Counter-Currents
2,826 words
When a white person — a white man in particular — comes of age either by escaping, eluding, or ignoring the seductive clamor of modernity, he becomes hardened. This doesn’t mean he becomes hard of heart or that he cannot love, appreciate beauty, or even change his ways. It means simply that he understands that the injustice of Truth will always be preferable to the injustice of Lies — and that there will always be injustice. What is tradition if not the regulation of human behavior honed over centuries of bitter Truth? What is modernity if not the abandonment of tradition for the sake of the elegant Lie? And what is the desire of the traditionalist, the conservative, and the reactionary if not to select the way of life with less injustice — measured and meted out as it may be — over that which promises no injustice at all, yet always enthusiastically overdelivers?
A man in this position grows sad, angry, and alienated when he watches his children and his people grapple unsuccessfully with the modern world. This, I believe, epitomizes Walter Bridge, the eponymous character in Evan S. Connell’s 1969 novel Mr. Bridge. The book is the sequel to Connell’s 1959 debut novel Mrs. Bridge, and the two books follow the same pattern: depicting the everyday life of an upper middle class family in 1930s Kansas City through brief, discrete chapters which resemble sketches or vignettes more than elements of a broader story. The novels make little demand on the reader to remember character names, plot points, or symbols. The chapters, for the most part, can be jumbled this way and that with little overall impact. It would be easy to dismiss both works as pointless since they offer little suspense or imagery, and since the dialogue-laden prose rarely rises above serviceable.
The genius of these novels — wherein one finds their gripping suspense and poignancy — is embodied by their deftly-hewn characters and narrator’s comprehensive historical understanding. Will Walter Bridge continue to provide for his family with his secure, low-yield investments and his long hours at the law firm? Will he keep his home as a bastion of stability in a slowly decaying world? Will his heart give out before he can ever retire? Will his wife India ever overcome her loneliness, boredom, and feminine insecurity? Will she ever be able to express her emotions or indeed act on her own? Will their children Ruth, Carolyn, and Douglas ever resist the natural temptations of youth and the less natural temptations of the modern world to become honorable, upstanding citizens like their parents?
You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s young adult novel The No College Club here.
Sounds like a lot of families we know, doesn’t it? Are they our neighbors, our colleagues, our friends? Are they parts of our families? Are we them? It takes quite a bit of life experience to be able to convert such extra-textual context into literary suspense. This is what Connell delivers, and this is why someone who is 38 and married with children will appreciate the Bridge novels more than someone who is 16, struggling in school, and itching to escape his parents’ house. Reading them is very much like living itself. If you want to know how the lives of your friends and family members will turn out, you will want to turn to the lives of the Kansas City Bridges.
A great example of Mr. Bridge’s grudging approval of life’s natural injustice comes when his children’s pet rabbit dies from shock after a neighborhood dog had lunged against its cage. His family mourns –but not Mr. Bridge:
That the creature could die of terror, and nothing except terror, was something Mr. Bridge found difficult to believe. Yet this was precisely what had happened. It disgusted him a little. He disliked weakness. He wrapped the carcass in a page of newspaper and threw the bundle in the garbage can. He did not blame the dog, which had acted according to nature. And if the dog had not destroyed the rabbit something else would have gotten it. Pets were difficult to keep in a city. The dog itself had been hit and nearly killed by a car a few months ago.
So be it, he thought, as he put the lid on the garbage can. The day may come when I will wish for a death as painless and quick.
Mr. Bridge applies his perspicacious fatalism to people as well, and is rarely wrong. He correctly predicts that a certain young boy will grow up to become a murderer because he sees that “he has the mind of an adult.” In Europe he knows instinctively when someone is trying to take advantage of him because he is a tourist. He recognizes socialist claptrap when he sees it, whether it comes from trendy authors, modernist painters, flamboyant psychiatrists, or one of India’s bookish friends. He has no time for society bores and blowhards, the very men India insists they socialize with every year. He also despises dishonesty and holds a longstanding grudge with a sitting Senator for never repaying a debt.
This makes him a bit of a fuddy duddy, but not one to be trifled with. His family knows this well. He slaps his oldest daughter Ruth when finding her in their living room with a man. He had approached them in the dark with a loaded pistol, expecting an intruder. If there is anything he hates, it’s carelessness — and this Douglas learns when facing his father’s wrath for not locking the doors and windows one evening.
Walter Bridge is the hardened conservative described above. People always challenge him to change, including his sensitive and malleable wife and his sometimes petulant children. But as an excellent judge of character, class, ethny, and race, he is moved by the modern world as much as a ten-ton ancient monument is by the tickling breeze:
A squat, bald Jew dressed in an expensive blue pinstripe suit skipped out of a doorway with an umbrella hooked over his arm. Mr. Bridge stopped walking and looked down at him suspiciously. The suit was an attempt at good taste, but it failed because it was obvious. He carried a copy of the Wall Street Journal but he held it so that it could be noticed. On his plump, pink, manicured little finger sparkled a diamond ring. Mr. Bridge looked again at the umbrella. The sun was shining, no rain had been forecast. This man was not to be trusted. Whatever his business, he was shallowly successful, and the business probably was marginal. He had the air of a slum lord. He could be a political lobbyist or a North End liquor wholesaler. He might be an osteopath or a cut-rate dentist. He was not a corporation executive or a reputable businessman. Whatever he did, he was not to be trusted. He was shrewd. He was repugnant. He was an opportunist.
Can the American WASP’s distrust of the Jewish nouveau riche be encapsulated better than this?
Walter Bridge also has no illusions when it comes to race, noting drily that a society gets the crime it deserves. He refuses a loan to his black live-in maid Harriet when her boyfriend becomes indebted to mobsters. He is appalled at the very idea that Harriet’s nephew wishes to attend Harvard. After his black garage attendant Lester gets arrested for fighting, he learns that Lester had spent ten years in prison for armed robbery. “Those people,” he scoffs wearily. “Time and Time again. If it isn’t a knife. It’s a razor.”
But there is nothing hidebound about Mr. Bridge. He is always willing to treat individuals on their personal merits (unless that individual is the son of a plumber who can’t even afford a diamond engagement ring for his daughter!) He defends a Mexican who had been disabled in an accident and is outraged when the man receives a paltry settlement. When Harriet gets arrested along with her boyfriend when her boyfriend was caught dealing drugs, he generously bails her out and spares her a tongue-lashing for some sage advice. When Ruth accuses him of anti-Semitism in a letter, he writes for several pages about how fairly he treats respectable Jews in town.
Walter Bridge may be humorless, which harms him socially from time to time, but it also lends him dignity. The same impulse not to laugh at dirty jokes is the same impulse not to laugh at people his class would deem dirty. He is as incapable of mockery or derision as he is of condescension. He treats everyone as an equal, as he would wish to be treated. A veteran of the Great War who had been born in poverty, he knows too well the stink of death and the pain of want. He denies himself luxuries and guilty pleasures because “his heritage argued against indulgence.” He has an unbreakable moral core, and a fierce love for his family which is beyond his sense of propriety to articulate.
Most of all, he understands the clash of civilizations. As the pre-war vanguard of the American white majority, he embodies this clash. Perhaps this is Connell placing his thumb on the scale from his modern vantage point, but Walter Bridge does seem to feel that things are slipping for the Anglo-Saxon Protestant America in which he grew up. He resists history because he correctly sees the degenerate world that widespread racial integration, philo-Semitism, mass immigration, and sexual liberation will lead us towards. There is little he can do about it except lash out at President Roosevelt or complain along with the aging Kansas City elite in their swanky country club.
But it goes beyond politics; it’s his gut reactions to things which define him. Walter Bridge will make an effort to judge a man on his merits, but he will not allow his daughters to attend parties in the black part of town. He sincerely empathizes with Jewish concerns over Nazi Germany, but when he notes the many Jewish names on the masthead of an avant-garde quarterly, he feels resentful. It goes further than this, though. In an animated argument with Grace Barron, India’s free-spirited and enigmatic best friend, Walter Bridge lays out a substantial part of today’s Dissident Right’s agenda:
“I have no love for Communism. None whatsoever. Let me tell you, if the Communists once obtain a foothold in this country they will stop short of nothing. Those people, if they ever get started, will divide up everything we have, make no mistake about that. Now you may not be disturbed by this prospect. You may not mind ‘sharing the wealth.’ But I, for one, have worked too hard for too many years to surrender lightly what I have earned and regard as my own.” He stopped talking. She already knew his opinion of Communism. He could not understand why she had brought up the subject.
“I find it one of the world’s loveliest thoughts,” she said. “Christ asked us to love each other. Marx is asking us to be sure everybody has enough to eat.”
She was attempting to start an argument. “If so, it has been a singular failure,” he said. “And let me remind you that Winston Churchill addressing the House of Commons stated recently: “If I had to choose between Communism and Nazism, I would choose Nazism.”
Later that evening Grace informs him that Avrum Rheingold — the squat, bald Jew described above — had put in a bid for a house in Mr. Bridge’s neighborhood:
Mr. Bridge was silent. The thought of Avrum Rheingold living in the Edison house enraged him, but he was careful to hide his anger. He reached for his glass, took another sip of water, and cleared his throat. He did not like the feeling that swept through him, or the urge to say aloud that he approved of the pogrom in Germany.
Any time a white man feels the need to hold his tongue while the civilization his ancestors built and that he himself maintains becomes cheapened or degraded by outsiders — and while he is forced to make room for these outsiders himself — he can look to Walter Bridge’s strenuous life for a wellspring of strength and hope. In his Bridge novels, Evan S. Connell has given the modern Right nothing short of a literary north star.
* * *
A note about the 1990 Merchant and Ivory film Mr. and Mrs. Bridge: It is well-acted and directed, as one would expect from such a production. James Ivory applies his characteristic light touch throughout the film, rendering the novels’ quotidian essence into enjoyable cinema. The film makes ample use of its period set and costume design, and Richard Robbins’ spellbinding soundtrack helps build suspense at key moments. But most of all it is Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward who make the film a worthy complement to its literary sources. They turn in picture- perfect and unforgettable lead performances. Having read both novels prior to seeing the film, I can state that Newman’s gruff and dignified Walter has supplanted my vision of the character almost completely, as did Woodward’s desperately decorous India. Both changes were as welcome as they are rare.
Yes, perhaps if screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala had integrated scenes from the novels a little more artfully, we would have had a smoother final product. What’s appropriately disjointed on the page becomes jarringly inappropriate onscreen when you don’t have chapter headings demarcating one scene from another. Often I felt that Jhabvala had selected certain scenes not because they served any unified purpose, but simply because Connell had included them in the books. For example, the film stalls towards the end as Walter’s overwrought secretary Julia reveals that she has held a flame for him for 20 years. Her character plays no important role in the film whatsoever, so why are we wasting time on such pedestrian melodrama so close to the film’s conclusion? Shortly afterwards, we discover what happens to Grace Barron (in a heartrending performance by Blythe Danner), of whom we see far too little in the film. Her fate is not only thematic in both the books and the film, it also leads to some gripping drama involving India. Couldn’t Jhabvala have given us more of one woman and less of the other?
You can buy Spencer Quinn’s novel White Like You here.
About how the film mangles the ending of Mrs. Bridge, however, the less said the better — but it was so shocking I must report on it. Mrs. Bridge has one of a novel’s most mystifying conclusions I have ever read. No spoilers here; I wouldn’t dare cheapen it in a review. The utterly ham-fisted way in which the filmmakers perverted the literary ending to become its cinematic opposite made my jaw drop, however. The film adaptation of Robert Cormier’s angsty young adult novel The Chocolate War chokes at the goal line as well, but at least that ending made sense from a cinematic perspective. The ending of Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, however, is lame by any standard. It seems Merchant and Ivory didn’t have the fortitude to adhere to Connell’s harrowing vision (which they easily could have done), and further couldn’t have been bothered to replace it with something good, let alone great — as if their typically erudite audience was not sophisticated enough to tell the difference. It is perhaps the most astounding filmmaking blunder I have ever experienced.
The most remarkable thing about the movie, however, is what Merchant and Ivory did not include, which was probably 80 to 90% of what Connell had presented in his novels — and this includes nearly all of the race realism and ethnocentrism mentioned above. Newman’s Walter Bridge is certainly conservative and makes his anti-Communist stance well-known. Hardly depicted, however, are his unflattering opinions about blacks, and the film mentions Jews not at all. Only after magnanimously bailing Harriet out of jail does Mr. Bridge grumble a bit about colored people seeking entry into white schools like Harvard. Such a perspective was so common back in the late 1930s that modern audiences would probably have scratched their heads if Mr. Bridge hadn’t said something along those lines. Plus, he had just done something kind and generous for a black person, so calling him racist would have been out of place as well.
It seems that the filmmakers wished to protect this upstanding, politically incorrect, white Protestant male’s reputation, and this is a decision I appreciate despite how it may depreciate the film over time. Unlike many Hollywood movies which flirt with gravitas, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge was not looking to stir the cultural pot or promote any kind of subversive agenda. Unlike the 1975 adaptation of The Day of the Locust, it didn’t use a popular novel’s scandalous nature to smear legacy white Americans as intellectually-challenged bigots. Instead, it kept all the humanity, passion, and pathos of the characters — just as the author had intended. Weeding out their uglier aspects may have made the film suffer a bit, but it was a small price to pay for propriety.
I’m sure Mr. and Mrs. Bridge would have approved.
* * *
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26 comments
Once again, an excellent article Mr. Quinn. I have seen the movie and I enjoyed it but this gives me much more insight into it. I would love to see you write an article about “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean”, also starring Paul Newman. I know that movie much better than the “Bridge” movie.
Thanks, Jud. Will check out the Roy Bean movie and perhaps will review it.
This looks interesting, especially the novel.
Just for fun, after reading your article I randomly selected an article by roll of polyhedral dice from the Archives’ date-range. Voila! serendipity provided another of your own: Florence.
Thanks, James. The FFJ movie is one of my favorites of the 2010s. I love how Naxos compiled all her recording and fittingly called it “Murder on the High C’s”.
That’s great! Haha. I’m going to have to make time to watch the movie and seek out those Naxos recordings.
Great movie, terrible music…except maybe in a kitschy/novelty sense. She doesn’t even rise to the level of the spinal tap of Classical music. She is to Mozart what the Star War Christmas Special is to Citizen Kane.
This guy talks about her and is a little more interesting than he is annoying.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Txmy4IGOCI
I just read SJQ’s review of the Florence Foster Jenkins movie here on CC.
“Due to her sheer incompetence, Florence Foster Jenkins was perhaps the first classical performer to require postmodern attitudes of irony to appreciate.”
This! Absolutely hilarious.
I would love SJQ to review Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space.
So bad, it’s good! And very preachy.
Nice article, sympathetic toward Connell and the Bridges. Quinn (I know Quinn. I like Quinn.) failed to give us background on the others involved in the movie project. (Or maybe you edited it out as you likely will this comment. You shouldn’t tho, it’s likely the only one you’ll get on the piece.)
prawer jewish
paul newman jewish
richard robbins gay, likely jewish
ismail merchant (nee Rahman) Indian, member of a new intellectural overclass imported to in-form us goys.
No ‘sympathy’ for goys Connell and the Bridges amongst that crowd.
I see Kirkpatrick has commented. I know Kirkpatrick. I like Kirkpatrick.
In the interest of disambiguation, I’m afraid you may mean the more well-known author of shared name. 😎
I’ve seen the movie but never read the book, I liked it very much and the acting was superb. I especially liked the scene in Paris when he surprised his wife by buying her a painting. That scene showed he wasn’t an asshole at all but rather he was just a good man with firm convictions.
Exactly. The critics of the day claimed the Bridge novels were satirical but they really weren’t. The couple was portrayed straight, foibles and all, and come out as both tragic and sympathetic. The movie captures this very well, and makes Mr. Bridge *more* sympathetic to modern audiences by leaving out his race realism and clear thinking about Jews. Mrs. Bridge to a lesser extent. At one point at a party Grace was complaining about how whites mistreated the Seminole Indians, and India replied, “I’m sure we did some dreadful things, dear, but don’t you think once you investigate this further you’ll realize that the Seminole had attacked us?”
Great piece. The shitstorm we find ourselves in has been a long time coming. I suppose it has never not been coming in one form or another.
On a semi-related note; I recently watched a biography of sorts of the Newman-Woodward love story which took the bloom of the rose for me a bit. He was married and the story made it sound like they really couldn’t have cared less about sparing the first Mrs. Newman any indignity. I never knew of it before and it made their “perfect” love story just a little less pretty IMO.
Interesting. Will look into that. Jerry Seinfeld had a similar situation with his current wife being just past her honeymoon when he met her if I am not mistaken.
I believe it’s called the Last Movie Stars, or something similar. Newman definitely ditched his wife but we may not be getting the entire story, he had several children with her and I’m pretty sure they ended up living with him. Also, Woodward comes off kind of slutty. The series interviews an old boyfriend from high school who alludes to her being highly sexual as a teen in the South. There are also mentions of Newman and Woodward having sex all the time on set and between takes while they were dating. There is even a mention that Woodward converted a garage on their property into what she called “the fuck hut” because they were so loud when having sex in the house while the children were there.
In Seinfeld’s latest standup routine on Netflix or something he has a whole bit on how much he hates his wife. All I could think was, serves you right, and the first husband is probably way better off.
Both Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge are described by critics as “classics of WASP repression.” (Oppenheimer in Wikipedia)
I haven’t read either of the two Connell novels but now you’ve made me interested.
The perceived cause of such alienation, of course, is always the unbearable Whiteness of being ─ and the remedy therefore is to start bringing in the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity.
Start with Jews and non-Protestant Christians, soak liberally with ethanol, and then start busing in the PoC, the weed, and the non-English speakers ─ the Burger King Kids’ Club, and all the other huddled masses of sexual deviants yearning to be free.
The new catechism is the deconstruction of Whiteness and cultivating edgy Social Justice virtue with totalitarian vigilance. Yay.
But what, if anything, is really so alien and repressive about Whitetopia? I’d like to know.
However, I don’t see this in terms of “Modernity” at all. I don’t even know what that means. I cringe when neo-Reactionaries use the term “Modernity” because there are different visions of Modernity, and Progress. I don’t see how the necessary Western instauration comes from the non-rational, let alone from old superstitions. I tend to be critical of extreme agrarian romanticism as well. I don’t see any self-imposed Morgenthau Plan coming to the rescue, climate change or not
I have never been a Conservative or Liberal and have always considered myself Nationalist and Progressive, until more recent times when in true Orwellian fashion progress became a dirty word or conflated with Marxist utopianism.
My vision of progress and modernity is going to be far less Bolshevik and Bourgeois ─ and likely far more inspired by a certain mid-20th century Kriegsherr and his propaganda minister.
I want to know if there really is anything that can be concluded about all this supposed deoxygenated atmosphere of repression and bourgeois alienation that is or was Middle America in its prime ─ and what realistically can be done for improvement.
Surely the systemic causes of the modern malaise and dystopia are more clinically rational and amenable than any existential lack of Whiteness and transgressive piety in any case.
Either Whiteness really is toxic soup or the opposite is true.
🙂
The American problem was that we were not long in existence before the Jews came in large numbers and felt ‘repressed’ by not being accepted by Whites when their morals and hygiene were so radically different from Whites. They were ill-behaved children and Whites were the adults to kept them from having too much fun. ‘Artistic’ Whites started to pick up on the Jews’ anti-adult vibe and – artists being little better than children themselves – spear-headed a ‘White’ movement against ‘repressive’ and ‘banal’ White culture.
Excellent review. Damn, I recall seeing a copy of one of the Bridge novels on a remainder table some years ago. I thought about buying it, but decided it wasn’t quite “great lit”, and so passed it up. Regrets.
Sounds like these novels are literary explorations of the themes of The Dispossessed Majority. Today, most of those sub-themes (the intermixture of race and class, or the decline of the old Anglo-Saxon American majority caused in part by the importation of non-Anglo-Saxon whites, as well as Jews, and later nonwhites) are dead to us. We are being attacked one and all as a race, so that is how we will respond. But Robertson was not unperspicacious in discerning various non- and sub-racial currents contributing to the larger racial decline.
Thanks, LS. but I would say that in the 1930s when the stories take place, whites had not been dispossessed yet.
I forgot the setting date (I haven’t seen the somewhat famous film, either).
But you know what? A very old rightwinger (now about three decades dead) I was friends with, who was German-American and originally from a heavily German-American Midwestern community; had childhood memories of anti-German harassment at school between Americans and “Germans” during WW1; and had cheered on Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee on the eve of WW2 (my friend had been age-lucky: too young for WW1, too old for WW2), once told me something interesting on this point. This was late 1989 – or maybe early 1990 (not too long after the Fall of the Wall). I’d met this intelligent and very well-read guy at a local rightist conference, and as we lived reasonably close by car, and had overlapping ideological interests, we developed a friendship which lasted until the man died not too many years later. That particular day I mentioned The Dispossessed Majority to the old gent, and told him he had to read it (I think I’d read it in 1988; my copy, though its last revised date is 1981, mentions the SCOTUS appointment of Anthony Kennedy, which was in 1987, post-Bork). I even offered to get him a copy (through the old Howard Allen distributor). He laughed: he had an original edition!
We got to talking about it and praising its merits. Although for me the book was a revelation on so many levels (even though I was already a militant prowhite, especially wrt immigration), I’ll never forget something the old man said about it: “It was already out of date when it was published.” I asked what he meant by that. “Surely things were so much better back in the 50s,” I suggested.
“Not really,” he said. “In degree, certainly, but not in kind. Things were already going downhill, even though it was a great time to be an American and especially to make money. Everybody was making money. You had to be a dummkopf not to make money. But the country had already been taken away from us. The country was ours when Roosevelt took office. But by the end of the war, everything the book [TDM] complains about was in place. The old Protestants [he meant WASP Establishment; he was Catholic] were gone [he meant gone from power], and the Jews had taken over. No one would dare talk about them once the war had started. And after the war they controlled the real power. It was only a matter of time before the Negroes would get their cut, and then all the rest of it [he meant the whole shit-show of post-60s liberalism to follow].”
I was reminded then and still am of Shakespeare’s line starting “there is a tide in the affairs of men …”. Perhaps one can say there are varying “social logics” built into different mental and cultural frameworks. “He who says A must say B.” If certain new assumptions get widely adopted, or a new type of people get empowered, certain distant effects become nearly inevitable. My old friend seemed to suggest that the mental outlook of progressive liberalism, and that outlook’s chief proponents and beneficiaries, had already become dominant by the end of WW2; that the old majority was indeed already dispossessed, even if very few then perceived this.
Thanks for this, Lord Shang.
I look forward to reading these two novels.
I am so behind on my reading. I wish I had more time.
Excellent review, SJQ.
I never saw the movie, and didn’t read the novels. I was really caught up in other things, and I read a volume of Connell’s short stories, and they didn’t really impress me. But to me Connell’s great work is Son of the Morning Star, his book on Custer and Little Bighorn. It’s a great read, encompassing all views of the battle and cultures involved in it, and Connell has a very balanced, cool narration. I do admire his prose. He posed Little Big Horn as a Proustian dilemma: that people involved did what they always do, that people aren’t really capable of change, and how these forces met each other. He also has a very nuanced view of life on the Plains. Disparaging the white invasion, but not really a great Indian lover.
There was an article published on it a couple of years after publication, and he was teamed with two other men, they mostly taking the anti-white, pro-Indian line, and Connell was very neutral about that, and wouldn’t take the bait.
He also wrote a very good piece on Goya in Atlantic Monthly a few years ago.
I should read the Bridge works, snd shove them on my reading list, and I’ll read them before I see the movie.
My memories of the film was that it had lukewarm appreciation, but wasn’t “relevant” for now.
But of course any reality well described and portrayed is relevant any time, as we all know.
Hello S. I have Son of the Morning Star and do plan on reading it, probably next year. Of the 3 Bridge works, Mr Bridge is the most relevant to our struggles today, and the movie least so, but they are all worthwhile. Thanks.
Spencer or anyone else: If you’re not able to get Son of the Morning Star, there was a TV movie of that made in 1991, with Gary Cole as Custer and Rosanna Arquette as Libby Custer. It’s a pretty good movie, western, and historical film, although it lacks the depth of Connell’s work. It kind of touches on some points, and also makes an Indian woman a narrator. Not exactly like the book, but the film works out pretty well, and the battle of Little Bighorn…more a clusterfuck by the cavalry when they deal with an Indian Blitzkrieg than epic battle…is more authentic than what we’ve always seen. But again, it pales with reading the book. Connell really is like Gibbon describing the events, and has such a calm, masterful style movies can’t touch.
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