Follow-up to Mercury Pictures Presents
This is a novel about war, more or less, but in some ways wars of a different kind. First of all, the setting here is WWII but we don't get battle scenes; in fact the battle scenes for the propaganda films have to be re-enacted on a backlot and skillfully filmed with sets and character actors, lighting and cinematography that simulates war, or our perception of what war is supposed to look like. It is a false front.
But like many women writers of historical novels who focus on the "backstory" of war, the horrific effect on those who stay behind, or fight in the shadows, Marra also focuses on those effects, specifically the devasting impact on the families of two women—Maria and Anna.
When Anna refuses to join the Fascist party, as her husband dictates, he takes their son so that he can shape the boy into a man like himself. Kurt works in Hasso's propaganda films for Hitler. Anna never sees him again, or sees him only in the photograph that Nino has captured from his research on these propaganda films. She dies, beseeching him to "see me, I'm here." Although she's no longer in his life, she has not abandoned him, as her own parents did to her. She shouldn't have lost her child for the sake of her husband's success or the ego maniacal ambition of a fascist dictator. They wanted to maintain the false front.
Follow-up to Mercury Pictures Presents
The other woman of course is Maria who feared what would happen to her father if his papers were discovered, papers that outlined the legal cases disputing Mussolini's defiance of the law. And so she burned them, but they were discovered, her father punished with confinement and she and her mother forced to emigrate. Although Maria's parents don't communicate particularly well between themselves, they do agree to keep quiet about Maria's mistaken deed. They don't want to accuse her or make her feel guilty. And, by doing so, they inadvertently maintain the false front that she was not at fault for the breakup of her family.
But she needs the truth; she needs to break through that false front, to admit that she unwittingly played a role in events, and to get her parents' forgiveness. By maintaining a facade and keeping her deed a secret, they prevent her from facing the reality of what she did, dealing with her guilt, and be reassured that her parents still love her. She is effectually imprisoned behind a false front by this secret and her guilt.
When she pieces together the letters from her father, with the passages excised by the censors, she is trying to put the whole picture together, to break through the false front, and find that her father loved and forgave her. Like the miniature, she is attempting to zoom out and see all the pieces in a wider context. In the original miniature, she is simply a faceless facade in the window of Artie's office. She's not an identifiable person, merely the facade of one. For both Maria and Anna, these acts constitute confinement.
Follow-up to Mercury Pictures Presents
But this theme of "see me, I'm here," extends to other immigrants as well. In part because of the war at this time, immigrants from Europe and other places are known only by their "false fronts." Eddie is constrained by the limits of his facade, a complexion not white enough to even suggest some Italian heritage. He looks Chinese and is therefore constrained by the prejudices of the time to be a "monster," an enemy combatant. Despite his acting ability and his knowledge of literature, he can play only bit parts in dominantly white movies.
Until the propaganda film Tell 'Em in Tokyo; then he exemplifies the villain and gets a starring role. When he tries to "flesh out" the character, give him a personality or identity, the director criticizes him, saying he isn't being paid to be an actor, he's getting paid to represent a "monster." And when he tries to merge Maria's film, The False Front, with footage from Tell 'Em in Tokyo, he can't find an exit, a way out. Defeated, he leaves the films and Maria.
Prejudice, stereotyping, give him no way out. To most of the world, he cannot be a fully developed person; he's confined to the facade he represents. That of course is the essence of the prejudice that defines immigrants to the US. People want to be known for who they really are, what they can do, or have done.
Follow-up to Mercury Pictures Presents
And Nino of course hides behind the false front of Vincent Cortese, whose immigration papers he took after Vincent was killed trying to steal a car for their escape. But Concetta Cortese sees the person Nino and agrees that he is her son when questioned by the local authorities.
The "see me" theme is echoed also in the fingerprint that Giuseppe leaves behind on the excavation wall that he has rigged to explode, in the name Giuseppe finds scratched on the wall of the Vault by a previous occupant, and by the piece of lumber used to construct the false front Berlin erected in the desert for bombing practice. And, a small item, when the war begins, they also erect a fake town on the roof of the aircraft manufacturing buildings to disguise their purpose from enemy bombers.
And of course Artie's toupees are a "false front."
Even Bela Lugosi plays a "false front" for himself.
But Ferrando's false police report rescues Nino, and his absorption in Sherlock Holmes novels allows him to imagine himself as a clever, successful detective.
Disappearance of Literary Men
David Morris, NYTimes—"Disappearance of Literary Men"
Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales.
Male under representation is an uncomfortable topic in a literary world otherwise highly attuned to such imbalances. In 2022 the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote on Twitter that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.” The public response to Ms. Oates’s comment was swift and cutting — not entirely without reason, as the book world does remain overwhelmingly white. But the lack of concern about the fate of male writers was striking.
To be clear, I welcome the end of male dominance in literature. Men ruled the roost for far too long, too often at the expense of great women writers who ought to have been read instead. I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction; they don’t suffer from the same kind of prejudice that women have long endured. Furthermore, young men should be reading Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante. Male readers don’t need to be paired with male writers.
David Morris, NYTimes—"Disappearance of Literary Men"
But if you care about the health of our society — especially in the age of Donald Trump and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster — the decline and fall of literary men should worry you.
In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent. This disparity surely translates to a drop-off in the number of novels young men read, as they descend deeper into video games and pornography. Young men who still exhibit curiosity about the world too often seek intellectual stimulation through figures of the “manosphere” such as Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan.
The marginalization of young men seems to have been a significant factor in this year’s presidential election. No voters were more committed to Mr. Trump than young white men — and he also did well with Hispanic men and continued to make gains with Black men. I think of 2024 as the “Fight Club” election, in which disaffected guys vented their frustrations and anxieties through a brawler who will one day reveal himself to be not their hero, but rather a figment of their imagination.
David Morris, NYTimes—"Disappearance of Literary Men"
These young men need better stories — and they need to see themselves as belonging to the world of storytelling. Novels do many things. They entertain, inspire, puzzle, hypnotize. But reading fiction is also an excellent way to improve one’s emotional I.Q. Novels help us form our identities and understand our lives. Like many other bookish Gen X-ers, I can’t conceive of my formative years without the Douglas Coupland novel that gave our generation its name. This is why we need a more inclusive literary culture, one that will bring young men in from the cold.
I am not saying that we should declare progress for women writers complete and now focus only on men. The question for me is: What will become of literature — and indeed, of society — if men are no longer involved in reading and writing? The fortunes of men and women are intertwined. This is why, for example, I make sure that my male students read The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s not just their edification that matters; women also benefit from the existence of better men.
David Morris, NYTimes—"Disappearance of Literary Men"
Here I am reminded of something that the feminist scholar bell hooks once wrote:
“There remains a small strain of feminist thinkers who feel strongly that they have given all they want to give to men; they are concerned solely with improving the collective welfare of women. Yet life has shown me that any time a single male dares to transgress patriarchal boundaries” — something I am convinced that literature enables men to do — “the lives of women, men and children are fundamentally changed for the better.”
GQ, Jason Diamond, "Men Don't Read Books" (08/09/2024)
Subtitle: The self-improvement-obsessed grindset bros who can't spare the bandwidth to pick up a novel are the people who need literature the most.
If I’m being honest, I usually look forward to the periodic resurgence of “Men don’t read” discourse, because it boosts my fragile ego. I’m a man who reads a lot of fiction, including a pretty sizeable amount of novels and short story collections written by women, and I don’t care what you think about that. But then I’ll read an article that says men account for a small portion of the fiction-buying market and gives some blanket statement about how novels “just aren’t written for men these days,” and I’ll start to feel weird, like I caught the last helicopter out of Saigon for dudes who like books. Then another, darker thought usually crosses my mind: this is a bad sign.
There’s plenty of speculation as to why that is, from novels supposedly becoming “an arena for virtue-signalling and culture wars” to modern fiction becoming insufficiently masculine. The idea that’s put out is that there is nothing a guy who wants to be a real man can get out of picking up a novel.
GQ, Jason Diamond, "Men Don't Read Books" (08/09/2024)
Since I’m a writer and I’ve spent most of my adult life around other writers and people with different jobs in the publishing industry, I’ve often heard this discussed as some existential problem that might inevitably be impossible to tackle. It’s almost as if people have thrown up their hands and agreed that, yup, men and fiction just don’t mix.
I’m always perplexed by this, as a guy who both reads and writes fiction, but lately I’ve started to worry about the next generations of boys and young men who will grow up without fiction—who'll learn about the world through message boards, unverified Wikipedia sources and YouTube videos of dudes with muscles on muscles explaining why Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker had the right mindset to advance in a competitive world.
I think about this a lot, and I’ve come to the conclusion we’re going about fixing things all wrong. It’s not just about marketing, like some people in the publishing industry might say; it’s messaging. Fiction can be fun. It can entertain or challenge you, but you also grow from the experience. It’s a road to self-betterment.
GQ, Jason Diamond, "Men Don't Read Books" (08/09/2024)
I say all of that as somebody who grew up without any strong male role models, who found fiction almost by accident. I was your typical bored teen who liked hockey, skateboarding, and going to punk shows. I was also angry, misguided, and in embarrassingly stereotypical fashion, I got really into reading The Catcher in the Rye when we were assigned it in the 11th grade.
He moved on to Kafka, then Philip Roth.
But something about those reading experiences got me wanting more. I kept picking up books. When I was 16, a bookseller told me if I liked funny fiction, that I should read Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth. I finished it, loved it, but ended up thinking, “Man, I don’t want to be like that guy” about the book’s narrator, Alexander Portnoy. . . . Roth left behind one of the strongest bodies of work of any American writer when he died in 2018, but the problem is that there aren’t many people telling young men at a crossroads, “If you read Philip Roth, you’ll see it’s less about hating women and more about his characters hating themselves, and how their actions turn off or push away nearly everybody around them.” Instead, the message I tend to see is “Philip Roth hated women.” And maybe that’s true—but if you actually read his fiction, you come away with a more nuanced view of things.
GQ, Jason Diamond, "Men Don't Read Books" (08/09/2024)
The first time I ever Googled the phrase “How to be a better man” was while I was writing this article, and one of the first results was a link to a Jordan Peterson Reddit page, with a user admitting, “I[']ve been into self improvement for a while and I still feel like a piece is missing that I need to work on,” and that they’re introverted and lonely. The thing that really got me was this part: “I currently work full time, live by myself, I got a home gym [a]nd train 6 days per week (I love my kettlebells) and I recently lashed out and spent a few hundred dollars on art books to teach myself how to draw and about composition, eventually I want to paint.”
The first thought that went through my head was I felt awful this person had nowhere to turn besides a Jordan Peterson Reddit forum. But the next was empathy. I was that guy in some way once. I grew up feeling lonely and isolated, but I longed to create and also figure out how to live a fuller, richer life. I’m 44-years-old now, and feel like I’ve accomplished that. Yet I truly believe that my Sliding Doors moment is that high school English teacher telling me to check out Kafka. Without a trace of pith, I can say that getting into fiction probably saved my life; it definitely made me a better person.
GQ, Jason Diamond, "Men Don't Read Books" (08/09/2024)
So no, there’s not one definitive right way to get more men to start reading fiction, but I do believe there’s a better message we could be sending. I’d say you can read about history, but if you want to understand America in a more honest light, undertake reading Moby Dick, then pick up a few of William Faulkner’s books. Move onto Toni Morrison, then Jesmyn Ward. Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Denis Johnson were some of the greats, but if you read enough of their work, you might come away with a better understanding of what drives other people to do terrible things. It’s about incorporating fiction into a lifestyle and not reading fiction as a lifestyle. It’s about saying if you pick up Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth, then I promise you that you’ll go out of way to not end up turning into a guy like that, and that’s a good thing. It won’t teach you everything, but it will provide an important enough lesson that will last the rest of your life.
Male Mystery Writers
Why I'm doing this
When I started these courses, I focused on the transitions in genres—mystery, historical novel--as women captured the book market. We've examined how women have changed the genres they had taken possession of.
So, a couple of questions—why have men stepped back, and among those who stayed and continued writing, what are they doing.
P.S. Based on Mercury Picture Presents, and Trust, (Hernan Diaz, Pulitzer), men write complicated novels.
Characteristics
According to an AI generated summary, based on the commentary in Reddit, male mystery writers "tend to focus on creating hard-boiled, cynical detectives with a strong sense of justice, often set in gritty urban environments, and incorporate elements like complex plots with intricate clues, a focus on procedural details, and a penchant for morally ambiguous characters, sometimes reflecting their on internal struggles or societal issues.
Key characteristics:
Tough jaded detective protagonist. he central character is frequently a lone wolf detective with a troubled past, often dealing with personal demons while solving crimes, sometimes exhibiting a cynical or sarcastic attitude
Gritty, realistic settings: Stories often take place in urban environments with a focus on the darker aspects of society, like crime-ridden neighborhoods or corrupt institutions
Intricate puzzles and clues: Emphasis on complex mysteries with well-laid clues that the reader can try to decipher alongside the detective creating a sense of intellectual engagement
Characteristics
Key characteristics:
Procedural details: Detailed descriptions of investigation techniques, forensic analysis, and police procedures, often grounded in realism.
Moral ambiguity: Characters may not always be clearly defined as good or evil, with shades of gray in their motivations and actions.
Focus on the "whodunit": The central mystery often revolves around identifying the perpetrator, with the reveal being the climax of the story.
According to AI, . . . The best-selling male mystery novelists are known for their fast-paced thrillers and intricate plots.
Fashion and Books
The Hottest Thing in Fashion Advertising? Books, WSJ (Feb. 2022)
Subtitle: The ubiquity of tech has made old-fashioned reading a way to signal luxury, by Katie Deighton
Fashion brands that long made bedfellows with art and music have lately been flirting with a nerdier muse: literature. J.Crew this month hosted a ticketed “literary salon” with the trans-Atlantic book club Buffy’s and introduced a preppy collaboration with the New Yorker.
Tiffany & Co. erected billboards filled with quotes on love from writers . . . And a recent ad campaign for Saint Laurent starred Chloë Sevigny, Charlotte Gainsbourg . . . and Marcel Proust.
“Stories of women, invented by a woman, literature here is a tool, to add depth and meaning, to enrich experience,” Prada said in a press release. But unlike most books, Prada’s offer was designed to be owned and read by a select few, presented only to guests at events in New York, Tokyo, Milan, Paris and London. In fact, the elevation of paper, ink and intellect among fashion advertisers in general is partly an attempt to project luxury, marketing experts say.
“It’s about demonstrating intelligence, demonstrating discernment and demonstrating the value of time, because to have your own time is one of the greatest luxuries in the world,” said James Denman, a brand consultant specializing in luxury and fashion.
“Reading—not being always online, not always being connected, not having the phone constantly next to you—has come to imply that you are just operating at a different level.”
The Hottest Thing in Fashion Advertising? Books, WSJ (Feb. 2022)
Brands are also using books to keep up with elusive younger consumers. Last year marked the first year of growth for the physical book market since 2021.
But Gen Z readers are loud about their love of books, with social-media literary subcultures #BookTok and #Bookstagram comprising tens of millions of posts and influencing the merchandising strategies of booksellers, who were once thought to be a dying breed.
“You always want to find relevance,” said Trey Laird, a creative director who works with the fashion brand DKNY. “I try not to over intellectualize it, but this movement is growing—in this age that we live in, where everything’s like a second of content, instantly consumed—to find things that last and things that have integrity and a true idea and story and craft to them.” DKNY’s ads featured Gerber clutching books in front of the Manhattan skyline and posing on the floor of the trendy bookstore McNally Jackson.
The wider campaign included quotes from books set in New York City, including “Bright Lights, Big City” by Jay McInerney and “Just Kids” by Patti Smith. The fashion line also erected “mini libraries”—cubby holes similar to newspaper vending machines painted taxicab yellow where people can take and leave free books in London, Milan and New York.
Next week:
We Solve Murders