Do You Hear the People Sing?
Movie reviewers are still trying to solve the mystery of why audiences respond so emotionally to Les Miserables, now out on the big screen, when it says all the wrong and politically incorrect things. Stacy Wolf in the Washington Post writes wonderingly “viewers are flocking to a movie full of outdated gender roles … and, somehow, we still love them”.
Charles Isherwood of the New York Times arts beat found himself “rooting for a movie I don’t particularly like”. Megan McArdle comes right out and asks it: “Why All the Hate for Les Mis?” After all, she liked it. “I happily sobbed for the last half hour of the movie, while my husband, a movie critic, kept uncomfortably leaning over to ask if I was all right.”
Yes she’s all right.
The probable reason audiences like Les Miserables, the musical, as opposed to the novel which is more complex, is the theme. It is a story about angels and demons. It is not exclusively about social commentary or gender roles or any of that stuff. Angels and demons? That seems improbable at first glance because its characters are nearly all low life. Ex-convicts, working class women, prostitutes, beggars, street gangsters, policemen, clip-joint innkeepers or addle brained revolutionaries make up the cast. Only Marius Pontmercy, Cosette’s betrothed, is reasonably respectable.
They are the opposite of decent company. Nobody in the Washington Post, the New York Times or Google would dream of hiring any of these types to work with them. Yet in the play we find these characters bursting out time after time in song of the purest idealism. They seem concerned — almost obsessed despite their low stature — with things like honor, love, justice, freedom and selfless sacrifice. These scum of the earth are constantly driven by these imperatives as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
McCardle notices it too. She writes that the characters in the musical “are forever … struggling with their conscience, risking all to do the right thing”. Whether that is Fantine selling her hair, teeth and virtue to support her child, or Jean Valjean turning himself in to save an innocent man from penal servitude, or Eponine giving up her chance at happiness with Marius to smooth the way for his life with Cosette, or Jean Valjean again returning to the barricades to save the man who will take his daughter from his old age, the protagonists seem bent on performing acts of such unutterable loftiness that it seems impossible not to notice the contrast between that and their low estate. It is entirely as Victor Hugo intended. In the novel itself he wrote:
The book which the reader has before him at this moment is, from one end to the other, in its entirety and details … a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life; from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. The starting point: matter, destination: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.
Not everyone of course, is engaged in this Pilgrim’s Progress. And in this respect Hugo is politically incorrect. His poor, no less than the middle class and wealthy, can be cruel and unfeeling. Fantine’s co-workers at the factory; the Monsieur who expends his bestial appetites upon her in the brothel-hulk and above all the Thénardiers are concerned with nothing more than petty nastiness, lust or money. Evil, as much as good is an equal opportunity choice in his universe.
But as for the rest they shine brighter than the stars in Javert’s judicial firmament. The police inspector himself occupies the middle ground. Low life like the rest of them (“You know nothing of Javert. I was born inside a jail with scum like you. I am from the gutter too!”) he is not a nihilistic as the Thénardiers. He believes in something, but unlike all the other positive characters of the Les Miserables universe who reach out across the natural cosmos for light, Javert is dependent on the State for salvation. Javert’s route out of the mire has been through the ladder of the state. To Javert the State — whoever might be running it at the moment — is God.
Stars
In your multitudes
Scarce to be counted
Filling the darkness
With order and light.
And so it has been and so it is written
On the doorway to paradise
That those who falter and those who fall
Must pay the price!
And when at the last Javert is forced to choose between the State and Natural Justice, it does not compute and he resolves the crisis by throwing himself into the Seine.
The contrast between the transcendence which these low-life characters aspire to and their miserable surroundings is enhanced by the movie because it can depict dirt and grime in a way that the stage cannot. My wife, who invited me to the showing, remarked that period France as depicted on film seemed almost as dirty as Tondo, the giant slum in Manila in which I spent some years. “I wonder if people who’ve grown up in the First World will realize how much like that it is.”
I wondered too. Indeed, period France with its sewers, roaches, filth and vomit seemed classier, if anything, than the Tondo of my memory. The brothel hulks on the shore of the Montreuil-sur-Mer were a cut above those the on the Tondo foreshore, where prostitutes plied their trade under tarps, but with more flies and stifling heat. The Thénardier’s seedy tavern is a step up from the Boteng Umiilaw a bar that features in my novel No Way In.
And that contrast was a giveaway because the theme of angel-in-man, and the devil within us, while after all Hugo’s motif, was familiar to me already. The thread running through Les Miserables is an old proverb in the Philippine slums: sa Tondo man ay may langit din, that is to say “even in the dirt you will find angels”.
And there are lots of them in Les Miserables. Jean Valjean, the bishop of Digne, Fantine, Eponine, Enjolras and Gavroche. Even the monumental screw-up Enjolras is forgiven, not because his amateurish revolution has a chance. He is forgiven for loving much. When Valjean asks Javert “who do you see in the mirror”, the answer of course is us. The inclusive us, not simply the college-educated us. What we might see in the mirror when we watch Les Miserables is humanity reaching for God. God in some sense at least; but a meaningful God, something greater than Javert’s state.
Perhaps the reason we like the characters in Les Miserables, despite our sophistication, is because they are who we would like to be if we were brave enough to try. The characters hardly inhabit their bodies. It is the spirit they live for. They don’t seem to mind poverty, but are terrified at the prospect of a life without love. Death hardly seems to matter to them; it is honor that they value. Maybe that is why the critics hate Les Miserables on an intellectual level but find themselves reaching for the hankie all the same.
The power of Les Miserables the musical and the movie is that it goes so directly to our deepest aspirations that it sweeps aside our desire for respectability and the need to be cool. That is the probably reason why Christian iconography, even the sacraments, so startling in other Hollywood movies, seem so natural within its context. When Jean Valjean awaits death in the chapel we are not surprised that Fantine comes to forgive him.
VALJEAN
forgive me all my trespasses
And take me to your glory.FANTINE
Come with me
Where chains will never bind you
All your grief
At last, at last behind you
Lord in Heaven
Look down on him in mercy.For love is everlasting
And remember
The truth that once was spoken
To love another person
Is to see the face of God.
No we are not surprised, nor are we disbelieving.
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“..and his greatest sin was that he did not love his fellow man.” Ethan Frome?
I loved the novel, play and now the film. Call me a sucker, but I think it is great.
there have been many movies, TV series on “the Miserables”
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mis%C3%A9rables#Adaptations
Depardieu incarnated Jean Valjean during last decade
Well this novel in France didn’t impress us so much,Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, or Stendhal novels (la Chartreuse de Parme, le rouge et le noir) had more our affection
“honor, love, justice, freedom and selfless sacrifice”
They went down with the Titanic or were trampled into the mud of the Somme. WW-II was fought merely for survival and the States by all parties.
1914 may have been the last time that men went willingly to war intending to bring Civilization to the foe. It was the last gasp of the confidence that fueled Imperialism. By 1940 the most that even Churchill could do is rally his people to preserve their lifeboat from the rising darkness of a perverted science. Now the Great and the Good will only consider acting to protect and enable the enemies of what their great-grandfathers believed in.
“honor, love, justice, freedom and selfless sacrifice”
People who believe in those are people who can trust each other with guns. A state that rules over a people who do not believe in those must arrogate all power to itself. Javert is doing it for the children.
The wiki doubts that August Bebel originated “Anti-Semitism is the Socialism of fools.” The current debased state of the Left that is lead by men like Obama and Hagel is the result of draining the ideals from what is now a purely selfish world. People are reduced to objects manipulated by narcissists. The State accumulates power while distracting the people with traditional hate objects. Islam is a model.
I saw the version with Depardieu. He struggled and became successful and they raised his taxes so high! And the taxman would pursue him wherever he went. The taxman thought it was his duty to the Socialist government. And Depardieu threatened to depart. He said he will jump in the Seine rather than pay these taxes! Or was it move to Belgium? I’m not sure. It was in French.
I believe Whitaker Chambers attributed a very early reading of Les Miserables as foundational (at least sub-consciously) to his ultimate turn against communism. It forced him to think in terms of good/evil and the individual in the context of a unique soul.
Other events, like the birth of his daughter also contributed.
The seeds were planted at an early age after discovering the book in a trunk in his parent’s attic.
HDGreene wrote: “Or was it move to Belgium? I’m not sure.”
No, you missed the last act! He decided to take a cue from Napoleon and set his sights on Russia! Although he got a much friendlier reception than old Boney did, probably because he promised not to burn Moscow to the ground.
(FWIW, I do think Depardieu’s portrayal of Jean Val Jean was the best by far of any who have played the role, even though his version wasn’t a musical. He made me believe the character was real, the mark of a great performance. And John Malkovich was the most sinister Javert since Charles Laughton took on the part)
May I point out that some of the entertainers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans close up shop, stay awake for coffee at Cafe duMonde, and then go to the first mass of the morning? And that they know themselves enough to sit, not near the front, but in the middle, and do not walk up for communion. But that they are there every morning after they work.
I wonder at the hardness or fear of the priests’ hearts, after serving the clean of conscience their bread and wine, that they don’t walk up the center aisle and at least bless these faithful children with a blessing ” you are a loved child of the living God” and then walk further up to the back of the sanctuary, and bless the still-stinking, drunken, sodden types who are barely able to come in at all, and hide in the back.
These are the children of God who know God, but are afraid that he doesn’t know them.
“…a movie full of outdated gender roles…”
Who knew that gender was a role and not human nature. Homo sapiens traces to a common female ancestor about 170,000 years distant. Oh, the horror that humanity thought they knew that there is a difference between male and female for 169,950 of those best-forgotten, unenlightened years.
Are these gender scripts available only from the Princeton University book store?
When do we rid ourselves of feminist departments?
Speaking of gender roles, some of you may have seen James Taranto’s column in the Wall Street Journal on February 9, 2012, where he created quite a stir by asserting that the McDonald’s Happy Meal was the very symbol of modern feminism. An opinion quite the contrary of then prevailing convention “wisdom’ about there being a “War on Women”!
http://preview.tinyurl.com/bb3pqjk
Today, the WSJ has a remembrance of Fred Turner, former CEO of McDonald’s and the Father of the Happy Meal. http://preview.tinyurl.com/bd95yyb I highly recommend reading this article as it also gives insights into how an empire is created, and how they tend to yield to the Second Law as successors screw up what made them successful in the first place.
That is not all those successors screwed up! In trying to bring “value”, they resorted to the dumbest of all strategies, “Supersizing”. Is there anybody out there who longs for an original McDonald’s french fry, cooked in tallow?
Surrendering to the “Food Police”, by abandoning what made them what they are, has hurt McDonald’s. They even made Michael Moore look like he is merely an imbecile, rather than the idiot he truly is.
The moral?
Don’t surrender what is good to what is fashionable.
Book, good, musical, dreadful.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/01/theres-still-hope-for-people-who-love-les-miserables.html#ixzz2H1uIANLj
The novel was published in 1862, and the English language version was instantly devoured by the Army of Northern Virginia, who thereafter called themselves Lee’s Miserables.
My problem is simply that Les Miserables is a bad choice for a musical. And I generally hate musicals anyway. What is this, Pollywood, where every film must have a song and dance scene?
Nothing wrong with a straight dramatic presentation of a dramatic novel.
Like these, for instance:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119683/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113828
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026725
They seem concerned — almost obsessed despite their low stature — with things like honor, love, justice, freedom and selfless sacrifice.
Not their cell phones and twitter accounts? How quaint.
5. hdgreene
Depardieu’s case isn’t so simple, he was ostensibly supporting Sarkozy, and said that he would move abroad as soon as Hollande was elected. Taxes weren’t really his problem, but medias attention. Now, that he is a Russian personality, good luck with him to get out the Putin’s paws, he’ll ask him some “services”.
Anyways, Hollande’s law was rejected, by our Constitutionnal Concil, but it would have been from Brussels too, as you know, we aren’t free to rise taxes like we used to
BTW, Wretchard’s interpretation is interesting, we never had such from our teachers
Ah, Richard, before I read the others’ comments, this line sings to my heart and soul: “Perhaps the reason we like the characters in Les Miserables, despite our sophistication, is because they are who we would like to be if we were brave enough to try.”
Marie (16),
Stick around, you may learn something!
Kirk @16
Stick around, you may learn something!… while we update our policies from EU !
SF @ 19 – “French fries” are actually Belgian fries, AKA Vlaamse Frieten or Flemish fries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_fries#Belgium
McDonald’s sells French fries as its primary side order. Until 1967, French fries were never frozen, but were cut on-site from potatoes and immediately fried.
i.e. The original McDonald’s french fries were classic Flemish Fries.
Ohhhhh, all that saturated fat tastes soooo good, just like Julia Child always told us!
Now which would cause us to gain less weight, a small portion of Flemish Fries cooked in tallow or a supersized portion of fries cooked in partially hydrogenated cooking oil?
On the humanity! The Nanny State is tying to fatten us up on bad tasing food by banning natural animal fats in culinary artistry!
Somebody gag that , the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomburg. His policies are such that it makes one want to “Occupy Wall Street”!
I’ve very much enjoyed Wretchard’s recent forays into movie reviews. He fights the good fight on a number of fronts.
#4 wrote, “1914 may have been the last time that men went willingly to war intending to bring Civilization to the foe. It was the last gasp of the confidence that fueled Imperialism. By 1940 the most that even Churchill could do is rally his people to preserve their lifeboat from the rising darkness of a perverted science”.
You must have missed the part in Churchill’s speech about a victory allowing mankind to move into ‘broad, sunlit uplands’.
to MP @ 20 :
try that one instead if you ever come up north :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poutine
SF
mp @ 20 again
and while up there try this one; it’s RSVP all year round
http://labanquise.com/en/
SF
SF @ 22 7 @3 – Merci beaucoups!
Do you think that Les Mis gives voice to the inchoate rage of those suffering from the indoctrination of the Radical Progressive Left?
If the trial in the Deepwater Horizon spill ever gets to the point where they want to call the guy who wrote the Management of Change document that led directly to the killing of the well via the “static kill”, I might end up going to New Orleans, where there is an offshoot of Canadien cuisine, as done by the Cajuns. Know any good places there?
MP @ 24
”Do you think that Les Mis gives voice to the inchoate rage of those suffering from the indoctrination of the Radical Progressive Left?”
yes, maybe it’s a step toward a state of mind that our host wrote more eloquently about:
,,Perhaps the reason we like the characters in Les Miserables, despite our sophistication, is because they are who we would like to be if we were brave enough to try. The characters hardly inhabit their bodies. It is the spirit they live for. They don’t seem to mind poverty, but are terrified at the prospect of a life without love. Death hardly seems to matter to them; it is honor that they value. Maybe that is why the critics hate Les Miserables on an intellectual level but find themselves reaching for the hankie all the same.”
hum : ”they are who we would like to be if we were brave enough to try”
and : ”it is honor that they value”
never been to N.O. but could recommend this one too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyHni6pwCQc
located in an area settled by Scottish immigrants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis-sur-Mer,_Quebec
regards
4 / 4 and I’m out !
SF
no ‘S’ at Merci Beaucoup
Another fantastic post, nearly brought on a sob; I’ll admit it, but I am in a weird place at the moment. Your last few posts have been striking cords.
I don’t know if anyone here watches the show Dexter, but after watching the end of this past season, I am literally still in shock over both the events, the new perspective it sheds on the show I was completing missing, and what it says about myself that I missed the point. I am struggling to put it into words in an essay when I have not written in months, because I am literally haunted by it.
I don’t want to give anything away about the show, but suffice to say the existence of Angels and Demons, and the how insidiously evil can corrupt the good was brilliantly illustrated. I was seduced by it myself.
It is weird to say it was brought on by a television show, but I am re-examining the whole idea of evil, the vital importance of always striving for good and understanding the vital importance my religion places on forgiveness.
Your previous post on the Hobbit (A Wilderness of Dragons) seemed to awaken in me a new appreciation of what the whole point of faith is in a world sometimes overrun with darkness and monsters. As you quoted Tolkien on Beawulf:
“Beowulf’s byrne was made by Weland, and the iron shield he bore against the serpent by his own smiths: it was not yet the breastplate of righteousness, nor the shield of faith for the quenching of all the fiery darts of the wicked.”
The ability to persevere, and to maintain one’s sense of humanity and decency rather than seek survival as the ultimate goal seems clearer to me now as we seem to enter a darker age. We are tested in so many ways, and as they say, the Devil takes all forms in order to work his mischief, and whether born again or atheist, if you think you can’t be tempted down a dark path, think again.
Thanks again for all you do, Richard. Your perspective on things has really helped me understand and cope with a world seemingly bent on chaos and self-destruction.
The historical background to Le Mis is the series of European revolutions in 1848 — a kind of “European Spring” if you will. A time of great ferment. It was France’s 2nd or 3rd revolution. All the rebellions were crushed, and, at best, only minor reforms resulted, except for the ending of serfdom in a couple of regions.
The aftershocks of that upheaval eventually started to influence American intellectuals, to the point where they became enamored with Euro-style notions of “freedom” and “reform.” In time these “thinkers” began to disparage the original Anglo-based sentiments of our much more successful rebellion against a European state. They claimed to like the “German model” instead. These new conceits delivered up the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Lucky us!
W: I have been preceded by commenters at 17, 25 and 26 but it deserves repetition (infra). Dude, you rock. This is simple and profound. Nobody who hasn’t lived a great deal, and seen some hard stuff, could have written this. Thanks.
“Perhaps the reason we like the characters in Les Miserables, despite our sophistication, is because they are who we would like to be if we were brave enough to try. The characters hardly inhabit their bodies. It is the spirit they live for. They don’t seem to mind poverty, but are terrified at the prospect of a life without love. Death hardly seems to matter to them; it is honor that they value.”
Loved the novel, liked the musical, fear seeing the film-version. But I will.
Interesting that Marie Claude disses Hugo in #3. Hugo was the overwhelmingly popular novelist in 19th century France. Streets are named for him in just about every French city of any size. He was one of the best-selling authors of the 19th century. He was a Romantic and so faded in popularity by the turn of the century.
One thing Wretchard elides here is that a story of angels and demons only makes sense in a Christian milieu, and makes most sense in a orthodox Christian milieu, i.e. Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. Although Hugo abandoned his Roman Catholicism for Spirit mediums and seances as he grew famous and suffered ego-inflation, his novels always presume its values. Unlike Emile Zola, he remains committed to the notion of the virtues in human life. As with many great artists, he was a terrible rascal.
It’s interesting to contrast Dickens with Hugo: the whiggish Protestant with the Romantic Roman Catholic.
just found a article
“Tocqueville classic becomes Chinese bestseller
“The success of “The Old Regime and the Revolution” has largely been attributed to leading members of China’s Communist Party, who recommended it to their peers. In the book Tocqueville explores the idea that major revolutions, like the French Revolution, do not occur during times of poverty, but rather when disparities between classes have become great enough to divide society. In other words, when a small handful of people are extremely rich, and the vast majority of people are not.”
http://www.france24.com/en/20130104-france-tocqueville-revolution-classic-china-best-seller-list
medium rare,
I had a school price, “les miserables” the novel revisited for children, and the story passionated me, but as a highschool student, I found boring to read Hugo
I might reread him again, trying to find what I missed
“Death hardly seems to matter to them; it is honor that they value.”
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death! “
I am surprised that no one else has mentioned this. Maybe it is just me.
These lyrics:
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!
When you look at the crowds in Les Mis, when you hear them singing that song, does it not bring at least a glimmering of an identification with them as an American? Does it cause some reflection on our own lives? And does not that reflection cause some comparison between our own current regime which rules over us, and the Ancien Regime of reconstituted Bourbons who mis-ruled France then? And looking at the lawless, unconstitutional nature of our own regime, how can we judge the Bourbons as having been worse?
We, as a country and people who arose from an act of resistance to oppression, should identify with that crowd in the street. Indeed, Thomas Paine, who wrote COMMON SENSE to rally support for our Revolution; later wrote the French Revolutionary “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”. His equivalent there, of what became our Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights here, is stated as the right of “resistance to oppression”.
The elites who rule us may not like Les Mis. They are right not to, or at least cunning enough not to. Because while we may not be as pure of heart as Hugo’s characters, we are even less born to be slaves than them. And we are not dumb enough to just stand still behind flimsy wood barricades while the government brings up troops and artillery.
There are other old songs. One that comes to mind starts,
The Night of Fire is yet to come, the Tyrant’s Shadow on the years …..
Subotai Bahadur
“Now, that he [Depardieu] is a Russian personality, good luck with him to get out the Putin’s paws”
This is vaguely reminiscent of Brecht and Ulbricht. Or Dean Reed and Erich Honecker.
“Singing a song of angry men?”
This does not remind me of America. The Les Mis flag was red and black. Let’s see, which famous EU country had a red ‘n’ black flag in the 20th century? The song reminded me more of ‘Cabaret.’
I expect Depardieu will find, at an inconvenient moment, that he signed a couple of forms he didn’t notice when he went Russian.
The suggestion that the return of ‘Honour’ might help the discipline and disorder problem in our schools was met with a polite silence. Anything that does not have an immediate and foreseeable value in ‘learning’ or a connection to a current buzz word in education is carefully avoided. “Can you provide an example of a current program with measurable results?” if not we won’t go there.
We don’t teach “Good and evil” much any more, just what is useful. Evil, especially, is reduced to ‘mistaken, or worse, politically incorrect and therefore can not even be discussed.
The most memorable line (from a sociological prespective) was:
Here’s to pretty girls who went to our heads
Here’s to witty girls who went to our beds
Hearing that it occurred to me that the singing revolutionaries were breeding a new generation of orphans. After all, iirc Cosette’s father left Fantine circa 1815, so I assume he died in the last gasp of the Napoleonic wars. In 1832 our fated singing students impregnate pretty/witty girls, and those young orphans will likely die in the 1848 rebellion. But not before they impregnate a new generation who will die in the 1871 Paris Commune conflict.