Category Archives: Popular culture, general

World War Z: A review

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World War Z, the new zombie thriller from Marc Forster, starring Brad Pitt, is known around our house as ‘Mireille’s zombie movie.’  Mireille Enos, who I remember with great fondness as a stunningly talented BYU student actress (and who I cast and directed in her first show at BYU, not that I’m name-dropping or anything), is the second lead here, playing Pitt’s wife, Karin.  (You may also know her from the AMC TV series The Killing).  It’s always a bit of an odd experience seeing people you know in movies.  It does take you out of the story a little.  You find yourself going ‘wow, she’s great in that scene,’ when you probably should be thinking ‘what’s going to happen with the zombies?’  When Mireille kicked a zombie in the face, it was a very tense scene, but part of me was also going ‘wow, that’s so cool, she got to kick a zombie!  Well done!  Good kick!’

The movie itself is plenty suspenseful and exciting, as long as you don’t think about it too much.  In that respect, it’s just another summer action movie–a plot that makes sense isn’t so important.  Essentially, World War Z is like a mash-up of two much better movies: 28 Days Later and Contagion.  Brad Pitt plays Gerry, a UN operative with a track record of solving really intractable international problems.  Some kind of virus is turning people into zombies.  These are the really fast 28 Days Later zombies, and the zombie-virus has an incredibly rapid incubation period–basically ten seconds. (At one point, someone says it takes ten minutes, but we see it work–it’s just seconds).  Gerry and Karin and their two daughters are caught in a city (Newark?  Ah, poor Cory Booker!) under zombie attack, and the first half-hour of the movie shows their hair-raising last second escapes from various threats.  They then get rescued by a US military helicopter, and off they go to a command ship out in the ocean. That’s where the assistant Secretary-General of the UN, Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokoena) is waiting for them, and decides to send Gerry and a (we’re told) brilliant young virologist Dr. Fassbach (Elyes Gabel) on a trip to find out where the virus came from, to find a cure.

So World War Z‘s a lot like Contagion, except in that movie, when Gwyneth Paltrow infects someone, they just get really sick and die.  But in WWZ, when an infected person bites someone, the infected person becomes a zombie, really quickly.  You go from 1 to 2 to 4 to 16 zombies.  What this means is that, in an enclosed space (an airplane, say), one zombie can turn an entire plane into hundreds of zombies in a matter of minutes.

Another difference; in Contagion, the focus is on a whole bunch of researchers at WHO and the CDC working on the problem from different angles, while we also see various doctors trying to keep people alive. Lots of characters, wide-ranging story. It’s a world-wide pandemic, and the world health community works on it–the movie gives us a sense of that international effort.  In WWZ, it’s just Brad Pitt.  I desperately hope this isn’t what would happen.  I desperately hope that in the event of a real zombie apocalypse, there’d be tons of Brad Pitts jetting around trying to de-zombie-fy the world.  I get that it’s a movie, but we’re talking billions of undead spreading their undeadness.  This seems to me as a really bad thing.  I want lots of people working on it.

But that’s not the main oddity of this actually very odd movie.  What struck me is how much trouble the characters in this movie cause themselves by behaving really stupidly.  I don’t just mean that they don’t figure things out that they should figure out.  I mean the movie is built on moment after moment that should be funny but aren’t, that show the characters making comical blunders, which the movie doesn’t acknowledge as comical.  I mean, some of the moments of greatest tension in the movie basically come from someone messing up, sometimes even kind of clownishly.

Remember, the idea is that Pitt is this UN operative, and he’s been tasked with taking this Dr. Fassbach to various hot spots to figure out how to cure this virus, or maybe develop a vaccine.  And Pitt’s been given a team of Navy SEALS to provide protection.  First stop–a US military base in South Korea, because that seems to be an early infection point.  So off they go on this plane, land at the base.  Everything’s quiet.  Too quiet.  Ominously quiet.  Suddenly: a zombie attack!  Navy SEALS shoot back.  And the scientist, the virologist, the one guy who is the entire point of them being there, panics, trips, falls down, and shoots himself dead.

Oops.

I suppose the fact that I found that funny proves what a sicko I am.  But come on.  Are we really not supposed to notice the reason for this, uh, absurd plot twist? I mean, we all get this, right?  Brad Pitt’s assignment is to help this scientist solve the problem, right?  It’s a supporting role.  And this is a Brad Pitt action movie!  He has to be the one to save the day, solve the problem, defeat the zombies.  So this silly (but fatal) banana peel moment for the scientist.  Blarg.

It continues.  Pitt and Mireille each have phones, and agree to call each other daily.  This is great, because Pitt doesn’t seem to have any other way to communicate with the US warship or the UN.  You’ve got an agent in the field, an international emergency, the survival of homo sapiens as a species at stake, and everything, all their communications, go through the dude’s wife.  I mean, I liked it, because it gave Mireille something to do and she was the main reason I wanted to see the movie.  But it did strike me as, uh, implausible.  (They also might have given Pitt a battery charger. That might have been nice.  I’m not a fan of ‘my phone’s going dead’ plot points.  Phones have chargers.)

Anyway, after the scientist dude’s pratfall-death, Brad Pitt carries on with the assignment, because he’s Brad Pitt, and anyway it’s just science, right, not something that needs, like, training or expertise, and anyway he probably also stayed in a Holiday Inn Express the night before.  He interviews some of the soldiers at this base, and they tell him the Israelis seem to have sussed out the zombie problem, and maybe that’d be a good place to visit next.  But first, they have to refuel the plane.  So Pitt and all the soldiers (his SEALS, plus the base guys), all sneak out.  The zombies, it seems, respond to noise.  They remain dormant, if you’re quiet enough.  So Pitt and his SEALS ride off on bicycles. Keeping silent as mice. And that’s the moment Mireille’s character chooses to call her hubby.  And the phone rings.  Loudly.

And the zombies attack, and there’s a big firefight, and it’s all very exciting. But a few questions occur.  Like, wouldn’t you just silence your phone?  Turn off the ringer?  I turned mine off, and all I was doing was watching a movie, not tip-toeing through a field of dormant deadly zombies.

I mean, Brad Pitt’s the hero, and he’s certainly plenty heroic in this.  And he’s Brad Pitt; I love Brad Pitt.  He’s a terrific actor, and he’s great in this too.  But his character’s supposed to be smart.  And he is smart–he figures out the whole ‘how to stop zombies’ question.  He saves humanity.  But his character does  some really dumb stuff too, basic stuff, like not turning off a cell phone ringer.

There’s more.  Next, they’re off to Israel, where Mossad has built a big ol’ fence to keep the zombies out. And it’s worked great, and they’re even inviting in refugees, on the sensible premise that anyone who wants to join them means fewer future zombies.   But remember, zombies are actuated by noise.  They shamble around, mostly, not really getting anywhere, but noise bugs them, and can drive them into a feral attacking frenzy.  We know this–we’ve seen it earlier in the movie.  Brad Pitt knows this too–he was in the scene where we learned it.  So he’s wandering around old Jerusalem with his old Mossad buddy.  And a group of refugees break out the microphones and decide it’s time for a music festival!  Yay!  Triumph of the human spirit sort of thing!  And Brad Pitt sees the concert, and looks maybe a trifle worried.  But does he say, ‘guys, this is a terrible idea.  Ixnay on the usic-may.’  We know, and he knows, and we know he knows that ‘noise=insensate zombie rage.’  So maybe it’s not a good time for Woodstock 3?

This wasn’t treated comically, but it could have been. I found myself wondering what the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost team might have made of this material.  I also wondered what the point was.  At times early in the movie, Brad and Mireille survive because of the kindness of strangers.  Is this movie some kind of commentary on mankind?  We are capable of kindness and even nobility, but boy are we also screw-ups?  That kind of thing?

Anyway, in Israel, we meet the movie’s new awesome character, Segen, an Israeli soldier, played by an Israeli actress I’ve never heard of, Daniella Kertesz.  She’s bitten by a zombie, on the hand, which Pitt quickly chops off, I guess hoping the virus wouldn’t have spread to the rest of her that quickly.  Which turns out to be the case.  And this unbelievably courageous one-handed female soldier ends up saving the day repeatedly–loved the actress, loved the character.  Anyway, she and Pitt barely escape Israel, make it to a World Health Organization hospital in Wales, despite a zombie-fied airplane and subsequent plane crash.

So, they’re in this hospital, where Brad Pitt shows off his typical movie hero recuperation-from-deadly-injuries powers.  Anyway, not to give away the plot, but they need to get from a safely barricaded lab to another zombie-patrolled one, looking for a vial.  One WHO scientist, plus the Israeli chick, plus Our Hero.  Three of them, like, eighty zombies.  They have to keep quiet.  So why is that the WHO scientist kept doing stuff like kicking soda cans and stepping on crunchy bits of broken glass?  Again, it’s a very tense scene, but it could have been funny–they kept turning these essentially comedic tropes into serious dramatic tension. And that’s okay, I guess.  But they’re in a fancy lab, the kind of place where lights are programmed with motion sensors, to go on when someone enters a corridor.  Couldn’t that have been the thing to set the zombies off?  And not turn this scientist into Bozo the Clown?

I’m making it sound like I didn’t like the movie.  I did like it.  I liked it a lot.  I thought it was a good, scary, exciting action adventure movie.  I just look at Marc Forster the director, at his track record.  Finding Neverland.  Stranger than Fiction.  The Kite Runner.  Terrific director, with some great movies on his resume.  But he also did Quantum of Solace, way the worst of the Daniel Craig Bond films.  Check him out on IMDB.  His record says he’s a guy who does big budget action movies to pay the bills, to free him to do another Stranger than Fiction.  I suppose I can respect that.  And WWZ was apparently a fairly troubled movie, many re-writes, and a movie detested by fans of the novel it’s based on.  (Which I have not read.)

So, I’d say, it’s a pretty entertaining action movie, one that doesn’t make a lick of sense, but which was scary and exciting and sort of oddly comical without meaning to be.  And Mireille got to kick a zombie in the face.  That’s not a half-bad takeaway.

 

Gulp: A review

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I’ve had some, uh, intestinal issues lately.  I could get more specific, if you like.  But I think I won’t.  My wife reads this blog, and I think she wouldn’t like it.  It turns out that there are pronounced gender differences when it comes to, uh, certain human odors and sounds.  Okay, so take flatus, for example.  Men and women basically pass the same amounts of gas daily.  And the gas we pass tends to be equally toxic (not very), and unpleasantly odored (though folks really genuinely do tend to think theirs personally don’t stink all that much).  But in general (with many exceptions), women tend to sneak theirs out as quietly and unobtrusively as possible.  Men, on the other hand, are more likely to let ‘er rip, possibly with accompanying humorous commentary.  (“Speak again, toothless wonder!”)  Mary Roach admits this.  She compares her own, uh, public output with that of her long-suffering husband Ed, who, she informs us, is particularly fond of brussels sprouts.  And broccoli. And unembarrassed about how his digestive tract sometimes responds to that diet.

I love knowing this stuff.  I mean, it’s interesting, is it not?  I was a Boy Scout, and spent time in summer camp, and enjoyed pork and beans for lunch.  And as is the case with most thirteen year old boys, was completely nuts about fire.  Boy Scouts are terrific pyromaniacs, which is why adult Scouting leaders have to remain ever vigilant on the subject of fire safety.  And why Smokey is a bear.  (Grown-ups think kids think bears are cool, and that kids might possibly be inclined to listen to one.)  So, yes, I’m familiar with the concept of blue darts.  When you’re a kid, there’s nothing more delightful than discovering that your body can produce fire.  But to read about the science of flatulence, the researchers who have dedicated their lives to the study of this stuff; well, it’s terrifically interesting.  And maybe a little gross.  And pretty funny, at times.

If you love good writing, if you are fascinated by science, and especially if you’re interested in the science of taboo subjects, may I recommend for your reading please: Mary Roach.  Her newest book, Gulp, is sub-titled: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.  It’s about digestion. It’s specifically about the various scientists and researchers who study human digestion.  Which means a lot of it deals with stuff that’s gross and icky.  Which Mary Roach knows.  And which she has a lot of fun with.

In Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, she took on death; the physiology of it, the history of it.  Human cadavers, it turns out, have been used in all sorts of kinds of medical research; guillotined, shot off into space, crucified (to test the authenticity of the shroud of Turin.)  She had a lot of fun with all of it.  In Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, she explored the work of researchers into such subjects as erectile dysfunction, or zero gravity sexologists.  Now, in Gulp, it’s time to study digestion.  And answer such pressing questions as this: did Elvis really die of constipation?  Is that possible?  And what about Kurt Cobain?

She’s one of the funniest writers I know.  But also one of the most inquisitive.  Her books aren’t smarmy or gross.  She’s genuinely interested in the science of food and digestion, and in the scientists who study it.  She wants to know. About why a reputable museum has, on display, a badly engorged large intestine.  About the guy with the hole in his stomach, and his slave/master relationship with the 19th century scientist who kept studying him.  About the guy who invented the flatus-trapping underpants.  About how Elvis really did die.

And not just about good science, but also the history of digestive science, and the bad scientists who fill its pages.  We read, for example, about one Horace Fletcher, a scientist who invented and popularized the notion of ‘Fletcherizing’ one’s food.  Fletcher believed that there was essentially no such thing as excessive mastication.  He taught that every morsel of food should be chewed up to a thousand times, so that our bodies could derive every possible nutritive benefit from it.  He claimed to know someone who survived for months on a diet of 4 corn muffins and a single glass of milk, all very very thoroughly chewed.

None of this is true.  Your body does a perfectly fine job of deriving nutritive benefit from the food you eat, no matter how much, or how little, you chew it.  You don’t have to Fletcherize.  I mean, we should chew some.  Wolfing too much food too quickly isn’t all that good for you either.  But chewing the heck out of it does nothing except wear out our jaw muscles, plus it’s death on dinner-table conversation.

Mary Roach has a wonderful eye for the telling detail, plus a terrific sense of absurdity.  She writes vividly and well, and conveys the science in a readable but accurate (I suppose) way.  Best of all–and I think this is the key to her success–she gives some attention and respect to scientists working in fields where they probably don’t get much.  I think the men and women she interviews are probably thrilled to talk to her.  They’re probably excited to share their researcher with someone as personable and fair-minded as Mary clearly is.  And the result is a terrific book.

Anyway, if you’ve read other books by Mary Roach, you’ll like this one.  And if you haven’t, this is a fine one to start with. Gulp it down.  You’ll enjoy it thoroughly.  And I predict, you’ll want to read particularly fascinating or humorous passages to your significant others.  And if you’re like me, you’ll find yourself beginning conversations with stuff like ‘did you know that flatulence actually includes up to three different gasses!’  Don’t be discouraged if conversations stop dead right there.  Persevere.  This is genuinely interesting stuff.

Veep: A review

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HBO’s half-hour political sitcom, Veep, just concluded its second season on a high note.  The first season was funny enough, but it felt a bit generic, a show that rested on fairly worn ‘politicians are incompetent nitwits’ schtick.  But as we might have expected from a show created by Armando Iannucci, the wit has gotten sharper, the targets more pointed.  And it’s really funny now, extraordinarily funny.  It took a Brit to get our politics right.

In Veep, Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays the Vice-President of the United States, Selina Myers, a loyal member of an unidentified major American political party, and a terrible human being.  She’s grasping, selfish, incredibly ambitious, not terribly bright, and not remotely moral. When she learns that the President is having chest pains, she can’t quite hide the greedy smile on her face, and her every move is calculated to advance her own shot at the Presidency. 

Most of the show features her interactions with her staff.  Amy (Anna Chlumsky) is Selina’s chief of staff, and the closest thing to a morally centered person on the show.  Her entire life is spent in emergency mode, trying to extricate Selina from some major blunder or another.  The great Tony Hale gives us another of his this-close-to-a-nervous-breakdown characterizations, while Reid Scott is brilliant as Dan Egan, a completely opportunistic careerist who would cheerfully stab his sister for a slightly better job title.  Matt Walsh is Mike, the world’s worst communications director, and Sufe Bradshaw plays Sue, Selina’s unfazed and efficient personal secretary.  I should also mention Timothy Simons as Jonah, a staffer whose job is essentially POTUS liaison, which means they all completely detest him.

The final episode of the second season involved the impeachment of the President (who we never see).  Selina has to decide how loyal she should be to a politically damaged President, which essentially means, because she’s Selina, deciding the exact precise perfect time to jump ship.  At one point, she decides that her best strategy might be to resign as Veep, thus positioning herself to run for President in the next election.  So her entire staff starts desperately hunting for other jobs.  But then, she decides to stick around (having coerced the President into a one-term only promise), and her staff just as quickly all come running back, filled with protestations of loyalty.

Funny as that all was, it can’t beat the comic highlight of them all, Selina’s trip to Finland.  This clip only gives a hint of it, the extraordinary awkwardness of her gift exchange with the President of Finland.  Both women have been instructed by their staffs to give magnificently inappropriate gifts, and both women have to sound diplomatic when they accept them.  I was in tears.

Because that’s a lot of the fun of the show; Selina’s staff (and the White House staff with whom she interacts) aren’t just terrible people, they’re also hopelessly bad at their jobs.  The overall impression isn’t that Washington is a cesspool–it’s that Washington is a clown college.

Now I should tell you that if you’re sensitive about foul language, don’t watch this show.  Not only are all the characters (all of them) horrible, but their language reflects it–they swear essentially the whole time.  They’re actually rather creative swear-ers.  They cuss with some real panache. So if you’re bothered by bad language, really, honestly, just give this show a pass.  I love it, I think it’s really funny.  But that’s just me.

Veep is, obviously, political satire, and as such, it reminds me of shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.  And, like those shows, the attitude reflects that of Puck: “What fools these mortals be.”  But there’s a difference.  Jon Stewart is a fundamentally serious guy, who excoriates the American media and our current politics because he’s angry, angry at how serious our nation’s problems really are, and how little progress we seem to be making towards solving them.  That’s also Colbert; he’s great at mocking Bill O’Reilly and similar conservative pundits, because the target of his satire tends to be conservatism itself.

No, the show Veep really reminds me of is The West Wing.  The West Wing also focused on staff, on the people working behind the scenes.  In fact, as I understand it, Aaron Sorkin’s original plan was to never show the President at all, though in time he grew so fond of Jed Bartlett, POTUS became the show’s central character.  But we liked Josh and CJ and Leo and Toby–we liked the high-minded ideals of them all, we admired their grasp on issues.  Jed Bartlett was the President liberals wish we’d had.  And he was ably served by a staff that we wish was working in the West Wing today.

But, sadly, we’re also aware that the actual reality may well be closer to Veep.  I doubt that anyone in government is as completely foolish and incompetent as Selina or her staff.  But ambitious and grasping and more interested in careerism than governance?  That strikes me as . . . not wholly inaccurate.

It bothers me, because I’m a liberal, and because one of the most important conservative talking points is that government is incapable of doing any good in the world.  So Veep emerges as a far more effective piece of conservative satire than almost anything Rush Limbaugh could concoct.  The problem is that conservatives believe in the genius of the American people, their entrepreneurial spirit, in hard work and in the far-reaching vision of capitalists.  But Veep isn’t having any of that either.  When we meet ‘ordinary Americans,’ they’re as foolish and credulous and easily manipulated as anyone.  It’s a cynical frickin’ show, is what I’m saying.  No one is good, and no one knows anything, and everyone’s out for themselves.  Everywhere.

And it doesn’t feel all that untrue.

But it does feel a little untrue, and there’s where it offers a ray of hope.  Iannucci’s sensibilities are those of Aristophanes, but Aristophanes did, at times, open up a space for reform.  So far, Veep hasn’t opened up such a space, and that’s okay too.  After all, satire just needs to be accurate enough to be funny, accurate enough to possibly lead to self-recognition and change.  The moral center of the show resides in the audience, not the characters, but that’s a healthier place for it, is it not?  We can do better.  Maybe we can’t achieve West Wing levels of good governance.  But we can do a few things maybe a little better than they’re being done right now.  Let’s cling to that slender thread.  And meanwhile, share a laugh at Selina and her not-very-merry band of nitwits.


Man of Steel: Review

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I went to see Man of Steel, the new Superman movie, today, on the Fourth of July.  On purpose.  I mean, Superman really is the All-American superhero, isn’t he?  Truth, Justice and the American Way, right?  The red, white and blue costume?  In the 40s, didn’t Superman fight Hitler? In the 50s, wasn’t it communism?  Isn’t Superman an American patriot?

I put it off forever, actually, because as superheroes go, Superman kind of sucks.  My opinion, but the fact is, he’s unbeatable.  No weaknesses, no vulnerabilities.  Give me Iron Man, give me Batman, give me a superhero who survives by intelligence and technology!  (Or even super-but-limited powers guys like Spidey).  Kryptonite is Superman’s one weakness, which of course makes for some preposterous plot points.  Where on Earth is anyone going to find shards of a destroyed planet thousands of light years away?  Not that stops a super-villain as dedicated as Lex Luthor.

Lex Luthor isn’t in this one, though, and neither is the idiotic conceit that ‘Clark Kent’ works at the ‘Daily Planet’ as a ‘newspaper reporter.’  And all he has to do is put on some glasses, and nobody can tell he’s Superman.  The classic Christopher Reeves Superman films played with all those tropes without taking any of them all that seriously–they worked, because Reeves was so charming, and had such supreme comic timing, and the films didn’t strive beyond popcorn films.  But this film hasn’t any humor, and not much charm, yet it still works.  The kid sitting next to me hardly ate his popcorn, so riveted was he, and I was too.

It’s portentous, solemn, even rather tragic, without necessarily becoming pretentious or dull.  I thought it was splendid.  I’ll explain why in a second, but first, let me take a moment and talk about another really good Superman movie.

I quite liked the 2006 Superman Returns, the Bryan Singer film starring Brandon Routh.  But the problem with that film was that it took the Superman story so seriously, it deconstructed the myth entirely, rendered it absurd in an existential sense. Let me try that in English. If we take Superman seriously, if we think of him existing, then he becomes a kind of God figure, but the kind of God who really, genuinely tries to answer everyone’s prayers, but can’t due to his semi-human limitations.  If Superman’s role in the world is to fly around rescuing people from burning buildings, well, at any given time in the world, there are always buildings catching fire.  That’s all he’d do, all day long.  His masquerading as Clark Kent, intrepid reporter, and his romantic mooning over Lois Lane strike us as the most arrant selfishness.  How dare he pretend to be a reporter?  There’s probably a building on fire somewhere!

If God exists, and if He answers prayers, then why does He only answer some of them?  Why rescue those folks from those buildings?  Why not all folks, in all burning buildings?  I know people who believe, theologically, that God really does show His love for humanity by answering prayers, not just by miraculously healing cancer patients or something, but literally by helping us find our car keys or remember that we left the stove on.  I also believe in God, and believe that He can and does answer prayers.  But if we believe in a simplistic, Superman-like God, then God’s interventions start to feel really disturbingly arbitrary.  After all, lots of people die of cancer, lose their car keys, leave stoves on.  So if Superman represents selfless good, selfless service, God-like flying-about-helping-people service, then it’s distressing that he has any weaknesses at all.  And a movie about him reveals not only the deconstruction of his own myth, but the fallacies of our own most naive theologies.  It’s not an accident that Brandon Routh (a wonderful actor, and a charismatic and exciting Superman), only got to play the role once.

Back to Man of Steel, then, this Zack Snyder/Christopher Nolan collaboration, which manages to sort of raise and side-step similar theological concerns.  (Nolan co-wrote and produced, and Snyder directed).  As I said, it’s a  very serious sort of Superman movie, a big humorless, in fact.  Henry Cavill, a fine British actor (I know, sacrilege, a Brit playing Superman!) is quite good in the role, but I wouldn’t say comic timing is his strength.  It’s an origin-myth movie, about where Superman came from and, above all, what he means.  And one interpretive possibility is that Superman is Jesus.

The movie drops Superman=Jesus hints all the time.  For example, the movie makes explicit the fact that he deliberately chooses to begin his ‘ministry’ at the age of 33.  He makes that decision in a pivotal conversation with a minister, in a Church, the shot framed so a stained glass picture of Jesus is just off his right shoulder.  He is the son of Jor-El (and of course, ‘El’ means God in the Biblical tradition).  He’s not just Jor-El’s son, he’s his only begotten son.  On Krypton, people are cloned, raised and trained for specific jobs.  But Jor-El and his wife Faora-Ul (the incomparable German actress Antje Traue) have a child biologically, the first Krypton child born in centuries.  Literally, ‘only-begotten.’  As Krypton is destroyed, Kal-El, the baby is sent to earth, where he is raised by Joseph and Mary, which is to say, Jonathan and Martha Kent, (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane) and named Clark.  Grown Clark is even blue-collar, not a carpenter per se, but also not a white collar reporter for the hoity-toity Daily Planet, a common laborer, working on oil rigs (and rescuing oil rig workers from a fire).

I was particularly fascinated with the film’s villain, General Zod, superbly played by Michael Shannon.  He is the General of all Krypton armies, sworn to protect Krypton at all costs, no matter what.  Raised, in fact, without a conscience or sense of morality, but with only a sense of duty.  As such, he’s kind of weirdly honorable.  And what he wants to restore is Krypton.  Clark/Kal-El’s DNA includes the genetic codes needed to restore the entire civilization of Krypton, right here on Earth, though doing so would also require the complete eradication of all those pesky homo sapiens.  That’s what Superman is trying to prevent–he’s literally the savior of all mankind.  But it’s also interesting, is it not, that what Zod wants is a world where no people ever have choices.  At all, ever.  Where everyone is genetically pre-programmed with a specific task and destiny.  Satan’s plan, anyone?  What makes Kal-El unique is precisely the fact that he wasn’t programmed at all.  He was just born.  He can become anything.  He can decide to do anything.

So what we have in this film is a Superman who doesn’t actually seem particularly affected by Kryptonite, and who doesn’t, until the film’s final moments, work at a newspaper.  Most of the film is his fight for the future of mankind, but it’s a fight dependent on the virtues of the human species.  Is humanity good?  Worth fighting for?  Is Superman going to decide to be ‘good,’ and if so, what will that mean?  So if Superman=Jesus, it’s a Jesus who has the capacity to save mankind, but has to decide first if mankind is worth saving.

Late in the film, there’s an odd moment.  Superman and Zod are having this big ol’ fight in downtown Manhattan, and every punch drives the other guy with such force that buildings are getting wrecked right and left.  One building has collapsed, and Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) is busy getting the Daily Planet staff to safety.  A secretary, ‘Jenny’ (Rebecca Buller) is trapped in the rubble, and a reporter, ‘Steve’ (Michael Kelly) wants to leave her there.  But Perry stops him, and the two of him find a metal rod and try to lever her out.  It’s an odd scene, involving extremely minor characters, but I liked it a lot.  Aren’t we human beings at our best in emergencies?  Don’t really ordinary people become extraordinary heroes sometimes?  If we’re making a case for humanity, two guys risking their lives rescuing a co-worker they don’t know very well really works.  And although Superman finally does have to kill (has to decide to kill, a tough call, we can tell), it’s to save threatened strangers.

In part, it’s a film about the wisdom of parents, and particularly, the wisdom of fathers.  Jor-El’s spirit/soul/consciousness/essence keeps coming back and offering Kal-El sage advice.  And the film is structured around a series of flashbacks in which Joseph/Jonathan Kent/Kevin Costner does the same–key moments of advice from ol’ Dad.  And Costner’s Dad is a realist.  He warns Clark against revealing his identity too soon, because he’s all too aware of the dangers of human paranoia and human mean-spiritedness born of fear.  And during much of a big threeway fight between Superman and two Krypton villains, the US military is busy shooting missiles at all three combatants.  It’s takes awhile for our armed forces to figure out that Superman’s not a threat to anyone.

And in the end, Superman is still trying to convince them.  I loved this touch: Superman flies around destroying NSA surveillance drones.  ‘Cause, you know, (he tells a general) you guys need to get over that kind of fear.  This new Superman is going to represent Good, yes.  But he’s going to go about it with some subtlety.  At the end of the film, he decides to be a reporter, as a cover for surveillance.  He’s not going to be a Superman who rescues people (unless it’s Lois).  He’s going to be working quietly to, I suspect, nudge things in the right direction. 
I haven’t even mentioned Amy Adams, the best Lois Lane ever.  Or the splendid Richard Schiff, (yay Toby Ziegler!) as a mad scientist type who sort of accidentally saves the day.  I just thought the film was smart and thoughtful and theologically sophisticated.  And a really solid Superman pic. 

 

Cowboy poetry

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So my brother’s in town, and we get to talking about traveling, and one thing or t’other, and eventually we start talking about Nevada.  And the fact that Winnemucca advertises itself as the ‘Hub of Northern Nevada.’  And Battle Mountain is apparently proud of the fact that it was named Armpit of America by New York Magazine.  And also that Battle Mountain put its high school’s initials on a nearby mountain, so right there, for everyone to see, the mountain has a big BM on its side.

And Elko hosts the annual Cowboy Poetry festival.  They actually call it a Gathering.  It’s a very big deal.

So we’re chatting there, my brother and his kids and me and my wife, and I’m on-line, and I thought I’d Google Cowboy Poetry, the way you do.  And found, I’m not kidding, cowboypoetry.com.  And sorted through some of the poems.  And fell in love.

I’m not kidding, it’s great stuff.  A lot of it is narrative poetry, the kind of stuff folks used to memorize and recite.  And I love stuff like that.  “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”  “Casey at the Bat.”  “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”  People used to gather and listen to recited poetry–it was theatre and it was literature and it was art.

I like real poetry too, of course.  (And am kicking myself right now for making a false distinction between ‘real’ poetry and ‘recited’ poetry–it’s all good.)  But there’s something about the public, performative quality of recited poetry.  You get to play with voice, you get to create a character.  You get to tell a story.  And relish the inevitable plot twist at the end.

So here’s one I absolutely love, a poem I’m working on memorizing, and hope someday to recite.  It’s by cowboy poet Henry Herbert Knibbs.  I like all his stuff.  But this poem, I adore:

Boomer Johnson

 

Now, Mr. Boomer Johnson was a gettin’ old in spots

But you don’t expect a bad man to go wrastlin’ pans and pots

But he’d done his share of killin’ and his draw was gettin’ slow,

So he quits a-punchin’ cattle, and he takes to punchin’ dough.

 

Our foreman up and hires him, figurin’ age had rode him tame,

But a snake don’t get no sweeter just by changin’ of its name.

Well, Old Boomer knowed his bidness–he could cook to make you smile,

But say, he wrangled fodder in a most peculiar style.

 

He never used no matches–left ‘em layin’ on the shelf,

Just some kerosene and cussin’ and the kindlin’ lit itself.

And pardner, I’m allowin’ it would give a man a jolt

To see him stir frijoles with the barrel of his Colt.

 

Now killin’ folks and cookin’ ain’t so awful far apart,

That musta been why Boomer kept a-practicin’ his art;

With the front sight of his pistol, he would cut a pie-lid slick,

And he’d crimp her with the muzzle for to make the edges stick.

 

He built his doughnuts solid, and it sure would curl your hair
To see him plug a doughnut as he tossed it in the air.
He bored the holes plum center every time his pistol spoke,
Till the can was full of doughnuts and the shack was full of smoke.

We-all was gettin’ jumpy, but he couldn’t understand
Why his shootin’ made us nervous when his cookin’ was so grand.
He kept right on performin’, and it weren’t no big surprise
When he took to markin’ tombstones on the covers of his pies.

They didn’t taste no better and they didn’t taste no worse,
But a-settin’ at the table was like ridin’ in a hearse;
You didn’t do no talkin’ and you took just what you got,
So we et till we was foundered just to keep from gettin’ shot.

When at breakfast one bright mornin’, I was feelin’ kind of low,
Old Boomer passed the doughnuts and I tells him plenty slow:
“No, All I takes this trip is coffee, for my stomach is a wreck.”
I could see the itch for killin’ swell the wattle on his neck.

Scorn his grub? He strings some doughnuts on the muzzle of his gun,
And he shoves her in my gizzard and he says, “You’re takin’ one!”
He was set to start a graveyard, but for once he was mistook;
Me not wantin’ any doughnuts, I just up and salts the cook.

Did they fire him? Listen, pardner, there was nothin’ left to fire,
Just a row of smilin’ faces and another cook to hire.
If he joined some other outfit and is cookin’, what I mean,
It’s where they ain’t no matches and they don’t need kerosene.

Now, pardner, tell me that ain’t great poetry.  And when you say it, smile. . . .

 

Telling a big story

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The essence of commercial television story-telling is that nothing can ever change, but every episode has to create the illusion of change.  I Love Lucy: case in point.  Every episode involved Lucy trying to carve out a career for herself–usually in show biz.  The template: Lucy decides she wants to become, say, a playwright.  Ricky, her husband, tells her not to.  She tries anyway, and makes a comic mess of it.  She confesses her failure to Ricky; he forgives her.  Every episode. I mean, there were obviously changes, the most significant being the birth of Little Ricky in the show’s second season.  But essentially the show was about Lucy, and especially  Lucille Ball’s extraordinary gift for ditzy physical comedy. It also leads us inevitably to consider the nifty feminist twist at the heart of the show: I Love Lucy was about Lucy, a talentless woman desperate for her gifted husband’s approval. But it starred Lucille, a brilliantly talented woman who dragged her much less-capable husband behind, in her wake.  Nothing ever changed, except, in time, the gender assumptions it so brilliantly deconstructed.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Didja ever see the episode of Home Improvement where Tim offends his wife, and has to ask his neighbor, Wilson, for advice on how to make amends?  How ’bout the episode of Cheers where Sam and Diane almost hook up, but don’t quite.  You ever see the Bewitched where Endora enchants Darrin, makes him do something goofy, and Samantha has to provide a counter-spell to set things right?  Or the Big Bang Theory where Sheldon misses really obvious social clues, and is lucky to have Penny to set him straight?  While the other characters dress up like comic book loving dorks?

Multiply times ten thousand.  That’s television; that’s the narrative content of nearly all mainstream television programming. Change threatens, but in the end, Niles Crane’s love for Daphne remains unrequited, Archie never actually evicts Meathead, and Alex Keaton still lives with his hippie parents.  The Enterprise will always survive the latest threatening alien encounter, Matt Dillon will cope with the latest creep to pass through Dodge, Joe Friday and Bill Gannon always make the arrest, Perry Mason always gets the accused guy off (and finds the real killer), and Dr. House always finds a cure for the mysterious disease, which never turns out to be lupus.  We watch, mostly, because we like the characters.  And, in part, because it’s fun figuring out who-dun-it.  Even M.A.S.H. did this, featured the illusion of change without actually changing all that much.  Actors would leave, and so characters would go home (or, memorably, die), and the new characters were almost always more interesting than the ones they replaced, but still, it was a show about wisecracking doctors keeping soldiers alive in Vietnam Korea.  It was never not about Hawkeye Pierce, M.D.

But James Gandolfini just died.  Tony Soprano just died.  And I thought about the meaning of that remarkable show, and what strikes me as an utterly remarkable new entertainment phenomenon.  In recent years, we’ve seen something brand new.  We’ve seen the beginning of the long-form, extended narrative, anything-may-change television show.  The kind of television narrative with a beginning, middle and end, not just middle, eternally and forever. The Sopranos seems a particularly seminal example. It was a show where anything could happen, any change was possible, any character might die, any misfortune may befall them.  And that show, and a handful of others like it were generally regarded as the best shows on television, the critics’ darlings, the Emmy winners.  They’re the water cooler shows, the ones you talk about in the break room and at the dinner table and on dates.

Mad Men.  Breaking Bad.  The Wire.  Battlestar Gallactica. The Sopranos.  Deadwood.  Lost.  Game of Thrones.  I’m making a distinction here between shows where the point is the over-arching narrative, and really good shows where things do change some, but that are essentially episodic: St. Elsewhere or Hill Street Blues or NYPD Blue or The West Wing.  The West Wing had a narrative–President Bartlett faces scandal, runs for a second term, deals with the kidnapping of his daughter. But what we remember isn’t the Big Story, it’s the incidents–Sam getting schooled by Ainsley, who then gets hired by Leo, or, on Big Block of Cheese day, when CJ learned valuable lessons about cartography.  It’s not until the final season,when the show really did turn on the Santos/Vinick Presidential race, that narrative took the upper hand.

I wrote a couple of days ago about Game of Thrones, which led to a conversation with my son.  We talked for nearly an hour about the show: who’s up, who’s down, who seems ascendent and does the Stark clan have a chance anymore, with Robb Stark dead.  It occurred to me that the entire conversation had been about narrative, about the larger, overarching story.

I remember my wife and I seeing trailers for Lost.  It looked intriguing, and when we talked to friends, it seemed like the kind of show we might enjoy.  But we never watched it.  We decided it was ‘the kind of show where you have to see all the episodes, from the beginning.’ And then it was in its second season, and it seemed like too much trouble to bother with. But that’s kind of a compliment, in a way.  We wanted to see the whole story unfold.  Other great shows, shows we love enough to purchase on DVD–Fawlty Towers, Grimm, Pushing Daisies, Firefly–you can sit and watch one episode and be perfectly satisfied.  But try that with Battlestar Galactica.  You won’t know what’s going on, and you won’t much care about the characters, not after one random episode.

Nearly all TV shows do have something resembling a master narrative. Every episode advances that main story, while also standing on its own as an episode.  To take one example (a good, not great piece of commercial entertainment), Burn Notice. Jeffrey Donovan is a former CIA agent, burned and involuntarily retired.  He gets together with his friends to solve various peoples’ personal problems, but he’s also intent on discovering why he was burned, so he can get his old job back.  So every episode, there are moments that advance the ‘Michael v. CIA story-line’, but mostly it’s about that episode’s single conflict–about someone in Miami who “needs our help, Michael.”

That’s a normal structure for most television series. But the shows I’m singling out here are shows in which the master narrative is the main thing, in which the larger story is the entire point.  On Mad Men, Don Draper has accounts he’s working on, but that’s not why we watch the show. We don’t actually care if he gets the Chevrolet account.  We want to know what’s going to happen to him. We’re caught up in his self-destruction. We want to know what’s going to happen with Ted, and Peggy, and Pete Campbell, and Roger Sterling, and Joan.  We follow the story of the ad agency, Sterling Cooper, and we look in on all its story lines and characters.

I think, in part, these shows are historical and political in ways normal television is not.  In Battlestar Galactica, we were always aware of the various political alliances of the characters, of their religious affiliations and what they meant, in both the Cylon and human histories unfolding before us.  That’s absolutely true of Game of Thrones, obviously.  On Breaking Bad, it’s a quieter family dynamic, but no less about the acquisition and retention of power, as was also true in The Sopranos.

What was the first show to do this?  What is the first show, in the history of television, to make a master narrative the point of the entire series?  One answer, of course, was Shakespeare, who brought the same broad narrative sweep to Richard II, Henry IV parts one and two, Henry V, Henry VI parts one two and three, Richard III.  But who did it first on television?

I’m going to propose a candidate: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  It was about a space station, located by a worm hole, close to the newly liberated planet of Bajor.  Bajor had been held by the Cardassians, who are still around.  The Ferengi had a presence on the space station, and were always sniffing around, and there were constant conflicts with the Maquis.  On the other side of the wormhole were the Dominion, who wanted to wield power from another quadrant in space.  It was an amazing show, especially after the first season, when the master narrative involving war with the Dominion and the Cardassians began to dominate the series.

DS9 was always my favorite of the various Star Trek series, and its broader narrative sweep was the answer.  It started in 1993, and closed in 1999, which was also the first year for The Sopranos.  I don’t know if The Sopranos was in any way based on DS9, but they were doing the same thing, really.  Telling a big story.

It’s an awesome innovation.  To paint on a huge canvas, to compose a whole suite of symphonies, to write, not a novel, but three trilogies.  The Lord of the Rings took three four-hour movies to tell its Big Story.  But Battlestar Galactica took 73 one-hour episodes.  And then, when the whole huge story was done, they stopped.  That may be the most remarkable innovation of all.

This is the End: A review

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I want to make it very clear from the beginning that I am not recommending This is the End as a movie you should go see.  It’s crude, juvenile, tacky and uncouth, full of barnyard humor (or worse), and raunchy beyond belief.  It’s R-rated, and deserves every bit of it.  Is it also funny?  I went with a friend; I laughed a lot, my friend did not.  And he’s not the kind of person who is easily offended.  There were four other guys in the theater when we saw it; they laughed a lot too, and as we left the place, were chatting about how incredibly funny, and also incredibly disgusting the movie was.

No, I want to review the movie, not because I thought it was great, but because I thought it was interesting.  Like, theologically interesting.  Because it really is a religious film, deliberately and specifically.  It’s like a Rabelaisian sensibility tacked onto a medieval morality play: Everyman, starring Sir John Falstaff.

In fact, most morality plays DID star Falstaff.  When we teach morality plays in theatre history classes, we usually have students read Everyman, because it’s accessible, quietly reverent, and widely available in a good English translation.  But it’s very much an exception to the general order of morality plays.  Most were pretty rowdy, with a Vice character, a cowardly, corpulent embodiment of most of the Deadly Sins–Vice became Falstaff, in Shakespeare’s capable hands.

Anyway, that was the point–to entertain the audience in a very basic, pretty rowdy fashion, while also teaching an improving lesson about the eternal awards granted the righteous and hideous punishments doled out to the wicked.  Well, that’s This is the End.  That’s exactly what it is.  Sort of, though it’s also a spectacularly vulgar deconstruction of vulgar religious expectations.

The premise: here’s what happens when the Apocalypse, the End of Days, interrupts a Hollywood party at James Franco’s place.  At this party are a number of movie stars: Franco, and Seth Rogan, and Jonah Hill, and Michael Cera: Rihanna and Kevin Hart and Channing Tatum, Emma Watson (fabulous, in a much-too brief role) and Jay Baruchel and Craig Robinson and Danny McBride.  They’re all in the movie, all playing themselves.  Or, at least, some particularly unflattering version of themselves.

And that’s a lot of the point of the movie.  They’re awful human beings.  They even talk about it, how movie stars are complete wimps and wusses, the last people on earth you would want to count on in an emergency.  They’re all incredibly selfish and whiny and cowardly, and that means that demons, stalking the earth, seem particularly interested in them.

Now, because it’s the Last Days, there’s an alternative to being roasted on a spit in hell.  You can be raptured.  And good people are raptured, lifted into heaven in a beam of blue light.  Not movie stars though.  None of them seem remotely likely to make it.

And of course, don’t we think that?  Don’t we generally think that ordinary folks stopping (say) at a convenience store for some over-the-counter medicine for an ailing child are far more likely to experience Divine Grace than Seth Rogan, star of The Green Hornet and The Pineapple Express? And that becomes part of the appeal of the movie.  Seth Rogan wrote and directed this film, the point of which would seem to be that Seth Rogan isn’t even close to a good enough person to go to heaven.  Or James Franco or Jay Baruchel either.

Or Jonah Hill.  In one of the funniest scenes in the film, Jonah Hill (playing Jonah Hill), prays.  “Dear God,” he says, “Jonah Hill here.  (pause).  From Moneyball.  Anyway. . . .” Like, of course, God will pay particular heed to his prayer.  I mean, he was in Moneyball.  James Franco seems to feel the same way.  “But we’re actors. We bring joy to millions of people,” he says, before admitting to a particularly heinous (though sadly plausible) sin he once committed.

A Morality Tale requires a Vice, and Vice, in this film, is played by Danny McBride.  Of all these actors, he’s the one I know least well, but he’s known for playing red-neck creeps (I gather, from checking out his IMDB page), and he’s just disgusting in this.  One scene involves a particularly awful revelation, and I think I may have forfeited the possibility of personal redemption by laughing aloud at it.

But redemption does seem possible.  Some people are thrust to hell immediately–Michael Cera’s immediate damnation strikes us as peculiarly apt, though I felt a little bad when Rihanna went immediately afterwards.  Others give in to demonic possession (specifically Jonah Hill, whose niceness, we see, hides a miserable personality).  But Franco, Robinson, Baruchel and Rogan seem to be on a kind of cusp between good and evil.  And a single act of self-sacrifice may be enough to save them.

And it is, for three of them. They get to go to heaven.  Which is conceived as . . .  a big Hollywood party.  And this, I think, is the savviest conceit of a very smart film–the idea that, lacking any specific knowledge of what Heaven actually is like, we imagine a particularly earth-bound one.  Heaven, turns out, has great weed.  Pretty girls in bikinis.  And in heaven, the Backstreet Boys have reunited just so they can perform for you.

But that’s right, isn’t it?  As Christians, we disdain Hollywood, and are surely convinced of its damnation.  But aren’t we also enticed by it?  Don’t we imagine ourselves enjoying Heaven?  Using our halo to light a blunt, and getting God to hook us up for front row seats at a Backstreet reunion concert?  We may not specifically enumerate 72 virgins as our eternal reward, but we’re in that ballpark, imagining, perhaps, a consequence-less never-ending hedonism.

Some critics have suggested that it’s a vanity project, a film that imagines that America will be as amused by the antics of that group of actors as those actors are in love with themselves, and their oh-so-shallow friendships.  I don’t think so.  I think we need to dig down to another strata, where Rogan is sending up vanity project films, where he’s mocking the idea that we’ll be amused by a movie about him and his actor friends.  In other words, it’s not a film about Seth Rogan and Jay Baruchel and their friendship.  Nor is it a movie mocking the idea of a movie about that friendship.  It’s a movie mocking the idea of mocking a movie about Rogan/Baruchel Inc.

In other words, it’s a movie about the Bible, and the Apocalypse foretold in John’s Revelation.  But it’s also a movie about how ridiculous it would be to take things like The Rapture and the End of Days seriously.  But then it takes those ideas seriously.  But then it gives us a shallow, comic book afterlife. But then, perhaps all our notions about an after-life are shallow comic books.

My head hurts.  But ultimately, I think it’s a pretty interesting and serious film.  One possible approach to the World might be to say, ‘no actions, ever, have consequences, so nothing’s actually evil, so I can do anything, cannibalism, anything, and who cares?’ That’s the Danny McBride approach.  Another is ‘if there’s a God, let me figure out what He wants from me, because I’m a good enough actor, I can easily fake that.’  The James Franco approach.  Another is, ‘just be superficially nice all the time, and God will owe you.’  Jonah Hill.  But then there’s Jay Baruchel’s approach, and Craig Robinson’s–’let me actually try to do good.  Self-sacrifice seems to me the best thing humanity can manage.  And I am willing to sacrifice for my friends.’  And if the heaven that earns them is silly, well, we mortals probably haven’t the wit to imagine a more real one, or one more vividly profound.

 

 

Smash and I are through

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I gave it one full season, plus a good part of the second season.  But I can’t take it anymore.  It’s just gotten too stupid.

Oh, sorry, I’m talking about Smash.  Just can’t deal with it.

Smash is a TV series, on NBC, following a group of New York theatre artists as they write and produce a musical about Marilyn Monroe.  Main characters are Debra Messing as Julia, a writer, Christian Borle as Tom, a composer, and Jack Davenport as Derek, the show’s director.  Anjelica Huston is Eileen, the producer.  Katherine McPhee, of American Idol fame, plays Karen, one of the two actresses vying for the role of Marilyn; the other is Ivy, Megan Hilty.  These actors are not, BTW, the problem.  Borle’s terrific, Messing is fine, and Davenport does a nice job portraying a complete jerk.  Hilty’s brilliant, and McPhee sings well and looks great.  The acting is more or less fine.

The premise has tremendous promise.  The Karen/Ivy battle for the leading role could be dramatically exciting.  Two exceptionally talented young actresses fighting for a Broadway lead–that could be awesome.  Plus, the story of Marilyn has dramatic and musical possibilities.  And the fact that the Smash creative team soaped it up some didn’t bother me; I get that it’s television. So Julia, the writer, once cheated on her husband with Michael, an actor the producers all like for the role of Joe DiMaggio.  Well, that could be interesting, especially when he reignites the affair, destroying her marriage. Like I said, it’s a soap.

There were several story threads the show followed, some of them more compelling than others.  One involved Eileen’s relationship with her ex-husband (and former producing partner) Jerry (Michael Cristofer). Cristofer is a wonderful writer (I still love The Shadow Box), and I suppose he was okay in this moustache-twirling soap villain part.  I just couldn’t care, though.  Part of it was the bangs.  Poor Anjelica Huston was given the single most hideous hairstyle I’ve ever seen on a middle-aged woman, with these awful bangs.  It was distracting, how horrible she looked. Let me put it this way: every scene involving Eileen and Jerry, I wanted to fast-forward.  Nothing happened of dramatic interest in any of them, and if you skipped ahead, you didn’t have to see that hairstyle.  Probably a wig. I hope it’s a wig.  I hate the thought of Anjelica Huston looking like that all the time.

But the one thing that should have been interesting, the Ivy/Karen duel for Marilyn, turned out to be peculiarly uninteresting.  In part, it’s because it was such an acting mismatch.  Katherine McPhee is a lovely young woman, with a beautiful voice.  But she just didn’t have the acting chops to compete with Megan Hilty.  So when Derek, the director, threw a fit and got Karen for his lead, I lost a lot of my interest in the show.

But the second season got so much worse than the first season, it finally defeated me.  I love the theatre, love this art form.  I wanted desperately to like the show.  But its multiple crass stupidities finally wore me down.

In the second season, for example, it was decided that the show was close to ready for a Broadway opening, but the book was the weak link.  Julia was going to have to re-write, and Eileen hired a dramaturg to assist her.  And she gets this really great, first class, super famous and accomplished dramaturg–not just a dramaturg, but a Dramaturg.  Peter, played by Daniel Sunjata.

Dramaturgs, apparently, are sort of a combination life coach, S/M torturer and play-whisperer.  At first Julia resists his blandishments, but eventually Stockholm syndrome sets in, and she re-writes to his specifications.  So let me describe to you the scenario that transpires next:

Julia writes this brilliant script.  They have a reading; everyone agrees, it’s superb.  Wonderful.  We don’t get a lot of details, but here’s what we’re told: it tells the story of Marilyn Monroe through the eyes of the main men in her life–DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, JFK.  A series of vignettes, each narrated by a different guy.

But Jerry The Evil Producer doesn’t like it.  In fact, he wants to go back to the earliest draft of the script, about Marilyn, and her fight to succeed in a world dominated by men. The show has to choose between these two scripts; version A: Marilyn’s battle to succeed, and version B: the Dramaturg-inspired one in which we see Marilyn through the eyes of these powerful men.  Julia wants B.  Tom wants A.  Anjelica Huston’s bangs will decide.  They even turned it into a mini-cliff-hanger, dragged it over two episodes.  Which will she choose?

Do you see the problem? Have you gotten the difficulty here?  Do you see why this episode is one of the main reasons I refuse to watch the show anymore?

You have two versions of the Marilyn story.  And one of them is about a strong, volitional protagonist making choices.  And the other one is about  . . . a woman who is the creation of men.

A is better. In fact, A is so much better, it’s hard to imagine why absolutely everyone can’t see it.  B is rubbish.  B is non-volitional.  B is bad playwriting.

Which Julia was forced into by her Svengali-like dramaturg.

I’m a playwright and I’ve worked as a dramaturg, and this is just rubbish. Insulting, idiotic nonsense. A good dramaturg CAN be helpful, immensely helpful, if a good collaborative working relationship can be established between dramaturg and playwright. This is NOT HOW IT WORKS. And plays require dramatic action, which means characters making choices and decisions and then dealing with the consequences of those choices.  A script in which none of that happens is not, by definition, great.

Also, Jerry the Evil Producer is, without question, evil.  We’re told that many many times, usually by Anjelica Huston’s bangs.  But what exactly is the nature of his perfidy?  He likes the dramatically stronger, probably more commercial version of a script he’s planning to produce.  He wants to produce a financially and artistically viable show.  He also wants to protect his ex-wife from producing a show funded by highly questionable and probably criminal money sources.  In other words, he’s not actually evil at all.

It got worse.  In the second season, we meet a young composer/lyricist, and his book writing friend, Jimmy (Jeremy Jordan) and Kyle (Andy Mientus).  They’re collaborating on Rent a musical of their own, called The Hit List, and we’re consistently told that Jimmy’s music is the shiz and Kyle’s book, not so much.  And, I’m totally not kidding, Karen quits Bombshell (the Marilyn musical, which is a couple of weeks from opening on Broadway), so she can do this little workshop production of Hit List, because she Believes In Jimmy.  (Hit List gets compared to Rent so many times, I lost count, which come to think of it, is kind of bad news for Jimmy, considering what happened to Jonathan Larson!). (If you don’t know what happened to Jonathan Larson, look it up.)

(But, okay, one specific:  Derek gives Jimmy a note: the show needs an opening number establishing the show thematically.  Jimmy’s response is his go-to, default mode response to any note, by anyone–he throws a whiny little hissy fit.  Then he goes ahead and writes the song.  Which everyone compares to Rent. Now, in Rent, that opening number is “Seasons of Love.”  “Seasons of love”, one of the greatest songs in the history of musical theatre.  Now here’s Jimmy’s song, meant to be the “Seasons of Love” equivalent:  “Caught in the storm.”  Generic, mediocre pop song.  But nobody on the show thinks so–they think it’s, typically, brilliant.)

Anyway, yeah.  An actress cast in the leading role of a Broadway musical quits three weeks before opening night because she’d rather do a workshop show.  This is presented to us as a completely plausible and even admirable decision.  It enables Ivy (stuck in a horrendous production of a musical based on Les Liaisons Dangereuses) to take over Marilyn, the role she was anyway born to play.  I threw a shoe at my television set.

But worst of all is the character of Jonathan Larson Jimmy, the Genius.  His show has a slot in the New York Fringe Festival.  They’ve got a tiny space, and 10 hours to load in their show, tech, and open.  They walk in the space, and Jimmy sits down at the piano, and plays one of the songs from the show.  And cast and crew join him singing, and dancing.

I would punch him in the face.  I seriously would punch the little dweeb.  We have ten hours, people!  We have work to do!  We have X number of tasks to perform, Y number of hours to do it in, and Z number of people to do it.  You just changed the equation, unilaterally reducing the value of Y and the value of Z. Seriously, you little jerk. Get to work.  Now!

Have none of you ever actually done live theatre?

And the answer is obviously yes.  I have no doubt that the talented actors in the cast of Smash have all done some theatre. The show-runner, Theresa Rebeck, is a produced playwright.  They all know better.

But they think the television audience is, oh I don’t know, obsessed with the Tony awards. So all these characters are, like, preposterously obsessed with Tonys.  And rehearsals are boring, obviously, unless they’re excuses for working out people’s personal neuroses.  And of course it’s not remotely a problem, say, to turn a book musical into a sung-through musical in two weeks (while also rehearsing it).  And every note composed by a show’s composer is brilliant, while those playwright types are The Problem, what with their dissolving marriages and multiple affairs and various insecurities.

It just got too stupid.  I couldn’t watch it anymore.  It just astounds me that people who have worked in theatre, who love theatre as an art form, could possibly produce a TV show about theatre that gets absolutely everything wrong about how theatre works and what it is and how shows are created. I want them all to die.

 

 

Keynes revisited: a review

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A couple of years ago, I made the fateful decision to write a play about John Maynard Keynes and a night he spent on a college chapel roof with F. A. Hayek.  Two of the greatest economists in history in a small, limited, theatre-friendly setting; sounded fun. The problem: I didn’t know anything about economics. Plus, economics is about math.  Yikes.  Words are your friends; numbers are the enemy–I found the prospect of research, uh, daunting. I did have a son who majored in economics, and he lent me his macro-economics textbook–that was a good place to start. And I read a whole bunch of books. Really, a boat-load of books.  And I think now, finally, I’ve kind of gotten my head around the subject.  Some.  A bit.

One of the books I had to/got to read was Robert Skidelsky’s monumental 3 volume biography of Keynes.  Each volume was some 700 pages, which means the three books together had to add up to, uh, (shoot, uh, 3 X 700, carry the 4) 3600 1278 a whole bunch of pages. But it was worth it–a great read about a great subject. So imagine my feelings when, couple days ago, my wife went to the library, and found a new Keynes biography, just published.  Only way shorter, and tons more readable.  Keynes, by Peter Clarke, Professor Emeritus of Modern British History at Cambridge.  It’s quite splendid. It clocks in at a brisk 180 pages, and took a day, instead of the weeks it took me to wade through Skidelsky.  Don’t get me wrong–I don’t in any sense resent the time I spent with Skidelsky’s 5478 many pages.  But man, do I wish I’d read this first.

There have been three Keynes biographies that I know of, plus Nicholas Wapshot’s book on Keynes and Hayek, which is the one that got me started on the project.  The first Keynes bio was by Roy Harrod, who was a friend of Keynes and wrote not long after his death.  I found it pretty hagiographic, plus it chose to ignore Keynes’ homosexuality–gentlemen didn’t talk about that sort of thing when Harrod was writing.  Skidelsky’s brilliant, but he presumes a readership with a basic knowledge of the period and history.  I found I had to read it with my computer open to Wikipedia–spent a lot of time going ‘okay, who was Lord Halifax again?’  That’s one reason I like Clarke–he takes the time to give you a few sentences orienting you on major figures.  Love that.

But the main reason I love Clarke is this: he’s not so much interested in writing a biography of Maynard Keynes, as in Keynes’ economics.

‘Cause here’s the thing; we’re in a Keynesian moment right now.  Our economy remains struggling, not quite in full recession, but stagnating and with completely unacceptable levels of unemployment.  Exactly the situation Keynes faced in the ’30s in the US and Britain.  But the idea of a Keynesian stimulus has also been politicized.  There are tremendous misconceptions about who Keynes was, what he taught and believed, and how relevant those ideas are to us, today.  Those are the issues Clarke takes on.  He’s primarily interested in the relevance of the Keynes legacy on public policy in the early 21st century.

So, some myths.  The first is, that Keynes was ideologically inconsistent; the second, paradoxically, that he insisted on a rigid doctrinaire program to be followed without deviation.  The reality is that Keynes was the very antithesis of the unworldly ivory tower academic.  He managed to arrange his teaching schedule at Cambridge so he could spend most of his time dealing with huge responsibilities at the Ministry of the Treasury.  He had a wide correspondence in the US, and frequently traveled there to meet with government officials.  He may not have been architect of the New Deal, but he was consulted by the people who were its architects. He was also a director of the Bank of England.  And a trustee of both Cambridge and Eton.  And director of the Cambridge Art Theatre, a trustee of the National Gallery, a ballet impresario.  And an astute and successful investor.  And so on.

In other words, Keynes did not just write about economics, he practiced both economics and politics at a very high level.  And he did so during the Great Depression and the two World Wars. Although his ideas were radical, he had to make them practically achievable. And Clarke shows exactly how he did it, how he would work within a committee and ministry structure to influence policy.  He knew how to trim his sails to the wind.  So if you accuse him of inconsistency, he also understood that any economic theory is worthless unless it can be actively implemented as policy.

So to apply Clarke’s insights to current events.  President Obama’s response to massive unemployment was a Keynesian stimulus.  And it’s axiomatic on the right that the Obama stimulus didn’t work, that it did not pull the US out of recession.  So stimulus is a failed policy. So Keynes was wrong, and Obama wrong to believe in Keynesian economics.

But the stimulus did work.  There’s just not a valid case that can be made for it not working. It slowed unemployment to a halt, and it reversed the job-loss trend.  It just wasn’t large enough to do the job completely. Every major neo-Keynesian economist–Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Greg Mankiw–all called for a much larger stimulus.  But Keynes would have appreciated the fact that a larger stimulus was simply not politically possible.  President Obama had to do what he could with the money Congress would agree to authorize.  Half-measures, sure.  But Keynes knew all about half-measures.  He spent the Great Depression urging the Roosevelt administration to triple what it was spending on New Deal programs. It was tricky though–Roosevelt had won election by accusing Republicans of fiscal profligacy.  A larger New Deal wasn’t politically feasible.  And Keynes knew that as well.

That’s the thing about Keynes–he was the ultimate realist. But my gosh, it’s interesting to see the parallels between his work in the 30s and today.

I think one of the objections to Keynes is, essentially, moral. We’ve all been raised to consider ‘thrift’ a virtue.  Keynes thought thrift was destructive. Budget deficits are often described in moral terms, as ‘piling debt on the next generation.’  Keynes did not actually favor budget deficits, but he didn’t mind them, in national emergencies.  Keynes even described himself as an ‘immoralist.’  So conservatives didn’t like him then and don’t like him today.

But above all, Keynes was an optimist.  He believed in the positive power of good government, and he believed in it as an insider, as someone who spent most of his life working closely with government ministers.  He believed in the creativity of common, ordinary people. He liked Roosevelt, in part because he too believed that the only thing we had to fear was, in fact, fear.

Here’s the Keynes I love:

The Conservative philosophy says, you must not try to employ everyone, because that will cause inflation.  You must not invest, because how will you know if it will pay?  You must not do anything, because this will only mean that you cannot do something else.

But we are not tottering to our graves.  We are healthy children.  We need the breath of life.  There is nothing to be afraid of.  On the contrary.  The future holds in store for us far more wealth and economic freedom and possibilities of personal life than the past has ever offered.”

I love Hayek too, for other reasons.  But right now is not the time for pessimism.  I voted for a man who promised hope and change.  Keynes would have liked him, I think.

Hollywood and the Constitution

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Last night, my wife and I decided to watch the latest movie delivered by our elf friends at Netflix, Jack Reacher.  Perfectly competent Tom Cruise thriller.  Suspenseful, well put together, lean and mean and pretty exciting.  It’s been interesting to watch how Tom Cruise has taken control of his own career, producing as well as starring in films specifically taylored to his gifts as an actor.  For a man in his early fifties, he looks tremendous, moves with a great economy of motion, and conveys a kind of terse intelligent intensity.  And for my wife and I, it made for an enjoyable evening home alone.

Anyway, the story involves a lone crazy shooter scenario, in which an Army sniper apparently guns down five random people in Pittsburgh.  An opening montage shows, without dialogue, good cops putting together the clues, and arresting a former Army Ranger named Barr (Joseph Sikora).  The evidence is overpowering against him, and instead of a defense, he writes down a name, Jack Reacher (Cruise).  His defense attorney, Helen (Rosamund Pike), her DA father (Richard Jenkins) have no idea who Jack Reacher even is, until he walks into their attorney conference.  He’s a former Ranger himself, a prosecutor of war crimes, and he knows all about Barr, who he had previously prosecuted in Iraq.  Reacher’s immediate thought is that Barr probably did what he’s accused of, and he’s fine with Barr getting the death penalty, but Helen persuades him to take another look at the evidence.  He eventually concludes that Barr’s been framed, and as the film progresses, he goes after the real shooter, who he learns has been hired by a Russian mobster businessman, the Zec, a wonderfully creepy Werner Herzog.  (In fact the film is basically worth watching just to see Werner Herzog act.)

Okay, so, but, Reacher has no evidence for any of this.  All the evidence points to Barr, and nothing in the film changes that.  Yes, he gets the actual shooter to even admit it to him, but Jack Reacher is basically an off-the-grid drifter do-gooder martial arts expert/attorney.  Not somebody whose testimony is going to hold up in any court.  So Reacher knows who-dun-it, also who didn’t do it, and he can’t prove any of it.  So he kills all the bad guys.  Just shoots ‘em in cold blood.  (To be fair, they’re busy shooting at him for a lot of it).  Rescues the girl. (Rosamund Pike is terrific, by the way, a performance with emotional resonance far beyond that required by this frankly pretty generic thriller).  And we’re fine with it.  We’re fine with Jack Reacher, (well, Tom Cruise) playing judge, jury and executioner. I certainly was, watching the movie last night.  Because he knows who the bad guys are, obviously–I mean, geez, it’s Werner Herzog, he’s obviously evil to the core–and since our poor pathetic criminal justice system clearly can’t cope with a guy like that, justice has to be done somehow.  So bang bang bang.  Done.

Bear in mind, this is a movie I quite liked. And why not like it?  How different is this from a whole bunch of other thrillers?  How much time gathering evidence and taking depositions and building a case does John McClane spend in the Die-Hard movies?  All (gulp) six of them?  I mean, it’s Bruce Willis–of course he can be trusted to get the bad guys.  How punctilious is Liam Neeson in the Taken movies about chains of evidence and international coordination?  (To be fair, in the first Taken movie, he does try to involve the French police, only to learn that they’re in cahoots with the bad guys.)  How many thrillers, how many cop shows, how many action flicks show cops, uh, not bothering much with due process?  Actually, a TV cop show like, I don’t know, Law and Order, did a pretty job showing police procedures.  Though they did manage to close every frickin’ case.

So, change of subject, back to reality.  On September 30, 2011, an American citizen living in Yemen, Anwar_al-Awlaki was killed by a drone attack.  Two weeks later, his son, sixteen year old Denver-born teenager, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, also living in Yemen, was similarly killed.  Both were killed as terrorists, without due process, without having been charged with a crime.

And yes, al-Awlaki was a member of Al Qaeda, and a recruiter for terrorism.  There doesn’t seem to be much question about that.  And so you can say, well, he was an enemy to the United States, and a dangerous man devoted to the destruction of our country.  Someone who supported and possibly even planned terrorist attacks against our country.  And we’re in a war on terror and on terrorists.  Of course we have the right to kill him.

But we are a nation of laws.  And we are governed by a constitution. And there is nothing in the constitution that gives the President of the United States the power to kill an American citizen living on foreign soil (living in a country with whom the United States is at peace) without due process.  Was al-Awlaki guilty of treason?  Well, Article 3 Section 3 is quite specific about the grounds for a treason prosecution.

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

Yes, the President is Commander-in-chief.  Absolutely.  Read Article 2 Section 2.  Nothing in there about ordering the deaths of American citizens without due process.

Our constitutional obligation, if the CIA did in fact have evidence of al-Awlaki’s treason, was to ask Yemen to extradite him to the US for trial.  And then try him.  And yes, I know that’s complicated ten different ways.  And I know we’re at war with Al-Qaeda, whatever ‘at war’ means with an international organization.  I totally get that it’s way way easier to just send a drone strike.

But we can’t. Or rather, yes, obviously we can, but we shouldn’t, and we can’t do it legally.  Anymore than Jack Reacher can just shoot the bad guy in a movie.  It was interesting to me to see the reaction of the Rosamund Pike character to Reacher killing the Zec.  She’s an attorney, a member of the Pennsylvania bar. She’s just watched her paid consultant (I guess that would basically be Reacher’s relationship to her) kill a suspect in cold blood.  She’s an officer of the court.  She has a professional obligation to arrest Reacher, to testify against him, to cooperate with a police investigation into murder and the subsequent capture and arrest of the killer.  She didn’t do any of that in the movie, obviously, because it’s a movie, and as such, a fantasy.  But due process means something.  The law means something.  Ignoring it, pretending that this or that situation is somehow beyond a legal remedy, that’s a terrible indictment of us and our society.

I love this exchange, from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons.  It’s a conversation between Sir Thomas More and his son-in-law William Roper.

Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

I’d give the Devil benefit of law.  Yes.  And, okay, maybe Al Qaeda is the Devil, and maybe the plans of al-Awlaki are indeed devilish, Satanic, just as Werner Herzog is pure evil in Jack Reacher.  Pure evil, a murderer, a man who orders the deaths of four innocents so he can kill the one person he wants dead, someone holding up a business acquisition he wants to have happen.  We still have to take him to court.  For our own protection, to live in a nation ruled by laws.

Two final points. Robert Duvall is in Jack Reacher, playing an elderly rifle range owner. A crusty conservative, he agrees to help Reacher kill the baddies, and provides covering sniper fire as Reacher moves in on them.  I am on record on being in favor of gun control. But I have family members who are gun owners, and who fiercely defend their Second Amendment freedoms.  Those same family members love the Constitution.  They would not, under any circumstances, join a vigilante in a frontal attack on possibly bad guys, an attack of at best dubious legality. I found the whole movie, and especially the portrayal of the Robert Duvall character, an insult to my gun-loving friends and their principled support for the Second Amendment.

And finally this: Anwar al-Awlaki and his son (and I haven’t even talked about the killing of his son) were men who held certain beliefs, men, apparently, of strong views.  If we can believe the news reports on al-Awlaki’s beliefs, they seem to have believed that the United States of America is evil, is an insult to the God they worship.  They believe that the United States is an affront to their religion, and that America should be therefore brought to its knees.  According to my reading of the Constitution, those are opinions they are allowed to hold.  Americans are allowed, constitutionally, to not believe in America. American citizens are protected in their right to believe that the United States of America is evil, and should be destroyed.

They are not allowed to do anything about it.  They are not allowed to actively work to murder, or to attack US possessions or institutions.  Americans are not, in short, allowed to perform acts of treason. But we are allowed to hold treasonous opinions.  That’s how confident our Framers were about the nation they created.

Recently, Michele Bachman has made some silly noise about impeaching President Obama for this IRS nonsense.  She’s also welcome to her opinion, as I am welcome to consider her a dimwit.  At the same time, I think there do exist grounds to impeach President Obama.  For ordering the murder of American citizens without due process.  I consider those actions high crimes and misdemeanors.  We elected a President, a chief executive, a commander-in-chief.  We did not elect Jack Reacher.  Hollywood fantasies have their place in American culture.  They have no legitimate place in American jurisprudence.