SUNDAY EVENING SOAPS

Last night I watched three hours of soap opera on my local public television station. Not everyone will agree with my description of all three as soaps, and the quality among the three most certainly varies. First up was Last Tango in Halifax, with a magnificent cast of fine actors. The episode last evening was eventful, to say the least, and ended with a Perils of Pauline cliffhanger, which I will not spoil. I adore watching the performances of the actors, especially Derek Jacobi's Alan and Anne Reid's Celia. I admire more and more with each episode Nicola Walker's performance as Gillian, Alan's daughter. Sarah Lancashire as Celia's daughter, Caroline, the Ice Queen, is very good, too. The entire cast is superior, and none of the actors strike a false note, so I continue to delight in watching the performances, even as I sometimes roll my eyes at the twists and turns in the plot.

Then on to the new Poldark series, with Aidan Turner as the smoldering, shirtless Poldark, which I admit has improved over the first episode, which was quite disappointing. Poldark smolders less since he married his kitchen maid, Demelza, played by the lovely, flame-haired Eleanor Tomlinson, but he must be shirtless when he democratically shares in the mine digging with his workers. At least one mine owner does what a mine owner's got to do in hard times, and Poldark is not above hard physical work when it's warranted.

The last soap opera series, The Crimson Field, which becomes soapier with each episode, tries my patience, but I will probably continue watching just to see how the story turns out. There will be no second season for the series.

"THE IMITATION GAME" - FILM

The Imitation Game was last week's movie. I have the least expensive Netflix subscription, so I receive only one DVD at a time and average about one movie a week.  Since I can watch only one movie at a time, the inexpensive option works well.  I assume most of you know something of the story of Alan Turing, thus I am not concerned about writing a spoiler review.  During World War II, Alan Turing, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician, worked at Bletchley Park Code and Cypher School in England where the supposedly unbreakable Enigma code used by the German military was, in fact, broken, thus shortening the war by a number of years and saving a large number of lives.  Turing also formalized "the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine", a hypothetical device that is the father of the computer as we know it today.

While I enjoyed the film, I had the sense throughout that the story was in some way forced, that the director, Morten Tyldum, and script writer, Graham Moore, were trying too hard in a way that seemed fairly obvious to me.  However, since I knew only the bare bones of Turing's story, that he was a mathematical and cryptological genius, that he helped break Enigma, the German military code, while working at Bletchley Park during World War II, and that he was gay, I couldn't be sure of the how and why of the apparent strain.  After watching, I did a bit of online research and learned that the story, as told in the movie, took great liberties with the facts of Turing's life, such as they are known.  Though I agree it's quite common and sometimes works well when films take liberties for the sake of a more interesting story line, it seems to me that the movie would have been more entertaining if the director and writer had not portrayed Turing as two-dimensional, an awkward, anti-social, nerdy, gay genius and martyr to an ungrateful, homophobic nation, and rather fleshed him out as a complex and more rounded human being.

In 1952, Turing was charged with "gross indecency" for committing homosexual acts to which he confessed after he was arrested. To avoid prison, he was forced to undergo a year of chemical castration therapy.   In 1956, a little over a year after the hormone therapy had ended, Turing committed suicide.  Laws against same sex relationships were on the books in England until 1967 (and much later in some states in the US).  Though I do not minimize the cruel consequences of the laws for gay men, I wish the movie had been truer to the story of Turing, the man, who made no great effort to hide his sexual orientation from those who knew him and worked with him.  Also, according to biographer Jack Copeland, though he was indeed introverted and eccentric, "Once you got to know him Turing was fun — cheerful, lively, stimulating, comic, brimming with boyish enthusiasm."   Copeland also questioned the suicide verdict of the inquest.

If Turing is portrayed as two-dimensional in the movie, the supporting characters are one-dimensional, and that's not to demean the performances of Benedict Cumberbatch, as Turing, and the other actors, whose skillful efforts succeeded in holding my interest throughout the film by doing their best with poor material.

What the movie accomplished was to motivate me to learn more about Turing, which I've done by searching for material online and giving Jack Copeland's book, Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age, a place on my reading wishlist.

A REMINDER AS WE CELEBRATE INDEPENDENCE DAY

THE NEW COLOSSUS

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus

UPDATE: Accompaniment to the picture and poem.

JULY 4TH - INDEPENDENCE DAY

Thanks to Doug for his very wise words which helped me articulate my thoughts about tomorrow, our national holiday, in which we celebrate the birth of the United States of America. The original sin of our birth as a nation is grave, indeed, and soils all that followed, with serious consequences still felt today. The US is my country, because I choose to live here, rather than somewhere else, but I am no fervent, flag-waving patriot, because I see the good, the bad, and the ugly in our history. (As a matter of fact, flag worship is repulsive rather than inspiring to me.) I prefer to honor the inspirational words in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the US Constitution, which did not speak the whole truth at the time they were written, and are not yet wholly true to this day. I will continue to do my duty as a citizen, as I see it, because it is my responsibility to do so in my country of choice, with only a remote hope that the splendid ideals spelled out in the founding documents will one day be realized.

GOOD NEWS

The House of Deputies concurs with the House of Bishops on Resolutions A054 and A036 that provide for marriage equality. Thanks be to God and to the bishops and deputies at General Convention. May God bless the Episcopal Church.

PRESIDING BISHOP-ELECT OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH IS BISHOP MICHAEL CURRY

Michael Curry, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, is the 27th Presiding Bishop-elect of the Episcopal Church. He was chosen on the first ballot.

PRAYER FOR THE 78TH GENERAL CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH

Almighty and everliving God, source of all wisdom and understanding, be present with those who take counsel at the 78th General Convention for the renewal and mission of your Church. Teach us in all things to seek first your honor and glory. Guide us to perceive what is right, and grant us both the courage to pursue it and the grace to accomplish it; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

PRAYER FOR THE ELECTION OF A PRESIDING BISHOP FOR THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH

Almighty God, giver of every good gift: Look graciously on your Church, and so guide the minds of those who shall choose a presiding bishop for this church, that we may receive a faithful pastor, who will care for your people and equip us for our ministries; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"LOCKE" - THE MOVIE

The film, directed by Steven Knight, is gripping, harrowing, and claustrophobic. Nearly the entire movie is filmed inside a moving car with with one character, Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy), a foreman in the concrete business, talking on the phone with various voices on the other end of the phone. Ivan is on his way to London from the hinterlands at night, in the dark, under great stress. The moving car lights on the road and road lights whizzing by are dazzling, dizzying, and blinding, all of which make for a dangerous ride and sustained suspense for the viewer. Will Ivan make it to London in one piece?

Locke has a cold; he coughs and constantly wipes his dripping nose throughout the film. The viewer sees Ivan's face, arms and hands, surrounded by darkness and never gets a look at the rest of him.

One bad thing after another happens to Ivan all along the way, but we hear about them only through the phone conversations. As Ivan's life begins to fall apart, in a sort of crazed desperation, he talks to his dead bastard of a father about how well he's handling all the problems. At one point, he says, "The Lockes were a long line of shit, but I straightened them out." And yet, and yet, even as he's near the edge, Ivan maintains enough control and sanity to deal with the problems as best he can, with very mixed results.

Hardy as Ivan is superb; words fail to adequately praise his performance. As noted above in the conversations with his dead father, gallows humor (unintended by Ivan) runs throughout the course of the film. I think especially of Ivan's attempts to calm the women on the other end of the phone by repeating, "You're distressed", and to calm those around the women with, "She's distressed". Another instance is when Ivan responds to one of the voices wanting reassurance that everything will work out, "Absolutely!...hopefully" The actors doing the voices on are terrific, too, especially Andrew Scott as Donal, Ivan's assistant on the job.

After watching the movie once, I decided to see it again before I sent the DVD back to Netflix, and I watched once more the following evening. Indeed, I had missed parts of the dialogue that I picked up on the second viewing, so it was a good thing I saw the film again. Not quite so harrowing the second time around, but nonetheless quite enjoyable.

RANDOM QUESTIONS FROM A GRIEVING, RACING MIND

Are we now seeing the beginning of the breakdown of civil society in the United States?

Have we ever had a civil society in the US?

Is there greater violence now, or were we always a violent nation?

When is a massacre by a white person a terrorist act, an existential threat that we must fight with all our might?

When will we give attention to the phrase "a well-regulated militia" in the Second Amendment and seriously discuss the meaning of the words? Or does the phrase signify nothing whatsoever?

Not that I expect answers, but I do believe we need to start talking about these matters.

Though I know them to be true, I was saddened by President Obama's words.

We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.

Now is the time for mourning and for healing. But let’s be clear:

At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it.

It is in our power to do something, but we will talk about the shootings for a while, and then we will do nothing.

The president said further:

The fact that this took place in a black church obviously also raises questions about a dark part of our history. This is not the first time that black churches have been attacked. And we know that hatred across races and faiths pose a particular threat to our democracy and our ideals.

The dark part of our history goes back to the beginning, with the Founding Fathers acceptance of the institution of slavery for the sake of unity.