Great Driving Moments No. 317

Early morning September, rainy, just before it gets light. Music was Eric Coates' Saxo-Rhapsody.

I picked a video for the weekend at random and got another film starring Tobey Maguire - Pleasantville. I don't know if I have the words to describe this film. It had all sorts of ideas and yet they were all boxed-off neatly with the ending comment about no one knowing what will happen next - a quantum universe created from a classical one. It seems from the comments on the linked page above, that most people see some kind of religious motive behind the film though the director seems to dismiss this. Maybe he made the obvious religious references because he could rather than to make any point. You could see the film as a final burying of the myth of what we think recent history is about and a recognition that the future is the only thing we can make a difference to, albeit a future which we can never know. We (and Americans especially) seem to hanker after a perfect milk-and-cookies past which never really occurred for most people. This reminds me of Charlie Chaplin's dream in Modern Times - the little wooden house with roses round the door and the cow walking by to provide the milk to go with the cookies. If I remember it correctly, at the end of the film, the main characters walk off into the sunset - the old version of not knowing the future. There is nothing outside the text - except the director's commentary on the DVD special edition - and the alternative shooting script - and the writer's original idea etc etc.

I am nearly at the end of the Orwell bio and I have to say it has been a long read. It is not a difficult read, just amazingly wide-ranging. It seems to switch from comment about political positions to straight accounts of events without any signposting. There are separate chapters on various meta-themes - Orwell's face, Orwell's things and even a strange 'case against' chapter supposedly made up as being by an arch (Communist) critic of Orwell which I assume is not the feelings of the biographer. Unless the strain of writing the whole book made him so hate Orwell, that he wrote this diatribe as a way of releasing the pressure. Anyway, I am in the last chapter but I was falling asleep so I had to put the bookmark back a few pages and leave the end until today. The next book is the biography of Robert Hooke - The Man Who Knew Too Much. Report on that this week hopefully.