The Deep Contradictions of Our Era Become Personal in Scorsese's "Killers of the Harvest Moon"

If you ever intend to see the movie Killers of the Harvest Moon, you may not want to read these musings. If you've already spent three and a half hours letting it wash over you, then you may, like me, be wondering how there could be love in a marriage in which the husband contracts the killing of others while slowly debilitating his diabetic wife with tainted insulin. In a movie that is part Godfather, part Gaslight, the purpose of all the killing is to get rich during the oil boom in Oklahoma in the 1920s. 

Who knew that the Osage Indians were among the wealthiest people in the world at the time, having been forced onto the most barren land the government could find, only to discover that there was oil in them there hills? While oil companies extracted oil from the reservation to fuel the automobiles of the Roaring Twenties, others were working to extract the oil money that by rights went to the Osage. Since oil rights could not be sold, only inherited, the strategy was to intermarry with Osage women, then hasten them to an early death with the help of slow poison, guns, or even dynamite. Outstanding Osage men, who presumably would have competed with whites for the Osage women, died mysteriously at an early age. 

Just an hour away, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, prosperous blacks were also under attack, most dramatically in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. 

The improbable hero of the story is J. Edgar Hoover, who, as head of the newly formed Bureau of Investigation, and at the behest of the Osage, dispatches investigators to break the case and dispense some small measure of justice. 

Somewhat reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman, who played the white man through whom we witnessed the Lakota Sioux in 1970's Little Big Man, Leonardo DiCaprio is the white man through whom we witness the Osage. Director Martin Scorsese presents us with complex characters, where even the contract killers are invested with ambivalence towards their work. But the central character, Earnest, doesn't add up. A love story between a man and the woman he is knowingly poisoning is not a love story. 

I found myself squirming at the movie's seeming disconnects, and yet that depiction of lethal love resonates with our present day relationship with nature. We sing nature's praises even as we knowingly poison it slowly with an overdose of carbon dioxide from our machines. In a weird way, DiCaprio's baffling character captures the essence of our era. His relationship with his fullblood Osage wife Mollie is the personal, domestic equivalent of our collective relationship with the planet we call home. 

One can even see a deep contradiction in Scorsese's relationship to the movie itself. How could he invest so much care in rendering a story, only to insure its early exit from the theaters by making it three and a half hours long? 

Lazy Eggs

January 27, 2023

Today is as good a day as any to extoll the culinary virtues of lazy eggs. There can be days when nothing comes to mind to cook for dinner. Then I miraculously remember lazy eggs, and head straight off to the Whole Earth Center to buy beets with the greens still on. Cut the leaves off with their stems, rinse well, dice up the stems, dice up some onion, and get them sauteing together. The beet stems turn the onions a really nice color. Meanwhile dice up the greens, and add them when the onions and stems are soft. Add some salt, pepper, and a bit of nutmeg. After the stirred-in greens have been in there a few minutes, break four or so eggs over top to nestle here and there on the greens. Cover and turn heat to low. When the yolks are half-hardened, it's time to chow down. With only three ingredients, lazy eggs taste way better than they have any right to. And you still have the beets to turn into raw beet salad. It's laziness made delicious.

Artesian Wells

June 6, 2023
I liked the concept of an artesian well, back when I first encountered it during an environmental field trip in Georgia and Florida I took while at Antioch College, and this morning it occurred to me why. An artesian well is a gift to the above ground world that arises out of a long underground journey, and the same could be said of my life--a giving that comes after a long underground journey--and in fact any giving that comes from the workings of the unconscious, where things slowly develop unseen before finally emerging. 

The Boy and the Truck

My third grade teacher, who was also my first and second grade teacher, told a story about a truck that was a little too big and had gotten caught beneath a bridge, squeezed between the bridge and the pavement. No one could figure out how to free the truck until a boy came along, looked at the situation and said, "Why don't you just let some air out of the tires?" That story has always stuck with me.

Wise Children's Wuthering Heights at McCarter Theater through March 12

There's an extraordinary feast for the eyes and ears, heart and soul happening at McCarter Theater this week. Wise Children's Wuthering Heights would be worth seeing for any one of many facets of the production--the acting, the music, the costumes, the staging--or just the thrill of witnessing such a concentration of creativity and inventiveness. 

We went unschooled, unprepped, unread. Was it "Wuthering" or "Withering"?--such was the level of our conversation as we walked down the aisle to our seats. For the more schooled impressions gratefully sent by a friend, scroll down. But for me, it was endearing and enchanting on many levels. For one, chairs. I really like chairs. We run something akin to a chair orphanage out at Herrontown Woods. It's a place where abandoned chairs can have a second chance. 

And what more glorious second life for a chair than to become a prop in a play? Chairs are used every which way in Wuthering Heights. Part utility, part fantasy, stacked right side up, upside down and sideways, they acquire all sorts of shapes and meanings. 

There is a breaking down of borders. Actors seamlessly shift from character to stagehand, carrying off props or helping to rotate the doorway to magically shift the scene from outdoors to indoors, or carrying a sign that thoughtfully reminds the audience which character just died. When not part of the action, the actors become spectators, sitting in chairs that line the left and right of the stage. The doctor, who grows comically resigned to the tendency of characters to die--would occasionally sit on the sidelines and play cello along with the band. Puppets participate as if alive. Even characters who have died can sustain their power and presence among the living. After Isabella Linton dies in childbirth, the actress returns as a hilarious version of her son, Little Linton. 

Endearing for me as a nature lover is the casting of the land itself as a character. The equivalent of a Greek chorus calls itself The Moors. The land itself looks on, comments on the abundance of human folly, sings deeply soulful melodies. The wind, too, is a character, grabbing comically at clothes, sending hair flying upward. Dark clouds cast a spell from the back screen. Wuthering, I just learned, means windy.

Comedy frequently breaks through the cracks, all the more powerful and welcome, given the tragic arcs, short and long, that nearly all the characters are trapped in. Though based on a novel written in the 1800s, the play felt to me like everyday life in the 21st century, with humanity still caught in spirals of revenge, unable to stop abusing nature--human and otherwise. Might a generation ever come along to break the cycle of self-destruction? We wait, both participants and witnesses, like the actors on stage.

 

The playbill, which I have misplaced, offers evidence that Heathcliff is of mixed race, and he is cast that way. Come to think of it, Heathcliff is a found child, like those chairs that form stage props or end up out at Herrontown Woods. 

I saw and heard echoes from previously witnessed plays. Fiasco Theater's production of Sondheim's Into the Woods had a similar creative informality, with actors shifting out of their characters to become witnesses or musicians. The "I am the Moors" of Wuthering Heights recalled the chanted "We are the Wolves" in last year's play, The Wolves. 

Wuthering Heights was conceived and developed by Emma Rice and her Wise Children theater company, adapted from the Bronte novel that a couple Victorian english professors recently called the best novel ever written in english, and which, alas, I almost surely haven't read. It doesn't hurt that Wise Children is based in Bristol, and the story takes place in Yorkshire--two of my favorite places in England.

Here, as promised, are thoughts of a more literary bent from my friend Carolyn Jones--a genuine english major!

It's fun to relive the highlights of the play. Here's what stood out to me:

1. The economy and imagination of the set, as well as the fleetness of the stage crew. The scene changes flowed so naturally and, alongside the Moors' music, meant those crazy story-parts blended together in a way the book never did for me.

2. The costumes were a visual feast, especially the Moors, and most especially the Head of the Moors. In my mind, he played the role of a modern griot and his costume made me think of west African storytellers/seers. I also loved the ragged knit sweaters the families wore in Part 1, because of course they were rough Yorkshire people. The comic costumes were also a delight. Brava to their costume designer.

3. I appreciated the surfacing of Heathcliff's backstory and how this might have influenced his character development. It gave the story new relevance for modern audiences, and made the Moors' griot-like appearance more meaningful. It also made me think of undeveloped slave narratives in other Bronte stories. Have you read Wide Sargasso Sea? Of course neither Bronte sister specifically loaded their stories with colonial backstories, but they sensed dark edges and they left enough in their works for us to explore. It made me think how porous good stories are, and how exciting it is to see these new artistic interpretations. 

4. Nature was its own character and those moody clouds on the back screen did a lot of the muscle work of conveying 'atmosphere'. Interestingly, I didn't get a gothic vibe from this play even though the book itself is loaded with spookiness. I wondered if the director had deliberately diluted 'nature' into something more appealing, or whether us modern audiences are just less creeped out by dark weather. I also loved the bird/book motif, especially when she used it to convey death, as well as hope. As an english literature major, I appreciated the symbolism she loaded into those books!

I could go on and on (the pacing! the comedy! the dark energy! the knowing way they played with the confusing plot!) 

Shows continue through March 12.  

Other reviews:

NYTimes

TownTopics

TapIntoPrinceton

A Review of The Wolves: Exploring the Tension Between Our Individual and Collective Selves

When I heard that a play about a girl's elite highschool soccer team would soon begin a run at McCarter Theater in Princeton, I immediately understood why it was called "The Wolves." Years back, writing an environmentalist's take on the World Cup final in 2014, Cheering for the World, I realized that soccer, perhaps more than any other sport, is like a collective hunt. Unlike baseball, basketball, and football, where coaches constantly interject and manipulate like helicopter parents, a soccer coach is stranded far off on the sidelines with few options, shouting commands into the wind. The team must then largely fend for itself on the field, like a wolfpack, reacting spontaneously to myriad variables as it collectively stalks its prey. As in a hunt, scores are few. There are countless small steps that may or may not lead up to a moment of opportunity, when the killer instinct must kick in and the ball be struck just right. 

Soccer in some ways turns the world upside down. In most of life, feet play pedestrian roles, in both meanings of the word, bearing our weight or sitting idle while the hands show off their facility. But in soccer the hands become secondary while the feet dance and manipulate and propel the ball with grace and power. The spectator's dilemma is also counterintuitive. In a game where a full 90 minutes may pass without a single score, you'd think the spectator could be casual about watching. Instead, the paucity of goals means that attention must be maintained throughout, lest one miss the quick series of passes leading to the one moment that changes everything.

Though organizations overseeing soccer can become corrupt, the game itself remains in some ways inviolate. For 45 minutes each half, neither advertisers nor coaches can stop the time to impose their agenda. Nor does time itself wield an iron tyranny. Several minutes of "stoppage time" tend to be added to each half, and the referee customarily allows any last-minute attack to play itself out before blowing the final whistle. There is, then, something about the game that remains untamable, wild, like the "fierce green fire" in a wolf's eyes.

The liner notes and reviews of "The Wolves" make no mention of the wolfpack analogy, but it's both comic and real how the coach in the play remains a figure off in the distance, referred to but never quite making it onto the stage. The all-women cast and dialogue make the play an intense introduction to teenage girlworld, with flurries of overlapping conversations that the playwright conceived as voices in a symphony. The ear cannot possibly capture all the dialogue, much like the eye cannot note the movement of all the players on a soccer field. I found myself imagining what theater might have become if it had developed in a female-dominated world, and this play does break some long-standing rules. 

For instance, though the characters have clearly wrought personalities, their identities are known not through their names but by the numbers on their jerseys. This, too, is reality-based for me. As an occasional spectator at Princeton University women's soccer games, I become familiar with the players through their numbers and their personalities on the field, not their names. 

Written by Sarah DeLappe, whose passions growing up were soccer and theater, there's the feeling that soccer influenced her view of theater, and vice versa. The theater improv classes I've attended begin much as the play does, with participants in a circle, doing some preliminary stretches. The soccer ball is kicked from one to another, like spontaneously conceived dialogue in theater improv, where you must build on, rather than contradict, what your partner has said. A pass in soccer is like a bit of dialogue which the receiver has no choice but to accept as is, then quickly formulate a new pass to send flying, all working to create forward movement towards a shared goal. In theater improv, this collaborative approach is called the "Yes, and ...", in which you build on your scene partner's ideas rather than contradicting them. When you think of how much of our identity can be wrapped up in finding flaw and expressing a contrary opinion, you begin to see how revolutionary and transformative a simple concept like "Yes, and ..." can be. 

And what is the goal of this unconventional play? McCarter Theater's promo describes The Wolves as a "drama about nine young women on a competitive high school soccer team navigating high pressure games and a complicated world." Though there is one scene with only the goalie on stage, and a duet between two players in which one is puzzled by the curiosity the other shows in the identity of a bird that has somehow found its way into the dome where their games are held, most scenes have all or nearly all of the characters together onstage. 

For me, The Wolves delves into the tension between the group and the individual. We are all individuals with our own needs and freedoms who are also members of collectives, be they a family, a team, a musical group, a nonprofit, or some other organized enterprise where members all work together towards some shared goal. We are also citizens of a nation, and members even more broadly of the human species, participating in small but measurable ways to determine collective destiny. The characters in The Wolves are bonded by jersey and mission as a team, and yet a mix of personalities and circumstance strain the bonds to the breaking point, threatening the shared goal. 

There is one scene that, when I later described it to a friend, surprisingly brought an upwelling of emotion that left me nearly unable to speak. It's towards the end of the play, when all seems to have fallen apart. The future of the team hangs in the balance. Will they play the big game, or will animosities and petty resentments, insecurity and fear send them spinning off into disconnected lives? Not knowing what else to do, the captain invites the players who have straggled in to huddle for the team chant, which begins at first soft and hesitant but grows in power with each repetition. "We are the Wolves. We are the Wolves. We are the Wolves! We are the Wolves!! We are the Wolves!!! WE ARE THE WOLVES!!!!" 

That scene is the most dramatic transformation from individual disarray into powerful collective unity that I have ever seen. The run of The Wolves at McCarter ended two months ago, so why has that scene only gained in power within me since first witnessing it on the stage? The play, along with a number of other experiences recently, has led me to more clearly understand that each of us has two identities. These two selves, the individual and collective, can either be allied or in conflict. 

Perhaps more than most, I thrive on collective enterprise. It began early in life, playing on sports teams or in the symphony band. On twice-yearly journeys north, my family would join others to set up a girlscout camp each spring and stow it away each fall. Even working with others in the family on some small task, like stacking firewood for the winter, is enormously satisfying. 

And yet there is one theater of endeavor, surely the most important of all, where my individual and collective selves are in direct conflict. As an individual, I use fossil fuels for almost everything--cooking, transport, domestic comfort. In so many ways, combustion literally powers my life, and yet I know that by meeting my individual needs, the machines I use are adding carbon to the atmosphere. My contribution to chemically altering the planet is a pittance, and yet the power of collective action, of all those pittances piled one upon the other, is enormous. No matter how intentionally good I am in my life as an individual, I am unintentionally doing harm to nature and to the future of humanity nearly every minute of every day. 

In years past, trying to do my part, I responded to that deep division between my individual and collective selves by reducing dependency on fossil fuel-burning machines. I tweaked the thermostat lower in winter, wore warmer clothes to better utilize my own body heat. I rode a bike, limited travel. I used my inner resourcefulness to reduce dependence on resources dug up from underground.

The assumption was that the rest of the world would follow suit. That was the dream I expressed in Cheering for the World, inspired by the World Cup eight years ago. But of course, the world has not followed suit, and so we are largely trapped in a form of collective self-sabotage. We care for our children even as we contribute unintentionally to unraveling the world they will inherit. Our individual selves are empowered while our collective selves feel helplessly chained to a tragic trajectory. 

For those of us who acknowledge the collective self and respect its power for good or harm, there forms within a deep pit of grief for what we are collectively doing to our one and only oasis in space, and the implications for human destiny. And embedded in that grief is a longing for a world in which our individual and collective selves could be aligned rather than at war. 

For me, in me, The Wolves exposed that deep longing. 

Suddenly Getting Noticed

Last year, 2021, was the year when people suddenly started writing nice things about me. I had been working quietly in Princeton, doing what would widely be considered good things--working to restore a public nature preserve and house, blogging about nature, and writing and performing jazz and climate theater--but it hadn't garnered much attention in the news media. Since attention wasn't the point, I didn't think much of it. I assumed that people weren't writing about me because I was already writing so much on my own, on myriad blogs. 

Then, out of the blue, some editors of a new publication, Princeton Living Magazine, contacted me, wanting to have me on the cover of their first issue. Well, that was nice. They wrote up a whole profile entitled "The Hiltner Family: On a Mission to Beautify Princeton," and had me posing with my younger daughter and our dog, Leo. 

Then Pam Hersh, the indefatigable Princetonian columnist, interviewed me for a column for the online TAPintoPrinceton entitled "Steve Hiltner, a Natural Wonder on the Princeton Landscape." Well, that was nice, too. A month after that, a writer named Patricia Taylor contacted me about writing a piece for ECHO about our nonprofit's rehabilitation of Herrontown Woods. She called it "History and helpful hands in Herrontown Woods." Being a Hiltner, I felt very at home among all the H's in the title, what with "history" and "helpful" and "Herrontown", and all the while living on Harrison Street just up from Hamilton and Hawthorn, and Horner. 

For many years, advocating for nature and sustainability, I had come to the conclusion that my mind works differently from other people's. Conclusions that were obvious to me, about our place in the world and what we must do to save it, didn't seem to be registering with many others. It occurred to me that I was sharing conclusions, but not the underlying forces and principals that led to them. If I could convey to people something more about what drives my thoughts, about process, that might put them on the road to seeing how our individual lives add up to a giant collective impact on the world, and thereby feeling the motivations I feel to collaborate with nature rather than abuse it. 

That's the grander motivation for writing this blog.