![]() ![]() Everyone's dress reflects his or her personality but not in any obvious way. Anyway there's a little touch of Ionesco in here too, in addition to Kafka. ![]() Bureaucracy, as a social problem and as a literary subject, was in the air. Henry Ford adopted Jackson's "assembly line" methods and - well, you get the picture. It was the period in which small craftsmen were being replaced by the kind of gigantic corporations that "alienated" the worker. The fact is that after Melville and before Kafka there was an enormous interest in bureaucratization, the "rationality" of labor as Max Weber referred to it. Melville is often cited as a forbear of Kafka but I don't know how well deserved that description is. But I was surprised because it turned out to be very well done. It has less action than Hemingway so I was prepared to switch channels on impulse. I wasn't expecting much from this movie either. You want to see an example, watch Hollywood's version of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" sometime, especially the scene in which Gregory Peck receives a message - that famous floating pregnant italicized first paragraph of Hemingway's - and reads it aloud between guffaws in a smokey saloon midway through the film. Ordinarily when the industry tries to turn a short story like Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" (which I haven't read since high school) into a "major motion picture," you can forget about it. ![]()
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