Word: stanleys
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Recluses come in two varieties: those who live in 8-ft. by 10-ft. shacks in Montana and those for whom top Hollywood talent begs to work--for scale. The latter category includes directors Stanley Kubrick, who kept Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman on a movie set for almost two years, and TERRENCE MALICK, the anti-social filmmaker who hasn't directed a movie or agreed to be photographed (until now) in 20 years. Malick has made only two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, but his reputation has grown in inverse proportion to his output, enabling him to draw...
...bosses have often been unbearable and will continue to be. "The caveman who sat around the fire and picked up the stick and hit the other guys on the head became the leader, and things haven't really changed," explains Stanley Bing, author of Crazy Bosses: Spotting Them, Serving Them, Surviving Them. "The really great bosses are not really great human beings. Gandhi was a terrible boss...
...Hochschild is at no loss for characters in this story; one of the earliest we meet is Sir Henry Morton Stanley, of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" fame. Stanley is hired by King Leopold II of Belgium--according to one of Leopold's best PR men, Henry Shelton Sanford--in order to create "a chain of posts or hospices, both hospitable and scientific, which should serve as means of information and aid to travelers...and ultimately, by their humanizing influences, to secure the abolition of the traffic in slaves." Stanley was the first to betray this rhetoric in service to Leopold...
Leopold and Stanley were certainly not the only villains in this story; even the infamous Mr. Kurtz of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness makes an appearance. Specifically, Hochschild has found no less than three men who could feasibly have served as models for the character of Kurtz. One of these men, Leon Rom, was station chief at Stanley Falls, on which Conrad's "Inner Station" may be based, and kept 21 heads as a decoration around his flower bed. But Hochschild makes an important distinction--he asserts that while Conrad's tale may have many levels of literary significance...
Most endearing in spite of his sleazy role is Stanley Tucci. Though the ending could read as a reproach to Grigoris, he ends up on top, reigned in if not transformed. Like Robin Hood, he has the miraculous ability to bend morality and its most loyal adherents without making either immoral. By the end, one is convinced of the justice of his scheme since even with his cheating, there remians genuine goodness in him. It is hard to sort out what was what and who was right, but in the end they're all endearing. If robbing the rich puts...