"What Are Happy Endings For Anyway?" (II) - The Docks of New York

Yes, fellas. Your calendar is correct. We are, in fact, 10 years out from La La Land.

         My main point of interest in Damien Chazelle’s groundbreaking 2016 musical has historically been its role in helping set off the sort of stealth renaissance of musicals we’ve been experiencing the last ten years where we all try to see how big we can make the genre before anyone notices. Chazelle explained at the time, “Now more than ever we need hope and romance on the screen, and I think there’s something about musicals that just get at something that only movies can do. That idea of movies as a dreamland, movies as the language of our dreams and movies as a way of expressing a world in which you break into song, that emotions can violate the rules of reality.”

    The hook for this film, though, is very much the film’s ultimate rejection of the traditional happy ending for which musicals are so well known. That is the reason why people paid attention to this movie. I was in film school when this came out, and this was one of the most discussed movies among my classmates, with most of the discussion centered around that ending. And so, La La Land emerges as a really useful window into how the rising generation feels about the happily ever after. Chazelle further added, “The idea was to take the old musical but ground it in real life where things don’t always exactly work out.”

         But I’m going to have to unpack my turbulent feelings for La La Land some other time. The film I really want to spotlight has considerably more than just ten years under its belt.

         Josef Von Sternberg’s The Docks of New York is a 1928 romance film from the earliest days of cinema. Lucy Sante wrote for The Criterion Collection,

“No one could consider The Docks of New York an empty affair, but it is true that almost any frame could stand on its own as a composition. Its beauty and its grit mark it as operatic … and indeed it is a sort of opera without music. Its plot could hardly be more elemental …

“The picture, if merely described, sounds merely sentimental. Everything that is really valuable about it hinges on von Sternberg’s treatment: its deliberate pacing, its unostentatious but exquisite framing, its delicacy cloaked in apparent gruffness, its devil-may-care romanticism.”

At the core of the film is this interrogation of the happily ever after that we also see examined nearly a hundred years later in La La Land. The film follows the brief love affair between two lost souls who find a moment of reprieve in one another’s embrace and wonder whether or not this love affair could possibly survive their real world circumstances.

Part of what this film shows me is that, even back in the halcyon days of silent movies, people have always had reasons to be cynical. They have always had reasons to not believe in happy endings. But that only makes the choice to pursue them all the more courageous, and all the more rewarding. And maybe that’s something that us film school nerds living in a post-La La Land world could do well to remember.

 

Before Films Could Talk

Wings (1927)

      I want to start this off by demystifying silent films just a little because the barriers that keep classical film as a whole unknowable to modern audiences tend to be compounded by the specific formalistic components of silent movies, and that's a part of what makes it easy to write them off as artifacts of a more archaic civilization. The idea of them tends to scare people off, much in the same way that international films do, but their unique composition combines the inherent visual lyricism of film with the sort of personalized experience that comes with reading a book. Kevin Brownlow described in The Parade’s Gone By,

“The secret of the silent film lay in its unique ability to conjure up a situation that closely involved the audience, because demands were made on its imagination. The audience responded to suggestion, supplied by the missing sounds and voices, and became a creative contributor to the process of projection. A high degree of technical skill was required to make such demands effective; what the audience saw it had to believe in.” 

The Cat and the Canary (1927)

    There are some real gems here in the silent era, especially if you have special interests in specific genres. Silent horror films, for example, were pure atmosphere. And I don’t care how many episodes of The Office you’ve seen. Until you’re familiar with Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd, you don’t understand comedy. The real hotspot, though, was here in those last years before cinema made the jump to talking pictures, like in 1928 when we got The Docks of New York. 

The film sees a band of seamen working on a tramp steamer coming ashore for a day’s reprieve from their long toil. And naturally, they spend that leave entertaining themselves in the local whorehouse. One of these boat workers, Bill, spies one of the prostitutes leaping off the dock into the water in a suicide attempt. He dives in and rescues the girl, Mae, and carries her up to recover in a room above the bar. She is tended to by Lou, another prostitute who is actually married to one of Bill’s fellow crewmen, Andy. Bill steals a dress for Mae to wear when she awakens.

Bill and Mae find themselves drawn to each other, even as their hard-earned cynicism prevents them from really falling for one another. They both mutually muse over the impossibility of them ever getting married. After all, he has to ship back out to sea the next day. And with the bitter marriage of someone like Lou and Andy on display for everyone, there’s really no doubt about whether this kind of arrangement could survive. And just to prove how silly the whole idea is, they agree to go downstairs and get married in front of everybody in a kind of sham wedding. Yet even with all the pretense, Mae can’t help but tell her new husband, “I’ll be a good wife, Bill,” and he can’t help but wish that could be. 

The next morning, Bill slips out quietly. Andy, seeing an opportunity, slides in and makes advances on Mae, insisting that they both know that Bill is never coming back for her, which Mae vehemently protests. A minute later, a gun has fired, Andy is dead, and a crowd has swarmed around Mae’s abode, with Mae being charged for the murder. Bill returns as Mae is about to be taken away, only for Lou to swoop in and claim credit for shooting her own lecherous husband, and she is taken away in Mae’s place. Bill and Mae have one final interaction before he is to return to sea. Mae makes it clear that she thought they could have worked out and that she would have waited for him. The conversation ends with her screaming at him to leave her alone. 

The freighter ships out that evening, but before it can carry them too far, Bill has a change of heart, and he dives back into the harbor to swim back to shore and back to his wife. Bill learns that Mae has been charged with stealing the dress he nabbed for her and is being held at the police station. Bill arrives and clears up the misunderstanding, and he is sentenced to 60 days behind bars. Bill implores Mae to wait for him just this one time, and Mae agrees.

    Charles Silver, then curator of the Museum of Modern Art, called the film “probably the last genuinely great silent film made in Hollywood.” Film critic Andrew Sarris was referring specifically to The Docks of New York when he noted in The Films of Josef von Sternberg that this movie confirmed, “Chaplin’s observation that the silent movies learned their craft just about the time they went out of business.”

         And all the usual roadblocks that should on paper make this film’s silence alienating, they just become part of the experience. We don’t actually get to hear Mae’s voice as she shrilly screams at Bill to get out of her house and leave her alone. But your imagination fills in the space with whatever your intuition decides is the correct sound and volume for whatever it feels like when your heart breaks.

    This is also where the nuances of the acting really start to fill in the blanks. This was film acting at its most theatrical, but you also see the medium discovering the benefits of something like the close-up, for people experiencing emotions they are trying desperately to keep a lid on, but which are still spilling out nonetheless. 

This was also before films had the expectation to actually say their words out loud, so they could get away with lines like, “You may be a big shot on board, but you’re only an animal cracker here!” Ah, the devastation … (Or heck, this was a hundred years ago. For all I know, “animal cracker” was the worst thing a man could be back then.)

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

         By the 1920s, and especially by the end of the 1920s, filmmakers had mostly figured out the basic semantics of film language. They understood things like how to crosscut between time and space or when a close-up could be useful. We were graduated from high school Spanish I & II and knew how to use the language to ask the day of the week or where the bathroom was. Now, film was starting to learn how to speak eloquently.

By now artists like Von Sternberg had figured out that if you show a gun on the desktop, cut to a person walking menacingly toward another person, and then cut to a flock of seagulls taking flight suddenly as if startled by a gunshot, then you have a really interesting way to display someone being shot, and without us even needing to hear the gun firing at all.

         The choice to capture the image, as another example, of Mae leaping into the ocean by filming her reflection in the water, was rather innovative for the day. My knowledge is not comprehensive enough to say whether or not Sternberg was in fact the first person to use this shot, but you can get in the head of Sternberg when it first dawned on him just how affecting it would be to not actually see her jump, but to catch its reflection. We know she hits the water not when we see her body plunge, but when our window into this world is blurred by the ripples she left in her wake, as though her decision to exit this world has actually shattered the universe she left behind.

         What’s true of all good classics is certainly true here. A masterwork like The Docks of New York becomes a repository of a million stunning films that would follow in its wake. Even in the process of drafting this, I’m seeing strong tethers to like a billion other favorite movies, including those I’ve written about here. Self-loathing flowers wilting from neglect? Say hello to the Guardians of the Galaxy. Rescue from a suicide attempt as a major plotpoint? Kinda like the one from The Apartment? And it’s lucky for this film that sound and music were still a little off, or else these guys pretending that they were happy not believing in happiness would be singing the song chords we hear in Moulin Rouge!

          The thing that drove me to write about a silent film—and to write about this silent film—was the way this movie, which is nearly a hundred years old, feels so modern. This movie’s attitude toward falling in love, and happy endings, it has a lot in common with something like Silver Linings Playbook, which is why my essays for either film share the subtitle. They both speak to an audience that maybe wants a happy ending, but kind of knows the score and knows that things have every reason to not work out. This movie knows the way the world works, and it is tired. 

But from that weariness emerges something all the more hopeful.

 

Life Sucks LOL

        If you look at the kinds of movies or even television shows that tend to be described as “important” in the modern scene, you’ll see that critics tend to be more agreeable with cynicism over media with a more optimistic bend. That’s not to say an optimistic movie has never won an Oscar, even recently. Heck, CODA is one of my favorite movies of the 21st century. But even that film makes regular appearances on “Most Overrated Best Picture Winner” lists from people who won’t accept that, no, The Power of the Dog wasn’t as smart as it thought it was … 

Wallstreet Journal referred to nihilism as gen z’s “attempt to find personal agency in a system that’s increasingly denied it to them." The Atlantic described this as “the lingua franca of the internet …” saying

“Memes flatten any event, shrinking it down and making it indistinguishable from the rest of the slop and ephemeral content in a person’s feed, and they also become their own motivation for action. The 4chan logic that turned even the most hideous news and ideas into empty entertainment pervades everything on the internet now—more proof that lol, nothing matters …

“The memes, the trolling, and the Epstein video slop are all a cultural defense mechanism amid a crisis of impunity. The files are more proof that elites of all persuasions seem plenty comfortable saying the quiet part out loud or engaging in egregious, shameless behavior, banking on a culture that has given up on demanding consequences. When faced with evidence of the worst kind of sexual deviancy and conspiracy and no consequences, who could blame a bystander for choosing to hold nothing in their heart at all? …

There are periods and segments where the population has been more agreeable to more idealistic media. Post-WWII America was really big into bombast, and post-Vietnam America recoiled at all things glittery. But on the whole, cynicism is just generally easier for the rising generation to trust, and we could maybe think of a few reasons why that might be. Nihilism is, after all, also a method of protecting yourself from having your hopes crushed or your heart broken. What’s that thing Zendaya says in Spiderman: No Way Home? “If you expect disappointment, then you can never really be disappointed”?

  Again, the counterviewpoint to this is commonly linked to older generations. People who just “didn’t know better.” And classical Hollywood was absolutely not above indulging in this kind of brazen sentimentality. In 1958’s South Pacific, the idealistic Nellie tells the handsome Emile, “You just told me you killed a man, and that it’s alright. I hardly know you, yet I know it’s alright.”

         But rather than viewing this kind of thing as a choice for this specific narrative serving a specific audience in a specific genre, the modern film student tends to view this kind of thing as 1950s dogma obeying specific programming. The same basic thing we looked at in deconstructing Pleasantville. It may surprise some viewers to consider that South Pacific came out the same year as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with players like Burl Ives supplying such blistering observations as “The truth is pain and sweat and payin' bills and makin' love to a woman that you don't love anymore! Truth is dreams that don't come true, and nobody prints your name in the paper 'til you die!” 

    Part of what makes The Docks of New York work so well is that it displays a common fallacy that pervades discussion about the olden days. Most folks under 40 are pretty comfortable with this idea that “the good old days” weren’t necessarily that good. But the corollary truth—that the tribulations of the time also gave them plenty of opportunities to be disenchanted, and therefore made any display of optimism a willful act—sometimes gets left behind.

Even the 1920s, a decade known primarily for its prosperity and luxury, was beset by the toxicity that comes with urbanization, and without many of the social safety nets to catch vulnerable members of society. People fell through the cracks even back then. It was also hard for people of this time to imagine happy endings. And The Docks of New York does an enchanting job at capturing the spirit of a society that couldn’t see if things would work out, and focused on people who are most likely to feel this way. Bill and Mae aren’t royalty. They aren’t millionaires. They are people just trying to get by.

The film’s opening scene sees Bill among the other boat workers, and it telegraphs just who these men are. We see the workers in their element, operating these larger-than-life machines, and we see the soot just painting every inch of their skin. This is also reflected in the culture of the group. These men are brash. They are crude. They are loud about everything—but don’t expect them to talk about no feelings! These are folks who are very inundated with the grit of real living.

    As with all the best black and white movies, the shading goes a long way to reinforce the attitudes of the world and the situation, revealing the respective spaces where dark and light fills this world. As in something like Limelight, rendering everything in lights and darks communicates the sense of hopelessness that pervades the situations of the characters. The exterior scenes of the dock, for example, are shady and dismal while Mae and Bill’s first waking scene together is washed with comforting light. The milieu is poetic and rich, but to the characters inhabiting it, it’s all just a bunch of fog.

        This was way too early to be any attempt at “subversion,” at least within the specific framework of film. But that’s why this presentation feels so clean, and so honest. It’s not banking on impressing anyone with its daring or tenacity. It’s just laying bare something honest about the nature of trying to be decent in a world that just sees shadows everywhere.

 

 

True Love

         The idea driving this film is a very simple one. This is a universe of people looking for relief. An escape. But they also refuse to believe that the clouds would ever part for them, or that they’d deserve to step in the sun anyway. The details of the histories for both characters are vague, but we can intuit why a prostitute or a seaman would feel unanchored.

No, that's not AI doing what AI does
In-universe, her legs are actually bitten off in an orca accident

    The movie has a lot of parallels for me to something like Rust and Bone, a 2012 French romance film about two lone wolves who find companionship in one another. It may just be because both films feature the man carrying the woman in his arms in or out of the water as a signature image within the text. But the parallels also run much deeper than that. Both films follow a pair of characters who have history and baggage, and who may not even be “good people,” but who have need for companionship nonetheless.

         Rust and Bone has a very earthy filmmaking style in contrast to the opulence and majesty of something like Titanic. The subject of the film is also concerned with the deep-seated passions and longings of two people who would never see themselves at the center of any kind of passionate love story. And so the fact that genuine love emerges from this unlikely terrain adds an extra charge to the relationship that blooms.

         The romance that The Docks of New York floats on is shown to be a disruptive element in this world–much in the same vein as like Leon the hitman choosing to open his home to little orphan Matilda and disrupting the criminal underworld in the process. This is a world that does not recognize altruism when it sees it. When Bill carries the unconscious Mae into the establishment and into the room, his cohorts all just react like he’s scored, while the landlady is demanding that he keep “that sort of thing” away from her establishment. But despite this hostile landscape, something very sincere emerges.

    As she is recovering, Bill demands that his environment give her the proper space and respect she needs as she is healing, pushing the bartender out of the room and insisting he quiet down. The reason we get to assume these two reach out for each other is that their loneliness, their disenchantment, has stirred in them some appetite to see that unkindness frustrated for a change. They want to do better for others than what the world has done for them, even if they’re not sure how to approach something so proximate to disaster.

         Following Bill’s rescue of Mae, the two of them marry each other almost on a dare. The only way they know how to pursue the thing that brings them comfort or joy is to swaddle themselves in irony and approach the whole situation with this casual dismissal. The wedding ceremony itself shares custody between a sort of reverence for the event and also the imperviousness that the characters shroud themselves in. The barmaid tells the attendees that if there is any reason why these two shouldn't get married, “Speak up now or forever shut your trap.” Bill and Mae seal their wedding vows with a simple “Sure, let’s do it” while the patrons all cheer ironically. 

         This is the attitude that I see deployed in a lot of shotgun weddings in like a 2010 sitcom where the two lovebirds are just so darn pleased with their quirkiness that they don’t even need a real wedding ceremony and basically get married in their pajamas. I don’t always hate this. It is a way of demonstrating that the real substance of a marriage is in the commitment of the couple, not the price tag of the ceremony. But this kind of thing can also feel really distancing, like the most important day in the lives of these characters has somehow devolved into a contest for apathy.

         I don’t get that feeling here.

    I see two people who believe this is the closest that people such as them can get to a traditional love at first sight happily ever after. And though the whole situation is held together in-universe with a lot of irony, it’s still a moving thing to watch. The ceremony itself is actually played very tenderly with the priest offering a very sincere blessing upon Bill and Mae. 

The moment they are removed from that loud environment, their authentic emotions do rise to the surface. We’re allowed to see how cynicism is the performance, the covering that conceals genuine hopes. They reveal a yearning for love and happiness with substance, yet they only know how to approach it with irony. Dreams are fragile things. If you dare to reach out and touch them, if you speak them out loud, the whole apparatus pops. 

The movie itself also provides a kind of mirror for Bill and Mae in the characters of Lou and Andy, this other romance between a prostitute and a sailor. This couple serves the same purpose as like the Thorwalds in Rear Window. We see in this bitter married couple what awaits our young lovers if certain things turn out to be true. So, already we’re getting this idea that Bill and Mae are sort of fated for a tragic ending, that the romanticism that spurred this union is going to atrophy or even rot. 

    We get this close up of Lou embracing after Mae has offered her wedding vows where we see Lou with tears in her eyes, no doubt anticipating the aching that is in store for her new friend once real life breaks her heart. Lou showing genuine concern for what will happen to this girl when her husband inevitably leaves her also does a lot to undercut the cynicism being readily supplied to the situation.

There’s also that episode late in the movie when Andy makes advances on Mae when he believes she is vulnerable. Andy is killed with a gun and the police arrive to take Mae to jail. But Lou claims responsibility for the murder and goes to jail in Mae’s place.

    It’s not totally clear whether Lou is actually the one who killed Andy or if her taking the fall for Mae is just her way of protecting her friend. A lot of people seem convinced it is Lou, I don't feel like it's definitively declared in the text. But whether or not Lou is telling the truth, saving Mae from her husband is, in its own way, a declaration of faith. She’s saving Mae from having to pay for her husband’s indiscretions, while also enacting some retribution for her lecherous husband. In this way, she creates a safe path for someone she is in a position to protect while also reclaiming her own power. 

Maybe Lou’s right, and Bill and Mae are fated for the same kind of marriage that Lou and Andy had. But Bill and Mae have some things going for them that Lou and Andy did not.

 

 

The Case for Optimism

         Many of the more edgy or cynical attitudes I see displayed from modern filmmakers, and modern critics, they remind me of a lot of the attitudes that were valued in storytelling during the 1970s, a time that was also hungry for realness. Usually that translated to a rejection of a traditional happy ending. And mind you, the world being what it is, and what it has been, it can be just as hard to envision a happy ending on the big screen as it is to envision them offscreen.

        This kind of defeatism was articulated in crime films like Chinatown, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and The French Connection that really captured the disenchantment that post-Watergate, post-Vietnam conflict America was feeling. Director Roman Polanski wrote in his autobiography, “Polanski by Polanski,” that he saw in Chinatown "… a potentially first-rate thriller showing how the history and boundaries of L.A. had been fashioned by human greed.” Polanski really pushed for the tragic ending where the bad guy gets away and the love interest gets killed. Thus, we get our iconic, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” closing.  

         Chinatown was actually inspired by the California Water Wars of the time this film is depicting. One of the minor characters is based on civil engineer, William Mulholland, who was essential in the development of the water system through the Los Angeles area with his special aqueduct as well as the St. Francis Dam. In 1928, incidentally the same year that The Docks of New York would come out, the dam failed after Mulholland ignored certain safety concerns that emerged, and the resulting disaster would cost over 400 civilian lives. Mulholland never worked again, and he died in disgrace seven years after the incident.

        So the tension of the movie emerges from documented neglect by a society’s powerholders. But it’s worth noting that in this case, the powerholder was held responsible and had to answer for his actions. (I personally haven’t really done enough research into Mulholland to declare whether he was like a serial cheater or if he just had a specific moment of arrogance with deadly consequences.) That dire ending that Polanski insisted upon to achieve that elusive realness was not totally reflective of the reality from which it drew. Mind you, this is still a valid artistic choice, and no doubt captures some slice of reality. It is still, however, a reflection of how an artist chose to perceive the world and what he wanted to emphasize. 

         Back in silent film land, we could maybe think of some reasons why Bill and Mae won’t remain together, most of them have something to do with their life situations or their histories. If we really want to get sociological, we could perhaps concede that some people are more disadvantaged than others. But especially when it comes to maintaining a romantic relationship, no person really has a clear shot at the playing board. Everyone has something to overcome, some vice or perspective they have to thwart. The question at the heart of this situation with Bill and Mae really comes down to whether or not these two, and especially Bill, have it in them to overcome their base programming. 

The Angel and the Badman sees a similar setup where a happy union between a gunfighter and a quaker is dependent on whether or not he can leave behind his violent ways and go join the lovely lady on the farm for a peaceful life. There’s lots of back and forth about where such a thing is even possible for a character played by John Wayne. (Or Zachary Levi, I guess. Nobody told me they were doing a remake until like a week ago.) There’s a critical moment during the climax where John Wayne is going to kill the bad guys, in a situation where we could believe he’d be justified in doing so, yet Wayne ultimately chooses to toss the gun aside and not feed the cycle of violence that has pervaded his world and his own soul. This is not only a drastic change of programming for him, it has him literally discarding his tether to this dark otherlife. 

         Bill does more or less the same thing in The Docks of New York. The reason why we might hold out hope that Mae and Bill might make it where Andy and Lou couldn’t is that Bill does choose to turn away from his life adrift at sea. He literally leaps from the boat to return to her. He rejects the comfort of his prison, and does something he would never do before.

         And there’s development on Mae’s end as well. It is teased that, driven once again to misery, she might try jumping into the water to escape her pain, as she did before. But having seen that life does have something to offer her, she chooses to hold on. And from these declarations of hope, both of them are free to savor the company of someone with whom they can share something real and lasting.

         When you’ve finished climbing this mountain and look at both the view it offers and the trail it took to get here, you see that the film has brought you to a place that is very deeply sentimental and romantic, but the way it carried us here was through had us walk past a lot of hard edges, and this is what makes the thing that much more enrapturing.

 

         And They All Lived … 

This is not a rejection of all things revisionist. Nor is it a blanket dismissal of deconstructionism. This is not me telling the kids they should not examine the stories they are being told or that their generation doesn’t have reasons to be sad.

This is more me saying that … people have always had reasons to feel poorly about the world they live in and the future they may face. Amidst world wars and great depressions and cold wars, and all other manner of dark clouds, we can maybe take some strength from the fact that the world kept going through the mess. People still had opportunities to either find happiness or create it themselves.

Breathless (1960)

         Youthful disenchantment has also historically been a useful force for, among other things, artistic liberation. You’ll have to wait for my forthcoming essay on the French New Wave for all that. But I concurrently find that a lot of contemporary media marinates a little too much in defeatism. And this kind of thing, it gets exhausting, but not in a way I’d designate as helpful or even truthful.

         Cause for existentialism or despair isn’t necessarily unique to Gen Z. What is relatively unique for them is the system’s ability to supercharge cynicism itself in ways that were not feasible before the explosion of online phones and social media—to make it feel more prevalent than it actually is. Myojung Chung described “algorithmic cynicism” as “the sense that personal action is futile against massive, profit-driven social media systems designed to capture attention rather than serve truth. This isn’t just apathy; it reflects a broader cultural mood where young people feel paralyzed in the face of a media ecosystem flooded with sensationalism and polarization. When the game feels rigged, why bother playing?”

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)

    Jonathan Haidt, one of the foremost leaders on the subject of social media and mental health, noted in his seminal book, The Anxious Generation, “Collective anxiety can bind people together and motivate them to take action, and collective action is thrilling, especially when it is carried out in person. Among previous generations, researchers often found that those engaged in political activism were happier and more energized than average …. Threats and risks have always haunted the future, but the ways that young people are responding, with activism carried out mostly in the virtual world, seem to be affecting them very differently compared to the previous generations, whose activism was carried out mostly in the real world.” 

         Again, this is not me dismissing social media comprehensively. This is me saying that someone should maybe put up some guard rails.

Stories that exhibit attitudes of cynicism or that reveal tragic endings are a necessary part of culture. They help train us to recognize patterns in real life that portend negative outcomes both in our personal lives as well as our larger society. Moreover, even the emotions documented in situations that “didn’t work out” are still precious and deserve recognition. 

But a generation that selects cynicism as the default stands to lose a lot. So this idea that nihilism is somehow the braver choice, the thing that our ancestors just weren’t strong enough to accept? And that we should just go belly-up and accept that the world will always be broken so why bother trying? 

Maybe that’s something we should question. 

                    --The Professor