‘Sport is human life in microcosm’
—Howard Cosell

Sport and History have a lot in common. What can Lukas Rosol’s upset over Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon reveal about the way history works?

The writing of history and sportswriting might not appear to share too much at first thought. Historians sit in quiet archives, calmly analysing documents revealing past events and dynamics, thoughtfully arranging them into causative and explanatory patterns, trying to answer how things came to be the way they were. History itself moves quickly, but history-writing is a slow process: not only does it take a long time but historians also prefer to wait until events are quite a bit past to analyse them (a guiding element of this project). Sportswriters on the other hand live and work first-hand, either on-site or watching events as they unfold, instantly having to react to the quick-moving, dramatic, competitive world of sports. Explanations and judgements are more proximate, causation more easily revealed by the fact that sport will, unlike history, always produce clear winners and losers. Sport is considered a pretty crude metaphor for historical events, its black-and-white, A vs B, winner and loser simplicity hardly an accurate reflection of history, the infinite shades of grey.

But historians are missing out on sport (and not just because it is thrillingly, exhilaratingly, gloriously, endlessly fascinating, entertaining and exciting: most academics would prefer a nice book). Sport may produce simple contrasts, inherent confrontations, and simple outcomes, but sportswriting and history-writing do mostly the same thing: they try to explain causes (both proximate and long term), examine patterns, build narratives, build up or tear down or analyse iconic heroes and villains, focus on the micro story or pull back to the wider picture, and above all, explain why a certain thing happened instead of all the other possibilities, to tell a story which answers that most human of questions, “why?”.

At Wimbledon last week, Lukas Rosol beat Rafael Nadal in five sets on Centre Court. Rosol is ranked 100, whereas Nadal is ranked 2. Rosol has never won a tournament on the ATP Tour; Nadal has won 50. In nine years as a professional Rosol has never been ranked in the world’s top 60; Nadal has spent nearly seven years ranked either 1 or 2. Before Wimbledon began Rosol had won three matches at Grand Slam tournaments in his whole career; Nadal has won 11 Grand Slam titles. Rosol had never before qualified for the 128-man main draw at Wimbledon before this week; Nadal is a two-time Wimbledon champion, the winner of perhaps the greatest match in The Championships’ history (the 2008 Final).

The two men are from different classes of talent and achievement, different worlds of experience, wealth, and fame. Rosol is not a classy veteran hoping for a last hurrah, not a dangerous dark horse who sometimes springs an upset, not a rising talent who impresses the pundits, not an exciting wunderkind, not even a developing young player (he’s nearly a year older than Nadal). To tennis journalists, the fashioners of the sport’s narratives, he is an invisible extra, without even an entry in the ATP Tour’s media guide of player information, not even worthy of the backhanded compliment ‘journeyman’.  In the cold-hearted terms of professional sports, he is nothing, nobody.

And he was playing Rafael Nadal, sporting legend, at Wimbledon, on Centre Court. When Nadal won the first set, some time-pressed tennis journalist probably switched attention to another court, or headed to the interview room to hunt out a story. The intelligent analysis was that Nobody was not going to trouble Nadal. Rosol seemed blissfully unaware of the script, and hit some great shots, surprisingly going up two sets to one. But Nadal roared back to take the fourth set 6-2. Twilight was giving way to dusk and the players took a break to allow the roof and lights to be turned on for the final set.  All the intelligent analysis predicted Nadal would now win the match, as the intelligent analysis had of course predicted at the start: all the important factors – class, talent, momentum, ability to deal with pressure – favoured Nadal. An entertaining late evening cameo from Nobody, but it was all over. As the players waited for the lights to come on, the sports fan watching on TV might have switched to the Euro 2012 semifinal. The up tight man in Row G might have looked at his watch and said to his wife that maybe now was a good time to beat the rush to the Tube.

Somehow, though, the intelligent analysis was wrong. Rosol didn’t wilt under the Centre Court lights; instead he became utterly possessed. He played the fifth set as if in a trance, thundering 20 winners (5 full games of them) past Nadal. Every time it seemed that he might get nervous, Rosol swiped another winner. By the time Rosol had thundered through the final game with three aces, the word ‘historic’ was filling the mouths and keyboards of tennis journalists. Was this the biggest upset in Wimbledon history? How could something so unusual happen? The shocked analysts agreed that this had no explanation, it defied analysis. Rosol won because…he won. This was a lightning strike, a freak, a black swan.

Black swans are random occurrences, unexplainable and unpredictable.[1] Nassim Taleb has argued that The Black Swan is history’s fatal flaw. Only by looking at history in hindsight, with a Platonic desire for narratives and explanations do historians make events look like they follow patterns with underlying causes. A ‘hotel journalism’ of the  academic archives, a deluded research programme following hindsight bias, retrospective distortion, and group-thinking ‘clusters’ of thinking and source-selection cause historians to ‘reverse engineer’ history into causative narratives when in reality ‘history does not crawl, it jumps’.

This is clear because history hides The Black Swan: the most dramatic, radical, important historical events are those which are totally unpredictable, those which defy historians’ attempts to create explanations. Black Swans are not ‘the exception proving the rule’, or distracting blips in historical progress, or dramatic froth over deeper historical waves, they are central to history, the events shouting out that the Emperor has no clothes. Historians can’t accept that the world is more complicated and random than is explainable: “Nobody knows what’s going on”. Others who believe in history’s explanatory power still see the Black Swan as a flaw in the way historians work: Niall Ferguson has commented that historians too often search for underlying linear explanations of events instead of accepting that their proximate triggers can ‘explain the sudden shift from a good equilibrium to a bad mess’.

There is undoubtedly some truth in this. Far too often hindsight bias does indeed make history look more explainable and predictable than it really is. Historians can reverse engineer an explanation for the French Revolution, or the Holocaust, casting them in a long sweep of narrative and cause, but they were still historically unthinkable events, and Taleb (and Karl Popper) would argue that historicising them denies that unthinkability. Good history, though, is not inherently incapable of dealing with Black Swans: exogenous and endogenous, thinkable and unthinkable, predictable and random, can all be integrated into a match report or a historical argument. But Black Swans will always be a historical problem.

Sport has no problem with Black Swans. Nadal was admirably philosophical in his post-match comments. When asked how he could explain such an incredibly unlikely result. Nadal shrugged: ‘That’s sport. You win, you lose.’ Rosol agreed: ‘It’s sport. Nobody’s unbeaten. Everybody can lose and everybody can win’. Unpredictability helps add to sport’s excitement, its drama. In many ways The Black Swan is the most thrilling of all sporting outcomes, either as an unbelievable upset, or as an outcome which somehow totally defies all narrative. Bill Simmons recently wrote about Larry Bird’s final shot in Game 4 of the 1987 NBA Finals:

‘I would have bet anything that the shot was ripping through the net. I would have bet my baseball card collection. I would have bet my Intellivision. I would have bet my virginity. I would have bet my life. Even the Lakers probably thought it was going in. Watch the tape and you will notice Lakers backup Wes Matthews crouched on the floor and screaming behind Bird in sheer, unadulterated terror like he’s about to watch someone get murdered in a horror movie. You will hear the fans emit some sort of strange, one-of-a-kind shrieking noise, a gasping sound loosely translated as, “Holy shit, we are about to witness the greatest basketball shot ever!” Hell, you can freeze the tape on the frame before the ball strikes the rim. It looks like it’s going in. It should have gone in.

It didn’t go in.

…[After the buzzer] my father looked at me.

“That was supposed to go in,” he groaned. “How did that not go in?”

More than twenty-two years have passed since that night … and I still don’t have an answer for him. For everything else, I have answers.’

For the sports writer such moments are part of the glory of sport, the reason every sportsfan in the world will effectively wear a blindfold and ear plugs to avoid the result of a game if he’s going to watch it later: no one knows what’s going to happen. For a historian looking back on a past event where a historical argument says something should have happened, whatever model or argument upon which that assumption rests is obviously flawed. But that difference between future and past uncertainty is the flaw of The Black Swan: perhaps the randomness of the event means we cannot explain why the ball didn’t go in, but we still want answers. In the historian’s gut, The Black Swan’s most extreme criticism of history – ‘nobody knows what’s going on’ – is as heretical as telling a scientist that an unexplained physical phenomenon is a mystery, or the work of angels: a cop-out which responds to the difficulties of history, the challenges of intellect, by throwing one’s hands up and saying “it is written”, “who knows?”.

People yearn to understand why things happen. “Why?” is the most human of all questions, the question, in many ways, which makes us human: historians are adults following the lead of the child who continues to ask “Why?” to every parental answer, unconvinced by a jaded “because”. While The Black Swan Problem is undoubtedly a challenge for history, the fact that we cannot explain the historically unthinkable in an endogenous model, or explain why Bird missed the shot, or how Rosol beat Nadal, is not evidence of history being a random series of ‘one damn thing after another’. It’s evidence that history, like sports, is cast with people, humans – complex, unpredictable, contradictory. A human history is one which does not see The Black Swan as either the abberation outside the narrative or the randomness which shows that narratives are damaging. A human history delights in the challenge of explaining. When asked to explain his performance, Rosol commented that for all the records and results, “it’s always open. It’s sport. Nobody’s unbeaten. Everybody can lose and everybody can win…We’re just people. We’re just humans.” In sport, in history, just people, just humans.

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[1] Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: 2007).

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[This post originally appeared in "A History of the Present"]

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[The cover picture is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license and is attributed to  Rl91]

I’m going to risk sacrilege here.

Pixar is not, as many say, the new “golden age” of Disney.

Pixar is much, much more.

Sure, Disney’s tales were nice enough: the “Little Mermaid”, “Sleeping Beauty”, “Aladdin” – healthy doses of escapism with pat moral truths, often leaning on the Brothers Grimm catalog and twisting those stories into more palatable entertainment fodder for the masses. This, they did well – but that’s about it. They gave us nice, feel good fun. When I think back through a haze of nostalgia to my childhood days of revelling in the splendour of Disney, I find its often just that – nostalgia.

And Pixar? Pixar movies are often, simply put, casually transcendent. Its about time we stopped comparing cheerful fluff that other animation studios churn out with any given Pixar outing; its simply unfair to the others. At any rate, let’s see where this particular offering stands.

“Toy Story 3” does not, at first glance, have a lot going for it. The fact that it’s a sequel is crippling enough, but that it’s the third part of a trilogy puts in the potential company of, oh, “The Godfather – III“; “Spiderman 3“; or “X-Men:The Last Stand“. Notice the pattern? All third instalments of once great franchises that were astonishingly underwhelming – and that’s being kind. The plot itself, when I saw the first trailer, threatened to be a rehash of “Toy Story 2″, so really, TS3 has no right to work, let alone scale the stellar heights we now take for granted from this studio.

But folks – this is Pixar. And so, against all odds, the wizards of animation have fashioned the strongest instalment in the Toy Story franchise, and arguably one of the better films in a very impressive oeuvre.

Our plastic heroes remain timeless – unfortunately, their owner Andy is growing up and now gets ready to head down to college. Fun and games come to a stop as the toys wonder about their fate: Woody is picked by Andy to accompany him to college, the rest land up at a day care centre. All seems well … a little too well actually. Before the toys know it, they’ve entered a darkly dystopian existence, and must get away before, well, their parts fall off or something.

Out of this barebones premise is fashioned a movie that is frequently hilarious and inventive: the great escape scene is one of the most inventive of its ilk that you will encounter in cinema, and Buzz-the-toy-astrounaut-spouting-flirtatious-Spanish is simply inspired. But what makes the movie truly wonderful are the moments when it reaches for the gut. Two incredible scenes towards the end form this movie’s one-two punch, as the characters are confronted with mortality and adulthood. In a moment that serves as a re-introduction as well as a fond farewell, Andy tenderly bequeaths his prized possessions to a little kid. I can give no greater praise for this movie, or for the universality of Pixar’s magic, than point out that both my 11 year old sister and I had strongly emotional reactions based on completely different reasons at the conclusion of the film. She sat in rapture at the little kid getting a new treasure trove of toys – and I reacted to Andy’s final goodbye to his childhood, and to the toys themselves resigning to the idea of mortality with barely controlled tears.

So what’ll happen Oscar night? “Toy Story 3″ will definitely lose out on the best picture award: not because it isn’t on the same level of craft as, say, a “Black Swan” or a “King’s Speech“, but because this is the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences that we’re talking about, with its usual abject refusal to look too much beyond well manufactured high pedigree drama. As far as they’re concerned, this nomination is enough of an award for the animated film. Similar, I think, will be its fate in the adapted screenplay category. That leaves us with the perplexing category of best animated film. I’m glad it exists simply because I think this reliably entertaining medium (not genre) of film deserves that kind of recognition. But how is it in any way a race this year, when, like last year’s “Up“, a best picture nominee, finds itself in competition with an obviously lesser lot ?

Oh well, good for you Pixar, anyway.

There was a point last year when I wrote about the issue of “Queer cinema” continuing to be a genre per se. It was, I felt, about time that Hollywood moved onto stories where the alternate sexuality of the characters was merely incidental to the narrative. Instead, the prime mainstream examples that leapt out – “Brokeback Mountain” and “Milk” – featured the idea of the sexuality of the characters at the fulcrum of the narrative; sexuality-as-the-issue so to speak, either personal as in Brokeback, or political as in “Milk”.

And then along came “I Love You Philip Morris“; a romantic comedy with 2 male A-listers in the lead, a movie that was blissfully unaware about the fact that it was a TRAILBLAZING GAY MOVIE. Nope, here we had the queerness of the characters as an established non-issue from the onset, after which the only concern of the movie was to spin a rollicking good yarn, give us a story for the ages – gay or straight.

If Philip Morris demolished notions of what a queer movie could – and should – be, “The Kids are All Right” cheerfully steamrolls over the debris, giving us a neat little family dramedy that refuses to call too much attention to the casually revolutionary nature of its sexual politics.

Nicole (Annette Bening, who deserves her Best Acress nomination) and Jules (Julianne Moore bloody well deserved a nomination herself) are your everyday married lesbian couple with 2 kids from the same anonymous sperm donor. As they near adulthood, the kids want to know more about their dad, and manage to investigate their way to the charming, laidback Paul (Mark Ruffalo has the most unshowy role of the lot, but does it well enough to merit his supporting actor nod). Paul has no family of his own, and his foray into the life of the settled foursome leads to surprising consequences for everyone involved.

Other than a refreshingly unconventional premise at its core, Kids makes a lot of interesting decisions with its turns of narrative. Some are satisfying; Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore play off against each other remarkably well, and its great watching Ruffalo’s character realizing his long-buried need for family. Others, like the closing scenes, don’t ring completely true – there’s a strangely rushed feel, and a lack of deserved closure for one of the characters.

Bening and Moore’s equation is really at the core of the movie, and the two make for a great screen couple. Bening’s the hard-to-like control freak who has moments of fragility; hers is a wonderfully written character, layered with sarcasm and empathy, and the actress masterfully navigates us through these different facets. Moore complements her with an almost balm-like laid back vibe that begins to ignite with the presence of this new person in their lives. “Marriage is hard” she says, in one tearful scene, and we nod in agreement with her, simultaneously rooting for this one to work. As for the kids, they’re, well, pretty all right.

Come Oscar night, and I think this nicely made, well acted, and well written film will probably walk away without any awards. Its probably the weakest in the movie category, as are Mark Ruffalo’s chances for supporting actor. The screenplay nomination contends with the dizzyingly intricate “Inception”, and the sweeping-but-comic “King’s Speech”, both of which I think will leave it trailing. Finally, there’s Annette Bening’s best actress nomination. This right here is possibly the closest the movie could come to snatching Oscar victory, but there’s a raging insane ballerina fighting tooth-and-nail for this one, and the way things look right now, it’s probably Natalie Portman for the gold.

Between the 500 million status updates reading, “Just watched that Facebook movie and it is awesome/totally untrue/misogynistic/loveXXX” and Zadie Smith’s review, it’s all been said, and then some. The only movie that I’ve spent more time reading about is “Inception” and its three million crackpot theories. So instead of another review about how this movie totez defines my(?) LOLtastic generation, how about we discuss its prospects at your office’s Oscar betting pool?

Let’s do the easy ones first: Aaron Sorkin is practically a shoo-in for the Best Writing – Adapted Screenplay Award. If nothing else, “The Social Network” (TSN) was a dialogue-centric movie. It didn’t underestimate its viewers and it didn’t come off like a bunch of guys wildly hypothesizing on what “smart folk probably sound like”. Sorkin has years of experience writing snappy, witty dialogue for the critically acclaimed TV show, “The West Wing“, and it really comes through in this movie. Besides, Sorkin was the one who wrote, “You can’t handle the truth!“. Give the man an Oscar already.

If it were up to me, I’d give the Best Cinematography award to “Inception” just for the zero gravity fight scene. Otherwise, it’s a close call between Black Swan and TSN. Despite being a movie about entitled computer nerds, TSN was a visually stunning movie, especially the (now much-talked about) Henley Royal Regatta scene. But “Black Swan” just had more opportunities to showcase creative artistic devices and moody lighting, what with all the beautiful women looking scared/ flitting gracefully across the set.

As the (apparently fictional) stony-faced, socially inept Mark Zuckerberg, Jesse Eisenberg was chillingly convincing. From the odd gait to the twisted lips, Eisenberg played the part to perfection. But his real achievement was, despite having to play such an unrelatable character who almost seems robotic at times, he managed to humanize him. While the audience’s sympathies may have been with Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) at having been shafted by his best friend, it was Eisenberg who claimed our empathy. The Best Actor Award– will Jesse win it? Doubt it. He’d have to beat Colin Firth in “The King’s Speech“. Everybody knows that the Academy has an enormous crush on the British monarchy and can barely restrain itself from flinging all its statuettes at movies about them. And Colin has already won at the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards, both of which are considered good indicators of which direction the wind is blowing. Besides, there was something so endearing about Colin impotently gasping for words, unable to express himself. If Colin wins this one, you won’t hear any cries of protest from the TSN bandwagon.

As for the Best Director Award, the Coen brothers won recently, so I doubt they’ll be taking the trophy home this time. Tom Hooper though, is the dark horse who just may end up taking the prize home, after his recent win at the Directors Guild Awards. For me, it is a close call between Darren Aronofsky and David Fincher—both of whom have made iconic movies in the past and are extremely deserving of every accolade being heaped on them for their latest effort. Fincher ought to beat out Aronofsky because it takes a special kind of skill to make a movie where computer programming+vodka shots is passed off as a nail-biting action scene, and actually manage to get us cheering wildly.

People saw the non-nomination of “The Dark Knight” in the Best Picture category as an egregious lapse on the Academy’s part. [The AMPAS should have been publicly flogged, drawn and quartered. - Alok] Lest they be called doddering old snobs who love them some prunes, the Academy made some major changes to update themselves to accommodate the v2.0 crowd. This meant having younger hosts for the ceremony and having 10 nominations for Best Picture so the cooler movies get nominated too. This whole get-with-the-programme strategy of the Academy also meant they had to invite Miley Cyrus and Kristen Stewart to the ceremony, but so long as the draw the line at Snookie, I think we can all agree that it’s a fair trade-off, now that movies like “District 9” are finally getting their due.

Of course, it will be a few more centuries before the Academy actually starts giving the Best Picture Oscar to certain genres of movies, so we can safely rule out the following movies from this year’s contenders: “Toy Story 3″ (token animated movie), “Inception” (token sci-fi movie), “Winter’s Bone” (token hard-hitting indie movie) and “The Kids are All Right” (token quirky family drama).

This leaves the following serious contenders: “True Grit“, “The King’s Speech”, “127 Hours”, “Black Swan”, and TSN. Of these, I’ve a very strong feeling that the victor will be TSN. This is, after all, The Year of Facebook. Zuckerberg has been constantly in the news, becoming Time magazine’s Person of the Year and donating millions to charity. Contrary to what Zuckerberg’s PR people feared, TSN does not vilify him. He comes off as an incredibly dedicated, simple guy who is, despite all his billions, just a boy at heart; which is far better press than bequeathing all your money to charity can buy.

A couple of weeks ago, Delhi had a minor earthquake in the middle of the night. All the shaking woke me up, and since my computer was right there, I lost no time in updating my Facebook status to “Earthquake!” patting myself on the back for being the first. And that’s when I noticed that at least 3 people had already updated their statuses about the earthquake. This could only mean one thing: these people were updating their Facebook statuses during the earthquake instead of, oh I don’t know, crawling to safety under their desks.

Yes I don’t think we need to worry about the imminent zombie apocalypse finishing off humanity any more—we’ve already lost our sense of self-preservation. Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg! How about, in retaliation we get Hollywood to make a movie about how you (probably) stabbed your best friend in the back, make it a box office success AND critically acclaimed (you know the twain rarely meet) and ironically talk about it endlessly on Facebook?

Your move, Zuckerberg.

It comes as no big surprise then that “The King’s Speech”, a handsomely mounted period piece about yet another British monarch, starts the Oscar race as the frontrunner, with 12 nominations, ranging from the obscure technical categories (someone explain how sound mixing is judged, please?) round to the grandslam of movie-directing-acting honours. It has won a fair few awards in the pre-Oscar race too, and from what I figure, the best picture win is coming down to a photo finish between this and that-facebook-movie-we’re-tired-of-praising.

Point being, I went into this one with hugely heightened expectations. I really wanted to like this movie – and I did. Just, well, not as much as I wanted to. See, I wanted to come out of the experience gushing about it, with that transient state of headiness that undergo emerging from a defining movie experience. Instead, I came out simply, well, pleased. Content, even – which, mind you, would make most movies a towering achievement, but, well, that’s great expectations for you.

So here we have Colin Firth (absolutely, and expectedly, astonishing) playing the-then Duke of York, who in the opening sequence in 1925 sets out to address a crowd at Wembley. A tap of the microphone, a sharp intake of breath, he mutters the first few words, and then … nothing. His mouth seizes up, the words are lost somewhere in his throat. The crowd looks on derisively, almost piteously, as the son of the king is unable to even make a salutary speech in public.

The Duke has by his side a wonderfully supportive wife – Helena Bonham Carter in a remarkably uncharacteristic role plays the eventual Queen Mother – who leads him to a succession of speech therapists, all of whom are unable to help.

And then the couple comes across Lionel Logue. As essayed by Geoffrey Rush, and impressively rounding out a great trio of central performances, Logue is brash, unconventional, and quite possibly the Duke’s only hope. The stakes are raised when it looks like the Duke might just become the next King of England, and in the process be required to make some particularly impassioned speeches, even while down south in Germany, a short man with a toothbrush mustache is giving some very powerful speeches indeed. And so the stage is set for an inspirational, typically rousing, period drama,

Which honestly, is the only issue “The King’s Speech” has – that it’s predictable, that there’s a paint-by-numbers feel threatening to come out of the woodwork, that it’s got all the expected elements so firmly in place. It’s that unquantifiable difference between achieving cinematic greatness on the one hand, as opposed to manufacturing it. If this sounds like nitpicking, well, I suppose it very much is – and yet I have to point this out to you to explain why I fell short of unabashedly loving this seemingly perfect piece of film-making.

Because, yes, its almost, just about perfect otherwise. The cinematography is casually stunning – 1930′s London plays hide-and-seek with the mist, while long tracking shots waltz with, and around, the King. The climactic walk down the corridors of the BBC is a particularly masterful bit of filmmaking; Roger Ebert interestingly observes that the long tracking shots might be evoking the king’s constricted vocal passages as he tries to get his words out. The screenplay is often hilarious and alternately touching; the performances I will say nothing more about, but that those 3 Academy Award acting nominations are absolutely well deserved.

In the end, then, the speech that King George VI delivered was one of guiding the country, the empire, towards hope in the darkest of times. That it is as much about his own personal triumph in being able to make that speech at all is the real power of the story.

Come Oscar night – I will be cheering this one on for the Acting nominations. Firth and Rush are almost certain to win their categories; Bonham-Carter a little less so, but that’s primarily because of a little girl in “True Grit” who steals the show from under Matt Damon and Jeff Bridges collective noses. As for the big two? Nyet, and nope. The other directors on the list pretty much all leave a greater stamp into their work, and as for best movie – well. “True Grit” is more satisfying, “Black Swan” more intense, “Inception” more challenging, and that-facebook-movie-that-we’re-tired-of-praising was pretty darn great too.

Firth and Rush in 'The King's Speech'

The King’s Speech begins on a dreary day in 1925 when the Duke of York, second son of King George V of England, prepares to make the closing speech at the British Empire Exhibition. The Duke clutches his speech, looking sick with worry, as he waits to be called to the stage. When he finally steps up to the microphone, his voice turns on him and he stands in front of a crowd of thousands, speechless, heaving with fear and choking on words that will not be said.

From the very first scene, your heart begins to ache for the King with the stammer – George VI (Colin Firth), or Bertie, as he is known to family and friends. His wife, then the Duchess of York (Helena Bonham Carter), finds him a Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), and Bertie and Lionel strike up an unlikely friendship as they battle to overcome Bertie’s tortured childhood and find him a voice that is his own. When his father passes away and his elder brother, King Edward VIII, abdicates to marry the woman he loves, Bertie, against the odds, ascends to the throne of England. Now, the stakes are even higher as the newly crowned King George VI must face not just his fears, but also an anxious nation. The film ends as it began, with a speech, this time the King’s speech, as George VI addresses the empire on radio at the start of the Second World War.

The King’s Speech is one of the most talked about films of 2010 and, with 12 nominations, a likely big winner at this month’s Academy Awards ceremony. Along with a stack of technical nominations, the film is a contender for Best Picture, Best Director (Tom Hooper), Best Actor (Firth), Best Supporting Actor (Rush) and Best Supporting Actress (Bonham Carter). More ominously, it has been produced by Harvey Weinstein, formerly of Miramax Films, who has the Midas touch as far as the golden statuette is concerned (16 nominations for Best Picture including 3 wins in a twelve-year career with Miramax).

The first thing that strikes you about the film is the profusion of bizarre characters. An eccentric BBC radio presenter gargles with whiskey before every announcement, a quack doctor with a manic gleam in his eye stuffs marbles into the Duke’s mouth in an attempt to get him to talk, and the pompous Archbishop of Canterbury (Derek Jacobi) harrumphs that a commoner cannot possibly sit in the Royal Box in Westminster Abbey for the King’s coronation. The royal family is equally caricatured: the fierce old king George V (Michael Gambon) barks at his son to “spit it out” and fix his stammering problem while his wife, and mother to King George VI, Queen Mary (Clare Bloom), is white, cold and rather unfeeling. King Edward VIII is portrayed as a shallow fool – who, when asked what he’s so busy doing, replies grandly, “kinging” –while his temptress, the evil Mrs. Wallis Simpson of Baltimore, seems sour and manipulative. A positive (and surely unintended) cartoon is Winston Churchill himself (Timothy Spall) – I almost expected him, any minute, to turn into Spall’s Wormtail from the Harry Potter series.

Nor is the historical background very convincingly portrayed. The public drama of abdication is severely glossed over and the build-up of war seems hollow and inadequate. Apart from a few flashes of Hitler making a speech (“I don’t know (what he’s saying)”, says the King, “but he seems to be saying it rather well”), the film appears to be taken by surprise when war breaks out. Christopher Hitchens has written an excellent piece on the historical inaccuracies relating to Churchill’s role in the film, particularly with respect to his close friendship with the Nazi-sympathising Edward.

Yet, amid all this exaggeration and melodrama, a remarkably warm story emerges of a friendship between two men – the King of England and his speech therapist. Through a series of meetings in a sparsely decorated consultation room, Lionel helps Bertie break down his paralyzing fear through often unconventional techniques: prancing about the room, singing songs like Swanee River and Camptown Races, and letting forth a stream of expletives. Lionel is an agreeable and irreverent chap who refuses to be cowed by the royal background of his client. Bertie takes his time to warm to the cheeky Australian. “You’re peculiar”, says the King to Lionel. “I’ll take that as a compliment”, is the quick response. Yet, they eventually become close friends and confidantes.

Colin Firth towers as the stammering King. Girls of my generation have mooned over Firth ever since he played the gloomy Mr. Darcy in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. I was around ten when I first watched that mini-series; Firth was my first crush and I’ve had a soft spot for him ever since. Even so, I was astounded by his wonderful performance as a homosexual college professor in A Single Man – an Oscar-nominated turn which lost out to Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart (probably because half the Academy hadn’t even seen A Single Man).

As the gentle and sad Bertie, Firth is excellent. In his own restrained way, he brings to life the gut-wrenching terror that renders Bertie speechless and the hot shame of failure that follows. Rush is smart, funny and engaging as Lionel. Bonham-Carter, too, strikes the perfect note as the loving wife – supportive and witty, and not beyond a bit of low gossip at the expense of Mrs. Wallis.

However, both Rush and Bonham Carter are probably too delicate and subtle for the Academy – not when there are roles of drug addicts and murderous outlaws waiting to be awarded. Firth, however, is probably going to bring this one home. The King’s Speech doesn’t suffer from the obscurity of A Single Man and here Firth plays not just a historical figure (and the Academy loves those), but also one with a physical disability. It seems too good to be true, and if Firth wins, in my opinion, it would be a very well deserved victory.

This is more than I can say for Tom Hooper’s nomination as Best Director. Frankly, I thought his directorial style was a little over the top (Beethoven blaring during the eponymous King’s speech) and vastly predictable: his fellow nominees in both David Fincher (Social Network) and the Coen brothers (True Grit) are far more nuanced (read about why Lekha picks Fincher for the win here).

Ultimately, The King’s Speech is a feel-good bromance between Bertie and Lionel and it is practically impossible to not like it. Will it win the Best Picture Oscar? If it does, it wouldn’t be on a list of the best of best picture award-winners of all time. Actually, it wouldn’t even be close. But it remains a delightful little movie with genuine heart.

Look out! It's a black swan!

At next week’s World Economic Forum at Davos, a subject up for discussion at one of the many “interactive sessions” involving leaders from business and government is titled: Managing Fat Tails. Just as “shadow banking” evokes an aura of mystery and mirage, fat tails call to mind squat, repulsive geckos crouching in the naked white glare of a tube-light. And this horrid phrase is everywhere! Fat tails are the definitive answer to everything that went wrong in the financial world in 2007 (no doubt it feeds well into the current favoured view of the investment banker), and have even found favour among climatologists, political theorists, and wannabe philosophers. Everyone loves to talk fat tails.  

Fat tails refer to a phenomenon most of us studied in introductory statistics: positive excess kurtosis or leptokurtosis (not much prettier, evoking some sort of advanced arthritis). The entire set of possible outcomes of any scenario can be arranged by the probability with which each outcome can occur in the form of a probability distribution. The extreme ends of this distribution - representing events that are extremely unlikely – are referred to as tails. In a normal bell-shaped distribution – the kind that characterizes most outcomes, such as the toss of a coin (when Dhoni isn’t involved) or the adult height that a child will grow to – the tails are narrow and thin. The striking feature of the thin-tailed normal distribution is that the probability of an extreme event falls rapidly with respect to the actual magnitude of the event.  

Think about this as an example: the probability that a runner will break Usain Bolt’s 100 metre world record of 9.58 seconds is pretty low, making this an extreme event. However, if someone does manage to break the record, the margin by which he would break the record would be tiny, a fraction of a second – maybe 9.57. So the unlikely event is actually very marginally different from the more likely event. This is a feature of the normal distribution.  

In a fat-tailed distribution, by contrast, the tails are long and, well, fat. Neutrally described as leptokurtic, more casually as heavier-tailed and downright insultingly as fat-tailed: these distributions have become a catch-all explanation for the financial crisis. In such a distribution, the probability of an extreme event, or a tail event, falls slowly relative to the magnitude of the event. An extreme event will be just as unlikely to occur as earlier, but when it does, it has an enormous impact. With a fat-tailed distribution of world record sprint timings, for instance, the next person to break Usain Bolt’s record might snap it by 6 seconds. Impossible? Of course. Until it actually happens.  

The reason fat tails are so much in fashion these days is that it is now widely accepted that the financial crisis was an extreme event in a fat-tailed distribution of possible outcomes. It was so extreme so as to be barely possible, but when it did happen, it was huge. Former options trader-turned-modern day philosopher, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, argues in his best-selling book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, that people, in general, are not equipped to comprehend very extreme events – until they happen. As such, financial system regulators, risk managers, traders and other finance professionals are never able to adequately prepare for what he refers to as black swan events – large events of near-impossible scale. Taleb reserves particularly colourful language for risk managers at large banks, referring to them, among other things, as imbeciles on his rather amateurish website.  

What he essentially tears into is the modern risk management system widely used in the financial sector for the last fifteen years. Most risk managers use a measure of risk called Value-at-Risk, or VaR, to capture the inherent riskiness of a portfolio or a trading desk or even an entire financial institution. The VaR is a seemingly elegant measure that uses historical data to capture risk in a single figure denominated in a currency. An investment portfolio with a VaR of $10million at a 99 per cent confidence level specifies that 99 per cent of the time, the portfolio will not lose more than $10million. So the VaR is another way of capping probable losses in non-extreme events.  

What the VaR doesn’t do, of course, is tell you how much you will actually end up losing in an extreme event. Another way of reading the above example is that $10million is the least you can lose on this portfolio in an extreme event of less than 1 per cent probability. If the extreme event does occur, you could lose $10billion. Or $100billion. Or $1trillion. With a less than 1 per cent probability, of course.  

In the last three years, plenty of holes have been poked into the VaR model: the use of non-representative historical data to build the model, the fact that traders learned how to game the system and so on. Yet, even if VaR is executed to the best of its ability, isn’t the use of the retrospective normal as a benchmark for the future blinding the world to the universe of adverse possibilities that can and do (and did) take place? Taleb certainly thinks so: he calls it “future-blindness”. His language is cringe-worthy: he refers to the world we normally live in as “Mediocristan”, whereas the extreme events that can take place inhabit “Extremistan”. Yet, there is a point in there somewhere: the average human is strikingly unfamiliar with the unprecedented.  

Oddly enough, a rather more scholarly post-financial crisis tome suggests that perhaps crises aren’t quite so unprecedented after all. Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, formerly of the IMF, have produced a minutely-detailed and intensely researched book – “This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly” – which looks at over eight hundred years of data on financial sector crises and the default of sovereigns on their debt. They seek to establish patterns leading to large sovereign default and they arrive at quite a few: serial default by countries takes place in waves, sometimes with individual episodes separated by years, even decades. Default often follows the rapid build-up of sovereign debt – whether domestic or foreign – and episodes of default are accompanied by high inflation and currency crashes. Finally, a high level of international capital mobility has historically led to a large number of private bank failures. In short, a crisis announces its impending arrival well before it actually shows up.  

So where does that leave us? According to Rogoff and Reinhart, governments can certainly do a better job of tracking warning signs in financial sector and macroeconomic indicators, and can also find the will to act preemptively. Yet, the extreme event may fundamentally be unpredictable: whether it’s the size of the next earthquake or the collapse of the global financial system. One of the more recent expositions of this dilemma came from that famed intellectual dynamo, Donald Rumsfeld. He got a lot of stick for this quote, but I think he captured the heart of a very real problem.  

“There are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don’t know we don’t know.  

How do you predict or even prepare for something you don’t know that you don’t know?

Many years ago, I read a biography of the prima ballerina, Anna Pavlova and I was enchanted. I decided that my life’s ambition was to become a danseuse and I surreptitiously practiced (what I assumed were) plies and demi-plies using my bed’s headboard as a bar in the hope that I would soon be invited to train at the Juilliard School. I remember this because no book or movie since has made me yearn to learn an art as much, till Black Swan. Ever since I watched this movie, I have been playing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake on repeat and doing the “ballet” (if you ask me about this, I will stoutly deny it).

Like a ballet production, this movie has poise, drama, style, emotion and a thundering climax. It has been described as a psychological thriller, but it is so much more. Do you remember the final scene in Billy Elliot? Billy Elliot has grown up and is about to make his entrance as the lead in a ballet. We know he’s talented, but what will he be like as a mature dancer? The moment of suspense is almost unbearable, the crescendo is rising, and then, he soars and he is glorious. That scene still makes my heart stop every single time I watch it. Now, stretch that one scene into 108 breathtaking minutes, and you have Black Swan.

In Black Swan, Nina Sayers is a quiet, timid, young ballet soloist who lives with her overbearing mother, practices every day and does what she’s told. The director of the ballet announces that the coveted role of the Swan Queen in the famous ballet, “Swan Lake” is up for grabs. But the dancer who claims this role must not only be able to play the role of the beautiful, chaste, and frail ‘White Swan’, but must also be able to play the role of the darker, seductive and sexual ‘Black Swan’. Nina gets the role, but everybody knows that while she’s a perfect White Swan, she’s just too virginal to play the Black Swan. And thus, Nina descends into the darkness of her own psyche, to find the Black Swan in her.

Perfection of technique in an art can only take you so far. Take a look at this video (it is less than 2 minutes long). It is of Anna Pavlova performing her masterpiece: The Dying Swan. Then take a quick look at some of the other artists performing the same role. Don’t they seem practiced and self-conscious? With Pavlova on the other hand, I feel the dying throes of the swan. Death has never been more heart-rending and at the same time, beautiful. They say that she was never very good at the ‘gymnastics’ bit of ballet, and yet she remains the most famous ballerinas of all time because of her power to emote. I confidently comment on her performance, despite being barely able to spell ‘ballet’ let alone claim awareness of its intricacies, because Pavlova felt that her art was not to be restricted to the lorgnette/monocle crowd, but must transcend education, class, nationality and language. She enthralled audiences from the hallowed halls of the Mariinsky Theatre to little towns in South America. Art must communicate and not be mired down by rules, she believed. And like Pavlova, Nina too struggles to throw off the shackles of training and morality, and find the essence of the Swan Queen in her.

Many have compared this movie to Rosemary’s Baby. It’s a fair comparison (and a compliment) because one slowly loses one’s sanity as the film unravels. But in Rosemary’s Baby, we are a part of Mia Farrow’s madness and despair, because we don’t quite know what to believe either (till the makers copped out in the end and smashed subtlety with a sledgehammer). In Black Swan, though, we are kept at arm’s length; front row spectators to her existential crisis. It is kind of fitting in a movie about a performance art, and certainly not unintentional.

Edgar Degas famously said, “Art is a vice. One does not take it in lawful wedlock, one rapes it.”
I have always wondered what it must be like, to have such an all-consuming passion for an art, that one needs no other sustenance; to burn from within. How wonderful it must be to love something so deeply, that everything in life, including death, must seem trivial. That’s what being the Swan Queen meant for Nina. The same burning passion we saw in Billy Elliot, in Edith Piaf (La Vie en Rose), Van Gogh (Lust for Life) and so many others. I now understand the meaning of the agony and the ecstasy, and I envy them for it.

(The closest thing I have to a passion is StumbleUpon, and I am pretty sure I wouldn’t want to die while Stumbling. It would be so horrendously embarrassing to be found dead with a LOLCat on your computer screen).

That Natalie Portman is going to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress is a given. The question is, will she win? Her serious competition for this year (barring any obvious Oscar fodder that releases this month) will probably be from Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right, Nicole Kidman for Rabbit Hole and Hilary Swank in Conviction. Hilary’s got two and Nicole’s got one already, so they won’t be winning in a year when two actors are due overlong for an Oscar. Julianne Moore has been passed up four times, and Annette Bening thrice. Add to that the fact that being gay in a movie is the fastest route to a tearful, “spontaneous” speech at the Kodak Theatre. Which is why this is almost certainly Annette or Julianne’s year. I’d go with Annette because her character was way more compelling.

So what are Natalie’s chances? The Academy does go nuts over pretty movies about elegant things (like the ballet), so that’s in her favour. And the one thing that the Academy loves almost as much as a gay character is a crazy/having-psychiatric-disorders character. And Natalie’s so pretty and put in so much effort. But she’s young, so they’ll probably hand her a Golden Globe for her troubles, a pat on the back and give the Oscar to Annette. Which is an awful pity, because, if these things were objective, Natalie would win this hands down.

Go on, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, prove me wrong.