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No Posts Next Week

 


I won't be saying anything new here next week. This will probably be the last you'll hear from me on 'Refreshed' until August 30.

So for my final pre-break post, allow me simply to say that I enjoyed the moment in the movie The Gambler (1974) when the late James Caan discusses Dostoyevsky with his students. 

Caan is a 'literature' instructor. His course work in vaguely defined, so he can discuss whatever books the screenwriters think suitable for that point in the plot of his extracurricular life.  The plot of this movie is very loosely drawn from the Dostoyevsky novel of the same name (where the protagonist is a private tutor). 

In the movie, Caan is discussing another work of Dostoyevsky's, Notes from the Underground, and especially the passage involving the truism that 2 + 2 = 4. The protagonist rails against conformity, and reason itself, and says that he will assert his right to count 2 and 2 together as 5.

It is absurd. Dostoyevsky, knows it, Caan's character knows it, and the students in class know it. The point though is that gambling addiction is a rebellion precisely against arithmetic. It is a rebellion against somewhat more complicated arithmetic than that -- against Pascal's triangle and the bell curve -- yet it is still a rebellion against arithmetic. And Caan's character is both teaching it and engaging in it. 

Hollywood usually botches references to great literature. In this case, the passage was handled quite thoughtfully.   

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  1. HenryAugust 18, 2022 at 6:53 AM

    Speaking of botching references to great literature, the title of Dostoevsky's novella is always translated as "Notes from Underground" or "Notes from the Underground." The protagonist, admittedly, is often referred to by commentators as the Underground Man.

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