MOVIE REVIEW: EXECUTIVE SUITE

I WATCHED AN OLD MOVIE CALLED Executive Suite the other night and went on a full-bore nostalgia trip. The story is about a group of executives as they duke-it-out for control of a large, American corporation, following the sudden death of the company’s CEO. Avery Bullard—there’s a man’s name for you!—dies of a heart attack while away on business in New York. His is a character whose face we don’t see on screen. The opening scene is viewed through his eyes--like a first-person shooter, minus the guns and body count--as he completes a meeting on Wall Street, buys a newspaper, and then collapses to the pavement, dead. We learn he was a larger-than-life character, a captain of industry, beloved by employees, respected by his competitors, admired by all. Under his leadership, he turned around the fortunes of the family-owned Tredway Corporation, making it into the third largest furniture manufacturer in the United States. He bestrode the earth with great strides, and all who followed him did prosper.

Yet, after years of struggle and growth, cracks are seen in the façade. All is not well at Tredway. Through dialogue between various characters we learn there are forces afoot that threaten to change the character and direction of the company, to make it into something that would have made Avery Bullard ashamed. And these forces were loosed, in no small part, by the great man himself, who in recent years had come to tack his boat more often in the winds of a changing corporate sea, whose airs filled the sails of the great man’s ship and took him further and further away from his former course. Nautical imagery aside, the story is about the scheming of several Tredway executives as each attempts to garner enough votes before the hastily called board meeting to be named president.

Based on a 1954 novel by the same name, the movie could easily have been staged as a play, because much of the action takes place in the executive offices on the top floor of the company headquarters. By the way, the emperor Nero would have been jealous of that pad! Talk about plush! It had heavy wood-paneled walls, marbled floors, fireplaces, a gothic-styled entrance way you could play basketball in and even a bell tower that chimed on the hour! And the bells are heard throughout the movie. In the opening scenes we hear them chiming. At first, it is a welcoming sound, a sound of gathering and community. After Bullard’s death they sound ominous, discordant and funereal. As the various  factions battle, the ringing becomes strident, oppressive, foretelling of doom. At one point, board member George Caswell—a low-life Wall Street wolf whose goal is to capitalize, through insider trading, on Bullard’s death—claps his hands to his ears as the bells sound out the hour. (They are the sound of Ballard's ghost angrily denouncing Caswell's duplicity.)  But our hero, Don Walling, scarcely notices them. For him, they are the sound of the beating heart of his company. They sound for workers and executives alike, for their community and their workday lives. They ring out for the dead, and they will announce the arrival of new king. (I want a bell tower, too, but my landlord won't go for it!)

William Holden as Don Walling

Walling is the executive in charge of production who seeks to innovate and invigorate the company, and he is seen as the man of the future, the type of CEO that should be in charge. His protagonist is the oily bean-counter, Loren Shaw. (“Shaw”—everybody calls him “Shaw.” They say his name like they had something stuck in their throat.) He is like a spider who waits in his lair to trap others in his web. Yet, he perspires heavily, and compulsively washes his hands--almost as often as Pontius Pilate washes his hands of the blood of Christ--suggesting Shaw may have a conscience, after all. Nevertheless, he carries on with his plotting, and his behind-the-scenes manipulations and back-stabbing would give Machiavelli a run for his money! Will this technocrat and nickel-and-dimer win out, or will the soul of the company be kept alive by Walling. Will quality and honest brokerage win the day, or will Shaw’s flow charts and profit-margin mentality change Tredway into a place where the bottom line is put on the top shelf? Will the company be a place where innovative, quality furniture is made or will it become another Ikea? (I know, I know! A lot of people love Ikea. But, seriously—why?)

So the gist of the story is whether you can stay true to yourself, keep your core values, and run a giant company ethically. By the movie’s end, Walling, played by the affable, yet steely-eyed, William Holden, wins the day and accepts the torch handed down by Bullard’s ghost. The bells ring out. (That Bullard must have had enormous brass clappers!) The King is dead. Long live the king! The End. Fade to black. It was David versus Goliath, George Bailey versus Mr. Potter, Gary Cooper at High Noon. You get the picture. And in glorious black and white! No wonder I had a nostalgia high zapping me harder than the sugar rush I get from a plateful of Grandma’s homemade fudge!

Fredric March as "Shaw"

Wow! How times have changed. And it’s too easy; it’s like shooting ducks—or executives—in a barrel! In the real world now, fast-forward twenty years and then another thirty and who's won the battle? Not Don Walling*. His factories are all closed. All his workers are laid off or moved, or dead. Company towns like Millburugh, with their once bustling factories and plants, are now ghost-towns and places that have seen their heydays pass them by long ago. Production has moved to China or Vietnam, or places where rainforests are razed to the ground to make shitty, mass-produced furniture for Walmart. It all went pear-shaped, and then the bottom fell out. And so the “Shaws” of the world have won, after all: Sales margins and stock options, market share and shareholder dividends are the new mantras. It's quantity versus quality; global versus community; profit versus pride. 

The Board Room

And for some reason, that really annoying song, “It’s a Small World” comes to mind. Wik says the tune is played as part of “a water-based dark ride located in the Fantasy Land area at the various Walt Disney Parks,” and that it is the most “publically played” song of all time. (Egad! If you hear the thing just once it sticks in your brain like a trough of cold treacle!) And the idea of being forced to take a “dark ride” through a “Fantasy Land” while listening to how small everything has become over and over, and bloody over again, somehow seems an appropriate rite of passage for our times. And if Don Walling was around (and not under an overpass drinking hooch) he might agree with me.

Thus, neoliberal economic policies and rampant capitalism over the past forty years have taken us all for a ride, gutting manufacturing infrastructure and turning former makers of things into consumers of things (all atop a mountain of debt that can never be repaid.) Where will it end, and when, are questions I’ll leave for another day.

Finally, in the movie's climactic scene, Don Walling makes an impassioned plea to the board of directors, sharing his vision for the company:

“The force behind a great company has to be more than the pride of one man; it has to be the pride of thousands. You can't make men work for money alone - you starve their souls when you try it, and you can starve a company to death the same way.”

Isn’t he just adorable?

Cheers

"...peg A2 into hole B3? WTF!?!"

*I was looking to see if there was any of the uber-mensch in Walling—this movie reminded about another movie based on a book by the same name, The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, and it's protagonist, the brilliant architect Howard Roark—but I found Holden’s character to have a greater need to promote the collective well-being of his society versus the glacial individualism of someone like Roark (or for that matter, the highly competent and gifted, yet self-serving and avaricious "Shaw".) However, there was matter of the ‘vestal virgin’ figure of Bullard’s secretary, Miss Martin, that reminded me about how high the glass ceiling was back then when there were so many Randian swinging dicks coming into their own.

  

Executive Suite, 1954, directed by Robert Wise. Staring William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March and Walter Pidgeon, Shelley Winters)

RANTS: ATOMIC PENCILS AND RADIOACTIVE STENCILS

I READ AN OLD SIFI STORY A WHILE AGO WHERE a character had a dream about the future and how his neighbourhood had changed. Now, it was prosperous, with happy people, small businesses, new store fronts and so on. There were bright neon signs and fixtures and streetlights in abundance. It also had your friendly, neighbourhood nuclear reactor to power all those shops and electric doo-dads. In his dream, the main character walks by the facility. It is glass-fronted and about the size of a small craft brewery, the kind where you can look in at all the vats with their yeasty suds ‘a brewing. He walks by the windows, looking at the turbines and steam pipes, and the nuclear core encased in cement and buried below street level. Just another evening's stroll through Atomic City. The point is—this was seen as a good thing; I didn’t read it as an ironic or foreshadowing moment in the story. Maybe I missed something; I hope I did. But it seemed like mini-nuke plants on every street corner was progress and a sign that prosperity was just a split atom away. It was uber-wonderful, though I’d definitely be wearing my lead shorts to take Fido out for his nightly stroll. Definitely.

How times have changed. The story was written in the mid-60s, when they were doing above-ground nuclear bomb tests and strontium 90 was being gently dusted into mother’s milk around the globe. But just a smidgen, so I guess that was okay. Actually, it wasn’t, and you would think the nuclear arm’s race and all the craziness happening back then (Cuban Missile Crisis, anyone?) would make such foolish dreams appear foolish. Back then, there was still hope for a safe, atomic world, with electric power so cheap that “it couldn’t be metered.” Yeah. That was just around the corner. Such imaginings were part and parcel with the unwavering and near-universal belief in the god of Progress and  of infinite growth on a finite planet. But life was good and drugs were cheap. [NOTE: It’s really a bit difficult to judge other people’s craziness and insane machinations, when you’re insane yourself. Today, lest we forget, the Doomsday Clock stands at two minutes to midnight! Synchronize your watches, folks! Ed.]

Turkey Point Station

That was a decade or so before the melt down at the Three Mile Island facility in New Jersey. Chernobyl and Fukushimi were on the horizon like petulant mushroom clouds. And yes, Virginia, dreams really do go up in smoke. Yes, they were times of prosperity, at least in the developed world, but a prosperity based mainly on cheap fossil fuels, with nuclear power tooling around town like the fancy, sports-car model of energy generation--all glitz and glamour, but at what cost?

Alfred E. Newman

Today, there is an aging nuclear reactor—twin reactors, actually—at Turkey Point, some twenty-five miles south of Miami on the Pacific coast of Florida, that's nearing, or past, its pull-by date. So...hmmm? An aging nuclear plant. Increased hurricane activity. Sea level rise. Miami predicted to be underwater by the end of the century; the Keys meanwhile going glub-glub. What could go wrong? There are many such turkeys around the globe, barely above sea level, and unless we round them up in some sort of sane fashion and reign in all those flying electrons, future generations, for centuries, millennia, to come, will curse our bones. 

I don’t know why I’m on about atomics today. I guess because, like the DDT-impregnated shelf paper that we lined our cottage pantries with in the 1950s, the metastasized suburbs, the twelve-lane superhighways we continue to bind Mam Gaia Kinbaku-like with--nuclear power and the Bomb and “battle-field nukes”, and all the rest, all of them, seem to be part of our subconscious Id, that giant, squalling pile of “I want”, without any adult checks and balances in the room. The Id just grows and grows until it’s ready to explode out of its shell, with the good chance it will die along with everyone else. And it’s not so much that we have mad scientists—we can’t single out physicists for blame—it’s like there's a general psychosis that’s gripping everyone. Or perhaps we're living in a dream and sleepwalking toward a cliff. We seem incredibly short-sighted; willfully so. We can barely think beyond one or two generations let alone seven, as some First Nations teachings would have us do when considering the consequences of our actions. 

Professor Morbius

But, as the late, great Alfred E. Newman always said, "What, me worry?"

Well, there are people starting to worry. And there are more and more of them, all the time. And that's good. So, I shouldn’t be so negative, by crumbies! Well, sorry. I ranted on a bit. It's time to hit the sack. I think I‘ll make  myself a glass of warm milk and turn up my atomic heater.

Cheers, Jake.

BOOK REPORT: LAST AND FIRST MEN BY OLAF STAPLEDON

THIS BOOK IS MORE LIKE AN EXPERIENCE THAN A STORY. Written in 1930, it is a science fiction novel with the ambitious goal of describing nearly two billion years of human evolution! The premise is of someone from the far future (a member the “Last Men”) gaining control of the mind of some unnamed person from our time (the time of the “First Men”) and directing that individual to compose the history of the human race that unfolds as we read it. Why the Last Men wish to do this is revealed in the final chapters, but it is Stapledon’s vision of humanity as it rises and falls, and as civilizations come and go through wars, environmental disasters, cosmic events, senescence, ennui and evolution that is enthralling. Of course, his great, long vision of the human project has few characters in it, the kind we might expect in a novel, other than a handful that are fleshed out as examples of the type of person inhabiting a brief moment within the author’s vast tableaux. There are no individuals here, just a great choir of humanity. His novel reads like a historian’s overview, which might be off-putting to some readers, but his rich language and detailed descriptions of the myriad epochs of humanity, including different types of humans--for the Last Men are, in fact, the eighteenth version of homo sapiens--is at times nothing less than masterful. It is written with a profound love and respect for who and what we are, and what we might become.

Olaf Stapledon

Stapledon combines science, art, music, sociology, psychology, philosophy and history to weave a tapestry of our human condition that is truly unique, and I can’t begin to do the book justice here. He writes with more than an element of prescience when he describes the rise and fall of the First Men after a world-wide industrial civilization, one he calls an “Americanized” world, whose final challenger to capitalism and business orthodoxy is China (which eventually accedes to the globalized, corporate agenda of an oligarchic "First World State"). 
It is interesting, and somewhat disconcerting, to have the end of this first iteration of humanity caused as the result of a new energy source that acts to “stimulate the ultimate positive and negative charges which constitute the atoms…to annihilate each other.” (26) Discovered in a period following our own, during a phase of European war, it was deemed too dangerous at the time, and its secret buried until it was discovered, in another part of the world, after several thousand years which saw the rise of another major civilization.  Of that original discovery, Stapledon's narrator ominously concludes: “Thus was this once noble people singled out by the gods to be cursed, and the minister of curses.” (32)

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was barely two decades old when Stapledon began writing Last and First Men. The great theorem transformed the science of physics and helped focus research into the mysteries of the atom. And that terrifying quest made its way into his book. As well, World War I was a raw, dreadful and still-lived experience for many in 1930, one that Stapledon was all too aware, for he had been a member of the ambulance service during the war and witnessed firsthand the results of industrial-scale warfare. The horrors of poison gas, whose effects on troops he would have seen during his time there, features prominently in the fall of the First World State, as does germ warfare. The re-discovery and use of atomic energy, millennia later, as another civilization flowers, would eventually cause a world-wide conflagration that destroys most life on earth, leaving only a handful of humans to survive through the “First Dark Age.” Following a ‘caretaker’ civilization that for millennia clings to the rim of the Siberian Peninsula and gradually re-populates the Eurasian plains, and after a “Second Dark Age” lasting millions of years, a new species of humanity develops, the “Second Men” (and my personal fav!) Then there are invading Martians and sixteen more versions of Homo Sapiens 2.0 until the time in the far future where the narrator, our mind-controlling historian and time-traveler, resides.

It’s quite a ride! Stapleton paints his canvas with broad brush strokes, but his book is also about ideas and philosophy, ethics and morality and religion. So many societies, cultures, civilizations rise and fall over the course of the novel that what you take away reading it is that there is great potential for humanity—if only we have the time to recognize and develop it!

Oswald Spengler’s seminal work, The Decline of the West, was published in 1922 and his theory on the cyclical nature of civilizations demonstrably shaped Stapledon’s thinking. But, as concerned as he is about the various civilizations and the shape and construction of their societies, Stapledon is equally concerned with the shape and substance of humanity—of our beliefs and ethics, our philosophies, our skills and accomplishments, our strengths and weaknesses, our nobility and our dark, baser selves. He is very concerned with sociability and altruism—themes that reoccur throughout his book. He looks to an evolution of spirit where love of others and of existence, itself, is primary. The Last Men are close to this sense of universal consciousness or of some communal awareness of the cosmos that is the culmination of the great struggle of human evolution, and that seems, in the end, to be what consciousness or the mind is struggling toward. Whether this is our goal or destiny, I don’t know. But Stapledon’s vision is truly breathtaking.

Where I would find fault is in his anthropocentrism. I think there is the strong sense throughout the book suggesting nature is something to be conquered and controlled—manipulated—by humanity, and much of the non-human world is given short shrift, I feel, though perhaps over the ensuing decades since his writing we have evolved somewhat in our thinking about our place in the natural world? I’d like to think so. And I am not blaming Stapledon for writing from his own time; his work has too much hope and wisdom in it to prompt significant criticism here.

I’ll end with one quote that among so many others epitomizes his sweeping prose:

“In tracing man’s final advance to full humanity we can observe only the broadest features of a whole astronomical era. But in fact it is an era crowded with many thousands of long-lived generations. Myriads of individuals, each one unique, live out their lives in rapt intercourse with one another, contribute their heart’s pulses to the universal music, and presently vanish, giving place to others. All this age-long sequence of private living, which is the actual tissue of humanity’s flesh, I cannot describe. I can only trace, as it were, the disembodied form of its growth.” (250-1)

The speaker, the Last Man, as he concludes his dictation to the First Man says, “It is very good to have been man.” (294) I hope that this will prove to be the case, someday.

Cheers.

"It was for the best, wasn't it?"

Stapledon, Olaf. Last and First Men. 1930. Orion Publishing Group. Gollancz. Great Britain. 2009