Give David Paterson this: when someone rights the definitive social history of how America came to rethink its acceptance of the pundits' conventional wisdom that sexual immorality is the only moral issue that can drive a politician into the wilderness, never to return, he'll merit at least a footnote. In March 2008, when word got out that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had frequented prostitutes, Spitzer's reputation flatlined. No one ever liked the guy much, and the revelations about his personal life made him look like the skeeviest kind of hypocrite, and so the dogs were turned on him without mercy. New York magazine ran a typically delicate, elliptical cover illustration by Barbara Kruger, showing a full-body photograph of a smiling Spitzer with an arrow labeled "BRAINS" pointing to his crotch; as with Bill Clinton in 1998, the last-ditch argument for people who really aren't fascinated by politicians' sex lives but didn't want to be left out of the pile-on was that, by getting laid outside his marriage, he'd proven that he was too dumb to hold elective office. Now, less than two years later, Spitzer is already back, an official wise man figure, much in demand on TV talk shows and public speaking engagements; he writes a column for Slate. Part of his speeded-up rehabilitation has to do with the economic collapse in 2008; Spitzer is regarded as being smart about financial issues, and of course, he had the advantage of not being in office, and so not an obvious scapegoat, when everything went to hell. But he still couldn't have begun to seem so brilliant in retrospect if his replacement, Paterson, hadn't come to seem so lackluster, simultaneously ineffectual and disastrous. In took Richard Nixon about ten years to be officially reclassified a Statesman in Winter by the media, and he had been able to bathe in the reflected dullness of Jerry Ford.

Paterson survived a meeting with President Obama in which it was practically suggested that he'd wake up to find a horse's head in his bed if he didn't bow the hell out of this year's governor's race, only to announce earlier today that he won't run, following yesterday's publication of a New York Times story alleging that the Guv and the cops might have been involved in a cover-up to protect one of his aides, David W. Johnson, "who had risen from working as Mr. Paterson’s driver and scheduler to serving in the most senior ranks of the administration", and who has been accused of assaulting a woman he was living with. (And by the way, what is it with New York pols and this strange pattern of them selecting the scariest thug who polishes their apples and grandly elevating them to the highest echelons of power? Maybe, someday, Johnson and Bernie Kerik can be brought together, so they can argue over who gets the top bunk.)

I was under the impression that Paterson had about as much popular support as a return to Prohibition, but it didn't take long after the Times posted its first news of his decision before somebody chimed in to insist that the poor bastard had been the victim of a race-driven conspiracy to bring down the black man. Seeing that, posted at an hour when it seemed unlikely that anyone had done much drinking already today, really gave me a jolt; it took me back to the '90s, when some people, uneasy about the coming post-racial America, were so desperate to see racial victimization where none existed that they were ready to take up a collection for Marion Barry. In New York, the unfettered NYPD of the Giuliani era were always eager to meet racial paranoids more than halfway, but things have calmed down so much since Rudy left thatit never occurred to me that anyone would think to try to revive that kind of thing on behalf of a human speed bump like Paterson. You can get nostalgic for anything, I guess.

Buffaloed

I've been meaning to say something about how much I've been enjoying Lance Mannion's Virtual Robert Altman Film Fest, a chance to give people an excuse to watch a few movies by the most fondly remembered American moviemaker who didn't invent kiss-proof lipstick and then jaw about them at Lance's site. Lance and company have already dealt with a couple of my all-time favorites, California Split and Thieves Like Us.; last night's movie was Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), a film that I've always wanted to like a lot more than I do, for reasons that I try to explain in the comments section here. Next up, Thursday March 4: a double bill drawn from Altman's filmed-theater phase, Streamers and Secret Honor. It'll make for an interesting contrast, not just compared to what's come before (Buffalo Bill itself was based on a play by Arthur Kopit, indians, that Altman scarcely bothered to honor) but as two very different examples of the director's '80s work. Hope to see you there.

Everything You Need to Know about Some of the Places Where I Once Worked in New Orleans

The answer to 19-Across in today's New York Times crossword puzzle, "Something below the bar", is "KEG". Which I figured out about five minutes after I wrote down the word that first came to me. Which was "GUN".

With a Name Like...

One of the side benefits of gorging on a lot of music and movie and book reviews and the like in your adolescence is that you may develop a life-long interest in certain writers who never write a "real" book but who turn up repeatedly in your favorite magazines. For me, one of these was Tom Smucker, who won my heart with his essay on gospel music in the 1979 rock-critic anthology Stranded. I haven't seen his byline anywhere in so long that I sort of assumed that he'd either died or married into royalty, but I've still been known to google his name from time to time, and the other day I hit paydirt. I haven't yet looked into his current writing yet to guarantee that it's not part of some Scientology cult project, but I'd definitely encourage those new to the name to investigate his life's work, Debbie Boone review and all.

The Times, They Are Derangin'

Returning to the air after one of its semi-regular hiatuses, The Daily Show led off Monday night with a string of clips at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where a number of speakers (and Fox News announcers covering the event) referred to it as "our Woodstock", which I guess means Brit Hume is Wavy Gravy. My first reaction was that if Woodstock nostalgia survived that Ang Lee movie, then it's official that nothing can kill it. But still, it sure was strange to see a political gathering of any stripe likening itself, in hopeful tones, to a pop music concert (and, okay, "watershed generational moment", if you don't mind sounding like a total douche) of more than forty years ago. Is a Woodstock to call their own something that any of these people, some of them middle-aged, some of them youthful if only in Earth years, really something they've been yearning for all this time? And thirty years from now, will they be as dickish about it as Dave Marsh was in 1994, when, during a TV discussion of Woodstock's "legacy", heard a fellow panelist meekly suggest that maybe Lollapallooza was almost sort of kinds about as good as Woodstock and reacted with appalled disgust to the blasphemous suggestion that anyone might think the Beastie Boys, Green Day, and the P-Funk All-Stars might be worthy to lick the feet of Richie Havens, Canned Heat, and Sha Na Na?

One of the more concrete results of this line of babble was Michael Lind's column in Salon yesterday, which used one of the most gruesome-looking things I've ever seen in my life, a mash-up photo of Glenn Beck reporting for his audition for the Dick Shawn role in The Producers, to drive home its point that the hard right has constructed its own version of the New Left '60s counterculture at its most unendearingly unhinged. This must be one of those ideas that just starts circulating in the air, because I had it myself last week and thought about writing a post to that effect but ended up putting it off because other things seemed of more pressing importance, like those twelve dollars that Martin Scorsese stole from my pocket after knocking me down with a garbage can lid and pissing in my mouth. I regret not having gotten right on it, since I think I'd enjoy thinking that Michael Lind knows who I am and is sometimes impressed enough with my ideas to rip them off. In the Information Age, one is constantly reminded that the race is to the swift.



What actually got me thinking along these lines was reading Renata Adler's report (reprinted in her book Towards a Radical Middle) on "the National New Politics Convention, which was held at the Plamer House in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend [of 1967]," and which "began as a call from the National Conference for New Politics...for delegates from all radical and liberal groups opposed to the American involvement in Vietnam to unite on a course of political action for 1968." There were some intelligent, even heroic people present, including Martin Luther King, who delivered the keynote address. According to Adler, they were lost in the noise generated by the hustlers, thugs, and those who discussed "one's politics as a most interesting turn in one's personal psychology"--the kind of people who, thirty years later, would turn a blind eye to the danger represented by Bush and Cheney because they were too busy mistaking Al Gore for Boss Tweed and confusing Bill Clinton with the Boston Strangler. These worthies began splitting up into groups and composing "programs", trying to outdo each other with their Utopian uselessness. King himself was heckled by kids who thought he was too compromised and old hat a figure to deserve the crowd's respect and who, during his speech, "whispered, 'Make way for Rap Brown.' (This never failed to produce an awed 'Where? Where?" from whatever white radicals were nearby.)" How totally bughouse was the scene? To hear Adler tell it, after King and Dr. Spock fled the premises, the sanest person there was Martin Peretz.

Fast-forward to CPAC last week, and it's hard to tell what the difference is supposed to be, at least on the surface. There's the same wholesale rejection of reality connected to the same unearned self-righteousness, the same love of conspiracy theories, the same meaningless rhetoric, the same reliance on litmus tests designed to out anyone who could ever produce a coherent or effective plan of action as a phony, the same infatuated attitude towards violence, which in the old days stank of radical chic and might now be called "militia chic." One young Turk, Jason Mattera, yelled, "We must be that generation that stands athwart history yelling, 'Hey, jackass, get your government off my freedom!' " This rewriting of William F. Buckley's zinger about conservatives' responsibility to "stand thwart history, yelling, stop!" helped to clarify the ways in which the CPAC mob sees itself as the new blood. Buckley was too refined and gracious a role model; the new generational model is Bluto Blutarsky. With an unlicensed firearm. At Woodstock. You could make yourself pretty dizzy pretty fast trying to juggle all the context and meaning that the CPACers have had to shuck away from their second-hand role models and convince themselves that, despite their stale and discredited political ideas, they are, in the words of the Love Boat theme, exciting and new.

Beneath the surface, the members of what might be called the New Reactionaries are substantially different from the old New Left, but in ways that aren't especially flattering to them. Both groups, to their eternal shame and disgrace, reacted to their frustrations at the ballot box by rejecting democracy itself; the members of the New Left who turned to violence and other forms of assholism came to believe that to work "within the system" by voting for actual electable candidates would sully their souls, and so they kept their souls and helped inflict Nixon and, later, Bush on us. The New Reactionaries are mixed in their feelings towards Bush, but they're agreed that Clinton, who (unlike Bush) won re-election in a landslide, was not a legitimate president, and that Obama, who (unlike Bush) was swept into office on a wave of acclimation by a loud, vocal majority, and whose failures have so far been the result of his efforts to achieve some kind of non-acrimonious bipartisan consensus (something that Bush would no more have dreamed of than he believed in the Easter Bunny), is a dictator who obtained power by unjust means and is cramming his vile ideas down the country's throat. They may not all be Randians--though it wouldn't shock me shitless if it turned out that they are--but they share the Atlas Shrugged daydream that they belong to a small, select group who should be entrusted with the job of saving us all from King Mob.

No subject does more to highlight the differences and similarities of the New Left and the New Reactionaries than their attitudes toward violence. Both groups are full of people who get off on it, so long as they're not hurt by it. One of the great moments in cognitive dissonance came on the morning of September 11, 2001, when the New York Times ran an interview with Bill Ayres and Bernadette Dohrn, the Weatherman scumbags turned Establishment slimeballs, in which they touted his memoir and looked back fondly on the good old days of blowing shit up, which, as the black clouds began billowing up from the remains of the World Trade Center, suddenly didn't seem as adorable. Conservatives can see clearly that the bomb-throwing goons of the New Left were terrorists, often in league with common crooks using their new friends' confusion and unfocused rage opportunistically. But that same rigorous moral focus gets all blurry when they're confronted with the likes of Timothy McVeigh and Joseph Stack and the murderers of abortion providers. The horrors spread by these jackasses causes New Reactionaries to fumble and prate, trying to find the right words to convey their feelings about people who did terrible, bloody things that they cannot endorse--but in the name of just causes, driven by frustrations they can understand.

It's hard to say how Stack's rage at having his businesses messed with because he decided that he was above paying taxes--a position that links him with such populist heroes as Leona Helmsley and Wesley Snipes--has to do with the frustration of a honest everyday breadwinner's problems with making ends, and even harder to understand how you can feel sympathetically inclined towards someone whose narcissistic self-pity was so out of control that, rather than care about taking care of his family, his last act before going on his kamikaze run was to burn down their house. But New Reactionaries are terrified of not seeming in touch with any anti-government sentiment, no matter how unjustified or miserably expressed. This is, after all, a movement based on purity of feeling! Glenn Beck is always bragging about how the people in his fan based don't know what they're so upset about and can't articulate it, but they sure are upset, and isn't that the important thing? When your movement is driven by rage over how taxes keep going up and the government isn't doing anything to end the recession, when in fact taxes went down for at least ninety percent of Americans last year and the government created almost two millions jobs last year, the last thing you'd want to do is encourage people to know what the hell they're so mad about.

Of course, the biggest difference between the New Left and the New Reactionaries is this: the self-styled "revolutionaries" of the New Left saw themselves as outsiders who, especially in the case of the well-fed, well-educated middle class white kids of the movement, felt that they were rejecting a privileged place in society to fight for causes that, in their childish, self-flattering cynicism, they decided could never come about by way of the ballot box and other means of conventional societal change. And because of that, the Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with them, though for decades Republicans have talked about Democratic candidates such as George McGovern as if they used to vacation in Hanoi while plotting to make Jane Fonda Secretary of State and install Abbie Hoffman at the Federal Reserve. But the New Reactionaries, even as they romanticize themselves as guerrilla outsiders, are trying to hold onto the privileges they see as their birthright; they have contempt for democracy not because it improves the world too slowly for their taste, but because they feel outnumbered by people who don't look like them, and so, they imagine, have less right that them to have their voice heard.

In particular, young'uns like Mattera and Chris Sorba (the proudly belligerent old-school homophobe idjit who complained about the presence of a conservative gay rights group at CPAC, saying that "civil rights are grounded in natural rights," and that gays have no claim to civil rights because they exist in violation of natural law) give off the kind of stiff reek of angry resentment that George Bush, Jr. does, the resentment of someone who showed up after people started monkeying around with preposterous notions about how people should be given a chance to rise based on something besides how much their daddies contributed to the college war chest and is steamed as hell about it. Yet the Republican Party courts these cretins as furiously as the Democrats tried to steer clear of the bomb-throwers and campus Communist groups, and it does so with the sweaty, uneasy desperation of those who isn't sure how much of a legitimate constituency they have left. They're right to worry; too many of those chin-scratch pieces about how the Democrats and Obama are doomed because their approval numbers keep falling bother to mention that the approval numbers of the Republicans keep falling even lower. All this is beside the point to people like Beck and Sarah Palin, who'd turn up at a cockfight if they were assured of getting the love there. But if there are any serious people left in the Republican Party, and if they're old enough to remember how damaging the mere existence of the New Left turned out to be for the Democrats, they might want to think loud and hard about how closely they want to be associated with a bunch of folks who William F. Buckley would have screamed himself hoarse yelling to get off his lawn.

Hack License

Sp I saw Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese's ten-ton unofficial remake of Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, with what appears to be some outtakes from Inglourious Basterds thrown in and the killer bikes thrown out. My strongest reaction to it was the the killer bikers were missed.

Sometimes, I think that Scorsese has not just declined, but that he's declined in the saddest way imaginable for a great movie director, especially the kind of director he used to be. He hasn't lost all interest in contemporary life, like Woody Allen, or become the world's biggest A-V geek, the way Coppola did in the '80s, or become drowsily immersed in the process for its own sake, like Kubrick. (I once had an online debate about Eyes Wide Shut with someone who smugly asked me if I knew that one of the sets in the film was a duplicate of a New York street that Kubrick lived on forty years earlier. If your interest in story and character and meaning and entertainment value in general pales next to your delight in that kind of trivia, you too may be able to believe that Eyes Wide Shut has a reason to exist.) For Scorsese, it's all about the process, keeping his career going, though he isn't drowsy about it: he still works hard at giving you something to look at. Elvis Mitchell likes to say that the director's job is to solve problems, and for some twenty years now, the problem that Scorsese has faced has usually been some version of, how can I take this script that nobody could care about and realize it so that people feel there's a reason they're watching it?

With Cape Fear, the problem was to inflate the effective old B-movie material so that it seemed like the work of an A-lister (which was more important than making sure that it was effective this time); with The Age of Innocence, where the narration and so much of the casting spelled out that he didn't really get the material, the trick was to make a movie that looked enough like a Merchant-Ivory picture that people would marvel at how he'd stretched himself out of his comfort zone. When he's failed to convince most of the critical media that he's made another masterpiece, it's usually been not because he let his visual energy level sag bit because he allowed himself to settle too easily into his comfort zone. Watching Casino, you could practically hear him whispering to himself, "This'll be an easy sell at three hours; it's a lucky thing for me that there's nobody in the world who could ever get tired of watching beefy, middle-aged guys with big hair and loud clothes pretending to be young guys, screaming curse words and assaulting each other between trips to the Rainbow Room to hear Vic Damone. They are, after all, the most beautiful and fascinating of all of God's creations. I can't understand why Monet didn't paint more of them instead of water lilies." But some of us philistines had actually started to get a little tired of it even before the closing credits of GoodFellas showed up.

Scorsese is touted as the maverick who tamed the system, a guy who made his name in independent, "personal" filmmaking who made a home for himself in the studio system and built his career there on his own terms. But are we all sure who really tamed who? There have always been signs, even back in the '70s when he seemed to bleed celluloid, that he might possibly revere old studio filmmaking a little more than was good for him. In a BBC documentary from the time of The Last Temptation of Christ, maybe the last non-documentary, feature-length Scorsese movie that really felt (to me, anyway) as if he had to make it, the way he had to make Mean Streets and Taxi Driver and The Last Waltz and American Boy, Scorsese could be seen talking about what it meant to him to bring that material to the screen, but he could also be seen staring at Nicholas Ray's King of Kings on his huge-ass TV and talking about it as if it were a masterwork from which we Could Learn Much. It is, at it happens, a train wreck, like every other Hollywood Biblical spectacle from the 1950s and 1960s, but I wouldn't be surprised of it didn't hold a special fascination for Scorsese at that time, because it's the work of a "maverick" director working in the studio system (and, like Eyes Wide Shut, is full of "interesting" details of the kind that seem to mean more to some movie nuts than actual good moviemaking) who was very near the end of his attempts to find a place for himself in the big system.

Scorsese is, along with Spielberg, one of the two great success stories of their generation, in terms of carving out a big-studio niche and turning out picture after picture. Scorsese is probably much more the hero to critics and film students than Spielberg, who never tried to buck the studio system, and because of his internal pipeline to the mass audience, maybe never needed to. Both have very spotty careers, but the key difference between them may be that Spielberg, the entertainer with erratic taste, still works on material that clearly means a lot to him. Scorsese, the insider who the other insiders point to as the artist in their midst, runs an assembly line where he takes projects that might just as well have been handed to Richard Donner or Michael Bay, shapes them in accordance with his "style", and sends them off to market on a rocket sled. If someone fresh out of film school was farting around like this, he wouldn't get very far--hell, he'd be the new Phil Joanou--but try it when you've got a backlist of actual accomplishments and you might just be the recipient of a steady stream of reviews ecstatically explaining that your latest works as about nothing so much as your pure love of filmmaking itself. The whole point of them is to get to that moment at the end where, as in Shutter Island, the red herrings and hambone cameos and pointless flourishes are replaced by a black screen and the words "Directed by Martin Scorsese" loom above you like King Kong. There, you've seen the new Scorsese. Mark it off your checklist for the year.

God Bless Us, Everyone

When did it become standard practice for anyone admitting to having held an opinion he knew to be wrong or copping to an emotion that he knew was sort of embarrassing to lead with his chin by belligerently insisting that "everyone" had thought or felt the same way--meaning not that no one didn't disagree with the opinion, but that anyone who did (and so was, if you want to get pissy about it, was "right") should have been wrong, like all respectable people? I think that the first time I caught an echo of this mindset was when I read a column that Russell Baker wrote in the mid-1970s, when "everyone" had come around to the idea that the Vietnam War had been a mistake. Baker noted that nobody was rushing to congratulate, or even apologize to, any of the reporters or politicians who'd lost their jobs for objecting to the war when their bosses or the voters were still mostly in favor of it, or at least were wary of moving too far away from what was then conventional wisdom. The fact that such men as J. William Fulbright and Albert Gore, Sr. caught shit for opposing the war years before others did didn't make the people who came to agree with them feel that those men had been right when they themselves were mistaken; as Baker wrote, most people don't award you any honor for having been right too soon.

Still, I don't remember hearing this sort of attitude expressed quite so baldly before the Bush years. Of course, as support for the Iraq War dried up, you heard again and again that, while it turned out that Saddam didn't have any WMDs, "everyone" thought that he had--at least after 9/11, because before that, many of the individual members of "everyone" thought that the effort to seal him off and keep him harmless was working fine--and so the fact that the people who didn't buy it, even though they turned out to be right, were still a bunch of nuts. Or, as The New Republic once editorialized, the Cold War idea that the Soviet Union was a powerful threat to America in its last few decades of existence turned out to be baseless, but if you didn't subscribe to it at the time--if, in other words, you saw things as they really were--you were not just not right, but irresponsible. The measure of an idea's validity is how many respectable people believe it at the same time. Whether or not it's true is immaterial. Of all the benefits that come from being one of the deciders of conventional wisdom, none is more impressive than this: you get to determine when it's unforgivably wrong to be right.

This sort of thing isn't limited to matters of life and death. Last month, Erich Segal, the author of the terrible book and movie Love Story, as well as some other terrible novels that were marginally less successful, died. Although Segal's writing was worthless, he does have some footnote importance for his role in helping to create the culture wars: he was practically present at the creation when, back in 1970, he sold the sticky wad of Kleenex he'd palmed off as a novel by means of a snarky-dipshit book tour recital in which he (as Nora Ephron reported at the time in Esquire) "praises Love Story at the expense of Portnoy's Complaint and then rises to a crescendo in a condemnation of graphic sex in literature. 'Have you any doubt," Segal asks...what happened between Romeo and Juliet on their wedding night?...Would you feel any better if you had seen it?'" (Ephron also noted that when Segal was accused of "knocking freedom of speech and sucking up to his audience", he shrugged, "We're here to sell books, aren't we?") Now, of course, Philip Roth's entire published output for the first thirty years of his busy career has been enshrined in the Library of Congress, while Segal is remembered, if he is remembered by anyone outside his family and friends, as the perpetrator of one of the most embarrassing best-sellers since the days of James Gould Cozzens. Surely posterity will straighten all this out somewhere down the line.

But that's not enough for Martin Peretz, whose remembrance of his dear, talentless friend in what used to be his very own magazine is full of defensive reminders that, in addition to having been a fine fellow, Segal should be considered beyond the bounds of criticism as a writer and cultural force, because his slop was so popular. "No one who has read Love Story will ever forget it; it is more memorable than the film. And, if you are of a certain age, please don't deny reading it. If you didn't, you were a cultural freak." The business about the book being "more memorable", presumably in a good way, than the movie is less a matter of opinion than a bare-faced lie; the movie, after all, is the book, and not so much because the movie was faithful to the book as the other way around. (Segal wrote the movie script first, then, at the behest of the studio, wrote the book, as what used to be called the "novelization" of the movie so that they'd have something to hustle in bookstores. Novelized movie scripts used to be standard practice in the movie business in the 1970s, before people could swing by the video store and just pick up an actual home edition of the movie.) But calling someone "a cultural freak" seems an awfully condemnatory way to say that someone never got around to wasting an hour or so of his life by dabbing Erich Segal's drool off his chin. Would Peretz, who thinks that he isn't regularly invited on TV panel shows to share his views about how all Arabs are psychopathic at birth because he's a brave, lonely voice in the wilderness (and not because he's a pathological racist idiot, or shall we say, a cultural freak), say the same thing about those who enjoyed Jonathan Livingston Seagull or Flashdance or Saved by the Bell, to cite a few works that no one could argue are any worse than Segal's? Maybe he would, if he knew the folks responsible for them; for all I know, someday he will. In the meantime, so far as I know, Leon Wieseltier has not yet resigned his post as TNR's literary editor over Peretz's article, which is worth keeping in mind the next time he has a gas attack in the magazine's back pages because he's so disgusted with other publications for lowering the bar of cultural standards.

What got me thinking of this was the coverage of Tiger Woods's nationally televised apology for having fucked around on his wife and failing to text the rest of us in advance to let us know he wasn't perfect. The event was preceded by a conga line of reporters and commentators, on TV and the Internet, promising that "everyone" would of course be watching--after all, who has a job that requires them to be at work on a Friday when the sun is up?--which served to underline the importance of the occasion. Once everyone had agreed that it was important, columnists and other opinion makers were free to review it as if it were the season premiere of Lost: maybe he was sincere, but he seemed robotic, and why did he fill the room with friendly faces instead of taking questions from reporters (though I've yet to hear anyone specify which vital question went unasked--"Hey, Tiger, how does it feel to be the national scumbag?"), and why didn't he work harder to seem like the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with? Writing in Slate, Josh Levin dissed the set design, complaining that Woods delivered his mea culpa while "standing before velvety blue curtains that looked more appropriate for a Broadway show." Maybe he should have stood in front of a target range or as part of a police lineup, but the fact is, treating a man's attempt to recover from a public shaming as if it were a reality TV entertainment (or a Broadway show) is something we're still learning to do, and the cliches will come.

But I couldn't help thinking that Levin's claim that Woods's demeanor seemed to say, "I'm deeply sorry, I hate you, now die" smacked of projection. Woods's great public sin was not his adultery but his having managed to project an image smooth enough that people were surprised to learn that he'd committed adultery. This made it fascinating, which in turn put people of a certain attitude, one that seems to be prevalent in the media classes if not the species as a whole, to blow the whole thing out of proportion to justify their fascination, so that they'd feel that they weren't just a pack of dirty-minded gossip whores. Woods had let them down, not just by being someone different (to be honest, someone more interesting) than the person they'd been telling their readers he was for more than a dozen years, and then by making them read the New York Post in the sweaty, desperate hunch for one more greasy nugget. For this he must pay and suffer their disapproval. Probably some of them will continue to find grounds to disapprove of him for the rest of their lives. As Molly Ivins once wrote of the Hillary Clinton haters brigade, "Most people have a very hard time forgiving those whom they have deeply wronged."

The trickiest part of the Woods affair for mot of the people trying to find a way to justify their reluctance to shut up about it is that they're not dense or hypocritical enough to pretend to believe this is any of their business. Bill Clinton's adultery wasn't the business of anyone outside his family tree either, but if you squinted and tilted your head funny, you could get away with pretending to think that it kind of resembled a constitutional crisis or a debate over whether the perjury guidelines or some goddamn thing. You can shake the Woods case like a snow globe, hold it up to light, run warm water over, dress it up like a llama, and it just continues to yield the same result, the same reason it caught your attention in the first place: the Buddhist Howdy Doody with the golf swing is a freak! Some observers have been forced to try to act above the actual details by pretending this is also about captitalism; "Publicly, anyway," writes Charles P. Pierce in the Boston Globe, "this is now all about saving what's left of the brand." I guess that's true, unless you think that the public side of all this includes the sight of Woods's face, on TV, tacitly admitting that what he called his "irresponsible and selfish behavior" was everybody's business, even if he wasn't sure of that himself, and looking to me like someone who everybody had bullied into doing something nobody would want to do, as his penance for having been judged interesting beyond the call of duty. If he'd only been a different kind of celebrity--the kind who's expected to have a harem on the side, none of this would have been imaginable, and everybody would be a lot less peeved at him, because they wouldn't be chafing against their own unwanted suspicions that they'd been party to making things harder than they had to be for a confused but basically decent guy who's trying to put his life back together and isn't helped by polls on the subject of whether women who are complete strangers to him and his family will have a harder time forgiving him than men who are complete strangers to him and his family. Ideally, the last word he uttered into the microphone Friday would have been the signal for everybody to back off for a while instead of rushing into print with their insightful and acerbic comparisons to R2D2. But that's not how everybody rolls.

Prating for the General

For those of us who are old enough to remember having been very young during Ronald Reagan's first term as president, it is possible to feel a certain nostalgic affection for the memory of General Alexander Haig. As a politician-general, Haig aspired to player status, and after his time as White House Chief of Staff under Presidents Nixon and Ford--during which he held the place together as Nixon crumbled during Watergate, brokered the deal for the ex-president's pardon by his successor, and lived to spin it all to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as a major source for The Final Days--he must have seen himself as a pretty slick customer. But as smart as he was, he never seemed to have any understanding of how he was coming across to mere mortals, which is why, maybe eight times out of ten in the public eye, he came across as belligerent, self-promoting, and batshit crazy. In the first few years of Reagan's time in office, you got used to hearing that Haig--not James Watt, not even Nancy--was the "scariest" member of that bunch. Haig, who only betrayed what must have been a mile-deep vein of persona insecurity with the grotesquely ornate, pompous-ass turns of phrase that inspired the creation of the term "haigspeak" and turned the General into an international figure of fun, had none of common-guy charm of Reagan or George Bush, Jr., and he was too much of a hands-on guy and a glory hog to be content with finding a common-guy charmer to use as a mannequin for his own ambitions, like Dick Cheney. Thus, he was the least threatening and dangerous of any would-be strongman of the past forty years, because he stood the least chance of getting near the seat of power.

Unable to either mask his ambitions or his ego or soft-pedal his personality, Haig scared the shit out of people--a useful quality to a White House whose political success depended on the public's thinking that a president who consulted with an astrologer and who thought he'd participated in the liberation of Nazi death camps when he'd never actually left Hollywood during World War II wasn't scary because he seemed so cuddly. Haig's Norma Desmond close-up moment came when Reagan was shot and the General bum-rushed the TV cameras to declare that, while Reagan was incapacitated and his Vice-President was not on deck, "I'm in charge here." A surprisingly meta obituary in The New York Times quotes Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger as saying that Haig was painfully aware that “the third paragraph of his obit” would be dedicated to that event--the quote serving to fill the second paragraph of the Times obit, so that the writer can dwell on the event itself in the next paragraph and make good on Nofziger's prophecy.

At the time, reporters, Johnny Carson, and other Constitutional scholars fell over themselves to point out that Haig had the official chain of succession wrong. Haig always insisted that he wasn't trying to make a power grab, Constitutionally-sanctioned or otherwise; he was just trying to reassure the country (and advise the Russkies) that, fear not, somebody was running the government. What Haig could never understand was that the thought that he was running the government struck no one as reassuring. He didn't get it that, stomping around the West Wing as if he should have been wearing jodhpurs, throwing his hawk-eyed face into every camera lens in the vicinity and talking gibberish, he came across as dangerously unhinged and scared the hell out of people, at least when he wasn't making them fall out of their chairs laughing. When Haig ran for the presidency in 1988, he flamed out early on and was rewarded for his many years of faithful service to the party with a speaking slot at the convention that was scheduled far the hell away from the hours that would be covered on network TV. Political junkies still revere that moment as the one in which Al unveiled his mighty bat metaphor, all about how the Democratic party is blind, flea-ridden, and prone to "hanging upside down in dark, damp caves up to its navel in guano." Quoting that nugget in his New York Times column on language, William Safire wrote that, upon hearing it, the convention chairman, Robert H. Michel turned to somebody and said, "That's probably why Al Haig is not on the short list for Vice President."

By providing a focal point for anyone made uneasy by the Reagan administration's proxy wars in Central America, its support given to such regimes as South Africa in the age of apartheid and Pincohet's Chile and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the saber-rattling rhetoric against the Soviet Union, Haig was an invaluable bulletproof shield for Reagan, someone people could point to and say, "That guy's the nut." At the same time, his apparently having stepped out of a print of Dr. Strangelove helped inspire opponents of the administration to ever more heated attacks on Reagan himself, which, in the eyes of most people in the middle, helped make them look like nuts. It's doubtful whether Haig ever tumbled to how he was being used any better than he ever experienced an attack of self-knowledge on any other front. He would have been a handy fellow to still have in place when Iran-Contra broke, but by then he had long since departed, Reagan having accepted his resignation in 1982. I am not sure that it was ever made completely clear what he resigned over. It has been reported, and I have no doubt that it is true, that Haig had gotten into the habit of storming into the Oval Office and offering his resignation every day that the gravy in the White House commissary was lumpy, and that he finally did it when Reagan wasn't in the mood to humor him about having his panties in a bunch. If that's true, the expression on his face when Reagan gracefully accepted his kind office to get the hell out of his face must have been something to see. I'd love to be a fly on the wall the first time he tries that with Lucifer.

So I have the sympathy for Haig that I would for any confused, easily hurt creature who was handed a raw deal by slicker forces. But I'd hate for anybody to think that I'd have any sympathy for him if his lucky streak had extended far beyond his getting to play Mrs. Wilson to Nixon's Woodrow. For all the important, world-changing events in which he longed to meddle, the clearest glimpse I've ever gotten of the darkness at the center of the General's heart (and head) came in a 1994 BBC documentary series about Watergate, for which the old spin-meister naturally sat for a fresh interview. Recalling the events of the Saturday Night Massacre--when Nixon's Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, and his Deputy Attorney General, William Ruckelshaus, resigned rather than agree to Nixon's order that they fire the independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox--Haig sniffed at the men's principles and then described Robert Bork--who, as next in line to head the Justice Department, was more than happy to dismiss Cox--as "a different sort of man... a patriot." The fact that Haig, given twenty years to reflect on it, could not see that someone might see it as patriotic to refuse to short-circuit a legal investigation and fire a hard-working, honorable man without cause in order to protect a criminal shitbag who happened to be the President of the United States is all we need to know about how much mischief he could have caused if he were not better suited temperamentally to writing semi-coherent crank letters to the editor than the work of a smooth political operative. I still find him more lovable, by miles, than Dick Cheney. But that's a useful reminder than lovability is often the consolation prize for being ineffectual.

Burning Ambulance

Phil Freeman, author of Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis, editor of Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs, and also editor of the late, lamented Metal Edge and the late Global Rhythm magazines, has a new project out: Burning Ambulance, a culture magazine whose first issue includes Phil's profile of Matthew Shipp, Kurt Gottschalk's appraisal of the sprawling, smoking career of Henry Threadgill, Stephen Haynes's report from a recent recording session with Bill Dixon, and an article by Matt Cibula on the Spanish band Orthodox. (Relevant video clips related to some of this can be found at the accompanying blog.)

Also included: my Keilloresque reminiscence of the Christian pop culture of my blighted childhood--kiddie Khrist komics, born-again stand-up comedy, etc.--and how it made me the man I am today. For those of you whose main reaction to this blog has been to wonder how the hell someone like me happens, here's your chance.

Preserve and Report

[Today's post is intended as my contribution to the gala, week-long Film Preservation Blogathan, which is going down at the Self-Styled Siren's joint and Ferdy on Films, two glittering jewels in the crown of the blogosphere. Click here to donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation. The "commercial" for the Blogathan at the top of this post is the work of Greg Ferrara.]

Has anyone pinpointed the moment when it became general knowledge among people working in film that the fruits of their labor wasn't going to just wash away with the passing years? It's been a while now since we entered the second century that will be permanently preserved, visually, for future generations, and pretty soon we'll be entering the second one that will also leave behind a permanent record of how our world sounds. Old movies provide a documentary record not just of the surface of things but of the collective fantasies, daydreams, and shared delusions of the times in which they were made; if nothing else, the crummiest old commercial flick--say, a Monogram Western designed to occupy the double bill's lower half-- records what a bunch of people with a back lot and access to stunt men and horses thought would divert some bored ticket buyers trying to get their minds off the war in Europe.

Of course, the movies made by talented people with singular imaginations serve as more than that, which is why we care about them on a level beyond sociology and nostalgia. A great movie blows the cobwebs out of your ears like nothing else. But for those of us with an interest in sociology and a susceptibility to nostalgia, the peculiar properties of movies makes not just second-tier entertainments and even films that, as entertainment value goes, count as mediocrities or worse, seem oddly fascinating and even valuable in a way that, say, the short fiction in a turn-of-the-century issue of the Saturday Evening Post isn't. When you talk about seeking out and preserving lost or threatened films, people automatically think about vintage silents and ancient newsreel footage, but because the idea that old movies that had outlived their cultural moment might still have money to be squeezed out of them is relatively new, and the idea that footage that is unlikely even to generate revenue might be worth holding onto is newer still, there are some movies that were made and well-received within hailing distance of my birth that I've never been able to catch a glimpse of or hear a holler from, which for those of us who were born into the home-video age can seem almost like a calculated insult.

Anybody ever seen James Blue's The Olive Trees of Justice (1962) or The Crazy Quilt (1966), Funnyman (1967), or Riverrun (1970), the early features of John Korty, a San Francisco-based director who played mentor to the '70s movie brats before disappearing into the world of made-for-TV movies? (He made The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Go Ask Alice.) Me neither--and I'd like to. These, like such marginally better-known, or at least easier to find, films such as Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract (1958) and Robert Kaylor and William Richart's Derby (1971) (to name two that made it to DVD last year, the Lerner as part of the five-disc set Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics, Vol. 1), were indie films before there was an audience for indies, let alone an indie film "movement." (They were, in fact, made before anyone concocted the term "regional filmmaking", the Granola-flavored label that critics used to stick onto independently produced movies before some marketing genius started calling them "indies".) These films and their cousins, from the now Criterion-approved freakhouse flick Carnival of Souls to early works by Philip Kaufman (Goldstein and Brian De Palma (Murder a la Mod), which were made outside the studios and spottily distributed long before such guerrilla activity was a badge of hip, can now be given a second life on small steel cylinders designed to be played on one's home appliance; in many cases, whether they get that afterlife depends on whether the mice have gotten to those film cans that, long ago, the director asked his mom to stick under her bed for him.

Luckily, such outfits as the Orphan Film Symposium (who have been good soldiers in helping to keep the work of my late friend, Helen Hill, alive) and Milestone Film and Video (who did stellar jobs with Charles Burnett's 1977 Killer of Sheep and Kent Mackenzie's 1961 The Exiles) have set an example by showing how much good a properly motivated group of people can do for the right movies. But if any budding film preservationist is in need of a heroic example towards whom he can bend his knees and say a prayer before rising to his feet refreshed and emboldened, I would whisper but one name: Henri Langlois. Co-founder, public face, and beating heart of the Cinémathèque Française, Langlois was an archivist-enthusiast who could teach any movie geek worth his salt much about passion, priorities, and (as every photo of the man I've seen proudly boasts) personal style.

There was a great movie to be made with Langlois as its hero, though we probably lost any hope that it would be made by the right people when we lost both Chuck Jones and Robert Morley. (As it stands, Jacques Richard's excellent documentary, Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinémathèque--augmented by Richard Roud's book A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois and the Cinematheque Francaise-- may have to suffice.) Laboring away at the collection from 1936 until his death in 1977, Langlois was the film freak as sacred monster, a man who turned his archive into both a private lair and an incubation chamber for a new generation of converts and enthusiasts who, of course, would go on to shape movie history as fans turned critics turned directors: the French New Wave. When Langlois's job was in trouble, angry geeks took to the streets to protest, and Francois Truffaut (looking like a teenage Moonie with a bad haircut) and Jean-Luc Godard (signaling the importance of the occasion by the practiced insouciance with which he attacks his cigarette while his sidekick Truffaut is flapping his gums) took to the airwaves to explain it all for you:



Langlois's position was in jeopardy because he had managed to work the last nerve of André Malraux, then the French Minister of Culture. (Feel free to take a minute to turn that one over in your head. People were screaming at each other in the streets because of a dust-up between the author of Man's Fate and Anti-Memoirs and Jean-Luc Godard's supplier. Can you imagine the closest thing that might be comparable to that which is imaginable in America? Palin vs. Letterman, maybe? It's easier to picture a battle between Mothra and MechaGodzilla, which, in this fantasy, dominated C-SPAN for a day because Mothra had recently been appointed to the President's Council on Physical Fitness.) It is important to concede that Malroux was not without grounds in thinking that Langlois was notm in bureaucratic terms, an ideal custodian of an important cultural institution, or for that matter, the first man you'd nominate to hold the keys to your apartment during your vacation and water your Chia Pet. Under his stewardship, the Cinémathèque was a notorious hotbed of clutter and what we partisans choose to call sn eccentric management style. Langlois is reported to have kept a massive sack stuffed with a lively mixture of different international currencies and to keep dangerously flammable nitrate stocks piled in the sunny courtyard. There were haphazard screenings of classic films with mismatched dialogue tracks and subtitles, none of them in the original language, and program notes that were written in a language not spoken by any tribe yet discovered to reside on our planet. In the book Midnight Movies, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum recount an anecdote about how Langlois once sent a New York curator a copy of the Tod Browning-Lon Chaney silent The Unknown a decade after the request had been made, explaining, "There were all these cans of film labeled 'Unknown', and we had to open every one..."

So, as public servants go, Langlois was not someone whose window you'd want to approach if he were working at the D.M.V. But, as Pauline Kael wrote of Elliot Gould's Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, he was the one who cared! Not only is that probably the most important quality in a custodian of culture, but I'm not sure that it doesn't go hand in hand with being a little nuts. People who care about film preservation aren't ready to let yesterday's daydreams, manifestos, wild boasts, off-the-cuff wisecracks, hairy-eyeball fantasies and beautiful visions dissolve in the mists of time, and they do their work in a culture that's defined by an entertainment media that boils everything down to which movie earned the top grosses last weekend and a mass audience that knows that box office trivia better than it does the authentic cravings of their own brains. Godard would describe Langlois, at the end of his supremely well-spent life, dying "like an elephant." Don't tell me that trying to find a working 3-D print of Top Banana isn't a noble thing to devote your life to.

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Happy Mardi Gras.

The 2010 Muriels

I'm a week late with this, but the winners of the Muriels, the online movie poll begun by my old Screengrab colleague Paul Clark and hosted this year by Steve Carlson are currently being unveiled, one category at a time. The timing actually works for me, because Fat Tuesday is coming up this week, and after a dozen years in New Orleans, I kind of think of that as my New Year's anyway.

R.I.P., Charlotte.

That Would Be Telling

Who dat say they gon' beat them Saints, right? As a son of the Pelican State and long-time, albeit long-ago, resident of New Orleans, I am of course thrilled by that long-suffering team's Super Bowl victory, over a team led by the more fanatically revered of Archie Manning's boys, no less. (Arch, who played for the Saints for more then ten years, starting in 1971, was for a long time the only thing that Saints fans had to point at with pride. In terms of the scale of talent lavished on a team that mostly could only aspire to mediocrity, he was the NFL's answer to Walter Johnson.) Somewhere in the course of a busy weekend, New Orleans also elected a new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, a not inconsequential event that went all but unnoticed in the buildup to the football game and the planning for what I imagine was one hell of a party last night. Landrieu is the first white mayor New Orleans has had since his father, Moon, held the post from 1970 to 1978, and his election has inspired some chin-pulling over whether it's a good thing that a city with a large black population that was royally screwed over on national television by a white president who'd used FEMA as a place to house his drinkng buddies now has a white dude calling the shots. Personally, I've always liked Mitch and would probably have voted for him if I still lived there. If nothing else, this development means that James O'Keefe and the boys just earned some retroactively awarded idiot points for having fucked with the mayor's sister.


I wish I could use this space to provide a play-by-play account of the gladiatorial conflict that went down in Miami, to say nothing of the historical re-enactment of the making of Caligula that must have been taking place in the French Quarter, but I didn't see the game, because my deep pleasure over the events of this past weekend don't change the fact that I can't stay awake while watching football. Instead, me and my buddy Rothschild went to the Chelsea area to catch the last performance of David Greenspan's one-man show, The Myopia. (As a treat for the weekend crowd, Greenspan threw in a matinee performance of Plays, an abridged-than-God delivery of a lecture by Gertrude Stein. I have no idea how seriously Greenspan takes Stein's ideas about theater, some of which he does reference by name in The Myopia. But he does seem to regard it as an acting challenge to make her prose come to life--at one point, I snuck a glance at the woman seated on Rothschild's left and saw that she was doing a full-on Karen Ann Quinlan--and what's fun about the piece is watching him act it, becoming a fluttery old lady who, talking about her enjoyment of melodrama and Shakespeare and "the twenty-five cent opera" as a child, can't quite summon up enough pretentiousness to entirely smother her own charm.) There's a lot of interesting theater in the city (not to mention outside it) that I miss, but in 2004, the night of the Super Bowl--the one best remembered for Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction--Rothschild and I went to the final performance of the revival of Bill Irwin's The Regard of Flight. If we manage to attend the closing night performance of something during the 2016 Super Bowl, I guess we'll have a tradition on our hands.

The Myopia, which has something to do with a man's heroic, doomed attempt to complete a musical based on the life Warren Harding, has something to do with love of theater and warring approaches to it; in addition to Stein, it name drops Aristotle, who also figures in Greenspan's The Argument, and whose Poetics he seems to regard as having kicked the ass of the theories of Plato. Greenspan, who (at least under ideal theatrical lighting) looks a little like a skinny-legged Gabriel Byrne with a faint trace of the diva about him, is a phenomenal actor who deploys a full arsenal of gestures and voices (in the days of radio comedy, he could have written his own ticket) to keep the show alive without ever seeming manic or unpleasantly showy. He's an entertainer demonstrating how little you need in the way of production values to make a satisfying evening of theater. Though this may not be intentional, he's also a living rebuke to most theater monologuists, some of whom see it as their job to "give the audience something of themselves", and who, after they make their first breakthrough belch, try and extend their careers not by experimenting on ways to deepen their form by digging deeper for nuggets of themselves to shower upon helpless theatergoers.

Greenspan only seems to be sharing something of himself at the start of the second act, when he talks about his career; by then, after you've seen him play a full room of Republican senators deciding to nominate Harding, "the best of the second-raters",for the presidency, you've been sufficiently dazzled by his talent to want to know something about who's really in there. (Of course, the idea that this fellow on stage talking about his wack-job experiences in acting class is the "real" David Greenspan could just be another theatrical illusion, one that's needed at that point in the performance.) Greenspan is obsessed with creating dramatic moments and how best to get information across onstage; that's the essence of his approach to making theater (and to making theater that's a commentary on other people's ways of making theater), and it comes across in a moment when he recalls his horrified reaction to someone complaining that the opening of The Tempest, with Prospero briefing his daughter on who they are and how they got there (“It’s telling how telling a telling can be.” ), has "too much exposition." The Myopia was itself a revival, but the original was previously only performed during one weekend, in 2003, as part of a theater festival. I feel kind of silly writing about The Myopia at all now that its run has ended and I can't do anything to encourage anyone else to see it, but that, too, is part of the nature of theater in general and Greenspan's work in particular. Blink, and you'll miss it.

Big Red

In an article in >i>The New York Review of Books about the Red Riding trilogy--three feature length movies made last year for British TV that are now opening in movie theaters in the U.S.--David Thomson wrote that the epic "is better than The Godfather... but it leaves you feeling so much worse." This is getting to be an annual ritual. Around this same time last year, the Italian movie Gomorrah, a two-hour-fifteen-minute look at criminal activity in Naples that was based on a nonfiction book by Roberto Saviano, also inspired its admirers to use it as a club to use on The Godfather, the charge being that it was gritty and realistic in a way that revealed The Godfather as a romantic daydream. The idea underlying Thomson's review is actually that Red Riding is better than The Godfather not in spite of the fact that "it leaves you feeling so much worse", but because of it. Some people think that the Godfather movies are corrupt, because, even though the way of life that the movies show are hellish, the sensual pleasure of the movies themselves is thought to confer glamor on the lives of the gangsters.

Neither Gomorrah nor Red Riding is glamorous, and neither offers up much in the way of senual or aesthetic pleasure, either. In the case of Gomorrah, in particular, I'm not sure that's the result of a brave choice so much as it is the limits of the style of the director, Matteo Garrone. I've seen a couple of his earlier pictures, including The Embalmer, about a dwarfish taxidermist who does some work for the mob on the side, and Primo Amore, about a dance-of-death romance between a violent bully who forces his girlfriend to starve herself, and I think he's a natural flattener, someone whose specialty is pressing all the dramatic interest out of gaudy material. Gomorrah has a lot of narrative threads overlapping and is filmed in a pseudo-documentary style that never points anything up or threatens to draw you in emotionally, and it took me three tries to stay awake through it. Red Riding wears its own gaudiness on its sleeve, but it's so relentlessly, humorlessly downbeat that it's exhausting; the main thing that it and Gomorrah have in common is that neither gives you a cleu as to why anyone would be tempted to become corrupt, which if anything makes them less dangerous, and less deep, than The Godfather, even if they're better suited to Sunday school instructional lectures on how unrewarding it is to be bad.




The trilogy consists of three films, set in Yorkshire, whose titles pinpoint the dates in which their action unfolds: 1974, shot on 16 mm film and directed by Julian Jarrold; 1980, shot of 35 mm and directed by James Marsh, best known for the documentary Man on Wire; and the concluding episode, 1983, shot on digital video and directed by Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie, Shopgirl). The source material is the Red Riding quartet, four novels written by David Peace that aim to do for Yorkshire in the Thatcher years, and the years leading up to them, what James Elroy did for Los Angeles in the Dragnet era. (Tony Grisoni did the adaptation, which, for reasons of funding, passed over the second book in the series, 1977, entirely.) Like Elroy's L.A. Confidential, it mixes fictional characters and events with glimpses of real horrors such as the Yorkshire Ripper case.

Each installment features a different crusading hero at its center: in the first, it's puppyish Andrew Garfield as an investigative reporter; in the second, it's Paddy Considine as the only honest, and most ineffectual, detective ever to be assigned to the town; and in the wrap-up, it's Mark Addy as a burnt-out slob of a solicitor who finds himself pulled, kicking and screaming, into the case of a wrongly convicted, mentally slow kid and is soon working hard for his own redemption. And each part of the trilogy has its own stand-alone story to tell but also serves as a building block in a larger urban tragedy into a series of murdered children and a criminal conspiracy involving the cops and a shady thug of a local businessman (Sean Bean) who's planning a huge, "American-style" shopping center. There are also characters who run through the whole series, notably a haunted male prostitute called BJ (Robert Sheehan); a bearded priest and all-around busybody played by Peter Mullan; and the local head corrupt cop, Bill "the Badger" Molloy (Warren Clarke), a malignant, dead-eyed bullfrog of a man who is demoted for his one, misguided act of sympathetic imagination, when he goes on TV and, addressing the Ripper, says that he "understands" how he must feel towards the hookers he's been carving up. Molloy also delivers the throatiest rendition of the series' catch phrase when, gathered with his lads and toasting their dark work, he yells, "This is the North, where we do what we like!"

The production team on Red Riding was clearly under orders to replicate the Yorkshire of thirty-odd years ago so that it looked like hell on earth, a poisoned urban war zone where no walk in the fields is complete with the silhouette of nuclear towers looming in the background, and they did a hell of a job. It's hard to sit through any two hour without starting to think about scheduling your next check-up. But though the three features vary in quality, each of them feels incomplete without the others, and watching all three, whether all in one gulp or with breaks in between, is like sinking in a bog. It's as if the filmmaking team had heard the complaints of those who find The Wire or The Shield to be just intolerably depressing and taken them as some kind of challenge. The series starts out, with 1974, with a full head of steam, but the section lacks a string center: Andrew Garfield's baby-faced reporter, a self-styled cynic who turns out to be romantically naive, is the weakest link in the large cast, and watching him get put through all twelve circles of Hell is wearying without quite being compelling. 1980 is the best-directed of the three films, but, especially given what's come before, it's even more of a downer. Paddy Considine's flawed hero, a hopeful but doomed investigator weighed down by residual guilt from cheating on his wife, is like every politician you agreed with on every point but couldn't bring yourself to vote for because his prim, masochistic righteousness is almost as creepy as corruption. The bridging section brings you deeper into the labyrinthine evil of the Yorkshire establishment without giving you anyone to root for or any reason to at least hope that you might see the bad guys get theirs.

Thanks to a lot of help from the actors, including Rebecca Hall (in 1974) as the single mother of a lost little girl and Sean Harris as a rodent-like cop, Red Riding remains watchable up to the third chapter, 1983, which is a straight loser despite Addy and David Morrissey as a police detective who, after appearing in the margins of the earlier films and participating in his colleagues' dirty work, suddenly begins to feel pangs of conscience. It's not Morrissey's fault that, by the time he first gets to signal that his worm is turning, the series has bludgeoned you with its doomy vision that you never believe for a minute that a Yorkshire thug with a badge could give a rat's ass about justice. His actions help set up a sort of happy ending that tries for a rhapsodic transcendence, and Anand doesn't begin to know how to bring it off. There's a lot else that he can't bring off; favorable reviews of Red Riding have been quick to acknowledge that much of the trilogy's storyline is unclear and elliptical, but Anand is the only director who fails to summon up enough directorial authority to convince you that what might be taken for narrative ambiguity isn't just incompetent filmmaking. Peace's books don't have the tabloid juiciness and electric cackle of Ellroy at peak flavor; Ellroy's alternate histories have a strong current of anger, where Peace's work is more strictly despairing, as if he couldn't really imagine things being very different from his nightmare vision. The films feel like labors of love, but in a self-defeating way: they feel as if everyone involved cared less about giving the material credibility and weight on-screen than in mai=king sure that Pearce's tone of mythologized depressiveness is fully captured, drip by drip--until the hopeful conclusion, which might seem to come out of nowhere even of Anand hadn't vulgarized it with too much clumsy, angelic visual poetry. Watch the trilogy all the way to the end and you may experience the odd sensation of being angry at seeing a five-hour film betray the principles that you weren't really buying anyway.

Clarence Thomas's Lonely Fight Against Racism: Latest in a Series

"The part of the McCain-Feingold law struck down in Citizens United contained an exemption for news reports, commentaries and editorials. But Justice Thomas said that reflected a legislative choice rather than a constitutional principle.

"He added that the history of Congressional regulation of corporate involvement in politics had a dark side, pointing to the Tillman Act, which banned corporate contributions to federal candidates in 1907.

'Go back and read why Tillman introduced that legislation,' Justice Thomas said, referring to Senator Benjamin Tillman. 'Tillman was from South Carolina, and as I hear the story he was concerned that the corporations, Republican corporations, were favorable toward blacks and he felt that there was a need to regulate them.' "

--"Justice Defends Ruling on Finance"

[Thomas also explained that he's stopped attending the Presidential State of the Union addresses because “'I don’t go because it has become so partisan and it’s very uncomfortable for a judge to sit there,' he said, adding that 'there’s a lot that you don’t hear on TV — the catcalls, the whooping and hollering and under-the-breath comments.' ” If this were a TV commercial, that would be the cue for someone to say, Dude, maybe it's your breath.]

War Babies

Listening to Tony Blair explain his role in the Iraq War at the Iraq inquiry is like listening to a badly overeducated six-year-old explain how he didn't break that vase. Yes, he happened to knock it off the mantle when he was running through the house like a maniac because he was pretending that the mailman at the door was a brain-eating zombie, but the way he sees it, the blame lies with the vase for being susceptible to the laws of gravity. What he'd like you to focus on is how much worse you'd feel if the mailman had been a brain-eating zombie and he'd done nothing to alert you to the threat. Unlike Dick Cheney, Blair knows he's not talking to idiots who are eager to be given a reason to agree with him. So he doesn't try to convince you that there was some reason to think that Iraq and al-Qaeda were somehow connected, or that Saddam Hussein had squat to do with 9/11, or that the intelligence that seemed to suggest that he might have had WMDs was any more persuasive than the bountiful amount of intelligence that plainly asserted that he didn't have shit, which Blair and others, Dick Cheney included, had been pointing at since 1991 to explain why it had been a good idea not to keep the first Gulf War going until the dictator who George Bush, Senior had described as worse than Hitler had been dislodged. All Blair will say is that, if everything he and other world leaders had been saying for a decade about how brilliantly they were keeping Saddam "contained" was actually bullshit, it would have been a lot scarier after 9/11 than it had been before 9/11. Not that he's saying that he ever really thought that they hadn't been doing a perfectly swell job of keeping him contained. What do you think, they're incompetent?

Unlike Cheney, who is perfectly willing to go for broke and insist that Saddam actually had a role in 9/11, depending on who he's talking to and how likely that audience is to hoot at him, the best argument Blair will ever be able to make in defense of the war is that. after 9/11, it was unacceptable to let any regime that pose a threat to the unruffled serenity of the free world continue to exist. He has a little more trouble when the members of the Iraq inquiry hit him with the obvious follow-up question, which is why, if that's so, we didn't go after Iran or North Korea or one of the other nations that might actually be said to have posed a threat to the free world. He can't very well offer the obvious answer, which is that if we did, we would have gone in fully expecting to get our clocks cleaned in a terrible, large scale conflict that would have eaten up years and untold quantities of blood and treasure. You can't argue that you really thought that Iran was a threat and at the same time remind everyone of the truism that, at the time, the appeal of attacking Iraq was that it would give the U.S. a chance to avenge itself for 9/11 by smashing someone in the Middle East who'd been elevated to super-villain status years earlier and who we could take out in a cakewalk. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time is the test of a first-rate intelligence. Blair may not be possessed of a first-rate intelligence, but he's smart enough to know that spitting out those two opposed ideas while testifying at a war inquiry is likely to be taken as evidence of something else.

9/11 didn't make Saddam Hussein any scarier, or at least it didn't make him any more dangerous or the evidence that he might be dangerous any more convincing. What it did do was create an environment in which the public could be made receptive to any war that the Bush administration wanted, and they already had an itch to go to war with Iraq that had nothing to do with the threat of terrorism. In his new book, Bomb Power, which is about the birth of the national-security government cult of secrecy that accompanied the invention of the atomic bomb and that reached full, repugnant bloom under Bush and Cheney, Garry Wills points out that, when Harry Truman became president and was presented with the news of the bomb's existence, he was made to feel that he had to use it; to not do so would make it seem that all those years of work and all that funding had been for nothing. The lives of the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were nothing compared to how wasteful it would have been to spend all that money and then put the finished product on the shelf. Bush and Cheney and the neo-cons must have seen 9/11 the same way: as an opportunity that it would be shameful to not cash in. Blair might not have made that connection himself, but the fact that it was so easy for him to come to see it that way as soon as he got close enough to them to taste the contact high is a tribute to the idea's seductive power.

Part of what was most disgusting about the build up to the war was seeing characters like Bush pretending that they hadn't made their minds up to proceed when they--Bush in particular--were plainly champing at the bit to start lobbing missiles, and in fact reacting to every postponement as if it were a punch to the nuts. The fact that they were prepared to endure the occasional postponement speaks to how powerfully the idea that war is something to regret is still ingrained in the culture. It was galling to hear Bush, a fifty-something-year-old kid playing G.I. Joe with the bodies of real living strangers, pretend that he knew that he understand that he was doing something that was meant to tear him up inside, instead of thinking that qualms over war were "quaint" like the Geneva Conventions. For me, one unexpected side effect of the past ten years has been to get me to re-evaluate how important actual military experience ought to be in selecting a president. Chalk that up to the gratifying spectacle of seeing guys who evaded military service, like Bush and Cheney, belittling people who did serve in wartime (Colin Powell, John Kerry, Max Cleland, even G.I. Johnny Deadline Al Gore) as wussies for their having a proper respect for war as something you don't just dance into eagerly. We also got to see these same guys hiding from criticism of their stupid decisions and mismanagement by claiming to care not about what their critics say but about what "the generals" say, even as generals who dared disagree with them and tell them things they didn't want to hear were having their careers cut short left and right. A failure to regard war as a last resort ought to be an automatic disqualification from high office if any one thing is; it would be nice to think that the number of elected officials who turn out to suffer from it will, at least, never stop being surprising.

At first blush, McCain might seem to be an exception to most of the Republican war hawks, a hopped-up jingo loon who can at least claim to have known the suffering of war himself. McCain's experience as a POW makes him not so much a war hero as a living war martyr, and for most of his political career, he's been wily and effective about using his martyr status to guilt-trip those who'd attack him or even try to hold him to some reasonable standard of honesty and good sense; when he hasn't been there to do it himself, the media used to be eager to jump in and do it for him. (One not-too-distant example: the near-demonization of Genral Wesley Clark when, in an interview on Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer, Clark said that "I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president." Most of the TV news accounts of Clark's gaffe showed him saying that line in a vacuum, as if it were an act of unprovoked churlishness; few showed the full exchange, in which Clark was responding to Schieffer's saying that Barack Obama had never "ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down," the implication seeming to be that, because of that, Obama was unfit to touch the hem of McCain's toga.)

McCain's aura of personal nobility isn't what it used to be, but even so, he's seldom misplaced his hand and misjudged how he was going over quite so badly as when, on Tuesday, he appeared at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing and reaffirmed his opposition to freely allowing gay men and women to serve in the nation's military, even as military leaders have begun to line up to share their opinion that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is bulshit. At this point, it would just be insulting to go through the usual arguments about why there should be no prohibitions on gay soldiers, just as it would be insulting to make a reasoned case for why black people who work in the produce section shouldn't be watched to make sure they don't steal all the watermelons. And it would be silly to go to the trouble of pointing out why McCain, who has long been on record as saying that the policy works for him because it works for the generals, and if they ever decide that it doesn't work for them anymore it should be re-examined, should be embarrassed with himself over his mealy-mouthed hypocrisy. But no one expects any displays of personal honor from the bullet-headed wonder anymore.

What made McCain's appearance downright skin-crawling was how far he went over the top, after a lifetime of hiding behind the military's skirts, in expressing his disgust with the officers who, by speaking their minds and talking sense, had out him and his buddies in the Senate in a weird place by abandoning them and leaving them alone on their iceberg. Anti-gay discrimination in the military is fated to end, for the same reason that all policies based on nothing but primitive fear and prejudice are fated to end: the last generations made up predominately of people who unapologetically share those fears and prejudices are dying off. That leaves McCain in a corner, at least so far as his personal legacy is concerned: with his presidential dreams now officially dead and buried, he can no longer shit all over himself this way in the confident knowledge that his pals in the media will assume that, of course, he has to pretend to think this stuff until he's installed in the Oval Office and can reveal himself to be Captain Marvel after all. At least now, the next time he asks the military for security the next time he feels like popping over to a Baghdad street market to shop for fresh fruit, his hosts will know whose side he'll be on if they ever get into a shouting match with a bunch of senile bigots with seniority.

Trailer for the Next "Left Behind" Movie Hits the Internet

Nuking Tall

The reviews I've seen of the new movie Edge of Darkness have focused mostly on the question, can Mel Gibson, who hasn't appeared in a real acting role since 2003's The Singing Detective, and hasn't starred in a movie since Signs from the year before, come back as a movie star after a long stretch spent off-screen maintaining his celebrity through tabloid headlines and his side career directing dead-language torture porn epics. I've been a little surprised at how little discussion has been spent on how the movie holds up in comparison to its source material, a 1985 British TV miniseries that first aired in 1985, and turned up in America, on public TV and videocassette, a couple of years later. (Both the movie and the TV series were directed by Martin Campbell. The series was written by the late Troy Kennedy Martin, whose other credits include the original The Italian Job, Kelly's Heroes, and the TV series Reilly, Ace of Spades.) I think I heard more carping last year about the liberties that Will Ferrell and company took with Sid and Marty Krofft' Land of the Lost. In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott came right out and bragged of never having seen the original Edge of Darkness, despite its six hours being available on DVD. This at least meant that he couldn't blame the movie's faults on the worthlessness of the source material, as he did with the movie version of the Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons comics series Watchmen. For all I know, he never read Watchmen either, but maybe he has regards TV shows, unlike comic books, with enough respect that he isn't comfortable writing them off sight unseen.

Me, I became curious about it as soon as I heard that the movie was being made, partly because I remember liking the TV show, and partly because it doesn't seem like an obvious choice for a big-deal Hollywood remake. Like Watchmen, the show was a thriller set against a backdrop of nuclear jitters, informed by the kind of total cynicism about government cynicism about government secrecy that the Thatcher-Reagan era inspired in a lot of liberal Brits. The hero, played by Bob Peck, was a middle-aged Yorkshire cop whose grown daughter (Joanne Whalley) is gunned down in front of him, a murder that he first takes as a botched attempt on his own life by one of his old enemies. It turns out that his daughter's activist anti-nuclear politics had earned her an official designation as a terrorist by the government. Like another Alan Moore comic from the Thatcher era, Darkness is a document of a time when the British government inspired so much hostility and fear in some of its more thoughtful citizens that it was possible to suggest that one person's terrorism might be another person's civil disobedience. Whatever the new movie does or doesn't have in common with the miniseries, I have a hard time believing that Hollywood is ready to ask multiplex audiences to sympathize with a man looking to avenge someone who the CIA has labeled with the "T" word, even if he did used to dandle her on his knee.



In both movie and TV show, the hero has his eyes opened for him with the help of a mysterious fellow called Darius Jedburgh. In the original, Jedburgh was a CIA agent stationed in London; in the movie, which is set in Boston, he's Ray Winstone, and the Village Voice reviewer was quick to point out that the idea of a grief-stricken English cop having the score explained to him by an American spook has a certain...resonance that is lost when the hero is American and his new friend is a murderous yob. The Voice didn't see fit to mention that, in the original, Jedburgh was played by Joe Don Baker, the great redneck actor who swung a mean stick across drive-in movie screens throughout the seventies, in such movies as Walking Tall, Charley Varrick, The Outfit, and Framed. The white-trash-hero action genre cooled a bit in the '80s, partly because, in the Stallone-Schwarzegger-Seagal era, big studios began churning out so many sleazy B-movies on A-movie budgets that there were fewer opportunities for directors like Phil Karlson to show what they could do with a few bucks and a mangy script and so make cult stars out of actors like Baker, with his bountiful charisma and considerable skill joined to the looks of someone who must have seemed bizarrely "regional" to suits whose idea of a good ol' boy was Burt Reynolds.

When Darkness was first broadcast in the U.S., Baker told an interviewer that he had gone looking for work overseas because he found himself increasingly ghettoized in Hollywood because of his redneck vibe; the fact that this same quality made it easier for him to score a good role in merry olde England was so weird that the interviewer didn't seem to know how to address it. Still, Baker probably had his two best roles in the mid-80s: Jedburgh and the Whammer, the Babe Ruth facsimile in the otherwise godawful movie version of Bernard Malamud's superb baseball novel The Natural. As the Whammer, he managed to be a mean, hateful son of a bitch yet rather lovable, all the more so for sharing the screen with a stiff Robert Redford as the movie's pasteboard hero. As Jedburgh, he's downright sinister, yet with an air of twisted heroic nobility. His wild card character is also a much-needed counterweight to Peck's tortured hero. (The series has a love-hate relationship with mythic American culture: Peck soaks in his grief while listening to Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger. For his part, Baker cuts a memorable image when, back in his London townhouse after a weekend spent on some mysterious errand, he parks himself in a chair in front of the TV, with a huge bowl of popcorn in his lap, and catches up with the ballroom dancing competition.)

I like Ray Winstone, and I'm sure he's a treat in the movie. But I've always loved Joe Don Baker, and I'm grateful to the makers of EDge of Darkness the elder for giving him the chance to embody the human face of American imperialism: fearless and committed yet, on his best days, conflicted and capable of turning on his masters, even at the risk of going down in flames, when he realizes that the chores he's been carrying out have been doing more harm than good to people who deserve better. Especially when when he senses that they're pissing on his shoes and telling him that it's raining.