I caught Oliver Hirschbiegel’s chilling film, Downfall last night on Channel 4’s latest offshoot, More4. If it weren’t for the fact that the picture was actually released in 2004, it would definitely be a contender for my picture of the year. What was disturbing about the movie was not so much the scenes of Berliners losing limbs for Hitler’s insane ambition or the atmosphere of Götterdämmerung in the uncannily bright Führerbunker, but the fact that Bruno Ganz’s superlative performance brought some measure of humanity, indeed fading charisma to the portrayal of the palsied dictator.

Aspects of the film’s atmosphere made me uneasy: at certain points, characters such as Traudl Junge (played by Alexandra Maria Lara, who sported implausibly luminescent skin for a bunker dweller) look at Hitler was something like distaste when he starts ranting about Jewish conspiracies. I felt that this was a piece of anachronistic special pleading. I mean, an intimate of Hitler who finds anti-Semitism distasteful?

More broadly, it seems Downfall is part of a larger revisionist project that is concerned with emphasizing the suffering experienced by German civilians during the latter stages of the war. Such examples from this tendancy that could be cited include W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (dealing with the Allied bombing of German cities), Gunter Grass’s Crabwalk (which deals with the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, which was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine and sank with an estimated 9,000 people) and even a book by a British historian, Anthony Beevor’s Berlin - The Downfall 1945 (dealing with the rape of the majority of Berlin women by Red Army soldiers).

However, the hissed words of Ganz’s Hitler seem painfully apposite when considering the plight of ordinary Germans in the war: “There are no civilians in this war.” The populations of Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, in particular would have undoubtedly acknowledged the veracity of such a statement, at least those left living (let’s not forget that per 1,000 of population, the Poles lost an incredible 160). Moreover, the panic that gripped Berlin in the opening dire months of 1945 was fuelled by the knowledge that the Red Army's retribution could mirror the Germans’ despoliation of the Eastern lands following Operation Barbarossa.

But Ganz can't be faulted for imbuing his Hitler with qualities that go some way in explaining the fanatical devotion and obedience manifested by his inner circle. There’s always a temptation to depict Hitler on screen as a pop-eyed ranter, and although the film did show this aspect, it also hinted at the way he manipulated people by both showing and withholding approval. This humanizing of a mass murderer struck a chord with me as I’m currently making slow progress through Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. There’s an excellent review of the book by Andrew Nathan in the London Review of Books, which questions the book’s methodology.

My issue with the book rests on the fact that Chang and Halliday’s depiction of Mao is so relentlessly negative (slightly understandable when dealing with a man who is considered to be responsible for an estimated 70 million deaths). According to one story told about Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping conceded that Mao was 70 percent correct but only 30 percent wrong. But Chang and Halliday seem to think that Mao might not even have been 1 percent correct. Yet this relentless disparagement and demonization makes the reader wonder how did this shallow conniver succeed in uniting a vast and ancient country for what was effectively the first time? The man must have had some kind of brilliance, even it was put to dark ends.

Perhaps my view is clouded by personal tastes: I find it hard to find a character entirely alien if they abhor manual labour and somehow succeed in persuading people to carry them across half of China while they reclined in a litter, obliviously reading.

I caught Harold Pinter's Nobel lecture on television today. All in all, a perplexing performance. It began promisingly with Pinter describing the origins, in a phrase and an image, of two of his great plays, The Homecoming and Old Times. Then, with a few perfunctory comments about the nature of lies in modern politics, he launched into a sustained kicking of the USA and all its works. The efficacy of this lecture is questionable--how many people who tuned in to listen to Pinter's words of wisdom are likely to consider the invasion of Iraq to have been an act of brillant altruism?

What piqued my attention was when Pinter described "the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US." Now, the US prison system is a grim symbol of the social and racial inequality that bubbles beneath the country's facade of prosperity and opportunity-for-all. But is it accurate to use the acronym that described the network of slave camps that existed in the Soviet Union? No one, to my knowledge, freezes to death being transported to US prisons, or starves in custody, or is locked up for cracking jokes about the President (not yet anyway).

One wonders what a fellow laureate, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, (who was prevented by the Soviet authorities from traveling to Stockholm) will make of the comparison?

It's a bit like calling Malcolm McDowell Michael McDowell, Ireland's controversial minister for justice and bête noire of the Left, a Nazi--by reaching for the most visceral language you are merely alienating that section of the audience that is ready to be won over. However, Pinter, who was too unwell to travel to Stockholm to collect to prize in person, seemed more interested in defining his political credentials for posterity than providing the kind of enlightenment some might expect from a Nobel lecture (actually after a perusal of the Nobel site, most of them seem pretty gaseous). In any case, the laureled writer didn't waste too many words on what now seems like his secondary interest, literature.

Thanks to the eager eyes of one of my loyal readers, I have updated my previous posting. As many people will know, the Irish Minister for Justice is not, as I wrote earlier, Malcolm McDowell but, of course, Michael McDowell. Perhaps the unconscious change of forename is linked to memories of A Clockwork Orange, which seems to be re-enacted most nights on Irish streets after closing time, despite the promises of tougher policing espoused by McDowell--Michael, that is.

Several weeks (months?) ago, I claimed that David McWilliams was consistently one of the best columnists working in the Irish print arena. Well, now he’s starting to grate a bit. Perhaps it’s a function of his heightened profile recently as he frantically plugs his new book (“The Pope’s Children”) in the run-up to Christmas. His columns in the Sunday Business Post have recently been little more than promotional extracts (such as the one that appeared yesterday), full of breathlessly delivered facts (“These are the Pope's Children. There are 620,000 of them and they are the future of the country”) and littered with cod-sociological insights: “This is Ireland's Baby Belt. It is the savannah of the Kells Angels, Ireland's first long-distance commuters. […]This is the home of Destiny's Child.”

Frankly, there’s something a little desperate in McWilliams’s relentless phrase-coining. It’s as though he tried to inject some of the aura of a New York Times magazine article on emergent lifestyles and landscapes (on exurbia or the growth of megachurches) on the rather humdrum reality of Irish suburbia. For example, McWilliams describes the new suburbs that have sprouted up in the last decade as “Deckland” because…well, people like putting wooden decking down in their back gardens. Am I being blasé about the radical changes that have swept the nation if I claim that I don’t find this trend especially jaw-dropping? It’s not as if people have started keeping Tigers in their back gardens.

On a more rarefied level, I enjoyed Toby Bernard’s review of The Buildings of Ireland: Dublin, by Christine Casey in Saturday’s Irish Times. It features a word I hadn’t noticed before, although anyone embroiled in "the Law" will probably be familiar. The sentence reads “Now a third Irish instalment looks at the area probably most densely packed with the architecturally important and idiosyncratic: Dublin within the curtilage of the canals and the North and South Circular Roads.”

According Dictionary.com, curtilage (which Microsoft Word amends, unrequested, to the more carnal “cartilage”) refers to “[t]he enclosed area immediately surrounding a house or dwelling.” In case anyone’s interested, the word derives from the Latin, cohort- cohors farmyard.

Maybe the quotation above uses the word too loosely but I like its resonance. Curtilage--yes, I’ll have to contrive an opportunity to use it at least once in any future scribbling.

The cosy world of the Irish blogosphere seems all aflutter (see here, here, and here, for example) over the actions of Irish Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, who seems to have a gift for pouring Tabasco sauce over the stigmata of right-thinking Ireland. McDowell appears to have basically scuppered the recently established Centre for Public Inquiry (CPI) by claiming that its executive director, journalist Frank Connolly, is (literally) a fellow traveller of the IRA. McDowell initially used Dáil privilege to claim that he had reliable information from the Gardai that Connolly had travelled to Colombia with a senior IRA figure. (This trip supposedly occurred in 2000, before the August 11, 2001 arrest of Connolly’s brother, Niall, one of the “Colombia Three” charged with supplying narco-terrorists FARC with bomb-making skills.)

In recent days, the controversy has been ratcheted up with the disclosure that McDowell previously passed on the information he shared with the Dáil to an Irish Independent journalist, Sam Smyth. Crucially, it was also revealed that the CPI's funder Atlantic Philanthropies--set up by Irish-American billionaire Charles "Chuck" Feeney--is backing away from the project after being personally briefed by the Minister.

By last night’s Questions and Answers, the outrage over McDowell's manoeuvrings in some sections of the electorate could be gauged when the audience (usually packed with political hacks of various shades) applauded worthily when the chairman John Bowman read out a message from a viewer calling for McDowell’s resignation.

Perhaps I lack the respect owing to the law and the “due process” (a phrase much on pundits’ lips at present) it entails, but I think the outrage and concern over McDowell’s actions are overblown. (And disproportionate given the gravity of Mr. Connolly’s alleged offence.)

First, people have been claiming that McDowell has made allegations that first need to be proven in a court of law. This is the defence Connolly himself presented during a very dubious interview he gave to RTE, when he refused to say where exactly he was when he was not being in Colombia. (I believe the technical term for what the interviewer was seeking is an "alibi"). Perhaps Connolly bowed to the precedence of legal process because he’s pretty certain that the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) will not bring a case. As the DPP never reveals the reasons why it decides not to proceed with prosecutions, its operations are opaque to the public. However, there are many instances, perhaps the majority, when an offence has clearly been committed but the DPP believes that it cannot bring a case successfully to court. McDowell, correctly in my mind, decided that legal technicalities should not prevent him from sharing what he is sure is the truth—-namely that a character with close links to paramilitaries is the head of an organization that has set itself up as an arbiter of standards in Irish public life. Let's be clear about this--McDowell hasn't jailed Connolly without trial, but he has put his political reputation on the line by revealing information that he believes to be in the public interest. Newspapers make similar judgement calls all the time.

The fact that McDowell decided to pass on his concerns to a paper merely highlights his conviction that he’s right. To clear his name (and earn several hundred thousand euros), Connolly merely has to take Independent Newspapers to court and tell a jury where he actually was during this supposedly fictional jaunt to Colombia. Given that fact that this story about travelling to Colombia first appeared several years ago, Connolly's reluctance to clear his name and give "Dr." O'Reilly's outfit a bloody nose before now is baffling.

Moreover, Connolly’s outrage over allegations being made outside of the courtroom is a bit rich considering he's head of an organization dedicated to exposing corruption and shady dealings. Nowhere could I find on the CPI's pseudo-official-looking website any information on what avenues of redress were open to those who believed they have been poorly treated by the centre. At least, McDowell is an elected representative. In contrast, the CPI is a group of self-appointed ethicists bankrolled by an American billionaire. What exactly is “Public” about that?

The CPI was established to dish it out—-can they really start calling foul when their work has been pre-empted?

Meanwhile, the dispute continues to bubble. The Irish Times reports:

The chairman of the Centre for Public Inquiry (CPI) has described allegations made by Minster for Justice Michael McDowell against CPI executive director Frank Connolly as a "drumhead courtmartial". Retired High Court judge Mr Justice Feargus Flood, who chairs the CPI, said Mr Connolly had the right to presumed innocence and due process.

I love the “drumhead courtmartial”—-typical of the meaningless Gilbert & Sullivan rhetoric that resounds in the halls of the Four Goldmines.

Can we next expect Christy Moore & friends to announce a benefit concert to keep the CPI going?

On the subject of observing and being observed, I must mention the long, grim gander I took at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning. Usually these days I do not dally before my reflection any longer than is necessary. There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not any more. Now I am startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never and not at all the one I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Hallowe’en mask made of sagging, pinkish-grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.

I quote the above passage from pages 127-8 of John Banville’s novel The Sea in the context of an interesting article, entitled “The Fiction Machine,” bemoaning the influence of creative writing workshops on American fiction. (click here for the link to the New York Press site). The author of the piece claims that the kind of insipid prose and narrative being churned out by MFAs (Master of Fine Arts) who graduate from writing workshops can be blamed on a number of factors, not least the fact that teachers faced with large numbers of students substitute rules and doctrine (the “craft” of writing) in place of meaningful mentoring.

According to the article, budding writers are told they should “Never begin a story with a character waking up in bed. Never write a scene where a character looks at himself in a mirror. Never use the word "stuff."”

So I suppose if you really wanted to attract the hooting derision of your fellow writers, you could kick off your precious short story with the following line:

“Regaining consciousness, he opened his eyes and caught sight of himself in the ceiling mirror—his thin, sweating body was tangled up in white sheet speckled with blood and other stuff he couldn’t identify.”

And the prohibition against mirror gazing is vehemently supported by a blogger at slushpile.net, who rages “One of the first things we all learned in workshops was to try and develop character. Make the reader visualize the character. Make the reader sympathize and understand the character. Define the character. And sure enough, next week, everyone one of us turned in a stinking mirror scene in our stories. But usually it got drummed out of us and by the end of the semester, we knew better than to do this. At this point, I’d rather the author never give me a single detail about the character than to see this freshman writing 101 device used.”

Obviously, Banville’s failure to enroll in “freshman writing 101” has been a major break on his career as a novelist.

Anyone else think of some major mirror gazing scenes in contemporary fiction? If I remember correctly Updike in his latest book, Villages, has his protagonist assessing himself in the glass (and also not coming to a happy conclusion).

An interview with AA Gill that appeared in Thursday’s Guardian took what might be called a revisionist approach to its subject. That’s to say that the interviewer tried to persuade the reader that the Sunday Times’ journalist and critic is not quite the jerk one would assume him to be.

Actually, I have to admit that on a Sunday morning, if I’m reading the Sunday Times online (why buy it? For the Style supplement?), I’ll usually make a beeline for Gill’s TV column. Yes, there’s occasionally a streak of repellent malice in his prose. His comments about those he finds lacking adequate pulchritude, particularly middle-aged women, are sometimes creepily convoluted, as though he spent all week trying to deliver the most annihilating insult possible. Yet there’s a confident rhythm to his writing--full of similes and generalisations that work perfectly on first reading but might not bear up under scrutiny--that carries the reader along to the last sentence of the final paragraph without them fully realizing that they profoundly disagree with about 90% of the opinions expounded in the previous 1,000 words.

(BTW, The account of his visit to Iraq, while startlingly apolitical, was a very strong piece of sensory-attuned reportage)

Unfortunately, because Gill is an entertaining stylist, this also makes him a fairly average critic. Any manifestation of earnestness would salt the mirror-slick surface of his prose. A real engagement with the medium would halt the flow of gags, which in turn might make the reader ask a fatal question: where are the ideas here?

This is also the problem with another critic known for-—let’s be generous here—-his waspish aesthetic. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker is one of the most influential film critics in the world. But you get the impression—-as with Gill and television—-that he doesn’t really love the medium he critiques. For Lane, cinema seems just the most convenient platform upon which he can demonstrate his linguistic expertise and perform his repertoire of Richard Gere jokes (Some of which are good, it has to be said: "I was happy to salute him as a robotic fornicator in “American Gigolo,” but, given that his sole means of signalling brain activity is to go very still and shut his eyes, the world of academia may not be his patch.")

Indeed, I sometimes think Lane prefers bad movies to good ones—the former being better punchbags on which he can whale on to the soundtrack of readers’ guffaws.

Of course, earlier critics were not immune to gags. Think of Pauline Kael describing Kevin Costner’s pious Western as Dancing with Cameras. Yet at the same time, you got the impression that, for Kael, movies were about as insignificant as oxygen. And earnestness, that stance which you adopt at risk of looking of fool, was fearlessly displayed when Kael compared Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris to the Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring.

Maybe it's the films today, but I can’t see Anthony Lane ever putting himself on the line in the same way.

I’ve just picked out two particularly high-profile examples of contemporary critics who have decided to entertain rather than explain. In fact, since they do it well, one cannot carp too much about either Gill’s or Lane’s critical shortcomings. Unfortunately, because critics working in Irish, British, or American papers, would like their jobs, this has become the writing style, the mentality, to emulate. This has resulted in everybody becoming a comic. Or, is sadly more often the case, failing to be a comic.

In a piece excoriating know-nothing celebs preaching about the solutions to Africa's problems, Paul Theroux takes aim at Bono:

THERE are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.

I have a suggestion: what about being lectured at by a middle-aged American novelist better known for his misanthropic travel books who recycles his 40-year-old experiences as a Peace Corps worker in Malawi into credentials for speaking as an authority about what the beleaguered continent really needs?

Nah, Bono is still more annoying.

Gavin's Blog suggests that a website should be established to keep track of Michael McDowell's actions. Yet given the spate of revelations about his past, it is arguable that there's enough material to fuel a site chronicling the doings, past and present, of Frank Connolly. For example, The Sunday Independent (seen in some quarters as mouthpiece for the State's "security apparatus") reported on Connolly's involvement in a groupuscule with the faintly ludicrous name of "Revolutionary Struggle".

This would seem a pretty innocuous example of a student playing Wolfie Smith if it were not for the fact that this group was linked to a bizarre and sinister incident that occurred in 1981 when a British Leyland executive, Geoffrey Armstrong, was shot three times in the leg while addressing "the Junior Chamber of Commerce in Trinity's arts block."

The Indo recounts that three men wearing balaclavas entered the room while Mr. Armstrong was speaking:

"According to reports, a gunman shouted: "Everybody freeze, nobody move, this action is in support of the H-Blocks." Mr Armstrong was shot three times in the leg.

A far-left organisation, known as Revolutionary Struggle - in which Mr Connolly was involved - was blamed for the shooting. Mr Connolly, then aged 27, was among several members of the extremist group to be arrested and questioned about the shooting.

Whoever was behind the shooting, one wonders what they hoped to achieve by inflicting such a cruel punishment on the apparently blameless executive of a car company. Perhaps, from their fevered reading of Gramsci, the gunmen thought that striking at Britain's economic structure would destabilise the superstruture of British colonialism as manifested in Northern Ireland. But if they really wanted to damage the British economy, wouldn't it actually have made more sense to allow a executive of British Leyland--a company that more than any other blackened the name of British manufacturing--to go about their business unharmed?

Such a convoluted argument, however, would most likely have been lost on characters itching to play out their childhood Starsky-and-Hutch fantasies by walking into a room and shouting "Everybody freeze, nobody move."

While the first civil partnership ceremonies in the UK, which took place today in Belfast of all places, are to be welcomed as a reasonably sane and compassionate acknowledgement of reality, it raises the question of what effect this legal innovation will have on the island of Ireland as a whole. According to Slugger O'Toole, "anything that even indirectly challenged the status of marriage would require a constitutional amendment." (If this is the case, I pray the Irish electorate has moved on from the mid-1990s, when the legalisation of divorce barely squeaked through on a margin of about a thousand votes in a referendum.)

However, given the fact that such partnerships are explicitly not marriages, I wonder whether it would be possible to introduce legislation without having to tweak the Constitution.

Moreover, it is arguable that--given the framework of the Belfast Agreement, which states that "measures brought forward [in the Republic] would ensure at least an equivalent level of protection of human rights as will pertain in Northern Ireland,"--a well-funded legal case might oblige the introduction of similar unions down South sooner rather than later.

Proper legal experts, feel free to weigh in.

I have been so busy pontificating recently on political issues, that I neglected to mention, as I had hoped, that I caught the supposed "event picture" of the holidays, King Kong, over the weekend. Once I formulated the glib insight that the picture seemed to have grown fatter while its director became thinner, I was left with the question of why I felt distinctly underwhelmed by 200 million dollars' worth of CGI-enhanced entertainment.

Then it hit me--I'm a 34-year-old man! Why the hell should I expect to swoon over something geared for the Xbox-jangled synapses of a 13-year-old boy?

(Actually, 13 might be a slightly old demographic for this picture. On the afternoon I caught it, parents seemed to treat the cinema auditorium as a sort of crèche, oblivious of the fact that their five-year-old children were likely to wake roaring in the early hours of next morning from dreams of being swallowed by carnivorous worms.)

The annual book-of-the-year lists (see here for an exhaustive\exhausting selection) is always an opportunity for those asked to nominate to showcase their taste, erudition, and, in some cases, their lack of both.

However, I think the incomparable George Steiner deserves the laurels for recommending, in the December 2 issue of the TLS, the most intimidating tome of 2005. As it's Steiner writing, there's the obligatory namechecking of some of the Easter-Island monuments of Western Civ (and he gets double-bonus points for a book not yet translated into English written by someone who is dead):

Sebastiano Timpanaro was a figure of quite exceptional moral and intellectual stature. Philologist of the very first rank, heretical Marxist, penetrating critic of Freud, his posthumous influence has been growing steadily. Much in the collection of his Contributi di filologia greca e latina (Università di Firenze) is severely technical. But the identification of scholarly rigour with personal and political morality shines through.

Scholarly rigour! Severe technicality! What more could you ask for during the zombified, dying days of 2005?

Given the Economist's somewhat erratic policy of making material available for free online, it was a pleasant surprise to see that numerous pieces from its end-of-year double issue are easily accessible.

One of the articles on America's Most Hated Companies got me thinking. First, it made realize that, for a small country, Ireland has an abundance of enterprises that people would be willing to nominate. My personal choice would be torn between two companies with TLAs: NTR (responsible for the Westlink embarrassment) and NTL (who have, in my experience, the worst customer service in Christendom).

Second, The Economist indulged in some Googling to gauge popular sentiment:

Type “hate Bill Gates” into Google even now, and you will probably get over 15,000 hits. Type “love Bill Gates”, and on a good day (for Mr Gates) you may get 2,000.

In a similar vein, I decided to use the search engine to discover how people really feel about this time of year. "Love Christmas" elicits 617,000 results on Google, while "Hate Christmas" uncovers a mere 273,000 hits.

However, and it wouldn't be a Monkey's Typewriter column without a caveat, while the combo "Christmas + happiness" leads to a whopping 7,030,000 results, "Christmas + depression" prompts an ever greater 7,260,000 links.

I hope my readers find the first combination closer to their experiences in the coming days!