Lance Mannion's Foreign Office: September 2006

Hour of the Gun

Plodding shouldn't be a complimentary way to describe a movie, but offhand I can't think of a better word for the pacing of John Sturges' revenge Western, Hour of the Gun, starring James Garner as Wyatt Earp and Jason Robards as Doc Holliday.

It's as if Sturges set the beat to Wyatt's first, slow, measured steps out into the streets of Tombstone and towards the O.K. Corral, in the opening shots of the film. The pacing from there on, never speeding up, never slowing down, matches Earp's inexorable march towards vengeance and his final showdown with the man who ordered his brother's death.

That's deceptive.

Wyatt's path to that last gunfight takes him all over the map. It moves in fits and starts. There are times when he isn't chasing the bad guys at all, he's off on some other, mundane, or at least non-violent, errand, like taking Doc, who's dying of tuberculosis, to a sanitarium in Colorado, hundreds of miles away from Tombstone, so far off that it might as well be another planet. Definitely far enough away---and he spends several weeks there, looking after Doc---that you begin to wonder if he's given up his vendetta.

But Sturges hasn't paced the movie to keep in step with Wyatt's geographic travels. He's matching the progress of Wyatt's thoughts as Earp changes from a decent-hearted and dutiful lawman into a lawless but cold and methodical killer.

This progress is only seemingly inexorable. The measured pacing, the one foot in front of the other, one step following from the last scene structure---no jump cuts in this movie. Few close-ups too. Sturges shoots mainly in medium and medium long shots and lets the characters' movements provide all the action, and since Garner is in just about every shot, he sets the pace, slow and steady. Too steady. Inhumanly steady. Scarily steady.---what we're being shown is that this change in Earp is not inevitable. One thing does lead to the other, but predictably, and because it's happening slowly, he has time to think about what he's done, where he's headed, what the final results will be.

He could stop himself at any time.

Like I said, there are times when he seems to have stopped; in the scenes in Colorado Wyatt even comes close to looking cheerful, as if he's let it go. But the measured beat of Sturges' drum is relentless. In his mind, Wyatt's never given up the hunt.

It doesn't help that Clanton can't give up his obsession with Earp any more than Earp can give up his obsession with Clanton. Clanton wants to see Earp "cold and in the ground" and just at the moment when Wyatt seems ready to listen to the angel of his better nature, he gets news of Clanton's plottings.

He doesn't have to do anything about the news, though. He just decides that he will.

He gets back on the trail. The killings continue, each one more violent and more unnecessary and more like murder.

There's not much suspense in the plot. The suspense arises from the place suspense arises in all tragedies---from our hope that something will stop the inevitable in its course and our despairing certainty that nothing will.

Hour of the Gun isn't a true tragedy, though. For one thing, we know going in that Wyatt Earp can't die. Not if the movie is going to be as historically accurate as the title card after the opening credits proclaims it will be.

This movie is based on fact: This is the way it happened.

And for another thing, neither Sturges nor his screenwriter, Edward Anhalt, do much to make us care about what happens to the men Earp goes gunning for. They are bad men and their boss, Ike Clanton, is worse.

What Sturges expects us to care about, and to mourn, is a good man throwing away his own soul.

Hour of the Gun has been called a sequel to the movie Sturges made about Wyatt Earp ten years before, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, starring Burt Lancaster as Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday.

Sequel's the wrong word. Hour of the Gun is the Wyatt Earp movie Sturges would have liked to have made in the 1950s. The Jimmy Stewart-Anthony Mann problem westerns had already shown that movie audiences were ready for morally ambiguous stories with conflicted, if not downright unsympathetic, heroes, but apparently the Wyatt Earp legends were still untouchable. Sturges did what he could to make Gunfight at the O.K. Corral a more realistic story and not another burnishing of the myth, but it is finally an old-fashined shoot-em-up, set in a romanticized Wild West with an idealized Wyatt Earp as its hero.

Hour of the Gun isn't a revisionist western. Sturges isn't out to debunk the myth he had helped shine. He's really trying to show what the title card says: This is the way it happened.

By 1881, when the Earps confronted the Clanton gang at the O.K. Corral, Tombstone wasn't in the Wild West, it was at the very westernmost edge of the tame East. And Wyatt Earp and his brothers weren't heroes riding in to town to clean up. They were peace officers---cops---hired by the town to maintain an orderliness that was already established. In his bulkiness and stolidity, James Garner's Earp is a little bit like John Wayne. But he's more like the guy who's running for sheriff in your town today, a career lawman who's spent too many nights breaking up fights between drunks and picking up the pieces after an accident and arguing with local politicians about budgets.

Hour of the Gun opens with the shootout at the OK Corral and it's staged fairly close to "the way it happened." It's over in a couple of minutes. I think the real gunfight took about thirty seconds. That's because it wasn't meant to be a showdown. It was four cops going to tell a street gang to break it up. The fact that three men ended up dead was enough of a suprise to everybody concerned and seen as something so heinously out of the ordinary that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday were actually arrested for murder, although a judge decided there was no case against them and refused to indict.

That's the "wild" west of Hour of the Gun. Showdowns are not a part of daily life and dead bodies in the street are a sign that something went wrong, not that the good guys have put things to right.

You don't need to have seen Gunfight at the O.K. Corral to know what's going on in Hour of the Gun. What you do need is enough of a sense of the legend of Wyatt Earp to accept Earp as a hero at first sight. You also need enough innocence to believe that the legend must have some basis in fact to carry you past any reflexive cynicism that might stand in the way of your seeing Earp as a good guy.

It might help, then, to know that the real Wyatt Earp apparently never killed anybody before the the O.K. Corral. He was a crack shot and could have killed any bad guy he felt needed killing. But his preferred method for dealing with troublemakers was to walk right up to them, snatch whatever weapon they were brandishing out of their hands, cold-cock them over the head with his pistol, and drag them off to jail.

This appears to have worked for the real Seth Bullock of Deadwood fame too.

The real Earp didn't look like James Garner or Burt Lancaster. He was tall, but he was skinny. So it wasn't his size that cowed people. There was something about the force of his character.

Whatever it was that kept him alive and saved him the trouble of having to kill anybody didn't work with the Clanton gang. Gang is the word for them too. They were more like modern gangsters than like the outlaw gangs of the movies or the real life James and Dalton gangs. They were cattle thieves and stick-up artists who ran "legitimate businesses" and bought up local politicians and while some revisionist histories suggest that the gunfight at the OK Corral was actually the result of business and political rivalries getting out of hand, with the Earps being in their way as dirty as the Clantons, it's more the case that the Earps shocked the Clantons by deciding to treat them like the criminals they were instead of the honest ranchers they pretended to be.

The shock caused Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers to draw their guns---or have their guns drawn, that's never been clear. We don't really know if the Earps knew they were walking into a gunfight and went anyway. The way they just walked straight at the Clantons suggests they didn't, and Ike Clanton may not have been wearing his guns, which would mean he wasn't expecting real trouble either.

The famous shootout was probably a mistake. Both sides miscalculated. What happened in the weeks after, though, was murder. Ike Clanton or somebody associated with the gang ordered a hit on the Earps. Morgan and Virgil were ambushed. Morgan was killed and Virgil left crippled.

Then various members of the Clanton gang began turning up dead.

My second favorite Wyatt Earp movie, 1993's Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer as Wyatt and Doc, treats this part of the story as a simple kill or be killed shoot out that takes place over the course of weeks instead of all at once at high noon.

My favorite Wyatt Earp movie is My Darling Clementine, but that's one of John Ford's fairy tales.

Sturges, though, makes it plain that Wyatt Earp does not have to kill any of the men he confronts. He's a much better lawman than they are outlaws and gunfighters. He has the drop on them and the ones who make the mistake of drawing on him do it because he provokes them to.

In every confrontation, except the final one, Earp's former method of handling bad guys---stare them down, take their guns, drag them off to jail---would have worked.

In effect then, Earp murders them all.

Each killing seems less accidental than the last, and with each one Earp grows less and less surprised at himself. When he lets a bad guy live it's only to make him tell him where the next bad guy is hiding out so he can go kill him.

This is the story of a good man who does wrong, but Sturges doesn't ever let us think that Earp has no choice. Wyatt knows that the citizens of Tombstone have been working, successfully, to run Ike Clanton out of town and have effectively disarmed him by breaking up the gang, arresting and buying off those members Earp hasn't caught up with yet.

On top of which, Sturges makes us doubt Wyatt from the start. The opening gunfight is shot almost entirely in longshot and although there's some dialogue we don't hear the words, as if we're being kept out of earshot with the camera. We don't know what the Earps are thinking as they walk down the street or what the Clantons are really planning when they gather at the corral.

But Sturges has James Garner give Earp a moment of pause in which he seems to be re-thinking the situation and even telling himself that this probably isn't the way to go about things and he ought to stop it right now. It's only a moment, but before it passes Garner suddenly looks very sad, as if he has lost something important and is mourning the loss.

And while Sturges' title card insists "This is the way it happened," he's changed an important detail.

In real life, Ike Clanton was with his brother and the McLaurys. The reason he didn't end up dead like them is that when the shooting started he ran at the Earps shouting that he was unarmed---he might have thrown his guns away, he might have dropped them when Virgil Earp ordered the gang to disarm, or he might not have been wearing them to begin with. Whichever was the case, Wyatt Earp shouted at him to get the hell out of the way and even gave him a helpful shove.

In the movie, Sturges has Ike standing across the street with the rest of the gang and then ducking for cover as soon as the shooting starts. He's wearing his gunbelt, but he takes it off before the smoke clears so that he'll appear to have been an innocent bystander.

He doesn't owe his life to Wyatt then. He owes it to his trigger-happy kid brother Billy and the McLaurys who started shooting too soon. The Earps have to deal with them first and while they are shooting it out with Billy and the McLaurys, the rest of the gang scatters and Ike is forced to take cover.

The implication is that Ike meant to be part of the confrontation and that the Earps expected him to be. And since Ike is played by Robert Ryan and is the only star among the Clantons---although Jon Voight appears in one of his earliest roles as Curly Bill Brocius---Ike is the only Clanton of interest at that point. So we can't help feeling it was Ike the Earps were on their way to...

...do what to?

Arrest? Argue with? Interrogate?

Kill.

That's what I think Garner's little moment of hesitation and sorrow is meant to tell us. As the movie begins, Wyatt Earp has already decided that he's going to kill Ike Clanton. He's concluded that there's no other way to deal with him. The decision is morally wrong because it's wrong for practical reasons. The town has already begun to make moves to get rid of Ike. Clanton himself is desperate because, as he tells his bought politicians later, "The East is coming." He means that the town's honest citizens will finally have the backing of real government and he won't be able to survive that.

Wyatt certainly knows the East is coming too. But he's lost patience. Perhaps it's also a matter of pride with him. He's going to put a stop to Clanton himself, once and for all, and that means he has to kill him. The thing he's mourning the loss of in that moment, then, is himself.

We're not meant to think that Wyatt is driven to murder by passion and an understandable desire for revenge. When Clanton has his brothers ambushed it gives him justification not motivation for a course of action he's already decided upon.

Hour of the Gun is a director's not an actor's movie. There's not much in the way of dialogue. The characters tell each other what they they need to know, never what they are thinking or feeling. Garner isn't called upon to do much more than glower and then glower harder. Robert Ryan's job is to give Ike Clanton the charisma and intelligence necessary to organize, lead, and hold together a collection of thugs, cowards, sociopaths, drifters, and grifters. It's interesting and fun to see him make Clanton into a precursor of Deadwood's Al Swearengen. In his speeches to his gang about the threat from the East he sounds very much like Swearengen ranting about Yankton, without the profanity of course and without the poetry either, but he has exactly the same contempt for his bought politicians as Ian McShane has Swearengen show towards the corrupt "decent" citizens that are his allies.

All the real heavylifting is left to Jason Robards. He only has a couple of notes to sing, going back and forth between world-weary cynic and outraged idealist, but he doesn't go the usual route of having the cynic be the mask of the idealist. He makes the idealist the creation of the cynic.

As I said, you don't need to believe the myth as much as remember it to accept the movie's premise that Wyatt Earp is a good man. But it's clear that Robards' Doc Holliday not only believes the myth but needs it to be true to the point that he drags himself out of the hospital in order to try to get in the way of Earp's self-propelled downfall. If there's killing to be done, Doc Holliday is the one to do it not Wyatt Earp.

Holliday sees himself as having been a bad man, and not just a sinner but a villain. Somehow and for reasons neither man can probably articulate Wyatt Earp became his friend. Holliday has concluded that if someone like Wyatt Earp can see something good in him then maybe he's not as irredeemble as he'd supposed.

Wyatt Earp is Doc Holliday's personal savior and now that Doc knows that he can't fight off his TB any longer, that it's going to take much more time to kill him, he desperately needs Wyatt to be what he thought him to be so that he can die thinking of himself as not entirely damned.

I like it that the dialogue doesn't lay this out for us. We have to see it for ourselves in Robards' anger and anguish at what Wyatt is doing to himself.

The nicest thing about Robards' performance, though, is the calmness that comes over him when he realizes that it didn't matter that he couldn't stop Wyatt.

It's Robards, not Garner, Sturges gives the last scene and the last lines to.

Before leaving him at the sanitarium, knowing that this is the last time, it's the end of the line for Doc, Wyatt has told Doc a lie about himself, a charitable lie, meant to leave Doc with his illusions about Wyatt's heroism. Doc pretends to believe it, but he doesn't and there's a heartbroken look on Robards' face as he watches Wyatt ride away.

But it doesn't last. He turns his attention to a card game he's playing with an orderly and finishes the game and the movie with a rueful but sincere grin.

"Aces," he says as he lays out his winning hand. It's a description of his mood as well as of his cards.

In Wyatt Earp, Sturges is showing us that the seeds of our moral self-destruction are in our own hands.

But in Doc Holliday he is showing us that the corrollary is true too. The agent of our redemption is our own self.

Friday, September 29, 2006 in Now Playing at Cine 1-1000 | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

More kindling for the bonfire of the Vanities

It's kind of a given that politicians have gigantic egos.

Givens are not always truths.

I don't think it's the case that it's their egos we're talking about when we see someone like Jeanine Pirro, the Republican candidate for Attorney General here in New York, self-destruct in a public display of hubris, anger, vindictiveness, and a complete contempt for the laws that as the one-time Westchester County district attorney she'd sworn to uphold.

I say public but Pirro didn't mean to have an audience of more than one. She goofed when she tried to enlist Bernie Kerik in her plans to spy on her philandering husband. She didn't know that Kerik's own habits of ignoring inconvenient laws had attracted the attention of the Feds who had his phone bugged.

Excerpts from the transcript show Pirro afflicted by a severe case of the It's all about ME's!, which, by the way, I think is understandable for a person whose spouse has been humiliating her with a series of adulteries and, not incidentally, risking her political career through his self-indulgence.

Of course, Pirro isn't an ordinary betrayed wife. She's a public figure with not just an image to maintain but responsibilities, to her party, to her staff, to her constituents, to the State of New York. Her feelings are natural and we can all sympathize with her anger and her pain, but she has a duty to keep a lid on them. It's her job not to let her personal life take control of her public life.

So you could say that in trying to drag Kerik into this---and, although I don't feel the least bit sorry for him, he has enough problems of his his own; she's supposed to be his friend---she let her ego get in the way of her good judgment.

But I think ego's the wrong word.

The right word is vanity.

Ego can be partly defined as one's self-regard, and so can vanity, but that doesn't do justice to either word. Ego isn't self-love as much as it's self-respect. Our ego doesn't just include our sense of who we are, it includes the kind of person we are striving to be. It includes our determination to get there and the discipline to accomplish it. It is that part of us that exercises self-control.

The ego stands a bit aloof, objectively watching our lives unfold, stepping in to hold things together, or put them back together, when the other, weaker parts of our nature explode and tear our psyches apart.

Vanity is that part of us that tells us we are the most important person in the world, the part that is always asking in a demanding whine, What about MY needs?

Ego is that part of us that says that the kind of person we are matters more than what happens to us. Ego is the part that says, This is not worth making a fool of ourselves over.

A strong ego can make a person arrogant, but it never makes them act silly.

Whether you're a politician, a movie star, a business executive, a famous artist, a blogger with a reputation even, being in the public eye, having power over events or just over a few other people's opinions, having celebrity, having too much money or too much access to other people's money, being flattered all the time, being in any way the sun around which other people's planets revolve, this is all warping. It pulls a person's sense of self all out of shape.

Vanity is that part of you that loves the new you, that thinks, You're worth it, babe.

Ego says, No, this is me, and resists all the tugging and pulling by other people.

Politicians ought to have strong egos. What too many of them have is an out of control sense of self-worth. They are vain.

From Pirro to Joe Lieberman to George Bush, and back through time to Lyndon Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, and on to Aaron Burr and even poor John Adams, the country has had to put up with the outsized Vanity of too many politicians, great and small, while we've lucked out by the appearance of a few politicians with titanic egos---Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt.

All this has not much to do with anything, and although it's her own fault that we know all about it, Pirro's soap operatic private life shouldn't be an issue in the election.

Her willingness to use the influence she has as a public figure to serve her own personal needs, however, is a reason to vote against her.

Still, I am mainly interested in this story as a story and Pirro's character as the basis for a character.

This would be the basis for a good if a little trashy movie or an episode of Law and Order or...

...another short story that I should be writing.

Which reminds me. It's almost time for the next installment of the Lance Mannion Tall Tale of the Month Club. Watch your mailboxes early next week.

Meanwhile, there's still time to get this month's short story, A Penance for Tom Mallory, if you're interested in stories about politicians and their vanities.

Thursday, September 28, 2006 in Everybody Has a Hungry Heart, Smoke-filled rooms | Permalink

We are Americans

Torturers are cowards and sadists.

Americans are not cowards and sadists.

Torture doesn't work.

Amercians are not stupid. We don't use tools that don't do the job. We don't pursue courses of action that take us nowhere. We do not persist in doing what we know is wrong and futile because we are too stubborn or dumb to think of anything else to do.

Torture is against all our principles.

Americans are people who sacrifice their lives for their beliefs. We aren't yellowbellied lily-livered chickenhearted scardy cats who throw away all we believe in just because we are afraid for our own skins.

Torture, rendition, secret military tribunals, great big holes poked in the Constitution, whimsical suspensions of haebeus corpus---these are not things Americans do. They are things done by a feckless and reckless President who can't think of any way to solve any problem except to make it worse.

Americans do not blindly follow any President, we do not give any President whatever powers he demands, not even the best Presidents, let alone one who ignored a serious terrorist threat and allowed the worst mass murder in our history to take place, who used that tragedy as an excuse to lie us into an unnecessary war that he then proceeded to lose, and who cannot under any circumstances bring himself to admit a mistake or make a move to correct himself.

We are not sheep. We are not cowards. We are not a nation of unprincipled thugs and sadists.

Spread the word.

Write your Congressmen. Write your Senators. Write your local newspaper.

Tell them.

We are Americans.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006 in Rants 2 | Permalink

"Live from New York, it's...aw, who gives a hoot?"

Thinking about the Saturday Night Live-like show we so far haven't seen much of on the show that's supposed to be about producing said Saturday Night Live-like show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, has me wondering.

Just how funny was Saturday Night Live?

Was it ever truly funny?

Is it funny now?

For all it has mattered to me, SNL might as well have gone off the air when Dan Aykroyd left. I watched it on and off over the years, including the benighted early 80s shows, the Lost Years followed by the Eddie Murphy Show featuring Joe Piscopo.

Do the names Charles Rocket, Robin Duke, Denny Dillon, Mary Gross, and Brad Hall make your heart sing? The only reason I remember Julia Louis-Dreyfus from that time is that just as I was forgetting who she was she turned up on Seinfeld and I was shocked that she had not only grown a lot prettier but had learned how to be actually funny.

But I think I've seen maybe four episodes since Will Farrell moved on. The last one was a year or so ago, and all the skits seemed to be about how stupid and ugly people can be. One of the skits, Appalachian Emergency Room, was actually about laughing at the cripples and retards.

In the old days a skit like that would have been condemned to the last half hour when the cast was too coked up to remember their lines anymore and the only audience left watching on TV were those of us too desperately lonely to go to bed or whose roommates still had the sock hanging from the doorknob.

There was a kind of train-wreck fascination keeping you glued to the screen. The joke wasn't in what was happening on the screen but in wondering what the idea must have sounded like when they came up with it and at what point they stopped bothering to write any of it down, figuring that Belushi would save it by improvising or going nuts or both.

Except by that point Belushi was usually comatose.

I've often wondered how many of the skits done in the last half hour were back-ups, if at around 12:15 Lorne Michaels began looking around to see who was still coherent.

"Shit. Ok, we'll save the Killer Bees for next week, again. What do we got that that Jane and Gilda can do? Oh hello, Garrett, what's on your mind? Can whatever it is wait?"

But Applachian ER came in the first half of the show, I'm pretty sure before Weekend Update, since I was only watching to see who they had anchoring the news. Prime real estate, in other words.

Tell me that was while Tina Fey was off making Mean Girls.

Still, the old show had its share of clunkers in the first half hour. Not surprising, really, when you consider that the first and most critical audience a joke or a sketch has to make laugh is the other writers and when you read about the smorgasbord of drugs being sampled backstage, even if as much as half the shit was going into Belushi, you have to think it must have been pretty easy for the writers to crack each other up.

But how much of what we thought was funny was funny?

Saturday Night Live has always had an easy audience. It comes on about the time its target demographic is staggering back to the dorm or the apartment, stoned or half-drunk, with their morale flagging. Everybody's realizing, "Ok, there are no good parties, we're not going to get laid, and, what the fuck, Sergei's delivers, might as well turn on the tube."

People are looking for something, anything, to cheer them up and send them to bed thinking the night's not been a total waste.

You're just ready to meet the Coneheads, Gumby, the Church Lady, Wayne and Garth, the ambigously gay duo half way.

More than half way.

Was it funny or were we just too ready to laugh? I loved the original cast but did they ever do anything more than provide us all with a set of catchphrases we could use to sound funny to ourselves later and employ as code words at parties to identify ourselves to each other as would-be hipsters?

We are two wild and crazy guys.

Vito, you're blocking.

Let us consume mass quantities.

Good evening, I'm Lance Mannion and you're not.

Jane, you ignorant slut.

Nevermind.

And there was just something reassuring, almost magically healing, in knowing, when you were home alone, or at least not with the girl or the friends you wanted to be with, again, on a Saturday night, that at that very moment, live, in New York, there was this gang of really cool, truly funny, mildly dangerous people having a ball for your benefit.

There was Steve Martin! There was George Carlin! There were the Stones, Joe Cocker, Linda Ronstdat! There was Fran Tarkenton, for crying out loud! And you were on the same planet as they were, alive in the same moment, sharing a joke, thinking the same thoughts, enjoying the music together.

Damn, it was fun. In a totally and, later on, depressingly vicarious way.

But was it funny?

Sometimes I don't see how it could have been, because those people were not good at focusing on their jobs.

It's part of their own self-legend that putting on a live comedy show week in and week out was brutally difficult, it was amazing to them, and ought to be amazing to us, that they managed to fill the first half hour with anything, let alone all the brilliant stuff they did fill it with---think what it was like then to have to fill 90 minutes.

Of course, like I said, they didn't fill 90 minutes, those last 30, often the last 45, were almost always a waste. But still. What they did verged on the heroic, didn't it?

They were heroes and heroines in the service of Comedy.

Except that Milton Berle and Sid Caesar did the same thing, and they had to do it close to 40 times a year.

And the turn-around on sitcoms that film before live audiences is pretty quick.

Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Selma Diamond---they expended as much energy every week as Michael O'Donohue and his writers, but they didn't expend it getting in their own way. Belushi and Aykroyd and the rest may have worked as hard as Sid Caesar, but a lot of what was work for them was just holding themselves enough together to make it through the week until 1:00 AM Sunday morning.

Yes, it's amazing Lorne Michaels had a whole 90 minutes of show to point cameras at every week, but considering the uncontrolled self-destructive and self-indulgent impulses of the cast and the writers it's amazing that any work got done at all.

If some of that work turned out to be funny it must have been a miracle.

How miraculous was SNL?

It's still the highest compliment that can be paid to any succeeding incarnation of SNL that it's as funny or funnier than the glory days. I've heard people say that under Tina Fey the show was better than it ever was. I wasn't as devoted a fan, but I thought the Phil Hartman-Dana Carvey-Jan Hooks-Mike Myers era produced more consistently funny episodes, and, by the way, Kevin Nealon is one of the most under-rated of all the SNL alum and I'm glad to see he's having a good time on Weeds.

Going back to watch old episodes wouldn't help me make up my mind. If I laugh, I won't know if it's nostalgia or my funny bone at work. If I don't laugh, that doesn't mean anything because so much of the show's humor was topical and I've probably forgotten many of the topics. Dan Aykroyd's Jimmy Carter struck me as brilliant and The Pepsi Syndrome was one of my favorite skits of all time, but how much of the effect depended on Jimmy Carter being in the White House at the moment and The China Syndrome in the movie theaters?

I want to believe it was funny. I want to believe I was smart, hip, cool, and funny because I liked it.

But there are too many doubts.

It's always something.
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Questions it would be more fun to contemplate if you're 20: Is SNL funny now? What's funny? Who's funniest? Who's doing Bush? Who was the best President anyway---Aykroyd's Carter? Aykroyd's Nixon? Phil Hartman's Reagan? Dana Carvey's George Herbert Walker Bush? Phil Hartman's Clinton? ("You gonna eat those fries?") Will Farrell's Dubya? Darrell Hammond's anybody doesn't count. It's unfair competition. Hammond's a god.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006 in Too Much TV | Permalink | Comments (25) | TrackBack (0)

Blogging Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Updated as show progressed. Wrap-up added below on Tuesday morning.

Opening. This is a show about a comedy show, right? I counted 16 lines that were meant to sound like jokes. I counted one joke.

Does this mean that this is a drama about writing a comedy show?

Pretty girl with full lips who played the Pinkerton/Governess on Deadwood to skinny girl: I wish my body looked like yours.

Skinny girl: I wish my talent looked like yours.

Is the Pinkerton/Governess talented enough to carry the burden of that line?

Josh Lyman or whoever he is: You raised the bar a little high.

Amanda Peet: I raised the bar a little high?

Chandler or whoever he is: A little high, yeah.

Amanda Peet: Clear it.

We're meant to take that seriously? That's a sign of her faith in them, her high standards, what the business requires? Bad sports metaphors?

Seconds after first commercial break bloggers get dissed.

"Bernadette is writing in her pajamas surrounded by cats."

We get dissed with a five year old joke.

Aaron Sorkin has been in suspended animation since he left West Wing. Given their ages, half the "cast" and many of the writers would have their own blogs and websites. A character who went around insulting bloggers and being dismissive of the Internet would be picking fights with his co-workers.

Benefit of the doubt: Maybe that's supposed to be a part of D.L. Hughley's character.

I am not in my pajamas. I am not surrounded by cats. I am the cat's pajamas.

No, I am the walrus.

The cat's in the cradle with a silver spoon, the little boy laughed with the man in the moon.

Love triangle. Governess/Pinkerton still carrying torch for Chandler. Sexy chick in black tank top is sleeping with him. This is news to Governess/Pinkerton. They played this straight.

Sexy chick might be skinny chick from earlier. Can't tell. All the brunettes in the "cast" and among the writers look and dress alike.

Back from second commercial break. Governess/Pinkerton is showing a lot of cleavage for a supposedly uptight Christian type. Not that I'm complaining.

Chandler and Governess/Pinkerton have had the first of what I'm afraid will be a weekly event: The big scene in which they come close to kissing!

Twenty six more lines that sound like they were meant to be jokes.

I did like it that Chandler's afraid that Phil Donohue can beat him up.

"Seriously, he's a big Irish man."

What's Charlotte's husband from Sex in the City doing in the writers' room? He must be important because he's Charlotte's husband from Sex in the City but he hasn't said anything yet that explains why he's important. Somebody explain please?

Christians are on the march against the show. Terre Haute won't air it if the Crazy Christian sketch is included. Amanda Peet stands up for her guys. Was there ever a doubt?

Steven Weber's afraid for his job? Who's his boss?

Aaron Sorkin remembers when Steve Martin returned to Saturday Night Live and promised to restore the show to former glory in a big song and dance number. Inspiring rock music rising on the soundtrack as Chandler sits down at his laptop and starts to create tells us that he will write something as funny and brilliant as Steve Martin did. Fade to commericial.

Ok. Hard to go wrong with a Gilbert and Sullivan parody.

Steve Martin's song and dance number was funnier and they moved through the studio.

Is the whole point of Governess/Pinkerton's character to prove that gosh darn it some Christians are nice folks and like to laugh just like we godless liberals?

I think I'm going to like Steven Weber's network exec best.

Are we ever going to get to see the Crazy Christians sketch?

Do you think someone will tell Aaron Sorkin that the reason it was fun to watch the writers at work on the old Dick Van Dyke show was that they were funny? Their lines were written by comedy writers! Buddy Sorel was played by a comedy writer!

Rethinking the Gilbert and Sullivan parody. It was a song full of inside jokes about a phony comedy show that's the subject of a TV drama full of inside jokes about television. Sorkin made up an inside and then made jokes that were only funny if you were inside the inside of the inside. Is that hip or what?

What.

Wrap-up: I'm going to give Studio 60 a couple more chances. West Wing made me grumpy like this for the first few episodes---and there were things about it that I never stopped being grumpy about---but I was glad I stuck with it. I stuck with West Wing for Martin Sheen and Rob Lowe. I'm sticking with Studio 60 for Steven Weber and Matt Perry, who so far, seems to be the only character on the show who understands that comedy is harder than dying.

I hope the can't live with you/can't live without you business between Perry and Sarah Paulson starts being played for more laughs. It's probably Perry's ranginess and the fact that he's playing a comedy writer, but I couldn't help being reminded of Dick Van Dyke and that got me thinking, What if Rob and Laura had met later, after Rob was successful? Laura was an awfully conventional girl, even for the time period. Imagine her having to compete for Rob's attention with actresses, writers, etc. after he had gotten used to dating actresses, writers, etc. Paulson's character is apparently a bit in the same boat, because of her religion and her conservativism. She doesn't really fit in Perry's world, and her challenge is to make him see how he might fit and be happy in hers.

But if it's true that her character is based on Kristin Chenoweth, then I wish they'd cast a Kristin Chenoweth type. Paulson is willowy and fragile, she doesn't just wear her heart on her sleeve, she is one long exposed vibrating nerve. How can Perry not see how much she loves him? How can he let her be hurt like that? Chenoweth, who looks like a cartoon character brought to life, is tough, brassy, and a bit abrasive. If they had "her" in the part, you could see how the other characters might forget that she had feelings they had to be considerate of. You could also see how Perry's character might forget that she's pretty and sexy. She'd have the problem of reminding him she's a girl, as attractive in her way as all the willowy bulemic brunettes around, while also making sure he knows she's off limits until the ring's on her finger.

Plus, Chenoweth is funny. She's a born comic and entertainer. As played by Paulson, the character's just a leading lady who can deliver a funny line, not even a Mary Tyler Moore, who was a comedienne trapped inside the body of an ingenue.

The show is going to pale really fast if they don't start showing "the show." A sketch a week. Plus, the writers' room has to be funny. No more talking about jokes and sketches. The writers have to tell them and act them out. Like West Wing, Studio 60 is a show about doing the job. But if we don't see the job getting done, it'll be a show about pretty people bragging about what great jobs they have. If the work they do is so all-fired important that we're supposed to sit still for an hour every week watching them do it, then we should see what makes it important---the comedy.

I wish I'd seen the first episode. Shakes loved it!

But at The House Next Door, Todd VanDerWerf's feelings about it are summed up by his post's subtile: The quick wit and false heart of Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Comedy writer and director Ken Levine has a blog. He wasn't impressed with the first episode, either. He was impressed by his experience working with Mary Tyler Moore, once upon a time, but not in a good way.

This, however, was nice to know about Ted Danson. But I'm not surprised.

One more update: Jaquandor, a Sorkin fan, but a level-headed fan, watched the first and second episodes and liked the first but was left a little cold by the second. He sums up his feelings thus:

Folks, if ever a TV show is going to make my head explode, Studio 60 is going to be the one. I love watching it, basking in Aaron Sorkin's wordplay and noting his ever-apparent mastery of the four-act structure. But at the same time, man, does it piss me off.

Monday, September 25, 2006 in Too Much TV | Permalink | Comments (39) | TrackBack (0)

Lilith unpins her bun and lets her hair down

Sure, Frasier joked about her. But Lilith was never a castrating shrew battle-ax harridan fishwife.

Not on Cheers, anyway.

When Frasier got his own show, he moved into a parallel universe, one where he had been married to a castrating shrew battle-ax harridan fishwife named Lilith and good riddance to her.

But it was necessary to that show's storyline that the audience didn't keep asking, When are Frasier and Lilith going to get back together?

It was also intrinsic to the show's guiding spirit. Frasier was one of the most strangely gynophobic sitcoms ever. Lots of sitcoms have hated women and treated them as the Other and the Enemy. Frasier's main characters were all terrified of women.

The only good woman was a dead one---literally. Fraiser's mother---or a version of a boy, Roz, or an impossibly virginal overgrown little girl, Daphne.

Whenever Lilith made an appearance, everybody, including Roz and Daphne, quailed before her like the Munchkins whenever the Wicked Witch broomed in.

Meanwhile, back in the Cheers' universe, the other Lilith was a much more sympathetic character.

Sometimes she could be a bit of a scold, and often she seemed to be one of the types of girlfriends that Matt Groenig classified in a list Velvet Goldmine helpfully posted in the comments on my last Cheers post. Huffy.

"I see nothing humorous in those silly cartoons you keep snickering at."

Also known as: No Fun, Humorless Prig, Cold fish, Chilly Proposition, Iceberg, Snarly

Advantages: Your friends will feel sorry for you

Disadvantages: You will have no friends.

This is how Norm, Cliff, Carla, and the regulars would describe Lilith. It's how Frasier sometimes sees her himself. But she's only this way because she can't help disapproving when her smart, decent, reliable, heroic husband acts like a particularly dorky teenage boy, a side of him hanging out with the gang at the bar brings out.

Lilith doesn't like the gang as a gang, but she likes Woody and she likes Norm and trusts his taste as an interior decorator. She makes friends with both Diane and Rebecca. And she loves Sam, thinks of him as one of her best friends---he thinks of her this way too---she has him over to her house a lot, and she trusts him to look after Frederick.

She's not humorless, either, although her sense of humor is...um...idiosyncratic? Zeppo is her favorite Marx Brother.

She is not No Fun. She and Frasier are always doing things together that they both enjoy. In fact, whenever they are in the bar together it's usually because they're either on their way out for an evening on the town or on their way home.

And she is anything but a chilly proposition.

Fraiser jokes that she uses sex as part of a system of punishments and rewards, withholding her favors whenever he misbehaves or is disobedient, which, in his jokes, is synonymous with acting adult, male, and independent. But there's not much in the writing and nothing in Bebe Neuwirth's performance that supports this.

Lilith has a very passionate side---a hot temper and a sex drive always on the boil---and it doesn't take much to bring it to the fore. She and Frasier got together in an explosion of lusty abandon---their foreplay took place on television!

Not only does she delight in her sexuality, she is even a little vain about it. When she asks Henri, the caddish French photographer who has followed Kelley home from Paris, to take her portrait, they agree that the picture must be tasteful, serious, and becoming to a professional woman and a wife and mother. Henri promises those results but:

Henri: With a hint of smouldering sensuality dancing behind ze eyes.

Lilith: That goes without saying.

We don't get to see the final photograph, but we can tell from Frasier's reaction---"OH MOMMA!"---that once she got in front of the camera Lilith shed a few inhibitions and some clothes. They're both driven wild by the sight and Frasier sweeps her up into his arms and carries her out of the bar, heading for home and the bedroom as fast as he can.

Then there's one of my favorite episodes. Lilith goes on a TV talk show to promote her new book, Good Girls, Bad Boys---the title was her editor's idea; she wanted to call it "A Cross-sectional Study of Control Group Females With a Tendency Towards Self-Destruction Vis-a-vis Damaging Relationships With Members of the Opposite Sex."

As Woody says, "Oh brother! Not another one of those."

She brings along Frasier and Sam for moral support and the men wind up on stage with her, called up by the hostess as examples of a good boy and a bad boy.

Sam's bad boyness excites the all-female audience to the point that they start demanding an answer to what they consider the most important question: "What does Sam look like with his shirt off?"

Women in the audience (chanting): Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shirt!

Lilith (to hostess): Now this is the perfect example of what a bad boy like Sam can do to a roomful of good girls like these fine women. (Her eyes lock on Sam) One can't help but be attracted to his steely glance and the strength therein, to imagine (her gaze grows more intense, her voice slower and hoarser) the warmth of his skin against ours, his arms pinning us down so we can't move. (She's losing it; Sam sees it and starts looking nervous.) One sees his full lips and imagines what they must feel like (seductive pause) slightly moist, (another pause) tugging at ours, before long one's feeling a little dizzy, and for God's sake, Sam! Let the buttons fly!

(Lilith launches herself at Sam's chest and begins tearing at his shirt.)

Definitely not Groenig's Huffy type.

What Lilith is, is the Schoolmarm.

The Schoolmarm is the one who always has to be the grown-up in the room. She sees herself as setting an example. The Schoolmarm is always on her best behavior in public. She has a habit of treating other people around her, especially when they're fooling around, as if they were children, although she tends not to start scolding, but to wait. She'll wait patiently for everybody to settle down and get back to work. She judges the importance of situations and experiences by how much of a lesson can be learned from them, and she's very good at finding the lesson even when there doesn't seem to be one to be found. She knows the value of fun. She believes in play, but in moderation and only when all your homework is done and the toys and books and crayons are put away.

She seems to prefer to watch others having fun to joining in.

The Schoomarm is one of my gender-specific sounding types that actually is gender specific.

An important quality of the schoolmarm is that she holds herself aloof, her physical self as well as her inner self, but there's a promise implied. The promise is that later, when the time is right, she will unpin her bun and let her hair down. Her aloofness is the result of professional expectations. She has internalized the idea that she must be be a public virgin, an ideal of chastity.

Since that's not expected of men, even men who are actually teachers, men can't be schoolmarms. The closest type for them to this is the Parish Priest.

Other types related to the Schoolmarm but that can be male or female are the Professor, the Den Mother, the Scoutmaster, the Headmistress/Headmaster, the Mother Superior, and the Coach.

On Cheers, Coach was not a Coach type.

An important difference between all of them and the Schoolmarm is sex appeal.

The Schoomarm withholds the possibility of erotic and romantic adventures. She can't withhold possibitlities that are in fact impossibilities, therefore the Schoolmarm is usually relatively young, attractive, marriageable, and sexually desirable. She knows it too, but dresses to downplay or hide the fact.

The Schoolmarm as a type is a subset of the archetype of the Ingenue. Schoolmarms make themselves available as love interests, but their availability is subtly suggested and they must be wooed and won in the proper way.

This is a type that it is possible to age out of. When she grows older, or when she becomes too obviously a wife and a mother, she turns into a less complicated type, the Schoolteacher.

On Cheers, Lilith becomes a wife and a mother, but she doesn't show those aspects of herself around the bar often or show them at all, we can be sure, when she is at work. In fact, habit seems to prevent her from showing those sides of herself to Fraiser often enough that when she unpins the bun and lets her hair down it's always a surprise and delight to him...and to her.

Frankly, I'm personally drawn to Schoolmarm types, but I prefer ones who aren't quite as in control of themselves all the time as Lilith is.

I like the ones who are of the psychological type---as opposed to character type, which is what I've been describing in these posts; I've used personality and temperament to refer to psychological type, but all three terms refer to an individual's inner make-up, while character type describes their outward behavior---the Good Girl With a Naughty Streak.

There are Good Boys With Naughty Streaks.

Frasier wants to be one of these, but he can't manage it.

Frasier (upset that Rebecca has called him a good boy and compared him to a favorite pair of comfortable slippers): You think I can't be dangerous? Is that it? You think I'm just an old slipper? Well? Am I a good boy? Would a good boy do this? (He picks up a pair of scissors and begins running around the bar.) I am running with scissors! (After two laps, he heads to the door and stops.) I'm going swimming right after lunch. I'm leaving now. I'm going outside. I'm going to pet strange dogs no matter where they've been. Look out, World! Fraiser Crane's going to raise some hell...

(He leaves. Cliff comes through the door just after he goes.)

Cliff (calling back up the stairs to Fraiser): Hey, pet him if you want to Fraiser, but you don't know where he's been.

Lilith takes delight in being what she thinks of as wild and impetuous, but she doesn't have enough of a naughty streak to be able to imagine being truly naughty either.

Diane is more of the good girl with a naughty streak. She's also something a schoolmarm type herself, come to think of it. Explains a lot.

A variation of the good girl/good boy with a naughty streak is the good girl/good boy with a rebellious streak.

Again, these are personalities not character types. They are people at odds with themselves. The job they've chosen, the role they play, the responsibilites they've accepted, have required them to repress important parts of themselves or sacrifice a little too much of their own needs and desires.

Often, they've taken on tasks and responsibilities they're not cut out for, consequently they either hate what they're doing or they aren't any good at it or both.

Which brings us to the subject of the next post in this series.

Rebecca.
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Feel free to keep adding to our ever growing list of types. To get to the comment thread on A typical English professor spouts off click here.

Friday, September 22, 2006 in Too Much TV | Permalink

A typical English teacher spouts off

Every time I think I'm out, they keep pulling me back in!

CJ Colluci and MoXmas are leading a delegation demanding I expand upon something I wrote yesterday in Sexual Politics, sexual jealousy, fiction vs. analysis, and the novel I should be writing:

Once upon a time, I drove one of my writing classes into fits because I insisted that people do indeed fall into types, that all of us are to a great degee typical. I went on to say that there are in fact a very limited number of human types and I made a list that didn't come close to filling one side of the blackboard.

CJ and Mo and a few others want me to post the list.

This is something I'm reluctant to get into.

For one thing, to do it right, I need to dig out my old lecture notes and, even if I knew which box in the garage or the basement they were packed away in, that's a memory vault I'm not sure I want to visit. It's dark, it's creepy, it's full of bats and spiders, there are at least three evil trolls guarding the door, and God knows what skeletons lay entombed inside.

And for another, I'm worried it might provoke me into writing the book I should have written 15 years ago, except that now I'd write it online in an endless series of long posts that would drive away all but my most loyal readers---Hi, Mom!---and which Atrios, Wolcott, Shakes, and Avedon Carol would never link to in a million years.

Maud Newton might link, but she'd be doing it out of pity, and who needs a pity link?

But then CJ, Mo, and the others are among my most loyal readers and their loyalty ought to be repaid.

Still, there's the problem of getting started. Probably I should just post my list and wait for the angry objections to pour in.

Lance, you blithering fool, those aren't types, they're cliches!

Mannion, you horse's ass, don't you know the difference between a character type and a personality disorder?

Son, I love you, but even a mother can stand only so much tedious pedantry.

So it seems to me that before I got started I would need to define my terms, at least differentiating between temperament and type.

Then I'd need to explain how while a character may be a type, a type isn't a character.

I think I'll start there, because it'll let me write about something I love.

Cheers.

The main characters on Cheers included three variations of the same type. I'm not sure what to call the type.

The pedant?

The know-it-all?

The pompous windbag?

Diane, Frasier, and Cliff.

All of a type, but very different characters.

The three of them approached life at second-hand, through things they'd read. None of them could resist the temptation to show off their store of knowledge, and they each did it to establish their superiority over others.

But they had very different temperaments, backgrounds, and educations, and the differences caused extreme variations within their type.

Diane and Cliff were both damaged goods. They were insecure, sexually conflicted---Diane thought her romantic and erotic life should be driven by her mind and her body's attraction to Sam confused the hell out of her and was a blow to her vanity besides; she never got over resenting Sam for making her want what she thought she should have been too good to want. Cliff, of course, had serious Mommy problems.---and they were both egocentric and expected the world to revolve around them.

Frasier, because of his education and training as a doctor and psychiatrist, was more inclined to listen to other people and also step outside himself and see himself as others did.

Sam (advising Frasier on how to get out of the trouble he's in with Lilith): Listen, I know what you'd tell me in a situation like this. First you'd say a lot of gobbledy-gook no one could understand, but then you'd get me to go back there and face the music, admit the truth.

Frasier: You're right, Sam. Confronting one's fears is one of the five ways to resolve an inner conflict. Of course the other four being...(Stops himself dead.) God, aren't I a pompous ass!

He had more of sense of humor about himself and more self-awareness. Temperamentally, too, he was more outgoing and affectionate. Diane and Cliff wanted to be loved and admired. Fraiser wanted to love and admire others and he succeeded. It's why he was able to become one of the gang, while Diane had to stay on the outside. He could enter into their games, often despite his better instincts.

Frasier: Now what mindless subect are you beating to a slow, lingering death? What's the best car?

Norm: What's the best car song.

Frasier (like a shot): GTO! You hear them lyrics, boy, you're buring rubber!

His generosity of spirit, his temperament, is what made him not another second banana, but the second male lead, one of the show's three heroes, Woody being the third, although Woody wasn't a male lead, he was the juvenile, the young lover. Diane was the antagonist. Cliff was one of clowns.

Don't get me started on the differences between types and archetypes.

Cheers also repeated the type of the dimwitted innocent. Coach was replaced by Woody. Same type, very different temperaments and consequently very different characters.

So, temperament is our inner weather, the inchoate core of our personality, the "self" that nature and nurture conspired to curse or bless us with. Type is the outward manifestation of temperament, the face we present to the world, and it's shaped by temperament but also by expectation and choice. Temperament is feeling, type is behavior.

People of different temperaments can wind up as similar types, and people of similar temperaments will turn into different types.

Some people are resenters. They feel slighted by everybody and everything. This is basically a very egocentric personality. People like this just know in their bones that the world ought to be paying them more attention, recognizing their merits, and applauding their every effort, but for some really unfair reason this isn't happening.

Everywhere they go they find themselves pushed into the wings when they ought to be front and center, and it's always because the teacher, the coach, mother, friends, editors, bosses, or blog readers are inexplicably drawn to someone far less deserving!

We all know this kind of person. But I don't consider this a type, because this kind of person shows up as a lot of different types.

My favorite is the Self-righteous Wet Blanket.

We all know this type. The type who can always be relied upon to spoil the fun by pointing out that there are children starving in Africa.

When a conversation is getting lively, people are having a really good time, joking around or being passionate about something that matters to them, the Self-righteous Wet Blanket will always pipe up to point out that whatever it is doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

How can you waste all your time arguing about baseball when Bush is shredding the Constitution!

The object, of course, isn't really to make people be more serious. It's to give the Wet Blanket control of the conversation.

This type is similar to the Little Red Hen who can always be counted on to bustle in when others are goofing off, or doing things that the Little Red Hen thinks aren't the things that need to be done at the moment, and make everybody else feel guilty and ashamed by the example of the Little Red Hen's energy, diligence, and responsible nature.

Some Little Red Hens are resentful personalities and they have the same object as the Self-Righteous Wet Blankets, to make themselves the center of attention and admiration.

But many Little Red Hens are in fact energetic, diligent, and responsible...and compulsive.

And, by the way, don't let the gender implications fool you. There are plenty of men who are Little Red Hens.

Resentful personalities can also turn out to be Rebels. They say they want a revolution, and they all want to change the world. But when you look closely you see that the new world they want to create will have themselves as princes and princesses, if not kings and queens.

Other types that resentful personalities can become are the Instigator---this is the type who is always egging others on to challenge authority, act up, and rebel, while lingering safely in the background, out of range when the shit hits the fan---and the Underminer. Underminers divide into other types: the Saboteur, the Foot Dragger, the Naysayer, and the Obstacle Builder.

You know who I'm talking about, right? They work in your office? They live in your dorm?

Ok. I'm sure you get the picture. That's enough for now. Tonight, if I feel brave, I'll go down into the memory vault and see what I can unearth.

Meanwhile, I could use some help here.

What are some types you know and love...or loathe?

Tuesday, September 19, 2006 in Ideas in search of a post | Permalink

My empty sketchbook

Winslow Homer drew the illustration above for a magazine called Ballou's Pictorial in 1857 when he was 21 year old, and it's apprentice work and not all that good, considering what Homer would be doing just a few years in the future.

There's a lot of busy-ness in the drawing but nothing really going on. (Make sure you right click on the picture to see the larger image.) The central drama of the "story" being told here, the young woman hurrying out of the way of an onrushing carriage and the policeman dashing out to stop it, is taking place smack dab in the middle of things and yet it seems to be in there simply to divide the two groupings in the foreground, as if Homer's intent on having us focus on the rather static figures in the right and lefthand corners, particularly on the group of women on the right, who are a pretty interchangeable bunch.

The one "character" in the scene, the organ grinder to the left, might have been drawn from life---the extended caption that accompanied the drawing when it was published tries to give the impression that Homer drew the scene on the spot, as it happened, as if taking a photograph; more likely, Homer filled the scene with figures he observed and sketched over the course of a number of visits to that corner---but he looks like a college student dressed up in a costume, a pal Homer dragooned into modeling for him and not happy about it.

Homer never did develop the knack for, or the interest in, showing character through faces, but he became a master at suggesting a person's mood and thoughts of the moment through posture and gesture.

That mastery isn't on display here. The people are as stiff as manequins, like life-sized dolls in a museum display. Only the organ grinder's monkey, the dogs, and the horses seem moved by real muscle, and the most alive figure in the scene is the stone eagle ornamenting the cornice of the building across the street.

Homer would always be good at birds.

Like I said. It's not all that good.

But I love it.

I love it for several reasons.

The first is that I know that scene!

Back in my college days I used to work in a bookstore very close to that corner. The movie theater where I also worked was just up Washington Street from there.

Turn right to get to the bookstore, left to find the movie theater.

That intersection was part of my daily rounds for two years, and I swear that if you'd showed me this drawing then without any identification or mentioning it was by Homer, I'd have told you, "Why, that's the corner of Winter, Washington, and Summer in Boston."

Those days are so long ago now that it sometimes seems to me that Homer and I could have been contemporaries, but I'm sure that in the 130 or so years between when he was in his early 20s and wandering around downtown Boston and I was in my early 20s unknowingly marching around in his footsteps, there must have been a few changes in the neighborhood.

But maybe it's the angling of the buildings or the apparent width of the streets, but something in there identifies the corner to my memory as surely as would a photograph taken from the same spot Homer supposedly stood with his sketchpad in the 1980s.

Of course nowdays my memories of Boston are full of images and incidents that I did not see or witness when I was living there. Things I've read, movies I've seen, stories I've been told by people who still live there or who visited since I left, and photogaphs, paintings, and pictures like Homer's that I've looked at over the years have all been edited into my mental 3D map of Boston.

But even while I was there, what I saw wasn't just what my eyes took in and what I experienced wasn't just what I did.

There are books written about how hard it is for people to live life directly, how there's no living in the moment for creatures with big brains full of memories, no seeing a thing in and of itself, unassociated with memories, expectations, prejudices, and simultaneous demands on our attention from within and without.

I don't remember when I first saw this drawing by Homer. It could have been before I ever got to Boston.

It could be that I never crossed the street there without seeing Homer's Boston at the same time I was looking at mine.

It may also be that what I recognize in the drawing isn't the architecture or the geography, it's the scene itself.

Homer was drawing a typical street scene and that typicality never changed.

The crowds of shoppers, the cop on the beat, even the young woman hurrying to get out of the way of onrushing traffic, all of that would have been the same. I even saw an organ grinder down there once, with a monkey. The organ grinder was a young woman and the monkey was a stuffed toy, but she turned the crank on her hurdy-gurdy and her music was real. The people had changed their clothes but the business that took them to that corner hadn't.

And that's another reason I like this illustration. It is typical.

I like paintings and stories and movies that do that, show people being typical.

We don't have enough of that kind of art now to suit me. There aren't very many paintings or stories or movies that show us to us.

People used to like that. Seeing themselves on the stage, on the page, on the screen. They thought they were funny.

The magazine Homer drew for, Ballou's Pictorial, seems to have had no other purpose but to show people what they were like, for their amusement.

We don't have that. Television shows us caricatures of ourselves, farcically debased on sitcoms, absurdly romanticized in dramas.

Movies are worse, and magazines and newspapers only tell us what's wrong with us or what we're buying.

In fact, since almost all our popular arts and entertainment are driven by advertising, their job real job is to lie to us, to flatter us or scare us about ourselves, to make us think so highly of ourselves that we'll reward ourselves with the advertisers' products or despise ourselves so much we'll rush out to buy the products in the hopes of becoming somebody else.

Serious fiction still does it, to a degree. But because writers tend to focus on a very small demographic these days, themselves and their intellectual friends, and then to show them in isolation, cut off from the worlds of work and play, which means cut off from the way we live now, most people won't find themselves represented in a short story or novel even as a minor character.

It's why I prefer to read 19th Century novels. They're filled with crowds.

Like Homer's drawing.

If I could draw better, that's the kind of scene I'd be drawing.

And that's the third thing I love about the picture.

It's so much like something I would draw if I could that it almost feels as if I did draw it.

A friend and I were talking a couple weeks ago about our alternative lives. What are we doing in a parallel universe, we asked ourselves. This is another way of playing the What would you be if you weren't what you are game.

The rules were that these couldn't be outrageous fantasy lives. They had to be plausible in that we might very well have had those lives if we'd only made one or two different but minor choices.

So, the I'd have joined NASA and become the first man on Mars kind of thing was out.

My alternatives were park ranger, theater director, and Charles Kuralt like journalist.

But I'd add that I'd like to have a job like Homer had at Ballou's Pictorial.

I'd like to spend my time looking at people and then showing them themselves and making them laugh in an affectionate, forgiving, glad to be alive way.

What would you be doing?

Friday, September 15, 2006 in Sketchpad 2 | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)