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Eric Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Jennifer Mendelsohn

the breakfast table
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from: Daniel Mendelsohn

Scurrilous, Schmurrilous--Be Assertive!

Posted Wednesday, March 15, 2000, at 1:17 PM ET

Jennifer, you bichon (and not even frisé, I might add),

I will be contacting you through more official channels later on today, so this is merely to alert you to the fact that I deeply resent your scurrilous assertion that I was, in high school, a "choir fag." Clearly, I was in choir, and clearly (as Er so astutely pointed out yesterday), I was a--well, you know; but never, never a "choir fag" in the earnest, fedora-and-piano-keyboard-print-scarf-wearing sense you suggest. I prefer to think of myself as having been enacting a deeply self-conscious and ironic postmodern commentary on choir-fagginess: a choir fag in (as it were) quotation marks. I loathed all that handholding and preconcert "psyching."

Anyone for a madrigal? "Il est bel et bon, bon, bon ..."

As for movies: Clearly The Sixth Sense was in all ways the superior movie of the year, at least of those movies nominated. It had everything important: mood, tone, a good story, surprisingly deep emotionality, and a strong odd vision. And a faboo surprise ending, to boot. It is a rare that a scary flick actually has emotional content (emotions other than fear, that is), but this one did. I loved the infectious invasive melancholy and was mesmerized from the first frame and stayed that way through the very end.

I know we're supposed to admire Boys Don't Cry, and yes, Hilary Swank (God, for a name like that) is excellent, as are they all in that movie; but I've never actually enjoyed a movie less, because it had only one grim way to go, and that was down, down, down: It was like being strapped into a luxury car that's being pushed over a cliff. I have to say I just loathed American Beauty, which was technically slick but was a cliché from start to finish: the kind of movie that proposes a vision of the suburbs (as the locus of all stultifying-ness) that seems designed to allow urban moviegoers (or at least those who aspire to urbanity) to congratulate themselves on living far richer lives than people in the burbs do. But this of course is a fallacy; all people have complicated and interesting inner lives, potentially; it just takes real artists to realize that. (Would de Sica have made American Beauty? Nope.) The movie I'm waiting to see made is the one about how stultifying and emotionally deadening the grueling, grinding lives of most city people are, heh.

I have to say I adored Titanic, however (and no, not because of Leo, who I find has all of the sexual allure of polenta). Yes, the "human interest" story was dumb, not least because wholly unnecessary. What makes the story of the Titanic so irresistible, after all, is that it plays exactly like a Greek tragedy, whose classic structure the Titanic story has: the hubris, the self-aggrandizement of the builders, the overconfidence in technology and man's inventiveness, the beauty and outsize grandeur of the "hero" (in this case, the ship); the perfect confluences of any number of small mistakes to create, in the end, a total disaster. (Oedipus Rex proceeds in exactly the same way.) And what I loved about the movie was how it made you love the ship--which you need to do in order to be moved by its loss. (I just ignored the human romance stuff.) That scene with the engine room at the beginning, where the pistons start piston-ing as the ship gets under way, was thrilling, and just right--it makes you believe nothing bad can happen. Heh. So I do think it was, in its way, a wonderful movie. Although all my friends in our Schlock Movie Club who saw it ranked me out that day, because when the lights came up I was bawling uncontrollably, which they found hilarious. Which I suppose it was. (Something about that old lady at the end with her red-painted toenails, climbing on the railing to throw that diamond overboard, just got to me.)

Adieu, sweet amaryllises ...

xo D.

the breakfast table
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from: Daniel Mendelsohn

Scurrilous, Schmurrilous--Be Assertive!

Posted Wednesday, March 15, 2000, at 1:17 PM ET
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Eric Mendelsohn is the writer/director of the film Judy Berlin, currently in theaters and starring Madeline Kahn, Edie Falco, Barbara Barrie, and Julie Kavner. Daniel Mendelsohn is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and the New York Observer, a lecturer in classics at Princeton University, and the author of The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (click here to buy it). Jennifer Mendelsohn is Slate's Washington, D.C.-based "Keeping Tabs" columnist.
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Highlights from The Fray:


Don't the Mendelsohns remind you of J.D.Salinger's Glass family of precocious children?

--Patti

(To reply, click here.)

[Eagle80 was of the opinion that the Mendelsohns were in fact The Sopranos of the literati. Stacy Grover asked How did so much cleverness end up in one family? and this brought the Missing Mendelsohn brothers to The Fray: Andrew said I often wonder that myself. And you haven't even heard from the rest of us yet!
And Matthew responded:]
I have to agree with my brother Andrew. I've been feeling like Zeppo Marx all week. I think Slate should host a Breakfast Table with the forgotten Mendelsohn brothers. Jennifer, Eric and Daniel can host a discussion about gay culture while Andrew and myself discuss biotech stocks. You'll learn more with them but you'll make more with us.

(To reply--or to follow the thread in more detail--click here.)


Thursday's entry: As for Jennifer and marriage, I believe she is the star of an upcoming Fox special called, Who wants to Marry A Mendelsohn? Should be good.

--Bill Watrous

(To reply, click here.)

[If you want to read the marriage proposal for Jennifer (and her response) click here. Yet another member of the Mendelsohn family, Jay, entered The Fray here. Marriage proposal for Dan is here. Sorry, Eric, no proposal, but lots of Fraygrants did like your film and one of them liked your photo.

But there were also Fray readers who wanted to discuss serious issues, or at least give a short, thrilling history of religion down the ages:]

Typical drivel from the pseudo-intellectual phenoms. Here's some of my drivel. Let's see: there were 12 tribes waiting for the Messiah, He comes, they kill kill him because he wanted to give Caesar what was Caesar's, they wanted power, all he wanted was your faith and devotion to a Greater Good. The various churches spring up, (no-one mentions the Orthodox Churches and the atrocities they committed), Popes are killed, moved to France, etc., they offer forgiveness of sins for money, and kill, all for power using the popular religion of the time. Then we have Protestantism, (no one mentions the 2.5 million Catholics Cromwell killed and the killing that has gone on since then in Ireland) Let's leave for the New World, Puritan brothers, so that we the church leaders can have the power over every bit of your life (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Al Sharpton, Pat Buchanan, et al) Oh yeah, you're a witch, die! (You also had a piece of land I wanted...)I am going to skip a century or two now... lets see Joseph Smith, ex-con, sees an angel called Baloney, no Maloney, no, Moroni... yeah that's the one. Yeah, Yeah, that's my wife...Morgan Fairchild...all 11 of them...God told me I could, I swear!

Well enough of this. People are the problem, not God, not Jesus, no matter what religion, faith, creed.

--St Pat

(To reply, click here.)


Is it possible that the pope's "doctrinal rigidity" and "gestures of expansive humanity" [Monday's entry] are of a piece? As I understand John Paul II's thinking, the humanity Mendelsohn admires arises almost entirely from the pope's dogmatic beliefs about God, man's nature, and the consequent requirements for living a good life. Liberals (and I don't intend that as a lazy epithet) should consider the possibility that the "humanity" they praise must rest either on certain irreducible truths or on a collection of insubstantial, albeit attractive, sentiments.

--Michael Pollard

(To reply, click here.)


Many have decried the pope's apology as a political ploy. I doubt it, if only for the reason that if it were, he would have vaguely referred to the Crusades and Inquisition as "youthful indiscretions" of a church that is now much more mature and therefore knows better as a result of the important lessons it has learned.

G Wiz

(To reply, click here.)


1. Gays (yawn). How over. How '90s.
2. Catholics. "Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual."

--P.J.O'Connell

(To reply, click here.)


To P.J.O'Connell: Let's jump back in time to 1960...
Negros (yawn). How over. How 50's.
2. Jews. "Just ignore them and they'll go away."
It ain't over by a long shot!

--Dave

(To reply, click here.)


I'm glad Eric Mendelsohn cleared up the confusion over Beauty and the Beast. But I'm still not sure which Psycho he had in mind. Perkins or Vaughn? Or Christian Bale? I hope he clears this up before the Breakfast Table is wiped clear of bagel crumbs, the dishes go in the dishwasher, and he goes off to film The Magnificent Mendelsohns.

And, by the way, the poet Catullus [see Wednesday's entry] was really the Matt Drudge --or maybe Fray contributor--of his times. How low can you get?

--Eagle80

(To reply, click here.)

[The Catulluses of the modern age also discussed dogs, names, the Oscars, The Sopranos and many other Breakfast Table topics in The Fray this week.]

(3/17)

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