It Seems That Most People Who Saw Revolver Really, Really Hated It

I'm just saying that as a warning: I like the movie very much, but most people hated it. So don't take my positive review as a guarantee that you would like it. Don't go see it because of what I'm saying and then come back angrily to me because you hated it, because I warned you: most people hated it.

I've mentioned the film a few times already in this blog, in connection with chess: watching the movie has significantly improved my chess game.

Okay, as long as I'm warning you about the movie, I should mention that it contains lots of violence, nudity and vulgar language. Lots and lots and lots of all three, so if those are things which make you not like a movie, then there's no point in you watching this movie.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to stop reading this blog post, because violence, nudity and vulgar language are not the interesting things to me about Revolver, and those interesting things can be looked into without seeing the movie, if it's not your kind of movie. The interesting things are: Kabbalah, and overcoming the ego.

Let's take the 2nd one first. This may be something that many or even most people are already familiar with, but it had eluded me until I watched Revolver: the concept of the ego as an enemy of the true self, the ego as an obstacle.

One of the things which the movie relates to the ego is the game of chess. Jake Green, the film's protagonist, played by Jason Statham, is released from prison at the beginning of the movie. He had done part of his time in solitary confinement in a cell between a chess Grandmaster and a con-man. Jake never saw either of them, but he did intercept many of the notes they passed back and forth, and he learned a little about chess. After his release, he becomes mixed up with a couple of loan sharks, Zach (Vincent Pastore) and Avi (André Benjamin), and plays some games of chess with Avi.

Before I ever saw Revolver, I had already noticed some of the ways in which ego interferes with playing chess. In some of my blog posts about chess I noted that over-confidence in my ability as a chess player leads directly to disastrously poor chess play. In Revolver, this interference is addressed much more directly. In the film, chess is one of the things which teach Jake about the ego. For example, the ego resists playing stronger players. It wants to win all of the time. Even though it's very plain to see that a chess player (or, as the chess players in the movie point out, a player in any sort of game) can only improve by playing stronger players -- which of course will involve a lot of losing, which offends the ego. In his games with Avi, after having studied chess in prison for years with not much else to do, Jake wins game after game, and after one of the many times Jake announces checkmate, Avi says with annoyance that he's not going to play Jake anymore.

But since watching the movie I'm playing stronger players much more, and surprise surprise, my game has improved quite a lot.

As I have written on this blog before, I've seen chess games where the very best players in the world -- Fischer, Kasparov and other world champions -- lost, analyzed by the world champion who lost. Whereas for the most part it's very unusual to come across games analyzed by the losing players. I keep analyzing games I've won, even though I realize how much my game could benefit from analyzing games I've lost. My ego is still directly interfering with my chess game to that extent, and I can see it, and I still can't bring myself to battle my ego that much. I believe I've analyzed a total of 1 game I've lost on this blog.

Oh well. Rome wasn't built in a day, and it's not as if I make my living from chess.

Revolver represents only the 2nd time of which I'm clearly aware in which a work of art directly, tangibly and immediately improved my life by explaining something about my own mind to me. The first time was decades ago when I read Gravity's Rainbow, which explained to me that paranoia consists of irrationally over-estimating the amount of attention other people pay to you. I just needed to remind myself that others had plenty of better things to do than participate in a plot against me, and poof, there went my paranoid tendencies.

Again, maybe that was everyday common knowledge to many or most people, but to me it needed pointing out.

Also, at the end of the movie several different people, not playing fictional characters, spoke about the ego. I think some of them were psychiatrists. One of them was Deepak Chopra, and he said something which I didn't find dopey. I like that. A few years ago, I was caught up in a feud between New Atheism and Chopra. In the meantime I have come to regard New Atheists as dopey. Who knows, maybe Chopra belongs on the long, long list of people and things about which the New Atheists are wrong.

The other interesting thing about Revolver is the Kabbalah symbolism: names, numbers, colors, mannerisms and other things refer to symbolism and archetypes of Kabbalah. I don't really know anything about Kabbalah yet, but the colors are purty, which I think is way cool, and the stories are interesting, whether they actually make sense or not. (And SOME of them probably DO!) I'm an atheist, but I've never let that spoil my appreciation of religious art.

For those of you considering watching Revolver -- remember, most people hate it, as I've warned you several times now -- there's a third thing I'd like to mention: Mark Strong, one of my very favorite actors. He gives the most brilliant performance in Ritchie's much-more-popular Rocknrolla, as the hard-as-nails Archie, and he gives the most brilliant performance in Revolver, as Sorter, a very quirky and extremely lethal hitman.

Chess Log: I Got Lucky And Spotted A Couple Of My Opponent's Mistakes

5-0 blitz, I played Black:

1. c4 e5 2. ♘c3 a6 3. g3 ♘f6 4. ♗g2 h6 5. d3 ♗b4 6. ♘f3 O-O 7. O-O ♘c6 8. ♗d2 ♗xc3 9. ♗xc3 ♖e8 10. a3 d5 11. cxd5 ♘xd5 12. ♖c1 ♘xc3 13. ♖xc3 ♘d4 14. ♘xd4 exd4 15. ♖c4 ♖b8 16. ♕c2 c6 17. ♖c1 ♗e6 18. ♖c5 ♗g4 19. f3 ♗f5 20. g4 ♗g6 21. h4? ♕xh4! 22. ♕b3?? ♖xe2! 23. ♖1c2 ♕f2 24. ♔h2 ♕xg2 0-1 {White checkmated}

I felt my opponent had the upper hand until 21. h4?, which allowed me to get my Queen into attacking position. And 22. ♕b3?? ended White's chances. (Did White play ♕b3 because he or she was stunned by my previous move? Or was there a strategy in there which I as yet haven't been able to see?)

Most of the games which I've seen in annotation have been Grandmaster games, world-class games. I can't claim that I've understood very much at all of what is going on those games. I wonder if a chess pro ever sees any of these games which I played and then recorded on my blog, and if so, what his or her reaction has been. I always think of Tyrone Slothrop and Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck in Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, with myself in the role of the well-meaning bumpkin Slothrop and the chess pro analogous to Sir Stephen:

"At certain hours the harbor blue will be reflected up on the whitewashed sea-facade, and the tall windows will be shuttered again. Wave images will flicker there in a luminous net. By then Slothrop will be up, in British uniform, gobbling down croissants and coffee, already busy at a refresher course in technical German, or trying to dope out the theory of arrow-stable trajectories, or tracing nearly with the end of his nose some German circuit schematic whose resistors look like coils, and the coils like resistors-"What bizarre shit," once he got hep to it, "why would they go and switch it around like that? Trying to camouflage it, or what?"

"Recall your ancient German runes," suggests Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck, who is from the Foreign Office P.I.D. and speaks 33 languages including English with a strong Oxonian blither to it.

"My what?"

"Oh," lips compressing, some kind of brain nausea here, "that coil symbol there happens to be very like the Old Norse rune for 'S,' sol, which means 'sun.' The Old High German name for it is sigil."

"Funny way to draw that sun," it seems to Slothrop.

"Indeed. The Goths, much earlier, had used a circle with a dot in the center. This broken line evidently dates from a time of discontinuities, tribal fragmenting perhaps, alienation-whatever's analogous, in a social sense, to the development of an independent ego by the very young child, you see…"

Well, no, Slothrop doesn't see, not exactly. He hears this sort of thing from Dodson-Truck nearly every time they get together."

I always imagine that I'm giving the chess pro brain nausea, and like Tyrone, I'm sorry.

So why do I do this chess log? Two reasons. One: because, although I've seen a few games on or near my humble level of sophistication recorded now and then in places like periodical entirely devoted to chess, I've never seen a whole series of them published anywhere. And so I think possibly the Wrong Monkey Chess Log might be interesting simply because it's different. Two: players on my level, who look at Grandmaster games, annotated by Grandmasters, and scratch their heads and say, Well, okay, if you say so. If it's clear to you that it's time for White to retire because everybody on your level can see that Black will checkmate him in 12 more moves or less -- players on my level may see these games and actually understand what's going on.

Arts & Humanities & Sciences

Some people will tell you that in the Renaissance in Europe, there were some people who were both artists and scientists, and that these glorious individuals were what we now call "Renaissance men." But the truth is even more delicious than that: up until the Renaissance, in Western "civilization," it never even occurred to anyone to separate the arts from the sciences. People thought it was only natural for someone gifted in one area to be gifted in the other. And of course, it only is. Only after the Renaissance did this ugly and unnatural separation and antagonism between the arts and the science begin to grow and fester. I want no part of that split, and I'm hardly the first to reject it.

As long as I can remember I've been artistically-inclined. As a small child, unfortunately, I shared an attitude toward science which was widespread among artists and ranged from indifference to hostility. Then in the 1970's I read Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, which helped me to several big breakthroughs, mentally. It greatly eased my paranoia, for one thing, by explaining to me what paranoia is: namely, a great over-estimation of one's own importance to others. More than 9 times out of 10 they're not only not out to get you, they rarely give you a thought one way or another.

For another thing, the novel made me interested in science and technology, and refuted my notion that these were in opposition to the arts & humanities. Gravity's Rainbow's author, Thomas Pynchon, had studied engineering physics at Cornell from 1953 to 1955, then dropped out and spent 2 years in the Navy, then returned to Cornell and switched his major to English and for the most part concentrated (for the next 58 years so far) on writing fiction -- fiction which refers to scientific and technical topics as well as to poetry and music and the visual arts and so forth, as if that were the most natural thing in the world.

Which of course it is. Pynchon is not the only one who behaves as if there were no rules against liking both the sciences and the arts. Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso come to mind, each a great admirer of and great influence upon the other. It seems that for nearly 4 decades, ever since first encountering Gravity's Rainbow, I had been living in a state of grace, removed from that stupid, ignorant opposition between art & science of which I had been a part as a child. Somehow managing to not to pay a lot of attention to how many scientists continued to be abysmally ignorant of the arts and how many artists continued to be abysmally ignorant of the sciences.

To be sure, I had noticed for a few years already that there was an entire group of scientists ignorant of the arts & humanities: the New Atheists. But then just very recently it came home to me that there had been an abysmally equivalent counterpart to the New Atheists infesting the humanities departments of many universities for decades before the New Atheists were so called. I'm talking about the postmodernists. And I don't think that many of them have ever been able to get any sort of jobs outside of the humanities departments of universities. (Nota bene, humanities departments are far from entirely Postmodernist and there have always been many academic historians, philosophers and critics who couldn't stand this PoMo crap in the slightest.) The Postmodernists despise what they think is the entire group of scientists, but which is actually only the group of New Atheists -- who should be despised for their ignorance of art and history and philosophy. Conversely, the New Atheists look with contempt at the dopey postmodernists, worthy of contempt with their contempt for science -- except that the New Atheists mistake the postmodernists for the whole of the arts & humanities.

They walk among us to this very day: New Atheists who think that "modern art is a fraud," and Postmodernists who think that all scientists are right-wing reactionaries. If that were not enough, and it certainly would be, it seems that Postmodernists also tend to claim as their own all sorts of perfectly sensible people who would've wanted nothing to do with them, from the Dadaists to Heidegger to the Abstract Expressionists to Borges to Nabokov to Gaddis and, yes, even Pynchon.

So it seems that all we need to do is to get all of the New Atheists together with all of the Postmodernists. (New Atheists very often reject that label, but that's okay, they're still easy enough to spot. On the other hand, only someone who describes him- or herself as a Postmodernist, is a Postmodernist.) Then they can expend all of their energy against one another, and leave the rest of us much more free to accomplish things and hopefully even enjoy life now and then.

Some of the People, Places and Things I'd Never Heard About Before Reading Gravity's Rainbow

The V-1. The V-2. The A-4. Kyrgyzstan. How the Soviet Union gave alphabets and written vernaculars to its previously illiterate nationalities. Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz. The benzine ring. IG Farben. The fact that Shell Oil maintained companies of great strategic importance for both sides in both Allied and Axis territory all throughout WWII. The Poisson distribution. Entropy. Plasticman. The Zoot Suit Riots. The genocide of the Herero. Margaret Dumont. The Spartakists. The cities of Nördlingen and Peenemünde. All of these were new to me when I came across a copy of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in a used-book store in 1974 or '75, when I was 13 or 14 years old. German rockets fired on London? Shell seeming to have no qualms about profiting from the war efforts of both sides during WWII? Math and chemistry which were actually interesting?

I checked all of these things and found that they were in fact nonfictional. So you can see, perhaps, that my world was broadened a little.

And then there was the matter of prose style, unfettered by considerations of "high" or "low," setting a good example for me before I'd had the chance to take seriously those who might tell me a piece of writing had to be one or the other. Thanx Tom.

And an inkling of the multiplicity of the world's culture was given to me, before some single ideology had had a chance to plant itself deep into me, with proto-Beatnik hipsters, upper-middle-class British, somewhat lower middle-class British and overachieving working class, tossed together by the War and all quite uncomfortable with each other, zoot suiters, Soviet functionaries, Kyrgyz tribespeople, German Communists resisting the Nazis, rich decadent sexual perverts (It's okay, that's how they would've described themselves), gauchos, pre-Bop jazzmen, grim American Calvinists, cynical American Calvinist businessmen, Chinese opium addicts, witches, dopers, Swedenborgian mystics, Navy lifers and others and many characters who were several of the above at once all in the mix.

You can tell I like the book a lot, right? But any praise is insufficient. Read it.