A silent film; scary context; and a backyard tea party.
I’m All Lost in …
the three things I’m obsessing over THIS week
#44
1) Unlike most of the pre-code (1928-1934) Hollywood movies I watch, City Girl (1930) which I streamed on YouTube this week, is a silent film; silent films had mostly fallen out of fashion by the late 1920s. Also unlike most pre-code Hollywood movies in general—risqué and playfully radical flicks, but formulaic B-grade affairs at best—City Girl is a breathtaking piece of cinema. It was directed by high-art German filmmaker F.W. Murnau; Murnau is most famous for his Expressionist masterpiece, 1922’s Nosferatu, but his expert craft is certainly evident in City Girl as he gives Edward Hopper treatment to Chicago’s diners, studio apartments, and El trains alongside the film’s dreamy camera-work-ballet portraying Minnesotan wheat fields
Exactly like most pre-code movies, however, City Girl, the second of three films Murnau made after emigrating to the U.S. in 1926, tries, with its tidy Hollywood denouement, to recant its subversive message, namely that progressive urban values have a moral clarity one doesn’t find in American farm country .
Despite the movie’s canned ending though (in which the “City Girl,” Kate, played by charismatic Mary Duncan, happily embraces rural living), the vast majority of Murnau’s unflinching footage documents tyranny and sexism inside a supposedly ideal, but in reality, physically-abusive country household. In a pretty shocking scene, the movie’s patriarch, a stoic farmer played with simmering puritanical angst by Scottish actor David Torrence, strikes his doe-eyed son’s new wife, Duncan’s character, Kate, immediately upon the young couple’s arrival from Chicago. The son, Lem (played by man-child Charles Farrell ), had been sent to Chicago to sell the family’s latest crop at the stock exchange and has startled the family by returning with a forthright, sassy, modern woman by his side. (Lem’s kid sister Anne is thrilled.) Hitting Kate across the face and sending her stumbling backward across the room, the angry father, inherently suspicious of big city trickery, declares (via the silent film’s full-screen inner-title cards): “Women like you love for what they can get out of it… But you’ll get nothing from me… I’m the master here! My son does what I say…and so will you!”
I was holding out hope that rebel-smart Kate, who Murnau poignantly portrays in the film’s opening acts as a jaded yet longing striver working at a busy Chicago lunch counter, would ultimately reject the once-idealized farm life she’d fantasized about back in her cramped city apartment and get on the train back to the Windy City. This was certainly how the story was going by the time of the film’s finale when Kate outmaneuvers the two encroaching forces around her—the brutal patriarchy governing her new home and the group of sexually menacing farm hand predators—to expose their countryside hypocrisy.
Indeed, Murnau’s reverse-engineering of the standard Eden-versus-Babylon trope turns Kate—initially a street-wise waitress—into a feminist freedom fighter of the prairie who translates her front-of-the-house restaurant-battle smarts into farm-house survival skills.
Chicago transplant (Mary Duncan) stands up to her brutal father-in-law (David Torrence) in F.W. Murnau's expertly crafted silent film, City Girl (1930).
But alas, even though we get one last nod to feminism (Kate rejects her husband’s assist to mount the horse-drawn carriage back to the train station and ascends the buggy herself), the story ultimately opts for young love (aka, traditional marriage) instead of political rebellion as the antidote to isolationist despotism. Kate and Lem turn the carriage around and return to the farm.
Had Kate and Lem followed through on Lem’s coming-of-age declaration that they will “live our own lives,” defiantly addressed to his father in the previous scene, and actually chosen a liberated yet unknown future after starting off in the carriage to the depot (a bit like Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross on the bus in the enigmatic final still of The Graduate), City Girl would have made good on Murnau’s indictment of conservatism.
Despite ignoring all the the rural heartland’s red flags and choosing to return to Lem’s family’s farm house, Kate’s class war and gender consciousness do in fact appear to be intact in the movie’s closing moments. After humbling the father and then benevolently embracing him in his repentance, Kate has positioned herself to transform farm life around her rather than reject it. In this sense, City Girl stands as a revolutionary sobriquet not a cautionary one.
2) I’m still obsessing over the election. And I do like the dramatic swing toward Harris in battleground state polling this week—a 12-point swing, for example, in Arizona from mid-July when Biden was still on the ticket.
But it’s two pieces of larger context that struck me this week.
The first was laid out in a concise Washington Post column.
Data for the win: Nope, nope, and nope on Trump’s main campaign issues—violent crime surge, porous borders, and devastating inflation.
Crime wave?
Noting how “data has repeatedly indicated that crime — and violent crime in particular — has declined over the past few years,” the Post rolls out the numbers: Homicide down 17% in 2024; robbery down 6%; aggravated assault down 5%; rape down 10%.
Border “invasion”?
The Post provides a reality check. “[Trump],” they write, “is fond of amplifying data about the number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border to suggest that the country is overrun with new arrivals, particularly those who entered the country illegally. … But Trump's assertions about an ‘open border’ are … hobbled by the striking decrease in apprehensions in recent months.”
Then, once again, they roll out the numbers: apprehensions dropped by half in January, dropped another 2% in February and March, dropped 6% in April, dropped 9% in May, 29% in June.
They conclude: “Another way to look at it: There were fewer apprehensions between border checkpoints in June 2024 than there were in June 2019 under Donald Trump.”
Runaway inflation?
Well, we all certainly saw Wednesday’s New York Times headline: “Inflation Cools to 2.9%” …
And as the Post article reports: “On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on inflation showing that the annual increase last month was lower than at any point since March 2021.” And they add: “average wages have increased more rapidly since 2021 and… the increase in the rate of inflation has slowed. … The rate of increase in wages has in recent months consistently been larger than the rate of increase of inflation, in fact.”
Their conclusion offers a delicious metaphor for the new state of the race (namely, a warm welcome to Kamala Harris), which may reflect why—as the aforementioned polling shows— people are losing interest in Trump:
These shifts also are not likely to change Trump’s rhetoric. He is no more interested in presenting accurate information about crime, immigration and inflation than he ever was, so he highlights things like the unmeasured-and-exaggerated concept of “migrant crime” to stoke fears about the direction of the country.
Still, the current numbers are a reflection of how the ground under Trump’s feet has shifted. He’s running against the first half of Biden’s administration, when Biden was his opponent and crime, inflation and immigration were acute problems. But now, to his chagrin, it’s 2024. The landscape is very different.
The second bit of context I appreciated this week came in a New York Times Magazine piece that placed MAGA on a logical timeline, tying them to earlier incarnations of feral right-wing American populism such as the anti-New Deal right of the early FDR-era, the nativist “America First” movement of the 1940s, the paranoid anti-Communist McCarthy-era of the early 1950s, the virulent racism of the conspiracy-theory obsessed John Birch Society in the 1960s, and Pat Buchanan’s apoplectic culture war in the early 1990s.
That last example is the one my Spidey Senses tracked with horror back then; it was laid out in this prescient narrative research paper by Elinor Langer published under the title “The American Neo-Nazi Movement Today,” as an entire issue of the Nation in July 1990. Reading the original 1990 article—it’s included in the link as a PDF—will give you the chills as you recognize how Langer’s 35-year-old observations about the dark corners and far fringes of the American political psyche in the 1990s now define the core of MAGA’s mainstream ideology.
Prompted by that issue of the Nation, I started keeping a file folder on the underground right at the time—I labeled it “The Convolutes,” as in convoluted ideology—and I immediately recognized the creepy noise when the same themes emerged in Trump’s rhetoric, QAnon conspiracy theories, and at MAGA rallies.
The NYT Magazine piece does a good job unpacking the ”ragtag assortment of self-described neo-monarchists, techno-libertarians and right-wing Marxists” (that last seeming contradiction should grab your attention) and summarizes it all like this:
At the heart of the New Right is a belief that most of what ails America can be blamed on a liberal elite that has burrowed into the federal government, the news media, Hollywood, big business and higher education … To them, liberalism is actively hurting the country, funneling fortunes from hard-working Americans into Washington and Wall Street and then casting any criticism as racist or fascist.
In contrast, the New Right posits a nationalistic nostalgia for a small-town America of decentralized government — a “front porch republic,”
“The right-wing populism that’s gotten such a strong foothold in Trump’s Republican Party has a long lineage,” said David Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers University. “In the early 20th century, there was a similar rural backlash against the changes in society that were making America more centralized, urban, cosmopolitan and interconnected with the world.”
3) Realizing that this weekly catalog of things I’m devouring at the moment has become a default diary, I need to note that upon receiving an invite from my good friend Velma last week, I attended her daughter’s last annual Teenage Tea Party this past Sunday evening.
Velma’s daughter N—, who decided back when she was a precocious freshman that she should hold a proper backyard tea party for her gang, is off (out-of-state) to college later this month, and given my ongoing delight in early ‘70s Bowie, 19th Century fiction, sad poetry, and Lorde—I’ve been lucky enough to be considered a cool grown-up over the years. So, in addition to Velma and Velma’s partner Byrne (also a close friend), I was the only other adult in attendance for the epic final tea party.
(Velma objected to that description, texting back in response to my “Planning on it… last annual tea party seems epic”-RSVP note with this: “I don’t think it will be the last, just the last of the HS years.”
I “was gonna qualify it as such,” I texted back, “but the ones that continue sporadically as HS gang slowly scatters and morphs into college pals and other assorted versions will be New Order to Joy Division. I want to catch the last Joy Division gig.” )
Thanks to the fact that N— plays the electric bass (naturally), the tea party was, in fact, a gig. Her high school band, Tin Men March, set up in the idyllic backyard—bongos, guitars, and techno drums among the ivy.
The whole groovy scene reminded me of Jane Fonda’s seismic 1965 summer party where Sunset Strip proto-indie hipsters, the Byrds, played at young Jane’s Dad’s L.A. house, a historic counter cultural inflection point that defined the new generation gap.
Mind you, I didn’t feel like 60-year-old Henry Fonda (Jane’s old-guard, Hollywood royalty father, though I certainly should have), but more like a casual patron saint digging the Edith Wharton-meets-Velvet Underground-meets-Karen Dalton mash.