A NOTE ON EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBERTSON’S THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

The House On The Hill

Edwin Arlington Robinson

They are all gone away,

   The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray

   The winds blow bleak and shrill:

They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day

   To speak them good or ill:

There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray

   Around the sunken sill?

They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play

   For them is wasted skill:

There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay

   In the House on the Hill:

They are all gone away,

There is nothing more to say.

Hi Richard: 

I liked speaking (too briefly) with you about Robinson’s poem. But I left feeling unsatisfied about what it means even as I think I understood us saying that its meaning might be either a certain kind of worked through acceptance or mere rumination, ie obsessive repetition. So (given my own obsessiveness 😊)I looked at the poem more closely, more leisurely and gave it some thought, as I sometimes do with poems we’ve read. 

I think the final repetition of “They are all gone away” is said differently from how it’s said earlier. At first it seems declarative. We’re told of the fact of absence. 

But comes the question: “Why is it then we stray / Around the sunken sill?”, which suggests knowing the fact isn’t enough. We know they’re gone, but we keep returning to where they were. The fifth stanza then makes it plain that imaginative efforts are futile in coming to terms with this loss: “our poor fancy-play / For them is wasted skill.”

At poem’s end , therefore, has the speaker not gotten a certain kind of acceptance? The last “There is ruin and decay” is  stated after the speaker has worked through the impossibility of accommodating in any way ruin and decay. And so when “There is nothing more to say” finally comes, it means more than literally “I have nothing else to say”. It means there is nothing that can be said, that can alter the fundamental fact of the loss, neither language nor imagination.

There’s no consoling substitute, no transcendence, reunion, religious assurance, or claim that the dead somehow live on. Acceptance here means accepting the impossibility of any consolation or comfort. The house remains ruined; the people remain gone; and the only response finally is literal and notional silence, poem’s end.

I see the poem’s movement as not simply from the fact of loss as ruin and decay to bleak acceptance. It’s more a repeated attempt to come terms with loss. The speaker in effect asks: “I know they’re gone; why, then, do I keep returning to them?” The answer finally emerges in “our poor fancy-play,” the recognition that efforts somehow to accommodate ruin and decay are useless.

So the six-times repeated refrain is like a thought being worked through. Doesn’t each “There is nothing more to say” have a slightly different quality as the speaker struggles with what it all means? At first it’s assertion; then it’s perplexity; then admonition to stop imagining; and finally, after “ruin and decay” have been squarely faced, it’s acceptance of the irredeemability of loss.

My view is that the repetition of “There is nothing more to say” isn’t opposed to the speaker’s thinking; it’s how it’s conducted. The speaker keeps circling the house until fully confronting that there’s nothing there. Isn’t there too much amplitude in this struggle to deal with, think through, loss to obviate it as mere rumination? For example and as noted:

Why is it then we stray

   Around the sunken sill?

They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play

   For them is wasted skill:

There is nothing more to say.

The final “There is nothing more to say” is now the conclusion the speaker has finally come to terms with.

Cheers (I guess 😊)

Itzik

INITIAL THOUGHTS ON NOLAN’S 2026/THE ODYSSEY

 The Odyssey, 2026

Initial few thoughts on seeing/in parts sitting through The Odyssey on a Cineplex, ie a smaller, screen.  

First thought is that I have mixed feelings that I’ve been thinking about. But not so mixed they end up in irresolution.

All the effects, the filmmaking that runs from spectacular to spectacle, are on balance a plus. So is the undauntedness in Nolan to take on such a mega project (and to a majority of opinions he succeeds.) 

Then I think of different meals that I’ve had. And the few that stand out were meals at the right time, right place and the right people I ate with all coming together. The food was *almost* an afterthought. Not really though. The food was fine if unmemorable. Memorable was the above three coming together. 

Which is to say by strained analogy, I typically am relatively impervious to special effects especially when the content isn’t much. But then again, back to the strained analogy, I’ve had a few meals where the food was so good that it in itself remains memorable, when the other three were fine but nothing special.

So in The Odyssey the effects ranging as I say from spectacular to spectacle are awesome and, so, in that way memorable but with a caveat. The effects are so abiding, so relentless, so loud, so crashing down on me, that they start to exist for their own sake. 

And so they, to the ears and eyes of my mind, do so at the expense of the clarity and audibility of the dialogue. I often strained to hear what was said and at times couldn’t make out chunks of it. 

I’ve read that this is part of Nolan’s approach: he wants the audience so immersed in the movie’s visceral experience that not making out every word is inconsequential. If so, then that’s for me a problem because for one thing, it loses the balance between speech and action, and for another, losing speech is losing substance.  

Speech in Homer illuminates character, events, the reasons for action, internal dilemmas, relations between and among characters, and choices, moral and otherwise. So then obscuring speech  doesn’t merely inconvenience us, it lessens what distinguishes The Odyssey from a series of spectacles.

And I come to a few more minuses. I’m unpersuaded that the movie suffers from bowing to woke. And to a point I’m unpersuaded that movie suffers from its infidelity to the poem. But going back to some meals, they seem delicious when eaten but then not long after I can barely remember what I ate. It was just another meal out. 

The Odyssey isn’t exactly like such a meal, the effects are too memorable, even if to a fault. But what after them is the movie’s emotional and intellectual resonance?

Matt Damon, handsome, sturdy and certainly manly looking, isn’t essentially swashbuckling, leaderly, vital, cunning, magnetic. charismatic or anything like that. He is quiet in his leadership, world weary, with no real cinematic pop to him. And in that he betrays the Odysseus of the epic, majestic, militantly soldierly, hungry for glory, savage, cunning, sexy, and manly in the sense of charging in amid understood risks. 

I can see an argument that how I’ve negatively described him is how the Trojan war has left him. But surely we ought to get at least a peek at him as he was formerly, larger than life, so as to give meaning to what he has become. But we don’t get that. We never get that. 

We essentially see a pretty limp and passive Odysseus whose objective correlative is the pittance of the raft he finally, straining credibility, floats away on back to Ithaca. It reminded me of a surfer rafting out on his board to catch a big one wonderfully to surf back in on. But our depleted surfer just keeps going. 

So when does his great soldiery come so we see it? When? Well, it arrives in the movie’s biggest unintended cartoon-like, unintended caricature-like scene. He, with some fraught help from Telemachus, slays the suitors. The movie is suddenly like a ludicrous action flick where one guy can take on and take out a seemingly endless horde of rushing oncomers.

What contributes to it being like a cartoon is that we’re asked to believe not that a hero can’t perform heroic feats—the very stuff of epic—but that Damon’s mere life-sized, subdued, diminished Odysseus suddenly becomes an unstoppable action hero. The problem is improbability bred in part by discontinuity in character

In fact as I joked to friends, but it’s true, that scene generated an ear worm in my head, traces of which days after still linger:

“Oh-ho-ho-ho

Oh-ho-ho-ho

Oh-ho-ho-ho

Oh-ho-ho-ho

Everybody was Kung Fu fighting

Those cats were fast as lightning

In fact, it was a little bit frightening

But they fought with expert timing.”

I get the argument that it’s foolish to complain about, say, the casting when so much of the poem and this movie is magic, myth, monsters, unnatural catastrophes and Gods and Goddesses. 

But isn’t a flaw in this argument that when it comes to earth bound matters like Helen, or Sinon, or men fighting men, ought we not get at least some reasonable verisimilitude, especially in the slaying of the suitors, which is such an important scene in the movie?

Instead, we go from world-weary hero to humble beggar to John Wick. And the way a bad end to a holiday tends to cast its shadow retrospectively, so does this action sequence. 

Which brings me to my last minus for now. What am I left with at the end of the three hours besides relief that the movie’s over? Am I enthralled, left in wondrous contemplation, exhilarated by what I’ve seen? Do I feel like I’ve been engaged by a compelling movie? 

Not I. 

The two biggest things on my mind on leaving the theatre were: guilt over eating that damn big tub of buttered popcorn; and the ear worm, which I hummed to myself as I went to my car.

It’s of course fine to adapt, modernize, even experiment with classics, all up to a point. For me that point is when the original is so departed from, that its reworking becomes entirely detached from its source. I’m unsure if Nolan’s movie  crosses that line. I can see it argued both ways.  

I wouldn’t want to see something called Romeo and Juliet—I love West Side Story by the way—wherein the kids are both gay, their families hate each other and they tragically die trying to help each other fulfill their sexuality. I wouldn’t want to see something called King Lear, where Lear stomps through the whole play as a kind of Tennessee Williams’ Big Daddy all in the interest of attacking the patriarchy. 

Understanding the poem most generally and most broadly, it’s about a heroic, cunning, ferocious, soldier and king of a man on a long, long, long, 10 years long, perilous, travail-filled and temptation-filled journey to find his way home, home being his literal home and a metaphor for finding himself, coming back to himself. 

In the poem Odysseus slays the suitors, has Penelope’s heart; Athena and Zeus cool out the armed families of the slain; Odysseus resumes his crown and rules over a now peaceful Ithaca. What’s past is past, Troy no less than anything else. Nolanesque utter remorse and utter self flagellation in Homer’s Odysseus? There are none. 

In the movie,  Odysseus (disguised as a beggar) strings his bow, reveals himself, and as noted—as aided by Telemachus—slaughters the suitors in a ferocious fight that leaves him near to mortally wounded. But instead of reclaiming the throne, he abdicates it with Telemachus become King. Odysseus after his expression of guilt, shame and remorse:

“What if the Odysseus you knew lost his way? What if...one night, in a strange city, he saw things that made him think the home he knew couldn't possibly be there anymore. What if…when he left the belly of the horse, and opened the gates of Troy, he saw ten years of rage pour into that city in one night?

We left them a gift, an offering of peace, that they took into their home. We violated all that's ever sacred between people. It turned a fight into a hunt.

To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world-entire. Including his home.

What if he knew, that very night, as he walked through fires, anarchy, and pain—and in a daze of sweaty celebrations that follow—what if he knew exactly what he'd done?

[Penelope: What all of you had done?]

One man's idea. One man's trick to break Zeus's law forever. We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it.

[Penelope: You are the people from the sea.]

Yes, my queen. The breaking of Zeus's law, spreading like plague. Our age of bronze is collapsing, and maybe he couldn't bear to see the ruins of what he'd done. Anywhere. Least of all, his home.”

sails into self-imposed exile with Penelope. He seeks atonement for the horrors of Troy and the men he lost. And so as is disturbingly clear, this ending is not Homer’s poem. It is Nolan’s something else.

Maybe a larger than life, heroically compelling  Odysseus—not the quiet, sometimes passive, world weary Matt Damon one who suddenly transforms himself into John Wick—might have pulled this ending off. But as it is, it is of a piece with an Odysseus who is basically the same size as life.

For me, just as final slaughter is an action cartoon, so going the other extreme way all of Odysseus’ self flagellation is consistent with his just noted relative under-sizedness (as against the poem’s heroic figure). His final sailing away with Penelope stirred in me very little in the way of emotion or  thought.

To end with my meal analogy, all in all, emotionally and intellectually, the movie was like a meal that is delicious in some ways, with some spectacular, flaming table side preparation, but then over as next to nothing, with most of my thoughts on other things. Similarly, for all that is in The Odyssey that is impressive, what does it come to in the end for me? It’s some amazing not-to-be-forgotten spectacle and, truth to tell, not much else that’s  impressively memorable.

AI AND ME ON MURDER BY PROXY AS FILM NOIR AND WHETHER FILM NOIR IS A GENRE OR A SYYLE

me: An example is the UK 1954 Murder By Proxy., which is conventionally called a film noir and has some noir features, night club setting, a seeming femme fatale, a down and out ordinary guy who gets taken in by and manipulated by her to work through a seamy murder, But he’s committed no crime. He’s manipulated into being a Pi solving a murder and exposing real evil. And the femme fatale, though at times alluring, tough and manipulative is mostly a frightened, put upon runaway. away. In the end the murder is solved; the man who the woman manipulated into marriage falls reciprocally in love with her and they “live happily ever after”. It’s almost as is the director is tantalizing us with the appearance of film noir only to subvert it. 

AI: I think that is an excellent example, and in some ways more persuasive than your deliberately exaggerated “conversion and salvation” case because it shows how subtle the boundary problem really is.

Murder by Proxy (also released in the U.S. as Blackout) seems, from what you describe, to borrow heavily from the iconography and narrative setup of Film Noir while quietly withdrawing from noir’s deeper commitments. The audience is invited into familiar noir expectations: an ordinary, vulnerable man adrift in life; a mysterious and sexually charged woman; a seedy urban underworld; deception; apparent criminal complicity; a surrounding atmosphere of danger and corruption. Classical noir teaches us how to read those signs. We assume the protagonist is being drawn toward destruction and that the woman is either predatory or fundamentally untrustworthy.

But what is fascinating in the example you give is that the film apparently reverses the moral logic embedded in those conventions. The protagonist is not morally compromised but essentially decent. He is not descending into criminality but, unknowingly, performing detective work. The woman is not a true femme fatale weaponizing sexuality for selfish ends but a frightened and vulnerable person acting under duress. The apparent labyrinth of betrayal turns out not to be a universe structured by corruption and doom but simply a mystery awaiting moral clarification. The ending — justice restored, reciprocal love established, future happiness possible — fundamentally rejects noir fatalism.

That is why your phrase “tantalizing us with the appearance of film noir only to subvert it” strikes me as exactly right. It suggests something important about artistic classification generally: genres are not merely bundles of conventions but systems of expectation. A work can borrow the external conventions of a genre while strategically frustrating the expectations those conventions create.

One might say Murder by Proxy is syntactically noir but semantically not noir. Its vocabulary is noir — nightclubs, danger, sexual ambiguity, crime, urban seediness — but its meaning is closer to a romantic thriller or suspense mystery. (I borrow syntax and semantics there partly because your earlier discussion of Bostock v. Clayton County and pragmatic meaning showed you are already thinking in exactly these structural terms.)

This points toward a broader principle in aesthetics: style provides signals, but genre involves fulfilled expectations. If a western ends by denying frontier conflict, if a tragedy ends in genuine flourishing, or if a noir ends by affirming trust, love, justice, and moral intelligibility, then the work may be using the language of the genre while speaking a different philosophical language underneath.

Your examples persuade me that calling noir simply a style is inadequate. Better to say: film noir is a stylistic vocabulary joined to a characteristic moral and existential vision — and when that vision disappears, what remains is noir-like, not noir proper.