The Peasant Audience

"Everybody hates a tourist." -Pulp, from their song "Common People"

SOMETIMES you can observe two things at once, and draw a connection between them.

So it is with my reading Anna Karenina simultaneous with the release of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" starring Rooney Mara.

Don't get me wrong, Karenina's a great novel, for all its flabbiness. But. The peasantry serves as a captive audience for the self-obsessed doings of the aristocrats. They're there to applaud the various comings and goings of the carriages filled with nobles. "Aw! Isn't that nice?" Makes you wonder why there was ever a Russian revolution.

I'm reminded of the appearance of Jonathan Lethem and Jennifer Egan at the Occupy Wall Street encampment, gracing the downtrodden with their gleaming presence, media in tow.

Do you think Margaret Mitchell read Tolstoy?

Frankly, it's hard after awhile to sympathize with the plight of Anna and Vronsky as they sit around their massive estate complaining about how bored they are. If ever a couple needed a revolution to wake them up, they did.

Is America today all that different?

Now we have precious newcomer Rooney Mara. The name, you know, is the combination of two plutocratic dynasties. Tolstoy would love it! Kind of like being named "Crassus Pompey," or "Borgia DeMedici."

If everything in this country is going to be for the aristocrats-- I could name a couple score of dynastic Hollywood celebrities-- then why should the rest of us bother trying to do anything? Let's at least have honesty! There should be a large sign put up saying, "CLOSED"-- to all but the right people, the proper crowd. The nobles should wear uniforms, with short jackets and epaulets, as they do in Tolstoy novels.

The rest of us are here to be the peasant audience; to serve; to loyally gush and applaud the delicate Rooney Maras when they make their society debuts.

Life Imitating Art

Speaking of Newsweek, they have an interesting article by Nancy Collins on the Natalie Wood case being reopened. Simultaneously, I happen to be reading for the first time Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, one of the great novels that I'd somehow never gotten to.

Isn't the triangle of Natalie Wood, husband Robert Wagner, and then-young Christopher Walken much like Anna, her husband Karenin, and Vronsky in the book? It's interesting that Natalie Wood was of Russian descent-- and looked it, very beautiful-- and I believe that Walken played an ethnic Russian in "The Deer Hunter," his first great movie role. Walken anyway could've easily played Vronsky back then, and Natalie Wood would've been a fabulous Anna Karenina. As an actor Walken was never the same after the strange night of her death-- he went from handsome leading man to weird character actor almost overnight.

I'm halfway through the novel. No, it's not as great as War and Peace, but it's still one of the biggies, timeless, with rich characterization and clear writing. No novelist today is comparable, sadly-- least of all the well-hyped frauds pushed at us from New York. Just my opinion, of course, but I doubt anyone can dispute it.