Making a Pretty Solid Case for Vampires to Go on Disability

Up until this past spring, I used to supplement my income by working part time for a cruel, wicked ogre with offices on West 19th Street. It was my job to plow through stacks of manuscripts submitted by would-be authors responding to my employer's Faustian offer to examine those deemed worthy of publication and then go lie down in Oprah's driveway. Every week, a few hopefuls would be invited to swing by the office and be ushered, trembling and hopeful, into the boss's lair. Later, their bones would be gathered into a biodegradable bag and placed out on the sidewalk at dusk. Every so often, James or Valerie Best would stop by and make the job bearable by helping to drown out the pitiable screams of the damned. I wasn't always there when they arrived, which was clearly my loss. The hot office assistant, whose cries of "Thank Christ!" whenever one of them arrived turned out to be not entirely inspired by her relief that I might now shut the fuck up, used to wax starry-eyed about the time that Valerie dropped by to re-enact the previous evening's broadcast of the 2008 Olympic swim meet for her. It reminded me of listening to aging theatergoers reminiscing about seeing Marlon Brando in Truckline Cafe.

Having been denied the Best's more recent material since the boss caught me doing the crossword in her subscription copy of TV Guide and turned the hounds on me, I was overjoyed to discover the online comedy site American Nobody, which has recently launched a regular "debate club" feature starring James and Valerie. In the inaugural installment, which appeared on "Episode 13", they discussed the inner workings of the judging panel on So You Think You Can Dance; an instant classic, it only made me salivate at the prospect of someday hearing them discuss something that I'd heard of before. The latest, on Twilight, is almost as good, even though James comes dangerously close at one point to disrespecting Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an activity that would of course render him unfit to be a part of human society. I recommend checking this stuff out, both for the entertainment value of the free-flowing exchange of ideas and for the example they provide to attempted couples everywhere. Any two people who can happily draw so much inspiration from listening to each other's preposterous drivel have clearly figured out How It Works.

Hugh Millais

One of the side effects of seeing too many movies is that you can end up feeling a mysteriously strong attachment to certain people who you not only never met, but whose earthly existence would still be unknown to you if they hadn't happened to have performed just the right services once on just the right film set. So it was, for me, with Hugh Millais, who was in his early forties when he made his acting debut, in Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, as Dog Butler, the professional killer who works for a big mining company, trudging through the snowy woods to dispatch people who have proven inconvenient to the men in a distant boardroom. He was one of those people who Altman noticed somewhere--in his case, a bar--and invited to join the cast of whatever movie he was working on, out of some instinct that he had something to bring to the party. With Millais, the real trick would have been to step into whatever room where he was part of the crowd and not notice him; he stood six foot seven and, in the movie, arrives in town toting an elephant gun and wearing a walrus mustache and a coat that looks as if he'd skinned a yeti. Talking to Dick Cavett in 1971, Altman said of Millais that he was "a sort of a con man anyway, so he's been acting all his life."

The movie stars Warren Beatty as McCabe, a would-be entrepreneur whose reputation is that of someone who'd once committed a celebrated murder. The mining company wants to buy the town that McCabe has built, and McCabe is eager to sell, but not being as wily a capitalist as he thinks, he misplays his hand and the company's representatives stomp off in disgust and send in Butler and his team--a silent, glowering cipher and a soft-faced blond punk who looks like an evil fetus. When McCabe goes to "negotiate" with Butler, explaining that there was a misunderstanding but he'd still very much like to make a deal, Butler is incredulous: "I don't make deals!" he says. It's just not his department. Maybe, theoretically, he could, instead of killing McCabe, he could tromp back through the snow and tell whoever hired him that it isn't necessary, they can buy him off instead, but to do so would make no sense in light of the central fact of his role in the process: he's already there. No hard feelings, but he's come a long way, and in the company of a couple of guys who cant be a hell of a lot of fun around the campfire. This is how it works. I can't think of a scene in another movie that so perfectly captures, and makes such an awful sucker punch out of, that moment in life when you realize that the window of opportunity closed a ways back and the universe can not be made to share your belief that the terrible consequences that will now befall you are reason enough to jimmy it open again.

Everything about Dog Butler, from his name to his size to the impassiveness of his logic to the Freudian joke when he affably responds to McCabe's offering him a cigar by offering him a bigger one, has the making of a cardboard villain--a cartoon of the whip hand of American business sweeping through and flattening the frontier--but Millais makes him too fearsome to laugh off. He looks like the end of the world coming at you in 3-D, and he's so self-assured and authoritative, and so big, that he you might think for a minute that he has a right to mow down normal man, because he's more alive than them. It's an optical illusion: there's nothing inside the huge frame but snide arrogance and billable hours. Told that McCabe is the man who killed the famous Bill Roundtree, Butler responds, "That man!?" and waits for the punchline. Finally realizing that none is forthcoming, he delivers his own verdict: "That man never killed anybody." He makes it sound like the worst character defect imaginable.

There's a Wikipedia entry on Millais that claims that he "played leads in several films of the '70s, '80s, and '90s." Uh, no he didn't. After McCabe, Altman used him again in his next film, Images, as Susannah York's lover; the movie was one of Altman's ambitiously "poetic" botches, but Millais's does have a terrific death scene. Almost a decade later, he played Christopher Walken's contact in the mercenary thriller The Dogs of War--his third screen appearance and his last in a decent movie. His only other movie appearances were supporting roles in the Cannon Films disaster The Wicked Lady (1983) and 1990's Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, starring TV's Kiefer Sutherland and the long-lost Emily Lloyd. I always wondered whatever happened to Millais, and mostly I assumed that he had died or had some awful disease or personal problems that kept him from having more of a movie career. (Manfred Schulz, who played "the Kid" in McCabe, never made another movie and I have no idea whatever happened to him, either. But I was basically content with just being sure that he didn't live in my building.) So I was brought up short by the news that he died earlier this month at the age of 79, and grateful to learn that my morbid fantasies about him only demonstrated the limits of my imagination. It turns out that he was a simply too robust and uncontainable a personality to settle into so stable and respectable a profession as film acting. (I'm guessing that the waiting required of anyone working on a studio production probably drove him bats.)

As informative as the Times obituary of Millais was, I do wonder if whoever wrote it has actually seen McCabe, or if he just consulted the cast information at Wikipedia. His version of Millais's role in that movie is that "he played the butler", which calls up images of Millais, in his bear tracker's Western garb, carrying a little silver tray and saying, "Tea, madame?" But then, the last novel that I liked enough to write about here managed to misspell the names of both Jean-Luc Godard and New Orleans's premier uptown music joint, Tiptina's, twice. I know that times are hard, but assuming that there are still fact-checkers and copy editors out there somewhere, what exactly do they do all day?

I Remember Mammon

In my head, memories of the Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, known to one and all as Reverend Ike, are lodged in there alongside images of Pet Rocks and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Ike, who died earlier this week, was the son of a Baptist minister in South Carolina who found his own voice as a preacher in the mid-1960s, when he established a base in an abandoned Harlem movie theater. Within a few years, he was touring the country and broadcasting on TV and radio, and he was still at it until a couple of years ago, when he suffered a debilitating stroke. But in the mid-70s, Ike was briefly the subject of saturation coverage from the media, which seemed to regard him quizzically as a kind of fad. It may have been that some news outlets thought that Ike, who preached "prosperity gospel", talking about how reveling in earthly riches could be the best way of expressing a love of God, was a crook who just needed to be exposed, and that once that happened, he would come tumbling from his perch. But part of what made Ike seem such a man of that moment was that, to steal something Pauline Kael once wrote (about Paul Williams), he "reeked of the seventies mountebank's transcendence of satire." When a TV interviewer quoted him the line about how it was harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven, Ike, without blinking, replied that this was why he encouraged his flock to give him their riches, so that they could pass through that much more easily. Not the sort of man who stayed up night in fear of being caught in a contradiction, Ike could sometimes be heard spinning the line about the camel to his own purposes, insisting that its real point was that, since we all know that it's easier to do anything if you have money, it must be even more difficult for poor people to enter the kingdom of Heaven, since the gatekeeper will find them that much less impressive.

His would-be exposers couldn't lay a glove on him, of course. Ike was part of a classic tradition of bare-faced charlatans who were endlessly appealing to their marks, partly because they told their customer something that they wanted to hear, but also because their pitch was so entertaining that it felt to the marks as if they were getting value for money. The truth is, you can't really "expose" someone who's so openly a snake oil salesman, whether he's a W. C. Fields character or Jeff Koons or the four-time Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, much celebrated for having paid off his debts to Las Vegas casinos with suitcases stuffed with cash and for such bon mots as his boast that the only way his enemies could beat him in an election would be for them to catch him "in bed with a dead girl or a live boy." Such figures have a talent for making anyone trying to hold them to account look like a sanctimonious ass. Ike was also lucky in his timing. At his seventies peak, after Watergate and Vietnam, he was the beneficiary of a social climate so saturated with cynicism that a con man who made no bones about being a con man seemed, incongruously, to be the last honest person around.

He happened to arrive in Harlem the year after the death of Father Divine, to whom he was often compared, especially by white reporters who couldn't readily think of the name of another black minister. But it may have been more important that his breakthrough success overlapped with the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the blaxploitation era, when it became fashionable for black Americans to withdraw from political movements aimed at social change in favor of pursuing their own version of hip capitalism. At the same time, Ike had perverted ties to political activists of an earlier age; like the labor activists and other radicals of the 1920s, he had a particular, sneering obsession with the idea that poor Christians will get their reward in the next life--that, as an old folk song has it, "there'll be pie in the sky when you die"--but where Woody Guthrie mocked that notion as a way of encouraging people to fight for a better life for the workers, Ike was content to encourage his flock to fill the collection plate and live vicariously through him. He didn't introduce that concept to African-American church tradition; he was just more shameless than anyone else about spelling it out in big block letters. And he did offer personal services to improve people's lives. In the '80s, Ike sent out fund-raising letters that included a checklist of problems and ailments that might be plaguing the recipients. In exchange for a check, Ike promised to include in his prayers a request that God give the donor some relief in such areas as "back trouble", "foot trouble", "female trouble", "nervous", "bad habits", "past-due bills", "mental oppression", and "car (what make?)"

The tradition of social activism is strong in the black church, and for most of his career, Ike remained a singular phenomenon; it wasn't until the '90s that you began to really hear about religious materialism becoming widespread enough in black churches to become controversial. I've always wondered, though, if Ike's example had any effect on the development of the religious right in the late '70s, which would explode into a muscular, stubborn force in white American churches, until it became not just acceptable to talk about the poor as if they were being singled out for punishment by God, who showered material riches on those who had won His favor, but practically heretical to suggest that God didn't give a rat's ass who was rich and who was poor, let alone that He might smile on those who'd been fortunate in this lifetime if they spread it around a little. I doubt that the children of Ayn Rand needed Ike to come around to this line of thinking, but they might have harbored honest doubts about how many credulous God-fearing people they could sell it to, until they got a whiff of Ike's TV ratings. Who knows? Maybe the man who, for his own reasons, drained politics out of the black church was the great unacknowledged inspiration for the men who drained Christ's teachings out of white Christianity and turned it into a partially owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.

The Break-Up

Time's cover story on "Bush and Cheney's Final Days" may prove disappointing to anyone who snatches it up in the impulse-buy line in hopes that there will be glimpses of the former president drunkenly conversing with the portraits on the walls or Cheney giving him coded hypnotic instructions while dressed as the Queen of Hearts. ("George, why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?"). It is instead a rehashed account of how the President decided not to use his last days in office to bestow a pardon on Scooter Libby, a disappointment to Cheney that sums up how much his power had diminished since the years before the 2006 midterms, when, as book after book has indicated, he really was basically running the administration while his little pal, President Jim Hawkins, blushed in the face of thunderous applause from cherry-picked crowds when he wasn't in Crawford, clearing brush. Cheney went from being, in Barton Gellman's words, a "sounding board for advice he originated himself," to--well, a vice-president, and one whose backup (Rumsfeld, John Bolton) had started being escorted from the building.

While portraying Bush as a good-hearted if credulous fellow ("His reluctance [towards granting pardons] stemmed not from a lack of mercy but from his sense that pardons were a rigged game, tilted in favor of offenders with political connections"--that's what inspired his hilarious and very merciful stand-up routine mocking Karla Faye Tucker) and Cheney as obsessed with, in his words, not leaving "anyone on the battelfield", Time does make it clear enough that Bush got pretty sick of having the vice president petitioning him with the stubborn determination of a rookie Jehovah's witness with an arm full of Watchtowers. At least implicitly, it also impresses the reader with just how much of a shock it must have been for Gepetto when the president he himself had carved out of wood started taking advice from other unsavory figures and listening to strange gods. It will be worth revisiting this story at some later date when people close to both men have finally gotten sufficiently jaded and ornery to start filling in some of the juicy details. ("Then Cheney turned red as a fire truck and hollered that at least his own mother wasn't played by Wallace Beery in a white wig, and that's when the President came over the desk with his nunchucks. You wanted to know the real reason Cheney left the White House in that wheelchair?")

The final word on Cheney's lust for a pardon for his flunky, and his uncustomarily high-profile behavior since Obama took office, is that,"as a Cheney confidant puts it, the Vice President believed he and the President could claim the war on terrorism as his greatest legacy only if they defended at all costs the men and women who fought in the trenches." That sounds noble enough in a misguided sort of way. What I'm still waiting for, regarding the Plame-Libby mess, is for someone to ask Cheney or one of his defenders point blank if they don't see any distinction between protecting the country and protecting their own names from being tainted by honesty or accurate reporting. To repeat Time's summary of what happened and why: "Cheney's former top aide on domestic and foreign policy stood accused of obstructing a federal investigation into the source of an egregious media leak: the identity of an undercover CIA officer named Valerie Plame. Her husband Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat, had written an Op-Ed for the New York Times in July 2003 claiming to have evidence that the Administration had lied to bolster the case for war in Iraq. Within days, in an effort to discredit Wilson's story, a conservative columnist had revealed the identify of Wilson's wife. Plame's 'outing' was seen by her husband and his fellow Democrats as an act of revenge orchestrated by Cheney himself — and the most extreme example of how far an Administration would go to cover its tracks in a war gone bad."

The question for anyone employing lost platoon imagery for poor Scooter Libby is, how does punishing a whistle blower by costing an intelligence officer her career actually serve the war effort? Assume that you believe that war with Iraq was so vital to our security that it was a patriotic act to cook intelligence if that's what it took to get it rolling: still, Wilson didn't make any attempt to short circuit the build up to war, but published his editorial two months after the President of the United States had declared that the war was, for all practical purposes, over. Although it's become pretty clear by now that Cheney really did believe that Saddam Hussein had WMDs--a not reassuring piece of information, since he seemed a lot smarter when it appeared to be just as likely that he didn't--both he and war fans such as serial Wilson-Plame basher Christopher Hitchens have long taken the position that it didn't matter that much in the end because the war was still worth doing because it toppled a dictator. What doesn't compute is how punishing Wilson became priority one if what he'd revealed was irrelevant to the justness of the war itself--at least, unless you think that the war plotters' good names were of such paramount importance that protecting them called for a scorched earth policy. It's easy to see Cheney and company thinking just that. It's a little harder to understand how someone like Hitchens thinks that attitude is in keeping with his longing to be seen as a fantasy camp George Orwell. And no, it doesn't matter in the least if Joseph Wilson is kind of an asshole.

When Cheney started his eternal campaign to defend his and the administration's names, he told an audience that, in the wake of 9/11, you could have assumed that the coordinated attacks were a once-in-a-great-while, if not once-in-a-lifetime, event, or you could assume that they were the start of a new era announcing that al-Qaeda was ready to launch wave after wave of carefully planned, lushly funded master plots against America. It would have been irresponsible to have just shrugged and assumed that there wasn't likely to be a follow-up commensurate with 9/11, but to not even consider the possibility--hell, the likelihood--that the attacks were, for the attackers, a lucky fluke on the order of the Oklahoma City bombing for the militia movement, a good indication of how much rage was out there but not such a good indicator of how easy it was to pull off something like this and often it was liable to happen--well, let's just say that you're maybe most likely to jump to that conclusion if, on some level, it's what you want to be true. Which is not to say that Dick Cheney wanted anyone to die that day but that taking the most extreme, apocalyptic take on the event suited what he wanted to believe about the world, partly because it served his career-long obsession with granted unlimited powers to the (presumably conservative) president. And he has likely never considered the possibility that the administration's taking its eye off the ball, ignoring al-Qaeda because it was more interested in Iraq and New Orleans whorehouses, had something to do with making 9/11 possible. In his world, having the most catastrophic terrorist attack in the country's history occur on your watch is the crowning proof that you, and only you, have the right ideas about keeping our nation safe. Now he's planning to spend the rest of his days serving as some gasbag combination of General Patton, Gandolf, and the guy in the New Yorker cartoons wearing the sandwich board reading "THE END IS NEAR", but his one great unintended message to us is that politicians who see spin control as an occasion to cast themselves in battlefield metaphors shouldn't be trusted with a net and a dogcatcher's badge. Dick Cheney has a fully shaped vision of the world he'd like to share with us, but we, as a nation, and as a species, should have other priorities.

Loopy

Ever since it played at Sundance last winter, I've been looking forward to Armando Iannucci's In the Loop at least as eagerly as any new movie I've seen this year. That should probably be kept in mind when I say that I ended up being a little disappointed with it. In the Loop marks Iannucci's debut as a movie director, but he's already well established as a writer, producer, and director in British TV, especially for his role in the creation of the character Alan Partridge, the cretinous TV host played by Steve Coogan, and The Thick of It, starring Peter Capaldi as a political spin expert named Malcolm Tucker who works for the British prime minister. In the Loop is a spin-off that deals with Tucker's role in shaping public opinion and cooking intelligence during the lead-up to the Iraq War. (It also features a subplot involving Coogan, unrecognizable in heavy disguise, as an angry constituent.) In the Loop features a remarkable cast of comic heavy hitters, some of whom (such as James Gandolfini as a Colin Powell-like general who tries to short-circuit the march to war but who backtracks on his promise to resign if he fails, citing his responsibility to his "boys") don't get the chance to play real comedy often enough, and many of whom don't have the high profiles that their talent deserves. (That includes Mimi Kennedy as a diplomat who's the most prominent anti-war voice in the room and David Rasche as a Rumsfeld clone named Linton Barwick; for American audience, at least, it also includes Capaldi, probably best known here as Peter Reigert's lovestruck sidekick in Local Hero back in 1983.) The movie is expertly performed and parts of it are pretty funny; I enjoyed a lot of it and wouldn't discourage anyone from seeing it. But the uniformly slavering critical notices have painted it as an audacious, explosively funny political satire on a par with Dr. Strangelove, and to me it looked more like--well, an extended version of a TV show that satirizes the headline events of seven years ago. (The movie is also being acclaimed for the unprecedented inventiveness of its characters' profanity, and I also thought it was a little disappointing, after all the buildup, in that area as well--but then, I'm a Larry Sanders Show fanatic who was weaned on Richard Pryor records.)

In the Loop begins with the news that Simon, an amoeba-like cabinet minister played by Tom Hollander has told a radio interviewer that the war that the major players are all trying to get primed for takeoff is "unforeseeable." To a great degree both the movie's point of view and its comic approach can be boiled down to the moment when Malcolm, trying to make this gaffe disappear, barks into a cell phone that Simon didn't say what he said: "You may have heard him say it, but he didn't, and that's a fact." If Tucker is an updated version of Nigel Hawthorne's Machiavellian schemer on Yes, Minister, then what's new about him is that he replaces the Hawthorne character's labyrinthine ingenuity with sheer brazenness, daring anyone to call him on how blatantly he's contradicting reality itself. After he and Simon cross the pond and get involved in the war planning effort at its red-hot center, he meets his match in Rasche's Linton Barwick, who scolds him for his behavior in what he calls "this sacred place," adding, "You may not believe that and I may not believe it, but it's a useful hypocrisy."




In its terms, In the Loop hits its targets with precision and accuracy. So what more did I want from it? The characters aren't over-scaled enough to qualify as surreal cartoons, like the characters in Strangelove, except maybe for Simon and his equally foul-mouthed, bulldozing buddy, Jamie, played by Paul Higgins. If the movie had encouraged the viewer to not just enjoy Simon and Jamie but identify with them, as sacred monsters whose lack of scruples seemed liberating, so that we caught ourselves rooting for them, then it might carry more of a charge, and it might also shake you up a little, so that you understood the dangerous thrill of seeking and serving power for its own sake. But the movie stays on the outside, so that you never really identify with anyone in it--especially since one thing that it does have in common with Strangelove is that the characters who are most thoughtful and morally responsible are unappealingly ineffectual. When Jamie tortures a would-be whistle blower who finally doesn't have the guts to stand up to him, forcing him to sully himself by participating in the creation of sham intelligence and then taunting him, "Don't cry," the bullying is contemptible but the victim so pathetic that he almost seems to have it coming. The scene isn't funny, and maybe it isn't meant to be funny, but it's hard to imagine that it's meant to seem as queasy as it feels. (The movie also includes a Washington staffer, played by Anna Chlumsky--the title character of the My Girl movies, all grown up--who made the mistake of writing a report that honestly lays out the flaws in the administration's war plan and who is coming to the realization that she may have destroyed her career, and the most affecting moment in the film comes when she quietly drifts over to the dark side.)

In the Loop could use some of the satirical hyperbole that Dustin Hoffman's parody of Robert Evans brought to Wag the Dog; without it, the movie doesn't leave you with much beyond admiration for its ruthlessness and the simple accuracy of its take on how spin works. Although it's clearly about the Iraq War, the movie never references Bush or Tony Blair by name, and there's no discussion of the crackpot theories of the neocons. It's all very abstract, a graduate seminar in the misuse of language married to a demonstration of the way that the unprincipled and ambitious roll over the sensitive and the gutless. (The war boosters are devoid of passion for anything beyond career advancement, though ideas as bad as invading Iraq don't happen in an emotion-free environment. Though it might seem that way to future historians, the people who insisted that the correct response to a terrorist attack organized and executed by a bunch of Saudis was to overthrow a foreign government with no connection to the attack didn't pick Iraq by throwing darts at a map.) After it was over, I found myself remembering David Gregory and Judith Miller and all the "journalists" who have angrily responded to complaints about the way the media failed to properly examine the build-up to the war by saying that it's not a reporter's job to do anything but read an administration's press releases into the cameras. In the Loop demonstrates that an accurate description of how the war was sold is better left to comedians than journalists, which, granted, is a pretty good joke. But it's too bad that the filmmakers decided to leave wild exaggeration and surreal fantasy to the journalists who told us about how the heroic George W. Bush and his Vulcans brain masters would protect us from Islamofascism and bring democracy to the Mideast by invading a secular dictatorship and making the great and beloved Ahmed Chalabi the king of all he surveyed.

The Great Profile

Is Sgt. James Crowley, the cop who arrested Henry Louis Gates last week, the new Frank Ricci? That's got to be the hope of the right-wingers who've been fanning the flames since President Obama, in his press conference last night, said that the cops acted "stupidly" in arresting Gates, and it may be the fear that's informed a lot of the commentary from left-wingers that's come out since the news broke earlier this week, commentary that's tried to downplay the racial elements of the case and even paint Gates as something of an ass. In Salon, James Hannaham wrote--perhaps partly satirically, but only partly--that the incident showed how far we'd come: Gates may have been dragged out of his home in handcuffs because a cop didn't like his attitude (Crowley having not even tried to suggest that he'd arrested him on suspicion of having unlawfully broken and entered his own home), but at least the brother hadn't been lynched and presented with a bill for the rope. Part of the irony of this whole incident is, of course, is that Gates, who's been banging pots and pans and screaming "racial profiling" from every perch he can find, has the image of a mild-mannered, non-radical mainstream-media type whose specialty is gently explaining black folks to white folks, and vice versa. Phillip Atiba Goff of U.C.L.A. has suggested that this very fact may make it possible for some people who'd be put off to hear such talk from a more wild-eyed arrestee to finally see the evil of racial profiling, but that brushes aside the possibility, which is worth at least considering, that to the kind of people inclined to take the police's side in these matters, one black man with a diploma looks very much the same as another, and make look much the same as a black guy with a bomb in one hand and the collected works of Amiri Baraka in the other.

In the New York Times, Katharine Q. Seelye described Obama's remarks as "an extraordinary plunge by a president into a local law-enforcement dispute." That strikes me as a melodramatic way to characterize a president's decision to answer a direct question at a press conference, albeit a question that amounted to an open challenge to the President to declare himself the only black man in America not on the Supreme Court willing to claim that he can't imagine a situation in which his skin color might cost him a cab. Obama's saying that the police behaved stupidly is a hard one to question on its merits. But let's take this step by step. The cops showed up to investigate a report of a possible burglary. They answer the call, knock on the door, and are greeted by a middle-aged black man. They explain their presence and ask for some I.D. so they'll know that this cool customer claiming to be the homeowner is not in fact the smoothest break-in artist since Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. So far so good. The homeowner is belligerent and unpleasant to them, which is regrettable for the two working stiffs just doing their jobs but at the same time not entirely understandable coming from a jet-lagged old dude who, not too long ago, was entering his own domicile via the window. He does, eventually, cough up some I.D. Then the cops bust him, for having been "disorderly" in "a public place", i.e., the entrance way to his own damn house. Assuming there's any actual crime to be tended to in Cambridge, is anyone really going to argue that this isn't stupid? Seriously, considering that many of the people complaining about Obama's remarks are the same hard cases who thought that the cops handled Dick Cheney's accidental shooting case about right, though it wouldn't have killed them to have backed off a little?

In fact, if the central question of the Gates case is whether "racial profiling" occurred, then the President skirted it by saying that he simply didn't know how much race had to do with what happened. I don't know, either. Sgt. Crowley's comments in his official report that "“While I was led to believe that Gates was lawfully in the residence,” he wound up arresting him anyway because “I was quite surprised and confused with the behavior he exhibited toward me” make it alarmingly clear that the good officer went to the trouble of busting the well-known professor because he felt that he'd busted his chops. Crowley also wrote that when he told Gates that he wanted to make sure that he, Gates, wasn't a burglar, Gates replied, “Why, because I’m a black man in America?” Maybe Gates did say that, but it strikes me as exactly what a bullying white cop would claim a man in Gates's situation would say, and include in his report as a sly way of covering his own ass; including it amounts to ostentatiously insinuating that the idea itself is ridiculous on its face. (I'm not even sure that suggesting that Gates didn't say is necessarily the same thing as saying that Sgt. Crowley is a liar; it's the kind if thing that a fed-up white cop who feels that he's being patronized by a fancy-pants black professor might well imagine that he's seeing in his antagonist's eyes, whether it's said aloud or not.)

Obama's reluctance to assume that the cops' motivations were racist seems fair and right to me; there are other possibilities. Maybe they don't like elitist smart boys, and maybe they don't like guys who live in nicer houses than they can afford, and maybe they're just bullying thugs, and maybe their day up to that point was not one to write home about. But we all ought to be able to agree that, while there are a number of plausible explanations for why the cops did what they did, it's impossible for them to have had a good reason for it. By acting as if the President said something wrong, or even something debatable, people are revealing their own kneejerk racial assumptions, which, in the Ricci case, could be boiled down to the belief that, whatever the law is supposed to be, it always indefensible, and perhaps treasonous, to take anyone's side over that of white firemen. This week's version of that tautology goes, whatever conventional wisdom or common sense might normally lead you to conclude, it is always wrong, and probably unpatriotic, to take any black person's side over that of a white cop. It is, I suspect, an argument that Republicans think is a bullet-proof vote-getter, but I'm not so sure. It seems as if, were that the case, Guiliani should have done a lot better in the primaries last year.

Acid Flashbacks

There's a time-honored tradition in the arts, but maybe especially in film criticism, of sifting through underappreciated works from the past and subjecting them to "re-evaluation", in hopes of turning up some misunderstood classics. Movie geeks are brought up on inspiring stories of how the French critics who went on to form the New Wave and other auteurists rewrote the classic film pantheon, and it's only natural that younger writers want to have a similar impact on behalf of their favorites, especially since the insane overflow of writing about movies on the Internet instills in one a longing to stand out and prove the special value of one's worth by breaking some wild new opinion that override decades of canon law. I get all this. I have my own share of noncanonical opinions that I'd love to slip into the record. (Spielberg's 1941 rocks!) Sometimes, though, when I'm watching Richard Fleischer being redefined as a master one revival at a time (Violent Saturday, 10 Rillington Place) or hearing that Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon (which isn't even the best of his really bad movies) has been revealed as a lost masterpiece by a new DVD that recasts it in black and white, I can't help wondering if the re-evaluation track hasn't jumped the tracks more than a time or two. With so many people making sweaty claims for everything this side of Howard the Duck in terms of sheer screaming awfulness, maybe what's most needed now, maybe what's even most radical, is sometimes to say that everybody really did get it right the first time.



At least, that's how I felt after seeing Dennis Lim's take on Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 belly flop Zabriskie Point. It's easy to understand the desire to make a case for this much-derided film, at least in theory; certainly no sensible case could be made on the grounds of the movie itself, which left a sizable crater when it landed and which remains the only film made in the U.S. by the late director. It seems a shame that he came here for nothing, that he wasted not only his time but that of his hip collaborators (notably Sam Shepard, Clare Peploe, and Antonioni's frequent screenwriter Tonino Guerra, who all worked on the script, as well as Jerry Garcia, John Fahey, Pink Floyd, and others who contributed music to the soundtrack), and that such a visually lush movie could be so unmoving, simple-minded and inert. It is a gorgeous-looking picture, no question about it, and like its leads, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, a testament to the fact that it is possible to be very beautiful and seem very stupid, with the end result of being very, very dull.

Zabriskie Point is not a movie that can be understood, either on the level of what it's trying to be or how the hell it got made (or why it doesn't work and never did) without putting it in its proper context. That context includes the blockbuster success of Antonioni's previous film, Blow-Up, his first English-language movie, which was set in London during its Swinging "60s phase. That movie, which had its roots in a Julio Cortázar story, was in many key ways a continuation of Antonioni's earlier films about privileged, movie-star sexy people failing to distinguish themselves morally in a chilly, corrupt modern world whose man-made architecture and natural landscapes dwarf them in a way that sums up their alienation from the world at large and any higher values towards which they might aspire. However, its commercial success had a lot to do with all the people who were happy to simply take it as a moving version of one of those newsmagazine cover stories about where it's at. Whatever Antonioni's standing as a world filmmaker, it was this, and the promise of a big hit that would do for revolutionary American youth what Blow-Up was thought to have done for Carnaby Street fashions, that induced MGM to write Antonioni a check and vouch for him at Customs. They wound up with a high-profile release about revolutionary American youth by a 57-year-old Italian who plainly didn't know, understand, or much care about America, American youth, or American revolutionary politics.

Anyone who thinks that the rehabilitation of Zabriskie Point's reputation is essential for the good of Antonioni's reputation can relax. It is a minor work in his filmography, and for decades now, his reputation has been getting along just fine without its help. Where Zabriskie Point looms large is in the short but not uninteresting history of Hollywood trying to make a buck off counterculture audiences at a time when the ticket buyers were thought to be more into Herbert Marcuse than the wisdom of Entertainment Weekly. Zabriskie Point rode into theaters on the wave created not just by the success of Blow-Up but Easy Rider; it was followed by such campus-protest pictures as Richard Rush's Getting Straight (in which Elliott Gould played a former Civil Rights marcher who escaped into the relative safety of grad school, only to realize that academia was a corrupt sham after being exposed to the shocking heresy that the relationship between Jay Gatsby and Nick Carroway had homoerotic overtones), The Strawberry Statement, and R.P.M., directed by Stanley Kramer, from an original screenplay by Erich Segal. None of these movies is as well-remembered today as Zabriskie Point, partly because none of them inspired quite the same degree of ridicule. It's not that they're so much better than Antonioni's failure, but they're bad in more normal, comprehensible ways: Getting Straight is a topical exploitation movie made with cunning and concern for entertainment values--and it was a big hit--while R.P.M. is a sincere message movie from a confused old fart who can't get a grasp on the times, but at least it was out of touch in a way that regular Americans could understand. Kramer might cast Anthony Quinn as a swinging college administrator whose days are divided between an affair with a grad student played by Ann-Margaret and arguing with campus radicals led by Gary Lockwood, but at least the studio could count on him not to stage a scene in which his non-actress heroine, having journeyed to Death Valley to ball the non-actor hero, is set upon by a bunch of kids who must have thought they'd been recruited for a remake of Village of the Damned.

To see Zabriskie Point as (in Lim's words) "an invaluable time capsule" with something real and informed to say about the sixties (as opposed to a symptom of the virus that soon had the era in its death throes), you'd either have to subscribe to the idea--admittedly, one not without currency in some of your more inane college courses--that an artist's intentions have no bearing on whatever neat theories you can spin about or project onto his work, or else conclude that Antonioni meant his heroes, and their revolutionary hopes, to come across as both clueless and doomed. The temptation is strongest in the movie's one classic scene, the concluding fantasy of America being laid waste to via the highly photogenic destruction of all our consumer goods. It's a silly, obvious idea, but by the time it arrives, it feels like a triumph, not just because the sequence is executed with considerable cinematic panache, but also because it's still an improvement on the "ideas" that have come before it. The whole thing is a fantasy experienced by Daria Halprin after the fascist pig cops have gunned down Frechette, and the best evidence for the case that she's meant to be as insipid as she comes across is that, after imagining laying waste, Michael Bay-style, to the evil consumer society, she smiles and hops in her shiny new Buick and tootles off into the sunset. But coming at the very end, that still leaves a hell of a lot of seemingly un-ironic twaddle unaccounted for. (As she makes her exit, she leaves behind her middle-aged land developer boyfriend, who is played by Rod Taylor, the star of Hitchcock's The Birds, who is about to appear as Winston Churchill in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, all of which is good information to have at your fingertips if you have plans to play six degrees of separation professionally.)



A better time capsule of the revolutionary hopes of the sixties and the collapse of same could be had by using the material about the movie in J. Hoberman's The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties for a making-of documentary. Hoberman writes that the production was subjected to considerable scrutiny by the fuzz and by Nixon's Justice Department; Antonioni was even threatened with legal action for staging a fantasy orgy in the desert with members of the Open Theater risking sunburn by miming nude sex acts out in the sands. In the end, he may have had more to fear from Frechette, a member of Mel Lyman's jug-band cult who at one point went on strike to demand rewriting and reshoots and insist that Antonioni visit the Lyman camp so that he could get his head together. After appearing in a couple of Italian films and having an affair with Halprin, Frechette was arrested in 1973 for trying to rob a bank, along with a couple of fellow Lyman commune members; he explained that he did it as a protest against Watergate, and because "standing there with a gun, cleaning out a teller's cage - that's about as fuckin' honest as you can get, man!" In 1975, he was found dead in the prison weight room with a 150-pound barbell resting on his throat. Considering that Halprin would parlay her own fame into a brief marriage to Dennis Hopper, you could say that Frechette got off easy.



In New York this past week, the sixties--or, rather, that half of the seventies where it looked as if the sixties had no plans to stop hogging the couch--have also been on display at Anthology Film Archives, which has been hosting a retrospective of the work of the late Robert Kramer, an obscure but much-praised independent filmmaker whose work may be as little-seen, and as hard to get a chance to see, as that of anyone working in narrative, English-speaking film in the past forty or so years. One of the supreme masters of indie films touted by the spinachy Ray Carney, Kramer's films are not just hard to find but kind of hard to watch when you do find them; they're valuable, though, to those of us interested in better understanding just what happened in the sixties and early seventies, with virtues and defects that are the exact opposite of those of Zabriskie Point. Kramer wasn't an outsider; he was very much of the movement he was making movies about, so much so that the 1975 Milestones ends with a message flashing on the screen in which the filmmakers thank "the Vietnamese people" for having inspired the rest of the world through their struggle against the Yankee imperialists. Considering how long Milestones is, this must have seemed a very important message to the filmmakers for them to choose to extend their movie so much as another second in order to include it. (Just about every source I can find insists that Milestones is three hours and fifteen minutes long, but I am sure that the movie I saw was even longer than that, and as it cantered gaily past the three hour mark, I assure you that I was checking and re-checking my wristwatch with metronomic regularity.) Antonioni didn't understand the people or the scene he was making a movie about, but he certainly did his damndest to make a handsome-looking movie. Kramer was on close terms with his characters and the lives they lived, and his determination to record their state of mind and the way of life that grew out of it was not constricted by such factors as a concern for entertainment value or pacing or even decent cinematography.

A lot of Kramer's first two narrative films, The Edge (1967) and Ice (1969) looks like it must be the result of incompetence or indiiference in the filmmaking, but Kramer seems to have felt the need to make his movies as hard to sit through as possible out of principle--a rejection of what he saw as bourgeoisie filmmaking. (In between making these movies, he not only went to Vietnam to shoot the documentary The People's War but picketed the 1968 New York Festival as a protest against "élitist art".) Like Antonioni, Kramer populated his movies with non-actors, but they weren't good-looking empty shells like Frechette and Halprin but regular kids caught up in the life; placed inside scenes intended to serve as part of a loose structure but permitted to improvise their dialogue based on their own thoughts and feelings about their lives and the state of the world around them, they're not charismatic or exciting to watch but are often sort of interesting in the same way that it's interesting to see someone in a documentary living a life that you can barely imagine for yourself. The people in The Edge were once politically involved in the Civil Rights movement but have grown disillusioned and despairing about the possibility of constructive political action; the most motivated of them is plotting to assassinate the President. Ice is about people who've gone all the way into revolutionary terrorism. When they talk about what they hope to do, what's most interesting about them is the utter lack of passion in their voices, which matches up eerily well with the lack of passion in the filmmaking. What comes across is that they think that things are just awful and may not actually be crazy enough to think that killing people and blowing things up will make things any better, but aren't going to let their feeling that they ought to do something trick them into making the mistake of being suckers and working within the system as if they thought any good could come of it. The movie is ostensibly set in the near future, when the government is waging war against not Vietnam but Mexico. The implicit assumption that radical domestic political terrorism was going to remain a staple of the American political scene for years to come is the most poignant thing about the whole movie.

The 1975 Milestones, which lists Kramer as co-director with John Douglas, is another cross-section multi-character movie that catches up with the children of the movement at the next stage of development: scattered to the four winds and concentrating on their own lives and feelings. The last word is key: at a certain point, the non-stop talk about feelings, much of preceded by actual invocation of the "f" word, threatens to turn the movie into an epic, premature edition of thirtysomething that could use a haircut. I started to have visions of Kramer telling his cast members to improvise monologues about what they thought their characters were feeling and then never having the heart to ask them to try it again without actually saying the word "feelings" in every other sentence. Nor is the film about to sacrifice its instinctual free-form style for a little thing like narrative clarity. At one point, a man and woman who are on the road with their small son Leaf stop at a diner for a spirited discussion of the woman's feelings. Then they resume their travels and the next time we see them, the car has died and they're on the side of road in the middle of nowhere, talking about what to do next, while Leaf plays with a little girl who now seems to be traveling with them. The man says something about how maybe he should go back to town for help. The woman says something about how maybe she should wait here while he does just that. The viewer waits in vain for one of them to suggest that they should maybe return to the diner and ask if anybody there is missing a kid.



Milestones builds to an ending that, in its way, seems as inevitable as the final car chase in a different kind of movie: a woman is lying in bed, preparing for natural childbirth. A full complement of her sisters gathers around, massaging and rubbing her and offering encouragement, while a man who looks as if he pays his rent modeling for the covers of Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics leans in close to her face and bounces up and down while showing her how he breathes while conducting obscene phone calls. While he's doing this, another woman keeps leaning in with a bowl for the expectant mother to throw up into, an understandable reaction under the circumstances. As in Ice, the cast is pretty much uniformly white and of educated middle-class background; though the people in these movies spend a lot of time talking about their concern for the poor and racial minorities, they only seem to seek out their own for company, to the point that they're practically cocooning en masse. Taken together, these movies provide a fairly comprehensive survey of all the ways in which educated people who've stopped caring very much about anyone but themselves and the people who are practically interchangeable with themselves learn to convince themselves that there's no point in trying to make a real difference in the world while congratulating themselves on how sad they feel about it.

Up, Up and Away

At The Root, Martin Johnson makes a valuable point about the historical context of the first moon landing: although it happened on Richard Nixon's watch, ol' Slope Nose "hadn’t yet dismantled the Great Society programs he inherited from his predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson. Thus the resentment of the space program, best voiced by Gil Scott-Heron’s 'Whitey on the Moon,' wasn’t in full effect." In other words, the moon shot was the culmination of a period when people believed that we could afford spectacular gestures and a social safety net. That's worth keeping in mind. In recent decades, various politicians, most of them right-wingers of the "Let's make America great again!" variety, have proposed rebooting the space race with a trip to Mars, and then seemed confused and hurt when the public response ran the spectrum from outright hostility to the sound of crickets chirping. But that's because most people, whatever their feelings about Big Government, can't fully shake off their instinctual feeling that there's something obscene about wanting to play Buck Rogers in the same breath that you're using to badmouth school lunch programs.

In the late '70s, Lily Tomlin did a long routine, intended to sum up the '60s through the eyes of one snotty adolescent, that included the line, "The astronauts go to the moon, and when they get there, they plant a flag and hit a golf ball. Is this really happening, or is it the drugs?" I confess that when I heard that for the first time as a snotty pre-adolescent, I found the idea of sneering at the space program to be thrillingly daring and radical, but then I myself was but a wee tad when Apollo 11 lifted off, and throughout my childhood tended to view the space program as something that, every year or so, popped up during daytime TV and threatened to pre-empt Captain Kangaroo. Now that I've heard similar testimony from a number of other people who were very small during the ripest years of NASA's glory days, I've come to think that one of the falsest pieces of conventional wisdom to take shape during or just prior to my lifetime is the idea that children were naturally starry-eyed around astronauts. I think that idea got started because there was a time when adults felt so starry-eyed around astronauts that they felt like children. In the excellent documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, one former space traveler recalls that his own aged parent could barely comprehend what he was on the verge of doing but that his five-year-old son didn't think it was any big deal. It's obvious to me now why that would be the pattern: adults had a better understanding of the risks involved and of the scale of the adventure because they had a better grasp of the distance between daydreams and gravity. As Johnson writes, people in movies and comics had been going to the moon forever; as a kid, one tended to assume that this meant that the people who sent those characters to the moon had some practical notion of how it could be done, so actually getting there was just a matter of picking up the right book and paying attention. Last night, Turner Classic Movies invited Buzz Aldrin--a man who I'll bet has been addressed by his nickname by more strangers than have ever thought to call him "Mr. Aldrin"--to ride shotgun with Robert Osbourne for its evening of space-themed films, which began with Méliès's 1902 A Trip to the Moon, in which a team of six is stuffed into a capsule that is in turn loaded into a giant cannon and fired at the moon by a chorus line of lovelies. Once there, they battle attacking moon men before deciding that it's time to go home and jumping back into the capsule, tipping it off the moon's surface so that it falls back to Earth and splashes down safely in the ocean. I have seen few things in my life more weirdly touching than Colonel Aldrin gently informing Robert Osbourne that this film contains "some inaccuracies."

In all the time that I must have spent gazing at footage of actual space travel on TV when I was a kid, I don't think there was a second when it crossed my mind that something might go wrong and those guys could get killed. This indifference to the possibility of a catastrophe made it much easier to become dissatisfied with the quality of the entertainment that the guys in the sci-fi football gear were providing while lumbering pleasantly around in an oxygen-free environment. I'm ashamed to say that what got me to rethink my position on all this was a movie--a movie released in the fall of 1983, and not The Right Stuff, a terrific entertainment that Buzz Aldrin likes a hell of a lot more than he does Capricorn One, but Terms of Endearment, in which Jack Nicholson's aging astronaut character reacts to the suggestion that he might make too much of his past by exploding that there's only so-and-so many astronauts in the world, "and I'm one of 'em!" I take no pride in having been more easily impressed, at that stage of my life, by the satisfaction that a made-up person played by Jack Nicholson took in his own achievements than I was by the eternally silent, stoic off-stage presence of Neil Armstrong, but there you have it. For a much better sense of what happened back then, you could do worse than check out the new Criterion Collection reissue of For All Mankind, Al Reinart's classic documentary composed of footage of NASA missions, including the film shot on the moon itself. That film does wonders for putting the whole thing in perspective, not least because it is so very beautiful, suggesting a vantage point that is very precious, all the more so for the fact that you couldn't get me to check it out first-hand even if they were handing out free pork chops up there.

The Last Voice You Hear

For people young enough to have only learned first hand what the world was like since the 1980s or later, the thing you have to understand about the death of Walter Cronkite is that it severs our last major living connection to a America where consensus seemed easier to arrive at, because there were fewer options. Television and radio hadn't yet splintered into a thousand narrow markets, and people didn't have the choice of putting something off until they could download it or rent the DVD or watch it on YouTube. "Everybody" watched Cronkite when they got home from work, and the evening news on TV actually served a function then, because it wasn't just a rehash of all the stuff you could have been monitoring all day on CNN or the Internet. Four hours later, "everybody"--a slightly smaller version of everybody, consisting of the people who stayed up till eleven--watched Johnny Carson, or at least the monologue. Between the two of them, you had a handy daily briefing not just on what was going on in the world but also the current state of conventional wisdom. This is something that people used to complain about, and not without reason. It may seem like an odd thing to feel nostalgia for. But while it's true that you shouldn't blindly follow conventional wisdom, there were definite advantages to living in a country where everyone shared a basic sense of what the facts were.

In the late '60s and early -70s, say, you could argue, in opposition to the conventional wisdom, that the Vietnam War was worth fighting, and you could argue about why it wasn't going well, but you didn't have the option of arguing that it was in fact going just splendidly. If you tried, you'd have your status reduced to that of a crank, because everyone knew that it was going badly: Cronkite had said so. It made for a different playing field today, where there's a different news outlet dedicated to supporting any viewpoint that you don't ever want to hear contradicted, whether there's a factual basis for it or not. People who wanted to argue for the Vietnam War in Cronkite's day had to begin their counter-arguments with, "Yes, the war is going badly, but...", and their arguments ended up having to be stronger for that, because they couldn't just posit an alternate reality without being made figures of fun. But people who want to argue today that the Bush administration was right to go to war with Iraq don't have to make the concession that the war did not follow logically from the fact of 9/11, because they can make their arguments on Fox News, which will not trouble them or their audience by conceding that fact. If you folks at home want to think that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, that's fine with them. It's possible now to keep in touch with some big organization's version of the news and never come into contact with a stated fact that conflicts with your world view and never feel like a crank at all, which must be soothing, but on some days, alienating, too. If you followed last year's presidential campaign entirely on Fox, Obama's election must have come as quite a shock, enough to explain why it must seem that sinister forces were involved.

Of course, some people--way more now, probably, than at the time--would hold that Cronkite himself was pushing a deeply biased version of the news, one that passed for objective only because of the extent of the liberal media conspiracy's influence in shaping conventional wisdom. This is unadulterated horseshit, and the best proof of that is in President Johnson's legendary remark, after hearing that Cronkite had gone on the air and declared Vietnam unwinnable, that if he had lost Cronkite he'd lost middle America. As a conflicted admirer of Lyndon Johnson's, I don't think that a profane, besieged man given to fits of self-pity and paranoia would talk that way about a turncoat TV anchorman unless he thought that the anchorman's standards of veracity and trustworthiness were pretty goddamn irreproachable; Johnson was known to say nastier things about the hired help who put too much chlorine in the White House swimming pool. He knew that middle America would put stock in Cronkite's informed opinion, not because they were a bunch of dulled-out zombies, but because he, the President, put stock in them himself.

"Objectivity" is always a trap for someone attempting to practice journalism, but Cronkite handled the responsibility that his audience invested him with pretty well, I think. He did his best to walk that narrow line, passing along what he'd been told without editorializing about it himself, but also not making the mistake of reporting that it was raining after some press flak had spent part of the day pissing on his shoes. In his 1979 book about the media, The Powers That Be, David Halberstam described some of the times when Cronkite chaffed against the limits of corporate TV news, and how he won what little victories he could against them, especially when he set aside a significant portion of a couple of nightly news shows to explaining, in careful detail, the shape of the then-unfolding Watergate scandal to viewers. CBS shut down that experiment before Cronkite had completed it to his satisfaction, and as he got closer and closer to the then-mandatory retirement age of 65, Cronkite also got to witness the beginnings of the network's dismantling of its once impressive documentary division. In his last years at his desk, he, like Johnny Carson, settled in to concentrate on embodying a figure of middle of the road reasonableness with as much thoughtfulness and dignity as possible.

That's an achievement that it would be easy shrug off, but to get a true sense of just how hard it was to bring off, and of what we lost when the splintering of the one big broadcast audience into so many niche markets made that stance obsolete and untenable, one has only to compare them to their successors, Dan Rather (who didn't leave the evening news until he was eight years older than Cronkite at the time of Cronkite's retirement, and who didn't leave of his own free will) and Jay Leno. Both men were entrusted with a franchise that couldn't go on meaning what it had meant in its better days, and the pressure to fit themselves to what they saw as the demands of their roles and to maintain the old standard of cultural relevance ended up making both Rather and Leno look as if they'd gone batshit nuts. Maybe the worst thing you could say about Rather is that Leno probably ended up doing a better job of adjusting to changed circumstances; after a lot of desperate flailing, which couldn't have been helped by his knowing that he wouldn't have been Carson's first pick for the job, he settled down into a solid, mediocre rut and became something like NBC's official cruise liner entertainment director.

Rather, who CBS was reportedly keen to stick into Cronkite's chair because of some delusional belief that he'd improve on Cronkite's excellent ratings because he was not just younger but "sexier", seemed to want to inherit the "most trusted man in America" identity but couldn't relax enough on the air to assume any identity but Bug-Eyed Flop Sweat Guy who won't shut up until you're convinced that he's smarter than you but also that he cares; he also had the unfortunate notion that he could be Mr. Objective News Delivery System while at the same time racking up points as a fire-breathing investigative muckraker. As a result, he quickly boiled the possible reactions to his newscaster persona to either being embarrassed for him or, for those who saw him as the ringleader of the liberal media conspiracy, hating his florid guts, and he set up traps, like the time he tried to will George H. W. Bush into spilling his guts about his role in Iran-Contra, then walked right into them himself while whistling a happy tune. Rather tried every weird gimmicky way he could think up to be convincing in the role of America's herald, and he never figured out what Cronkite's career seems to reveal, which is that it's a role you don't seek out: when the person who can fill it reports for work, America will let him and his bosses know that it likes what it sees. Anyway, the job doesn't exist anymore, because not enough of America is ever looking at the same thing at the same time now.

Staying Alive

The Chilean film Tony Manero may be the most thoroughly unpleasant movie that I've ever been pretty much held me in the palm of its hand. The film, which was directed by Pablo Larraín, is set in Santiago in 1978, some five years into the Pinochet dictatorship. The central character, who's rarely off screen, is Raul (Alfredo Castro), a 52-year-old sleazeball who is first seen standing in line with a bunch of wiry musclemen with blond haircuts and beards; it turns out that they're there for the weekly celebrity lookalike contest that a popular TV show holds, and Raul, is there a week early: they're doing Chuck Norris. Raul's fantasy is to be told that he is the living embodiment of Tony Manero, John Travolta's character from Saturday Night Fever; not only has he acquired the necessary white suit, but he headlines a show in a seedy club where he does his rusty-jointed best to duplicate Travolta's moves on a stage that he's assembling to look like a low-budget version of Saturday Night Fever's dance floor, which looked like people were dancing on a big Simon game. When Raul tries to channe; Travolta, he's a man possessed, and while he doesn't have the physical goods to bring it off as well as he hopes, he also doesn't have the mental equipment and the sheer capacity for realistic self-doubt that would get in the way of his conviction, and his intensity is impressive, even though he looks a lot less like Travolta than like Al Pacino, or maybe like what Pacino would have looked like by 52 if he were still managing buildings for a living. Sometimes it's hard to remember that the movie isn't called Tony Montana.

It's not giving a lot away to reveal that Raul commits murder in the course of the picture, and I've heard the movie described as being about a serial killer, though I think that's a little off the mark. Raul doesn't seem to have any sexual hang-ups or pathologies; he is in fact impotent, which doesn't keep him from hitting on the women who come his way, as a means of establishing what he imagines to be his strutting prowess. The women's reactions to him--at one point, one of them bathes him lovingly--may best be understood as a comment on how hard up the people living under Pinochet were for any trace of exceptionalism, even if it's exceptionally delusional. There's nothing likable or admirable about Raul, unless you're a fan of the go-for-it ethos prepared to cheer the sight of that attitude taken all the way to psychosis, and in some ways Tony Manero resembles King of Comedy and other movies that fall into what may be my single least favorite movie genre, the one where the filmmaker sets up a character totally unworthy of the viewer's interest and, staying on the outside, invites the audience to share his feeling of superiority to this idiot thug in the name of making a statement about the societal cancer that could create such a fellow. (The screenplay is credited to Larrain, Castro, and Mateo Iribarren.)

I think that it pulled me in deeper than some other similar movies have done partly because of Castro's compellingly lived-in performance--he inhabits the shell of the rodent-like Raul without fuss or any suggestion of judgment or condescension-- and partly because of the political resonance that the period setting lends the material. The movie never tries to fill in what Raul's life has been life during the past five decades, or to suggest any way that it was different before the coup. Maybe he's making a last, late effort to set himself apart from the crowd, or maybe, five years earlier, he was painting his fingernails green and trying to be Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles. Whatever's the case, with Pinochet in charge, he's split between his feral need for applause and his weaselly need for self-preservation, which means staying far, far off the radar. The scariest scenes in Tony Manero may not be the moment s when Raul expresses his rage by exploding in violence, but the quieter ones where, striding down the street with a stolen TV on his shoulder, he has to duck in and out of sight to avoid the members of Pinochet's goon squad. If Tony Manero proves anything, it's that it may not be capable to create a character so irredeemably scuzzy that you'd wish to see him fall into the hands of guys like that.




The documentary Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg is a rare creature in this day and age, because it deals with a major pop culture phenomenon from the last sixty-odd years that is now virtually forgotten--something so strange nowadays that it feels like a transmission from a place much farther away and more foreign than Chile thirty years ago. (The publicity tagline for the movie is "The Most Famous Woman in America You've Never Heard Of.") Mrs. Goldberg--please, call her Molly--was created, and embodied, by Gertrude Berg, a writer-actress who conceived of the character as the linchpin a fictional Jewish family living in a Bronx tenement apartment who first appeared in a fifteen-minute radio comedy that premiered in 1929 as The Rise of the Goldbergs. (The Goldbergs, it was eventually established, lived on Tremont Avenue, not far from my own present stomping grounds. I hope the mail service was better in their day.) Berg, who hadn't originally intended to play Molly herself, became inextricably welded to the character as soon as she auditioned her script for the network brass by reading it aloud. The Goldbergs moved to television in 1949; there was also a Broadway version that played between the radio and TV incarnations, and a 1950 movie that watered down the ethnic nature of the material by casting Molly as matchmaker to a couple of slices of white bread.

One of the movie's interview subjects, Susan Stamberg, describes Molly/Berg as "the Oprah of her time." (Among the more mixed of her achievements, she turned out to be a whiz at product placement, seamlessly incorporating speeches celebrating her sponsors' products into the scripts, so that it was a bit of challenge to pinpoint the moment where the show had stopped and the commercial had begun.) From the cloudy kinoscopes that are excerpted here, it's easy to detect a good-humored if drowsy charm that explains the show's appeal at the same time that it'll probably keep a lid on any petitions demanding that whatever remains of the old shows be reinstated to the airwaves in place of Gossip Girl. The show tried to keep things light, but Berg also slipped in references to the unfortunate relatives who'd failed to escape Europe before the war, and a rock once came flying through the kitchen window during Seder. The first clear sign that real life might have caught up with Molly came when Philip Loeb, the veteran actor who was the TV Mr. Goldberg, was blacklisted in the McCarthy era and driven from the show, despite Berg's best efforts to save him. (One legend, which probably falls into the too-good-to-check division, has it that New York's Cardinal Spellman offered to broker a deal to have Loeb declared acceptable to the red-baiters, but only if Berg would agree to convert to Catholicism.) His career destroyed, Loeb committed suicide in 1955. He was replaced on the show by the actor Harold Stone, who would in turn be replaced, at Berg's insistence, by Robert Harris, who was married to an actress friend of Berg's Viola Harris. Though the moviemakers either didn't notice or didn't think to point it out, I find it interesting that Stone was apparently hired in part because he was said to resemble Philip Loeb, while the final Mr. Goldberg, Harris, rather resembled Gertude Berg's real-life husband, Lewis Berg. For some fans, though, it could never be the same; one old gent recalls that when he saw any actor besides Loeb keeping house on the show, he couldn't shake "the terrible feeling that Molly Goldberg was involved in an illicit relationship."



Was The Goldbergs, as they say, good for the Jews? People who knew Gertrude Berg say that, in writing the adventures of her fictional family for more than twenty years, she was creating the ideal family that she had been denied when she was growing up, and a lot of people seemed to take this bunch of broadly accented comic actors as just that, an ideal American family. It's hard not to be struck by the contrast between Goldberg's world and the Jewish movie moguls with the Anglicized names who created WASP daydreams on film and sold that as some sort of American ideal. (It's also hard to fully get your mind around the ironies when the film compares this affectionate form of ethnic humor with the other big comedy hit of the day by filling the screen with a publicity photo with the stars of the radio version of Amos and Andy in full black-crow makeup; you might just spill your Coke in your lap.) The documentary isn't very interesting in exploring whatever case might be made that Molly Goldberg was not a helpful stereotype, though it does give Ed Asner a chance to pipe up, expressing concern that Gentiles might have been "laughing at" the Goldbergs "instead of laughing with them," and to complain that, as a kid, he felt that the show "interfered with our blending." (The predominately blue-haired audience at Lincoln Plaza when I saw the movie didn't much care to hear for Lou Grant's concerns, and a few of them hissed him so enthusiastically that I considered circulating among them to point out that he wasn't actually in the room with us and so was unlikely to be moved to reconsider his position.) Tellingly, although Berg and the older actors in the cast clung to their oy-gevalt inflections, the actor who played the Goldbergs' teenage son on the TV show recalls that he was instructed to talk "like just an American kid"; maybe Berg, the progressive-minded show business professional, who started writing and organizing shows to keep the kids busy at her father's Catskills summer getaway, figured that ethnic vaudeville with mock-old world accents and comical malapropisms was fine so long as it was made clear that the next generation would be fully acclimated.

The movie cites the rise of Lucille Ball as serving Molly Goldberg's death knell, but the coroner's report might show that the character came to her real natural end when, in the series' final season, the Goldbergs got out of their tenement and moved on up to a suburban house, which had the same effect on the integrity (and comic potential) of the concept as Roseanne's family winning the lottery and Ralph Kramden moving to Florida. It's perfectly understandable, of course, that popular artists who've built their work on what they remember of having been poor and striving would find that, as they get more and more successful, it gets harder and harder to even remember how things used to be. But if they want to keep their careers going, it does behoove them to try.

This Will Show the Fools Who Called Me Mad: Chapter 328

I got an unseemly amount of delight out of this story from the New York Times' technology blog:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

The Times writer, David Pogue, saves his big ironic reveal for the end: that the book sales that were rescinded as part of what he terms this "Big Brotherish plot" were by George Orwell. It's hard not to automatically see that as some big, telling irony--I shared that reaction when I first heard about it myself--but on reflection, I don't think it's really that telling at all, given that this was the fruit of a misunderstanding between businessmen instead of some political crackdown. If the writer in question hadn't been Orwell, it would still stink to high heaven, but I doubt that anyone would invoke the cliches of 1984 to help people understand what's unsettling about it. Though if someone in Amazon's marketing department comes up with some blatantly insulting phrase designed to put a happy face on the practice of selling people something and then, as stealthily as possible, deciding that they can't have it after all, then we're in business.

No, this turn of events pleases me because, as as I have boasted before, I am an enthusiastic cultural consumer and a hard copy kind of guy. And when it comes to reading material, I am the hero of Bertolucci's Partner, with his room filled with stacks of books; I am Burgess Meredith on the steps of the library after the world has ended. I have no interest in little fiddly mechanical gadgets designed to store my library in cyberspace where the silverfish can't get at it, and I have even less interest in hearing anyone explain to me why these innovations will displace the storehouse of printed crack that is my favorite of the countless reasons that my apartment is unfit for human habitation. I can understand the appeal in theory, just as I understand in theory the appeal of those little pills the astronauts in old sci-fi movies used to gulp that, the movie's resident Werner von Braun would explain, packed all ze nutrients of a three-course dinner vit steak und ize cream into a zingle capsule. But the thing is, I enjoying chewing, and I want my stuff.

So all the advantages of my misguided, outmoded twentieth-century way of life, and the undreamed-of terrors of the dread new world are summed up in this nightmare vision of Amazon sneaking into people's Kindles like a thief in the night and removing their new, treasured possessions, leaving behind a few bucks but not even a note reading, "Our bad!" I supposed it's within imaginable possibility that Amazon representatives might try to tiptoe into my home after bedtime to retrieve whatever actual by God book I've just bought from them, even after I've held the usual party with cake and noisemakers to introduce it to all my other stuff, the family it has joined after its long, lonely trip from the warehouse. How would that turn out? The people planning to remake Straw Dogs would be well advised to come along and take notes. Now, to further celebrate this triumph for myself and my Luddite brothers, I am going to stretch out on the fire escape and read this week's edition of Wednesday Comics, DC's summer foray into giant-sized newsprint serialized graphic adventures, and a sterling example of what print can do that loses something when reduced to palm-sized digital replication. The little bastard sitting across from me on the subway who was working at some three-figure edition of how to get the B.B. in the bear's eye stared at me in abject misery as I unfolded the pages, and that's the important thing.

"Reverse Racist" Is the New "Uppity", or Funny Peculiar II

The rule since the Bork hearings of twenty-two years ago has been that Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees serve as occasions for judges to smile and act cordial and respectful and insist that they have virtually no view of their own on the eternal hot button issues and try to come across as someone who wouldn't run wild with the judicial activism and the personal bias and the thing and the what. Meanwhile, the Senators bang away relentlessly at whatever pet issue or non-issue they think their constituents want them to appear to be irrationally obsessed with. Sometimes the affair becomes dominated by some piece of personal trivia that everyone grasps onto in their sweaty desperate desire to have something to talk about. On some occasions--Clarence Thomas will remain the nonpareil example until someone is sitting in front of the desk with the microphone when, live on camera, a dog trots into the hearing room and deposits the leg bone of his missing wife at his feet--the side issue that emerges leaves the nominee wishing that he'd instead agreed to a walking tour of the continental United States in which he would explain his personal feelings about abortion, as honestly and in as much detail as possible, to everyone they meet, whether they are carrying a bucket of pig's blood or not.

It was decided, almost from the second that Sonia Sotomayor popped out of the box, that the big side issue of her confirmation hearings, which would take center stage whenever a Republican had the stage, would be the nominee's racist tendencies, which she especially delighted in taking out on white guys who can't read and so choose to spend their time not at the library but running into burning buildings. Partly this came about because, in a case that can't really be said to have been about preferential hearing practices because the aggrieved white firemen in question couldn't bear to wait for anyone to actually get hired or not hired before punching their lawyer's number on the speed dial, Sotomayor voted according to accepted legal precedent, which strikes a lot of the loudest white guys in this country as a gross act of judicial activism. Partly it is because she once told a crowd that she "would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." For these trespasses, she was viewed with caution and concern by such interrogators as Senator Jeff Sessions, a man who has called the Voting Rights Act a "piece of intrusive legislation" and who has chided the "communist-inspired" NAACP for having "forced civil rights down the throats of people." As has been pointed out more than once since the hearings began, Sessions's own nomination for a federal judgeship back in 1986 got shot down in part because he had said that he hadn't thought that the Ku Klux Klan was such a bad bunch of folks until he found out that some of them smoke marijuana.

Those who have been paying close attention to the standards for racial sensitivity that Judge Sotomayor's detractors seem to insist upon might find it surprising that they would tolerate having someone with a mind like that allowed to sit in judgment on anyone. But Sessions's has satisfied the white guys sensitivity squad by explaining that his remark was a "joke." He was funnin'. Everyone knows that only a humorless spoilsport tries to examine the mechanical works of a joke, in hopes that we might learn something about the kind of person who tells it, laughs at it, or sees nothing offensive in it, but perhaps, when the joke in question is as still born as this one, we may be forgiven for trying to use it this way, since it's the only way that might be found to justify its existence. The joke is not sui generis in its approach. It's very much like Ann Coulter's knee slapper that it's too bad that Timothy McVeigh didn't park his truck next to the New York Times building--or, because this vein of attempted humor knows no ideology, like Robin Tyler's swifty from the early '80s about wanting to raise money to send John Hinckley, Jr. to marksmanship school, or, more recently, Michael Moore's gutbuster about wanting to explain to al-Qaeda that the people of New York were thoughtful sorts who could understand their grievances, and so they really should have killed thousands of Red Staters instead. Their status as "jokes" is meant to absolve these remarks of any unpleasant reflections they might cast on those who tell them, but for a joke to work, there have to be certain shared assumptions between the teller and the audience. For a demagogue like Coulter or Moore, the snug, smug knowledge that whoever you're talking to will agree, at least in theory, that a pile of bloody corpses of the right sort is something to chuckle about makes all the difference between a round of mirthful applause and the sound of crickets chirping broken up by scattered murmurs of "Jesus Christ!"

Similarly, saying that the KKK are all right with you except for the ropers in their midst makes sense as a statement only if you mean to say that you heartily approve of the group's philosophical foundations, and only functions as a "joke" if the anticipated reaction of your intended audience would be to throw an arm around you and say, "Haw, ain't it the truth. Let me buy you a beer." The joke thus reveals something ineffably grotesque about the teller even if everyone who hears it can tell that it's a joke, and the fact that Sessions has had to explain a few time that it was a joke should have been his first clue that there was something the matter with it. He could have taken some tips from a professional failed comedian like Dennis Miller, who, doing his C-lister-turned-demagogue routine on some cable show, tried plugging his latest book or nude centerfold or whatever piece of shit he's trying to peddle these days by howling that it would be better "if I were a wise Latina woman" and then, after exploding in laughter and doing some weird "Ole'!" gesture with his hand, actually had the presence of mind to explain to the baffled host, that this was "my Sonia Sotomayor joke." Technically, it wasn't a joke, just an expression of contempt delivered with a gargoyle grin and the same I-am-my-own-laugh-track shtick that Miller used in his "Weekend Update"/talk show days to tip those frozen to the sight of him in dumbstruck horror that, all their senses to the contrary, he'd just gotten off a good one. Years of scuffling have at least taught Miller how important it is to explicitly notify the viewer that the horrible or head-scratching thing that just came out of your mouth was humorous, and to prove it by laughing as if you're about to cough up a lung. In the case of either Sessions or Miller, it's all that stands between your recognition that jocular entertainment is being attempted and your just thinking that Grandpa has gone off his meds.

Sotomayor herself has never tried to say that her "wise Latina woman" line was a joke; it was "a failed rhetorical gesture." I'm down with that. The key part of the line is obviously the part about life experiences, and though the sentence was clumsily worded enough that anyone looking to find a basis for grievance in it could choose to take it as meaning that Latinas are universally smarter than white guys, I will defy anyone who isn't either a drooling moron or a hardened professional bullshit dispenser to say, with a straight face and without turning red as a beet, that they really, really did take it that way the first time they heard it. What's funny, and a little bit of a shame, is that by giving the GOP this line to turn into her "There's a pubic hair on my Coke can", Sotomayor made it all the more necessary for her to turn into a stone wall and insist that her life experiences wouldn't really shape her decisions as a judge. Of course they will, for good and for bad, just as the judges who voted in the case of Brown v. Board of Education made a decision that was informed by the disparity between what a racially divided society was really like and what its effects had been and threatened to be for generations of children; just as those who voted in Roe v. Wade were thinking about all the women they could save from dying at the hands of back-street abortionists; just as, on what some might view as a less noble plane, those who voted for the majority in Bush v. Gore couldn't help thinking of how much more of a nightmare Scalia was going to be to have around if the Democrats got hold of the White House for another four years. In the case that has caused Sotomayor so much grief, the Roberts court went with a decision that, based on the details and merits, can best be understood as the members of the majority wanting to close out their docket with a show of solidarity with a bunch of guys who rescue babies from burning buildings, and the Senators who are troubled by Judge Sotomayor's adherence to precedent when she was presented with that case are really asking that she acknowledge the wisdom of bending in the wind, so long as she bends in the direction they prefer.

In reference to the "wise Latina" remark, Lindsey Graham, who with his clammy, heavy-lidded mask comported himself more than ever like the bastard son of Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, told the judge that "If I said something like that, my career would be over." But of course, Graham says things like it all the time, just as, it was pointed out, Justice Alito did when he extolled his personal experience during his hearings. The reason that pointing this out cut no ice with those trying to paint Judge Sotomayor as a racist is that he didn't explicitly talk about his experience as a "wise white man", because he didn't have to. A white man drawing on his life experience is seen by people like Graham and Sessions as not just unexceptional but the normal order of things, to the point that it has no ethnic or gender component at all, which is why any deviation from that pattern--say, a Latina woman arriving in a position of power, without even signing, in her children's blood, a contract agreeing to clear every opinion she has with the "normal" white guys, who draw their own opinions from an imaginary pure well of clear, unbiased, even-handed judgment. That's the more tolerant position, of course; at the other extreme we have someone like Rush Limbaugh, who has called President Obama "the ultimate reverse racist", which, given Obama's record on racial matters--and assuming that Limbaugh wants us to do him the favor or assuming that the things he says have any meaning at all--can only be taken as a way of saying that it's racially unfair for Obama to ever appoint a non-white to any position at all, and probably that it was morally wrong for him to beat a white guy in a presidential election himself.

If that is what Limbaugh and his pasty brethren are trying to get at, it's not unreasonable for them to find these recent developments threatening. It certainly helps to explain how someone like Karl Rove, casting to the four winds those fantasies he used to have of broadening the GOP by making it the party of choice for Hispanic voters, could actually go on TV and insist that the Princeton-educated Columbia Law professor Sotomayor was "unintelligent." If it looks as if Sotomayor's harshest critics are trying to rewrite the rules for what amounts to qualification for high office and being taken seriously in general, it may actually be the case that they're trying to prevent the real, long-accepted rules from being rewritten. What, after all, are their qualifications for hogging the airwaves with baseless crap about people who've worked hard and distinguished themselves to get ahead? Well, Rove is a toady who attached himself to the host body of a former President's son, failed to get him elected, managed to get him re-elected by the skin of his teeth after the kid got the job anyway, and subsequently managed to burn his party to the ground, all the while babbling about the permanent realignment of which he would be the architect. Limbaugh is a degenerate dope fiend who does a radio show where he speaks nonsense to an audience of idiots who either don't have day jobs or work someplace with very lenient standards about in-office entertainment. Miller is an unfunny former comedian and failed talk show host who is guaranteed a mention whenever ESPN does one of its "Worst of All Time" specials and thinks back fondly on his time in the Monday Night Football booth. These are the people who will tell you that the Sotomayors of this world owe their every moment of success entirely to the color of their skin. And as soon as American society shifts enough that being a loud-mouthed white guy isn't accepted as the sole criteria for having your viewpoint deemed worthy of being heard, they'll have a lot of shuffleboard games on their schedule.