Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould: A more

intimate view
By Joanne Laurier
10 September 2010

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould opens soon in a number of US cities.
This comment appeared as part of coverage of the Toronto film festival in 2009.

Glenn Gould

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould by Canadian documentarians Michéle
Hozer and Peter Raymont is a compilation of previously unseen footage of Gould, as
well as hundreds of photographs and excerpts of private home and studio recordings.
The film’s main talking heads include Cornelia Foss (painter and wife of Lukas Foss,
the prominent composer, pianist and conductor); Roxolana Roslak, the Hungarian
soprano; pop-singer Petula Clark; and Vladimir Ashkenazy, the Russian conductor and
pianist, to name a few.

Gould (1932-1982), one of the great pianists of the twentieth century, was highly
eccentric and reclusive. The documentary traces his life and career, whose highlights
include the history-making eight-concert tour in Moscow and Leningrad in 1957, in
which Gould performed Bach—a composer seen as too connected to religion by the
philistine Stalinist bureaucracy—to a wildly enthusiastic public. A photograph of Gould
and the Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter records the meeting of two supreme musicians.

Another seminal event treated in the film is the 1962 New York Philharmonic concert,
viewed as one of the orchestra’s most controversial. Remarks made by conductor
Leonard Bernstein in introducing Gould are famous: “Don’t be frightened. Mr. Gould is
here. … You are about to hear a rather, shall I say, unorthodox performance of the
Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I’ve ever heard,
or dreamt of for that matter. … But the age-old question still remains: ‘In a concerto,
who is the boss, the soloist or the conductor?’ … [W]e can all learn something from this
extraordinary artist, who is a thinking performer.”

Gould’s five-year affair with Cornelia Foss, which only recently became public (her
husband, composer, conductor and pianist Lukas Foss, died in February 2009), is one of
the film’s preoccupations. Foss speaks fondly of Gould—as do her children. Gould was
an admirer of her husband’s musicianship. The families of both Cornelia and Lukas had
fled Nazi Germany.

Genius Within takes up Gould’s decision to quit public performance for the recording
studio in 1964 more or less at the height of his career. Emotional factors aside, the
Toronto-born pianist saw the relationship of a concert performer to the audience as akin
to that of a bullfighter to his spectators. The metaphor was not meant approvingly. He
felt that recording was a more democratic, do-it-yourself technology, a sentiment ahead
of its time.

Says Cornelia Foss: “Anything pretentious made him ill,” and the desire to shun
celebrity entered into his decision to quit the stage. The relationship between Foss and
Gould ended as the latter descended into paranoia and abuse of prescription medication.
Recalling Gould as a “Renaissance Man,” the film asks but never answers the question:
What in the Gould mystique continues to captivate beyond the genius of his music?

Genius Within refers in vague terms to the 1960s and raises interesting questions about
a man who took his art seriously—to a crippling degree. But more could have been done
to connect, in a complex fashion, the artist’s contrarian streak with the upheavals and
traumas of the times.

Salt leaves a bad taste in the mouth

Salt
After directing a number of sensitive and socially aware films, Australian director
Phillip Noyce has taken a major step backward with his new movie Salt, a tired post-
Cold War thriller. Was this absolutely necessary?

Noyce, who put a good deal of thought and emotion into directing The Quiet American
(2002), Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and, to a lesser extent, Catch a Fire (2006), has with
his new film reminded us of his inglorious past as the creator of such politically noxious
works as Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), both based on
right-wing potboilers by Tom Clancy.

Unhappily, Noyce’s comments about his recent dilemmas and difficulties say a good
deal about the ideological climate within which filmmakers have worked in recent
decades and the ideas they have accumulated. Many of the latter have to do with the
importance of commercial success as the only standard by which to measure a career.

Apparently disappointed by the box office failure of his film Catch a Fire, about Patrick
Chamusso, a courageous fighter against South African apartheid in the 1980s, Noyce
(born in 1950) complained: “I think that everything we thought would be appealing
about the film turned out not to be appealing. That was just when Hollywood was
discovering the ‘terrorist’ was a no-go for movie audiences. We know that now, but we
didn’t when we made the movie.”

Is he implying that, in retrospect, he would have tailored his choices to conform to

In Salt, Angelina Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a CIA operative. The film opens in North
Korea where Evelyn is being tortured in a prison, a scene with overtones of cinematic
sexploitation. Soon after, she is released in a swap for a North Korean agent. The movie
jumps forward two years when she is happily married to a German arachnologist
(August Diehl) and working behind a desk at CIA headquarters in Washington, DC.

A Russian defector named Orlov (veteran Polish actor Daniel Olbrychski) turns himself
into the CIA and accuses Salt of being a Russian sleeper agent, alleging that her name is
really Chernkov and that she was taken away by the KGB in infancy to be trained as a
spy. The renegade claims the CIA agent is a mole who will trigger Day X and set into
motion a war against the US. Evelyn protests, but does not stick around to be
interrogated by her agency cohorts.

From here, the film becomes an unbelievable mish-mash of flying limbs and
superhuman feats. The happy housewife morphs into the bionic woman, who
continuously outmaneuvers her pursuing CIA colleagues Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber)
and Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Whether she is meant to be cartoonish, à la Lara Croft
in the Tomb Raider series, or the genuine product of intense, specialized Russian
training is not clear. But it is curious, since she single-handedly can penetrate the
impenetrable, that she was not able to escape the North Koreans who presumable trail
the Americans and Russians in technological wizardry. To offset some her character’s
lack of credibility, Jolie occasionally turns on the waterworks.
The film hinges on the question of Evelyn’s loyalty. Is it to the good guys, the
Americans, or to the bad guys, the Russians?—although answering the question never
truly presents a challenge, given Jolie’s stature and studio film formulae. Noyce’s work
moves from one implausible chase scene to another. Dizzying camera work and a
pounding score rev up when Jolie jumps into action. Salt is dramatically infantile, with
puerile dialogue, and obliges actors to utter lines such as “Utilitarian is the new sexy.”

Salt is an empty, unpleasant film with a whiff of anticommunism. Having made

The film’s production notes are a paean to the US intelligence community. Columbia
Pictures producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura goes on stupidly about sleeper spies:
“There’s something really mysterious and sexy about the notion that somebody could
lie in wait—for decades, if necessary.” A 16-year veteran of the CIA served as
consultant on the film and the spy agency is given a clean bill of health by Noyce, who,
in several interviews, mentions nostalgically that his father worked for Z Special Force,
the Australian equivalent of the OSS, forerunner to the CIA.

How can the man who made The Quiet American, a devastating portrayal of the bloody
role played by CIA agents and their local operatives in the dying years of French
colonial rule in Vietnam, Rabbit-Proof Fence, an equally devastating depiction of the
plight of the Aborigines in Australia and the cruelty of the authorities, and Catch a Fire,
about armed struggle against Apartheid, direct a deplorable film like this?

Presumably the answer lies within the fatal limitations and contradictions of Cold War
liberalism, along with the considerable political and economic pressures currently
brought to bear on artists. For example, Miramax attempted to shelve The Quiet
American following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

To explain, however, is not to condone. Artists such as Noyce give in rather easily.

When asked by [Link] what it was like to make a studio movie after years as
an independent filmmaker, Noyce said: “I tell you what. It’s a relief to be able to know
that whether your movie is good, bad or indifferent, [the studio] is going to sell it. And
it’s a relief to know that you don’t have to go around the world playing the part of the
town crier yelling out, ‘Please come see my movie.’ The studio is going to bludgeon
people to Eskimos in their igloos to feel that they owe it to themselves to get out to a
cinema and watch Salt. That marketing machine is Hollywood’s greatest achievement
because it’s a colonizing force that’s more effective even than the Romans were. After,
they needed a sword to contain their empire but Hollywood owns the hearts and minds
just through the work of publicists.”

So the global population must be artistically colonized! How enticing! Of course, Noyce
is being ironic, in part. But the cynical ironizing reveals all too much. That Noyce can
so easily move from The Quiet American to Salt, from CIA as Murder Inc. to CIA as
heroic enterprise, points to a bad intellectual atmosphere. Can one imagine, for example,
an Orson Welles—whose financial and other difficulties in the 1950s dwarfed anything
Noyce has ever encountered—addressing his problems by directing a pro-FBI film at
the time of the anticommunist purges?

What Noyce probably does not understand is that there are artistic consequences to
playing fast and loose with big historical and social issues. One cannot turn socially
progressive cinema on and off like a faucet. Many have made this mistake, convinced
that they could make a piece of rubbish simply for the money and return unscathed. It
doesn’t work that way. Filmmaking requires conscientiousness, even on the most banal
projects. Like it or not, one eventually becomes what one does.

At this point, it seems, Noyce lacks a sufficient understanding of the world. In sum, the
pressures on him as an artist to conform are greater than his grasp of social reality,
including his own place within it.

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The Stieg Larsson phenomenon

Crime novels, detective stories, mysteries, come in all shapes and sizes, with varying
national overtones and colorings. The best of them can entertain, but even the vast
majority of those do not stay long in one’s memory—they are not challenging or
complex enough. So such books can be read, forgotten, and then re-read, on the bus, on
vacation, in a waiting room.
 Stieg Larsson

The three novels by Swedish author Stieg Larsson, who died in 2004 at the age of 50,
published in the US as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with
Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, have attracted much attention and
many readers around the world.

For the English-speaking reader of a certain age any mention of Swedish crime fiction is
likely to bring to mind, first of all, the novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö written
between 1965 and 1975 (when Wahlöö died). Prominent among them were The Man on
the Balcony, The Laughing Policeman, The Abominable Man, The Locked Room, and
The Terrorists.

Then there is the more recent work of Henning Mankell, best known for his series of
gloomy Inspector Wallander novels, the first of which was published in 1991. Kenneth
Branagh played the lead character in a six-part British television adaptation, shot in two
series of three films each in 2008 and 2009.

The plot of Stieg Larsson’s novels, which he conceived of as a whole, is too sprawling
to recount in detail. Two figures dominate the books: Lisbeth Salander, a young
researcher and computer hacker of almost superhuman skill, with a painful history of
abuse that has made her deeply mistrustful of authority, even anti-social; and middle-
aged journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who specializes in exposing corruption and financial
swindling.
In the first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Salander and Blomkvist eventually
join forces to solve a 40-year-old mystery and flush out a violent serial rapist and killer.
In the course of the book, Salander also suffers a brutal assault from her legal guardian
and revenges herself upon him in equally savage fashion, and Blomkvist gets the goods
on billionaire corporate crook Hans-Erik Wennerström, who has previously inflicted a
legal and professional defeat on him.

The second and third novels, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked
the Hornet’s Nest, which form more of a single unit, are taken up by an investigation
into sex trafficking conducted for Blomkvist’s magazine; a triple murder, which
Salander is accused of committing; and Salander’s attempt to settle the score with her
terrifying father, a former Soviet spy and defector, and later a prominent gangster in
Sweden. An important subplot involves the misdeeds of a secret unit of the Swedish
security police, Säpo, which for convoluted reasons has conspired against Salander for
years.

How is the immense popularity of these books to be explained? Larsson was the second
best-selling author in the world in 2008, and his trilogy of novels has sold some 40
million copies to date. The Girl Who Played with Fire was the first translated work to
top the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list in a quarter-century. Swedish-
language films of all three books have been released, and Hollywood is planning its
own versions, with Daniel Craig, the current James Bond, in a leading role.

Larsson’s books are superior to run of the mill crime fiction in a number of ways.
Although somewhat farfetched, his plots are carefully planned and worked through. One
feels the author has actually worked at the books, and has a purpose in mind. There is
something single-minded, almost fanatical, about the construction and trajectory of the
work. The result is that the reader is drawn into the story and follows it attentively.
Larsson’s language, at least in translation, is not extraordinary, but it is clear, efficient,
and does not get in the way.
The various Swedish crime fiction writers mentioned have one principal advantage over
the majority of their US and British counterparts at least, the influence of left-wing
ideas (the contradictions of which we shall return to). In general, the Swedish writers
indicate a sympathy for the underdog and a hostility, or at least a critical attitude toward
the powers that be. This social conviction is not the least important element in
explaining their popular appeal.

We are not centrally treated in Larsson’s work, for example, to the inner lives, the
everyday stresses and strains, of CIA or FBI agents, or their Swedish equivalents. Such
lives presented honestly would be of interest, of course, but in contemporary thrillers
these characters and their activities are, in one way or another, thoroughly sanitized and
even glorified.

The villains in Larsson’s novels are individuals whom wide layers of the population
instinctively consider to be villainous: corporate directors, fascist sympathizers, military
spies, secret policemen, gangsters, corrupt lawyers and psychiatrists, etc. The heroes are
crusading, relentless journalists and researchers, dedicated to exposing wrongdoing at
the top of society. Blomkvist is a likeable figure and Salander, when she is not inflicting
punishment on other people, has her intriguing and even sympathetic side.

The combination of sufficient literary skill, clever and detailed plotting, and an anti-
establishment stance help explain the success of Larsson’s books. Readers are looking
for something out of the ordinary, something striking and lively.

Nonetheless, Larsson’s novels have many unattractive features as well, which speak to
some of the peculiarities of our time. Above all, his books reveal to what a degraded
state a “left-wing” point of view has been reduced in current literary or semi-literary
circles.

Larsson was an individual, of course, with his own life history, psychology, and
conceptions. Sweden has particular political and artistic traditions. However, certain
global trends unquestionably find expression in his work, many of them not healthy
ones.

One is struck by the violence in the novels. The author depicts scenes of rape, torture
and various forms of mayhem in graphic and gratuitous detail, without artistic
distancing or much critical insight. One might go so far as to say there are even hints
here and there in Larsson’s work of the repugnant “torture porn” genre of horror films.
(The Swedish film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo follows its source in that
respect.)
 The Girl With
the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor), directed by Niels Arden Oplev

The books exhibit a type of left-wing or anarchist “vigilantism” that will not help
anyone. Salander in particular is remorseless in exacting personal and painful revenge,
and generally the reader feels urged to side with her. The books revel in Salander’s
desire for retribution, including her childhood fantasy of setting her malevolent father
on fire. Even her researching, i.e., computer hacking, has overtones of physical
violence: “If there was any dirt to be dug up, she would home in on it like a cruise
missile. … Her reports could be a catastrophe for the individual who landed in her
radar.”

At a critical moment in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Salander delivers a blow to the
vicious killer from behind, who howls, eliciting a comment from her worthy of Clint
Eastwood: “Do you like pain, creep?” Later, speaking of “men with fucked-up
sexuality,” such as the serial killer, she says, “If I had to decide, men like that would be
exterminated, every last one of them.” The author makes no effort to separate himself
from such comments.

In The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Larsson writes, “What actually convinced
her [Salander] to decide to play the game Blomkvist’s way was her desire for revenge.
She forgave nothing.” This theme, driven home again and again, has nothing in
common with socialist, or even democratic, principles. How does raw vengefulness
advance the struggle against oppression?

The absence of compassion—even for miserable wretches—and the general distaste for
anyone who doesn’t share the author’s and characters’ obsessions and world outlook are
troubling. Intriguingly, borrowing from the “law and order” right, the novels (or its
principal mouthpiece, Lisbeth Salander, at any rate) reject any consideration of what
drives someone to crime. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, dismissing Blomkvist’s
attempts to place the murderer’s insane crimes in the context of an extremely diseased
family background, Salander asserts angrily that the killer “had exactly the same
opportunity as anyone else to strike back. He killed and he raped because he liked doing
it.”
Sounding very much like a radio talk-show demagogue expounding on “personal
responsibility,” Salander later complains “that it’s pathetic that creeps always have to
have someone else to blame.”

Bound up with this is Larsson’s relentless and puerile “feminism,” which reaches
absurd heights. A great portion of life, according to the author, revolves around male
violence against women. The Swedish-language title of the first novel in the series is
“Men Who Hate Women,” and Salander again spells out the point. After listening to
Blomkvist’s theory about the killer, she remarks two-thirds of the way through the
book, “I think you’re wrong. It’s not an insane serial killer who read his Bible wrong.
It’s just a common or garden bastard who hates women.”

Sex trafficking, it turns out, is a perfect subject for Larsson and his journalist characters
because “It’s not often that a researcher can establish roles along gender lines so clearly.
Girls—victims; boys—perpetrators.” (The Girl Who Played with Fire) Larsson makes a
concerted effort to reduce all of social life along similar lines, with deplorable results.
After some 1,800 pages, the trilogy more or less ends on this remarkable note (in
Blomkvist’s words): “When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies
and secret government agencies; it’s about violence against women, and the men who
enable it”! (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest)

Larsson also apes the ultra-right in his Manichean view of humanity. One uses the
words “heroes” and “villains” advisedly. Each character enters the stage unmistakably
marked either “good” or “bad,” and universally lives up to his or her tag. (One reliable
predictor is gender; there is not to my recollection a single female evildoer in the
novels.) What Salander practices in the realm of the relations between the sexes,
Blomkvist argues for in reporting: “For Blomkvist the golden rule of journalism was
that there were always people who were responsible. The bad guys.” (The Girl Who
Played with Fire) Variations on this theme too are repeated numerous times.

“Left” simplification or mythmaking is no better than any other kind. Social life and
human behavior are complex, intensely contradictory phenomena, which demand
profound study and thought. Larsson obviously had no time for Trotsky’s notion that
the reader could take from serious literature “a more complex idea of human
personality, of its passions and feelings, a deeper and profounder understanding of its
psychic forces and of the role of the subconscious, etc.”

The artistic consequences are severe. One reads Larsson voraciously, and one forgets
the bulk of the story almost as forcefully and decisively. There are no moments of great
drama to hold in one’s consciousness (the disturbingly violent or semi-pornographic
sequences remain for different reasons), no compelling encounters and conflicts that
sum up our time or our problems. In this regard, Larsson’s work unhappily resembles a
considerable portion of contemporary popular writing and filmmaking.

Larsson was an admirer of science fiction, and the books have that feel to them. They
concern themselves, above all, with various technological or “forensic” processes,
especially Salander’s computer skills. Some of it is riveting, and Larsson’s fascination
with the details of the processes is infectious. But the effect wears off, and by the end of
the third book, the series is significantly losing steam.
In the end, these are not books that mirror life in any important or enduring manner.
Perhaps the most damning criticism one could make is this: readers can have no more
idea about the texture of life in Sweden after reading the three novels than they had
before they began. Oh, one learns something about the world of Swedish journalism,
how the police force and courts operate there, something about the history of Swedish
pro-Nazi movements and the activities of the secret police. But the blood and sweat of
everyday life? Its taste and smell? Nothing.

And here is a critical component of the type of middle class “leftism” that Larsson
engaged in—the absence of any orientation toward the life of the working population, or
toward social relations and problems in general. The working class is almost entirely
missing. Larsson was a member of an organization that falsely called itself “Trotskyist,”
but Trotsky would have only had contempt for its politics. The lack of a genuine
revolutionary party in Sweden was not Larsson’s fault, but his participation in petty
bourgeois protest politics (ecology, feminism, etc.) masquerading as Marxism helped
disorient him and his novel-writing.

The artist is free to create whatever he or she likes, but the “social conditions in historic
human society are, first of all, the conditions of class affiliation” (Trotsky). Art, which
“often expresses the deepest and most hidden social aspirations,” ignores those
conditions at its peril. This is not some sociological task artificially imposed on the
artist, but flows from the deepest purpose of art itself. The greatest drama lies nearest to
the truth, and the central truth about our world is its domination by social divisions and
their implications. The greatest writers in the modern era have understood this, however
they chose to interpret it.

The crime novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

Even a comparison with the earlier Swedish crime fiction writers Maj Sjöwall and Per
Wahlöö, also leftists, but of another generation, is instructive. Wahlöö described the
pair’s goal as using “the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the
ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois
type.” Whether they achieved that is open to question, their books can be overpraised,
but they certainly succeeded, at their finest moments, in providing a feeling for the
distinctive features of life in Sweden at the time.

Their second novel, The Man on the Balcony (1967), based on the case of a man who
attacked and killed two small girls in Stockholm, opens with the unsettling image
captured in the book’s title. In the early morning of a hot summer’s day, a man stands
silently on the balcony of an apartment building in a big city, smoking cigarettes,
intently watching the street.

“The man on the balcony was of average height and normal build. His face was
nondescript and he was dressed in a white shirt with no tie, unpressed brown gabardine
trousers, gray socks and black shoes. His hair was thin and brushed straight back, he had
a big nose and gray-blue eyes. … The man on the balcony had no feeling of being
observed. He had no particular feeling of anything. He thought he would make some
oatmeal a little later.”
The individual proceeds to commit quite horrific acts, but Sjöwall and Wahlöö never
portray him, or any other of their killers, as monsters. Each is portrayed within a
concrete social situation: Swedish society at the time had provided for certain minimal
economic and social needs, but poverty, injustice, and deep-going alienation and
dissatisfaction persisted. The perpetrators of crimes in their novels tend to be the
flotsam and jetsam of modern capitalist society, forgotten, isolated, resentful.

In Murder at the Savoy (1970), the authors describe a series of brawls, attacks and
violent random acts, with which the police are suddenly confronted, as “unpremeditated
crimes, almost accidents. Unhappy people, nervous wrecks, were driven into desperate
situations against their wills. In almost all the cases, alcohol or drugs were of decisive
importance. It may have been partly due to the heat, but more basic was the system
itself, the relentless logic of the big city, which wore down the weak-willed and the
maladjusted and drove them to senseless actions.” This sentiment is well expressed, and
almost completely absent in Larsson.

In the same book, the killing of an executive, Palmgren, is carried out, also on the spur
of the moment, by a man who has been the victim several times of Palmgren’s business
operations. The killer tells police how he had sat and stewed. “After he’d been evicted,
forced to move, laid off from work and finally divorced, he would sit in his lonely room
in Malmö thinking over his situation. It became clearer and clearer to him who was the
cause of all his troubles: Viktor Palmgren, the blood-sucker, who lines his purse at the
expense of other human beings, the big shot, who didn’t give a damn about the welfare
of his employees or tenants. He began to hate this man as he’d never thought it possible
to hate any human being.”

The authors clearly see themselves as speaking for those who have no voice. In The
Abominable Man (1971, filmed by director Bo Widerberg in 1976), they write: “The
center of Stockholm had been subjected to sweeping and violent changes in the course
of the last ten years. … Stockholm’s inhabitants looked on with sorrow and bitterness as
serviceable and irreplaceable old apartment houses were razed to make way for sterile
office buildings. Powerless, they let themselves be deported to distant suburbs while the
pleasant, lively neighborhoods where they had lived and worked were reduced to
rubble.”

The “abominable man” of the title is a vile policeman, slain for once allowing an ill
woman to die unattended in his jail-cell. A former police colleague of the murder victim
tells Inspector Martin Beck of the homicide squad, the central figure in the Sjöwall-
Wahlöö series, that the dead man “taught me a lot.” Beck replies, “How to commit
perjury, for example? How to copy each other’s reports so everything’ll jibe, even if
every word’s a lie? How to rough people up in their cells? Where the best places are to
park in peace and quiet if you want to give some poor bastard a little extra going over
on the way from the precinct to Criminal?”

In The Terrorists (1975), the last in the series, an eccentric lawyer defends a distressed
young woman, falsely accused of trying to rob a bank, in court: “Rebecka Lind has not
had much help or joy from society. Neither school, nor her own parents, nor the older
generation in general have on the whole offered her support or encouragement. That she
has not bothered to involve herself in the present system of rule cannot be blamed on
her. When, in contrast to many other young people, she tries to get work, she is told that
there is none.”

The girl, after a series of personal disasters, ends up shooting a government official. She
later explains to Martin Beck, “It’s terrible to live in a world where people just tell lies
to each other. How can someone who’s a scoundrel and traitor be allowed to make
decisions for a whole country? Because that’s what he was. A rotten traitor. Not that I
think that whoever takes his place will be any better—I’m not that stupid. But I’d like to
show them, all of them who sit there governing and deciding, that they can’t go on
cheating people forever.”

The elements of social understanding and sympathy for humanity’s difficulties need to
be revived, and significantly deepened, in contemporary fiction and film.