Shouts from a Third Act

Dr. Gachet, in a scene from Loving Vincent

Loving Vincent is a gorgeous feature film about the final weeks of van Gogh’s life. If you haven’t seen it, I promise it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Although animated feature films are nothing new, studios like Pixar and Disney have never worked their magic by commissioning 65,000 oil paintings (in this case, ones that mimic VvG’s work) and turning them into scenes. And, just to be clear, this movie was made for grownups.

Vincent died penniless, a suicide at thirty-seven. Only one of his 860 paintings was sold during his lifetime. And yet he was on the cusp of recognition. A genius, according to some fellow artists (like Monet, who also attempted suicide but lived to know success.) What if the gunshot wound that killed Vincent wasn’t self-inflicted? That’s the question the filmmakers use to fuel the plot:

It’s a year after Vincent’s death. His friend, drinking buddy and frequent painting subject–the postmaster of Arles, France–worries about a letter returned as undeliverable, the last one Vincent wrote to his brother Theo. What’s more, six weeks before his suicide, Vincent wrote to the postmaster telling him he felt “absolutely calm and in a normal state.” This, after suffering a mental breakdown and checking himself into an asylum. Find Theo, the postmaster tells his son Armand, a fairly useless hot-tempered fellow. In Paris, Armand learns Theo died six months after his brother. And so begins Armand’s journey to the last stop on Vincent’s: the town of Auvers, where Vincent painted some of his greatest works (including Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which sold at auction in 1990 for a record-breaking $82.5 million.)

The film is stunning, wondrous, a work of art. While the story-telling isn’t quite as amazing as the artistry that went into creating the scenes, don’t let that stop you from seeing it. (My opinion: the story lags in the middle, but picks up steam at the end.) If you enjoy paintings, it’s like a trip to your favorite museum to see a special exhibit on van Gogh. Except it’s more alive, a more immersive experience. In the hand-painted opening credits, paint swirls onto the screen. It starts to look oh-so-familiar. Ohmygosh, it’s van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night (you’ll recognize it when you see it). The painting isn’t static–it ripples with life. A man appears and walks into the café. The story begins and we’re off–seeing the world through van Gogh’s eyes.

As Armand makes his way to Auvers, just outside Paris, he hears conflicting stories from people who knew or talked to Vincent. Flashback scenes are cleverly shot in black & white to avoid confusion, and they reveal information about the artist’s state-of-mind and early life. For me, one of the most heart-wrenching discoveries was learning Vincent had been given the same name as his older brother, who was stillborn a year earlier. Whenever Vincent visited the grave with his mother, he saw his own name on the headstone. The other surprise was learning how prolific Vincent was and how fast he painted, particularly since he was in his late 20s by the time he decided to become an artist. During the year he spent in the asylum (after the slicing-off-his-ear incident), he produced 142 paintings, including The Starry Night. From there he went to Auvers, where he was looked after by Dr. Gachet. He rented a room and created 68 paintings in the 70 days before the gunshot wound took his life.

The actors in the film are more than just voices. They were chosen for their resemblance to real people van Gogh painted, real people turned into characters in the story. A couple of notable names: Saoirse Ronan, a Best Actress nominee for the 2015 film Brooklyn, and Jerome Flynn, who plays Bronn in Game of Thrones. The actors filmed all the scenes. Afterwards, every frame was projected onto a canvas and the artists went to work–125 of them. They painted over the scenes, not precisely, but in the style of van Gogh. What’s so fascinating is that about 1,000 canvases were re-painted an average of 76 times, as each frame was altered bit by bit until the last frame of the shot. The black & white paintings (or scenes) are different in that they were not based on van Gogh’s iconic paintings. They’re used as backstory or to show other characters remembering incidents involving van Gogh.

Who are the filmmakers? A husband and wife team who wrote and directed. Hugh Welchman is a British animator. Dorota Kobiela is Polish, and she trained as a painter before switching to film. Loving Vincent is clearly a labor of love, many years in the making. The work began in 2008. Dorota was looking to combine her love of painting with film. She’d read van Gogh’s letters and been moved by them. Convinced that his own paintings were the best way to tell a story about him, she envisioned painting a very short film. Then she met the man who would become her husband, and the idea expanded into a feature-length film that’s now being released in 130 countries.

Vincent died in 1890. Eleven years later, in 1901, seventy-one of his paintings were exhibited in Paris. Today van Gogh is one of the most famous painters in the world. His paintings hang in the finest museums. In Amsterdam, The Van Gogh Museum gets 1.6 million visitors a year. While he’s considered a post-impressionist, some call him the father of modern art. And yet, a week before he died, he wrote to Theo, his brother and best friend, the man who sent him money so he could keep painting:

“Who am I in the eyes of most people? A nobody, a non-entity, an unpleasant person. Someone who has not, and never will have, any position in society, in short the lowest of the low. Well then, even if that was all absolutely true, one day I would like to show by my work, what this non-entity has in his heart.”

It’s heart-breaking, and yet the world is a more beautiful place because Vincent van Gogh followed his heart. As did the filmmakers.

A rising star in the courtroom. A jury of no peers. A seemingly unwinnable case. If done right, the film should be compelling to watch–and it is!–but the fact that we know the rising young star is a young Thurgood Marshall gives the film extra sizzle.

Twenty-six years before Thurgood Marshall made history by becoming the first African-American Supreme Court Justice; thirteen years before he famously argued in Brown v. the Board of Education that separate schools were not equal, a charismatic young Thurgood went to Greenwich, CT, to defend a black chauffeur accused of the rape and attempted murder of his employer. The year was 1940. Thurgood was 32, married and living in Harlem, but most of his time was spent travelling the country for the underfunded and understaffed NAACP.

The odds were stacked against attorney Marshall and his less-than-credible client. It was mostly a she said, he said case, and she was Eleanor Strubing: 33, beautiful, a socialite from a  prominent Philadelphia family, married to an old money advertising executive who was away on business during the night in question. He was Joseph Spell: 31, raised in Louisiana, dishonorably discharged from the army for drunkenness and stealing, estranged from a wife he never divorced. And yet, the NAACP’s very publicly-stated policy was to represent clients like Spell only if they believed them innocent. Thurgood believed in Spell’s innocence, even though his co-counsel, white local attorney Samuel Friedman, initially did not. Part of the joy of the film is watching the prickly pairing of Marshall and Friedman and watching it evolve–especially since the judge hearing the case won’t allow Marshall to speak or question witnesses during the trial.

Was the sex between Joseph and Eleanor consensual? If it was, why would a woman like Eleanor make it news before anyone learned about it–assuming they ever would. During the course of Marshall’s storied career, Connecticut v. Joseph Spell is like a footnote in a brilliant manuscript. But in 1940-41, it was a big deal for the NAACP. You can imagine the lurid headlines: Beautiful Socialite Raped Multiple Times by Black Chauffeur, Thrown off bridge into reservoir & left for dead. Newspapers up and down the east coast had readers riveted and scared. Wealthy northerners started firing their domestic black help. And since most work for blacks was domestic–even in the north–this was a serious problem. The head of the NAACP chapter in Bridgeport, CT–where the trial took place–was a Fordham University grad but worked as a chauffeur.

Any footnote in the life of a great man or woman begs for further reading. Here are a few things I found out:

*Thurgood is a striking name, but not half as striking as the one his parents gave him: Thoroughgood. By the 2nd grade and fed up with writing such a long name, the boy shortened it.

*As a child, Marshall described himself as a “hell raiser.” If he misbehaved or was too argumentative at his all-black high school, his teacher would send him (and others) down to the basement to memorize parts of the U.S. Constitution. “I made my way through every paragraph,” he said.

*Thurgood graduated from an historically black college but wanted to attend law school at the University of Maryland. They wouldn’t let him because he was black. Two years after graduating from Howard University Law School, he helped try the case of another black student (and Amherst grad) denied admission to Maryland’s law school, and won. Today the Law Library there is named after Thurgood Marshall.

*President Lyndon B. Johnson picked Marshall for the Supreme Court in 1967 and the Justice served until 1991, stepping down two years before his death at 84. At that time, Marshall’s widow Cissy told The Washington Post that Justice Hugo Black was the one who swore in her husband, which was ironic because Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan when he was young. “Then when he got into the court, he turned out to be one of the most liberal justices.”

*The NAACP was founded in 1909, partly in response to the continuing horrific practice of lynching and to a race riot in Springfield, IL–the place where President Abraham Lincoln is buried. A group of white men and women issued a call for a meeting to discuss racial justice.  About 60 people showed up–only seven were African-American.

Michael Koskoff, 74, is the man who co-wrote the Marshall screenplay (with his son). The New York Post ran an article on him earlier this month. A litigator from Bridgeport (where the Spell trial took place), Koskoff had started researching the little-known case at the suggestion of a friend. He gave the idea to his children, who are both screenwriters. They told him he was the lawyer and a good storyteller to boot, why didn’t he write it? In the NY Post article, Koskoff says, “Most people who have an image of Thurgood Marshall have an image of a jowly, heavy, maybe avuncular [person]–and that was how he appeared later in life. But when he was young, he was this guy–he was a kick-ass, party-loving, courageous and brilliant lawyer.” Koskoff also said that Marshall’s family was very happy with the portrayal. His widow Cissy said, “That man who played Thurgood. He’s a good actor and a very handsome man. But not nearly as handsome as Thurgood was.” I agree that Chadwick Boseman, as young Thurgood, nailed the part.

Emma Stone and Steve Carell in Battle of the Sexes

Tennis is a sport dear to my heart. The thrill of winning a hard-fought point. The laugh-out-loud moments when the ball–despite a player’s miss-hit or pathetic return shot–somehow crosses the net to win the point. For me, however, the agony of defeat is reserved for my tennis heroes, the pros who are talented enough to make it into the four Grand Slam tournaments held in Australia, France, England and the United States. Forty-four years ago tennis wasn’t my sport and Billie Jean King wasn’t my hero, if only because I wasn’t watching the televised Exhibition match between Billie Jean and her would-be nemesis, Bobby Riggs. The two battled in front of 30,000+ spectators in a packed Houston Astrodome. Another 90 million people around the globe tuned in. The prize money was $100,000, winner-take-all. How in the world did I miss it? Last Saturday I finally got my chance to experience the unforgettable.

The film is funny, poignant, eye-roll inducing, exciting and triumphant, a great combo when dealing with two serious subjects played out against a big-but-silly publicity stunt. Except, that stunt turned out to be a game-changer–for women’s tennis, for other women athletes, and for women’s self-esteem in general. The serious subjects? Not that you don’t know already, but I’ll say them anyway: Equal Pay and a Secret/Taboo Lesbian Relationship.

Let’s look at the combatants:

Billie Jean King: In 1973, she’s 29 and 5’5″ tall, a California native raised in an athletic family. A softball wiz as a kid, she was encouraged by her folks to try a more “ladylike” sport. At age 11, she tried tennis. While attending Cal State University, she competed in tournaments but dropped out in 1964 to pursue her tennis career. Billie Jean won her first singles championship in 1966, at Wimbledon, and her first U.S. Open the following year. By 1968 she was ranked #1 and turned pro. (This was the beginning of the “Open Era” when pros were finally allowed to compete for prize money in tournaments previously open to only amateurs.) By the time she is carried–Cleopatra-like–into the Astrodome, college sweetheart Larry King has been her husband for eight years. But she has a big secret: she’s torn between an irresistible attraction to another woman and loyalty to the smart, supportive guy she married–although he’s caught on to the affair. That won’t be made public until 1981, in part because it might damage the fledgling women’s tour.

Bobby Riggs: In 1973, he’s 55 and 5’7″ tall, a California native who’s been married twice, most recently to a woman whose wealthy father funded their posh lifestyle. Once-upon-a-time Bobby was the #1 men’s player in the world, but we’re talking long ago–right before & after WWII. These days he plays some Senior tournaments, but his favorite sport in middle age is gambling–on just about anything. He’s a shameless self-promoter who discovers trash-talking about female players seems to draw a crowd. (Remember, this was the era of Archie Bunker and the hit sitcom All in the Family. Archie calls his wife Edith “dingbat.” He’s upset his daughter Gloria is a feminist, because he’s a bigot longing for the good old days–and yet, buried inside him is a heart.)

Emma Stone and Steve Carell as Billie Jean and Bobby are equally fabulous. Wonder of wonders, they even look like the real people. Billie Jean said as much about Emma to Sports Illustrated. “It was amazing. Her mannerisms, her voice. If I close my eyes, I would have thought it was me.”

The film plays loose with a few facts, mainly the sequence of certain events leading up to the King-Riggs Battle. It doesn’t matter. The essence is there, a thought echoed by Billie Jean King after seeing the film.

If there’s a bad guy in the film it’s Jack Kramer, not so much Bobby Riggs. Kramer is a former #1 player who runs the pro-tour for both men and women, but he pays the guys a lot more. When Billie Jean finds out the purse is eight time more for the men ($12,000 vs. $1,500) at an upcoming tournament in L.A., she points out that the U.S. Open final, which she just won, sold as many tickets as the Men’s final. Jack Kramer doesn’t care. Most of the men have families to support, he says. Actually, I’m the main bread winner in my family, she says to deaf ears. He also tells her women are biologically inferior. It’s Kramer who comes across as the bigger male chauvinist. Bobby says plenty of offensive things about women, but he doesn’t come across as mean-spirited, just a man trying to drum up interest in his tennis match. (In any case,  comments by both men made my eyes roll.) In response to Jack Kramer, Billie Jean and eight other top players quit to start their own tour, sponsored by–da da–a cigarette company. Some of the humor and funny one-liners result from that ‘unhealthy’ pairing. And from Gladys Heldman, a great character in her own right played by Sarah Silverman. She’s the founder of the World Tennis Magazine and one of the organizer’s of the new Virginia Slim Tour. She’s also a witty, tough-talking New Yorker with a passion for women’s tennis.

Billie Jean never wanted to play against Bobby. When she said no, he turned to Australian great Margaret Court, ranked #1 at the start of 1973. Margaret, a new mother, lost in two straight sets, and it was dubbed “The Mother’s Day Massacre.” The next time Bobby asked Billie Jean, she felt compelled to say yes, later explaining,” I thought it would set us back 50 years if I didn’t win that match. It would ruin the women’s tour and affect all women’s self-esteem.”

The Virginia Slims Tour was a popular success. Within a few years it evolved into today’s Women’s Tennis Association, and the men took them back into the fold. In 1973, Billie Jean threatened to boycott the U.S. Open if they didn’t offer women equal prize money. They agreed. The other majors followed suit, eventually. Wimbledon was a hold out until 2007 and finally buckled after Serena Williams led the charge. Last month at the U.S. Open, held at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in NY, American champion Sloane Stephens won $3.7 million, the same as Rafael Nadal. It sure looks like treating the women fairly and growing their half of the sport benefitted the men as well. Although, even today, not every tournament on the tour pays women equal prize money.

The film isn’t all tennis. There’s a “falling in love” story at its core. I found it believable and poignant. In the end, the relationship didn’t work out but the film ends long before that happens. Billie Jean later became the first prominent female athlete to announce she was gay. She and her husband divorced a few years later. He remarried and had kids; she found love with a new partner.

This is what Emma Stone said she learned from ‘becoming’ Billie Jean King:

“You can be doing things you shouldn’t be doing, being so worried, losing when you think you should be winning, all these different things. You can still effect change in the world. You don’t have to be perfect to be great.” Emma Stone in a sit-down interview with Billie Jean King and Sports Illustrated, September 2017.

The cake at Interabang’s Launch Party, 9/11/17

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any book lover in possession of a place to call home must be in want of a good bookstore.

If you love Jane Austen, you’ll know that I borrowed–and reimagined–her immortal opening line from Pride and Prejudice, my personal favorite of her six much-revered novels. It was in July that I first walked through the doors of Interabang and was immediately smitten (unlike Elizabeth Bennet, when she first encountered Mr. Darcy in P&P.) For starters, this year marks the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, and small stacks of her six novels were enjoying the spotlight on one of the store’s large front tables. Paperbacks, but not just any paperbacks. Lovely Janes, each cover similar but a little different, like six sisters blessed by a great gene pool. I wanted to snap up one of each to replace my aging dog-eared copies at home, but forced myself to shop for other books instead. It wasn’t difficult. The store seems a perfect size–not too big, this one’s just right, as Goldilocks said in that book about her run-in with the three bears. The friendly staff knows their books and is happy to make recommendations, or they’ll graciously let you explore the wonders of the place on your own.

Interabang had its official opening a week ago Monday, and there was a launch party that evening. Everyone was welcome, and I was one of 300+ people who stopped by. The place was packed; the vibe was great: live music, waiters wandering the crowd to offer wine, beer and nice hors d’oeuvres. The main draw, however, was Ann Patchett, another novelist beloved by many readers around the world. She’d come to Dallas–not to promote her own novels–but to cheer us on and applaud our support for a grassroots movement to bring back the Independent Bookstore. The cause is close to her heart. She lives in Nashville, TN, and by early 2011, the downtown area’s last two bookstores–a Borders and an Independent purchased by a chain a few years earlier–had closed their doors. Even though both were profitable. Bookstore lovers there were sad, but nobody came forward until Ann decided to put up the money and partner with a woman who worked as a sales rep for Random House. Together they realized a dream and opened Parnassus Books in late 2011. And it was that achievement–that debut–that landed Ann on the front page of The New York Times. That’s remarkable. Ann has been book-famous ever since her breakthrough, award-winning fourth novel Bel Canto became a Best Seller, but the release of a new book isn’t page A1 News. It took opening an indie bookstore to get her that free publicity.

The day before the Launch Party a friend of mine who rarely reads novels (other books, yes) raved to me about an Audible book she was listening to, Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett. “What a coincidence,” I said, and told her about Ann coming to Interabang. She insisted on going. We were in the children’s section when she ran into an old friend who’d moved away twenty years ago. Soon we three were talking books & life with an ever-expanding circle of strangers and acquaintances and all the while, the woman’s nine-year-old daughter–fresh out of ballet class–pirouetted past the Picture Books. The girl appeared to be the only child at the party, but she didn’t look out of place.

“Interabang: a punctuation mark in the form of a question mark superimposed on a exclamation point.” The Free Dictionary

“The Bookstore Strikes Back” is an article Ann Patchett wrote for the December 2012 issue of The Atlantic magazine, a year after Parnassus Books opened. In it, she talks about how she wanted to re-create the bookish happiness of her childhood with “a store that recognized it could not possibly stock every single book that every single person might be looking for, and so stocked the books the staff had read and liked and could recommend.” She consulted an entrepreneurial friend, who told her it was a bad idea, especially since Ann planned to turn over the running of the business to someone else. Once she met her future business partner, she threw that advice in the paper shredder and decided to go with her gut. It was the spring of 2011, and she was about to start a book tour for her latest novel, State of Wonder, and she decided to tell everyone she met about her future bookstore. Most people said things like, books will be dead in two years–along with bookstores. And yet her bookstore was all the journalists who interviewed her wanted to talk about. They told her about their favorites and, off the record, wished her success. Ann didn’t believe books were dead. She refined her pitch. “The small independent bookstore is coming back. It’s part of a trend.” After the independents were crushed by the big chains and then Amazon crushed the big superstores, she further explained, “We realized what we had lost: the community center, the human interaction.”

I not only hope she’s right, but I believe she’s right. Parnassus Books, Ann told us, is profitable. That means it serves a need and gives customers what they want. If they have to pay a little more, they’ll do so if they can. There’s room for everybody: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, some of the other chains, and the Independents. We have more power than we know.

At the end of her talk at Interabang, Ann implored us, Don’t leave this store without buying anything. Even if you read your books on a Kindle or a tablet, there are many beautiful gift items you can buy to support the store. And there are: pens, pencils, reading glasses & eyeglass cases, notecards, Zen puzzles, etc. But the emphasis is on books. When I left, the line to buy was out the door. I had to be somewhere else and didn’t obey Ann’s edict but I didn’t feel too guilty about it. I’d bought a number of books a few days earlier and knew I’d be back in the near future.

Do you have an Independent bookstore in your city/town? Or a favorite one from your childhood? How do you prefer to read your books? (Or do you listen?) Please share.

“The Blue Marble” 1972, Earth photographed by Apollo 17 astronauts on route to the moon

Hurricane Harvey is an inconvenience. Nobody’s said that, as far as I know, because the devastation caused by the flooding in the Gulf region around Houston is like something out of a horror movie. Oh wait, there is a movie out in theatres right now, except it’s not about Hurricane Harvey. It’s about the dangers of Global Warming–turns out there’s a strong connection. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power was officially released on July 28, just a month shy of the hurricane. It’s already disappearing from movie theatres, but I’ve seen it twice now–before and after Harvey–and I think Americans should ask for an encore at theatres across the country.

The 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar for Best Documentary. With that film, environmentalist and former Vice President Al Gore introduced the phrase “Climate Change” to a lot of people around the world who’d never given much thought to this pesky problem (was it a problem? many wondered.) Since that time eleven years ago, even more scientists have started waving their hands in the air, shouting, yes, we’ve got a real problem here on Earth, but increasingly it’s become a divisive issue for Americans. Why is that? Maybe, in part, because Science is complicated. To understand it, you have to claw your way through strange concepts and exotic phrases. No. It turns out Climate Change can be explained in simple, common sense terms.

In the new documentary, Gore shows us a scene from the first film: an animated depiction of the 9/11 Memorial site (then under construction) filling with water from a storm surge made worse by rising sea levels attributable to Global Warming. Critics attacked that scenario as the most “ridiculous” of the entire film. Remember what happened afterwards? In 2012, Hurricane Sandy surged over the coastlines of NJ and NY and flooded the 9/11 site. At the time, New York Governor Cuomo called it “a wake up call” about Climate Change.

What causes flooding like nothing we’ve ever seen before? What causes sea levels to rise? For the last 150 years, since the start of the Industrial Revolution, our country has been fueled by coal, oil and gas. Other countries, of course, use them, too–most notably China and the European Union. Today this trifecta of fossil fuels is mainly responsible for the 110 million tons of heat-trapping chemicals released into the Earth’s atmosphere every day. The carbon traps the sun’s radiation. Most of this heat energy (93%) ends up in our oceans, the rest in the atmosphere. The world still has cold weather, of course, but it has more warmer days than it used to, and the warm-day temperatures keep trending up. Scientists say that warmer oceans cause more water to evaporate into the atmosphere. The buildup of moisture in the air contributes to the increase in extreme rainfall. And extreme rainfall is what we got from Harvey. The Texas flood zone was the size of New Jersey. Fifty inches of rain fell in less than four days. Rainfall from Harvey set a new record for the continental U.S.

As for the rising sea levels–you’ve heard the talk about ice caps that are melting at a much faster rate than ever before. Here’s one scene from the film I’ll never forget: Gore travels to Greenland during a recent unusually warm April. The camera follows, and we see pieces of glaciers exploding. We also see large patches of brown where there used to be sheets of blue-white ice. The drip, drip, drip of melting ice trickles into a stream and flows into a big hole. The force of the flowing water under the ice creates cracks in the glaciers, which is how they begin to break apart. A scientist in Greenland compares the ice mass to Swiss Cheese.

Other Memorable Scenes from the Film

*News videos of a typhoon that devastated part of the Philippines in 2013. Over 6,300 people were killed. Property damage was horrendous. The typhoon crossed ocean waters that were much warmer than usual

*News videos of massive flooding in the streets of Miami, New York, New Jersey and pre-Harvey Houston–all from storms in this century. (Miami is the #1 city in the world at risk due to rising sea levels)

*The behind-the-scenes drama leading up to the Paris Climate Agreement in December 2015. Can you imagine getting 195 different countries to agree to anything?

In Paris, the central goal of the agreement was to use pre-Industrial temperature levels as a benchmark and keep the temperature rise in this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius above what they were back then. (Scientists say 2 degrees C (or 3.6 degrees F) is the tipping point for great risk to our planet.) That’s why the addition of “renewables”–wind and solar–are so important, and can help us cut back on the harmful emissions from the fossil fuels. Heading into Paris, India was not looking like it would sign the agreement. The country has 1.2 billion people and 300 million of them have no access to energy. India was getting ready to build 400 new coal-fired power plants, which could have erased all the progress the world has made to date. As India basically told Gore, you’ve had 150 years worth of fossil fuels to become a rich country; now we need them–talk to us in 150 years. India was not against using solar power but didn’t think they could afford it. Gore spent much of his time in Paris trying to broker a deal to get them a huge but cheap solar loan. Then, in early December, flooding paralyzed one of India’s largest cities–Chennai. It was the heaviest rains they’d seen in more than 100 years. Indian Prime Minister Modi travelled back to India from Paris. “We are feeling Climate Change’s fast-growing impact now,” he said, and India signed the Paris agreement. Out of 197 countries, only Syria and Nicaragua did not sign.

GEORGETOWN, TX, is a city about 30 minutes north of liberal-minded Austin. About 67,000 people live there. Towards the end of the film, Gore pays a visit to their mayor, Dale Ross, who tells him, “This is the reddist city in the reddist county in Texas, and I’m a conservative Republican.” He’s also a numbers guy, a CPA with “a duty to our rate payers.” Georgetown now uses 90% renewable energy–wind and solar–and soon they’ll be the first city in Texas to go 100% renewable. He says, “The less stuff there is in the air, the better it is. You don’t need scientists to tell you that.” As for other cities doing what Georgetown has done, he says, “We have a moral obligation to leave the planet better than we found it.”

Extreme flooding and storm surges–these aren’t the only dangers of Global Warming. Higher temperatures suck the moisture out of the ground and cause severe droughts. In Syria, a drought from 2006-2012 was the worst in 900 years, as far back as any records go. It displaced 1.5 million Syrians, many of them farmers. Vulnerable, miserable, desperate people: fuel to the civil war that broke out, and then ISIS showed up. Warmer temperatures also increase mosquito populations, but they also speed up the incubation rate of the Zika virus inside the mosquito, which can cause severe birth defects when the insects bite pregnant women.

The film will tell you so much more than you can read here. And it’s very watchable. Al Gore is no longer a politician, but he’s a man on a mission, a journey that started forty years ago when he was a young congressman. He’s passionate about our planet. He often gets discouraged, but he never gives up. When he’s angry, he’s eloquent, like when he imagines future generations looking back and asking, “What were you thinking? Couldn’t you hear what Mother Nature was screaming at you?” But, he also gives us reason to hope by showing us positive changes taking place around the globe.

As we all know, President Trump decided to back out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Perhaps, in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, he might reconsider. And, even if the United States decides to zip-lock our borders, it’s clear that the Earth’s atmosphere knows no borders. We’re all in this together when it comes to Climate Change. One look at “The Blue Marble” is to know the truth.

“After the final no there comes a yes/and on that yes, the future world depends.” Al Gore quoting the poet Wallace Stevens, at the end of the film.

from the film Dunkirk

It takes vision to make a film like Dunkirk. First and foremost, it’s a film about war–the early stages of WWII–and war has millions of moving components: soldiers, weapons, ammunition, tanks, warships, planes. Another key factor of war is Geography, and writer-director Christopher Nolan had his hands full grappling with the logistics of portraying 400,000 troops stranded on a beach in France as the Germans close in for the kill.

Christopher Nolan is a Brit. It’s important to note he was born and educated in England, even though he made his name in Hollywood and enjoys dual citizenship thanks to his American mother. Every school child in Great Britain knows the significance of Dunkirk. Operation Dynamo, as the Dunkirk evacuation was called, was the starting point–the first brushstroke on a massive painting depicting Good vs. Evil. Soldiers stranded in Dunkirk did in fact die or get left behind, but more than 338,000 men made it across the English Channel to safety, thanks to the armada of “little ships” that came to their rescue–many of them owned and manned by ordinary English citizens.

England and France had declared war on Nazi Germany the previous fall, following the surprise invasion of Poland. Operation Dynamo began on May 26, 1940, and concluded June 4th, when the last of the 700+ ships made it across the water to England. Prime Minister Winston Churchill called it “a miracle of deliverance.” Churchill went on to say, “Wars are not won on evacuations.” Buoyed by the success of Dunkirk, Great Britain regrouped. The machinery of war they’d lost at Dunkirk was replaced. When the Germans attacked England by air the following month, the Brits were prepared. No man is an island, even if his country is. The Battle of Britain lasted for three months, and the Brits won that battle, which meant the country didn’t fall to Nazi Germany (as France did, weeks after Dunkirk). The British lived to fight another day, and another, and another–and work on enlisting help from the Americans.

“The Dunkirk Spirit”: a willingness by a group of people who are in a bad situation to all help each other.–The Cambridge Dictionary

As an American, I learned about Dunkirk in school, but I remember it as a short paragraph that became fuzzy over time. Heading into the movie was the first time I began to wonder about the name. Dunkirk? It doesn’t sound French at all. You may already know the answer, but it took me decades to learn that Dunkirk is the English spelling. Dunkerque is the name of the port city in France where those 400,000 soldiers were stranded. A majority of them were British; a good many were French; others were from neighboring countries or beyond. The English claimed it–that patch of foreign soil was embedded with their blood, sweat and ingenuity. I imagine that’s how Dunkerque became Dunkirk in the collective consciousness.

Dunkirk is a movie of few words, but the magnitude of the operation is never in doubt, nor is the personal cost–the soldiers who didn’t make it out and the ones who sacrificed their lives for the cause. We see bombs destroying warships in the harbor. We see long lines of men in shoulder-high water, waiting/hoping to be rescued. We see men packed like matchsticks onto a long wooden pier, waiting for rescue before German aircraft can mow them down. And, within the Big Picture, we see brushstrokes of three personal stories:

1. An anonymous soldier making his way from beach to pier to ship to certain death to unexpected salvation
2. A father and teenage son sailing for Dunkirk in their small yacht–they will experience tragedy and triumph
3. Three British spitfire pilots shooting down German aircraft to protect the “little ships” and the sitting-duck soldiers they hope to evacuate; the operation ends well but they do not

In an interview with TIME magazine last month, director Nolan lamented what he sees as too much emphasis on the individual in modern society, as opposed to the communal miracle of Dunkirk. “The idea of communal responsibility and communal heroism is being lost.”

“We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in fields and in the streets; we shall fight on the hills; we shall never surrender. . .” Winston Churchill, June 4, 1940 to the House of Commons

It strikes me that we Americans have just experienced our own “Dunkirk Spirit” moment. Last week the Senate voted in three different ways to repeal our existing healthcare act. All were defeated–and not because our healthcare system isn’t flawed. It’s because too many millions of people would have lost insurance coverage. Americans banded together and showed up at town hall meetings, legislators’ offices and in Washington; they wrote their Senators and Congressmen; and some brave women and men in the Senate–most notably John McCain, just out of surgery and diagnosed with brain cancer–stood apart from their colleagues and said, no, this isn’t right. Now, finally, Congress says it wants to approach healthcare together–not as two separate and warring parties.

After experiencing Christopher Nolan’s remarkable film, I’ve joined the ranks of ordinary people–albeit on the other side of the Atlantic–who will never forget the name Dunkirk or what it stands for. Helping other people. Digging deeper for courage. Keeping my eye on the Big Picture.

The Two Fridas, 1939

Vogue put her on the magazine’s cover in 1938, shortly after she impressed art luminaries at a gallery in New York City–her first solo show. Paris was next, and, in 1939, The Louvre bought one of her self-portraits, the first by a Latin American artist. Picasso was already a star when they became acquainted in Paris and he turned into an admirer, presenting her with a pair of earrings shaped like hands. In 1953, a year before her death, she arrived by ambulance for her first solo exhibition in Mexico City and held court from her four-poster bed. And yet, Frida Kahlo sold very few paintings during her lifetime and her celebrity was mostly attached to her husband’s, famous muralist Diego Rivera. Twenty years later she began to emerge on her own as a cultural icon and one of Mexico’s most famous painters. By 2001, she was the face of a new U.S. postage stamp; by 2002, the subject of the award-winning movie Frida starring Salma Hayek; by last Spring, one of her paintings sold for $8 million at auction.

Frida Kahlo is my new art obsession–a girl crush, you could say–thanks to a special exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art. I’d been hearing about it for months, and finally managed to get there before it left town this past weekend. Mexico 1900-1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jose Clemente Orozco and the Avant-Garde debuted in Paris last fall, moved to Dallas in March, and is now headed home to Mexico. Chronologically, it took a while for the exhibit to get to Frida, who was born in 1907 and didn’t start to perfect her craft until the 1930s. As soon as I met up with her in a section called “Strong Women,” I was infatuated.

What did I know about the artist/woman going into the exhibit? Not all that much. Her paintings were kind of strange. She looked like nobody else: those eyebrows that met at the bridge of her nose–like a winged bird in flight! A hint of mustache. Photographs showed her in long, brightly colored Mexican dresses and elaborate hair accessories featuring flowers or fruit. At some point, she’d married the more famous Diego Rivera. Last but not least, I knew she’d survived a terrible accident in her youth but was sketchy on the details.

Even though my intent here is to obsess over Frida, it would be unfair to slight the men in the room. Their contribution to Mexican culture and the art world at large deserves a standing ovation. In 1910, after Mexico’s President/dictator Profirio Diaz rigged his re-election (at 80, he’d been in power for almost 35 years), the Mexican Revolution began. When it was over 10 years later, the incoming president wanted a way to unite the mostly illiterate country and handed the job to his Secretary of Education, Jose Vasconcelos. The secretary commissioned the country’s best artists  to paint murals throughout Mexico. “The Big Three,” as they later became known, were: Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. They had different styles, but each worked to capture Mexico’s history, its people and heritage, the horrors of war, the beauty of everyday life, or the technology of the future. Internationally, Rivera became the most famous of the group, and private commissions took him to San Francisco, Detroit and New York City. During the Great Depression, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt drew inspiration from Mexico’s mural project and created his own Federal Art Project to put artists to work.

Frida started painting in bed–after a horrific accident at the age of 18. She’d been sitting with her boyfriend, riding home from university in Mexico City, when their bus collided with a trolley car. A metal handrail shot through her hip and came out the other side. She spent three weeks in the hospital with a crushed pelvis, a fractured spine, and a broken leg and foot. She was sent home in a body cast, where she recuperated for three months, and gave up on the idea of becoming a doctor. Her parents encouraged her painting, buying her the supplies and attaching a mirror to her bed so she’d have a subject to paint: herself. Over the course of her life, she would require 30 operations. (Life can be cruel: at age 6 she’d contracted polio, emerging with a stunted right foot and a limp.)

“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.” Frida Kahlo

Diego Rivera entered her life three years later. She’d first encountered him at the university, standing on a piece of scaffolding as he worked on his first mural for the government. At 16, she was only one of 35 women at the university. Diego was twenty-one years older, a child prodigy who’d studied art in Europe for the duration of the Mexican Revolution. When they met up again, they were both members of the Communist Party. She asked for his artistic advice. He showed up weekly at her parents’ house, Casa Azul (Blue House), to instruct her in painting and to court her.

“It was obvious to me that this girl was an authentic artist.” Diego Rivera, writing about Frida’s first paintings.

When the couple tied the knot in 1929, her parents described it as a “marriage between an elephant and a dove.” He was 6 feet tall and about 300 pounds; she was only 5’3″ and petite. He’d already been twice divorced. Appearances aside, he was said to be charismatic, and his enormous talent must have served as an aphrodisiac. His two great loves were painting and women, and he was incapable of being faithful. Their relationship and his many affairs which broke her heart (including one with her sister) figure into much of her work. Of her approximately 150 paintings, over 50 were some sort of self-portrait. Frida has been called “mother of the selfie.” Today’s cell phone selfie is a way to insert oneself into the context of a larger story: a celebration, a “remember when” moment, or even an “I may not be the most important thing in this picture, but I was there–my life matters” moment.

Frida and Diego Rivera, 1931

Telling a personal story through her paintings became Frida’s trademark. She had almost no formal training–a few drawing lessons as a girl, a photographer for a father–but her husband was a great muralist and storyteller. Watching him work, she learned how to tell a story, but her paintings were more personal and smaller in scale. By all accounts, Frida and Diego had a deep bond and love for one another. They divorced in 1939 but remarried the following year. She had many of her own affairs (with men and women) and it’s easy to speculate that hers were payback for his, but who’s to really know? She died at 47, but despite all her physical and emotional pain, she continued to dress up in her colorful clothes, she continued to paint and laugh and love, and she continued to fight for causes she believed in. And after she was gone, she evolved into a cultural icon: for feminists, for gays, for other artists.

Frida Kahlo was one strong woman. By example, she was telling us that life is full of tragedy, despair and heartbreak, but it’s also a thing of beauty–and well worth fighting for.

 Maybe you’re watching the new TV series The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu. Or maybe you’re one of the many readers who propelled the novel to #5 on the New York Times Best Seller List this week (it’s made the list for the last 14.) Maybe you’re listening to the new Audible book narrated by Claire Danes of Homeland fame. Or, maybe–if you’re old enough–you remember the 1990 film starring Natasha Richardson and Robert Duval. The Handmaid’s Tale keeps spawning babies, but the real Birth Mother is acclaimed Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Today her baby is 32 years old: potty-trained, a college graduate, gainfully employed, so why all the hoop-la right now?

This dystopian novel, first published in 1985 and set in the near future, gives us a chance to talk about two issues: women’s rights and a world turned upside-down, seemingly overnight.

Imagine a government coup. It’s not hard, right? If you were half-awake in school, you learned that Tsarist Russia was toppled by the Bolshevik Revolution, that Fidel Castro overthrew the Cuban government and made himself a Communist Dictator, and that the Shah of Iran was forced out of power by Islamic revolutionaries. And those are just a few of the biggies. There have been coups in Africa, Egypt, Czheckoslovakia, Ukraine, etc. Comparatively speaking, we in the United States have been sitting pretty. We live in a democracy with 3 branches of government that check up on one another. It’s not perfect, and we’ve had our share of challenges–including a devastating Civil War–but we’ve never had a sitting government overthrown by an illegal seizure of power.

Fiction gives us a way to explore this. Atwood’s tale is set in Cambridge, MA, home of Harvard, where Atwood once earned her masters degree and began work on a doctorate. When the novel opens, a young woman named Offred is telling us her story–how she ended up where she is and what’s about to happen to her. Except we don’t know any of this yet, not even her name. Instead we wonder why she and other women are sleeping on cots in a former gymnasium with varnished wood floors, and why “Aunt Sara” and “Aunt Elizabeth” patrol the room with electric cattle prods. In time  we learn that Offred and the gym crowd are being groomed as “handmaids,” the new regime’s term for surrogate mothers.

 As the tale unfolds, we learn that the United States is now called the Republic of Gilead. Infertility seems to be the country’s Number 1 problem, and a group of young women who were known to be fertile are forced into service. (In Offred’s case, she and her husband conceived a daughter, but both have been taken away from her.) Who gets serviced? The elite men of society. “Commanders,” they’re called. The Commanders all have wives, older women who cannot conceive, but the new regime treats them with grave respect. The wife must be present, in bed with both her husband and handmaid as they try to make a baby. There are other rules like no kissing; all three individuals must wear as many clothes as possible. Predictably no one is happy, and a little rule-breaking takes place. First the Commander, then the wife, then Offred, each doing what they can within a totalitarian environment to feel less miserable–or just survive.

Even in fiction, how could such a scenario take place? Before the coup, the U.S. was a chaotic place: pornography was rampant, freedoms-for-all created anarchy, and environmental disasters led to infertility. “The air got too full, once, of chemicals, rays, radiation, the water swarmed with toxic molecules, all of that takes years to clean up, and meanwhile they creep into your body. . .” Last week I read a disturbing news story–in my local Dallas Morning News, based on legitimate fact-checked sources. There’s a pesticide, CHLORPYRIFOS, produced by Dow Chemical, which is extremely harmful to fetuses and young children. At the end of March, EPA Chief Scott Pruitt announced his decision to deny a petition to ban the Chlorpyrifos pesticide from being sprayed on food. This, after the scientists at the EPA–his own agency–had concluded that ingesting even tiny amounts of the chemical could harm brain development. The American Academy of Pediatrics (66,000 pediatricians and surgeons) urged Pruitt last week to take the pesticide off the market. “Deepy alarmed” and “the risk. . .is unambiguous” were statements made in the letter to Pruitt.

“If you mean a novel in which women are human beings–with all the variety of character and behavior that implies–and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial. . .then, yes.” She goes on to say that women are not an afterthought of nature. “They are not secondary players in human destiny, and every society has always known that.”

She’s also often asked whether the book is anti-religion. In writing a novel where a totalitarian government takes power, she had to decide what kind. Not communism, she decided. Americans had already demonstrated their fear of communism through the McCarthy Era and the Big Red Scare. Her thoughts turned to the Salem Witch Trials, where religious fanaticism led to mass hysteria and the murder of innocent young women. Atwood decided a theocracy would be the most plausible regime to take over, one that used a few passages from the Bible to justify its actions. But in the novel, as the author has pointed out, the regime is annihilating other religious denominations–Catholics and Baptists, for example.

There’s nothing inherently wrong in being a conservative. Just as there’s nothing inherently wrong in being a liberal. The urgent question, I think, is: how far are we each willing to go to conform to either label? Surely we can find common ground about protecting ourselves against harmful chemicals being introduced to our environment. Surely we can find common ground in the belief that women–not just men–are human beings and their rights need to be protected.