Lance Mannion's Foreign Office

A sweep is as lucky as lucky can be

2011-07-10T13:30:00.000-07:00

Ok, everybody sing along:

So you think that you've got trouble?
Well, trouble's a bubble,
So tell old Mr. Trouble to "Get lost!".
Why not hold your head up high and,
Stop cryin',
Start tryin',
And don't forget to keep your fingers crossed.
When you find the joy of livin'
Is lovin'
And givin'
You'll be there when the winning dice are tossed.
A smile is just a frown
that's turned upside down,
So smile, and that frown
Will defrost.
And don't forget to keep your fingers crossed!

What do you mean you don’t know the tune? Of course you do.

It’s stuck in your head now, isn’t it?

That the show’s theme song was a song with lyrics is something I learned from reading Dick Van Dyke’s memoirs, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business. I also learned the lyrics were written by Morey Amsterdam who played Buddy Sorrell on the show.

Something else I learned was that Van Dyke’s lover and companion for thirty-five years was Michelle Triola, the plaintiff in the infamous Lee Marvin palimony suit. Which means that I learned that for thirty-odd years Van Dyke wasn’t married anymore to his wife, Margie. That bit of news had passed me by. Of course at the time it became news I wouldn’t have been paying attention. I probably thought I knew everything I needed to know about Dick Van Dyke.

He was the head writer for The Alan Brady Show. He and his wife Laura lived with their son Ritchie at 148 Bonnie Meadow Road in New Rochelle, New York. Their best friends were their next door neighbors Jerry and Millie Helper. He grew up in Danville, Illinois, had a brother named Stacy who sleepwalked and played the banjo, often at the same time, and served in the Army and was stationed at Camp Crowder where he was boxing champ of his barracks and where he met and fell in love with his future wife, Laura Meehan, who was a seventeen year old dancer with a USO troupe when they married. He was a brilliant comedy writer but didn’t consider himself a real writer and worked on and off on writing a novel.

Before you “Oh, Rob!” at me, I know. But I’m sure I’m far from the only fan of The Dick Van Dyke Show for whom Rob Petrie and Dick Van Dyke might as well be the same person.

The confusion is actually built into the show. The Dick Van Dyke Show’s creator, chief writer, and guiding spirit, Carl Reiner not only gave Rob Petrie pieces of Van Dyke’s biography, including the brother who sleepwalked and played the banjo. He worked important aspects Van Dyke’s personality into Rob’s.

There are differences. For instance, Rob is a bit of a klutz because Van Dyke wasn’t. Rob had a tendency to bump into things, trip, stumble, fall , touch hot objects, knock things off shelves, break things (like a tooth or a violin over his head), and otherwise expose himself to pain and embarrassment because Van Dyke was a brilliant physical comedian and Reiner and the other writers were always on the lookout for an opportunity to show off his talent for making pain both funny and as graceful as a dance by Fred Astaire, who was a Van Dyke fan, by the way.

And five or six years of Dick Van Dyke’s life weren’t given to Rob Petrie (which makes Rob five or six years younger than Van Dyke), so Rob didn’t have time between getting out of the Army and starting work on The Alan Brady Show to travel the country as a peripatetic nightclub comic, turn down a contract offer from a “manager” who was actually a front man for the mob (although at one point Rob, Buddy, and Sally were asked to write a monologue for a mobster’s nephewwho wanted to break into show biz), put in several stints on live television, local and network, and get his big break starring in a Broadway musical which led to his getting his own sitcom whose devoted fans mistook him for the character he played to the point that they believed he was actually married to the actress who played his TV wife.

Another difference between the two men is that Van Dyke is the more spiritual and for a long time the more conventionally religious. He is also the more politically engaged. There are hints that Rob and Laura are nominally Catholic, but they seem to spend Sunday mornings at home and the only time I recall their going to church was for Laura's cousin’s wedding. When he was young, Dick Van Dyke was a regular attendee at whatever Dutch Reformed Church was nearby and when he was working in television and then on Broadway in New York City he found time to teach Sunday School.

How many young actors teach Sunday school? How many young actors are awake on Sunday morning?

Rob was involved in various worthwhile local causes and even ran for city council. But Van Dyke shared a podium with Martin Luther King, campaigned for Gene McCarthy, spoke out against the War in Vietnam, and cheerfully and proudly declares that of the Presidents he’s met, and he’s met four of the nine who served since 1963, Barack Obama is his favorite.

At eighty-five, Van Dyke seems to have scaled back some of his political and social activism, and he eventually drifted away from organized religion. (The drift began when he quit the church he belonged to because the board of elders balked at inviting members of the congregation of a neighboring black church to their services.) But he is still curious and thoughtful on the subject and reads and re-reads books on theology, spirituality, and philosophy. What exactly he thinks and what questions he wants answered, however, are left somewhat vague. Van Dyke shies away from self-examination and self-reflection whenever things threaten to become intensely personal. He does that on almost every aspect of his life, including the biggest difference between himself and Rob Petrie, which I’ll get to.

One more difference, not as big but still important considering that this is a book review. Rob is a writer not an actor, and he writes a lot like Carl Reiner. If he wrote his autobiography, it would be more like Reiner’s My Anecdotal Life than like Van Dyke’s My Lucky Life. Which, it almost goes without saying, means it would be funnier. But it also means that it would be a writer’s book and writers, because they can’t help themselves, tend to see everything as a story. A comedy writer, like Rob or Carl Reiner, will see it as a funny story.

Van Dyke has a sense of humor and, obviously, knows how to tell a joke, and he writes well. But he isn’t a storyteller. He knows he has a story to tell and diligently sets about telling it, but it’s one big, long story, the story of his life, and he tends to treat major events and minor incidents, the things that happened to him and the things that he did, as pieces of the larger narrative rather than as stories or anecdotes in their own right. For instance, a visit with President Bill Clinton in the Oval Office that Reiner and Van Dyke made together takes up half a chapter in Reiner’s book but gets a couple of paragraphs in Van Dyke’s. Now, that visit is really Reiner’s story to tell because the focus is on how the President and Reiner’s brother Charlie hit it off (and Reiner tells that story beautifully), but Van Dyke doesn’t even mention that Charlie was there. The point of telling us that he met President Clinton is that it happened.

And that’s how the book goes. This happened, then that happened, and then the next thing happened. There’s something very journalistic about My Lucky Life and I mean that it often reads like an extended magazine article (think The New York Times Sunday Magazine not TIME or The New Yorker and definitely not People or Entertainment Weekly, earnest, thorough, informative, not particularly stylish but not trivial, chatty, or phonily personal either) but also that it reads like a fleshed out journal.

Readers used to contemporary memoirs being confessionals might find themselves perplexed by how little confessing Van Dyke does. There’s much recounting and accounting but not much in the way of revealing or unveiling. One thing happens after another because that’s how it went, and along the way, as the players in his life make their entrances and their exits, we’re introduced to the people Van Dyke got to know, professionally and personally.

Gene Hackman makes a cameo appearance as the annoying kid cousin of Van Dyke’s best friend back in Danville, tagging along after Van Dyke and his high school buddies, two of whom weren’t, apparently, Donald O’Connor and Bobby Short, even though they were in the same class.

Walter Cronkite storms in, demanding to know why Van Dyke is firing him from the morning talk show they’re working on together, Van Dyke hosting and Cronkite delivering the news.

Cary Grant stops by to admire his tailoring and offer him a part in That Touch of Mink and to this day Van Dyke can’t understand why he turned it down.

Fred Astaire slips onto the set of Bye Bye Birdie unnoticed just for the pleasure of watching Van Dyke dance.

Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s former press secretary, enlists him in his ultimately losing campaign for United States Senator from California.

Warren Beatty calls and not just refuses to take no for an answer but refuses to even hear it and so Van Dyke winds up cast in Dick Tracy despite himself.

He meets and becomes friends with Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton. Harold Lloyd wants him to play him in a movie version of Lloyd’s life, a movie I wish had been made instead of The Comic, a rather strange tribute to Laurel, Keaton, and Lloyd that gives aspects of all their careers to a a fairly unlikeable character named Billy Bright.

Frank Sinatra makes dinner but refuses to sing. Debbie Reynolds tells Van Dyke he doesn’t know beans about making movies. Cloris Leachman does her best to help him quit smoking cold turkey. Michelle Obama gives him a big hug and declares that The Dick Van Dyke Show is still her favorite of all time, a statement President Obama is on hand to confirm. The President also asks Van Dyke to teach him some moves.

Julie Andrews, Chita Rivera, Carol Burnett, and Angie Dickinson sing, dance, mug, and slink their way onto his life’s stage to, pointedly, not have affairs, despite what some people assumed, and become instead Van Dyke’s very good friends.

And I wrote about how he met Charles Nelson Reilly in an earlier post.

After a while, a pattern becomes noticeable. All these famous people come and go without being the subjects of stories. Van Dyke doesn’t tell stories about them. It’s more as if he’s showing us their photographs in the family album and then, hurriedly, turning the page. And then it begins to dawn that he’s deliberately avoiding telling stories and even that not telling stories is part of the point.

Of course, what I’m saying is that this is a show business memoir that is surprisingly lacking in gossip.

And it begins to seem to be the case that it’s because Van Dyke doesn’t have any gossip to dish.

A theme of the book is that Van Dyke deliberately tried not to live a life that would make him a topic of gossip or a witness to others making themselves topics of gossip.

Not that he would dish it if he had to dish. Van Dyke comes across as someone who wouldn’t say anything about an enemy let alone a friend that he wouldn’t say to their face and that he hadn’t cleared with them first to see if they minded if he said it. Even the dead are protected by his inherent tact and discretion and compassion.

There are exceptions and one of them is the great character actress Maureen Stapleton who we learn was eccentric, phobic, and, when she’d had too much too drink, and she drank too much too often, sometimes carrying fortification in a paper bag on the set, inclined to making clumsy plays for other women’s husbands in front of those women.

About Stapleton Van Dyke does have a story to tell and he tells it. During the filming of the movie adaptation of Bye Bye Birdie, in which Stapleton was playing Van Dyke’s mother, despite being his exact same age, thirty-eight at the time, Van Dyke and his wife, along with Stapleton and another Bye Bye Birdie co-star, the acerbic character actor Paul Lynde, went to a party at the director’s home, at which Stapleton got drunk and embarrassed herself and her friends in a variety of ways before winding up naked in the director’s swimming pool and calling on all the other guests to join her.

Not the most salacious or scandalous of tales, but just about nobody else in the book is shown at so much less than their best as Stapleton in this instance, and the question is why her?

The answer is that it’s the party Van Dyke is writing about not Stapleton, he just appears to have decided he couldn’t write about it honestly without telling us what Stapleton got up to or down to. Possibly if he could have thought of way to disguise her he would have, but there may not have been any point, either because the story’s well-known and oft-told in Hollywood or because Stapleton herself was in the habit of telling it. The important thing is that that was the Van Dykes’ first Hollywood party and while it wasn’t their last, it was their introduction to a side of the movie business and celebrity-hood they resolved never to become part of.

But there’s another reason for his telling the story. Stapleton, along with Lynde, who, although he didn’t wind up naked in the pool, also wasn’t on his best behavior at that party, and Dean Martin, shown arriving drunk on the set of Van Dyke’s next movie, What a Way to Go!, were what Van Dyke thought alcoholics looked and acted like, which is why it took him so long to recognize the alcoholic who was threatening to ruin his life.

Himself.

That’s that big difference between Dick Van Dyke and Rob Petrie I was talking about.

In his acknowledgements, Van Dyke thanks his collaborator, Todd Gold. But that’s the only credit Gold is given. There’s no “as told to” or “with” on the title page implying that Gold was a true co-author if not the actual writer. There’s something about the writing that suggests Van Dyke did most of it himself. There are no signs of a ghost writer’s touch. No rhetorical effects, no narrative or dramatic surprises. No mixing it up for variety’s sake. One sentence is crafted like the last. Paragraphs are neat, well-ordered, exemplary, but too much so. This isn’t prose you’d pay someone to write. It’s prose you’d pay someone to correct or, rather, to make sure was as correct as you intended and worked hard to achieve. And from the impression Van Dyke gives of himself, I think he wouldn’t have undertaken the book if he hadn’t felt he could do most of the work himself. This would have to be his book, as in his job to do, his responsibility to meet. This was a book written out of a sense of duty.

I’m not sure who all he feels he owes this duty to. His children, obviously, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His fans. But also, I think, to his ghosts. His parents. Michelle Triola, who died of lung cancer in 2009, just as he was setting out to write the book. Margie, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2007 and with whom he appears to have felt still married in a strange but still deeply loyal way until the end of her life. His grand-daughter Jessica, a budding poet who died of Reye’s Syndrome when she was only twelve.

The first epigraph in My Lucky Life is an exchange between Van Dyke’s comic idols, Laurel and Hardy, from their movie Block-Heads:

Stan: You remember how dumb I used to be?
Ollie: Yeah?
Stan: Well, I’m better now.

But as a second, he’s chosen to quote himself:

If I’m known for giving people decent entertainment and raising good kids, that’s all right. I’ll have lived a good one.

With that, of course, he’s setting himself up to be judged. With the Laurel and Hardy quote too. He has to show us. Has he lived a good life by his lights and ishe better now?

As I said, My Lucky Life isn’t a confessional, either in tone or effect, but it is an accounting. Van Dyke has given himself the job of honestly laying out the facts of his life that would allow readers to judge whether or not he has led his life the way he intended to live it, and honesty requires him to face up to the ways he failed at that. He did, after all, cheat for years on his wife and then leave her for the other woman, and he was an alcoholic---emphatically was. Van Dyke is not a graduate of AA, he dried out on his own and doesn’t feel compelled to say is an alcoholic, not after nearly thirty years of sobriety. But his point isn’t that he overcame his drinking problem but that he had one and he counts himself lucky that it didn’t destroy him.

That’s the other reason Maureen Stapleton appears in the book the way she does. It’s not her that Van Dyke wants to call attention to her as much as to her behavior that night, self-abusive, self-destructive, because it portended a way Van Dyke’s life could have gone, should have gone.

That he was able to get away with so much that so many alcoholics can’t---a stellar career of uninterrupted work, a happy family life, a lifelong reputation as a good, decent, responsible and reliable adult---is one of many reasons he considers himself to have been lucky.

My Lucky Life isn’t just a title. It’s a statement of one of the book’s main themes.

Van Dyke writes with a healthy dose of humility. But although he’s a humble man, he’s not a falsely modest one. He’s aware of his considerable talents. He knows what he was able to do and he knows its value. He believes the work speaks for itself. He’s willing to give himself credit where credit is due, but only in order to share it. He knows the difference between himself and his idols like Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton and Carl Reiner. And an honest accounting of his life requires him to show how lucky he was in having met and been able to work with so many people who were, by his lights, more talented and more dedicated and more deservingly successful in their ways than he was.

So he’s emphatic that he owes his having had any sort of show business career at all to his first partner, Phil Erickson, who almost literally dragged him out the door to take their act on the road. That he was able to enjoy and depend on a relatively calm and normal family life is due to his having been lucky to have met and married Margie who saw to it that their children grew up happy and fairly well-adjusted. He was also lucky to have Margie there to help and support him when he faced up to his drinking and set out to stop. His Tony Award-winning performance in Bye Bye Birdie was, as far as he’s concerned, pretty much all the doing of the director and choreographer Gower Champion who saw something in Van Dyke he didn’t see in himself and brought it out onstage. Mary Poppins couldn’t have been what it was without Julie Andrews and Walt Disney and the composing and songwriting genius of the Sherman Brothers. And, of course, The Dick Van Dyke show was, when you got down to it, Carl Reiner’s show.

But even as he’s expressing his gratitude to people, Van Dyke maintains a detachment and reticence as if he’s afraid to say any more about them because he’ll wind up saying too much and revealing things about them, and about himself, he doesn’t believe it’s his business to reveal.

There are, however, a few individuals for whom his feelings are so great that they carry him away despite himself and cause him to open up in ways that not only enliven the book but fill it with joy. One is Triola, another is Margie, and a third is Reiner, who comes across here (and almost everywhere else I’ve heard or read about him) as everybody’s over-achieving, too good to be true big brother who is successful at everything he does, including and especially at loving you and taking care of you in exactly the way you want and need to be loved and taken care of.

Another is, hilariously but also touchingly, Van Dyke’s co-star in my second favorite Dick Van Dyke movie, Lt Robin Crusoe U.S.N. No, not his leading lady, Nancy Kwan. The actor named Dinky who played his sidekick, an astronaut Crusoe finds marooned on the island he washes up on.

Well, not an astronaut, exactly.

An astro-chimp.

Van Dyke and Dinky hit it off on the set and developed, Van Dyke persuasively insists, a real friendship. Dinky gets almost as many pages devoted exclusively to him as Carl Reiner, a fact I like to think Reiner has noted and takes pleasure in pointing out every chance he gets. One of the more heartwrenching scenes in the book is when Van Dyke and Dinky say good-bye for the last time in the zoo where Dinky has been, you want to say, imprisoned.

But the person who rivets Van Dyke’s attention, the one who makes his heart and his prose soar, the one who makes him happiest to write about, is Mary Tyler Moore, with whom he is still, after fifty years, madly, wildy, and joyfully in love. And she with him.

Theirs is and has always been a completely innocent and Platonic love affair. The two seem to have been made for each other, although neither---they were each married to other people when they met---would ever have done anything about it. But they couldn’t help letting their feelings show when they were on camera as Rob and Laura. And it wasn’t just as if, like their fans, they confused themselves with the characters they played, at least for the time they were playing them. It was, and still is when you watch, as if they were and are in touch with that alternative universe where Rob and Laura are real people, where it is still and always will be 1961, and Sally and Buddy have come over for dinner and they and Laura and Ritchie are waiting for Rob to arrive home a little late from work, and that ottoman is in exactly the wrong, which is to say, the right place.

Photo of President Obama adjusting Dick Van Dyke’s tie by Pete Souza, courtesy of the White House.

______________________

Luckily, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir, published by Crown Archetype, is available in kindle and hardback from Amazon.

______________________

Excerpt: “This chimp was a pro.”

In the movie, he played golf and he was incredible. We also played poker. One day he was sick. I think he had a temperature of 103. In the scene, we were playing cards. He was supposed to be able to see my cards in the shaving mirror behind me. Amazingly, he looked up and smiled on cue. But the second that [Byron Paul, the director] said Cut, he would groan and lie down, ill.
I turned to the trainer and Byron. I wanted [Stewart, the trainer] to help him and Byron to praise him. This chimp was a pro.
The downside was that when he misbehaved, the trainer took him away and hit him. I hated that. In one scene, I came sliding down a coconut tree, but I startled Dinky, who was seated at the base of the tree. I saw all of his hair suddenly stand on end. So did Stewart. He balled up a chain he kept with him and threw it at the chimp. He saw the look on my face. It was one of surprise and anger.
“He would’ve attacked you,” he explained.
I never got used to that part of working with the chimp. To me, he was a doll. I forgot that he was an animal being cajoled, if not forced, into performing acts that did not come naturally to him. Later I heard he was doing a Tarzan movie in Mexico and bit an actor in the face. I was told the actor picked him up and pinched him, an in turn Dinky nipped his face. That was the end of his film career.
He was ten years old, so he was pretty close to retirement anyway. After I heard he’d been placed in the Los Angeles Zoo, I went there to see him, knowing he had been raised in a house---he had never been in a cage. When I got there, he was sitting in the middle of a large circular pen. It was outdoors, but it was still a cage---and I saw the effect it had on him.
I called out his name. He looked up and recognized me immediately. He ran over as close as he could. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was asking me to get him out of there. It looked like he was saying, I’m in here with a bunch of monkeys. Take me home.
The whole visit upset me. I knew he thought that I had come to take him out, which I would have if it had been possible.
I had to walk away. I couldn’t look back.
---from My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business by Dick Van Dyke.

Lance Mannion on Friday, July 08, 2011 in Ruining my eyes, Too Much TV |Permalink

A hobble in the woods

2011-07-05T05:35:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, when I first heard that Robert Redford had started planning to direct a movie version of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods starring himself and Paul Newman, I was baffled. My first thought, “They’re too old!” My second thought was “Which one is going to play Katz?” a question I’d have asked even if they’d both been the right ages to play the mild-mannered writer Bryson and his eccentric, irascible, and totally unreliable college buddy with whom he set out to hike the entire twenty-one hundred mile length of the Appalachian Trail. Bryson more or less did it. Katz went his own way, even when he and Bryson were hiking together.

After our summer in Europe, Katz had gone back to Des Moines and had become, in effect, Iowa’s drug culture. He had partied for years, until there was no one left to party with, then he had partied with himself, alone in small apartments, in T-shirt and boxer shorts, with a bottle and a Baggie of pot and a TV with rabbit ears. I remembered now that the last time I had seen him was five years earlier in a Denny’s restaurant where I was taking my mother for breakfast. He was sitting in a booth with a haggard fellow who looked like his name would be Virgil Starkweather, tucking into pancakes and taking occasional illicit nips from a bottle in a paper bag. It was eight in the morning and Katz looked very happy. He was always happy when he was drunk, and he was always drunk.

I figure Newman would have had to play Katz. A character like Katz is way outside Redford’s comfort zone. Well into his old age, Redford has managed to continue to play Redford-esque leading men, although, fortunately, while showing the sense to avoid making those leading men romantic leads. (I’m disappointed to note that his long-planned Jackie Robinson movie isn’t listed as being in pre-production at imdb.com anymore, which I guess means we won’t get to see him as Branch Rickey.) Newman always allowed himself a little more range and even his leading men had more than a little touch of eccentricity. In his late middle-age, he started ranging a little farther and became something of a character actor. I think he’d have gotten a kick out of playing Katz---if he could have done it as a follow-up to Butch Cassidy or Henry Gondorf.

Still, Bryson and Katz were approaching fifty when they set out, not past seventy and eighty. Supposing the book had been written twenty-five years before, though, when both Redford and Newman were middle-aged, Newman still wouldn’t have been the best choice for Katz. Among Redford’s contemporaries, Dustin Hoffman would have been off the list because I’m pretty sure that after All the President’s Men Redford wasn’t in the mood to work with Hoffman ever again, but Jack Nicholson, Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, and George Segal would have made great Katzes.

And those would have been Redford’s best choices if he’d only wanted to go with a leading man in the character actor’s part. If he’d wanted a character actor who could also be a second male lead there was Bruce Dern, Alan Arkin, and Peter Falk.

Redford and any one of those guys would have made a more interesting pairing than yet another Redford-Newman bromance. For my money, I think I’d have liked to see Redford and Dern or Redford and Gould best.

But you know who else would have been nearly perfect?

Nick Nolte.

The fun for me in this pairing would have been in that on screen Nolte often played an eccentric and more temperamental version of Redford. In fact, to a great degree, his career in the eighties and into the nineties was the career Redford could have had if he hadn’t pretty much given up acting during the decade after Brubaker and The Electric Horseman. Nolte began as the guy you went to when you wanted a Robert Redford type but had no hope of getting Redford himself and eventually became the guy you got because Redford wouldn’t have been up to the part.

Nolte started off with a string of movies that easily could have starred Redford instead. The Deep. Who’ll Stop the Rain. Heart Beat. (Not hard to imagine Redford as Neal Cassidy if you’ve seen Little Fauss and Big Halsey.) North Dallas Forty. Teachers. Under Fire. Teachers.

That changed with the movie that makes it easy to imagine Nolte as Katz, Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

But even after that, Nolte took on roles that Redford would have been just as right for, in Cape Fear, The Prince of Tides, Jefferson in Paris, The Golden Bowl, and The Good Thief. I think Redford could have handled Affliction although he probably wouldn’t have risked it, just as he decided not to risk The Verdict.

So it could have been fun watching Redford playing opposite his not quite evil but definitely wilder and less well-behaved twin.

Interestingly…

Of course, it’s not often that kind of perfectly compatible material crosses any actor’s inbox. But this could be one of those moments … if there is any truth to the tentative report in today’s LA Times that Redford and Nick Nolte are poised play the lead roles in an adaptation of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.

Redford would play Bryson and Nolte would costar as his college buddy, Stephen Katz, who accompanies the expat author on an epic hike along the Appalachian Trail.

Better late than never?

Here’s the thing.

The point of turning Bryson and Katz into a pair of grumpy old men was so that they could be played by Redford and Newman. The movie was being made to give the two one last chance to work together again and it didn’t matter who played Katz since both would really have been playing themselves. The controlling joke of the movie would have been that they were too old to be doing this, they being the characters and the actors. “Bryson” and “Katz” would have been too old to make the hike and Redford and Newman would have been too old to play men making the hike. The movie would have been Redford and Newman’s acknowledgement that they were long past being the handsome and dashing leading men we last saw them together as. Hopefully, this would have been done without too many old geezer jokes.

But once illness forced Newman to drop out, there was no longer a good reason to make “Bryson” and “Katz” a pair of grumpy old men. The point was the reuniting of Butch and Sundance, not in watching a couple of old coots having a good time making fools of themselves. Anybody who wants to see that can watch The Bucket List.

Besides, Redford has already done his farewell to being a leading man in Spy Game and his I’m getting too old for this turn in the little known but well worth seeking out An Unfinished Life, in which he co-stars with the great old geezer Morgan Freeman. So we’ve seen him do the dueling old coots act .

I’d hoped when Newman dropped out that if Redford still wanted to continue with the project he’d reconceive it as being about the real Bryson and Katz as portrayed in the book and cast leads who were the right ages or close to them. I even knew who should play Bryson.

Every movie Redford has directed (except for, possibly, his most recent, The Conspirator, which I haven’t seen yet.) has featured a Robert Redford part that in his better efforts isn’t played by Robert Redford, starting with a two-fer with Donald Sutherland and Scott Doebler as Timothy Hutton’s father and brother in Ordinary People. In The Milagro Beanfield War Christopher Walken plays a parody of Redford’s character in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. Ralph Fiennes is very much a young Redford as flawed golden boy in Quiz Show. Matt Damon takes on the role in The Legend of Bagger Vance. But the quintessential Redford role that is most perfectly cast and played is Paul McLean in A River Runs Through It.

Which is why Brad Pitt would be me choice for Bryson.

Redford can have his pick of Katzes. If he wanted to go the Redford-Newman route, George Clooney might work as Katz. Clooney hasn’t done it often enough, but he clearly enjoys stepping out of his comfort zone and poking fun at his leading man image. But I think another, better way to go would be to take the Redford-Nolte route and cast a Redford against another Redford.

If you can’t see Matt Damon in the Nick Nolte role, I recommend you watch or re-watch The Informant! Damon is another leading man with an inner goofball he’s itching to let loose.

Lance Mannion on Sunday, June 26, 2011 in Now Playing at Cine 1001-2000 | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

The rooftops of Paris at Midnight in Paris

2011-07-05T05:11:00.000-07:00

There has to be a website that lays all the shots of Paris street scenes in the opening montage of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris side by side with the famous paintings they pay homage to.

Allen and his cinematographer set up their camera at the same spots where the artists set up their easels or stood or sat with their sketchpads and filmed the scenes from the same angle at the same time of day depicted in maybe a couple of dozen paintings.

At least I think that’s what they did.

I’m not anything close to an art historian, but I’m sure I recognized a Manet or two, a bunch of Monets, the painting above by Gustave Caillebotte, possibly the one below also by Caillebotte…

and at least one…

…two…

three…

…Pissarros.

Or was that a Cortes?

I’m also pretty sure they worked similar homages into the movie and that the scene at Maxim’s includes something from Degas and of course the scene at the Moulin Rogue cribs from Lautrec. Allen is cagey enough not to show it but I suspect his Lautrec may be sketching one of the Lautrecs Allen’s scene designer used as models.

Two actual Picassos appear, along with Picasso, who looks like himself.

This portrait of Gertrude Stein, which provides a funny moment when we see Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein sitting in a chair beneath it…

And one I haven’t been able to turn up with the Google, so maybe it isn’t a real Picasso after all, which is ok, since we learn isn’t what art historians think it is.

Anyway, back to Paris itself…

The problem with trying to identify the paintings I think I saw in the montage is that Paris itself looks like a painting…

…and it has been painted so many times by so many different artists…

…that every shot of Paris looks like it must have been a painting.

For instance, there's a shot of some rooftops with rows and rows of orange chimneys. I thought I know that one! But do I really?

Do I know that painting or did the shot look so much like a painting that my mind was convinced it "remembered" that painting?

I think I need to see the movie again.

Or go to Paris.

_________________________

Make sure to click on the pictures. They’re what they call in the video game trade Easter Eggs. Most of them will take you to more to see than just an enlarged image.

Originally posted at LanceMannion.com.

Lance Mannion on Monday, July 04, 2011 in Arts, crafts, and stagecraft, Now Playing at Cine 1001-2000 | Permalink

Lance Mannion

2009-08-12T17:39:00.001-07:00

Lance Mannion

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A very neat sort of monster

2007-10-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

Dexter Morgan, the vigilante serial killer of serial killers who is the hero of Showtime's darkly comic mystery series Dexter, describes himself as a very neat sort of monster, and he is.

Neat and a monster.

Neatness is his chief virtue, of which he has many. Of course he’s neat when it comes to his murders. He cleans up carefully after he’s done, naturally, so that there’s no evidence. But he’s also very neat when it comes to the planning and the execution of his...executions. He makes sure that he has the goods on the murderers he murders before he murders them. As a private detective, who has his victims’ victims as his clients, he’s meticulous about gathering evidence and following the procedures he’s late adoptive father, a great police detective in his day, taught him.

But he’s neat in the other areas of his life too. He dresses neatly, he’s well-groomed, he’s neat in his manners, that is he’s careful to be polite and cheerful, he picks up after himself, he’s as meticulous about his day job—he’s a blood spatter analyst for the homicide division of the Miami police department—as he is about his work as a serial killer. And he’s always ready to help his family, friends, and colleagues pick up after the messes, large and small, in their lives.

Dexter himself (brilliantly played with the right mixture of neatness, charm, and heartless glee by Michael C. Hall) wouldn’t describe his neatness as a virtue. He wouldn’t call any of his other virtues virtues either. He doesn’t think monsters like him can have virtues. As far as he's concerned, his neatness, being as coldly calculated as his murders, is part of his disguise.

He’s disguised as a human being.

Because when Dexter calls himself a monster, he doesn’t mean he’s a human being who does monstrous things. He means he is a monster, the way Frankenstein’s monster is a monster. Something not human. A creature who might as well have been created in a laboratory or fallen to earth from outer space, a strange being from another planet with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.

I’m not being sarcastic with the Superman reference. Dexter’s story is a sinister twist on the superhero myth. Like Clark Kent, Dexter is an orphan who is taken in and raised by strangers and taught by his adoptive father to use his strange powers for good, it’s just that Dexter’s powers happen to allow him to track, trap, torture, kill, and disarticulate small animals.

Like Jonathan Kent, Harry Morgan recognizes his adopted son’s “special” abilities and teaches him to hide them, to pass as a regular person, but to use his abilities to help fight crime.

But it’s not just because he has this ability to kill without regret or remorse that Dexter thinks of himself as not human. His insatiable need to murder and butcher is the least of his problems.

Dexter is lost in an alien world without a guide book to tell him how to deal with the natives and their strange and apparently absurd customs. His survival depends on his passing as human, on no one seeing through his mild-mannered disguise to the monster beneath, and since Harry died ten years ago (although he’s a regular character in the show, recurring in flashbacks and dreams) Dexter has had no way of knowing how to fit in except by taking his cues from the humans he encounters—and they are, as it turns out, mostly nuts.

Trying to be human means mimicking human emotions. Dexter is empty inside (he thinks), he has no emotions, and, as he’s smart and logical, relentlessly, remorselessly so—he can make Mr Spock look whimsical—Dexter has a lot of trouble pretending that he does. Human emotional responses make no sense. People laugh when they should cry. They take pleasure in what hurts them. They love what hates them. They don’t even seem to understand their own emotions, which they routinely mistake for rational thoughts. They are always doing things they would call thought-full when they are being driven by appetites and desires they dislike and condemn when they see other people driven by the same appetites and desires.

Deb, Dexter’s adopted sister, an up and coming young detective, thinks of herself as a smart, tough, hard-nosed cop simply following in their father’s footsteps. In truth, she is a marshmallow, a wreck of insecurities and contradictory impulses, a lost little girl who is using her career to win her dead father’s love and approval. She is also emotionally and professionally dependent on Dexter.

Lt LaGuerta, the head of their homicide unit, thinks she is a cool professional’s professional. She is aware that she’s a calculating careerist, but she thinks that’s simply a fact of life for an intelligent and ambitious young Latina trying to make her way in the face of the old white boy’s net. But she is just as driven by petty jealousies, narcissism—to take her eyes off the prize for a second means taking her eyes off the image of herself holding the prize—lust—it’s probably not the case that she’s slept her way to the top, as Deb and some of the other cops believe; it’s more likely that she’s been too happy to reward men she likes who have helped her in her career with sex—and, to her own confusion and surprise, principle, professional pride, duty, feelings of compassion she has told herself she’s beyond, and more tender emotions—she’s got a terrific schoolgirl crush on...Dexter!

Rita, Dexter’s girlfriend (He claims to be dating her only because he’s learned that normal men his age have girlfriends. So she’s part of his disguise.), thinks she’s finally escaped her emotional dependency on her abusive and alcoholic ex-husband and has made long strides towards becoming an independent and self-reliant person in her own right. But to the degree she has achieved this she has done it by transferring her dependence onto Dexter, and the masochism and insecurities that caused her to stay with her ex-husband long after it became clear what he was are now blinding her to what Dexter really is. By the final episode of last season she had developed some doubts and this season she’s going to figure out that he is hiding a dark secret from her—his drug addiction. She makes him go into rehab.

Dexter of course would never do anything so un-neat as use drugs.

And Detective Sergeant Doakes thinks he’s a righteous cop out saving the weak and innocent from the bad guys, but he’s driven by angers and memories that quite possibly are turning him into a less rational, and much less neat, version of Dexter, a murderer of murderers. It’s no wonder he’s the one person in the department who can’t abide Dexter. Of course Doakes thinks he’s got Dexter figured out. What’s likely going on is that he’s afraid Dexter will figure him out.

Nobody in this crowd is really thinking at all, which makes Dexter, because everything he does is thought out with monstrous rationality—even his killings, which have method and purpose and require intense self-control and discipline, at least before and after the actual slaughters, are rational—the sanest person he knows.

That’s one of the themes of the show and the source of much of its humor. Our emotions, the qualities that make us most human, that is normal, also make us crazy. Much of the comedy arises from Dexter the Monster’s utter bafflement in the face of human beings acting emotionally, crazily, and expecting him to react in kind.

But beneath the humor is pathos. Dexter describes himself as empty of feeling. He doesn’t know that his emptiness is a feeling. If he were truly without emotions he wouldn’t miss having them as much as he does.

Dexter needs to seem to be a normal human being. But he also wants to be one. Another feeling he doesn’t know is a feeling.

It’s not true that he has no emotions. It’s more as if he has downloaded them into a computer that he keeps in another room but with which he is in unconscious contact, wirelessly, at a frequency too low for him to always hear. Startled, though, the right buttons pushed by circumstances or by other people’s insistent hands, the connection will suddenly intensify and all at once Dexter will feel. Love, anger, guilt, compassion—he experiences them all. They are just over too fast for him to think about at the moment, and they go without leaving a trace. He can remember having felt, but he can’t feel having felt. And because he doesn’t understand how human beings work, he doesn’t recognize the feeling he’s remembering as an emotion. He remembers it as a sensation, usually as an unpleasant sensation he’d prefer not to experience again.

Another thing that Dexter doesn’t understand about us human beings is that quite often a feeling doesn’t exist until after we act upon that feeling. Hugging someone causes us to want to hug them. Acting as if we love them, makes us love them.

Dexter wishes he loved his sister. He wishes he felt for Rita the same passion as she feels for him. He wishes he cared about her children. He wishes he could get angry about the crimes he’s solving and avenging.

He doesn’t know that he is loving his sister and Rita by going through the motions of brotherly concern and sexual passion. He doesn’t realize that he is caring for Rita’s kids by taking care of them.

Dexter has ideas about what it’s like to be normal. Those ideas are wrong. But because what goes on inside him doesn’t match up with those ideas he rejects himself instead of the ideas.

He doesn’t understand that by being pretending to be normal he is actually making himself normal.

In one of the episodes last season, Rita is seen tucking her kids into bed after having read to them from one of their favorite books.

Pinocchio.

Dexter thinks of himself as a puppet for which he himself is the puppeteer pretending to be a real live boy. The question is will his pretending turn him into one?

Emotions, after all, are so messy, and killing can be so neat, and...satisfying, for a very neat sort of monster.

Besides having a wonderful cast, smart scripts, and a great look---lots of gorgeous shots of South Miami Beach at night---Dexter has one of the best theme songs and wittiest opening credits since Get Smart.

Dexter starts its second season this week. Here’s the schedule.

Download Season One or catch up on on DVD.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

Monday, October 01, 2007 in Too Much TV | Permalink

High School's Revenge

2007-09-28T06:51:00.000-07:00

Have a confession to make.

Maybe it's more of a boast.

Nobody ever done done me wrong.

Oh, I've had my heart broken. Friends I counted on have failed to come through. There are a few things I'd still like to talk to my parents about. And I'll never understand why when we were ten Tommy Hawkins devoted an entire year to making the game in the neighborhood Let's make fun of Lance. But he couldn't get enough kids to play along and then he took up smoking cigarettes which got him in big trouble with his parents and they grounded him for a month and after that his family moved to Cincinnati so I felt he'd gotten his comeuppance and shrugged it all off.

My first grade nun hated me and emotionally tortured me, but she hated and emotionally tortured just about every kid in our class and what she did to me now and then was nothing next to what she did to Frankie McClintock and Virginia Lamb every day.

She was my first encounter with a crazy person that few supposedly sane adults realized was crazy. Prepared me for Dick Cheney, I guess. Some philosopher or psychologist or novelist must have written about this. Crazy people who are allowed to roam free as if they aren't crazy are as common and as obviously screwy as chipmunks but it's mostly children who recognize them. Adults not only don't seem to notice these crazy people are crazy, they actually go out of their way to give these crazy people power and responsibilities.

Don't know why that is.

At any rate, people have hurt my feelings, they've caused me all kinds of trouble, a few have gone out of their way to do both. But I've never taken it personally. I've either been able to forgive them or excuse them or get over them and chalk up what they did to experience. Mostly this has been because from the time I was three and told my first lie I've always felt a desperate need to live by the Golden Rule. I treat other people the way I want to be treated because I need them to forgive me or excuse me or get over me far more often than I've needed to forgive, excuse, or get over them.

But it's also the case that, while I claim to think people stink and they are stupid, I actually know we are all weak and thoughtless and trapped inside ourselves in a way that makes it difficult to remember that there are other people in the world whose needs and hopes and desires are not the same as our needs and hopes and desires.

Finally, though, the real reason for my saintly forbearance is the truth that I've always been my own worst enemy. Nothing anybody's ever done to me has ever hurt me as badly as I've hurt myself.

Which makes me a very lucky guy.

And probably explains why I don't have much sympathy for people over the age of eighteen who can't get over what happened to them in high school.

I'm not talking about people for whom high school was literally four years of living hell, people who were bullied relentlessly and unmercifully, people who were abused physically and emotionally by adults they trusted, people with undiagnosed learning disabilities that got treated like behavior problems or dismissed as simply proof they were stupid, people whose home lives were nightmares for any number of reasons, people who were suffering from mental illnesses that nobody, not even they themselves, knew they had.

I'm talking about the apparently vast numbers of people who are still smarting because they weren't popular with the kids they wanted to be popular with.

Comment thread regular and blogger, and my source for all things related to climate change, Kit Stolz left a link on my Kerouac post yesterday to an article in the LA Times rounding up a bunch of contemporary writers' reactions to On the Road. Worth reading for what it is, although I was dismayed to find that the writer who best shared my opinion of On the Road was Cynthia Ozick. I respect Ozick as a critic and essayist, but as a novelist she's a writer whose works leave me far, far, far colder than anything Kerouac typed out on his most automatic and self-indulgent day. Nevermind. My reason fro bringing up the article here---my reason for writing this post---is this quote from one of the other writers:

I read it in 1965, as a high school senior, expecting to be hit by the weight of this cool Beat book. I wasn't. I read it in the decade of Dylan and the Beatles, and in its boozy, self-conscious, priapic posturing it seemed a boy's book, as it does to this day. Its central conceit, Sal's adoration of Dean, means that if you don't dig Dean, the book is lost on you, and, frankly, Dean is very hard to dig if you're a woman. He and Sal were supposed to be veterans of life and war, but even then they seemed like the same jerky males I knew in high school. That's what "On the Road" taught me: You don't leave the boys you went to high school with. You go through life with them.

You don't leave the boys you went to high school with. You go through life with them.

Really? You do? That's very sad.

Forty-two years later and she's still annoyed at On the Road because it reminded her of some twerp who knocked the books out of her hands in the hallway?

I stopped counting the number of people I've known over the years, smart, sensitive, sophisticated, supposedly grown-up people, who have let their pleasures in life be dictated and limited by how much or how little something reminds them of kids they didn't hang out with in high school.

Like I said, I know high school was a combination of jail and boot camp for some people, and I know that for others it was heartbreaking, soul-crushing, and physically painful, even deadly, for others. But unless there was something my friends and acquaintances weren't admitting to, what was bothering most of these people is the fact that there were kids back in high school who didn't like them and never suffered for not liking them.

These people now have their own auteur. Judd Apatow seems to be set on making his career's work cinematic revenge on the cheerleaders who went to the junior prom with football players instead of with nice but schlubby guys like himself.

Am I missing something? Is there something more going on here than that ten, twenty, thirty, and more years later they haven't gotten over the fact that the guy they hoped would ask them to a movie called them four-eyes instead or the girl they wanted to laugh at their jokes laughed at their pimples instead?

Is it symbolic of a larger societal rejection? The mean girls and jocks who rejected them and marginalized them in high school went on to run the world are in many ways still rejecting and marginalizing them?

Or is the case that it's true what they say about all of life being high school continued and that no matter what happens to us we never really stop being seventeen?

Friday, September 28, 2007 in Ideas in search of a post | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBack (0)

Amazin' and Phantastic

2007-09-28T06:49:00.000-07:00

Desperate note to any fellow Mets fans in the Philadelphia area: Can somebody please lure Susie Madrak into a bar or restaurant where the game is on this weekend? Susie's convinced that the reason the Phils are on a tear is that she hasn't been watching any of their games.

Hey, it ain't over till it's over, but at this point I'm almost hoping the Mets don't make the playoffs even as the wild card. The baseball fan in me trumps the Mets fan. (Sorry, Tom.) I like every post-season series to go the limit, five games in the first round, seven after that, and the Mets, if they sleepwalk into the playoffs and don't wake up, will be done in three. And I like to see good and deserving teams in the post-season.

The Mets' collapse wouldn't be seen as the historic disaster it is if the Phillies weren't playing such terrific baseball. If you're a fan of the game, you want to see a team like the Phils, talented, bouncing back from injuries, recover and go all the way, and you want to see a team like the Mets, sloppy, unfocused, dazed, listless, and confused, get booted from contention.

And not to take too much away from the Phils, but this is the Mets' second collapse this season. They really went to work throwing away the season just after the All-Star break, just that time around it looked as though Atlanta was the team that was going to benefit.

Sour grapes, and of course if the Mets wake up tonight and remember they're in a pennant race, I'll be singing a different tune...maybe.

Funny thing is that I haven't been following the Mets closely all season. "You gotta believe!" declared the greatest Mets reliever ever (who, although he was a great reliever for the Phillies too, was not Billy Wagner), but I just haven't believed since they picked up Moises Alou last winter.

Alou is a very good ballplayer, the kind of very good ballplayer who will inspire some fun debates over the next forty years about whether or not he belongs in the Hall of Fame. (No. At least not until the sportswriters come to their senses and let Jim Rice in first. After that...still, no.) But a team with the best offense in the league already and a bunch of talented young outfielders and no reliable pitching does not need to go out and acquire a forty year old right fielder with a history of leg and ankle injuries.

When they signed Alou I said to anybody who would listen around here, which means I said to myself, "They're not serious."

But you know when I really gave up on them? The first series against the Phillies back in April. Not because of the games. The Mets swept. Because of the fans' and New York media's laughing reaction to Jimmy Rollin's prediction that his team would be the team to beat this season.

But Rollins was only making the not unreasonable observation that a team that has himself, Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, and Aaron Rowand in its starting line-up has a pretty good chance of winning a ball game on any given day.

Mets fans scoffed and said Rollins was tempting the baseball gods to punish Philadelphia for his hubris.

But I thought it was more likely that the baseball gods would punish Mets fans for theirs.

_________________________________________________

Family loyalties: What I'm really rooting for is that both the Mets and the Phils make the play-offs, preferably with Philadelphia as the wild card. Then I'd like to see them take out the Cubs and Diamondbacks and face each other for the league championship, although that will make things a little tense around the Mannion house.

Going to be a little tense this weekend.

The blonde is a Phillies fan.

She's been trying to keep that to herself all season. Not for my sake. For the teenager's who's been having his heart broken just about every morning since school started when he's rushed out to fetch the newspaper to see how his Mets did last night and found out the answer's the same old story---the bullpen blew another one.

Good mother that she is, she's been trying to hide her delight around the teenager. She even pretends to be disappointed on his behalf and if the Mets do manage to stumble into the World Series, she'll be cheering right along with her son (unless the Red Sox stumble in too) but I'm afraid that if what the baseball gods have apparently been arranging to happen since April---Jimmy Rollins at the plate with the deciding game on the line---happens, her facade will collapse.

A mother is only a mother, but a Phillies fan is a Phanatic.

Friday, September 28, 2007 in Sports Squawk | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

That's not writing, or typing, it's driving---and in circles

2007-09-26T06:45:00.000-07:00

I have my own dreams of the open road. But although I dream them all with a literary finish----not necesarily with a Fitzgeraldian passage of interior monologue summing up America and my place in it, but definitely with a writing down of my adventures---my dreams are inspired by driving not by reading about other people's driving.

Travels With Charley captured my heart because I already wanted to do what Steinbeck had done, pack light, call my dog, jump into the car and drive.

As for Kerouac...

Well, Kerouac.

I read On the Road when I was exactly the right age and in the right mood to take it to heart. I was twenty-two and I was spending a lot of time alone with my typewriter, making what I've come to regard as the biggest mistake of my life, trying to turn myself from a guy who wrote plays sometimes into a novelist and short story writer. I should have been trying to turn myself into a lawyer or an accountant, but nevermind. As long as I was trying to turn myself into a species of professional writer, I probably would have been better off getting a head start on the way things worked out and tried to turn myself into a journalist, especially since in what I was doing to turn myself into a writer, writing a lot, I was mostly practicing a kind of journalism.

Since I was already pretty adept at dialog, I'd decided that what I needed the most practice in was turning what I'd seen into prose. I needed to learn to be descriptive, I thought, so I spent a lot of time typing out descriptions. I wanted an audience though, so I put all my descriptions into letters. My friends became resigned to receiving 15 and 20 page letters from me. Typed. Single-spaced. I didn't keep copies of my letters but I'm pretty sure that taken together they amounted to a proto-blog, a disorganized, unedited, rambling mix of politics, book reports, romanticized reminiscences, anecdotes that didn't adhere strictly to the facts, self-conscious snippets of prose poems I couldn't bring myself to think of as prose poems and so never shaped into anything, and logs of that part of my day that wasn't spent typing up my letters, which, since I didn't sleep much, included a lot of time watching old movies late into the night, which I dutifully reviewed for my friends who I was sure were dying to know what I thought of My Darling Clementine and Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

All this typing, it wasn't writing, had an underlying message.

"I'm dying of loneliness here. Come save me."

Every now and then one of my friends, usually Nora, sometimes Meg, and, when she was in the country, Cathy, would try to save me. And of course I would type up their attempts to save me and send them off in letters to other friends.

I didn't always stick to the facts.

I don't stick to the facts even now. I just changed all their names.

Sharon, the friend I most wanted to come save me, knew better and kept her distance.

I wrote about her anyway.

Although I didn't recognize it, what I was doing in my self-referential, self-pitying, self-aggrandizing letters was writing---typing---the first draft of my own On the Road and so you might think that when I read the book I slapped my forehead and said, This is what I should be doing!

I didn't. I don't think it even occurred to me that there was anything in what I was typing remotely like what Kerouac had written in On the Road.

It wasn't the case, though, that I was fixating on the most obvious differences, that I was nowheres near close to Mexico City, jail, the merchant marine, or San Francisco. I spent a lot of time in New York City, but not Kerouac's New York City, which I'm sure I was convinced was as dead as Peter Stuyvesant's. But I was a long way from Joyce's Dublin, Conrad's Malaysia, and Graham Greene's Africa, and that didn't stop me from thinking I could learn a few tricks from Dubliners, Lord Jim, and A Burnt-Out Case, which I read at about the same time.

I just didn't like the book.

Dean Moriarty---Neal Cassady---was a bore and Sal Paradise was a drip.

I was disappointed...in myself. I "knew" On the Road was an "important" book. I "knew" I "needed" to read it if I was going to be a great American writer. So I thought I had failed somehow, either as a writer or as a reader, in not liking the book. I had assigned myself the job of reading On the Road, as homework for my self-taught course on becoming a writer, and I finished it with a sense of relief, as if it was homework and I was glad to have the task over and done with it.

I was a savvy enough reader to understand that I was being unfair to the book. I was judging it against my expectations and not on its own terms. But I was expecting, and I needed to read, a book that was a dream of the open road, which is to say a book about escape, and On the Road is a book about being trapped.

The point keeps getting made again and again throughout the novel: No matter where you go, there you are. There being stuck inside your own self.

On the Road isn't about being on the road, it's about being in the car and not looking out but looking up, into the rear view mirror, and seeing the same damn face looking back every time.

Since I was already spending far too much time looking in a symbolic mirror in hopes of finding somebody else more interesting looking back and not enjoying it at all, it's no wonder On the Road didn't strike me as a useful literary model.

Ten or so years later, when I was teaching and looking around for books and authors to put on my reading lists, I decided to give Kerouac another chance and I picked up On the Road again, and The Subterraneans, and Big Sur, and Desolation Angels, and Dharma Bums.

And they all had as one of their themes the same unattractive (to me) theme as I saw in my first reading of On the Road, Kerouac's self-disgust and his wishing that he was another, more interesting, happier, or at least more well-adjusted, man.

The trouble is that what makes the men Kerouac wishes he were interesting at all is the work they produced on their own, and so it's more profitable and enjoyable to read their books and their poems, listen to their music and look at their paintings, than it is to read Kerouac's extensive chronicling of his man-crushes on them.

In an essay on On The Road in the New Yorker, Drive, He Wrote, Louis Menand looks at this theme as it appears in On the Road in a more sympathetic light:

Satire and polemic are, on some level, defensive. It’s possible that something about the Beats simply made people uncomfortable. For the nineteen-fifties images of the Beat—Partisan Review’s bohemian nihilist and Hollywood’s hip hedonist—are almost complete inversions of the character types represented in “On the Road.” The book is not about hipsters looking for kicks, or about subversives and nonconformists, rebels without a cause who point the way for the radicals of the nineteen-sixties. And the book is not an anti-intellectual celebration of spontaneity or an artifact of literary primitivism. It’s a sad and somewhat self-consciously lyrical story about loneliness, insecurity, and failure. It’s also a story about guys who want to be with other guys...

The car is also a male space. The women who end up being driven in (never driving) the car are either shared by the guys (Marylou, for example, whom Dean hands off to Sal, as Cassady handed off LuAnne to Kerouac) or abandoned (as happens to the character Galatea Dunkel, and as happened to her real-life counterpart, Helen Hinkle). But the car is not an erotic space. Driving is a way for men to be together without the need to answer questions about why they want to be together. (Drinking is another way for men to be together, and there is a lot of drinking in “On the Road.” There is a lot of drinking, period.) In this sense, “On the Road” is a little like another sensational road novel of the time: Humbert and Lolita drive obsessively back and forth across the continent because that is the only public way for them to be together. As long as they’re driving, they’re not doing anything they shouldn’t be doing.

But maybe we should not understand the sexual themes in “On the Road” too quickly. Maybe the best thing to say about those themes is that they are murky and underrealized, not entirely within the author’s control. Sal has a crush on Dean, in the way that attractive but insecure men can form attachments to gregarious and self-confident men. Sal gets close to women vicariously by being closer to Dean than Dean’s women are (until he, too, gets dumped, in Mexico City). This is perfectly consistent with the “Ocean’s Eleven” genre of buddy stories: there is always a dame, but the real bond is between Brad and George. They have something with each other that neither could have, or would care to have, with a woman.

Menand also sees that On the Road is not about being on the road. The road isn't taking Sal and Neal and the various women they pick up and drop off anywhere. They all want to go somewhere, but they can't get there because the road they want to take to get there doesn't exist anymore, it's lost in the past, recoverable only through memories and regrets, and the point becomes simply being in the car and being on the way to somewhere:

Nostalgia is part of the appeal of “On the Road” today, but it was also part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties. In 1947, when Kerouac began his travels, there were three million miles of intercity roads in the United States and thirty-eight million registered vehicles. When “On the Road” came out, there was roughly the same amount of highway, but there were thirty million more cars and trucks. And the construction of the federal highway system, which had been planned since 1944, was under way. The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving. Kerouac’s original plan, in 1947, was to hitchhike across the country on Route 6, which begins at the tip of Cape Cod. Today, although there is a sign in Provincetown that reads “Bishop, CA., 3205 miles,” few people would dream of taking that road even as far as Rhode Island. They would get on the inter-state. And they wouldn’t think of getting there fast, either. For although there are about a million more miles of road in the United States today than there were in 1947 (there are also two more states), two hundred million more vehicles are registered to drive on them. There is little romance left in long car rides.

In fact, the characters in “On the Road” spend as short a time on the road as they can. They’re not interested in exploring rural or small-town America. Speed is essential. The men rarely even have time to chase after the women they run into, because they’re always in a hurry to get to a city. A lot of the book takes place in cities, particularly New York, Denver, and San Francisco, but also Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Mexico City. Even there, the characters are always rushing around.

The bits and pieces of America that the book captures, therefore, are snapshots taken on the run, glimpses from the window of a speeding car. And they are carefully selected to represent a way of life that is coming to an end in the postwar boom, a way of life before televisions and washing machines and fast food, when millions of people lived patched-together existences and men wandered the country—“ramblin’ round,” in the Guthrie song—following the seasons in search of work. Robert Frank’s photographs in “The Americans,” taken between 1955 and 1956 and published in Paris in 1958 and in the United States a year later, with an introduction by Kerouac, held the same interest: they are pictures of a world not yet made plump and uniform by postwar affluence and consumerism.

The sadness that soaks through Kerouac’s story comes from the certainty that this world of hoboes and migrant workers and cowboys and crazy joyriders—the world of Neal Cassady and his derelict father—is dying. But the sadness is not sentimentality, because many of the people in the book who inhabit that world would be happy to see it go or else are too drunk or forlorn to care. They do not share the literary man’s nostalgie de la boue; they are restless, lonely, lost—beat. “There ain’t no flowers there,” says a girl whom Sal Paradise, the Kerouac figure, tries to pick up in Cheyenne by suggesting a walk on the prairie among the flowers. “I want to go to New York. I’m sick and tired of this. Ain’t no place to go to but Cheyenne and ain’t nothin in Cheyenne.” “Ain’t nothin in New York,” Sal says. “Hell there ain’t,” she says. She wants to get in the car, too.

Nothing worth staying at home for. Nothing in their destinations that make them worth the drive or worth sticking around in once they get there. Nothing to see out the windows or stopping along the way to explore because all that's worth seeing and exploring has vanished. Nothing to do then but drive.

On the Road is one of the most claustrophobic and static novels not written by a French existentialist.

Menand clearly admires On the Road much more than I do, but he sees the book's importance as being primarily biographical and historical not literary. He doesn't try to argue that On the Road is a great American novel. He does point out that it's a better written book than is sometimes thought. It's the stuff of literary legend how Kerouac typed the first draft of On the Road on one long roll of paper in a frenzied and caffeine-(not drug)-fueled three weeks. That's not why Truman Capote dismissed On the Road as typing not writing though. Kerouac may have banged out the first draft in a blur, but he took his time with the following drafts, polishing and revising the book over the course of ten years. Kerouac, says Menand, made a deliberate aesthetic choice in shaping On the Road that his one hundred and twenty-five foot page of paper helped him achieve:

He saw that this-happened-and-then-that-happened had literary possibilities, and the scroll was a way of forcing himself to stick to this vision. (A little later, Frank O’Hara made poems using the same theory. “I do this, I do that” is how he described them.) The scroll was therefore a restriction: it was a way of defining form, not a way of avoiding form. In religious terms (and Kerouac was always, deep down, a Catholic and a sufferer), it was a collar, a self-mortification. He did, after he finished the scroll, go back and make changes. But first he had to submit to his discipline.

Capote was probably refering to Kerouac's "this-happened-and-then-that-happened" approach to his subject. But he might just as well have been referring to something else. On the Road is a written book. But it is not an imagined one.

I mentioned Joyce and Conrad and Greene earlier as writers I was reading for the first time around the same time as I read On the Road. Coincidentally, all three of them, like Kerouac, drew heavily on their experiences and personal biographies in their fiction.

But unlike Kerouac, the other three managed to see and re-create their experiences as having shape and meaning apart from their original sources. Kerouac worked hard at not letting that happen to his stories. I don't think Capote was right, On the Road isn't just typing, it is writing, but in the end it's a particular kind of writing. It's journalism with a get out of the facts free card attached.

Conrad, Greene, and Joyce aren't American writers, of course, and I think it's best when comparing Kerouac to other writers to see him as part of the American grain. Menand mentions Hemingway, Pynchon, Updike, and, not as oddly as it might at first seem, Nabokov---after all, Lolita is the other notorious American road novel from the period. And there's no getting away from or around the other Beats and their sons and heirs, particularly Ginsberg and Burroughs, but also Gary Snyder and Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.

Gee, no women. What a shocker.

But the American writer who always springs to mind whenever I think about Kerouac preceded him on the road, although he didn't go very far down it, by a century, his fellow Massachusettsan, Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau is another one who took himself as his main subject. But unlike Kerouac he was never tempted to write up his adventures as fiction and, as cranky as he could be, and as unforgiving, he was basically a cheerful man who got a kick out of other people, even if he didn't always like them very much. He was egocentric, but not self-absorbed, and so he was a more active and more objective observer. Makes him more entertaining and more informative company. Thoreau famously traveled extensively in Concord. He got up to Maine too, and over to Cape Cod, but mainly he stayed at home. Kerouac went back and forth across the continent several times. But of the two of them Thoreau did travel. He got away. On his short hikes and lazy canoe trips, in his bean patch, and during one night in jail, he managed to escape. From himself and from his demons.

Kerouac went a long way to get nowhere.

Done and done.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of On the Road and Tom Watson salutes it by taking a more Thoreauvian position and celebrating the pleasures of Staying Put.

Your turn: What reputedly great book have you read that disappointed you?

Wednesday, September 26, 2007 in Fragments of an autobiography, Ruining my eyes, Writer's Workshop | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBack (0)

"You have a dull sense of humor, Dad."

2007-09-22T06:42:00.000-07:00

At soccer game, half-time, thirsty husband, desiring to purchase a cold beverage, puts hand inside pants pocket to retrieve money he was sure was in there last night. Comes up empty. Says to wife, "Wife, did you rob me of my change?"

Wife admits to theft with no sign of guilty conscience. "You only had a few dollars."

Husband says, "Now I have none and I wish to buy a soda."

Wife asks in tone that implies husband has been irresponsible about family finances again, "And you have no money?"

"Not so much as a nickel."

"How much do you need?"

"Buck, buck and a half."

Wife reaches into her own pocket. Carefully counts out one dollar and fifty cents in paper and coins. Husband asks if she'd like a drink herself. Wife declines offer. Son who is not on field says he'd like a Pepsi. Wife carefully doles out another dollar and fifty cents. Husband and son skip off to buy sodas.

Half hour later. On the walk home. Family unit passed by ice cream truck. Sons politely request ice cream. Parents shake heads together. "Not right now," says wife. "We'll go out later," says husband, "To a real ice cream parlor." Sons like the idea of going out later to real ice cream parlor. Dreams of sundaes and milk shakes dance in their heads. Husband's head too. Wife says ice cream parlor sounds like a fine idea.

Two minutes later family catches up with ice cream truck parked on their street. Wife says, "Who wants ice cream?"

Husband says, "??????????????????"

Wife and sons, dreams of sundaes and milk shakes dancing right out of their heads, skip off to buy ice cream from truck, leaving baffled husband behind.

Seconds later, sons have King Cones in hand, wife unwrapping ice cream sandwich. Wife calls out to husband by name. Husband, thinking she's wondering what he'd like, calls back, "None for me now, thank you, dear wife."

Wife gets huffy. That's not what she asked. "I said, Do you have any money?"

Husband, kindly, "You took all my money, sweetheart, remember?"

Wife gets huffier. "How am I supposed to pay for the ice cream then?"

Husband says, "How did you think you were going to pay for it?" but has sense enough to say it quietly enough that only he can hear. Runs a block and a half to house, dashes inside, grabs cash off dresser, runs back. Only needs to go a block though. Wife and sons have already left ice cream truck a block back and are walking home, calmly eating their ice cream.

Husband, gasping for breath, manages to ask if ice cream truck driver let them have it for free or if he needs to keep running on to truck to pay.

Wife looks at him as if he's a fool. "Turns out I had some extra change in my pocket."

Husband falls over in street.

Later, back at house, sons declare the above scene hilarious. Big joke on dad all around.

Husband says, "Ha ha, very funny."

Younger son shakes his head in dismay. Says, "You have a dull sense of humor, Dad."

Saturday, September 22, 2007 in Sketchpad 2007 | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

Ugly Betty is not hot, neither was Katharine Hepburn, and that's the secret of their beauty

2007-09-21T06:39:00.000-07:00

America Ferrera---Ugly Betty---is not hot.

Glamour Magazine says she is. Glamour Magazine is wrong.

Ferrera is pretty. Very pretty. Take away Ugly Betty's lusterless wig, her complexion-muddying makeup, her fake eyebrows and false teeth, her braces, her dorky glasses and frumpy, unflattering, Catholic grade school teacher on a budget outfits, and Ferrera's a lovely young woman. But she's lovely in the way young women her age are lovely. She glows with good health and energy. Her skin is smooth. Her figure curves in the right directions.

She comes across as a nice and intelligent person, both qualities absolutely essential to being attractive.

And photographed in the right light at the right angles she can be beautiful.

But that's the difference between TV and movie stars and models and ordinary people. There are more shades of right light and more flattering angles for the stars and models. Some models aren't even good looking in real life. They just take the light well.

Ferrera takes light well. She's lovely and amazing.

But she's not hot.

I say that with the respect, admiration, and appreciation of the aging rouee who has not lost his eye for beauty.

I say it because "hot" is not a compliment.

It's just a current slang word that means vaguely, sort of, in the ballpark of, either, "I recognize that a certain person is what most people around me would think is sexually attractive" or "I would like it very much if you agreed with me that the person I'm sexually attracted to at the moment is in fact sexually attractive."

Either way, it doesn't say much about the actual degree of attractiveness possessed by the body being declared hot. It is merely a statement by the body declaring its attraction that it belongs to the group it wants to belong to.

That's the purpose of slang, to identify the speaker as a welcome member of a group, and that's what it's doing on the cover of Glamour. The editors aren't using "hot" to describe Ferrera. They're using it to try to describe themselves and their magazine to the young readers they covet. "Look at us, we're like you. We're in your group." Of course, they don't mean it. They don't want to be part of their group. They want them to be part of their customer base. But I'll get to that.

At any rate, unlike pretty, lovely, beautiful, handsome, sexy, stunning, gorgeous, and just plain good-looking, "hot" is not an automatic compliment. It's a statement of intent. It doesn't describe the person who is "hot." It announces the effect of that person's "hotness" upon the speaker.

"You're hot," "She's/he's hot" means "I want to strip you naked and roger you roundly."

There are only a very select and extremely circumscribed situations under which this sentiment will strike the person so addressed as a compliment.

Compliments are supposed to make the person being complimented feel good about themselves. To the degree that the other person's feelings and autonomous personhood are considered "You're hot" assumes that the person looks the way she/he looks because they want to be stripped naked and rogered roundly and by the person declaring them hot.

Not the smartest assumption, particularly when the speaker is a man and the subject a woman. Men are apt to assume that a pretty woman's prettiness is an act of will and/or she knows she is pretty and understands that with great prettiness comes great responsibility for the effect of her prettiness upon men.

"You were given a gift, young lady, and you were meant to use it---on me!"

Implicit in the thought is a warning. "If you don't want me to react like a dog in heat to your prettiness you should wear a burka and a veil. The fact that you don't gives me permission to think and act as if I stand a chance of seeing you naked, just for the asking."

Probably the editors at Glamour did not use the word on their cover to mean "America Ferrera is someone you'd want to strip naked and roger roundly" and I doubt that Ferrara, if she's as smart and together as the character she plays, would ever regard being called hot in that way as a compliment.

There are times when calling someone hot can be very complimentary. Those times occur between two people who know each other well enough to have already communicated, at least subliminally, their mutual desire to strip each other naked and roger each other roundly. Under those circumstances, "you're hot" means either "I don't have the right words to express my deeply intense romantic and erotic feelings for you" or "Let's not waste time thinking of the right words, let's strip each other naked and roger together roundly right now!"

Whether or not America Ferrera is hot or has been hot under those circumstances is none of my damn business.

The editors of Glamour didn't chose the word because they wanted to let their readers know Ferrera has someone in her life who thinks she's hot.

In fact, on the cover of Glamour, the word has no real meaning. It's just another advertising slogan. It means, as much as it means anything, "Buy our magazine and we'll tell you how by buying our advertisers' products you an share in some of America Ferrera's beauty, success, and celebrity."

"Ugly Betty is hot" is part of the on-going attempt by the fashion and beauty industries to seduce young women into giving up their personhoods to become consumers. The thing to be consumed is an industrial standard of "attractiveness" that's based entirely on what the industry wants to sell this year.

In this, Ferrera's heavily air-brushed photo on the cover is like the word "hot," a piece of advertising. Ferrera is there not because she has any meaning as an actual human being with a real amount of personal attractiveness and charm, any more than the word "hot" in the copy has any meaning as a word actually describing her personal attractiveness or charm.

Her face and body are there because they are both currently popular with a certain group Glamour wants to add to its group of consumers by convincing them that Glamour, through the image of Ferrera, belongs to their group.

I forget what college freshman course in semiotics I learned all that kind of stuff in.

Now, here's the irony and perversion.

Ferrera is popular---which is to say useful to Glamour, a beauty and fashion magazine---because she doesn't conform to the beauty and fashion magazines' current standards of feminine beauty and also because she's a very talented actress playing a character who is by those standards "ugly" in a hit TV series that mocks and derides those standards.

So what is Glamour supposed to do with that? They need Ferrera to identify themselves as hip and current, but they can't very well put Ugly Betty on their cover. That would be like flat out saying, "You don't need to read our magazine and buy our advertisers' products to be a romantic heroine and have the Henry Grubsticks and Daniel Meads of the world fall in love with you. All you need to do is be yourself and set your own standards."

That's the irony.

Here's the perversion.

They put Ferrera herself on the cover as if she is Ugly Betty, as if they are saying "To be beautiful, to be hot, be like Ugly Betty," but they make sure that Ferrera conforms to the current standards instead of defying them by manipulating her image and tagging her image with the word "hot."

This happens all the time. Every now and then the popular culture throws up a person who is unique, who is interesting for not being like the rest of the popular culture's currently popular idols, an original whose success threatens to overturn the whole applecart by setting new standards or setting aside---making irrelevant---all the old standards, and the advertising industry which has been feeding off the old standards has to adapt in a hurry.

The more creative and intelligent advertisers adapt by adapting. But the usual response is like Glamour's editors, whom you probably noticed I've been equating all along with advertisers not journalists, with good reason. They appear to accept the new standard, to celebrate the uniqueness or the difference, all the while trying desperately to make it fit inside the old boxes.

America Ferrera is celebrated for being Ugly Betty by making her look as much as possible like every other cover girl who has appeared in the magazine over the last twenty years.

Ferrera herself is probably resigned to going along with this, because she knows that if she is to have any sort of TV or movie career beyond Ugly Betty she'd better look, or be thought by producers and casting directors to look, as much as possible like every other starlet her age.

I hope she doesn't have to go as far as starving herself into a stick and dying her hair blond.

And I hope before she goes any farther along she reads Karen Karbo's book on Katharine Hepburn's personal and peculiar style of living and being beautiful, How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great.

Seventy years ago, Hepburn, as Karbo says, was another original that Hollywood and the worlds of fashion and celebrity fan worship didn't know how to cope with so they tried to cope by denying her originality.

They tried to cram her into the currently fashionable boxes.

How Hepburn escaped the boxes and set her own standards for beauty and movie stardom is the subject of Karbo's book.

Besides being the author of How to Hepburn, Karbo is a novelist, memoirist, journalist, essayist, film critic, blogger, and occupier of a spot on my blog roll. Over there on your left, under Literary and Artistic Types, though her webpage is under re-construction at the moment..

I interviewed Karen about How to Hepburn and she's been patiently wondering why the devil I haven't yet posted that interview. I've got lots of good excuses but my latest and last one is that I had a brainstorm.

Karen's a regular reader here, although unless she's been using an alias, she's been something of a lurker in the comment threads. That has to change. And she's promised it will, at least when I post the interview. Karen will turn up in the comments to answer your questions. The thing is you are more likely to have questions if you've already read the book. Here's your chance.

I'll be posting the interview on Tuesday, October 9. That gives you plenty of time to request the book from your local library or better yet buy it, which you can do right now by clicking on this link to How to Hepburn at my aStore.

If this works out, maybe we can get a Lance Mannion Book Club going. Show the folks at Firedoglake they're not the only bookworms on this side of the bandwidth.

Got to be better than live-blogging Studio 60. Or at least more intellectually stimulating.

Speaking of live-blogging. I'm going to experiment with live-blogging Heroes Monday night. It's an experiment because I have a feeling it might not work. I think I could get so caught up in each episode that I'll forget to type. We'll see. New season begins Monday, September 24, at 9 PM Eastern.

Catch up: The first seasons of Heroes and Ugly Betty are available on DVD. Please help support this blog by shopping at my aStore.

Friday, September 21, 2007 in Ideas in search of a post, Now Playing at Cine 1001-2000, Too Much TV, Travel | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

Nostalgia, memory, and why the 1965 Mustang was the last great American car

2007-08-25T19:39:00.000-07:00

I have no particular memories of the 1960s as the 1960s.

I remember the decade as the decade when I was a kid and I had a very generic kidhood. Cub Scouts, Little League, model airplanes, comic books and baseball cards, Hardy Boys, school days, school days, dear old golden rule days, reading and writing and 'rithmatic, taught to the tune of a hick'ry stick...

I was vaguely aware of Vietnam, but I didn't think about it or worry about it until I was in eighth grade when I was an altar boy serving the funeral mass of a local kid, the nephew of a neighbor, who had been killed not in the rice paddies but in Texas where he was training to be a helicopter pilot, which pretty much meant he was training to be a sitting duck in the air over the rice paddies and that made him a casualty of the War as far as I could tell, but by then Nixon was President, Vietnamization was the word of the day, and Henry Kissinger was promising us Peace With Honor any day now. We were coming to the light at the end of the tunnel at last. It was the light at the opening back where we went in, unfortunately, but our part in the War was winding to its bitter end just as I was beginning to understand its horror.

Before that, though, for all I really knew or cared about Vietnam, the protests, Lyndon Johnson, the counterculture, hippies, yippies, racial tensions, the riots, the music, the fashions, sex, drugs, and rock and roll and for all it affected the daily lives of us kids, I might as well have been growing up in the late 1940s, the 1920s, the 1980s, or now.

So it's odd to me that I can be so nostalgic for the 60s.

But not those 1960s.

Not John Lennon's 1960s.

John Kennedy's.

Which were of course really the late 1950s.

A time I certainly don't remember.

But that doesn't stop me from missing those days.

I miss the music. I miss the fashions, the gray flannel suits on the men and the flouncy dresses on the women. I miss the cars. I miss the colors. After the 1960s, those 1960s, when somebody turned up the brightness and colors became florescent and blinding, designers of all kinds, fashion, interior, industrial, artistic, and graphic, adopted a more muted palette and even in periods when brighter colors have come back in style, they've only been relatively brighter, not as muddy or sombre as the periods immediately before and after.

I want my Technicolor blue skies back.

Late last night, inspired by the Mad Men live blogging at newcritics and the YouTube clip I posted the other day of Robert Morse singing I Believe in You, his signature song from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, I watched the movie How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

And I realized something.

Something that had begun to dawn on me last week when I watched North By Northwest.

I'm not nostalgic for the actual 1960s.

I'm nostalgic for the movie version, which I didn't get to know until long after I'd lived through the real thing.

I was in my twenties when I saw North By Northwest for the first time.

Since then though I've seen it and the other great Technicolor Hitchcocks---Rear Window, Vertigo, To Catch a Thief---and plenty of other movies from the period enough times that the look has saturated my brain to the point that it's spilled out of that part where I file my memories of the movies I've seen and flowed over into that part where I keep my memories of my actual life.

Add to this my long-standing love for The Dick Van Dyke Show, my taste in music---Frank Sinatra in his Nelson Riddle-Capitol-Songs for Swingin' Lovers years---and the fact that I was alive and had eyes and ears at the time, even if I wasn't paying close attention to all that grown-up stuff, and the result is that I now "remember" the early 1960s as if I'd been Rob Petrie, Roger Thornhill, or J. Pierpont Finch.

And I miss those times.

Which is ridiculous.

Given that these are mostly false memories, and given that what is actual memory is actually memories of the time in my life when I developed my tastes for the period, my twenties, and given that a lot of what I miss hasn't gone away because what I'm missing are movies I can watch and records I can play anytime I want, I should either be nostalgic for the 1980s or not nostalgic at all.

But I am and it bugs me.

I hate feeling nostalgic generally because it's a roundabout form of self-pity, but being nostalgic about a time you not only weren't aware of you were living through but which isn't even wholly real is a problem when you're trying to make artistic judgments.

(Won't get into it here, but nostalgia is by definition a feeling inspired by a time that never was, as it's the case that when we're nostalgic we're usually remembering the past in a highly selected and idealized way.)

I honestly believe that movies were better then.

That the fashions were better then.

That the music was, if not better, more varied and more complex in ways that made listening to music a better experience, and at any rate listening to Sinatra on the hi-fi was more pleasurable than listening to Green Day on your iPod.

People looked and moved better then.

Ok, Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint looked better than Brad and Angelina.

And I know it was the point of Everybody Loves Raymond, but Rob and Laura were sexier, funnier, and cooler than Ray and Debra.

The women were prettier then.

The comedians were funnier then.

The President was better then.

I'm convinced this is all true, and yet it's not, because my judgments are tainted by nostalgia and false memories.

But then...

Watching How to Succeed in Business last night I could see signs of coming changes that were I think objectively changes for the worse.

The movie was released in 1967 but the director and designers seemed to be trying to capture the look and feel of seven years earlier when the musical was on Broadway. I think they understood that those 1960s had taken hold and that the musical already a period piece. The set designs, the lighting, the color schemes, even the cinematography, and definitely the sound, not just the music but the voices and the background noises, were meant to recall an earlier and already vanishing New York City. The street scenes were carefully framed so that the cars rush by in the corners and far background of the shots and you can't identify any makes or models that would fix the time period. The men's suits and hair styles were far more conservative than they would have been even in a corporate office in 1967.

The one aspect of the overall design where the late 1960s impinged and the period feel is broken is that aspect where Hollywood designers have always given themselves permission to be anachronistic---the women's fashions and make-up.

You wouldn't call anything any of the women are wearing "mod"---except for a dumb pink vinyl jockey cap somebody who hated her stuck on Michelle Lee's head in one short scene---but the women's dresses generally didn't flounce the way they should have; in fact, they had that stiff, sack-like blockiness that defined women's silhouettes by 1970 and made even trim and pretty young women like my mother look like they were built like shoeboxes and as if they were wearing army blankets decorated with oversized buttons and wide strips of construction paper.

There's no way you can look at what the women in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying are wearing and what Eva Marie Saint wore in North By Northwest eight years earlier and not think, When did ugly become the fashion?

Maybe it's nostalgia or maybe it's just a matter of personal taste, but it just looks to me that between 1960 and 1970 people forgot how to do a lot of things they had known how to do and do well and they've not learned how to get those skills back since.

Times change, technologies improve, societies rearrange themselves, skills and talents that were admirable, that are still remarkable in retrospect, become obsolete, habits and mores and even moralities evolve, devolve, reverse, dominate, or subvert themselves.

An awful lot of life has gotten better since 1960, so much better that it's trivial-minded of me to lament the passing of the three button suit and the mambo, especially since I never owned the one or danced the other.

But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking that we've forgotten a lot that we didn't need to forget to get ourselves from then to now.

We forgot how to make movies.

Forgot how to design and wear clothes.

Forgot how to sing a song.

Forgot how to dance.

Forgot how to tell a good joke.

Forgot how to build...well, most anything, but especially cars.

All the other losses might be arguable, but I defy you to convince me that America has designed or built a better car since the '65 Mustang.

Saturday, August 25, 2007 in Fragments of an autobiography, Ideas in search of a post, Now Playing at Cine 1001-2000 | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)

Four weeks, five days, nine hours, and thirty-one minutes since the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows...

2007-08-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

...and I'm done. Finally.

Don't tell the eleven year old.

He and I have been listening to it together. But I got caught up. I had to know. I started reading ahead and couldn't stop.

Which I guess tells you what I think of it.

It's a rattling good yarn.

Measured solely by the energy of its narrative drive and the excitement and chills and thrills it delivers, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the best of the series after Prisoner of Azkaban.

If there was a Marauder's Map for this post at this point you'd see your footprints stopping before a sign that says, Here be spoilers.

I'll try to be careful not to let too many loose.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows gets a little too exciting in spots, I think. The final battles feel rushed and the bodies pile up too fast and too high. JK Rowling promised she'd be killing off some important characters, but I think she couldn't make up her mind which characters. I don't think I'm spoiling if I say that there was no way she was going to kill Harry, Ron, or Hermione---you'd have heard about it by now if she had. But having knocked off Dumbledore in The Half-Blood Prince, Rowling was left with only two main characters to kill whose deaths would seriously matter, and the death of one of them is a foregone conclusion, not just from the first page of Deathly Hallows, but from the last pages of Half-Blood Prince. And the other one, whose death would have been important just in the amount of tears it would have wrung from her readers, but who could have died in a heroic way that would have brought his character full-circle and elevated him beyond pathetic comedy, she couldn't bring herself to kill.

Or leave dead after the penultimate draft. That's the only explanation I can think of for why he's not in the epilogue. She went back and hurriedly resurrected him.

At any rate, it felt to me that having promised us dead heroes or heroines to cry over, but unable to off any of her three major characters or her favorite supporting player, Rowling was at a loss trying to decide whose death would most move us so she started firing randomly into the crowd.

So four important good guys bite the dust, but three of them go in hurried, apparently unplanned for ways that waste (sorry about the pun) their death scenes and their characters.

The fourth's death surprised me and did choke me up a bit. But the surprise came from the fact that whenever he's disappeared from the books, which he's done for long stretches, I've tended to forget about him. When he finally does go, I looked back in my head and saw that his death has been plotted and foreshadowed from his first appearance and that's why it was so fitting and moving when it came. Plus, Rowling gave his death scene the attention it needed and the character deserved.

The other three are thrown away, their deaths turning out to be meaningless to the overall story or to the last book on its own, except, in the case of one of them, setting up a confrontation in the last battle that will probably be more satisfying in the movie than it is on the page, thanks to the two actresses who'll be on the screen when it comes.

The other two die for no good reason unless it was to help Rowling in the settting up of her next series of Hogwarts stories starring another orphan with a heroic godfather.

(I don't know if Rowling has any plans to return to Hogwarts or to the wizarding world someday. Rumor had it that her next book was going to be a murder mystery. Rumor, as usual, didn't get its facts straight.)

Besides the not quite Shakespearean littering of the stage with bodies, I was also a little disappointed that Rowling resorted to so much expositionary dialog to wrap up the central mystery of the story and I could have done without the epilogue entirely. It didn't tell us anything about the characters' futures we couldn't have guessed while revealing a few things that I, for one, wouldn't have guessed. Rowling dropped in a few clues that Harry doesn't turn out to be the boring, middle-class quidditch dad he's playing the part of on the station platform, but the clues aren't all that insistent or convincing, and there are no clues that Ginny hasn't turned out to be merely a quieter, demurer version of her mother.

And I'd have thought that twenty years on Hermione would be head of Gryffindor if not headmistress of Hogwarts.

Tonks and McGonnagle were blinds. I think Rowling is a sexist. Bellatrix and Umbridge and Rita Skeeter are her real takes on women with careers.

Nevermind. I liked the book. I liked the way she handled Harry's confrontation with his destiny. I liked the way she prepares throughout the book for the moment when he crosses that threshold from teenager to grown man, which, by the way, called my attention to a long-running theme I hadn't been paying attention to.

Once Harry has his moment---when he literally dies as a boy and is reborn as a man; Joseph Cambpell would have been pleased---he becomes the first and only healthy, decent, and serious young man in the books.

Almost all the other men in the books are old, dead, villains, or members of the walking wounded (Sirius and Lupin). The ones who aren't any of those are fussily and impotently middle-aged, like Arthur Weasley and Cornelius Fudge.

I guess I could count Bill and Charlie Weasley as grown-ups but they are sketches of characters.

I shouldn't focus on the maleness of the missing young adults either. Tonks is the only young woman who isn't a ghost or a villainess. Fleur is still a girl. Wizards and witches marry shockingly early in life. I was stunned to find out that James and Lily Potter were only twenty-one when they died. That means that Snape's only about 32 when the series starts, a fact that it's hard for me to get my head around now, but only because Alan Rickman's been playing him in the movies. I think if I went back to The Sorcerer's Stone and started re-reading from the beginning Snape's relataive youth would change my perception of the way his character and story develop for the better.

But the absence of strong, effective, protective adults in their prime, which should have been obvious to me from the start, is something I need to think about, because it's clearly been very important to Rowling. I have to decide what it means. Any ideas?

Finally, for now, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, although as I said one of the two best books, is not the most important book in the series. With it Rowling did a fine job of wrapping up her epic and capping her myth and told a good, exciting adventure in the process, but the other impressive bit of work she did with it was using it to make Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince an even better book.

And The Half-Blood Prince, which I liked very much, by the way, needed to be made better because it's the most important book.

I think I've been very dumb about these books because I should have known this by the time I was half-way through The Order of the Phoenix. Rowling has been telling two stories all along. The main one and the obvious one is the story of Harry's becoming a hero---his hero's journey, to make the ghost of Joseph Campbell smile again. In that story Dumbledore has played the archetypal role of the wise old man who passes along secret knowledge and wisdom to the hero. He's been Harry's Merlin, his Obi-wan and Yoda.

But in the other story, the one I'd been ignoring, Dumbledore is the hero. The tragic hero.

In The Half-Blood Prince Rowling wrote the denoument of both her stories. We see Harry's final steps on his journey. At the end of the book he is a hero, if not yet a completed grown-up. And we also see the end of Dumbledore's story, although it's not clear exactly what that story is or means until the late chapters of Deathly Hallows.

I think I'll need at least one whole post to deal with that story.

It's quite a dark story for what seemed to have begun as a simple boys' adventure tale.

It's the story of Dumbledore's failure.

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Friday, August 24, 2007 in Ruining my eyes | Permalink | Comments (19) | TrackBack (0)

The police go to Hooters for the famous chicken wings

2007-08-22T19:35:00.000-07:00

Nearby town was without police protection the other night.

There were supposed to be two officers on duty, but one of the cops scheduled for the night was on suspension and the other refused to work the shift alone. Didn't feel comfortable about it, according to the town supervisor. What could the chief do? He'd already given all his other officers the night off and they had plans. The chief had plans too.

They were all going out to dinner together.

At a Hooters in New Jersey.

Three carloads of off-duty Deerpark police officers, outside law enforcement officials and residents headed to Hooters restaurant in Franklin, N.J., Thursday night.

While the officers were out on the town, there were no town cops on duty back in Deerpark — 35 minutes away.

The story in the Times Herald-Record describes Hooters as "a sports bar, widely recognized for its scantily clad waitresses and popular wings."

I'm sure the cops all went for the popular wings.

The point of the outing, the chief said, was to "build camaraderie." The department has eighteen officers. Three of them are women. The camaraderie-building trip to Hooters was announced around the station by a flier that none of the female officers received. Maybe their brother officers invited them along anyway. The chief wouldn't say if any of the female officers ate chicken wings that night. He said "it's not relevent" whether or not they were there building some camaraderie too.

Women back in town must feel comforted, knowing their police force was doing all this male bonding over chicken wings.

The supervisor wishes they had picked another restaurant to bond over wings at, but his main concern is that the town was left unprotected except for a state trooper whose patrol takes him through there a few times a night.

The chief is sure the town was perfectly safe. He's sure because nothing bad happened. The fact that nothing bad did happen is proof that nothing bad could have happened.

As for the choice in restaurants? The chief thinks that's no big deal, maybe not as irrelevent as his female officers' inclusion in or exclusion from the camaraderie-building, but not anything to criticize.

"No one was on official duty and no police cars were taken," the chief says. "It was a group of adults being adults."

Hooters is also widely recognized for the very grown-up behavior of its clientele.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007 in Cop shop | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Sinus headaches are a punishment from a just and wrathful God

2007-08-19T19:36:00.000-07:00

Woke up this morning with a sinus headache and the depressing certainty that the box of Advil Cold and Sinus in the medicine cabinet was empty.

Nothing to do but fortify myself with a pot of coffee and set out for my bi-monthly encounter with the Patriot Act.

But I had to wait an hour. It was eight o'clock. Our regular drugstore doesn't open until 9:30. The nearest supermaket opens at 8 but its pharmacy doesn't open until 9, which until a couple years ago wouldn't have mattered. I'd have just grabbed my medicine off the shelf and taken it to the register. Can't do that anymore. My sinuses are stubborn. They will only respond to doses of pseudophedrine and you can't buy anything with pseudophedrine straight off the shelf. You have to ask for it and have it handed to you from behind a counter after you show some ID and sign your name.

The ostensible reason for this is that pseudophedrine can be used to manufacture methamphetamines and the best way to stop meth makers is to inconvenience law-abiding folks with swollen sinuses.

A few years back, several states, including, I'm ashamed to say, New York, thinking they had an epidemic of meth addicts on their hands, or worried they might, or wishing they might, because the war on drugs means government grants and lots of new fancy toys for local police departments, passed laws inconveniencing people like me that I'll bet without doing a single Google search's lick of research have not much inconvenienced the meth makers or helped their customers kick habits.

The Feds got into the act when some nitwits slipped the Combat Methamphetimine Epidemic Act of 2005 under the umbrella of the Patriot Act, and helping prove that a better name for the Patriot Act would be the Oh What the Hell Let's Just Make It a Crime to Be Alive and Let the Police Sort It All Out Act, inconvenienced sinus sufferers and honest pharmacists all over America while doing nothing much to inconvenience meth makers.

In fact, laws like this tend to do nothing but create more criminals. I'm sure there's been an increase in the trade of illegal IDs, the corruption of many formerly law-abiding friends who have been prevailed upon to go to the drug stores whenever the makers and addicts get worried they have gone there too often too recently (if buying boxes of Advil is even the best and easiest way to get your hands on enough psuedophedrine, which I doubt), and quite probably a sharp uptick in the enlistment of bribed druggists, delivery truck drivers, and pharmacy clerks.

On top of this, it's probably done what all laws that inconvenience honest citizens without actually preventing the crimes the laws are supposed to prevent do, made a whole lot of honest citizens more cynical and suspicious of the law and the cops and government agents who enforce the laws.

This is what happens in all authoritarian regimes---the people become criminal in their sympathies.

Commenter came along the other day who didn't like my review of Weeds last week. Commenter thought I wasted my time, um, reviewing the show, and incidentally making fun of the smugness of my smug pot smoking friends back in college and grad school. Commenter thought I should have devoted the post to advocating for the legalization of pot instead.

As it happens, I think pot should be legalized.

I think all drugs should be legal. Marijuana, coke, heroin, acid, ecstacy, meth, you name it.

It's not that I think drugs aren't bad for you. Obviously they are terribly destructive. Even pot does more than make you unbearably smug and goofy. It's just that the criminal drug trade destroys, ruins, and corrupts more lives than the cops fighting the war on drugs save.

And I won't bother getting into the waste of money and manpower.

I'm of the opinion that, generally, laws that are designed to prevent bad behavior tend only to make people more ingenious in their determination to behave badly.

We don't have laws to prevent murder, bank robbery, kidnapping, or assault.

We have laws that punish murder, bank robbery, kidnapping, and assault.

I'm all for punishing any destructive behavior that results from people using drugs.

As I said, though, drug laws, like the Combat Methamphetemine Epidemic Act, are intended to prevent bad behavior, and they don't do that. They just let government agents intrude and spy (and I'm sure let insurance companies intrude and spy now too) on honest people's lives and inconvenience us.

If this were really a law designed to prevent meth makers from making meth, then it would be based on the assumption that criminals are happy to play right into the hands of the cops, as if criminals are dumber than the mice we used to have who learned how to take the cheese from the other side of the traps.

The meth makers were supposed to go out to the their local drug store and buy a suspiciously large amount of Advil using their real names and the cops, reviewing the books a month or so later, would swoop down and pounce on them, finding them at home, waiting with their hands out and their wrists already locked together to make it easier to put the cuffs on them.

But it's not desinged to be effective. It's like all laws that have as their announced goal preventing bad behavior; it's something for the politicians who passed it to wave in front of frightened voters and brag about: "Look what I've done to protect you from the bad guys!"

I say, leave us sinus sufferers alone. Leave us all alone. Leave the self-destructive alone to self-destruct, and leave the rest of us free to decide if we want to self-destruct or play around with the possibility for a night.

Legalize it all.

Gasp!

We can't do that. The second after we make drugs legal every teenager in America and half their parents will rush out to shoot up, light up, snort, pop, sniff, lick, swallow, or absorb by osmosis anything and everything that's handy.

This is the authoritarian's view of human nature, that the only thing standing between a person and the moral, ethical, or psychic cliff he might throw himself off of is a stern and earnest God promising eternal damnation or His earthly representative swinging a club.

When certain conservatives, like George Will, try to explain their opposition to progressive social and economic programs intended to improve the general lot of humankind, they will say that those programs depend on human beings behaving well and the difference between liberals and conservatives like themselves is that liberals have a Polyanna view of human nature while conservatives, being smarter and more realistic, know that human beings are on the whole fairly unreliable.

They mean people stink and they are stupid and self-destructive.

I happen to agree.

The difference between me and George Will is that I think people are even worse.

I think we're lazy and timid and terrified of pain, hard work, and death.

And this is what keeps us civilized and on the path to enlightenment.

Conservative authoritarians think that people will run off moral cliffs like lemmings into the sea unless we erect tall fences with barbed wire and post armed guards. I think that all we need is a few signs pointing out that while the fall might in itself make for a pleasurable rush, the rocks and crashing waves at the bottom of the cliff will insure an uncomfortable and painful ending to the ride and most people will read the sign and say to themselves, Let's find an easier way down.

To put it another way, I believe that most people will arrange their lives in ways that increase their comfort and security.

A few minor laws that encourage and reward their pursuit of comfort and security don't bother me. I just don't think we need many laws to force them into that pursuit.

I'm not a libertarian, though. People do stink and they are stupid and they will find ways to turn the pursuit of comfort and security into its opposite. They do this mainly by pursuing comfort and security with too much energy. That is, they get greedy.

In our society, money is the great ensurer of comfort and security, so people want money. Lots of money.

Unlike some of the other deadly sins---lust, gluttony, sloth---greed never results in a victimless crime.

Consequently I think we need laws to discourage greed, control it, and punish it when it results in destructive behavior towards other people, which it almost always does.

Now, speaking of the deadly sins, many conservatives these days like to pride themselves (committing one of the deadly sins right off the bat, the sin of vanity) on being more rigorously and absolutely moral than us relativistically moral liberals.

The fact is these conservatives usually only object to three of the deadly sins; the other four, they've turned into virutes.

The seven deadly sins are Anger, Vanity, Lust, Greed, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth.

In the authoritarain-conservative's moral universe, the only ones we need to police, and we need to police those hard, are Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth.

Lust: If we don't regulate people's sexuality, if we don't make young people ashamed of their bodies and their natural desires, if we don't punish young women for failing to remain chaste by forcing them to carry pregnancies to term and then shaming and stigmatizing them for being single mothers and making it nearly impossible for them to provide for their babies, if we don't railroad people into marriage and make it hard for them to get out of a bad one and cement them into wedlock by burdening them with lots of kids, if we give them access to birth control and let them learn sex can be fun, then we'll wake up one day to find ourselves in a coast to coast orgy, writhing, naked bodies everywhere, with none of those much noticing or minding if the body they're writhing with at the moment is of the same gender or not of the same species.

Gluttony: Give people access to recreational drugs and that's all they will do, recreate on drugs. We'll have a nation of addicts and thieves stealing and murdering to feed their addictions---ok, we'll have more of that. Lots more.

Sloth: If we weave together a decent safety net, if we guarantee people good health care, if we put good schools in every neighborhood, if we promise that if they get sick or if their children or parents get sick and they need to stay home to take care of them they won't lose their jobs, if we don't make them work nonstop, if we pay them enough so that they can get a bit ahead, put some money in the bank, have something to depend on if there comes a day they need to stand up to their bosses and say I quit, then we'll wind up with a nation of lazy bums who won't go to work or lift a finger to feed or take care of themselves, they'll just sit around, probably smoking dope and having sex, when they're not zoned out in front of the TV, while they wait for their check from the government to arrive.

But as for the other sins, Anger, Vanity, Envy, and Greed?

Well, it's ok if we have a foreign policy based entirely on Anger and Vanity, if whenever another nation wounds us or wounds our pride, no matter how slight the wound, or makes us feel the least little bit afraid, or the least little bit as though we are not the most powerful nation on earth and entitled to every other nation's abject worship and terror, then we have a right to send in our armies or drop a bomb on them just to show them, as Thomas Friedman says we should show them, that we can do it.

And it's good that our entire economic system should be based on Envy and Vanity and Greed, although let's call the Envy and Vanity "competition" and claim the desire to accumulate wealth and power and status isn't a sign that we think too well of ourselves or want to think a lot less of our neighbors in comparison.

And Greed...well, do I even need to go there?

Reading over this post I see that it is rather ill-tempered, not to mention disjointed, rambling, and pointless.

I'm sorry.

I've got a headache.

Sunday, August 19, 2007 in Sunday Sermon | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)

Hawk rise

2007-08-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

Red-tailed hawk took a tour of our neighborhood this morning. I was out on the front porch having coffee, facing west. The hawk flew up from the east, appearing from the fields behind our house. Because of the angle of the morning sun, above and behind it, its shadow arrived well ahead of it. A large shadow that darkened the roof of our car in the driveway, then spanned the crown of the tallest maple in our neighbor's yard across the way. The shadow flapped its wings once on the neighbor's roof, covered the whole of one dormer, ran over the shingles, and vanished in the shade of another tree, and that's when the hawk itself appeared, looking smallish in comparison to its expansive shadow-self but as it glides in at treetop level forcing my eye to recalibrate and my mind to acknowledge, That's a big bird.

The hawk circled that tall maple, followed the line of the neighbor's roof, then chased after its now-gone shadow and disappeared after it behind the trees.

Pretty morning here. Heat's broken. Zip humidity. You might need a jacket. There's a stiff breeze that keeps the branches of the trees fidgeting between gusts and there's a constant hissing in the leaves as they dance and the neighbor's laundry, white and yellow towels and pillow cases, bounce on the line.

Hope it's as nice where you are.

Saturday, August 18, 2007 in Sketchpad 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Shakespeare's flowers

2007-08-14T09:38:00.001-07:00

Recently started reading The Shakespeare Riots, by Nigel Cliff, my new second-favorite book about Shakespeare, although it's not actually so much about Shakespeare himself or his plays; it's about the mania and passion for Shakespeare and the theatre in early Nineteenth Century America and how it led to mayhem and violence in the streets of New York in 1849.

My favorite book about Shakespeare is about him and his plays. James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599.

So, at any rate, I'm reading along in The Shakespeare Riots and I came across a passage that reminded me of comment Lou left here a couple of weeks ago on my post The past is another country. Responding to something I wrote about people who think that Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare because the real author of the plays knew too much about the intimate lives and thoughts of kings and queens to have been a mere commoner from the sticks, Lou wrote:

I'd turn your observation about Shakespeare around about the realism of his portrayals of court. I've always dismissed the conspiracy theorists because the funniest and most realistic of his characters always were his commoners. Would someone who spent all their life at court be able to do that? Servants can observe the habits of their employers pretty closely. The employer (or at that time, master) seldom knows a thing about the servant.

I tend to agree with Lou, but it's a debatable point. If the portraits of Henry V, Prince Hal that was, and Hamlet are portraits of noblemen by a fellow nobleman then they are portraits of two noblemen who could have written very well about the lives and thoughts of commoners by a nobleman who could write very well about commoners himself. (Untangle that sentence, and good luck to you if you try, and you'll see there's a point in it somewhere.) But there's a larger point in Lou's argument that isn't as debatable: There is more in Shakespeare than is dreamed of in your philosophy.

That is, Shakespeare knew about a great many things, far more things than intrigues and romances at court. He knew about flowers, for one thing. And not any flowers. He knew what grew and thrived in the fields and woods and gardens around Stratford. Michael Wood makes this point in his documentary In Search of Shakespeare. Based on evidence from the plays, it's clear that whoever wrote them was from the country, and from a particular part of the country.

Shakespeare didn't just know what the countryside around Stratford looked like and what grew there. He knew what it was like to live there. He knew the rhythms of speech and accents and habits of thought of country people. He knew their folktales and folk wisdom, their work, the comings and goings in their daily lives.

Trying to explain in The Shakespeare Riots why Shakespeare's plays were so popular on the American frontier, Nigel Cliff finds the answer in Shakespeare's being a rude, indifferently educated, half-wild boy from the country---that is, Americans living two-hundred years after he died saw him as something of a proto-American pioneer:

His plays, the settlers saw, were too vital to be mired in respectability. Shakespeare's imagination might have spanned the world, his ear might have caught the legion tones of life, but hte country boy from the English Midlands was also wild, vulgar, and bloody; his goriest scenes, the eye gougings, child murders, and wife suffocations, were too much even for frontiersmen and were banished offstage or whisked behind a curtain. His writing was rooted in the countryside and its folklore, its witches, monsters, and spirits; throughout the plays, the daily rhythms of shepherds, fleeces, and feed, of foot soldiers, gravediggers, and pimps, of merchants, markets, and hard-won lives, act as a check on the elevated stories of lords, ladies, and kings. Macbeth has its drunken porter; King Lear finds its heart in a hovel on a storm-torn heath.

To put it another way. Whoever wrote this:

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

Also wrote this:

When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow
And coughing drowns the parson's saw
And birds sit brooding in the snow
And Marian's nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

Saturday, August 11, 2007 in Arts, crafts, and stagecraft | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Wacky tabacky

2007-08-13T14:19:00.000-07:00

Back in my salad days, a good measure of how much you loved your friends was how long you could stand to be around them when they were stoned.

For me, though, the tougher test came before the first joint was lit, sometimes hours before, at that moment when someone let it be known that there was some righteous weed available, if anyone was interested----and you could tell who was interested by the look of sly smugness that came over their faces. It was bearing the company of that smugness that was the test.

I don't think anyone has written extensively on the smugness of potheads back in the day. Weeds, however, which is starting its third season tonight on Showtime, has captured it perfectly.

The smugness of the soon to be toking could and did pass as a hipster's cool. There was that insider's confidence that they knew something only the truly with-it knew and something of a rebel's delight in taking on and defying the Man. But it wasn't a true rebellion, not for the crowd I hung with, upper middle class suburban white kids, because real rebels put something on the line.

They might have liked to think of themselves as glamorous outlaws, but their smugness was really the smugness of spoiled brats. They knew they were about to do something that their parents, teachers, priests, ministers, rabbis, the cops, Nancy Reagan, and even many of their friends thought was wrong, or just dumb, but they didn't care. They didn't care because they knew they were going to get away with it no matter what.

They were upper middle class white kids. Nobody was going to punish them for doing something as goofy and harmless as smoking pot. They knew the hypocrisy behind the war on drugs. They knew it was just a cover for a war on poor young black men. They were safe. Their coolness lay in their being among the privileged.

They were congratulating themselves ahead of time for being invulnerable.

In the middle of the first season of Weeds there's an episode in which Nancy, our heroine, the pretty widow making ends meet by dealing pot, expands her market onto the campus of the local commuter college---a school, it's made plain, that isn't like commuter colleges in more working class areas where kids who can't afford to go to private colleges go part-time when they're not at their jobs; this is a school for upper class underachievers who were too lazy, or too distracted, to earn the grades they needed in high school to get into a good college. It's a place for them to hang-out for four years while they wait for their family and social connections to rescue them.

And as Nancy makes her rounds, drumming up business, shopping her wares, that familiar look of smugness appears on one pretty, bland, young face after another.

It was during this sequence that I almost gave up on watching the show. I wasn't put off by the smugness, although the nostalgia it induced was hard to bear. But I made the mistake of thinking the writers and producers wanted us to cheer the fact that Nancy had successfully opened up a new market. I thought, Oh, I see, we really are meant to take Nancy's dealing as just a business and through it see the hypocrisy that underlies legitimate business.

Then Nancy got busted by the head of campus security.

She's cuffed and thrown in the back of his SUV and her smugness dissolves away in a flood of tears. She pleads and she begs and she even flirts with the cop, trying to convince him to let her off with a warning, on the grounds that she's just a poor widow woman trying to support her family and suddenly my attention was riveted. It finally dawned on me.

She has no clue!

I realized something I'd been missing because Nancy is played by Mary-Louise Parker, who is adorable, and I was making the mistake the show wants us all to make at first, attributing Parker's adorableness to Nancy.

Nancy has a lot of little tricks, gestures, expressions, cute little habits of speech that she shares with Parker and that help give the impression that she's just as adorable as Parker, plus she is as beautiful as Parker and has great big gorgeous brown eyes like Parker's that you just want to throw yourself into.

But as her dealing partner Conrad says somewhere in Season Two, You showed me those big brown eyes and I fell into shit.

Nancy isn't adorable. She's a reckless, self-deluded, dangerous narcissist.

She truly expects the cop to let her go. She expects him to accept her version of herself over the reality and feel sorry for her.

And when it turns out that the cop is actually shaking her down---although Nancy, because she is too busy feeling sorry for herself, doesn't figure this out---and he "relents," having had no real intention of arresting her, he just wants to get his hands on her merchandise, and lets her go with a warning but holds onto her pot, she starts pleading and flirting again, trying to convince him to let her keep it so she can sell it to make her mortgage payment.

She thinks she's talking to an honest cop and she's asking him to give her back her pot as if he wouldn't and shouldn't care she's going to use it to continue dealing.

Nancy doesn't know she's a criminal.

She doesn't see herself as a drug dealer.

She believes she is a nice, fairly decent person doing something she should be congratulated for, taking care of her family.

And it's not as though she's developed a mobster's double-think about what she does. Mobsters consider their criminal activities "business" with a set of hard and unforgiving rules, and while they don't necessarily think of themselves as bad guys---they get around having to face this by insisting there are no good guys. One way or another, everybody's on the take, they'll be glad to inform you, and it's hard to argue with them on that point.---they understand on some level why civilians don't like them.

Nancy knows that drug dealers are bad people. But she's not a bad person. Therefore she can't be a drug dealer.

She's not a businesswoman either. She's not focused enough on what she's doing. She's always looking past the moment to the future payoff, when she has the money in hand to pay her bills, not paying attention to how she's earning the money, but fixating on the image of herself as having succeeded in doing what she says she's doing, being a good and responsible mother.

This is how she navigates through all her daily chores and errands, how she handles all her obligations and manages her love life, by looking past the actual moment to the future payoff and the time to come when everything will be well and happy for herself and her family again.

The writers of Weeds don't go in for flashbacks or long expositionary speeches, so we're never sure if Nancy's self-flattering state of permanent denial has always been the main feature of her personality or if it's a reaction to her grief. She might just be a narcissistic flake or it might be that if she lets herself actually focus she'll have to face the awful, central truth of her life: Her husband is dead and she isn't up to the job of surviving without him.

It's the possibility that it's the latter that allows us to forgive the appearance of the former, to a point.

That point comes quickly in the second season when Nancy's fecklessness helps corrupt the so far only real grown-up in the show and her general inattention leaves her sons to descend into their own forms of corruption and out and out criminal activity.

And we're way past that point by the time Season Two comes to its cliffhanger ending with five guns pointed at her and Conrad's heads and an important character lying dead on a garage floor because of her.

Nancy's inability to accept that what she is doing is real, even at a remove, as a "business," makes her dangerous, and the professional criminals in her life, her supplier Heylia, her now former partner Conrad, and, as Season Three gets underway, her new boss, U-Turn, know she is dangerous and know why she is dangerous. She brings the cops with her everywhere she goes because she doesn't believe she has to worry about them.

Each of these three criminals tries to make Nancy see the truth. They try to make her grow-up and take responsibility for herself and her actions. In doing so, they come across as close to being actual grown-ups themselves.

But they aren't. We're not meant to take Weeds as a 21st Century re-play of those early 70s movies in which the outlaws are the real good guys. Conrad is a coward. U-Turn is a remorseless killer. And Heylia, it turns out, is in her own way just as narcissistic and just as in denial as Nancy.

In the first season, Heylia seemed to be the show's most grown-up character, insisting that Nancy face up to what she's doing and follow the rules. Heylia appeared to have an ethic---a ruthless busineswoman's ethic, but she kept to it and tried to teach it to Nancy. Whenever she tried she managed to sound somewhat wise and adult, at least when it came to their business.

But in the second season it turns out that her ethic is only a rephrasing of Look Out for Number One and that her apparent responsibility towards her family, her nephew Conrad and her pregnant daughter Vaneeta, isn't based on love but on yet another narcissist's inability to see other people as not mere extensions of herself. She turns on Nancy because Nancy steals not Conrad's love or loyalty but his usefulness to her---when he's out following Nancy around he's not there to do Heylia's bidding. He's her extra pair of hands and legs, that's all.

Heylia isn't a very smart criminal, either, as it also turns out. Being a version of Nancy, she doesn't really see herself for what she is, despite all she's said previously. The fact that she thinks she has a chance of marrying a devout and extremely priggish follower of the Nation of Islam (a plot development that parallels Nancy's thinking she can date a DEA agent) shows the extent of her self-delusion. But she's even more dangerous than Nancy. Nancy is self-centered and self-aborbed, and can be careless of other people's persons and feelings. But she's not mean and not entirely selfish. Heylia is mean. And like anybody who never questions their own righteousness or self-importance, she's capable of anything, including murder---Nancy can get people killed, but so far, she's been incapable of having them killed---and incapable of remorse, shame, guilt, or even taking responsibility.

As Season Three gets underway, the immediate threat to Nancy's life is coming form U-Turn and the Armenian drug dealers. But the long-term threat has to be from Heylia for whom Nancy is a narcissist's worst nightmare, an unflattering mirror.

This is how Nancy survives as a character worth our sympathy if not our affection.

Bad as she is, everybody else is worse.

Except for her eleven year old son, Shane, but he's trying. Thanks to the tutalege of his cheerfully amoral Uncle Andy, Shane's on his way to becoming a precocious pervert.

Nancy's eldest son, high school senior Silas, has already come close to ruining his girlfriend's dreams of a career and robbing her of her chance to go to Princeton by deliberately and coldly, calculatingly getting her pregnant. He's also a thief and he's trying to muscle his way into his mother's business, apparently with the intention of expanding her product line io include heroin.

In fact, there isn't a truly likeable or even half-way decent main character on Weeds. All of these people are sociopaths. They are criminally narcissistic when they aren't out and out criminal. They have their charms, even some good qualities that border on actual virtues. They do and say things that make us forget for a moment what terrible excuses for human beings they are. Mostly, though, the show's writers and producers make sure we don't forget what they are or let us make excuses for them. They let us identify with them, even sympathize. They are all in desperate staits, of their own devising, but we've all been in those ourselves. Just when we're ready to pass judgment, to loathe and despise one of them they way they all deserve, another one of them comes along and does something even more loathesome and despicable to them and we are forced, despite ourselves, to feel their pain and humiliation.

But ultimately the show never lets us lose sight of the fact that all of them, Nancy included, are a collection of amoral, destructive, and self-destructive jerks.

It's kind of our Restoration Comedy.

Weeds is a very funny show about people who wouldn't be at all funny to know in real life. It's a very moral show about amoral people that achieves its moral ends by never being moralistic or judgmental.

And it's not a show about weed. It's about the smugness of those pot smokers I used to know extended to everything. It's about people who think they never have to worry about getting caught because they know that consequences are for other, less privileged mortals.

Tonight we'll find out if the character we think is dead really is dead, how Nancy and Conrad escape getting shot by U-Turn and the Armenians, if Silas is going to wind up in jail and if Shane will wind up in Pittsburgh.

But almost as important to me is that we'll find out if Zooey Deschanel's going to be coming back for more episodes.

Episode One of Season Three starts tonight at 10 PM, Eastern and Pacific. David Duchovny's new series, Californication, premieres immediately afterwards at 10:30. Over at newcritics, Dan Leo gives his review. Short version: Fun if you what you want to see is David Duchovny do the wild thing, which he does, a lot.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

Seasons One and Two of Weeds available on DVD through your friendly neighborhood aStore.

Monday, August 13, 2007 in Too Much TV | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

Toad of Toad Hall crosses the Rubicon

2007-08-12T09:34:00.000-07:00

I imagine that at about ten of nine, Tuesday morning, Uncle Merlin was standing outside the door of his local video store, rapping on the glass, and calling to the sleepy-eyed clerks inside getting ready to open up, "Let me in! Let me in now! I have to rent it and watch it immediately."

"It" being the second season of Rome which came out on DVD this week. Uncle Merlin watched season one with all the ferver and exegetical attention of a recent religious convert. He is not just a fan of the show, he has become a virtual citizen of Rome, the ancient city, the vanished Empire, the decaying Republic.

Rome may not have been built in a day, but his obsession was established after a single episode, and since that first, revelatory viewing Uncle Merlin has been deep into researching the glory that was Rome and hardly a day goes by when I don't receive an email with a link to something he's turned up in his obsessive googlings of all things Roman. When we were down on vacation he was so absorbed in Anthony Everitt's biography of Cicero that one night he had to be dragged bodily off the front porch and thrown into the back of the car to get him to his favorite seafood restaurant. I was glad that his now two-years old, Brokedown Mountain-inspired enthusiasm for Country Western music still has him wearing his cowboy hat and pearl-buttoned shirts everywhere otherwise we might have had to face the sight of the six feet six of him appearing at the breakfast table some morning in a toga and a plumed helmet.

This has always been the way with him. Uncle Merlin has never had interests or hobbies. He has enthusiams. Manias! Restoring old automobiles, repairing and selling vintage appliances, refitting his house with steam heat; Country Western music, Marantz receivers, smoothies, English bull terriers, Rome---when something comes along that grabs his interest, it grabs his heart, mind, body, and soul along with it.

The joke around the Mannion house is that Uncle Merlin is really Mr Toad from The Wind in the Willows. Toad, you probably remember, was regularly carried away by his manias, his enthusiasm for automobiles being the catalyst for Toad's main misadventure and the cause of his temporarily losing Toad Hall to the weasels and stoats.

So far, fortunately, none of Uncle Merlin's manias has resulted in his having to disguise himself as an old washer woman to escape from prison.

Me, I'm nothing like Toad. I don't get carried away by anything. In fact, I resist enthusiasm. If I'm like any of the characters in Wind in the Willows, I'm like Badger, grumpy, withdrawn, inclined to be solitary, and that's on my good days.

Thinking about this the other day, when I was imagining Toad outside the video store...I mean Uncle Merlin...I wondered if I was like any character from children's literature.

I kid the blonde that she's the Little Red Hen, but really she's Harriet the Spy.

But who am I?

Robin Hood?

Long John Silver?

In my dreams.

I know who I am. I've known it since I was a little kid. I recognized myself the first time I heard the story on Captain Kangaroo.

I'm Mike Mulligan.

You remember how it goes, Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel?

How Mike always said his steam shovel Mary Ann could dig as much in a day as a hundred men could dig in a week, although he was never quite sure that was true? How Mike took such good care of her that she never grew old? How...

It was Mike Mulligan and Mary Ann and some others who cut through the high mountains so the trains could go through...

It was Mike Mulligan and Mary Ann and some others who lowered the hills and straightened the curves to make the long highways for the automobiles...

It was Mike Mulligan and Mary Ann and some others who smoothed out the ground and filled in the holes to make the landing fields for the airplanes...

And it was Mike Mulligan and Mary Ann and some others who dug the deep holes for the cellars of the tall skyscrapers in the big cities...

I always liked that apparent throw-away phrase "and some others." It captures Mike's pride in Mary Ann and the reality that of course they didn't do any of this alone without taking readers' attention off the most significant fact in each sentence. Mike and Mary Ann had done important work and done it well.

I identified with Mike from the first and I even felt that like Mike and Mary Ann I always worked a little better and little faster when people were watching.

I'm not sure what work I thought I was doing when I was seven years old.

But then:

...along came the new gasoline shovels and the new electric motor shovels and the new diesel motor shovels and no one wanted Mike Mulligan and Mary Ann any more.

It was that feeling of being unwanted that grabbed me and stuck with me.

How a little kid wound up feeling that the world and time had passed him by is beyond me. There's a simple explanation, but I don't like it. By the time I was in first grade I had four little brothers and sisters, a very young age to become your parents' lowest parenting priority. Mom and Pop Mannion didn't neglect me, not by any measure, but I'm sure I must have often felt like they didn't have time for me any more. That's too pat, though, and I prefer to think that my identification with Mike has a quirkier, more psychologically colorful explanation.

Come to think of it, Captain Kangaroo read a bunch of stories that had a similar theme. Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, Hercules: The Story of an Old-Fashioned Fire Engine, Virginia Lee Burton's other great children's book The Little House---makes me wonder if that feeling of having been left-behind is universal among children of a certain age.

Whatever the explanation, in my head I am Mike Mulligan---what or who's my Mary Ann is another mystery---and I'm looking to find my way to Popperville to dig the cellar of the new town hall to show that Mary Ann and I can still dig as much in a day as a hundred men can dig in a week, although I'm still not sure this is true.

I would, though, make all the corners neat and square.

But there are days when I'm not Mike Mulligan, days when I'm Pooh and other days when I'm Eeyore. I've been Aladdin and Natty Bumpo and the boy who cried wolf. I was Frank but never Joe Hardy.

Joe is the athletic, impetuous one. Frank is the more thoughtful older brother.

And I've known some other characters. I've known Peter Rabbits who can't resist going where they've been told they should never go. I've known Cats in the Hat, cheerful troublemakers who think that the rest of us should accept and forgive the mayhem they cause because it was so much fun. (The character of Andy on Weeds is a Cat in the Hat, come to think of it. His ex-girlfriend, played by Zooey Deschanel, is even more so, and is significantly named Kat.) I've known all three of the little pigs.

I've known Cowardly Lions, Tin Woodsmen, Scarecrows, and humbugs hiding behind curtains, pretending to be great and all-powerful wizards. I've known Dorothy.

I've known Tom Swifts, Tom Sawyers, and Tom Tom the Piper's Sons. I've known Pollyanas and Peter Pans of both sexes.

I've known Ramonas who were pests and Ramonas who weren't.

And, of course, I am friends with Toad of Toad Hall.

Your turn.

I like putting it this way.

Who are you?

Who do you know?

But I guess the better way to put it is probably "What work of children's literature meant or still means the most to you?"

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and other favorites of the Mannion boys when they were small are available through my aStore.

So is Rome.

Sunday, August 12, 2007 in Fragments of an autobiography, Ruining my eyes | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)

Cinephilia

2007-08-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

Other night, I'm at the video store, looking to pick up the next disk of Season 2.0 of Battlestar Galactica and maybe a movie for family movie night (Note to the Siren: Thanks for the recommendation. The Crimson Pirate was a family movie night feature last year. Big hit.) and there were two couples in the store, in different aisles, arguing over what movie they were going to watch.

Not discussing. Arguing.

And in both cases the refrain was, "We always watch what you want! Why can't we watch something I pick out for a change?"

And in both cases the person claiming to never get to pick the movie was the woman.

And in both cases the reason she never got to pick was the same. He will only watch action movies.

It was all I could do to keep from going up to both couples and saying, "That's it. End it. Break up now. Your relationship is doomed for a variety of reasons, not least of all because he's a bully or a baby."

I might have added that if he always has to get his way when it comes to choosing the movies, maybe it's because he doesn't get his way in anything else. Bullies come in all shapes, sizes, and genders, and work in mysterious ways their emotional intimidation to perform. But although that's a possibility, it's not the likeliest one.

Run, I wanted to say to the women, run now, and ran far, and run fast.

I also might have added that if your guy has to feel like a GUY all the time and watching action movies makes him feel like a GUY, and if when he doesn't feel like a GUY for even the hour and a half it would take to watch Music and Lyrics he feels he is not being a GUY, he is not a man, and he's going to take his lack of real manliness out on the world in one way or another.

Run, run now.

This of course is a prejudice and it's based on my assumptions of what these two couples define as an action movie.

Bond movies are one thing. Steven Seagal movies are another. In this video store Space Cowboys, Excalibur, The Searchers, Heat, Blade Runner, all the Star Wars, Star Trek, Superman, and Lord of the Rings movies are shelved in the Action section, along with Jet Li's oeuvre, Starship Troopers, The Transporter, Total Recall, and Robo-Cop 2, but not the original.

If by action movies, these couples mean movies from the Action section, then it's possible that thanks to the him they never watch anything but great movies, while if her definition of more light-hearted and interesting fare is mush, Nacho Libre, or Saw III, he's saving her and himself from watching drek.

On the other hand he may be forcing her to watch nothing but drek.

But beyond the questions of whose taste trumps whose and the amount of bullying involved and who's actually bullying whom, I was also thinking that if these people don't enjoy the same movies, then they just aren't compatible.

And that's a different prejudice based on something else, the fact that not only do the blonde and I tend to like the same kinds of movies, it was movies that brought us together. I can't remember exactly how and when we started getting friendly, but I know our first long and serious conversation began when we discovered that we both loved an obscure little independent film called Between the Lines.

Things took off when it turned out that our favorite movie was Casablanca.

Naturally, we don't always like all the same movies. Once, when we were dating, I made her cry by revealing I hated Fame. We don't always like or dislike the same movies to the same degree. We don't always want to watch the same movies. She's not going to watch Inland Empire with me when it comes out on DVD next week. (It's generally the case that I want to watch more movies than she does, and I'm willing to try movies she's pretty sure sound boring or dreadful or not a whole lot of fun. Then again, she took the boys to The Simpsons and enjoyed it, while I refused to go.) And I'm sure if we each made a list of our top 25 favorite movies of all time, after Casablanca there'd be a lot of disagreement.

But there's never been a night when we wanted to watch a movie together that we couldn't agree on what movie to go see or what movie to rent or watch on TV.

So when I hear that there are couples who don't like the same movies, ever---or overhear them---I'm baffled.

I can't believe that their couplehood will survive.

But here's the thing.

One of those couples was college-aged. The other, however, was well into middle-age. I don't know if they were married or how long they'd been together, but except for my prejudice about shared taste in movies there was no reason for me to think they weren't married and hadn't been so for a while. They sounded married.

The blonde and I like the same movies. But we do not like the same books. We don't like the same TV shows. We don't like the same foods. We don't like all the same people. We don't have the same feelings about God, the Catholic Church, or religious faith in general. We don't even like each other all the time.

And our apparent compatibility when it comes to choosing and enjoying movies may actually be a sign of something else about us.

We aren't the kind of people who just show up at a movie theater and decide what movie to see based on which one is starting soonest. I don't understand those people at all. And we almost never run out to the video store at the spur of the moment to pickup whatever looks good just to have something to watch that night. When one of us goes, it's usually with a short list of two or three movies we already know we want to see.

It may be that the reason we never argue about what movie to watch is that we learned a long time ago how to avoid those arguments.

It may be that we spend so much time talking about movies we've heard about, read about, or seen in the past, that we've practically unconsciously negotiated and come to an agreement well before we decide to head out the door.

It may be that over time we've shaped each other's tastes.

It may be that our conversations about other things have taught us so much about each other that we don't even think to suggest a movie the other wouldn't like.

And it may be that it's just one of those flukes of personality.

For all I know, movies are the only area of disagreement for both those couples.

For all I know, when they're arguing about movies they are unconsciously coming to terms about a dozen other important matters in their lives, that they are learning about each other's feelings generally, and even though they're disagreeing about what they're going to be doing tonight, they are coming to an agreement about what they're going to be doing over the next couple of years---they're agreeing about how to raise the kids or how to divie up the housework or whether or not they're going to move or buy a new car.

For all I know, arguing over movies is a useful and necessary way for them to blow off steam so that they can discuss those other matters calmly and rationally.

For all I know, arguing over movies might be their form of verbal foreplay and it doesn't matter what movie they finally take home because when they get home they're going to be too busy to watch it.

And for all I know, they might just like arguing.

When you get right down to it, all I know is that if the blonde and I hadn't both seen Between the Lines I'd have probably kept chasing that wan, willowy, sad-eyed brunette and I'll bet you dollars to donuts she wouldn't have appreciated Casablanca at all.

By the way, family movie night this week's going to be The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines.

The whole family enjoyed the first one in the series.

Still not looking forward to the Friday night when The Simpsons Movie is the feature.

Your turn: Lots of points for commenting. What brought you and your significant other together? What do you like that he/she doesn't and vice versa? What movie do you both love? What movie do you both hate? What does she/he like/hate you can't believe he/she likes/hates? What do you like/hate she/he can't believe you like/hate?

Thursday, August 09, 2007 in Everybody Has a Hungry Heart, Now Playing at Cine 1001-2000 | Permalink | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)

Mitt Romney gains new appreciation for the political genius of Bill Clinton

2007-08-06T08:27:00.000-07:00

So, guy running for President walks into a diner in New Hampshire and winds up in an argument with a waitress over health care.

Guy happens to have been governor of the next state over and he brags about the great health insurance plan that got implemented down there while he was in office.

Waitress says that's all well and good for the folks in that state, but how's he going to see the rest of us in all the other states get the same benefits? And the guy doesn't have a good answer.

Because the guy's a Republican and the state he was governor of is Massachusetts and no Republican's going to win his party's nomination by promising to turn the whole country into a version of Taxachusetts.

Fact is, the guy's whole campaign platform to date can be pretty much summed up like this: "Folks, those four years I was governor? I was kidding!"

Still, Mitt Romney seems to have done a pretty good job of it, talking to an actual voter who has no reason to like him or trust him or play along with his make believe Man of the People moment.

But maybe the TV reporter just left it out and Romney did ask the waitress the questions he should have asked her.

If the exchange went exactly this way though, Romney has a lot of work to do before he comes close to matching Bill Clinton's talent for talking to people:

The waitress then explained that she has two daughters with health problems and that one was recently taken out of school and no longer has health care.

"Well, one of the things I think is important to do... is to find a way to get health insurance to all of our citizens," Romney said.

Think Bill "I feel your pain" Clinton wouldn't have stopped things right there to ask what her daughters' health problems are and how old they are and how the one daughter's coping with being out of school and how the waitress herself is coping and whether or not the daughter's under a doctor's care, health insurance or no health insurance?

Like I said, maybe the reporter left it out, but Romney appears to have changed the subject back to himself and his Presidential ambitions awfully fast.

One of my all-time favorite Saturday Night Live skits was one that ran just after Clinton was elected and starred Phil Hartman as Clinton. In it Clinton shows up at a McDonald's after jogging and as he goes from table to table talking to the diners about their problems and his plans as President he's stealing fries from their trays, sips from their shakes, bites from their burgers.

Hartman was brilliant as Clinton, generally, but this skit was inspired. It got at Clinton's weaknesses, his self-indulgences and his vanities, but it also captured his greatest talent---his ability to talk with people as if what they have to say and what they they think about what he says matter.

Almost as good is the scene in Primary Colors, the mediocre movie starring John Travolta based on Joe Klein's awful book, in which the narrator-protagonist, campaign staffer Henry Burton, goes looking for his candidate, Governor Jack Stanton, in their hotel late at night and discovers that Stanton is not in his room. Burton has a moment of panic as he jumps to the conclusion that the philandering Stanton is out tom-catting around. But then he happens to glance out the window and sees across the parking lot a near empty diner where Stanton is sitting on a stool deeply involved in a cheerful conversation with the counterman.

Despite what I was saying last week, sometimes fiction captures the truth about life better than journalism, history, or biography.

Few politicians have that talent. Bobby Kennedy did. FDR. George Washington, amazingly, but only amazingly if you can't picture him outside of his portraits.

Pop Mannion could do it.

For the benefit of the few Beltway journalists who happen to read this: That talent is a part of a politician's character, and it's a virtue in a leader in a democracy.

Democrats---well, most Democrats---have an advantage when they walk into diners. They don't have to pretend that their honest answer to a waitress' question about how they plan to help her take care of her family isn't, Whatever your bosses and the corporations they work for tell me I can do, which very likely will be...nothing.

But having that advantage doesn't mean they know how to make the most of it. I haven't seen any of the Democratic contenders, except Hillary, work a crowd, and Bill was with her at the time.

I've heard Obama's good one on one, but that's just it, I've heard it.

Still, that advantage is why Democrats don't only appear before carefully screened crowds of proven and unquestioning loyalists.

I hope that visit to the diner won't be the last time Mitt Romney tries to mingle with regular folks again.

Actually, I hope that visit helps him win the New Hampshire primary.

I'm praying the Republicans nominate Romney.

Of course, that's primarily because I think he'll be easier to beat than Rudy Giuliani.

But it's also because it would prove that the Republicans still care a little bit about who gets to be President of the United States.

Besides having been a competent governor of an important state (Please, gang. Competent does not mean politically acceptable. Competency is a neutral virtue.), as opposed to being the divisive and not nearly as effective as he brags of being mayor of admittedly the most important city in the country, Romney is a relatively decent human being. Nevermind the stupid mistake with the family dog. (Decency is not a neutral virtue, but it is a minimum one and a fairly easy one to manage. That's why it's often called common decency. Having common decency is not the same as being a saint by a long shot.) He is also disciplined and responsible and he's worked hard. Giuliani isn't lazy but he's arrogant and thinks he can skate by without working hard, and he's intellectually and morally empty, and he's nasty. He treats everybody, including his children, far worse than poor goofy Mitt treated the family dog that one time.

And I believe what he told to the waitress, that if he gets to be President he won't just sit around and talk about problems, he's going to try to do something about them.

I don't expect to like what he tries to do.

And I think his health care plan amounts to little more than hoping the Democrats force him to sign something that's not totally unacceptable to the insurance industry.

But that's a far better plan than Giuliani's, which as Ezra Klein points out is not a plan at all, just an excuse to harsh on the Democrats as a way of endearing himself to the Radical Republican Right:

The twice-divorced, pro-choice, pro-gay Giuliani knows he's not conservative enough for the Republican base. But if he cannot erase his ideological heterodoxies, he can at least demonstrate some partisan reliability. Attacking Democrats as socialists and blasting Michael Moore ably demonstrates Giuliani's commitment to the vilification of liberals. Hating the right people is almost as good as believing the right things And having something that looks kinda sorta like an actual health care plan gets the press to cover his attacks on the Democrats as if the two sides were engaged in something worth reporting on -- say, a discussion of how to reform the American health care system. It's a smart political strategy for Giuliani, and comforting, in a way. At least we know he's got a plan for something.

Best part of the story about Romney's visit to the diner, though, is the ending:

Following the exchange, Griffin expressed her frustration with the entire poilitical process and said she wishes politicians could live in her shoes.

"Maybe they should live in our shoes... just to see how it is. It's not pretty," she said. "I'm just so sick of the nice clothes, all these fancy cars. They walk around like (pauses)... you know?"

"He was in here for what? Over an hour? That's money off my table," Griffin said.

This is what it means to be working for the minimum wage in America. Doesn't matter what a Presidential candidate's promising to do down the road, and it wouldn't matter if it it was a Democrat in there instead of a Republican; at the moment, what's a a far bigger worry is that by holding things up at the diner, the candidate was robbing her of tips.

Related: Charlie meets Bill.

Update: Apparently Romney got a little testy with the waitress. Over at Shakesville, SpaceCowboy has a link to video of Romney's visit to the diner and to a Washington Post article that reports that one of the waitress's daughters is diabetic and the other has Crohn's disease.

Big thanks to Julia. Thanks also to Avedon Carol, Kevin Drum, and Steve Benen.

Sunday, August 05, 2007 in Smoke-filled rooms | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

Two weeks, nine hours, and forty-seven minutes since the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows...

2007-08-04T20:00:00.000-07:00

...and I'm only two chapters in.

The blonde and the teenager had been hogging our copy, trading it back and forth between them, and playing keep away with me.

So I don't have anything much to say except that if Snape is a double-agent, he's so deep undercover he's in a worse postion than Leonardo DiCaprio's character in The Departed and I hope they hire Martin Scorsese to direct the last movie because the ending's going to be a bloodbath.

And I'd rather not hear anything about it yet.

Ok. Maybe a little bit. But no spoilers, please!

I've been avoiding reading anything about Deathly Hallows, but I couldn't resist this post by Sara Robinson at Orcinus about why Christian Fundamentalists hate the whole Harry Potter phenomenon.

Sara makes some excellent points about the role of doubt in helping to create the paranoid worldview of the Fundies and how Harry Potter frightens them by encouraging doubt. She also shows how authoritarian figures foster that doubt as a way of solidifying their own power. Authority becomes the shield against the very doubt it has exacerbated and exploited, and again Harry Potter is frightening, this time by undermining authority.

Implicit in this is the idea that all authority is necessarily, rightfully external. The fate of the entire world depends on how completely we can give up our desire to control our destinies, and submit to God and his appointed earthly overseers. This obsession with the need for external authority is, in a nutshell, is why fundamentalism is a form of religious authoritarianism.

Stories about magic openly defy this whole belief system. Magic-using characters like Harry usurp the supernatural power and prerogatives of God -- a sufficient heresy in its own right. But it's worse than that: they're also exercising their own internal authority, and acting out of their own agency. And that's the last thing fundamentalists want their children -- or anyone else -- learning how to do.

Sara's post is a follow-up to a post by her Orcinus colleague, Dave Neiwert, in which Dave includes a clip from Jesus Camp showing an anti-Potter rant and this bit of a cartoon published by a Potter-bashing pastor named Jack Chick:

Don't think there are any tarot cards or ouija boards in any of the Potter books, and I don't remember if even Professor Trelawney uses a crystal ball, but if she does then crystal balls would be just as much a target of Rowling's satire as Trelawney herself.

Magic is one thing in Rowling's storytelling universe, the necessary gimmick that props up the whole adventure, but fortune-telling is another. Rowling makes it clear that divination is crackpot "magic." Predicting the future is only possible if the future is pre-ordained and people have no control over their own fate, an idea that is rejected by one of the books' most important themes---Harry is not destined to be anything or anybody but who and what he makes of himself, and the same goes for the rest of us.

Sara, Dave, and a number of commenters on both posts point out that this theme is another reason for Fundamentalists to hate and fear Harry Potter. If we're in charge of our own lives, what's God supposed to be doing? What's the point of there being a God if He's not controlling our lives?

Of course, as other commenters point out, most of the anti-Potter crowd don't know this is a theme of the books because they haven't read the books. They don't dare. They've been told by their preachers to avoid them like sin.

As sin.

The books depict witches and warlocks as "good" and even heroic characters and show magic being used as a force for good and we all know that witches and warlocks work for the devil and their magic is Satan's power transmitted through them.

Sara's points are dead-on and psychologically penetrating, but I think best applied only to the Fundamentalist/authoritarian churches in general and some Fundamentalists in particular.
The fact is that a lot of these people believe that the devil is real and here and hard at work on earth.

They believe that there are witches and warlocks because they believe in magic.

They don't believe it all because they are Fundamentalist Christians and the Bible tells them so.

They believe it because they are human beings and apparently most of us are inclined to believe in the supernatural.

Professor Trelawney is a caricature of a very real type, a type we call a New Ager, but a type that existed way before the term was coined.

There are people who aren't Christian Fundamentalists who believe in witches and warlocks.

There are people who believe they are witches and warlocks.

Flying saucers, the healing powers of crystals, angels---not every believer in angels is a Right Wing Christian or even Christian at all---feng shui, horoscopes, the Force, ancient weapons and hokey religions, are all signs of a general human tendency to believe that some mystical power controls our destinies and that if only we learn the trick we can tap into that power and save ourselves from...

Well, from the awfulness of being human.

Fundamentalist Christians believe in a God who works magic on a daily basis, although, unfortunately, and conveniently for the preachers who would speak for Him and divine His will and interpret His plans, not always when you need Him to or in a way you'd like Him to. And in a world that works by magic, but one in which there is only one Magician and He's unpredictable and working on His own agenda, the temptation to acquire some magic power for oneself must be great. There is only one source to go to for that power, though, and that is Satan.

No wonder then that letting their younger children read Harry Potter would be for Fundie parents like giving their teenage sons and daughters a subscription to Playboy.

If these Christians actually read the books they might learn something that would make them hate Harry Potter even more.

When all is said and done, Rowling makes one very key point about magic.

It's not important.

Harry does not succeed because he is a great wizard. He is, as it happens, not particularly adept at being a wizard.

Magic isn't what saves the day. To say it does is like saying that the hero's gun saves the day in a Western.

Magic is just the technology of the wizarding world and Rowling makes it clear that putting one's faith in magic is a sign of stupidity (the folks at the Ministry) or inhumanity (Voldemort and his followers). To trust in a tool or a technology is to give up thinking for one's self or to give up one's soul and make a tool of one's self.

To make a belief system out of trusting in tools over people is an insanity.

It isn't hard to make the leap from that to the conclusion that Rowling isn't fond of any belief system that encourages people to put their trust not in their own selves but in the authority of the belief system and its ruling elders.

Dumbledore, the greatest wizard ever, performs very little magic over the course of the first six books, and he teaches Harry very few tricks.

His main, and almost his only lesson, for Harry?

Think, Harry! Think!

As always, all the Harry Potter books and the CDs are available through my aStore.

Saturday, August 04, 2007 in Ruining my eyes, Sunday Sermon | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

Sex, grass, teeth, and sticking around for breakfast

2007-07-31T15:40:00.000-07:00

Sex is fun.

It’s also funny.

People are comical in bed. This is not something you would know from watching television or movies where sex is always beautiful, when it’s not dangerous or terribly, terribly sad because it’s with the wrong person or the main character is using sex to self-destruct psychologically, spiritually, or even physically.

Get naked, tangle up your limbs in someone else’s, let go of your inhibitions and good sense and pride, and you will make yourself ridiculous.

Be glad if there are no videos of you in the sack.

Taking a break from my Battlestar Galactica addiction and preparing for the third season of Weeds, which begins in a couple of weeks, I’ve been going back through the first season, catching up on episodes I missed by watching them all from the first to the last, and one thing that’s struck me is that along with its main theme, which is how an essentially amoral society functions with a semblance of order and normalcy through inertia, hypocrisy, and regular infusions of money, lots of money, Weeds is also about how sex is just another part of life where people show themselves up as the weak and foolish animals they are.

Even the gorgeous and impossibly, irresistibly adorable Mary-Louise Parker, who can’t do anything, even aim a gun at a man’s crotch, without it being too cute for words, looks ridiculous when she’s got her legs in the air.

The fact that she’s wearing cowboy boots at the moment is a nice touch, because it’s in character, it’s right for the moment, and it adds to how silly she looks.

In an episode I watched last night, one of Parker’s character Nancy’s neighbors, the mother of her son’s best friend, shows up at the door and within minutes winds up in bed with Nancy’s brother-in-law, Andy.

The neighbor is played by Clare Carey who was last seen by me starring as Craig T. Nelson’s too perky, too spunky, and too permed daughter Kelly on Coach. Here she was again, fifteen years older and several thousands of degrees hotter, more proof that women in their late thirties and early forties are the sexiest creatures on the planet, a fact Weeds offers weekly proof of anyway in the persons of Mary-Louise Parker and Elizabeth Perkins, a sad fact of life for men around their age because, unless we are really lucky in the woman we married—lucky being she still enjoys our company and can bear the sight of us naked, and I don’t mean for a good laugh---we can’t enjoy their late blossoming without a messy divorce somewhere in the equation, theirs or our own and the emotional and logistical fallout from one or the other or both, which leaves the field open to younger, handsomer, unattached men sexy and beautiful forty year olds can have, and would rather have, with a snap of their fingers, but nevermind.

The sex scene between Carey and Justin Kirk, who plays Andy, is fairly explicit, without being graphic, and erotic but not at all pretty. There’s no romantic music, no flattering lighting, no over-choreographed dancing between carefully arranged sheets. The camera doesn’t swoop in and out, linger and then slowly scan, finding only the actors’ best features and most attractive curves. The scene is pretty much one straight on long shot of two very naked people doing some rigorous bare-assed fucking.

The comedy in the scene, besides the funny bicycling Carey does with her legs, is that Andy, who thinks of himself as the seducer and therefore the one in control, finds himself being out-fucked by this suddenly very demanding, very vocal, and very physical wild animal of a woman who, it turns out, is a biter.

Not a nipper.

She bites. She chomps down and draws blood.

Andy later jokes that if she were to die in a plane crash he could help identify her remains because he’s got her dental records, but she’s scared him, and turned him off. Of course, for reasons of plot I won’t get into here, he has to keep seeing her and fucking her, and now the joke is that each time we see them in bed again Andy has more flaming red bite marks and bruises on various parts of his skin.

Ultimately his body rebels at the abuse and saves itself by shutting down blood flow to his dick. Much to his chagrin and dismay he can’t get it up for Carey anymore, which, considering what we’ve seen of her, would seem to be an impossible violation of the laws of nature.

But the writers of Weeds know people and understand the ridiculous nature of sex.

Carey’s character, Eileen, is by almost every measure perfect. She’s nice, she’s funny, she looks great in and out of clothes. She’s putting no demands on the commitment-phobic Andy. She’s willing to see him just to sleep with him—or not sleep—as the mood strikes without expecting any promises or demonstrations of serious feelings on his part. She clearly loves sex.

But she’s a biter.

Another man might not care. Andy has tender skin and a big ego and he doesn’t like to be that vulnerable to another person’s whims.

Most TV shows and movies don’t deal with this aspect of sex—incompatibility between two people who like each other.

Usually it’s the case that sexual incompatibility is a sign of the main character’s current and temporary bedmate’s character flaws. In comedies it’s just proof that that character is a loser or a weirdo. In more serious movies, mush and dramas, it’s a sign of spiritual incompatibility. In all other cases it’s a sign of that character’s pathological and dangerous strangeness.

Incompatibility and incompetence—and the two often go together obviously, in that incompetence makes for incompatibility, but it works the other way round too; people who are incompatible in bed will be inept and awkward with each other—are the usual features of most casual sex. The sad truth is that you usually can’t tell whether or not you will like having sex with someone until you are having sex with that someone. Good sex between relative strangers is a lucky accident or a sign that one of the partners is gifted teacher and the other a willing and eager and compliant student. Great sex, however, is a like a pas de deux—or if you’ve been lucky, a pas de trois. If you’ve ever been a happy participant in a pas de quatre or more, I don’t want to know about it.—and it takes practice and requires time. The partners have to know each other’s moves. And then there’s the matter of chemistry. You can’t just put any two good dancers on a stage and expect that they will turn out a performance like Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse.

Sometimes, no matter how good they have been with other partners, they can’t find a rhythm and wind up stepping on each other’s toes.

Styles clash too.

Most of my own erotic adventures, and misadventures, as a single guy took place between the time I was a junior in high school and my final year of grad school. This means that most every girl I dated was young and relatively inexperienced and I was young and relatively inexperienced. This had its upside in that being young and inexperienced it was generally the case that neither of us recognized how young and inexperienced the other was, which did not cut down on the awkwardness or the comedy, but did keep us from being disappointed. We were glad for what we got. Well, I was, at any rate. I have only their word for it that they were too.

But the other thing about our being young and inexperienced is that we hadn’t yet developed our personal styles and tastes.

When you’re young and inexperienced you’re often too scared to try things or suggest things or to let certain things happen again, things that you might learn later, through more experience, you really, really, really like.

Maybe I was just lucky and dated only reasonably inhibited girls. But I never found myself in bed with a biter.

Or anyone else whose tastes or style struck me as just too weird.

I’m not saying that nobody ever tried anything that could be described as kinky—or that young and relatively inexperienced lovers might think of as kinky—there just was never a moment when I was suddenly thinking Oh my God, this girl is insane!

Now some of these girls were insane. But their insanity expressed itself emotionally not sexually. Which is how it happens that the most embarrassing and awkward sexual memories from my misspent youth aren’t actually sexual but post or pre-coital.

Some Saturday night when I’m feeling lonely and nostalgic and in the mood for making myself miserable I may write a post about a few of those memories.

As it is I’ve written a long post about how I kind of, sort of, maybe, half-heartedly wish I could write a post about a biter or two in my past.

It’s not exactly a regret, but I often wonder what my romantic life would have been like if the blonde hadn’t trapped...um...if I hadn’t fallen in love with the blonde when we were both so young, if I had lived the life of a single guy until I was into my early 30s, dating actual adult women, as opposed to girls on the brink of adulthood or women who were chronologically adult but hadn’t gotten the hang of being an actual adult yet.

Which is to say that I wonder what it would have been like to have slept with a lot of different adult women.

You’ll notice I’m assuming I would have slept with a lot of women. I know, I know. I also think that if I had stuck with baseball past little league I’d have grown up to be the starting center fielder for the New York Mets—Dykstra played it too shallow—and if I’d joined the Navy I’d be an admiral commanding my own battle group right now.

On the other hand, I’m sure that if I’d gone into politics I would never have gotten elected dog catcher anywhere and if I’d become I doctor my name would have become a synonym for malpractice insurance before I was jailed and the AMA took away my license. So give me the benefit of the doubt when it comes to my judging my own potential.

If certain trends that began in my college and grad school days had continued into my late twenties, I would not have become Sam Malone, but to put it as Archie Goodwin would, I’d have shared breakfast with more than a few beautiful women.

And I’d probably have skipped out on breakfast with a few more, because I’d have met my biters.

And no doubt another few more would have skipped out on breakfast with me, having met in me their idea of a biter.

But, and I don’t know whether or not I’m sad to say it, I’ve got no teeth marks on my skin or on my psyche.

If this was a different kind of blog I’d be asking you right now to tell us about the biter in your past.

What’s the weirdest thing anyone ever did with you that made you want to skip out on breakfast?

But this isn’t that kind of blog.

Is it?

Tuesday, July 31, 2007 in Everybody Has a Hungry Heart, Fragments of an autobiography, Too Much TV | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Ratatouille, a complaint

2007-07-31T15:32:00.000-07:00

Not ready to review Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but I have a few thoughts about the other movie we saw at the drive-in this trip, Ratatouille, which gave me only one moment of pure joy. There were lots of laughs, easy laughs, I thought, but I didn't love anything I saw on the screen until the final credits began to roll and with them some real cartoons started to appear.

By real cartoons I mean pictures that are drawn by a human hand holding a pen or a pencil or a brush or a piece of chalk or a stick moving in the dirt.

I've always been more impressed by computer animation than taken with it.

The animation in Ratatouille is fine enough, better than Pixar's work in Cars and Finding Nemo. Actually, in style and zip and in approach to characterization through drawing, Ratatouille has more in common with the best of the classic Looney Toons than it has with Toy Story or A Bug's Life.

Monsters Inc is still my favorite Pixar production, closely followed by The Incredibles, both of which also come closer in spirit and effect to the Warner Brothers' hand-drawn work. But it's their stories and their voice work and their jokes that carry the day for me.

I had a problem going into Ratatouille that was going to make it hard for me to enjoy it. The movie spends a lot of time on two things I find very unappealing. Rodents and food.

I'm not sure which put me off more, the rats or the detailed attention to the preparation and cooking of food. I can enjoy a good meal, as long as I am not involved in the actual cooking. Ratatouille took away my appetite for a week.

But when those cartoons appeared at the end I had to ask myself if it wasn't the food or the rats but the computer animation itself that had gotten in the way of my enjoying the movie more.

For a moment or two I was telling myself that I would have liked it more if instead of looking like a hand-drawn cartoon, Ratatouille had truly been hand-drawn.

Seems to me that over the last decade computer animation has been improving in technical achievement while stagnating where it counts most in making movies, telling stories through images. The better the images look on the screen the less interesting they are to look at.

By that reasoning, though, I should love the Shrek movies because they look to me like they were painted with canned peas mashed up and turned to paste.

Almost as soon as I decided I'd have liked Ratatouille better if it had been a "real" cartoon, I was asking myself, Oh yeah, Lance? What cartoon have you ever liked because of the way it was drawn?

Certainly not the so-called classic Disney cartoons of the thirties, forties, and fifties. Even when I was a kid I disliked those. They were so pretty and so tame and so safe as ads for soap. I thought something interesting was happening at Disney during the decade between the release of The Little Mermaid and Tarzan. It wasn't a revival, it was a complete reinvention, as if the animators had said, What would Walt have done and whatever that was let's do the opposite. There was sentimentality, there was schmaltz, there were too many songs by Elton John, but there was verve and there was a sense that the drawings had something to do with the telling of the story---that the way a character was drawn, how action unfolded in drawing after drawing could and should have a roughness in order to call attention to the fact that a cartoon is different from a live-action movie and there's a reason for telling this story through drawings rather than through photographs.

But Disney lost interest in cartoons as soon as they realized they could make more money letting Pixar do all the work and distributing their movies.

But going back over the cartoons they made from the late 80's through the late 90s, I can think of only one I liked for its drawing. Mulan.

And having reached this conclusion, I am now wondering something else. Do I even like cartoons at all?

Those great Warner Brothers cartoons were brilliant essays in economy of line. The animators did more by freezing a moment and having Bugs or Wile E. Coyote hold an expression for a count of five than Disney often did with a hundred beautifully rendered cells.

But I like Bugs Bunny cartoons for Bugs, not for the way Bugs is drawn.

I'm not familiar enough with European and Japanese animation. But right now I can't think of a single cartoon, hand-drawn or computer animated, that I truly like for its look as opposed to its voice work and script.

What about you? What's your favorite animated movie?

Friday, July 20, 2007 in Now Playing at Cine 1001-2000 | Permalink | Comments (39) | TrackBack (0)

The past is another country

2007-07-27T15:44:00.000-07:00

One of the arguments routinely made by the crackpots who insist that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays is that the middle-class nobody from Stratford couldn’t have known as much about the lives of kings and queens as the author of the plays knows.

The flaw in this argument is that most of what we "know" about the lives of kings and queens we know because Shakespeare told us about it.

And the odds are he made it all up.

This is a general problem in trying to figure out what people were like in the past. Most of what we "know" about what they were like we learned from plays and movies and novels and TV shows before we were even aware that there was such a place as the past.

The past isn’t dead; it's not even past, said Faulkner. (Quote corrected, thanks to Mike Schilling.) I love that quote, but the past isn’t exactly here and now, either. It’s a foreign country we can only visit virtually and for which there is no reliable Michelin Guide. Historians do what they can, but most people leave no record of what they’ve felt and thought and how they’ve managed to get through a day, and the people who do leave records tend to be...not exactly representative.

There have been periods throughout history when it was not unusual for an average person to keep a diary and write long, thoughtful letters, but those periods have been rare and the practice has been geographically and culturally limited. Since the invention of writing, most people who have been moved to take up a pen or a quill or a hammer and chisel or to sit down at a keyboard have been oddballs and weirdos, introspective misfits who had time to themselves to write because they didn’t like the company of other people as much as they liked their own or because other people didn’t much care for their company.

Socially gregarious and popular types like Henry James and Marcel Proust are the strangest of ducks in a crowd of strange ducks.

Your average poets and novelists and creative non-fictionalists want to have as much to do with the world outside their own heads as most people want to have to do with cleaning septic tanks.

They are the last people to go to to find out how the world works.

They are often very good on the kinds of truths they can discover through explorations of their own hearts and minds, moral and psychological truths. But when it comes to politics and sociology they get fuzzy.

And it’s not just the case that when writing about how the world outside their heads works they aren’t particularly knowledgeable or insightful. It’s that in novels and plays and short stories and movies and TV shows everything—everything—is in service to the plot.

Their job is to get their main characters from here to there and if the historical or sociological facts of life are in the way, they will have their characters just go around them.

And if the facts aren’t getting in the way, but they aren’t helping either, writers will invent their own facts that will do the job.

So you don’t sit through a production of Hamlet to find out about life in the royal court of Denmark in the late middle ages, or even about life in the court of Queen Elizabeth in the late Renaissance. You do it to find about what’s going on in the heads and hearts of Hamlet and Claudius and Gertrude and Ophelia.

Does Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia tell us anything about the roles of men and women in Shakespeare’s day? Not unless you think that all men in Elizabethan England were mad but north by northwest and all women were emotionally fragile flowers with serious daddy issues.

Last night’s live-blogging of Mad Men over at newcritics, ably and insightfully led by Tom Watson, with assists from some of newcritics’ best and brightest (I can say this with all modesty, because I wasn’t home last night and couldn’t take part) and some outside guests including Mr James Wolcott, produced a savvy and sometimes savage group analysis of the show.

But if there was a theme running through the commentary it was this: How many of the attitudes being dramatized on Mad Men, particularly the attitudes towards women, are historically true to life?

(Dramatized may not be the best word. One point that Wolcott kept bringing up is that last night’s episode was not inherently dramatic. There was no real story.)

Mad Men’s production values force the question.

As Nancy Nall lays out over at her place, the show’s producers and designers have done excellent work in re-creating the look of the world of the organization men in late 1950s New York.

But did they put the same effort into recreating the mindset of the people who lived and worked in the living rooms and offices so faithfully reproduced on the sets of the studio?

Dan Leo decided that at least some of what was coming across was true to life because of the similarities he saw between attitudes in the show and attitudes dramatized in literature from that specific time, particularly the short stories of John Cheever and the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

Now, Cheever was one of the best American writers of the last 60 years, and Yates was a fine writer whose collection of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, is, I think, the American Dubliners.

But Cheever was a closeted gay man who pretended to be straight and additionally pretended to his family not to be a writer at all. He used to put on a suit and tie every morning, say goodbye to his wife and kids, and go out the door as if he was leaving to catch the train to his office, then go down into the basement of their apartment building where he had set up a table and typewriter to write all day, "returning" home at the time other 9 to 5 dads were returning from their real office jobs.

And Yates was a terrifically angry and self-loathing drunk who had a habit of self-destructing wherever he went. I wish I’d known who he was when I was in college in Boston because he was still alive then, not writing a lick, but available to meet, every night at a bar near campus, where I could have gone to watch him fall off his barstool, an acrobatic feat he was said to perform nightly.

This is to say that while both Cheever and Yates wrote about the suburban and office worker worlds of the late 1950s and early 1960s they were not either of them truly of those worlds.

They were outsiders who had no real desire to become insiders, even imaginatively.

When I was teaching it was an article of faith among the deconstructionist types that I worked with that outsiders were the most insightful critics of a society or culture, outsiders being usually defined not as foreigners but as people from groups marginalized or ostracized within that society, so that the best critics of straight society are gay people, the best critics of male only worlds are women, the best critics of white society are the black and brown people who serve it. This idea, self-serving and self-flattering because who is marginalized and ostracized if not neurotic academic types, doesn’t take into account the emotional damage being caused by being marginalized and ostracized, as if anger, frustration, hatred, and self-loathing are the necessary ingredients to objectivity.

John Cheever and Richard Yates were two of the most unrepresentative middle-class white men alive in 1960 and they produced fiction that expressed their own situations as misfits.

Cheever’s short stories are prose poem dreams of a self he couldn’t be, and Revolutionary Road is a nightmare vision of a life Yates was trying desperately not to have.

You don’t read their stories to find out about life in their time. You read them to find out what their characters are up to.

If the writing on Mad Men seems to be historically accurate because of how well it reflects the work of John Cheever and Richard Yates, it’s probably because what the writers know of life back then they know from reading the likes of John Cheever and Richard Yates.

My feeling is that it doesn’t much matter if the attitudes of the characters in Mad Men are historically correct, any more than it really matters if Tolstoy’s Napoleon matches up with the historians’ Napoleon.

One advertising agency doesn’t represent the whole advertising world, the advertising world isn’t the whole of the business world, the whole of the business world isn’t the whole of the working world, and the whole of the working world isn’t the whole of life.

In other words, there’s a lot of room for the creators of Mad Men to play around in. They are free to say, maybe the stories we’re telling aren’t representative of life in general in the business world of 1960; they are, though, stories about the way things were at this particular agency.

So the question isn’t whether or not anything on the show is historically accurate, but whether or not they are dramatically plausible.

We can’t really know what people in general were thinking and feeling in 1960. But we can know what these characters are thinking and feeling, and knowing that, we can judge whether or not those thoughts and feelings are true to life.

We don’t need to know if these characters are behaving like people did back then. We only need to know whether or not they are behaving like people.

When all’s said and done, a story isn’t compelling because of what it tells us about life back then.

It’s compelling because of what it tells us about life.

Then and now.

The past may be another country, but I need to get around in this one, the present. So my question for the gang at newcritics is this: How well does Mad Men help us navigate through the here and now?

Friday, July 27, 2007 in Arts, crafts, and stagecraft, First as tragedy, then as farce, Too Much TV, Writer's Workshop | Permalink | Comments (27) | TrackBack (0)

Traffic Court

2007-07-25T16:04:00.000-07:00

I'm innocent! Innocent, I tell you.

Honest. I am. In order for me to have been doing the 47 in the 30 MPH zone the cop said I was doing that night in June when he pulled me over I'd have had to have blown through the red light and taken the turn on two wheels.

The other afternoon I was up in traffic court, pleading not guilty and applying for a court date. This amounted to signing a form I could have signed at home and sent in by mail if I'd read the fine print. But to do it I still had to stand in the long line of other innocent people and pass through the metal detector, glad that unlike the woman ahead of me I had read the poster-sized sign on the front door when I'd driven up to the court house: No Cell Phones Allowed in This Building.

Woman ahead of me had her cell phone with her and was told to take it back out to her car. Man behind me had a paint can and a cereal box. He was allowed to bring both of those in the court room after the bailiff looked them over and asked him, with more genuine curiosity than what kind of weirdo are you exasperation, but still with plenty of the latter, "Why would anybody be bringing an empty paint can into traffic court with them?"

The man, who was around 30, broad and bluff-faced with a receding hairline and round rimless glasses, explained he had been out collecting for a Save the Wetlands cause. His paint can and cereal box were decorated with construction paper pictures of ferns and birds. The paint can was for the donations. The cereal box contained flyers and envelopes and other paperwork. "What's this," asked the bailiff as he went through it, "Your filing cabinet?"

Because I didn't have an actual court date, the bailiff asked me to step over to the side to wait for instructions with another guy who hadn't read the fine print on his ticket either. The other guy had a good excuse. He didn't read or speak any English. He was about 25, thin, deeply sunbrowned, Hispanic, spattered in paint from his shoes up to his cap. The bailiff, a gray haired man in his sixties with a drooping mustache, dealt with the house painter first, and the first thing he did with him was take his cap by the bill and pull it off his head and hand it to him with a look that said in any language, "You're a grown man, you should know better than to come into court dressed like this."

The painter nodded apologetically and did not give the bailiff a look that said, If the town didn't hold court during hours when I have to leave work to get here in time I wouldn't be dressed like this.

The bailiff didn't give me any particular looks at all, not even the Are you that dumb you can't read the fine print look I was expecting. He had me sign the form, warned me not to sign the part where I'd be requesting a deposition from the arresting officer, and sent me on my way, explaining that it would be next month before I'd have to appear, the exact date would come in the mail.

I took one quick last look around the court room. My hope coming in had been that the cop who'd pulled me over wouldn't show. I'm not sure he did. There were eight cops in the court room, with four different uniforms represented---town cop, state trooper, campus police, and sheriff's department. My cop had been a campus cop---I guess their jurisdiction extends into the town roads that pass by the college---but the one in the court room looked a lot shorter than the cop who leaned in my window that night, politely demanding my license and registration.

All the cops were in a jolly mood, laughing and talking together by the empty judge's bench. Traffic court's a regular office party for them. Probably shouldn't count on my cop not showing on my actual court date.

On my way out I met the woman who'd had to return her cell phone to her car huffing and puffing her way up the steep front steps to the court house. She was a stout woman, a retired schoolteacher, it turned out.

"That wasn't nice," she said to me, taking a break on her way up the steps. "That wasn't nice, making me go all the way back to my car. He could have held onto it for me."

"Probably he'd have a dozen cell phones to keep track of if he did," I said, I hope with sympathy.

"What's with that anyway? Why don't they just ask us to shut them off?" But she knew the answer to that one. "Terrorists, right? They're worried I'll use mine to set off a bomb. Do I look like a terrorist? I'm a former schoolteacher! I look like a former schoolteacher, don't I? Me, a terrorist!" And she hurried up the steps into the court house.

I wonder what our old pal Chris the Cop thinks of my chances of convincing the judge of my "innocence" when my time comes.

How about you? What didn't you do they say you did and did you get out of it?

Wednesday, July 25, 2007 in Sketchpad 2007 | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

Unrevenged, a fish story

2007-07-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

Towns around here have gotten concerned about nitrogen in the watershed carried there in runoff from leaky septic systems and over-fertilized lawns. By a process I don't quite understand, the nitrogen causes too much plant growth and when those plants die they release oxygen that somehow kills off fish.

The towns have formed an alliance, the Pleasant Bay Resource Management Alliance, to try to reduce the nitrogen levels or at least prevent them from increasing. Volunteers are wading out to check on the levels and I met a couple of them this morning down on the beach at Rock Harbor in Orleans. Husband and wife team. Their field lab was in the trunk of their car and they were using turkey baster-sized syringes to squirt the samples they'd just taken into squat, Tupperware-style plastic jars. They were not scientists themselves, although she used to teach high school biology before she retired.

I first encountered them as I walking down the beach towards the marsh. They were coming arond the rip-rap breakwater, having finished collecting their samples from the boat channel. He was carrying a heavy-looking blue Igloo cooler and she held a legal-sized clipboard jabbed against her hip. On the clipboard were sheets of yellow paper with lots of boxes and graphs. She was a short, wiry, yellow-haired woman approaching 60. He was very tall, with signs of having once been lean and lanky but now giving in to middle-aged spread. His ball cap was pulled down low on his forehead and he was wearing glasses, which made it hard for me to judge his age, but I put him a few years older. Both were wearing shorts and t-shirts, but she had on a pair of yellow rubber beach shoes and he was wearing a pair of plain old sneakers, which meant that he had been wading barefoot while her toes were protected, which had turned out to be bad news for him and lucky for her.

The woman saw the camera in my hand and said, "Too bad you didn't get here with that sooner. You'd have had a heck of a picture."

"What'd I miss?" At that point, because of her scientific-looking clipboard, I was taking them for a pair of biologists and I was thinking exotic marine wildlife---a lost pilot whale, an adventurous seal, even a wandering shark.

"Him," she said jerking her head towards the man. "Falling in."

Then I noticed that he was soaked from the chest down. He grinned sheepishly but I could tell he was still feeling grumpy about his dunking.

She said, "A crab bit him and he fell over."

"Oh no," I said. "Where'd it get you?"

"Toe," he said.

"What kind of crab?"

"Little one."

"Can you eat him?"

"Got away."

"Too bad," I said, "Revenge can be sweet."

He was dead silent.

Wasn't in the mood to laugh about it yet, I guess.

Thursday, July 19, 2007 in Cape Cod 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Give these guys a break

2007-07-17T15:33:00.000-07:00

Out on my bike, making my way up towards town along Cross Street, guy passes me on his bike with his seven or eight year old daughter on a tag-a-long behind him.

I'd heard them coming up. They were having a conversation. He was telling her about Mopeds. Nothing in what he was saying. The words were right. A father telling his little girl about a fad from when he was her age. But the tone was off. And when pulls past me and says first, "Passing on your left," and then "Good morning," the tone of that good morning is off too.

There's an edge, a coldness---a low growl under the words. I know this tone. It's a familiar sound down here. I know it but I don't know it. I can't explain it. I hear it from men just like this one, men in their thirties and early forties, close-shaved, short-haired, neat, gray-skinned under their tans, if they have tans. Something about them suggests both competence and desperation, money and anxiety. I think of them as business types, stockbrokers, corporate attorneys, number crunchers of various kinds, because I see in them the vestiges of the frat guys I knew in college who were business majors and pre-law. Not the beer-drinking louts. The driven guys. The smart, hard-working guys who never seemed able to relax and enjoy a conversation. They were always sizing you up, looking for an advantage, waiting for that moment to tell you what they knew, what they were planning, how they were going in the right direction and from the sounds of things you weren't.

If they'd had a motto, it would have been, Here's what I'd do better if I were you.

I don't know that the men I'm hearing are these guys half a lifetime on. I'm just saying they look like they could have been them.

Whoever they are, wherever I see them, whatever company they're in, they speak with that edge. They use that tone that's always slightly off, with their wives, with their kids, with their friends, with store clerks and waitresses, with strangers they're passing the time of day with, even when they're trying to be polite and friendly, as this guy was.

You don't see them everywhere. They're almost never at the beach. Hardly ever in a bookstore. If they're in the stands at the ball games they don't talk so I can't pick them out of the crowd by their voices. I never run into them on my late walks around town.

They're at the restaurants, usually for dinner, trying not to be brusque with their servers. Sometimes you'll meet up with one in the late afternoon, waiting with the kids outside of a store, growing impatient with their kids' impatience. Mostly, though, you see them in the early mornings. They'll be out for a run or a bike ride. They'll be hurrying back to wherever they're staying with a cardboard tray full of coffee and bagels. They'll be at the coffee shop, with a stroller, a dog, a sleepy-looking young teenager, looking not so much sleepy themselves as just drained---and when you meet up with them at these times they don't talk, not even to say good morning, they just nod. To the baristas behind the counter they grunt and hold up the paper cup they're about to fill from one of the self-serve carafes.

You don't have to hear them to recognize them though, because besides their reflexively challenging voices---challenged's the better word, the edge is defensive---they're identifiable by their looks of distraction. They're here but they're not here. Their eyes aren't on what's in front of them. They're thinking of other things, serious things, things they'd rather not have to be thinking about, but things that have to be thought about nonetheless because that's what guys like them do, think about hard and serious things.

I wish I knew what those things are.

Work? The office? Maybe other people they'd rather be with. The guys from work? A woman from work? Are they that uncomfortable, feeling stuck with their families for whole days on end? Are their lives so built around their jobs that they don't know how to relax, don't to how to talk to anyone who's not part of their work. In our service economy other people are our tools. I'm not saying they're objects. I'm saying that we can only get our work done by going through other people, which must infect our perception of people with a certain utilitarianism. If a person isn't being useful to us, why is he taking up our time? For some of us this becomes a habit that's hard to drop even with the spouse and kids.

I said I think of these men as business types because of the guys I used to know they remind me of. But they are a business type, not the business type. There's a lot of money down here, which means the town must be crawling with people who make it by the sackful and plenty of them must be lawyers, stockbrokers, numbers-crunchers of various types. Not all of them use this tone, wear that look. And a lot of them must be women and I never hear any women using the tone, wearing the look. Women here fall into two groups, those who are friendly and those who aren't. There aren't any who are trying to be friendly but can't manage it for whatever reason, like these guys.

I sometimes think it's just the case that they don't know how to relax. They can't leave work at the office.

But maybe it's not that they don't know how, it's that they don't dare.

Maybe it's that they're not allowed to.

I'm here on vacation. They're here because their families are on vacation.

They have a day or two off so they've come down to be with the family even though they feel they shouldn't. It's going to catch up with them somehow. They're going to pay for the time they've taken away from work. If they've got the whole week, it's an illusion that they've gotten away.

When this guy on his bike and his daughter get back to the house they're supposed to be vacationing in there'll be a package from FedEx or some email or a voice mail waiting, demanding his attention now.

Come to think of it, maybe I'm not observing a type at all.

Maybe I'm witnessing an effect.

An effect caused by a different type. A type of boss.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007 in Cape Cod 2007 | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

The Battlestar Galactica passes the starship Enterpirse, headed in the opposite direction

2007-06-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

Five episodes in on the DVDs now and I'm hooked.

I'd been staying away. Uncle Merlin, a BSG fan, had warned me off. "It's dark," he said.

He forgot to tell me it's also grim.

But because I wasn't watching when the first two seasons were actually running I didn't pay any attention to the various political debates that Battlestar Galactica stirred up. All I know is that some change in the way the Cylons are portrayed riled the Right Wingers who I guess had jumped on the show's bandwagon initially because they thought it was an allegory for post 9/11 America and hating the Cylons was patriotic in some way.

There are definite 9/11 references. The white board in President Roslin's office with the number of survivors in the fleet scibbled on it, a number that goes down as did the numbers of the 9/11 dead but with dread not hope being the result of each erasure and correction. The hallway walls covered with pictures of missing relatives.

But since every episode so far begins with a reminder that humans created the Cylons, a way of insisting that humankind brought their destruction down upon themselves, I can't see how the Right Wingers, even adept as they are at ignoring the broadest hints that ideological interpretations may not apply, could have seen the Cylons as stand-ins for the Islamofascist scurge. Isn't suggesting that 9/11 or the Islamic fundamentalists' hatred for the US are in any way the result of our own doing, let alone our own fault, the talk of treasonous liberals?

Shouldn't that have been a clue?

But every episode also begins with the scene of Laura Roslin being sworn in as President in a shot that recreates exactly the famous picture of Lyndon Johnson being sworn in aboard Air Force One after JFK was assassinated. This would seem to set Battlestar Galactica in a post-Kennedy America instead of simply a post 9/11 one. Whenever something terrible happens in America pundits are quick to tell us that "Today America has lost its innocence," as if a nation founded on slavery and expanded through an attempted genocide ever had any innocence to lose. Every time we lose our innocence, however, it's somehow restored in time to be lost all over again when the next tragedy strikes.

But after Kennedy was killed there was a sea-change in the country. We did lose some quality, if not our innocence, and I think a lot of the history of the culture wars of the last generation and a half is rooted in the desire of a large segment of the people desperatedly trying to deny that loss.

Our sense of ourselves as the good guys.

Our sense of America as God's chosen country.

It wasn't the case that we discovered that we were the bad guys or that there was no moral or practical difference between us and the bad guys---which some people on the Left were proclaiming and many on the Right accused everybody to their left of believing, and they're still making that accusation.

But it was the case that we now knew, if we chose to face the fact, that just being the good guys was no longer enough.

It never has been.

Just being good is no protection from doing wrong. Harder to take is that believing you're the good guys often blinds you to your own evil. In fact believing you're the good guys makes it easier to go wrong because you've already permitted yourself everything from the beginning. We're good, therefore whatever we do must be good or for the good.

But even if you aren't blinded this way, as Commander Adama is not blind to the fact that the Cylons are humankind's own arrogance boomeranging back upon us, just punishment for our having put ourselves in the position of gods, that is of permitting ourselves anything, you're still not going to avoid evil.

Too often the right thing and the self-interested thing are at odds.

Life seems arranged to force us to make choices that are according to our own precepts immoral.

On Battlestar Galactica it seems so far that no character can make a decision that is not morally compromised.

I don't see how Right Wingers could have found any vindication of their post 9/11 world view in that.

Or am I wrong about how the political debate has spun itself out.

At any rate, I think it's a mistake to make too much of BSG as a political allegory.

If it's any good, any work of art---and The Sopranos has proven that TV shows can be works of art, not by being the first TV show that was, but by being the first that made us notice that it was, so all we have to accept for the sake of argument here is that Battlestar Galactica has, if not claims to be a work of art, artistic ambitions, at least---is a closed circle of references. I mean that it is about itself, not about anything in real life that it happens to parallel or allude to. Not that connections between the work and life can't be made or aren't meant to be made. Just that those connections aren't foremost on the artist's mind, or in the case of a collaborative work like a movie, TV show, play, dance, or symphony, the artists' minds. A work of art is more likely best seen in relation to other works of art than to real life.

Artists are more likely to be having arguments in their work with other artists instead of with politicians, philosophers, and professional moralists.

If Battlestar Galactica is about anything other than Battlestar Galactica, then, it's about...Star Trek.

If Star Trek presented us with a Kennedy-era optimism and can-do spirit projected into the future and outer space, and it did, then Battlestar Galactica is set in a dystopic, post-Kirk universe.

No surprise there when you consider that Ron Moore, the series' executive producer, wrote the screenplay for the Star Trek movie, Generations, and takes pride in being the writer who got to kill Captain Kirk.

Kirk, in all but a couple of episodes, always came up with the purely right decision in the end. Commander Adama's decisions are always tainted. Somebody has to die for others to live. Innocents have to suffer so that the rest can keep going. The wrong thing has to be done just so the ship can surivive, never mind so that the right thing can be accomplished down the line.

The ends never wholly justify the means.

Kirk could rely on the advice of his wise and upright first officer and his wise and noble ship's doctor. Adama's executive officer, although a good man, is a drunk. Tigh is physically and emotionally exhausted, worn down not just by old age and booze, but by his own bad conscience and feelings of guilt and self-loathing.

And there is so far nobody even close to being Adama's Dr McCoy.

Kirk operated on his own. He was out of range of restraining hand. He was free to make decisions based entirely on his own moral compass. He didn't have to worry about the corrupting influences of politicians and military careerists and timid civilians.

He was an independent man.

Adama is surrounded by civilians. He has to answer constantly to a politician practically at his elbow. So far he's been spared having to deal with military careerists, but I've heard that this changes when the Battlestar Pegasus shows up.

Kirk was young.

Adama is old.

And Kirk was taking the Enterprise boldy where no one had gone before. Battlestar Galactica is in flat-out retreat. Kirk was leading the way into space. Adama is running away.

Those of you who've watched more than five episodes can tell me if I'm way off.

Couple of things I like or am intrigued by before I sign off here.

I like it that the show makes no attempt to hide the fact that it's set in late 20th Century America. Most of the technological and cultural artifacts look as though they could have been bought out of a Sears catalog. People in the Twelve Colonies lived pretty much as if they were living in the United States in 1982, except that they somehow have invented faster than light space travel, highly advanced robotics, and a form of artificial intelligence that's smart enough to improve upon itself.

Of course a lot of bad sci-fi movies, TV shows, and novels are full of lame 20th Centuryisms, but in their case it's usually the case of a failure of imagination or of a low budget or a lazy contempt for the audience. Battlestar Galactica has made it a guiding aesthetic principle.

I like it that three of the coolest characters, Adama, Tigh, and the President, are over 50.

I like what they've done with Gaius Baltar. I like how charismatically self-interested and unprincipled they've made him and I like the way they've put Number Six in his head and then make him react to her as if she's really there, making him appear to be a borderline lunatic to everyone else.

I'm not sure I like the two Sharons plots.

I'm not sure I like either Starbuck or Apollo, which could be a problem if they are meant to be the two main younger heroes.

And it looks to me as if in the Battlestar universe there are three genders. Male, female, and tom-boy.

Males and females are pretty much what they are in our universe and get to hold all sorts of positions and jobs and although it appears that many of females are mothers in the most traditional sense, females can also be soldiers and engineers and Presidents of the Twelve Colonies, and males can be secretaries. But tom-boys can only be pilots.

The main difference between a tom-boy and a female is that a male is free to punch a tom-boy in the nose and can also expect the tom-boy to punch him back, harder and with more effect.

Sexuality doesn't seem to be an issue. Of the two main tom-boys, Boomer is obviously heterosexual. Starbuck's preferences aren't clear to me yet. Was she in love with Apollo's brother or were the three of them just good pals. I kind of hope they were just pals. In fact, I hope Starbuck's a lesbian. This has nothing to do with her being more macho than any of the guys around her except Helo and the Chief. I just think she looks like she'd be a lot of fun to go cruising for chicks with. A lot more fun than Apollo.

And by the way does Apollo ever get rid of that stupid pompador? It makes him look like Bob of Bob's Big Boy.

That's all I have for now. If any of you who've watched regularly can tell me what themes and character developments and plot points I need to be on the look out for, feel free to load up the comments. Don't worry about spoilers on my account, but put warnings in for others.

Thoughtful conservative Jon Swift says I have the Right Wing argument all wrong because I failed to see that it's the Cylons who are the good guys.

Seems like I'm always too late to the party. According to the Armchair Generalist, BSG's finishing up after this upcoming season.

Seaon 1, Season 2.0 (Episodes 1-10), and Season 2.5 (Episodes 10-20) are available through my aStore.

Programming note: Tonight's the final episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and although I've tried to talk myself out of it, I can't do it---I'm going to handle the live-blogging one last time.

Thursday, June 28, 2007 in Too Much TV | Permalink

Seraphim Falls and the better, and baser, angels of our nature

2007-06-22T19:35:00.000-07:00

Third Season of Deadwood's out on DVD now and over at newcritics Al Swearengen himself's giving a preview.

So I'm not going to write about Deadwood today. I'm going to write about another western. A movie. Seraphim Falls, which stars Pierce Brosnan as a former Union officer turned trapper and Liam Neeson as a vengeance-seeking former Confederate colonel who tracks him down and chases him from the Ruby Mountains, across Nevada, and into the alkalai desert for a final showdown, and that about sums up the whole of the plot.

Still it's a good, taut, intelligent film. Nothing special but exciting. And in its own quiet, understated, symbolic way almost as cynical about the settling of the Wild West as Deadwood, though not as profane.

The characters don't curse much nor do they speak in blank verse ever. In fact they hardly speak at all.

Brosnan's character, Gideon, is the focus of the movie. He's outnumbered and outgunned, usually on foot while Neeson and the gang of bounty hunters he's hired to help capture him---but not kill him. They don't get paid if they kill Gideon. Neeson's character, Colonel Carver, is reserving that pleasure for himself.---are on horseback, and he's wounded badly in the shoulder from an ambush in the very first scene, and our rooting interest is in seeing how Gideon will stay alive for the whole movie and arrange it so that there will be, as we know there must be, a final showdown between himself and Carver.

Brosnan isn't given much to say. He's on his own for close to half his screen time and when he meets up with other characters his conversations with them are short and to the point. "I need a horse." "Water!" "How far to the next town?"

But he's very good at acting without dialog. Like Harrison Ford in The Fugitive---to which director David Von Ancken gives respectful nods throughout, including having Gideon take a plunge over a waterfall that like Dr Kimble's there's no way he should have survived---Brosnan is excellent at silently portraying inner turmoil and physical exhaustion. Gideon is a desperate man, in pain, afraid, confused, losing hope, but thinking, always thinking, so that he's always dangerous.

Brosnan's also good at suggesting an underlying guilt and an accompanying sense of resignation. That guiltiness and the fact that his antagonist is played with nobility by Liam Neeson makes us wonder if, even though Gideon is in the position of underdog hero and has captured our sympathy, he is in fact a hero and if we should be rooting for him.

Brosnan does such a good job with the guilt, condemning himself with a Serves me right look of sadness after every wince of pain from his shot-up shoulder and after every new stroke of bad luck undoes what his last careful plan of escape had accomplished, that well before Carver reveals why he's chasing Gideon we're certain there's a very good reason.

Neeson has far more to say, Carver has to talk to his hired guns sometimes, but he's also usually short and to the point. His main job in the movie is to be Liam Neeson, the good, heroic Liam Neeson of Rob Roy and Michael Collins, in order to impress us with a sense of an underlying decency in a man who is on a brutal mission, going about it ruthlessly, and is throughout all business, his business being deadly revenge.

We're never meant to believe that his character is the real hero, but we are meant to know without being told that at one time he was a hero. He's changed or forgotten that side of himself but through Gideon's guilt and Carver's own residual nobility we become convinced before we know the whys and hows that if the change in Carver isn't all Gideon's fault he is still to a great degree responsible.

What we have then are two tragic figures on their way to a confrontation that, because Von Ancken has made Seraphim Falls more visually poetic and narratively symbolic movie than the average horse opera needs to be, we suspect is going to tell us something about role of the Civil War, or war generally, has had in shaping the American character.

But because along the way Von Ancken, who wrote the screenplay with Abby Everett Jaques, is taking us on a cynic's magical history tour of the west to see some iconographic moments and archetypal characters through rather skeptical eyes, we can guess that whatever he finally has to say about the War won't be romantic or as tragic as the main characters.

Gideon himself starts out as one of those archetypal characters, the lone trapper, reluctantly blazing a trail he'd rather the rest of civilization wouldn't follow. His path of escape takes him from the isolated and unspoiled mountain wilderness---gorgeously photographed---down to a pioneer homestead where he meets a family of settlers, father, teenage daughter, young son. No mother. She's dead. It's never said specifically what killed her---disease, wild animals, childbirth, Indians, outlaws---whatever it was doesn't matter, because the real cause of her death was the frontier itself. Through the mother's absence and what the daughter who has had to take her place at too early an age goes through Von Ancken is suggesting the important, hard, and brutally dangerous role women played in the settling of the country and the price they paid for it.

Gideon---and after him Carver, always right behind him---goes on from there to a railroad camp where immigrant labor is hard at work industrializing and civilizing the country and where instead of making common cause one despised ethnic group, the Irish, take out their resentment and anger on another, the Chinese.

Gideon and Carver meet up with a band of religious pilgirms who at first encounter appear so wrapped up in their faith and their bible that reality seems to be slipping right by them and they're becoming a wandering mob of delusional psychotics but who reveal themselves to be when they need to be worldly, crafty, licentious, greedy, and dishonest, without dropping their self-congratulatory God-bothering for a second.

They come across the burned out skeleton of a covered wagon and the broken remains of a piano someone had planned to build a new home around, the evidence of the too great hopes and the unfulfilled dreams of too many people who went west looking for a better life.

And they meet up with an Indian, perhaps the last of his tribe, who because he's played by Wes Studi comes across as as noble and wise as Chingatchgook but turns out to be the first of a very different kind of Indian, the kind hucksters sell to tourists. Indeed he's set up his own little tourist trap, selling not hokey souvenirs but water. Still it's a forerunner of the shops that will someday peddle little dolls and toy tomahawks and factory-made Navajo rugs to compensate for not being able to offer tourists a real taste of Native American culture because it's been wiped out.

They never come to a real town because that would be a dramatic dead end for them. A town would have a sheriff who would very likely get in the way of the final showdown. But they do encounter the chief reason for there being such things as towns, which is that people need somewhere to go to buy and sell, what Al Sweargen would call fuckin' Commerce, and that arrives in the form of Angelica Huston as a traveling saleswoman of patent medicine appealing to the fears and baser instincts of prospective customers to sell them her snake oil.

All of this sounds more heavily handed in its irony than it plays. Von Ancken always keeps the chase and escape story front and center and moving swiftly so that in our excitement we don't notice until after Carver leaves a place or says goodbye to the characters what cynical point just got made. It also happens that people tend to behave better around Gideon and don't show the darker, or darkest, sides of themselves until they meet up with Carver and his men. In fact, Carver seems to bring out the worst in them. Just as a for instance, when Gideon is in their cabin the family of settlers treat him kindly and go out of their way to help him, even though they have good reason to think he's there to steal from them. The father deals with him fairly and the son is just a curious little kid who is both afraid of him and in awe of him as a figure of adventure and mystery. But when Gideon leaves and Carver arrives, the father is made a coward and the son shows himself up as little thief and the daughter, who was grown-up and motherly and competent around Gideon, is reduced to a helpless victim.

There is a Do Unto Others of courseness to this. Gideon treats people better because he needs them to help him, while Carver has not a thought for anything or anybody but his own mission and therefore tends to treat people more directly as means to his ends as opposed to Gideon for whom people are aides to him in achieving his ends.

And I think Von Ancken does intend a moral lesson here. But it's still connected with the cynical themes of his movie.

Carver is a former Confederate officer, after all. There's no reason for us to think that Von Ancken isn't using his main characters in the same ironically iconographic way as he uses his minor characters, so Carver is not just from the South, he is the South.

When we find out what happened at Seraphim Falls in the last days of the Civil War we understand that Carver has an excellent reason for hating Gideon. But there's something missing in his sense of justice.

Responsibility.

What happened at Seraphim Falls was a result of a war the South started, a war that Carver as a Southern solider then ought to bear some responsibility for too. He helped cause the terrible thing that happened to him. And he doesn't see that. To him it was as if there'd been no war. It was as if Gideon and his troop of soldiers had come along out of pure malice. He puts all the blame on Gideon as if Gideon had simply decided to do him a terrible wrong for sport. His insistence on placing all the guilt on the Northerner and his refusal to shoulder even a little bit himself is even more arrogant and blind because what happened was not just a result of war, it was an accident of the war. No fighting was underway. Gideon and his men were just being careless.

A great deal of the West was settled after 1865 by former Confederates leaving their war ravaged homes to start over, but if many of them were like Carver they took with them into the West and ingrained in the Western character, which is the American character, a sense of agrievement without a sense of responsibility. Self-pity and a baseless sense of moral superiority that makes a man a hypocrite from the get-go without his having an inkling of it are the marks of an American descended from the likes of Carver.

Gideon is compassionate because he is guilty. He is always reluctant to presume upon others because he cannot forget that at bottom he doesn't deserve special favors. Which says a lot about the importance of having an oppressed and oppressive conscience. But it has its drawbacks. In general, Gideon would rather retreat than stand up for himself and when push comes to shove he almost can't bring himself to defend his own life.

And if a lot of Carvers went west after the war so did as many Gideons. There are two strains of Americans then, according to Seraphim Falls. Neither one of them is pure of heart, neither one of them is clearly and cleanly heroic. But one knows itself to be guilty and is therefore inclined to stay its hand, to think before acting, to doubt its own motives and to try to make sure it's right before it sets out to do anything, while the other is self-righteous, certain, angry at heart, quick to lash out, unable to forgive, and brutal when it decides it wants a fight.

In the end, the Carvers of the world never know themselves to have been beaten, only wronged, while the Gideons never feel they've won or deserved to win and so can't press their advantage, and while the two might be walking side by side in the same direction, trying to cross the same wasteland of history, they aren't walking together.

Seraphim Falls. Directed by David Von Ancken. Screeplay by David Von Ancken and Abby Everett Jaques. Starring Liam Neeson, Pierce Brosnan, Wes Studi, Angie Harmon, and Angelica Huston. Icon Productions and Samuel Goldwyn Films. 2006.

Please help support this blog. Buy the Seraphim Falls DVD at Mannion at the Movies or click on the link to purchase Deadwood: The Complete Third Season.

Saturday, June 16, 2007 in Horse Operas, Now Playing at Cine 1001-2000 | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

The terrible loneliness of being free

2007-06-22T19:29:00.000-07:00

In the opening sequences of Moscow on the Hudson, flashing back to his life in Russia, Robin Williams' character, circus musician Vladimir Ivanoff, remembers risking being late for work, putting his job and his upcoming, much looked forward to trip to New York City with the circus in jeopardy, to jump into a long line outside a store to buy...he's not sure what. Toilet paper, he hopes. Whatever they're selling, he knows that.

In the Soviet Union, you see a line, you get in it, because everything's so scarce, store shelves are usually so empty, what's available is usually so expensive, that odds are whatever is on sale at the end of the line, you need it.

Or you can use it.

What's at the end of this particular line are men's shoes. Vladimir buys two pair, neither in his size, because there are none in his size, all the shoes are the same size, a size too small for most men. Vladimir doesn't care. He can sell the shoes at a profit or use them as bribes.

The privation, the corruption, the paranoia, the dullness, the way everybody lives on the borderline of poverty, how the consumer goods and the small luxuries that separate them from the truly poor are no compensations because they are ugly, badly made, cost too much in time and effort and rubles to obtain, how every relationship, friendships, family life, love affairs, marriage, is reduced to a business deal---we see a society and an economy horribly crippled by the fear and corruption and purposeful bureaucratic inefficiency necessary to keeping its own evil regime in power and our first thoughts are naturally, Three cheers for capitalism and How did we ever see this sorry nation as a threat to our way of life?

The answer to that second thought is that the Soviets had nuclear weapons and men as crazy and as soulless among their leadership as we had among ours.

Still, you wonder how our saner leaders didn't look at what was going on over there and think, We can outlast them, we can out sell them.

This isn't the place to get into the old containment vs confrontation debates or look at what a lot of our leaders were really looking for as an outcome to our rivalry with the Soviet Union---safe markets not new democracies.

As for the first thought, director Paul Mazursky more or less responds, Are you sure you want to cheer that enthusiastically? Maybe you should wait and see.

Mazursky takes a long while to get Vladimir to the United States where we know he's going to defect and where we expect the real plot of the movie's going to unfold, testing our patience, because he wants to show us something else about life in the Soviet Union first.

The way people cling to each other.

Despite the corrupting influence of money, actually the lack of it, on relationships---a marriage proposal, even a sincere one inspired by love, is phrased in starkly economic terms with a list of material benefits that would result---and the fear that any person you know and are close to and trust could turn out to be a KGB stooge---at one point Vladimir is given a choice, spy on your best friend and inform on him, or your beloved grandfather could wind up in a "mental hospital"----the people grab hold of each other, literally, and hold tight, because their only joy in life and their only solace is love.

In Sartre's No Exit, Hell is other people. In the Soviet Union, says Mazursky, all there is of heaven is other people.

With that established, he finally sends Vladimir to New York where he defects in Bloomingdales.

And for the first few scenes after he defects, the movie really does allow us, encourages us, to give three years for capitalism and the USA.

This really is a wonderful country.

Seeing it through Vladimir's eyes as he takes it all in for the first time choked me up.

God, I love this country!

But it is not a paradise, it is not heaven on earth, and it is not without its own forms of hell, even for the lucky like Vladimir.

First, there is just the overwhelming fact of freedom itself. To be able to go where you want, do what you want, be what you want to be---all those choices, all those decisions, all those problems that follow and all the more choices and decisions that have to be made after the first ones! Where do you start? How do you start? Why bother to start?

And having all that freedom to make choices doesn't necessarily mean you have the means to follow through. In America you are free to want everything. You can only have what you can afford.

Or what you know how to ask for. One of Vladimir's friends on his first job in America, washing dishes, is another recent arrival to America, an astrophysicist who has to work in a kitchen because he doesn't speak English well-enough to get a teaching job. He's worried that when he finally does master the language skills, his other skills as a scientist will have become out of date.

All those choices can be depressing too. Just because it's not as bad as it was back in Moscow doesn't mean that it's not dispiriting. Vladimir literally faints when he walks into a grocery store to buy coffee and faces an entire aisle full of fifty brands of coffee to choose from.

Not being able to choose is not as sad as having no choice, but the result is the same. You go home empty-handed.

Freedom means being able to rely on yourself, to not have to ask for favors or make deals just to get through a day (Which inspires the question, how free are any of us?), and that means people don't need each other as desperately as they did back home. Vladimir finds that all his new friendships are much looser than they were in Russia and likely to be temporary.

And the freedom to be your own self, to live your life your own way, to be the person you want to be, can make people jealous of themselves. It can make them resist any claim you might make on them, even the most well-meaning and caring claims, even the claims of love and affection. They will see it as an attempt to control them, as an attempt to steal from them a part of themselves.

On the day Vladimir's new American girlfriend, the Italian sales clerk under whose skirt he hid when he was fleeing his KGB handlers in Bloomingdales, played by Maria Conchita Alonso, becomes a US citizen she turns immediately cold and sullen. She finds a far corner to be alone and away from her family at the party celebrating her citizenship. She pulls away from Vladimir whenever he tries to hug her. She provokes a fight. When he storms off she looks triumphant.

It didn't help that he picked the moment she wanted most to be alone to propose and that he put his proposal in the old, Soviet-style way, as a matter of economic convenience to both of them, making her afraid that all he wanted out of her was a nicer apartment and his own path to citizenship smoothed out. And she's terrified of her new freedom as well. It has sunk in what it means to be able to call her life her own---she is on her own in a way she has no idea yet how to handle.

But what's really upsetting her is that now that she is truly her own person she doesn't want to share any of her new-found self with anybody else. She wants to enjoy it all to herself. She is, understandably, feeling extremely selfish---self-ish---and here's Vladimir trying to claim a major piece of her self away from her.

It isn't long before they break up.

This is how it goes with all of Vladimir's American connections. All his new friendships turn out to be transient or illusory or unreliable in some other way.

The only friend who sticks with him is his lawyer, Orlando, merrily played by Alejandro Rey making the case with his infectious grin that as miserable as life can be here, anywhere, there is still always much to enjoy and love, and Orlando isn't sticking because he likes Vladimir, although he does, very much; he's sticking because he's his lawyer and he's being paid to stick.

The crisis Mazursky has brought Vladimir's story to is spiritual. Freedom has come at soul-crushing price. For Vladimir, being an American, being a New Yorker at any rate, means being all on his own, which is to say, being terribly lonely.

His best friends have wandered away, paying in their way the prices of their own freedoms. The woman he loves wants nothing more to do with him. He will probably never see his family in Russia ever again. There are millions of people all around him but they are strangers and pretty much all of them are content, eager even, to remain strangers.

He is part of a crowd and apart from it. And what he must do is find a way to live with himself as his own best company, figure out how to use his freedom to make himself happy...or at least not miserable.

Thus the last scene of the movie. Vladimir, having found work as a musician again, sets up on a street corner to play his saxophone. Most of the passersby ignore him, but a few pause, listen, applaud, drop some coins, make a connection, a temporary one, and move on, leaving him alone in the crowd, playing his music for himself, making himself happy by himself.

Moscow on the Hudson. Directed by Paul Mazursky. Written by Paul Mazursky and Leon Capetanos. Starring Robin Williams, Maria Conchita Alonso, Alejandro Rey, Cleavant Derricks, and Elya Baskin. Columbia Pictures. 1984.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007 in Now Playing at Cine 1001-2000 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

In a huff about Huff

2007-05-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

Watched the first two episodes of Huff last night and I’m afraid I’m hooked.

I don’t need this.

A show about an outwardly happy and successful middle-aged man coming apart at the seams? Every week we watch as another stitch in Huff’s life pops and more of his stuffing bursts loose?

And he just sort of stands outside himself and watches it happen?

Here’s a guy with a great job he’s very good at. He has a beautiful, loving, sexy wife who looks great in a blue teddy and even better after she wriggles out of it, a condition she enjoys attaining for his sake and more importantly and more erotically exciting for her own; who misses him when she wakes up in the middle of the night and finds he’s not in bed with her; who worries about him; who puts up with his bizarre mother and the rival demands from his clients for his time and attention; who still manages to be an intelligent, talented, successful person in her own right and have a life apart from being his wife. He has a preciously wise and compassionate teenage son who worries about him and tries to be there to take care of him.

Ok. His mother is nuts. And his beloved younger brother is schizophrenic. And his best friend has a self-destructive streak and apparently thinks that the best thing for him to do about it is try to drag Huff along for the downward ride.

But on the whole Huff has it pretty good.

And then all of a sudden he finds himself isolated within his own life. All at once he’s disconnected from everybody and everything that matters to him. He’s batting away attempts from all sides to continue or re-establish those connections that were there and important just a few minutes ago. Nothing he does gives him any sense of satisfaction or accomplishment. Even doing good, helping people, loving them, feels wrong. Whatever decision he makes, feels like the wrong one, except for decisions not to care anymore.

It’s as if Huff has fallen asleep and is dreaming his own life and as if in a dream Huff has no power to affect or control or even interact with what’s happening to him, only to watch. The scary part, to me, though, is that Huff describes what’s going on in exactly the opposite way.

He says he feels as though he’s just woken up from a long dream and now he’s looking around like Rip Van Winkle not recognizing the world he’s supposedly a part of and the people that are supposed to matter to him.

This is scary to me because I think it happens to people all the time.

There are moments when everybody feels as though it’s happened to them. Whole days can go by when it is in fact happening. But then it stops and things go back to normal.

Except, now and then, for some people, it doesn’t stop.

Something terrible happens to Huff and that seems to be what does it to him. But Hank Azaria, who is great as Huff—the whole cast is terrific—has in the few short scenes that precede the tragedy manages to suggest an already rooted restlessness. Huff’s impatient, brusque, even a bit irritable with the first three clients we see him with. They’re annoying him. They are annoying people, but it’s Huff’s job not to be annoyed with the people who come to him for help; his talents include the ability not to be annoyed longer than most of his colleagues can go without being annoyed. Azaria makes us see that the talent is still there but the discipline is going.

The terrible thing is not just the straw the breaks the camel’s back. It happens because the camel’s legs are already coming out from under him.

What I’m saying is that something big and terrible didn’t have to happen to Huff for him to become a stranger in the strange land that is his own life. He was already wandering and he would have wound up there anyway. And that’s how most of us who get into the same strange country will get there. We’ll just wander in.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You Mr Rosewater a character talks about hearing a click go off inside another man. The click is the sound of whatever demonic engines inside him that drove him to be what he was shutting down.

You're working...next to this man. You've known him twenty years. You're working along and all of sudden you hear this click from him. You turn to look at him. He's stopped working. He's all calmed down. He looks real dumb. He looks real sweet. You look in his eyes and the secrets are gone. He can't even tell you his name right then. He goes back to work, but he'll never be the same. That thing that bothered him so will never click on again. It's dead, it's dead. And that part of that man's life where he had to be a certain crazy way, that's done!

That certain crazy way we all have to be, that’s us, it’s our self and all that self was connected to and cared about.

There’s a hopeful side of this. People who are living bad lives, who are destructive or self-destructive, who are trapped in miseries of their own devising or who have been trapped by others, can suddenly wake up and see their way out. The strange land they wander into is reality or a happier reality than the one they’ve been living in.

But that’s not what happens to Huff and it’s not what I’m afraid of happening to me or to people I know and love.

Which is why I don’t need to become addicted to a show that’s going to have me constantly on the alert, listening for the awful sound of that click.

I may be saved by the fact that Huff was not picked up for a third season. There’s no point in sticking with it through to the end of Season Two, which ends in an emotional cliffhanger for Huff and his wife Beth, if there’s no conclusion to watch.

I might as well give it up right now.

I don't need it. Or anything like it.

But I’m afraid I’m going to be drawn back in.

By Azaria.

By the one actress I've always been nuttier about than I'm nutty about her daughter Gwyneth, Blythe Danner, as Huff’s impossible mother.

By Andy Comeau as his brother.

By the wonderful Oliver Platt as Huff’s self-destructive pal Russell, a brilliant but unscrupulous attorney who is as much fun to watch at his worst as he is at his best.

By Paget Brewster as Huff’s wife Beth---by her performance and by the promise of her continued wrigglings out of various colored teddies and lingerie.

Something else I don’t need, as you know, if you read yesterday morning’s post.

Observations from my red convertible

2007-05-08T17:36:00.000-07:00

I've been trying mightily to resist the temptation to write about this, Garance Franke-Ruta's call for raising the age of consent for girls who want to get naked on camera.

Franke-Ruta is worried about the future careers of the young women flashing their breasts for Girls Gone Wild. She has a point. I think that it's good to keep in mind that on Arrested Development GGW was parodied as Girls With Low Self Esteem. Joe Francis, the pondscum producer of GGW, makes his money by taking advantage of women at their most vulnerable, when they are young, inexperienced, insecure about their bodies, sexuality, and self-worth, and, usually, stupidly drunk. It's a shame that some of these young women might lose out on a job when they are 25 for one overly-excited moment that occured because they weren't thinking when they were 19.

But. But...but...but...

I've been trying to resist the temptation because I have begun to worry about myself. I had been a long time praiser of older women, proud of the fact that on the beach I could look past the 17 and 18 year olds in bikinis to ogle their mothers. Once upon a time I, like Neddie Jingo, could rhapsodize about the regular mom-aged women in their sensible one-piece swimsuits who grace the pages of the Land's End summer catalog.

Lately, though----well, lately, not so much.

There's a college town near here that because it's where our drug store, video store, church, and barber are, I visit a lot. It's spring, the weather has been beautiful, and that means the lawns around town are dotted with blankets on which lie somehow already magically tanned college women in mostly nothing more than their glistening skin, and on my last trip up there I almost drove off the road, twice.

I don't like this. It makes me feel like I'm just one more pulled muscle, one more childhood favorite's death, one more grizzled baby boomer buttonholing me to rave about Bobby and tell me how much I'd appreciate it because "you're the right age to remember" (I'm not and I don't, not clearly anyway), one more reach for the Zantac away from an eye tuck, orange hair, and a red convertible.

Writing about nubile young women getting naked seems like a bad choice for me right now.

Not that it has or will stop me. I'm just saying why I've been putting this off and why now, even though I'm giving in to temptation, I'm leaving the heavy lifting to others.

Lindsay Beyerstein for one.

Garance seems to be arguing that the current age of consent for porn is no longer appropriate because the stakes are so much higher today. I’m not sure I agree with her cost/benefit analysis. Sure, a compromising video clip can hang around the internet forever. On the other hand, everyone else’s pictures are going to end up there, too. At a certain point enlightenment or mutually assured destruction will kick in and our social mores will adjust to our technological milieu.

Frankly, I doubt that some old untagged GGW clip floating around online is all that much of a liability. Sure, the footage will be out there, but unless Joe Francis identifies his subjects by name, it will be difficult to match today’s 18-year-olds to their future selves.

Garance thinks that raising the age of consent for commercial porn will give 18-to-21-year-olds more freedom for erotic experimentation with their peers. She hopes her proposal will let young adults flash each other and take pictures on their camera phones, safe from greedy letches like Joe Francis.

I don’t understand how 18-year-olds could lack the maturity to choose whether to be in a commercial flick and yet be able to give meaningful consent to being photographed by their peers. If I were advising an 18-year-old on how to protect themselves from future embarrassment, I’d worry less about GGW and more about friends with camera phones. Compromising pictures taken by friends and lovers are much more likely to end up on the internet with enough context to identify the subjects later.

Lindsay's right. Just ask Dr Laura.

But I think Roy puts things best, as Roy so often does.

Lord knows our discourse is distorted when it comes to sex. It is my observation that it is distorted because of our misperceptions about sex and the body, not because sex and the body are themselves noxious. Popular R-rated giggle-fests from Porky's to the American Pie movies are, to me, dirtier than a typical porn film, because they posit sex as something you get away with, like theft or vandalism.

The appeal of "Girls Gone Wild" is based on that social malfunction. It's not the sight of 18-year-old tits that's gross -- O, far from it! -- but the idea that the filmmaker and the viewer have stolen the view because the nubile was, in Franke-Ruta's words, "intoxicated by both a Scorpion Bowl (illegally served) and her own newly developed form."

To worry as Franke-Ruta does that "Girls Gone Wild" participants will suffer lasting damage when their videos "follow them around for life" is to acknowledge that this fucked-up American sex-madness is unavoidable and undefeatable. Why else prevent women who are otherwise judged capable of sexual freedom from exhibiting their lady-parts? Elsewhere Franke-Ruta explains that she doesn't complain if young women (and men, she suddenly adds) privately enjoy "photos for personal use." But what is the meaning of the "privacy" concerns she claims to support if she wants private citizens to be legally enjoined from exercising or disposing them?

Exploitation, alas, exists. But this is no reason to fold the tent of liberty. All our rights -- the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right not to incriminate ourselves, etc. -- can be exploited, and indeed are exploited every day, but we try to find (or should try to find) the least restrictive way to limit those abuses, rather than allow those abuses to limit our rights.

So if the brain-damaged idea of sex as explotation is the problem, I say let us militate against that idea, not against the sexual autonomy of legal adults. Let us have wide and unapologetic dissemination of sexual imagery. Let us preempt the Joe Francises of the world by having fully empowered girls (and boys) go wild on their own terms...

I may not be old enough to really remember Bobby, but I was just the right age for Porkys and Roy's dead on. Those movies creeped me out because, for all the lovely T and A they included, the emphasis was really on the guys as they were driven into chattering, screeching, chest-thumping, pre-mastabatory simian delight. Young women were treated as objects, definitely, but the young men were treated as chimps in a zoo.

I haven't seen any of the American Pie franchise or the lastest in National Lampoon's series of Field Guides to Girls With Prodigious Breasts, but my sense is that the only way they've "improved" on the Porkys formula is that the T and A shots aren't as fleeting and now the young women get to act like lady chimps.

In other words, these kinds of movies aren't liberating at all, because all they do is let us see sex and sexuality and the human body in exactly the way the Puritanical see them.

So I agree with Roy, for the state of our own mental health and sexual well-being, it's best to fight exploitation with exuberant expression not well-intentioned repression.

But if Roy's utopia ever comes to pass I'm afraid you'll find me out there joining in.

I'll be the guy with the orange hair and the permanently surprised look about the too wrinkle-free forehead, leering from the driver's seat of his red convertible.
_____________________________

Avedon doesn't think much of Franke-Ruta's proposal to protect women from their own decision-making because it would have the effect of turning photographs of naked adults into "child porn." Besides, says Avedon, she can think of a few different kinds of decisions that can have worse effects on an 18 year old's future than getting photographed naked on spring break, like:

Being indentured for the rest of your life by student loans or foolish credit card decisions could just end up being a life-ruining thing, though. But we don't seem to get nearly as upset about that.

Jon Swift, high-minded conservative that he is, begs to disagree of course. To save civilization, Mr Swift declares, the age of consent for posing naked needs to be raised indeed, to sixty-five.

Then, says Mr Swift:

Young men would begin to think of sex as something their grandparents do to make a little cash and could put the energy they once used to search for porn on the Internet into fighting terrorism or curing cancer or pursuing more difficult quests on World of Warcraft.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007 in Ideas in search of a post | Permalink

Keep swinging: Everyone's Hero and the last lesson of Christopher Reeve

2007-04-30T21:54:00.000-07:00

Family movie night this week was the negligible Happily N'Ever After, a good premise done in by a script that seemed to have been written with the idea in mind that nothing was to go onto the screen that would tax the modest talents of the computer animators. The result is kind of a Greek tragedy of a cartoon with all the important action taking place offstage while the characters declaim about their troubles and woes.

Last week the family feature was the only slightly better animated Everyone's Hero, a tall tell set in the year when the New York Yankees and the Chicago Cubs faced off for the second time straight in the World Series and the Cubbies came close to defeating the Yankees in six games, because the Cubs crazed owner, who is not Philip Wrigley, has Babe Ruth's magic bat, Darlin' stolen from his locker in Yankee Stadium.

The Cubs and the Yanks played each other in the 1932 Series, the Yankees wining it in four straight. In 1933 the New York Giants beat the Washington ~~Nationals~~ ~~Senators~~ ~~Nationals~~ Senators (Either one. See comments), 4-1. In '34 the Cardinals beat the Tigers, 4-3.

The Cubs were back in the Series in '35 and they lost, 4-2...to Detroit.

The next and only other time the Cubs and the Yankees met in the World Series was 1938 and the Cubs lost again, of course. But not because Babe Ruth swung a magic bat or any bat. Ruth was gone from the Yankees by then.

You could look it up.

In other words, Everyone's Hero is set in a year that never was, call it 1932B, a magical year in which baseballs could talk like Rob Reiner trying to sound like Billy Crystal in Monsters Inc and bats talked like Whoopi Goldberg sounding like Scarlet O'Hara one moment and like Aretha Franklin the next, the World Series was played over the course of two and a half weeks, without any rainouts, Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Tony Lazzeri, Irish Bob Muesel, and Earle Combs, all of Murderers Row except for Babe Ruth, forgot how to hit at the same time and the Babe was carrying the team on his back, Ruth transformed into an elegant, articulate sophisticate, a little rough around the edges, but modest and self-effacing, and---SPOILER ALERT---a ten year old boy could be inserted into the World Series line-up at the last minute and hit a game-winning inside the park home run.

The younger critics in the Mannion family room bought the idea of anthropomorphic sporting equipment but...um...balked...at the idea that the rules of the game would be automatically suspended just so the hero of the movie could save the day in dramatic fashion.

They also thought it was just plain dumb that the story took all that trouble to get the Babe his magic bat back and then didn't have him swing it.

You got that right. SPOILER ALERT IS STILL IN EFFECT. The movie does not show Babe Ruth hitting a home run.

There's a difference between implausible and stupid and Everyone's Hero defines it in its final ten minutes.

Up until that point it's a likable enough evening's diversion. Not terrible, but nothing to write home about and not worth a blog post half as long as this one already is and the only reason I'm still going on at this point---you knew I would have an excuse, didn't you?---is the moral of Everyone's Hero.

I've said it before here and I'll say it again. I don't like morals in kids' movies. Mainly for two reasons.

One, it's usually the same moral no matter what the movie. Be True to Yourself. Variations of this are Follow Your Heart and Follow Your Dreams. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing any of these things, provided you know who you are and you are a decent person worth being true to and you can tell the difference between what your heart is telling you to do and what your vanity, ego, id, and appetites are telling you to do, and you're not insane or deluded and your dreams are things you have the ability to realize. Not knowledge most children possess, but never mind. As the guiding principle for character development, though, Be True to Yourself seems to me a recipee for raising a generation of egomaniacal monsters.

So I wish moviemakers would come up with some additional morals to tack on to their movies.

But it's that idea of morals being tacked on that makes me dislike them so much. Because that's what morals usually are. Tacked on.

Morals may or may not grow intrinsically from a story's theme. But when they appear, not always at the end, often they're repeated again and again throughout the movie, the filmmakers beating their young audience over the head with them, they appear in CAPITAL LETTERS, as the narrator or a character stops the action dead to lecture the audience, pretty much saying, "Now, children, what important idea have we learned here today?"

BE TRUE TO YOURSELF.

FOLLOW YOUR HEART.

FOLLOW YOUR DREAM.

Or, in the case of Everyone's Hero:

KEEP SWINGING.

If a moral grows out of the story then it's unnecessary to have anybody say it. Kids are pretty swift on the uptake. They get the point.

The little kid hero of Everyone's Hero who rescues Ruth's stolen bat and sets out to return it to him, a ten year old boy named Yankee Irving, has a big heart and big dreams, he is a devoted and knowledgeable baseball fan---he's a Jewish kid from a city that has three Major League teams, but he also follows the Negro Leagues closely enough to know all the players---and he loves the New York Yankees. But he's short, uncoordinated, impatient, and not good at following instructions, all of which combined make him the worst ballplayer in his neighborhood. He's the kind of player whose best chance of getting on base is by never swinging and hoping for a walk. Naturally, he's always the last kid picked. Naturally, this breaks his heart. Naturally, by the end of the movie he's going to be the one to come through for everybody in the clutch.

He's able to save the day because he never gives up. He keeps swinging. Throw him off a moving train to Chicago and he bounces to his feet and starts walking.

Literally, Yankee's never thrown off a train, although he comes close to falling off one several times. He is put off the train to Chicago, because he doesn't have a ticket. But the train stops and the conductor shoos him off at a station in rural Pennsylvania, and after a moment of despair, Yankee plucks up his courage and starts walking.

Figuratively, though, Yankee is thrown off a lot of moving trains. He has a lot of adventures on the way to Chicago that almost take the heart out of him. But he keeps on going. He stays in the box and keeps swinging. As a lesson for kids, this isn't a bad one. Don't give up. Keep looking for a way to succeed. If this plan doesn't work, come up with another one. Go back to the drawing board and try, try again.

And I've said this before and I'll say it again, I don't mind lessons in kids' movies. Lessons are different from morals. A lesson is a practical piece of wisdom a story teaches just by telling itself. Kids watching Everyone's Hero don't need to have it explained to them that when you've got a problem to solve the only way to solve it is to solve it---to keep at it, keep swinging. They'll get it.

But the filmmakers didn't trust their audience. Every step of the way somebody stops the story dead to tell Yankee, KEEP SWINGING, KID! and by the time the movie's reached its implausible and stupid climax, the lesson has turned into a moral that is very close to becoming another version of FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS.

The utter stupidity of the ending undercuts the good of the lesson, to boot, by suggesting that as long as you keep swinging at some point the rules of the universe will magically rewrite themselves in your favor and you will get your heart's desire just by virtue of having wanted it.

At any rate, not being a kid, just a dumb grown-up and therefore not swift on the uptake, by the time Yankee reached Wrigley Field and was poised to save the day, I had grown cynical about the lesson cum moral and was busy thinking up lots of examples of when Keep Swinging is in fact bad advice---I'd even muttered out loud, although, I hope, only loud enough for the blonde to hear, That's one lesson I wish George Bush hadn't learned; we'd be out of Iraq by now. She told me to shut my trap. Then the final credits rolled and I saw something that did make me shut my trap.

Produced and directed by Christopher Reeve.

Everyone's Hero was the project Reeve was working on when he died.

Judging from the documentary tribute that's a special feature on the DVD, he was only there for the earliest planning stages. He worked on the storyboarding, but he never saw even the first stages of animation.

I don't know how close to final the draft of the script he was working from was. I'd like to think that he wouldn't have allowed the stupid ending. I'm not sure, but I had a sense, listening to them talk, that the filmmakers who finished Everyone's Hero for him wanted the movie to be a kind of monument to Reeve and they might have gone overboard on the idea of showing how a hero who everyone thought couldn't accomplish what he wanted to coming through in the end. It's an article of faith among everybody who knew him that if he had lived Reeve would have done what was thought to be impossible. He'd have been the first quadrapalegic to get out of a wheelchair and walk again. It may have been that his friends thought they needed to show that happening metaphorically in his last movie.

I don't know.

All I do know is that if there was anyone who had earned the right to teach children that the most important thing is to stay in there, to try and continue trying, to never give up, to keep swinging, it was Christopher Reeve.

When he died, Reeve was still in the batter's box, still swinging.
________________________________

Extra innings:

Keep swinging isn't the only good lesson of Everyone's Hero. As he makes his way to Chicago, Yankee is helped along by a bunch of characters who are, like Yankee himself, people not held in very high regard by the most everybody else. They not only help get him to Chicago, they teach him how to be a better baseball player. He learns about strategy from a trio of hobos. He learns how to throw from a little girl. And he learns how to hit and how to play with confidence from some men who will never get to play ball in the Major Leagues even though they are every bit as good as the players on the Cubs and the Yankees because they are black.

Not bad lessons for kids: No one can do it all on their own. All of us need help. Everyone we meet has something worth sharing, something to teach. Everyone counts.

_________________

In the movie the Cubs' owner is obsessed with Babe Ruth as the source of all his unhappiness. In real life, Ruth didn't win the '32 Series single-handedly for the Yankees and in fact he wasn't all that great a factor in the Cubs' defeat. He had a good series, but he hit only two home runs, both of them in the same game. If Chicago fans had a reason to fear and loathe Ruth it was because of what he did to the Cubs in the 1918 World Series...as a pitcher...for the Boston Red Sox.

You could look it up.
_________________

Robin Williams does the voice of the Cubs' crazy, Irish-brogued, Ruth-hating owner. William H. Macy does the voice of the cheating Cubs pitcher who steals Ruth's bat. Robert Wagner does the voice of the New York Yankees' general manager. And Mandy Patinkin does the voice of Yankee's father. All of them were good friends of Christopher Reeve.

In the documentary, Patinkin tells about how when they were very young actors and he and Reeve were doing a play together in New York after rehearsals they used to ride home together on the subway. The first of Reeve's Superman movies had recently opened so Reeve was suddenly a big star, but, says Patinkin, nobody ever recognized him on the train because of his modesty. Patinkin's point was that Reeve never called attention to himself in a movie star way. He was just another working stiff taking the subway home.

I find it a little hard to believe that try as hard as they might have to blend in these two very handsome and very large young men could have sat there completely unnoticed on the subway night after night. But then New Yorkers practice at being bored by the incredible.

What I really like about the story is just the picture of two friends at the beginning of what will turn out for both of them to be wonderful careers riding home together. I think that's how all of us should be remembered, as we were when we were young and at our best and our lives were full of hope and promise.
___________________

Reeve's widow Dana Reeve was one of the co-producers of Everyone's Hero and she did the voice for Yankee's mother---she and another actress. Dana Reeve died before she could finish her voice work for the movie. She was sick while she was working on it. She was still in the box, then, too, still swinging, at the end.
__________________

And here's the post I wrote when Christopher Reeve died, Powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

Monday, April 30, 2007 in Now Playing at Cine 1-1000, Sports Squawk | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

Licenses to kill

2007-04-05T13:01:00.000-07:00

A long time into Casino Royale---a very long time into Casino Royale---Daniel Craig, modeling his new tailored tux, looks up into the mirror and gives himself a smile that, with the camera looking in over his shoulder at his reflection and his reflection looking back at the camera, is really meant for us, a smile that asks, "Remind you of anyone?"

Of course he does.

Bond, we say in our heads, James Bond.

And it would be a great moment, like the moment in the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie when Clark Kent, dashing across the street, pulls open his shirt to reveal the big red S we've all been waiting to see, if it had been the moment it was meant to be, the moment when we finally accept that Craig is the new Bond.

But as I said it comes an awful long way into the movie, a movie in which Craig has been extremely busy right from start being James Bond.

I thought Casino Royale was supposed to be about how Bond became Bond. I expected a learning curve to be part of the plot. But aside from a few lines of dialog mentioning it and a couple of good jokes---"A martini!" "Shaken or stirred?" "Do I look like I care?"---Bond's being the new kid in town doesn't figure much in the storyline. He's just been promoted and the ink's still wet on his license to kill, but he takes to the job as naturally as Craig takes to playing the part.

Which makes it just another Bond film.

I say that as a compliment. It's just not the compliment I expected to be paying it based on all I'd heard and read about it before seeing it.

As just another Bond film it's better than most of them, as good as a few of the very best, but except for the big chase through the construction site and the embassy it didn't add any scenes to the ultimate ideal Bond movie that's been playing in my head since I saw my very first Bond, which, for the record, was Live and Let Die, so Sean Connery, great as he was, does not define Bond for me---he's a contributor, but not the creator. Roger Moore didn't define Bond for me either, much as I enjoyed his take on 007, because he was already defined in my imagination as The Saint and Beau Maverick and Lord Brett Sinclair, Tony Curtis' partner on The Persuaders. I had the same problem with Pierce Brosnan, who will always carry a little too much of Remington Steele in his Bond. That's why, back in the day, I was so looking forward to Timothy Dalton's Bond and why I really liked Craig's. Neither one of them entered my head with any previous work's baggage to check.

But, not even considering how it fails as an origin film, Casino Royale disappointed me as a Bond movie because its plot was upside down.

Spoilers coming.

Putting the poker game in the spot where the big climactic chase or shoot-out should have been was a really bad idea. The loss of the money and Bond's apparent betrayal would have been a good way to get the plot off the ground and the chase across the airport runway, which, by the way, was as clumsy and dumb as the big chase in A View to a Kill, although it has a great payoff, should have been the big finale. The buildings crashing into the Venice canals could have been left out entirely. Structured that way, the whole middle part of the film could have been about how Bond learns to be Bond or at least how he learns to be a better Bond. M would have had a whole lot more to be exasperated with him for, a real reason to consider pulling his license to kill, instead of merely fussing over his failure to shoot out the security cameras in the embassy.

Spoilers over.

What Casino Royale has going for it is Craig.

Now, if you're a Bond fan, if you actually like the character and whole conception behind the movies, your opinion of what Bond should be like is probably based on how seriously you take the whole license to kill thing.

If you think the fact that defines Bond is that he's an assassin and therefore basically a cold-hearted killer, a paid thug who happens to know how to tie a bowtie and which fork to use, then of course Connery is your Bond and Craig will appeal to you because he has a good degree of thugishness about him. Craig looks like he could be a British football hooligan. He looks more like he could be a soccer star, the kind of player though who makes soccer into a contact sport more brutal than rugby. And he can do cold. Not cold as in ice. Brosnan did that. Cold as in stone. A stone that has hurled itself off a cliff face aiming itself right at your head.

He's brutal, but he's also clearly intelligent and educated.

Connery's Bond was smart too, but there was something of the unfinished auto-didact about him, a scholarship boy who had to drop out of school when the money ran out, possibly even before he reached university. Craig looks like he made it all the way to his final semester at Cambridge before he got kicked out for seducing his tutor's wife and beating up four or five star players on the cricket team.

That makes his Bond a bridge between Connery's and Brosnan's and Moore's Bonds, both of whom got firsts at Oxford and were well liked and popular despite having seduced their tutors' wives and beaten up four or five star players on the cricket team.

Bond's license to kill doesn't mean as much to me as a sign of his innate brutality as it does as a sign of his intelligence and judgment. Hired thugs don't have to be discerning. Being given the power to decide whom and when to kill means being given the power to decide this person doesn't need killing at this particular time. Bond is a spy before he's an assassin. We only see him on missions when things are so out of control or have gone so wrong that the bad guys must die. But there are plenty of suggestions in all the movies that Bond routinely goes on missions in which he slips in somewhere, extracts the information he needs, and slips out without anybody getting their hair mussed.

The women we often see him with at the beginning of a movie are there to reward him for his good behavior.

Brosnan and Moore were able to suggest that, while they didn't have a problem with the killing, they thought more highly of themselves for pulling off a job without pulling out their gun, because that meant they'd been really clever. Good spies shouldn't leave any traces behind and dead bodies are hard not to notice.

So it's not Craig's toughness that I liked as much as the fact that his toughness never gets in the way of his letting us see him thinking.

What Craig adds to Bond is blood. And sweat. Craig's Bond is the first who looks like the work he does is physically demanding. When his Bond jumps from a steel girder to a swinging I-beam he feels the force of it in his chest and arms. He gets hurt. He bruises. He gets the wind knocked out of him. He gets tired. The payoff of the chase through the embassy depends not on Bond being cornered but on his being too exhausted to run anymore or think his way out of the situation.

Craig isn't the first Bond since Connery who looks like he can do the stunts Bond is required to do. Brosnan was in great shape in his first two Bonds and he moved like a panther. But Craig is the first one who looks like he is really taking the punishment. What's more, he looks like he could survive them despite the toll they take on him.

This new and realistic physicality isn't all Craig's doing, though. It is a result of filmmakers having learned since Roger Moore's hey-day how to stage and shoot and edit fights in a way that makes them appear more real and physical.

I was watching The Spy Who Loved Me last week and I was struck by how the director didn't even bother to try to make Moore's fight scenes look like hard work for Bond. Moore was fifty years old at the time. He was in fine shape for an old guy but it was clear that he'd lost a step or two, that he wasn't as limber as he once was---and Moore even when he was playing Simon Templer never gave the impression he was much of an athlete---and yet a number of his fight scenes and chases were filmed in long shot with very little cross and jump cutting so that we could see either that we were watching a stunt man or that Moore and the stuntman he was fighting were being very careful with each other.

But then nothing about Moore's Bond movies was supposed to be taken seriously. It was all a game, a fun fantasy. Moore's job was to make us simultaneously see the game and the fun while getting caught up in the excitement. He was good at that.

By the way, despite his age, he was the only Bond who was persuasive as the kind of man who didn't have to rely on damsels in distress throwing themselves into his arms and villainesses scheming their way into his bed to get laid.

Handsome and dashing as all the others including Craig are, none of them look like they'd be a lot of fun on a date or even in the sack, unless you like it fast, muscular, and without any cuddling afterwards and any chance you'll have company for breakfast.

Don't confuse the roguishly charming post-007 Connery with his gloomy misogynistic Bond, James "Let me call you a cab before I have to kill you" Bond.

So, for what it's worth, Craig is the first realistic Bond.

By the way, when this quality of the movie, its relative realism, was being touted back before its release, I was confused. I had thought that we'd already had a realistic Bond. Timothy Dalton. Turns out my memory was playing tricks on me.

Watched License to Kill recently too. It had been one of only two of the Bond films I'd never seen. (The other was and still is Moonraker.) I was shocked.

As Rob Farley says of both Dalton efforts, License to Kill doesn't even feel like a Bond film.

I remember liking The Living Daylights but if Dalton's work in License to Kill is a continuation of what he was doing in his first Bond the I must not be remembering it very well. I don't know what he was up to, but he wasn't playing James Bond. He was playing some British toff who'd gotten caught up in a spy game and thought the only way he could get through it was by acting like James Bond. His Bond is realistic in that Dalton acts out every emotion Bond might be feeling at a given moment. When Bond has reason to worry, he looks worried. When Bond is smitten with Cary Lowell's character---the first and so far only Bond girl I believe might have a realistic counterpart in this universe---Dalton looks smitten. When he's in pain, he looks like he hurts. But it doesn't add up to a character and all that emoting certainly isn't what anybody expects out of James Bond.

Craig suggests that his Bond has real feelings by showing us how he's hiding them.

Last thoughts: I liked Craig as Bond and I'm looking forward to his next outing. But as I said I don't think Casino Royale was exceptional. The actor playing Bond is finally only as good a Bond as the movies he's playing Bond in are good Bond movies. I think part of the reason a lot of Bond fans see Brosnan and Moore as so much weaker Bonds than Connery's is that they appeared in some bad movies. Two out of four of Brosnan's movies are not any good (Here's me on Die Another Day) and several of Moore's are just plain awful. A couple of Connery's Bond movies are pale efforts, particularly You Only Live Twice, and depending on my mood Thunderball is either a hoot or a bad joke, but the first three are well-made genre movies, each one almost able to stand on its own without your having to like or know anything about the Bond series.

We'll see if Craig's movies measure up, then we'll know if he's truly the rightful heir to the double O's.

But the basic appeal of the Bond movies is that they are the ultimate fantasies of male escape (which isn't to say that women don't share the same fantasies only that in the movie the fantasy is pitched at men): Bond is a truly free man. He doesn't need anybody or anything. He doesn't need the job. He doesn't need MI6. He doesn't need a family, friends, or relations. They need him, but Bond is free. He is free even of moral constraint.

And being free he doesn't have to care.

That he bothers to care is what makes him a hero and not a villain or a monster.

The difference between all the Bonds is in each actor's decisions about how much Bond does bother to care and how much he then shows it. Leaving Dalton out of it, Moore cares the most, although he is cool about showing it, while Connery cares least. Where Craig fits himself in between them will decide who his Bond is.

Licenses to Critique or A View to a Review:

Tom Watson hated, just hated Casino Royale. He didn't think much of Craig as Bond either. And did I mention that he hated Casino Royale?

He's outvoted though by Dennis Perrin who likes Craig's barely concealed "raw physical and psychological fury" and thinks his Bond could mop the floor with Connery's, by Rob Farley who says Casino Royale is the best Bond movie since On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and by Shakes who thinks Craig is to live and let die for.

Meanwhile, Moved by Michael Medved's politically correct misreading of Casino Royale, TBogg knocks on Medved's wooden head and asks if anybody's home and Jason Chervokas considers the question, Is a post-Cold War Bond possible?

Sir Roger Moore has a webpage through which you can help him continue to save the world, for real now, through his work for UNICEF.

Casino Royale. Directed by Martin Campbell. Screenplay by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade. Starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, Mads Mikkelsen, and Jeffrey Wright. MGM. 2006.

Casino Royale available from my aStore.

Thursday, April 05, 2007 in Now Playing at Cine 1-1000 | Permalink

Lord Jim and Robert Jordan resist the lure of blood diamonds, each in his own way

2007-03-31T16:51:00.001-07:00

In my apparently unread probably because uninspired review of Blood Diamond last week, I described a key scene in the movie as Hemingway-esque. But thinking it over I think I may have been wrong to bring Hemingway into it. I was fooled by the scene's being a conscious visual quote from the movie version of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Blood Diamond's protagonist, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, the soldier of fortune Danny Archer, is more of a Conradian tragic hero than a Hemingwayesque anti-one.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Hemingway knew his Conrad as well as he knew his Crane and his Turgenev. The difference between them, though, is in their approaches to the question of guilt.

Hemingway's characters are innoncents. Conrad's characters are guilty. They are complicit in the events that sweep them up and desorty them.

World War I happened to Jake Barnes, Nick Adams, and Frederick Henry. The fact that all three of them volunteered to fight carries no guilt because they were in a way society's dupes. They were tricked into it by a phony idealism and when their stories get underway they are in the process of figuring out how to live decently now that those ideals have been shown up as lies.

But Lord Jim invites the pirates in. Martin Decoud allows himself to be enlisted in a fight he doesn't believe in on the side he more than suspects is wrong. And, of course, Kurtz himself brought about the horror that kills him.

Conrad's heroes are and want to be pillars of the society events force them to live or die for. A lot more than their own survival depends on their success or failure.

Hemingway's heroes are anti-heroes in that they don't want any part of the society that has brought trouble and disaster down upon itself. Their main job is to escape the aftermath of the catcaclysm. A Farewell to Arms is literally an account of running away. The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time, in which the two parts of Big Two-Hearted River provide the denoument and climax, are about young men finding a separate peace outside the society that sent them off to war.

Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls is a transitional figure for Hemingway. He's the first of Hemingway's heroes to die and he dies sacrificing himself for others. But although he's on the right side in the Spanish Civil War, he isn't ever committed to it. He dies understanding that that there is no separate peace. Every man's death diminishes him for he is a part of mankind, and so on. But his death is more a personal matter to him than a political one. He doesn't see himself as giving up much of anything and he's reclaiming himself more than he is saving anyone else.

Hemingway's stories, when they aren't about escape, are about recovery or succumbing to wounds, physical and psychic, while Conrad's are tales of redemption or, more often, damnation. This is why Conrad's vision is essentially tragic, while Hemingway's isn't quite.

There was an element of absurdity in Conrad's tragedy, but that only makes his tragic vision different from Shakespeare's and the Greeks'.

I'm not disparaging Hemingway here. I think Conrad was the greater writer, but in Hemingway's defense it has to be said that he was pretty much done as a writer at about the same age as Conrad was when he began.

I don't understand why Hemingway wrote so much that was second-rate, self-parody, and out and out crap after For Whom the Bell Tolls. But the fact is that he did. Except for a few short stories, he might as well have stopped writing in 1940. Yeah. I wouldn't miss The Old Man and the Sea if it disappeared from the canon and our collective memory. Everything fine and true we have from him, all the good words, are the work of a young man.

Hemingway turned 41 the year he published For Whom the Bell Tolls. Conrad was 38 when he published Almayer's Folly, 39 when An Outcast of the Islands came out. There's nothing in this except that it emphasizes what I said, that Hemingway's best work is the work of a young man while Conrad's best is that of a man well into middle age, and maybe that partly accounts for the difference in their visions, helps explain why Hemingway's stories, despite their characters' expressions of existential despair, are the more hopeful and the more naive.

It also makes me think that an interesting college lit course might be made out of pairing the two. It's a nice reading list, don't you think? In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Men Without Women, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Victory.

Back to Blood Diamond.

In the movie, it's Solomon Vandey, the father searching for his lost son, who has the tragic grandeur, but that's mainly because he's played by Djimon Housou, who was born to play every one of Shakespeare's great tragic heroes, except maybe Hamlet---he's too robust---and Lear---no audience would believe he could be that big a fool.

I take that back. Maybe there's a way to play Lear as an arrogant fool instead of a senescent one, a great man carried away by his pride rather than a silly one self-deceived by his own vanity.

At any rate, Vandy is tragic in that he represents the tragedy of Africa. In himself, he is a pretty straight-forward hero, a seemingly ordinary man who rises to to occasion. He isn't the protagonist, though, because he doesn't change. He is the catalyst for change in Danny Archer.

Archer is like a Hemingway-esque hero in that he is psychically wounded. But he isn't alienated. He is a happy player in the corrupt economic order that runs things and that he thinks of as a much a part of the real Africa as the jungles and savannas. He learns, from Vandy, from Maddy Bowen, the journalist, played by Jennifer Connelly, who would be his love interest if he was a better, more deserving man, and from helping Vandy and Bowen, that Africa is a separate place from the "place" where he lives and works, his work being theft and murder, and it's a place he would like to live in. Unfortunately, that place can't exist unless he is willing to die for it.

It's the willingness to die for it that makes him, while a cousin to Robert Jordan, a brother to Lord Jim.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

__________________________

Depressing fact about my book-buying addiction: I've been re-reading my Oxford World's Classics edition of Conrad's The Secret Agent. Winnie Verloc is Conrad's only female protagonist. He created many heroines, plenty of ingenues, but Winnie's the only woman he let carry a whole book. Like Conrad's men she is complicit in her own tragedy, but in her case her guilt is the result of her having done the right thing by her family. At any rate, I wrote most of this post at Barnes and Noble where I started reading Steven Marcus' introduction to the B and N edition of The Secret Agent.

I didn't finish either the post or the intro before it was time to go home.

So I bought the book.

What kind of person buys a second copy of a book he already owns for the introduction?

Saturday, March 31, 2007 in Now Playing at Cine 1-1000, Ruining my eyes | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Lord Jim and Robert Jordan resist the lure of blood diamonds, each in his own way

2007-03-31T16:51:00.000-07:00

Blood Diamond's protagonist, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, the soldier of fortune Danny Archer, is more of a Conradian tragic hero than a Hemingwayesque anti-one.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Hemingway knew his Conrad as well as he knew his Crane and his Turgenev. The difference between them, though, is in their approaches to the question of guilt.

Hemingway's characters are innoncents. Conrad's characters are guilty. They are complicit in the events that sweep them up and desorty them.

Conrad's heroes are and want to be pillars of the society events force them to live or die for. A lot more than their own survival depends on their success or failure.

There was an element of absurdity in Conrad's tragedy, but that only makes his tragic vision different from Shakespeare's and the Greeks'.

Back to Blood Diamond.

I take that back. Maybe there's a way to play Lear as an arrogant fool instead of a senescent one, a great man carried away by his pride rather than a silly one self-deceived by his own vanity.

It's the willingness to die for it that makes him, while a cousin to Robert Jordan, a brother to Lord Jim.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

__________________________

I didn't finish either the post or the intro before it was time to go home.

So I bought the book.

What kind of person buys a second copy of a book he already owns for the introduction?

Saturday, March 31, 2007 in Now Playing at Cine 1-1000, Ruining my eyes | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Missed it by that much

2007-03-30T16:59:00.000-07:00

Pointed in that direction by Mary of View from the Corner, I came across this interview with Barbara Feldon, who played Agent 99 on Get Smart.

Number of things in the interview made me sit up and take notice.

Would you believe that Get Smart is finally coming out on DVD?

Would you believe that Barbara Feldon is 74 years old? Feldon was the second-sexiest woman on television when she was doing Get Smart, despite the black and white horizontally striped turtleneck minidresses and the bizarre hairstyle that was not quite a bob and not quite a beehive, but she was sexier at 54 than she was at 34, so imagine what she's like now that she's 74!

Would you believe that Feldon can make casual references to the songs of Tom Lehrer, which is just a reminder that a great deal of her sexiness has always been due to her intelligence and sense of humor?

Would you believe that her co-star on Get Smart, Don Adams, Maxwell Smart, Agent 86 himself, served in the Marines in World War II, fought at Guadalcanal, was the only member of his unit to survive, almost died there of fever, and Feldon was apparently unaware of any of this back when she was working with him on the show.

She only found out when late in life they renewed their friendship and he showed her some chapters from the autobiography he was working on and, sadly, didn't get to finish before he died.

I don't know what to make of the fact that during the course of five years Adams never talked about his time in the war. I don't know if it was modesty, stoicism, or simply a sense of proportion---just about every man his age had served, so he might not have thought it was worth mentioning because he assumed everybody around him had the same stories to tell.

But a lot of WWII vets made a point of not talking about what happened to them in the war and in the process of learning to keep quiet about their experiences they learned to keep quiet about a lot of things and wound up not talking to anybody about anything that had to do with what they were feeling.

And would you believe that I have only one story to tell about Don Adams?

I got it from Bob Newhart's book, I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This.

Newhart credits Adams with convincing him to become a stand-up comic and perform his own material on stage.

But he doesn't mean that in a way entirely complimentary to Adams.

When Newhart was starting out in show business, he first tried to make his name as a writer for other comedians. He wrote a routine for Adams about a submarine commander talking to his crew at the end of a two year tour at sea. It's a famous routine now, Newhart himself made it famous. "The Voyage of the USS Codfish." But if you read it you can hear Adams doing it too and imagine how funny it would have been in his voice.

But Adams didn't think it was funny.

At least he said he didn't.

He claimed to hate the routine. Said it stunk. He refused to pay Newhart for it.

Oh well, thought Newhart. Them's the breaks.

Then one night he saw Adams on The Tonight Show----doing the routine!

Big chunk of it at any rate.

That's it! Newhart decided then and there, I'm through writing for other comics! From now on he wasn't going to let anything he wrote out of his hands. If he wasn't going to get paid for writing the stuff, then at least he'd get paid for performing it.

If you listen closely to Newhart doing the routine on one of his old albums you might pick up on it. You can feel something's missing. There's a jump, a gap in the captain's monologue. Newhart left out the parts of the routine Adams had stolen because he didn't want anybody to think he had stolen it from Adams.

But Newhart liked and admired Adams anyway. They were friends. Newhart never told the story in public, while Adams was alive. When Adams died, his widow called Newhart and asked him to speak at the funeral. She asked him to tell the story. Don's friends will love it, she said, it was so typical of him, the cheapness and the nerve.

Newhart was glad to oblige.

Friday, March 30, 2007 in Too Much TV | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBack (0)

Weirdos, neurotics, lunatics, poets, and dreamers

2007-03-30T16:55:00.000-07:00

A note to my fellow bloggers, right and left:

When we get the urge to project our feelings about politics or politicians onto the American people, we need to remember one thing.

We're a pack of weirdos.

I don't mean that we're weird in the blogging in our pajamas while the cats play about our slippered feet way that used to be our image among people whose lives were entirely confined to the analog world, although, frankly, some of us are still a little too enamored of our cats.

Most of us are intelligent, talented, accomplished people with successful or at least marginally fullfilling lives offline.

And I don't mean that we're weirdos in the ranting, foaming at the mouth, blinded by ideological rage way that various members of the traditional media elite would like to dismiss us as, although there are more than a few of us, more on one end of the bandwidth than the other, who have to wipe the spittle off their monitors after typing every post.

I mean we are weirdos in the sense that most normal people do not have the urge to share their every passing thought with a world of strangers.

We're weirdos because we're writers.

Most normal people when they're mad about something, moved by something, provoked into thought or sunk into deep brooding by something they''ve read, heard, seen, remembered, or dreamed don't deal with it by sitting down at a keyboard to write about it.

And if they did it would never occur to them to hit the publish button because they would never assume that what they wrote about what they're mad about, moved by, provoked into thought or sunk into brooding upon would matter to anyone besides themselves.

Now I happen to think that writing is a positive, active, life-affirming way to engage with the world. But that's not how most normal people see it.

Most normal people see writing as a withdrawl, even an escape. Writers, just in order to write, have to detach themselves from the world. Most normal people understand that part of the job. But they think that writers like that detachment. And they're right.

Too many of us, if we're honest, would have to admit that the happiest times of our lives when we were young were the times we holed up somewhere far from the madding crowd with our notebooks, sketchpads, guitars, computers, or our thoughts.

There have been periods in human history when it was more common for people to react to something that occured to them or around them by picking up a pen, or a hammer and chisel, or a brush and a pot of paint, and the rise of the internet, the ease and ubiquity of email, and the emergence of blogs has revealed that more people have the talent and the urge to write stuff down than anybody would have thought when the ability to publish depended on access to a printing press.

With this the act of writing might be seen as less eccentric than it was in the past and that might lead to more, and more normal, people taking to their keyboards.

I think this would be a good thing.

But it won't ever be a usual thing.

It will always be a little bit of weird thing to do.

I'd like to believe that being a writer is just a result of having a particular talent and the normal human urge to use a talent.

But the whole history of writers and writing, including those periods when it was more usual for people to write down their feelings and thoughts in their diaries, in letters, or in poems and songs, shows that the people who write out of sense of vocation tend to be weirdos, neurotics, lunatics, freaks, and geeks.

We can flatter ourselves that in our crazy way we are wiser and more attuned to the world than the poor, stifled souls who can't express their thoughts and feelings in as felicitous, even poetic ways as we do.

That still makes us weirdos.

I'm not trying to insult us or put us down. I just think it's important for our own sanity's sake to remember this.

It's also important in helping us to reach conclusions and judgments that aren't simply projections of our own feelings, fears, and wishful fantasies.

The way we think is not the way most people think.

Add to this the fact that we are way more interested in politics than is probably healthy.

So, whenever we're responding to something in the news, something a candidate for President or Congress said, something a pundit spouted on the Sunday bobblehead fests, and we get the urge to speak for regular people and tell our readers how they're feeling or thinking or likely to feel and think, we'd better have some specific facts to back it up, poll numbers for instance.

Because...

While we're writing about an issue or a candidate or an event, putting all our passion, intelligence, insight, and talent into it, most normal people are reacting to the issue or candidate or event by saying to themselves, "Damn! I forgot to pick up the bread."

Saturday, March 31, 2007 in Blogs About Town, Writer's Workshop | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)