First of all, what a terribly, terribly good movie. It has a lot of things going for it, but I want to address the most obvious question somone could have: doesn't this movie advocate terrorism? It does expend an awful lot of creative energy making violent attacks on government officials and edifices seem rousing and emotionally satisfying.

Warning: Some spoilers, I guess. After name-checking the Boston Tea Party in the opening few minutes of the movie, the violence quickly escalates from slapping around government-sponsored thugs to a rather bloody showdown at the state television studio. It's hard to say whether the narrative is really trying to justify the violence, the innocent loss of life, even as it characterizes the future regime as a froth-mouthed, Orwellian nightmare where everyone is complicit.

I think what the movie does is problematize political violence, even in the face of bloody dictatorship, as well as political apathy, in the face of the same. There's enough meta-criticism to go around, and while V does inevitably appear heroic, he is always a bit monstrous, too. So, no, I don't think the movie wants me to blow up any buildings.

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Moving along: There are some realy beautiful performances, the most subtle of which is the voice-acting of Hugo Weaving as V. You'll remember him as Agent Smith in The Matrix, and if you didn't think he had the creepiest, most nuanced voice since James Earl Jones, you will after hearing V tell someone he killed them ten minutes ago. Weaving balances between an over-the-top dinner theater Macbeth (complete with rolled R's, which always sound bizarre on this side of the Atlantic) and a tortured, obsessed, eloquent Frankenstein's monster, circa the "you made me" ice-pit indictment.

And the entire performance must have been over-dubbed, because the mask has no mouth hole. So that's another level of difficulty for an already brilliant performance.

I have never seen Natalie Portman so terrified, and I hope I never do again. Her face is, at times, the hardest thing to watch in this movie, and that's saying a lot. It's hard not to follow Natalie Portman's career, and I honestly havn't been as pleased or as moved by her since The Professional. I take back everything I ever said about her during the Star-Wars-Closer-Stupid-Lame-Garden-State-Exploring-The-Infinite-Abyss-Are-You-Kidding-Me period.

And then there's John Hurt, who appears mostly on a large video screen throughout the movie. As the totalitarian dictator, Hurt is mostly seen screaming and scheming, but somehow manages to communicate a certain tenuousness, a kind of screeching paranoia that is at once horrifying and pathetic. In a movie where the totalitarian regime is so, well, totalitarian, Hurt gets across the kind of weakness and fear that drives such a man to absolute power, and manages to humanize even the inhumaness of the dictator. So good.

Let's be honest: this is a comic-book movie, a problematic treatise on terrorism and revolt, and the protagonist has no facial expression beyond the creepy Guy Fawkes grin on his mask. There probably aren't a lot of Academy Awards in its future. But it is one of the most moving, beatifully acted, beautifully written movies I have seen in years. And while it's a different kind of movie than say, Lost in Translation, it manages at least the same depth of emotion, at least the same amount of pathos (if pathos is quantifiable).

And things blow up good.

So I like Bertolt Brecht. You know the guy—Marxist author and playwright, proponent of “alienation in art.” Argued against writing that stirred up the passions, in favor of things that held spectators at a distance, putting them in the proper critical mindset.

I know, I know—liking Brecht is like liking Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, or any of those films Warhol put out, full of pretty people who couldn’t act, lying naked in bed, smoking cigarettes, talking slowly. Brecht is cool, maybe, but cool in a way that makes actually liking him distinctly uncool. The sort of thing you might write a really hip dissertation on. Not the sort of thing you’re expected to actually enjoy.

Brecht has the heavy scent of capital-T Theory about him. All that discussion of Marxism, dialectics, exchange—at least with other theory- or philosophy-heavy writers you can ignore the theoretical side of things and get swept up in the drama. Brecht, on the other hand, never lets you forget that his characters are in fact nothing more than dressed-up actors, that the dialogue is written on a piece of paper somewhere and has been repeated dozens of times before the first performance.

All of this intended to keep the audience in that alienated critical mindset. If you don’t like capital-T Theory, then you’re probably not going to like Brecht. And we Creative Writers—particularly those of us in MFA programs—often have a problematic relationship with Theory, to say the least.

So, can theory and practive ever find a common ground?

To a certain extent this is a result of our programs’ place within the university. One of the interesting side-effects of the growth of MFA programs is the split that has arisen in US academia between writers and scholars, as well as the belief that the two occupations are somehow antithetical. In the rest of the world, where Creative Writing programs generally don’t exist, the idea that a novelist or poet can’t also be a literary scholar and theorist is laughable. Nabokov, Kundera, Borges, Burgess—none of these authors show the least fear that critical analysis of literature will somehow dirty their aesthetic sensibilities. Quite the opposite.

In the US, however, we see the results of specialization: Creative Writing programs, relatively new to the academic game, have to claim their territory, and that’s going to lead to certain rivalries. We Creative Writers often regard ourselves as the hard-nosed realists in departments filled with advocates of grand, abstract theories: Marxism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, semiotics, the whole hairy beast of Postmodernism. References to, say, Derrida or Girard in a class full of MFA’s are often viewed with suspicion, if not outright scorn. We have no use for theory—we stick to the text.

Of course, the effects of specialization are not confined to our side of the divide. Narratology—the study of the formal aspects of narrative—has all but disappeared from many MA and PhD programs. A colleague of mine once described sitting in on a Literature class where, in the midst of intelligent, well-read students, people who could pull apart a novel in terms of Historicism or economic struggle, he was the only one who’d heard of the “inverted checkmark” structure of a story (ie, rising action, crisis, falling action—one of the traditional forms of a narrative).

This is not the first time such rivalries have existed in academia, nor will it be the last. A similar thing is going on between Lit programs and Rhetoric/Composition, another relative youngster. And yet it’s worth asking ourselves, how useful are these rivalries? Clearly, certain studies are going to be more directly useful to the production of literature, while others will be more useful for critiquing it. Nonetheless, we’re talking about the same basic object—literature—and anything more we can know about it, as writers or scholars, can only help us in our literary careers.

If we’re going to be honest with ourselves, it’s not that Creative Writers have no use for theory, we simply disagree about which theories are useful. As has been pointed out by more than one cultural critic, narration, however conceived, is as full of assumptions and theoretical underpinnings as any of the big theories mentioned before. Besides, when we talk about getting “depth” in fiction, what are we talking about other than an attempt to work-in some bigger picture which, if openly examined, is closely tied to some theory? Theories are, after all, only the careful working-out of our world-views. It’s worth examining what sorts of depth—psychological, political, philosophical—we put into our stories and poems, and what other theoretical depths are out there.

I don't know how to say his last name either. Let's just pretend like you pronounce every letter and move along.

Marek Hlasko is one of my favorite writers that almost no one has ever heard of. He writes with a kind of tempered hopefulness that you don't normally associate with Cold War writers, regardless of their nationality, but that is even more surprising coming out of Soviet-controled Poland. As the title of this novel suggests, the characters are all waiting for something that probably won't come, but the way they wait, the dignity of their suffering and their enduring hope make Eighth Day of the Week a beautiful novel to spend a night with (it's only 128 pages).

 The novel opens with a young couple in a park. The novel's heroine, Agnieszka (your guess is as good as mine) is explaining to Pietrek that she does not want to consumate their relationship in the park, she wants to go somewhere private. But in Poland , however, where familes live two or three to a house, and the secret police and even private citizens are constantly scrutinizing every move, there is simply nowhere for young poeple to go and be alone.

The rest of the novel follows Agnieszka as she and Pietrik try desperately to find a secluded place. I'm a big fan of predicament, and this novel has a great one: where can we get it on? We meet Agnieszka's brother, Grzegorz (now you're just messing with me), who is in love with a married woman who lives in another city. He waits for her constantly, but she will not visit him. Agnieszka finds him in bars, getting into brawls, trying to kill himself. Meanwhile, her father looks out their front window and dreams that "Next Sunday I'll go fishing."

All this can sound awfully depressing, and it is, but Agnieszka's passion and clarity of purpose make for a compelling counterpoint to the hopelessness and delusion that surrounds her. She is determined to do something, anything, to break out of the cycle of whistful dreaming that has infected her family and, indeed, all of Poland.

The novel is out of print, but Amazon always has a bunch of cheap, used copies, and it is really worth the trouble of locating it. I've bought a couple of extra copies for friends over the years. It's a beautiful, agonizing novel, with a kind of unassailable dignity you can't find anymore, especially here at home.

Another of his novels, Killing the Second Dog, about two con-men in Israel, is also worth a look. Enjoy.