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Weigel Room

Last week, I wrote something to the effect that anyone who styles himself as a libertarian would have been unable to support the civil rights movement and forced desegregation. Writing about gay marriage at National Review, George Weigel agrees with me, kind of. Noting that there are people who support the right of gays to marry because they see it as the position that best promotes individual freedom, Weigel argues that “'Gay marriage' in fact represents a vast expansion of state power: In this instance, the state of New York is declaring that it has the competence to redefine a basic human institution in order to satisfy the demands of an interest group looking for the kind of social acceptance that putatively comes from legal recognition... On what principled ground is the New York state legislature, or any other state legislature, going to say 'No' to that, once it has declared that Adam and Steve, or Eve and Evelyn, can in fact get married according to the laws of the state There is a curious rhetorical fact that has usually gone unremarked in these debates, but which is worth pointing out. That what the New York state legislature approved has to be described, not as marriage, but as 'gay marriage; or 'same-sex marriage' is itself a verbal indicator that what is being done here is counterintuitive. We all know, or thought we knew, what marriage is, and to add the qualifier 'gay' or 'same-sex' is a tacit admission by the proponents of the practice that it requires an appeal to authority to enforce what seems strange, odd, not right. The verbal tic of 'gay marriage' or 'same-sex' marriage is thus itself a rhetorical warning sign that what was done in Albany was an exercise in raw state power, the state’s asserting that it can do X simply because it claims that it has the power to do so. And that is an exercise of power that libertarians ought, in theory, to resist, not support."

The verbal gamesmanship will go over well with anyone who has ever nodded in agreement with Neil Cavuto as he's argued that climate change has to be a hoax, because one term people who believe in have used has been "global warming", and some of the otherwise inexplicable, calamitous weather events that have been occurring with ever greater frequency these last several years took place when it was cold. Pop culture nostalgists may enjoy the hilarious and argument-settling "Adam and Steve" line, which is a callback to statements made against gay rights in the '80s by such sensitive and thoughtful cultural observers as Jerry Falwell and Donna Summer, one of whom was seriously swimming against the tide of her fan base. (The whole thing about "gay marriage" being a dishonest phrase that cancels itself out will also recall some of George Carlin riffing on such terms as "jumbo shrimp" and "military intelligence." But when it appears under the National Review umbrella, Weigel's argument might also remind those with long memories of William F. Buckley's arguments in defense of racial segregation in the South. In a famous 1957 essay which itself anticipated the Supreme Court's decision that it would be indefensible to count the votes cast in Florida in the 2000 presidential election ton the grounds that the outcome might not favor George's kid, Buckley wrote that "the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically... because, for the time being, it is the advanced race." The question of how the non-whites were to become as "advanced" as the political and cultural sophisticates who put Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond in positions of power so long as the "White community" was denying them equal access to education, jobs, and the ballot box was not Buckley's concern.

Anyone who quotes from that essay today is required to mention that, of course, Buckley later recanted those views, once it became clear that anyone who kept talking like that much deeper into the twentieth century would be recognized as a monster and a butthead. (Buckley, or course, was the man who led conservatism away from the paleolithic paranoid goons, such as the John Birch Society, who were such a prominent part of its makeup when he was young. When he died, in the last year of George W. Bush's presidency, he was much admired, both as the man who helped bring modern conservatism into being and for having had the grace to largely detach himself from whatever the hell it then turned into, which is to say a movement dominated by the paleolithic paranoid goons, some of whom were working to revive the theories immortalized in the literature of, yes, the John Birch Society.) Weigel picks up the line, which has become as familiar as it is goofy, that extending equal rights to marry to gay people will result in people marrying dogs, dolphins, their siblings, their parents, indoor plants, etc. This is on the same level as the argument, which has not disappeared from the earth but is no longer exactly mainstream, that letting gay people work in the school system will result in agents of Stonewall doctrinating kids to embrace preverted lifestyles themselves. It is also on the same level as the argument that, if you let black people vote, why not gorillas. I have no idea if Weigel would have made that argument if he'd been standing proudly alongside William Buckley in 1957, but I know that he wouldn't now. just as Buckley had to backpedal from having said something similar in as elegant a manner as he could, because, as he acknowledges, "the classic civil-rights movement and its righteous demand for equality before the law remains one of the few agreed-upon moral touchstones in 21st-century American culture." To his horror, he recognizes that people demanding equal rights for gays are now widely seen as being engaged in a struggle similar to that of the movement to award equal rights to blacks. In his eyes, this is wrong, because blacks are people too, whereas gays are just filthy pervs who don't even sincerely want to marry for the same reason normal people do; they just want "to redefine a basic human institution in order to satisfy the demands of an interest group looking for the kind of social acceptance that putatively comes from legal recognition."

In fact, Weigel thinks that, when you get right down to it, gay rights are a lot like the racist white citizens' councils. "Legally enforced segregation involved the same kind of coercive state power that the proponents of gay marriage now wish to deploy on behalf of their cause," he writes. "Once the American people came to see that these arrangements, however hallowed by custom (and prejudice), were, in fact, unnatural and not obvious, the law was changed... What the gay lobby proposes in the matter of marriage is precisely the opposite of this. Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality. The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness. The gay-marriage movement is thus not the heir of the civil-rights movement; it is the heir of Bull Connor and others who tried to impose their false idea of moral reality on others by coercive state power."

If this is a reflection of anything, it's not historical reality but how far alienated anti-gay rights conservatives, today's legislative bigots, have become from the true story of how their predecessors, even noble, silver-tongued Bill Buckley, reacted to the notion of blacks as equal partners in society when that idea was still controversial enough to push against. To call for racial desegregation, especially in the South back then, was precisely "a call to reinvent reality," arguably "to fit an agenda of personal willfulness." That's certainly how it looked to Buckley and others who objected to desegregation partly on the grounds that it was so much the way things were that fighting it would be more trouble than it was worth. Was Buckley himself a racist, or to put it more gently, someone who couldn't have cared less about the lives of those less white then himself? It would be unthinkable to even suggest such a thing about so fine a man. Funny thing, though: he never argued that trying to dismantle Communism would be more trouble than it was worth, or that the suffering of those forced to live under it was not his concern as a Christian. Perhaps he thought that tearing down the Berlin Wall would be a breeze compared to making some redneck sheriffs obey the goddamn law.

Movements devoted to ensuring the rights of oppressed minorities have a way of throwing into stark relief the fantasy that libertarianism has some claim to having a moral dimension. Both Buckley and Weigel cite tradition as the reason to keep standing on people's necks, because it's just how things have always been done around here. In neither argument is there any acknowledgment that there's a central flaw to the idea that it is amoral, to put it kindly, to support the denial of rights to one group just because you naturally feel closer to the group that's doing the denying, and not for any reason more enlightened than what Mike Huckabee memorably termed "the ick factor." Back in Anita Bryant's day, anti-gay bigots had an armload of reasons why gays shouldn't be treated as full citizens, and now they're down to this one that they feel inexplicably comfortable saying in public: if they can get married, then my marriage will be less special! Does Weigel really not hear how much that sounds like Archie Bunker complaining about the effect that blacks moving into his neighborhood would have on his property values? Is that an argument that Weigel himself would still be able to get behind, if it was just him and me alone in the country club locker room?

The American people did not, in fact, suddenly come to see that laws enforcing racial inequality, "however hallowed by custom (and prejudice), were, in fact, unnatural and not obvious"; those of them who weren't moral imbeciles had always known it, because it was always impossible to miss, but many of them had become inured to it over time, and then, when they heard the spoken poetry of the most eloquent civil rights leaders and saw the worst white barbarians in America clubbing and kicking those people and blasting them with fire hoses and setting dogs on them, they realized that the moral high ground had been taken in public, and there was no way to even be on the fence about that issue without knowing that you were coddling monsters. The gay rights movement has come along by other means, and it hasn't had one spectacularly wrong part of the country (the part I'm from. I should probably remind everybody) to be seen as pitting itself against, but it has its secret weapon: as its become more and more acceptable to be known to be gay, there have been fewer and fewer families who don't know that anti-gay laws hurt someone they love.

Because Weigel has a brain the size of a raisin and the moral sense of a turnip, he can't be expected to understand any of this, let alone agree with any of it. He can't even be expected to get the key similarity in the way that the path to gay marriage mirrors the civil rights movement: both have come to a fight against cruel, witless, and bigoted "state's rights" laws, partly because he's in step with the modern conservative/libertarian fantasy that the civil rights movement was somehow conservative/libertarian in nature, instead of a rebuke to everything he and his lot stood for. In the case of gay rights, we're talking about the rash of ballot measures passed all over the country in 2004 in response to the gay rights scare tactics that went into the stew that got George W. Bush re-elected by the skin of his teeth. Those laws were part of the way that a generation of aging Boomers expressed their bewilderment over living in an America where, a new study reports, whites will no longer be in the majority within less than thirty years and homophobia is literally dying out with each displaced generation; William Saletan refers to such laws as "a prison inflicted by the old on the young." The thing about the civil rights movement is that it really did create exactly the world that racist Southerners--such as my father, who had a stack of pamphlets whose text was just there to pad out the meant-to-be-horrifying photographs of chaste-looking young black men and pretty white girls walking on campus, holding hands--warned that it would, a world where "miscegenation" just looks like normal people living their lives. George Weigel gets the cold sweats from imagining a world where two men walking home together hand-in-hand and bitching at each other about their insurance plan will just look normal, too. That world will come, and if he's lucky, Weigel, like Buckley, may live long enough to get to explain to some curious, tolerant interviewer what he really meant when he wrote all that garbage that, from a modern standpoint, just looks like a scared bigot having a hissy fit.

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Leverage: "The Long Way Down Job"




Law & Order: Criminal Intent

I also wrote five on the entries in this "Inventory" feature: the ones on Crime Story, Lou Grant, Now and Again, The Rockford Files, and Tanner '88.

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Homicide: "Son of a Gun"

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MasterChef: "Top 16 Revealed/ Top 16 Compete"

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The premiere of the new Countdown with Keith Olbermann

And the season finale of Nurse Jackie

Free to Be... You and Me

Stephen Metcalf writes about how Robert Nozick created the best philosophical case for libertarianism with his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and how he later came to renounce it even as it was going viral. Deep inside the longish, well-argued piece is this juicy slice of irony:

We're faced then with two intriguing mysteries. Why did the Nozick of 1975 confuse capital with human capital? And why did Nozick by 1989 feel the need to disavow the Nozick of 1975? The key, I think, is recognizing the two mysteries as twin expressions of a single, primal, human fallibility: the need to attribute success to one's own moral substance, failure to sheer misfortune. The effectiveness of the Wilt Chamberlain example, after all, is best measured by how readily you identify with Wilt Chamberlain. Anarchy is nothing if not a tour-de-force, an advertisement not just for libertarianism but for the sinuous intelligence required to put over so peculiar a thought experiment. In the early '70s, Nozick—and this is audible in the writing—clearly identified with Wilt: He believed his talents could only be flattered by a free market in high value-add labor. By the late '80s, in a world gone gaga for Gordon Gekko and Esprit, he was no longer quite so sure.

Even in 1975, it took a pretty narrow view of history to think all capital is human capital, and that philosophy professors, even the especially bright ones, would thrive in the free market. But there was a historical reason for Nozick's belief: the magnificent sieve. Harvard's enrollment prior to World War II was 3,300; after the war, it was 5,300, 4,000 of whom were veterans. The GI Bill was on its way to investing more in education grants, business loans, and home loans than all previous New Deal programs combined. By 1954, with the Cold War in full swing, the U.S. government was spending 20 times what it had spent on research before the war. "Some universities," C. Wright Mills could write in the mid-'50s, "are financial branches of the military establishment." In the postwar decades, the American university grew in enrollment, budget and prestige, thanks to a substantial transfer of wealth from the private economy, under the rubric of "military Keynesianism." As a tentacle of the military-industrial octopus, academia finally lost its last remnant of colonial gentility.

At the same time the university boomed, marginal tax rates for high earners stood as high as 90 percent. This collapsed the so-called L-curve, the graphic depiction of wealth distribution in the United States. The L-curve lay at its flattest in 1970, just as Nozick was sitting down to write Anarchy. In 1970, there were nearly 500,000 employed academics, and their relative income stood at an all-time high. To the extent anyone could believe mental talent, human capital, and capital were indistinguishable, it was thanks to the greatest market distortion in the history of industrial capitalism; and because for 40 years, thanks to this distortion, talent had not been forced to compete with the old "captains of industry" with the financiers and the CEOs.

Buccaneering entrepreneurs, boom-and-bust markets, risk capital—these conveniently disappeared from Nozick's argument because they'd all but disappeared from capitalism. In a world in which J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt have been rendered obsolete, reduced to historical curios, to a funny old-style man, imprisoned in gilt frames, the professionals—the scientists, engineers, professors, lawyers and doctors—correspondingly rise in both power and esteem. And in a world in which the professions are gatekept by universities, which in turn select students based on their measured intelligence, the idea that talent is mental talent, and mental talent is, not only capital, but the only capital, becomes easier and easier for a humanities professor to put across. Hence the terminal irony of Anarchy: Its author's audible smugness in favor of libertarianism was underwritten by a most un-libertarian arrangement—i.e., the postwar social compact of high marginal taxation and massive transfers of private wealth in the name of the very "public good" Nozick decried as nonexistent.

And the screw takes one last turn: By allowing for the enormous rise in (relative) income and prestige of the upper white collar professions, Keynesianism created the very blind spot by which professionals turned against Keynesianism. Charging high fees as defended by their cartels, cartels defended in turn by universities, universities in turn made powerful by the military state, many upper-white-collar professionals convinced themselves their pre-eminence was not an accident of history or the product of negotiated protections from the marketplace but the result of their own unique mental talents fetching high prices in a free market for labor. Just this cocktail of vanity and delusion helped Nozick edge out Rawls in the marketplace of ideas, making Anarchy a surprise best-seller, it helped make Ronald Reagan president five years later. So it was the public good that killed off the public good.

I remember I started coming across Metcalf's articles in Slate something like ten years ago and got in the habit of looking forward to them, until he used the occasion of Robert Rauschenberg's death to declare that the artist's work was wholly without merit, unlike the work of Andy Warhol, which Metcalf thought was the bee's knees. All at once, and not without some degree of sheepishness, I realized that Metcalf must in fact be a drooling, wall-eyed Sling Blade type who, like all who would say such things, was incapable of critical judgment or coherent thought, but had sometimes in the past managed to arrange the plastic colored letters on his glow-in-the-dark composition board in such a way that, quite by accident, they formed an intelligent-seeming and engaging piece of writing. I must say, I'm pleased that he was able to do it again, and at such impressive length.

I'm especially grateful to see a demolition job on libertarian ideology that attacks it on economic theory grounds, since I've never felt entirely comfortable with attempting such a case myself until I've managed to hold onto an honest job that pays a living wage for more than six months, an accomplishment that probably lends weight to one's claims to understanding the limitations of the unfettered free market. For me, the easiest case to be made against libertarianism, and the most devastating example of what is (to use Metcalf's word of choice) repugnant about it, was made last year by Rand Paul, when he had the rare honesty and intellectual consistency to acknowledge that, because of his ideology, he could not have supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Of course he couldn't have, because that legislation, and just about everything else that led to the breaking of Jim Crow and the culture of racial segregation, was the product of a mindset that believed that a system that was satisfying to all the businessmen in the region, even those sacred creatures known as small businessmen, ought to be outlawed and made intolerable by the government if it was clearly evil and causing needless suffering to thousands of people, as well as perpetrating a culture that was making the people who were obliged to live under it and go along with it backwards-ass. The rationalization that goes with the rejection of the Civil Rights movement from people like Rand is that, eventually, things would have changed anyway, because the market is too smart and decent to have allowed segregation to continue. Keep in mind that the system wasn't any smarter or more decent in 1900 than it was in 1960, and until "outside agitators" rolled in and started decreeing that this shit had gotten too embarrassing to defend or dance around any longer, the system did not budge.

In this case, the government was right and the businessmen were agents of Satan, and libertarian ideology would demand that the government back off and Satan be given the right to go to hell his own way, regardless of the damage that way was doing to the community at large. I grew up in the single most persistently backwards-ass part of the country, Mississippi. in an area where the schools didn't desegregate until the 1970s, and if you're like me, and have grown up being thankful for not having been forced to decide whether I was going to go along with the system or make myself socially unacceptable and borderline unemployable by doing the right thing and constantly starting some shit, then you may find that you always throw up in your mouth a little whenever some lucky dipshit with a good income starts lecturing on the inherent wickedness of government interference. Yet Slate's own house libertarian media critic, Jack Shafer, has said that he supports his religion of choice on the grounds that "Traditionally, the state censors and marginalizes voices while private businesses tend to remain tolerant." So, fine--the brother's never been to Mississippi, and good for him.

That's a Wrap!

Last night was a big TV night for me, what with Ned Stark on Game of Thrones getting his head cut off and not getting up and putting it back on (though things might not have worked out as well for the executioner if it had been the real Sean Bean, and the mystery gang at The Killing finally getting around to arresting the wrong person. But I still staked out time to watch the double-decker premiere of the highly touted sci-fi series Falling Skies. It's... well, highly touted. The pilot was directed by Carl Franklin, and I had a great deal of interest in his movie career, back when he had one. I turned it on and settled back in my chair, thinking, check me out, keepin' up with the zeitgeist! I couldn't tell you what happened in the first twenty minutes to save my life, but I know that at some point between the three-quarters and halfway mark, I realizes that I was standing in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher. The show is set during the end of the world, kinda. Extraterrestrials have declared war on us, and big, six-legged robot hit men are clomping all over God's creation, trying to waste Noah Wyle.

Noah is part of the resistance movement. His unit calls itself the 2nd Massachusetts, which may be meant as a nod to the Tea Party audience or may just be a reminder that Wyle's character used to teach history at Boston University. But he also has three sons, so you'll know he's both straight and potent, and he can shoot, even though the gray-haired guy from the Land of the L. Q. Jones Stand-Ins reminds him of his place in the food chain when he reminds him that he has to defer in certain things to the members of his unit who've spent their lives just drillin' holes in folks. A lot of them books that Noah spent his life a-readin' were books about military history, they'll grant him that--but still, they were books. Noah, who has a son out there in thrall to the aliens, swallows deep and nods at the truth in this. When what's left of America's portion of the free and living human race is broken up into nomadic groups, a couple of hundred "civilians" under the authority and protection of a hundred "fighters", the fighter in charge of Wyle's group is Will Patton, who's been working on his gruff 'n' grizzled.

Radiating rough-hewn manliness, Patton demonstrates his rightful place as leader by loitering around the set waiting for someone to come up to him and try to raise a serious practical issue that doesn't specifically involve blowing someone or something's head, so he can stare at his interlocutor and say, "I don't have time for this," before heading off to loiter in a different part of the set. Wyle is a little less withholding, but with his dialogue written by a focus group trying to make a hero who'll be acceptable to any conceivable audience that might turn up, he tends to come across as a little inscrutable. What does he think about the relationship between the fighters and the civilians, who Will Patton's service people derisively refer to as "eaters"? "Civilians versus the military is an age-old question." Yeah, I get it, you're a history professor, but the question was, what do you think about it? "I think civilians are a liability and a hindrance." Pause so that half the audience can go "Whaa-aa-at!?" and the other half can pump their fists and holler, "Yeah!" Then he adds, "I also think they're the best motivation we have to fight." You speak in riddles, Sahib.

The second of last night's two episodes is a bit livelier than the first, mainly because Colin Cunningham, who plays a rogue robot killer leading a half-assed white trash militia, is not reined in by the regulations that seem to have been imposed on the regular cast members, who can be seen struggling to remain inoffensively boring--not that Noah Wyle makes that look like a struggle, Cunningham, who I don't remember ever noticing in anything before, although IMDB claims that he's been around forever, is allowed to cram a whole hour's worth of character, and then some, into his guest appearance. He's a smart natural leader, but also a natural outlaw, which makes the point that the qualities that might make someone a dangerous malcontent or a rejected outsider in normal times might come in handy when everything's gone to hell in a hand basket. He's also the charismatic glue holding the mugs under him in line. We can tell they're the true rabble, even before they're revealed to be rapists, because they hoot derisively at at a couple of Noah's friends for being "a black" and "an Oriental." At the end of the episode, Cunningham is locked up, and may be back, if the show knows what's good for it, but his buddies are executed by one of their rape victims. This move seems partly meant to appease those viewers who long for a post-racial apocalypse and would not feel altogether comfortable in having these guys running around loose and heavily armed, no matter how many alien robots they waste.

Watching Falling Skies just made me realize just how deathly sick I am of the current wave of post-apocalypse fantasies. Post-apocalypticism (is that a word? it is now) was all about nuclear terrors in the 1950s, and in the '60s and '70s, midnight movies such as The Bed Sitting Room, Glen and Randa, A Boy and His Dog and Death Race 2000 spiked it with doses of black humor and playpen satire. In the '80s, the apocalypse went cyberpunk, and while the Mad Max films and their imitators got high on the nihilistic thrill of motorized speed and destruction in a future landscape where there was nothing left to lose, movies like Repo Man raised the question of how surreal and degraded society had to become before it became a moot point whether the end was near or not; maybe it had already come and nobody noticed. But in pop culture now, the end is deadly, numbingly serious and realistic-looking, whether the enemy comes in the form of killer robots, or zombies (as in the TV series based on the comics series The Walking Dead) or just other crazed, hungry people trying to stay alive in a world gone wackadoo, as in The Road.

A certain sameness set in a while back. The characters in these visions all dress like survivalist gun nuts, unless it's cold, in which case they dress like Beckettian tramps. And they trudge through on their way to nowhere, killing who or what they have to kill, with only one idea in their heads: finding lost loved ones and keeping what's left of the family together, because the family unit is the last trace of civilization. It's become as formal and repetitive as kabuki, and I confess to seeing the same steps gone through again and again so far from involving that I have to wonder what the appeal is for others. Is it a reflection of anxiety over the economy and American decline in general? If so, that has the feel of a sick joke, because entertainment that actually acknowledges the damage done to people's souls by an economic system on steroids and crack, whether the work in question is sharp (like Michael Tolkin's Great Lost '90s movie, The New Age) or earnest and soapy (like the more recent downsizing drama The Company Men) still just seems to make people uncomfortable, just as any talk about correcting a system that nearly drove us all into the dirt a couple of years ago inspires a Greek chorus on op-ed pages and cable news shows to start tearing out their hair and wailing about the unfathomable evil of "class warfare."

But a lot of people who don't want to hear about real world problems, because that would be "depressing", seem to get a kick out of watching people making do without electricity or running water or the other basic necessities demonstrate, as in a how-to show, the best way to survive an attack of cannibals while armed only with a rusty pair of pliers and a staple gun. Many of the people who were rooting for the world to end on Harold Camping's time table were so frustrated with their earthly lives that they were eager to get to the next one, maybe after one last credit-card shopping spree that they wouldn't have to pay for. And I suspect that part of the appeal of these realistically presented post-apocalypse fables must be that they show how the end of the world levels the playing field: all of a sudden, money and fame really are just shit, and people will be valued according to the strengths they can display in such areas as building a fire, providing food and shelter, and letting a slavering zombie have it right in the sweet spot. Could all the people imagining they'd be the resourceful heroes of this fantasy if it came to pass really capable of doing these things? Maybe not. But apparently it's more soothing to them than trying to imagine a world where the playing field got a little more level because the CEO of Halliburton had to pay his fair share of taxes.

Happy Fathers Day

Hung

The resignation of Anthony Weiner brings to a close a terrible period in our country's recent history, a time when TV news readers could, to their endless one-sided amusement, repeat the name "Weiner" in conjunction with an honest-to-God penis-related news story. I recently reviewed the TV film Field of Vision, part of the "Family Movie Night" project, whose website slyly promises to dprovide viewers with "Teachable Moments" as opposed to, say, entertainment. "Teachable moments" are now what the media promises whenever they get ahold of a new sex scandal to use as a delivery system. To boil it down, what the scandals teach us is what, in a sex scandal, you can and can't get away with since the last time the goal posts were moved. It's all very meta.

Once upon a time, you really had to be out there in the middle of the town square with your pants around your ankles, cocaine drizzling from both nostrils while you screamed the lyrics to Millie Jackson songs through a bullhorn, before the media would consent to acknowledge that you sort of had a colorful private life. And, as the late Wilfrid Sheed pointed out in the wake of the Clinton impeachment--which left its target standing atop record approval numbers while tarnishing the reputation of Henry Hyde, one of the Congressmen who'd been looking to take him down, and taking out two of the others, one of whom had just succeeded the other as Speaker of the House--the two parties didn't use this stuff on each other, because of the Mutually Assured Destruction factor. The goal posts really started rolling with Gary Hart in 1987. Those in the media who were a little uncomfortable with that one rallied when it became clear that the teachable lesson at its core was, don't double-dog dare the media to put a tail on you if you're doing something you don't want them to find out. Few were troubled by the fact that the Miami Herald already had reporters tailing Hart before he issued his ambiguous but nevertheless ill-advised "challenge".

Hart may have assumed that he was safe simply because everyone else who'd behaved the way he did had been safe, so long as he didn't plow into a phone pole while drunk with his baby in his lap. After all, if he'd stayed in the race and won the Democratic nomination for president, he would have faced George Bush, Sr. in the general election, and Bush's extramarital life was no secret to the Washington press corp. There were a few faltering attempts to bring it to voters' attention towards the end of the 1988 election, attempts that never took but that may have been fed by some reporter or editor's suddenly wondering why Bush deserved a higher degree of protection from prying into his personal life than Hart did. After the election, I remember seeing Ben Bradlee addressing this very question on C-SPAN,. Sadly, I forgot to write away for the transcript, but as I recall, the gist of his argument was that Hart had dirty, dirty sex with a number of bimbos, which proved that he was an unstable lunatic who had to be kept away from the nuclear button at all costs, whereas Bush had a long-standing affair with a lady of quality, which proved he was a gentleman.

Because the world of sex scandal coverage and commentary is surprisingly small and keeps recycling the same people. Bradlee is married to Sally Quinn, the professional snob who, during the Clinton impeachment mess, wrote a notorious Washington Post piece calling Kenneth Starr a true Washington social "insider", which she meant as praise, and sneering at the Clintons for being tacky outsiders who needed to be brought down by whatever means came to hand. It was around that time that Bradlee published a memoir in which he shared his nostalgic reminiscences about how, as a Washington reporter in the early '60s, he had kept what he knew about President Kennedy's philandering to himself; the book came out less than ten years after a previous book, Conversations with Kennedy, in which the sage old square shooter had continued to insist that. if JFK ever got himself during his time in the White House, he sure pulled the wool over Ben's eyes.

By the time the smoke cleared on the Clinton business, the teachable moment preferred by the best media representatives seemed to be that, while you could maybe do this sort of thing in Kennedy's time and not be a bad person, if you did it now, you were the scum of the earth, all because of how much "things had changed." I suspect that, by now, some of the people reciting this line in 1998 would admit that the main way things had changed was that you used to be able to get away with this stuff, and now you were supposed to know that you can't, unless, like who knows how many adulterous politicians who aren't big enough fish for anyone to care about, you just do. At the time, though, the phrase used to be uttered in dark, ominous tones, as if it meant something more-- as if there had ever been a time when reporters or politicians would have publicly claimed that they didn't take fidelity to one's spouse seriously. (What they'd say to each other is another matter. Watching Bradlee on C-SPAN, I remember getting the impression that, if he viewed men who sleep with too many slutty babes as contemptible and men with well-regulated extramarital lives as gentlemanly, he would have seen a man who was faithful to one woman for long stretches of his adult life as a prissy joke. Is it out of bounds to mention that Bradlee was still married to his second wife when he started measuring Sally Quinn for her role as number three?) I think some people who fell back on the "things have changed" line wanted it to somehow refer to feminism; I guess the idea was that a man who betrays his wife in the sack is showing her a lack of respect, which in turn reveals his disdain for all women. I have never begun to get the logic behind this. I think that a person's acting on a desire to sleep with a number of persons besides that person's spouse may reveal something about a great many character traits, but contempt for a whole gender, and in spite of that person's stands on such issue as equal pay for equal work and abortion? It's like saying that Scott Walker is more pro-labor than Samuel Gompers was, because Walker gave his driver a nicer Christmas bonus.

The worst thing anyone has "learned" from the Weiner affair is that Andrew Breitbart is a credible source of information and is to be treated with the respect due such a one. Breitbart had previously distinguished himself by promoting a series of stunt videos that firmly established that, if someone entered the offices of the community-based organization ACORN and talked nonsense at one of their staffers, the staffer might humor this fool for a while before saying goodbye to them and never filing their paperwork or otherwise following through on what they'd talked about. Not riveting stuff at its core, but the videos were edited to look like outtakes from Doctor Detroit. and with conservative news organizations primed, in the wake of the election of a goddamn Democrat to the presidency, to find cause for displeasure in the existence of an organization that, among other useful services, helped get lower-income people registered to vote, much hay was made of them. Breitbart subsequently topped himself by getting a woman fired from her government job by posting a video in which she appeared to be a racist monster, then, after word got out that the video was, again, edited with a meat cleaver to make its phony point, having a hissy fit and denouncing all those who were such spoilsports as to watch the entire video, even after it stopped seeming to make the point he wanted it to make and started making the opposite point.

Breitbart, in sequence, posted Weiner's junk shots online, boasted that he had more of the same, hijacked Weiner's press conference at which the Congressman admitted the shots were of him to repeat that he, Breitbart, had even worse stuff in the icebox but that he wasn't going to release it because he was "trying to save [Weiner's] family", then went on the Opie and Anthony radio show and let them use their phones to take pictures of one of the "worse" shots off his phone, so they could post them online, When asked about the apparent disconnect between his concerns about Weiner's family and his eagerness to share the contents of his "CLASSIFIED" file with Opie and Anthony, he seemed to express surprise that their phones had the same photo-taking capacity as his own, adding that he was in town that day and thought, "Why not stop in for some hi jinks?" So, the final tally on Breitbart seems to be this: totally without credibility when it comes to busting black politicians and community organizations notable for the assistance they offer to the black and low-income communities, but a man to be taken at his word if he makes any claims regarding his vast storehouse of photos of other people's genitalia. Add to this the fact that, when he's carrying his dirty pictures around on his phone and has a standing invitation to show them to some shock jocks and asks himself the question, "Why not stop in for some hi-jinks, he is in that one percent of the population not smart enough to answer, Do you just want the top twenty-five answers why not, or do you want to pull the car over so we can spend the rest of the day going through the whole file. Then there's the fact that he says he felt the need to bring Weiner down in order to uphold the personal honor of Clarence Thomas. Which reminds me of a line from Mario Cantone's standup act, after he's mentioned that Cher has an Oscar: you're waiting for the joke, but that is the joke.

The avalanche in the redefinition of what makes for a media-worthy sex scandal may not have begun until 1987, but there were some earlier attempts to push it forward. A lot of people thought it would happen in the 1970s, when the more permissive climate about what could appear in print mingled with the investigative-expose spirit of post-Watergate America. Some thought that they saw a new benchmark in the Wayne Hayes-Elizabeth Ray scandal, involving the Democratic Congressman from Ohio who resigned from office after his secretary told the Washington Post that he'd been fucking her for two years and indicated that she was so incompetent a secretary that her federal salary had to be considered payment for her services in the sack. But Ray's candor about her supposed whoriness, coupled with the fact that Hayes was one of the most intensely disliked men in Washington, may have made that one a special case for its time. Later that same year (as Nora Ephron wrote in her book Scribble, Scribble. the Detroit News, which at the time had a reputation for seeing it as part of its mission to destroy Democrats--a goal that Breitbart owns up to enthusiastically--ran a series, just in time for election season, detailing Congressman Don Riegle's affair with a former employee. Apparently the paper and the hack it entrusted to do their dirty work thought that they were in Pulitzer territory, but instead, the wire services failed to pick up the stories, the city's rival paper had a field day writing up the behind-the-scenes machinations involved, readers and voters were repulsed by both the wallowing in sleaze and the obvious partisan motives behind it, and Riegle, who'd been struggling in the polls, got a sympathy bump that helped him to lay waste to his opponent in November.

What was the big difference? Well, aside from the cumulative effect of thirty-five years of declining standards, the Detroit News was deliberately stirring up shit to try to hurt a politician it disliked, whereas Breitbart, like Matt Drudge in the Clinton case, gave the mainstream press the chance to write about how someone outside their clubhouse was stirring up shit to try to hurt a politician he didn't like: isn't it squalid, and now that we've been forced to bring it up, we'd better examine just what it is these scandalmongers are talking about. The old media and the new media have bedded down together in some complicated ways and will continue to do so, but in these cases, where the little guys who make their own standards serve as beards to give the big guys an excuse to give their tabloid Internet headlines wider circulation, it's hard to tell who's supposed to be the pimp and who's the whore. Just so long as both fall asleep with smiles on their faces.

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Homicide: "Night of the Dead Living". Sorry about the shitty-looking photo, but that's what you get when a steal a frame from a DVD reproduction of a TV show that's badly underlit.

Candidate Update: Tim Pawlenty

The clear loser of the Republican debate was Tim Pawlenty, who in one bizarre exchange dug in his heels and resolutely refused to humor the moderator's urging him to use the term "Obamaneycare", which he seemed to have coined in an interview last week in order to tar President Obama and Mitt Romney with the same anti-health care brush, and which many observers assumed was meant to be his new campaign mantra, what "Ideas!" is to Newt Gingrich and "9/11!" is to Giuliani. In some societies, Pawlenty's reluctance to play this game would be taken as a heartening sign of dignity and self-respect, but in ours, it was widely seen as horrifying evidence that Pawlenty is already dreaming of being Mitt's vice-presidential candidate someday, and doesn't want to have to try and explain what he'd meant a few months earlier, the way George Bush the Elder was once obliged to insist that he had never met that mysterious man who looked just like him who was in all that news footage condemning "voodoo economics." The sad fact remains that wanting to be vice-president under Mitt Romney is sort of like dreaming of being an actor in the hope that someday, you might get to be Scott Baio's understudy. It does not make you seem like a world beater and future leader of men.

Those who had been talking up Pawlenty's chances are now reconsidering whether the country is really crying out for combines unspeakable dullness with cult-like devotion to economic theories that are known to not work. On a more shallow level, the possibility exists that Republican voters may not flock to a man who, whenever he tries to smile engagingly and triumphantly, looks like the really scrawny guy who, in a movie, plays the pathetic, virginal best friend of the supposedly scrawny guy, played by a tanned and muscular teen idol who has consented to wear eyeglasses because it'll give him a chance to broaden his range, who has just won the winning touchdown after the couch brought him off the bench after everyone on the starting line came down with swine flu.

Know Your Candidates: Michele Bachmann

Michele Bachmann declared her candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination during Monday night's debate between Republican presidential candidates, which does go a long way towards explaining what she was doing there. (Depending on who you ask, it was either the first such debate that mattered or the second one following the special debate of marginal wackos.) Bachmann was the unquestioned victor in that debate in the category of exceeding low expectations. Because reporters so enjoy lazily settling into a lazy groove of repeating the same cookie-cutter images they've collectively formed of politicians but at the same time hate themselves for it, a pol who seems to break out of his or her plaster image by seeming just a little bit or less crazy than their regular doppelganger on Saturday Night Live can get a lot out of it. The White House press corps waited for four years for Dan Quayle to exceed expectations so they could proclaim his presidential, and even alerted him to the occasions when they'd be watching in hopes that he'd do it, but Dan is a pure formalist who sticks to the script, his career arc be damned. Bachmann may not have needed to do much to exceed expectations, maybe less than Dan would have. People are celebrating the new, improved Bachmann because she didn't stare into the middle distance at nothing (something she did in her special "Tea Party" response to the President's State of the Union address, because, to demonstrate her political purity, she was looking not into the camera that would carry her image to the news channels but into a special "Tea Party" camera meant to capture the YouTube clip.) Nor did she attempt to stare down viewers as if she were Hyno Toad or flap her bat wings while shrieking that the President is a Muslim terrorist whose green card has expired. She looked well-preserved and acted personable. For this, some have gone so far as to claim that she "won" the debate, mainly because somebody has to have won the debate and a lot of people would rather eat the still-beating hearts of their grandchildren than allow the possibility that it was Romney.

Bachmann's performance was especially impressive to those who had gotten used to reading, or writing, that she's a hysterical nut case. In factm her views are hysterical and nutty, but that doesn't mean she's not a professional politician who knows how to charm people and present a reasonable-seeming surface. That's perhaps the most obvious of the many differences between her and Sarah Palin, who might have been created in a lab for the express purpose of being compared to Bachmann in ways that make Bachmann look good. Ever since John McCain elevated her to national celebrity, Palin has behaved as if she can't believe that it's taken this long for her ship to come in and that she has to spend every waking second cashing in on her fame to make up for lost time. She has also made it painfully clear that she means to put her celebrity to the cause of bringing celebratory and lucratory attention to the gift from the gods that is Sarah Palin. Bachmann, who is almost ten years older than Palin, entered politics more than thirty years ago and has labored long and hard to promote her issues, which are based in hard-right Christian conservatism, while patiently waiting for a movement to come along that she could use to spearhead her values. The greater point of comparison is not with Palin but with George W. Bush, who also knew how to appear reasonable to reporters and voters who knew next to nothing about him while using Christian code phrases to speak right over their heads to the faithful. One difference between the two of them is that, since Bush had no serious accomplishments before being handed the presidency and was promoted as a viable presidential candidate on the basis of his bloodline, it was a little easier for him to insist that he be judged not on his perhaps nonexistent opinions but on the firmness of his handshake and the sunlight gleaming off his Polident smile. Not being the daughter of a past president, Bachmann has had to ruse through the traditional method of doing hard work in the trenches, and has left more or a paper trail for the media to ignore.

Bachmann has taken a fair amount of ribbing for having said that she underwent a political conversion to the right after reading one of Gore Vidal's historical novels. "He was kind of mocking the Founding Fathers and I just thought, I just remember reading the book, putting it in my lap, looking out the window and thinking, 'You know what? I don't think I am a Democrat. I must be a Republican.'" As she describes this Eureka! moment, it's actually a revealing anecdote, as it describes the mindset of someone who believes that attitude is everything, and who thinks that the most extreme representative of a political side must speak for everyone who would meet him halfway on anything. If Gore Vidal, sympathetic pen pal of Timothy McVeigh and the Jermiah who warned us all against the economic yellow peril, looks like a liberal to some people, then all the people who can find better uses for their college degrees must be... whatever the opposite of a liberal is, which is a Republican, It's a cute story, but the details of Bachmann;'s political history suggest that she simply be one of those people who thought that liberal politics and Christian beliefs could co-exist in the same body until the rise of religious right in the late '70s assured them otherwise. In 1976, Bachmann and her husband worked for the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter. That was the first time a lot of Americans heard about the born again experience, and Carter's high comfort level in discussing his faith unsettled a great many people who were not mollified by his promise to keep his stewardship of the country separate from his stewardship of his soul and to not use the presidency as a religious pulpit. Bachmann was one of many Christian voters who were disappointed to learn that he meant it, especially since these people were receptive to the new gospel that God votes Republican and that there were officially "Christian" sides to every issue from the estate tax to climate change. Bachmann got with the program, switched her allegiance to the Moral Majority's candidate of choice, Ronald Reagan, and has never looked back.

In the '80s and '90s, Bachmann's political activism took the form of opposition to abortion and what I'll be a sport and call "education reform." In 1993, she was one of a group of parents who started a charter school in Stillwater, Minnesota, but her ideas for a religion-based curriculum may have led to her departure from the board. Her first stab at electoral politics came in 1999, when she was part of a controversial, ultimately unsuccessful slate of five Republican candidates who ran for the Stillwater school board on a religious-conservative social-issues platform. The next year, she was elected to the Minnesota sate Senate and immediately established homophobia as her personal crusade. (Her husband, Marcus, runs a "Christian counseling service" that includes curing homosexuality among its holy missions, has said simply of gays that ""Barbarians need to be educated.") Gary Laidig, the "moderate" Republican who lost his state Senate seat to her, has said of Bachmann, "She is absolutely a cold, calculating person. It's always the same with her on campaigns: Nobody really knows who she is, and she just comes across as this petite, attractive soccer mom. And that's it. But the fact is, she's part of a group that is absolutely determined to take over the Republican Party. It's that wing of the party that's very much in step with people like Norm Coleman and the Taxpayers League. And the fact is that they know how to run races. Good races, too. From getting delegates to hitting phone banks, they cover it, and Michele's part of that. At the end of the day, her politics are like this: Everyone will have a gun, nobody will have an abortion, no one will pay taxes, everyone will go to church, and there won't be any more pinko liberal teachers in school."

Bachmann became a figure of fun during the 2008 election and in the time since, when TV reporters have loved to chuckle about her lunatic statements about Obama's "anti-Americanism" (a term she used during the election, later appeared to sort of apologize for, then still later insisted that having used it made her "look like Nostradamus"), and such bloopers as her saying, when in New Hamsphire, that it was the site of the Battle of Concord. But how she handles such matters give insight to her smoothness as a pol and her appeal. As David Weigel pointed out, by way of comparing Bachmann to Palin, "It was the gaffe reporters were waiting for, but Bachmann admitted it, and joked that she'd made the mistake because New Hampshire, not Manchester, was where people still remembered the battle. (IE, they're more patriotic.) Compare that to Palin making chorizo out of a statement about Paul Revere's ride -- and then claiming that when she talking about him 'warning the British' and ringing bells, she was totally right." Palin doubled down, and looked even stupider; Bachmann admitted her mistake with a "self-deprecatory" humorous line that drove him the point that the "mistake" was based on a superior, intuitive understanding of the real America and the history they don't teach in books but that the right people know in their hearts.

In Iowa earlier this year, Bachmann showed what the surreal, politicized approach to American history that so appalled her when it was wielded by Gore Vidal sounds like when it's coming from a theocratic Tea Party queen, talking about how "it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forebearers who worked tirelessly – men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country," and saying that ""...our ancestors had different cultures, different backgrounds, different traditions. How unique in all of the world, that one nation that was the resting point from people groups all across the world ... it didn't matter the color of their skin, it didn't matter their language, it didn't matter their economic status ... once you got here, we were all the same. Isn't that remarkable?" The point of this blinkered gush isn't to be "true", it's to say that Michelle Obama can take her talk about "finally" being able to be proud of the United States and shove it. A Tea Party Congressional candidate from last year, Dave Funk, summed up the candidate's appeal when, after an appearance in Iowa last January, he said, “It was almost like ‘a new day in America’ speech, like Reagan. Everybody else is talking policy, issues, ideas — she’s talking about motivating the people to get out and do something.” Of course, the Tea Party is composed of both religious social conservatives and those who are more fixated on economic issues; the vaguer Bachmann can remain about exactly what it is she'd like to motivate people to get out and do, the better she'll be able to continue to pose as the Congresswoman for all of them.

New at The A.V. Club

MasterChef: "Final 38 Revealed/ Elimination Round"

New at The A.V. Club

Nurse Jackie: "Batting Practice"

New at The A.V. Club

My review of the new P & G/Walmart "Family Night Movie" production, Field of Vision.

New at The A.V. Club

Homicide: "Ghost of a Chance"

This Is Our Youth

Movie reviews, some of which started out as Tweets that I didn't feel like going to the trouble of editing down to 140 characters:

DAYDREAM NATION: I've written before that I have a long-standing problem with the word "smug". I can't always tell what the people who throw it around mean, and I sometimes get the feeling that all they mean is that they're offended that someone who for some reason rubs them the wrong way, or who believes something true that they wish wasn't true, doesn't have the grace to pretend to think they're full of shit. But this thing here... this is the smuggest movie I've ever seen. It belongs to an especially, inherently smug genre, the acrid, cutting-edge satirical vision in high school teen pic drag. (Previous examples: Heathers, Jawbreaker, Pretty Persuasion. The friendlier, not-so-acrid Easy A could eat them all for breakfast.) This one was written and overdirected by a fellow named Michael Goldbach, who wants everyone to know that Sonic Youth mean the world to him, and stars a hideously glammed-up, malfunctioning robot version of the wonderful Kat Dennings. She gets to deliver voiceover narration in her sarcasm-dripping, luded-out voice, letting us know which characters will die of cancer after the movie ends and tipping us off to the presence of a serial killer on the edge of the action, lest we forget that the specter of death hovers over all the high jinks that she reacts to with her suffocating attitude. New in town, she fails to connect with her dumb-as-a-post stoner boyfriend when she tells him that the area "has more incest than an Atom Egoyan movie", and he doesn't get it. That's okay, because the whole point of the line, and the whole point of more like it to come, is to show that the listener doesn't get it, because nobody is as cool as our heroine, her creator, and us lucky ducks who are assumed to appreciate her. It's kind of a drag that there have to be any people in a movie at all, but you can't just film yourself facing the camera and saying, "I guess I'm kinda awesome. Maybe you can be awesome too, if you like what I'm shoveling." That wouldn't leave you much to build the trailer out of.

I liked Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation back in 2003. I wonder if I would have liked it as much if I'd known that Coppola was going to remake it so soon, without Bill Murray. Somewhere stars Stephen Dorff as a movie star whose life, from what we see of it, consists of all the least interesting parts of a being a movie star. He checks in and out of hotel rooms, hangs out by the pool, and attends award shows and press conferences and does interviews on a press junket, where he has to contend with dopey questions and undignified situations that might make for compelling viewing if, as was the case with Bill Murray's appearance on the Japanese TV show and his filming the commercial in Translation, we had any sense that he might have more on his mind and better uses for his time. When I first heard about Somewhere, I remember being happy that Stephen Dorff had a lead role in a prestige picture. When Dorff first appeared on the scene, I sort of loathed him, mostly because he seemed awfully comfortable starring in the rotten 1993 movie S.F.W., which wanted to be to twentysomethings in my day what Daydream Nation wants to be to kids today: a raised middle finger and a sneer presented as the Attitude of the Moment. And in Backbeat, I thought he came across as a guy who thought he deserved to be a movie star, which was maybe not the best quality to highlight when you're supposed to be playing someone who walked away from the Beatles. But he won me over with his generous, flashy performances as the bad guys in City of Industry and Blade; he had a real man-you-love-to-hate quality.

He isn't bad in Somewhere, which gives him the chance to play the guy he might have turned into if S.F.W. and Backbeat had been massive international hits and his career had flourished while his soul and brains died on the vine. He has an endearing, wan little smile as he lies on the bed in his room at the Chateau Marmont and watches twin blondes pole dancing to lull himself to sleep. But during the first half of the movie, he hasn't been given anything much to do except suggest that the good life can get to be a rut, and after the unseen mother of his little girl (Elle Fanning) dumps the child on him and they get to hang out for most of the rest of the movie, all that happens is that he has the chance to experience some simple pleasures during the hours he'd otherwise be occupied with anonymous sexual encounters, and then after the girl leaves for camp, he feels empty and sad. It's not the worst insult to say that Dorff can't create a fleshed-out character from next to nothing as well as Bill Murray. As for Coppola, I'm starting to think that all the reviewers who can't talk about her movies without referencing her father are going to look pretty silly if the DNA tests fail to confirm that her father wasn't really Antonioni.

WILD GRASS: Alain Resnais was 86 when his latest film won him a special jury prize for Lifetime Achievement at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and a number of people have remarked on how youthful-spirited the film itself is. It is that, and the bouncy mood and brightly hued cinematography by Éric Gautier can make you feel buoyant for a while at the start, before the heavyweight whimsicality of the thing start to feel slightly obnoxious. Sabine Azéma, outfitted with a head of red hair like a topiary sculpture, loses her wallet during a shoe-shopping excursion; André Dussollier, like Azema a Resnais regular of long standing, finds it, turns it in to the police, and then, having become fixated on the idea that his having found the wallet should somehow lead to a romantic encounter between the two of them, he basically stalks her. This is presented as if it were cute as all get out, and after she first reacts with confusion and anxiety, she decides that she should probably find it cute, too. The tone is all that much harder to read because of something that probably does reflect Resnais's age and that may not be intentional, and that was also a problem in his last film, Private Fears in Public Places, an artsy French adaptation of a machine-tooled British farce by Alan Ayckbourn, which was full of actors who seemed a little old for their parts. Dussollier, whose character is supposed to be in his fifties, is in his mid-sixties and looks older and not a little enfeebled. Azéma was 59 when the movie was made, and Anne Consigny, who's supposed to be Dussollier's wife of thirty years, was 46, which makes me feel less stupid about the fact that, for much of the movie, I thought she was playing his daughter. The fact that Dussollier looks (and moves) as if the most he'd really want from either woman would be that they might tuck him in with a glass of warm milk helps take the curse off the stalking scenes, including one in which he slashes Azéma's tires, because he never seems like much of a threat, sexual or otherwise. But he also doesn't seem so much romantic as dotty. I kept waiting for the scene that isn't here but feels as if it ought to be: the one where Consigny says, "Now daddy, you know perfectly well I'm not your wife. You've mixed your medications again. Now get out your hedge trimmers and do something to help this poor lady with her hair."


THE GREEN HORNET: After all the bad advance publicity, I wasn't expecting a good movie from Michel Gondry's superhero flick, but I was expecting a better time than I got from this thing. Outside of your hardcore pulp nostalgia niche, does anyone care about the Green Hornet? His contemporary, the Shadow, inspired a crappy movie in the '90s, but has otherwise had his legacy burnished by some excellent comic books (by Mike Kaluta and Denny O'Neil, by Howard Chaykin, and by Andy Helfer, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Kyle Baker), and will always be associated with the voice of Orson Welles. The Green Hornet's fame was only extended beyond the era of radio drama because the single-season '60s TV show co-starred Bruce Lee, who went on to greater things after the show was canceled, but who was always willing to share with interviewers what a demeaning experience it had been to drive the car for a leading man who possessed about a tenth of his charisma. (Particularly galling was the cross-over episode where the stars of The Green Hornet had to face off against the stars of Batman, which meant that Lee had to pretend to not have the stuff to wipe up the floor with Burt Ward.) The one promising thing about a Green Hornet movie was that, working on a property that didn't have a million Marvel zombies waiting for it with their knives out Gondry would be able to relax and do whatever he wanted with the property. But he seems to have viewed this project as his big chance to be a good company man and turn out something that, in today's corporate pop culture landscape, passes for normal. Those whose reaction to The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was to hope that he might be able to turn down the overflowing spigot of his imagination may be unprepared for just how uninteresting he can be when he puts his mind to it. Except for a random surreal touch or two buried in a flashback sequence here and there and a mock action scene with the heroes driving through the wreckage of a newspaper office in the front half of a car that's been cut in half, the movie never feels as if Gondry had any fun making it, and the feeling is contagious.


STONE: The director John Curran pulls an honest performance out of Robert De Niro as a parole officer, facing retirement, who gets involved with a scarily unreadable convict (Edward Norton) and the convict's wife (Milla Jovovich), a sexually voracious schoolteacher who displays the ingenuous sweetness of one of her students while leading the older man into an affair. The good cast is rounded out by Frances Conroy, as De Niro's wife and partner in unspoken misery of umpteen years. The script of Stone was adapted by Angus MacLachlan, the author of Junebug, from his own unproduced play, and it joins his feeling for the mysteries of family ties to the fearlessness about the deranging pleasures and terrors of sex that Curran demonstrated in his early movie Praise, and in parts of the films he's directed since then (We Don't Live Here Anymore, The Painted Veil). At first, it looks as if having his world turned inside out might liberate De Niro, at least to the degree that he'll realize how empty his existence had been; his full hopelessness isn't revealed until he accuses Norton and Jovovich of destroying his life, and it hits you that he still thinks there was something there substantial enough to destroy. It's hard to tell whether, at the end, the other characters are facing a wide open road or a dead end they'll have to get comfortable in. The sudden, inconclusive ending of Stone disappointed me a little, but I can live with it. Nobody seems to know how to end a movie anymore, and it's getting harder and harder to find a movie that had a reason to begin at all.

Not to beat a dead horse, but after my comments a couple of days ago on what I find frustrating about so much curent film criticism, I can't help drawing your attention to the very smart David Edelstein's review of Super 8, After saying a lot about the terrific movie that it could have been, all in the course of pointing out the reasons it's less than the movie of his own imagination, Edelstein shrugs, "At least Abrams makes you feel his enthusiasm... Now, with the blessing of the master [i.e., Steven Spielberg, who is back, just as he was in the days of Gremlins and Goonies and Young Sherlock Holmes, to funding homages to himself--P.N.], he can plagiarize with alacrity. He can track in on his youthful subjects from below, vividly bringing their emotions to the fore. He can shoot the horizon line and heavens to make us instantly aware of all the mysteries of the universe we’ve been forced to forget just to get on with our days. He can use a sudden silence to make us laugh out loud at the prospect of being jolted out of our seats. It’s sad to say, but in the midst of so many impersonal, FX-bloated franchises and tent poles, that might be enough." To which I'd ask, well, do you think it's enough? If you think it's "sad to say", maybe you don't think so, but if so, why dance around it? You're only the movie critic for New York magazine. Who else's job is it to say it's not enough. if not yours?

Bonerheads

KJ Dell'Antonia, one of the writers at Slate's blog devoted ti women's viewpoints, argues that Anthony Weiner needs to go, not because of the moral implications of his online flashing, but because his activities prove that he "isn't bright enough to... be in Congress." I've been wondering when I was first going to hear this argument, while recognizing that, if I still lived in New York, I'd have probably heard it a couple hundred times at work and on the subway by now. I feel that I remember the first time I heard it said, and not in jest, about Bill Clinton, fairly early in Impeachment Year 1998. I think that that time, it came from Russell Baker, a man I've regarded as a reliable fount of common sense since I was about nine. (I know that makes me sound like a godawful little wonk, but I make no apologies for having read the op-ed page of the McComb, Mississippi Enterprise-Journal as a child. There wasn't a hell of a lot else to do back then, in that place, once the sun went down and the werewolves were out. And believe me, you didn't have to tap into a vein of common sense too fucking often to stand out in the op-ed page of the McComb, Mississippi Enterprise-Journal.)

Just in the last couple of days, I happen to have been re-reading some of the things that smart, experienced political writers pitched into cyberspace during the first half of 1998, and it's sobering how many of them could not imagine any way that Bill Clinton was still going to be president by the end of that year, not if a majority of Americans came to believe that he'd made extramarital merry with an intern. When it became clear that the polls were sort of going his way, it made no sense to them, and possible explanations were offered up for the public's ability to simultaneously disapprove of the big boy's private failings and prefer that he stay on at a job that he was doing rather well. These included mass shock and a cynical desire among the populace to keep cashing in on the healthy stock market--I think I was the only registered voter in 1998 who wasn't supplementing his income by day trading--even at the cost of destroying the children's inner lives and moral compasses. It just occurs to me that, if there's an equivalent to my nine-year-old self reading this now because he got rerouted on his way to the online edition of the McComb, Mississippi Enterprise-Journal, that little fella has no first-hand knowledge of what it was like to be alive in 1998. Try and imagine starting every week, first thing Sunday morning, by turning on the TV to see Cokie Roberts and George Will telling you they're very, very disappointed in you and repeating unironic variations on Oscar Wilde's line about not knowing what the lower orders think they're there for, if not to set a good example.

It wasn't until very late in Impeachment Year 1998 that I remember the media starting to parrot the line that I'd been hearing from the people selling me my muffins and hamburgers for months. It had to do with the elementary fact that there is such a thing as private morality, as opposed to public morality, and that one is central to a public servant's fitness for his job, whereas one just seems to be beside the point, so long as it's not your kid he's screwing on the side. Back in the days when Franklin Roosevelt went to his reward holding his mistress's hand and Ike laid waste to the Axis menace while frolicking in his off hours with Kay Summersby, and even later, when President Kennedy frolicked while three-quarters of the Eastern seaboard, no one in the Fourth Estate ever had much of a problem doing the math on this.

But at some point, after Watergate failed to deliver on its promise to cleanse civic life of any hint of moral squalor, and the political culture of the 1980s banished shame forever from its temples, the media went a little nuts and began to confuse the two. Then it went absolutely drool-cup batshit and began to regard politicians' private morality as an excuse for investigations and expose's, even as their public morality was treated as something not to be dwelt upon. Because increasingly, in that age of a Teflon president surrounded by indictable ages, and with a a scandal that dwarfed Watergate for sheer illegality but that never seriously threatened to remove him from office, the media had begun treating politicians' lies and conflicts of interests and pandering appeals to voters' lowest impulses as "just business' and nothing to cluck over. To fill the void, they started to focus on private, especially sexual morality, as the only morality to which politicians could be held. Underlying this was the idea that the public would welcome the change because, unlike something like Iran-Contra, a politician's sexual history was something us rubes could understand.

The Clinton affair established how uncomfortable even some media people still were with this development. For them, the argument that slutting around should disqualify a politician for high office, not because it's immoral, but because it proves he's so stupid, is the ultimate cop-out. I propose that, if there is a distinction to be made between private and public morality, there damn well ought to be a distinction between private and public stupidity. There is such a thing as public stupidity. You see it whenever a politician stands up and declares that he knows that global warming is a hoax because he had to get the snow tires out last February, or calls for field trips for elementary school students to the Creationism Museum, or suggests that Obama's books were ghostwritten by Bill Ayers. And like public immorality, whether it takes the form of race-baiting campaign adds or sticking your face in the lobbyists' trough, it's much worse and more closely related to the way a politician does his job than private stupidity or immorality, even though the media is less likely to call for someone's head over it. As I said, I don't live in New York anymore, and I don't really have a horse in the race over whether Weiner is going to be able to brazen this out, like David Vitter, or if he's going to go the way of his brother in shirtlessness, Chris Lee. But if you're going to make the case that he should go, you have to recognize that it's all about his private morality, and you should be honest enough to own the argument that you think private morality is reason enough to end someone's career--or that you just want him gone because he's become too embarrassing to be associated with, or whatever. But claiming stupidity as a reason to run him out of town is just disingenuous. What he did was stupid, sure. But do you really think that there's any correlation to Tweeting pictures of your stuff and becoming convinced that Sharia law is spreading like kudzu through America's courts?

Your Eyelids Are Getting Heavy, Heavy...

You'll appreciate that I keep some pretty fast company if I mention that I spent part of the weekend following an online debate about whether or not boringness in movies is or is not a bad thing. I first discovered that this was not a settled question when someone called my attention to a couple of opinion pieces by New York Times critics Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott, which was in fact a rebuttal to a couple of pieces I'd missed: Dan Kois's attack on what he calls "eating your cultural vegetables, which I didn't know about for the same reason I seldom know about anything that appeared in the Times' Sunday magazine, and Richard Schickel's pan of the new Terrence Malick movie, The Tree of Life. In the first sentence of his review, Schickel makes it clear that he's out to start some shit by comparing Malick's techniques to what he calls "the Hiroshima Mon Amour scam." It's the word "scam" that's the tip-off that Schickel, far from being satisfied with pointing out the ways in which The Tree of Life and, while he's at it, Hiroshima, Mon Amour) don't work for him, he's out to accuse their makers of perpetrating a con job. The implication is that the people who like these movies are suckers, and that the people whose work they admire are laughing at them behind their backs. This tactic, while I'll admit to having used myself in my callower moments, is a proven winner when it comes to inducing apoplexy in a segment of your audience.

Mind you, if you're going to bad-mouth Terrence Malick, you might as well go for broke. People who love Malick's movies--there may be people who are content to like some of them, but they are apparently more reclusive even than Malick, whose image as the solitary intellectual hermit of the movies is inseparable from the standing of his movies themselves--tend to start praising them in terms usually reserved for religious experiences, and then they get a little excited. Malick is so bullet proof that it's taken as a shocking apostasy whenever anyone offers a dissenting opinion on his work, though dissenting opinions really aren't that unknown. Pauline Kael's negative review of Badlands is said to have broken the heart of New Yorker editor William Shawn, who reportedly wimpered that she must not have known that "Terry is like a son to me." David Thompson, who liked Badlands just fine, wrote of the follow-up, Days of Heaven, that its "imagery had become thunderous and stately, as if Malick and [his cinematographer] Nestor Almendros were so greedy for prestige that they couldn't release a frame unless it had that sentimental, decorous spaciousness beloved by Andrew Wyeth." Malick kept his fans waiting another twenty years for his next film, The Thin Red Line, of which Thomson simply asked, "What happened?" And Dave Kehr complained that the critical praise accorded Malick's Pocahontas movie, The New World, that it showed a trend towards criticism that rejected thought and analysis in favor of wallowing in what the observer feels. (He blamed this state of affairs, oddly enough, on the influence of Pauline Kael.)

Me, I'm not a fan. I agree with Thomson that Malick has never made a movie that duplicated the best qualities of his first film, and that what I've seen of his later films combine an aimless yet inflated narrative approach--especially annoying in the case of The Thin Red Line, where the drooling spaciness was a betrayal of a good book, by James Jones--with a pointlessly "beautiful" visual approach that impresses some moviegoers as painterly but would be dismissed as kitsch Americana if the frames were hung in a gallery show. I also think that Malick is something of a New Age airhead with a frustrating habit, one not entirely keeping with his image as a man not of the Hollywood marketplace, to cast as his make leads whichever dubiously talented, handsome actor currently has the best publicist and most undeserved reputation as the new Brando. (The one exception to this rule is The Thin Red Line, in which he basically cast every actor in Los Angeles who wanted to spend a few weeks working with a living legend, then filmed every thought that passed through his head and took a meat axe to the results, so that the closing credits are overflowing with "Thank You" mentions of actors--Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Donal Logue, Lukas Haas, Viggo Mortensen, Jason Patric, Randall Duk Kim, and Mickey Rourke among them--who traveled to the set to do work that was not fated to see the light of day. In my favorite moment--besides the Nick Nolte/Elias Koteas sequence, which is the best thing Malick's done since Badlands--George Clooney appears just long enough to make a speech to a group of soldiers, which you can't hear, because Malick decided that it was the best place to have another actor read a voice-over monologue.) But that's just me.

But there isn't anything I've ever seen in a Malick movie that I hate as much as the thought of being seen to agree with Richard Schickel. Schickel, who thinks Malick's movies are so pretentious and boring, thinks that the greatest living American moviemaker, and one of the greatest of all time, is Clint Eastwood. I find Eastwood's directorial efforts pretentious, boring, and one-take sloppy. At least Malick is trying. I'm just not sure what he's trying. (And on the subject of bad choices for leading men, Eastwood's movies often have Clint Eastwood in them.) In my list of most overrated directors, Eastwood would definitely come in ahead of Malick. (Though my top spot would still go to John Cassavettes, Father of the American Independent Cinema. I mention this not in hopes of pissing off anyone who's read this far, but just because I happened to make it through almost an hour of Faces when it was on TCM the other night, and I now have, for the first time ever in my life, a theory about what others see in this stuff that eludes me. I think they're movies for people who've somehow failed to notice that drunks are the most uninteresting people in the world, including coma victims and Mitt Romney. I have an alternate theory that these films appeal to drunks who want to believe that the gibberish that comes out of their mouths when they're three sheets to the wind is not entirely without interest, and to hang onto that mad dream, have to believe that what happens in Cassavettes' movies is interesting too.)

One word I wouldn't hesitate to apply to the Eastwood movies that Schickel loves so much is "boring." Most of the movies on which Eastwood was a prime mover and shaker--whether we're talking about the genre action fodder that kept his star aloft after he stopped working with Sergio Leone or the more "artistic" projects he's taken on in his dotage--bore me because they're predictable, shallow, and served up with a minimum of style and invention. Schickel doesn't really disagree, he'd just use different words to say the same thing. In a review of the 1976 The Outlaw Josey Wales, he wrote that "One man's classicism, however, is another man's cliché", making it clear that as far as he was concerned, the good-guy-shoots-bad-guys Western mechanics of Josey Wales amounted to sheer classicism, adding, "Eastwood as a director manages his action sequences in a no-nonsense manner" and " reminds us of a traditional American style of screen heroism—a moral man slow to rile but wonderfully skilled when he must finally enforce his conception of right and wrong. In these moments, he links us pleasingly, satisfyingly with our movie pasts, rekindles briefly a dying glow." Basically, Schickel wants to see the same old movie over and over, with a cowboy hat on it.

Manohla Dargis brings up the point that it is possible to be bored by the formula entertainment that Schickel sees as the lifeblood of movies. I wish that she had managed to do it without invoking the name of Andy Warhol, though. "“'Of course, what I think is boring,' Warhol wrote in his memoir Popism, “must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different.' Warhol’s own films are almost always called boring, usually by people who have never seen or sampled one, including minimalist epics like Empire, eight hours of the Empire State Building that subverts the definition of what a film is (entertaining, for one)." The first thing to say in response to this is that the Warhol quote is awfully cute coming from someone who voluntarily made a guest appearance on The Love Boat. Maybe Dargis thinks that was an adorable camp gesture; if you can believe that you have to sit through Empire to know that it's boring, you can believe anything. (For what it's worth, I have seen and sampled a number of Warhol's films, and not only would I say they're boring, but they establish that nobody was less entitled to sneer at TV hacks or anyone else for doing the same thing over and over again.) When Dwight Macdonald was on movie patrol for Esquire back in the 1960s, he wrote a funny account of trying to sit through Empire, but then, he would have seen little to cheer in Dargis's apparent suggestion that there's something valuable about the demonstration that a movie need not be entertaining. Macdonald, who was not exactly a member of the MTV-and-computer-game generation, once pointed out, very sensibly I think, that while not all entertainment is art, all (successful) art is entertaining. If it isn't entertaining--that is to say, interesting and pleasurable--what the hell is the point of it?

If Schickel and Kois are dispiriting because Schickel is an old fart repelled by the shock of the new and Kois is a jaded young thing who wants credit for keeping up with the culture but bores easily when he's not being regularly zapped in his adrenaline zone, then Dargis and Scott are tremendously depressing because they seem to accept the terms set up by their opponents. Unlike Macdonald, they don't allow that there may be different kinds of entertainment than Bob's Burgers and Red Dead Redemption; they don't argue, as I would, that certain "slow, meditative" movies are, for those of us who get on their wavelength, pleasure and fun, even if it's not the kind of fun that makes you stand on your chair and twirl your T-shirt over your heads while you whoop at the screen. Instead, they seem to accept Kois's concept of "cultural vegetables" and then bang their fists on the table, ordering you to force some down before you can have your ice cream. The work of Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr, Dargis writes, "take time away even as they restore a sense of duration, of time and life passing... In wandering there can be revelation as you meditate, trance out, bliss out, luxuriate in your thoughts, think." Funny, I thought that's what nature was for. If I went to the trouble of making a movie, especially one that ran more than an hour and twenty minutes, I'd flirt with the idea that I'd fallen down on the job if the comment cards came back comparing it to the last time the viewer spent the afternoon staring at a rippling stream, but maybe that's just what some of today's film school grads are shooting for. Scott asks, "Why is it, though, that 'serious' is a bad word in cultural conversations, or at least in discussions of film? Why is thinking about a movie an activity to be avoided, and a movie that seems to require thinking a source of suspicion? ... I certainly don’t think fun should be banished from the screen, or that popular entertainment is essentially antithetical to art." That's a relief. Just don't get caught saying that you think that The Makioka Sisters or The Home and the World and La Belle Noiseuse are "fun." (These are examples of movies that I regard as long and slow and meditative and that I derive pleasure from watching, though for all I know, Dargis and Scott think they're only a half a step removed from The Matrix Reloaded.) And be sure and mention, as both Dargis and Scott do, that you really, honestly do like "fun" movies. Scott is so hard up for fun that he liked Hot Tub Time Machine. And if I've read some of her broad hints correctly, Dargis counts herself as a fan of Richard Donner. (She also shares Schickel's high opinion of Clint Eastwood. Her rave review of Gran Torino seemed to go out of its way to call for a reappraisal of Stanley Kramer, who I thought we all agreed was the most happily forgotten big name director of the '50s and '60s.)

It's sad to see the top critics at the paper of record ceding the battle to Schickel and Kois like this, but who knows what they think their role is today? Maybe they really don't think Meek's Cutoff is any fun. (Is it? I'll never find out, myself--I saw Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy. Never again, baby!) Maybe they really mean what they seem to suggest, that movies that aren't entertaining can still be worth your time. Why? Do they think they're morally affirming, and that suffering through a movie that has no pleasure to offer even the most literate, thoughtful, and hip moviegoer--which is to say, by my definition at least, a bad movie, a total artistic failure--is somehow good for? That its lack of pleasurable qualities makes it serious art? Has Robert Hughes really lived his life in vain? Maybe they don't mean it, maybe they find these movies pleasurable themselves, but suspect that the people with taste as rarified as theirs are few and far between, and the only way they can fill up the theater at Lincoln Plaza is to make sitting through a "serious" movie is to make it sound like spiritually rewarding torture, and thus bully their readers into going, so they can crow about it at parties. If I knew what the people who run the culture racket at The New York Times thought they were doing, I'd buy a subscription instead of shrugging and going somewhere else on the web when I've used up my monthly quota of free articles.

Just between you and me and the lamppost, I'm not even sure it's the impatience with slow, meditative movies that's turning film criticism into a dead art. I think it has more to do with the eagerness to embrace and celebrate anything that strikes the cineastes as "interesting", a category that many a slow, meandering movie definitely fits into. Talking to youngsters who've been dipping into the great, lasting film critics of previous generations who've shaken things up and gotten people to talking--such writers as Kael, Macdonald, Manny Farber, and even a few who are still alive and kicking, such as Thomson and Kehr--I've heard expressions of confusion and impatience with them; they've gone back to read trumpets-blaring praise of older movies such as Easy Rider and The Shining and West Side Story, the kind of reviews that would certainly appear on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section if those movies were to open a revival series today, and they've been shocked to see that the "great" critics working then had problems with them, and even dared to make smart-ass remarks about their failings. Crotchety and wrongheaded as Schickel and Kois may be, they at least stand out in stark contrast to the overprotective tone that reigns now at critical outlets like the Times, where anything that might strike an informed viewer as "interesting" is treated very gingerly. Interestingness is now more prized than pleasurableness, maybe because it's more common, and maybe because pleasure is a deeper, more personal response, which may expose a critic to ridicule. Dargis even liked Southland Tales, arguably the most pointlessly "interesting" cinematic experience of the last few years. It's hard to imagine these people looking at a movie as "interesting" as A Clockwork Orange, say, or Bonnie & Clyde, and taking it apart and examining it, the way Kael did the former, or being so ungrateful as to smash it against the wall, as Farber did the latter. This state of affairs is not real good for movies; there are directors who've emerged in the last several years--I don't want to mention any names, kaffkafftheCoenbrotherskaff--who've been accorded a pretty sweet, largely unreflective ride from the critics because their movies are so ceaselessly "interesting", and who, though they've made some movies I like just fine, haven't turned into what they might have become if they'd been challenged and poked and prodded a little along the way. But it's really been death to film criticism, which is itself an art, and one that does not thrive on overprotectiveness and self-defensive bows to the zeitgeist.