Last year at Kabul (with add-on by Paul)

Last Year at Marienbad is the 1961 French film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet. The film is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, as Wikipedia explains, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish, and the temporal and spatial relationship of the events is open to question.

Over at NewsBusters, Jack Coleman has posted video of Rachel Maddow’s “exclusive interview” with Nancy Pelosi under the heading “Next year, year after, whenever: Pelosi’s addled take on US departure from Afghanistan.” Glenn Reynolds cites the video for “the awkward moment when Rachel Maddow corrects Nancy Pelosi.” I recommend it unreservedly. I will just add that Pelosi is probably not the go-to person to help us straighten out the plot of Last Year at Marienbad.

PAUL adds: Rachel Maddow is probably well-suited to explain a film in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish. During the interview, she tells Pelosi:

To have this scandal now touch on General John Allen, who’s the commanding general in Afghanistan, today was the confirmation hearing for the man who would be his successor, General (Joseph) Dunford, in Afghanistan. Obviously that sex scandal, that personal behavior scandal, is unrelated to the war. But the fact that these things are all happening at once raises for me once again the strangeness of the fact that we have so little political debate about our ongoing war.

Outside the domain of “nouvelle vague” film and MSNBC, when one fact is unrelated to another, the first fact raises no issues regarding the second.

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