meanwhile, in movie news

[selenak]

Second post of the day, as I thought everyone who commented on this entry might be interested: Ian McKellen just tweeted the official trailer for All Is True, the Kenneth Branagh/Judi Dench/McKellen starring Old Will Shakespeare In Stratford tale:

"All Is True | Official Trailer" (Watch on YouTube)

(As for the thing that puzzled me most about the original announcement, seems that McKellen, in a blond wig, is indeed Southhampton, and not in a flashforward. Yup. That stint in the Tower after the Essex rebellion must have added decades. Otoh, this is a more sympathetic Southhampton than I've seen before.)


And while we're talking trailers, I've noticed a certain irritation in my flist/circle that the two Presidents Bush are getting nostalgia benefits due to the awfulness of Individual 1, as Mueller's investigation calls him. Now I have no strong feelings about Bush the Elder either way, though I have to say, the two Germanys would not have gotten unification without him (what with Thatcher endlessly replaying WWII movies in her head and spouting every cliché ever, Mitterand actually having lived during WWII, and Gorbachev sceptical about the larger implication re: NATO; it was very much Bush the Elder's personal support there which made the difference), which is why the obituaries in our papers all were titled with a variation of "friend of Germany" and why Merkel attended the funeral instead of sending someone else to represent the country). But my ire about the Dubya years is certainly undiminished. As for for W. himself, I stand by my theory that he's George III as characterised by Byron in Vision of Judgment -
Whose History was ever stained as his will be
With national and individual woes?
I grant his household abstinence; I grant
His neutral virtues, which most monarchs want

I know he was a constant consort; own
He was a decent sire, and middling lord.
All this is much, and most upon a throne;
As temperance, if at Apicius' board,
Is more than at an anchorite's supper shown.
I grant him all the kindest can accord;
And this was well for him, but not for those
Millions who found him what Oppression chose.


Anyway, if W. as a person certainly is preferable to Individual 1, his years in office certainly did a great deal of the damage that led to this point. That certainly seems to be the opinion of Adam McKay, who just collected a whole bunch of nominations for Vice, which appears to be a Cheney-centric pitch black satire:

"VICE Trailer NEW (2018) - Adam McKay Christian Bale Dick Cheney Movie" (Watch on YouTube)

Alright then. 2019 is off to an interesting start, movie-wise.

Comments

[naraht]

As for for W. himself, I stand by my theory that he's George III as characterised by Byron in Vision of Judgment -

That's absolutely fantastic. Thank you for sharing. I agree and didn't know that quote previously.

[selenak]

You‘re welcome. The Vision of Judgment is brilliant anyway: it‘s that rarity, a political satire with a wit that still works centuries after the contemporary context is gone. More in my Read Byron! post from many years ago:

https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/524961.html

[kore]

One of the things I'm loving about the DW RenaissanceTM is people linking to their older posts, it's like a library!

[kore]

Wow, that quote is devastating.

[selenak]

I had read The Vision of Judgment repeatedly before, but since the Dubya years, I can never come across that passage without equating the Georges.

[shadowkat]

Thank you for giving me a reason to appreciate HW Bush. I didn't realize he was largely responsible for tearing down the Berlin wall and reunification of Germany. For some reason I always credited Regan. (I remember the Berlin Wall, I actually visited Berlin in 1980, and went through Checkpoint Charlie. Never forgot it. Also my Uncle was possibly a spy in Berlin during the Cold War years of the 1970s and 80s, serving as soccer coach for a soccer team traveling around East Germany, and housed out of West Berlin. We didn't know he was a spy of course, until it finally occurred to my father that it made no sense for a Major in Army Intelligence who wasn't know for his athletic abilities to be working as a soccer coach.)

Anyway thanks. I had blatantly refused to mourn him.

And the trailer for Vice looks good. Not so sure about the "All I Will" trailer on Shakespeare...even though I'd watch Ian McKellan and Judi Dench read the phone book.

[selenak]

To elaborate: I said "reunification" not the wall. These are two different issues. If there's any one person (more than others) responsible for the wall coming down, it's Mikhail Gorbachev. It all could have gone so very differently, i.e. like the Prague Spring, with Soviet troops mowing down the demonstrators in the GDR, if Gorbachev hadn't meant what he said about Glasnost and Perestroika.


(Now, I realise that in the US, Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" is treated as iconic, but over here, it really isn't, because at that time Reagan said that, Gorbachev's reforms had already been in full swing. What Reagan did do was to outspend Gorbachev's predecessors, Breshnev, Andropov, et al, in the arms race, which greatly contributed to the ruin of the Soviet economy and enabled a reformer like Gorbachev to come to power in the first place, but I very much doubt the later had been Reagan's original intention.)

(Gorbachev was, and remains wildly popular in Germany; it's his tragedy that he's hated in his homeland for pretty much the same reason he's loved over here. During the 25th years fall of the wall anniversary, you could still hear the Berlin crowd chanting "Gorbi, Gorbi" as if it was 1989. That kind of thing never happened for Reagan.)

However, just because the wall was down didn't mean automatic reunification for Germany. Au contraire. (The GDR didn't automatically dissolve itself, for starters. Honecker & Co. had no intention to go at first, and even within the protest movement, opinions were divided as to whether the future should be a unification with West Germany or a reformed GDR. Since once crossing the border was possible for everyone again, people continued to leave in droves, however, the question soon started to become academic, because it was clear that without both states joining, the GDR would literally empty itself out.) After WWII, the various treaties made had postulated all of the former allies had to agree to it. At this point, Reagan wasn't president anymore, Bush was. And of the four allies, he was literally the only one who was pro reunification.


As I said, Thatcher was anti German reunification. So much so that in February 1990, she told Bush in a phonecall she thought the Soviet Union needed to be strengthened because the prospect of a reunified Germany was so bad. Bush was, shall we say, bemused. (More on Thatcher's position here.) Mitterand wasn't thrilled, either, but he came around. And the fact that Bush on the one hand maintained a pro-united Germany position but on the other was diplomatic about it, bringing the other three around via persuasion, not high handedly ordering them around, certainly made a difference. (I shudder to think what his son would have done.)

And that's why, as mentioned, basically our papers went all "there never was an US president who did so much for Germany, and most likely there never will be one again" in their obituaries.


ETA: Here is an article about Bush's role in reunification by former ambassador John Kornblum.

[shadowkat]

Thank you, didn't know any of that. All I remember is the wall falling down on the news. (I've no idea if they went into detail or not over here. My memory of it isn't necessarily the most reliable. I know that a big deal was made of Regan and Gorbachev ending the Cold War, and how Regan's foreign policy and spending on defense was justified by it. And I remember fighting with people over that.)

Curious though - what was it like? Were you on the West or East side? Was it an improvement?

[selenak]

I was on the West side. Too far from the border the night it happened to go there, but I was glued to my tv screen. And then, January 1st of the new year which was the first time you didn't need a Visum anymore to visit East Germany, my entire family went by car to visit a couple of East German towns. It was the most amazing time, not least because none of us had ever believed it would happen in our livetimes. I was born in 1969, so to me, the Iron Wall had always been there.

(Re: visa - the way you could travel from West to East before 1989 was that within Berlin, you got a 24 hour Visum as a West German wanting to visit East Berlin, but you had to be back in West Berlin after that time. If you wanted to visit the rest of the GDR, you had to apply for a Visum months in advance. Those were usually granted, but came with obligations to stick to certain roads and hotels. If you were an East German wanting to visit West Germany and weren't some party official's relation or an athlete or someone like that, well, dream on.)

Was it an improvement: given that the GDR was a dictatorship with an order to shoot its own citizens if they tried to leave the country secretly, well, obviously. As to whether a reunified Germany was an improvement (as opposed to two democratic German states, hypothetically speaking, though as I said in practical terms that wouldn't have worked because everyone was busy going west where the money was as soon as they could), there are things I miss about the Bonn republic, and I think the long term damage that's left by 70 years of uninterrupted dictatorship (first 12 years of the Nazis, then the communists) is partly responsible for the right wing extremism currently strongest in the former GDR. But on the plus side, for me, personally, post reunification: lots of friends whom in some cases I learned a lot from, lots of additional places and landscapes to like and explore, and in general having to admit being wrong about a couple of things (case in point: Berlin as the capital - I'd been against it); the last one hopefully prevents drifting off into self rightousness too much.

[shadowkat]

Thank you so much for sharing. I'd always assumed the reunification and the removal of the wall was a good thing, but I was curious to hear another more personal perspective - from someone who was actually living in Germany at the time. Mainly because I'm learning to question some of my assumptions.

My own perspective is somewhat colored by the media, my own experiences and friends/family/etc. Also, I was born in 1967, so grew up during the Cold War along with all of the information and misinformation surrounding it. Up until roughly the early 1990s, after the Wall fell, and the Soviet Union dissolved, we were worried about the Soviet Union starting a nuclear war or invading and the evils of communism.

I've discussed some of what happened in Russia during this period with a Russian Co-worker, who is in his mid-thirties. He immigrated to the US in 2000. He told me that while things were better post-Soviet Union dissolution, they were also worse in some respects -- because of the levels of corruption. And the difficulty with "communism" was everything was run by bribing or who you knew. If you didn't have the right connections, you couldn't get anywhere. Also the bureaucratic red-tape was crippling. He also said that Putin had been in office for forever - from his perspective and was akin to a dictator. What he was describing was pretty much a dictatorship, which has a crippling effect on people. He said that they didn't know what to do without a dictator in place, everything fell into chaos, so they just elected another one to take the place of the former one, which I thought was an interesting perspective.

[pseudo_tsuga]

:sucks teeth:

damn, that quote is so spot on. I guess there are no new characters....

[selenak]

True. Though W. is spared poryphyria, at least.

[nenya_kanadka]

"Individual 1" is...an absolutely fantastic quiet burn. (In original context I'm sure it's just what you call the party under investigation, but out of context it's beautiful for someone so self-obsessed.)