Feudal

Did you know that it’s possible to write a whole darn thing and then forget completely about it? Yesterday, for example, I started compiling my 2022 book list, and I started writing about Cloud Cuckoo Land, thinking to myself that it was one of the few books that I had read and not written about. And then as I started to write about it, I remembered that I actually HAD written about it. 

Did you also know that Google Docs will allow you to give two different documents the very same name? That doesn’t seem wise. 

Anyway, here is what I wrote about Cloud Cuckoo Land, the book; by way of “Heartburn,” the movie, just about a year ago. There’s a connection, however tenuous, I promise. 

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Last week on the very cold MLK Day holiday, I watched “Heartburn” on Hulu. I wrote about the Nora Ephron book upon which this movie is based right here. I don’t think that the movie was particularly popular or well-received when it was released in 1986, but it’s a good movie, as 80s movies go. Or maybe it’s not so much a good movie as a movie worth watching because of the great acting and the amazing scenery and sets and costumes: upper middle class homes and gardens, and spot-on bourgeois bohemian fashion, and mid-80s Washington and NY street and restaurant scenes. So I enjoyed watching “Heartburn,” but of course, it doesn’t hold up in a lot of ways. Few 80s movies do. 

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In the first act wedding scene, which takes place in Rachel’s father’s dream of an Upper West Side pre-war apartment, I noticed a Black guest. The actress who played her looked like Anna Maria Horsford (and I later looked her up on IMDB, and she was Anna Maria Horsford, thus explaining the resemblance). I thought that maybe Mike Nichols, who directed "Heartburn," thought that representation was important, and that’s why he made sure that his wealthy and artsy but powerful characters had Black friends who would naturally be invited to their weddings. 

LOL, no. Eventually we learn that Horsford’s character is not a wedding guest at all. She is Rachel’s father’s housekeeper, Della. There’s a scene in which we see poor Della minding her own business, doing her job, when Meryl Streep's Rachel (who has just left her philandering husband, played by Jack Nicholson) blows into the apartment like a hurricane, hugely pregnant, all wild hair and maternity sack dress and oversized big-shouldered jacket, with a toddler in one hand, and a Kenyan sisal tote bag* slung over the opposite shoulder. She takes up a lot of space. In five seconds, the large room is filled with nothing but Rachel. 

She flings her jacket and her bags and her personal belongings all over the apartment that Della is trying to clean, and immediately asks Della to babysit so that she can run right back out the door to do New York writer things. There is no mention of any additional compensation for the extra work, which is exactly what you would expect from Rachel and her ilk, now and then. What makes the scene typical of the 80s is that there is no real acknowledgement that for the housekeeper, caring for a toddler IS extra work in the first place. Spoiler alert: Della agrees to take care of the baby, of course, because what choice does she have? 

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In some ways, the whole movie is like that, all about the pretty much feudal relationships between upper class Washingtonians and New Yorkers and the people who clean their houses and care for their children and deliver their groceries. We don’t know if Rachel’s own nanny, Juanita (played by the same actress who played the housekeepers in “Clueless” and “Regarding Henry”) receives vacation pay or Social Security or any of the formal acknowledgements of the dignity and worth of her work that Rachel and Mark take for granted, but it’s safe to assume that she doesn’t. It was widely accepted then (as it is now) that only certain occupations are worthy of respect and therefore worthy of fair compensation, job security, dignified working conditions and treatment, and benefits. 

Still, working class people were better off then, in a lot of ways. Even if Juanita doesn’t receive benefits, she at least knows who her employers are. They interact with her daily. They pay her directly, cash in hand, not through a third party and certainly not through a mobile app. The grocery delivery man receives a tip from Catherine O’Hara, but he also gets a paycheck from the grocery store. He’s not subject to the vagaries of a five-star rating system designed by software developers whom he will never meet and who will never have a clue about any aspect of his job. 

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Wait, did you not come here for Soviet social realist film criticism? Yes, sorry, that took a bit of a turn. The thing that I can’t get out of my head is that I was an adult–a barely formed adult, but still an adult–when that movie came out, and the world that it depicts is almost completely gone. And in some ways, good riddance, obviously. But the gap between the working class and the well off, though it was wide enough at the time, still seemed bridgeable. Now that gap is more of a chasm, vast and ever widening; and the system of work and compensation has been so disrupted by the high tech industry (and not for the better) that it feels like the rich and powerful will continue to get richer and more powerful and the rest of us will be ever more subject to their whims until in 30 years or so we become a 5G feudal state. 

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I thought that maybe I had made up the phrase “5G feudal state” but I Googled it and found that of course somebody else got to it first. Did I say thirty years? Make it ten.

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Sometimes after I watch a movie, I’ll read the book upon which it is based but I have already read Heartburn and as we have already established, the book doesn’t hold up any better than the movie. It’s not Nora’s best. I like her essays better than her fiction. 

Instead, I read Cloud Cuckoo Land. I started this book with absolutely zero knowledge of the plot or the characters or the themes or anything at all. A friend whose taste I share recommended it and so I just opened it and started reading. My friend was not wrong - it’s a great book. The plot bounces around in time and space, moving the reader back and forth between 20th and 21st century America and the (of course) post-apocalyptic future and 15th century Constantinople (soon to become Istanbul). 

I won’t reveal any plot details except that there’s a part that involves an infectious disease and a quarantine. I don’t know if Anthony Doerr started writing Cloud Cuckoo Land before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but I guess that he did because the research and plotting for a book this complex must have taken more than two years. Well, it would have taken me more than two years, anyway. 

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The Cloud Cuckoo Land plot line that involves the virulent disease takes place in the post-apocalyptic future and given the last two years of plague, you’d think that this would be the most compelling part of the book. But it’s the 15th century scenes that seem most modern and relevant to me right now, filled as they are with desperately poor vassals and slaves and indentured servants who are utterly powerless and subject entirely to the whims and demands of their wealthy and powerful overlords. I don’t think that it’s likely that a small remnant of humanity will end up on a spaceship on a decades-long journey to a possibly hospitable planet (OK, one spoiler) but I do think that it’s likely (very) that we will return to a late middle ages social and economic and political system. It’s already happening. The 5G feudal state is under construction. 

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Again, I wrote most of this about a year ago, when people still thought Elon Musk was a genius. Things change in a year. 

We just had a three-day weekend, so we drove back to Philadelphia where we had just been two weeks ago so that my high school senior could visit Villanova. My sister lives ten minutes away from Villanova and she is also an alumna. My son is interested in several schools but his aunt is pushing him toward Villanova. 

My children are quite different from one another in many ways, including politics. My older son is a Bernie Sanders and AOC fan, and very attracted to radical progressive ideals. My younger son hates Trump but has no other thoughts about or interest in politics. 

Older son is a student at the University of Maryland. He's opposed to private colleges and universities, on principle, but he's still on winter break so he tagged along for the trip. We stopped at the bookstore and I asked him jokingly if he wanted a Villanova sweatshirt. 

He scoffed. "No," he said. "And I also don’t want golf clubs or a sailboat or a Vineyard Vines belt with little whales on it.” 

I laughed. “Yeah,” I said. “If you’re out here wearing a Villanova hoodie, you can’t stick it to the man because you are the man.” We said the “because you are the man” part in unison. This is one of my favorite jokes, and my children know it well. 

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And so I’m still hopeful for the future. Young people aren’t going to knuckle under to high -tech feudalism, not without a fight. Yes, they're all scrolling TikTok all the livelong day, but they’re not stupid. They are immune to the charisma of genius tech bro disruptors. They are wise to the gig work sector’s false promises of “flexibility.” They are neither afraid of nor awed by the Internet. They are less materialistic than their parents and grandparents, less worried about the right house and the right car. They aren’t afraid to fight the power, whatever and wherever and whoever it is. They aren’t afraid to stick it to the man. 

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* I used to have one of those tote bags. I bought it in 1985 when I was a student at Temple University, after months of seeing them on the shoulders of the most stylish students on campus. Some things never change.