The Browning Version

Koko: With ignorance that is both mathematically and dynamically sublime and therefore quite charming, Slothrop chose to dismiss this movie as stiff and boring. In fact, it is quiet, humane, and beautiful. Like all men wise enough not to know Latin or Greek, he can't understand the loneliness of dead letters or appreciate the irony of a classicist who defends Robert Browning's translation of something deft and ancient and powerful into heroic couplets, the flattest of all English measures. I watched it again last night, when I had nothing to do but remember my many failures, and I found this movie wonderfully apt and heroically cruel--cruel because it recommends that you accept the pain of being a good man, even when it's too late to restore what you've wasted, heal what you've hurt, or even finishing failing, when failure always was your chosen vocation. Like the prodigal clown whose epigrams are about as funny as calculus, you too hate your wife, despise your students, and render the glories of Aeschylus into literal translations to be used as punishment for tardiness. You're just as guilty as he is, only you don't say "the clock lacks five minutes of eleven."

Slothrop: Koko, having chosen to eat one too many pharmaceutical bananas, did not remember Slothrop's penetrating critique correctly. Slothrop did not dismiss the movie as stiff nor boring, but rather as a supremely cruel task to sit through. We are forced to watch a miserable outline of a man for, like, ever and eternity plus infinity, so that in the last few minutes of the movie we can see beauty in the suffering. So the structure of the movie is necessarily cruel toward the viewer if it is to achieve its purpose, fine, but that doesn't mean I need think highly of the sadism. Koko is right in putting it on when self-mutilation is the prescribed medicine. But on a day like today, when I already flagellated myself with a bull-whip of thorns by watching Tom Cruise yell, and go to the prom, and yell some more, watching The Browning Version would be an act of self-absorbed self-loathing. There's only so much a man can take before he goes to pieces.

Koko: If you watch the movie with eyes instead of cock, you'll see that the Crock's tenderness is there from the beginning. It doesn't just emerge at the end like magic. He doesn't transform; he wakes up to what we, and the little boy, knew all along. Go read your Wordsworth.