In Country

Rubicon, which is so cerebrally cryptic and moody in its Byzantine geopolitical paranoia that it could be the first TV series inspired by Syrianna, stars James Badge Dale as Will Travers, an "intelligence analyst" at a shadowy think tank, where he and his fellow wonks pore over possible codes, listen in on private conversations, and occasionally take a vote on whether or not some mysterious figure a million miles away merits assassination. Will is a little distant from the people around him, and in the pilot episode, someone drops the information that he lost his wife and child on 9/11. I could have missed something, but in the month's worth of episodes that have come since, I don't think that Will's tragic backstory has come up again. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the possibly murderous conspiracy that he's working to unearth, though I guess you could construe it as being part of the motor for his career path--his using his brains and gift for "pattern detection" to keep his country safe. Mainly, though, it just seems to be there to sanctify his melancholy and give it historical weight.

I don't remember seeing 9/11 used like this before. (Again, though, I may well have missed something.) But it reminded me of the way Vietnam began to be used in the early 1980s. I don't know who was the first regular TV series hero to be designated a Vietnam vet, though I know that I first noticed it with Magnum, P.I. Thomas Magnum was a happy-go-lucky guy with a steady retainer and a studly beach bum lifestyle, but you knew that he had hidden depths and that he cared, deep down, about right and wrong, because he had been in 'Nam. And the spoofy, locker-room camaraderie he had with his buddies was also supposed to run deep, because they'd been in 'Nam together. This was also how it worked with Sonny Crockett on Miami Vice, and with the members of the A-Team, and God knows who else that I might be forgetting. Sometimes it seemed as if the only guys on TV who passed for about the right age but who hadn't been in Vietnam had to work extra hard at their back stories to compensate; for instance, on Cheers, Sam Malone had to be a former major league baseball star and a recovering alcoholic. These guys tended to be subject to Vietnam flashbacks, and maybe because they couldn't get 'Nam out of their system, geopolitical Cold War politics had a nasty habit of tracking them down, in whatever paradisical location they'd gone to set up camp for the rest of their lives. Magnum once got involved in busting a Commie conspiracy that gave him the chance to waste a Russian bad guy he'd run across back in country. On Miami Vice, the modern-day drug trafficking storylines kept circling back to connect to the Golden Triangle and people the heroes had known back East, whether it was Castillo's mystery wife or a crackpot CIA officer played by G. Gordon Liddy.

In a way, this was nothing new. In the '70s, most TV action heroes of a certain age had seen time in Korea (a war that, thanks to M*A*S*H, was probably more prominently in the consciouses of TV viewers than it had been in the '60s, and maybe even in the '50s). But they didn't seem as defined by it, and it seldom seemed like part of a waking nightmare that they were still trapped in. It was mostly a recurring plot convenience; if Jim Rockford needed to have an old friend who didn't seem like the sort of person Jim Rockford would have gotten to know in the course of his everyday life, it was nice to be able to have the fellow's close bond with Jimbo made self-evident by explaining that they'd served together in Korea. (Jim Rockford was probably the most socially open of all the TV detectives of his time, yet it sometimes seemed as if every friend he had was someone he'd either met on the battlefield or in prison.) It marked a big change, though. There were Vietnam vets all over TV in the '70s, but they were less likely to be chasing crooks than to be the crooks. For a while there, so many psychotic vets were running amok all over the airwaves, driving McGarrett and Kojak and the rest to distraction, that it inspired an article lamenting this development in that provocative journal of the arts, TV Guide. I don't know if crazy killer vets took over the cop shows because they were thought to add a note of spurious topicality to all the standard shootings, beatings, and chases, or if some kind of social comment was intended, whether the idea was that the war had driven the men crazy and our chickens were coming home to roost or that we'd lost the war because the guys who were supposed to win it for us had proven themselves to be too high-strung and breakable. Maybe some scripts were written by people who believed either or both of those things, and probably a lot were written by people who didn't believe anything at all.

Maybe the transformation of the stock TV Vietnam vet as psycho villain into the TV Vietnam vet as upbeat but quietly troubled all-American action hero was some sign of health as the country began to accept the loss of the war and tried to move on. Except that it often seemed, in the '80s, as if accepting the way that the Vietnam War had turned out and moving on was the last thing the country was interested in doing. People began celebrating vets, to the point that any show that presented vets as psychos would have been at risk of being attacked on the floor of the U.S. Senate and driven from the air. But the war suddenly started turning up in movies, full-throttle, and the movies where often about why these heroes had not been, in the words of John Rambo, allowed to win. For all you heard about the game-changing cathartic power of Oliver Stone's "requiem" for the boys, Platoon, most of the big movies that invoked Vietnam during the most eightiest days of the eighties tended to be about somehow winning the war after all, whether by restaging it (as in Heartbreak Ridge, in which Vietnam vet Clint Eastwood trains the hell out of his boys so they'll be ready when a last inning of the Cold War is called in Grenada) or, as in Rambo and Missing in Action and Uncommon Valor, by going in one last time and pulling out all the captive POWs who've been waiting there to be used to give us closure. (The MIA/POW fantasy is enough to dishearten anyone who'd like to believe that American attitudes about Vietnam got saner the further away you got from the last day of an actual shooting war. Apparently it was inconceivable that anyone could get killed and just remain unaccounted for in the chaos of a jungle war that was going badly, and never mind that there were more American MIAs reported by the end of World War II than there were in Vietnam, without anyone ever speculating that those men were still alive and being held prisoner to work the assembly line at some Volkswagen or Honda plant.)

One reason that movie screens erupted in Vietnam movies in the '80s may be that the lid had to come off. Hollywood managed to keep images of the war out of movies through the '60s and '70s, except for John Wayne's unfortunate The Green Berets and, of course, all those movies (such as Robert Altman's M*A*S*H) that were about Vietnam and looked as if they were set in Vietnam but insisted they were set somewhere else. For the most part, actors didn't begin to slink warily through leafy-green jungles with Hendrix blaring in their ears until around 1978, three years after the last U.S. government representatives were scrambling for their helicopters. The major exceptions to this rule were grubby little exploitation movies such as 1970's The Losers, in which special forces imported members of a biker gang to liberate a shadowy "diplomat" from the clutches of the Vietcong, and Bob Clark's Deathdream, a hallucinatory nightmare of a horror picture in which a dead serviceman comes home to confuse and frighten his rah-rah armchair patriot father and the rest of the population of his small home town. By comparison, American filmmakers were fairly quick to jump right in with trying to depict Iraq and pick apart the War on Terror, whether in quiet art house musing posts such as The Great New Wonderful or middlebrow thought pieces such as In the Valley of Elah or big-screen throwbacks to the golden age of made-for-TV movies such as Redemption. Some of these movies were better than others, but collectively, they've been the product of a media age where many people feel that nothing has really happened until the world has seen Don Cheadle have a good cry over it, and the total effect has been to make you kind of yearn to see a few killer bikers or rotting zombies (or even the Dark Knight) go up against Osama bin Laden.

I'm not sure where we're at now, or if Rubicon's use of "9/11 survivor" as a universal signifier means anything as a signpost. I don't think that you can look at the faces on cable news protesting the Islamic center in New York and feel sure that we're doing a stellar job, as a nation, of recovering from, or even processing, something that happened nine years ago. The war in Vietnam was an ongoing nightmare that for years had no end in sight, and it could be that the major accomplishment of the right wing news/echo chamber has been to make "the War on Terror" feel that way too, even as combat operations in Iraq have been wound down. If anything, they've managed to ramp up that feeling, even though there was always a threat of terrorism in this country before 9/11 and nothing comparable has happened since; much of the country is apparently poised on the edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or pretending to believe that it might, if that's the price of indulging in the exciting, cathartic scapegoating of Muslims that George W. Bush, taking charge after the terrorist attacks, assured us all that Americans would always be above. Republican leaders don't talk like that now; it would be unpatriotic, at least until after they see how much a state of jump-started sustained panic will help them in the mid-terms. So, no bikers and no Batman. Zombies, though, are much in evidence.

Burning Ambulance #2

I don't want to get all emotional about what might have been. I suppose I did okay, considering my circumstances and what I had in the way of a genetic inheritance. Still, I have to admit that when I'm in bed, deep in the pit of the darkest night, lying on my back with all my paws kicking in the air, I drift away and dream of being Phil Freeman. To be that hip and completely secure and confident in the sureness of my judgements, yet too affable and good-natured to ever betray a trace of condescension or disdain towards those poor sons of bitches too benighted to see it all my way, to be be a true son of the urban jungle, moving through the landscape of the city with sureness and ease yet remaining just enough removed from his surroundings to remind you that you're dealing with someone who is his own man, immune to the seductive power of crowds and cliques, to be able to tell one Norwegian death metal record from another--but now I'm just torturing myself. Anyway, who knows? People are funny. Maybe Phil Freeman dreams of watching Hawaii Five-O reruns all morning while hiding out in a Texas suburb, dreading the day that the billing department from Con Ed tracks him down to discuss the outstanding balance from his last month living in the Bronx.

We can't all be Phil Freeman, but we can buy the second issue of Burning Ambulance, the hot new arts publication that Phil assembles, which boasts his smoking profile of Darius Jones and a terrific, ear-opening "Beginner's Guide to J-Pop". Readers of BP2 will also get a fine section paying tribute to the late trumpeter Bill Dixon, Matt Cibula on recent developments in Brazilian music, Kim Kelly's visit with the New Orleans metal band Eyehategod (whose front man, Michael IX Williams, contributes a sampler of his poems), and my own sprawling article about what punk music did to the exploitation movie and vice versa, which gave me the chance to pretend that countless wasted hours from my last few decades on Earth were actually meaningful research. School is starting, and being seen grokking Burning Ambulance is a surefire way to tell attractive and interesting persons of whichever gender you find most intriguing that you are someone worth getting to know. It's available for purchase as a download or in a handsome hard copy edition, for the convenience of my fellow Luddite bastards.

Mallrats

After the National Parks Service released its estimate of the attendees at the 1995 Million Man March, Louis Farrakhan and the other March organizers had such a shit fit that the Park Service simply stopped conducting such estimates. (The Park Service originally estimated the size of the crowd at 400,000 people. After the dispute hit the papers, ABC News commissioned a study that estimated there were 837,000 people. This failed to mollify Farrakhan, who maintained that there there damn well had to have been a million men at what was clearly labeled the Million Man March. I'd known for a long time that Farrakhan was hateful and deranged, but I'd never guessed what a boringly literal-minded nut job he was until I heard this.) This means that, for all the talk about how Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally on the National Mall yesterday was Beck's chance to either besmirch the memory of Martin Luther King or pick up his gauntlet, it's Farrakhan Beck can thank for the fact that there will be no "official" head count of his gathering of the tribes. I don't mean to suggest that Beck and Sarah Palin didn't pull a humongous crowd; it's just that, as Farrakhan's pouting fifteen years ago demonstrates, there's always a way to be disappointed by any concrete numeral, especially if you're a megalomaniac. The rally will always seem that much more of an awesome historical event to those who were there, or wish they had been, so long as they can always revise the size of the crowd upwards without fear of being contradicted by anything as dispiriting as factual accuracy. It's best for them if the actual numbers remain vague and unspecific, like everything else about the event.

Beck and Palin fans have a funny relationship to factual accuracy. As David Weigel puts it, "They are hungry for any information they might have missed that might point them to some revelation." Their problem is, they're looking for that information from charismatic individuals who, like Beck, freely admit that they didn't know anything about how politics and the way the world works until fairly recently, when they began to soak up "information" from the weirdest and most fanciful sources they could find, or who, like Palin, view any means of communication more cerebral than hitting people's emotional buttons with a mallet as a way to prove that they're listening to their guts as elitist malarkey. The rally was promoted as "non-political", and the organizers forbid people to hold up signs, presumably for fear that someone might wave around a slogan that wouldn't look real good on the news. (They let a few T-shirts slip through, though.) Beck may have hoped to stir up his fan base, but he must have also hoped that, by being on his best behavior, he could expand his audience and his celebrity. The test of just how much of a noodlehead Beck is may be the answer to this question: does he really think that he can do something to move the country forward without a program, an agenda, or anything more political than home-stitched bromides such as "America is good, not just because America is great, but because we are good! When we are good, we make America great!"

Maybe he does. Maybe his audience does. They may even think that "progressives" aren't just people with different politics than theirs but people who aren't good, who by the very nature of their un-goodness, are holding America back from being great, the way everybody knows it was when Ronald Reagan walked the Earth. I wonder, though, how many in that crowd were ready for all the religious talk; prevented by his own guidelines from trash-talking the President or anyone else, Beck, who has said that it was "divine providence" that caused him to schedule his rally at the same site and date as the rally at which King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, talked up God with every other breath. This may have been confounding to those in his camp who'd like their fake populism without the religious right Jesus gravy, but at least he didn't go to town with the crackpot numerology.

In truth, his big show had a lot in common with the Million Man March: both were pointless pseudo-events that used the bodies of thousands of people who felt disenfranchised and hoped to get a charge of strength from being in a mob of people with whom they felt they had something in common, all as a publicity stunt intended to help a mentally unbalanced demagogue achieve a more respectable public profile. And both were treated very kindly in most of the mainstream media, whose guardians must have been afraid they'd appear insensitive to the feelings of those who'd turned out for the things if they just quoted from the speeches while blowing raspberries and making jerking-off motions. In the end though, the Million Man March was sort of Farrakhan's last hurrah; he started to slide from public view soon after, not because he'd exposed himself as a raving nut (or any more of a raving nut than he already was) but because the country was fast becoming more and more multicultural, to the point that a black guy with a name like Barack Obama could get himself elected President. In other words, it was no longer the kind of place where black people looking for a champion might feel that they couldn't afford to turn their noses up at a raving nut. If Beck's moment goes on much longer, it'll be because angry white people who feel scared, overwhelmed, and outnumbered don't think they can afford to be as picky.

Vroooom!!

Today marks the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, and, of course, Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers' rally designed to co-opt the date and site with their own "non-political" gathering intended to "restore honor" to America. (I seem to recall that, besides the tax cuts, George Bush Jr.'s whole rationale for his 2000 campaign was that America needed its honor restoring, which he implicitly planned to do by not getting a blow job in the West Wing. I was under the impression that Bush had managed to fulfill the part of his mandate, but apparently our honor already needs restoring again. Maybe Beck has access to some steamy security-cam footage that hasn't hit eBay yet.) Though Beck has repeatedly said that, when he scheduled his rally, he didn't know about the significance of the date and time--and has even made it clear, from some of his statements about King, that he isn't really clear on who the dude was or what he believed in, though he's on board with the idea that he rocked--but also says that he hopes that his spoken-word wingnut answer to The T.A.M.I. Show will change America for the better, maybe not tomorrow, but for sure in 25 years, when young John Connor grows to manhood and begins to act on the fire that Glenn's words will light in his heart today. No doubt this will all come to pass in due time. Funny thing, though: as the event as neared and I've had to hear more and more about this late-summer outdoor event bringing together the cream of Glenn Beck's demographic audience, I've found it harder and harder to keep from remembering this:





Which is, I know, kind of nuts. I mean, in 1974, the median age of Evel Knievel's fan base was probably way under sixty.

Balls

I'm one of those poor souls who's never been able to focus on team sports for more than thirty seconds without my brain glazing over, but I do enjoy hearing people who are fascinated by sports talk about them, and I've enjoyed most of the films in ESPN's 30 for 30 series of documentaries. I'm also a sucker for Ron Shelton's sports movies. (Shelton wrote and directed Bull Durham, Cobb, Tin Cup, White Men Can't Jump, and the underappreciated Play It to the Bone, and wrote the 1986 football comedy The Best of Times.) There was a time when anyone making a sports movie with some ambition to it was probably going to end up delivering the message that winning isn't everything; really ambitious movies tended to carry the message that winning kills the soul. (This kind of movie disappeared in the go-for-it Reagan '80s, starting around the time that Rocky Balboa started winning his fights. I don't know which kind is more prevalent today; the last sports movie I remember seeing, Pride, struck a compromise: the basedonatruestory swim team coached by Terence Howard won its big meet, but Howard, who decides that he must be punished for some infraction that escapes my mind now, leaves the pool area and denies himself the cathartic thrill of seeing his boys win.) Shelton, who used to play minor league baseball himself, has a more nuanced approach: his movies tend to adopt the point of view that, despite everything you've heard, winners are not necessarily the most interesting people in the world, especially compared to some of the smart, gifted people who, because of some mysterious quirk of luck or fate or attitude or personal chemistry--"Perhaps," says the slumming golf pro played by Kevin Costner to the beautiful therapist (Rene Russo) he hopes will find him tantalizing, "I am chock full of inner demons."--can't break through to the winner's circle.

Shelton's new 30 for 30 film, Jordan Rides the Bus, is about the gap in Michael Jordan's basketball career that began in the fall of 1993 when, reeling from the death of his father at the hands of some bungling thieving scumbag, Jordan announced that he was retiring and signed up to try his hand as a baseball player. Part of what's interesting about the documentary is how Jordan, who's only seen in news footage from the time, come across as a typical Shelton hero. He may be a giant in his primary sport--one interview subject after another refers to him as the greatest basketball player in the world, as casually as someone might tell you that the sun is hot--but during this phase of his life, he was someone trying to get something out of sports that was more personal, and more important to him, than winning. He worked hard while playing for the farm team the Birmingham Barons, but he hung onto his entrepreneurial savvy. The film's title comes from the bus that was used to take Jordan and his teammates from one small-time ball lot to the next; it was a luxury bus, one befitting a celebrity of Jordan's standing, but shit, it was still a bus. The story was that Jordan bought it himself. Shelton interviews the guy who owns the bus company, and he says, no, he never wanted to shoot that story down, because it's a good story, but he owned the bus. But Jordan did cut a deal for its use that involved his agreeing to appear in an ad in a bus industry magazine. Meanwhile, ad reps from Nike were spending Jordan's time away from basketball by sweatily examining the sharp edges of their letter openers.

Shelton touches lightly on a couple of the major, larger ironies involved with the reaction to Jordan's retirement and year away with the Barons. We see clips of Jordan talking about how he's lost his passion for basketball since his father's death, and he also talks about how his dad always wanted him to play pro baseball. What's startling about it is that, while he's clearly chock full of inner demons, he seems completely self-aware about what's going on inside him and to have a sure grasp of what he needs to deal with it. It's a real "two plus two equals four" situation; whatever you think of the logic of his decisions, to think that he's not being utterly straightforward and behaving logically would be like thinking, back in 2003, that the reason the trained UN weapons inspectors combing though Iraq after it had been living under sanctions for a decade couldn't find any WMDs must be that they're so well hidden. You just wouldn't go there, unless you were blind, deaf, and didn't have a functioning brain cell left in your head. Naturally, a lot of people concluded that Jordan must have been deranged or that something sinister and conspiratorial was going on. People who were inexplicably eager to demonstrate their inability to pass an entrance-level test to qualify as human beings tortured the grieving son by speculating aloud that his dad had been killed as a reprisal for Michael's gambling debts, and there were even whispers that David Stern, the commissioner of basketball, had suspended or banned Jordan from the game but agreed to a ruse that would keep it a secret to protect his sensitive feelings. Someone in the film suggests that anyone who believes that should look at some photos taken of Stern that year, so they can see how frayed his pants legs were from getting on his knees to beg Jordan not to retire.

The other irony is more pleasing, albeit in a double-edged way, and almost worthy of Preston Sturges. Jordan caught hell for wanting to not play basketball for awhile; his coach, Phil Jackson, recalls telling him that he should think of all the people who'd be denied the pleasure of seeing him play, and he recalls it without shame, as if he still hasn't realized that the only proper thing to say to someone who was going through what Jordan was going through would have been, "Man, if you think climbing the Himalayas would help you get through this any easier, you go fill out the paperwork and I'll get on the horn and start pricing Sherpa guides." Part of the reaction was similar to the outcry when Dave Chappelle decided to shut down Chappelle's Show and explained, reasonably enough, that he doubted his ability to do another full season of sketch comedy satirizing race issues and remain in control of his volatile material; people couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that a sane person in America might decline to continue doing something that had made him rich and famous, when he did it with such apparent ease that it was spending his days writing himself six-figure checks. (Of course, both Jordan and Chappelle worked their asses off at what made them rich and famous; that's why they were the best at it. Part of what made them best at it is that they made it look so easy.)

This sort of thing, coupled with the idea (which draws snorts of derision from the baseball people seen in the doc) that Jordan was unfairly using his celebrity status to deny some richly deserving person of his chance to fulfill his dream of playing right field in Alabama, inspired a tidal wave of bad press that was typified by a Sports Illustrated cover line: "Bag It, Michael." Everybody knows that Jordan was a bust as a baseball player, but not everyone knows the second half of that truism, which is that he got a lot, lot better. Steve Wulf, who wrote the story that went with that cover, went back to see Jordan later in the season and was stunned by what he saw: Jordan had, he says, turned himself into a baseball player, and was well on his way to becoming a plausible candidate for the major leagues. He filed a story with SI that said so, but the magazine rejected it because it didn't go with the agreed-upon narrative: "everybody" knew that Michael Jordan could never be anything but a waste of space on a baseball field. It didn't matter, because when the season was over, Jordan, now thirty-two, returned to the Bulls and started leading them to championships again, again and again, as if he'd just been on a long bathroom break. His recently acquired major demons had been quelled, leaving only the ones that could only be dealt with on the basketball court.

The One

Last week, a few sites picked up on the news that something called "Right Wing News" had compiled a poll, after soliciting one hundred "conservative bloggers" for their suggestions, of the 25 'worst people in American history." The news was mostly picked up by left-leaning sites and bloggers, who got a kick out of how cartoonish the results were, serving as a caricature of wingnut thought in a way that was so predictable that they would have had no kick at all if someone had made them up. (The first three spots went to, respectively, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, and FDR, the anti-New Deal gospel being such a sticking point among the most fucktarded of wingnuts that they don't even give him any love for his role in licking Hitler and Tojo. Woodrow Wilson and LBJ also made the top eight, which is more than you could say for Timothy McVeigh; in fact, every Democratic president since the beginning of the twentieth century (including Al Gore, who only managed to get elected president but was denied to chance to actually serve his term) made the list except for John Kennedy (whose brother Ted made the list at number seven) and the mysteriously durable Harry Truman, who both parties seem to want to claim, maybe because politicians of every stripe sometimes find themselves trapped in losing elections, and no losing candidate wants to be denied the chance to remind reporters that they all wrote off plucky Harry too fast.

I suppose the reason the list didn't get more play than it did has to do with the fact that it's such a puny sampling that it's hard to pretend that it means anything much: One hundred voices isn't that many, especially when they're marching in lockstep, and in fact only 43 of these pitiful ditto-stamp motherfuckers bothered to get back to Right Wings News at all. So the results don't mean a hell of a lot, beyond the shocking news that 43 idiots who have Internet connections and identify themselves as conservatives aren't ashamed to be heard saying that they think Jane Fonda is a worse person than Charles Manson or Lynndie England. (That's a lot of people still angry that they couldn't get their money back after seeing Monster-in-Law.) Still, just because the opinions compiled are clearly those of such a bunch of self-parodying, Kool-Aid guzzling goobers, there's one startling thing in the poll: there, at lucky number thirteen, snugly placed between Hanoi Jane and Noam Chomsky, and well ahead of both Clintons, Michael Moore, George Soros, Al Sharpton, and Saul Alinksy, is Richard Nixon. In fact, Nixon finished ahead of Alger Hiss. I don't care how dead he is, for Nixon, that's got to hurt.

For most of my life, Nixon was the ultimate villain in the great collective liberal imagination. He may have been supplanted in recent years by George W. Bush and the other architects of the new pro-torture/permanent-war culture, but Bush and company don't have the clear outline and identity, as an iconic monster, that Nixon had acquired by the time he left the presidency. A disturbing number of supposedly satirical portraits of Bush--in such movies as American Dreamz and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and Oliver Stone's W., even, ultimately, in Will Ferrell's one-man show--insist on sustaining the notion that he's an ultimately sympathetic guy, a nice, lovably dim party dude who may have gotten in over his head but never meant any harm and has suffered from knowing that people got hurt on his watch. The political cartoons of Nixon by Herblock and Paul Conrad and in the National Lampoon, the Doonesbury strips and Hunter S. Thompson screeds, the David Frye routines and full-scale imitations by Jason Robards (Washington: Behind Closed Doors), Philip Baker Hall (Secret Honor), Rip Torn (Blind Ambition), Dan Hedaya (Dick) and, most recently, Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), were powered by real contempt sometimes bordering on loathing, and even spilling over the border. While Nixon was still in his first term, Philip Roth consigned him to Hell in Our Gang; after he was deposed, Robert Coover depicted the young Congressman being rejected by his adored Ethel Rosenberg in her prison cell and, after the execution of the Rosenbergs (jointly listed at number four on the worst-Americans-ever list), being sodomized by Uncle Sam. (In 1974, arguably the worst year of his life, Nixon was transformed into a nun by Muriel Spark in her novel The Abbess of Crewe--a Watergate burlesque from a British writer with a complicated relationship to God and conservatism, and the rare Nixon satire that betrays a streak of admiration for its target.) The thing is, for a long stretch there, you didn't have to care about politics, or even know that much about Nixon, to know he was supposed to be the devil, you just had to pay enough attention to popular culture to know which way the wind was blowing. When I was I kid, I was renowned among some of my peers for the uncanny accuracy of my own Nixon impression, but my "Nixon impression" didn't sound anything like Richard Nixon. It sounded like Dan Aykroyd's Nixon impression on Saturday Night Live, which all my little friends were much more familiar with than the real McCoy. (It says a lot about Nixon's ability to inspire his tormentors that Aykroyd's impression of him retains more venomous juice than just about any recurring political imitation in SNL's thirty-five-year history, in spite of the fact that Nixon had been out of office for more than a year when the show itself premiered.)





There was always an element of snobbery and smugness to a lot of what passed for Nixon hatred; his middle-class squareness invited derision from his hipper enemies, and because he was painfully self-conscious and ill at ease most of the time, the blows stuck in a way that didn't work when people tried to mock the cornball simplicities and droning grandpa act of the great and powerful Oz, i.e. Ronald Reagan. Nixon once told someone that Reagan's enemies wouldn't be able to get him out of office over something like Iran Contra as easily as he'd been sent packing, because Reagan had the option of throwing himself on the mercy of the public and saying, in essence, that he was a moron "and can't be blamed." Nixon seemed too intelligent for most of the thugs he surrounded himself with and the tactics they employed on his behalf. The likeliest explanation for his taste in helpmates, which set him up for his own self-destruction, may be that, having come to the conclusion that life was unfair, he felt that he had to set up the political equivalent of Murder, Incorporated to get anywhere. He seethed with resentment over the Kennedys, who he felt could climb to higher office by standing on his neck because of their money and charm. He went out and got his own money, but that doesn't seem to have done a thing for his self-image; he sure didn't seem to think that he could summon up any charm of his own. So he marketed himself to people who had that resentment, even if he didn't always agree with them about what they should be resentful about.

Nixon fully deserves his status as America's boogeyman; he disgraced his office, staffed the White House with sleazeballs, frustrated gangsters, and ratfuckers, and consistently played to Americans' most polarized views of their fellow countrymen in order to win elections that he couldn't count on winning on the basis of his nonexistent personal likability. But since he died, it's become increasingly easy for people to separate the charmless image and outright criminal acts from his actual policy positions. Part of this is the natural process by which the media embraces any piece of shit as soon as it ages and dies. And the news that Nixon wasn't a kneejerk wingnut comes late; back in 1970, in his book Nixon Agonistes, Garry Wills came right out with and called Nixon "the last liberal", for his belief that government as a means to help people and address social ills. In the last decade or so, we've seen an increasing number of cases in which liberal commentators have tried to render conservatives speechless by showing how the positions they oppose as unacceptably lefty were, in fact, endorsed by... Richard Nixon!

In his 2000 book The Fix, Michael Massing showed how Nixon favored battling the scourge of drugs with programs that favored treatment for addicts and information programs over locking people up. More recently, the health care debate was enlivened with reminders that Nixon believed in expanding government health care. The people who spring these traps, as if they thought it would cause whoever they're springing them on to rethink their positions and admit defeat, are presumably working on the assumption that Nixon's standing in contemporary conservative circles, whatever that standing is supposed to be, is based on a widespread belief among right wingers that he was a sound policy thinker and wise man. That's like thinking that supporters of Sarah Palin think she knows jack shit about anything. People who love Sarah Palin think that knowing jack shit about anything is treasonous and probably proof that you've had sexual congress with the devil during a midnight mass in the woods. They support her because they think that, every time someone cheers for Sarah Palin, there's a chance that Barack Obama's head will explode. Similarly, those who love Nixon today do so not because of anything he ever believed or did but because they think that every time someone says a good word for our thirty-seventh President, a hippie dies and goes to Hell.

Whatever wisdom there may be in trying to win points for your side by arguing that the most corrupt president in United States history would have been all for it, the real effect of unearthing Nixon's better ideas has probably been to disillusion today's right wingers and turn them against him; at least, I find it highly plausible that Nixon's fall from grace among 43 of our wingnuttiest citizens must have more to do with his attitude towards the public option than any conversations he might have had considering the pros and cons of firebombing the Brookings Institute, let alone the implementation of the Southern Strategy. I'm not sure what this means for the careers of those conservative spokespersons, such as Monica Crowley, Ben Stein, and Pat Buchanan, whose "credibility" on political issues is supposedly rooted in their deep, personal relationships with the wheeze from Whittier. What all this really proves, of course, is how new it is for those who denounce government regulation and federal action against poverty, failing standards of living, environmental pollution, rapacious business practices, discrimination, the collapse of the schools and the infrastructure, and a hundred other ills, to be accepted as representatives of any kind of mainstream, let alone mainstream conservatives, who are, you know, supposed to want to conserve things.

It's simply true that today's Fox News panelists regard as signs of radical Marxist madness were accepted as a baseline for decency and sanity forty years ago, and this says more about where we are now than it does about Richard Nixon. (Things didn't really change that much under Reagan, either. The open secret of Ronald Reagan's titanic popularity in the early 1980s was that he gave voice to resentful feelings about welfare queens and tax-and-spend wastefulness without actually applying major cuts to the programs that so many of the resenters benefitted from themselves and didn't want to see shut down. And anyone who talked shit about the New Deal would have been shut far, far out of mainstream opinion then; Reagan himself was always careful to stress that he was a Democrat until after FDR's death and his subsequent alienation from the party whose old good works he still professed to believe in.) It is difficult to guess what Nixon would think of today's Republican party, whose current stars, such as Palin, are so dependent for their appeal on his old technique of getting people to see you as their champion against the kinds of people they most despise, but who do not balance this with any degree of intellect (knowledge being to Sarah Palin as garlic is to Dracula) or any plans to use what power they can gain at the ballot box to reshape government for the betterment of the country, because their only campaign promise is to do whatever they can to frustrate anyone who would use government to do anything. It is tempting to think that he might say about today's Republican party what Reagan used to say about the Democratic party, that he didn't leave it, it left him. At the very least, one might expect that he would be horrified, if not personally hurt. But who knows? The one thing that everybody could always agree on about Nixon was that he was full of surprises.

Beyond Dreamland

When an artist whose work you've admired dies when he's barely set one foot into middle age, it's natural to think about the waste and the loss of all the things he might have done if he'd lived longer. Sometimes, though, those feelings are offset by a sense of amazement as you think back over his career and realize just how much ground he was able to cover in a too-brief span of time. That's how I feel about John Cazale, a god among American supporting actors, who died in 1978 at the age of 42, and who, in the course of a six-year movie career that he considered a sideline to his real work in New York theater, created a remarkable series of character portraits that includes at least one of the most iconic figures in American movies. It's sort of how I feel about Satoshi Kon, the Japanese animation director who died yesterday at the age of 46. Kon's first feature, Perfect Blue (1997), was a violent erotic thriller, with echoes of Hitchcock and De Palma, that was greeted by some critics, especially in the west, as the work of some kind of anime punk. It was actually a fluke that Kon got to make that movie at all; it was planned as a live-action picture, but the material was assigned to him after the studio decided to switch it to have it done in cheap animation as a cost-saving measure. Of all Kon's films, Perfect Blue may be the one that partakes the least of the full fineness of his sensibility, but it has some startling moments that provide a clue to what a prickly and surprising filmmaker he was to become.



Nothing in it really prepares you for his second film, Millennium Actress (2001), a head-spinning, meta-textual but genuinely romantic movie about the history of Japanese film and spending your life drunk on movies. Tokyo Godfathers (2003), an update on John Ford's Three Godfathers about a homeless trio who find a lost baby in contemporary Tokyo, was the most conventional of his films and merely excellent by comparison, but the 13-episode TV series Paranoia Agent (which played here, in a dubbed version, on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block) was all spiky, brainy provocation. The last film he completed in his lifetime, the 2006 Paprika, used a plot device about therapists entering their patients' dreams as an excuse for the most gloriously eruptive flow of insane visual imagery that Kon had yet dared to unleash upon the screen. (Somewhere, Christopher Nolan is blushing.) Fitfully coherent but thrillingly grand in scale, it seemed to promise another great wave of inspiration from him. We may yet get a taste of what that wave might look like if his fifth film, The Dream Machine--which he described in an interview as a project that he hoped would please younger audiences but also satisfy the adult fan base he'd developed already with his earlier work--is completed and released in a way that honors his intentions, but it's not been made clear yet how far along he'd gotten with it before we lost him. Keep watching the stars.

Three Ways of Looking at a Birdbrain

In a better world, "Dr, Laura" Schlessinger's angry, bitter announcement that her radio show is coming to an end, as a result of the abusive on-air tirade that she began this week by apologizing for, would count as a simple case of inevitability in action. Schlessinger has been on the radio for decades, spouting hateful, hurtful things and encouraging people to confuse bigotry and closed-mindedness with a campaign for moral uplift. She ought to have remained, at best, a marginal figure, and if she still somehow managed to attain larger celebrity, she should have quickly returned to the margins of professional hate speech practitioners--not because she doesn't have the right to say any nonsense she likes, not because there isn't an audience for ridiculous bullshit, not even because boycotters (such as the gay activists who banded together to shut down her TV show in 2000) can make trouble for broadcasters who would give them an audience, but because major broadcasters and publishers ought to have more personal pride than to give unfiltered air space to people who have long since established their utter lack of credibility and inability to play well with others, just because they might have a following on Twitter. Of course, if that were the world we lived in, Newt Gingrich would find it no easier to get on TV than most people claiming to have evidence that Bigfoot killed John Kennedy.

Satisfying as the spectacle of Schlessinger's meltdown is, it will probably prove nothing more than a speed bump in a career that, like Gingrich's after his resignation from the House of Representatives or Don Imus's after CBS finally couldn't take the stench anymore, has already gone on too long but has built up too much momentum and name recognition to stop completely. But before all decent people go back to pretending to forget about her again, it might be worth itemizing a few points that come to mind as a result of her troubles. Perhaps they can serve as educational for the next gasbag who finds himself hanging on by his fingernails:

1. THERE'S CONTEXT, AND THEN THERE'S CONTEXT:

Dr. Laura has her defenders among black writers, such as John McWhorter, who argues at The Root that the whole controversy hinges on "understand[ing] the difference between statement and quotation. Black people are no more deaf to context than anyone else, as clear from endless claims that Reverend Jeremiah Wright's performances were 'taken out of context.' The pretense that referring to the n-word is equivalent to calling someone the n-word is a kind of incivility in itself -- abusive, visceral and dishonest." It is true that there is a fundamental difference between saying, for example, "I hate niggers, niggers, niggers", and what Schlessinger said at great length, which is that "Black guys talking to each other" say "nigger, nigger, nigger." Schlessinger says that, by carrying on like this while talking to a caller, a black woman married to a white man whose friends throw racial epithets around in a way that bothers her, and who made it clear that she didn't enjoy hearing Schlessinger throw those words back at her, she was trying to make a "philosophical point", which seemed to be that black people, some of them anyway, take offense when they hear white people use racially offensive terms that don't bother them as much when black people use them. She says that the reasons for this baffle her. It would be a very cruel thing to assume that she means this, because if she does, she's a functioning moron, but then, there really can't be much question about the intellectual ability of someone who raises a question that's been thoroughly kicked around by the guys spitting watermelon seeds while sitting in front of Goober's gas station as a "philosophical point." Schlessinger insists that not only is she evil, which we'd established a long time ago, but that, like anyone who's ever spent a second mulling over the "why can't white people talk like a Samuel L. Jackson character without black folks getting touchy about it?", she's so stupid that she could lose an argument with a brick wall, unless she bored the brick wall to death. I guess I'll take her word for it.

McWhorter is absolutely right that words like "nigger" shouldn't be given such special power that no one can say them, in any context, not even a discussion about the use of such words, without being branded a racist. But he must be so hung up on thia point that he's willing to be obtuse about the way the word was really being used in this exchange. Back in 1992, Robert Crumb did a comic strip, in his over-the-top surreal fantasy mode, titled "When the Niggers Take Over America", about how there'd be "hell to pay" when that event goes down. The comic, which pictured white people being whipped and forced to pick cotton by their vengeful new masters, was a satirical expression of racial guilt that's taken the form of racist paranoia, which is certainly nothing we've seen any traces of in response to the ascension of Barack Obama. (Dr. Laura says that she finds it "hilarious" that people still complain about racism, even with a black man in the White House.) A dozen years or so ago, I was hanging out in a comic book shop that had one other customer in it, who was black. Some goofball ambled in, checked out the scene, and said to the guy at the counter in a voice that could have been heard two streets over, "Hey, do ya have that Crumb story about niggers, about how the niggers are gonna take over, about how bad it'll be when all the niggers take over!?" My fellow browser gave him a dirty look and left the store.

The clerk got into a screaming match with the goofball and bounced him from the premises, with orders to never return. He was right to do it. The goofball argued that he hadn't done anything provocative or offensive; the word "nigger" is right there in the title of the story to which he was referring. He seemed to think he was being very sly, but there was no mistaking the fact that he'd said what he'd said just to rile a random black person, and that he was giggly about thinking that, under the circumstances, he had an "out" that made it okay for him to do so. Listening to Dr. Laura taunt her caller with the word "nigger", then sneer at her that people like her shouldn't "marry outside of your race", you'd have to be pretty thick to not recognize that Schlessinger is deliberately tormenting the woman, apparently for the sins of expressing sentiments that most nonbigoted people would characterize as sensitive and reasonable. Does this, by itself prove that Dr. Laura is a racist? Hard to say, but it does prove, if proof were needed, that she's a mean, sadistic bitch. I would be the last person to argue that this, by itself, ought to disqualify someone from having a public forum; I can imagine situations where a mean, sadistic bitch might be just the person you'd want speaking out on the issue at hand. But a mean, sadistic bitch who's always attacking the wrong people as a means of supporting an indefensible point of view is a potential public menace, and as she's made clear with her remarks about the "philosophical point" that she was trying to make, Schlessinger is far too stupid for it to be likely that she could ever be right about anything.

2. BEING A PUBLIC BIGOT AND GASBAG OUGHT TO MEAN NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU'RE SORRY:

Really, don't you think so? What good does it do anyone for people like Schlessinger and Imus to issue these ridiculous apologies for things they aren't sorry they did, except in the sense that it got them more heat than they were planning to get. You'd think that Schlessinger would have known better than to bother, since she's been down this road before: back when she was trying to salvage the TV show and use it as a step up to greater media prominence, she issued a sort of blanket "apology" to anyone who felt offended by her cast-iron belief that gay people are disgusting perverts, then took it back when it failed to get her critics to back off. Nor should she have expected it to. Maybe she and her fellow gasbags should stop and think about what these fake shows of contrition do to their fans. Aren't these upright moral guardians supposed to care more about hating gays and telling blacks to stay in their place than appeasing the uppity bastards? Seeing Dr. Laura pretend that she thinks she did something wrong, just to keep her career from taking a hit, can't be very inspiring for the people who want to believe that she's really prepared to suffer a little if that's what it takes to keep fanning their favorite prejudices on the air. Look at Rush Limbaugh, who's proven so much sturdier than most windbags: can you imagine him ever saying that he was sorry for, say, having been exposed as a profligate enjoyer of illegally obtained meds even as he took to the airwaves daily to call for a harder hammer to use on drug addicts, or for pointlessly claiming that a beloved actor stricken with a degenerative disease had faked symptoms of his physical decline in a TV commercial for political purposes? It's not as if we're speaking in hypotheticals here.

3. WHAT DEGREE MARTYR?

Now that Schlessinger had learned to live with her guilt over having, as she claimed in her apology, done something wrong, she's taken to the talk show circuit to complain about her First Amendment martyrdom, the way that she'd been denied her right of free speech by anyone who doesn't want her on the air anymore. If Schlessinger thinks it's "hilarious" that some people think racism still exists in the United States despite the election of President Fela, maybe she can find it in herself to understand why some of us are busting a gut over the thought of her marching in lockstep with Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, 2 Live Crew, and Beavis and Bull-head, not to mention God knows how many antiwar protestors. Or does she see those characters not as her fellow martyrs but scruffy miscreants laying wrongful claim to a title she's earned the only honest way you can, by saying "Boo!" to the pervasive bullying evil that is political correctness? That's how the guys in front of Goober's gas station see it.

If there's anything sad about this, it's Schlessinger's inability to see that the same stick-up-the-ass shrillness that makes her want to see herself as being nailed to a cross is the same thing that's always blighted her career and finally shriveled her audience share. Is it possible for a racist or homophobic banshee to be a First Amendment martyr? Maybe, but I'm not sure that it's the most graceful pose for such a creature. By comparison, look at someone like Brother Dave Gardner, the ebullient, Tennessee-born, Southern Baptist ministry-trained standup comic who attracted a mainstream following--club dates, comedy records, TV appearances--in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a sort of redneck Lord Buckley, but who eventually found himself cut off from big-time show business because of his tendency to gloat happily, onstage, about the murder of Martin Luther King. (Or, as Larry L. King quoted him as having put it in a post-stardom profile written in the early '70s, "Wasn't that a clean shot they got off on Doctor Junior?) Gardner, who died in 1983, never made it back to the mainstream, so we'll never know if he would have been deemed acceptable, by contemporary standards, as an "outrageous" host of a radio talk show or a sometime guest on Red Eye, or if he'd have been declared a "real" racist and unfit for public broadcast, the way that the Nazi armband and Klan robe in the back of David Duke's closet render him unfit for a place in the same political party that's perfectly comfortable with a Jesse Helms or a Jeff Sessions. But when Larry L. King caught up with him, he seemed to be having a good time, being true to himself and speaking his mind, even if he only got to speak it in backwoods dives where half the crowd would end up walking out. There's a lesson there for hysterical scolds like Schlessinger, and the increasingly grumpy Limbaugh, too. There's a reason that so many lost conservative lambs would rather adopt Glenn Beck as their public spokesman these days. He makes mental illness look like fun.









Dr. Laura's Appology for Channeling Mel Gibson Is Sorry and Insincere
Posted: August 17, 2010 at 4:59 PM By Marjorie Valbrun

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When Dr. Laura unleashed her inner racist during her call-in show last week, she not only revealed her hostility toward black people, she also revealed her profound ignorance.
Just because some black comedians routinely use the so-called N-word doesn’t make it right for her—or them—to use it. For many people, both black and white, the word is a deeply painful and offensive reminder of the legacy of slavery, lynchings, and state-sanctioned segregation.
More telling than her comfort with repeating the word over and over again was the leap she made from supposedly giving advice to a black woman who called in about her white husband’s racially insensitive friends to weighing on the psychology of black voter support for President Obama.

“Without giving much thought, a lot of black people voted for Obama because he was half-black without knowing what he was going to do once in office,” she told the caller, Jade, who obviously didn’t realize she was a stand-in for all black people.
Let’s set aside for now the obvious fact that no one knows what a political candidate, black or white, will actually do once in office. What does Obama’s election have to do with Jade’s husband and his friends? That black people who voted for Obama were guided by racial allegiance, so it’s OK for friends of Jade’s husband to routinely make racist comments?
Using Dr. Laura’s logic, one could argue that white people guided by racism only voted for Obama because he was half-white or didn’t vote for him because he was half-black. People who use such oversimplistic and stupid logic are usually the first to ascribe reverse racism and hypersensitivity to black people whenever the subject is white racism.
Here are some of Dr. Laura’s more insightful comments from the conversation with Jade:
Describing how a group of people from work were going out to play basketball: “My bodyguard and my dear friend is a black man, and I say to him 'White men can’t jump. I want you on my team.’ That was racist?”
Yeah, right. I get it. Some of her best friends are black, including the black man she pays to protect her. I’m willing to bet that this picture of the good doctor and her dear black friend was posted online after her Mel Gibson moment and that she doesn't keep it in a frame on her nightstand.
When Jade expresses disappointment with Dr. Laura’s unfettered and repeated use of the N-word, Dr. Laura responds:
"Black guys use it all the time. ... I don't get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it's a horrible thing. But when black people say it, it's affectionate. It’s very confusing."
She’s right about the mixed messages relayed by people who use the word, but Dr. Laura was clearly not among the confused. She knew exactly what she was saying and used the call as an opportunity to get on her racial soapbox.
When, Jade asked, is it ever OK to use the word?
“It depends on how it’s said,” Dr. Laura retorted. “It depends how it’s said.”
Why Jade kept trying to have a serious discussion with Dr. Laura is perplexing.
“Don’t NAACP me,” Dr. Laura snapped at her. “You know if you’re that sensitive about your race, don’t marry out of your race,” she lectured after hanging up on Jade.
Dr. Laura then turned her remarks to her listeners, telling them that Jade’s comments were an example of “black think” and “hypersensitivity which is being bred by black activists. ... I really thought that once we had a black president the attempt to demonize whites as hating blacks would stop but it seems to have grown, and I don’t get it. Yes I do, it’s all about power and that’s sad.”
So now that she has made clear how she really feels, why apologize for it? Empty apologies are just that, empty and entirely meaningless. The only thing she’s probably sorry about is that she didn’t join the Rush Limbaugh school of racial ideology sooner to increase her audience share.

Black and Bluie

The Criterion Collection has just brought out a new edition of Terry Zwigoff's instant classic Crumb on DVD and Blu-Ray. This is terrific news, but you've already seen that movie. The simultaneous release, by Criterion, of Zwigoff's first film, Louie Bluie, on DVD is something else again. Louie Bluie is a close-up portrait of Howard Armstong, a self-taught musician, painter, and author of a handmade, profusely illustrated book he calls ABC's of Pornography. (Armstrong's cursive handwriting is so elaborate that the text itself is a design element.) Zwigoff presents the handsome, humorous Armstrong, who was 75 when the film was finished, as a laid-back hedonist who embodies what's strongest and most fun about the folk art tradition. A Tennessee native seen hanging out with his buddies and fellow musicians in Chicago and reminiscing out loud about his childhood while visiting family back home, he has one foot in rural culture and one foot in the urban world, but wherever he is, he comes across as an inspired amateur, just keeping himself entertained. Zwigoff clearly sees him as an example of a live well lived, and though Louie Bluie, which is an hour long, didn't get that much attention when it was new--it played a few festivals, came out on VHS, and played on public television as part of the first season of the indie documentary series P.O.V>--it gave Armstrong's career a shot in the arm, enough that he he got a festival named after him and even inspired another documentary that was completed a year before his death, in 2003, at the age of 94.


Zwigoff himself ought to be an inspirational figure to aspiring filmmakers, even if, unlike the eternally spry Armstrong, he tends to look, in photographs, like something the maid just found under the couch cushions her first day back after her vacation. (The bonuses on the DVD include a hilarious behind-the-scenes photograph of the crew, on location in Tennessee, standing outside a Long John Silver's diner wearing little cardboard pirate hats; Zwigoff looks as if he'd put his on at gunpoint.) Louie Bluie, and by extension his whole directing career, grew out of his obsession with "State Street Rag", a record that Armstrong, using the name "Louie Bluie", cut in 1934 as a mandolin player, with Ted Bogan accompanying him on guitar. Zwigoff, whose fixation on old jazz records and the world they evoke was his bonding agent with Robert Crumb (and which he'd later use to flesh out the Steve Buscemi character in his movie version of Daniel Clowes's comic book Ghost World), was moved to track Armstrong down in the hopes of writing an article about him. When he met him, tape recorder in hand, he decided that the guy was so amazing--his story, his presence, his gifts as a raconteur-- that he'd have to learn filmmaking so that he could capture the whole package.



In an essay published in the DVD booklet, Michael Sragow writes that "Zwigoff originally saw his film as a bleak piece of cinema verite' contrasting the musicians' current lives with their rosy artistic pasts. 'But the film went in its own direction,' he says." This is a choice example of a novice artist setting out to fulfill the cliches of respectable art that he's read about and getting thrown a curve by his material; the test is in whether he'll rise to the discovery that life can be more surprising than that or insist on distorting what he's found to get it to fit the mold he'd set out with, and Zwigoff was up for the challenge. The information included with the DVD is also eye-opening for what it reveals about how craftily Zwigoff assembled the elements that would best set off his star. Armstrong was actually living in a Detroit housing project at the time, but Zwigoff couldn't get permission to film there, so he hauled Armstrong and a load of his belongings to Chicago and "remade" his apartment there.




Several of the warmest, funniest scenes in the movie show Armstrong trading wisecracks with the guys he's later seen playing with--Bogan, Banjo "Ikey" Robinson, and especially Yank Rachell, a crusty mandolinist who hovers over his share of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken (as that precious resource was still known in the early '80s) and grunts to Armstrong, "If had a biscuit and you hadn't eaten in a month, I'd tear it in two and eat both pieces." Based on their rapport, you'd assume that these guys had been chewing on each other for decades, but Bogan was the only one Armstrong didn't meet for the first time during filming. As Armstrong's chief sidekick, Bogan was a last-minute replacement for a fellow musician, Carl Martin, who died just before shooting was to begin. Zwigoff now says that Bogan himself "was on his last legs", but you couldn't tell it from the movie. A lot of loving craft and artifice went into this movie, but it just feels like a causal snapshot extended to an hour's length, which is presumably just what was intended. Watching it has always made me feel unreasonably happy.

S.

Bruno Schleinstein, who died this past weekend at 78, attained a measure of fame in the 1970s under the name "Bruno S." Abandoned as a child to a series of mental institutions, where he may have been the subject of Nazi experiments, he became a street musician and appeared in a documentary film, where he was spotted by Werner Herzog. Herzog cast him as the lead in his 1974 The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and later wrote the 1977 Stroszek for him to star in. Seen today, Kaspar Hauser has a whiff of hippie sanctimony weighing down its remarkable images; it's attached to the idea that Kaspar, the mystery man who grew up outside society, is intrinsically superior to it. But Bruno's performance transcends the stalest of the movie's ideas. His presence is strong and strange enough to make it one of Herzog's sturdiest early movies. The slyness in his slightly doughy face lends credence to the notion that the uneducated Kaspar, whose stalks out of a church service because the worshipers' singing sounds like screaming, has a natural wisdom and spirituality that society can't beat out of him. The English critic Paul Coates once suggested that Bruno S. and Klaus KInksi represented the two poles of Herzog's imaginative world, which he likened to Dostoyevsky's Myshkin and Raskolnikov. If Coates was onto something, the tragedy of Herzog's career is that both his two ideal leading men were taken away from him--Kinski by death and Bruno by the simple fact that he was too difficult to work with that their working relationship was exhausted after two films--and he was never able to fully replace them. In fact, Bruno was so much harder to replace that, in Fitzcarraldo, Herzog actually tried casting Kinski in what was essentially a Myshkin role--a Bruno S. role--with predictably unfortunate results.

A couple of Christmas Eves ago, Michael Kimmelman filed a remarkable report from Berlin, where he and a companion had seen Bruno performing at "a cozy wood-paneled dive" where the management had extended him an open invitation "to come sing whenever he felt up to it, not for money, just to have a place to go, and since then Bruno has stopped by on the odd night. As usual he set himself up in the entryway, on a low green stool, cradling his accordion, his little bells on a table beside him. A plastic bag, parked at a corner of the table, contained his bronchitis pills. He sang the songs he always sings, about prison and despair, bloodshed and lost love, songs Berlin street singers have sung for hundreds of years. Customers mostly squeezed past him, oblivious. A few stopped to listen. One woman wept." Interviewing Bruno, Kimmelman noted that "It’s hard to imagine today what an international celebrity and figure of fascination to German intellectuals that Bruno became, a real man about town, but then, in the way of such things, he drifted into obscurity, resentful and confused." Referring to himself in the third person, Bruno said that, after a brief period of celebrity, “Everybody threw him away.” On a happier note, he looked forward to Christmas itself, when, he predicted, “He will transmit. He will take his accordion and his bells and go around the houses, and one of the songs for sure will be ‘Mamatschi.' Because this will touch people.”

Cranky Contrarian Weekend Special II: I Don't Love the '80s

Tom Shone's Blockbuster,, a sort of critical history of the big-budget, uver-hyoed genre of Hollywood movie that began with Jaws and Star Wars. I'd come across Shone's work online and gotten a chuckle out of it, and thought it would be fun to read his impressions of the work of such sensitive auteurs as Lucas, Cameron, Ridley Scott, and John McTiernan. It turns out that the book is positioned as a sort of corrective to Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and all those other arguments for the greatness the pre-Star Wars seventies as a lost golden age for American movies, a time when the collapse and confusion of the old studio system made it possible for a few maverick talents to get some ground-breaking movies made and distributed before the corporations moved in and streamlined the commercial process. The way Shone sees it, the blockbusters were mostly terrific movies--though he makes an exception for Tim Burton's Batman, probably because a little birdie told him I like it--and the triumph of the corporations left us with a healthier state of things, a movie culture in which we have, on one side, big blockbusting chunks of fun like Transformers and Iron Man 2 and, on the other side, the work of a new generation of "independent" filmmakers who, taking their real inspiration from the blockbuster makers, have a renewed appreciation of things like story and character, which sets them apart from the kind of farting around done by people like Dennis Hopper, whose daring editing style on Easy Rider turns out to have been inspired in part by his failure to realize that, once he'd taken a scene out of the rushes, he still had the option of putting it back.

Shone's writing is clear and engaging and sometimes pretty funny. This had the effect of making the reading experience far more depressing for me than it might otherwise have been. (It didn't help that the book is littered with the kind of minor factual errors--writing that Ordinary People robbed Raiders of the Lost Ark of the Academy Award for Best Picture when the two movies didn't come out the same year, that sort of thing--that will mean nothing to most people but that, when you do recognize them, and they keep popping up to poke you in the eye again and again, began to make a book seem like it was put together as a silent protest against the lack of editors in the publishing industry.) Everyone's entitled to their opinion, of course, and Shone is hardly the only person in the world who likes 1941 a lot less than me and the collected works of James Cameron a lot more.

But Shone's breezy style, combined with his humor and his obvious intelligence, made me feel like a scold and a spoilsport. He even generates ideas that aren't just smart but are cunningly calibrated to appeal to people like me, who've spent our whole moviegoing live disagreeing with his basic premises. Whatever you think of the term "independent filmmaker" and who it does or doesn't apply to, I'd certainly take Quentin Tarantino or Alexander Payne over Dennis Hopper in a hot minute. Shone doesn't just think that the age of the blockbuster was beneficial to independent filmmaking; he argues that, by creating these two tracks of entertainment-based moviemaking, blockbusters basically killed the middlebrow, homework-like Oscar bait picture typified by Ordinary People. If anything, I'd say that it instead compelled the makers of such movies to adopt a surface hipness, resulting in movies like American Beauty. I'd rather spend a couple of hours watching Kevin Spacey lob Alan Ball's sourballs than sit through something like Ordinary People, but, as with most of what Shone is chronicling, we're talking less about aesthetic developments than advances in marketing and packaging.

There's a trace of Anthony Lane in Shone's glibness, but unlike Lane, I think Shone is really writing from the heart. Lane once wrote a seemingly rave review ("seemingly" because, really, who can be sure with the man) of Last Action Hero that had the feel of something composed in response to a coin toss; it was as if he didn't believe what he was saying but wanted to see how much he could dazzle you while appearing to say it. Shone doesn't actually call Last Action Hero a good movie, but he describes it as a wounded animal that needed, and was deserving of, love, not the vicious catcalls and outbreaks of schadenfreude that greeted its release. Now, this would be a humane response to some labor of love that turned into an ambitious wreck of a failed work of art, but Last Action Hero is an $85 million inert multiplex movie directed by a lout from a much-reworked script originally written by a lout that was shaped as an exercise in media spin intended to prolong the screen career of a hulk. It, like most of the movies that Shone expresses such warmth towards, is a factory product; it was ill-received by the public not because it was ahead of its time or because the fecund creativity of its makers got out of hand, but because it is a mangled factory product, something that came off the assembly line with its head on backwards, or even children's pajamas that catch fire if you cough on them.

In the end, Shone's misplaced expressions of love leave one with the feeling that he loves these movies indiscriminately because they're the movies he grew up with. We've grown accustomed to people who grew up with this shit continuing to obsess over them well into adulthood, but we've also come to expect a certain level of knowing sarcasm about the objects of their obsession. Shone's sarcasm is reserved for those who think that movies can be something else than a Jerry Bruckheimer production. If Shone has any doubts that this is the true path, it comes out only indirectly, in the special place he accords James Cameron, because Cameron is someone who's managed to have it both ways, making one tremendously over-scaled, high-concept commercial blockbuster after another while maintaining the profile of an independent artist who does the projects he wants to do, shapes them himself from his own ball of clay, and tells the cowering suits who run the studios how he's going to let them make a gazillion dollars by releasing his towering masterworks. Basically, in the neverending battle between art and Mammon, Shone is on the studios' side. There are always lots of successful film writers who are: the late John Gregpry Dunne used to threaten to dislodge his cheek muscles from sneering at anyone stupid enough to think that art could ever have anything to do with the movies, and today, Patrick Goldstein could open a correspondence school for them. But Shone's the first one I've ever read who made made taking the studios' side seem hip.

Shone and I are close to the same age, and these are the movies I grew up with, too. But they're not the kind of movies I was ever crazy about, and they're a part of the reason why, although I can't honestly say that I never ever had a good time between 1980 and 1990, I spent much of my time during that decade feeling as if the majority culture, which I pictured as an exploding fireball that sounded like Duran Duran and sold arm to the Ayatollah, was sitting on my head. I knew that a lot of people felt differently about it at the time, but I didn't guess at how many of them actually look back on those years with more respect than embarrassment until John Hughes died and serious critics began lining up to declare that Ferris Bueller's creator was "our Godard." I tried to chalk that up to the deranging effect of grief, even if the people sending gift-wrapped quotes to their worst enemies were mourning their own teen years and twenties more than a hack writer-director with a Supercuts hairdo and, at best, maybe three-quarters of a good movie to his name. I was more perplexed this past spring, when I went to see the doggedly unfunny, ramshackle and shitty-looking Hot Tub Time Machine, and then came home to read reviews explaining that the movie's visual ugliness and general sloppiness were part of a deliberate effort to honor the "aesthetic" of unfunny, ramshackle, shitty-looking '80s movies. I guess that believing that incompetence and lack of inspiration constitute an aesthetic style worth keeping alive is a big help if your list of all-time favorites includes Caddyshack. But that was when I started to feel the way a City Lights poet who participated in lunch counter sit-ins during the '50s might have felt if he'd been strapped down like Malcolm McDowell, in front of a TV set showing Happy Days. And that was before I read the reviews complaining that new big-screen remakes of The Karate Kid and The A-Team failed to live up to the wonderful, classic works whose name they had taken. I mean, I know for a fact that the original The Karate Kid was a piece of shit, just as I've known it for twenty-six years, and I'm not even sure that I ever saw the original The Karate Kid.



Maybe I should be having nightmares about what the box-office success of The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone's old-action-guy jam session, might portend in terms of a flood of bad '80s nostalgia, but it's probably just a one-shot novelty burp. Although Stallone was able to get two actual stars, one of whom is even a real actor, to contribute cameos to his little enterprise, most of the supporting mugs here aren't really what you'd call big draws, even to the action crowd. With all due respect for Jet Li, the not-exactly-hard-to-hire Jason Statham, and the newly employable Mickey Rourke, who exactly do we have here padding out the cast to turn this into an "event"? Randy Couture? Stone Cold Steve Austin? Dolph Lundgren? Was Cynthia Rothrock unavailable? The Barbarian Brothers? And what with the reports that Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal both turned down their chance to be part of such a sterling ensemble, am I the only one who's wondering what Stallone has against Chuck Norris? Is Sly jealous because he doesn't have his own Internet meme, or did Chuck refuse to introduce him to Mike Huckabee?

Of all the major 80s-era has-beens, it's hard to think of one who would seem less deserving of a comeback that Stallone, just as it's hard to think of one who, in the space of half a dozen years (the time it took him to concoct three increasingly awful, hammerific variations on the Rocky theme and make the character of John Rambo his own, and remake Tony Manero in his own image for good measure) went as far in transforming himself from a likable up-and-comer to a noxious megalomaniacal load and public eyesore as anyone ever has without forming his own religious cult. The 1985 Rambo was the last straw, not just because it was a deranged steroid-fueled grunt-a-thon dealing in cartoon murderousness and the sadomasochistic use of Catholic Christ imagery some fifteen years before it became common knowledge that Mel Gibson was officially certifiable, but because the "American MIAs are alive and being held prisoner in Vietnam!" hoax was always as cruel as it was insane--those people had families, for Christ's sake--and Stallone wasn't so hard up for attention at the time that he couldn't have found a way to make the cover of People one more time without exploiting it. But damned if I haven't seen friendly reviews of Stallione's previous Herbert West imitations, Rocky Balboa and the 2008 Rambo, even from critics who openly made fun of him back when he was a superstar. Given that Stallone, in his prime, wore his deep, pathetic need for the public's approval so nakedly that he made Tom Cruise look like Greta Garbo, is it out of line to wonder if some people in the press pat his head now because they feel sorry for him?

One of the great things about getting older is finding out how younger people, or even people your own age who are blessed with shitty memories, will misrepresent the times you've lived through, just like the people I went to college with in the '80s who not only watched reruns of Leave It to Beaver but accepted the Reagan Time delusion that it was a documentary glimpse into the Ways Things Were before the Soviets got prayer banned from the classroom and sold the kids pot and the wimmen and colored folks got uppity. In a Salon review of The Expendables by someone named Michael Joshua Rowin, who must have been more surprised by the movie's box office success than Brigitte Nielsen and myself combined, writes of the action movie heroes of the mid-80s, "Stallone's John Rambo was haunted by Nam, but he was also a one-man army with God-like combat skills. Die Hard's John McClane turned the average Joe into an anti-corporate, wife-saving, wisecracking populist daredevil. And as the Terminator, Schwarzenegger embodied the perfect male physique as a ruthless killer-turned-savior. But soon arrived an unbeatable foe: camp." Actually, camp, or irony, or whatever you prefer to call the kind of deeply self-protective facetiousness that characterized '80s culture was always a big part of the what made Stallone and Schwarzenegger and the rest of them popular. I don't think it's any coincidence that Stallone peaked, both commercially and in terms of the shamelessness of his imitative self-parody, with Rambo and Rocky IV in 1985, the same year that Sports Illustrated ran a long story about professional wrestling and put Hulk Hogan on its cover.

Rambo and Hulk Hogan were heroes for the age of Reagan and the NBC edition of David Letterman, puffed-up cartoons of masculinity equipped with simple values and self-righteousness, who smart people in touch with the zeitgeist could cheer and snigger at simultaneously. (The sniggering was also directed at some audience, imaginary or not, that was so unhip as to take this shit seriously.) Stallone may not have fully understood this, though, like Tommy Wiseau, the auteur of The Room, he was observant enough to figure out that he was inspiring complicated reactions from people, and responded with strange quotes to interviewers about how he'd wanted to "go almost jingoistic" with his neorealist fable about blowing up confused, stock-still Vietnamese with his exploding arrows. (Stallone's failed attempt to keep his career going in the early '90s by turning himself into a comedian, in such movies as Oscar and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, suggests that he may have been slow to understand that, to a major segment of the audience that turned out for his biggest '80s hits, he was already a comic figure. Or maybe it just proves how much less smart he is than Schwarzenegger, who had better luck pulling the same trick in Twins and Kindergarten Cop.) It was a strategy for commercial success that played well at a time when Americans, seeking to out the Vietnam years past them, were attracted to the idea of strutting and beating their chests but didn't really feel all that threatened, in a world where the White House was content to fight a tottering enemy, Communism, by funding proxy wars in Latin America. Maybe, in a world that's gotten as scary and genuinely threatening as ours has, it makes sense that people would feel nostalgia for Stallone's brand of refried crap. ButThe Expendables is the kind of conceptual triumph that makes the movie itself seem like a superfluous appendage to its own marketing campaign; its success was dependent on Stallone's ability to put across the idea that the movie represents a nostalgic celebration of the bad action epics of twenty-five years ago. If they didn't tell you that's what it is, nobody would have any way of knowing that it's not just another straight-to-video action dud with a cast of leathery-looking Botoxed old dudes who your mama thought was cute back when she was in high school. For this reason, the guys at Big Hollywood might want to think twice before declaring that the movie is some kind of ideological triumph for their side, even if they do subscribe to the notion that bad movies are somehow as key to the conservative philosophy as moral hypocrisy.

Cranky Contrarian Weekend Special: Roger's Version

Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel began doing their movie-review TV series, for Chicago public television in 1975. Two years later, the show went national, under the title Sneak Previews. The formula was simplicity itself. Every week, the two Chi-Town critics would show clips of (I think) four movies, trade opinions, and then each would wrap things up by designating a "Dog of the Week", a couple of movies so rotten that they didn't deserve to be picked apart at length, even though, given the show's brief running time and ho much of each episode was devoted to showing film clips, the "full-length" reviews could have scarcely amounted to five minutes apiece. When the show landed in 1978, James Wolcott, writing in The Village Voice, was not impressed with Siskel and Ebert. "I've never seen their work, so it's possible that on the printed page each combines the grace of Agee with the slangy verve of Otis Ferguson, but on television they're The Brothers Gormless. They've obviously spent a lot of time in screening rooms together, and their chummy chatter reminds you of Kubek and Garagiola gurgling over a ground ball that's just squeaked through the infield."

The sportscaster metaphor sticks nicely, because Siskel and Ebert's achievement, if we have to call it that, was to make it seem as if reviewing movies was a simple matter of sitting on a couch like a couple of lumps and ticking off the pluses and minuses of a movie in the most monkey-like-banana sort of way. Something about this act struck a lot of people as tremendously appealing, and Sneak Previews turned into such a cash cow for PBS that, in 1982, both Siskel and Ebert bolted for commercial syndication, renaming the show At the Movies. In 1986, after Gene and Roger feuded with their syndication company, they broke away to form their own show, called simply Siskel & Ebert. By then it was clear that, despite the easily replicable cookie-cutter format, it was Siskel and Ebert themselves who were the big draw. The Chicago PBS station WTTW kept the Sneak Previews title going with various hosts (Neal Gabler, Jeffrey Lyons, Michael Medved), and so did the Tribune company, which kept the At the Movies title alive with a crew that included Myron Breckinridge himself, Rex Reed. None of these efforts took, and the attempt to keep Siskel & Ebert going, despite the absence of Siskel (who died in 1999) and Ebert (whose cancer surgery resulted in complications that left him unable to speak) with other asses in the reviewers' seats will end this weekend.

I don't know if the various hustlers who tried to duplicate Siskel and Ebert's TV success without Siskel and Ebert were ever able to make sense of the fact that viewers seemed to regard any other pair of dullards gassing on about movies, in between film clips, as the equivalent of New Coke. I know I don't understand it. Not that I'd expect anyone to circle their calendar to make sure they wouldn't miss finding out what Rex Reed thought of Out of Africa, but why would anyone especially care what Siskel or Ebert thought? I was still a kid when they first turned up on what passed for public television in Mississippi in the late '70s, a kid who was very interested in movies and didn't get to see many of them. At first, Sneak Previews was broadcast on my channel late at night on Fridays, and I never missed it, though I watched it for the film clips. I had begun reading as much film criticism as I could by then, which mainly meant what was in the newsweeklies and my mom's magazines like Ladies' Home Journal and People and what was picked up from various syndicates and reprinted in the local paper--none of it especially distinguished, and just about all of it more fun and interesting than anything Siskel and Ebert ever said on the air. The clips, though, at least gave me more of a sense of what a movie might look and feel like than the stills that accompanied print reviews, and because of them, I watched Sneak Previews religiously until about 1982 or 1983--which is to say, when I began seeing a lot of movies regularly, in theaters, on my own, a change in my routine that rendered the show completely without any point so far as I was concerned. I can honestly say that, although I remember where they fell regarding their thumb's-up or thumb's-down on a few specific movies--usually because said opinion, whether it was pro-Rambo: First Blood, Part II or virulently anti-Blue Velvet, threw me for a bit of a loop--I can't for the life of me remember a single turn of phrase or joke or surprisingly insight that I gleaned from all those years of listening to two dudes talk about the latest flicks.

Ever since Ebert withdrew from public view, what New York magazine approvingly referred to as his "canonization" has been well under way. I don't have any big thing against Roger Ebert. I'm sure he's a nice guy. He's handled his long, highly publicized health problems a hell of a lot better than I would. And, long before he began his transformation into an institution, he did some memorable interviews with movie figures, including a classic sit-down with Robert Mitchum that I first came across in a now hard-to-find anthology published by the National Film Critics Society. But I'm not really a fan of his work as screenwriter on Russ Meyer's bull goose looney Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and every word of his own prose that he every published, to say nothing of the stuff he said on the air, was dead on arrival. So far as I know, Siskel's writing wasn't any better, but he trumped Dolls by making a funny appearance on The Larry Sanders Show, where he got to trance out in shock when Hank Kingsley refused to believe him that the leading lady in The Crying Game had a penis. It's my impression that Siskel was mourned a lot less when he died than Ebert has been for the last several years of his life: is it just because his final illness and subsequent death were comparatively sudden and quick, if no less sad than what Ebert has been through? My only point about this is that canonization, which strikes me as a fair word for what's been said about Ebert recently, no matter how seriously New York intended it, ought to be reserved for people who've done a bit more than spend a couple of decades in the public eye seeming nice, writing dully, and being encouraging to young people in their profession. I'd think that even if I didn't think that Ebert has had a largely unhappy impact on film criticism itself, both by virtue of his writing and as a richly rewarded bad example. Which I kind of think he has.

Wolcott teased Siskel and Ebert for not being in the same league as Agee and Ferguson--as indeed they weren't, to say nothing of Vachel Lindsay, Graham Greene, Robert Warshow, Manny Farber, Dwight Macdonald, Pauline Kael, Robin Wood, Andrew Sarris, Dave Kehr, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Veronica Geng, and J. Hoberman, and that's just sticking to people who'd begun to make names for themselves, by the end of the 1970s, with work written in English. But of course, that was part of the point of Siskel and Ebert on television, if not the key to their appeal. In terms of their prose styles and the range of their taste, their were the kind of guys, and there used to be hundreds of them working as movie reviewers all across the country until newspapers began tightening their belts on the culture beat, who might just as well have been rewriting press releases. I don't mean that they were consciously in bed with the studios or that they were running a game; I'm sure they thought they were thinking for themselves. But by the time they hit TV, they'd been hacking along for a number of years and knew which movies were the prestigious Oscar bait and which ones were the summer hits one was expected to "enjoy" to be seen as a fun guy and which ones were there to be derided as tacky or vulgar to prove that one was a hack of taste, and they kept in lockstep, always expressing pre-chewed majority opinion in the deadest language imaginable. To watch them every week, every week after week, as I did in the late '70s and early '80s, was to learn nothing about movies but to learn to keep tabs on what "everybody" was supposed to think about the latest movies. They may have seen themselves as a corrective to the brave new world ushered in by shows like Entertainment Weekly, where everybody knows which movies are the big grossers and cheers them on as movie art was a horse race, but by telling viewers which movies were generally seen as deserving hits, shameful hits, sleepers, and toxic disasters, they did their part to make knowingness about consensus opinion seem more important than having an individual sensibility and applying it to each new work, as a way of telling others what one critic had seen there.

In the early days of Sneak Previews, the reactionary nature of Siskel and Ebert's taste came through loudest in the yuk-it-up "Dog of the Week" moment, which was always set aside to deride movies that didn't have big publicity budgets from major studios--it was a chance to mock movies that might not have actually been the worst of a given week, but that were safe to dismiss as worthless. It's no wonder that some of the movies that I remember being flushed down the toilet at the end of the week included some that went on to have actual critical reputations, such as David Cronenberg's The Brood, or exploitation flicks, such as Joe Dante's Piranha and the Cheech and Chong vehicle Up in Smoke, that are now remembered more fondly in many quarters than the high-budget turkeys that the show respected enough to feature during the body of the show. Calling something like Raise the Titanic or Can't Stop the Music a dog barely worthy of mention might have served a public service in terms of restoring some perspective to the world, but it would have pleased neither the studios nor viewers who wanted to hear movies they'd actually heard about subjected to their full five-ish minutes of sneering wisecracks. (The one time I remember a major studio release, with Tv commercials promoting it on during prime time and everything, getting the "Dog of the Week" treatment, came in early 1981, when the Buck Henry satire First Family was so dishonored. It was a worthy call: First Family is indeed a piece of shit. Looking back on it now, though, I can't help wondering if this maybe it would have been treated with more respect if Reagan hadn't just been elected, and even lousy "political satire" was suddenly very unfashionable. The seventies were over.)

It was while watching Ebert decree that the work of J. Lee Thompson was more deserving of extended debate on public television than that of a Cronenberg or a Joe Dante that one might remember that it was Ebert's 1967 report on seeing Night of the Living Dead with a Saturday matinee kiddie audience that put him on the map, after it was reprinted in Reader's Digest. In that piece, Ebert describes the reaction of the audience to George Romero's then-unknown horror classic--"I felt real terror in that neighborhood theater last Saturday afternoon."--and goes on to write that "Censorship isn't the answer to something like this. Censorship is never the answer...But I would be ashamed to make a civil libertarian argument defending the 'right' of those little girls and boys to see a film which left a lot of them stunned with terror. In a case like this, I'd want to know what the parents were thinking of when they dumped the kids in front of the theater to see a film titled Night of the Living Dead. The new Code of Self Regulation, recently adopted by the Motion Picture Assn. of American, would presumably restrict a film like this one to mature audiences. But Night of the Living Dead was produced before the MPAA code went into effect, so exhibitors technically weren't required to keep the kids out. I supposed the idea was to make a fast buck before movies like this are off-limits to children."

Reprinting that piece at his website, Ebert includes a new introductory note, explaining that it "is not, properly speaking, a review -- or rather, it is a review of the audience reaction." He wants it to be known that he "admires the film itself", which he retroactively awards a three-and-a-half-star rating. If Ebert means to suggest that he's always admired the film, that he admired it that afternoon, I don't buy it: his pissy, prissy, self-righteous tone is too close to being identical to the tone he and Siskel sometimes struck on TV, such as on a notorious 1981 episode in which they pulled up their skirts and ran for cover from the misogynistic ugliness of the spate of slasher-splatter horror films that followed in Halloween's wake. I do believe that he admires it now, though. That's part of the problem. At his website, and in his books, Ebert is constantly "revising" his opinions of movies, such as The Shining, that he dissed on their original release (because "everybody". i.e., conventional wisdom, was dissing them at the time), but that respectable opinion has since shifted enough on that he'd hate to be left out. Basically, Ebert wants to like as many movies as he can, though there a rare few well-regarded pictures, Blue Velvet remaining the crowning example, that will always be too hot for him to handle. (Typically, his big problem with that one seems to be that he detects elements of "irony' in it, and he thinks that means that its scenes of cruel violence and sadistic degradation must be really degrading, because if David Lynch is capable of irony, then he must not really harbor sympathetic feelings towards his characters. Boy Scout sincerity counts for a whole lot with Rog.)

And that's why I think that Ebert has finally done more harm than good for movies and movie criticism. It's not just the thoroughgoing mediocrity of his entire body of written and spoken work. It's that he and Siskel managed, through their success on TV, to inflict their idea of what a movie critic is on the whole country, and that idea is that the critic is a bean counter who establishes a thousand-title canon based on which movies are "officially" great, pretty good, forgotten, and putrid. It's a canon that has more to do with a dullard's notion of respectability than with personal reactions and explosive feelings of joy, erotic excitement, comic inspiration, heart-stopping ideas, head-spinning ideas, piercing insights, and any of the other things that were trafficked in by the real critics I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, all of whom were trying to convey what a particular work meant to them, which meant that they were likely to express things that weren't in the press kit about movies that the studio had tried to hide under a rock--which, to Siskel and Ebert and those taking their cues from them, could only be seen as, well, doing it wrong. The great film critics broke new ground; to read them, at their best, was to get caught up in a terrific one-sided debate about what mattered in movies. Siskel and Ebert perfected an approach designed not to generate debate but to shut it down, based on the notion that there is no movie that can produce reactions so complicated that it can't be neatly tied up and labeled "thumbs up" or "thumbs down", as if that settled that.

It should be said that Ebert, in embracing the Internet as a place where people can practice film criticism without official sanction (and without a paycheck), has shown a generous spirit towards those who will come after him. But if he and Siskel democratized movie criticism, something that nobody would have thought of as needing it just a few years earlier, they did it in the worst way possible, by perfecting a dead language and tutoring their viewers in it, so that everybody knew how to sound like an insider about movies they hadn't even seen, at least not with their brains turned on. It's resulted in a world in which people waste their lives (and insult the filmmakers they mean to flatter) trying to orchestrate "100%"-approval ratings at Rotten Tomatoes for their favorites (i.e., the biggest movies most effectively marketed to their self-defining demographic) and anyone who expresses an opinion about a favorite that isn't identical to the ones you hear yourself repeating must be denounced immediately as that most loathsome of all beings, a "contrarian." Or to put it another way: it's Harry Knowles's world, I just gnash my teeth in it.