Amarcord, Bitches

Happy Memorial Day. This is a day when we honor those who have fallen in the course of defending our country. That means people in uniform, but maybe you could also doff your cap today to, say, the people who were in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on the morning of April 19, 1995, or those who were killed when that self-pitying piece of shit flew his plane into an I.R.S. building in Austin last February. If, as we keep hearing, there's a revolutionary war going on to take "our"--oops, sorry, "their"--country back from the sane people and the grotty old bureaucrats, these people deserve to honored as something more than innocent bystanders and collateral damage.

Of course, people who work in federal buildings just think they're working stiffs, whereas people like Timothy McVeigh and G. Gordon Liddy reserve the right to consider them something less than human. (McVeigh went to his too-early grave--speaking as an opponent of the death penalty, I'd love it if he'd lived to gnash his teeth over the Patriot Act--refusing to express remorse for what he'd done, but he did apparently express confusion upon learning that there was a nursery in the building for the children of working parents. Who knew that government employees could breed?) Fifteen years after Oklahoma City, people like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck still roll their eyes at the notion that violent rhetoric can inspire violent acts, even as they extol the higher wisdom of people whose minds haven't been contaminated by book learning, who are therefore that much more likely to have trouble telling the difference between a crude metaphor and an edict from a burning bush. The definitive zen koan among the angry chucklehead set remains Ronald Reagan's deathless one-liner about how the biggest lie in the world is, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." This priceless nugget was passed along to us from a man whose family was rescued from the brink of financial destitution by a government-created jobs program, and whose enduring legacy includes the deregulation of the financial industries, the creation of the modern culture of homelessness and the thirty-years-in-the-making, ever-expanding gap between rich and poor in America. Thanks for all the help, Dutch!

Reagan demonstrated that you could spend eight years expanding the federal government and build up a vast deficit, all the while talking about how government was the enemy and that you, an outsider, were holding it at bay by the use of strict financial discipline, and people would love you for it, because the results of your cluelessness would perfectly align with the nature of their hypocrisy: the problems of this country over the course of my lifetime have been the result less of too much big government than of the childishness of an electorate overstocked with people who want everything they they've grown accustomed to seeing as part of their way of life regarded as sacrosanct but regard anything the government does that they don't see as benefiting them directly, whether it's a school lunch program or signs printed in two languages or buildings that are designed to be wheelchair-accessible, as a waste of money at best or an infringement on their space and pocketbook at worst. The stupidest and meanest among them aren't even ashamed to appear in public equating having a few cents shaved off their taxes to pay for such things with "tyranny".

There's been a great move among Republicans, and even some Tea Partiers and libertarians who harbor actual political ambitions in the real world, to distance themselves from Rand Paul since his unfortunate show of honesty a couple of weeks ago, when he freely acknowledged that the provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that made it illegal for citizens to deny people entrance to their place of business because of their skin color was not in line with his views about the place of government, and then compared this abomination to what he sees as the evil of using the government's power to enforce better public accommodations for the disabled. In his defense, Paul has bleated like a stuck pig that he isn't a racist, and I believe him. Calling Paul a racist is an easy way to evade the unpopular truth that his jolly blather threatened to remind people of, which is that there have been times in our history when government intervention was the only way to stop unacceptable, evil things from going on, and there is no reason to think that it won't happen again--or that, by Christ, it isn't happening now. George W. Bush pulled the same trick when he turned FEMA into a featherbed for unqualified cronies and left New Orleans defenseless to recover from the ravages of a major hurricane than that everyone saw coming days before it hit.

Bush didn't understand the rage that the images of New Orleans provoked in people, because he had reason to think that the public at large agreed with him that government is the problem, not the solution, and that all those people who cheer that line at rallies understand that the cost of not funding FEMA and taking it seriously--or just shutting it down, which would have been his first choice--is that, when a massive natural disaster hits an American city, everyone who can't afford to charter a helicopter and escape to their place on the Eastern Seaboard is going to have his life destroyed, and he assumed that everyone was okay with those people suffering the consequences of God's displeasure, which He'd already visited on them by not having them born the son of a millionaire's son.

Of course, most people are light years away from being as morally obtuse and hatefully devoid of empathy as George Bush, Jr., but he had the right to be confused about the reaction: it was almost as if those nice folks hadn't thought out the real-world ramifications of what they were salivating at whenever he rang his little bell. As for Rand Paul, who thinks that racist segregation would have done a much better job of sorting it out by the natural process of marketplace wisdom if the government had just stayed out of it--those people who acquitted Byron de la Beckwith and laughed at seeing black protesters knocked on their asses and dragged for miles by fire hoses and police dogs would have eventually realized that practicing brotherly love just made good business sense, and that would have been that--he has made a decision to intellectually divorce himself from the real world altogether, which is the price any honest person must pay to achieve the level of rigorous philosophical consistency that Nader supporters find so admirable in a politician.

Rand has also weighed in on President Obama's criticism of the BP oil spill, saying that it is "un-American" to go tsk-tsk at any representative of American business. This is actually a long way down the road from Charles Erwin Wilson's stated belief that "was good for the country was good for General Motors", a line that for years was considered the ultimate in corporate self-aggrandizement. (Wilson worked as Secretary of Defense under President Eisenhower, whose speech warning against the dangers of the "military-industrial complex" would have given Rand a conniption fit. As for other alleged conservative heroes, such as the trust-busting environmentalist Teddy Roosevelt, forget it.) The most insane thing about the bad-mouthing of government and those who work for it is that, especially among the Reagan-worship crowd, it often goes hand in hand with a protective attitude towards "business", with being "pro-business" often mistaken for the more skeptical and nuanced philosophy that is capitalism. To believe that government can do nothing right and that business can do nothing wrong--that regulation and industry safeguards are just political correctness run amok--you need to be able to believe that the environmental disaster on the Gulf Coast, which threatens to change to economic culture of the area as ruinously as its natural culture, is somehow more the fault of the government than that of the company, if only because the real crime was the government's trusting these representatives of an American business culture that should be allowed to do anything it wants. It says a lot about where we've come that it's not surprising that many commentators have proven themselves capable of making that leap.

America is a great country with a great past and remarkable possibilities. If our future doesn't measure up to where we've been, the blame will lie less in those trying to make the government work to move us forward and improve the lives of those on the bottom than in the kind of people who get very excited about the idea that a war that will be great fun to watch on CNN will renew our national fiber and bring American-style democracy to all the Middle East but who roll their eyes when they hear the suggestion that maybe we could cut back a little on our energy use or experiment with alternative energy sources that won't do much to enrich the people who are rich now from oil field revenues or even find a way to get the salaries of CEOs and the people munching sandwiches in the break room, not in the same ballpark, but just in adjoining stratospheres. Where do these people get their ridiculous, crackpot notions? Some of them came from our own past, before people born since John Kennedy died started peddling books explaining that Franklin Roosevelt fucked up the country and equating universal health care with Hitlerism. Hell, a lot of people even fought for a country that they thought embodied such ideas, fought for it while wearing American uniforms. They're not here anymore, which is why it's up to us, acting on their behalf, to tell the Rand Pauls and George Bush Juniors of this world to get stuffed.

The Menace

Friday night, the air conditioning went out. It was eighty-three degrees inside the house and felt like ninety-five, and as the Missus and I sat on the patio, munching ice cubes and fanning the dog, our conversation somehow turned to formative experiences, and I got to talking about seeing Blue Velvet when it came out when I was in college. Turned out the Missus had never seen it. Which is how, once the air conditioning came back on, we found ourselves watching Blue Velvet that night. The first time I saw it, it was impossible to separate anything in it from its place in the total effect, but whenever I've seen it again in recent years, I've always found one element to concentrate on that's impressed me as it never did before, and this time it was the force of Dennis Hopper's performance as the greatest human movie monster since Harry Lime, Frank Booth. Frank is different from Harry in that he has no charm--when he's first seen stalking the streets with his scurvy posse, the Missus blurted out, "He has friends!?--but they're alike in that they're both totally unredeemed yet capable of inspiring you to feel a fleeting moment of sympathy for them, when Harry is cornered in the sewers and suddenly has the expression of a cat lost in the rain, and Frank's voice cracks as he warns Jeffrey Beaumont not to force him to do something to him that will make Frank's sex slave, Dorothy Vallens, like him even less. ("Don't be a good neighbor to her! I'll send ya a love letter!") At a moment like that, you recognize the pain of being a monster, and wish that this creature didn't have to suffer from the knowledge of what he is. But at the end of the movie, as Jack Nicholson said in Batman, you're glad he's dead.

Blue Velvet was Hopper's comeback movie, even if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in its infinite wisdom, chose to officially recognize his return that year by giving him an Academy Award nomination for his role in Hoosiers. It was so obvious that Hopper would be nominated for something that year that Entertainment Tonight had its cameras in his house and trained on him so that they could record his reaction when he heard his name read, along with the other Best Supporting Actor nominees, on live television. They thus managed to preserve one of the baffled expressions of gratitude on record: "Oh boy! Wait--they gave it to me for...huh." By conventional Hollywood standards, it made perfect sense that Hopper's professional rehabilitation after drinking and drugging had rendered him null and void for at least a decade should be recognized by honoring his having played a nice drunk in a feel-good family film. After all, if they'd just wanted to fuck with his head, they could have nominated him for his other notable performance that year, in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

I was a huge fan of Hopper's at that time, and I was thrilled to see him come back. But I had only the faintest idea who he was, and of what he was coming back from. The short, vague answer was that he was a Hollywood maverick who, having been run out of the business in the dull old '50s because he was too pure and weird in his devotion to his craft, had fought the good fight for indie film, hoisted the flag for counterculture cinema with Easy Rider, and then been run off again, but had conquered his sodden demons and come back, wholly unexpectedly and better than ever. All of this gave him an aura, and it was the aura that made me a fan. It came packaged with a new humility that was very becoming, as when a Film Comment interviewer mentioned that Harry Dean Stanton had turned down the role of Frank Booth because "Harry Dean wants to be a leading man" and Hopper, after saying that "I can understand that", added that he himself was just "happy to be working."



That's not how Hopper talked for most of his career. In Lawrence Schiller's American Dreamer, a documentary shot during the time he was working on The Last Movie, his follow-up to Easy Rider, Hopper can be seen babbling about how he expects his second film as a director to be a massive hit, but if it turns out to be like Orson Welles's second film, The Magnificent Ambersons--i.e., a masterpiece that doesn't make a lot of money and hurts his career--that'll be okay too. ("I was sleeping on a mattress when I edited Easy Rider, and I can sleep on a mattress again.") In the same breath, he pre-emptively blames "the audience" if it turns out that his star vehicle and definitive vision is rejected. Easy Rider, whose success David Thomson once called a disaster in the history of film comparable the early death of F. W. Murnau and "the longevity of Richard Attenborough", is as thoroughly unwatchable today (except for Jack Nicholson's stoned rap about extraterrestrials) as any zeitgeist film whose moment moved on, but it performed a service by shaking up the studio heads so badly that, for a time, they were willing to bankroll interesting directors and give them some freedom, because the studio heads had to admit that they had no idea what kinds of movies might excite "the youth audience", and maybe people like Hopper (and Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpah and Brian De Palma and Woody Allen) did.

But Hopper had his role in bringing about the crackdown, too. The Last Movie, along with The Hired Hand, which starred and was directed by his Easy Rider co-star Peter Fonda (as well as Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, Milos Forman's Taking Off, John Cassavettes's Minnie and Moskowitz, Frank Perry's Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running), was funded by Universal Pictures as part of its "youth division" slate, a scheme to court the new audience with a bunch of movies made by offbeat directors, working with full creative freedom, on relatively low budgets. With the partial exception of Mad Housewife, none of these movies were big hits, and there is cause for speculation that Universal, which changed regimes between the time the "youth division" was conceived and most of the pictures were ready for release, deliberately let them die on the vine just to show that the weirdo arty directors didn't know how to connect with audiences any better than the people who gave the green light to Doctor Dolittle and Tora! Tora! Tora!



Of all the youth division movies, none was more hotly anticipated than The Last Movie, and none was received with greater hostility. The film, which stars Hopper as a stunt man shooting a Western in Peru who stays behind when the film crew he's part of returns to Hollywood, and who becomes a martyred Christ figure when the natives begin staging their own movies, using bamboo cameras but real violence, was a year in the editing, and Hopper, who was lost deep in his own hallucinogenic fumes throughout the process, seems to have set out to create a massive, defiantly self-deconstructing machine that would simultaneously sum up and negate the history of movies, and maybe America itself. At the same time, he had lived with the project for so long that he probably thought that the hash he'd made of the footage was still comprehensible to general viewers, if only on an emotional level. (As a director, he's very taken with images of himself being mysteriously driven to tears.) Hopper himself never tired of assuring interviewers that The Last Movie was a lost masterpiece that was ahead of its time, and those interviews, coupled with the movie's general unavailability since 1971, have had their effect: in a recent New York Times piece on Hopper, Manohla Dargis insisted that The Last Movie is "not as narratively incomprehensible as its reputation suggests", which is less a contrarian critical opinion as an exercise in alternate history, along the lines of saying that, despite what you may have heard from the ill-informed, dinosaurs didn't become extinct until the last free range herds of brontauruses and T. rexes were wiped out in the 1871 Chicago fire.


The combination of Hopper's terrible movie and even worse public profile, with his verbal diarrhea preserved in hundreds of interviews as well as Schiller's movie, turned him into a club for the studios and industry journalists to use on anyone trying to find a different way to make movies, just as Michael Cimino would be used a decade later. But the fact that this was wrong doesn't retroactively make Hopper a great director. Nor does it do anything for his acting. As a young man, Hopper had a bland screen presence and a shaky grasp of technique, which he joined to the worst case of James Dean worship ever. He put himself out there, desperate to express something, but he either didn't have much to express or couldn't figure out how to use his body and voice to express it. (It was probably a little, or maybe a lot, of both.) Sobering up didn't really do much for his directing: a still photographer whose work has been featured in gallery shows, Hopper always had an eye, but his post-comeback movies (Colors, The Hot Spot, Chasers, and the thriller Backtrack, which he starred in and later disowned), while more conventional in their narrative approach than his pre-comeback work, show no other signs of directing talent; he sometimes gave it his all when it came to composing arresting-looking frames but couldn't get them to pulse dramatically, and didn't even seem to know how to work with the actors. (His best work as a director was, confoundingly, on the Canadian film Out of the Blue, which was made in 1980 when he was still deep in his substance-abusing period. Hopper, who had been hired to play the teenage anti-heroine's father, took over the film a few weeks into the production and shifted the tone and focus of the script; it's a mess, but it has more life in it than anything else he had an offscreen role in.)

As an actor, though, the clean and sober Hopper was a man reborn. Look at some of the high-profile roles he had in the late '70s and '80s (Apocalypse Now, Rumble Fish, The Osterman Weekend) and compare them to his work in something like Black Widow or Flashback, and the change is clear: the past-fifty Dennis Hopper was a spark plug and an entertainer, a man more interested in showing the audience a good time than in impressing anyone with how hard he was groping to explore his dark, inner depths. No more crawling off to a lonely corner of the screen for this cackling dude. He got typecast as a maniacal villain, thanks in part to Frank Booth but also to Speed, Red Rock West, and, sinking low and flirting dangerously with having worn out his welcome, Waterworld. (We shall not speak of his King Koopa in Super Mario Bros.) He did a lot of crap and he gave a lot of performances that he'd given already, but hey, he was happy to be working.



And he could still be startling in the right context: the series of Nike commercials he did after Speed raised his profile among the multiplex goers were among the finest and most audacious television entertainments of their day, and I say this without the least trace of an ironic smirk. The last time I saw him acting was a couple of years ago in Elegy, the movie version of Philip Roth's The Dying Animal, in which he played a gray-haired poet who suffers a fatal attack while beaming with bashful pleasure at the praise that his best friend (Ben Kingsley) is lavishing on him during his introductory remarks at some college literary function. In the story, he provided the wary but tolerant voice of reason to Kingsley's Rothian aging horndog. I know, it's hard to wrap your mind around the notion of a gracefully autumnal Dennis Hopper, especially after the tabloid coverage of his divorce battle with his fifth wife while on his deathbed. But all I can say is that it turned out to be a good look on him.

When it was announced last fall that Hopper was dying, it set off a rush among people to get in their retrospective tributes (such as Dargis's) to his life and career; after all, P. T. Barnum had expressed a wish that he might be able to read his obituary before he died, and the New York Sun actually printed its obit shortly before his death, in order to oblige him. In addition to making some grand claims for his directing skills and even for some of his sadder work as an actor, much of what I've read about Hopper, including things that were written in the months leading up to his death and what's appeared since yesterday, has banged the drum for his stature as a wild man and uncontainable anarchic force. Hopper told a lot of stories on himself, and some of the work he did before he got a grip--his worst acting as well as The Last Movie--lives on mainly as relics of the stories about him, about how far out on the ledge he managed to go before, miraculously, reeling himself back. People like the stories; they're cautionary tales that make you giggle, and they seem to mean something more than that, because, watching Hopper explode across the screen in his best later work as an actor, it's easy to feel that they have some connection to what finally made him great.

They don't. Before Blue Velvet, Hopper was a wild man, not in any way that fed or fueled any work he did that was worthwhile (the way someone like Peckinpah used his intemperate emotions to light an atomic charge on screen, or someone like Richard Pryor would take off into ozone and come back with lucid accounts of what it was like out there where the buses don't run). As an actor and filmmaker, his wildness took the form of arrogant, blinkered egomania and self-destructive wallowing in whatever he wanted to wallow in, and its sole effect on him creatively was to prevent him from being able to express himself meaningfully or cogently. It's exciting to think about the young prince getting himself blackballed in Hollywood because he got into a Method pissing match with the likes of Henry Hathaway, or about the counterculture seer out there in Peru, cobbling together his avant-masterpiece while plastered to the highest cloud. But actually watching the movies is work.

I have no problem with people enjoying the stories; I enjoyed them myself, the first four or five times I heard them. But at the risk of sounding like an A.A. sponsor, I'd like to get more of a sense that the people relaying them and toasting Hopper for his wildness understand that the wildness was something he had to learn to channel and control before he actually began doing work that mattered, and that the messianic young madman they (and he) retain so much affection for was the person he had to outgrow. Watching Blue Velvet again Friday night, I was knocked cold, yet again, by Hopper's performance, but this time my admiration had a dimension to it that it hadn't had when I first saw it, because now I know had hard-won that level of control was for him. When I was working in college and regional theater in the late '80s, I knew a lot of people who wanted to give that kind of performance, and who thought that the key to it was to have the nerve to go all out with the kind of cursing, yelling, uninhibited display that'll shake all the bananas out of the trees. I am not entirely certain that, on some nights, the list of people I knew who made this mistake did not include myself. Those of us who were educable, or at least capable of achieving conscious embarrassment, learned that there was a lot more to realizing a character like Frank Booth than a willingness to behave like a Tourette's sufferer experiencing an attack of St. Vitus Dance on the same day that you forget to take your thyroid medication.

Hopper himself found out that this was no way to live. Based on his interviews, he may never have figured out that it was no way to act, but it's asking a lot of someone that he write off the fruits of the first thirty years of his career as an exercise in public wankery. I myself have chosen to go on about it for a bit not because I thought I might make some new friends and increase donations here by blowing shit at a much-loved dead man but because "Frank Booth" seems like a heroic creation to me now, because I appreciate the hard work and deep thought that must have gotten into Hopper's performance, which entailed rethinking his whole approach as an actor. Actors who've earned reputations as dependable lightweight charmers sometimes get raves for their newfound daring when they agree to play villains, like Ian McShane since Sexy Beast, or take on roles that give them a chance to make their charm seem shady or repellent, like Tom Cruise in Magnolia. That wasn't the kind of breakthrough that Hopper needed; he was always up for a scene in which he curses out and abuses a woman and then rapes her with the sash from her robe stuffed in his mouth, but he hadn't previously been known to take the time and care to do such things in a way that showed you a bottomlessly cruel yet suffering human being up there, instead of an actor trying to scale Mount Everest in his underwear, with a hangover. Redemption was denied to Frank Booth, but Dennis Hopper, as artistically ambitious as any bundle of sweaty flesh and neuroses as ever stormed Hollywood, finally achieved artistic redemption, against all odds and at a point when the smart money barely knew he was there, never mind whether it would have bet on him. That's why he deserves to be remembered. Any idjit can blow himself up in the Russian death chair. Only one of us idjits could have done this. [NSFW]

Not Found

The series finale of Lost was a lot of fun for the first hour, the second hour, heading into the third hour...and then, as the characters reunited in a church (with Benjamin Linus sitting outside rather than inflict his presence on some of the people inside who'd be less than thrilled to see him--a nice touch, as was his and Hurley's exchange about "Number 1" and "Number 2", which I took as a shout-out to the original great mindfuck TV series, The Prisoner) and trading smiles and slo-mo back slaps while bathed in a heavenly glow, as Jack had an improbably tender exchange with his own ghostly world's worst dad, it sank in the sap. I don't want to write off what, for most of its running time, struck me as a pretty fair wrap-up, but it was depressing seeing a show that had often managed to be bracingly tough-minded about giving its characters a rough time for the sake of the storyline sanctifying itself in such a feel-good way. Part of what bothered me about it was the two-and-a-half-hour length of the episode. It was only a couple of weeks before the broadcast that ABC announced, in a burst of self-congratulatory hype, that it would be allowing the creators to extend the finale by another thirty minutes. On the one hand, you couldn't help but wonder if they wouldn't have been better off having some restraints placed on their ability to fully explore the world they'd made one last time, which by the end seemed to be taking the form of wallowing in their bittersweet feelings about losing a steady gig. On the other, you sort of dreaded ever knowing for sure whether, if they'd had to trim the episode back to a neat two hours, they would have had the perspective to cut the right stuff.

At the very end, we were whisked away from the joyous alternate-reality scene of the holy cast party to Jack, back on the island, stretched out on the grass and receiving communion from a dog as he lay dying. This was a restaging of the first scene of the pilot, and the fact that the final close-up of his eye shutting was followed by images of the plane wreckage sitting quietly on the beach with no one around made it all the more tempting to conclude that the whole series was a dream that passed through Jack's mind in his last moments after he fell to earth as the plane broke apart. If we have any reason for discounting this theory out of hand, it can only be that one of the show's producers, Damon Lindelof, specifically promised that he and his colleagues would never stoop to such a thing, presumably because he knew that people who saw them on the street would tear them apart limb from limb. (When Nestor Carbonell's Richard, in an episode earlier this season, stood up and declared, "We're all dead and this is Hell", before making it clear that he was speaking figuratively, it was a joke designed to see how far the show could go in tempting long-time viewers to hurl their remotes at the screen.)

One reason it was so tempting to read the finale as writing everything off as Jack's death dream, despite repeated protestations from the people who concocted it that they would never serve up that kind of ending, is that the group hug that preceded it wasn't just sticky; it was also muddled. It seemed to be meant as a gathering of the show's dead, reconciled to their fate and strengthened by their bond to each other, but it included characters who were alive the last time we saw them: were they there just because they were too important to be left out, or because they had all been dead the whole time, an idea that, if anything, would be even ickier than the "it was all a fantasy"? And, not for the first time with Lost, any real attempt to understand the rules was further complicated by trying to separate what was intentional from decisions that had to be made around real-world considerations of the kind that any big TV series has to deal with. There were some characters who were both important and dead who didn't show up in the church, and you couldn't help but wonder if this was some kind of statement about, say, Michael's or Mr. Eko's place in the scheme of things, while knowing that it was probably just that Harold Perrineau and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje had other commitments.

At least what was disappointing about the Lost finale counted as a letdown after building up some real excitement. At its flimsiest and least meaningful, Lost still had the feel of someone throwing together ideas about storytelling in a void, out of the cradle endlessly vamping. 24 also ends its run tonight, and though I'll watch it, it'll have less to do with any fascination or even any curiosity the show still holds for me than the mysterious power of force of habit. In the beginning, the show was potentially exciting for its gimmick: it seemed as if it ought to be fun to watch some hardy, hungry pros--such as co-creator Joel Surnow, a veteran of Wiseguy, Miami Vice, and La Femme Nikita--try to keep a serial adventure story rolling for a full day's worth of hour-long installments. But while 24 was sometimes exciting and sometimes compelling, it was hardly ever fun, because it was never playful. Sex and humor were exiled from its universe, and this seemed to compel a lot of people to take it seriously. It took itself seriously, which helped critics who want to believe that pop culture is commenting on our times, even when it really isn't, to use it as a base for think pieces about what it said about our attitude about torture as a weapon in the war on terror. Anything that features the hero alternately bashing the hell out of people and getting bashed himself that's not more fun than this must have a serious message, because why the hell else are we watching it?

24 really must have been a zeitgeist show for the past decade: that helps to account for how tired it feels now. But if it felt as if it were summing up the times in a way, that has less to do with anything it had to say than with the way that, both in form and content, it came down to an exercise in spin control. Surnow became famous in the press for his Republican views and for his celebratory attitude towards Jack Bauer's torture-happy expertise, even as he ridiculed the idea that there's a political message in showing the guy in the white hat kicking the crap out of the guys in the black hats. What Surnow, and 24, actually embodied was the contemporary hustler's notion that "politics" are just something you use to tweak whoever you've identified as your ideological nemesis; you don't examine what's going on in the world or try to really conclude what you think about it, you just have a giggle saying whatever you think will piss off those losers on the other side of the aisle. (After it was identified in the media as a "political" show, 24 stepped up its game by hiring actors, such as Jon Voight and Janeane Garofalo, with public profiles based on their politics, and cast them as unsympathetic caricatures of themselves, as if daring the audience to decide whether it was mocking them or paying them tribute.)

24 did contribute a few indelible characters to the pop culture landscape, such as its dream of a strong, idealistic president, Dennis Haysbert's David Palmer; its nightmare of a supreme weasel in chief, Gregory Itzhin's Charles Logan; and Mary Lenn Rajskub's Chloe, every asocial geek's fantasy self-image of him or herself as the only person in the building who can see clearly and get the damn job done. But over the course of nine years, it brought a lot of good actors on board only to flavorlessly chew them up and spit them out in its relentless, headlong rush to get to the next shootout or car chase. Even Keifer Sutherland's performance, which anchored the series so thoroughly that no attempt to partner him up with a sidekick of near-equal weight ever took, was really a triumph of spin control. Jack wasn't likable or fun to watch, he wasn't especially good company in the way that a natural series lead like James Garner was in his prime (or Timothy Olyphant, on Justified, is now), but if you remembered the puffy-faced Brat Pack juvenile with the weird hair, or the aging former juvenile who, in such movies as Freeway and Dark City, seemed well on his way to building a career on sheer weirdness, seeing his reinvention of himself as a two-fisted, bluejeaned, defiantly colorless action man was so unlikely that it was sort of awesome. (That said, as unexpected second acts go, he was nothing on Michael Chiklis.)

Jack Bauer was both a law unto himself and all business. Unlike James Bond and other, earlier superheroes, he wasn't witty or wisecracking or debonair or fun-loving; unlike Batman, he wasn't emotionally tortured in a way that seemed baroquely romantic and glamorous. And though, for all I know, there may be people who found him sexy, he himself seemed to have next to interest in sex, and for the women on the show, going to bed with him or even having an off-screen sexual history with him was the kiss of death. He was the indestructible hero of an escapist pop adventure fantasy, but his only point of entry as an identification figure for the audience was his ability to generate rage and to violently take it out on as many people as he liked, while looking like the regular guy of a talk-radio host's demographic dreams. At its most typical, 24 was mediocre in a way that was supposed to make it more realistic. When Jack Kennedy was president and Sean Connery wore a rug, believability wasn't a big priority among Americans looking for a good thriller, but that change may say as much about the drop in the national self-confidence level, and the panic over it, as people's ability to convince themselves that George W. Bush was somehow capable of managing and protecting the country after they realized that they were stuck with him.

In the end, no successful show that was acclaimed as some kind of breakthrough quite summed up the stuck-in-a-rut nature of series television the way 24 came to. It began with its narrative gimmick, and it never figured out what to do with its gimmick except: keep it going. The bar wasn't really set that high for its first season. It was guaranteed to be acclaimed as a triumph so long as it managed to get from episode one to episode twenty-four with its through line more or less intact, without collapsing, and it did, though it tripped a few times. The real hopes for the series began after that. A lot of us were rooting for the writers, once they'd shown that the feat could be done, to move beyond just getting it done, and tell some real stories, with some wit and wild flourishes, rather than keep grafting alleged high points onto each other until the clock ran out, and they never did. If there's a real disappointment about the end of 24 for me, it's that the gimmick may be chalked up as the exclusive property of Surnow and company and retired now, because I'd love to see somebody else try something along the same lines--ideally, somebody with a little Carl Barks in his soul.

More proof that you learn something new every day: I caught a piece of an Underdog rerun this weekend, something that I'd been meaning to do for years, because I had faint memories of watching it as a kid and had a notion, which was not confirmed by this latest experience, that any animated show that crappy-looking must have had something in the writing to recommend it, the way Bullwinkle did. (A 24 with the Jay Ward touch would be too awesome for words.) I was impressed, though, to learn that the mad scientist villain, Simon Bar Sinister, was voiced as if he were played by Lionel Barrymore, a genius touch that, owing to an unfamiliarity with the oeuvre of Brother Lionel, went right over my head when I was four. His hulking assistant with the bad hair sounded kind of like Humphrey Bogart, which makes a lot less sense, or to be more specific, no sense at all, but maybe the voice actor just had a cold that day.

Apparently, I Saw This: "The Delinquents" (1957)

Even though my thing for Robert Altman is well-documented, I'm still filling in gaps in my knowledge of his filmography. Altman didn't find his style as a filmmaker until he was in his mid-forties, and he did a shitload of TV work before then, and stayed busy with a lot of haphazardly financed work for cable television and independent producers after he and the Hollywood suits fell out of favor with each other a decade or so later. The Delinquents, his 72-minute first feature, was made in his native Kansas City with money from a local theater chain magnate, Elmer Rhoden Jr., who, Altman later explained, offered to fund a movie "if I'd make it about delinquents. I said okay, and I wrote the thing in five days, cast it, picked the locations, drove the generator truck, got the people together, took no money, and we just did it, that's all. My motives at that time were to make a picture, and if they'd said I gotta shoot it in green in order to get it done, I'd say, 'Well, I can figure out a way to do that.' I would have done anything to get the thing done."

Up until I came across it the other day on a cable channel, MGM HD, the closest I'd ever come to seeing The Delinquents was reading an interview with Altman that appeared in Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn's mid-'70s anthology Kings of the Bs, which the director seemed to have given in hopes that anyone who read it would decide to pass up any opportunity to look at the film, knowing that it would cause him pain. Turns out I was weak to honor his wishes. It didn't help knowing that the movie stars another maverick figure from '70s movies, Tom Billy Jack Laughlin. He plays Scotty, who turns out to be a good boy, despite expectations raised by his first scene: while his Millie Helper-style mom is doing a diva turn in the living room, boring her tween-age daughter and Robert Benchleyesque husband with an aria about what hoodlums kids are these days, Scotty comes downstairs, makes a "This shit again!" face, and casually flips his sister's skirt up over her back. Altman's moving-house-party approach to working with his cast and crew began on The Delinquents, but Laughlin, who Altman remembered years later as "an unbelievable pain in the ass...with a big Catholic hangup and a James Dean complex", seems to have been too self-serious and uptight to fit in, and Altman says that his star did the second half of the movie "under protest" after his resignation was not accepted.

The eighteen-year-old Scotty is a nice kid, but he has love problems, of an unlikely sort. The love he shares with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Janice (Rosemary Howard) is of Abelard-and-Heloise proportions, but Janice's father thinks that Janice is too young to be dreaming of marriage, wearing his class ring around her neck, and picking out names for the children they will someday conceive in a marriage bed that has been officially sanctified by God and man. In a speech that shows a commitment to his daughter's having a varied and well-rounded sexual history to look forward to that seems surprising even in a resident of Kansas City, he tells Scotty to hit the bricks and never return so that he can see to it that Janice instead date a whole bunch of other joes. In despair, Scotty skulks off to the drive-in, where he has a "meets cute" with a carload of the title characters. (The head thug's chief goon is played by Dick Bakalayan, in his second movie role. His very next job would be in the Jerry Lewis picture The Delicate Delinquent, a transition that sums up his long career nicely.)



At this point, I thought I knew where the story was headed: Scotty, filled with rage over the injustice done to him by his girl's oddly freethinking father, would throw his lot in with the delinquents, and before you knew it, a point would have been made about how a failure to communicate with the young and respect their love rights can lead to Richie Cunningham winding up on the Ten Most Wanted list. But I was wrong. Scotty doesn't break that easily, though he may be a tad naive about the character and intentions of leering fellows he meets combing their hair with their switchblades in the parking lot. The head delinquent offers to present himself at Janice's doorstep, pretend to be a new beau, and deliver her to Scotty so that the two of them can be reunited at the wild party the delinquents are going to attend the next night. The scheme goes well until the cops raid the party and the delinquents get it into their heads that Scotty must have dropped a dime on them. When questioned, he tells them, "Why would I go to the cops when I had liquor on my breath?" Then he says it again. And then he says it again, until you start to think that for Altman to say that he needed five days to write this thing was less a backhanded boast than a sad cry for help. The delinquents force him to swig a bottle of scotch, then abandon him at the site of a gas station robbery before abducting Janice. It all comes down to a very poorly staged and edited fight in a kitchen, which features close-ups of the worried Janice, with tears that look as if they'd been swabbed onto her face with a mop, that was never meant to be seen in high definition.

That fight scene aside, and discounting the chicken-livered lameness of the plot, with its resolutely-good-boy-who-never-really-joins-the-wrong-crowd, The Delinquents doesn't approach Ed Wood territory; in terms of technique, it's passable, though there isn't anything in it that would cause you to guess at what Altman was going to grow into, or what path he'd take to get there. The dialogue scenes are flat and prosy, and the most vivid frames come at the very start, when we see a black woman singing with a jazz combo in a Kansas City club, before the camera moves away from her and the movie has to start being about delinquents. Once Altman concentrates on delivering the j.d. exploitation picture that he'd been contracted to make, his interest on what he's shooting dries up fast, but he managed to demonstrate enough technical proficiency for it to get his career off the ground: it got picked up for distribution by United Artists, made a modest profit, and, as a test reel, got Altman his first work in network TV, directing episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. So why did Altman, a man very secure in his attitude towards his work by the mid-'70s, seem so humorlessly appalled at the thought of anyone seeing it after he'd hit the big time?

The movie's undistinguished badness aside, he may not have wanted the audience that saw him as a counterculture hero to know that he'd made the squarest j.d. exploitation movie of the '50s; in addition to the stick of a hero, there's the narration that UA stuck on over the opening titles, with a stentorian voice speculating on the possibility that "man has forgotten the spiritual values which are the moral fiber of a great nation: Decency. Respect. Fair play", and cautioning that the sordid horrors we are about to see are intended as "a reminder to those who must set an example." It's the kind of thing that the Altman of M*A*S*H would have had read over the P.A. system to the accompaniment of fart noises. As it was, he apparently didn't know these lines were in the movie until he heard them at the premiere. Probably his experience with Rhoden and UA helped shape the attitude towards authority that would affect the shape of his career and eventually his work itself. As for Laughlin, his experience with Altman may have been a factor in his coming to the conclusion that the only director with whom he could enjoy a satisfying working relationship was Tom Laughlin.

Ten "SNL" Spinoff Movies

I wrote this for Nerve, ostensibly in honor of the release of "MacGruber", though in their wisdom, the bosses chose to run their version of the piece a month early. Now, "MacGruber" is in theaters, after a heavyweight media blitz that may qualify it as the most high profile movie to open without the benefit of press screenings since "Snakes on a Plane"--Will Forte, the movie's reliably, doggedly unfunny star, recently complained to the New York Times that "all these people seem to have decided it’s going to be horrible before they’ve even seen it"; I'm sure this is really gonna help--and given that a lot of words dropped off my piece when Nerve ran in, I thought I might as well give the full text a home here.

1. A MIGHTY WIND (2003)



For the 1984-85 season of Saturday Night Live, the show's producer, Dick Ebersol, decided to make things easy on himself by plugging the holes in his cast with proven veterans of the comedy scene instead of taking a risk on completely unknown new talent. Two of the new hires who came to be known as "Dick's all-stars" were Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer, both of whom had appeared in This Is Spinal Tap, the cult comedy hit of the year. It was during their time on the show that Guest and Shearer, along with their Spinal Tap teammate Michael McKean (who would do his own stint as an SNL cast member ten years later) introduced the Folksmen, a hoary musical trio who would be later serve as part of the lineup in this parody of the folk scene, directed by Guest. Since the Folksmen only made one appearance on SNL, a lot of people probably don't consider A Mighty Wind to be a "real" SNL movie, but there are a couple of good reasons for including it here. For one thing, it makes it easier to get to ten entries without having to include both Wayne's World and Wayne's World 2. For another, it allows us to kick thing off by mentioning a movie that's actually funny.

2. CONEHEADS (1993)

In their original TV incarnation, the Coneheads were the stuff of which midnight movies are made: surreal, grotesque, and mean-spirited. (Within the context of SNL in the late 1970s, they were also implicit, walking drug references. When they indulged in mass consumption of beer and snack food, and it was as if they'd gotten the munchies from the viewers' contact high.) Revived more than a dozen years after their last TV appearance and reconceived for a family-audience movie, they became cute, lovable, and implicitly just-say-no in their attitudes. The movie itself was a big commercial disappointment, and to add insult to injury, was the recipient of negative publicity when cartoonist Bill Griffith used his newspaper strip to accuse Beldar's creator, Dan Ackroyd, of having ripped off Zippy the Pinhead. That said, it's about as good as you have any reason to expect a movie version of a played-out TV skit to be. Parts of it are funny, the parts that aren't funny aren't unduly painful, and many of the guest stars, including Dave Thomas as an alien warlord and a dashingly toupeed Jason Alexander, really strut their stuff. Even David Spade is kind of funny as the sidekick to the Coneheads' nemesis, a Javert-like I.N.S. agent (Michael McKean), and even Chris Farley, as a mechanic with eyes for the littlest Conehead, is, well, kind of bearable.

3. THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)



John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd had already spun off their white-soul-men routine into a hit album and a touring act before making this 27-million-dollar movie vehicle, directed by John Landis (National Lampoon's Animal House). The first real movie based on SNL characters, it was also the first clear sign that the original SNL players, who liked to go on about how they were revolutionary figures clearing away the dead wood of earlier generations of show business hacks, had a notion of hip that was not significantly different from that of Frank, Dean, Sammy, and maybe even Joey Bishop. This is essentially a Rat Pack movie, albeit one for people who prefer blunts to martoonies and who try to assert their hepness not by letting Sammy Davis, Jr. do a crazy beatnik number but by parking John Lee Hooker in a random corner of the screen, something for which, I trust, he was richly compensated. Overall, it's not too unpleasant, provided you don't mind spending what feels like half your life watching car crashes, but most of what's in it that flirts with being really entertaining is the work of the musical guests (Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway) and the guest comedians (John Candy, Henry Gibson). Belushi and Aykroyd only really connect with the audience in those (fleeting) moments when they lower their sunglasses and drop their "characters". Aykroyd and Landis reunited in 1999 for a sequel, Blues Brothers 2000, for reasons that have never been made clear. Maybe Chevy really didn't want to do Spies Like Us 2.

4. WAYNE'S WORLD (1992)

Most of the movies on this list wouldn't have been made--it would never have even occurred to anybody to make them --if it hadn't been for the blockbuster success of this massively hyped vehicle for Mike Myers's Wayne and Dana Carvey's Garth, the dithering teenage headbangers with the cable access show. In addition to launching Myers into the stratosphere, the movie also made a celebrity of Tia Carerre, gave Rob Lowe to redefine himself as being in on the joke, and created a new generation of Queen fans, mixed accomplishments all. If we learned anything from the death of John Hughes, it's that any movie about teens that people saw in a packed theater when they were teens and subsequently watched a hundred times on home video or HBO will always be regarded by them as a timeless classic, so I expect to catch hell for pointing out that Wayne's World isn't really very good. Most of the point of Wayne and Garth is lost by taking them out of mom's basement, with the result that the movie comes closer to celebrating mullethead stupidity than satirizing it. To his immense credit, Myers--who, unlike Carvey, would go on to be funnier in actual funny movies, ranging from his greater creation, Austin Powers, to Inglourious Basterds--later scandalized the industry by refusing to do a Dieter-from-Sprockets movie because he couldn't get the script to work, even if that does make you wonder how much worse it could have been than the script he signed off on for The Love God. This was also a transitional film for the director, Penelope Spheeris, who had previously been best known for the Decline of Western Civilization documentaries and other films about teen subcultures, and who followed this one up with The Little Rascals and The Beverly Hillbillies.

5. STUART SAVES HIS FAMILY (1995)



Harold Ramis directed this film starring Al Franken as the self-disintegrating public access self-help guru Stuart Smalley. It sat on the shelf for a while before being giving a flyspeck of a theatrical release, and it did badly enough at the box office and with most critics to send Franken himself into a reported shame spiral, but it has its defenders. Me, I actually like it more than Wayne's World, but in anticipation of negative public reaction, have chosen to rank it beneath the smash hit, which is just my way of saying, hey, I care about your feelings, please don't stuff dead cats inside my mailbox. With the vulnerably, touchingly mealy-mouthed Stuart trying to reconnect with his awful family (alcoholic father Harris Yulin, sweetly oblivious mom Shirley Knight, ineffectually blustering brother Vincent D'Onofrio, binge-eating sister Lesley Boone) at the same time he's coping with the cancellation of his TV show, it's as genuinely dark as SNL movies get, and certainly as well cast. There are funny moments throughout, but it has trouble achieving sustained liftoff, maybe because it's hard to make a movie seem fully alive when its hero keeps responding to crises by taking to his bed for six days at a stretch.

6. THE LADIES MAN (2000)



Among SNL cast members who arrived in the '90s, Tim Meadows stood out: he was generally pretty easy to take. If anything, his light touch and niceness may have held him back a little in a field that rewards pushy, obnoxious types who are in too much of a hurry to get to the top of the ladder to waste time worrying about whether their material stinks. Where someone like Adam Sandler threw anything he could come up with at the wall to see if it would stick (Opera Man, Cajun Man, Unfunny Horrible Man Who Somebody Should Have Taken a Hammer to Before He got Rich Enough to Hire Bodyguards), Meadows was slow to acquire a recurring character: Leon Phelps, an ingenuously gauche love expert with a retro-'70s style and--a recurring curse in these movies--a funny voice that's amusing for five minutes at a time but can really get on your nerves over the course of a feature film. Meadows's likability is a major asset here, but the film itself has a dispiriting half-assed feel to it, partly because the moviemakers have the damndest time trying to figure out how "real" people should react to this sexed-up goofball; anyone who responds favorably to his come-ons seems deranged, but if nobody responds to them, there's no movie. (His most memorable encounter is with Julianne Moore, unrecognizable as a clown in full makeup who throws hers legs around his ass while cooing, "Come on, you know what Boopy likes!") In the end their solution is to have him "grow" by falling in love with his beautiful, bland sidekick (Karyn Parsons), settling down, and starting a family. Which is meant to be sweet, and is in fact kind of horrifying.

7. GILDA LIVE (1980)




Of all the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, it was the late Gilda Radner who Lorne Michaels took the greatest personal interest in. No doubt this was partly in recognition of her talent, but Radner, whose naked desire for the audience's good opinion could sometimes come across as neediness, also had a quality that must have made her especially attractive to a control freak like Michaels: unlike, say, John Belushi or Bill Murray, she took orders well. This performance film, which is consistently not included in retrospectives devoted to the work of the director Mike Nichols, grew out of a stage show that Radner did in 1979, which began as a little one-woman revue, something fun and low-pressure that she could do to fill the time during the summer hiatus. Then Michaels got involved and blew the whole thing up into a big Broadway event, which he arranged to have recorded for posterity as both a record album and this movie. Radner does all her familiar SNL characters (including those that by then were screamingly overfamiliar, including Roseanne Rosannadanna, who God would probably have pulled out of his back pocket and handed to Moses to inflict on the Egyptians if the curse of the first-born hadn't worked) and also some new "too hot for TV" material that the SNL writing staff whipped up for her, including a song by Michael O'Donoghue's called "Let's Talk Dirty to the Animals." ("Up yours, Mr. Hippo/ Piss off, Mr. Fox/ Tell a chicken, 'Suck my dick'/ 'N give him chicken pox") There are funny moments, but the discrepancy between the warmed-over material and the lavish mounting is so great that, when Michaels played a video of the forthcoming film at what was meant to be a celebratory party, Radner sank into a depression and Michaels immediately ordered that the release and the publicity surrounding it be scaled way, way back. In the end, Michaels and NBC wanted as few people as possible to know that the movie existed, and they got their wish.

8. SUPERSTAR (1999)

SNL's contribution to the unusually stimulating year in American movies that was 1999 manages to combine some of the best qualities, and most of the worst, of Fight Club, Election, Glee, and that dream where your mother keeps walking in on you while you're masturbating. Or maybe it's more like a cross between watching an Afterschool Special while on acid and repeatedly poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick when you are, regrettably, stone cold sober. In any case, it stars Molly Shannon as Mary Katherine Gallagher, the Catholic high school girl who longs to achieve a measure of success as an entertainer so that she can attract the attention of cute boy Will Ferrell. (In the meantime, she practices her make-out technique on trees.) Though Shannon has since demonstrated real range as an actress (especially as the star of 2007's Year of the Dog), most of her most attention-getting work on SNL was along the lines of what's now called "cringe comedy", a term that seems to have been invented to deal with stuff like The Office and Sasha Baron Cohen. That gives Shannon the distinction of having been about fifteen minutes ahead of the curve, instead of, as with most of what's been on SNL in recent decades, about two hours behind it; still, an hour and twenty minutes is a long time to cringe, especially at actors in their thirties who are playing teenagers. Superstar may suffer the worst from a problem that afflicts most movies based on SNL characters: torn from their natural habitat, sketch characters need to be given a new, stylized reality in which they'd fit in and make sense, like then one that Tim Burton fashioned around Paul Reubens in Pee-wee's Big Adventure. This would seem to be a no-brainer, but there's no indication that anyone who worked on most of these movies realized that there might be anything to turning a TV skit into a movie than to write a new skit and then to keep writing until the script was fifteen times
longer.

9. A NIGHT AT THE ROXBURY (1998)

This movie is mostly of interest as a signpost marking the period when SNL achieved a level of pure, unalloyed decadence, and I'm not talking about doing blow and screwing in the elevators. There had been a time when people did things on the show on the hopes that these things would be funny, and then, if people did seem to think they were funny, these things would be done again and again and again and again. By the time that Chris Kattan and Will Ferrell dressed up as a couple of floppy-haired fucktards and began bobbing their heads in time to Farraday's "What Is Love?" in nightclub settings, SNL was an "institution", and as such, what was "funny" was redefined as being anything that somebody had managed to do more than once on the show without getting lynched in the parking lot. When A Night at the Roxbury came out, revealing that the fucktards were a pair of Yeminite-American brothers named Steve and Doug Butabi, SNL and I had been taking a little break from each other, and I had never laid eyes on Kattan or Ferrell and didn't know about their head-bobbing act, yet when I saw the trailer for Roxbury, I instantly knew that they were SNL cast members doing characters they'd done a
million times on the show. There was no other plausible explanation for what I was seeing; they weren't doing anything that was even theoretically funny, yet they were obviously confident that anyone who saw the trailer would be not just convulsed but incredibly grateful: "Oh! My! God! They made a whole movie about the guys who go to nightclubs and bob their heads on Saturday Night Live! I hope my death was painless, because I must be in Heaven now!" There's nothing much else to say, except that this was Will Ferrell's first starring role in a movie, though there are times where, watching this, you could swear that the people who made it thought that they were having the honor of being present at the dawn of Chris Kattan's great movie career. Maybe they were really doing an ungodly amount of blow then after all.

10. IT'S PAT (1994)


This is probably the most infamous of all the SNL spin-off movies, though I'm not sure how many of the people primed to puke at any mention of its title have actually seen it; it became notorious before its (extremely limited) release, from published reports about all the difficulty that people were having trying to make an It's Pat movie, in bold defiance of the general consensus that there was no widespread demand for such a product even if it was good. Not having seen It's Pat before agreeing to write this, I actually held out some hope that it might turn out to be an undiscovered, weird classic, and that I could have the thrill of getting the ball rolling on its rediscovery and redemption. As bright ideas go, this one turned out to be about on the same level as letting Bernie Madoff watch over the retirement fund or deciding not to bother actually counting the votes in the 2000 election, just let George's kid have the job since he wants it so much, since how much damage could such a nice guy actually do? Pat, you'll recall, was played by Julia Sweeney in a costume that gives her a formless, blobby torso, a thick head of dark curls, and caterpillar eyebrows behind thick eyeglasses. (I don't know if anyone has ever said this, to his face or otherwise, but Pat actually bears more than a passing resemblance to the young Al Franken.) The joke of the TV skits was that nobody could tell if Pat was a man or a woman. This not being much to pin a movie on, the team of writers who worked on this project (including Sweeney and an uncredited Quentin Tarantino) came up with a second joke, one that virtually swamps the first joke and the movie itself: Pat is so rude, persnickety, clueless, and grating that it's impossible to imagine why anyone would want to put up with him/her for two minutes--never mind watch him/her for 77 of them--let alone get hung up on questions of his/her gender identity. The moviemakers must have sensed that not everyone would accept it as a given that their protagonist was worthy of their time and interest, because they shoehorn in a cameo by Camille Paglia, who swears that there is something called "the Pat phenomenon." The overall queasiness is made even sadder by the presence of the late, tragic Charles Rocket, who, not for the only time in his own post-SNL career, can be seen working very hard to very little effect. Its main effect is to stamp a sell-by date on the movie. Sweeney later worked the experience of making this bomb, along with her and her brother'streatment for cancer, into her stage monologue God Said, Ha!

They'd Like to Think

Scott Brown, whose triumph over an agent of Satan to claim Ted Kennedy's Senate seat inspired so many people to visions of the apocalypse, is an amiable lightweight who goes with the flow and who has already disillusioned many of his former supporters among the Tea Party faithful by acting like a politician. Rand Paul, son of Ron, and the victor in Tuesday's Republican primary to select a candidate for Kentucky's vacant U.S. Senate seat, is what an actual menace looks like, and he is an instructive example of a potential menace for our times. Appearing on The Rachel Maddow Show to "clarify" issues he raised in an interview he gave to All Things Considered as part of his victory lap, Rand, one likes to promise to "take our country back", thus endearing himself to those noisy charmers whose main priority in these difficult times is to divide the population into "us" versus "them", did a pretty fair imitation of a cartoon of a mealy-mouthed politician--one of those dudes who can do anything with words except give a straight answer to a direct question. The questions had to do with whether or not Paul, who has said over and over that he has no truck with "institutionalized racism" but that he also doesn't approve of part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, thinks that. overall, thinks that the government is right to outlaw discrimination. Rand, who sounded very confident on NPR, came down with a case of the sweats as he realized that Maddow, who in her previous encounters with him had treated him with the kind of affectionate condescension that hard-left types sometimes reserve for those (such as Pat Buchanan) who they regard as "conservative" in an exotic, unelectable kind of way, had suddenly sized him up as being dangerous enough to treat seriously. (Folks like Maddow seem to find it so charming whenever they meet an extreme right wing nut case, like Rand or Buchanan, who opposed the Iraq War, that they're happy to give them a forum, though why you'd want to spread the word that a nut agrees with you on anything is beyond me.) At his weirdest moment, he bragged about how long Boston had enjoyed legal protection from racial discrimination, while going on and on about the evils perpetrated in that hateful, mythic place, "the South." You had visions of him clapping his hand to forehead in shock when he got off the air and his campaign manager showed him where Kentucky actually is on a map.

In the NPR interview, Paul, sounding indulgent and not a little bit amused at the misplaced priorities of the misguided representative of the liberal media, said that, because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed when he "wasn't alive", it didn't strike him as a particularly pressing issue and hadn't been much on his mind. (By the time he went on Maddow, someone in his inner circle had explained to Paul, who's 47, that 1963 actually came before 1964, and he was eager to show that he had his facts straight and supply the information that it was passed when he was one.) At the same time, he kept saying that he'd "like to think" that, had he been more in tune with the events of the day back then, he would have marched with Martin Luther King and the other heroes of the civil rights movement--the very people who, Andrew Breitbart has explained, are lying provocateurs who, in the lead-up to the vote on the health care bill, deliberately tried to inspire Tea Party conservatives to discredit themselves by yelling racial slurs. Breitbart explains that they did this by appearing in public, in full view of the Tea Partiers, while black, knowing that the sight of black men with some political muscle would be a cruel and well-nigh irresistible temptation to the Tea Partiers, who, nonetheless, foiled their scheme by not yelling the racial epithets the troublemakers richly deserved to hear, because they were so "media savvy." The notion that people like John Lewis only bother to leave the house because they know that the sight of them will cause trouble and inspire good white people to behave in ways that will not look good on television strikes many as innovative and media savvy as all the bedamned, but I remember, growing up, hearing pretty much the same thing from my grandfather, who liked to explain how, in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King had taken the trick of using his existence to push the white man too far just about as far as anyone could go with it.

Paul himself expressed disgust with the violence that meanies in "the South" meted out to black people in the '60s without trying to argue that the black people were asking for it, but he did respond to Maddow's asking him whether black people should have a legal right to patronize any lunch counter they pleased by asking whether gun owners should have the right to venture into any privately owned restaurant they liked while packing heat. Presumably this was a libertarian ooga-booga designed to blow the mind of any liberal within the sound of his voice; he kept insisting, all evidence to the contrary, that he and Maddow were batting around "interesting philosophical questions." But partly because he never made it clear whether he himself thinks that restaurant owners and shopkeepers should have the legal option of telling people they can't bring their previous boom sticks into their places of business--presumably he thinks the answer is self-evident--you were just left with the impression that Rand Paul thinks that black people and loaded guns are kind of the same thing. Nothing wrong with them in and of themselves, but if you leave them within reach of children or trot them past a bunch of angry white guys, don't be surprised if someone gets hurt.

An awful lot of white politicians who inveighed against legal desegregation when that was a position that would do your career more good than harm, some of who even voted against the Civil Rights Act, later swore passionate allegiance to it when it became clear that a new age had arrived where opposition to its principles was incompatible with accepted notions of basic decency. It's not worth asking which of these opposing positions was the one they "really meant." If some tide in the affairs of men had suddenly caused a majority of Americans to decide that the morally correct thing was for brothers to marry their sisters, someone like Trent Lott would be in the town square by midday to tell the TV cameras that he dearly wished that some un-American malcontent who refused to marry his sister would step forward, so that he could personally tear him limb from limb, and he would mean it just as much as he's ever meant any of the things he's said over the course of his career. Paul's problem is that, unlike most people in American politics, he actually has principles. He is a committed libertarian dingbat whose thinking is genuinely in line with what so many Americans, and so many politicians and pundits trying to keep in step with them, claim to believe this week: taxes bad, government bad, "polticians" bad, every man for himself good, I'm Cincinnatus, and I approved this message.

Paul wants everyone to understand that he isn't looking to repeal civil rights. His attitude about it is like that of a mainstream politician's toward abortion when he's courting people on both sides of the issue: something about it makes him queasy, and he's going to go down talking shit about it, but he won't do anything personally to turn back the clock, because he respects what has long since become the law of the land and part of the fabric of our lives. Of course, Paul doesn't actually oppose civil rights. He's for them, so much so that he'd like to think that he would have marched with Martin Luther King, because we all know now who the good guys were in that struggle, even if the ones who are still alive are now the trouble making bad guys who make white protesters look bad if they want to have a little fun sending around pictures of Obama with a bone through his nose. But if Paul is honest with himself--and on Maddow, he comported himself with the sweatiness of someone who actually knows himself pretty well and is doing his damndest to keep that information to himself--then he must know that he wouldn't have done any such thing as march with Martin Luther King. Demonstrating an ideological purity that would do a Nader voter proud, he explains that he has a problem with the Civil Rights Act because of one of its ten provisions; he asks that business owners who are charmed by what he presents as tender concern for their interests to give him props for this, but that no one extrapolate that he wouldn't have supported the parts of this "obscure", long-ago piece of legislation that most everyone agrees are now central to our idea of what our country should be. But if he cares enough to be bugged about one-tenth of what the Act said all these decades later, is so unreasonable to assume that he would have cared even more back when the whole thing was regarded by many mainstream Americans as a radical piece of legislation.

Saying that you don't spend a lot of time thinking about forty-six-year-old pieces of federal legislation is the kind of thing that must sound really down to earth and level-headed among the Tea Party crowd and others who think that emotions, especially angry ones, are that much more valid if the reasons for them can't be backed up by facts or even clearly articulated, the most admired oratory style among Tea Partiers being the red-faced sputter. But when, like Paul and his libertarian brethren, assuming they mean what they saw even a little bit, many of the Tea Partiers, you regard the Great Society and the New Deal and all the rest of it as the country's original sin, you really ought to be well versed in what you're denouncing, so that you have a clear idea of what kind of world you're looking to trade ours in for.

It's easy, looking back from a modern vantage point, to think that you'd have supported the civil rights movement back in 1964, and even easier to like to think that you would have done that; the alternative, after all, is to think that you'd have been on the side of Bull Conner, or at best, been one of the cringing masses sitting at home watching the whole thing play out on your TV set, waiting to find out which side you'd wind up pretending to have supported all along. (Nobody would like to think that!) But if Paul is really grateful for the gains made by the civil rights movement, he must know that he's grateful for something that he thinks is wrong, or that at least was wrongly handled. It's not a question of being a racist; it's about how far you want to take your belief that government is the bad guy and the individual should be left alone to do what he likes.

Right now, it's considered unfashionable to ever take the side of the government over the individual; it's been that way for at least forty years, since Ronald Reagan rolled into town and declared the '60s a toxic waste dump. But the civil rights movement remains the crowning proof that, sometimes, government intervention is the only way we have of stopping individuals from giving in to their worst instincts and ideas of tradition in a way that damages the moral character and retards the progress of the country as a whole. In an especially brain-damaged episode of his TV show Bullshit!, one-man libertarian freak show Penn Jillette, howling about the injustice of handicapped parking spaces, bellowed that "Decency cannot be legislated!" That's the core logic of any "common sense" argument against government attempts to rectify social injustices or level the playing field, and many of the people who reflexively nod their heads to it have never put it together that it's an argument against anti-discrimination or desegregation, which were outlawed for the simple reason that they weren't right: racism, institutional or otherwise, is indecent, and King was able to turn public opinion on his side by making a majority of white Americans feel dirty because of what they were complicit in, as well they should have.

As I say, I don't for a minute think that Paul, or most people like him, want to go back to the way things were before the Civil Rights Act was passed. I do think that he knows that its tenets are incompatible with his political philosophy, and that for that reason, he's really glad that it happened so long ago, and can be shrugged off as ancient history, unless he wants to point to it as somehow, in some weird way, justifying people walking into Applebee's strapped as if they were on their way to their final showdown in Mapache's camp. The uncomfortable thing for libertarians is that the situation addressed by the Civil Rights Act was always about one person's individual rights versus another's: does a man's presumed right to be treated like anyone else anywhere he goes outweigh another person's presumed right to tell anyone he takes a dislike to, for any reason that makes sense to him, to get the hell off his property? The consensus answer was that it did, for no special reason other than that we all have to live together and tolerance is more deserving of respect than being a bigoted asshole. Now, in our perhaps crankier times, a lot of people are eager to conclude that the person who has to treat any jerk off the street like any other customer is the one who's being put upon, and that a man's right to be an asshole--or, as they're more likely to put it at Reason, "to be left alone"--is the real sacred and endangered right. That, in a nutshell is libertarian social policy, and Paul can cash in on it only if he persuades enough people not to think through the full ramifications. Rand, if he's honest with himself, can only feel that, had he been adult and politically active during the Civil Rights era, he would have said a lot of things that would have later made it difficult for him to pass himself off as a decent fellow, so he's just glad that he wasn't. And for anyone to ask him about it now is, as he said to Maddow, to play "gotcha!", which in this case is an implicit admission that most people would like him less if they heard him deliver candid answers to her questions.

That big Tea Party public opinion poll that I may have had something to do with hit the wires a month ago, with a headline that trumpeted how surprisingly well-off and "well-educated" the participants tended to be. It's important for folks in the mainstream media to make it clear that they recognize that the people who claim to be part of this "movement" are intelligent and mean well and aren't anything like the wildly mismatched assortment of terrified neurotics and raving nuts who somehow seem to dominated the TV coverage and the call-in shows; God forbid, right? No doubt there really are a lot of smart, caring souls trying to find something to hang onto inside the movement--Jonathan Raban seems to have found some--but most of the people within the movement who've been kind enough to speak to me about their concerns match up very neatly with the "elitist" notion that the noisiest Tea Partiers are basically people who either hated the '60s or came to hate it as they got older, who voted for Ronald Reagan and then for George Bush, Jr. with the understanding that they were voting for the repeal of the '60s forever. They now feel lost and scared or angry as they feel themselves being defined as "them" in relation to the American mainstream and are desperate to assert that they are in fact "us", what Sarah Palin calls "the real America", and the black president and the people who can bear the thought of being governed by him are "them."

In that New Yorker profile, Breitbart speaks of the terror and outrage of being labeled "racist" in America now, of how it's the worst thing in the world, and it's clear that he and others like him speak for the people who see their misgivings about and discomfort with the ways the world has changed during their lifetimes as what regular people ought to feel and, feeling oppressed by what used to be called "political correctness", lash out at anyone they think might judge them by calling them racists and Nazis first. So much for the pundits who predicted that no one would ever use Obama's race against him, because we're all better than that now, and even if some of us aren't, the few who might want to are, in Breitbart's words, too "media savvy" for such a thing. And so much for those of us who thought that the economic collapse might make the society at large more receptive to the use of government regulation and other government action to help people in trouble, now that financial hardship was too widespread for people to continue to want to buy into the Reaganite idea that capitalism will invariably reward the deserving and punish the guilty. The Tea Partiers I talked to, over the course of several weeks, are united in their hatred of anyone who they think has been helped by anyone, especially the government; the way they see it, no one has ever helped them, and never will, and anyone who hasn't worked as hard as they have but isn't dying in a gutter has survived at their expense. Their sense of history and their ability to take in reality is nothing compared to the scale of their self-pity. In the words of Henry Fairlie, these are the people that meanness comes from.

The Old Twenty

I'd be doing a better job at being outraged that NBC could cancel (or, pending a rumored pick-up by TNT, sort of cancel) Law & Order after twenty years on the air if I hadn't seen the show recently. After more than a decade of faithful service, during which time I was sufficiently on top of the show to spin baroque theories about its minor characters, some of my ardor cooled after Steven Hill was sacked--his character, D.A. Adam Schiff, was dismissed from viewers' minds with a throwaway line announcing that he'd pull up stakes to go work with Simon Wiesenthal--and when Jerry Orbach died shortly after leaving the show, I stopped following it altogether. But so long as it was grinding on somewhere out of my viewing range, I had to at least consider the possibility that it might still be just as good as it ever was, but that fifteen years' worth of expertly staged reenactments of criminal cases torn from recent headlines and refitted with twist endings were all that I needed. A few weeks ago, though, I took in a new episode with the Missus, and found the whole thing so tired that I'd stopped trying to adjust to the cast changes before the star of Priest showed up and started draining the life out of the dialogue with his colorless new American accent. The story played like a mash-up retread of a couple of classic episodes from more than a decade earlier--one dealing about the delayed blowback from the A.D.A.'s assistant's long-ago affair with a judge (here a shark-finned lawyer), the other detailing the case against a mobbed-up defense attorney, though this time we didn't have the thrill of seeing Big Pussy sneer at Ron Leibman and, for us Godfather fans, throw in a gratuitous reference to cannoli for good measure. And fifteen years ago, I didn't like seeing The X-Files pimp an Emmy for Gillian Anderson by giving her character a season-long cancer scare, and I didn't like seeing the hard-working S. Epatha Merkerson outfitted with a bad wig and a few awkwardly inserted lines about the precariousness of her life expectancy, either.

Is NBC dissing Dick Wolf by not renewing his baby for the one additional season that would have enabled it to take the record for longest-running dramatic program away from Gunsmoke? (Gunsmoke reportedly survived as long as it did--well after Westerns had become old hat and been replaced by cop operas as the dominant American network TV genre--because CBS President William Paley was devoted to it; he is said to have ordered it back onto the network schedule after some flunky had dropped it, much to the despair of fans of the show that got the ax in its place, Gilligan's Island.) It would be easier to dismiss such talk as out of place given the cold realities of the marketplace, if not for the fact that NBC is still plugging 10:00 holes after clearing away the flaming wreckage of the great Jay Leno experiment; at the least, they might have docked one more season within the confines of the elephants' graveyard that is Saturday night, where their current programming---mostly "encore presentations" of whatever shows from the last seven days the programmers hit with a dart, on weekends when there isn't an Olympics--could be improved upon by slotting Law & Order reruns from the Michael Moriarty era. But it feels funny to act as if I care more about Dick Wolf's feelings than he does about mine, and if he cared about my feelings, he never would have signed off on that Dragnet remake.

There is one thing that all we past and present fans of the show ought to be able to agree upon, and that is that NBC's intention to keep the franchise rolling with a new Law & Order series set in Los Angeles. A lot of lip service has been paid to the golden, fuck-up-proof nature of Law & Order's businesslike approach to police procedural formula, which did indeed work like gangbusters, right up to the point when it didn't. But I always thought that it was the show's ability to dip into the vast pool of New York city's character actor community that kept the machine well oiled. To watch the show regularly was to develop your inner fan club for any number of smart, seasoned, underutilized players--Bruce Altman; Mark Margolis; Laila Robbins; Jeffrey DeMunn; James Rebhorn; Welker White; John Benjamin Hickey; Dan Moran; Sam Shacht; Isiah Whitlock, Jr., whose pronunciation of the exclamation "Sheee-it!" on The Wire should be adopted by Maryland as its official state motto and maybe its state song; Bill Moor, who ought to star in a movie about the life of the guy on the cards in Monopoly; the affable, intensely beady-eyed Bruce MacVittie; the wittily phlegmatic Gerry Bamman...I could go on and on, but at best, I might give some starving artist's mother a thrill. The point is, it was these artists, theater stalwarts and acting teachers and indie film vets given the chance to strut their stuff for a nationwide audience, turning up as a lawyer one season and a con the next and then again as a grieving parent or innocent bystander, who gave Law & Order's formula dramas the rough edges that allowed them to breathe and the pepper to lend the show some flavor. (Even Jerry Orbach appeared on the show, pre-Lennie Briscoe, as a smooth, smug defense lawyer representing a stand-in for Betty Broderick.) I guess there are people just as talented, and just as important, just as underexposed, on the West Coast. But the casting department will have to dig deeper for them, if it cares to, whereas in New York, they could find them just by tapping the ground.