Career Report Card: Kathryn Bigelow

The writer-director Kathryn Bigelow has been getting some well-deserved love from the press for her new Iraq War film The Hurt Locker, the best new movie of the first half of 2009 that doesn't feature a balloon-powered flying house. That's a good thing, even if it is a shame that every piece ever written about Bigelow seems to bog down in the writer's confusion about what a woman is doing making movies about men--and women--who define themselves through action, often violent action. Bigelow is a master of flamboyant action, but she's also one of the few directors in Hollywood with a genuine eye, one that combines a fresh pop sensibility with a painter's gift for expressing emotion through visual beauty. Clearly a believer in proper planning, she's only managed to complete seven features since her solo directing debut, Near Dark, back in 1987. (She's also directed a couple of shorts, 1978's The Set-Up and 2007's Mission Zero, as well as episodes of Homicide, Wild Palms, and Karen Sisco.) Her body of work has been erratic, but it's seldom been boring.

THE LOVELESS (1982) Bigelow's little-seen debut was co-directed and co-written with Monty Montgomery, who would go on to become better-known as a producer and associate of David Lynch. (He played the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive.) Bigelow must have contributed mightily to the look of the film: set in a mythical period called "the '50s", and starring Willem Dafoe and the neo-rockabilly musician Robert Gordon as leather-clad bikers, it is what kind-hearted reviewers used to call "an exercise in style." It's all about the visual iconography of old Brando movies and Elvis pin-ups. But because Bigelow and Montgomery couldn't think of a reason to be doing it beyond their evident love of that style, it feels so remote, and so devoid of energy or a point, that it's like a homage to a homage, as if the filmmakers were imitating Scorpio Rising instead of The Wild One. Truth be told, they probably were. Grade: C-


NEAR DARK (1987) Five years later, Bigelow fully emerged with this incongruously beautiful splatter movie, a tale of white-trash vampires (co-written by the director and Eric Red) that adroitly straddles the line between the art house and the drive-in audience. At the time, much of the imagery here--the ageless vampires, some of whom appear to be middle-aged, some of them teenage, one a little boy, who function as a nuclear family; the black van with the windows blacked out through which they travel the country roads in search of prey; the big, bloody set piece in a roadhouse bar where Bill Paxton, as the most assertive of the vamps, laughs off having taken a shotgun blast to the chest; the father and mother figure (Lance Henriksen and Jenette Goldstein) reaching out to hold each other's hands as their flesh begins to smoke in the morning sun--had the force of genre material being revitalized with new blood and new rules. (The filmmakers also had the inspiration of making vampirism "curable", a rule-breaker that provides for the option of a possible happy ending for the young bloodsucker lovers, played by Jenny Wright and a young Adrian Pasdar.) For many people, this is the performance that Paxton will be best, or at least most fondly remembered for, while both Wright and Goldstein stake their claims to being two of the great underappreciated "where-are-they-now?" actresses of the '80s. Grade: A-


BLUE STEEL (1990) Bigelow's first big-studio movie is a filmed essay about sex and violence and gender roles dressed as an urban police thriller. In her blue uniform with her big gun, Jamie Lee Curtis is both a strong, likable protagonist and a walking fetish object as a rookie New York City cop who shoots an armed robber and inspires a witness to the shooting--Ron Silver as a Wall Street broker named Eugene--to get deep in touch with his inner Son of Sam. Much of the coincidence-heavy plot works only on the level of dream logic, if it works at all, and Silver goes way over the top and into the clouds as the stalker, who's meant to seem suave before his feral side emerges. (The funniest thing in the movie is the footage of Silver's character at work on the floor of the NYSE; he flails his arms and jumps about screaming, "Sell! Sell!" while the extras stare at him as if wondering if he's taken the brown acid.) But if you can fight off the urge to dismiss it all as just too silly, Bigelow's moody style and Curtis's star performance make for a hard combination to shake off. Grade: B+

POINT BREAK (1991): This surf-heist movie was probably the biggest hit of Bigelow's career, a fact that I suspect she herself can't help regarding with a crooked grin. It is the guilty-pleasurest of her movies, an overlong action fiesta that includes spectacular surfing and skydiving scenes and a remarkable extended chase-on-foot and that doesn't have a an active brain cell in its whole head. Keanu Reeves is the young FBI agent hero who infiltrates a chapter of the West Coast surf culture to find a crew of bank robbers who call themselves "the Ex-Presidents." (They storm in wielding guns and wearing rubber masks of Nixon, Carter, Reagan, etc.) It turns out that the leader of the gang--"Bodhi", short for Bodhisattva, played by Patrick Swayze with a mane of blond hair and the bright-eyed smile of a Cheech and Chong fan--is a gaseous adrenaline junkie who used the robberies to fund his intercontinental, thrill-seeking lifestyle. Reeves acquits himself well in his first action-star role; as Bodhi, Swayze throws himself whole-heartedly into the action stuff, especially the skydiving, but he also reels off his long-winded, comic-book-Nietzsche speeches without the requisite irony. The movie ends with Reeves, having tracked Bodhi to the beaches of Australia during a titanic storm, permitting him to ride out into the waters to certain death rather than subject him to the indignity of sticking him "in a cage," though by then there's no believable connection between the two men and it's hard to see why Reeves would feel that he owed this murderous, egomaniac goon any favors. Point Break is thrilling when nobody's talking, annoying when anyone is, and sheer torture when the shrill would-be starlet Lori Petty is onscreen, challenging you to tell the difference between her acting and nails on a chalkboard. At its worst, the movie feels as if Bodhi might have directed it. Grade: B




STRANGE DAYS (1995): This large-scale sci-fi fantasy, set in Los Angeles on the eve of the millennial New Year's celebration, is perhaps Bigelow's most ambitious movie and probably her most grandiose. Ralph Fiennes, ahaggy-haired and snakeskin-clad, plays an ex-cop named Lenny Nero who now deals in illegal discs that record sights, sounds, and physical sensations taken directly from the cerebral cortex. By playing them as if they were a DVD, you can experience the thrill of robbing a bank, or of being a teenage girl taking a shower--whatever you desire, as Pierce Patchett used to say. Lenny himself is a broken man who's hooked on his own product; long since dumped by the girlfriend (Juliette Lewis) he's still pathetically hooked on, he spends his time alone replaying the discs he made during their time together, reliving the happy moments of their relationship. This is a thrilling metaphor for depression's ability to prevent the sufferer from moving on and for the many forms that crippling addiction can take, and Fiennes gives himself over totally to Lenny's helpless romantic sadness; it's a bravely sodden performance. Angela Bassett has the tower of strength role as Lenny's best friend, who's heroically loyal to this broken-down mess yet smart enough to be angry with herself for being in love with him. Unfortunately, Strange Days loses track of its most intoxicating elements as it expands its canvas, trying for a vast picture of a society partying nonstop on its way to the verge of total breakdown. The last half gets ever messier and more hysterical, and Fiennes and Bassett's excellent performances have to be balanced against career-worst turns by Lewis and a fright-wigged Tom Sizemore. The movie all but challenges you to stay with it as it lurches towards its conclusion, but the viewer's memories of poor Lenny, huddled up in his squalid room compulsively replaying his life, and of Bassett extending him her motherly concern while trying to figure out why she still cares, die hard. Grade: B




THE WEIGHT OF WATER (2000): Bigelow's clearest departure from genre material is also her biggest misstep. Based on a novel by Anita Shreve, The Weight of Water--which premiered at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival but wasn't given a theatrical release until two years later--is set on the Isle of Shoales off the coast of New Hampshire. The movie cuts back and forth between two stories, one of them about the events leading up to a famous ax murder committed in 1873. In the other, contemporary story, a photographer (Catherine McCormack) who's obsessed with the murders and her husband, a famous blocked poet (Sean Penn), visit the island in the company of the poet's brother (Josh Lucas) and his new girlfriend (Elizabeth Hurley), who keeps flirting with the poet. The contemporary story is underwritten and underdramatized, and often resembles a glossy-looking version of one of those amateur films that beginners cook up when they get access to a camera, some friends, and a boat for the weekend. McCormack makes for a dull center of consciousness, while Penn, in a mustache, mumbles his lines as if he was sorry to discover that he remembered them and looks as if he were posing for a statue of Eugene O'Neill. (The liveliest performance in this section comes from Elizabeth Hurley, of all people; she looks as if she were enjoying playing a predatory groupie bitch.) The less lucky actors in the 1873 section--they include Sarah Polley, Katrin Cartlidge, Vinessa Shaw, and Ciarán Hinds--have to drag themselves over the wet, rocky seascape and hang out in uncomfortable-looking shacks while modeling their ugly-looking rags and unconvincing facial hair. The point of this section seems to be that forcing people to repress their natural sexual urges can lead to madness and violence, which would be an easier message to take if what the murderer hadn't been forced to repress was an inability, as a young girl, to keep her hands off her brother. The whole thing builds to a climax that intercuts the murders and their aftermath with McCormack, Penn and company trying to keep their boat afloat during a violent storm. It's the kind of inert "literary" movie where you appreciate the metaphorical connections instead of instinctively sensing them. Grade: C-



K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER (2002): This expensive summer epic, which in was, in a sense, Bigelow's first war picture, marked a major return to form for the director, though pitifully few people saw it. That's too bad, especially since it documents an actual but little-known act of heroic sacrifice from the Cold War era. The title refers to a nuclear submarine launched by the Russians in 1961. (It got its nickname before its first voyage: it was inspired by the number of men who were killed in the course of the vessel's construction.) When the sub's reactor springs a leak during its maiden voyage, the captain (Harrison Ford) and his second in command (Liam Neeson) are confronted with the problem of preventing an underwater meltdown, which means ordering men to subject themselves to lethal amounts of radiation to do the necessary repairs. Ford does a commendably solid job in the unlovable role of the brusque, careerist captain, and Peter Sarsgaard is superb as a nuclear technician who understands all too well what's being asked of him and has trouble convincing himself that the fate of the world above is worth it. Grade: A-

THE HURT LOCKER (2009): Bigelow's richest and most perfect movie is also the first great movie of the Iraq War, and it turns out that the secret in both cases was to focus on something that the director probably understands better than anything else: process. As in the old-school war flicks, Bigelow's soldiers don't talk about politics, and they don't make speeches; when not engaging in goofy small talk, their favorite topic of conversation is staying alive: how have they done it for this long, how can they keep doing it, and even, in one scene, whether or not the best way to make sure they can keep doing it would be to blow up the team leader. The movie is both big and, in narrative terms, scaled back, and the acting style of Jeremy Renner, who plays James, the free-style head of a bomb dismantling squad, is perfectly in tune with it.

Renner, who gave an amazing performance in the title role of the true-crime picture Dahmer, and who also appeared in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and 28 Weeks Later, is a stubby-looking little guy with the smile of someone who wants you to know that he's already enjoying the joke you plan on making at his expense as soon as he's out of hearing range. He seems to be one of those actors, like Gene Hackman, who by force of skill and talent, has willed himself to be the most charismatic person in the room. Part of the genius of his performance here is that he never overplays James's wildness. At work, he's careful and concentrated, with a full awareness that his next move could be his last; the problem is that he's a solo act, and his back-up team, Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), get antsy while standing on the sidelines, with the flow of communications shut off--James tends to discard his headset while trying to concentrate--and the implicit instructions to sit tight and have faith that their new friend has everything under control, at least until he disappears in a cloud of black smoke. The Hurt Locker sensitizes you to the insanity of war through the time-honored method of helping you understand how people do their best to survive it by acclimating themselves to it, at the risk of going a little crazy themselves. It's too bad that Bigelow's best movie had to get stuck with her worst title, but what are you gonna do? Grade: A

"My God, He Does Look Like Howdy Doody!"

So Norm Coleman has finally concluded, after eight tear-stained, emotional months, that the technique of trying to get appointed to elected office by threatening to hold your breath until you turn blue only works if your daddy can call in James Baker and a five-to-four majority of Supreme Court justices to tell Lady Justice to lift her skirt, bitch. I don't have a lot to add about Coleman's conduct in this, because sometime the jokes just write themselves. But I did want to record for posterity that, as some remember their first kiss or the birth of their child, I will always remember the moment when I learned that the membership of the United States Senate was about to include a man who once saved his job by co-writing a scurrilous comedy sketch about a deposed president while stoned. It feels darn good.

I hope that any leftover Republicans who've been thinking that this would be a good time to retire and spend the rest of their lives sitting on the lawn, bitching about crabgrass and restartng their hearts, but who don't want to have talk radio on their ass accusing them of having ducked out on their responsibility to stay and fight the hippies, will recognize the great opportunity they've just been handed: all they have to do is pitch a fit, "Why, I won't lower myself to be a part of any legislative body that would welcome such a fraggin' raggin' shaggin' blahblahblah etc., etc.", and storm out, then call the wife to tell her they'll be home for dinner and head straight for the next flight to Miami. They'd be the Fox News media hero of the week.

The Royal Treatment

Seriously: what do directors say to Ian McShane? "Listen, Sir Ian--oh, it's just Ian, is that right, somebody must've blinked, huh?--anyway, Ian, I hate to do this to you, I know you've been giving it your all for days now and that you were up all night deflowering virgins and rescuing orphans from burning buildings, but see, the thing is...there's a lot of Russian mob money tied up in this production, and word came down that if there's any chance that the audience is able to take their eyes off you at any point of the finished film, the next time I get to see my kids will be when their pictures are on the side of milk cartons..." I myself was late in discovering just how unworthy I am to share a solar system with Ian McShane. It didn't happen until I saw Sexy Beast, the kickass British gangster movie in which McShane, wearing an expression of weary dyspepsia and a topping of shiny black hair that looked as if a buzz saw couldn't get through it, played a crime lord known as "Mister black magic himself," Teddy Bass. (A tip for any aspiring writers of hard-boiled crime fiction: be sure and name one of your seedier characters "Teddy." McShane in Sexy Beast, Mickey Rourke in Body Heat, John Malkovich in Rounders--it always works.) Before then, I had a vague impression--based mostly on a few lame old movies (If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, The Last of Sheila) and several thousand commercials for the series Lovejoy during its run on A & E--that McShane was a lightweight fellow with a tendency to sort of twinkle at the camera. So seeing him as Teddy Bass, the kind of dark lord who makes mere career criminals shake a little in their shoes, who's never scarier when he's trying to be affable ("Gentlemen, you're all cunts!"), was a rude shock: either I'd been ill-informed and/or half-blind or he was a motherfucker of a late bloomer.

Even so, seeing McShane make a meal of such a flashy part didn't automatically spell it out that he'd be able to do what he did as Al Swearengen on Deadwood and what he's doing now as Silas on the NBC series Kings. Both characters dominate and define the society they've built around them, and both make their own laws (and both have had scenes in which they've knifed men to death in the sanctity of their offices); each role would have provided a fine chance for a public humiliation if they'd been handed to an actor who was unable to convincingly pass for the man whose vote always means more than that of anyone else in the room. In both shows, McShane supplies the necessary charisma and gravity with no visible effort, and so is able to spend his time riffing--sometimes delicately, sometimes broadly; almost always with irony, yet often with surprising depths of emotion--on the nature of power. In the early stages of Deadwood, Swearengen seemed to be the show's villain, the brutal primitive who simultaneously represented the beginnings of frontier captitalism and also what had to be erased before the west could be "civilized." I suspect there were any number of different moments in the show's run where different viewers came around to thinking of him as the hero, and something of a tragic hero at that: by the end, it was impossible to miss that Swearengen was fully complicit in ending his own way of life.

Silas, the theocratic ruler of a modern monarchy--and, in the context of King's set-up, an analogue of Saul, the Biblical mentor and rival of David--is both more instantly sympathetic and more reluctantly conflicted. The pilot episode ends with Silas's witnessing a miracle that he takes as a sign that the David figure is meant to replace him as the true king, and also with premonitions that David is connecting romantically with Silas's idealistic and beautiful daughter (Allison Miller). Silas isn't ready to give up either--"I love you so much," he tells his daughter, "that it embarrasses us both," though he also admits that he "preferred it" when his children were "small and manageable"--even though he himself frets over the possibility that he has lost God's favor.



At its most shallow, Kings is a lively soap opera with a lot of smart actors--including Susanna Thompson as Silas's queen, Dylan Baker as his power-broker brother-in-law (a role that takes full advantage of Baker's ability to make blandness seem sinister), and Eamonn Walker as the head of the church--to keep the sparks flying. (David is played by Christopher Egan, a pretty young Australian actor with the ability--a rare one, and in this show, an essential one--of radiating naive, pained decency without making you want to throw something at him.) It is often much better than that. As that line of Silas's about loving his daughter indicates, the writers sometimes slip into a slightly heightened, theatrical form of speech that fits the fantasy setting, and they've slipped McShane some gloriously florid speeches and turns of phrase. (I sometimes imagine professional Hollywood writers storing these bits of verbal filigree up while living in hope of sometimes having the chance to hand them off to an actor capable of knocking them out of the park.) McShane latches onto his grandest opportunities with a verve that can make you worry a little about the furniture, but he can also do amazing things with no words at all. The most recent episode ended with Silas's discovery that David had lied to him about his relationship with his daughter, which came just hours after Silas's decision that, in David, he had found someone he could actually trust. The tearful expression on McShane's face upon learning the truth was that of someone who'd been cast out of Eden.

The first--and, it turns out, the sole--season of Kings is set for DVD release at the end of September. Why wasn't the series picked up for renewal? Or, more to the point, why was it given no chance to earn audince that would have gotten it picked up for renewal? NBC originally positioned Kings as a hip show for people who don't watch a lot of network TV, a pitch that helped, albeit briefly, to make a phenomenon of Twin Peaks and a critics' darling of Homicide. When the show premiered in March, it did well enough to give the network something to build on, but after four weeks they shifted it to the network TV dumping ground that is now Saturday nights, and then they yanked it from the airwaves for a stretch. (It's now on Saturdays at 8 PM, with four hours left to go. Episodes can also be viewed on Hulu.) It's not the first time that something good on TV has failed to win the support of its network, of course, but Kings seems to be an interesting, special case because the Bible story connection seems to have spread confusion and misgivings throughout the network ant farm, creating pockets of resistance.

The show is the brainchild of the writer-producer Michael Green, who's credited with the idea of using the story of David as the framework for a modern serialized story. According to Green, he encountered nothing but encouragement from the NBC people he had to deal with while developing the series and shooting it, but the marketing department got cold feet over the Biblical angle. Kings was sold with a fancy-shmancy ad campaign built around mysterious images of Chris Egan in his military uniform and the butterfly logo that Silas has adopted for his regime. It seemed to suggest that the show was a sci-fi allegory along the lines of The Prisoner--not entirely misleading, but even if you didn't know anything about the show, you could all but smell the fear behind the campaign, which emanated from the marketers' determination to not even hint at what the story was about. The question is, were they afraid that the sophisticates would reject the show out of hand for fear of getting religion on them, or were they afraid that Bible belters would have a freak out because their mythology was being hijacked to provide diversion for sniggering blue-state decadents?

Probably a little of both. Kings isn't anywhere near as close to religious propaganda as moralistic sweet slop like Highway to Heaven or Joan of Arcadia; it uses the Bible story and characters as a jumping-off place to get to its own world. But it also deals with characters who believe in a God and in visions and moral instructions, and who struggle every day with trying to figure out just what these concepts have to do with their lives. The results can get thorny. (The doting father Silas is also a fanatic homophobe who threatens to disown his gay son, the crown prince, if the boy doesn't learn to deny his own heart. Silas himself has a secret "common" family--a second wife and a sick child--out in the woods. When he slips away to restore himself by spending time with them, his security detail codes his activities by reporting that the king is "in serenity.") Probably a lot of people in TV remember the headache they got over The Book of Daniel, and over Nothing Sacred more than a decade ago. But those were heavy, self-consciously "serious" attempts to address religious people with shows that took a solemn look at the issues underlying their faith--which means that they probably had the same degree of appeal to religious people, and to the rest of us, as a deadly John Sayles movie about the nobility of the working poor has to someone who just got off his second job and wants to be entertained. Kings is solid entertainment, and NBC might have built a bridge, and an audience, if they'd unapologetically informed secular viewers that they were mining the melodramatic appeal that Cecil B. DeMille and company found in the gospels while cooking up a study guide program that they could hustle to religious families who'd have loved to have had an excuse to watch this thing if only someone would help them pretend that it was good for them. Instead, the MBC marketing division pulled its head in, kept its mouth shut, and prayed that the storm would just pass without anyone hitting them. Nobody ever beat Goliath that way.

Sympathy for the Devil

Bernard Madoff's 150-year prison sentence puts a period at the end of Madoff's life, if not the case itself, or the fates of his victims. The government was out to make an example of Madoff, and in the wake of Wall Street's collapse, he made a good fit for the role of goat: there are plenty of politicians and CEOs whose decisions did deeper and more wide-spread damage, but Madoff was the one who was personally responsible for people losing--or rather, discovering at the worst possible moment that they'd lost--their life savings, and he was the one who could be seen on the TV news trying to navigate streets full of angry people hissing and spitting at him and shoving him. "Don't shove me," he says on one piece of tape, after someone has lunged at him, and you can see right there that he had no actual sense of just how much trouble he was in, or at least that he had no idea of how to spin it. A more cunning con man would have clutched his chest and crumpled to the sidewalk, just to see if a show of pitiable frailty would get him anything.

I'm not going to argue that Madoff deserved more leniency than he got (though I might be up for an argument about whether some of the Jeffrey Skillings and Bernard Ebbers of this world might actually have gotten off a little light. But ever since the Madoff story broke, I have been a little surprised at the level of venom that's been directed at the old guy's head. The judge who sentenced Madoff described his crimes as "extraordinarily evil", and he was just dotting the i; since the story broke last December, former investors, federal prosecutors, and assorted journalists had been describing Madoff in terms out of Paradise Lost. It wasn't long before the forces that shape conventional wisdom routinely described him as a sociopath or a psychopathic personality, usually with the implication that he had set out to deliberately ruin hundreds of lives. And early reports from the trial are making it sound as if he were insincere and, that dreaded word, "emotionless" in court, which is supposed to prove that he has a heart of stone, that it could also be taken as a description of a man in deep shock who's so ashamed to be where he is, in full view of people he'd wronged, that he's concentrating on trying to astrally project himself to some distant happy place.

Madoff could have been more co-operative with the prosecutors, who think he still has money stashed away someplace and is lying about how long his Ponzi scheme was going on. (Madoff says that he started living off his clients' funds, instead of investing them, in 1991; others suspect that he went off the reservation sometime in the 1980s, if not before then.) But it struck me as weird the first time I heard this little putz classified as a diabolical entity, and it still does. Something about it doesn't even fit his specific pattern of corruption. I'm not sure that Ponzi schemes attract evil schemers who view their victims as saps who deserve the worst that can happen to them. I think they're more likely to attract people like, well, me--that is, somebody who's been known to juggle the bills during a rough patch and take a deep breath and hope that the electric company just doesn't get around to depositing that check until the direct deposit comes into the account. I think that's probably true in the case of someone like Madoff, who, for at least a few years at the start there, was conducting a legitimate business and playing by the rules.

Part of what's striking about Madoff, and about the gap between what he is and the inflated version of him that the media has created so that he can stand in for all the financial sins of the past, what, thirty-something years, is that he's such a small-timer. Madoff kept his fraud going by not promising too much; he told investors that he wasn't going to make them insanely rich over night, but he assured them that, if they stuck with him, the modest gains on their returns would be a steady, uninterrupted flow. Something small but stable, one little thing in this world that one could depend upon. He also played hard to get, taking only those potential clients who were directed his way and scolding anyone who talked about his miraculous results out of school. Those who see Madoff as a determined snake will of course point out that this is a proven seduction technique. But I have a hunch that he really did sweat a little whenever a new sucker was brought on board. He must have lived in dread that the next person who became privy to his services might be the one to get suspicious and blow the doors open.

Why didn't anybody get suspicious? There's a telling moment in the Frontline documentary "The Madoff Affair" when Michael Bienes, an accountant who worked for Madoff for years, starting when they both in their early thirties, until 1992, and who continued to invest with him, is asked if he didn't ever notice that the steady returns Madoff achieved were statistically impossible. Yes, he says, it did seem funny to him after a while, and he and his wife were both troubled by it, but then his wife came up with an explanation that made sense to both of them, and after that they both accepted Madoff's results without question. And what was that golden answer? "God wanted us to have this" money. That's pretty much the American financial culture from Reagan to 2008 in a nutshell.

In the immortal words of Eric Burden: oh, lord, please don't let me be misunderstood. I'm not trying to suggest that the damage Madoff inflicted hasn't earned him a lifelong residence at the crowbar motel, and I am definitely not trying to say that his clients, who should have been more curious and skeptical, deserved to be ruined for having made the mistake of trusting him. But it's just a little surreal to see this hapless bastard denounced, again and again, in terms befitting a sadistic agent of chaos who set out to deliberately wreak havoc on society at large and his friends' lives. My gut feeling is that Madoff cared about his investors and that he probably first went wrong trying to dig himself out of a jam. He may have come up short and thought that, just this once, he could shift things around to cover the hole before he recovered, and nobody would be the wiser. And, if my guess is right, when he discovered that he was getting in deeper and deeper and nobody was really noticing, he must have gone a little nuts, but in a way that matched up all too well with the attitudes being taken by a lot of people were being celebrated in financial circles for their bold new thinking.

Madoff was a practitioner of a classic financial shell game, but in his operating as if the money wasn't real and that everything would just work out if he had confidence in the markets, he was a creature of his time and a spiritual brother to everyone from the junk bond kings and insider trading scumbags of the '80s to Dick Cheney proclaiming that "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" to Alan Greenspan spending his credibility on support for Bush's tax cuts, right up to Lehman Brothers' CEO Dick Fuld's serene confidence that some deus ex machina would appear in the nick of time to tug his drowning company to shore. Just as there's a part of him that I'm sure is truly repentant, I bet there's also a part that feels that things would have somehow turned out all right if only a bunch of other idiots hadn't wrecked the economy and caused his contented clients to start asking for some of their money. (I wonder how many of his clients died at some point between they began doing business with him and last December's revelations, and who went to their reward still grateful to him, still thinking he was a genius. Does he take some comfort from that?) Compared to a lot of people, he was more a symptom of what went wrong with American financial thinking in the last few decades than a cause of it, but he's the one who got caught doing something demonstrably illegal. As a wise man once said, it's what's not illegal that's often the real scandal.


While I'm on the subject of demonizing and forgiving public figures, Mark Sanford's weepy, dithering press conference last week inspired a number of thoughtful pieces calling for greater sympathy and understanding to be extended to the flailing sod; some of them made the point that, by painting a vivid picture of how much the object of his extramarital affections means to him, Sanford broke with a contemptible tradition among adulterous politicians, who have plastered their cast-off lovers with such endearing labels as "that woman" and cruelly thrown them to the curb. I respect the thinking behind such sentiments without being entirely convinced that Sanford's behavior wasn't both feckless and cruel to his wife. It reminded me a little of Steve Martin saying that, during the Clinton impeachment mess, he'd heard some angry bloviator on TV saying that Bill Clinton needed to apologize to Monica Lewinsky, and Martin's reaction was to think, "How do you know that he hasn't?" Contrary to the new media wisdom that nothing happens unless it's been broadcast, some communication between human beings needs to be done off-camera for it to mean anything at all, and there has to be a middle ground between churlishly treating a lover as if she had never meant anything to you other than a career obstacle and publicly improvising love odes to the path not taken in a way that can't help but cause pain to your spouse.

I didn't rush to say any of this last week because I had some faint, ill-informed sense that Sanford, however childish and deranged he might be, was still a reasonably decent human being who didn't need people further piling on as his life turned to ashes. That was before Sanford, who a decade ago both voted for Clinton's impeachment and approved of Bob Livingston's resignation on grounds of moral turpitude, dismissed calls for his resignation while comparing himself to King David and talking the scandal up as a learning experience from which he hopes to emerge as a better governor. The detached, self-celebratory quality of the speech matched up all too well with last week's press conference, where what looked to some like a man stumbling through a heartfelt, soul-searching moment looked to the rest of us like a goofball trying to get us to share in how thrilling it was to cast himself in an episode of Fantasy Island. (And if I may be allowed a private moment of my own here, the starry-eyed weasel did no favors for that select group for which I am the poster boy, that of fantastically unattractive men who very much enjoy the company of women and whose fervent desire to have more women friends are constantly running up against society's widespread belief that platonic friendship between women and even the homeliest men is an impossibility because of her unholy and uncontainable desires. If this Gomer Pyle can't keep his hands off a woman to whom he's offered religious counsel in an effort to try to help save her marriage, how much benefit of the doubt can the rest of us Neanderthals expect? I can also see this story being of little use to tempestuously hot Latin women who've been trying to convince the neighbors that it's safe to let them babysit.) He stands revealed as both a world-class hypocrite and a fantasist whose feet rarely touch earth. He was also, until a week ago, the latest model for what many Republicans said they'd most like for the new face of their party.

"I'm Sure He's Gonna Be Like Tupac, Y'know..."

Legend has it that Lenny Bruce had to play a gig soon after the assassination of President Kennedy. The audience was stiff with anticipatory anxiety: would Bruce risk the crowd's anger and disgust by making fun of the traumatic event, or would he go soft in the face of national tragedy, and which of those options would actually be worse? Bruce marched out onstage, looking pensive and upset about something, and then finally blurted out, "Boy...poor Vaughn Meader!" The Vaughn Meader of Billy Mays's sadly foreshortened life was "JaboOody Dubs", whose deceptively simple formula for redubbed Billy Mays videos, as seen at the JaboOody Dubs site or at YouTube, consistently struck me as just about the most inexplicably funny things on the web. I don't know what Mays thought of them, though I'd like to imagine that, as a proper pitchman, he was grateful for anything that made his face a little more familiar, and I can honestly say that I have a degree of affection for the fellow that I wouldn't have if these things did not exist. Rest in peace, and check the archives.

The Natural

My nephew Tanner, ladies and gentlemen!

Blood on the Dance Floor

To be honest, my first reaction to the news of Michael Jackson's death was a feeling of relief. Like a lot of people, I spent part of my life sort of feeling as if I'd grown up with Michael Jackson, and it was tiring to watch him spiral downward, from tabloid mess to tabloid mess, amid reports that he was on the verge, or past the verge, of utter financial ruin. I didn't realize how soothing it would be to get the word that I'd never hear about another catastrophe that he was involved in. I long ago lost any interest in him as an entertainer, and I thought I'd lost any stake I ever had in him as a person. But as it happens, my first sense of who Michael Jackson was came not through his music as a solo act or with the Jackson 5 but through the old Rankin/Bass animated TV series The Jackson 5ive, and maybe you never get over being a little in awe of someone who, as a kid, achieved the ultimate dream of many of us at that age: to become a cartoon.

I missed out on the Jackson 5's peak, but I do remember how exciting it was, not least for himself, when he grew to full, independent stature as a performer with his best album, the disco-era triumph Off the Wall. The follow-up album, Thriller, lacked Off the Wall's freshness and nonstop propulsion, but I remember getting it for my birthday about a week after it came out and thinking it was okay: it led off with a fierce dance track, had one great song ("Billie Jean"), a couple of pretty good songs, a cringe-worthy song with guest Paul McCartney, a blaring rock song with guest Eddie Van Halen, a very long title song that I never felt the urge to listen to again voluntarily but that I felt kindly towards in theory because I thought it was nice to hear Vincent Price's voice on the radio, and some filler. But it got to ride the wave created by Jackson's appearance on the TV special Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever, where he gave one of those once-in-a-lifetime displays of sheer, uncontainable talent that automatically elevates a celebrity's profile to the level of a star and an icon and that cut through the miasma of '80s culture like a switchblade.



I've heard a number of people allude to the scandals and assorted stunners that overtook Jackson's career in order to dismiss the idea that we should think of anything but "the talent." That's a reasonable enough sentiment, but it fails to take into account that Jackson's zenith of popularity in 1983 and 1984 couldn't all be attributed to his talent, either. A disciple of both Fred Astaire and Jackie Wilson coming into his own at the moment when hip hop culture was beginning to take shape, Jackson bridged generations of pop, and the scale of his success made people want to see him as more than a mere entertainer, as being symbolic of something. For a lot of people, including liberal rock critics looking for a sign of hope in the Reagan era, that something was the news that a black man was the most popular star in the world. But others--including the Reagans themselves, who welcomed him to the White House--must have taken stock of his old-school show business chops and all-embracing niceness and found him very reassuring.

Jackson was never under any obligation to make political statements or pick sides, but at some point, his stardom became so much a reflection of what was ugliest about the '80s that it was sort of distasteful. He was the greatest of all time and the biggest star in the world because he moved the most units. At the same time, he was, like Reagan, celebrated because of the supposedly magical quality of his seeming...not quite there. The inevitable Time magazine cover story was published, and it reads very strangely today, because it shows the magazine and various top celebrities and music-biz honchos falling over themselves to exalt Jackson for the same kind of Boo Radleyisms that, after declining sales and a few plastic surgery disasters, rendered Jackson a punch line and kryptonite to endorsement deal agents. "I wish we could all spend some time in his world," it quotes Steven Spielberg as saying of the "nice place Michael comes from," after mentioning that "During a break in a photo session... Spielberg saw Jackson chatting and swapping gestures with E.T."

Jackson's death marks a chance for people who miss being able to strain towards that level of hype to reach for it again; I turned on the TV a while ago just in time to hear Michael Eric Dyson assure a poleaxed Keith Olbermann that "you have to go back to Mozart" to find a comparable example of a "child prodigy" so thoroughly fulfilling his promise as an adult. Actually, you don't even have to reach beyond the Motown roster, since Stevie Wonder, who first signed with Berry Gordy when he was eleven, the same age as Michael when the Jackson 5 had their first hit, went on to build up a body of work that surely compares favorably with Michael's. In trying to understand Jackson, it's worth keeping in mind that, unlike both Mozart and Stevie, becoming a "child prodigy" wasn't his idea; he had his childhood shanghaied by his father's dreams of turning his offspring into a five-headed singing cash cow, and Michael didn't get a vote. You could almost say that, given how hard he worked--or to be more precise, how hard he was worked--from an early age, it's no wonder that he turned into a master performer, except that the same alchemy didn't work with his brothers. It's no wonder that, after the 1984 "Victory Tour" that he was bullied into doing with them, he spent the last twenty-five years of his life reportedly having next to nothing to do with his family either personally or professionally, except for his sister Janet, the only one of them in his league in terms of talent or popular success. Say what you like about blood being thicker than water, but talent has a way of seeking out its own level.


Everybody who cares has his own theory about when Jackson went off the rails, most of them having to do with pinpointing the moment when the scale of his weirdness definitively outstripped his ability to dazzle you with his star shine. But I think he bottomed out at the exact moment he was topping out: partly because the ugly, chaotic management of the Victory Tour, with its grab-what-you-can-while-he's-hot calculations, permanently damaged his image as someone who genuinely loved his fans, and partly because it left him with a benchmark in sales and cultural dominance that he could never repeat. His inability to repeat it seems to have done as much to drive him crazy as his fixation on buying a super-sized version of the childhood of which he'd been robbed.





Were the later albums any good? I'm sure they have their moments. But as early as Bad, I found myself unable to judge most of them independently of the three ring circus that now passed for his life, and not just because the life was distracting, but because he seemed to have trouble keeping them straight himself. It was Jackson's decision, for whatever reason, to slip stories to the tabloids that he was trying to buy the bones of the Elephant Man and that he slept in a hyperbaric chamber, even staging a photo of himself lying in state. Then he not only recorded a song called "Leave Me Alone" but commissioned a video for it that attacked the tabloids for running the stories he'd given them, complete with the ultimate heartbreaking image of poor Bubbles the Chimp in chains. This was half a dozen years before the first official charges of child molestation, never mind that promotional film showing a crowd of Asian kids experiencing what looked like a mass spasm of religious hysteria at the unveiling of a mile-high statue of Michael with a helicopter flying between its legs. But it was already clear that the delicate man-child's mind was not just strange but wallowing in a dark, creepy place where unjustified self-pity and rampaging megalomania were intertwined.

Time will sort all this out, of course; in a few years, maybe I can even stand to give an unbiased listen to Invincible, his last album, and the one that's best remembered for having inspired the weird scene where Michael, confused and hurt that he had failed, yet again, to come back and rack up numbers remotely comparable to those of Thriller, decided that the best way to save face was to publicly describe the head of his record company as "a devil" and accuse him of being part of a racist conspiracy to prevent Michael from making money for Sony Music. Maybe the many, many people who turned out for his last appearances and at his court hearings and outside his hotels and who are out in force mourning him tonight can still hear his music just fine, though I suspect that the vast majority of them are just driven to pay testament to the celebrity of a man who was always ready to tell you himself that he was the biggest star of his age. That would explain why the footage you always see of people reaching out to him, their faces wet with tears, as if he were a five foot-ten inch taco with the image of Jesus on it, don't look much like they're enjoying a musical performance, just as Jackson, for most of the last fifteen years of his career, minimum, really didn't look as if he were enjoying performing. At least Off the Wall, "Billie Jean", and the best stuff he did with his brothers are assured a place on the permanent shelf. In the meantime, his life and career have already inspired at least one important book, Margo Jefferson's slim, chewy On Michael Jackson. Be sure and read it if you haven't already. I'm guessing that Michael never did, which is a great pity.

New in Nerve

My interview with Jennifer Lynch

The Funniest Thing I've Seen Yet About Mark Sanford's Disappearance, Which Is Saying Something

Erick Erickson at RedState: "It is refreshing that Mark Sanford is secure enough in himself and the people of South Carolina that he does not view himself as an indispensable man." Does anybody know if Erick Erickson is looking for a personal assistant? Because somebody who happily endorses unexplained five-day disappearances with your cell phone turned off is somebody with whom I'd like to sign a lifetime contract.

update: Since Sanford's audition tape for a Douglas Sirk movie hit the airwaves this afternoon, Erickson has written one of those mea culpa posts that are really a lament that people who can see straight lack his superior character and fineness of spirit. "The left is linking to this post to laugh at it," he writes of the earlier piece. "What they are missing is that most of us tend to give people the benefit of the doubt..." I was moved to sign in at RedState so that I could comment on this, but the site kept spitting me out. So just for the sake of closure, I'll post what I wrote here:

I don't think the fascination with Sanford's Father's Day weekend disappearance, or the laughter at your praise of his behavior as "refreshing", had anything much to do with people failing to give anyone "the benefit of the doubt." That is, I don't think there was any mass rush to judgment to conclude that he'd been up to something shady. I think, rather, that both reactions were entirely about the perception among 95% of the population, whatever their political beliefs, that his behavior was that of an unstable fruitcake who shouldn't be entrusted to take care of a Chia Pet, let alone run a state. Now that everything's out in the open, my guess is that, after his press conference, the number of people who think that he's a basket case with an emotional age of thirteen has actually leveled out at about 97%. I suspect that the percentage that threw in the towel on him is higher than 2 %, but he probably did win over some Nora Roberts readers.

On the other hand, if you're looking for a reason to do some soul-searching, you did say in your post that the "facts" were that Sanford's wife and staff really did know where he was the whole time, even though they kept publicly insisting that, no, they didn't, so you basically accused his family and staff of being bare-faced liars. In other words, you had to decide to give someone the benefit of the doubt, and you chose to declare your trust in the fruitcake while slandering his wife and employees. You could have easily praised the nut without accusing innocent people of being dishonest.

More Good Times, Good Times

Some people remember Richard Nixon as a cancerous mole on the face of American presidential history, others think of him as a great statesman cruelly made to bear the onus of crimes committed by some of his less well-chosen associates and aides, but I like the think of him as the gift that keeps on giving. The general consensus seems to be that the big news culled from yesterday's release of a new raft of documents from the Nixon Presidential Library relates to a conversation Nixon had with Charles Colson after the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade. After expressing concern that legalizing abortion will make society more permissive, Nixon says that he recognizes that "there are times when an abortion is necessary," such as "when you have a black and a white.” (He then adds that abortion would also be excusable in the case of rape, indicating that he regarded interracial sex and rape to be about on the same moral plane, anticipating more recent arguments that permitting gay marriage would inevitably lead to people fucking goats in the street.)

The tapes, which have been held back from release until recent technological developments made it possible to clean the audio up sufficiently to determine that that contained no secrets vital to national security, also include a conversation in which our 37th president commiserated with Billy Graham, who was concerned about Jewish groups who opposed "efforts to promote evangelical Christianity." Nixon agreed with Graham that, by opening their big Jewish yaps, these trouble-makers would be responsible for any rise in the level of anti-Semitic violence in the land. "“It may be they have a death wish," says Nixon, whose career already showed signs that he knew a little something about death wishes. "You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.” Oswald Mosley couldn't have said it better. I'm sure that Monica Crowley will soon be submitting an op-ed piece to the Times explaining how these examples of frank speech about the tough issues remind us yet again why Nixon was such a great example to all of us both morally and intellectually. And if she doesn't have time to write such a piece, she can find one written by somebody else and copy it.

Street Scene

For the past week and a half, I've refrained from writing anything about the major international story of the day, the reaction to the Iran non-election, for lack of anything interesting or informed to say about it. (Hardened bloggers are free to point to this reluctance on my part as proof that I need a different hobby.) President Obama, who is better with words and, I sure do hope, is better informed than myself, has been fairly reticent on the subject himself, at least compared with how his predecessor would have handled the situation, which would likely have inspired a full steady blast of his unique verbal combination of Patton and Quick Draw McGraw. At his press conference yesterday, Obama got a little tougher in his language while insisting that his language hadn't really changed, thus letting his disgust with the Mullah mafia while underlining his essential statement about where the U.S. stands in direct relation to events in Iran: we're outta this. Some have suggested that Obama felt obliged to make a public display of anger at the repression because of John McCain, who, in a selfless gesture designed to show why a democratic electorate can be trusted to make the right choice, has been making the rounds banging pots and pans and weighing in on the situation, trying to set an example for the president to follow. John McCain can always be trusted to offer an interesting and informed take on world events, assuming that your idea of an interesting and informed journal of opinion on geopolitical affairs is Sgt. Rock.

The great advantage of (relatively) soft-pedaling the official U.S. government rhetoric against Iran is that it undercuts the best tactic that the Iranian clerics have had for the past thirty years in terms of protecting themselves from the anger of their own people: i.e., making it all about us. The prime motive for the drawing-out of the 1979 hostage situation was to generate rage at America, which could provide both a justification for the revolutionary government and a smokescreen to keep people's minds off that government's failings. It might have seemed inhuman to suggest a different approach at the time, but by taking the hostage situation as a cataclysmic event that drove everything else in the world off the front page, both the media and the Carter administration managed to throw gas on the fire, giving the clerics an excuse to want to see things drag on for more than a year. Carter was followed by Reagan, whose master plan to secretly swap arms for hostages might have been concocted by Kenneth the Page, arriving in Tehran with his cardboard suitcase and offering the Ayatollah one of his best chewin' straws. Considering the kind of minds we're dealing with, it's no credit to several U.S. presidential administrations that these guys have done so consistently well in winning the spin wars. Through no plan of their own, they even "won", sort of, the brutal, pointless, and prolonged Iran-Iraq war, which strengthened the U.S. relationship with Saddam Hussein up until the morning we all woke up in the summer of 1990 to discover that he was the devil, and left us with that great photo of Donald Rumsfeld practically tonguing the dictator's bicuspids. Good times, good times...

In his recent speech on the Middle East, Obama became, I believe, the first American president to acknowledge the CIA's role in restoring the Shah to his peacock throne after he was ousted in the 1950s. This is the sort of thing that would have made Jeanne Kirkpatrick swoon and label as a despicable example of "blaming America first." It's also honest, which is how you build trust, which is how you start building or repairing a relationship. Part of the irony of the Western reaction to the mess in Iran has been that many people have declared themselves to be in sympathy with the opposition party of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, which doesn't exactly deserve a lot on its merits. This is a contest to see who gets to be the mouthpiece of a loathsome, reactionary regime, and it's a sick joke that only those who would be moderately acceptable to the regime get to go far enough in the campaign to ultimately have the election stolen from them. But one of the major differences between Mousavi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is that the former has indicated a willingness to move away from America-bashing, and the protests have provided evidence that there's an appetite for that among the people of Iran, who may be reacting to Obama's outstretched hand. It will come as a shock to many neo-cons that people are more receptive to foreign leaders who express regret for past mistakes than to those who stick their names in a pot with two asshole regimes they feel antagonistic towards and label the whole thing the Axis of Evil. But then, unless Megan McArdle is doing a parody, we're talking about people who'll freely admit to having been shocked to discover that people don't spill over with love and gratitude towards people who blow up their houses and drag members of their family off to the torture chamber in the middle of the night.

From the point of view of the Iranian government, the problem with Obama's measured approach is that they want to be able to say that this is all about America. It's a problem they have in common with the McCains and other jingo American blowhards who can't figure out what foreign countries are supposed to be for except to be compared with us and found lacking. (They don't even have to be evil; we'll settle for them being French.) Some people just can't figure out how to function, let alone keep health care and income inequality off the table, without an enemy, and it might not entirely be a coincidence that right-wingers started escalating their rhetoric against their countrymen of a different political stripe, pulling out words like "treason" and accusing a sitting president of murder and drug-dealing, after the Soviet Union went and died on them and they decided that there was just too much business tied up in China for them to get too bent out of shape over Tiananmen Square. (That was in 1979, ten years after the Iranian revolution, and a great year all around for clarifying priorities. That year, it was liberals screaming at a Republican president to stand up to Iran, after the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie. The fact is that seeing a famous author with leftish views who'd written a "blasphemous" novel --as well as a chatty, noncritical travel book about Nicaragua under the Sandinistas--having a price put on his head just made many Western conservatives feel rather wistful.) As for clear-cut examples of a world leader being singled out and reviled as Satan incarnate and responding by pledging to change his ways, the best one I can think of is Muammar al-Gaddafi. But his visit from Jacob Marley came twenty years after Ronald Reagan had declared him an untenable threat to world stability and maybe fifteen years after everyone had, well, forgotten that the untenable threat was still there. I suspect that his pledge of fealty to George W. Bush might have been motivated by loneliness and a curiosity to be reminded which U.S. papers spelled his name with a "G", a "Q", or a "K."

So, in a nutshell, I think that the more quietly America sends the Iranian protesters a thumb's up, the better. The illegitmacy of the election should be noted, the protests encouraged, but the "Sez you!" tone that Senator McCain picked up in the shower room of one of our finest naval academy should be sacrificed on the grounds that it is only helpful to the enemy. And whatever credit we might want to give to our current president for reaching out to the people of the Middle East, or to his predecessor for having inspired the news footage from Florida in 2000 that may have helped show them that the losing side in an election can still be feisty, the credit for what's going on in Iran now really belongs to the people on the streets of Tehran. What they're going to get out of it is still far more unclear to me than some of the folks on the cable news shows claim that it is. I don't envision the Iranian government falling over at the touch the way some of the Eastern bloc governments did in 1989, but the clerics also have a problem that the Chinese government didn't have that year: when you've spent thirty years building a theocratic political culture on the basis of a glorification of "martyrdom", celebrating the moral purity of those who've sacrificed their lives to save the state from American and Iraqi monsters, it's hard to justify sending out your own soldiers with orders to start blasting. Stay tuned.

The Children's Glower: II

Up until a few weeks ago, I'd never heard of Jon and Kate Gosselin, and I might not have heard of them before a couple of days ago if I hadn't happened to catch the right episode of Best Week Ever, the one broadcast after Jon was seen in the tabloids cavorting with young lovelies. It turned out that Jon and Kate have eight little kids, and for the past few years they've been the stars of a reality series about, I guess, wanting a camera crew in your living room because your eight kids don't make enough noise. The series now airs on TLC, whose name used to stand for "The Learning Channel", though I'll bet that it's now supposed to just be one of those random collections of initials, like KFC. Last night's episode included commercials for another show that seemed to be about a family of bakers. Mom was on the warpath because she didn't want her boys making dirty cakes, so the guys were trying to make one behind her back to provide to a bachelorette party.

You might have noticed a confession that I cuningly slipped into the tail section of the previous paragraph. Yes, I watched last night's loudly hyped episode of the Jon and Kate show. It was the first episode I've ever seen and will almost certainly be the last, and I'll bet I'm not the only one. The commercials made it clear that something momentous was going to happen, and unless Jon was going to reveal that he was O. J. Simpson's ex-wife's real killer or something, it was hard to figure what it could be except that the marriage was at death's door. I don't know these people, I'd never heard of them before I received word, from Paul F. Tompkins no less, that their marriage was in trouble, and yet...I guess I felt that I needed closure. Jon and Kate made it clear where they were going with this in on-screen interviews, filmed separately, which were laid off piecemeal throughout the episode, which had once been entirely about how Jon and Kate got some cool little outdoor playhouses delivered to get their kids outside where they'd stop tripping over the camera crew. This isn't the kind of thing that I would normally find makes for engrossing television, and it didn't help that we were all gathered around the set, from coast to coast, to wait for the other shoe to drop. I started flipping back and forth between the Gosselins and Larry King's rotating panel of experts on the madness in Iran. I don't know how much Joe Klein gets paid, but if I were cutting him checks on the theory that he has some degree of mastery of the English language, I'd be a little irked if I turned on CNN and caught him describing Iran as "very unique."

Watching Kate talk about her concern that her children might be affected by the perception that their parents' marriage had "failed", and counting the number of times that Jon, who looked to be in a stupor, insisted that "I don't hate Kate"--surely a touching sentiment for the woman you've taken as your life partner to get to hear you say over and over on national television, as if you were trying to convince yourself that you meant it--I flashed back on something Louis Menand wrote a dozen years ago about Larry Flynt and Hustler. That magazine had its breakthrough success when it got ahold of some four-year-old candid snapshots of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sunbathing nude and printed them. Adding to the publicity windfall was the news that some pol had been caught buying a copy of the magazine and had been shame-faced about it. In typical fashion, Flynt saw this as an example of straight-laced repression or hypocrisy to be mocked, but as Menand pointed out, it was in fact neither. Neurotic repressiveness is when you get bent out of shape over something natural and normal, like when Lynne Cheney hears that someone has acknowledged the fact that her daughter is gay and reacts as if a smear has been perpetrated. Hypocrisy is when someone like Newt Gingrich fakes a swoon because Bill Clinton committed adultery even as Gingrich himself is playing around with his future third wife while loading wife number two into the ejector seat. But publicly disseminating nude photos of a woman who didn't knowingly pose for them and didn't get paid for them is a truly shameful act. It may not be genocide, but it is shameful, and looking at them, knowing what they are, is shameful too. But if the nude woman is Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, then the temptation to yield to curiosity is very great indeed. That makes the pol's act understandable, but it's still shameful, and his being ashamed to have done it is the closest thing there is in this story to a grace note.

Is it shameful to get caught up in a circus like l'affaire Gosselin and tune in to their show just to see them announce that their relationship is dust? I'm not sure. The Gosselins do get paid for this, and if I had eight mouths to feed, I might be willing to make a deal with any version of the devil that showed up on my doorstep, though for the sake of simple dignity, I might try to hold out for A & E, or at least the Biography Channel. I feel kind of bad about it myself, though I'm telling myself that I'd deserve to feel worse if I were someone--and I suspect that they're out there--who already knew who Jon and Kate were before the story broke in the tabloids, and who had seem them playing the happy, much-blessed couple on TV, and who had hung in there watching the show faithfully in wait for the moment when it would all come crashing down and they'd get to see just how utterly imperfect the family actually was, all exposed on national television. Anybody who signs up for the new "Make my life The Truman Show!" game--and how stupid can David Denby feel now, all these years after he wrote that The Truman Show was totally implausible, because who could believe that millions of viewers would tune in to watch such boring people?--has to be aware of the possibility that they're going to wind up looking like an ass, or worse, and for all the world to see. Of course, the ones who have no say in any of this, who are the real reason this ball got rolling, and the ones who stand to be most screwed up by it all, are the kids. But how do you single that part out without sounding like Helen Lovejoy?

By pure coincidence, yesterday I also happened to catch a documentary, My Kid Could Paint That, about another family-friendly tabloid story gone wrong that I missed: that of Maria Olmstead, the daughter of an amateur "photo-realist painter", who at the age of four started turning out canvasses that were subsequently sold, for five-figure prices, as the work of a prodigy in abstract art. Then, in a not unpredictable turn of events, a 60 Minutes report suggested that, on at least some of the many paintings Maria turned out in a short period of time, she may have only assisted her daddy, or he may have put the finishing touches on her doodles that made them resemble works by Pollack, Dali, and Matisse. The director, Amir Bar-Lev, is very thoughtful and conscientious about his responsibilities to all the parties. You can tell because he includes footage of him wrestling with his soul, wondering if he's playing "gotcha!" It must be said that Maria's work does seem to take some inspiration from the work of painters she doesn't seem to be familiar with and, in fact, isn't supposed to be familiar with. (The idea among her fans is that she's a natural, "inspired" artist; the idea among others, among them the professional chowderhead John Stossel and, in one revealing, bitter speech, her own dad, is that her work reveals all of non-representative "modern" painting as a fraud to its very core. It turns out that there are a lot of people still walking around carrying attitudes about Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism that I thought went out "I Like Ike" buttons.)

The mystery element to this story--the question of whether or not Maria does her own work all by herself--is ultimately less resonant to me than the news that some people are silly enough to spend thousands of dollars on a kid's refrigerator art just to make a witless point about modern art, or because it looks like an imitation Jackson Pollack. But it's the family dynamic that comes across as truly, deeply creepy. Maria's actual pleasure in painting is easy to believe in. Even easier to believe in is Dad's pleasure in the money and the media attention and the limo they take to her big show, none of which seem to mean anything to Maria, and all of which make Mom visibly uneasy. The movie's barely acknowledged running joke is that every time Maria's "career" hits a peak or runs into trouble, Mom tells the camera that it was fun for Maria for a while but she's really glad that it's over now; meanwhile, Dad is out back sweating over the bicycle pump, trying like hell to get the hype fully inflated again. As more and more of us start living out lives on camera and more and more stage mothers (and daddies) are doing their managing onscreen, we might need a new word for kids who were going along fine, minding their own business, not bothering anyone and without a care in the world, when suddenly--bam!--their parents yanked them into the spotlight and left them there to fend for themselves. "Bristol", maybe: "Man, I never thought he'd wind up in rehab. He was always such a together dude until his father got him them their TV deal, and since then, his life's been all Bristoled up."

Everyone's a Critic

Last Friday marked what would have been the 90th birthday of Pauline Kael, and I would be remiss if I didn't make some passing mention of the event. (Kael died in 2001; for some reason, I always remember that it was a week and a day before 9/11.) Kael was one of the five people to whom I've ever written fan letters, a selection process that meant weighing how much I'd regret it if I never told them how much I liked their work versus how devastating it would be if they sent the letter back with the spelling corrected. Kael was the one I sweated over the longest, and I finally decided that if Woody Allen was man enough to get out of bed again after her review of Stardust Memories, I could suck it up and take my chances. She actually sent me a very nice note in response, as did Robert Christgau and Janet Malcolm to the fan letters I sent them. (Carol Lay sent me a bizarre note, saying that she felt obligated to acknowledge me since I'd shown such rare, keen insight into the forces that shaped her comic book series Good Girls, then urging me not to pass her return address on to anyone. It just seemed strange, given that identify theft was not then the hot-button problem that it is today, and since there was not yet a eBay where I could have raffled her personal information off the highest bidder. I'm still waiting for Elvis Mitchell to get back to me.)

Kael remains a genuinely controversial figure, to such a degree that, almost eight years after she died and eighteen years after her retirement, there are those who would use her as an all-purpose boogeyman to invoke against whatever pisses them off about current movies. Since she was thoroughly unpredictable, an argument can be made, by those with nothing better to do, sticking her with the blame for literally anything. A few years ago, after I made cruel sport of a highly regarded writer-director in a chat room and was called out by a fan who informed that, although it was true that Kael had never reviewed any of the director's later work and had not lived to see the movie he had just released, my friend knew perfectly well that she would have hated it all, and knew that I had used my own necromantic powers divine this information myself, and so was only copying what she herself would have said if she'd ever said it. Amusingly, that same day, a veteran film writer used his own blog to air his theory that the new film by the director in question was getting rave reviews that it didn't deserve and that he suspected this was the work of--yes, the late Pauline Kael, who not only would have loved the movie if she'd lived to see it, but had infected others yet living, and with access to the Internet and to press space, with her misguided opinion.

Attacks on Kael--and "attacks" is the word, since measured, balanced criticism of her work tends to be, even at this late, thin on the ground--invariably accuse her of hyperbole, fannish, sloppy prose, anti-intellectualism, giddy hysteria, and a shameful lack of respect for movies that taste like spinach. I have my own theory that longtime Newsweek reviewer David Ansen said everything that needs to be said by way of explaining the strong negative feelings she aroused in others when he told a reporter that she was the only critic around who could make you "feel like an asshole" for disagreeing with her. (I used to read Ansen every week along with the rest of my mom's subscription copy of Newsweek for years, and as God is my witness, that's the only thing he ever wrote or said that I can remember.) In one of her first big attention-getting pieces, "Circles and Squares", Kael made Andrew Sarris look like an asshole, and then she doesn't seem to have ever mentioned him again in print--though she praised some of his work in interviews--while Sarris never let it go; I started getting The Village Voice while Kael was on sabbatical from her regular perch at The New Yorker, and I'd read a fair number of Sarris's frothing, half-crazed denunciations of her, including a cover piece that I remember as having been no more than a third the length of Gravity's Rainbow, before Kael returned to work and I finally got to see what he was denouncing. You didn't have to be in the film world long to understand that the name had power. When Michael Moore splashed down with Roger & Me, the movie had racked up a phenomenal number of raves before Harlan Jacobsen, then the editor of Film Comment, did a cover piece that laid out the factual inaccuracies and Moore's tinkering with the sequence of events. (It was tied to an interview in which Jacobsen, insisting that he still admired the film, offered Moore a chance to explain his technique and got an early dose of Moore's patented "Why do you so love our capitalist oppressors that you're trying to destroy me, the only man brave enough to speak truth to power?" routine. Daring to question Michael Moore reportedly cost Jacobsen his job.) Kael's review of Roger & Me may be as unmemorable as anything she ever wrote: she called the movie "shallow and facetious" and basically said, go read Film Comment. But when Moore felt like inviting crowds to cheer him for having been too bold and hip for the senile movie critics, he didn't settle for saying, "Did you see what Pauline Kael said Harlan Jacobsen wrote about me?"

Kael never went with the flow; she could build press excitement around a movie, and even inspire colleagues to take another look at a movie they'd written off (like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the singular masterpiece that many were quick to write off as an inert blur with a botched soundtrack), but she couldn't make hits, and she couldn't prevent movies she despised, from The Exorcist to Roger & Me itself, from becoming cultural touchstones. She had a heroic indifference to advertising and the zeitgeist and soft feelings towards people who've worked hard on some piece of shit that is on your side politically. She took every movie on its own terms and judged it accordingly--which meant that the more seriously it took itself and the grander its claims to be a work of art, the more harshly she was apt to judge it if it failed. The technical term for this is sanity, but it's the exact opposite of how most people working as critics actually think, if "thinking" is the right term.

The first book of Kael's that I ever read was When the Lights Go Down, collecting her writing for The New Yorker from late 1975 through 1979, and I first realized how important she was going to be to me while reading her review of Carrie, specifically the line, "Scary-and-funny must be the greatest combination for popular entertainment; anything-and-funny is, of course, great--even funny-and-funny." It doesn't look like much in the context of her full body of work, but at the time I was trying to figure out what art was for, and looking for clues in the worst places imaginable. The idea that comedy could aim to be funny, without the added lead weight of melodrama where Shirley MacLaine attempts suicide and Jack Lemmon stands up and Becomes a Man, and be "great", was completely out of step with all the signals I'd received from other sources, and it was bracing to have it pitched into my lap with the "No duh!" of that "of course." It made me feel the way that Richard Pryor said that reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X made him feel: in a nutshell, not crazy, after all.

An important clarifying phrase in that passage is "popular entertainment." Kael made her name promoting the best that pop movies had to offer, from the early talkies and vehicles for the Marx brothers and Astaire and Rogers to the exhilaration and audacity of the mixed tones of The Manchurian Candidate and Bonnie & Clyde. In an interview from the mid-90s with Ray Sawhill--it's the last one included in the University Press of Mississippi book Conversations with Pauline Kael--Kael said that her ideal hope for movies was to see work "with a vision." (Sawhill: "A vision that at the same time doesn't deny the popular aspect?" Kael: "That's right.") But movies weren't Kael's whole life. They weren't always even the central ingredient in her cultural diet. One thing I learned early on while out in the sticks dying of boredom is that the best way to educate yourself is to start looking for writers who seem to know something and start mining their collected works for the stuff they they think is worth calling attention to other people, even if they only mention it in passing. Kael is one of a number of writers I used early in life to compile reading lists, and the list of works and artists, apart from movies, that she helped turn me onto--writers and musicians and painters and photographers and what have you--is dizzying. I suspect that a number of the reviewers who'll never understand how she could have been blind to the greatness of so many splendid films don't know any other field half as well as they know movies, and there's probably a connection there. If it's part of your job description to think that American Beauty is a work of art, it probably helps if you don't know who Strindberg was.

Kael's great parting gift to the world to leave behind a record of her enthusiasms, which will inevitably result in the creation of new work, because it will continue to inspire people to want to experience creative work as widely and with as tough a mind and as open a heart as she did. Someone that tough-minded doesn't keep subjecting herself to Neil Simon movies over and over just because William Shawn is paying for the tickets; she had to see if something was there, and if there wasn't, she was genuinely curious about why other people thought there was. Her valedictory collection, For Keeps, the big career anthology that she put together on the theory that the full collections weren't going to stay in print forever, deliberately favors raves over put-downs, which says something about what shape she hoped her lasting impact would take. I can appreciate that, but I'd hate to live without access to her slam jobs, from "Circles and Squares" to the bite-sized eviscerations of disaster movies, The Sting, and The Day of the Dolphin that pepper my desert-island choice of all her books, Reeling, which just happens to cover a period (1972-1975) when things were popping at the movies and Kael's writing was a sustained aria of gratitude--a gratitude mixed with anger and even bitterness-- over having a place where she could weigh in on all of it.

Dim bulbs who write cultural coverage, and even dimmer bulbs who edit it, sometimes stoop to arguing that it's the critic's job to inspire interest and enthusiasm for the scene through the judicious use of hype and excess kindliness. Of course, these are the people who are turning life into a worn-out dishrag. Paradoxically, Kael inspired genuine interest and enthusiasm, not just with what Wilfrid Sheed, in reference to her legendary/notorious review of Last Tango in Paris, called her "liberating yells", but also by treating mediocrity as the lethal, poisonous scourge that it is. Of all the many established writers who have been tagged as her disciples, none of them has stayed as fierce in following her example at not letting ambitious clods and well-meaning dolts off with an encouragingly worded warning, except maybe for Armond White, and he's a fruitcake. (I say this with love.) In his terrific book Sontag & Kael, Craig Seligman suggested that Kael's reputation might settle in as one of our great eccentric, comic writer--which is fine, except that it smacks faintly of an attempt to reach out to those who've rejected her on the basis of her actual critical opinions by giving them the option of seeing them as sort of peripheral to her achievement, just as "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" can be enjoyed and howled over by people who don't think of Mark Twain as a serious literary critic. I've already ridiculed the idea that anyone could claim to know this woman's mind on anything, but here I'll make an exception and speculate that she'd have appreciated the thought. And then she'd have said, "Balls!"

On a side note, I was sad as shit to see the "Closed Forever" sign up at Newcritics, which for two and a half years served as a home away from home for such Internet folk as Tom Watson, Lance Mannion, M. A. Peel, Rick Perlstein, Maud Newton, Dennis Perrin, and other worthies. All of them can still be found elsewhere, but it was nice to be able to have a place where you might spy any one of them, and I was disheartened by the announcement that the archives will only stay "up for a bit." In his farewell address, Watson writes that "I’d gained valuable insight into online group dynamics, and ... I saw that conversation itself as a cause worth supporting. I still think it is - but it’s also clear that it will happen elsewhere. In some ways, the glory days of personal and immediate blogging have passed newcritics by; but in another sense, it’s really just part of a continued evolution in social media. The conversations I’m having on Facebook and Twitter with some of the very same people who used to hang out at newcritics are every bit as good as the ones we had at this particular web address." Could the "glory days of personal and immediate blogging" really already be a thing of the past, now that I'm just starting to get the hang of it myself? That does sound about right, but thought I'm personally as devoted to Facebook and Twitter as any shut-in, it would be a stretch to say that any exchange I've ever had via either of them counts as a "conversation", more like a hasty high-five passed between ships in the ether. It's too bad that Kael--who in the book-length final interview with Francis Davis that was published as Afterglow mentioned that these new shiny steel disc things with movies on 'em sounded interesting, but she could never remember the exact initials--was not fated to be a blogger. Ditto Henry Fairlie, about more later.