Word: watsons
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...Lila Mae Watson, Whitehead's hero, is an aging black elevator inspector in an unnamed eastern metropolis that resembles a Kafkaesque New York City. The bureaucracy of the elevator workers dominates the city government. That bureaucracy is divided between two main factions that vie with each other for political influence: the so-called Empiricists, a dry, hard-headed bunch who do their jobs with scientific precision; and the Intuitionists like Watson, who work by instinct, by feel. James Fulton, the Intuitionists' patron saint, is a deceased pioneer of "verticality" whose books contain cryptic, Masonic meditations that seem to address...
When, as part of a contest between white power brokers, Watson is blamed for the catastrophic free fall of an elevator she inspected, the path to exoneration seems to lie in a thorough decoding of Fulton's mystic writings, particularly those on the "black box," a gravity-defying superelevator that represents liberation and transcendence...
...story of how Watson comes to this quest, and where it ultimately leads her, is strange yet familiar. A child of the South, she worked her way up through the Byzantine white establishment by dint of stoic application and cheerful self-denial. Her city, which exists either in the near future or in the recent past, still refers to black people as coloreds and maintains a subtle quota system whose goal is not human equality but the appearance of social justice. The elevator bosses take their leisure at riotous banquets where the entertainment consists of humiliating minstrel shows. The civil...
Whitehead's fable is swift and pointed and by no means solely about race. Watson's tenaciousness, faith and curiosity are universal virtues, allowing her to maneuver in a society petrified by caste and class. What saves her, and ultimately brings her peace, is literature, the wisdom of the masters. The deeper she digs for knowledge and understanding, the higher she rises. A book is her black...
...aggressiveness. That has the unintended consequence of stupefying her and giving Rachel Griffiths an almost impossible role to play. Since Jackie's husband, the potentially litigious Daniel Barenboim (played with boyish inconsequence by James Frain), did not cooperate with this enterprise, that leaves all the emotional energy to Emily Watson's Jackie, who feverishly fills the screen, if not our hearts, with a sort of relentless brattiness--the genius as implacably spoiled child. Inevitably, our sympathy turns to impatience, and one escapes Hilary and Jackie as from a neurotically closed room, desperate for objectivity's sunlight, irony's fresh breeze...