Just by chance, could you use a song about perseverance and overcoming adversity? Something to give you a little encouragement and reassurance? Then we submit to you “Don’t Give Up,” featuring the isolated vocals of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush.
When he released the song on his 1986 album So, Gabriel told NME: “The catalyst for ‘Don’t Give Up’ was a photograph I saw by Dorothea Lange,… which showed the dust-bowl conditions during the Great Depression in America. Without a climate of self-esteem it’s impossible to function.” Elsewhere, on hiswebsite, Gabriel explained that the song was also “informed by the high levels of unemployment under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher of the 1980s.” Whatever the challenges they’ve faced, listeners have sought solace in this song for the past 38 years. No doubt, for some, it will come in handy during the weeks and months ahead.
For many a classic action-movie enthusiast, no car chase will ever top the one in Bullitt. The narrator of the Insider video above describes it as “the scene that set the standard for all modern car chases,” one made “iconic partly because of the characters, but also because of their cars.” The pursuer drives a Dodge Charger, a muscle car that “exploded in popularity during the late sixties in the U.S.,” with a V‑8 engine and rear-wheel drive that made it “basically built for informal drag racing.” The pursued, Steve McQueen’s detective protagonist Frank Bullitt, drives an instantly recognizable Highland Green Ford Mustang, “the first major pony car, a more compact, sporty take on the muscle car.”
Bullitt could change the game, as they say, thanks not just to the cars but also the cameras available at the time, not least the Arriflex 35 II. “Smaller and more rugged” than the bulky rigs of earlier generations, it made it possible to shoot on actual city streets rather than just studio sets and rear-projection setups. (To get a sense of the difference in feel that resulted, simply compare the Bullitt chase to the one in Dr. No, the first James Bond picture, from six years before.)
This threw down the gauntlet before all action filmmakers, who over the subsequent decades would take advantage of every technological development that could possibly heighten the thrills of their own car chases.
The video also includes vehicular action movies from The French Connection and Vanishing Point to Ronin and Drive. But the most important development in recent decades actually owes to the horse-racing movie Seabiscuit, whose production necessitated a rig, now known as “the biscuit,” that “makes it look like an actor is doing the driving, while a stunt person actually steers from the driver’s pod.” Gone are the days when a star like Steve McQueen, a genuine racer of both motorcycles and cars, could handle some of the stunt driving himself; gone, too, is the era of the muscle car not programmed to shut down automatically when it goes into a drift. But for viewers in constant need of ever more spectacular, technically complex, and expensive car chases, it seems the Fast and the Furious series will always come through.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”—and I’m not suggesting that you do—you would find yourself hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. Many sites condemn or exonerate him; many others celebrate him as a blood and soil Aryan hero. It can be nauseatingly difficult at times to tell these accounts apart. What to make of this controversy? What is the evidence brought against the famed Swiss psychiatrist and onetime close friend, student, and colleague of Sigmund Freud?
Truth be told, it does not look good for Jung. Unlike Nietzsche, whose work was deliberately bastardized by Nazis, beginning with his own sister, Jung need not be taken out of context to be read as anti-Semitic. There is no irony at work in his 1934 paper The State of Psychotherapy Today, in which he marvels at National Socialism as a “formidable phenomenon,” and writes, “the ‘Aryan’ unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish.” This is only one of the least objectionable of such statements, as historian Andrew Samuels demonstrates.
One Jungian defender admits in an essay collection called Lingering Shadows that Jung had been “unconsciously infected by Nazi ideas.” In response, psychologist John Conger asks, “Why not then say that he was unconsciously infected by anti-Semitic ideas as well?”—well before the Nazis came to power. He had expressed such thoughts as far back as 1918. Like the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Jung was accused of trading on his professional associations during the 30s to maintain his status, and turning on his Jewish colleagues while they were purged.
Yet his biographer Deirdre Bair claims Jung’s name was used to endorse persecution without his consent. Jung was incensed, “not least,” Mark Vernon writes at The Guardian, “because he was actually fighting to keep German psychotherapy open to Jewish individuals.” Bair also reveals that Jung was “involved in two plots to oust Hitler, essentially by having a leading physician declare the Führer mad. Both came to nothing.” And unlike Heidegger, Jung strongly denounced anti-Semitic views during the war. He “protected Jewish analysts,” writes Conger, “and helped refugees.” He also worked for the OSS, precursor to the CIA, during the war.
His recruiter Allen Dulles wrote of Jung’s “deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for.” Dulles also cryptically remarked, “Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof. Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war.” These contradictions in Jung’s words, character, and actions are puzzling, to say the least. I would not presume to draw any hard and fast conclusions from them. They do, however, serve as the necessary context for Jung’s observations of Adolf Hitler. Nazis of today who praise Jung most often do so for his supposed characterization of Hitler as “Wotan,” or Odin, a comparison that thrills neo-pagans who, like the Germans did, use ancient European belief systems as clothes hangers for modern racist nationalism.
In his 1936 essay, “Wotan,” Jung describes the old god as a force all its own, a “personification of psychic forces” that moved through the German people “towards the end of the Weimar Republic”—through the “thousands of unemployed,” who by 1933 “marched in their hundreds of thousands.” Wotan, Jung writes, “is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.” In personifying the “German psyche” as a furious god, Jung goes so far as to write, “We who stand outside judge the Germans far too much as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to regard them also as victims.”
“One hopes,” writes Per Brask, “evidently against hope, that Jung did not intend” his statements “as an argument of redemption for the Germans.” Whatever his intentions, his mystical racialization of the unconscious in “Wotan” accorded perfectly well with the theories of Alfred Rosenberg, “Hitler’s chief ideologist.” Like everything about Jung, the situation is complicated. In a 1938 interview, published by Omnibook Magazine in 1942, Jung repeated many of these disturbing ideas, comparing the German worship of Hitler to the Jewish desire for a Messiah, a “characteristic of people with an inferiority complex.” He describes Hitler’s power as a form of “magic.” But that power only exists, he says, because “Hitler listens and obeys….”
His Voice is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the German people have projected their own selves; that is, the unconscious of seventy-eight million Germans. That is what makes him powerful. Without the German people he would be nothing.
Jung’s observations are bombastic, but they are not flattering. The people may be possessed, but it is their will, he says, that the Nazi leader enacts, not his own. “The true leader,” says Jung, “is always led.” He goes on to paint an even darker picture, having closely observed Hitler and Mussolini together in Berlin:
In comparison with Mussolini, Hitler made upon me the impression of a sort of scaffolding of wood covered with cloth, an automaton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a robot. During the whole performance he never laughed; it was as though he were in a bad humor, sulking. He showed no human sign.
His expression was that of an inhumanly single-minded purposiveness, with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be a double of a real person, and that Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the mechanism.
With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better, a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk intimately with a nation?
Read the full interview here. Jung goes on to further discuss the German resurgence of the cult of Wotan, the “parallel between the Biblical triad… and the Third Reich,” and other peculiarly Jungian formulations. Of Jung’s analysis, interviewer H.R. Knickerbocker concludes, “this psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may sound to a layman fantastic, but can anything be as fantastic as the bare facts about the Nazi Party and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling them gangsters.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
The term gaslight has gained so much traction in popular discourse so recently that you’d swear it was coined around 2010. In fact, that particular usage goes at least as far back as 1938, when British novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton wrote a stage thriller about a husband who surreptitiously rearranges things in the house so as to make his wife believe that she’s gone insane. Gas Light proved enough of a hit to be adapted for the cinema two years later, with the two words of its title streamlined into one. You can watch Thorold Dickinson’s Gaslight just above, and if you enjoy it, have a look at the rest of the more than 70 literary movies collected into this playlist from the verified YouTube channel Cult Cinema Classics.
If you know your cinema history, you’ll know that Gaslight was remade in Hollywood in 1944, directed by George Cukor and starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, and Angela Lansbury. (That version inspired Steely Dan’s song “Gaslighting Abbie,” where I first heard the word myself.)
In those days, the American film industry looked to the British one for proven material — material the British film industry, for its part, had found in literature. Take the work of a rising young director called Alfred Hitchcock, who adapted Charles Bennett’s Blackmail in 1929, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1935, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent as Sabotagein 1936, and Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn in 1939.
Today, literary adaptation seems to have become a relatively niche practice in Hollywood, but in the mid-twentieth century, it had real cachet: hence the increasing ambition of productions like The Scarlet Letter (1934), Of Mice and Men 1939, Fleischer Studios’ animated Gulliver’s Travels (1939), The Snows of Kilimanjaro(1952), and Jane Eyre (1970). Naturally, these films reflect their own eras as much as they do the authorial visions of Hawthorne, Steinbeck, Swift, Hemingway, and Charlotte Brontë. Each of these pictures offers its own way of regarding its source material. And would it seem so insane to believe that some of them may even have influence still to exert on popular culture here in the twenty-first century? Watch the playlist of 70 literary films here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Many of us in these past few generations first heard of the Metropolitan Museum of Art while reading E. L. Konigsburg’s novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. More than a few of us also fantasized about running away to live in that vast cultural institution like the book’s young protagonists Claudia and Jamie Kincaid. Yet among other, more practical concerns, we might have wondered where we were going to secure enough reading material to get us through those long after-hours nights. Konigsburg had Claudia and Jamie visit the former Donnell Library Center, but what about in the Met itself?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Last Friday, The Cure celebrated the release of their new album, Songs of a Lost World, with a three-hour set at the Troxy in London. The band kicked off the show by performing all eight tracks from the album, before then playing another 23 songs, mostly hits from their large catalog of music. Originally live streamed on YouTube, you can now watch the entire show online. Just click play above.
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When the names of French poet Paul Éluard and German artist Max Ernst arise, one subject always follows: that of their years-long ménage à trois — or rather, “marriage à trois,” as a New York Times article by Annette Grant once put it. It started in 1921, Grant writes, when the Surrealist movement’s co-founder André Breton put on an exhibition for Ernst in Paris. “Éluard and his Russian wife, Gala, were fascinated by the show and arranged to meet Ernst in the Austrian Alps and later in Germany. Ernst, Éluard and Gala quickly became inseparable. The artist and the poet started a lifelong series of collaborations on books even as Ernst and Gala started an affair.”
This arrangement “eventually propelled the trio on a journey from Cologne to Paris to Saigon,” which constitutes quite a story in its own right. But on pure artistic value, no result of the encounter between Éluard and Ernst has remained as fascinating as Les Malheurs des immortels, the book on which they collaborated in 1922.
“It appears that Ernst, still in Germany at that stage, created the images first: twenty-one collages composed of engravings cut out of nineteenth-century magazines and catalogues,” writes Daisy Sainsbury at The Public Domain Review. Unlike in the Dada works known at the time, “the artist is careful to disguise the images’ composite nature. He blends each section into a seamless, coherent whole.”
“Ernst and Éluard then worked together on twenty prose poems to accompany the illustrations, sending fragments of text to each other to revise or supplement.” The result, which predates by two years Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme, “represents a proto-Surrealist experiment par excellence.” In the text, phrases like “Le petit est malade, le petit va mourir” recall “children’s nursery rhymes, with a sing-song quality stripped of sense”; in the images, “a caged bird, an upturned crocodile, and a webbed foot transformed through collage into the ultimate symbol of human frivolity, a fan, evoke the classification systems of modern science (and religion before that) as well as their potential misuse in human hands.”
It’s worth putting all this in its historical context, a Europe after the First World War in which modern life no longer made quite as much sense as it once seemed. The often-inexplicable responses of cultural figures involved in movements like Surrealism — in their work or in their lives — were attempts at hitting the reset button, to use an anachronistic metaphor. Not that, a century later, humanity has made much progress in coming to grips with our place in a world of rapidly evolving technology and large-scale geopolitics. Or at least we might feel that way while reading Les Malheurs des immortels, available online at the Internet Archive and the University of Iowa’s digital Dada collection, and regarding these textual-visual constructions as deeply strange as anything designed by our artificial-intelligence engines today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Update: The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put online 492,000 high-resolution images of artistic works. Even better, the museum has placed the vast majority of these images into the public domain, meaning they can be downloaded directly from the museum’s website for non-commercial use. When you browse the Met collection and find an image that you fancy, just look at the lower left-hand side of the image. If you see an “OA” icon and the words “public domain” (as shown in the example below), you’re free to use the image, provided that you abide by the Met’s terms.
It takes a little patience. But once you start surfing through the Met’s digital collections, you can find and download images of some wonderful masterpieces. We’ve embedded a few of our favorite picks. At the top, you will find the 1874 painting “Boating,” by Édouard Manet. In the middle, Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait” from 1660. At the bottom, a 1907 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz called “The Steerage.” And that’s just starting to scratch the surface.
Happy rummaging. And, when you have some free time on your hands, you should also check out another open initiative from the Met. The museum has also put 500+ free art books online. You can learn about them here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014. We have updated it to reflect some of the changes made in the Met collection over the past decade.
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