Elie Wiesel’s “Night” is psychologically graphic and necessary

Elie Wiesel’s Night was an emotionally difficult book to read. The psychological torture of Wiesel’s experience, and so many others like him that had it as bad or worse (not sure what might be worse … American slavery seems at least similar in context and cruelty). That this happened during the lifetime of people I grew up loving brings this particular account and atrocity closer to home; that is likely about anchoring.

The legitimate nightmare and anguish of Elie Wiesel’s experience is psychologically graphic and horrifying. Descriptions including psychologically graphic and horrifying make this book both a necessary and compelling reading. It’s a bit disappointing that my seventh-grade class had us read Seth McEvoy’s Batteries Not Included. This isn’t to diminish McEvoy’s effort; my point is that seventh grade seems like a reasonable time to expose children to questions involving historical and emotional literacy.

For illuminating something for scrutiny that needs to be seen, this book earns 4.5-stars. That the brutality indicated by Wiesel in Night occurred really spells out the crime of what Erik Larson wrote about in his book In the Garden of Beasts.

Matt – Monday, February 6, 2017

Top 20 Movie “The Shining.”

Stephen King has a solid history with his writings making a transition from book to television mini-series, cinematic movie, and a little more tenuously stage production. The second movie to make a transition from novel to the big screen is the 1980 Stanley Kubrick produced, directed, and written (as a screenplay) movie The Shining (1980). King‘s novel was first published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1977, coming in at 659-pages (per the novel’s Wikipedia page).

The Shining was a fortuitous marriage of some of Hollywood’s more commercially successful stakeholders. There was the novelist King, the producer, screenwriter and director Kubrick, and the starring actor Jack Nicholson. These three brought something special and awesome together.

King gave us The Shawshank Redemption (1994), The Green Mile (1999), Stand By Me (1986), and Misery (1990). Kubrick gave us 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Spartacus (1960), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Full Metal Jacket (1987). Nicholson gave us Chinatown (1974),  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), A Few Good Men (1992), As Good As It Gets (1997), and The Departed (2006).

Beyond bringing together the above three all-stars with their commercial success and influence, the story is a masterful examination of falling into madness in a place of isolation meant to force the confrontation of it. Jack Torrance (Nicholson), his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their son Danny (Danny Lloyd) give us a convincing glimpse into three characters with questionable grasps on reality. The narrative question that the viewer confronts with the Torrances is “are any of these three reliably sane?” At what point are we losing a grasp with reality? Is this person already descended into madness (mental health is a clear narrative device)?

The truth is that these questions elevate to the storytelling itself. Is the narrative itself reliable?  From the beginning scene where Jack Torrance is interviewing to be the caretaker for a snowbound hotel, Torrance is told that a former caretaker murdered his family and committed suicide. Something is clearly off, even then, when Jack brushes this off with the note that his wife enjoys ghost stories and horror films. Nothing in the Wendy’s character confirms this is true, though the frame of the story as a possible ghost story (it isn’t) and a definite horror film is set right from the start.

One might wonder where the notion of “shining” or “the shining” even comes into the storytelling of The Shining. That notion comes in with the character of Danny, who has the gift of “shining,” which is the psychic gift seeing things from the past and future while also reading minds. In this image here, you get an echo of the opening tale shared with Jack Torrance regarding the murders of the previous family, as we remember from that beginning tale that the first murderous caretaker took the lives of his two daughters.

That the notion of reliable characters is part of that scene comes up when Wendy Torrance doesn’t know to believe the “shining” of Danny, because it is completely reasonable to suspect that the Tony that Danny speaks of might simply be an imaginary friend. The growing drama that leads us to understand the meaning of Danny’s singing “redrum” is part of the genius of the larger tale of The Shining.

The content and tension of this movie, The Shining, is one that I recommend wholeheartedly to those with the temperament to enjoy. Psychological horror stories, as the Wikipedia page for the book tells us is true for the novel, are not for everyone. As such, Lynn of Matt Lynn Digital would neither watch nor enjoy this 18th ranked film on the Matt Lynn Digital blog. On the other hand, I do recommend that you watch.

Matt – Saturday, January 21, 2017

The Undoing Project proves imminently readable…for adults

Set outside of any real sense of constant place, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis is a nonfiction telling of how Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman went about identifying previously unrecognized patterns of systematic human irrationality. In the conventional style, Lewis imbues his telling of the revelation of that style with the real character and drama that you might expect in a highly strung, highly private, highly steeped in Israeli cultural reference that you might expect In the platonic though marriage-like relationship that these two men had.

Lewis is compelling in sharing the rules of thumb, or “heuristics,” that the human mind inserts into decision-making when confronting uncertainty. Expect to see things like “representativeness,” “anchoring,” “availability,” “halo effect,” and so forth as central themes to the somewhat heavy subject matter. In addition to words like heuristic, words like Gestalt theory or utilitarianism might scare some readers away. While the terms come up, they are not central points in an attempt to give you an academic textbook on psychology, philosophy, or medicine for that matter.

I found The Undoing Project accessible and readable. The close collaboration and ability to work together for Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, a pronounced extrovert paired with a pronounced introvert, is an understandably unique characteristic of this book. To have that pairing work with little outside understanding for the dynamics for what made the relationship work, is part of the clarity that Lewis brought out well in this book. I say that Lewis brought clarity in explaining the relationship; I’ll say that calling their relationship love might be wrong. I’ll at least say that if love is the right term, it is something in a professional, friendship-driven, almost brotherly “sharing of minds and vulnerability” kind of way.

The book gives shorter shrift to the actual subject matter of “The Undoing Project,” which I think worked for the narrative in that “undoing” failed to bear fruit for Tversky and Kahneman, though the men’s relationship came undone. It was also Tversky‘s undoing that paved the way for Kahneman to come out from Tversky‘s shadow.

I disagreed with the editorial decision to bring a discussion of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game into The Undoing Project, as the content and context for using that wasn’t relevant to any of the Tversky and Kahnerman story. Disposing of the sports subject matter altogether in The Undoing Project probably would have made sense.

Given all this as preface, my rating for The Undoing Project is 3.5-stars out of five. In my opinion, many high school kids would have trouble reading along with this book.

Matt – Friday, January 6, 2017