Indignation: anger or annoyance provoked by what is perceived as unfair treatment.
And it comes in all shapes and sizes, doesn’t it? And one of the most common is the indignation that one feels when judged solely by the prejudices swirling about inside small minds that ever and always view the world around us in a sludge of stereotypes. Received ideas that are almost always dumped into their heads by others.
For example: The Jew.
Or The Atheist.
And here the Jew [who is also an atheist] has received a scholarship to attend a college out in the Midwest. And it is 1951.
And then there’s the part about “coming of age”. The part where the world that many “young people” have constructed “in their head” never seems to be in sync with the way the world actually is. Also, as one reviewer noted…“[i]t’s about what happens when a young person realizes that the world doesn’t necessarily always work the way he wants it to and being unable to cope with that reality.”
Basically we come to understand that [here] indignation is a two way street. There’s the indignation that others bring to us and the indignation that we bring to others.
The film is said to be a “fictionalized” account of Philip Roth’s own 1950s college experience. So, if nothing else, it is going to provoke some serious thinking about what is unfolding on the screen.
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indignation_(film
trailer: youtu.be/ELKsrUssyQE
INDIGNATION [2016]
Written and directed by James Schamus [based on a novel of the same name by Philip Roth]
[b]Marcus [voiceover]: It is important to understand about dying that even though in general you do not have a personal choice in the matter, it is going to happen to you when it happens to you. There are reasons you die. There are causes, a chain of events linked by causality, and those events include decisions that you have personally made. How did you end up here, on this exact day, at this exact time, with this specific event happening to you?
…
Ron: Bert. Close the door at least.
Bert [ to Marcus]: Ronald doesn’t like Negro Communists. Paul Robeson in particular. He doesn’t like music at all, in fact.
Ron: If Dean Caudwell ever heard you playing that commie propaganda, he’d probably toss you right out of here.
…
Marcus: Uh… chapel?
Ron: Didn’t you read the handbook? Required. Every Wednesday at 11. You have to go to at least 10 of them a year if you want to graduate.
…
Sonny: You know that out of 1,400 people on campus, less than 80 are Jewish? That’s a pretty small percentage.
Marty: The only other fraternity that’ll have a Jew is the non-sectarian house, and they don’t have much going for them in the way of facilities or really anything.
…
Professor: The Puritans faced a particular challenge as, by the 1660s, the first generation began to die out. So in 1662 the Reverend Solomon Stoddard devised the so-called Half-Way Covenant, whereby members of the community could be half-members of the church if they agreed to abide by its rules, even if in their hearts they could not profess a complete Puritanconversion.
Student: So, “go along to get along.”
Professor: That’s right. By allowing people to stay part of the church, and by extension, the community, the Puritan leaders were able to maintain authority and political continuity.
Marcus: Isn’t that the same kind of hypocrisy the Puritans claimed to rebel against? Aren’t they doing the exact same thing they accused the Church of England of?
Professor: Well, Mr. Messner, hypocrisy is a very strong word.
Marcus: It is a strong word, but as ironic as it appears, I believe it is a word that accurately describes the political position of the Puritans of the second generation.
Professor: Pragmatism might be an even more accurate term.
…
Marcus [voiceover]: What is it that pivots or turns a person from existence to non-existence? For myself, perhaps it was the unceasing movement of Olivia Hutton’s leg.
…
Marcus [voiceover while Oliva fellates him]: What happened next I puzzeled over for weeks afterwards. Trying to reconstruct the morals that reigned over Winesburg College. And I wonder how my own sorry efforts to overcome those morals may have fostered so much misunderstanding, even grief. Even now I continie to puzzle over Olivia’s actions…I told myself “it’s because her parents are divorced.” I could think of no other explanation for a mystery so profound. Because in Newark it was inconceivabnle that girls like Olivia Hutton could do such a thing…but then again there were no girls like Olivia Hutton in Newark.
…
Marcus [to his roommate]: She blew me. I didn’t even ask her for it. She just did it.
…
Marcus [in a letter]]: “Olivia, You think I’ve spurned you because of what happened in the car the other night. As I explained, it’s because nothing approaching that has ever happened to me before. Just as no girl has ever said to me anything resembling what you said to me in the library tonight. You are different from anyone I’ve known, and the last thing you could ever be called is a slut. You’re mature. You’re beautiful. You are vastly more experienced than I am. That’s what threw me. Forgive me.”
…
Olivia [in a letter]: “Dear Marcus, I can’t see you. You’ll only run away from me again…this time when you see the scar across the width of my wrist. Had you seen it the night of our date, I would have honestly explained it to you. I was prepared to do that. I didn’t try to cover it up but as it happend you failed to notice it. It’s a scar from a razor. I tried to kill myself. That’s why I went for three months to the clinic. It it was the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. The Menninger Sanitarium and Psychopathic Hospital. There’s the full name for you. I used the razor when I was drunk. If I had been sober I would have succeeded. So three cheers for ten rye and gingers…they’re why I’m alive today. That, and my incapacity to carry anything out. Even suicide is beyond me. I don’t regret doing what we did, but we mustn’t do anything more. Forget about me, Marcus. There’s no one around here like you. You are not a simple soul and have no business being here. If you survive the squareness of this place, you’ll have a sterling future. Why did you come to Winesburg to begin with? I came because it’s so square. That’s supposed to make me a normal girl. But you? You should be studying philosophy at the Sorbonne and living in a garret in Montparnasse. We both should. Farewell, beauticious man. Olivia.”
…
Olivia: You weren’t in Chapel yesterday.
Marcus: I just needed a break. I don’t know how much more of Dr. Donehower going on about “Christ’s example” I can take.
Olivia: Maybe you could get some kind of waiver for conscientious objection.
Marcus: Why is that? Because I’m Jewish? I don’t object because I’m Jewish, I object I’m an atheist.
Olivia: I know.
…
Dean: I’d be curious to know why you didn’t write down 'kosher, ’ Marcus.
Marcus: Sir, if you are asking me if I was trying to hide the religion into which I was born, the answer is no.
Dean: Well, I certainly hope that’s so. I’m glad to hear that. Everyone has a right to openly practice his own faith, and that holds true at Winesburg just as it does everywhere else in this country. On the other hand, under ‘religious preference’ I see you didn’t write 'Jewish, ’ though you are of Jewish extraction and, in accordance with the college’s attempt to assist students in residing with others of the same faith, you were assigned Jewish roommates.
Marcus: I didn’t write anything under religious preference, sir.
Dean: I can see that. I’m wondering why that is.
Marcus: It’s because I have none. I don’t prefer to practice one religion over another.
Dean: What then provides you with spiritual sustenance? To whom do you pray when you need solace?
Marcus: I don’t need solace, sir. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in prayer. I am sustained by what is real. Praying, to me, is preposterous.
Dean: Is it now? And yet so many millions do it.
Marcus: Millions once thought the earth was flat, sir.
Dean: Yes, that’s true. But may I ask you, Marcus, merely out of curiosity, how do you get by in life… filled as life is inevitably with trials and tribulations lacking spiritual guidance?
Marcus: I get straight A’s, sir.
Dean: I didn’t ask about your grades. I know your grades. You have every right to be proud of them, as I’ve already told you.
Marcus: Well, then you know the answer to your question of how I get by just fine.
…
Marcus: Sir! I object to being interrogated like this! I do not see the purpose of it. These are my own private affairs, as is my religious life and my social life and how I conduct it. I have broken no laws, I’vecaused no one injury or harm, and in no way have my actions impinged on anyone’s rights. If anyone’s rights have been impinged on they are mine.
Dean: Sit down please, and explain yourself.
Marcus: I also object to having to attend chapel forty times before I graduate in order to earn a degree. I do not see where the college has the right to force me to listen to a clergyman of whatever faith, even once, or listen to a Christian hymn invoking the Christian deity, given that I am an atheist who is, to be truthful, deeply offended by the practices of organized religion. I am altogether capable of leading a moral existence without crediting beliefs that are impossible to substantiate and beyond credulity. I take it you are familiar, Dean Caudwell, with the writingsof Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell, the distinguished mathematician and philosopher, was last year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The work of literature in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize is his widely read essay entitled “Why I Am Not a Christian.” Are you familiar with this essay, sir?
Dean: Marcus, please sit down…
Marcus: Sir, I was asking if you are familiar with this very important essay by Bertrand Russell. I take it that the answer is no. Well, I am very familiar with this essay because I set myself the task of memorizing large sections of it when I was captain of my high school debating team. Now, if you were to read this essay, and in the interest of open-mindedness I would urge you to do so, you would see that Bertrand Russell, undoes with logic that is beyond dispute the first-cause argument, the natural-law argument, the argument from design, the moral arguments for a deity, and the argument for the remedying of injustice. Having studied these arguments, I intend to live my life in accordance with them, as I am sure you would have to admit, sir, I have every right to do.
…
Dean: I admire your directness, your diction, your sentence structure, even if I don’t necessarily choose to admire whom or what you choose to read and the gullibility with which you take at face value rationalist blasphemies spouted by an immoralist of the ilk of Bertrand Russell, four times married, a blatant adulterer, an advocate of free love, a self-confessed socialist dismissed from his university position and imprisoned during the First War by the British for what in plain English I would call treason…To find that Bertrand Russell is a hero of yours comes as no great surprise. There are always one or two intellectually precocious students on every campus, self-appointed members of an elite intelligentsia who need to elevate themselves and feel superior to their fellow students, superior even to their professors. Nonetheless, that is not what we are here to discuss. What worries me rather is your isolation. What worries me is your outspoken rejection of long-standing Winesburg tradition, as witness your response to Chapel attendance, A simple undergraduate requirement which amounts to, on average, little more than a few minutes per week of your years here.
…
Marcus: I cannot bear being lectured like this. I am not a malcontent. I am not a rebel. I have the right to socialize or not socialize with whomever I see fit. Furthermore, your argument against Bertrand Russell is not an argument against his ideas based on reason
but an argument against his character, i.e., an ad hominem attack, which is logically worthless. Sir, I respectfully ask your permission to stand up and leave now because I am afraid if I don’t I am going to be sick.
Dean: Of course you may leave. I just ask that you reflect on why leaving appears to be the only way you are dealing with your problems here.
…
Marcus: I don’t understand how you can be so…
Olivia: So what?
Marcus: Under control. So expert.
Olivia: Oh, yes, Olivia the expert. That’s what they called me at the Menninger Clinic.
Marcus: But you are.
Olivia: You really think so, do you? I, who have eight thousand moods a minute, whose every emotion is a tornado, who can be thrown by a word, by a syllable, am ‘under control’? You are blind.
…
Marcus: It sounds like you have a very democratic household. That’s very American.
Olivia: Yes we are - American. Though as a student of American civilization, Marcus, you must remember how Benjamin Franklin once defined democracy? Democracy, he said, is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
…
Mother: I never asked anything of you before. I never asked because I never had to. Because you are perfect where sons are concerned. All you’ve ever wanted to be is a boy who does well. You have been the best son a mother could have. But I am going to ask you to have nothing more to do with Miss Hutton. Because for you to be with her is unimaginable for me.
Marcus: Ma…
Mother: Markie, you are here to be a student and to study the Supreme Court and to prepare to go to law school. You are here so someday you will become a person in the community that other people look up to and that they come to for help. You are here so you don’t have to be a Messner and work in a butcher shop for the rest of your life. You are not here to look for trouble with a girl who has taken a razor and slit her wrists.
Marcus: Wrist. She slit one wrist.
Mother: One is enough. We have only two, and one is too much.
…
Marcus: Dean Caudwell, this is very hard for me to talk about. But I do think that whatever happened in the privacy of my hospital room was strictly between Olivia and myself.
Dean: Perhaps and perhaps not. Especially in light of the circumstances.
Marcus: Why?
Dean: Olivia Hutton had a nervous breakdown, Marcus. She had to be taken away in an ambulance.
Marcus: I really don’t know what goes into a nervous breakdown.
Dean: You lose control over yourself and your emotions, like an infant. You have to be hospitalized and cared for like an infant until you recover, if you ever do recover.
…
Marcus: She is where?
Dean: At a hospital specializing in psychiatric care.
Marcus: She can’t possibly be pregnant, too.
Dean: Time will tell.
Marcus: It’s not me.
Dean: What was reported to us about your conduct at the hospital
suggests it could be, Marcus.
Marcus: I don’t care what it suggests. Dean Caudwell, I will not be condemned on the basis of no evidence. Sir, I resent once again your portrayal of me. I did not have sexual intercourse with Olivia Hutton. have never had sexual intercourse with anyone. Nobody in this world could possibly be pregnant because of me. It is impossible!
Dean: Marcus, it is possible…
Marcus: Oh, fuck you it is!
…
Marcus [voiceover]: I wonder if everyone, after they die, remembers all the little details and decisions they made, all the reasons they ended up ending the exact way they did. That’s how I am…I remember, and replay those things, even if I can’t remember how long I’ve been remembering…maybe it’s been forever. And I speak to everyone…Ma, Pa, Olivia, everyone, even if they’ve been dead already a million years, but I keep speaking to them. Forever…
…
Marcus [voiceover after he has been kicked out of school, lost his draft deferment and has just been pierced by a bayonet as a soldier in Korea]: Can you hear me, Olivia? Can you hear me when I tell you that it’s okay, whatever it is, that it’s okay? Because someone did love you. At least I think that’s what it was. And you should know that. You should know, Olivia. You should know.[/b]