Fenster Graduates from the Police Academy

Slate has a good interview with Joel Kinnaman, the 31-year-old actor who plays the weedy, fascinatingly creepy police detective on the AMC series The Killing, a show that is to early Twin Peaks what Michael Winterbottom's The Claim is to McCabe & Mrs. Miller--a homage that taps into the visual and atmospheric spell cast by the original and carries it someplace else. I've been mesmerized by Kinnaman's oft-kilter inflections and line readings, which are the only thing I've heard in seventeen years that's reminded me of Benicio del Toro's performance in The Usual Suspects, where--I quote, from memory, and almost certainly imperfectly, Anthony Lane's review in The New Yorker--having learned his lines, he seemed to have somehow arranged to be filmed at the exact moment when he was starting to forget them. It turns out that Kinnaman was probably helped in achieving this effect by the fact that he--duh!-- isn't American, but instead, like the original version of the series itself, hails from Sweden.

Slate: How well-established were you in Sweden when you started auditioning for American projects?

Kinnaman: We only make about 30 movies a year in Sweden. The year that I left I played the lead in seven or eight of them, and they were quite high profile. It was kind of intense with the attention there for a while, so it was a perfect time to get the hell out. I moved to the U.S. before all of those movies came out.

Lucian the K

In one of my recent A-V Club reviews, I said some rude things about the state of documentary filmmaking on PBS, so I thought I'd mention that I enjoyed and learned some things from the latest episode of American Experience, "Stonewall Rising", the title of which refers to the 1969 riot set off by an unscheduled police bust of a New York gay bar. (I wrote "unscheduled" because the bar, like most gay bars in the city at the time, was Mafia-owned, and the cops usually gave such places a heads-up in advance of any harassment so as to stay on good terms with whoever was giving them their payoffs.) The headline event doesn't start to happen until about two-thirds into the film, much of which is devoted to setting the scene by describing the repressive atmosphere in which gays were then expected to live, with the use of interviews and clips from old propaganda reels such as this:




Besides gays and cops (and movie critic and People's Court star Ed Koch, who at the time was getting his political career rolling as a representative of the forces of institutional gay-bashing in the name of family values), the interview subjects include two old Village Voice writers: Howard Smith, whose account of observing the action up close is vivid, stirring, and funny, and a fellow whose byline I remember from my earliest days as a compulsive over-consumer of print culture, a journalist and author of the popular bad novel Dress Grey. Here, he takes credit, sort of, for a breakthrough in gay rights coverage at the Voice. It seems that he wrote one of the first articles on Stonewall, and in that article he used the word "faggotry." (A close-up of the first few paragraphs of his article included in the film shows that he also referred to the events of that night as "a fairy tale.") The ensuing protests led to a change in policy at the paper, and henceforth homosexuals were referred to as "gays" in its pages.

The writer in question used to go by the unforgettable handle "Lucian K. Truscott IV", which always stuck me as the quietest and most efficient way of basically appearing in main street at lunch hour dressed only in a cardboard Burger King crown and a pair of underpants with the word "DOUCHE" sewn in gold thread on the crotch and ass, chanting, "I am Lord Douchey Von Douchington from the planet Douche, look on my douchiness all ye douches, and despair, douchily!" It's good to know that I hadn't judged him too harshly. According to American Experience, he's now content to be known as "Lucian Truscott IV"; he's dropped the "K." Baby steps! Coming up on American Experience, on May 16, a new look at the Freedom Writers who journeyed South to protest racial segregation in 1961. Here's hoping that Lucian Truscott IV will be invited on to reminisce about his coverage of those great days. "Today, Martin Luther King, Jr., as hungry for social justice as he has ever been for fried chicken and watermelon, raised his arm and chucked his spear into the heart of racial injustice..."

36 Inches High

I'll bet there a lot of people who, as kids, had the experience I had when I was in the third or fourth grade and suddenly realized that the British royal family doesn't actually do anything. An actual shudder went through me, and I thought to myself, "My God, when the British find out, they're going to drag those poor people out of their beds and hang them from lampposts!" I was wrong about that, of course. It turned out that they already knew, and the ones who weren't delighted to have them taking up space there had more or less made their peace with it. Apparently America, a country that came into existence in order to satisfy the itch to drop them from the Christmas card list, is still full of millions of people who regard the British royals as especially glamorous celebrities and are keen to get caught up in what passes as the drama of their lives. I don't share this interest but don't plan to rail on against it at any length, partly because I live with someone who has expressed interest in it, which is why I'll be spending part of this afternoon juggling the DVR schedule, making sure there's room on it to suck up both twelve hours of royal wedding coverage and The Phenix City Story on TCM.

I do wonder, though, how much the morbid, grotesque, and probably treasonous American love of royalty has warped our politics, or at least our taste in presidential candidates, in my media-saturated lifetime. Maybe it's always been there and always had its effect. But the taste for political "dynasties", whether it's Kennedys or Bushes, is queasy-making, especially when it takes the form of someone like George W. Bush being proclaimed obvious presidential tender when there's absolutely nothing in his background, character, resume, or list of accomplishments that would indicate that he's qualified for the job except that there's probably some old White House stationary already sitting around that they could still use after the secretaries use a dab of liquid paper on the "H." (His father's natural constituency was always Anglophiles, given that his most endearing quality was how close he came to suggesting an American Bertie Wooster.) The ugly side of this, and, dare I say it, the most openly un-American side, is the way that people who are impressed by names they've heard before and money that's been cooling in the vaults for awhile seem obliged to justify their crushes by slamming people who've climbed up from nowheresville by using their brains and determination and hard work, the old Horatio Alger formula that, in recent years, has been embodied by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Whatever you think of the men themselves, you'd think that anyone could find something to admire in that kind of personal story. But when it comes to their critics, both men have never taken anything but shit over where they came from and how they got to the top. The kind of people who were born higher up on the cliffs just seem to regard them as peasants who've risen above their station, and a lot of people who are at the economic and social levels they were born into, people you'd expect would point to them proudly as examples to their own children of what possibilities are open to them, just view them resentfully.

This isn't entirely on-topic, but I look forward to hearing the people who've been explaining for two years now how birther conspiracy theories aren't racist now explain how it's not racist to base your attacks on Obama on the idea that he's not smart enough to have had his college career, or how he needed a white "super-genius" ex-terrorist to write his book for him. This, to me, is the ultimate example of how trying to find an acceptable language in which to voice one's lowest emotional revulsion towards Obama leads conservatives to turn their own standards inside out. If Obama were white, he'd be an obvious target for the kind of attack that Republicans used on Al Gore and Jimmy Carter and other liberal brainiacs: that he's a dumb ol' bookworm spoilsport who doesn't get it, because he thinks with his head, instead of with his heart like a real American, and wants to pass a whole bunch of smart laws and regulations without asking whether they wouldn't outlaw little sis's sidewalk lemonade stand.

But instead, they're contorting themselves out of all connection to reality by trying to make the case that Obama's really stupid and only pretending to be an egghead. In their eagerness to reassure their target audience that being president doesn't make the uppity Obama any smarter than them, they've carelessly thrown away the chief message of Republican spin-meisters of the past twenty or thirty years, which is that stupid people make the best leaders. The knock on Clinton, besides his being a Dionysian hippie and his connections to the World Crime League, was that his damnable intelligence would tempt him to try out all sorts of bizarre, hare-brained schemes, like the ridiculous idea that, by trimming programs and taxing those who could best afford it, he might be able to balance the budget. Then there was Gore, who, with his head addled with clever ideas, had the crazy idea that, instead of granting massive, permanent tax cuts to the top two percent, we should preserve Social Secure and Medicare by hanging onto some of the surplus that, by the end of Clinton's term, had been mysteriously put there by friendly elves. Republicans recognized that it would take a real American, someone whose college years were devoted to drunkenness and branding fraternity pledges with heated metal objects, to turn back from such silliness. It was of course during the Bush years that the economy cratered, the federal deficit ballooned, the employment rate became basically theoretical, crony capitalism fully replaced the real thing, and the bailouts that are so alarming to Tea Party types began, just as it was after Obama's swearing-in that Tea Partiers and other white conservatives began to wail and gnash their teeth about these things.

It would be tempting to take away the lesson that many people who are either accepting or apathetic about whatever goes on under a pasty buffoon lose their shit as soon as a duskier man takes the helm, but this is clearly not the case. It's just that it would be unnatural for a conservative person who sees terrible things happening to the country under a Republican president to complain about it until he's replaced by a Democrat, and since it's an immutable law of nature that ungodly, horrible things will consistently happen whenever someone named "George Bush" occupies the Oval Office, it stands to reason that Barack Obama was going to have a lot to answer for. But since Republicans believe deeply in the moral superiority and superior management skills of the deeply stupid, the strategy of painting Obama as a closet numbskull will present a problem for Republican voters next year if the Republican nominee for president turns out to be someone who, compared to Obama, appears to be kind of intelligent. Okay, so that's not a problem that's likely to occur.

Bar the Door

Back in 2004, when Dan Rather poured gasoline over himself and lit a match on the set of The CBS Evening News--for those of you who've just joined us, Dan managed to get himself fired over his sloppy, credulously dishonest reporting of a story whose point was that George W. Bush had gotten his post with the Air National Guard through connections and then failed to distinguish himself, a feat comparable to managing to get yourself sued into penury over allegations you'd made that Bill Clinton might have sometimes liked to get him some--I was rotting in a cubicle at the CBS News polling department. What gay times they were! I remember the thrilling buzz that went through the halls when word got out that, because they were going to have to address the scandal in a story of their own and needed footage of Dan looking reporterish, Dan was going to be chauffeured to the front of the building and dramatically enter through the front door, instead of making his customary entrance from the underground catacombs beneath the sidewalk. The CBS brass wanted to make sure that we didn't cluster around him, begging for autographs or the laying on hands. Somehow, word failed to reach Waddie, a fellow pollster who looked exactly like the Dick Tracy character B. O. Plenty, and he was leaning against the front of the building, enjoying his cigarette break, when Rather was filmed swanning through the door. The front desk later received a call asking why someone had felt it necessary to endanger the company's property values by making it appear that the CBS News building was a favorite hangout spot for homeless serial killers.

After CBS decided that Dan had delighted America long enough, Katie Couric was brought in, in a tsunami of hype, to replace him. What occasions all this nostalgia is, of course, the news that Couric has announced that she will be leaving her post when her contract is up in June. I wish I could say that all the memories are good, but truth be told, the main effect that Couric's arrival had on me was that, in order to help meet her astronomical salary demands, CBS issued a memo, which landed on my birthday to give it that extra bit of pep, declaring that they would no longer be providing snacks in the break room. It was a bit of a blow, because, at the risk of sounding like I was less than a blazing success at the time, there were many days, especially towards the end of the month, when that apple and handful of pretzels were all the sustenance I was going to get that day. But I hold no ill will towards Katie. She was hired to replace Ron Burgundy's stunt double and paid a fortune to bring the ratings up, and the ratings went up and down but mostly stayed down, and then after five years, she decided to leave. For purposes of comparison, remember that Dan was hired to replace the last network anchorman who achieved American institution status, immediately drove the ratings into the toilet and established himself as a figure of fun, and stuck around for decades, only taking breaks from being a bug-eyed load to negotiate his latest massive, unearned salary increase.

I remember that, at the time, the news of Couric's hiring generated great excitement in some quarters, including among a few friends of mine. Perhaps because I was weakened by hunger, I needed a lot of help putting together the reasons for this. It turned out that my friends thought it significant that a woman was going to anchor a national newscast. That went right past me, because I remembered that Barbara Walters had, also with great fanfare, anchored the ABC news back in the mid-'70s, and there had even been a brief period in the '90s when Connie Chung had been allowed to read the news at CBS while sitting next to Dan, presumably because no better way could be found to make him look smarter. But apparently the fact that women had co- anchored network news shows before meant nothing next to the fact that one was going to be sent out there to face the cameras alone. The word also came from up high that Couric was going to use all her innovative skills to change the exhausted format of the show and make it more relevant in the Internet-and-cable age. The biggest change in the direction that I can recall was the introduction of a commentary segment called "Free Speech", which was touted as an opportunity to give those whose voices might otherwise go unheard a national forum. Before the segment was abandoned, the it provided space to such unheard voices as Rush Limbaugh, who Couric must have mistaken for somebody's plumber before some brave soul embarrassed her with the news that he already had his own radio show. (Limbaugh recently used the news of Couric's departure to lash into her as the destroyer of CBS News. Maybe his feelings are hurt that she never called him back, assuming he wasn't too fucked up on OxyContin at the time to even know that he was ever on the show at all.)

Will CBS react to Couric's departure by finding a new hero to anoint and sign on to read the news in exchange for a salary that could build schools in every impoverished region this side of the Congo and still have enough left over to cover the budget overruns on the next Transformers movie? Both for the sake of whoever is now sitting in my old cubicle and on general principles, I hope to Christ not. Network evening broadcasts are never going to have the cultural importance they once had, partly because the country has become too fragmented for another Walter Cronkite to come along and assume the mantle of the most trusted man in America, but mainly because there's literally no point to them now and no good reason for their continued existence. The aforementioned Internet-and-cable culture has brought an end to a world in which people come home from work and collapse in front of the TV to be briefed on the events of the day, just as network evening news brought an end to the world in which newspapers printed separate evening editions. It's kind of perfect that Couric's best-remembered coup as a journalist during her time at CBS, the signal event that unexpectedly shored up her reputation and helped CBS keep her around for the full length of her contract, was the Sarah Palin interview that was probably conceived as a Today Show-style game on patty cake but suddenly turned into an exercise in "Gotcha!" journalism when Palin, to Couric's unmistakable and understandable shock, glazed over in reaction to such hardball questions as, what magazines do you read?

It would be an act of kindness to the world if the networks, having long since ceased to produce news documentaries, were to stop broadcasting nightly newscasts at all. The networks never wanted to be in the news business, and given how many options exist besides the underfunded scraps they now provide, nobody wants to watch them anyway; these shows continue to exist only because the networks are full of people who grew up in a world where TV executives were still supposed to pretend to believe that news was "important" and a "public service", and none of them wants to be the first one to cancel their evening news and be the recipient of all the angry denunciations that would appear in the media, many of them from people who haven't watched a network newscast in as long as I have. At the very least, they can find the lowliest, most seniority-burdened man on their totem pole and quietly give him the show, instead of pretending that an infusion of star power is going to make any difference. That's what CBS did after Rather was fired and before Couric came onboard, a period when the CBS Evening News was anchored by the dependably lackluster Bob Schieffer. The ratings went up while he was there and declined after he left, probably because the remaining fifteen or twenty people who never miss the show accepted him as one of their own.

Birtherism, School, Work Death

The White House has released the President's "long-form" birth certificate, to prove that he really is an American citizen and so eligible to hold public office. They say they're doing this so that people can stop being "distracted" by questions about whether the President is actually Kenyan or Iranian or a Mole Person from the center of the Earth, which I believe would technically make him Guatemalan thanks to an obscure ruling passed by the World Court in 1974. You may recall that, when this particular vein of horseshit first began to hemorrhage, Obama's people responded to it by issuing a "short-form" birth certificate, which immediately flamed the fires higher because, so reasoned a great many unreasoning people, if he were really an American he'd have issued a long-form certificate, and not the short-form which, it turns out, had absolutely every single bit of information that's on the long-form. The period when this shit was being stirred happened to coincide with a time when my old Louisiana state I.D. had expired and I was trying to get a New York state I.D. so I could buy a plane ticket and get the hell out of New York, but this process ended up dragging on for months and months, because my birth certificate identifies me as "Phillip Nugent" and everything I've acquired since I was born that has my name on it--high school diploma, college diploma, electric bill, cable bill, pay stub, work I.D., membership card in the Brotherhood of Dada--identifies me as "Phil Nugent", and nobody at the DMV could find it in them to allow that these were, even theoretically, the same name. So I would have been pretty far away from being in sympathy with the "long-form"/"short-form" sticklers even if they'd been using their arguments to try to keep the BTK strangler from moving into my neighborhood.

David Weigel writes of the Obama birther conspiracy theories, "Does that seem crazy and wrong? Well, it is wrong." Not to be a stickler, but the word "crazy" seems to have dropped off somewhere between those two sentences. maybe because Weigel would prefer not to say that a crushing majority of Republican voters and pundits and bloggers and politicians, who have endorsed or at least humored birtherism, are crazy. Me, I'd go with "stupid", not quite the same thing, but it seems evasive to try to dance around the fact that all of these people do not think right, just because there's a lot of them. Weigel doesn't think that the release of the birth certificate will end birtherism, but he does seem to imply that it will make a dent in it, and that it shows up birthers in some way that their words hadn't already shown them up. Writing of the former Spy cover boy who's worked so hard to re-introduced birtherism into the news cycle, he says, "There's really no way to spin this that doesn't reveal Trump as a buffoon or a conspiracy theorist." Well, yeah. That's all he was yesterday, just as it's all he was a month ago, and this sure doesn't change it. There exists an affidavit by one Tim Adams, who claimed that "Senior officers in the City and County of Honolulu Elections Division told me on multiple occasions that no Hawaii long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate existed for Senator Obama in the Hawaii Department of Health, and there was no record that any such document had ever been on file in the Hawaii Department of Health or any other branch or department of the Hawaii government." "After today," Weigel writes, " you've got to be wondering if Adams just flat-out lied." This is very true, just as it's very true that, before today, you'd have to have wondered if Adams just flat-out lied. There are, after all, only two possibilities in this case, and the other is that Adams is insane and has conversations with imaginary people who he thinks are senior officers in the City and County of Honolulu Elections Division. There's no third possibility. That makes it a little different than most birther arguments, where it comes down to trying to decide if the person speaking is insane, a moron, or an exceptionally cynical liar. In most cases, I suspect a combination of options two and three.

I doubt that this will put any kind of dent in birtherism, any more than Justin Elliott's Justin Elliott's justly celebrated piece on Trig Truthers will convince anyone who really wants to believe that Sarah Palin's is not her baby's mother. Because, whatever else there is to say about how our brains are wired, conspiracy theories finally come down to what someone wants to believe. They're not worked out logically in response to genuinely vexing, unanswerable questions but are emotional responses that help people deal with things that they fear their tender minds can't accept. The most interesting question about them may be to the people who believe them really "believe" believe them. I can sort of understand how people who were young in 1963 could be so resistant to the idea that the world is a random, chaotic place where anything can happen and one loser with a gun can change history, even though this is, of course, something that you have to accept and deal with if you want to be an adult. (Not that lots of people don't want to be that at all.) I guess that, for such people, it must be as comforting as it is exciting to believe that there's a powerful octopus running everything in total secret and they're the only ones who can see it, except for all those dead people listed at the end of Executive Action. (I guess I ought to be grateful that, by a stroke of timing and luck, the big political scandal of my boyhood was Watergate and the one of my early manhood was Iran-Contra; after that, you'll never believe that the people in charge could be pulling off major, complicated schemes and keeping them under wraps forever.) But I do wonder, sometimes, why so many of the people I've seen explaining how the Joint Chiefs of Staff killed Kennedy don't seem to be in despair over being trapped in an evil, murderous system that can never be brought to justice. Most of them seemed gleeful about it.

People believe the conspiracy theories that serve their emotional needs, and a big part of the appeal for many has to be that they feel they're hurting the ones they hate by showing just how much they hate them. This is what I think of you; you make me so sick, I'm willing to give up my connection with reality. It's like a kid throwing a tantrum and breaking his own toys to hurt Mommy. Trig Truthers want Sarah Palin to know they think she's so sleazy that she'd secretly adopt a baby, who may be her own grandchild, for political expediency; 9/11 Truthers want George W. Bush to ache from knowing that there are people who think that an act of mass murder would not be beneath him, and want it so badly they're willing to go around inviting people to stare at them in wonder as they claim to believe that no fire could become hot enough to bring down steel; there used to be people in the United States Congress who hated Bill Clinton enough that they wanted him to know they thought he was moonlighting as an international murderer and drug kingpin. But I can't remember anything like this so deeply permeating one side of the political landscape in this way: I sure don't remember any polls showing that a significant number of Republican voters would be reluctant to support a candidate who didn't believe that Clinton had killed Vince Foster.

Nor do I recall any widespread, hateful crackpot theories that seemed to so clearly reflect on the anxieties and prejudicial leanings of the people gathered under one political party, because of course the emotional need that birtherism satisfies is the deep need of most of the people who identify themselves as Republicans to believe that a black man with a foreign-sounding name cannot represent America, cannot be American, can't really understand America and what it stands for and what it needs, and probably hayes America and wants to bring it down. How intense is this feeling? Consider that when these people and the writers and talkers who stroke their anxieties for a living aren't talking about Obama's foreignness, they're talking about his "rage", and wherever you believe that comes from, there's no way it could come from having observed the mild-mannered fellow in the Oval Office. Claiming to believe that Obama isn't American offers some people, for the small price of sounding demented, a socially acceptable way of saying that n America where a black man can become president isn't a place they want to live. (Saying, as John Boehner has, that he doesn't see it that would but would never correct someone who did or argue with them, because they have the right to believe what they think, is a socially acceptable way of saying that, while you can live with having a black president, if black people make you want to puke, he personally has no problem with that.) Why is this even socially acceptable? The demonstrable fact that a clear majority of Republicans cannot fucking deal with having a black president is very much at odds with the official position of the media, which keeps reminding us that of course, whatever differences rational people may have with the Republicans or Fox News or the Tea Party, they're all good people with the best intentions whose hysteria is in no way colored with racism. They say it in exactly the same tone they used to remind us that, of course, Ronald Reagan was always completely in touch with reality and George W. Bush was never in the least little way stupid. I suspect that history, which will be written by people who've had time to get used to living in a country that's not as lily-white as it used to be, will be less kind to them and less sympathetic to Andrew Breitbart's position that the absolute worst, most unfair thing you can do in this world is accuse a white conservative of racism, that doing so is much, much worse than actual racism ever was, and that it should never be done to anyone who isn't actually dealing in slaves and stomping on rap CDs while wearing a T-shirt that reads "I HATE NIGGERS!"

Poly Styrene, 1957-2011

The media image of a British punk in the late '70s was some frothing, inarticulate, angry git, like a Tea Partier minus the middle-age spread. Perhaps more than anyone, Poly Styrene, nee' Marianne Joan Elliott-Said, suggested just how many different paths the liberating energy of punk could open up, and how uncategorizable some of its heroes might be. Styling herself neither as a political pamphleteer nor a difficult artist type, she started out as a kid who hadn't learned to be afraid that she might be speaking out of turn or saying something no one wanted to hear; no other punk's rebellion had such an infectious aspect to it. She grew up but she didn't turn old; having staked her claim when she was at a age where she had to explain to interviewers that, no, the braces on her teeth weren't some kind of anti-fashion statement, they were just braces, she mostly proceeded to just live her life. She treated music not as a career but as something she'd found a use for and that she could always turn her hand to again, if and when the mood struck her. You were loved, honey.

Bill Blackbeard, 1927-2011

Bill Blackbeard lived an exemplary, useful, and, from the viewpoint of a certain kind of pop culture geek with a long memory, a highly enviable life. A lifelong collector interested in pulp and genre fiction of both the illustrated and non-illustrated kind, Blackbeard made plans in the mid-'60s to write the definitive critical history of comic strips, then set about doing the necessary research, ransacking libraries for their stacks of old newspapers so he could assemble the necessary collections of classic comics. After years of this archeological work, he set about sharing what he'd found with the public at large, which had mostly been denied serious republication of older comics not created by George Herriman. Blackbeard worked on Hyperion's pioneering series of comics collections in 1977; that same year, he assembled and edited, with Martin Williams, A Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics.

Later, he worked on NBM's '80s collections of Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates and Roy Crane' Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, as well as other series. In 1995, he put out the gorgeous, slipcovered two-volume The Comic Strip Century. Like Martin Williams's Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz and the A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics that Williams later assembled with Michael Barrier, Blackbeard's work, especially in the multiple-artists anthologies, amounts to an example of editorial selection as criticism, one man's verdict on what deserved to be celebrated and preserved of a medium he'd fallen in love with. Because he was one man with the knowledge that would enable him to navigate a field that had been sorely neglected, he got to live out the fantasy of many a person with an obsession and a strong degree of faith in his own taste: he basically got to construct the canon. This kept him so busy that he never did write that critical history of the comics. Except that he kind of did.

New at The A.V. Club

Nurse Jackie: "Rat Falls"

New at The A.V. Club

Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate

New at the A.V. Club

Cinema Verite

New at The A.V. Club

Coal

Strange Conclusion of the Day

David Weigel highlights this section from Andrew Breitbart's new book, which Weigel has been "reading and enjoying":

In the past few years alone, citizen journalists have deposed Dan Rather for his scurrilous and baseless attacks on George W. Bush; exposed John Kerry's true war record during the 2004 election cycle; debunked Reuters's photography fraud in the Middle East; raised the question whether Barack Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father, was ghostwritten by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers; gotten rid of communist Van Jones; and the last goes on.

Weigel then notes that the fruits of Jack Cashill's "investigation" into whether or not Ayers wrote Obama's book (which came out in 1995, a year before Obama was elected to the Illinois State Senate, and before he and Ayers are known to have ever been in the same room together) is "less compelling" than the revelation that Dan Rather jumped the gun in 2004 and used fake documents to justify a news report that George W. Bush had not been an ideal member of the Texas Air National Guard. (The use of the documents was a mistake, to put it mildly, as was Rather's confidence that this was a potential game-changer of a story in 2004. That said, I wonder if it's not overkill to apply terms like "scurrilous" and "baseless" to allegations that I suspect everyone, Bush's defenders included, believes anyway.) Still, he adds, "Donald Trump and now Andrew Breitbart are now raising questions about the Ayers-Obama authorship theory, which tells you something about the collapse of trust in the media, if nothing else." Funny, but I can think of some other things it tells you. Though I guess I can see how you'd come to the conclusion that "the collapse of trust in the media" would be the first thing that came to mind, if you'd made it your mission in life to find Andrew Breitbart enjoyable.

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Nurse Jackie: "Mitten"

Notes on the Current State of the Counter-Revolution Against the Reality-Based Community

Earlier this year, just in time for Ronald Reagan's hundredth birthday, his son, Ron, Jr., was widely attacked by fans of his father--his adopted brother Michael among them--for having dared to suggest that Ron Senior might possible have had moments during his administration when he was not all there. It would be a simple matter for anyone who was alive and paying attention during those four years to come up with some examples, but at the time, Reagan's handlers tried to make the most of his disconnect from reality because it was seen as a better explanation for the untruths that flowed past his lips that to let anyone get away with accusing him of lying, perhaps because it made him seem more like a [shudder] politician. One of the most problematic moments in Reagan's career for these loyalists came in 1983, when Reagan told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that, while serving overseas during World War II, he had been present at the liberation of Nazi death camps and that it had been he who had the bright idea of making films of what he'd found there, just to make sure that nobody ever forgot about it. Once it was confirmed that Reagan--who, famously, was declared unfit for active service due to his eyesight, and spent the war in Hollywood--really had done this, a tremor went through the press corps: could it be that the all-American boy had told a fib? Everyone was greatly relieved when White House press secretary Larry Speakes addressed the matter and assured the country that the president had not lied: he really did believe, in his heart of hearts, that he had been in Germany at the war's end and had done these things, though of course he hadn't, if you just had to be a spoilsport about it.

Now, though, people hearing this story may be less charmed Reagan's flitting in and out of the magic kingdom in his mind than bothered by the possibility that the greatest power in the world was in the hands of someone capable of a brain fart of that magnitude. In his recent Washington Post article commemorating Reagan's centennial, Edmund Morris deals with the situation thusly: "In the spring of 1945, Capt. Reagan, as the FMPU's intelligence officer, spent weeks processing raw color footage from the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. The images so burned into his brain that later in life - quite understandably - he imagined he had been there at Ohrdruf and Buchenwald." No doubt the images did affect the young Reagan profoundly. Still, you have to wonder--is there any other world leader whose admirers would go that far out on a limb for him? Jesse Jackson used to go around talking about how he was at Martin Luther King's side when King was assassinated. When it came out that he hadn't been, how many people even toyed with the idea of suggesting that, given how traumatic the events of that day were and how deeply they must have touched Jackson on a personal level, it was "quite understandable" for him to really think he must have been there? What about Illinois Senator's Mark Kirk's misrepresentation of his own military record? I know, they're "politicians" and so capable of lying, while the kind of people who respond to Reagan's siren song prefer to think that he was sincerely confused, no matter what he was confused about. One wonders, though: is Morris actually saying what's implicit in that "quite understandably", which is that people who've closely studied nazi atrocity footage or read about the camps without becoming convinced that they must have been there themselves didn't respond to it as deeply as the soulful Reagan? Or is he being cagey here and trying to say, without coming out and saying it, that Reagan's inability to remember that he wasn't a million miles from home when the camps were liberated is "quite understandable", given that he was frequently in a state of dementia? That's the only way it could make any sense, and sense, unlike lively prose, is not altogether unknown to Morris.

Arizona Senator Jon Kyl is stuck being a mere politician, not an iconic figure in which thousands of people have invested their dreams and ideals, so when he says something insane, he just sounds like a liar. Kyl provided comedians with the most-mocked moment of the past week's budget crisis when he expressed his desire to defund Planned Parenthood because "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does" is provide abortions. Given that Planned Parenthood--which began to receive federal funding under President Nixon, a move that then had considerable bipartisan support--does no such thing, this meant that Fox News commentators coming to Kyl's rescue were put in the position of claiming to believe that it's disgusting that there are people out there using government funds to give patients breast cancer screenings and treatment for STDs. But the part that really had people rolling in the aisles was Kyl's explanation for why he had said something completely untrue: his office put out a clarifying statement to the effect that what he'd said "was not intended to be a factual statement but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives millions in taxpayer dollars, does subsidize abortions." (Planned Parenthood estimates that three percent of its services are abortion-related; of course, the Hyde Amendment, passed in 1976, prevents it from using any federal funds for those services.)

The general air of merriment that stemmed from Kyl's statement in response to the fact-checking of his claims was based on the idea that that it was desperate and weaselly to try and get around having told a lie by saying that it was never "intended to be a factual statement." But I think the sheer, unpolished rawness of the "correction", which is what left it openly exposed to ridicule, is the tip-off that it expresses the pained indignation of a man who believes that he's been treated unfairly. The fact is, people try to win arguments by saying things that aren't intended as factual statements all the time. If you're having an argument in a bar over whether Mike Tyson or Evander Holyfield could hit harder, you don't break out the almanac and start comparing statistics, you say that you were in the front row in Vegas one time and when Holyfield hit Tyson, you could hear his brains rattle. (Granted, this may be a pre-Internet-based argument, but surely there are some people out there who still play it old school.)

Kyl was trying to make a point, and he had to make it in code, because he couldn't come out and say what he really meant--which wasn't that Planned Parenthood gets federal funds and spends them on abortions (which it doesn't), or even that Planned Parenthood gets federal funds and provides abortions using funds it has obtained in some other way (which would be a pretty stupid argument for its defunding). but that Planned Parenthood gets federal funds and that's disgusting, because it isn't a missile launcher or a pork project for his district, and besides that, it singles out people who, because of their economic status, are less likely to vote for him and other candidates he likes and makes it that much less likely they'll die of breast cancer before the next election. If he had to actually say that on the floor of the U.S. Senate, it would really bring people down over the state of political discourse in this country, so he tried to make the case that they should be defunded using coded language that wasn't intended to be taken as a factual statement, and then, instead of being grateful, people gave him a hard time for it. It's like the ACORN sting videos made by James O'Keefe and promoted by Andrew Breitbart. After things had cooled down (and ACORN had been publicly discredited and forced to shut down), some ingrates complained that the videos had been recut and doctored and promoted in a misleading way, and that nothing in them had justified the charges that ACORN had engaged in voter fraud of any kind, which used to be the charge that conservatives were making against them. But the point is, O'Keefe and company had managed to put them out of business, and they'd managed to do it without ever once explicitly saying the real thought behind the sudden frenzy of attacks on ACORN, which could be best summed up as, "If somebody doesn't stop these people from getting blacks to register to vote, we're never gonna have another white guy in the Oval Office!" Which nobody wanted them to say, believe me.


The current issue of Bookforum features a cover story on Julian Assange--which is not available online, for the excellent reason that it's a superb publication and you should buy a copy that you can hold in your hands--in which John Cook writes:

...WikiLeaks... performed a technological end run around the sclerotic, compromised journalist class. Assange's digital machine was nearly automatic. Anonymous leakers uploaded their wares, and if WikiLeaks volunteers could verify the material, it would be published in the order in which it was received. If successful, such a system could rob the journalistic establishment of its power as gatekeeper between the murky netherworld of secrets and rumors and the light of day.

But instead of undermining that power, Assange sought to commandeer it. Both The Guardian's WikiLeaks and the Times' Open Secrets [a pair of quickie books published by the newspapers that had dealings with Assange] reveal Assange's tortured relationship with the newspapers to be more about control and ego than information. Worried that the disclosures of the Afghanistan, Iraq, and State Department documents wouldn't be high-profile enough if WikiLeaks staffers simply dumped them onto the Web, Assange agreed to offer The Guardian, the Times, and Der Spiegel (and later El Pais and Le Monde) exclusive access to the documents ahead of publication. But with each release... relations became more frayed. Assange began making side deals, promising access to the State Department cables to television news outlets without consulting the other partners. At the same time, he held off on handing over the cables to the eager Guardian reporters he'd promised them to... [and] "talked of how he would use his power to withhold the cables in order to 'discipline' the mainstream media."

One of the institutions most in need of discipline, in Assange's view, was the New York Times. When the Times obnoxiously declined to link to WikiLeaks in its online stories about the Afghan War Logs, Assange called executive editor Bill Keller to demand, "Where's the respect?" As the authors of Open Secrets recount, when the paper later published a profile of Assange that included criticisms from disaffected WikiLeaks volunteers, Assange fumed and cut the Times out of the deal on the cables. When The Guardian went around him and gave the Times a copy of the cables anyway, he burst into Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's office accompanied by two lawyers and began denouncing the Times and threatening to sue the paper over the loss of WikiLeaks' "financial assets." He later petulantly asked a Times editor, "Tell me, are you in contact with your legal counsel? You had better be."... This isn't the behavior of an information activist; it's that of someone who's angry at losing control over information he thinks belongs to him.

This nicely encapsulates why Assange has made it so hard, as Nora Ephron once wrote of another First Amendment martyr, Daniel Schorr, for others to march in his parade. The tricky bit that Cook fails to acknowledge is that being an "information activist" and being a vain control freak may not be mutually exclusive, just as the mainstream reporters and editors Assange so despises much actually be capable of seeing themselves as serious journalists adhering to a set of standards at the same time they look like spineless toadies. Assange, with his line of prattle about being in it to make things rough for the powers that be, is clearly a bad boy who's out for a thrill, which doesn't preclude him from having done some useful things. Certainly the appeal of being a political wild man is clearer than that of being a martyred whistleblower, so it's going to attract more people, and the people it attracts may tend to make for better copy. Enjoy them, and the good works they do, while you can. Just don't get close enough that you end up getting shrapnel in your pants when the inevitable happens.

These days, politics doesn't lack for fun-loving bad boys (and bad girls), but so many of them are charmlessly devoted to using their powers to attack the powerless. Starting in the post-countercultural late '70s and the Reagan '80s, places like the Dartmouth Review and R. Emmett Tyrell's American Spectator started turning out smug, mean-spirited right-wing put-on artists by the score, and now they're everywhere, daring you to decide whether they're serious as they kick around conspiracy theories, play with bigoted rhetoric, and change their opinions on a dime depending on the latest memo from Ailes Central. For all their success, I think the open secret to Glenn Beck's phenomenal appeal was that he offered up square but surreal mixture of Mormon apocalypse fantasy, post-rehab homilies, and racist/anti-Semitic conspiracy paranoia in purest sincerity. (It's also why he was fated to peak fast.) I know it's uncool of me to admit it, but a little exposure to these assholes does tend to foster in me a longing to hear from someone who means it.


A couple of weeks ago, Fox News' Washington editor Bill Sammon made news with his remarks about how he'd come to believe that President Obama was a socialist, months after he "went on TV on Fox News and publicly engaged in what I guess was some rather mischievous speculation about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism, a premise that privately I found rather far-fetched." Sammon caught a little hell over the speciousness of his reasoning and his hypocrisy, but the reason I haven't been able to get this out of my head is that a grown man credited himself with engaging in "mischievous speculation." Mischievous? What is he, a woodland sprite? I never thought of Sammons as a serious or intelligent person, but I never dreamed that he spends his weekends baking cookies in a hollow tree. The self-exposure at the core of that sentence--the discovery that the shapers of ignorant opinion at Fox News see themselves as so rascally and adorable that they just have to hug themselves and giggle when the red light on the camera isn't on--makes one stagger around the room trying to make it to a chair before one's legs give out. Back in Richard Nixon's day, treating politics as an occasion for frat-house hijinks was called "rat-fucking". That was in the good old days, when scumbags were men.

I know that I'm treating the war on the reality-based community as if it were strictly politically conservative in nature, and that may strike some people as unfair, so long as Michael Moore is still alive and out there somewhere. But, you know, if you're a liberal Democrat, and you've ever stood next to someone who was heard to idly speculate that 9/11 was an inside job, and you didn't either turn around and slap the taste out of their mouth or make piddle on their shoes, then your political career is null and void, which is how it should be; while, on the other hand, if you're a conservative Republican, and you're even pretending to be thinking about running for president as a stunt to shore up your TV show's ratings, an awful lot of people seem to feel that you'd better demonstrate your political viability by making your peace with the birthers. So do the math on that motherfucker before you get back to me.

Boxed History

When I was writing about the posthumous cult of Ronald Reagan the other day, it occurred to me that it reminded me of something--namely, the posthumous cult of John F. Kennedy, which, as someone who was born after Kennedy was killed, was very powerful during my childhood and seemed to level out during the Reagan '80s. When the cult was growing strong, Kennedy was often mentioned alongside Lincoln and Washington in polls listing people's choices for the greatest president of all time, though, as with Reagan today, people had trouble explaining what he'd done that had earned him a place in the pantheon. Like Reagan, he was treasured for having supposedly embodied some magical quality that just made everyone feel great about being American. Reagan was a movie actor who had never become a star, but who used what he'd learned in Hollywood as part of his political arsenal; Kennedy was the first president who was routinely likened to a movie star. And where Kennedy's death preserved him in collective memory of the leader whose tragic, pointless fall ended the golden age when everything was simple and innocent, the Reagan believers celebrate him as the one who brought it all back, or would have, if it hadn't been for those meddling rappers. In the wake of Kennedy's death, people hastened to name things after him, but even before people's passions for the murdered young president began to cool, some things, like Cape Kennedy nee' Canaveral, had already started changing back. Will there come a time when someone with the power to do something about it decides that what's now called Reagan National Airport was already named after a perfectly good president when it went by the handle Washington National? The posthumous cult of Reagan has held up longer than Kennedy's posthumous cult, especially if you date Reagan's "death" to his leaving office, and soon after that, public life, with the announcement of his Alzheimer's. But then, Kennedy didn't have Grover Norquist running an operation specially designed to pressure communities into naming shit after him; he had to settle for Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorenson sitting at home night after night, growing smaller and wrinklier, waiting for the next time the booker from Nightline or Charlie Rose would call.

Kennedy was said to be the first real television president, and since celebrating him gave TV another way to celebrate itself, it's not surprising that his flame was kept alive for years by one TV docudrama after another, with Martin Sheen and William Devane clocking in again and again and arm-wrestling to see which one would get the wear the presidential hair helmet this time, while the other one popped in the prosthetic overbite to play Bobby. I tend to think of the golden age of TV Kennedys as dating from 1974, when Devane's John F. squared off against Howard DaSilva's hambone Kruschev in The Missiles of October, to 1983, when the five-hour miniseries Kennedy, timed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the assassination, was overshadowed by The Day After, a very-first-term-Reagan-era prestige TV-movie purporting to show the effects of a nuclear war, all fifteen minutes of it. You might think that Reagan loyalists who had to live through the years of the posthumous Kennedy presidency would be excited about the chance to have their kids grow up on television images of actors made up with pointy orange pompadours and saying "Well..." every three minutes grimly saying things like, "It troubles me greatly to put any American boy's life in harm's way, but what we're hearing about this Grenada business cannot stand!"

Apparently not, though: When CBS scheduled the miniseries The Reagans in the fall of 2003, all the outraged pissing and moaning about how it was a liberal smear job finally drove the network to plug the plug on the show. After the script was posted on the Internet, the film turned up on Showtime, where people could see that it was a bland and uncritical take on the subject, one that had been shorn of the one line that was repeatedly singled out in news reports about the "outrage" as evidence of a harsh revisionist take on Reagan's presidency. (The line dared to suggest that Reagan was slow to respond to the AIDS crisis because he didn't see it as threat to anyone who mattered much, which is pretty much known to be the established truth.) To understand the Reagan loyalists' fabricated anger over the project, you have to understand that it's not in their interest for anyone to see any depiction, even the most blandly favorable depiction, of Reagan's life and career. All people should know is that he was the living vindication of whatever the GOP wants vindicated this news cycle. To depict him in any way is to commit sacrilege, because it muddies the purity of the image we should be carrying in our heads. It's sort--well, no, exactlty--like those Muslims who burn down a few city blocks whenever they hear that someone has dared to paint a picture of Mohammed.





When word got out that the History Channel had scheduled an eight-part miniseries called The Kennedys, people looking for something to complain about immediately zeroed in on the participation of Joel Surnow, whose public statements in support of his pro-torture adventure serial 24 have earned him a reputation as Hollywood's leading paleoconservative. (Surnow was one of six credited producers; Jon Cassar is listed as the series' director and Stephen Kronish its principal scriptwriter, though Surnow's name also pops up here and there as a co-writer.) Then people started complaining about the "liberties"" taken in the script, and before long, Robert Greenwald, the filmmaker who spent the Bush years making small, useful, video-samizdat documentaries such as Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism and Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties, had set up a website as part of a campaign to get the History Channel to drop the show. In this he was successful, and after being turned down by Showtime, The Kennedys finally wound up being aired this past week on the itty-bitty ReelzChannel.

In explaining why it was necessary to go after the series in this way, Greenwalt has repeatedly conceded that dramatists have the right to use fictionalizing techniques when they depict historical events and characters, but that a show that takes any liberties at all with the facts has no business being on the History Channel, because people have the right to expect a special level of factual accuracy when watching the channel of Pawn Stars and William Shatner's Weird or What? Greenwald isn't stupid, even if he did make Steal This Movie!, a 2000 biopic about Abbie Hoffman that he will now be obligated to start a protest website over if the History Channel ever threatens to broadcast it. He knows that, now that he's said these things, he will never be able to restore his reputation, certainly not in one man's lifetime, and that children and adults will be practically obligated to pelt him with rotten fruit and make cruel remarks about his heritage whenever he ventures outside. I suppose it's sort of touching that, at this late date, the Kennedys are still such liberal icons to him that he chose to gladly make himself a figure of fun just to stick up for them. Unless he did it just because he hates Joel Surnow so much, which would be weird but not wholly impossible to understand.



I watched every minute of The Kennedys, because I am a junkie for this kind of show. Not because they tend to be good, but because I love the idea of large-scale recreations of recent history that I always yearn for them to be good, against all odds. It's not that I'm hoping for Shakespeare, either. Actually, a Kennedy miniseries that earned comparisons to Shakespeare would probably disappoint me; what I'm really always hoping for is something like Phil Kaufman's movie of The Right Stuff, epic but irreverent, a mixture of satire, cartoon, nostalgia, and pockets of surprisingly deep emotion, all at the service of summing up a moment in time and bringing it back to life, without waxworks. Towards that end, it's the very things about The Kennedys that people like Greenwald and David Talbot object to. It goes a few places that the Kennedy docudramas made in the '70s and '80s would never have dared to go, for fearing seeming disrespectful, and that's a good thing. The shoddiness of the series, much more than most of what it's handling so shoddily, is the reason it sucks.

Events from different periods flow into and out of each other as if the whole thing were somebody's fever dream. Sometimes you can't make the connection between which events are being double-billed together on a given night; at other times, as when the show intercuts the showdown over James Meredith being admitted to the University of Mississippi with old papa Joe having his mentally challenged daughter lobotomized behind his wife's back, and his own being reduced, years later, to a silent figure in a wheelchair, or when the fateful day in Texas is intercut with Bobby telling Marilyn Monroe that Jack has to break it off with her and then learning of her suicide, you can see connections that you'd rather pretend weren't meant to be there. (Interestingly, the show's creators seem most confident about going out where the buses don't run with their wild-eyed, giddy "speculations" when history intersects with the show business. Aside from the stuff about Marilyn, there's a ludicrous section involving Frank Sinatra, played by the first runner-up, after an eight-foot-tall African-American with a lisp, in a contest to pick the English-speaking male actor who'd be least convincing as Frank Sinatra. "Frank" is depicted as not only arranging a meeting between Joe Senior and Sam Giancana and making a pitch to Giancana to put the fix in--deliver Chicago for Kennedy, he tells the mob boss, and "when jack gets in, you and the boys will have a pass. The feds'll leave you alone."--but quaking with terror, after Bobby begins investigating organized crime as Attorney General and Giancana thinks he's being screwed, for fear that the mob will take away his career or even have him popped.

When J. Edgar Hoover (Enrico Colantoni) gets wind of all this, he plays Bobby a snippet of tape in which Giancana is heard saying, "Sinatra was down at the hotel in Florida... Between you and me, Sinatra saw Joe Kennedy three times. Joe Kennedy, the father of the president!" You may detect a certain on-the-nose quality, as if the writer had done a first draft pencilling in all the important facts he wanted to be sure to communicate to the boneheads watching at home and had meant to go back and change the lines to something that would sound like human beings talking, but never got around to it. Right at the start, we see Jack shaving on the morning of the 1960 election, while a newsman on the radio intones, "Senator Kennedy, at 43, will be the youngest man ever elected, and the first Roman Catholic. A naval officer in World War II< he was severely wounded and received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for Heroism... The Kennedy campaign has been largely a family affair. The candidate's brother, Robert, has served as a campaign manager, with financing provided by Senator Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, one of the world's richest men..."

When Jack is lost at sea during the war, Joe tells a priest, "It's my fault. He shouldn't be in the navy. I fixed it so he could get it." When Hoover is chafing at the thought of taking orders from Bobby, Clyde Tolson reassures him: "You've always found a way to circumvent the authority of the Attorney General, whoever it is." And when Lyndon Johnson tells the brothers that they need to take the high ground on civil rights, Bobby snaps back, "I would love to hear your defintion of the moral high ground, coming from a man who stole his first election to the Senate." (Lyndon, who must have been lunching with Sam Giancana, says, "Well, now, there's buyin' and then there's stealin'.") In a show that goes as far back as the buildup to World War II in order to show how Joe's national career was truncated, there doesn't seem to be any bit of gossip too ancient to be included via this approach. When Giancana meets Joe, he asks him if it's true what he used to hear about him and Gloria Swanson. Things aren't much less heavy-handed when the writers decide to kick back and serve up a little irony: after his secretary meets his oldest sons and swoons over Jack, Joe assures her that "It's Joe who's going places." After Jack gets his medal and Joe announces that he's eager to get back into the war, he calms his worried brother by saying, "It's bad enough you got a medal, you think I'm going to let you outlive me, too?"

The best thing about the show is Tom Wilkinson's performance as the senior Joe. He's a bullying, coarse-grained man with the whiff of new money about him, reduced by the failure of his own political career to become a stage father, living vicariously through his sons. I suspect that the real Joe had more charm than this, but it's a plausible characterization, and if it's calculated to make the family hagiographers drop to their knees choking, at least the show doesn't get into the details of how Joe made the money. As sketched out, and as played by Wilkinson, he's a shady but dynamic American character, hard to like but worthy of respect, especially compared to a smug, old-money political dynasty like the Bushes. But the show pushes so hard at the idea that his sons are living out his dreams that neither Jack nor Bobby can match him in stature; if that was the idea, it's still dramatically self-defeating.

As JFK, Greg Kinnear isn't bad, but he had a stronger presence when he played Bob Crane, and it's just not plausible that this man, who keeps up an appearance of youthful vitality even though he's in extreme physical pain most of the time, could have been catapulted to the White House almost against his will. There's a scene on the campaign trail where a seasoned party hack sizes up the relationship between Jack and Joe and tells them that Jack will be wasting his time trying for a run unless he really wants it himself; nothing at all flows from that moment, except maybe for a scene when Jack, campaigning in front of a room full of woman whose sons fought in the war, breaks from his prepared text to say that, having lost a brother, he can relate to their pain. As Bobby, Barry Pepper is likable and has some moving moments, but the attack dog who worked for Joseph McCarthy and stared down Jimmy Hoffa isn't visible at all. As for Katie Holmes as Jackie Kennedy, she has at least one scene that belongs in the permanent annals of unintentional comedy when, after whimpering that she doesn't have the energy to do all the things expected of her as First Lady, she schedules an appointment with the Dr. Feelgood who's been giving Jack his amphetamine shots, and the next time we see her, she's reenacting the famous parody commercial from the first season of Saturday Night Live in which a motor-mouthed housewife extols the new wonder drug, Speed.

The Kennedys isn't much worse than Oliver Stone's bombastic American-President-name movies, though it doesn't have the flamboyance, or the budget, to paper over the dramatic and intellectual inadequacies as well as Stone sometimes can, at least while the movies are playing in front of the viewer's eyes and slugging him in the face. There's no sense of ongoing life around the characters--when Ethel points out to Bobby that she's given him eight children, it just underlines who weird it is that the family houses always seem as quiet as a crypt--so the over-explanatory lines, which pile up like placards, are all there is to most of them. It wasn't until the series was winding down that I realized that what it most reminded me of wasn't a movie by Stone but Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, a bizarre and underfunded exercise in exploitation-movie Gonzo history in a cast out of a Love Boat rerun hung out in sets that looked like the inside of a panel truck, insisting that they were Harry Truman or Melvin Purvis or Martin Luther King, saying things like, "You know Mr. Hoover was never too comfortable with anything sexual in nature." I love the idea of movies and TV series like this, I really do. I'd just like for the reality to do justice to the fantasy sometime. Aside from the three-hour-ten-minute, multi-million-dollar The Right Stuff, , my favorite gonzo history movie is probably Robert Altman's Secret Honor, which amounts to ninety minutes spent in a single room watching one guy pretending to be Richard Nixon. There's got to be room for something good in between those two extremes.

New at The A.V. Club

Nurse Jackie: "Play Me"

New at The A.V. Club

Army Wives

Mensch of the City

I'm one of those people who grew up in the sticks with the idea that the mark of a great city and cultural center was chaos and noisy belligerence, because that was the image of New York City before it turned into a glossy set for Donald Trump's champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Sidney Lumet went to his reward with an impressive share of the credit and blame for that. In hius 1995 book Making Movies, Lumet wrote that “Good style, to me, is unseen style. It is style that is felt.” It was an honest credo that nonetheless sounded very different coming from him than it would have from, say, Gustave Flaubert. Lumet had come to the movies after working in New York theater and live TV drama, and he directed the two best recorded examples of the art of Eugene O'Neill with the TV production of The Iceman Cometh, with Jason Robards as Hickey, and the 1962 big-screen Long Day's Journey into Night, with Robards, Ralph Richardson, Katherine Hepburn, and Dean Stockwell. But most of the movies he made in the '60s and '70s, especially those set in New York, didn't seem to be distinguished by an "unseen style" so much as no style at all. Lumet didn't seem overburdened with sensitivity or lyricism, he had no interest in visual beauty or flair, and he worked so fast that his cinematographers scarcely had the chance to impose any of their own on the material. Lumet was famous for plowing through a production, and a lot of tricky scenes in his movies look as if they were gummed up becasue his desire to get them done on time overrode any impulse he had to get them done right. But he'd developed a way with actors and solid theatrical instincts during those years working with live audiences and live TV cameras, and when the cast and the script were good, his pushy energy somehow got packaged along with the images in the film cans.

Some of Lumet's movies, such as The Hill--starring Sean Connery, who Lumet was onto when most other directors were slow to grasp that James Bond was eager to act-- stand up as solid examples of filmed theater, by which I don't mean that they're stagebound or even that they were based on plays (The Hill wasn't), but that they have the intensity of well-acted live theater, so that they may hold you in their grip even if it occurs to you that they don't seem to have been made to satisfy any strong impulse by the director except to hold your attention for a couple of hours. But when those lucky circumstances of good cast, good material came together on a project set in New York, the director's assurance and pleasure at feeling the concrete under his feet could result in a snapshot of the city at a moment in its history and an instant classic. I know of no greater advertisement for the thrill of urban chaos than Dog Day Afternoon, a movie that effortlessly captures, satirizes, and celebrates the process by which one man's public train wreck turns into a media spectacle, and then a tragicomedy, It was a very daring movie in its day, hot young male stars with romantic-lead potential not then being eager to play gay characters, and one of the most striking things about it remains the long telephone conversation between Pacino and Chris Sarandon, whose own career may have taken a hit from his appearance here as the "feminine" half of one of the movies' first same-sex married couples. It still has heat to burn, and Pacino's performance, probably the one the best combines his ability to be both smoldering and energetic, is combustible in a way that he would never quite be for another director.

In the '80s, Lumet, his own claims to the contrary, permitted himself to get a little stylish. He made a long string of films with the cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak--Prince of the City, Deathtrap. The Verdict, Daniel, Garbo Talks, Power, Thr Morning After--and then, in the '90s, reunited with him for Q & A, A Stranger Among Us, and Guilty as Sin. Something about Bartkowiak's dark, layered compositions and long static shots seemed to suck all the humor and vulgar energy out of Lumet, and on the most notable and hardest-to-sit-through of these movies, he suddenly seemed susceptible to believing that he had deep thoughts to share on morality and corruption. He didn't. Of the ones that earned rave reviews and Oscar nominations at the time, The Verdict is the most openly risible; it yokes Paul Newman, his head bowed as if marching up Calvary, to a near-parody of an old-Hollywood courtroom plotline about an incompetent, overmatched lawyer who tries to redeem himself by going up against an insurmountably powerful, unapologetically wicked team of villains (including the judge, who has sworn to give Newman's opponents every break he can give them), and then somehow wins ("Your honor, is it possible for us, the jurors, to award the victims even way more than the sum they're asking for?"), because he ought to, dammit, and dresses it up in so many David Mamet cusswords and frozen frames that it dares you to not take it seriously. At least it's coherent and easy to follow as the process of turning on a light switch, which might not strike you as much of a virtue, unless you've seen the politics-of-the-legal-system triptrych, Prince of the City, Daniel, and Q & A. (Lumet, working without Bartkowiak, later added a fourth installment, Night Falls on Manhattan, which I've never made it through to the end.) Prince, Q & A, Night Falls, and the even later Find Me Guilty
have the special distinction of being the features on which Lumet treated himself to a screenwriting credit, something that hardened filmgoers would come to see as the opening-credits equivalent of a blinking red light.

My favorite of all Lumet's studies of corruption is the forgotten 1980 comedy Just Tell Me What You Want which Warners Archive, that studio's no-frills DVD outlet, has just recently had the kindness to make available to consumers. An explosively funny burlesque of high-society romantic comedies, starring Alan King as a cheerfully crass wheeler and dealer who applies all his heartless ingenuity to winning back the lover who's had an attack of ethics and dumped him in favor of marriage to an insufferable playwright (and with Myrna Loy, in her last movie appearance, as King's secretary), is explosively funny, but earned Lumet the worst reviews of his life, with the possible exception of The Wiz. At the time, appalled critics reached for the smelling salts at the very suggestion that they might laugh at, never mind enjoy vicariously, such cynical, avaricious goings-on, though it wasn't that much longer that the Age of Reagan was well underway and millions had been granted permission to swoon over the antics of both the fictional Carringtons of Dynasty and the real-life Masters of the Universe who had taken over Manhattan. Of course, they were sleek and hair-gelled, while there was nothing remotely glamorous about the fiftyish, heavyset, balding King except for the fact that he had money, which make have given too much of the game away. No matter. Lumet did manage to go out on a high note with his last movie, Before the Devil Knows Your'e Dead, a highly engrossing thriller, full of bad feelings and worse motives, that he made in 2007, when he was 82. I remember that, at the time, there was a lot of whispering about how surprising it was that, at 82, he still had it in him to finish another movie, let alone a good one. But looking at him in the footage from his receiving an honorary Aacdemy Award two years earlier, it seems more surprising that he could have ever died at all.

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2011 Muriels Awards

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Mel McDaniel, 1942-2011

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