Tea at Trianon: Young Karl Marx (2018)

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, February 26, 2018

Young Karl Marx (2018)

There is a new movie about Marx and Engels whose writings provided the intellectual foundation for the revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Unfortunately, their way of thinking has almost become mainstream today. However, they would never have gained a foothold if factory workers had been treated in a humane manner. From the New York Times:

The history of the world may be the history of class struggle, but the history of class struggle — at least the decisive chapter chronicled in “The Young Karl Marx” — turns out to be a buddy movie. Marx (August Diehl), a scruffy journalist, and his sidekick Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarske), a renegade rich kid, meet in Cologne, Germany, in 1844 and overcome some initial wariness by bonding over their shared contempt for the Young Hegelians. (Man, those guys are lame.) They set out to write a “Critique of Critical Criticism,” and when it’s published (as “The Holy Family”), it’s something of a hit. By the time the revolutions of 1848 are ready to happen, Marx and Engels are the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the European left, rock stars for an age of revolution.

Scrupulously faithful to the biographical record, “The Young Karl Marx,” directed by Raoul Peck (from a script he wrote with Pascal Bonitzer), is both intellectually serious and engagingly free-spirited. The founders of Communism, full of intensity and ambition and sporting contrasting beards, look and act like pioneers of brocialism. They spend some drunken evenings hashing out the labor theory of value — Engels holds his liquor better than Marx — and many hours, together and separately, in furious paroxysms of thought. (Read more.)

And a summary from the National Review:

Films about writers face a big obstacle from the start: No one wants to watch a movie about a nerd scratching away at his desk. But Marx was a bit more than just a writer. Unlike the usual fight-the-power types, he actually did fight the power — and was forced out of three countries for it. Today’s radicals never even make good on their promises to move to Toronto.

Beginning in Cologne in 1843, Peck finds a grouchy 25-year-old Marx (the appropriately dour August Diehl) working for a febrile newspaper that is troubled by Prussian authorities, but not enough for Marx’s taste. Even among agitators, he’s an agitator. “Enough fighting with pins,” he declares. “I want a sledgehammer.” Karl does a lot of declaring in this movie.

As, no doubt, he did in life. And this is part of the problem with Young Karl Marx. He may have dreamed up a party, but he wasn’t exactly the life of it. Quoting the kinds of things Marx actually said is going to put the audience in a state of enjoyment approximating winter in Leningrad. Some movies feel like homework; others are more like punishment. When Marx goes to Paris and meets his soulmate Friedrich Engels (Stefan Kenarske), who has been riling up the workers in Manchester, England, at one of his father’s 13 mills, the two discover they can practically finish each other’s sentences, like Jake and Elwood — just call them the Reds Brothers.

Engels — limousine liberal before limousines — has been betraying his class amid much declaration of his own. “I hate and despise gentlemen,” he says. “They are the swine who grow fat on the sweat of laborers.” Sweat is fattening? Never mind. Catching the eye of Mary (Hannah Steele), a Norma Rae–like Irish worker who has been sacked from his father’s mill for demanding better safety conditions (or, really, any safety conditions), he consorts with the lower orders while gathering material for his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Marx’s marriage, meanwhile, is its own opposites-attract story: His bride is the aristocrat Jenny von Westphalen-Marx (Vicky Krieps, who was enchanting as a dress designer’s muse in the recent film Phantom Thread but isn’t especially remarkable this time). (Read more.)