Getting Even

Revenge... is forgiveness's other face. It is an emotion, discounting mercy, neat to the taste and born of a desperate need to rectify a wrong by inflicting harm in return for an injury, a slight, or an insult and to exact satisfaction for that which, at least in the sufferer's eye, blind and stupid fate (never, of course, without its specific agent) not only has allowed but in a way has cruelly fostered. The sole desire in retribution is to equalize: "I'll get even with you!" To revenge is, in fact, to avenge. Simply put, it seeks-it demands-justice...

Revenge transfigures you. It boils and concocts into poisonous nourishment all the facts and fictions it compounds from the lives of its enemies, and fuels the delight it abhors, for your grief has found the one thing in this life that causes it. Alive, it is your plague, instigates against you, throttles all you are. The vigorous if irrational idea is that you alone of all others on earth are left to correct what otherwise must go forever uncorrected. And in spite of the fact that in the process you become a cauldron of pure pain-owned, in fact, by that which you would sell,, and are diminished by ("The murderer," writes Nabokov, "is always the victim's inferior") -there is often a crazy comfort in the obsession with whatever must be vindicated by whomever must be abused or punished or killed...

REVENGE! Where hasn't this shadow reached? It is a poem by Tennyson, the name of Sir Richard Grenville's famous ship, and a tragedy by Edward Young. There is an Iranian drink so named. Fairy tales have virtually have no other plot. It is as old as the first murder ("And Cain was very wroth and his countenance fell") and as recent as the summer of 1982, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon and announced that this was in retaliation for the shooting of a diplomat in London. It is the central theme of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy, animates every discussion of capital punishment, and is even implied in the Virginia state motto: Sic semper tyrannis-Booth, avenging the lost Civil War, shot Lincoln howling those very words. I'd suggest that along with love and war, with which themes, let us say, it has more than passing acquaintance, revenge is the single most informing element of great world literature. And George Orwell, in his essay "Why I Write" (1947), cites it as the first motive for many taking up the profession ("the desire ... to get your own back on grownups who snubbed you in childhood, etc."). The revengeful personality-it is more often than not an intel1ectual's, of which Hamlet, a thinker, not a "rash and splenetic" type, is only one example-very often has the power, in fact, to give a significant penetrating quality to literary expression; one thinks of Juvenal on Roman decadence, Luther on papistical excesses, Milton on Charles I, and Hitler on the Treaty of Versailles.

--Alexander Theroux, "Revenge", Harper's, October 1982

The last day of September marks the conclusion of Turner Classic Movies' month-long festival of revenge pictures. If I were to be absolutely honest about it, I guess I'd say that revenge is probably my favorite motive: in movies, in books, and for getting up in the morning. For fantasy identification figures, you can scarcely beat it. I have enjoyed stories in which the hero is driven by the need to win the heart of the woman he loves or achieve recognition for his talents and accomplishments, but for most of my life, the enjoyment has been tinged with wistfulness, because the goals seem so unrealistic by the standards of my own life. Maybe I'm heading towards a big finish, but all in all, receiving love, instead of awkward silences or being made the subject of stalking rumors, in exchange for extending love, or receiving riches and adulation instead of blank stares and pink slips for my hard work and brilliant ideas: these things have mostly been unknown to me. Not completely unknown, but they probably don't make up more than one percent of the full term of my earthly existence thus far. But I have had some modest success at hurting and irritating people who have hurt or irritated me. Nothing flashy, I suppose, but the satisfaction is undeniable, and success at it in the past has led me to dare to dream that I might be able to keep doing it, just as past failures at love and material success have drilled into me a sense that I was simply doomed in those areas. I am not kidding when I say that there have been times in my life when the only thing that kept me from suicide was the certain knowledge that, were I to die, there would be people left behind who I would never hurt the way I wanted to hurt them. Even today, with my fortunes in the love department much improved and my material fortunes--well, I'm not homeless, okay?--even now, there are hollowed-out spaces in my life, patches that have turned black and gone numb and will never spark to life again, because there are people who I always wanted to hurt who went and died on me before I could do something to them that would grind them into the dirt like a burnt out cigarette. Aunt Betty, wherever you are, I'm looking at you.

I insist on a distinction between revenge movies and vigilante movies, the latter of which took over the action genre when I was a kid, and which are the bane of contemporary pop culture. The real difference is a degree of self-righteousness that infuses the view of the vigilante, the man who is not just fearlessly tough but so omniscient that he can serve as judge, jury, and executioner, without any worries that he will ever kill the wrong person or somehow do more harm than good. The model of the vigilante hero is Dirty Harry, who has a badge but isn't beholden to the laws of man, making him both a sanctified authority figure and a dashing rebel. He is, at his core, self-pitying, a wuss. He won't play by the rules, but he won't accept being classified as an outlaw, either. The true revenge hero will accept your respect, but he doesn't expect society to sanction his acts and he doesn't expect the law to let him off the hook. The important thing is payback, and he's willing to go down with his target if he has to, as readily as Ahab went down with Moby Dick.

The greatest revengers, from Hamlet to the members of Peckinpah's Wild Bunch, extending their punishment of the man who killed their friend in front of them to a declaration of war, have been self-immolating. The revenger wants to be successful and to have satisfaction, but if he has any intelligence, he must suspect that he also has no right to survive his revenge. Hamlet may want to avenge his father and Pike and the boys may want to avenge Angel, but they are also meting out punishment that is necessarily overscaled for a slight against himself. Because at the core of every revenger--we know this, because as the audience experiencing the story and identifying with the hero--is the fiery, driving feeling, I can't believe that you had the nerve to do something that you must have known would make me this mad! Your assumption that you would not pay terribly for having pissed me off is an insult that cannot go unanswered!



There is a sadness at the revenger's core that is apparent in the first movie TCM showed as part of its festival, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West. This is one of the total of two movies I know of starring Charles Bronson that haunt the memory, because he is driven by revenge untainted by vigilantism. (The other is Walter Hill's Depression movie Hard Times, in which he is so ennobled by hardship that he is beyond both these things, leaving human failings to his enemies and business associates.) Bronson wears a sad smile here rather than cloaking himself in self-pitying anger, and it makes an enormous difference. In the movie's Marxist-counterculture framework, he is, by helping Claudia Cardinale build her train station in defiance of the capitalist villains and their attack dog, Frank (Henry Fonda), he is participating in making himself an anachronism; when civilization comes to the West, there will be no room for mysterious, nameless drifters willing to burn the world down, if that's what it takes to avenge an ancient slight that even his enemy has forgotten. This is a classic Western trope, but the ending of Once Upon a Time in the West is dry-eyed compared to the soppy finish of Shane, in which the saintly gunslinger wipes out the bad guys so the good guys can thrive and then rides offscreen to die. Bronson isn't dying when he rides off, but he might as well just fade away. He's done what he had to do; there's no indication what he might have left in his life, with his enemy vanquished, or that, like Shane, he might have fallen in love and had a family if his life had taken a different turn. Bronson lived another 35 years after making the movie. The thought of what Harmonica might have done with another 35 years without his white whale dead is kind of frightening.

Once Upon a Time in the West was the first Western that Leone made without Clint Eastwood, whom he'd made a star with the "Dollars" trilogy. Eastwood, who would do as much as anyone besides Bronson to make self-righteous vigilante figures the dominant type in action movie heroes, directed and starred in High Plains Drifter (1973), which went about as far as any Hollywood movie made in the early '70s in trying to make an American Italian Western. There's some El Topo in there, too, and while most of the movie is set in a little town where Eastwood's mysterious nameless drifter has agreed to help the weak, cowardly locals protect themselves from some vengeful killers on their way home, there are also moments when Eastwood cuts to the killers, who seem to have blundered into a Monte Hellman movie. As its list of influences implies, High Plains Drifter is designed to be quite a head trip: the drifter is actually the ghost of the town's previous sheriff, who, in a series of flashbacks that make him out to be the Kitty Genovese of the Old West, was horsewhipped to death by the bad guys while the whole town stood by and did nothing; they wanted him dead because he was about to blow the whistle on some skulduggery perpetrated by the town's main employer. They then set the killers up and railroaded them for robbery, so the bad guys actually have solid grounds for wanting revenge on the townspeople. But because the drifter is played by the star of the movie, his claim to revenge on both the killers and the townspeople trumps everything else. (Twelve years later, Eastwood directed and starred in Pale Rider, which revived this mash-up of action Western, and ghost story and fused it to a rip-off of Shane for good measure.)



HIgh Plains Drifter mostly serves to illustrate why Leone was wise to see that Eastwood wouldn't fit into the world he began to explore onscreen after The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the last film of the "Dollars" trilogy. For all the weirdness, the movie never manages to budge above the level of a juvenile fantasy about the being the baddest motherfucker around. The drifter not only has both the moral authority and superior skills to kill anyone he likes without any fear of the consequences, he has a license to rape, which he seems to avail himself of in order to punish women for having grossed him out by desiring him. Eastwood was better suited to playing vigilantes than revengers--no compliment, just a sad truth. His lack of perspective and reflectiveness, a useful quality in the shaping of flawless adolescent identification figures but a problem if you hope to reach for anything more, defeats him here, as it would in the next Western he directed, the 1976 The Outlaw Josey Wales, in which he played a Missouri farmer whose family is senselessly butchered by pro-Union meanies; he takes up arms to avenge them, then, after the war, spends the rest of the movie killing people who keep showing up trying to start some shit with him, after he's survived, and partially avenged, a massacre of his unarmed comrades by evil Yankees after the Rebs have surrendered. The movie, which is included in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, has become a key text among those who sentimentalize the Antebellum South, who may or may not be embarrassed by the fact that it's based on a novel by "Forrest Carter", i.e., Asa Carter, a hardcore white racist who founded his own fringe Ku Klux Klan group and worked as a speechwriter for George Wallace in his "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" period. (Under the "Forrest Carter" pseudonym, he also wrote The Education of Little Tree, which, after his death, became something of a cult classic in New Age and granola circles. This could probably be seen as either his revenge on liberals or their unconscious revenge on him, but I'm not sure which.)



Comparing Leone's work with Bronson versus Eastwood's with Eastwood, one might conclude that non-American directors are more likely to keep their heads while remaking our genre cliches into something wild and new. Two of the flashiest and most febrile films TCM has shown were the work of cerebral, eccentric British directors: John Boorman, who was good enough to bequeath to us his vision of Los Angeles circa 1967 with Point Blank, and Mike Hodges, who kept things closer to home with his 1971 Newcastle noir Get Carter. Point Blank was based on The Hunter, the first in the series of books that Donald Westlake, writing under the name "Richard Stark", hammered together about the professional sociopath Parker. He was rechristened "Walker" in the movie, which might be his name or might be the generic label under which he's be filed at the supermarket; Lee Marvin's main function in the role is to walk, walk, walk to the next set at which he will administer his next ass-whupping as he climbs the corporate climb ladder, trying to reclaim the $93,000 he earned when he and his pal Reece (John Vernon, in his first big movie role in what would be a long, completely untrustworthy career) intercepted "the Alcatraz run." When Reece took the money, he also shot Walker, left him for dead, and made off with his wife. Part of the movie's outrageous fascination is that Walker dispatches Reece fairly early on, by which time he's visited his wife, who promptly reacts to the news of his continued existence by committing suicide. You might think that this would be the logical climax to his lust for revenge, and maybe it is, because he never seems particularly lustful or much of anything else as he continues to run amok, tearing down the whole organization as he chases after his $93,000. Maybe this is what Harmonica, in Once Upon a Time in the West, became after he'd finished off Frank: an empty vessel, still super competent and totally ruthless, denuded of all passion but still hard at work. Just because you've lost your reason for living doesn't mean you tolerate unfinished business.



The Parker books are so stripped for action that it didn't take much of a shove to turn the material into an abstract fantasy on the theme of violent revenge. Get Carter is more straightforward but has a similar merciless flavor. There is no pretense that any of the characters are likable, let alone socially tolerable. Michael Caine's Jack Carter is a professional killer who got out of the urban slum and moved to London, where he works for the big Mr. Big. The playwright John Osborne plays the Newcastle heavy, the small town Mr. Big. Carter has returned home because someone had the temerity to murder his brother, who he himself most likely cuckolded; there is a strong suggestion that Jack is the father of his brother's daughter. Everyone, including the people who have the most reason to fear Jack--Ian Hendry, the Osborne employee who had something to do with the murder, and Osborne himself, whose organization Jack has no compunctions about interfering with if that's what it takes for him to get what he's after--goes out of his way to treat Jack insolently and rudely, and to express disdain for his mission. Since they can't possibly doubt his ability to kill them, they must doubt his willingness to die himself if he has to in order to kill them, which is a bad call on their part. The movie ends with Osborne helping to set up Hendry so that Carter will leave his business alone. Then Hendry arranges for a sniper to be in place to take Carter out--though not before Carter has been allowed to take out Hendry. But by that time, Carter has guaranteed that, while he's finishing off Hendry, Osborne will be brought down, either as revenge for the double cross he knows is coming or just because he's so far past giving a damn. Get Carter is much loved by the English, who treasure it as evidence that they can make grim, mean action movies just like Hollywood. Of course, they can't make them just like Hollywood--an American remake of Get Carter made in 2000, with Sylvester Stallone in the title role, was apparently made for the express purpose of proving this--which is why all the rest of us treasure it. (The recent British movie Harry Brown, which stars Caine as an old man wiping out the scum who've infested the area surrounding the housing project where he lives, tries to tap into fond memories of Get Carter, but it is instead a ham-handed example of the vigilante genre, a sort of generic Death Wish--which, come to think of it, is what Death Wish installments 2 through 4 were, the last one having been made when Charles Bronson was in his seventies.)



There are more elegant ways of going about these things. The classic 1934 version of The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Robert Donat, The Dumas story is a full-blooded, baroque masterpiece of the art of the paranoid fantasy: the hero, Edmond Dantès, is packed off to a prison cell by villains to whom he has done no wrong, simply because circumstances have made his presence politically inconvenient. It's only slightly personal in the case of one of these sacks of shit, because he loves Dantès's fiancee. When, having long since been thought dead, he returns, with a new name and personal fortune, he goes above methodically springing a series of traps that bring his enemies low, though a big part of his triumph is simply that, reincarnated as the dashing Count of Monte Cristo, he has gone from being a harmless but likable fellow to a tortured, iconic romantic hero, and clearly their superior in terms of personal style. The fact that the woman he loves is now married to one of the men he will destroy, and that the image of the enemy's younger self lives on in the form of their son, who Dantès recognizes as a fine young man in need of a worthy father figure, adds a tinge of the kind of revenge fantasy I have always found most potent, that of the frustrated lover.



Tonight's TCM schedule is divided into two categories, one of which is "A Spurned Lover's Revenge", represented by two classic lit adaptations directed by William Wyler: Wuthering Heights and The Heiress. The other category is "A Con Artist's Revenge". Actually, the greatest movie on tonight, Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve, straddles these two categories. Like Sturges's other masterpiece, Unfaithfully Yours, it plays havoc with settled assumptions about love and faithfulness. Con artist Barbara Stanwyck sets her sights on rich goof Henry Fonda and snares him, only to find that her sweet simpiness awakens tender feelings in her. Then he finds out who she really--make that "really"-- is and wants nothing more to do with her. She adopts a British accent and a new name and goes after him again, and he, with the flawless logic of someone who wants to believe, no matter what, reasons that she can't be the same girl he met and rejected, because she would have tried harder to disguise herself. (Stanwyck, in turn, reasons that they really do look different to each other now, because they're no longer in love at that specific place and time.) She wants to prove that she can get him to the altar, because she needs to get even with him for humiliating and spurning her and breaking her heart. But she also wants to do it because she still wants him. ("I need him," she purrs, "like the ax needs the turkey.") The moral of the story is that you can have your cake and eat it to, so long as you don't mind there being a few shards of glass in the icing. I don' tknow about you, but there have been days when I wouldn't have minded at all.



With all due respect to the makers of Kill Bill and Oldboy, my favorite recent (i.e., not-classic-yet) revenge movie might be The Damned United, an English film from last year that was directed by Tom Hooper and adapted by Peter Morgan from a novel by David Peace, a fictional speculation on what might have been going on in the mind of the late "football"--you know, soccer--manager Brian Clough (played by Michael Sheen), during the few weeks in 1974 when he was in charge of Leeds United, the high point of his career in terms of his profile and the low point in every other way. The movie's Clough is a strutting, headstrong working class bloke with a smile on his face and a chip on his shoulder; he has a flair for delivering such sound bites as, "I wouldn't say I'm the best manager in the country, but I am in the top one." The movie's point of view is that Clough was driven to win, as the manager of the Derby club, by a ferocious rivalry taking place in his head between himself and Don Revie (Colm Meaney), who was his predecessor as manager of Leeds, who he thinks slighted him by not saying hello and shaking his hand when their teams met each other on the field of battle. Once Revie has been rude to him, it's not much of a leap for him to observe, or conclude, that Revie is a scurrilous cold-hearted bastard who has tutored his men in the dark arts of dirty play, unsportsmanlike conduct, and outright cheating. When he's brought in as Revie's replacement, he sees it as his opportunity to show that his way is right and Revie's way was wrong, wrong, wrong--an attitude that he makes the mistake of immediately sharing with the players and the media.



He promptly flames out, a victim of his own declaration of total war against an enemy who may or may not be fully cognizant of his existence, but there's a happy ending, and not just because a series of titles at the end informs the ignorant among us that Clough went on to success with a different team, winning two European cups in succession, while Don Revie was a dismal failure for the rest of his career, so that his name is now used by English schoolchildren to taunt the less genetically and intellectually gifted among them and is a common euphemism for "bedpan." But the real triumph is, of course, he's the one who got the movie made about him. In your face, Revie!

Avidly

Tony Curtis was the kind of actor that Tom Cruise would kill to be. Their early career paths were not all that dissimilar: like Cruise, Curtis broke into movies when he was in his twenties and rapidly rose to box office stardom on the basis of his youthful energy and good looks. In his early starring roles, in movies that hardly anyone (myself included) born since 1960 has seen but whose titles (The Prince Who Was a Thief, The Blck Shield of Falworth) have long been punch lines to movie junkies, he was amateurish and gauche, not that his fans could have cared less. He was paying attention and learning as he went along, though, and in interviews he gave later, he would claim to have been looking forward to getting a shot at playing a character he could relate to. That character turned out to be Sidney Falco, the febrile New York press agent in Sweet Smell of Success--directed by Alexander Kendrick from a script adapted by Ernest Lehman from his own short novel and overhauled by Clifford Odets, and released in 1957, almost thirty films into Curtis's career. Again, the role gave Curtis a chance at onscreen liberation in a way that made it roughly comparable to the part that Richard Price wrote for Cruise in The Color of Money, the biggest difference being that, in Curtis's case, when the resulting performance made your jaw drop and your mouth hang open, it wasn't because you had to vomit.

Curtis, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, grew up in the Bronx, not learning English until he was six. His mother was an abusive schizophrenic, the family so poor that Curtis was briefly housed in an orphanage because it was the readiest alternative to starvation. He may have seen Falco as one possible version of himself, a hustler who wasn't fated to be at center stage and so had to get his gratification by promoting other people behind the scenes, and who had to push that much harder because of it--and he definitely understood what made Sidney run. Unapologetically sleazy and desperately overcaffeinated, he incarnated big-city street energy in a different way than any movie star before him, even James Cagney, and he was more than up to the challenge of Odets's dialogue. The lines were so ornately yummy they were like gorgeously overdecorated pastries, and Curtis's delivery of them felt like a loving caress, even as he bit into them so hard that icing practically spattered the walls.

It would have been a great performance of it had come from Joe Pesci, but it also served notice that Curtis had learned to use his extraordinary looks to cunning effect. In his New York Times obituary, Dave Kehr points out that "Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early 1950s. A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity", notably in his drag performance in Some Like It Hot (in which he also unveiled his impression of Cary Grant, who he idolized as a premier example of someone who lifted himself high above a hellish, blighted childhood with nothing but his talent, looks, and some luck) and as the object of Laurence Olivier's desire in Spartacus. ("A singer of songs?" Oliver purrs, examining the younger man's CV. "For whom did you perform this wondrous talent?") A major style influence of Elvis Presley, Curtis wasn't merely handsome but beautiful, in a provocative way, and as an actor, he was both aware and in control of its effect on people: The oyster scene in Spartacus isn't something that the writer and director slipped in under his radar, like the homoerotic undercurrent that Gore Vidal and William Wyler smuggled past Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur. It's a major shame that, Some Like It Hot aside, Hollywood could offer Curtis nothing in the way of sex comedies beyond the likes of Sex and the Single Girl and Not with My Wife, You Don't! Somewhere out there in the ether, filed in the archives of the library of unmade movies, are the eye-popping comedies that the Curtis of the '50s or '60s could have made with the Pedro Almodovar of the '80s or the Bertrand Blier of the '70s or maybe even Marco Ferreri, possibly with a little input on the script from Joe Orton or Charles Ludlam.

On more than one occasion, I've heard Curtis say that the performance he was proudest of was as the title character in the 1968 The Boston Strangler. It was a funny thing to hear, given that it was an uncharacteristically joyless piece of work in a fairly grim, colorless movie. But Curtis makes his entrance late in it, having gained weight for the role and submitted to being outfitted with one of the least flattering (and least convincingly-looking fake noses in the history of movie prosthetics, and maybe he felt that he must have been doing the best work of his life because he was enjoying himself the least. After that, Curtis began doing a lot of TV--starring in such series as The Persuaders and the embarrassingly short-lived McCoy and playing a hotel owner named "Phil Roth" in the Robert Urich vehicle Vegas$--at a time when prominent exposure on the small screen was understood to mean that one had officially received one's gold watch as a movie star. His kind of delicate-featured androgynous beauty does not generally improve with age, and as the level of films he deigned to appear in sank past the level of Casanova & Co., Sextette (starring an octogenarian Mae West), The Manitou, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, and The Mirror Crack'd to pictures so devoid of interest (and, in most cases, release dates) that they don't have their own Wikipedia entries, his face kept getting thicker and his hairpieces kept getting sillier. But he still burned with charisma and bubbled over with humor, and if he couldn't animate whatever part he was playing, you likely couldn't get it to twitch if you put five thousand volts through it.

The fact that Curtis, who received the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995, never won an Oscar, not even one of those special lifetime achievement award dealies, might best be seen as Hollywood's revenge on anyone who would pay it the compliment of taking its honors seriously. It's easy for Hollywood to respect someone like Daniel Day-Lewis or Terrence Malick, who seems to have something on his mind other than taking whatever job is available and keeping in the public eye no matter what. Curtis, spending his last decades in show business as a busy C-lister, must have had a ferocious need to stay famous and get attention, but he also had something that seems like a lost blessing in our reality-show age: a genuine desire to give pleasure through his performances, to make people enjoy watching him, so they'd be glad when they saw him again. In fact, when you look at him today in the work he left behind, whether it's in Sweet Smell of Success or Lobster Men from Mars, his uncomplicated pride in his work, and in knowing that he's a treat to watch, look almost like a state of grace. Denied the full measure of respect that he deserved, he had to settle for the love and affection of all those with hearts that pump blood and eyes that see. Boo fucking hoo, right?

Tony Curtis: I F**cked Yvonne DeCarlo! - watch more funny videos

Meanwhile, Back at the Pineapple-Infested Hellhole...

The new Hawaii Five-0 isn't threatening to ever turn into anything more than a formula TV cop opera, and those of you with less constricted aesthetic standards than mine can be excused from any conversation in which it attempts to take center stage, but it is unusual for being one of the few "remakes" of a network TV series that gains a little something if you know your history well enough to compare it to the original. That series, the one that bequeathed the phrase "Book 'em, Danno" and the term "Five-0" as shorthand for "the police" to standup comedians and rappers of multiple generations, ran an inexplicable twelve seasons--from 1968, when LBJ was about to cede the stewardship of our nation to Richard Nixon, to 1980, before Ronald Reagan took the wheel from Jimmy Carter--and was the opposite of an ensemble show. It starred the late Jack Lord, who had previously hit the beach with his gun cocked as Felix Leiter in Dr. No, the first James Bond movie, and who, unlike Sean Connery, was not asked back to that particular franchise. Lord was the kind of star who was invariably referred to in TV Guide profiles as "a perfectionist", a term that, like "confirmed bachelor", was then understood, by regular readers of gossip magazines (such as my mother, who helped indoctrinate me in reading the code), to have a specific, unchanging meaning. Basically, it meant that he was such a pain in the ass on the set that, someday, lighting guys and grips and craft service people would be lining up taking numbers to dance on his grave.

Lord may not have been much of an actor--based on his twelve-year stint as Steve McGarrett, the deep-voiced keeper of order on the big island, it's impossible to tell--but he had the kind of ego-driven faith in his own charismatic importance that, onscreen, translates into a presence that eats up all the oxygen in the room, leaving nothing for the hapless players surrounding him. This may have made him a figure of fun; in the 1976 "collection of humor by women", Titters, Susan Toepfer wrote that "he has been known to swim in a bathing cap to protect [his hairstyle]...or perhaps its dark black coating. Lord gives his age as forty-six, but according to one reporter's calculations, this means the remarkable actor completed high school at age seven and married for the first time at nine." (According to Wikipedia, Lord was actually forty-seven when he first transmorgified into McGarrett.) But his inhuman dominance of all around him, and the way that it reduced those around him (such as poor James MacArthur, whose role as Danno required him to spend eleven years of his career on the wrong end of a sage-mentor/baby-faced-naif relationship) to bit players in his personal drama gave the show whatever interest it had, apart from its justly fabled theme song. (For me, the most perfect, iconic moment in the show's history comes when Lord makes his entrance during the opening credits. He's first seen, via a helicopter shot that seems to begin with the camera somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, standing on a rooftop balcony. The copter swoops in as if to capture his face in close-up, and then, just when it's almost got him in tight focus, he spins around, and we cut to a shot of his face taken by someone sharing the balcony with him, as if he were telling the camera operator on the helicopter, "Sorry you had to come all this way, but I only work with my personal photographer.")

On the new show, McGarrett, now the head of a special team put created by the governor (Jean Smart) to protect her island from international terrorists, Russian gangsters, and other new-style ne'er-do-wells, is played by Alex O'Loughlin, who starred in the highly promoted, quickly canceled 2007 series Moonlight, giving him the special distinction, along with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau of New Amsterdam, to be one of the few actors of our time fail to achieve breakout stardom playing a romantic vampire. Besides Smart--who, surprisingly, delivers her speeches about how she gave you complete authority to fight crime but didn't think you'd do this with it! as if she had been genetically engineered for this very purpose--the cast includes Scott Caan in the "Danno" role, Daniel Dae Kim as a cop who has been driven out of the department for having been falsely thought to be dirty and seizes on a job offer fro McGarrett as his shot at redemption, and Grace Park as Kim's eager rookie cop cousin. In this company, O'Loughlin is the hole in the donut. (There was also a guest appearance in the second episode by Martin Starr as a pothead computer wizard. If the producers have any sense, they'll try to lure Starr back about once every third episode.) The show uses him the way Kevin Costner functioned in the company of Sean Connery, Charlie Martin Smith, and Andy Garcia in The Untouchables--a strategy that Pauline Kael compared to the way the seven dwarfs helped to set off Snow White. O'Loughlin is pleasantly dull even when he's torturing suspects, and it's as if he'd sensibly farmed out the job of entertaining the audience to his underlings so that he concentrate on the important things, like bouncing off the hood of a car just before another car collides into it or sticking a captured bad guy's thumb into a bullet wound so that he can use the blood to get a usable thumb print.

So far, the show belongs to Scott Caan, who has failed to really stand out in a number of movie roles but here, as in his doubles act with Casey Affleck in the Steven Soderbergh-George Clooney Danny Ocean movies, reveals himself to be absolutely brilliant at his specialty: playing guys who can only communicate with those they feel closest to be squabbling with them, and who rattle off elementary-school-playground insults and sarcastic expressions--"Why are you still talking? Why are your lips moving!?"--as if he thought he was doing original new material from Oscar Wilde. It's not the highest form of the actor's art, I guess, but it's something that a lot of actors have turned themselves into public nuisances by doing badly, and Caan does it the way Bruce Lee used to trash heroin dens. At one especially telling point in the latest episode, Caan fills O'Loughlin in on Martin Starr's character, telling him that he's always "baked like a po-ta-to", and O'Loughlin nods and mimes toking on an imaginary joint. It's as if the two had discussed the scene beforehand and O'Loughlin said, "How about you say your line in a funny way, and then I'll do something really obvious and unfunny that basically repeats what you said, for the people at home who are really slow?" That's their relationship, as characters and as actors, in a nutshell. (Not the least funny thing about this is that it comes almost directly after a scene in which Caan actually refers to McGarrett as "Detective Obvious".) Caan has also developed an amazing, watchable face; it looks strikingly handsome and even sensitive from some angles, lumpy and unreflective from others, and every so often he strikes an expression or delivers an inflection that reminds you so much of his father that you wonder when Brian Piccolo came back from the dead and graduated from the police academy. He's enough, for now. But if the show is going to want to avoid wearing out its welcome fast, they really need to give Daniel Dae Kim something to do besides look hurt that his old friends on the force won't talk to him at crime scenes anymore and let Grace Park do something besides look great while kicking ass.




Last night also marked the second and final time that I shall watch NBC's The Event, an ambitious attempt at a mind-fuck cult hit that, as such things go, makes Flashforward, last year's stillborn ambitious attempt at a mind-fuck cult hit, look like Philip K. Dick driving a motorcycle through the collected works of M. C. Escher with the Ditko-Lee period Dr. Strange in the bitch seat. If nothing else, the show deserves credit for having made it possible to exactly pinpoint the moment when any not unreasonably patient viewer's reaction to it abruptly shifts from bored irritation to red-eyed loathing of everyone in any way responsible for its existence.

That moment comes near the end of the latest episode, when the hero is sitting in the back of a car and tries to explain to the cops who've arrested him that he's been framed for murder and is on the run after having hijacked a commercial airliner whose pilot was being compelled, under duress by conspirators who had kidnapped his daughter, to try to assassinate the President of the United States by flying the plane more or less directly into his face. When he finishes his summary, which has been of great help to anyone who came in late, one of the cops sneers at him and delivers a speech of her own, a very long one, delivered in a tone of withering sarcasm, which goes something like this: Oh, wow, I'm sure that all that happened, it doesn't sound at all unlikely, gosh, you sure must be a really important person for all those people to go to all that trouble just to ball you up, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Heads up to anyone who might someday find themselves writing what's intended to become an ambitious mind-fuck cult hit: anyone who is going to give your work a try is going to know going in that unlikely and preposterous things will happen in it. Absolutely no one in your target audience is going to ever think, at any point, man, I sure do wish that one of the characters would complain, ideally sarcastically and at great length, that this is all very unlikely and preposterous. If that does happen, not only will it not magically make the whole thing seem much more probable and believable, but those of us watching will take it as a personal affront.

VQR R.I.P., P.S.

Emily Bazelon's article about the suicide of Kevin Morrissey and the reverberations from it, which have imperiled the existence of the Virginia Quarterly Review--at least, the version of it that we've come to know since Ted Genoways took over as editor in 2003--is a necessary corrective to the version of this story that's taken off the Chronicle of Higher Education and The Hook, and then the goddamn Today show, picked it up late in the summer. Bazelon's piece makes you realize how much the earlier articles managed to "suggest" about what was going on at VQR simply by including some smallish details they pointedly left out, such as drawing a picture of Alana Levinson-LaBrosse, a staffer hired by Genoways, that doesn't try to imply that she was the editors' rich-dilettante sugar mama and underage love slave, some of the details of Morrissey's suicide note (which, she reports, was addressed to an ex-girlfriend; it was originally, falsely said to provide evidence that he blamed Genoways for his final act), and the circumstances that led Genoways to order Morrissey to remove his corporeal form from the magazine's offices.

Bazelon also fleshes out what inspired an email that Genoways had sent to Morrissey the day he killed himself, in which he is said to have basically accused of endangering a writer's life through his own incompetence: "The e-mail regards a Mexican writer for VQR who had contacted Morrissey to say that he'd been held up and badly injured by gunmen who'd come to his home in Ciudad Juarez. The writer didn't directly ask for aid, but he sounded scared and said the police had refused to help him. Morrissey eventually forwarded the message to Genoways, but not until 10 days had elapsed. When Genoways realized the e-mail was 10 days old, he wrote to Morrissey, 'Just so I'm clear: Why did it take you ten days to forward a message from someone asking our assistance with saving his life? A period during which you sent or forwarded twenty other e-mails to me?'" This is the message that Morrissey's sister has clung to as the smoking gun that lays her brother's death at the feet of Ted Genoways, and the excuse for shaping the whole story as a parable about workplace bullying and the need to produce victims and villains related to this phenomenon who can be memorialize in many, many appearances on Oprah. To which anyone who can read can only say: Really? Seriously? No shit?

I don't think of myself as being especially soft on the issue of workplace bullying. I used to work for someone who had inherited the business under the worst imaginable circumstances and had also recently gone through a messy divorce and had no better place to deposit the detritus of her issues than on the person who was paid to be around her for a certain number of hours every day. She fired me four times in three times, not counting the last time, when I decided to let it take; the second time she fired me, it was because the first time she'd fired me, the day before, I hadn't yet realized that telling me I was fired was just her way of saying that her head hurt, and so I had told someone that I'd been fired, which turned out to be a "firing" offense. I hung in there because I loved the job, but none of this was conducive to my mental and emotional well-being; still, while I don't think that people should treat their employees this way, even at the time I knew that if I killed myself, the blame, if that's the applicable word, would be my own, if only for not going out to look for another job with a more pleasing work environment. I'm not inclined to scold anyone, Morrissey included, for the suicide of someone who had a long history of depression, but I'm not his sister, and it's understandable that Maria Morrissey would want to find someone, anyone, besides her brother to blame for her loss. For those who have a little more distance from this sad event, the evidence that Genoways is to blame for it is so thin on the ground that the major thing driving this story, and maybe the issue of workplace bullying, at least for the people most intent on turning it into an issue with legal ramifications and its own subset of psychobabble, is the need, now that the market for stories of satanic ritual abuse isn't what it used to be, to have people who will give us permission to revel in the thrilling sensation of moral outrage, who will point their fingers and give us other people to whom we can feel incredibly, vindictively superior.

Next to all that, this seems a small thing, but I can't help mentioning it: in the course of reading so many stories about this, I have become mesmerized by how many people seem to have been appalled, disgusted, or just grossed out that Genoways, in the course of transforming VQR from the kind of sleepy little campus journal whose reputation was all the more solid because nobody read it into an excitingly, lively, great-looking read, spent a lot of money. Genoways' predecessor at the magazine had so little enthusiasm for actually spending his budget that, over the course of two decades, he had built up a surplus of $800,000; Genoways used it to pay generous fees to people whose work he wanted and to finance ambitious journalistic assignments, such as the material on mining in Bolivia, the Congo, Canada, Chile, Kosovo, India, Afghanistan, Montana, and the Peruvian Amazon that makes up the cover feature ("The Price of Paperless") in the current, possibly farewell, issue, not to mention the stories that were people were working on when Morrissey died. Never was it alleged that Genoways pocketed any of that money, but the earlier stories on VQR did manage to suggest that for a serious literary magazine to spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, over the course of six or seven years, by just giving it to its creative contributors and fund their projects, was at best unseemly, at worst, sort of crooked.

Now, I consider myself a child of the punk/DIY/fanzine/inspired amateur/whatchamacallit age, and I know that everywhere you look in this culture, at the movies and on Broadway and concert stages and on TV, you see money being pissed away, used as a substitute for imagination and creativity and style and truth itself. But speaking as someone who's been putting words together for money for at least ten years and who's never come within a light year of making a living wage at all, I feel comfortable in offering the suggestion that anyone who has ever flirted with the idea that somewhere in this world there might be someone who has contributed poetry or criticism or fiction or reporting on the copper mines of the Atacoma Desert to a publication with a circulation in the mid-four figures who might have been paid too much money for their work is probably overdosing on his fucktard pills.

It's Funny Because It's True

This is probably too obvious to even be worth pointing out. but the reason that Republican and Democratic Congressmen and conservative TV assholes are bitching about Stephen Colbert's "in character" appearance before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Security--in which he used his one day of manual labor, alongside migrant workers, as part of the United Farm Workers' "Take Our Jobs" program, as a springboard to mock callous attitudes towards people who, as he said, work their asses off for little pay at jobs that most Americans wouldn't touch with a stick--is not that it was a frivolous waste of time and taxpayers' money. If it had been, it would have been on a par with other celebrity appearances before Congress such as the time that John Travolta and Isaac Hayes testified about their concerns regarding religious persecution (i.e., the dissing of Scientology) or when a Backstreet Boy shared his informed concern about mining in the Kentucky mountains. (Or the time that Roger Clemens was invited to appear before the cameras so that Republicans could hold his hand and sympathize with him because mean people said he'd used steroids.)

Unlike 99% of the comedians on TV who insert the names of the current famous politicians and references to their latest scandals and gaffes into their pre-chewed material as if they'd learned to do political satire from doing Mad Libs, Colbert is the genuine article, someone with an informed point of view whose stuff is actually funny because it's actually on target. John Conyers didn't complain that his ten minutes were an egregious waste of the committee's time (and the clowns on Fox News didn't complain that he wasn't funny) because anyone was bored by him. They complained because he made the people who are happier not thinking about the issues he addressed uncomfortable, just as he did at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2006, when he used an occasion traditionally used by the press and politicians to be chummy with each other in a way that undermined the unseriousness of how both groups approach their jobs to tell the President, a captive audience, how he looked to the world outside his bubble. Bush didn't like it, but the most uncomfortable people in the room that night might have been the reporters, who must have felt funny seeing what someone who didn't want to be buddies with the most powerful person in America actually looked like. If any of them retained some phantom reptile memory of what being a reporter is supposed to be like, they must have been in real pain. So too for political and TV hacks who had the harrowing experience of seeing a Congressional hearing about something they'd rather people not even think about enlivened by someone who knows how to make it absolutely clear what he thinks on the subject in a way that entertains people and points out what's funny, albeit grotesquely funny, about those on the other side. Why can't all celebrities be like Elmo?

N.Y.P.U.

So far this fall season, my favorite new embarrassing attempt to grapple a little with the subject of Where We Are Now in the context of a dramatic network series is Blue Bloods, the family cop show currently propping up a tombstone in CBS's Friday night graveyard. (I have not seen the much-maligned Outlaw.) By "family cop show", I don't mean that the heroes say "Gosh!" and "Jumpin' jehosaphat!" when they come across a bloodless dead body laid out on the sidewalk with its eyes shut and its pants still on. Blue Bloods is actually about a New York family of cops who are so close that they might as well live together in one big house, like the Bradys, or the Monkees. Tom Selleck is the gruff and stoic chief police commissioner, who is a father figure not only to his kids but all of the five boroughs. The pudding-like Len Cariou, who wouldn't stop smiling inanely if you took a power drill to his kneecaps, is Selleck's old pappy, the grandfather figure and cautionary example, having had his own career derailed years earlier as punishment for some as yet unspecified transgression that presumably involved speaking truth to power. (In real life, Cariou is only six years older than Selleck but presumably pays his personal trainer a lot less.)

Selleck's older son, Donny Wahlberg, is a two-fisted , streetwise detective, and his youngest son, Will Estes, has just graduated from the police academy, a career move that meant walking away from his law studies at Harvard and "the fast track to Washington." (If Estes had held out for more money, the producers could have just arranged to use CGI to transplant Benjamin McKenzie's near-identical character from Southland.) Selleck had another boy who was killed on the job. To balance things out, he also has a daughter--played by Bridget Moynhan, who appeared in such movies as The Recruit and the short-lived series Six Degrees but who is, let's get real, probably best known as the mother of Tom Brady's son--who works in the D.A.'s office and, being a lawyer and maybe also because she's a chick, cares about constitutional niceties and the rights of the accused, whereas the guys care about locking up skels and perps and throwing away the key before they can rape and eat our children.

In the pilot, it is the need to find and bring down one such scumbag before he can destroy another innocent young life that pulls Wahlberg away from the festivities at MSG, where Little Brother has just been made one of the city's guardians. Besides having inherited the cop gene from his dad and grandpa, Wahlberg has been to Iraq and knows what it takes to keep the evildoers at bay, such as extracting the whereabouts of a killer pedophile's captive victim by ducking the quote-suspect-unquote's head in a toilet. Fortunately, he is equipped with a black partner, whose approval of his partner's methods certifies that he is no racist, though the bad guy in the pilot is white, just to be on the safe side. (Wahlberg, who in the past has shown himself capable of being a strong and surprising actor when given half a chance to be one, gives a standard TV-cop performance, crumpling up his face when he receives bad news and pumping his fist and saying "Yes!" when he hears news more to his liking.)

Right from the start, the dialogue is both hectoring and gruesomely on the nose. Holding a press conference to tell the city that a little girl has been kidnapped but that there's no need to worry because Donny Wahlberg is all over it like ugly on an ape, Selleck has to listen to a Latino reporter ask him about "blogger allegations" that the cops care more about white kids who've disappeared than non-white kids. Selleck, who isn't so much angry aa terribly, terribly hurt, says,"Miguel, you're a professional journalist. Do you really want to give credence to any amateur blogger with a laptop?" No one complains that he's evading the question, maybe because they were expecting him to use that question as an excuse to register the writers' (or Selleck's?) disapproval of bloggers, because why else would the reporter have phrased the question that way? It's not as if any real newspaper or TV reporter would use his time at a press conference to cast himself as a delivery system for the complaints of bloggers, not in a million years. (Another reporter in this scene is played by Andrea Roth. She only has one line in the pilot, but she's listed in the opening credits and will presumably turn out to be the mystery woman who Selleck later tells a family member that he's been "seeing".) When Selleck retreats to his lair, he is visited by the mayor (Bruce Altman), who reminds him, "You're popular with the public, but I don't have to tell you that you don't have a lot of friends in high places to back you up." It's as if he were reading aloud the notes that the writing staff pinned to the blackboard to remind them what the producers told Selleck to get him to take the part--something like, He's a maverick and a man of the people who the regular Joes love for keeping it real, but the suits just hate him that much more because of it!

Blue Bloods has been treated very respectfully by TV critics such as Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly, who called it one of the best new shows on the air, and Todd VanDerWerff at The Onion's A.V. Club, who has already nominated Selleck for an Emmy. Maybe they're impressed that the pilot was so different from other police procedurals as to have Wahlberg bust the villain midway through the episode. (Okay, that only makes it different from other police procedurals besides Law & Order, which is kind of like being different from other inside-the-mind-of-a-serial-killer thrillers besides The Silence of the Lambs.) Anyway, the show has to clear the table to make room for the big discussion of topical issues that dominates the second half. After Wahlberg tortures the child murderer by almost drowning him in the toilet, an act that the hoity-toity lawyer guy who wants death row inmates turned out onto the street and given free Cadillacs and directions to your daughter's bedroom calls "waterboarding", the entire family sits down to Sunday dinner for a spirited discussion. Moynihan argues that "if you're allowed to use force and torture, then you corrupt the moral fiber of the culture." Selleck counters, "Nobody's in favor of torture. The issue is whether the use of enhanced interrogation-- is it ever justified?" Moynihan, who lives in an eerie parallel universe where the 2008 Republican presidential candidate is a man of honor, replies, "I say no. And so does John McCain, by the way." "Okay," says Tom Selleck, master debater, "you've got a ticking bomb..."

The saddest thing, or, depending on your attitude towards well-meaning wimpishness, the funniest thing about this is the sense you get that the show means to say, this is how it should be! Sure, we, as a nation, disagree sharply about a lot of things, but we're still a family, and we ought to be able to come together and discuss those things in a respectful tone and a level tone of voice, just so long as there's an implicit understanding that the position taken by former National Review commerical spokesman and reasonable Hollywood conservative Tom Selleck is the correct one, and that nobody is going to laugh in his face or stick a fork in his nose if he pretends that torture isn't exactly torture if you call it "advanced interrogation" and even pulls that "ticking time bomb scenario" bullshit out of his ass.

Selleck shovels this stuff like the affably mediocre pro that he is, though his finest work as an actor still probably was those ads he used to do for Bill Buckley's magazine, where he looked right into the camera and, with a straight face, said that one reason he subscribed to National Review was that he loved "the humor--it's a very funny magazine", said that as if he meant it, said it as if it were a relatively sane and believable statement on a par with, "Rick, T.C., I was just hit in the head and had a dream where I met a beautiful woman on a military base in 1941 just before they bombed Pearl Harbor, and it made me realize, the little British guy who hates my guts is actually the mysterious millionaire who pays me to live in his mansion and drive his Ferrari!" Although Blue Bloods was officially "created" by a couple of Sopranos vets, Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, there have been reports that Selleck has gotten his fingerprints all over it, and it's worth mentioning that the family is called the Reagans and that the show was originally developed under the title Reagan's Law/ But I'm sure that doesn't mean anything, just as I'm sure the gang at Big Hollywood wouldn't think it meant anything if someone like George Clooney were to develop a series about a doctor who works out of a storefront church and who's committed to the cause of universal health care and called it Dr. King's Mission.

FXY

One reason that I'll never get a call from Esquire is that I've never spent a minute mulling over exactly what it means to be a man (as opposed to what it might mean to be human, or good, or a hero, or any number of more specific offshoots). I always figured that you get your Y chromosome and after that, all the rest of it takes care of itself. This may be because I'm so securely comfortable in my masculinity, or maybe it's because I grew up around people who were clearly men for whom the bar had been set pretty low. I don't know if it's by conscious design or if it's just how things fell out, but FX has defined itself as the network for shows about men struggling to define themselves as men, and/or by people obsessed with the subject themselves. After years if flailing, FX raised its profile, and found its niche, as the home of The Shield and Rescue Me, two dramatic series fairly throbbing with big-city energy and middle-aged testosterone.

Both shows were exciting and I found both of them frustrating, for the same reason: they were unstable, in a way that made me doubt that the creators had enough distance from their protagonists' macho dementia to get a handle on it. Early in The Shield's run, the show's naked determination to shock the shit out of viewers didn't seem that much more mature an approach to the job than Vic Mackey's B.M.O.C.-with-a-license-to-kill swagger. But the show fully redeemed itself for any initial callowness by the end of its hard-charging final season, especially with a series finale that trumped the fade-to-black final broadcast moments of Tony Soprano with a truly unnerving image of Mackey consigned to nine-to-five Hell. With Rescue Me, I'm still on the fence. The pilot included a speech about how, after people get too close a look at real life heroes, they start seeing little flaws and the next thing you know, they think they're looking at monsters. But the show's firemen are monsters: they're never shown as anything but bullying, homophobic, misogynistic fuck-ups. The show seems overly impressed with itself for daring to say that people who do heroic things on the job can do shitty things in their private lives; it's indifferent to the more interesting question that it raises, almost by accident: is it heroic to risk your life on the job if you stay in the job because you've become an adrenaline junkie with a death wish? I think that Denis Leary's Tommy Gavin is supposed to be in pain; on the other hand, I know that he's the same "character" that Leary, in his Boston Irish wild man persona, has always presented as a design for living. (The mystery of Leary's standup act is how anybody can reduce uninhibited lawlessness look to such a mechanical formula. Fearless about his taste in targets, too: the last time I saw Leary do standup, ten years ago or so, he was railing about Hanson.) In recent years, I've grown used to hearing the show's real fans complain that it's grown stale and lost its way. I've actually started warming to it a little, but I probably find it easier to take now for the same reason that they've given up on it: in the last season, it felt as if even the writers were sick of Tommy and his bullshit.

Earlier this year, FX threw onto the air a modern Western crime show with a hero created by Elmore Leonard, a title that paid tribute to Sam Peckinpah, and a cast that brought together the cream of Deadwood, The Shield, Lost and, um, Dirty Sexy Money--Justified. My favorite new TV show of the new decade (with all due respect the FX's other early-'10 debut, Archer, a hilariously profane cartoon that gave Jessica Walter the chance to keep Lucille Bluth alive by other means and serves as a reminder that no one is funnier than H. Jon Benjamin, so long as you can't see him), Justified managed to provide the old-school pleasures of a Rockford-style genre show, with stand-alone stories for each episode, while deepening the characters and setting--a meth-damaged slice of rural Kentucky fit for a Daniel Woodrell novel--and slowly building a larger narrative that gave the whole first season the heft of a complete miniseries. The new FX series, Terriers, starring Donal Logue as a recovering alcoholic ex-cop with a crush on his ex-wife and Michael Raymond-James as the reformed crook with whom he works as a team of unlicensed private detectives, is set in Ocean Beach, San Diego, and seems like a stab at transferring the same basic strategy to a West Coast setting, with the kind of lowlife heroes who'd fit into that setting.

As cookie cutter ideas go, it's not a bad one, but Terriers didn't hit the ground running the same way Jusitified did. Justified had enough confidence in the validity of its modern-cowboy-in-methland hero that it could afford to kid it a little; Terriers isn't as sure how to freshen up the cliches (guys working outside the law to help the law, mercenary heroes who have more in common with the crooks than they do with the official cops, beach bum-type hero old enough to be deepened by regret over past missteps) that, cobbled together, make up its heroes. It benefits a lot from the incongruity between Logue's big-shaggy-bear presence and the soft-spoken way he gently tucks his lines into the show's overall texture. I'm not sure exactly what the relationship between Logue and Raymond-James is supposed to be; there's a considerable age difference between the two, and maybe because of that, they don't really seem to be friends, and there's not a master-sensei thing going on, either. (Donal Logue isn't exactly the sort of guy who you can see someone wanting for a role model.) But the show may be developing into something: the most recent episode, which involved Olivia Williams as a woman whose husband hires Logue to provide proof of her infidelity, went in a direction that most other shows would have treated as an excuse for sick giggles, but that Terriers managed to handle with a straight face without becoming ridiculous. It ended with a development that confirmed that Logue's character is capable of being a cold son of a bitch, and this too was handled in a way so that you could understand his choices but still feel a little queasy about his making them, a feeling that was in no way mitigated by his wanting people to know that he did feel just awful about it. I don't know whether the show can keep moving in that direction, but three episodes in, it felt like a quantum leap forward.

Louie, a vehicle for the stand-up comic Louis C.K. --he starred in it and also had credits in it as executive producer, director, writer, and even editor--ended its thirteen-episode summer run on FX just as Terriers was about to premiere. It made for an intriguing contrast with Louis's previous TV series, Lucky Louie. (I don't know Louis C.K.--though I did meet him once, in 1992, when I was working for the New Orleans Film Festival and he submitted a half-hour movie he'd made, Caesar's Salad, and can attest that he was a really nice guy--but I'm going to call him "Louis" because calling him "C.K." feels bizarre.) That show ran on HBO in 2006; it was a domestic comedy about a family with money troubles and was taped in front of a studio audience, which gave it the look and feel of an old Norman Lear show from the '70s. Interestingly, it felt more weird than anything else, not because there was anything surreal about the action but because, in spite of the edginess of Louis's material, it seemed like something preserved in a time capsule from a less hip era in TV, because of the way it looked and the sweetened-sounding "live" laughter and applause, and the very fact that it was on HBO, home to The Sopranos and The Wire, made you wonder if it were meant to be some kind of exercise in style, a fucked-up riff on old TV comedy like The High Life, a bizarre 1996 HBO series created by Adam Resnik, the auteur of Cabin Boy.

It probably wasn't, but that's the kind of possibility that you find yourself taking into account when sampling pop culture in these self-aware days. The new show also begins with a '70s callback, but a much smarter and more fleeting one: the opening titles of Louie show our hero--a forty-year-old divorced father of two who's respected in stand-up circles but hardly a household name--coming out of a subway entrance, walking the streets at night, and noshing pizza to the accompaniment of the Stories' "Brother Louie". ("Louie, Louie, Louie, Lou-ee/ Louie, Louie, Louie, Lou-ey/Louie, Louie, Louie, Lou-ee/ Louie, Louie, you're gonna cry!") The show was shot, handheld camera style, on location in New York, without a laugh track, and the action is mostly low-key and simple: Louie has an unsuccessful date, Louie is driven out of his apartment for a few hours by a babysitter who can't stand to see how pathetically shut-in he's become, Louie plans to work out and gets high instead. Compared to Lucky Louie, the new show made you feel smart for watching it: it felt right, in the sense that the quiet, slice-of-life style made it feel like both a product of our times and an expression of its star-creator's sensibility.

The down side is that, surprisingly, it wasn't very funny; at least, I seldom laughed aloud at it, and there were long stretches, such as an episode in which Louie and a fellow standup get into a late-night shouting match about politics, wind up in an emergency room, and end up seeing in the new day while exchanging observations and marriage and kids and the passage of time, where I sensed the pattern of comic ideas underneath the material but wasn't sure that I was even supposed to laugh. The show turned into a reverie about being forty and alone and not in a bad place but still frustrated about what you haven't accomplished and where your life might, or might not be, going. On that level, it was absorbing and sometimes moving, but it felt odd that someone as funny as Louis C. K. hadn't managed to shape his obsessions into something that was actually funny. And it was sobering to compare Louie to Lucky Louie and reflect on how much the new show felt "better" than its predecessor because it was, in form and style, classier. The show got wilder and funnier towards the end of its run: the double-header season finale began with an inspired dream sequence involving a trash-talking TV news anchor that was worth the whole run just to get there. I'd be more than up for a second season, but only in the hope that Louie has had his fill of chewing thoughtfully on midlife melancholy,



Changing channels, if not the subject: for much of the past year, I've been enjoying a massive heterosexual man-crush on Jensen Ackles, one of the stars of the CW series Supernatural. (The other star is Jared Padalecki, who, to me, will always be the pouty-faced son of a bitch who took Rory Gilmore's virginity.) Supernatural, which is about a pair of brothers who belong to a secret subculture of "hunters" who tear around the country dispatching monsters, ghosts, and other assorted paranormal menaces, has been on the air since 2005, but I didn't give it a look until earlier this year, when I caught a rerun of the pilot on TNT and committed to catching up. It's not a great series; it has a lot of humor spread across its one hundred-odd episodes, but it doesn't expertly balance them with its scenes of emotional torment. (The brothers spend a lot of time popping their forehead veins over their hopeless yearning to just Live Normal Lives.) And while the set-up suggests a shotgun marriage between Route 66 and the "American Gothic" arc of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, some of the best episodes, which is pretty synonymous with saying the funniest episodes, are notable partly for how nakedly they "borrow" their central gimmicks from episodes of The X-Files. (There's been a score-settling dueling-flashbacks episode, an episode that did for ghostbuster-type reality shows what The X-Files once did for Cops, and even a tribute to classic movie monsters shot in black and white.) Like The X-Files, the show has an all-encompassing "mythology" that often drags it down more than it effectively ties things together; I wish that they had soft-pedaled the religious angle, which took things over last season, with warfare between goddamn angels and guest appearances by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (Amusingly, the casting department was able to reel in both Titus Welliver and Mark Pellegrino, the warring cosmic twins at the center of the final season of Lost; they played, respectively, War and Lucifer.)

What makes me tolerant of the show's lapses and maybe overly receptive to its virtues is Ackles. His Dean Winchester is a real, working class alpha male prick, the kind of guy who resents his brother for getting the education that he felt he couldn't get because of "family obligations" and taunts him by calling him a pussy. Winchester does as good a job as any actor I've ever seen of conveying the magnetic attractiveness of this kind of guy while also being authentic to the reasons he'd be insufferable if you had to be trapped in a car with him for too long. He does himself proud in the too-frequent high dramatic moments when Dean suffers or grieves or lapses into self-loathing or makes flamboyant confessions of his true feelings, but you can taste his happiness in getting to play the more entertaining moments when Dean is reduced to slapstick pratfalls by a curse or cuts through the teary bond between him and his wheelchair-bound substitute father figure (Jim Beaver) by calling him "Ironside", or just crams so many jawbreakers into his mouth that his square face turns into a rubber-lipped brick. Superstition was touted as a show that was designed and plotted to run for five seasons, but it completed its planned trajectory and returned last night for its sixth season because, well, CW was willing to pay for another year and who wants to throw people out of work in an economy like this? Does it have another year in it? I thought the season premiere, which began with Dean "retired" and thinking he'd begun that normal life he wanted, started out promisingly and then became problematic, which is my slightly self-protective way of saying that I have no clear idea what was supposed to be going on during the last fifteen or twenty minutes. I've been checking Television Without Pity all day to read the recaplet and enlighten myself, but as of this writing, it still hasn't appeared, so maybe they're taking a vote on it over there.

Yesterday's News

Last week, I was watching the season finale of True Blood after catching up on the news from the anti-Park51 rally in Manhattan. Early in the show, the blonde P.R. face of acceptable vampirism appeared on a cable news show to debate someone who was using Russell Edgington's unhinged rant on live TV to stir up anti-vampire fears in the electorate. This, she said, was irrational and unfair. Yes, there was a vampire named Russell Edgington who was a murderous lunatic who had declared war on the human race, but there was no reason to interpret this as meaning that the human race should fear and hate all vampires, or believe that a state of war existed between the two races. Huh, I thought, isn't that funny, when this scene was written and staged and shot, the people who worked on it could scarcely have imagined that, by the time it aired, it would seem like an explicit metaphor for what had turned into maybe the most explosive political issue of the summer. Then I caught myself and realized, Jesus Christ, I'm perceiving vampires as a symbolic stand-in, a relatively sympathetic one, for Muslims! I can't relate to the people at that rally in any way or on any level, and yet my brain automatically made the connection, moderate Muslims = misunderstood monsters. Which I guess means the terrorists have won.

The people who brought down the WTC wanted the West and the Islamic world to be at war. They lived in a world in which an enlightened, twenty-first century America took it as a given that it could make room for anyone regardless of ethnic background or religious belief system, and they wanted to throw a wrench into all of that, and get Americans to see that separation was necessary: that we had to stay out of their part of the world and view anyone whose religion allowed them to fit into that world had to be regarded with fear and loathing. When September 11, 2001 dawned, this was a view that "America" officially recognized as belonging to a previous century; even people who could take or leave what John Bolton, in his address to the rally, sneered at as "religious tolerance and understanding", dismissed xenophobia as a hindrance to the full reach of modern global capitalism.

George W. Bush, a man who seldom failed to see the superior moral wisdom in rejecting anything that someone with a Liberal Arts degree would regard as a no-brainer, was never susceptible to this kind of thing, because he had been raised from childhood to recognize that whatever he had in common with his fellow men was more important than however they were different, so long as the fellow man in question might have an oil well. If Bush had no other qualities that made it desirable for him to be in charge of the country in its time of pain and panic, and damned if I can think of any, the fact that his inclination to judge people not by the color of their skins but the size of their summer estates did ensure that he would be discourage blind hatred of Arabs and Muslims, even as he winked to the religious right that the new state of permanent war would count as a "crusade." Hints of anti-Arab bigotry, and suggestions that those not willing to indulge in them were undermining American security, were not unknown during the Bush years, but we know that Bush himself was immune to the stuff, because of the political tone-deafness that he showed in the Dubui Ports World deal. He may have used 9/11 as an excuse to go after his daddy's unfinished business, and been willing to exploit people's feelings that, if Osama bin Laden was hard to find, killing this other Arab bad guy would be the next big thing, but that didn't mean that he'd understand why his base was reluctance to do business with somebody.

Some of the people who jumped into the Park51 mess were aspiring demagogues and self-styled mean widdle kids with known racist bona fides, ecstatic over the arrival of their moment. The rally brought together a full cross-section of them, from that Atlas Shrugged ninny to the aforementioned Bolten (recently seen telling a documentary crew that he doesn't believe that we as a nation or any torturer or genocidal loon we think might be able to lend us bus fare ought to be subject to international law, saying, "If that makes me an American exceptionalist, I'm an American exceptionalist", seemingly dumb to the fact that, in fact, it makes him a monster) to the fearless tormentor of any black person so unreasonably pushy as to hold political office or vote, Andrew Breitbart. (Breitbart, who is as one with those who've spent the last eighteen months wailing that, because they came out on the wrong side of a landslide election, they are victims of tyranny, pointed out that, because polls show that most people are against the building of the community center, it would be ridiculous for anyone to say that this position is "morally incorrect", and then, in a spirited callback to 1993, accused people who think that people have the right to their own religion and building what they want on their own property are guilty of political correctness.)

Of course, the champion face of American anti-Arab bigotry is, and has been for at least a quarter of a century, Martin Peretz. In 1986, Peretz used his vanity page in The New Republic to lob into the world the insight that "nonviolence is foreign to the political culture of Arabs generally and of the Palestinians particularly. It is a failure of the collective imagination for which no one is to blame." After everyone gasped, Hendrick Hertzberg, the magazine's editor, fell on his sword and wrote that he was to blame, having carelessly reshaped his boss's prose in such a way that it seemed to mean something every bit as ugly as everything else that Peretz has proudly written about Arabs. Peretz churns this shit out on a regular basis, but every 24 years or so, he manages to amp it up just enough to get the gag reflexes of people who thought they'd grown immune to him to spasmodically jerk back to life. In the bloggy age, it's harder for Peretz to point to his current editor-for-hire as the guilty party, so the outrage over his most recent act of horror inspired his own bizarre non-apology. "I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse," he quotes himself, "I wrote that, but I do not believe that...So I apologize for my sentence, not least because it misrepresents me."

It's a novel approach, the writer (and owner of the only publication that will publish him) grunting that he was misquoted by himself, or at least that his own writing "misrepresented" him. (Of the other stink notable stink bomb in the column at hand, "Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, especially for Muslims," he only sniffs, "This is a statement of fact, not value." He also complains that one of his attackers, Nicholas Kristof, "made this seem like a statement of bigotry." It's true, he did, using the dirty trick of quoting Peretz accurately.) At least Peretz is more or less open about his admission that his life's work is worthless, surely the kindest judgment one can lay on someone who writes things he doesn't believe for publication. Hemingway, confronted with some mildly embarrassing things he's said by a Paris Review interviewer, affably suggested that maybe we sometimes say things aloud to find out if we believe them. This strikes me as reasonable. It certainly points up the difference between shooting your mouth off and writing, or at least reminds us that there ought to be a difference.

Of course, the anti-Muslim fever of the summer just past also inspired a lot of people who ordinarily couldn't care less about Arab-bashing to get solidly in touch with their inner Oswald Mosely. By the time things were coming to a boil, the most conspicuous of them might have been Newt Gingrich, recently seen in Esquire explaining to his second wife, who was perplexed as to how he could be overseeing impeachment hearings against Bill Clinton's faithless penis at the same time that he, Newt, was auditioning a staffer twenty-three years his junior to serve as her replacement, bu explaining that what he had to say to the country about proper morality was so important that it made his own personal morality beside the point. Gingrich is an extreme example of a hollow shell of a former politician who now exists only as a support system for his own hype balloon. He's permanently "exploring" the idea of running for president because he has no other way of seeming relevant to the people who book cable shows and he has to keep seeming relevant because he has no honest way of making a living. He might very well prefer to be talking about the global economy and one big blue marble--or any of the other things he's claimed to care passionately about over the course of a long, fraudulent career. But Arab-bashing and Islamofear is what his target audience is buying now, so instead he's been breaking a sweat, starring in apocalypse docs and plugging Dinesh D'Souza's latest crackpot sound bite and campaigning against the threat that Sharia law poses to the U.S. legal system. His determination to cover all bases, joined to his blatant opportunism, makes him seem more than a bit mad, but when you're a Method actor in a room full of authentic tongues-speaking snake-handling lunatics, you try harder.

Gingrich's feeling for the pulse of the nation has been overrated since he started branching out beyond using C-SPAN cameras for Potemkin TV effects, and he was still tearing it up on stage last week after most of the boys and girls of summer had moved on to other fake issues, such as Christine O'Donnell's honor and the Republicans' silly-ass Pledge to America. It might seem silly for me to be writing about this now, instead of whatever's going to be included on Keith's countdown tonight. I get the feeling that the media, whose coverage peaked and then quickly subsided with Terry Jones and the 9/11 eruptions, feels that it can all now be seen in its proper context, as a fun, exciting summer sideshow, this year's version of sharks and Chandra Levy. Never mind that, after 9/11 happened, the media hung its head over all that shit and vowed to never again waste print and airtime with so many distractions from what was important. Well, this past summer, outright racism became as acceptable in American politics since the schools were desegregated, and was justified by leaders of anti-religious-intolerance groups on the grounds that to condemn it would be to disrespect the feelings of those who lost families to terrorist murderers. It constitutes a moral outrage and will cause lasting damage not just to our relations to those who may have previously been on the fence about whether average Americans deserved killing, but moderate believers in Islam abroad, who not only really do exist but have suffered far more as a result of radical Islam than Andrew Breitbart or Martin Peretz will ever be. Never mind how much they've "suffered" as a result of political correctness.

Dog Days

Those of you who check in with this site every so often in the hopes of seeing cute dog pictures (don't laugh; Google tells me that the most traffic I've ever had in my life was thanks to a post that included a throwaway reference to Jersey Shore) may enjoy hearing about my boy Jesse. Jesse is the six-year-old boxer that belongs to the Missus, and I enjoyed getting to see a few pictures of him myself before I said "Fuck it!' to this long-distance relationship shit and moved down here last spring. I can honestly say, however, that his full beauty only comes across when one is in his presence and can appreciate the full dimensions of his handsome, rectangular profile, strapping physique and elongated jackrabbit legs.

I sometimes wish that I could have fewer opportunities to enjoy the sound of his voice; a bit over-dedicated to his role in the pack as bodyguard and enforcer, he has been known to bark ferociously at every Girl Scout or itinerant yard worker who dares wander close enough to the house to lob a flier at the front yard. But it's nice to know that I'll still have fair warning the night someone slips inside to cut my throat as I sleep, especially since the Missus has asked me to give up my old habit of spreading crumpled newspapers on the floor around the bed so that no one can sneak up on me noiselessly. In retrospect, I'm astonished by his reaction to me the first time he saw me coming through the door; he was perfectly friendly, very much so, in fact, almost as if we were old friends, though I've never had another old friend so committed to expressing happiness at seeing me by trying to lick my junk. I didn't know, then, how different this was to the way he acted whenever any other unfamiliar life form came within ten yards of the house. Obviously, it boded well for our future relations.

It's slightly perturbing that, because of his features, whenever Jesse doesn't look slyly pleased with himself, he looks as if he'd just learned that an updated look at his financial portfolio had indicated that he wouldn't be able to retire before he was 82. Between that and his natural tendency towards stoicism, it's possible for even the most caring owner to be slow to detect that he's under the weather. We got a hell of scare a while ago when Jess, having spent the evening seeming unusually downcast and low-energy, suddenly began roaming all over the house in constant search of a new spot to puke. Actually, he had the dry heaves, except they weren't dry so much as foamy--which is when it began to sink in that our boy, normally a possessor of a hearty appetite, hadn't touched his food for at least a day. I've heard that road trips are a great way to give your relationship a test drive, but I'd like to vouch for driving the dog to the emergency veterinarians' at eleven at night just as a tropical storm is passing through your area. You'll want to mark the calendar and honor the date.

I'm very happy to say that the big fella is home and seemingly his old self again, which would be a 100% good thing if it weren't for the fact that he has all these pills to take every day and his old self had a champion gag reflex. But we get through it. Truth be told, with a fair amount of encouragement from the vets, we were sort of bracing ourselves to give him up for lost. The worst of it was when whatever they were giving him for his kidney and liver ailments bloated up his face and paws so that he looked like Jerry Lewis in his own time of trouble a few years ago. And when the terrified, tearful decision to bring him home--cutting short the recommended course of treatment in the hope that, if he was checking out for good, he'd be happier doing it in familiar surroundings, in the bosom of his family--there were still moments when he would strike a pose in a dark room and stand there, stock still, staring at nothing, which really upset the Missus, because we'd been warned that he might have suffered some neurological damage, and freaked me the fuck out, because I'd recently seen Paranormal Activiet. But after his system had flushed the last of his medication, it was clear that his brains and personality were intact, even as his body rushed to catch up with him. This pleased me very much, as I am fond of Jesse and appreciate the job he did helping the Missus to hold it together during the prolonged period when I was feverishly boxing up DVDs and comic books and shoving boxes at the delivery people while she, of course, could think of nothing but the moment when my Jon Hamm ass would be knocking on her door. There were other, smaller reasons for my happiness, not the least of which is that, when Jesse took ill, I was showing the Missus Robert Zemeckis's Used Cars, a movie that includes a number of very amusing reaction shots of a trained dog. It is a movie I enjoy very much, and if Jesse had not pulled through and it had been connected somehow to our shared memory of his passing, I would never have been able to watch it again.

A digression: the night before we decided to discontinue Jesse's treatment, for an ailment that apparently nearly killed him but that the hard-working doctors never were able to diagnose exactly, we had a long conversation with a very sympathetic vet, who suggested that dialysis might hold his last, best chance for recovery, and, I can't help but feel, went to unnecessary length extolling the procedure's virtues before getting to the part about how it would cost $8000. That was the moment when Phyllis, who was already in the hole for a few grand over the vital but unanticipated expense of the care and upkeep he had already received, lost it. There was just no way to do it, but she was, of course, mortified that she couldn't spend the money--spend that money, let me stress, on top of the considerable sum that she had already signed over to the pet hospital--that might, the doctor seemed to suggest, mean the difference between life and death for her sick animal friend. It was a bit of an eye-opening moment, as it made me reflect on how many people must love their pet very much but can hardly afford to even shell out what we'd already paid just to buy Jesse even time to rally and get better on his own. Of course, from there it's not much of a leap to reflect that there must be a lot of people who have to make the same choice, and in many cases have the choice made for them by the size of their bank balances, when the sick party in question isn't an animal.