not merely Jack’s imagination running amok.

So if Kubrick wanted, like Roman Polanski with Rosemary’s Baby (1968), to have the supernatural stuff be as attributable to a nervous breakdown in the protagonist as much as attributable to real evil and such, in Polanski’s case the ambiguity only broke down in the final scene, where Rosemary (amid a rather ghastly christening party or such) finds her baby. In The Shining, the “realistic presence” of the supernatural is a conundrum that the film can’t quite escape. The film braids supernatural with realistic elements so that it doesn’t fully come down on the side of one or the other. But we still enjoy the film for its smooth, highly engineered quality.

Micro-looks at parts of the film

Here are a few little notes on the film—and there are many Web sites dedicated to it, too, which you can find if you Google “the shining.” (There was one, put up by a knowledgeable fan, that I enjoyed looking at repeatedly years ago, but I can’t seem to find it now.)

* How big was that Beetle? Jack drives that oft-seen emblem of the 1960s and ’70s, a Volkswagen Beetle. Did you notice that, with the three of the family members in that little car (with rear engine, air-cooled and not with normal coolant-filled radiator), it is incomprehensible how they got the mountain of luggage (is it 700 pounds’ worth?) into the car that is in the lobby of the Overlook Hotel when Jack et al. move in? This could well have been a joke of Kubrick’s; he was always precise about being realistic with details.

* Duvall was run roughshod to produce distrait Wendy. Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall, is a bit of a cartoon, yet despite her seeming to be drawn as a pathetic, put-upon housewife a good part of the time, she still ends up being basically sympathetic. By film’s end, she seems to have been the strong one to save her child (who is resourceful in his own right), almost by default. Duvall, also, was famously put under strain by Kubrick’s demands, in order to get the properly “distressed” performance out of her. This has been discussed repeatedly in different ways over the years. In the 1980 making-of doc that is very interesting on a number of counts (it is on the recent two-disk DVD of the film), she is articulate and seems forgiving about Kubrick in discussing how he pressured her. But in some later comments she has made (which I think I saw in a video somewhere), she seemed less forgiving.

Jack Nicholson himself as spoken as if Kubrick engaged in an “end justifies the means” strategy with Duvall in handling her as an actress. In this regard, Duvall isn’t alone; Tippi Hedren in The Birds (1963) has been famously remarked on (including in a recent cable bio-pic on her, The Girl [2012]) as having been put through too-tough treatment by director Alfred Hitchcock in the making of the film (including real birds being attached to her that could apparently do her harm). A more modern example is Alison Lohman, who was subjected to demanding treatment by director Sam Raimi for Drag Me to Hell (2009); she has referred to Raimi as seeming like two personalities, one his friendlier, comradely way and the other his harder way. She has commented that he subjected her to “torture” (this said in a video or quote from a video I saw online). (For more on Lohman, see the second part of my review of Matchstick Men [2003].)

* Some scenes that work really well. Some people seem to talk about Kubrick movies (as in Robert Osborne’s talk with a cohost on a TCM presentation of a Kubrick work) as if parts can be admirable/interesting, but not the whole movie. This is especially true of his later movies, I think—say, from Barry Lyndon (1975) on, when his movies became fewer and further between, and his attention to craft matters became, apparently, increasingly obsessive. (See, if you can find it, the article in The New York Times Magazine of July 4, 1999, on Kubrick, in which various collaborators and other former associates talk about him in a sort of oral history.) In The Shining, some of what I think are the really well-wrought scenes are:

+ When Jack first talks with Ullman, the hotel’s manager, in an initial interview. Some may say this scene displays what can be so idiosyncratic about Kubrick, the fussy attention to visual aspects that owe a lot to still photography (notice the compositional balance, and the color scheme on the desk, including a maybe-somewhat-mocking red, white, and blue in different things echoing the American flag, also present on the desk), and the production method of getting enough takes to get a sort of almost depersonalized, verging-on-boring quality to the performance of the actors. But I have to say I like how this is done in this scene—it conveys how a business interchange can have mixed elements of spontaneity, humdrum quality, disingenuousness, etc. The performances are precise and nuanced. Nicholson in particular is interesting to watch, even if, in this scene, he gives suggestions as Jack Torrance as if this fellow is someone to be a little suspicious about (as to his stability) from Day One.

+ Another well-done scene is where chef Dick Hallorann, played like a deeply patient trouper by Scatman Crothers, talks with Danny over some ice cream that Dick has plied Danny with. Though the scene took an enormous number of takes—according to Steadicam inventor and operator Garrett Brown, one shot of Crothers went to about 170 takes—and though Danny Lloyd, playing Danny Torrance, seems to show in some takes that he is under strain from all the takes (while Lloyd was selected by Kubrick for his ability to have patience with long spells of production), the scene seems to work well with Hallorann speaking with appropriate delicacy to a young boy. Such a situation, today, would raise concerns among middle class parents of boundary issues (“What is that man going into such depth about with my child?”), but overall, Hallorann shows care in approaching Danny about an issue he would naturally be shy about. And this interleaves well with things coming to a head where Danny suddenly “plays the trump card" of revealing he knows there is something ominous about Room 237, which gets Hallorann suddenly defensive, warning Danny in a tough manner to stay out of the room. (By the way, you might notice that Crothers employs an element of Black English—which is not a matter of degraded English but is a dialect of American English—when he says “When someone burns toast”—notice how he leaves off the t at the end of the word toast. I’ve noticed in various contexts that American Blacks elide the end of the consonant blend st, such as to say “toothpas’e” rather than “toothpaste.” This is different, and more subtle, than the more famous tendency of pronouncing ask as “ax.” Saying “ax” may connote lack of refinement, but the elided st doesn’t quite suggest the same.)

+ Another fine scene is where Jack speaks to Danny when Jack is sitting, unable to sleep, on his bed. I will come back to this later.

* Inconsistency about the timing of Jack’s dislocating Danny’s shoulder. The details surrounding Jack’s past fit where he accidentally dislocated Danny’s shoulder are a little murky. In an early scene where Wendy has a discussion with the doctor over an episode Danny has had (which they don’t know had to do with Danny’s capacity for ESP, where he gets a hint of the horror ahead with the hotel), Wendy—with Duvall’s performance in this scene perhaps one of the shakiest in the film—says after Jack dislocated his shoulder, Jack said, seeing his drinking was a problem, that if he did it again, Wendy, you can leave me. And he hasn’t, and “he hasn’t had alcohol in five months,” she notes with some satisfaction.

Yet when Jack is at the bar with Lloyd, he first says he has been “on the wagon” for five months. This squares with Wendy’s claim. But then when Jack is stewing disconsolately over the old issue of his fit, he grouses that it was “three goddam years ago!” Is this true? If it happened three years ago, why did he only stop drinking five months ago? Or is he lying about the “three years”? Though this could well have been a script-writing error on Kubrick’s part, he may have fashioned the detail this way to suggest some unreliability about Jack. (Or maybe other viewers have another theory.)

* Jack confronting Wendy with a long, ominous rant. The most tour-de-force scene that Nicholson pulls off is when, in the second half of the film, he is confronting Wendy in the enormous Colorado Lounge. (By the way, perhaps you heard—to get the snow-reflected, mountaintop light that comes in through the windows, Kubrick used stage lighting that he calculated to be a certain level to produce that light. That isn’t outdoor light you see. Apparently the lighting power was so great that it caused enormous heat in some part of the stage.) I always find this scene fascinating. However many takes Kubrick used (for various shots) to get Jack to be pitched at the fury he shows, with Wendy a crumbling, confused, tearful mess before him, it works quite well on its own terms. But this may be precisely the scene that divides viewers: those who love what Kubrick has wrought with this might feel this scene epitomizes what works well, while those who shudder at a clinical depiction of domestic abuse might find Jack’s intense ranting to get them the willies so much that they condemn the film just on this score.

* Jack declining in personality at the bar. One aspect of the film, written on by a critic, Don Shiach (see Reference), misses the point. This is when Jack is sitting at the bar with Lloyd serving him, specifically Nicholson’s depiction of a sort of hick, with the acting seeming hammy. Is this merely bad acting, as Shiach suggests? (A caption for a photo in the book notes, “This shot from the ballroom sequence gives some idea of how overripe Nicholson’s performance was.”) Kubrick was too much of a stickler for details to have let a performance degrade into self-parody. There was a point to Nicholson’s performance here, and I think it works well, especially—today—when it can serve as a time capsule for decades-old manners. Jack Torrance seems like a Western-tinged, slightly juvenile country bumpkin of sorts when he talks with Lloyd. Of course, we can say that he is reflecting that he is the old Jack, or Mr. Grady, or whatever deceased person Torrance is supposed to represent (in 1980) in terms of reincarnation (consider the zoom in on the photo of a Jack Nicholson-like character in a 1920s Overlook photo at the end of the film).

But as I recall how people (especially young ones) behaved in the 1970s, in becoming rebels—whether they closely identified with the hippies of the 1960s and early 1970s, or not—and especially if they embraced some ethos tied to substance abuse, there was a sort of “country rebel” quality to their manners. Jack (Nicholson or Torrance)’s manner in talking to Lloyd, even before he gets drunk, reflects this showy, bumpkin-ish quality. So one could say that Jack Torrance wasn’t merely echoing the spirit of the person “he had been before at this hotel,” but is showing a decline in terms of how, when someone aims toward more substance abuse, he or she also declines in personality a bit.

You remember the expression from biology: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. This means that, in the development of an advanced organism (like a human) in a womb, the organism seems to go through stages as if echoing the evolutionary stages—it seems like a tadpole, then like a small mammal, etc. Well, when someone is in the throes of a personal decline—from mental illness, drugs or drink, or severe personal misfortune—there can be a decline in personality style. He or she shows a (temporary) “Reverse ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.” He was an educated, articulate Italian before; now, snared in substance abuse, he seems like a dumb guinea. She was a refined WASP before; now, in the throes of a personal breakdown, she seems like a dirtbag on the order of the city-accented Protestant character Bill the Butcher played by Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York (2002).

So, Jack Torrance, returning to booze, now seems like a degraded-hick version of himself. To depict such a character decline is a very astute observation (on American personality styles, you might say) by Kubrick, I think; and it is well wrought by Nicholson.

* Jack with his son Danny on the edge of the bed. The whole sequence where Danny goes to the family living quarters to get his fire engine, and encounters Dad sitting up on the bed, is interesting for a few reasons. For one, very personally, this scene comes uncannily close to how I saw my father the last time I saw him alive. On April 17, 1970, I got up early, hearing someone in the kitchen, thinking it was my mother. I went down, and saw it was Daddy, sitting at the kitchen table about 20 feet away, not looking entirely well. I decided to return to bed. He died later that day, at home, when I was in school.

But all that aside, I think this scene in The Shining works well in terms of showing an elemental nature to the relation between father and son, some minimal decency working out between them, while the possibility of nervous breakdown and horrible danger lies just beneath the surface of things.

Danny Lloyd as Danny seems appropriately modest, even a little nervous, as he approaches Jack, and sits on his lap. The fact of their having been multiple takes (hopefully not 50-80) shows in Danny’s seeming stiff and depersonalized in Jack’s lap (and yet he can deliver a line with a ready enough voice). Jack, looking suitably disheveled (you can almost smell the morning breath and pre-shower body stink), unwinds his performance with a mix of distracted psychological weirdness, occasional tenderness for the boy on his lap, and sometimes a little self-satire (the satirical elements through the film, which usually happen in Nicholson’s performances, are what some might feel lend an over-the-top nature to the depictions here). Amazingly, a lot of this scene is done in one long take. The mixed classical music and other sound effects add to the odd atmosphere in the scene.

Interestingly, Danny Lloyd worked on only one other movie after this one, then never acted again (according to his Wikipedia page).

Reference.

Don Shiach, Jack Nicholson: The Complete Film Guide (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1999).

Movie break: In days not so old, Jews showing how to be bold: A Serious Man (2009)

The Coen brothers’ (perhaps) least facetious film is like a sermon mixed with comedy—and shows the generosity of the Jewish tradition, which may not always be obvious in today’s U.S. economy

[A previous blog entry of mine from last year has material on this film. Edits 3/17/16.]

This is a film that allows me to say with respect to Jewish themes (while I am a goy), “Who cares about the notion that X work of art is only for a limited audience.” This “limited audience” stuff is the sort of objection I’ve gotten to some of my book-length works over the years (which, incidentally, had little or nothing to do with Jewish identity). If you’re serious about your work, you can indicate a universal relevance in any work of art, even if the subject seems, on the surface, arcane, parochial, too “subgroup-oriented,” or whatever.

Ask if the work is made with heart, and if there are more universal themes mixed in with the more parochial values (say, if a work is on a type of illness, then the issues of solitude, pain, and finding meaning in life can still appeal to a wide range of people). If it is (and there are), then who cares if (as in A Serious Man) there are a lot of Yiddish or Hebrew terms used by the characters, and yarmulkes worn, and “ironic about goys” talk, and a big cast in the credits that you know isn’t representative of the King Family. I mean, my experience with Jewish people has run through five decades (since the 1960s), and it has included all values of interactions (good, bad, intricate, shallow, etc.), and after all these years, I can sit down and love watching this film. I like it both for its parochial touches and for its universal themes, as well as its technical adeptness.

But beware: it isn’t a consistent fun-fest. It deals with despair as induced by life circumstances, not by illness (mental or physical). It also treads a line between serious handling of a striving man’s suffering and a comic look at some of the (semi-)absurdity that can fictionally happen to the same man. From another angle, the film has a Saul Bellow–ish quality: it mixes a sort of earthy, street-smart humor with a treatment at high-culture themes, such as meaning in life and of suffering. In this way, it reminds me of one of the few Bellow works I’ve read (and enjoyed and valued), his early short story/novella “Seize the Day.” (His novel Humboldt’s Gift I also recommend.)

By the way, this film (according to its Wikipedia article) did make more than four times its cost, but both its cost and its worldwide earnings were pretty small—by no means of Transformers scale.

The plot comes with a tangle of absurdities

The main character of A Serious Man, Larry Gopnik, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, is a physics professor at a Midwestern university, and—along with dealing with a student who failed the midterm and now is trying to bribe him into giving him a better grade—his wife (somewhat shrewishly played by Sari Lennick) wants a divorce, after finding a satisfying partner in an older and familiar person, Sy Ableman. As the film spells out rather schematically (both in its unfolding drama and in making-of-doc comments), Sy is a “bigger deal” than Larry because he manages to be more of a “serious man,” or a macher (a Yiddish word) as Fred Melamed, who plays Sy, comments.

I’ve never been entirely clear if the Coens wanted, by posing the “serious man” concept, to really mean “a good Jew” (when the film was released in Israel in a Hebrew-language version, I understand it had the title A Good Jew), but knew this wouldn’t entirely fly in an American market. Another way to explain the title is that they were being a little more abstract than indirect/coy, as their concepts and stylizations through their work in general can be a bit arch, and in line with this, they wanted to focus on the more universal topic of “being the best you can be in your role.” In other words, a “serious man” was one with a little more authenticity, as the existentialists used to say, though I find Larry Gopnik’s working hard to be a breadwinning dad as a professor to be authentic enough (while Sy, shallowly enough, plays golf and drives a big Caddy).

It seems to me the character of Larry is more one of a sincere man who crumbles into emotional crisis because of a train of objective misfortunes, and maybe the film is trying to say he could be more of a “serious man” if he didn’t let his troubles get him down so much. However, if Sy Ableman is an example of a “serious man,” he seems like a rather compromised version of this: he’s a successful enough, average American of some kind, who presents an unctuous manner when trying to smooth over relations—with a neighborliness that seems wildly at odds with his moral position—with Larry in the midst of taking Larry’s wife away from him.

Other aspects of Larry’s complicated life include his being up for tenure (and a colleague advises him, unofficially, how the deliberations are going, and it turns out someone has anonymously been writing negative letters to the committee about Larry; we wonder after a while if that is Sy). Meanwhile, his son, who is studying for his bar mitzvah and fights with his sister with colorful curses, is getting into marijuana and has enrolled in a record-album club with a subscription he has put in his father’s name. And his brother Arthur (played by Richard Kind, who appears in a couple of Tom McCarthy’s films) seems like an autistic savant, or something else not quite normal, who writes and draws (seemingly doing manic doodling) in a school-notebook-type journal he calls the “mentaculus.” Arthur also has a “sebaceous cyst” on the back of his neck that he uses a mechanical device to evacuate accumulating goo from. So this movie is packed with people and their personal problems, and curve balls of fate.

The twists of fate even include the fact that Larry ends up being the one obliged (however this happened) to pay for the funeral of newly deceased Sy, the man who’d become his wife’s new lover (or soul mate, with partnership not yet consummated).

The “short” at the beginning of the film

The five-or-so-minute mini-drama at the start of the film—characterized by the Coens in the making-of doc as like the cartoon that used to run before feature films in theaters years ago, and not really meant to relate to the film proper—is interesting (it grows on you, I think, if you watch it more than once). Spoken entirely in Yiddish (with English subtitles), it recounts a couple’s conversation about the man’s having seen an old friend (and/or community pillar, maybe a rabbi), Traitle Groshkover, from whom he’d just gotten help on the road in tending to his business. The wife says the man he’d encountered was dead—he had died three years ago.

Then, portentously, Groshkover shows up at the door—a long-bearded sort played by Fyvush Finkel. The wife, certain that this friendly, small-talking entity is a dybbuk, a dead body inhabited by a random spirit, eventually thrusts a knife or other sharp tool into his chest to prove it. At first the suspected dybbuk, astonished, doesn’t bleed, then he does. He leaves, with a tone of disappointment at how he’s been treated. The whole episode may seem puzzling—it is a made-up folk tale, according to Ethan Coen—but overall it may serve as a reminder, perhaps, of how many U.S. Jews have descended from the tradition-schooled shtetl residents (as romanticized in Fiddler on the Roof) who flourished in Eastern Europe many years ago.

When the film moves to its title sequence, and we see all the Jewish names, we wonder next, What kind of story is this?, while the rock group Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” pulses on the soundtrack. Then we are delivered to a modern-day (well, 1967) scene, with people looking recognizably modern (OK, 1967-ish) and American (even if a high school–age class has a Hebrew lesson). Now the “old times” we are dealing with are about 45 years ago, with people who seem to blend (1) modern American ways of embracing values and comporting self, with (2) a more “Old World” parochial set of values and standards.

The tradition-bound Jews here are merging with what could be called the beginning of modern-style America (which some not so sympathetic to it would call the “Me Decade” way of living—and take your pick as to which decade since the 1960s has been called the “Me Decade”). Cultural shocks to this Midwestern community of Jews include divorce, sneaking commercialism, and recreational drug use. This picture I give—“Jews  x  ‘Me Decade’ values”—is one interpretation of the cultural intermixing the film depicts—though I don’t know if it’s necessarily the Coens’.

Tchotchkes of details in this film

One thing I’ve heard critically said about this film is that it heavily focuses on details. I think this makes for part of its charm. Along with the clinically clear-eyed cinematography of Roger Deakins, what makes this film both an engrossing study and a colorful environment in which to see its emotional drama play out are the details that bring home both the drolly-embraced look at late-Sixties culture and the Jewish usages of a wide range of kinds.

* Notice that Larry Gopnik’s pants are so short, they ride up his legs as, early on, he writes on the blackboard. We kids in grade school used to call such pants “flood pants” or “floods”—as if the legs were so short, they wouldn’t get wet in floods.

* Among ritual Jewish usages, notice the mezuzahs on the frames of doorways. Even Mrs. Samsky, who seems in her life to take a walk on the wild side (to Larry: “Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?”), has one at her door.

* When Arthur has a minor breakdown when he and Larry are living at a motor lodge, he is in a fit of despair and self-pity, and says “Hashem [phonetic spelling] hasn’t given me shit! … He hasn’t given me bupkis!” Bupkis, as I understand, is a Yiddish word that means, roughly, “shit”; I think it literally means “goat piss.” It was used in a recent Capital One ad campaign featuring comedian Jerry Stiller (who must be pushing 90 by now).

* By the way, Hashem is, from what I gather, an informal reference to God, for those Jews who, I presume, shy from using the Tetragrammaton or other more formal reference to God. (Adonai is another less-formal reference to God, which in this film I think is heard during the bar mitzvah ceremony.) It is interesting to consider this relatively modest Midwestern Jewish community being apt to “soft pedal” reference to God, as a sign of respect; meanwhile, in the Coens’ previous film Burn After Reading (2008; see my review of December 4), the constellation of people there, who seem almost exclusively Gentiles, use rather nasty curses, as if signifying how far they’ve fallen from traditional cultural standards, or such.

* The Coens get in a few looks at “humanity at its less flattering,” such as a waddling old female office worker in a print dress, clearing her throat grotesquely after she delivers a rabbi his tea. In a late scene, when Danny, Larry’s son, finally meets up with Rabbi Marshak (whom Larry has been trying to consult with, and been perpetually unable to), the man seems apt to give out—before finally uttering some modest words of wisdom—old-fart-style idle vocalizations and groans.

* I was trying to find out who sang the Yiddish pop/folk-type music that Larry “rocks out”—I mean, relaxes—to once or a few times in the film; it seems to be a Sidor Belafsky [sp?]; others would know better than I.

The marijuana theme

The movie’s use of marijuana as a plot element raises a few questions: (1) As an example of the “porn thread” in movies, a sort of sop to the Joe Averages with ticket money to spend, is it acceptable enough for this film? (2) Does it undercut the film’s more seriously handled themes? (3) How does it resonate with the consciousness of marijuana in the U.S. today (2013)?

Of course, how it appears in the film is (1) when Larry visits his sexy next-door neighbor Mrs. Samsky, on the assumption he should help others (following a rabbi’s advice—“Help others?—couldn’t hurt”), she leads him to smoke a joint with her (and therewith he appreciates—or thinks he does—another rabbi’s advice to seek a better perspective); and (2) in the climactic scene of the film, Larry’s son, who has been studying Torah for his bar mitzvah, goes through the ceremony stoned, with apparently no one but his fellow smoker friend (and maybe Mrs. Samsky, seated in the congregation) wiser about his condition.

I have spoken on my views on recreational use of marijuana before, in my review last August 9 of Easy Rider. Marijuana is increasingly in the news and in other segments of media culture. A Star-Ledger (the New Jersey newspaper) editorial from this January 23, 2013, pointed out the inconsistency of federal restrictions and legal stigmatization of marijuana—its federal classification makes even its academic study impossible or hard—even while medical marijuana, recently approved in New Jersey (and its implementation slow and cumbersome in getting started), is used in a somewhat tepid fashion, and the federally approved Marisol, a synthetic concentration of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, turns out to be bluntly unsatisfactory.

I am in favor of use of medical marijuana for a fairly simple reason: If it helps patients deal with such things as nausea (brought about by a longstanding, profound medical condition, either as a side effect or otherwise) or one of the debilitating effects of the likes of multiple sclerosis, and it helps like nothing else, why not use it? For me, some medications—not least, various psychiatric treatments produced by Big Pharma—have side effects that are not far from being stoned (e.g., sleepiness, stimulated hunger, a sort of increased estheticism). And these side effects are from synthetic chemicals. Marijuana is a naturally occurring substance (granted, not everything natural is good for you) that may have therapeutic effects for some patients, while no one has a problem with approving of synthetic chemicals such as some psychiatric medications, which, in addition to producing side effects like being stoned, can cause long-term problems like diabetes and tardive dyskinesia (as the antipsychotics can do; see “product information” profiles on such medications in the PDR). The logic here of considering marijuana no more or less bad seems fairly clear.

I think what causes hesitation in some to use medical marijuana is the long-term phenomenon of recreational use of pot in this country (and elsewhere). I must point out that I have, for well over 30 years, been disapproving of recreational use of pot (though I tried it a very few times in the late 1970s—and it would amuse you in what context this was). To me, it was—in the 1970s—a paining correlate of heartbreaking ravages of substance abuse to which I was a close witness in those humid, economically challenged years. As I get older, I get more understanding, and as I’ve said elsewhere, for some reason a lot of pot humor (in verbal art) strikes me as funny. (By the way—a discussion for another time—it could be pointed out that the Coens’ genre of storytelling—especially in some of its details—is “stoner humor,” especially with their older movies—1987-94. I think their work need not be studied this way, and certainly their later movies—especially from the past decade—generally tend to get away from that, and take a more embracing, if satirizing, look at America.)

In the few years since A Serious Man was released, marijuana seems to have come under increasing acceptance in various discussion of it in the media. It pops up as a regular joke element, such as in comedian Jon Stewart’s monologue during the 12-12-12 concert about the Pink Floyd music reminding you of the days when you hid your pot; or in the very mixed-bag CBS sitcom, with its occasional good laughs, 2 Broke Girls. As I’ve noted, newspapers hash out (no pun intended) discussion of the inconsistency of the federal government’s hard stance on pot being a dangerous drug, even while states take progressive steps to allowing medical marijuana.

How serious?

The most important question with A Serious Man is, What is meant by Larry’s son Danny getting through his bar mitzvah stoned? Is the film saying that if you can’t deal with the heavy trials of life with consultation with a spiritual leader of your choice, or with some other “non-medical” means, you can turn to pot? I frankly am not sure, but I think as a sort of larky element to the film’s story, this stoned sequence can be accepted (or forgiven) well enough.

And there’s enough traditional Jewish ritual woven in through the marijuana blur that the film delivers its more sober horsepill along with its more whimsical “candy” of Danny half-stumbling through his rite of passage and almost forgetting the song bit he’d learned as a pedagogical correlate for learning part of the Torah.

And is this so much more brow-raising than the really Coens-style sequence in the middle of the film, depicting a sort of parable told by one rabbi (played by a poised George Wyner), about “the goy’s teeth”? Here, a Jewish dentist finds Hebrew lettering seemingly drilled into a goy’s (Gentile’s) front lower teeth, which seems to give the dentist some occult advice. Much of the sequence is scored to Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun.” Take a look and then you’ll really wonder how serious the Coens were with A Serious Man.

What in the Name of Medicine?, Part 5 of 6: Genna Is Far Less to Blame for the Defamation than Tweedle Dum

[See statement at end of entry on confidentiality and privacy considerations. For those metrics types: the number of views for this blog has gotten much higher in recent months than I would have expected, but the number of views for my other blog is much lower. So that other blog does provide some shielding for what's on it. A few minor edits done 2/4/13. The only substantive additions are between + +. Slight additional edits, including to title, 7/2/13.]

It’s too bad it’s taken so long to get to this point, but given the dimensions of this mess—along with [Agency X] not doing a damn thing for more than two years other than being paranoid and defensive, and me doing all the heavy lifting in terms of accounting for what happened—I’m happy to report on one factual aspect of what happened the morning of August 27. And this is why I became a writer, and why writing about especially complex incidents that can happen—never mind “confidentiality strictures” (on which more below)—is always the root to reaching a final determination, after a lot is said and done.

Genna (the nickname for Ms. Genevieve Breen, whom I pseudonymed Georgia Bellamy) is far less to blame for the defamation that occurred than her supervisor Tweedle Dum. How I finally got some root basis for this was simple. I got out some draft pages of the first essay I wrote on this situation, stuff done in the tumultuous (for me) days of August 28 through September 4, 2010, and I see how I wrestled with the facts and moral situation, and I was reminded in those pages of a very key thing: how Genna and I interrelated with our eyes.

Coordination between us via eyes was still going on, on the last day

The eyes thing was a central theme of the first essay I wrote. Why? The unusualness of working (well) with her was centered on this. She was (still is?) is very eyes-oriented person—you could say intuitive, and maybe self-centered visually the way some young people can be—and she was also in what was for her an unfamiliar, high-stress situation in the last week we were working. I, of course, was her practical partner in handling the Suboxone items. And I was undergoing worsened stress myself.

What was interesting was how it had become part of our tactically relating—and also a matter of taste—to look at each other in a certain partnering way, almost like hands steadying each other. This may sound odd (and it mixes with stuff of a more subtle nature I keep private), but it is about as key a way as anything else to show how sanity between us was maintained amid the chaos. And she extended this way of “wanting to relate by eyes”—I formulated one style of it being an “eyes lock”—even on my last day there. I think she also said “Hi Greg” in some tiny-voiced, passing way in the later morning. Both of these innocuous enough actions she did when I knew about the defamation as soon as I came in.

And in our simply doing our work, we also, in a sense, were the only sane ones in the Ferguson division that morning, at least within the Suboxone group.

She didn’t think I knew about the alert, and moreover she might not have thought it was especially out of place. She did not come from the experience that would have said such an alert was remarkably unprofessional, or somehow tied to “me perceived as a danger.” She was probably aware that an alert of sorts had gone out—I seriously doubt she would have had the idea to demand it—but she was just there (with me, when she came by) in the everyday-ness of wanting to get more of the work done, and so she related to me accordingly. In this way, even while I was aware of the alert (with strong, violated-sense emotions—I was inwardly both fearful and enraged, but not at Genna), as I said, we were the only sane ones there: we were there to work, as we’d been doing for weeks up till then on that crazy account.

And she was young. How could she have been devious enough to be part of a grossly untoward “conspiracy” against me at that time?

How did emotional extremes play out? Not much

In my draft material on this stuff, complete with scribbled afterthoughts, etc., I wrestled with how much Genna might have spouted some emotional extremes the night before (August 26, after I was gone), or at some other points during the past week (whether I had witnessed this or not), as would have directly and yet unduly influenced Tweedle Dum into making a super-high-handed “alert” move against me for August 27. But while Genna did show—in her own right—some mood swings over a couple weeks or so, and while in a somewhat broad but quick change she had shifted from being somewhat and repeatedly flirtatious with me (not really offensive to me) to being so with someone else (which actually I had found relieving at some point several days before August 27), I don’t think she did anything so extreme (after I’d gone on August 26) to provide the necessary and sufficient basis for T.D.’s alert.

(You ask—was I too interested in GB? Actually, the type of interest you might feel is here didn’t come right away; but part of the reason for it was the traumatizing effect of the August 26-27 alert, which burned the details of the mess on my brain. Also, you ask, Do I embarrass GB with this? Well, what about me? You see, when an alert is done as was done, this doesn’t just embarrass me, it also embarrasses GB [whether she felt that way at first or not]. If you don’t think so, then you’ve got one sick company there.)

[copy redacted from here; could be useful, but not for foreseeable future] But I think through all this mess, even into the morning of August 27, Genna remained faithful to me in a general way (while in certain rare moments she showed a passing, strange antipathy or such toward me). I am sorry if my many-months story on this blog has seemed to suggest something more ominous on her part, but it has been important (as well as a consequence of my awkward situation) to deliberately draw the historical background of [Agency X] and come at this whole situation of August 23-27, 2010, in a gradual way, and I do this on my own power, not with any financial help or high-tech gadgets.

And on August 27, as today in a different context (and for different reasons), Genna was the young person whose innocence and earnestness (at the time) save her the most in retrospect from responsibility for what went awry among others in that context.

Also, she acquits herself as responsible for the alert as the only coworker who showed a minimal, elemental decency about how I was being made tired by all the shoved-through reading, this while she over the longer term inadvertently confessed, revealed, or otherwise conveyed her certain searching, straining, and earnest attitude that allowed me to bond with her, even while she was not being very conversational about non-work matters with me.

The way I was scheduled out

Other facts help anchor this assessment. One thing I saw on the morning of August 27 (it had not been sent to me; it was on someone else’s desk) was a “hot sheet” that Genna had typed up the day before that listed a ton of Suboxone items that had to be checked again (I think they were later versions of items that had already been approved for a set of “draft” versions that had been, or were being, printed up in advance for sales workers). All sorts of people were addressed in the e-mail, with others c.c.’d; even The Geek and ES were listed, but not me. That e-mail/“hot sheet” was sent on August 26 at 10:36 a.m., about an hour after Genna had spoken with me innocuously enough for the first time that morning.

When I saw that hot sheet on August 27, I was galvanized to quit when I did, not so much that I was bitter at Genna for it (though, over time, I would indulge in bitterness toward her about it, in the tumult of the whole aftermath). I saw I was solidly factored out of the situation there for the next week. So then why (by about noon) should I stay for that day, if I had finished what simple work there was to do?

But, though I puzzled or was bitter over this for months, I don’t think Genna was largely to blame for me being left out of the hot sheet. I think the responsibility for that lay largely with Tweedle Dum, who was exerting a lot of increased control (for that last week) over how Suboxone was wrapping up anyway. It had been on Wednesday morning (see here, at the end) that Tweedle Dum hadn’t wanted me to be an editor sitting in on a meeting on Suboxone, when she had Tweedle Dee sit in instead. (And recall my speculation in Part 1 of this series, early in the entry, about how my time was cut short in order to have the company limit its exposure to unemployment liability.)

I look at my 2010 writings on my last week there, and I see that amid notes on the managerial machinations from Tweedle Dum (that seemed to high-handedly ignore how integral I’d been to the Suboxone production, for weeks), there were also notes on how Genna was asking kindly about my eyes, and commenting on my going to get some rest, etc. Genna was being humane; Tweedle Dum was being aloof. (So you see why I kept such detailed notes: you needed them to filter out what was going on here, even at this late date, with this issue concerning me for over two years. By the way, apparently it concerns others too; you would not believe how many links there are to the third entry in this series.)

Genna in the wake of our “long” conversation

I have long wondered if, after I talked to Genna late Thursday afternoon, she had suddenly uttered some unusually strong emotional reactions about me, as if she was afraid of me, etc. I think now that whatever it was had to be minor, if there was anything. If I did hear what it might have been, I might not have been pleased, but I’ve reviewed enough such provocative facts in this case (for now).

And on a more general level, I think it’s clear from what all I’ve written and cogitated over in this mess that Genna may have shown some mood swings, but all in all she was being a good sport with me.

When I dealt with her on the morning of August 27, she seemed as if business was to be usual—there was work to ferry to me, among many other things in her realm of duties—and she also struck me as somewhat subdued, maybe feeling a little guilty. Did she show she may have felt that an alert had been circulated that was patently unfair to me? She did not show this explicitly, but as I said, she was naïve about this kind of unacceptable business practice.

Her saying Hi in the later morning, as I thought I heard in a tiny voice I could barely catch, also maybe suggested her trying to grab on to some “memory of nicer times”—if that phrase captures it. (Am I saying more was there than was there? Well, it's enough to say how much there was any "danger" between me and GB, which was very little.)

One of the worst things about this situation is how it may have been assumed, or concluded, by a range of people in the long wake of August 27 that Genna was the main person responsible for my being ostracized, rather than being a sort of inadvertent spark that set off Tweedle Dum’s far more licentious conflagration. At times I wrestled, with sharp negative emotion, with how much Genna was responsible. It’s a damned shame that a situation like this (and I will tell in Part 6 how I left, and what final e-mails I sent within the company) has led to such a widely-spreading-out wake of misunderstanding and paranoia and frustration about getting some proper airing of the issues that, as it seemed to me, Genna might repeatedly have been seen as the one to blame (and maybe more so than me being to blame for just being “nuts about the matter,” as some might have thought over the past two years, or some other interpretation).

My narrative agenda

You may have found my narrative accounts of these August 2010 days to be confusing, as if people seem to show different passing inclinations at different times, as if individuals as “characters” (if they were fictional) are not entirely coherent. Well, I have tried to be selective and fair, but to show that there were varying winds blowing throughout those days. I have muted my picture of Genna a good bit, but I have tried to show that she exhibited some emotional variation that could be stark sometimes; but this was woven amid our just interacting as busy workers most of the time.

It can’t be understated that (as I roughly call it) a sort of group anxiety/“hysteria” was going on there in August 2010, and that this factor tends, in retrospect, to “confound” what you can say of certain individuals as to how fair or realistic they were being, versus showing some individual personality quirks. And—just hypothetically and generally speaking—for Genna to have shown some, say, outburst typical of a “borderline” personality—which I actually have seen from other young female coworkers over the years—would have taken things to an extreme that I don’t think she was apt to show there. What I mean by a “borderline” outburst is that, even if the person felt an emotional bond to me and also contrarily was “drawing away” the way a borderline can do—which can be a painful “whipsawing” away from you when it happens—this would also, paradoxically, reflect a sort of fear of being abandoned. That is, the borderline person both wants to cling to the associate and to cut away from the associate; but when the issue of being abandoned is actually paramount in the borderline person’s mind, she engages in an emotional outburst, and “decides” the issue by having ties directly sundered with the person that way. If that sounds labyrinthine, that’s how it is with borderline people (and on issues other than potential “abandonment,” too), but complexity aside, it certainly can be painful for the other person. [Noted 7/2/13: Spelling this out may seem awfully complex and question-raising about the issue of discretion, but given the way the company set this problem up in August 2010, including deeply insinuating suggestions about me personally and the extraordinary means of communication that were used, I am doing what I believe best inserts balance, addresses a serious wrong concerning multiple parties, and is judicious in light of the company's labyrinthine and long-running evasions in the wake of the August 2010 events.]

But in Genna’s case, following the hypothetical and general approach here, I don’t think she did this on the late afternoon of August 26, and anyway—though (among the so-called “cluster B” personality disorders, from the DSM-IV) borderline PD and histrionic PD are close together in terms of symptoms—histrionic is actually “easier to take” for other people. And anyway, as a matter of simple facts, I seriously don’t think Genna so nastily spouted some disaffiliating comments about me after our August 26 conversation that this was an “easy pretext” for Tweedle Dum to circulate some defamatory alert about “Greg, this bipolar [sic; whatever T.D. said, which had to reflect a crass understanding] person who might raise a ruckus when he comes in tomorrow, because he’ll be torn away from his precious Genna.”

If that idea sounds ridiculous, that goes to how presumptuous Tweedle Dum’s decision to broadcast a warning was. As for Genna, as I said, she seems to have been the kindly soul least responsible for the alert—among the trio of herself, Tweedle Dum, and Tweedle Dee—because even on August 27, thank goodness, I was looking at her—we were both in close contact—because we had to be, to get that Suboxone account done. And I think I was tasteful enough in how I related to her—with the peculiarities of the situation, as I said, requiring the “eyes lock” thing. (By the way, something about Genna’s mother’s March 2011 letter to me is consistent with this, though not definitively concluding. [DOF]) Genna showed her comradely tone toward me on August 27 morning (not giving a phony look or comment as, for one, Tweedle Dee did with me that morning), which makes it all the sadder that as I was dealing with Genna, with my meaning her well as much as I could, I was also aware that a poisonous atmosphere had been created (by a manager, Tweedle Dum) leading to my being seen by all and sundry to be a “danger to Genna.”

In the immediate aftermath, I couldn’t tell quite who between Genna and Tweedle Dum had initiated the alert (though I knew Tweedle Dum had effectuated it)—and yet I was still called in to work. And in view of the completely untoward alert, with how incalculably insulting, even assaulting it was, I planned to quit abruptly when my work was done. And I knew how sad a situation it would be for Genna, because in a way she couldn’t be able to understand quite what was up, even while, just before leaving, I sent her an apology e-mail; and there was nothing I could do about this, other than be peaceable and “everyday” in how I left—so much so, I thought I would maybe shock people who expected an explosion: shock them with anticlimax.

What sensible purpose was there to the alert?

All of this raises the question: How crazy, or deviant, did Tweedle Dum have to be to circulate an alert about me, as if I didn’t know how to be a man with Genna, with whom I’d in fact been a work “dancing partner” for weeks? Was Tweedle Dum deluded about how Genna and I had ordinarily related? Was she jealous of our relationship?

One thing is clear: the type of alert was not something that could be kept secret. How could it? I was portrayed as a potential danger. (I have evidence suggesting that my Web site was linked to in an e-mailed version of the alert. [DOF]) Also, people gave away the sense of my being a danger, or close to it, when they looked at me. So what sense did it make to alert people about me, insulting my record of how I’d been with Genna, and how I’d been important to the Suboxone account? And of course, what sense does this make in terms of the fallout from this, over two years later? When the mishandling of the Suboxone P.I.s has become a more revealed issue?

What was Tweedle Dum’s problem, you might ask? On that, I would be far less sympathetic or empathetic than I would be to my former temporary work partner Genna, and the answer will be presented in a Part 6, which may not be available online. And it shows how ludicrous this situation is that such disregard was shown to the good taste and proper conduct I thought I exerted when there; to the responsibility I exerted for the account, even when put under health strain at the time; and to the professional standards by which the P.I.s should have been handled, and weren’t. The result has been that the whole matter has not been squared with for over two years, and even now, who knows if anything is being learned from it.

Was the alert—combined with my being expected to come in to read another version of the P.I.s on Friday (which ended up not being available)—a product of cynicism, stupidity, or something else?

##

Confidentiality and privacy considerations: Here is my CommonHealth confidentiality agreement signed in 2001 (the typed date says 2000, but it was penned over to read 2001; I never started at the company in 2000, only 2001). Notice it isn’t signed by a CommonHealth rep.

And here is a similar agreement signed in 2007—again, not signed by a CommonHealth rep. This pdf actually came from a CommonHealth human resources staffer in September 2010, when I requested a copy; I still have the e-mail [DOF].

The U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled, in 2011, that corporations do not have a constitutional right to privacy. See this article in The Washington Post; or this Reuters article. Corporations may have status as persons, according to the Supreme Court in 2010; see this Wikipedia article. But as I’ve found from experience, you void a confidentiality agreement (or I do), and consider a corporation not to have privacy rights, when it violates your rights in ways that are, in spirit, well out of step with the reason you sign a confidentiality agreement to begin with. Confidentiality should not mean that you keep under wraps being so grievously insulted, assaulted, subjected to gratuitous interference with your rights to work, and so on, that you can’t talk about the malfeasance outside the workplace. In short, if a corporation (more than one person) can sometimes be a “crazy lady” (sorry for the metaphor, old-line feminists) that you want to expose to the light for others to see what you are oppressively, maybe even deleteriously to your health, faced with “in confidence,” then the confidentiality agreement gets voided. Especially when it’s as vague and sketchy as the samples, linked to above, from CommonHealth.

Another way to look at this is as follows: if “trade secrets” were to be what was subjected to confidentiality, I would agree with the agreement (barring some special considerations why you might expose something that had been related to trade secrets). But there are a number of things that do not constitute “trade secrets” that may be subject to confidentiality: in the abstract, these may include assault; defamation; violation of privacy; tortious interference with your business prospect; conspiracy (maybe even racketeering); unacceptably provocative sexually related behavior (from a male to a female or from a female to a male), or perhaps very worst, a manager misinterpreting and broadcasting claims about what he or she sees as unacceptable sexually related behavior between two underlings; stalking; and cyberstalking. That's speaking in the abstract.

(I did not seriously intend to sue GB for anything, so let that be known and understood.)

The issue of stalking

“Stalking” as an issue comes up quite often, as we see from newspapers; but without going into an elaborate discussion, I will clarify what I know and believe about it, as a legal layman. I will refer to some academic and legal reference material. I may offer expanded remarks in a later blog entry.

Separating the wheat from the chaff

Stalking, like the terms harassment, abuse, and so on, often in practice has a subjective component. It can be defined—or invoked—by different women (or men) who have different ideas of what constitutes it, and how much of a behavior in another person a woman (or man) is able to tolerate, excuse, or interpret (after an interim) as acceptable enough. Sometimes we may feel that a person, especially a woman, may claim “stalking” while informing it with a significant emotional or subjective aspect. With this, is she expressing a passing mood to a large extent? Is she being manipulative? Is she seeking attention? Men can do this too.

So “stalking” must be defined with reference to something unusual that defines it—not a mere passing ornery mood. An interesting study (on female stalkers) available here notes that “According to Meloy [referenced in the study], stalking is 'the willful, malicious, and repeated following or harassing of another person that threatens his or her safety.'” Note some key terms: willful, malicious, repeated; harassing; and “threatens his or her safety.” This sounds like a significant component of danger is involved, and it should be clearly identifiable as such.

State statute on criminal stalking in New Jersey

Let’s look at the New Jersey state statute on stalking (N.J.S.A. 2C:12-10) to see how this state defines it—and this is criminal stalking:

“(1)…repeatedly maintaining a visual or physical proximity to a person; directly, indirectly, or through third parties, by any action, method, device, or means, following, monitoring, observing, surveilling, threatening, or communicating to or about, a person, or interfering with a person’s property; repeatedly committing harassment against a person; or repeatedly conveying, or causing to be conveyed, verbal or written threats or threats conveyed by any other means of communication or threats implied by conduct or a combination thereof directed at or toward a person.

“(2) ‘Repeatedly’ means on two or more occasions.

“(3) ‘Emotional distress’ means significant mental suffering or distress.

“(4) ‘Cause a reasonable person to fear’ means to cause fear which a reasonable victim, similarly situated, would have under the circumstances.” [p. 686 of the 2012 Compact Edition of West’s New Jersey Statutes]

These are definitions. The rest of the statute deals with what constitutes offenses of the fourth degree, third degree, etc., and details related to getting a restraining order, etc.

If you read the definitions again, it seems that key to whether something constitutes stalking is emotional distress and being caused to fear—in a reasonable person. This last aspect presumably is meant to eliminate subjective, fluky, or manipulative claims.

Again, this is criminal stalking. One presumes that for a charge of stalking to be brought—the state, of course, doesn’t have time for frivolous complaints—the alleged actions have to cross some threshold that is rather demanding—about an activity involving (alternatively, as it seems from the definition above) close proximity to a person or regular monitoring or communicating about a person, etc.; or interference with a person’s property, harassment, or threats; and reactions in the victim of emotional distress and fear (these latter aspects would seem essential).

I am not even touching on the issue of cyberstalking, which is complicated indeed.

My own speculations on civil stalking in New Jersey, pending my research on it

New Jersey recently passed legislation on civil stalking. I am eager to see the statute on this, to understand it, but one thing should be clear as a general matter: in civil matters, there are two sides involved; alleging stalking in a civil-court forum is not merely ringing the unambiguous bells of making an allegation about criminal activity. And in the civil process—as I learned in order to be effective in the Bauer v. Glatzer lawsuit—there are phases of discovery and, only if necessary, trial. Both sides present evidence and other components of their claims in discovery, and I would assume it would also be possible that a person sued for stalking could also countersue, perhaps alleging stalking on the part of the plaintiff (of course, as is independent of the lawsuit action itself).

Such a case may then fall apart in the discovery phase. The person initially claiming stalking may find that the defendant, as a reasonable person—I would assume this standard would hold again—has some representations of things that ultimately establish that he or she was not “stalking” the plaintiff—meaning to convey danger or harm, or to cause emotional distress, or whatever other behavioral criteria of civil stalking there would be. There may be some very valid set of reasons for the behavior on the part of the defendant that the plaintiff had earlier interpreted (or claimed to be) mere stalking.

This discussion can be modified as time goes on.