Done Anything Lately?

When Judith comes into the kitchen where Larry is grading homework, she starts off her announcement that Larry is going to be sloughed off in favor of Sy by saying, "Honey?"  Larry, not really seeming to listen at first, responds with an automatic and barely audible echo of this term of endearment.  (I recommend turning on the subtitles on the DVD, so the dialogue can be followed better.)  This scene is where the "I haven't done anything" thematic element--if that's the right term--first appears.  Larry in defending himself against Judith wanting to divorce him says, "I haven't done anything."  Then Judith says, after Larry more or less asks, that she and Sy haven't "done anything."  Whether they have done the deed together is one of the mysteries of the film, like the dybbuk question at the beginning.

In the Columbia Record Club call scene, Larry says he didn't do anything and Dick Dutton's voice explains or tries to explain how doing nothing is what resulted in his being sent Santana Abraxas.  So, doing nothing also has consequences, which is a rather complementary idea to what Larry tells Clive about actions having consequences.

When Arlen--with studied casualness standing at the office door each time he is seen--asks Larry about publications of his that might be of interest to the Tenure Committee in their deliberations,  Larry says, "No, I haven't done anything, I haven't published."

When Arthur is brought to the house in handcuffs by the police,  he pleads, "I didn't do anything!"

So at this moment I count four scenes of I haven't done anything in the movie.

And finally for today, a thought from The Moviegoer by Walker Percy:  "There was this also: a secret sense of wonder about the enduring, about all the nights, the rainy summer nights at twelve and one and two o'clock when the seats endured alone in the empty theater.  The enduring is something that must be accounted for.  One cannot simply shrug it off."

This is something I thought of myself, in regard to a particular new classroom where I took the first semester of calculus at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, years before I read any of Percy's books. Those empty, unobserved seats attached to the floor in the classroom while no one is in there--that fact needs to be considered, thought about, questioned.  Percy said it better, though:  Accounted for.  How the heck can that be achieved?  I bring this up here because this is what quantum mechanics deals with, sort of.  A quantum system supposedly endures quite deterministically, and quite beyond observation, until the moment it is subjected to a "measurement" or "observation."  Then quantum probability and the Copenhagen interpretation of observation--or some other interpretation--must be considered.

The lonely enduring of Schrodinger's Cat in his or her box unobserved during the one hour period in which the poison gas has a 50% probability of being released must somehow be accounted for.

Whose the dumbest

I just wanna see if my blog will show up on a Google search (Google by the way is a homonym of googol, a  name invented by a nine-year-old in about 1940 for the number "one followed by one hundred zeros") if I include my non-unique name, David Trulock, as part of my postings and not just in my low profile. 

I wonder how many times "I haven't done anything" or "we haven't done anything" appears in A Serious Man. It's definitely a repetitive element in the movie.  Later.

Questions

One reason I like A Serious Man is it raises many interesting questions that are internal to the movie and others that are real.  Is the old man in the opening sequence dead or alive?  The way he reacts to being stabbed with the ice pick is one of the funniest parts of the movie (something like, 'well, come to think of it, i'm not feeling all that well'). In the credits at the end of the film he is listed as "Dybbuk?"--yes with a question mark--played by Fivush Finkel.  Then of course there is the real question of the interpretation of the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment.  How can the cat be both dead and alive until observed?

A big question for me is why did the Coen brothers have Dick Dutton, on the phone from Columbia Record Club, refer to two albums that weren't released until 1970?  Those would be Santana Abraxas and Creedence's Cosmos Factory.  Jimi Hendrix's song Machine Gun, played during the "goy's teeth" scenes, is also from 1970.  The movie of course is set in 1967, which is when the song Somebody to Love was released by Jefferson Airplane. (An earlier and inferior version of the song was recorded in 1966 by Grace Slick and the Great Society, before she joined "The Airplane!")

I was approximately Danny Gopnick's age in 1967, but I can't relate at all to the pot smoking at that age or the frequent use of the f-word.  Oh yeh, the pot smoking came later -- in 1970, actually, when I was in the 11th grade.  We never referred to it as "pot" though.  That's what we said all the old folks called it.  To us it was grass or weed.  I only smoked it occassionally, for a few months, until I met my high school girlfriend and quit hanging out with the grass-smoking crowd.