Patriots and prophets: In The Harper Review’s inaugural letter of the autumn quarter, contributing editor Elena Eisenstadt proposes an answer to the question, “Should you love your country?” Eisenstadt describes Martin Buber’s essay on the biblical tale of the false prophet Hananiah ben Azzur, who misleads his people due to his unbridled love for his country. The prophet Jeremiah, however, is more restrained—because he directs his love toward the people of his country, he doesn’t lead them astray. To truly love one’s country, Eisenstadt argues, is to love more than an abstract idea of a nation—it is to love its people.
Elizabeth Eck, Senior Editor
Star-spengled banter: Economist David P. Goldman returns to Tablet magazine as bemoaner of the philosophical “farrago” of Alexander Kojève. Goldman, whose disdain for “the ideological godfather of the ‘global war on terror’” bleeds through the column, hosts a cadaver synod against his “unrepentant Stalin[ist]” subject, accusing Kojève of being the catalyst for the West’s intellectual decline, via his disastrous reading of Hegel. Invoking and indicting every post-war luminary from Strauss and Fukushima to Lacan and de Beauvoir, Goldman seeks to demonstrate how far and deep Kojève sowed his poisonous influence. Ultimately, he appears to prove that Trotskyism and neoconservatism can be conflated and that only God (and Hegel or some dyophysite fusion?) can set the record straight and prevent intellectual absolutism—absolutely.
Brady Santoro, Assistant Editor
Megalopolis: a failure: To call Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis a colossal failure is to give it too much credit. Indeed, there is little colossal about it. Most artwork can be forgiven for grand leaps that fail to stick their landing; Megalopolis, however, fails at the basics. Dialogue meanders stiffly with oddly distracting grammar errors. Set backgrounds that in some scenes look like the cheap greenscreen backdrops of one of those commercials for Liberty Mutual. One gets the sense that the immensely talented cast doesn’t quite understand what’s going on enough to know how to deliver their lines. Their performances feel like a collage of rehearsals in which they’re still trying different things out. The whole thing feels, well, badly directed. Everybody in the theater where I watched the film (or at least the half who stayed through the whole two hours and eighteen minutes) left in confusion. How could this have been the decades-in-the-making product of one of the world’s most storied directors and his own $120 million? It’s a shame because, to Coppola’s credit, the film asks some important questions: How do empires fall? What if we imagine our civilization as approaching its dead end? Is the way we’re living now the way it has to be? It even ventures some interesting answers: as we watch great statues crumble, we hear how our decline arises from a crisis of belief, from our decadence, and our inability to aspire to a promising future. This film, however, only exaggerates the marks of its own time. Instead of ambitiously lunging toward a future with promise and vision, it sputters with the incoherence of a third-rate Marvel spinoff or a senile presidential candidate.
Declan Rexer, Senior Editor