A Note On Whether Liberty In The 14th And 5th Amendments Entails Privacy

Justice Douglas in Griswold said that a zone privacy is a “penumbra” from emanations from certain guaranteed rights in the Bill of Rights. 

This has always seemed backwards to me.

I’d say rather that a zone of privacy is logically entailed by “liberty” in the 14th Amendment and in the 5th Amendment.  

If so, then it’s a core idea not a penumbral one. 

I’d argue that this idea is at the foundation of Justice Kennedy saying, perhaps floridly, in Casey, 

“These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Belief about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under the compulsion of the state." 

How can any notion of human liberty not entail, albeit within limits, an idea of privacy.

And how can any notion of privacy privacy not entail, albeit within limits,  the idea of freedom to do with one’s body what one wishes? 

Short Exchange On The Film Phantom Thread Directed By Paul Thomas Anderson

 L:

Saw Gangs Of New York too long ago, and I'm not even sure I watched it all the way through (I'm bad that way). But, yeah, I think Scorsese's a tad overrated generally, though he's good with set pieces. And what's with the gangster obsession?

Day-Lewis, on the other hand, is a brilliant, riveting actor in anything. He alone makes the quirky movie "Phantom Thread" work (strongly assisted though by the two women), with its oddly comic ending. It's on Netflix.

Me:

I just watched Phantom Thread. Quirky is for mild. I liked it a lot. It moves slowly but is never boring or tiresome. And, as you say, DDL is hot stuff here as an actor. What a difference between him as Woodcock and as Bill the Butcher! 

I’m not entirely clear why it’s called Phantom Thread. My best guess is that it has some connection to his mother as a key to him that then invisibly stitches him and Alma together, allowing her to manipulate him into needing her. When he talks to no one in his room, saying, paraphrase, “I need you. I want you always with me,” I take it he’s referring to his mother and it’s that that Alma is able intuitively to exploit in getting him, reducing him and keeping him bound to her. 

I’m not sure I’m seeing the ending as comic. She seems to have triumphed, at least for the moment, and he seems to accept that dynamic. I sense he knows when eating the poisoned mushroom omelette so deliberately and slowly, it dripping with butter, which he so detests,  that the omelette is actually tainted. 

We’re at the very end left with her fantasy of what life will be like with him, happy, loving, with a child, profitable and altogether fulfilling, while they’re actually smack in the midst of the perversity of their relationship. 

A Few Thoughts On Martin Scorsese’s 2002 Film Gangs Of New York.

I was unimpressed with it when it came out about just under 20 years ago. And I just happened to watch it again, in part to see what, if anything, I’d missed.

Here are my truncated impressions 

Scorsese’s film was about 24 years in the making and as spectacle it’s impressive. But, with all the scenes of brawling violence, and with all the impressive pageantry, the underlying story is thin even as the movie’s aim is for something larger than life, epical, mythic, as if suffused with some kind of archetypal, primitive evil truth. Instead we get something static and verging on the absurd. What’s meant to be vividly larger than life turns grey in its diffuseness. 

The aim goes awry, and the film sinks, then drowns in its ocean of spectacle. The thin story is met with portentous, bombast, especially from Day-Lewis. He does admittedly make for an eyes-bright, compelling, charismatic villain who alone transcends the weight of the spectacle. But there’s no one else to match him. DiCaprio should have, but is miscast as he fails, flails in his attempt at portraying youthful, righteous, even attractive, rage and ferocity, slyly biding his time for vengeance. He’s not convincing in his role and in acting and as a character is feasted upon by Day-Lewis. Cameron Diaz is even less effective and her growing relationship with DiCaprio is as lifeless as a dead rabbit. At least Jim Broadbent as the politically manipulative Boss Tweed is lively and convincing in his role. 

The final scene of Bill and Amsterdam finding each other amidst all the smoke filled murderous chaos is incredibly contrived as is Amsterdam and Jenny finding each other at the end and standing together, athwart all the chaotic, death filled, stinking  destruction. Them together surviving together in their love, their future open to them, form an homage to one of the hoariest romantic cliches.  

The films shows Scorsese at both his biggest and soggiest. The film isn’t boring but the ongoing spectacle makes it choppy, inorganic and static as though we’re watching a series of set pieces. The martial scenes at first impression are stunning but then in their continuing hacking, slashing, stabbing and blood letting  benumb us in the thick of all the endless chaos. They becomes dramatically pointless. And isn’t it contrived that the opening chaotic battle naturally comes down to a head to head to battle between Priest and Bill the Butcher? 

That’s, like so much else in this movie, device not drama. 

6/10