According to The Verge, Amazon has ponied up some money, and next year, Terry Gilliam will start production of his long delayed film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. On the surface, it sounds like the perfect project for me. It is a cinematic take on Don Quixote — something that really has never been done properly. And it is a film by a director who I admire. Yet I am extremely leery about this combination.
I know I’m just a little punk, but I think most people don’t get Don Quixote. They focus on the iconography — and on the title character. Yes, that’s all very interesting: the crazy old man who thinks he’s a knight errant. But what is most amazing about the books is how they play with the distinction between literature and reality. Quixote’s insanity manifests itself in his inability to distinguish between the two. And it is taken to absurd heights where the crazy old man causes so much trouble in his delusion that he becomes a literary figure. People say that Don Quixote was the first modern novel, but it is actually the first postmodern novel.
When Orson Welles attempted to translate the books onto the screen, he had one brilliant idea: put Don Quixote in the modern world. This shows that he understood one important aspect of the story: Don Quixote was an anachronism in his own time. Even if his ideas about knights were based upon romantic literature, the actual knights they were based upon existed centuries before. So Welles was right to see that Don Quixote was no more out of place with motor scooters and movie theaters than he had been with barbers and college students.
But again, how would one really capture the feel of the books? I think you would follow Welles’ lead and make it in modern times. And you would make it as a documentary. Don Quixote likes nothing so much as to have long conversations about his important place in the history of knights errant. And the people around egg him on and get quite a lot of enjoyment listening to the crazy man. I can well see interviews with him as well as the simple, but firmly grounded Sancho. I’m thinking something along the lines of the approach that Bob Fosse took in Lenny and Star 80. It could be brilliant in the right hands.
I’m afraid that Gilliam is entirely the wrong hands. According to Wikipedia the basic plot is, “An advertising executive who finds himself unstuck in time unwittingly travels between modern-day London and 17th-century La Mancha, where he participates in the adventures of Don Quixote.” Good God! I have flashes of Time Bandits. To make matters worse, the advertising executive apparently becomes the Sancho character. I guess there are ways of making this work, but Sancho is really the most important character in the book. Without him, there is nothing. His simple practicality is the perfect foil for Don Quixote’s complicated delusions.
A similar dynamic happened in They Might Be Giants where Justin Playfair who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes mistakes his psychiatrist Mildred Watson as Dr Watson. The point, though, is that Playfair is not Holmes. Now Don Quixote is insane and constantly sees reality differently than it is. So it could be made to work. But it is a supremely dangerous choice. What’s more, Holmes is interesting without Watson. Don Quixote really isn’t interesting without Sancho. And pushing him out of the plot almost certainly destroys the fabric of the narrative.
But we’ll see. As regular readers know, I’m a huge fan of 12 Monkeys. Then again, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is co-written by Gilliam — never a good sign. I’ll still want to see it. And I will be the first to admit if I’ve been wrong about it. I really want to love it. Anything based on Don Quixote can’t be all bad. But sadly, most things based upon it are mostly bad.
There are two large difficulties with equal opportunity as a principle of justice. First, what exactly should be this hypothetical moment of perfect equality — the equal starting line, to use the metaphor of a footrace? Should it be birth? This means that the unequal distribution of luck before birth must be counterbalanced, so that those who are congenitally stronger or more clever should be disadvantaged in equal measure. If that doesn’t appeal to you, then you perhaps imagine a moment even before birth and before genetic qualities are doled out. But related to this is the problem that, as soon as we are born, we begin to do things or have things done to us that, if not offset, will lead to unequal life chances down the road. The further back we push the moment of equality, the more subsequent inequality we must accept. If opportunities are to be equal at birth, then the advantages that some get in childhood will not count against “equal opportunity.” Perhaps you would set a much later age for the “starting point” — say 18. This commits you to much greater intervention to offset all the many pluses and minuses that can accrue by that age, including many that are due to the choices that children make for themselves. At the same time, it can be seen as a bit heartless, since it doesn’t allow for second chances. If someone discovers what they truly want at the age of 25 or so, too bad: they missed the moment of equality and they will have to make do with whatever opportunities they are lucky enough to still have. This sort of criticism can be addressed by requiring a multiplicity of “somewhat equal opportunities” that can reappear as one grows older, but then the criterion loses its sharpness: how equal must these second chances be and how many must be offered?
Timothy Taylor wrote an article that answers a question that I’ve wondered about for a while, 
The other part of this is that I saw my parents treat the actual employees they had fairly badly. And they were not at all exceptional — I’ve seen it countless times with employers I’ve had as well as ones I’ve observed from the outside. They live in constant fear of bankruptcy. They never feel secure, even when things are going really well. And they expect their employees to care as deeply about the business as they do. Sadly, employees often do feel deeply committed to the business. But they are rewarded with bad pay and treatment until they finally have enough.
We Democrats all admire Obama. But unlike the stereotype, we don’t worship him. We’ve had a lot of problems with many of his policies. And I do mean “we.” Obviously, as a functional Democrat — I’m a member of the party because it is the more liberal of the two major parties, not because I agree with it — I have even bigger problems with President Obama. But he has never been so clearly outside the current thinking of the Democratic Party as he is on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). So now was a really good time for the Democrats in the House of Representatives to say what needed to be said, “Suck. On. This.”
I’m not a big fan of Jean Sibelius. In fact, he is just the kind of Romantic composer that I’m thinking of when I say that I don’t like Romantic music. But that isn’t to say that he wasn’t a great composer. And he certainly didn’t commit any of the truly vile sins of the period like mindless chromaticism. And there are some times when you really want Romantic music. It is still very much alive in many film scores.
On this day in 1966, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court found that the police must tell suspects of their right to remain silent in