BEFORE: I've reached another milestone, another century mark, in a 12-year quest (at least). But it hardly feels like a time for celebrating, with people sick and dying around the country and around the world. I guess there always are people sick and dying, but just not usually at this rate. So I'm far from feeling like bragging, not when I haven't really done much, just watched a ton of movies and wrote something about them, it's a scant accomplishment compared to what some other people do, people who put themselves at risk to work in hospitals, EMTs who take people to hospitals, and even people who deliver vital supplies and people who re-stock grocery shelves. I'm fooling myself if I start to think of myself as a hero just because I'm staying inside and not riding the subway to work, really I'm doing all that for my own survival, not contributing to the spread of the virus is really just an extra side benefit.
But the news keeps showing signs of inspiration and hope among the front-line workers and even those quarantined and self-isolated, people are finding new ways to connect with each other and stay informed, others are volunteering in ways they didn't before, and maybe some people are getting things done around their houses, or being able to spend more time with their family while their work is on pause. It's still a terrible, terrible time to be alive, and nothing can ever compensate for the loss of life and the levels of anxiety and fear that are off the charts right now, but maybe there are one or two silver linings in the dark cloud.
Someone pointed out online that with the schools closed, that means no school shootings, right? And that's something to think about. We've also heard in the news that after the Javits Center was converted to a hospital to treat trauma patients and accident victims during the pandemic, allowing other hospitals to focus on the virus, it was revealed that accidents and violent attacks are way down across the city, and that's amazing, right? It's logical with everyone sheltered at home that there would be fewer car accidents because nobody's going anywhere, and major violent crimes are likewise nearly non-existent. Even gang members and bank robbers seem to have put their work on pause, is that possible? It almost sounds positive in a weird way, but it's still a strange thing to celebrate, that everybody's too sick or afraid of getting sick to be out killing each other. I guess we'll know that things have returned to normal when the crime stats start going up again.
Then again, other people are warning about a spike in domestic violence or child abuse while everyone's sequestered at home. So what can you do, but try to fight against the darkness with each new day? I went to the grocery store yesterday, with facemask and rubber gloves on, and disinfected my groceries when I got home, that was basically my Sunday. That and TV and my daily movie.
Sean Penn carries over from "The Tree of Life".
THE PLOT: Professor James Murray begins compiling words for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in the mid 19th century, and receives over 10,000 entries from Dr. William Minor, a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum
AFTER: This is a true (mostly, I'm guessing) story about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, which wasn't the first dictionary, but some would say it was the first to get things right, o really properly trace the origin and certify the existence of each word. They began working on the first edition in 1870's, after a committee had spent 20 or so years exploring the mysteries of starting, and, this is true, getting distracted by other pursuits, like printing up a bunch of old Chaucer manuscripts that they found. The first editor, Herbert Coleridge, published the plan for the dictionary, compiled about 100,000 little slips with quotations on them to prove the existence of certain words, and then died a month after the first sample pages were printed, but considering what came after, his death from tuberculosis actually now seems like a brilliant career move.
The second editor, Frederick Furnivall, is the one who got distracted by those Chaucer manuscripts, so while he spent 21 years preparing to publish the dictionary, at the end of that time he realized that he hadn't actually done any cohesive work on it, he'd just wasted two decades preparing, then decided that he wasn't cut out for the job. The work of 800 or so volunteers, who'd been mining British novels for quotations with key words, was handed off to his successor.
And that's where this movie starts, with the hiring of the third OED editor (actually, at first it was called "A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society") named James Murray, in 1878. Murray built a "scriptorium" to house all the little slips of paper, and then decided to move forward with words beginning with "A", with a staff of three men, and they basically crowdsourced the rest of the work out to the British reading public, who were asked to find unusual or notable words in common English texts, like Shakespeare, the Bible and Milton's "Paradise Lost".
Around the same time, a certain William C. Minor, an American former Civil War surgeon, had arrive in the UK, seeking asylum. I think somebody must have misheard him, because instead the British government put him in an asylum, which is not really what he had in mind. JK. According to this film, he shot a man in the street because he mistook that man for Declan Reilly, a soldier who he had branded as such, and Minor believed Reilly was stalking him for revenge. (According to Wikipedia, though, Minor shot George Merrett because he mistakenly believed Merrett had broken in to his room.). Anyway, Minor was put on trial and sentenced to the Broadmoor Asylum in Crowthorne. Since he was not considered dangerous, he was allowed to keep his military pension and use it to purchase books to pass the time.
Maybe you can see where this is going - over here, there's an editor who needs people to read books and find certain words, and over there is a man with nothing but time on his hands. (It's very timely to watch this now, with everyone in the U.S. sequestered at home, looking for things to do - too bad we don't need another dictionary right now, but who knows what else will come from the pandemic? Probably just a ton of terrible screenplays...). Anyway, Minor contacted Murray because he'd managed to find an enormous amount of quotations for the words that were needed, and the OCD inmate got befriended by the OED editor. When the men finally met, they bonded over their shared love of words and classic literature. With Minor's contributions, the first fascicle (A-ANT) was published in February 1884, and by 1888 they'd finished up the words beginning with "B".
It's probably a convention of this movie that they set up some kind of relationship between Minor and the widow of the man he killed - Wikipedia mentions that she visited him, but there's nothing to suggest that it was romantic in any way, so I think probably the film took a few liberties here. In the film, Minor gives his military pension over to the Merrett family, in exchange for a few new books to read, and the chance to teach Mrs. Merrett how to read, but this is where things started to feel very far-fetched. Would you date the person who killed your spouse, even if that person was sorry? Oh, yeah, and by the way, the court ruled him insane.
But the casting's great here, Sean Penn got short shrift in "The Tree of Life", I think, but here he's got quite a lot to do as the insane William Minor. It's debatable whether he's insane at the start, or perhaps just a little, and then becomes more insane after spending time at the asylum. It turns out that the techniques they used in the 1800's to "cure" the mentally ill look a lot like what we call torture today, and to survive in a madhouse, you probably have to go a little mad. Or more mad.
Despite the success of the OED, because who back then didn't want to buy a dictionary that took 50 years to publish and an entire bookcase to store all the volumes in, it was a huge scandal when someone broke the news that one of the dictionary's most prolific contributors was an insane murderer. Murray nearly lost his position as the book's editor as a result, but (again, according to the film) Murray's wife made an impassioned plea to the publishers that allowed her husband to continue his work. This is also a little unbelievable, that a bunch of old white men in the 1890's would follow the advice of a woman. Nevertheless, Murray kept his position and while he didn't live to see the OED completed, he did get up to the letter "T", and that's saying something.
Minor, on the other hand, took a turn for the worse in 1902. He believed that people were entering the asylum at night, abducting him and forcing him to commit sexual assaults on children, so as a precaution, naturally he castrated himself. Murray campaigned for him to be released from the asylum because of the horrible conditions, and pled his case before the Home Secretary in 1910. Fortunately for Minor, the new Home Secretary, in charge of police and prison services, was a young Winston Churchill, who believed in prison reform. Churchill allowed for Minor to be deported back to the United States, which got him away from the torture, only he lost contact with his dictionary friends. He lived another 10 years at a hospital in Washington, DC - a city which often bears some resemblance to a mental hospital itself.
I found this film rather fascinating, of course it ticks off a number of boxes for me personally, and also is on topic with some recent events, especially concerning matters of isolation, boredom, and finding a project to occupy your time. Working on an enormous undertaking, such as a dictionary, is both a blessing and a curse - the good news is that you've got job security for the duration of the project, but the bad news is, you're going to be doing the exact same thing, day after day, for a few decades. Not everyone is cut out for that - but I think I would be. If there wasn't an IMDB right now then I'd be first in line to work on creating one, spending tedious hours and days working on cast lists and watching movies to improve the database sounds quite appealing to me, and I think that would be something like the modern equivalent of the OED.
The Oxford University Press finally finished the first edition of the OED in 1928, then published a supplement to cover the new words that had arisen in the last 50 years, then finally wrapped up production in 1933. But within the next 20 years, the first edition was hopelessly outdated. And so they began work on the second supplement, which took another 29 years, and in that time the supplement itself had grown to four volumes. Eventually they had to publish a complete second edition, starting in 1983 and finishing in 1989. That itself represents some form of progress, getting the work down to just 6 or 7 years. And the work on the new revised Third Edition is still ongoing, it began in 2000 and is on track to be completed in 2037. Talk about job security, right? You'd think that with computers they'd be able to work faster, but the third edition looks more labor-intensive than the second, and they may end up doubling the size of the OED once again before they're done.
This is why you hear odd news stories every year about words being added to the OED, it's work that will never be finished as long as people keep making up new words like "burkini". (Yes, this is a real word, a combination of "burqa" and "bikini" that was added in December 2018. It's a modest swimsuit for Muslim women that only exposes the face, hands and feet, and was banned by some French cities in 2016, sparking claims of Islamophobia.)
Also starring Mel Gibson (last seen in "Daddy's Home 2"), Eddie Marsan (last seen in "Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House"), Natalie Dormer (last seen in "W.E."), Jennifer Ehle (last seen in "Vox Lux"), Steve Coogan (last seen in "Happy Endings"), Stephen Dillane (last seen in "Mary Shelley"), Ioan Gruffudd (last seen in "Playing It Cool"), Jeremy Irvine (last seen in "Billionaire Boys Club"), Laurence Fox (also last seen in "W.E."), Anthony Andrews (last seen in "The King's Speech"), Lars Brygmann (last seen in "Smilla's Sense of Snow"), Bryan Murray, David O'Hara (last seen in "Tristan & Isolde"), Sean Duggan (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Olivia McKevitt, Robert McCormack, Aidan McArdle (last seen in "Ella Enchanted"), Shane Noone, Brendan Patricks, Philip O'Sullivan (last seen in "Albert Nobbs"), Bryan Quinn, Ruaidhri Conroy.
RATING: 6 out of 10 glaring omissions
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