Somebody's Watching Me

The AMC series Rubicon is one episode away from the conclusion that what will likely be its only season. The ratings quickly fell way off after its heavily promoted premiere, and the buzz has been leaning in the direction of finding the series too slow, or "glacially paced", as Television Without Pity put it after removing it from its recap lineup after five episodes. I found the show really got under my skin, but it's easy to imagine how torturous it might seem to somebody who was expecting something more like 24 or the Bourne movies. Produced by Henry Bromell, who's worked on such series as Northern Exposure and Homicide and wrote and directed the underseen movie Panic, Rubicon wound up using its murder-and-conspiracy angle as a hook for a detailed, simmering look at the way people live and work together--people who spend their professional days poring over "information" looking for patterns and hints that might thwart a terrorist attack, or deciding whether to issue a "recommendation" that someone a million miles away be killed, in the name of national security.

The principal characters--Will Travers (James Badge Dale), the supervisor of a team of analysts at a Washington "think tank", and the geeks under his command--are drones, just trying to do their jobs, but they can't leave what they do behind them when they go home at night, and they can't keep from getting run over by internecine politics and the ramifications of what they do. Will is the only one who has to worry about coming home to find an assassin waiting for him in his living room--the result of his having gotten close to uncovering a conspiracy that involves his boss (Michael Cristofer, channeling, and improving on, Richard Perle)--but his problems are just an extreme version of what's happening to his colleagues, who are struggling with drug problems and marriages that are either busted or on their way to the intensive care ward. The most poignant character on the show is Maggie (played by the sad-eyed, sexy-mouse Jessica Young), a single mother with a scary ex-husband who is assigned to spy on Will by Kale (Arliss Howard), an unreadable master spook who claims to have the hero's best interests at heart. She reaches out to Will, who's interested in her but too distracted by the emerging threats to his life to respond at first; left feeling pent-up and vulnerable, she invites a dweeb she barely knows over for a one-night stand, and then, when Will knocks on her door late at night, has to explain that she isn't alone. Eventually, Kale himself blows her cover to Will, because he's decided that she "likes him too much" to be trusted to keep a cool head about the job.

Bromell took Rubicon over after the show's original creator, Jason Horwitch, abandoned the project--"creative differences", you know the drill--after writing and directing the pilot. It could be that what makes Rubicon so distinctive, and so distinctively uncommercial, is the result of Bromell's taking over a series that belonged to a genre for which he felt no particular affinity and trying to reshape it in a way that would keep him interested without throwing away the central premise entirely. That genre is the conspiracy thriller, specifically the movies that came out of Hollywood in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam and the assassinations: The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Three Days of the Condor, and any number of stillborn duds and imitations. Those movies were much a product of their era, and they caught, as if in a bottle, a distinctive atmosphere of wised-up despair, which is passed along to the viewer: the hopelessness they make you feel about the state of the country and the odds of making things better is the price you pay for the fatuous sense of now being one of the few who know the awful truth. I grew up watching these movies on TV, and I know first hand their addictive appeal; the down side is that, having gotten addicted to them, I watched them again when I was old enough to see that they're not really very good. (The weakest and most disappointing thing about Rubicon, and what best ties it to those movies, is the nature of the conspiracy itself: the aging game masters who've risen to the top of the intelligence community seem to have been shaping events to result in catastrophic events from which they can profit financially. If anything, this is a kindness to the people who use cooked intel and friendly media filters to reshape perceptions of reality according to their ideological beliefs; the implication is that the real bad guys would be doing that just for the money.)

Paranoia was in the air in the 1970s, and artists ranging from Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Ishmael Reed to Philip K. Dick and the Firesign Theatre caught it and twisted it into strange and fascinating shapes, but in big-studio movies, the zeitgeist belongs to whoever can best reduce what's in the air to formula. The king of post-counterculture Hollywood paranoia was the producer-director Alan J. Pakula, who began auditioning for the post as early as Klute(1971). That movie is best remembered as the once-stylish-looking, now slightly run down construction built to house Jane Fonda's performance as the endangered call guy Bree Daniels, probably the finest work of her career. You may have to jog your memory a little to recall that the plot pitted the actress already known as Hanoi Jane against a fat-cat business executive who looked like the poster child for Nixon's Silenty Majority, and who was revealed to have been leaving dead hookers and their johns all over Manhattan. Having tested the waters, Pakula dove in head first with The Parallax View (1974), in which ineffectual investigative-reporter hero Warren Beatty discovers that the uptick in political assassinations has been the work of a corporation that recruits both the actual shooters and the "lone gunman" types who serve as their scapegoats. The most memorable scene comes when Beatty infiltrates the organization and gets a look at the Parallax Corporation's recruiting film:



The idea is that, by monitoring the viewer's reactions to the montage, Parallax can determine whether he is the right kind of resentful, ego-fueled, frustrated loser. In the '70s, the lone nut was what serial killers became in the '80s and '90s: the dangerous lunatic who was supposed to be everywhere, living among us, waiting to pounce, but who could be understood if only we could crack the code that would enable us to get inside his mind. Parallax, which--spoiler alert!--ends with Beatty not only failing to foil the company's next planned assassination but being scapegoated for it, has some claim to being the perfect paranoia thriller, conceptually worked out to a T and utterly meaningless. There's no attempt to explain how the corporation profits from its work, which seems to be non-ideological in nature. (The movie begins with the assassination of a presidential candidate who suggests Robert Kennedy, and ends with the murder of one who, as played by Jim Davis, is a ringer for John Connolly.) Ideally, Parallax might have worked as a hallucinatory nightmare with no pretense of realism, but as a director, Pakula was literal-minded to the point of plodding. It could have been a satire of conspiracy thinking, with the revelation that Parallax makes its money by publishing books and promoting public speakers who cash in on crazy theories about the assassination fever that the company is in charge of maintaining, but Pakula could have given Jack Webb a fun for his money in the humorless sweepstakes. But as it is, in its self-canceling perfection, it beautifully captures the appeal of the large-scale political paranoid fantasy, which lies not in offering a plausible alternate explanation for terrible events but reassuring those who can't deal with the idea that life is unpredictable and one fruitcake can get off a lucky shot that changes history by presenting a vision of a brilliant bad guy who's in charge of everything. seeing to it that all goes according to plan. The Parallax Corporation is the opposite of an agent of chaos.

Parallax wasn't a hit in its day, but Pakula's next movie, All the President's Men (1976), was the self-important prestige blockbuster of the Bicentennial year. Based on Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book about their journalistic spadework uncovering the Watergate scandal, it's a time capsule of a brief window in the history of Americans' perceptions of reporters, after they were presented in movies as disreputable, wisecracking, fun-loving truth tellers and before they were redefined as whores and ventriloquists' dummies interested in cozying up to those in power and mastering the repeating of conventional wisdom in hopes of landing a TV deal. Hushed and uninvolving to a near-hypnotic degree, and fated to play a little strangely to audiences who aren't eager for a chance to dance, one last time, on Richard Nixon's grave, it records a moment in time when it must have been a bigger thrill for Robert Redford to get to pretend to be Bob Woodward than it was for Woodward to know that, somewhere out there in Hollywood, Robert Redford was pretending to be him. It is hardly the only movie in which Redford labored under the delusion that actual acting would mar the sanctity of the proceedings, but Dustin Hoffman, as Bernstein, is only slightly more awake, even though the movie does observe the traditional rules of conduct: the pushy little Jewish guy is the one who goes behind the handsome blond WASP's back to sneak his way onto the story and who keeps badgering people who are nervous and scared, until the Great White Father steps in and says something like, "We wouldn't want you to do something that would make you uncomfortable", and pulls on his partner's leash.

The movie does show a fair amount of the drudgery that went into the reporters' investigation, but I wonder if it would have been made at all if Woodward hadn't been able to throw Hollywood the one gaudy device of Deep Throat, presented here as the Oracle of Delphi in a parking garage, an authority figure so omniscient and authoritative that he makes Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, even in the Oscar-winning person of Jason Robards, look like Fred Willard with his fly open. Watergate did its damage to the concept of justice in future cases of presidential corruption by setting an impossible-to-duplicate standard, so that from then on, anyone obviously guilty of doing something unspeakable who had neglected to actually record themselves doing it or authorizing that it be done could insist until they were blue in the face that there was "no smoking gun." All the President's Men probably did its share of damage to the journalism industry, drawing into it countless people who only turned into hacks and whores after discovering, to their dismay, that no all-seeing person was going to invite them to arrange a series of secret meetings so that he could shovel the story at them in enigmatic bursts.



The movie also has its place in the history of Watergate, for having bequeathed to us the line, "Follow the money." Such is the power of movies that everyone now knows that this is an actual key piece of advice that the actual Mark Felt gave the actual Bob Woodward, without which he could never have broken the actual case wide open, even though it was the creation of the screenwriter, William Goldman. Goldman also supplied the big wind-up speech with which Bradlee proves his mettle, delivered to his weary reporters while they're gathered on his front lawn in the middle of the night: "Look, you're both probably a little tired, right? You should be, you've been under a lot of pressure. So go home, have a nice hot bath, rest up -- fifteen minutes if you want-- before you get your asses back in gear--because we're under a lot of pressure, too, and you put us there-- not that I want it to worry you--nothing's riding on you except the First Amendment of the Constitution plus the freedom of the press plus the reputation of a hundred-year-old paper plus the jobs of the two thousand people who work there--but none of that counts as much as this: you fuck up again, I'm gonna lose my temper." For a boring, pompous movie about a national calamity, All the President's Men has a fair amount of Butch and Sundance in it.

(Redford is also the star of the 1975 Three Days of the Condor, which has a passing family resemblance to Rubicon; the hero works as a reader for the CIA, plowing through all kinds of published material looking for anything that might be of interest to the Company. He becomes a target when a report he's filed on the content of a pulp thriller strikes someone in the loop as hitting a little too close to home. Ideally, Condor ought to have a solid streak of black humor in it: Redford finds out he's in trouble when he comes back to work and finds that all his colleagues have been killed by assassins who were really after him but missed him because they timed their attack for when he was out on the office lunch run. Unfortunately, Condor was directed by Sydney Pollack, a splendid fellow who showed his talents off well in other films but who succumbed to a bad case of Pakula whenever Robert Redford was in the vicinity. As for Pakula, All the Presidnet's Men really marked not just the high point of his directing career but the end of his run as an auteur. He flamed out with Comes a Horseman, a failed attempt to make a really depressed Western, and Rollover, a total failure of a financial-conspiracy thriller in which the damn Arabs pull all their money out of our banks and precipitate a wordwide economic collapse. He rebounded commercially in the '90s with movie versions of Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent and John Grisham's The Pelican Brief, but nobody gave him as much credit for their success at their bestseller-list titles.)



For what it's worth, my vote for greatest American political conspiracy thriller goes to Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981), made thirteen years and a lifetime or two after De Palma's Greetings, in which the great lost comedy actor Gerrit Graham played a camera buff with an assassination conspiracy fetish. Instead of a realistic surface and the tone of a pamphlet meant to convince you that The System is rigged, Blow Out has the texture and intensity of a bad dream, the nightmare of someone who's seen what's happening to his country and feels powerless to do anything about it. De Palma threw together echoes of Chappaquiddick, the Zapruder film, and Nixon's ratfuckers, and even invented a new, clamorously empty patriotic holiday--"Liberty Day", in Philadelphia--just so that he could have a properly celebratory din in which to have his hero fail to save the woman he'd placed in jeopardy. Filmmaking talent aside, part of what makes it more sophisticated (and less smug) that Pakula's movies and the run of conspiracy thrillers is that De Palma doesn't discount the possibility of conspiracy but knows that, as the the foxes say in Lars Von Trier movies, chaos reigns: the political dirty tricks in Blow Out only escalate to murder because Burke (John Lithgow), the G. Gordon Liddy figure who's been hired to embarrass a potential presidential candidate with a sex scandal, saw his chance to simplify the plan and, after being cut loose by his appalled employers, runs amok. In his book The Dream Life, J. Hoberman called it the last '70s movie, and when it opened in the first summer of the Reagan presidency, it did feel like--and, at the box office and by most reviewers, was received as--a movie unwelcomely out of time.

One funny thing about these movies that was part of their appeal for me when I saw them as a kid, and that watching Rubicon has reminded me: they make investigating a conspiracy look like the opposite of being in a rut. People in movies who are investigating conspiracies are constantly trying to find places where they can meet people out in the open and not be easily observed or overheard. In The Parallax View, Beatty and a CIA discard played by Kenneth Mars compare notes while visiting an amusement park; when Redford/Woodward and Hoffman/Bernstein aren't at the newspaper office or in underground parking garages or on their boss's lawn in the middle of the night, they're kicking back in the waiting rooms of minor out-of-state government officials or at McDonald's, a scene that, when I first beheld it, I had no idea was probably meant to show us how badly these harried, underpaid American heroes had to eat. When my life consisted of being bused to any from the rural Mississippi wasteland to a school distinguishable from home chiefly by the fact that there were fewer cows and more asbestos in my classroom, I used movies to dream about the possibilities that having the autonomy of an adult might someday offer, and being a conspiracy buster looked like a pretty good way of life just for the unpredictable variety of places one might visit in the course of a day, even if you were likely to be framed for the killing of a Supreme Court justice after sipping coffee laced with a chemical that would simulate a fatal heart attack. I had forgotten how important that element was to the affection I once had for these films, and Rubicon reminded me, thanks largely to the character of Kale, who is always leaving someone a message to meet him on some rooftop or public street corner. So far, he hasn't taken Will for a ride on a rollercoaster, but I'm hoping they're saving that for the big finale.

Why Is This the Best Possible Time in History in Which to Be Alive?

Three reasons, all taken from last night's TV lineup:

1.) With roughly one hour and forty minutes to go, Rubicon finally provided a possible explanation for why it's called Rubicon!

2.) On The Venture Brothers: the first Jacob Riis joke of the new millennium!

3.) Banksy's special guest Simpsons intro:

Parade's Canceled

I found out that today was Columbus Day the same way a lot of people must have found out: by turning on my laptop and wondering why a dead Italian was trending at Yahoo's front page. This news came at the worst possible time for me: after I'd already spent a couple of hours this morning trying to get my Netflix DVDs watched so that I could get them back in the mail before 10:30. It's not as if this is the only occasion when something got named after somebody who later generations decided they would have probably snubbed at the neighborhood pot luck social. Cape Canaveral was renamed Cape Kennedy after President Kennedy's assassination, but it went back to its original name in 1973, presumably because of the feeling that, if those ten years were understood as a separate moment in the area's history that stood apart from the run of normal times, then reruns of I Dream of Jeannie would make better sense. I, personally, don't know anybody who gets to take Columbus Day off. Even my bank is open today. But once the U.S. Postal Service gets it into its head that such-and-such a recurring point on the calendar means that I shouldn't get my magazines that day, it's like a dog with an old shoe. There's no letting go of it.

It's not unusual for national holidays that were conceived as a tribute to some historical figure to become flattened out and lose any real meaning over the years. In a recent New Yorker essay on the changes in biography as a literary form as they're reflected in the posthumous image of George Washington, Jill Lepore summed up the way it works when she wrote that, in the 1880s, "Washington's birthday became a national holiday, now commemorated as a great time to buy a new car." In my lifetime, the supreme example of how this works is Martin Luther King, Jr. When he died, King was a genuinely controversial and radical figure; fifteen years later, when Congress voted to make his birthday a national holiday, Ronald Reagan, who had to sign it into law, expressed his mixed feelings about it, and John McCain was outright opposed to it and supported Arizona Governor Evan Mecham's refusal to allow hist state to honor it, which, as David Broder and Roger L. Simon would be happy to explain if they were here, was the honorable, statesmanlike thing to do, and further proof of his stature as the greatest American of our time. (After this resulted in image problems and economic damage to Arizona and led to Mecham's impeachment, McCain completely reversed himself, which, as David Broder or Roger L. Simon could explain to us, was the honorable, statesmanlike thing to do and further proof of his stature as the greatest American of our time.) New Hampshire created the appellation "Civil Rights Day" so that it would have something to celebrate without whispering King's name, and stuck with that until 1999; a year later, Utah began observing King's holiday instead of their alternative to saying "Candyman" three times in the mirror, "Human Rights Day." And what is the upshot of all that bother? More than a quarter of a century after Jesse Helms called King a "Marxist" on the floor of the U.S. Senate to make it clear why he didn't deserve a holiday in his name, Glenn Beck defends King against any suggestion that he had Socialist tendencies and denounces "progressives" who would libel his memory by implying that he himself had progressive tendencies. Beck knows that can't be true, because the man has a national holiday named after him.

So far as having his big day given its full due, Columbus seems to be that rare case of an historical figure who has suffered, rather than benefited, from our image of him having grown fuzzier and our connection to him more remote. I don't remember ever having given him a lot of thought before 1992, which marked the 500th anniversary of his great voyage. I can't say that I've given him a lot of thought since then, either. But I did notice an unusual number of articles that year mentioning that his "discovery" of America was not an unmixed blessing for the folks who were here when he landed, who might in fact quibble with the idea the land they were standing on needed discovering at any point during their stewardship of it. No doubt I'm oversimplifying. But what made the experience of reading those articles memorable wasn't so much the articles themselves as the fact that they were clearly intended as a counterweight to something that didn't really happen. As eagerly anticipated nonevents go, the 500th anniversary was on a par with the 1987 bicentennial of the United States Constitution, which had the misfortune to come one year after the country's self-celebratory hype machine had shot its wad for a while with the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. Except for the people who felt the need to caution people not to get too excited about this momentous event, no one gave a rat's ass. I happened to be working for the New Orleans Film Festival at the time, and the Festival, then a whopping three years old itself, was supposed to begin every second weekend of October. I remember there was a great flurry of confused activity after some helpful board member pointed out that we had better, just this once, move the opening of festival back a week, so that it wouldn't be lost in the joyous clamor that would accompany Columbus Day, 1992. Unless the mail carriers of New Orleans got very drunk that day, which I am not discounting as a possibility, no[]']][ joyous clamoring occurred, though some of us did take the fact that we had no film festival to open that Friday as an excuse to go to the movies. The big release that day was Ridley Scott's Columbus epic, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, a $47 million, 140-minute visual essay illustrating the message that Gérard Depardieu would never have a career in English-language pictures.

If the kind of people who care deeply about Columbus's good name were going to mount a massive counterattack against the tarnishing of his name, 1992 was probably the best time to do it: conservative dudgeon about the evils of "political correctness" was at its peak, and the anniversary gave them a topical hook and the chance to complain that lib-labs were threatening to commit the most grievous sin imaginable to Americans by spoiling a party that might be a marketing bonanza. Maybe it didn't happen in part because it was an election year, and with George Bush the Elder's dreams of re-election going down in flame, the editorial board of National Review had other priorities. That was the year that Republicans failed to get very far with the public by going after Murphy Brown. By the time the holiday rolled around, it was clear, from the returns on the attempts to cash in on Columbus fever--that $47 million Depardieu movie made back about $7 million at the box office--that the captain of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria was not someone who resonated deeply with contemporary Americans. Republicans could take a pass on another opportunity to show how out of step they were with their own country's popular culture. In the eighteen years since, his biggest contribution to our national conversation may have been to have indirectly inspired the episode of The Sopranos that has the least reason to exist.

I suppose I feel a little bad for Columbus. Maybe it's just that, knowing next to nothing about him, I once referred to him in a high school paper as "a seafaring greedhead who got a national holiday named after him for managing to find the wrong continent", at a time when I was heavily under the influence of Hunter S. Thompson and eager to shock my teachers with what a bad boy I was, as if any of them gave a shit. I do remember being predisposed to belittle his accomplishments back then, because he happened to be the one whose name was written on the blackboard when I experienced an insight that probably occurs to everyone at some point in childhood and almost certainly means less than it seems to at first: that some people are remembered and honored because they do things, such as write Moby-Dick or serve as the poetically eloquent leader of a nonviolent protest movement that ends legal racial desegregation in the United States, that only they could have done, while others do things that somebody else was going to do anyway.

We can argue about which acts fall into which category: The Social Network, the (heavily fictionalized, I know) movie that has its basis in the many competing claims about who deserves the credit for creating Facebook (and I reconnected with the Missus through Facebook, so please, no cute comments about whether or not "credit" is the appropriate word), actually had the surprising effect of convincing me that only Mark Zuckerberg could have created it, at least the version of it that worked the way it did and was so quick to take over the planet. As with Thomas Edison, the best evidence that Columbus falls into the latter camp is that there are so many people who demonstrably did pretty much what he did before he did it but who failed to get rich from it. (Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network, is also the author of The Farnsworth Invention, a play about the legal battle between Philo Farnsworth, the "inventor" of television, and RCA president David Sarnoff. In a fascinating article about the making of the movie, Mark Harris quotes the producer Scott Rudin as saying, "one of the reasons I wanted Aaron to write this movie was, as much as he had found enormous pleasure in the Frank Capra story of Philo Farnsworth, it was clear to me that the person who wrote that play really had his heart with Sarnoff.”) But what the hell. We all know what Woody Allen said ninety percent of life is.

Two Voices

R.I.P. , Joan Sutherland:



And Solomon Burke. If you can hear the harpist, my hat's off to you.

Jesus Christ!

The satirical website Christwire currently leads the league in putting up fake stores and headlines (mocking conservative Christianity) that are picked up by news organizations that think they're for real. It happened with their denunciation of Bill Murray, it happened with their list of "9 signs your husband is gay (of which the Huffington Post, trying to cover its ass, wrote, "We're not sure if this is a satire or not, but from the looks of things no one really knows", apparently on the assumption that no one really wrote it and no really runs the site where it appeared). But you know what's really amazing? This appears to be on the level.

Don't Know Much About History

If you don't live in Ohio, you may not have heard anything about Rich Iott, "the Republican nominee for Congress from Ohio's 9th District, and a Tea Party favorite", except maybe that he's been "involved with a group that calls itself Wiking, whose members are devoted to re-enacting the exploits of an actual Nazi division, the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, which fought mainly on the Eastern Front during World War II." (Joshua Green, who broke the story, adds that "Iott's participation in the Wiking group is not mentioned on his campaign's website, and his name and photographs were removed from the Wiking website." I'm not sure how big a deal this story, however irresistible it might be, deserves to be. Iott wasn't expected to win before this came out, and now that it has, we all may get to hear a lot of indignant commentators complaining that, just because one patriot is interested in military history and likes to play dress-up, all the damned elitists are trying to imply that the Tea Party is full of brown shirt sympathizers.

That said, what I find mesmerizing about this one is that, instead of trying to bullshit his way out of trouble by saying something to the effect that he despises everything the Nazis stood for and has devoted a great amount of his free time to wearing a bully boy's uniform and retracing their dance steps so that he can better understand the nature of evil and protect us all from Hitler's Islamofascist spiritual descendents, Iott told The Atlantic that "I've always been fascinated by the fact that here was a relatively small country that from a strictly military point of view accomplished incredible things. I mean, they took over most of Europe and Russia, and it really took the combined effort of the free world to defeat them. From a purely historical military point of view, that's incredible." His people also referred those wanting to Read More About It to the group's website, which includes this statement of purpose: "Nazi Germany had no problem in recruiting the multitudes of volunteers willing to lay down their lives to ensure a 'New and Free Europe', free of the threat of Communism. National Socialism was seen by many in Holland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and other eastern European and Balkan countries as the protector of personal freedom and their very way of life, despite the true underlying totalitarian (and quite twisted, in most cases) nature of the movement. Regardless, thousands upon thousands of valiant men died defending their respective countries in the name of a better tomorrow. We salute these idealists; no matter how unsavory the Nazi government was, the front-line soldiers of the Waffen-SS (in particular the foreign volunteers) gave their lives for their loved ones and a basic desire to be free. "

I suppose the nice thing about this is that now we know that Rich Iott isn't one of those Tea Partiers who think that Nazism and liberalism must be the same thing because the National Socialist party had "Socialist" right there in its name. It does raise the question whether he's one of those Pat Buchanan types who think that most people who insist on remembering the Holocaust and talking trash about Hitler only do so to distract people from spending their time the way it ought to be spent: by hating Stalin and his enablers at the ACLU. (And don't get Pat started on the Commie-coddling, anti-papist bastards who make the baby Jesus cry by saying mean things about Francisco Franco.) I also feel like pointing out that people who are searching for a good, solidly condemnatory adjective to apply to the government of Nazi Germany and reject "psychotic", "insane", "evil", and "monstrous" in favor of "unsavory" are basically extending an open invitation for you to assume that everything they know about the Nazis, they learned from watching Dyanne Thorne movies.

The obvious point of comparison here is with people who dress up in Confederate uniforms and reenact Civil War battles--and I think it's safe to say that a lot of those people have sentimental feelings, to put it gently, about the Confederacy. (Is it fair to point out how many of the most fucked-up ideas that have plagued our country in the past century or so have come from people, and they are still among us, who are not only soft on those who fought for slavery but who, 95 years after The Birth of a Nation and long after serious historians have dynamited their arguments, continue to maintain that the white South was made to suffer so egregiously during Reconstruction that the decades of lynchings and Jim Crow laws that followed were somehow understandable, or even forgivable? Or to mention that this argument isn't so different from what Hitler's defenders were saying about him before World War II: that the countries that defeated Germany in the first World War were so smug about it that Hitler was within his rights to do whatever it took to make his people feel that their balls had grown back?) I figure there are three kinds of people who, for whatever reason, put on a Nazi uniform today: those who have to do it for an acting role or something and feel that it makes them want to puke, but who suck it up because they've got a job to do; those who see "patriotism" and "heroism" as such abstract concepts that they can fully separate a soldier's acts from whatever cause his acts are meant to serve; and those who get off on it. Iott sure talks like someone who gets off on it. Mind you, anyone who falls into the second category, whether we're talking Nazis or Confederates or the fucking Shining Path, would have to be pretty much total turnip head. Not that I'm saying that anyone who meets on the field of pretend battle is a Nazi at heart. I figure that, anyplace where people restage actual scenes of human beings forced to kill or be killed by one another because they think it's interesting or fun, the turnip head community must be pretty well represented.

October 2010 Horror Movie Diary (Second Sequence)

Tom Six's THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE is this year's Little Movie with the Big, Disgusting Premise. In a nutshell: a German mad scientist (Dieter Laser), who works out of his country house and who looks like Christopher Walken doing a bug-eyed impression of Michael Shannon, abducts tourists--two American women and an Asian man--and, after mutilating their knees so they can't stand up and remaking the women's jaws, sews them all together, asshole to mouth, to make "one" creature. Actually, the nutshell is pretty much the whole tree: this is a movie whose sole reason for existing is to document the most repulsive idea that its writer-director has ever been able to come up with. The longing to impress audiences with the novelty value of the grossest recesses of one's imagination is central enough to the appeal of horror movies, especially those of the midnight movie variety, that it would be hypocritical to attack him too lustily for this, not that it's been stopping people.

The real problem with the movie is that the effort of coming up with his disgusting premise seems to have left Six too exhausted to do anything much with it. The movie's poster art seems to promise something much stranger and more poetically disturbing than anything that's actually in the film, which is a disappointingly lazy piece of work: it doesn't even include much of an explanation for why the doctor thinks it's a good idea to be sewing people's faces to other people's asses, such as Strother Martin's theory in Sssssss that turning human beings into snakes would be beneficial for the future of the species when the next ice age comes. (My point is, it's not as if the bar is set sky-high for this sort of thing.) Everything about the movie, from the level of character development (you get to know the women just well enough to be grateful when their mouths are destroyed, because then at least they stop talking), to the way that victims just fall into the doc's lap, to the bloody wrap-up, feels phoned in. It's all there just for the sake of the image of some actors on their hands and knees with their noses pressed against each other's backsides, with surgical bandages obscuring the places where they're meant to be joined together. As it turns out, it's an image that, once you've seen it clearly and been obliged to keep looking at it for some length of time, isn't exactly guaranteed to haunt your dreams. (The coprophiliac element aside, it's less a vision of hell than like the punch line to the worst frat house comedy of all time.) So you can't even give Six points for being eager to get to the good stuff. In a way, though the movie's sketchiness is a blessing: if it featured people you could care about or even believe in, having to spend most of the film's running time watching them whimper and plead for the sweet mercy of a quick death would be a lot harder on the nerves. As it is, the most entertaining thing about The Human Centipede is the insistent claims in the publicity about its being "100% medically accurate", and the disappointing thing about the movie itself is that it makes you wonder if those claims are really meant as a joke.

The near-legendary British TV film THE STONE TAPE was written by Nigel Kneale and first broadcast on Christmas day, 1972. In its claustrophobic setting and mixture of scientific technology and metaphysical parapsychology, it's easy to see the influence it had on John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness. Michael Bryant, a bantamweight with a precarious-looking toupee and a full set of lungs, plays the head of a group of research scientists who are trying to develop new recording techniques for an electronics company. Having set up camp in a Victorian mansion, Bryant and his team discover that one of the rooms is haunted, and are gratified to learn that the specter, that of a young girl who died there a century earlier, has left a "recording" of her final moments imprinted on the room itself. Sensing the path to a techological breakthrough that he might be able to exploit for his corporate masters, Bryant vows to "find out exactly what makes it... well, it doesn't 'tick', it patters and screeches."

Directed by Peter Sasdy, a Hungarian-born filmmaker who also worked on such Hammer horror pictures as Countess Dracula, Taste the Blood of Dracula, and Hands of the Ripper, The Stone Tape doesn't look any pricier than the average U.S. TV-movie of the early seventies, but the chewiness of the ideas in the script and the skillful staging make it look more like a real movie. Bryant's scenery-chewing performance serves as a useful counterpoint to the low budget and the cerebral nature of the material: the most startling moment comes when, in the middle of a high-decibel rant at one of his subordinates, he suddenly, without warning, goes silent, and one can only marvel at the shocking power of any development that could get him to shut up. (The actor who plays his professional rival is made up to look like an EC comics version of Albert Einstein, and gives a performance that makes Bryant look like Marcel Marceau.) The combination of scare effects with science fiction and scientific theories of the acid-casualty-with-a-PhD variety makes it of a piece with Kneale's apocalyptic "Quatermass" stories--and maybe also the reworked script he did for the Carpenter-produced Halloween III, a career low point that resulted in his would-be disciple's prominent placement on Kneale's shit list--but The Stone Tape has a much more intimate feel, stoked by private feelings over individual suffering, The most haunting moment actually comes at the midpoint, when Jane Asher, as one of Bryant's lackeys, realizes that, in the course of their experiments, they've inadvertently "erased" the recording. She's been the one most affected by the fearful, lonely death of a stranger she can do nothing to help, and in the course of investigating the nature of how a record came to exist of that death, she's just seen it wiped out in front of her eyes.

Turner Classic Movies is celebrating October with a month-long Friday night series devoted to Hammer horror films. Although Hammer had existed as a British film company since 1935, it didn't have its own clear identity until the mid-1950s, when the surprise success of a couple of big-screen adaptations of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass TV plays turned Hammer into a scare factory, and the franchises that it built off its remakes of classic Universal creature features (The Curse of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, The Mummy) forever associated it with Technicolor blood and its house stars, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. (For some reason, Hammer never got into the wolf man business. Perhaps this is because their one real stab at it, which was ostensibly based on Guy Endore's awesome cult novel The Werewolf of Paris, starred Oliver Reed, who was arguably creepier and more threatening without the makeup.) I don't think I've ever seen one of Hammer's movies in a theater, but they were once, almost inadvertently, a big thing in my life. They happened to be clogging up the TV airwaves around the time that I was being allowed to stay up late, and catching up with the classic horror stories I'd grown up hearing and reading about was my number one priority. Because these movies, which were in color, were much more likely to be shown on local TV than the black and white Universals in those pre-cable days, these takes on the Gothic classics, with their slumming stage-trained actors and busty heroines breathing heavily in tight bodices and puddles of thick, viscous red liquid like so much spilled nail polish, were the first versions I ever saw.

TCM's festival is broken up so it manages to devote one night apiece to Hammer's vehicles for Frankenstein, Dracula, and its interchangeable stock company of staggering, crumbling mummies. (It pleases me that the final, closing-night selection is 1969's Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, which I vividly remember as the movie that introduced me to the concept of the reanimated monster with a screw-top head.) But I especially appreciated the mishmash schedule on view this past Friday night--PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES (1966), the Satan-worshipping THE DEVIL'S BRIDE (1968), THE REPTILE (1966) and THE GORGON (1964)--because it reminded me of a time when what I most dearly wanted from a horror movie was a new monster. Of course, I respected someone like Dracula, who could bite necks and cower from silver crosses with such aplomb that he could continue drawing crowds for decades, even as too close an association with him could render an actor unemployable in any other genre. But what I most wanted, every day of my life from around the time I was about six until I was twelve or thirteen, was to find out about a new kind of monster, get hip to its modus operandi, and, of course, discover the one sure way to kill it, so that I could be of help if Carl Kolchak ever came calling.

Of these four titles, the one that holds up best is probably The Devil's Bride (sometimes known as The Devil Rides Out), which was written by Richard Matheson from a novel by Dennis Wheatley, and which pits Christopher Lee, enjoying a rare opportunity to play the good guy, against an Aleister Crowley type played by Charles Gray, the neckless narrator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Made before Rosemary's Baby but not released until after that picture was in theaters, it has some claim to having helped cement the most beloved cliches of the "I'm from the bowels of Hell and I'm here to help you" genre, though I do wish that its first terrifying supernatural image, that of "some infernal spirit" who materializes on an floor decorated with a Satanic rune, wasn't some naked, smirking black guy wearing red togs and funny contact lenses. I also remember seeing The Gorgon when I was a kid and being happy that Hammer had brought back one of Hercules's old foes for a movie with a contemporary setting. To insist on too strict a delineation between those creatures familiarly seen in modern times and those of Greek mythology and other ancient lore always struck me as a waste of a good monster.

But for a true student of the evolution of the movie monster, Plague of the Zombies may be of even greater historical interest, as one of the last full-blown depictions of the old school zombie before George Romero rolled in with Night of the Living Dead and single-handedly reinvented a whole species of ghoul, a feat comparable to rewriting the rules of the Western so that whole generations of moviegoers could scarcely imagine a time when cowboys didn't wear pink tutus and fire laser cannons. The classic zombie, as seen in this film and earlier pictures such as the Jacques Tourneur-Val Lewton production I Walked with a Zombie and memorably strange, low budget White Zombie with Bela Lugosi, were the products of voodoo. There was some dissension about their appearance--the ones in Plague have bluish complexions, milky white eyeballs, and graying mop top hairdos--and, frustratingly for those of us who wanted to leave a movie like this better prepared than when we began watching it, no general agreement at all about how to kill them. Carl Kolchak dispatched one once, and he had to creep up on it while it was hibernating, fill its mouth with salt and sew its lips together, and then light a circle of candles around it--but many movie zombies were simply lit on fire or buried alive, or buried undead, when their workplace was destroyed.

Probably pre-Romero zombies never really caught on as movie monsters not just because they lacked personality, but because they had a workplace. One could enjoyably live, for a couple of hours, through a rampaging monster, like King Kong or Frankenstein's creation, who was strong enough to express his raging fury at having been mistreated in a place that he had never asked to be brought to, or through one who was smooth and elegant yet brutal and merciless, like Dracula, or masochistically devoted to a romantic heartache nursed for centuries, like Karloff's mummy. But zombies were drones, dragged out of a restful grave to do the bidding of some Montgomery Burns figure. (In Plague, the villain turns out to be the local mine owner, who is callously working the non-union living dead to within an inch of their non-lives. My favorite image is that of a zombie failing to notice the hero sneaking past him because he's too busy irritably brushing dirt off his tunic, as if to say, I know I'm dead, but this still sucks.) Time and again, the real villain of these stories is the zombie master, the conscious player who is pimping out the undead. By taking the middle man out of the equation and giving his zombies insatiable appetites, Romero gave zombies greater metaphorical power and relevance, but he also made them free agents. This made them more fun to watch, and after the shock of seeing them biting into people's faces and inhaling human intestines as if they were licorice began to level out, it even made it possible to project onto them, which is why the clearest steady development throughout most of Romero's zombie movies is that, the longer he keeps making movies about them, the more opportunities he seems to find to allow you to sort of root for them.

JERSEY SHORE: Yes, I'm having a bit of fun, lumping MTV's current exercise in serial pseudo-anthropology in with the horror movies, but after hearing and reading about the show for about a year, I finally took a look at a couple of episodes from the current second season, and, damn. I actually was able to watch a full episode of their antics, which I found interesting, mainly because the last time I decided to try watching one of MTV's zeitgeist scripted reality soaps, The Hills, the sucker defeated me before the first commercial break; ten minutes of that thing just about left my eyes in a sling. Watching these self-appointed representatives of the young adult Italian-American community wasn't involving or interesting, but I could do it. When they're not punching or slapping each other, they "party", 'get stupid" and be "real", which, in practice, means lots of drinking, tanning, and saying things like "She is literally on a ship headed for another planet" and, in response to the question, "What's in this?", "Just drink it." I gather that they did these sorts of things in the first season, but this season they also do a lot of complaining about each other, related to how certain cast members have become impossible to get along with and "aren't themselves", and I'd be curious to know how much of this is the result of the new stars trying too hard to live according to, and expand on, the TV images that have made them popular. ("Back in the day," the Situation tells the camera, "there was a prophesy that one day there would be a pimp of all pimps, and his name would be the Situation." In the days before reality-TV-generated fame, someone would have needed to have taken a great amount of cocaine before he felt like talking that way.) I'd also be curious to know exactly how many of the show's regular viewers watch it to mock and feel superior to the cast, as opposed to how many people watch it, thinking "That's the good life!" I'll bet that if those figures could be known and were made available, both groups would be appalled at how many people exist in the opposing camp.

But the most interesting thing about what I saw is that there are moments when the image gets a little fuzzy and there are vertical lines visible on the screen, the way there used to be in cinema-verite documentaries from many years ago. Given the relatively controlled conditions in which the footage is shot and the capabilities of modern technology, I can only assume that these blotches were put in deliberately in the lab, by someone who's seen some classic older films and is trying to make Jersey Shore look "real." It reminded me of the MTV of 25 years ago, when it often ran videos (such as Duran Duran's "Rio" and John Mellencamp's "Lonely Old Night") that were shown in letterbox format, not because they were originally made to be seen on wide screens, but because the people who made them had seen classic movies letterboxed on TV and thought the black stripes across the top and bottom of the TV screen was just one more tool in the visual stylist's bag of tricks. MTV: helping you understand what idiots see in art films since 1981.

You Learn Something New Every Day. So Far, This Is All I've Got to Show for Today

Around the time that my hormones were starting to kick in, Meat Loaf was at the peak of his commercial success, and one of the overcooked souffles that he managed to plant on the radio in heavy rotation was called "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad". The title refers to a girl who, the singer complains, once told him, "I want you... I need you", but "There ain't no way I'm ever gonna love you." Back then, there was no song that could make me lunge for the "OFF" button on the radio as fast as that one could, not because it was an aural horror (though it was), but because I thought the girl meant that she liked the singer, but as a friend, darn it, and in the lovesick and blue-balled condition that I was in for the entirety of my late childhood and adolescence, there was no situation that I wanted to hear about less, especially not at the extended, Wagnerian length that Meat Loaf could go on about something in the days when he was serving as the vehicle form Jim Steinman's misguidedly febrile imagination.

I just happened to hear the song again, though, for the first time in many years, and now that I've wised up enough to become a little hipper to the nuances of these things, I have only now recognized that the girl was actually saying (I believe) that she'd be more than happy to fuck the singer, but that he shouldn't expect their romance to go any farther than that. Swinish brute that I am, this depresses me far less than the thought of her spurning his advances with an offer of platonic friendship, no matter how heartfelt. If I'd understood it that way at the time, the song's existence would have weighed far less heavily on my nerves. This is probably the most chastening song-lyrics-misinterpreting experience I've had since I bought David & David's Boomtown on CD some twenty years after buying the cassette that I listened to so many times before and, with the help of the clearer sound and lyrics booklet, finally got it that Handsome Kevin, the scumbag drug dealer who deals out a table in the back of a Denny's in the album's lead track, "always listens to the ground." All those previous years and listens, I thought that the singer was complaining that the benighted fellow was a Foreigner fan who was always listening to Lou Gramm.

The Good Shill

I've never wanted to be one of those characters who sees political propaganda embedded in every burp emanating from the pop cultural entertainment-industrial complex, but sometimes, you just have to wonder... For instance, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the new CBS series Blue Bloods, in which Thomas Magnum, having staffed the New York Police Department and the D.A.'s office with members of his unimpeachable brood, explains that "enhanced interrogation" techniques are necessary to keep perverts from setting time bombs willy-nilly and laying waste to the next generation. (In the context of a fall TV season that has done little to push the nation's collective heart rate into the danger zone, Blue Bloods has been extravagantly praised as "perfectly decent" and deserving of "B" grades from professional television critics.) This past week saw the second episode of the sophomore season of The Good Wife, a program that has shown some cleverness and cunning regarding contemporary politics, particularly in its handling of the Alan Cumming character, a fixer helping a disgraced politician (Chris Noth) plot his comeback after a prison stint following an Elliot Spitzer-type sex scandal.

But that stuff is in the ongoing subplot. The main action takes place within the law firm where Julianne Marguilies's long-suffering heroine is trying to hold down a job in this tough economy. There, Margulies's character is balanced by the senior partner played by Christine Baranski, who is hard as nails but also seems meant to be a liberal feminist, or at least to believe in women's reproductive rights and disdainful of Sarah Palin. Last season, in an amusing non-starter of a subplot, Baranski considered putting her partisan identity aside long enough to accept having woo pitched at her by a drawlin' but super-intelligent and highly principled ballistics expert, played by Gary Cole, who disagreed with her politics but otherwise found her as adorably feisty as ol' Sarah herself. Palin herself failed to make a cameo appearance in the season finale, which meant that we missed out on the chance to see her and Baranski rolling around on the floor with fistfuls of each other's hair, like Faye Dunaway and Alice Krige in Barfly.

Last week, though, the actual Lou Dobbs was teleported from whatever magical realm in which he currently dwells to stalk the halls of the law firm and threaten to take his business elsewhere for fear that the political differences between himself and Christine will result in his being poorly represented. Baranski and Dobbs--who has either had some work done since I saw him last or, as seems more likely, benefitted from the more flattering lighting options open to performers when they're not on basic cable news channels--had a little face-to-face in her office, and had barely exchanged three sentences between them before Lou, charmed by her, yes, feistiness, declared that not only did he know that they could work together, but that he wanted her to be his personal shyster from that moment on. Sadly, he did not tell her, "You know what? You've got spunk! I hate spunk!" On the other hand, there was no indication that he would spend the rest of the season hanging around, sending her flowers and candy, and vying to be the new ideologically mismatched romantic partner in her life, because Garth Marenghi is not head of programming at CBS.

Now, I don't really think for a minute that the CBS network is trying to apply a political slant to their prime time schedule, and I'm sure there are lots of things going on there every night that would give the gang at Big Hollywood agita. But in the Dobbs-Baranski scene, I thought I could hear, not altogether faintly, the sound of a show sucking up to a particular segment of its audience: the message could have been, you may be one of those people who isn't altogether comfortable with big city elitists, like the people who made this show, or the people who are in it, but can't we set such feelings aside and trust us to just entertain you for an hour or so? Lou Dobbs can, for Christ's sake! If I'm onto something here, it may not be irrelevant that, as Troy Patterson has pointed out, Blue Bloods has the oldest audience of any show on the air now, and is one of four shows on CBS, the Methuselah network, that top the list of current geriatric favorites. We're talking about Boomers--the onetime Woodstock generation, which has turned into the Tea Party generation, the most self-importantly reactionary army of geezers ever seen. Once upon a time, these are the very people that advertisers couldn't have cared less about; back in the early seventies, when CBS famously canceled a bunch of long-running, highly rated shows (The Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, Green Acres, Mayberry R.F.D., Petticoat Junction) in order to make room for a new slate of shows (All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, et al.) aimed at a younger, more urban, hipper demographic, being a hit with the kind of people who'd rather watch Blue Bloods or The Mentalist than Fringe or 30 Rock would be the kiss of death. But networks aren't in a position to think they're too good for anyone willing to watch their product these days. And to many demographers, a Boomer is still a Boomer, even a doddering one.

Unslick Rick Redux

The news of Christopher Hitchens's cancer diagnosis reminded me that life is too short and can threaten to be cut shorter at any moment, so as soon as I heard it, I decided not to waste any more of my life reading Christopher Hitchens. But I knew that I'd weaken as soon as I saw his byline at Slate posted next to a photo of Rick Sanchez. I couldn't help wondering: how far would the last stubborn defender of Ahmed Chalabi go in sticking up for the stupidest, most loutish on-air talent in CNN history just because they both hate Jon Stewart's guts. True, there was a time when Hitchens was always up for an explanation of how anyone being made to suffer in the wake of a charge of anti-Semitism was evidence of the malignant power of the demon Israel, but that was back before he traded in his worship of Noam Chomsky for the chance to hang out with the neocons and decided that his real idea of a fun night out was getting sworn in as a citizen by the guy who fumbled the government's response to Katrina. As it happens, he sort of whiffs it; rather than coming to Sanchez's full-throated defense, he opens with the case of the European Union commissioner for trade, Karel de Gucht, who I'd never heard of before, who inspired an "uproar", which I also hadn't heard anything about, after saying that "the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill...is the best-organized lobby, you shouldn't underestimate the grip it has on American politics—no matter whether it's Republicans or Democrats." After he's had a fine time ridiculing the notion that anyone could honestly find that offensive, he basically tries to sneak Sanchez in through the back door. The Hitchens of few years ago would have tried to cast Sanchez as the second coming of Edward R. Murrow.

Hitchens also restrains himself from going on at any length about why Jon Stewart, who once committed the cardinal sin of having a name that, it seemed to Hitchens, inspired more awe from a bunch of college students than the august yet free-wheeling name of Christopher Hitchens, is a lightweight and a menace to the republic. ("If you chance to like this sort of thing," he once wrote about Stewart and Stephen Colbert, "then this is undoubtedly the sort of thing you will like. It certainly works very well with audiences who laugh not because they find something to be funny, but to confirm that they are—and who can doubt it?—cool enough to “get” the joke." I'd call that a case of the pot calling the kettle black if I didn't think it would be unfair to the kettle.) The worst he does by way of letting on that he has a grudge is the way he sneers, in that call-my-bluff-I-dare-you way, that "The best way to demonstrate the hidden influence of the chosen people would be for Jon Stewart and others to join me in calling for Rick Sanchez's reinstatement." (Adding, "If it then didn't happen, it would help us understand who really pulls the strings around here.") One might almost wonder if someone who cares about Hitchens and his legacy has been giving him tips on how to appear a little less like a raving dickweed in print.

Two small points might be worth making. First, since Sanchez got his walking papers, a number of observers have made the same observation I made before Sanchez's firing was announced: namely, that as a "newsman" he was a bad joke and a figure of fun, and that the "attacks" from Stewart that Sanchez chalked up to some kind of prejudice against working stiffs of a certain ethnicity were more akin to pointing and laughing at the village idiot. Is it possible that CNN was not altogether thrilled about having put a laughingstock on the payroll? Considering how long Don Imus, say, was able to postpone his day of reckoning, the network was pretty swift about kicking Sanchez to the curb. I'm not sure that you have to be much of a conspiracy theorist to wonder of maybe the bosses at CNN had the paperwork made up and sitting on someone's desk months in advance, just waiting for Sanchez to give them a reason that wouldn't include admitting that they're somehow hired a moron. It might be a nicer world if major corporations could make that kind of admission and just fire someone like Sanchez as soon as he's passed the point of no return into walking punch line territory rather than encourage him to give as many interviews as possible and patiently wait for him to let his freak flag fly; still, it seems a bit much to call for "the Jewish community" to show their magnanimity by begging the corporate overlords to rehire Koko the Clown, when they're barely recovered from their hangovers after all the celebratory toasting they must have done when they'd just gotten rid of him.

Then there's the fact that Hitchens mentions as someone else whose "recent abrupt disappearance" from the airwaves "seems to suggest a network system that cares only about playing safe and avoiding 'offense'." But by her own account, Schlessinger wasn't fired; after she was criticized for sadistically taunting a caller who had expressed unhappiness with having to listen to her husband's friends' use of the word "nigger" by repeating the word over and over, ostensibly to make the deeply significant and meaningful point that "Black guys use it all the time", rather in the manner of a child repeating, "Does this bug you? I'm not touching you", Schlessinger announced that she had decided herself not to renew her radio contract at the end of the year, because, she said, "I want to regain my First Amendment rights. I want to be able to say what is on my mind." This was not the only time, before or after her latest "controversy", that Schlessinger had confused other people's right to express their honest revulsion with the sound of her voice and her expressing her general cretinism with an infringement on her "First Amendment rights". Since it would be insulting to assume that a writer and former journalist of Hitchens's standing would throw her name into a discussion of the issues at hand without knowing the details of her case, I am forced to insult him by assuming that he agrees with her that the Constitution protects flim-flam artists from having to endure being called on their bullshit, which, if it were true, would protect his feelings from being bruised but not do him much good in his ongoing quest to be much talked about.

October 2010 Horror Movie Diary

The thing about horror movies is, I watch a lot of them, and the thing about October is, Halloween comes at the end of it, so for once, I have an excuse. So this may be the first installment in something. In fact, when I noticed that most of the horror movies I've watched recently have titles that begin with a "P", I thought about doing a series of 26 posts and calling it "The Alphabet of Horror Movies I've Watched Lately". But I wasn't sure I wanted to watch Q again.

The British movie PSYCHOMANIA (1971), which was directed by Don Sharp (a Hammer horror veteran whose credits for that studio include pictures in which Christopher Lee played Rasputin and Fu Manchu), is pretty terrible, but there's something about the sleazy yet open-hearted, goofy enthusiasm with which it embraces its moment in pop culture history that I find--well, kind of lovable. It's like an early-seventies Black Sabbath album come to life, or maybe just an early-seventies Black Sabbath album cover. Or maybe just the classroom daydream of a kid who's spent a lot of hours staring at one of those album covers and thinking, "Heavy!" (Or "Wicked!" or "Gnarly!", or whatever the kids think, which is something I was no expert on even when I was one of them. Who am I, Amy Heckerling?) It opens with a most excellent trippy credits sequence in which the members of an inter-gender motorcycle gang slowly tool around a mist-shrouded installation in the countryside that, the first time I saw the movie, I thought was the result of an underfunded and very poorly informed production designer's attempt to replicate Stonehenge. It turns out that it's actually a local site known as Seven Witches, and is said to be the resting place of a group of, well, seven witches who were turned to stone after seriously botching the negotiations of their contract with Satan. The motorcyclists call themselves the Living Dead, and wear ghoulishly decorated helmets that make me wonder if the young Brian De Palma ever came across this thing: they bear a striking resemblance to the mask worn by the title character of Phantom of the Paradise.

The leader of the gang is Tom, a David Warner wannabe with a death wish, played by Nicky Henson. In a development that is ripe with mystifying significance, he adopts a plump frog and takes it home to his rich, widowed mother, who is played by Beryl Reid and lives in the set of A Clockwork Orange. There she is attended to by a butler played by George Sanders, who, like other George Sanders characters before him, has been acquainted with the night. After Tom commits suicide by driving his hog off a bridge, the gang buries him, dressed in his full riding gear and sitting upright astride his bike, with his helmet poking a little above the ground, but from the looks of them it's a miracle they were able to get the grave dug as deep as they did. After George Sanders pulls a little hocus pocus, Tom comes roaring up out of the ground and sets about convincing his pals to snuff themselves so they too can be resurrected in a physically super-strong and unkillable form. I'm just going to come right out and say it: there are damn few movies that couldn't be made more entertaining by the inclusion of a sequence showing a bunch of biker meatheads jumping out of windows, plowing into trucks, playing in traffic, etc., to get themselves dispatched to the next life as quickly as possible. But once they are super-strong and immortal, Tom and friends fail to get along and play well with others, and a remorseful Beryl Reid agrees to make the supreme sacrifice: she allows George Sanders to freeze them all to stone, even though she knows that she herself will naturally turn into a frog as a result. (I could explain the science to you, but we'd be here all day.) Psychomania marked the final appearance by George Sanders, who was dead by the time it was released, leaving behind the famous suicide note in which he claimed that he was "leaving because I am bored." Not depressed over the decline of his career, not ashamed at some of the things he'd had to do for money, not even despondent over he aging process, but bored. He must have had the lowest threshold of boredom this side of Johnny Knoxville.

John Frankenheimer's PROPHECY (1979) is, by contrast, a purely terrible movie by a director with greatness in him, or at least someone who directed one great movie (The Manchurian Candidate) and a number of good ones. (Frankenheimer would later say that he had lost his touch while making the film because he was drinking so heavily. The movie seriously dented his career, but he came back years later with the highly regarded Ronin and his last feature film, Rendeer Games--which is less highly regarded but which I actually like a lot better--and the excellent TV films George Wallace and Path to War.) It isn't much less sleazy than Psychomania but is wholly unlovable, partly because there's something contemptible about an expensive big studio movie that aims no higher than a cheap little exploitation movie made by people trying to supply liveliness and cheap thrills with a fraction of the resources available to the big guys, especially when the big guys make the mistake of pretending to be aiming higher. That said, the Missus and I recently found that it can be a bit of a riot if you watch it in the wrong spirit on a slow Friday night, especially if one of you has a Scrabble app on her phone and you have something else to concentrate on during the first half, before the monster shows up and starts tearing people apart like fresh bread, in a series of scenes that might have been a lot more unpleasant if they had been competently directed. (In our favorite, the monster grabs a guy in a sleeping bag and hurls him against a tree, resulting in a lyrical, bloodless explosion of feathers.)

Prophecy, which is set in the Maine woods (but filmed in British Columbia), wants to pass for a warning against the dangers of environmental pollution. Some say that the local paper mill is cutting costs on safety standards and perilously befouling the ecosystem and causing mutations among the local wildlife in the process. Richard Dysart, in his corporate-shill-waiting-to-get-disembowled-by-whatever-he's-defending phase, says this is not so; Armand Assante, in his smoldering-all-purpose-ethnic phase, is a Native American activist who, between chainsaw fights with Dysart's men, assertively takes the position that, is too! In the normal course of events, this kind of thing would go on and on, with each group taking turns grabbing the microphone and touting the results of the latest study that is more in keeping with their position than the other side's. Prophecy cuts to the chase by having the heroes discover Jack Nance's baby from Eraserhead lying unattended in the woods, alongside its stillborn twin, Jesse Garon Eraserhead. Presumably, its mother is out there somewhere. The heroes decide that the thing to do is take the baby home with them and cling to it for dear life, even when Mom makes her entrance and, well, see the sentence in the preceding paragraph about fresh bread. In the script, the monstrous creature wreaking havoc on the countryside is taken by the Indians as the embodiment of an ancient legend about a vengeful forest god, which is described as being ""part of everything in God's creation." The special effects people reportedly went to town in their original design, sketching out plans for a gigantic, dragon-like critter with wings and gills and transparent skin through which working organs would be visible, but when the studio ran the numbers on how much it would cost, somebody apparently said something like, "Couldn't you just get a bear costume out of storage and kind of fuck with it?" Prophecy, with its fucked-up bear-suit monster, arrived in theaters three weeks after the release of Alien. Boy, were they fucked.



I'm old enough to remember when, on the strength of Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13, John Carpenter was widely regarded as a great director--not even that, really, but the new face of American movies, someone who would lead us out of the wilderness of strange, "personal" movies and back to the great days of, say, 1959, when horror movies made you go "Eek!" and romance movies made you go "Boo hoo!" and Westerns made you go "Yippee!" and comedies made you go, "Boy, that Bob Hope really knows how to tell 'em!" As you may have guessed by now, Carpenter's brand of genre formalism has always seemed a little dry to me. (And when he tries to push his imagination a little further, his machinery has a tendency to break down.) But I do find that some of his movies are more addictive for me than others, in that "I would never go out of my way to watch this, but whenever I come across it while flipping channels, I can't switch it off!" kind of way. Curiously, these tend to be the ones that even his biggest fans usually deride as pure shit. Exhibit A: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987), Carpenter's homage to the British writer Nigel Kneale, the creator of Professor Bernard Quatermass. (Carpenter, who wrote the script, used the pseudonym "Martin Quatermass".)

Prince of Darkness is mostly set within the confines of an abandoned church. Gathered there are a priest (Donald Pleasance) with a Secret and a bunch of scientists and grad students working under the direction of a professor played by Victor Wong. Meanwhile, Alice Cooper and a bunch of other people who aren't doing that well during Reagan's second term gather outside the building and try to look homeless and ominous. To boil it way, way down, the basement of the church is used to house Satan, who exists in green liquid form, and who would dearly like to possess someone so that he can free his father, the anti-God, from the realm of anti-matter, so that this spirit of pure apocalyptic malevolence can enter our world and get his own show on Fox News. This supernatural fusion of religious and scientific thought is designed to melt your brain. Unfortunately, Carpenter couldn't find any way to flesh it out into a story besides having half the faceless, characterless cast members become possessed and terrorize the other faceless, characterless cast members, which they mostly do by standing stock still and staring at them until you want to yell, "For the love of God, blink!" in this company, it seems like a blinding masterstroke of genius when one of the possessed combines a pained, wincing expression with an uncontrollable giggle. Prince of Darkness is short on action and long on claustrophobia and inertia, and that's probably why it gets to me. I spent a lot of my first twenty or so years sitting in a boring house on a boring farm in the middle of an especially boring part of boring-ass Mississippi watching movies, and that has stayed with me, so that if a movie manages to achieve a certain level of super-boringness while stubbornly refusing to budge from one interior set, I experience the kind of tingle that Hitchcock and De Palma and Michael Powell tapped into in their voyeuristic thrillers about voyeurs: the line between the watcher and the watched almost seems to dissolve. Certain Monte Hellman Westerns and cable access shows have had the same effect on me.

For the past twenty-something years, I had been under the impression that the dull blond hero was played by Parker Stevenson, Shaun Cassidy's co-star on the late '70s Hardy Boys TV show, but watching the movie again, I suddenly realized that he was actually Jameson Parker, Gerald McRaney's co-star on the early '80s TV show Simon & Simon. Truly it is the defining mark of an enduring work of cinema that you can discover something new in it even after having seen it many times.

Fritz Lang really was a great director. but between the fact that his style and sensibility, remarkable as they were, did have their limitations, and the even greater limitations imposed on him by the commercial demands of his employers for most of his career, he did make his share of stinkers. I'd never even heard of THE SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR (1948) before TCM included it in a marathon celebrating the film restoration work of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The movie--which I guess purists would label a psychological thriller, but such a baroque one that it shades into horror territory--is a failure, but I found it such fascinating one that I kept rooting for it up until it collapsed in on itself in am embarrassing wrap-up that combines the worst of Suspicion, Rebecca, Spellbound, and "Freud for Dummies". It begins straightforwardly enough, with Joan Bennett recuperating from a divorce by taking a trip to Mexico with Lovey Howell and falling in love with and marrying a eccentric architect (Michael Redgrave) with a passionate attitude towards his work and some questionable attitudes about women.

It isn't until after they're married that Bennett learns that Redgrave is a widower, and that the smart money is on his having killed his first wife. It turns out that Redgrave's hobby is recreating rooms in which men have murdered women; he has his own funny take on feng shui, believing that the layout and decoration of the rooms somehow compelled, or anticipated, or something, the violence that unfolded there. Shot by Stanley Cortez, the movie has a dreamlike feel to it that's compelling, but it's so explicit and talky that the storytelling feels at cross-purposes with the atmosphere; it's a dream that keeps compulsively explaining itself. Right from the start, there's a full load of character explication dumped in your lap by Bennett's voiceover narration. According to R. Emmet Sweeney at TCM's Movie Morlocks blog, Lang originally recorded a different actress delivering the narration, to put across the idea that the person we see and her internal voice might as well be two people, but the producer, Walter Wanger, who was married to Bennett at the time, later acceded to Bennett's demand that she rerecord it herself. I don't know if Lang's idea would have worked--it might have proved as weirdly hokey as a late sequence in which Redgrave takes over the narration and interrogates himself in a courtroom of the mind--but as it is, the movie's images, which are often beautiful and haunting, can't free themselves from a conventional voiceover narration that's so relentless that it seems determined to turn the movie into an illustrated radio play. Another problem may have been even more intrinsic: fine and mesmerizing actor that he was, Redgrave may have been a little too perfectly cast as a high-strung artist type with scary woman troubles and the night sweats. The plot developments might have been more surprising and effective if the architect had been played by an actor who could have better passed for normal at first sight.

If one original, unforgettable iconic image is enough to certify a movie as a classic, then Phil Tucker's ROBOT MONSTER (1953) is a classic. I'd seen the guy in the gorilla suit with the diving helmet turn up in film clips and punk cartoons long before I had a movie title to attach to him, and in some of the circles in which I came of age, the quotability status of the line "I must, yet I cannot. At what point on the graph do 'must' and 'cannot' meet?" compares favorably with that of "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" or "Shane!" As someone who spent a fair amount of time in his teens and twenties hoping to find the worst movie ever made with the same kind of seriousness of intent that better people have spent their lives looking for a cure for cancer, I am now not sure what possessed me. Probably I didn't quite grasp how short life can be, or how rare stuff that's actually good, never mind so-bad-it's-good, really is. But having looked at it again, I do feel that Robot Monster, like the oeuvre of Ed Wood, The Fountainhead, and Tommy Wisseua's The Room, meets the first requirement of something that people flock to because it's awful: it is a seriously intended labor of love, made by someone with serious ambitions to instruct and entertain, doing the best they can and, either through incompetence or an awesome level of miscalculation, giving you an experience that Tim Burton, speaking of ol' Edward D., likened to getting a glimpse into "someone's strange mind."

For me, the most interesting thing about Robot Monster is that I think it might have garnered a slightly different reception if it had come out a decade or two later, after people had become regurgitating and recontextualizing and commenting on old bad movies and their effects on people, in the name of "pop culture." Robot Monster begins with a credits sequence that features cover art from old Weird Science-style pulps, and then there's an opening, set in Bronson Canyon, where a certain level of visual and (thanks to Elmer Bernstein, who wrote the score) musical bombast is achieved and then rudely dispelled as a little kid wanders out of a cave, "blasting" everything in sight with his toy ray gun. The framing device that, at the end, shows that it's all been the kid's dream (or is it!?!), and therefore the product of an imagination fed on those pulps, casts the body of the film, with its corny dialogue and maladroit plotting, in a parodic, metatextual light. As some other observers have pointed out, the framework is almost identical to that of William Cameron Menzies's Invaders from Mars, which was released just a month earlier than Tucker's film, and which is regarded as an authentic sci-fi horror classic set in the mind of a young by. But that movie doesn't have a guy wearing a gorilla seat and a diving helmet in it. For better and for worse.

The Case Is Closed

If you watched TV in the 1980s, chances are you saw Stephen J. Cannell tapping at his IBM Selectric. Cannell and his old school writing implement appeared in the filmed logo sequence for Stephen J. Cannell Productions that ran at the end of every episode of the shows he created or co-created, and there were a lot of them. Cannell took credit for the existence of something like fifty shows, and of course he wrote for a lot more than that, in addition to writing novels and doing the occasional acting stint. (He, along with Michael Connelly and James Patterson, had cameos as themselves on Castle, which stars Nathan Fillion as a mystery novelist; on the show, they all shared poker night together.) I'd gotten a lot of enjoyment from Cannell's shows over the years, but I was surprised at how sad I was to hear of his death, from complications of melanoma. He was 69 years old, and lived just long enough to see a big-budget feature film version made of one his small screen hits, The A-Team, but anyone who's spent that much time at the typewriter and in development meetings ought to have a long, laid-back retirement.

In his Demographic Vistas (1984), which to the best of my knowledge might be the first serious book-length critical study of commercial television written in English by a sane person, David Marc divided TV crime shows into those that were created in the mold of the stern, moralistic Jack Webb (Dragnet, Adam-12), where the heroes ranged from robotic to blandly upstanding, and those that were more like the shows from Roy Huggins, whose heroes, on such series as Maverick and 77 Sunset Strip, were more likely to be hang-loose and fun-loving. (The most intense of Huggins's heroes was David Janssen in The Fugitive, whose plight simply couldn't have existed in Webb's world. Innocent men did not get convicted of murder there, and even if one did, he certainly wouldn't have inconvenienced the boys in blue by running away.) Cannell was a protege of Huggins's, co-created The Rockford Files with him in 1974. Huggins had helped the show's star, James Garner, develop his anti-macho, reluctant hero persona on Maverick, but Rockford became the first series that felt saturated in Cannell's sensibility.

The show kidded the cliches of private-eye fiction, even to the point of introducing (in an episode written by Cannell) a would-be private eye--Beamer, played by James Whitmore, Jr.--who believes them and tries to live by them, and who is summed up by Rockford as "one hundred percent chucklehead." But it wasn't just a spoof, like Garner's previous mock Westerns. Like Robert Altman's movie of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, it was an attempt to reimagine the detective hero, the man with a code who makes a living telling people things they'd be happier not knowing, more realistically, and to show how marginal and unglamorous he'd actually be without being too bummed about it. Cannell was a smart aleck who was blessed, or cursed, with an authentic love of the genre, and that carried over to his first cult failure, the 1980 series Tenspeed and Brown Show, which starred Ben Vereen and the twenty-seven-year-old Jeff Goldblum, and which was a lively, unstable mash-up of Cannell's recurring favorite things: mock hard-boiled detective lingo, con man heroes, unlikely heroes thrown into violence action, and slangy fast patter. It ran for fourteen episodes, just 86 fewer than needed for a syndication deal, though it would turn up sometimes in reruns after Goldblum hit it big with The Fly and was recently collected, minus the pilot, on DVD.

Cannell had other mixed successes--such as The Greatest American Hero, a badly titled, before-its-time spin on the costumed superhero archetype that had too many teenagers in the supporting cast (ah, ABC, the Fonzie network!) and was seriously hampered by a leading actor, William Katt, who made no attempt to conceal that he felt embarrassed as hell to be leaping around on the idiot box in red long johns, but that also an ebullient performance by Robert Culp as a right-wing FBI agent, who made a one-man party of his rapid-free dialogue as if he were mixing Coke and Pop Rocks in his mouth. Cannell also, God knows, served up a lot of pure sludge. But his best series, Wiseguy, starring Ken Wahl as an FBI agent who submits to a stretch in prison as part of his assignment to work deep undercover cozying up to gangsters and other criminal scum, may have been the most daring and best-executed of all the crime series (Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, Crime Story, and of course Sledge Hammer!) that stretched the possibilities of American TV in the '80s.

Cannell and his co-creator, Frank Lupo, showed a new generation of TV writers and producers how it ought to be done by breaking the bravura first season into a string of distinct "story arcs" that had beginnings, middles, and ends. (In a series that hewed closer to conventional network TV as it was then known, Wahl would have come this close to having his cover blown every week for as many years as the show could run, much as Gilligan and his friends kept coming this close to getting off that damn island.) This innovation made it possible for the show to regenerate itself right at the point when it should have started getting stale, and it also enabled them to snare such actors as Ray Sharkey (as Wahl's first target, new-style mobster Sonny Steelgrave) and Kevin Spacey (as the deranged, self-created Malthusian Mel Profitt) and allow them to give fully shaped performances that practically imploded TV sets all across this great American republic. Cannell's credits list is so sprawling and mottled that it looks like something from a long-ago era compared to the tonier resumes of the TV auteurs, such as Josh Whedon and J. J. Abrams and Chris Carter, who've come along to stake their claims since he was grinding out synopses for Silk Stalkings. But he did as much as anyone to open up the possibilities they've been exploring in a medium that, when Cannell started out, was widely thought to have practically no serious dramatic possibilities at all. The man who helped gave us Angel Martin and Roger LoCocca had earned the right to slum a little.