Lee Daniels' The Butler

Perhaps to balance out his Oscar-nominated film Precious, which had an almost all-female cast and focused on a young woman’s psychic journey out of abuse, Lee Daniels’ historical drama The Butler focuses most intently on its male characters. Oprah Winfrey delivers a terrific performance as the wife of ‘the butler’ played by Forest Whitaker, and she has a great many scenes showing how her character changes over the years, but she doesn’t get to make the overarching decisions about the family that her husband does. The hero of The Butler is Cecil Gaines, who journeys from a sharecropping childhood in the South to a decades-long post as White House butler, and the movie presents an overview of African-American history during the period as seen by both Cecil and his son Louis (David Oyelowo). The engine of the plot is how their politics and survival skills differ; this dialectic encapsulates a debate that existed in African-American culture as a whole and that persisted throughout the era. 

One of the central questions addressed by the movie is: how angry should a black man be?  The debate even covers Sidney Poitier’s persona: the older Mr. and Mrs. Gaines adore him and are thrilled to see a black man succeeding in Hollywood; the younger Louis and his Afro-sporting girlfriend believe that Poitier is merely the kind of non-threatening black man that whites want to see.

For much of the film, Cecil thinks the role of a black man should be to provide for his family and to be a model upstanding citizen. He gets nervous when his family discusses the brutal Emmett Till lynching even in the privacy of their home; he believes no good can come of rocking the boat, and is horrified when he sees Louis being influenced by the campaign of Emmett Till’s mother. Cecil’s position is completely understandable psychologically, since the movie begins with him as a young boy working in the fields experiencing severe trauma: he sees his mother being taken off lasciviously by their white employer and he urges his father to do something; the father makes the merest objection to the white man and is instantly murdered by him. Moreover, Cecil’s mother subsequently loses her sanity. This is absolutely overwhelming trauma for a child. 

Thus, the opening prelude establishes the father and son chain, and the issue of black manhood, which will become a central concern of the film. Cecil learned early that a black man has to keep his head down and pretend to see nothing in order to survive. He perfects this skill as a waiter in a fancy hotel, and it is this ingratiating quality – the pretense that he is, essentially, just like the stereotype of the loyal black house slave contented to serve – which gets him noticed by a recruiter for the White House job.

By contrast, next-generation Louis chooses to go to school in the South – the last place on earth his father wants him to go -- deliberately to get involved with the ‘Love campaign’ and lunch counter sit-ins. The narrative of the film cuts back and forth between Louis’ growing involvement with early civil rights actions and Cecil’s experience of the movement from within the Oval Office, where he overhears presidents talking about how to handle it. The scenes of targeted civil disobedience in the South repeatedly feature the stoicism of Louis and his well-trained peers in the face of humiliating and grueling violence by whites, and Louis is even one of the people on the Freedom Rider bus which gets fire-bombed. Eventually, after all the beatings and firehosings, Louis and his girlfriend become disenchanted by Martin Luther King’s vision of non-violence, and they join the Black Panthers.

The inspiration for the movie is a 2008 Washington Post article by Will Haygood, “A Butler Well Served by This Election” (expanded since into a book). The article is a human interest story about Eugene Allen, a then 88-year old black man who worked as a White House butler for 34 years, through eight presidencies, and lived to see Barack Obama’s election. Haygood wrote of a diligent servant who “never missed a day of work, and often worked 6 days a week”, and this is reflected in the movie in Cecil’s pride in his work and his meticulous attention to detail. Director Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong praise this diligence – and so does a civil rights group leader in one scene, who explains to the young volunteers, including Louis, that black domestics have aided the struggle in their own way, countering stereotypes with daily evidence of hard work and trustworthiness. 

At the same time, however, Daniels and Strong suggest that there is a cost to this kind of selflessness: Cecil is always at work, and his wife Gloria gets lonely at home. She takes refuge in alcohol and in a neighbor (Terrence Howard). Gloria also seethes with resentment at the great interest Cecil takes in the goings on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

The movie is a giant elaboration on the Washington Post article, but it takes its central structure from one line in the original piece: “He was there while America's racial history was being remade: Brown v. Board of Education, the Little Rock school crisis, the 1963 March on Washington, the cities burning, the civil rights bills, the assassinations.” The Butler begins with Eisenhower’s reluctant enforcement of school desegregation, and then touches on key presidents and their involvement with civil rights gains and losses. JFK has an epiphany and makes a speech pledging to fight for civil rights, but is then assassinated. Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights achievements are contradicted by the private man, who is foul-mouthed and disrespectful. 

The Vietnam War takes one of Cecil’s two sons and devastates Gloria. Though Cecil at first seems to support the war, which is in keeping with his overall philosophy of proving himself as a patriotic and model citizen, he eventually confides in voice-over that he doesn’t know what they were fighting for.

As Vice-President, Richard Nixon is shown courting the votes of the black White House domestic staff; as President, Nixon swears in front of Cecil that he will crush the Black Panthers and the entire Black Power movement. Once again, Cecil is caught in the middle, because at that point his own son is involved in the Black Panthers. As he did when his son was involved in the civil rights movement, he disapproves of Louis’ actions and opinions. 

Overall, the filmmakers show a debate between African-American accommodationism and militancy. This reflects a debate that has long existed within the African-American community -- even before there was a debate between the non-violence of the Martin Luther King Jr.-led civil rights movement and the Black Nationalism of Malcolm X, there was a debate between the approaches of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Cecil’s approach is to work diligently in a low-prestige career that lies in a traditional field for blacks, build up economic stability, and reassure whites that he bears them no ill will – in other words, Cecil is in the Booker T. Washington camp. Much like Washington, Cecil came from the South and suffered from the calamity of a bigoted system. On the other hand, his son Louis grew up in a comfortable and secure environment and didn’t experience that kind of prejudice – like W.E.B. Du Bois. Also like Du Bois, Louis believes African-Americans should not settle for second-class status and is embarrassed by his father’s servile job at the White House. Louis aims for higher education and a leadership role for himself – in addition to his extra-curricular activism, Louis also attends college and ends up running for elected office.

Like the debate in African-American thought over time, the needle is shown to shift during the film. For a while, Cecil responds to Louis’ civil rights activities, his protests and repeated arrests, as if they are extremely radical and are demanding too much. Those demands eventually become law, however --  Cecil sees first-hand that his employers, the leaders of the free world, have to bow to the pressure. The needle continues to shift when the Black Power movement comes along. Cecil reacts even more angrily to Louis’ involvement there, but he no longer feels that the non-violent civil disobedience was inappropriate. Louis quickly grows disillusioned with the Black Panthers; after a scene in which a cell openly discusses the desirability of violence, he walks away, and he starts to work within the electoral system instead. 

If the film short-changes any part of history it seems to be the Black Panther Party. In an on-screen coda at the close of the film, Daniels and Strong pay tribute to the men and women who fought in the civil rights movement, and this supports the way the film leans in favor of civil rights and Martin Luther King, Jr. and away from Black Power and Malcolm X. Louis’ strenuous objections to discussions of violence in small-group discussions among the Panthers makes it seem as if the Panthers were planning serious armed resistance as a main focus, while he dismisses the party’s professed aim to help the community with free school lunches and so on, as if they don’t mean it or have forgotten it. Though he runs for office himself, The Butler makes it seem as if such a move is in direct opposition to Panther philosophy – when in fact it wasn’t that long before Panther co-founder Bobby Seale ran for mayor of Oakland (1973), a stronghold of the movement. Far from being marginalized, Seale won 40% of the vote, paving the way for Lionel Wilson to become Oakland’s first black mayor a mere four years later. 

But Louis’ separation from Black Power ideology is not as great a change as that Cecil undergoes by the end of the movie. In the early years, when asked directly by presidents about his opinions on civil rights, Cecil tries to avoid answering. He is alarmed when his employers find out that his son has been involved in Freedom Rides. For much of the film, Cecil struggles to appear impassive at work, and seems to turn his anger instead on his son, barring him from the house and cutting off all contact with him when Louis becomes so radical they have no common ground anymore. But eventually, Cecil admits that he wears a mask when he acts the part of obsequious butler. First, he reveals it in voice-over when he tells us, during a banquet hosted by the Reagans, that he and other blacks wear two faces, one among whites in order to get by, and one for their real feelings, revealed only in private. This piece of narration imitates the notion of ‘double consciousness’ which W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about. When he offers his resignation to Reagan, he reveals to the president how he has suppressed his true feelings, and allowed his fears to govern him, preventing him from joining in the struggle. He promptly goes out and joins an anti-Reagan street protest being spearheaded by his son.

At the end of the film, an elderly Cecil and Gloria are helping Obama get elected by throwing house parties. After Obama’s victory, Cecil is invited to the White House to meet him one-on-one (dramatic license – a meeting really did take place with the real butler who inspired the story, but it was a group meeting). As a staff member directs him to the door, Cecil interrupts him: “I know the way.” This final line seems purposefully designed to include Cecil in the march of history we have just seen. By going out on this note, Lee Daniels’ The Butler honors Cecil’s own sacrifices, and shows that ultimately his faith was warranted that a journey from oppression to the presidency could occur.

How to Greenwash

If you are a large corporation, or even a medium-sized one, and you are in an industry which exploits natural resources, you probably find it very inconvenient that most of the American public says they care about the environment and that they want the government to protect it. This can really interfere with the way you do business: you may have to pay more to transport the resources you have extracted; there might be limits placed on how much you can extract in the first place; there could even be fines you are forced to pay for the by-product of your manufacturing activity. What a pain in the posterior. You didn’t go into business to placate a needy planet. Let the planet eat cake!

 Granted, you do have the option of relocating to another country where democracy is still struggling, especially where democracy of local people resisting multi-national corporations like your own is still struggling. However, you are likely very accustomed to the various perks of your CEO life in the U.S., so the most cost-effective solution is if you can get round the American body politic and then never have to leave home at all!

Listen up for just a few minutes – have your secretary tell whoever it is you’ll call them back -- and soon I can teach you how to be a whiz at Greenwashing too.

There are two major goals you will want to meet and address. Fortunately, there are clear steps to accomplish both.

Goal #1) Greenwashing your company

In order to satisfy the public’s deep suspicion that companies do not care about the environment but merely value profits, you will need to do a lot of work to change your image and brand yourself as a conscientious, responsible, communitarian company that voluntarily curbs its own greed and cleans up its act. You want the public to feel that you are on the same side as them. There are two options that will help you make this shift.

Option A) Hire an expensive public relations firm.

  The highest-end public relations firms have a great deal of experience in manipulating public opinion to conform with the wishes of corporate clients. Hire one of these, and be willing to pay hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. They will then handle everything for you. Before you know it, the public will be willing to vote against their own interests and for yours instead. 

Try to find a PR firm which worked for the tobacco industry for a long time -- they will have had  a great deal of important and instructive experience in the paradigm that so many other industries have successfully followed ever since. Those firms deserve awards for how many decades they managed to paint the tobacco industry as genuinely interested in finding out the truth about nicotine and addiction. This is the kind of magic trick you want someone to do for you too!

Or

Option B) Use your own internal public relations people, but train them well to follow these three steps:

1) Partner with a prominent environmental organization:

a) Look for a well-known, established environmental organization so that you can benefit from the name recognition of an alliance with them. Find a big enough, top-down, hierarchically-structured group so that they have assets they want to protect and a docile membership – look for  organizations with fancy offices, national membership bases, sleek newsletters, and extensive fundraising operations. This will make them much more likely to be willing to work with you than organizations which are more action-oriented. Since the more sedentary organizations do not have much opportunity to actually boast of specific actions and accomplishments, if they can boast to their membership that they have pressured you or transformed you, it will look like a big achievement for them. This is of course a win-win situation for you both. You do realize, I hope, that no actual transformation need happen.

b) Be willing to make some superficial concession if they require it. If your company has been responsible for a massive oil spill, for instance, you will want to show that you are willing to consider some sort of plan that will improve the environmental health of the devastated area. Do not, of course, just blindly concede to their requests. You are not allying with this organization in order to reform your own company, but to use the credibility of the organization to mend your own credibility. It is about image. 

c) Donate money to the organization or to a specific environmental project that your company and they develop together. Sponsor an event which seeks to make everybody feel good about helping the environment but that does not bring up controversial issues or raise too much awareness: cleaning up litter, for instance, or gathering items for recycling. Go for the kind of events that are good harmless fun for the whole family. (Planting trees makes you sound like hippies, though -- and besides, do you want the fake-tree manufacturers to get annoyed?) Make sure to tell stockholders, customers, and the public at large about your generosity and take lots of photos.

d) Treat the partnership as a long-term collaboration. Serve on their board of directors of the environmental organization; it is an inexpensive way to spy on them and shape their attitudes at the same time. Find joint ongoing projects that you can contribute to and thus give you something to boast about yearly. This will give you long-term credibility and be insurance for any further trouble you may get into in the future if your chemicals turn out to be toxic, your products turn out to come from old-growth forests, you realize you’ve killed off an entire species of fish, or some other potential problem.

2) Pay for slick ads which portray your company as environmentalist:

Ads do not have to bear any relation to actual facts, so you can just throw up images of trees, grass, water, children playing, butterflies, dandelion seeds blowing in the breeze, and so forth. Use terms like “clean,” “safe,” “healthy,” “Earth,” and “future,” all of which have positive connotations and can be applied to virtually anything. Make sure you stress your “commitment” to the environment. It is okay, you won’t have to get specific.

3) Counterbalance your perceived negatives:

If you are in a relatively new industry which the public tends to think is artificial and dangerous, like genetic engineering or the manufacturing of synthetic chemicals, make sure you play off the idea that you are making big and heartfelt investments in technology and innovation, and that you really have respect for the wonders of science. Be on the side of progress. Imply that the other side is superstitious and uninformed.

If your business needs to exploit natural resources that have been around for centuries – but which your company is fast using up – make sure you emphasize how much you value traditional things like family, our natural heritage, and common sense.

Goal #2) Pursuing your own agenda

It would not be much of a benefit for your company if collaborating with a green organization prevented you from continuing to pillage or pollute, so of course you also need the PR firm or your own PR professionals to guide you in a plan to prevent regulations from limiting your profit margin. These are easy principles to execute:

1) Delay, delay, delay

You may not be able to hold off regulations forever, but you can hold them off long enough to continue to grab what you can get in the meantime. You just need to keep telling the public that more information is needed before the health and safety of your product or activity can be determined. Scientific studies can take years to finally finish, but in the meantime, Wall Street stock trading takes place daily. Profits accrue!

2) Pretend that you care about the democratic exchange of ideas

Pass your company off as a proud part of that whole American democratic tradition thingy. Emphasize words in your public pronouncements like “dialogue,” “debate,” “openness,” and the weighing of all the information. (If you add the word “robust” to those nouns, that’s always helpful.) Promise to take action as soon as all the facts have been tabulated, just do not give a firm deadline by which anyone can expect said facts to arrive or to actually be conclusive. Take a calm and dispassionate tone!!!!!!

3) Engage in name-calling

Though you might think it would back-fire, somehow it never does. Make sure that you target your critics as “alarmist,” “nay-sayers,” “doom and gloom,” “anti-capitalists,” “kooks,” “emotional,” etc. Dismiss the science that criticizes your company as “junk science” and elevate science which redeems you as “sound science” -- no media outlet will ever mention which studies are funded by you, so this is a safe strategy.

4) Paint your side as the compromise position

Part of your name-calling approach should be to portray your opponents as extremists who have unrealistic demands and little interest in practical solutions. Contrast this with how you and your industry just want to pursue “wise use:” techniques and methods which still allow humans to make use of the environment, within reason. Do not allow the environmentalists’ arguments for “sustainability” to sound like the same position you are taking. Do not, of course, sign up for any true limits on exploitation or pollution of natural resources. 

You’re all set, as will be the future of the planet! If you follow these recommendations, you will be able to meet both the important aim of greenwashing your company so you can benefit from the public trust, and the pivotal goal of pursuing your own corporate agenda so you can keep doing whatever you were doing that the public objected to in the first place. 

In other words, you will be able to go on making use of the Earth’s bounty forever, or for as long as that bounty lasts. Even if that may not be for very long.

NOT SO THRILLING: AN OLD DORIS DAY PROPAGANDA FILM

It’s best to be forewarned about the 1963 broad comedy The Thrill of it All, in case you come across it unsuspecting and are drawn in by the caliber of names associated with it: directed by Norman Jewison, written by Carl Reiner from a story by Reiner and Larry Gelbart, and starring Doris Day and James Garner. You might be tempted to check it out as a retro, Technicolor romp -- and not realize that its entire aim is brainwashing. 

During the course of the film, Doris Day’s character Beverly goes from contented “doctor’s wife” to a high-paid career of her own in commercials, much to her obstetrician husband Dr. Gerald Boyer’s displeasure, since he maintains they make enough money on his salary. For a good chunk of the movie, Gerald amd Beverly are in a kind of war over her career, to the extent that Gerald tries all kinds of farcical tricks and ruses to make her stop working. The couplr have a lot of animosity as they fight this out. However, in the end, Beverly realizes the folly of her ways and quits her job, and the couple reconciles. 

One of the main brainwashing techniques the film employs is to sentimentalize giving birth, which it does repeatedly from the very start of The Thrill of it All, in the opening credits of white, paper-constructed nursery figures. It also kicks into the propaganda with Mrs. Fraleigh’s ecstasy over the news she is pregnant. Yet it is in the movie’s climax that the act of giving birth is downright lionized. Mrs. Fraleigh (Arlene Francis) goes into labor in a traffic jam and ends up giving birth in the limo -- by the time the car pulls up at the hospital, the baby is out. A close-up of Mrs. Fraleigh leaning back against the seat smiling as she tells her husband the news is back-lit and shot in soft-focus. The flowered veil on her fancy hat is spread around her perfect curls like a halo, idealizing her. It is as if, after trying to bear a child for 20 years, she has now been inducted into a mystical sisterhood of womankind. At the same time, Beverly is also back-lit and shot in a soft-focus medium close-up as she gazes proudly at her skillful obstetrician husband. Here Beverly looks soft and delicate too -- unlike, for instance, an earlier scene when she is offered $80,000 for a spokes-model contract, and falls into a crate of tomatoes. Here, it is as if the magic of childbirth has touched her too. Indeed, it has; we will soon learn that it has made her decide to leave her lucrative career and re-invest herself as her husband’s helpmate.

Interestingly, at the same time as having babies is built up as a woman’s finest calling, the difficulty of it is minimized in this climactic scene. Gardiner Fraleigh is running around frantically as the birth becomes imminent, but his wife, who has not complained to our knowledge during her pregnancy, seems to get by without labor pains, bodily fluids messing up the inside of the car, or complications – despite the fact she is middle-aged and without benefit of maternity ward care during the pivotal car ride. She also seems to have retained every single item of clothing during labor, none of her make-up has run, there’s not a bead of sweat on her, she does not seem in the least bit tired, and somehow, there was room for her, Beverly, and Gerald, to all sit in the back of the car and push out a baby without anyone’s knees getting in the way. The ease of this birth is even more striking in light of the frequent slapstick mishaps that make fools of Gerald and Beverly in the movie, and which are always linked to Beverly working outside the home. The message to women seems to be that having babies is both noble and a piece of cake, whereas getting mixed up in the work world is humiliating and causes havoc in one’s personal life.

Ironically, although childbirth is elevated in The Thrill of it All, women are not given higher status because of it. Our introduction to Dr. Gerald Boyer at the beginning of the film is when he walks confidently out of the delivery room after a successful birth to congratulate the father; the mother is invisible. Though the climactic race to the hospital with Mrs. Fraleigh is a key set piece in terms of story structure and the complexity of staging it, most of the sequence is about the externals: the traffic jam, whether Gardiner can procure needed items from other drivers like a clean newspaper, and Dr. Boyer’s arrival on a police horse – riding up dramatically to charged music as if he were a knight coming to the rescue. (A take-charge knight; as soon as he catches up to the Fraleigh car he starts acting like an authority, issuing instructions to the police.) There is no direct narrative attention to what Mrs. Fraleigh is experiencing. This may have a lot to do with the puritanical prohibitions of the Production Code, which was still limiting what Hollywood could depict, but the ironic result is that though it is her labor that sets the sequence off, she is practically a passive spectator while it is everyone else who is active. 

There is a disturbing double-repressiveness when a movie extols pregnancy as female fulfillment but dares not talk about it from a woman’s perspective. The woman’s part in the process is kept in the dark – in a black Rolls Royce, out of view of the camera – and the visuals focus on men, as if male management of childbirth mattered more than what the woman does. For example, when mother and baby are moved from the limo to the hospital, Mrs. Fraleigh is moved out of the car almost invisibly at the back of the frame, and only one female nurse is in the background -- the other four medical figures taking control from Dr. Boyer are all male doctors and orderlies. Moreover, the name of the institution is the “Doctors’ Hospital”, we’ve heard that and now we see it on the front of the building. It is the (presumably all-male) doctors who make the institution.
 

In the same vein, Gardiner calls his wife a “genius” in the first scene for getting pregnant! At the film’s climax, he calls her “brilliant”, for giving birth! What he doesn’t call her, ever, is her first name, and neither does anyone else in the movie, so it is hard to buy the idea that she’s truly revered. (At best she gets referred to as “Mrs. Gardiner Fraleigh.”) Gardiner also compliments everyone in the limo except for Beverly for their brilliance over the childbirth, and yet Beverly has been there all along at his wife’s request and has overseen the process until her husband arrived. Also, she has first-hand knowledge from having given birth twice herself. 

But even Beverly seems to forget her own first-hand knowledge. She is brought to tears by watching her husband deliver the Fraleigh infant, and afterward tells him: “Darling, you know when I helped you back there in the car? And I held that new life in my arms? I felt what you must feel every single day.” She has already held new life in her arms, twice, has actually created that life and felt an even greater feeling than what Dr. Boyer can as an obstetrician, and yet the movie seems so intent on the dangers of women competing with men in the workforce that even Beverly’s experience as a mother takes a back seat to her husband’s professional skill in helping mothers give birth.

Visually, in fact, Beverly’s journey from career woman to re-dedicated housewife in the final moments of The Thrill of it All is almost presented as if she herself were being born. She has engaged in a lot of foolery with Happy Soap earlier in the film when she was not yet fully developed – they in fact hired her because she was unpolished, awkward and hesitant – and now, having seen what a proper career is by watching Dr. Boyer pull a baby out, Beverly emerges from the dark, cramped, womb-like car into the open space -- and a brand new perspective. When the car has arrived, we see those inside it through a window that is masked around the edges in a horizontal oval shape, like an iris from early films – the inside of the car is lit, but outside the oval is dark. If you were so inclined, this could also be seen as reminiscent of a vaginal opening. Beverly walks out of the car through this opening, emerging into the pool of light in front of the hospital, and, crying, she joins her husband. We see him in profile, head and chest, holding her, as she sniffles on his chest. The position makes Beverly look weak and childish in contrast to Gerald’s strong, parental figure. 

In the last shot of the scene, she pledges to leave her job to be a “doctor’s wife” and they kiss, both in profile in a close-up two-shot. We then segue to the performers in the same pose and shot, kissing at home. The two young kids tell their parents how much they want a sibling. Gerald hugs Beverly from behind during this exchange – the woman who had been so elusive earlier is now completely enclosed by his arms, the stair railing and the walls – for it appears she has been tamed, domesticated. The children on the landing appear as wise little cherubs; after hinting that they plan to make a baby together that night, Beverly and Gerald ascend the staircase together lovingly –  their unseen bedroom is their heavenly destination. Their constant tribulations have been solved now and their future will be like a paradise, for Beverly has given up her career.

It is clear that Gerald has won. He has recaptured his runaway wife. Her lucid arguments earlier in the film about why she needs outside interests or why she’d like to contribute earnings to the household have been forgotten. This is depicted as a happy ending, complete with fireworks popping as we go to closing credits. The message of the movie really could not be any plainer. It is no wonder that Betty Friedan felt the need to write her book The Feminine Mystique, which came out the same year. The Thrill of it All epitomizes the kind of concerted societal campaign that was being waged to persuade post-war American women to stay home.

Death on the Nile (2022)

The prologue of the movie is ingenious, and surprises the viewers by plunging them immediately into the trenches of World War I and a glimpse of Belgian Detective Hercule Poirot’s past, before he was an investigator – but when he already had the kind of mind that would develop into one. That sequence, in fact, is quintessential Branagh. It epitomizes Kenneth Branagh’s assets as a filmmaker: flamboyant, theatrical, boldly expanding out from the anticipated milieu and imagining a back-story for Poirot that isn’t strictly necessitated by the mystery Agatha Christie wrote but that grounds the story to come by adding depth to Poirot, and in a way that the audience can readily understand and enjoy. Branagh’s greatest strength, perhaps, is his willingness “to go there” – wherever ‘there’ might be – without pulling his punches in fear of whether it is proper, de rigueur, intellectually sanctioned, etc. When he directed Shakespeare films, this was known as ‘popularizing’ Shakespeare, although that was always a very odd way to put it, considering that no writer since Biblical days has written for the mass audience more overtly or successfully over the long-term than Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Branagh was intent on bringing out what was already there in Shakespeare, unlike the stuffy dramatizations which seemed to want to hide it, and now with Death on the Nile, as with Murder on the Orient Express, he seems again on a mission to make us appreciate the author he’s adapting to the screen, not as a distant curiosity, but up close and visceral.

Death on the Nile is a grandiose kind of movie, the kind where Gal Gadot goes for a walk on the ship’s deck to go speak to Poirot and the shot itself is a tour de force that shows off the boat and how big it is, and has fun being able to move the camera in a crane shot that follows her in one move. When a spurned love interest makes a reappearance, the scale of her entrance is operatic, with an enormous red train on her dress in a high camera angle. When the holiday-makers pass by ancient Egypt’s pyramids and sphinxes, these ancient wonders are giant-sized – something akin to D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, although this time they are probably CGI – and the grandeur of them dwarfs the human sight-seers and their petty squabbles. It’s obvious that this is a big-budget movie, and that it fully exploits how expansive it can be. But it does so in a classic-Hollywood vein, not in a typical modern action-movie vein (the kind that sacrifices visual beauty and originality for special effects wizardry and rapid cutting). It’s a movie that wants to spin you a tale, of another place and time, and let you participate in the story-making. Mystery aficionados like trying to guess who the killer is, and a game is played between the reader and the author, leaving clues but trying to surprise as well. Branagh lays down clues with the right amount of aplomb (in a story with sufficient complication) so that you can enjoy the ride and the process simultaneously. For instance, you might notice how shifty-eyed one of the characters looks when the camera pans past the group of passengers, or you might register “huh, that character mentioned she has lost an item, I bet that item’ll turn up as part of the plot,” but this just makes it more fun when the strings are untangled later.

This time, the film is not as visually frenetic as Murder on the Orient Express was. Branagh was so busy in that first Agatha Christie film, it almost looked like Baz Luhrmann. Poirot could not even lie down in his bunk on that train without the camera angle slanting bizarrely, and there were a lot of attention-getting compositions, movement, and sudden cuts. Though lively and energetic, the many distractions made it difficult to follow the plot. By contrast, this time around, the plot flows smoothly and the cinematic style is entertaining and inviting, less hyperbolic. 

Death on the Nile is also quite witty. There were a number of laugh-out loud moments. For example, in one scene Poirot accuses two people of murder and they are deeply offended, and his friend, from the other side of the room, helpfully offers comfort: “He accuses everyone of murder.” Poirot admits: “it’s a problem.” There’s also the casting of ‘Saunders and French’, the longtime comedy duo from England, as a couple traveling together -- a clever little reference. Jennifer Saunders’ character is also amusing because she’s a socialist, and keeps expressing her critical attitude about the rich and their morays. There is also, of course, Poirot’s own anal-retentive qualities, and how his ability to notice when tiny little details are out of order is both a bonus, as a detective, and an annoyance, as a person. And there’s his mustache, which has only grown more stylish and more relevant.

The cast is consistently excellent, and features Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, as a hostess to this huge ship-bound party; Annette Bening, a a grande dame who carries her artist’s easel around Egypt with her and is a controlling matriarch to Poirot’s pal Bouc (Tom Bateman); Sophie Okonedo as a lounge singer and Letitia Wright as her daughter; Russell Brand in a surprising appearance as a stoic, clean-cut, bespectacled doctor – clearly not type-casting; and Arnie Hammer and the French-British actress Emma Mackey as one-time lovers. Though Christie’s novel is from 1937 and the film retains that period setting, Branagh and the screenplay by Michael Green (who also adapted Murder on the Orient Express) have made the sensibility more modern, so there are inter-racial and same-sex romances, and some fluidity and openness between classes.

Though Branagh and Green manage to extract an overall theme about love and passion from Poirot’s own personal arc as well as from the murder plot, Death on the Nile is a movie that embraces unabashedly how frothy and frivolous it is – as John Gielgud said, “Style is knowing what kind of play you’re in”, and Branagh as a director follows that dictum and embraces the style of the material itself. He is not embarrassed to show us rich people leading pampered lives and then murdering each other and acting shocked, because that’s the material, and it has its own value, even if that value is no cure for cancer or climate change. In order to underline what world or style we’re in, Branagh stages several musical numbers, set in night-clubs or on the dance floor of the cruise ship, which enliven the whole enterprise (especially with some risqué moves that I’m pretty sure were not period artifacts) and which also provide Poirot with a love interest of his own. The movie makes no bones about showing us just how decadent the wealthy characters on this pleasure cruise really are, knowing that the audience is later going to enjoy seeing them get their comeuppance.

As far as class politics, Poirot himself also helps to provide balance. Though he is invited into the highest echelons, we have already seen from the prologue that he came from humble farmer stock. Moreover, he doesn’t get down with their debauchery; he is an observer, an outsider. He counters their excesses and histrionics with his own reasonableness and calmness. While he is quirky enough to be a memorable and interesting character, it is also clear that he remains sane even in the midst of this insular, self-centered social circle, so the audience can watch these vain and corrupt people through his eyes – detached and bemused. Though the idle rich would love to win him over, his loyalty is, always, to uncovering the facts. In short, he is actually a timely role model for our own society.

Speak the Speech

The fact that William Shakespeare of Stratford began as an actor seems entirely compatible with his writing when we look at his obsessive references to theatrical performance and illusion in several of his works: the As You Like It  “All the world’s a stage” speech, the Prologue’s “wooden O” invocation in Henry V, and Macbeth’s “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player.” It makes perfect sense for Shakespeare -- an actor with years of stage experience, a feeling of solidarity with other players, and a financial commitment to theater through joint stock in his own company -- to insert plays-within-plays into Love’s Labor’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hamlet. Yet it seems less likely that a poet like the Earl of Oxford, sequestered (per the film Anonymous) on an aristocrat’s estate far removed from the London theater world, would express himself in those terms.  A detached, reclusive writer seems unlikely to spend so much time on the Melancholy Dane’s relationship with the Players, or Hamlet’s master class in the craft of acting, but an actor-writer might -- and might get away with preaching to fellow actors. 

Even more germane to the way acting shaped Shakespeare the writer, however, is that Shakespeare’s writing, far from being constantly flowery poesy, is down-to-earth and psychologically astute. Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona rips up her admirer’s letter to show she has no interest in him, then once alone, she falls to her knees and tearfully scoops up the pieces. Googoo-eyed Juliet calls Romeo back to her balcony, then forgets what she was going to say. The heartbroken Falstaff denies that King Henry V really meant to reject him, and waits vainly for a reprieve. Beatrice gets a cold on her cousin’s wedding day because subconsciously she wishes she were getting married, despite what she says about romance.

Such insights extend to deeper psychological through-lines and major characters as well. Macbeth makes a big splash as a warrior-captain and is promoted by a grateful monarch, but the moment he tastes that career success, this hitherto rule-playing and loyal subject is consumed by an insane ambition. Othello wants to trust that his beloved Desdemona is faithful, but being an exception as a general in a fundamentally racist society, he is easily tricked into suspecting that a white woman could not really love a black man; despite all his accomplishments and recognition, he can’t believe that the power structure, to which Desdemona is related, truly accepts him. Getting ready for retirement, King Lear falls for flattery and obsequiousness just when he is trying to set up his legacy, and like a narcissist who needs to hear constant compliments or he’ll get offended, he cannot see which of his children or aides are actually the loyal ones. All of these portraits are immensely gratifying for any actor to mine, and a strong argument could be made that these profoundly human roles still fascinate artists and audiences precisely because Shakespeare as an actor knew how to give other actors emotionally-sophisticated parts.

Shakespeare’s writing is even more precisely actor-oriented, however, in the rich variety of ways he uses pace and rhythm to express character and emotion. As actors who study the texts know, the speech patterns of Shakespeare’s characters can be profoundly psychologically revealing. Cleopatra misses Antony like a lovesick teenager would, asking her entourage a torrent of questions about what he might be doing at that moment. In Much Ado About Nothing, after her cousin’s wedding descends into chaos, an outraged Beatrice gets emotional around Benedick, interrupting and contradicting herself, blurting out her love for him before she realizes. When the treacherous Iago lays the seeds to taint Othello’s mind, he speaks in a simple and straight-forward way, so that he won’t appear too smart to Othello and arouse his suspicion. By contrast, when Iago speaks to the foolish Roderigo, he uses more complex language in order to impress and intimidate him into helping Iago carry out his scheme.

Students acting Shakespeare are taught to ‘scan’ the meter of the lines, because diagramming the rhythm shows what the characters feel, beat by beat. Cracking the code reveals mood, energy, intended pauses, racing thoughts, tortured logic, and so much more. If a line runs shorter than the usual iambic pentameter, that’s a clue as to the character’s thought process. If it runs longer, that’s another clue. If it begins with an “O,” extending that vowel sound can be wonderfully expressive. If the line has a lot of monosyllabic words, those can be drawn out. If one character stops half way through a line and another character comes in for the second half of the line, the second actor benefits from picking up the cue (following quickly on the heels of the previous line) because it reveals the appropriate energy and therefore the character’s emotion.  

Noticing whether characters speak in verse or prose, what makes them switch between those forms, where or whether they rhyme, and where they use alliteration, antithesis, or simile — these are all clues. Well-trained actors also pay close attention to the word on which the line ends, since they have discovered that Shakespeare has it there for a reason that is particular to that character at that moment in time. Shakespeare’s verse does not just get to the end of the line and allow the actor to take a breath; it ends the character’s thought there, or uses it as a jumping pad for an altered or more highly charged thought, or continues a complicated thought onto the next line in a new way. The end of the line is thus a clue to subtle inner changes within the character. 

The technical nature of Shakespeare’s writing becomes ever more astonishing the more one delves into it. Though of course we cannot expect Shakespeare to have been methodically and deliberately going about his writing with a conscious effort to plant clues for the actor, there is such richness to every piece of text it shows a profound inner actor’s instinct. He even seems to have been aware, probably subconsciously, of the emotional flickers that could be mined in the split-second pause of a ‘separation’: the slight breath necessary when a word ends on one letter or sound and the next word begins with the same letter/sound. An actor cannot rush through “Say I am merry” or “’Tis Caesar that you mean” without making the words unintelligible – and if he pauses between the two similar sounds and puts an emphasis on the second word, emotional subtext (sarcasm, anger, suspicion, and so on) can be conveyed. Separations can also help with stage business. “This is thy sheath: there rust and let me die” has two separations, the ‘th’ sound and the ‘r’ sound, and this allows the actor time to, first, stab himself and second, take a pained breath in reaction.

Such sensitivity to the actor’s needs seems so absolutely informed by an insider’s knowledge of acting, it is almost incomprehensible that the authorship debate has not acknowledged this fact as the predominant one. Shakespeare wrote like an actor would write.

Finally, Shakespeare was never likely going to attain wealth just as a performer – acting was a precarious business, and besides, he was certainly not the star performer in the company, but more like a character actor. It makes sense for him to have kept writing while acting; it probably paid better. Indeed, Shakespeare had earned a pretty good fortune by the end of his life – and it was not by being a grain merchant. If, all the while that Shakespeare was raking in dough it was merely for pretending to write these sought-after plays, it is hard to believe that the supposedly rightful author would continue to pass up all that money as well as the acclaim. At the very least, one might expect the ‘real’ playwright to throw down his quill and refuse to do any more plays under that unfair arrangement.

But the Oxfordians have an even greater problem with regards to the money that Shakespeare earned: their candidate the Earl of Oxford had money troubles. Anonymous rationalizes from this fact to defend their own position: de Vere went broke, so the reason must have been because he was too busy writing the Shakespearean canon to manage his finances. But why wouldn’t he get paid for his work like Shakespeare did? And also, De Vere did put his name on numerous poems -- he was not too proud or private for that. It seems to strain credibility that when he ran into money troubles he would not also lay claim to the greatest plays in the English language if they were his and the result of many years of constant effort. These plays were widely celebrated by then, and commercial hits – it seems coming forward might have offered a solution to his financial woes.