Lance Mannion

Tinker, Tailor…

If you need me to finish that post title for you, you probably won’t appreciate this trailer as much as I did.  Unless instead of adding ..Soldier, Spy I add Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch.  At any rate, first time through I had trouble picking out George Smiley, which I think was deliberate.  But it makes me wonder.  If you didn’t already know, would you know?  Only those of you who don’t know can tell me but if you don’t know, anything I say might give too much away.  So this is it until November when it reaches the theaters here.

Hat tip to Kelli Marshall, who doesn’t know because she hasn’t read the book or seen the mini-series, so don’t tell her.

God has called me to defend Michele Bachmann

So, what have we learned?  That Michele Bachmann wouldn’t win a game of Trivial Pursuit?

It’s not surprising that since she left her home state of Iowa for the wilds of Minnesota when she was 12 she’s forgotten that John Wayne was from Winterset not Waterloo.  After all, since she left Iowa she’s forgotten what it means to be a Democrat too.

And while it’s an almost amusing coincidence that the serial killer John Wayne Gacy spent some time in Waterloo, that’s all it was a coincidence.  She wasn’t confusing the murderer with the movie star.

As for the movie star whose spirit she invoked, she was only doing what millions of Americans have done for decades, taking the screen persona for the actual man.  Anyway, it’s just symbolic, a form of flag waving.  Pointing out that the man wasn’t like the character he played is like pointing out that the flag is a cheap piece of cloth during the Pledge of Allegiance while noting also that Pledge was written by a socialist.  All you’re doing is making yourself look like a humorless, clueless, sanctimonious know-it-all.

Parading your own virtue doesn’t persuade anybody who isn’t already marching along with you.  Showing off how much smarter you are than Michele Bachman on this one is showing off how much smarter you are than the average American and that’s just…showing off.

The things she said about Waterloo and John Wayne were campaign boilerplate and far from being the most deranged, ignorant and dangerous thing she’s said in her brief career.  The most truly deranged, ignorant, and dangerous thing she’s said…

Well, besides wanting to abolish the minimum wage…

And Social Security…

And Medicare…

And thinking it won’t cause any problems if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling..

…and  a couple dozen other things…

…is that God has called upon her to run for President.

As far as I know, God didn’t call upon George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or even Ronald Reagan. Doesn’t it seem odd that after ignoring them He’d give Michele Bachmann the divine nod?

Of course it’s odd!  It’s lunatic.  But as far as the journalists covering her are concerned, it’s barely worth mentioning.

As far as the New York Times and NPR cared the other day, Michele Bachmann might as well be Rick Perry who might as well be Mitch Daniels who might as well be Mike Huckabee who might as well be Sarah Palin who might as well be Tina Fey.  The only interesting thing about her is the what would have been for them the only interesting thing about the others.  Her presence in the race makes things more fun to write and talk about.

Michele Bachman can’t keep her facts straight.  She lies reflexively.  She has no clear understanding of how things are and how they work.  And she believes that whatever comes out of her mouth must be still be the truth because she’s chosen by God.  Her thinking is wildly disordered because her brain is constantly at work making whatever enters it fit her paranoid and apocalyptic world-view.  Bachmann believes that she has been called by God to be the heroine in a fight against the forces of evil in which victory will be the shredding of the Social Contract.

She says this all the time.  She brags about it.  She is a Right Wing Christianist idealogue on a mission from God to punish those who don’t enjoy God’s favor, which is to say, those Michele Bachmann loathes and despises.   And the Media ignores it.

I wish I had favorited it or RT-ed or just flat out memorized it so I could give proper credit, but someone I follow on Twitter wrote the other day that if a person stood on a street corner and started shouting at the crowds the sort of things Bachmann says wherever she goes, people would cross the street against traffic in their hurry to put space between themselves and the nut.

But let the nut stand on a platform surrounded by flags and crowds swarm and the Media reports on those flags and the size of the crowds.

The journalists covering her know what she really is but they don’t feel they can say it unless they can find a Democrat they can paint as being just as bad.  And since there are no Democrats running for the Republican nomination for President, not even crazy ones, their only alternative is to wait for one of her opponents to point out that she’s nuts.  It’s actually a story that none of them will because they’re all afraid of angering the Religious Right which is made up mainly of people whose beliefs are as radical and as paranoid and as apocalyptic as Bachmann’s, but that hasn’t ever been a story the Beltway Media has longed to tell.

These profiles of Bachmann, in the New York Times and on NPR skim over her religious beliefs without ever diving down to explore how they infect her politics.

Instead, they glom onto the “gaffe.”

Look, isn’t it funny?  She’s from Iowa but she didn’t know what we didn’t know until somebody on the web looked it up that John Wayne is from Winterset not Waterloo!  Har dee har har!

This amounts to telling people who are worried about their jobs, struggling to meet their mortgages, scrimping at the grocery store, and waking up in the middle of the night terrified about what will happen if they get sick or the car breaks down or their kid doesn’t get enough financial aid that Michele Bachmann would have lost on Final Jeopardy.

As Atrios said, with a nod to Jay Rosen:

The press feels empowered to jump all over these trivial things while not empowered to point out facts when two sides disagree or to explain the horrible consequences of certain policies. Aside from failing to educate the public, this has an additional pernicious effect. It helps to convince the vast majority of people who only kinda sorta pay attention to politics that Maureen Dowd is right, that this trivial bullshit is what really matters in politics.

So the average Jane and Joe tune out and stay home leaving the decisions to the True Believers.

It’s convenient for journalists to treat politics as a trivial game played by teams of cynical opportunists on both sides.  It means they don’t have to care or pay close attention.  They don’t have to know anything because there’s nothing to know except who’s winning at the moment, which appears to Michele Bachman, look at those poll numbers jump!  Why only 78 out of 100 Iowa Republicans don’t plan to vote for her now!

Lamestream media types can content themselves with being knowing as opposed to actually knowing stuff.  The rest of us need to know more than that John Wayne was born in Winterset and dodged the draft during World War II while John Wayne Gacy served chicken dinners in Waterloo prior to moving on to Illinois to become a mass murderer, oh, and the American Revolution started in Concord, Massachusetts not Concord, New Hampshire.

We need to know more than how much better we’d do than  than Michele Bachmann if we’re ever on Jeopardy.

Michele Bachmann is on a mission from a God she’s remade in her own image, which makes him a nasty, vicious, vindictive, paranoid, socially and economically destructive God…

…Who wouldn’t do well on Jeopardy.

Photo by Jim Cole for AP via NPR.

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The convenience store clerk uncertainty principle

First rule: At any store that employs a clerk you look forward to having wait on you and a clerk you dread having to deal with, the second clerk will work a schedule such that he or she is behind the counter six times out of ten when you have to shop at that store while the first clerk works a schedule such that you three out of the four times he or she is on duty when you step up to the counter he or she will either be waiting on someone else, get called away by the manager just before it’s your turn, or is going off shift.

Second rule:  The first clerk will always leave to take another job first.  He or she will be replaced by another clerk you enjoy having wait on you who will work the same schedule as the previous clerk.

Refrigerator physics

Based on the most recent observations, made within the last half hour during a detailed cleaning of the interior of a typical Kenmore refrigerator, it’s clear that certain items stored in a refrigerator will, while unobserved, cause themselves to leak and even spill and those spills can defy gravity and flow upwards.

Losing my touch

For a guy who made money for college painting houses, I sure am doing one lousy job on the window trim.

A stranger to myself

Eight-thirty a.m. Was about to make another pot of coffee, then I thought to myself, “Nah, I don’t need any more coffee this morning.”  Then I thought, “Who is this person?”

Coffee’s brewing.

Fifty Mississippis

Updated below.

You might have heard.  Friday night, here in New York State, our state legislature did a remarkable thing.

Something good.

In less than a month, we’re going to become one of the very few states where everybody is free to marry the person they love.

Another way of saying this is that we are about to allow gay people to marry.

We’re going to do this because four Republican state senators did the right thing.

Jim Alesi, Roy McDonald, Stephen Saland, and Mark Grisanti.  Mensches all.

The final vote was 33-29.  The thing to remember about those 29 no votes is that this is New York, most of those people aren’t haters, they’re just old Catholics.  In a few years they’re going to be sorry they didn’t vote yes.  A few years after that, they’ll think they did.

Our governor, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, worked long and hard to make this happen and I’d be a little more proud that I voted for him if he wasn’t generally so smug and too easily self-satisfied and I didn’t know he’s going to spend the next week breaking his own arm patting himself on the back while, meanwhile, you know, he’s in effect raising my taxes so millionaires don’t have to scrimp and save anymore to afford gas for their Beemers.

This is going to be a great state to be a gay hedge fund manager.

Still, it’ll be a pretty good state for the rest of us too, and we’ll be helped out by all the gay people from other states who move here to be free.  Give us your tired, your poor, your color-coordinated…

I’m being a wise-guy because this is really choking me up.  I’m so proud to be from here.

And, yeah, it’s not fun that we’re going to have to pay more to send our kid to college just so those millionaires don’t have car pool, but at least here in New York, even though we have to make cuts, we’re not about to reduce our school spending to less than Mississippi’s.

They just did that down in North Carolina.

That’s the richer, more enlightened, less crazy Carolina.

And over in Wisconsin, where our Republicans, including most of the ones who voted no, would be blackballed from the Party as RINOS, their Republican governor has submitted a budget that devastates the state’s education system and throws countless poor people’s children to the wolves.

So, yeah, I’m not just proud to be a New Yorker, I’m relieved.

Which is why this column at the Nation rubbed me the wrong way.

Hurrah! New York has, at long last, decided to join the twenty-first century and recognize the right of same-sex couples to civil marriage.

You know the difference between liberal self-righteousness and Right Winger self-righteousness?  Right Wingers are all, “You’re going to hell and I’m going to laugh” while liberals are “I’m going to heaven, why aren’t you?”

Excuse me?

How many other states have done this?

New York isn’t late in following the pack. There is no pack.  There are barely more than a handful of us.  We’re all helping blaze a difficult trail.  And it’s a trail an awful lot of other states have no intention of following any time soon.

And, anyway, there is no 21st century.  Calendars aren’t maps.  They are organizing devices that we use to sort what’s coming up from what’s past.  But to the degree there is a 21st Century we are only eleven years into it.  Eleven years into the 20th Century do you think people were saying, “You know, in the next 80 years we’re going to live through two horrific world wars, Germany will turn the murder of millions of people into an industry, totalitarian regimes will arise in China and Russia that will slaughter tens of millions of their own people, in large swaths of Africa ethnic wars and mass starvation will be the norm, and the United States and Russia will invent weapons with the potential to wipe out all life on the planet and then spend forty years pointing them at each other and barely avoid using them”?

I’m not predicting the 21st Century will be another ninety years of hell on earth, although, given the history of the human race, it’s a good bet.

But I am saying that the 21st Century isn’t some hip, happening cafe where all we cool kids are hanging out waiting for other people to get with it.

There is no 21st Century.  There won’t be anything to describe as the 21st Century until the historians get to work on it a hundred years from now.  Right now there is just…right now.  And right now things in the United States are a mess.

And getting messier.

There are a whole lot of angry Right Wingers out there, and while they just lost one in New York, they are winning in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, and more than half the other states in the Union.

For every person who said after Friday night’s vote, “Hooray” or “Thank God” or “It’s about time”, there was at least one person screaming in rage.

Those four gutsy Republicans here could lose their seats for doing the right thing and it won’t be to liberal Democrats.  It’s possible that come 2013 New York could have four Tea Party type state senators.

I don’t think that’s likely, but it’s a possibility.  What is more likely is that come 2013 the United States Senate will be controlled by Republicans.  Come 2017 we could have a Republican President, a Republican controlled House, and a Republican controlled Senate again. And what happens to the 21st Century then?

It gets repealed.

There are millions and millions of people in the United States who don’t want to live in the 21st Century, wherever or whatever that is.  They weren’t all that happy living in the latter half of the 20th Century and if they could work their will---and they are furiously trying to work it---they would drag us all back to the last decade of the 19th Century.

Two tribes of Vandals have united to do this.

The first is the kleptomaniacal corporatists who are obsessed with the desire to own all of it.  All of it.  If you have any of it, they want it, and they’ll take it.  I don’t blame the corporations.  Corporations have no minds, no souls, no ambitions or desires.  What they have is employees and a great many of these employees are narcissistic sociopaths.  They don’t give a damn about the corporations they work for and would gladly run them into the ground---and routinely do---as long as when the last lawyer leaves the premises they themselves are left happily sailing off into the sunset with their piles of loot.  These are people who if they wouldn’t chase a windblown dollar bill off a cliff it’s because they’re too busy chasing a fiver out into heavy traffic.  These are people who went into business for the same reason Willie Sutton went into banks.  The difference is that Sutton didn’t figure out how to pay off the bank managers so they’d open their vaults for him.

The other tribe is made up of mainly white, mainly middle-aged, mainly middle class, mainly but far from exclusively Southern and Middle Western political and cultural reactionaries who sincerely believe “their” country has been stolen from them.  Of course, all that’s happened is that they’ve woken up to the fact that the world contains more than their hometowns and was not made exclusively for them, but they aren’t taking the news well.

They are determined to take it back.  And if they can’t, they are willing to burn the place down around them so that THEY---who are we---can’t have it.

If the choice is between living in New York in the 21st Century and Mississippi in whatever part of the 20th Century they believe was ideal---usually that means the years of their childhoods---then they would rather live in Mississippi than share any part of New York with the likes of us.

They are wrecking their own states.  They are trying to wreck all the others.

Just for the sake of keeping things focused, let’s leave aside what they want to do to the economy, to the environment, to education, to women’s reproductive rights, to their civil rights.  The Republicans in the House want to bring back Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  They think it’s an impeachable offense that the President decided not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.  They talk seriously about introducing a Constitutional Amendment that would define marriage as a purely heterosexual institution.

New York may seem to you to be late to your party.  But to a great deal of the rest of the country, we’ve proved, again, that we aren’t part of America.  Which would be bad enough, if they were willing to let us go.  But their object is to re-colonize us.

The President doesn’t seem able to confront this or acknowledge it or even admit it, either because he doesn’t have the ability or the temperament or the will or the conviction.

The Media seems determined to pretend it isn’t happening, that this isn’t the goal.  To them, Michele Bachmann is a cute story.  Chris Christie is just what the doctor ordered.  Paul Ryan’s a statesman.  Wisconsin, they never heard of it.  Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, who needs ‘em?

If the 21st Century is like a place, it’s like an only recently discovered continent, so far unexplored, where Vermont and Iowa and New Hampshire and Massachusetts and New York have established precarious beachheads.  And it’s a real possibility that when we hack our way farther inland we’ll find that the Right Wingers have gotten there first and made the place look an awful lot like Mississippi.

_____________________

Updated Tuesday morning: Mark Grisanti, one of the four Republicans who voted yes, is already taking heat from the Republican Right.  The interesting news is that if he’s challenged in 2012 from the Right, we’re not likely to wind up with a Tea Party type taking his seat.  It’d probably go to a Democrat.  Some guy named Mark Grisanti.

A Hobble in the Woods

A few years ago, when I first heard that Robert Redford had started planning to direct a movie version of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods starring himself and Paul Newman, I was baffled.  My first thought, “They’re too old!” My second thought was “Which one is going to play Katz?” a question I’d have asked even if they’d both been the right ages to play the mild-mannered writer Bryson and his eccentric, irascible, and totally unreliable college buddy with whom he set out to hike the entire twenty-one hundred mile length of the Appalachian Trail.  Bryson more or less did it.  Katz went his own way, even when he and Bryson were hiking together.

After our summer in Europe, Katz had gone back to Des Moines and had become, in effect, Iowa’s drug culture.  He had partied for years, until there was no one left to party with, then he had partied with himself, alone in small apartments, in T-shirt and boxer shorts, with a bottle and a Baggie of pot and a TV with rabbit ears.  I remembered now that the last time I had seen him was five years earlier in a Denny’s restaurant where I was taking my mother for breakfast.  He was sitting in a booth with a haggard fellow who looked like his name would be Virgil Starkweather, tucking into pancakes and taking occasional illicit nips from a bottle in a paper bag.  It was eight in the morning and Katz looked very happy.  He was always happy when he was drunk, and he was always drunk.

I figure Newman would have had to play Katz.  A character like Katz is way outside Redford’s comfort zone.  Well into his old age, Redford has managed to continue to play Redford-esque leading men, although, fortunately, while showing the sense to avoid making those leading men romantic leads.  (I’m disappointed to note that his long-planned Jackie Robinson movie isn’t listed as being in pre-production at imdb.com anymore, which I guess means we won’t get to see him as Branch Rickey.)  Newman always allowed himself a little more range and even his leading men had more than a little touch of eccentricity.  In his late middle-age, he started ranging a little farther and became something of a character actor.  I think he’d have gotten a kick out of playing Katz---if he could have done it as a follow-up to Butch Cassidy or Henry Gondorf.

Still, Bryson and Katz were approaching fifty when they set out, not past seventy and eighty.  Supposing the book had been written twenty-five years before, though, when both Redford and Newman were middle-aged, Newman still wouldn’t have been the best choice for Katz.  Among Redford’s contemporaries, Dustin Hoffman would have been off the list because I’m pretty sure that after All the President’s Men Redford wasn’t in the mood to work with Hoffman ever again, but Jack Nicholson, Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, and George Segal would have made great Katzes.

And those would have been Redford’s best choices if he’d only wanted to go with a leading man in the character actor’s part.  If he’d wanted a character actor who could also be a second male lead there was Bruce Dern, Alan Arkin, and Peter Falk.

Redford and any one of those guys would have made a more interesting pairing than yet another Redford-Newman bromance.  For my money, I think I’d have liked to see Redford and Dern or Redford and Gould best.

But you know who else would have been nearly perfect?

Nick Nolte.

The fun for me in this pairing would have been in that on screen Nolte often played an eccentric and more temperamental version of Redford.  In fact, to a great degree, his career in the eighties and into the nineties was the career Redford could have had if he hadn’t pretty much given up acting during the decade after Brubaker and The Electric Horseman.  Nolte began as the guy you went to when you wanted a Robert Redford type but had no hope of getting Redford himself and eventually became the guy you got because Redford wouldn’t have been up to the part.

Nolte started off with a string of movies that easily could have starred Redford instead.  The Deep.  Who’ll Stop the Rain. Heart Beat. (Not hard to imagine Redford as Neal Cassidy if you’ve seen Little Fauss and Big Halsey.) North Dallas Forty. Teachers. Under Fire.  Teachers.

That changed with the movie that makes it easy to imagine Nolte as Katz, Down and Out in Beverly Hills.

But even after that, Nolte took on roles that Redford would have been just as right for, in Cape Fear, The Prince of Tides, Jefferson in Paris, The Golden Bowl, and The Good Thief.  I think Redford could have handled Affliction although he probably wouldn’t have risked it, just as he decided not to risk The Verdict.

So it could have been fun watching Redford playing opposite his not quite evil but definitely wilder and less well-behaved twin.

Interestingly…

Of course, it’s not often that kind of perfectly compatible material crosses any actor’s inbox. But this could be one of those moments … if there is any truth to the tentative report in today’s LA Times that Redford and Nick Nolte are poised play the lead roles in an adaptation of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.

Redford would play Bryson and Nolte would costar as his college buddy, Stephen Katz, who accompanies the expat author on an epic hike along the Appalachian Trail.

Better late than never?

Here’s the thing.

The point of turning Bryson and Katz into a pair of grumpy old men was so that they could be played by Redford and Newman.  The movie was being made to give the two one last chance to work together again and it didn’t matter who played Katz since both would really have been playing themselves.  The controlling joke of the movie would have been that they were too old to be doing this, they being the characters and the actors.  “Bryson” and “Katz” would have been too old to make the hike and Redford and Newman would have been too old to play men making the hike. The movie would have been Redford and Newman’s acknowledgement that they were long past being the handsome and dashing leading men we last saw them together as.  Hopefully, this would have been done without too many old geezer jokes.

But once illness forced Newman to drop out, there was no longer a good reason to make “Bryson” and “Katz” a pair of grumpy old men.  The point was the reuniting of Butch and Sundance, not in watching a couple of old coots having a good time making fools of themselves.  Anybody who wants to see that can watch The Bucket List.

Besides, Redford has already done his farewell to being a leading man in Spy Game and his I’m getting too old for this turn in the little known but well worth seeking out An Unfinished Life, in which he co-stars with the great old geezer Morgan Freeman.  So we’ve seen him do the dueling old coots act .

I’d hoped when Newman dropped out that if Redford still wanted to continue with the project he’d reconceive it as being about the real Bryson and Katz as portrayed in the book and cast leads who were the right ages or close to them.  I even knew who should play Bryson. 

Every movie Redford has directed (except for, possibly, his most recent, The Conspirator, which I haven’t seen yet.) has featured a Robert Redford part that in his better efforts isn’t played by Robert Redford, starting with a two-fer with Donald Sutherland and Scott Doebler as Timothy Hutton’s father and brother in Ordinary People.  In The Milagro Beanfield War Christopher Walken plays a parody of Redford’s character in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here.  Ralph Fiennes is very much a young Redford as flawed golden boy in Quiz Show.  Matt Damon takes on the role in The Legend of Bagger Vance.  But the quintessential Redford role that is most perfectly cast and played is Paul McLean in A River Runs Through It.

Which is why Brad Pitt would be me choice for Bryson.

Redford can have his pick of Katzes.  If he wanted to go the Redford-Newman route, George Clooney might work as Katz.  Clooney hasn’t done it often enough, but he clearly enjoys stepping out of his comfort zone and poking fun at his leading man image.  But I think another, better way to go would be to take the Redford-Nolte route and cast a Redford against another Redford.

If you can’t see Matt Damon in the Nick Nolte role, I recommend you watch or re-watch The Informant!  Damon is another leading man with an inner goofball he’s itching to let loose.

“Just once, I’d like to see somebody die regular on this case.”

In this morning’s post I wrote that I always find it hard to believe that TV stars I admired when I was a kid have gotten old and died.  Naturally, by writing that, I killed somebody.  I don’t believe Peter Falk’s gone.

There’s a lot of Colombo showing all over the web right now, so here, here’s Falk in my second favorite of his roles that weren’t Colombo, channeling Bogart in Neil Simon’s The Cheap Detective.

“He was a Stuka dive bomber and I was Poland.”

“Don’t call me darling in front of the police with a dead husband.”

 

Life of Reilly by way of the life of Van Dyke

Doing a writer’s juggling act.  Writing two reviews at the same time.  Going back and forth between reviewing a play and reviewing a book.  The play was very good.  The book was not as good as I’d hoped.  So of course I’m having more fun writing about the book.  Not because I’m panning it.  Not about to pan it.  There’s just something to hang your hat on when you’ve got more to say than This was good and this was good and that was good too and those things I haven’t said were good, I would have said were good if I had more time.  But even without going flat out to criticize a work you can get at its heart through its flaws and in that way really open things up for discussion.  Plus, the book in question happens to be Dick Van Dyke’s memoir, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business.

You got to figure it’s fun just to read words like “Oh, Rob,” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” which is in my spell checker and why wouldn’t it be?

Trouble is that once you’ve read those words you’ve pretty much had Van Dyke’s career summed up for you.

What you have in your hands then is a book by an eighty-six year old man whose best and most important work was completed by the time he was forty and who’s persisting in telling the story of his entire life, so far.

That means that a lot of the book is taken up with his personal life, and it’s reasonable to expect then a lot of personal stories.

In other words, or word, gossip.

But there’s hardly any.  Van Dyke reveals as little of the personal as he can, about himself or about people he’s worked with.  But then, it turns out, this is a book by a celebrity who was determined from very early in his celebrityhood to live the life of a non-celebrity and to avoid making himself the subject of gossip himself and a witness to others making themselves the subject of gossip.

That’s my way into the review.  The book turns out to be a sort of anti-confessional.  It’s the life story of a man who doesn’t think his life has been worth all that much attention.   The thing is, he’s wrong and his own book would prove it, if he’d just let it.

My Lucky Life is a case of a writer working against himself.

The dearth of gossip doesn’t mean it’s devoid of fun, though.

There are lots of words in it that are almost as much fun to read as “Oh, Rob!”  Three of them are Charles, Nelson, and Reilly.

Van Dyke is happy to write about people he’s worked with, as long as what he writes won’t be construed as gossip.  Charles Nelson Reilly was his understudy when he starred in Bye Bye Birdie on Broadway and Reilly bursts into the book when Van Dyke describes him bursting through the door of his dressing room to introduce himself as…well…here, I’ll let Van Dyke tell it in is ungossipy way---

I was especially fond of my understudy, Charles Nelson Reilly.  I hadn’t met anyone quite like him, but I took to him instantly.  He was hysterically funny, clever, quick, and intelligent.  I was never bored around him.  On the first night of previews, it was raining and he came into my dressing room with a scarf round his head and purred, “Hello, my name is Eve Harrington.  I’m such a fan of your work.”

He did the whole scene from All About Eve, which put me on the floor.  He was one of a kind.

Whenever I think of Charles Nelson Reilly, I tend to remember him as the Captain’s great-grandnephew on The Ghost and Mrs Muir, which means I’m remembering him as a caricature of himself.  I forget that when I was a kid I knew him and liked him best from his appearances on Hollywood Squares, where, of course, he played a different sort of caricature of himself but one, I suspect, that was somehow truer to his real self.

By the way, has any gay studies scholar done a comparison/contrast between the personas of Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly? I’d think it would be an interesting study of the difference between the ironic humor of self-loathing and the comedy of self-acceptance.

Charles Nelson Reilly died four years ago and when I looked up his obit the other night to confirm to myself that he was in fact dead---I have a hard time believing that the TV stars I admired when I was young have not only grown very old but that many of them have died---I was surprised at what short shrift the New York Times gave him. 

“Where’s the quote from Burt Reynolds?” I wanted to know.

Reilly and Reynolds were friends for ages, and I think it says something good about Reynolds that two of his favorite people were Charles Nelson Reilly and Dom DeLuise, that the quarterback loved the gay kid and the fat kid.

Time for me to get back to juggling my reviews.  But I was reminded the other night that Charles Nelson Reilly wrote his memoirs too, only he wrote them in the form of a one-man play, Save it for the Stage: The Life of Reilly.  Here’s a clip in which he talks about his friend, Burt.

Hat tip to Jonathan Korman, aka Miniver Cheevy.

Bilbo

Over at Shakesville, Wev McEwan has a link at to the first pictures of Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit.

To put it simply, Freeman looks more like a Bagginses than Ian McKlellan looks like a Gandalf, which means, I can’t wait!

Also, guess who’s doing the voice of Smaug.

There and back again on this blog: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Middle Earth.

Beautiful Cape Cod Vacation Rental

For the first summer in seventeen years the Mannions won’t be going to Cape Cod.  That’s a big disappointment for us, but that’s how it goes.  This does, though, open up Uncle Merlin’s house for anyone who’d like to spend a couple of weeks in a beautiful house in the gorgeous town of Chatham.

If you’re interested or know someone who might be interested in renting the house for a week or two between July 10 and July 23, drop me a note and I’ll put you in contact with Uncle Merlin.

The house is also available next week, June 26-July 2, and August 21-27, and throughout the fall which is a wonderful time to be down on the Cape too.

Follow the links to get a good look at the house and check the calendar.

The dog in the photo is not included in the rental.

Working until we drop: A fable for our times

Boy, you feel good today.  Full of pep.  Up at five.  Took the dog out for a good long walk, actually enjoyed a bit of a run, and were hardly winded.  Had a nice big breakfast when you came home, two cups of coffee, caffeine still hardly bothers you.  Had a cup after dinner last night and still slept like a log.  And here you are, five hours into the day, work piled up to the ceiling, but it’s all good, it’s money coming in, and these days, who’s going to complain about that?  Maybe you can keep the business running another few years.  You think?  Dad’d be proud, see the company he and Uncle Al founded still on its legs, sixty years later, even if some days it feels like it’s just limping along.  Besides, you’ll stay late tonight, an hour or two, clean it all up. No sweat.  Not bad for someone’s turning seventy-two next month and’s been at this since age fifteen, coming in after school to learn the business from the ground up.  Hell, screw staying late.  You’ll knock off at five, hurry home, the two of you’ll go out to dinner, go to a movie.  Come in a little early tomorrow and finish it all up.  Another few years?  Nah. You feel you can do this till you’re a hundred and five.

You get up for a stretch, wander out onto the floor to get a cup of coffee, give people the eye, remind them you’re here, still the boss.  Not that they need the reminding.  Good people.  Hard workers.  You hardly have to say a word to some of them.  Work their asses off for half the money, which, you know, you’d like to pay them.  Business is good, as in ok, but it’s not like you’re making the bucks so fast you can’t find space to put it all, it’s piling up so fast.  Help if you could lower the overhead a little.  Actually, though, what would help is if you could afford to hire a couple more people.  You got reps here doing the work of two.  Lots of orders falling through the cracks.

Well, three, in the case of those picking up the slack for Sid.

Sid.  Look at him.  Geezus.  Five years younger than you and looks like he could be your father.  Ok.  That’s a bit of an exaggeration.  But he’s not looking too good these days, is he?  Too bad.  He used to be such a dynamo.  Worked like a hero.  Put in seven days a week if you’d let him.  Best you had.  Then he turned sixty-five and it was like he hit a wall.  Bam.  Just knocked him flat and he’s never been able to get up again, not really.  Mostly, for the past year, he comes in, goes through the motions.  He’s become a real drag on the business.  He really should hang it up.  But what’s he gonna do?  You always paid him a fair chunk of change.  Never was going to make him rich, but he got by pretty well.  But 2007, 2008.  Everybody’s 401k took a big hit, then his wife got sick, and their house went under water.  He’s going to need to collect full benefits on his Social Security.  He needs to stick it out for one more year.

Oh wait.  It’s 2020 now, isn’t it?  They raised the retirement age for people Sid’s age back in 2011.  He can’t collect full benefits until he’s 69.  So he’s going to stick around for three more years!

Three?

Think about it.  His wife’s health is shaky.  Sid’s is none too good himself’s.  No way he can make up for the difference in medical costs for what the vouchers won’t cover.  Sid needs to work here till he drops just for the medical plan, which is no great shakes, it costs you both an arm and a leg, but it’s not like it’s suddenly got cheaper to go the doctor’s.  Even a simple check-up dings you, never mind if you need something big taken care of.

No, Sid’s here for life, unless…

Nah, you couldn’t do that to Sid.  Not after all the years he’s put in.

Could you?

You could do it to Mary.

In a heartbeat.

Well, not really.  Just some days you’d like to.  She’s just not pulling her weight.  She’s another one, old age caught up with her real fast.  And that car accident last year, she’s still hurting from that.  You can see it whenever she has to stand up, which no wonder she avoids doing.  She’s got everybody else fetching and carrying for her.  The time last month you called her into the office to talk about it, she starts crying, thinking you were going to fire her, because she knows, and it embarrasses the hell out of her, she hates what’s happened to her.  Like Sid, she used to be one of the hardest workers around here, but it’s not her fault some idiot runs a stop light, t-bones her like that, not her fault she’s not thirty years old anymore.  She’s crying on you, telling you like you don’t know how she needs this job, how her husband never found real work again after he was laid off by his company during the Recession for the crime of being in his fifties and why wasn’t that considered age discrimination, she wants to know, as if you were responsible and of course your conscience bothers you because you’re thinking how much you’d save by dumping a few people around here who aren’t exactly young anymore, like Mary…

Oh, and then she brings her daughter into it.  Kelly,  She’s just moved back in with them, because she hasn’t been able to find a good job in her field and she’s been out of school what?  Couple of years now, and those student loans were killing her.

Kelly, you think.  You’ve met her.  Good kid.  Lot like her mother used to be.  Hard to believe she can’t find a job.  You’d hire her.  You’d be thrilled to have a young version of Mary around the place again, working up a storm, leaving everybody else to eat her dust.  And you could pay her…

Forget it.  What are you going to do, fire Mary and as she’s on her way out, cardboard box full of her personal stuff in her hands, trinkets and toys and photos and souvenirs and awards she’s piled up over thirty years, ask her to send her daughter in for an interview?

But she’s only sixty-three.  She might be here for another six years. Hell, like Sid, she’s going to stick around till she drops, you let her.

And you’ll let her, right?

Right?

Right.

But it sure would be nice to able hire a Kelly.  Two Kellys, if Sid leaves.  Two?   Make that three.

Think of that.  For what you’re paying two worn-out, demoralized geezers who’d just as soon not be here and who are, not to be too harsh on them, mostly collecting paychecks to hold down their chairs in case there’s a sudden gravity shortage and they might fly up to the ceiling, you could hire three energetic kids, desperate for work, who’ll give you a hundred per cent for maybe twenty years, bringing in all kinds of business, maybe enough they’ll pay for themselves, and you’d still be saving a bundle.  Forty or fifty grand a year.  Think what you could do with that.  Buy a couple of new trucks.  Expand the warehouse.  Give Sherry and Brian the raises they haven’t had in three years.  You know Brian and his partner have been looking for a new house they can afford.  Sherry’s nursing her car along, hoping it’ll carry her another hundred thousand miles…

This is getting depressing.  You pour your coffee, take another look around, this time trying to avoid laying eyes on either Sid or Mary, sparing yourself and them both, and what do you see?

When did everybody get so old?

Half the people who work here, they’re gray or bald already.  How’d that happen?

Demographics.  They’re all Boomers and Gen-Xers you hired during the Clinton years when it seemed like the good times were going to last forever.  Twenty-five years later of course they’re getting up there.  But for Chrissakes, in another few years it’s going to be a geriatric ward in here.  Sid you can afford to keep around another three years.  Mary?  That’s a tough one.  But some of these others, they’re going to want to stay for twenty more years and who knows which and how many of them are going to turn into other Sids and Marys?

And it’ll be worse out in the warehouse.  Bad backs, bad knees.  How many guys already literally can’t carry their own weight?

Maybe it’s time you did a little housecleaning?

You wander back into your office, sit down at the desk, call up the payroll records on the computer, and you start making a list…

____________________

Inspired by a report from dday via digby that a new plan to “save” Social Security includes cutting benefits by raising the retirement age---that is the age at which new retirees can start collecting full benefits---to 69 for everyone now 58 and younger and by this op-ed in the New York Times by Thomas Goeghegan arguing that what we should be doing is just the opposite, lowering the retirement age and increasing benefits.

In a time when we need to create jobs, plenty of people have been hammering on this idea, that we should be looking for ways to encourage older workers to get out of the workforce to make room for younger workers.  Apparently, though, the geniuses down in Washington, have decided that what this country really needs is a whole lot of people working into their seventies or until they drop dead.

Waiting for the rush

The University Restaurant.  University Place and 12th. Noon-ish.  Sunday, June 19, 2011.

If it was only going to be there temporarily, then shouldn’t it have been for just 15 minutes?

Sunday, June 19, 2011. The Andy Monument.  17th and Broadway across from Union Square.  On display until October 2.

Uniforms

Are the female clerks at Forbidden Planet required to dress like just stepped out of a Manga or does it just work out that way?

I understand the whole Green Lantern movie looks like this

Display case.  Forbidden Planet. 13th and Broadway.  Sunday, June 19, 2011.

Drama critics only come out at night, up to no good…unless there’s a matinee, then they’re still up to no good but at least you can see them and be ready when they reach for the knife…

Off to New York today to review the Classic Stage Company’s final production of the season, Unnatural Acts.  Really don’t have an idea of what this one is going to be like, but the two shows at CSC I reviewed in the spring, Double Falsehood and The School for Lies were well-done.  School for Lies, especially, was a blast.

Grateful as I am to CSC for inviting me to review their shows---I expect they figure What harm can he do, he’s a blogger.  Goddamn New York Times comes in here, throwing their weight around.  Might as well let the poor schnook have a little fun, feel like a big shot critic for a day.---I’m hoping that I can start branching out and review shows by other companies.  (Are you listening, publicist for Atlantic Stage?)  But if that doesn’t happen, and CSC continues to invite me, I’ve got one helluva good time to look forward to next season anyway.  CSC has just announced their schedule for 2011-2012 and it’s a beaut! (Click on the image below to be taken to CSC’s website where you can read it clearly.)

F. Murray Abraham as Galileo!  Bebe Neuwirth in anything!  But I’m most looking forward to The Cherry Orchard, for Dianne Weist, naturally, but also---John Turturro.  Turturro must be playing Lopakhin, the villain of the piece, as much as Chekhov ever allowed a character to be seen as an out and out villain, but who is also, as this review of a recent production in London points out, the character we wind up rooting for even while we’re rooting against, assuming he’s played right.  Lopakhin needs to be loathsome and contemptible in every way except in being right, and his being so right put us squarely on his side, despite our wanting, needing him, to be wrong and to lose.  Turturro is perfect for this.  In fact, he sketched it out a long time ago in Robert Redford’s movie, Quiz Show.

Haven’t been able to learn what translation CSC will be using, but this reminds me.  David Mamet wrote an adaptation of The Cherry Orchard.  In my post about Mamet last week I wrote:

You go to [Mamet’s] plays to be made uncomfortable.  You go to have your liberal prejudices and pieties challenged.  You go to find yourself squirming in your seat as you sympathize with characters you know you’d hate in real life and hating characters you suspect are meant to be a lot like you.

That last bit, about sympathizing with characters you’d expect to hate and hating characters you’re actually inclined to sympathize with?  If Mamet didn’t learn it from Chekhov, it’s something he has in common with him.  I don’t always like what Mamet writes and I sure don’t agree with his politics, but the guy knows how to craft of play.

By the way, make sure you check out actor212’s comment about the challenges and rewards of acting in a Mamet play.

Ok. Hitting the road soon.  The play will not be tweeted, but I’ll probably check in from the City via Twitter with the usual almost witty observations and notes.  My review will post Thursday.

Thanks again to everyone who donated to the fundraising drive.  This trip is on you!

In heaven, it’s always the middle of a concert, and the Big Man is about to play

Wait for him. He takes up his ax at about the four minute mark, just when Bruce needs him most.

Clarence Clemons, 1942-2011.

All trails lead to Deadwood

Timothy Olyphant as Seth Bullock in HBO’s Deadwood, looking an awful lot like various movie versions of Wyatt Earp.  In real life, Seth Bullock was more like Wyatt Earp than the real Wyatt Earp was like Wyatt Earp.

Seems I’ve had a lot opportunities to bring up Deadwood around these parts lately.  My review of Howard Blum’s true-life western The Floor of Heaven.  Last Saturday’s post on the loud and proud conservative playwright David Mamet’s very liberal life in the theater.  A post I wrote while I was reading The Wilder Life, Wendy McClure’s memoir of her lifelong love for the Little House on the Prairie books, The little libertarian on the prairie, doesn’t mention Deadwood explicitly but it is an many respects a recapitulation of post I wrote last year, Deadwood as the model of a Conservative’s Utopia.  And now I have another opportunity, thanks to my having started to read The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the O.K. Corral-And How It Changed the American West by Jeff Guinn.

The historical Wyatt Earp wasn’t quite like his mythical namesake.  In reality, Wyatt was not a nice guy.  He also wasn’t much of a lawman.  He was brave, tough, resourceful, and, when he pinned on a badge, which he did from time to time mainly to make money and, according to Guinn, always with the hope that doing so would lead to bigger things for him socially and financially, he was determined, fearless, incorruptible, mostly, and a dangerous enforcer of the law. But he didn’t pin on a badge often or wear one for any significant stretch of time and he was always in a hurry to unpin it as soon as he could and move on to more promising money-making endeavors, usually gambling.

The sort of career as a professional lawman we imagine him as having had and the other personal qualities movies and television have usually attributed to him, a certain shy, easy-going charm, an innate chivalry, unwavering integrity, and a commitment to law and order and the betterment of his community actually belong more to his older brother Virgil, although, again according to Guinn, Virgil had his share of foibles and failings too.  In other words, not only was the real Wyatt Earp no Henry Fonda, none of the Earp brothers who took part in the shootout at the O.K. Corral, not Wyatt, not Virgil, and especially not Morgan, came close to being a heroic figure.  And never mind about Doc Holliday.

Life, of course, is mainly like that, a matter of weak and flawed people doing their best to get by while trying not to do too much harm and hoping that they might at least be doing a little good.  But exceptional human beings do ride into town from time to time, and a few of them did wear badges in the days of the Wild West.  One of them was Charlie Siringo, a main character in The Floor of Heaven, a Pinkerton Agent known as the Cowboy Detective, who had a long and illustrious career of adventure that included undercover assignments, threats to life and limb, fisticuffs and gunplay, and even some love and romance, all of it on the right side of the law (although not always on the right side of history.  The Pinkertons were often employed as union busters and Siringo never shirked or, apparently, minded when employed by the bosses against the workers ).  Another was Seth Bullock, a name that will be familiar to you if you were a fan of the HBO series Deadwood.

The real Seth Bullock was a lawman in the real boomtown of Deadwood.  He was also one of the town’s most successful businessmen and prominent citizens.  He was a friend of  Teddy Roosevelt and signed up with the Rough Riders. He’s credited with helping to establish Yellowstone as the first national park, which, by the way, happened when he was 23 years old.  He was one of those people who was born older.  He seems to have had the wisdom and maturity of a 40 year old when he was 14 and he grew up from there.  Deadwood, the show on HBO, not the town in Dakota Territory, begins with Bullock giving up a job as lawman in Montana to come to Deadwood, the town, not the show, to open up a hardware store and that’s true to life.  Where the show differs from the history is in presenting Bullock as not as good, noble, admirable, and successful as he was in real life, not at first, at any rate.

One of the themes of the show was that Al Swearengen, the saloon and brothel keeper and criminal gang leader who is the series chief anti-hero, wants to help turn Deadwood into a decent place to live, a real and functioning, civil and civilized society in which someone like himself has no place.  One of the things Swearengen does to bring this about is to turn Seth Bullock into what we know him to be from history.

Deadwood is about learning to become civilized.  While we watch Deadwood grow into a real town we watch Bullock grow into the kind of person who not only can live and thrive in it but who is its best representative.  We’re going see him become more like Wyatt Earp than the real Wyatt Earp was like Wyatt Earp.

As series creator David Milch has it, it’s a role Bullock isn’t ready for when we first meet him.  He’s a brave man and an honest man and a decent man, but he’s not yet strong or wise enough to be a good man.

His hero’s progress begins with meeting and making friends with Wild Bill Hickock during the last days of Hickcock’s life before he was murdered, shot dead in a Deadwood saloon while playing poker, holding a hand of aces and eights.  Like the real Wyatt Earp, the real Wild Bill Hickcock was more committed to the main chance than he was to public service, and that’s the case with the show’s version of Wild Bill, portrayed brilliantly by Keith Carridine who gives a performance that haunts the series until the end of its three year run, even though Carridine and Hickock are gone after the first four episodes.  Hickcock hasn’t come to Deadwood as a lawman to clean up the town.  He’s come to Deadwood for the same reason that just about everybody else is there, including Bullock, to strike it rich, not in mining, though, in shipping.  But he leaves the actual work of striking it rich to his friends and partners, Calamity Jane and Charlie Utter, and spends his most of his time gambling---and drinking.  He’s not an ideal role-model, in other words.  But he has important qualities Bullock needs to learn to possess.

Hickcock is poised, cool-headed, and in complete command of his considerable store of anger and propensity for violence.  It helps to know that in real life James Butler Hickcock earned his nickname from his large nose and wild temper.   Bullock is full of anger he can barely contain.  If you watch Justified, in which Timothy Olyphant is currently starring as a modern version of a fictional Wild Bill Hickcock or Wyatt Earp, but not a Seth Bullock, real or imagined, it’s amusing to note the different ways he plays his two character’s pent-up anger.  Raylan Givens grins.  Seth Bullock glowers.  Throughout the first season, Olyphant portrays him as being in a perpetual seethe, except for those few times when he loses control and lets his anger get the better of him.  Then he beats an Indian to death in a fight, after the man has already surrendered, and he picks a fistfight with Swerengen.  The two brawl in the street in a knock-down, drag-out that almost kills the both of them. 

Hickock’s anger is well tamped-down but he knows how and when to let the pilot light blaze in his eyes to let someone know they’re about to cross him, something they’d really be better off not doing.   He is also, and this is key, aware of himself as a public figure.  And he understands that this isn’t just a burden that comes with the job.  It’s an important part of the job.  Like I said, he hasn’t come to Deadwood to be a lawman, but people naturally turn to him when they’re in trouble and he steps up.  And when he does, his back straightens, his chest swells, his chin lifts, and his stride lengthens.  It’s not exactly like watching Clark Kent take off his glasses and start to loosen his tie, but it’s definitely the case that Hickcock is assuming a role he knows other people need him to play.

When Bullock takes over as sheriff, a job he accepts not out of civic responsibility but to get legal cover for avenging Hickcock’s death, he has no notion that he’s now expected to be something other and larger than himself and it’s suddenly up to Al Swearengen to teach him how to be like Wild Bill.

It’s interesting to note how Wild Bill’s death changes Swearengen.  When the series opens, Swearengen is just a bloody-minded criminal boss.  He hasn’t even begun to develop his what will turn out to be self-destructive ambition to turn Deadwood into the kind of town where respectable people can live safe from the likes of the Al Swearengens of the world.  But helping to organize the trial of Hickcock’s killer gives him a taste of what it’s like to be respectable and civic-minded and he enjoys it.  Meanwhile, Cy Tolliver has come to town, bringing his own brand of criminal enterprise with him.  Tolliver is a classier, cleaner, handsomer, more charming, but less intelligent and even less self-controlled version of Swearengen.  He’s also weak and craven, and Swearengen has recognized straight-away that Tolliver presents more than just a threat to Swearengen himself.  A rivalry between them will eat up the whole of Deadwood and drive respectable citizens away.  At first this prospect bothers Swearengen only because it would mean no customers and no victims and therefore no money.  Cynically, then, he determines that Deadwood needs some law and order so that there are limits to what he and Tolliver can do to each other.  But then it dawns on him that the Deadwood he knows, and profits from, is doomed anyway.  Either the rivalry between himself and Tolliver, or between other versions of themselves, will burn the place down or civilization will arrive and with it real law and true order.  Swearengen decides that if he’s going to be washed away in the flood of history, he wants to be replaced by something more than mud and wrack.

He becomes civic-minded and, tentatively, takes some steps to “improve” the town.  He plans to go slow because he wants to keep his businesses, criminal and legitimate, going for as long as possible.  But he keeps in mind that one of the first things that has to be done is the establishment of some real law and order and to do that he needs a real lawman.  A heroic lawman people will automatically look up to and whose leadership they will respect and follow.  He recognizes in Bullock the necessary qualities but the trick will be to get Bullock to recognize those qualities in himself and learn to draw on them.  He’s also keenly aware of other qualities in Bullock that Bullock needs to learn to control.  At the same time he has to convince Bullock to take on responsibilities and duties Bullock has already rejected in order to come to Deadwood.

It’s amusingly ironic that Swearengen sets out to accomplish this by manipulating Bullock into standing up to…Swearengen.  He forces confrontations and tries to maneuver Bullock into fighting back in ways that actually work to thwart Swearengen’s plots and schemes.

Bullock manages to be a maddeningly slow learner and there are times when Swearengen has to essentially step out of character to instruct Bullock in the right way to do his job as sheriff.

The series didn’t last long enough for us to see Bullock graduate, so we were never presented with a Seth Bullock who rivals Wild Bill Hickock or Wyatt Earp as a western hero.  He was always a work in progress and that progress was interrupted as David Milch grew distracted along the way.

In a bit of historical serendipity, it turns out that it’s possible that the real Seth Bullock and the real Wyatt Earp actually met.  In 1877, four years before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, Wyatt Earp was up in Dakota Territory trying to set himself up in the timber business in Deadwood.

If you’re thinking, wow, that would have made an interesting episode, and you were a fan of the series, that means you’ve forgotten.

It didn’t.

In fact, it didn’t make two interesting episodes.

Wyatt Earp and his younger brother Morgan come to town, loiter there for two episodes, and nothing important to the story comes of their visit.  Morgan’s bad temper and weak nature gets him into trouble.  Wyatt tries to get him out of it.  Bullock has to intervene.  Then he tells the Earps it’s probably best for all concerned if they ride out, and they do.

That’s it.  There’s nothing in this short story-arc that establishes this character as the Wyatt Earp, the real one, the legendary one, or even a revisionist version of one or the other.  Which may have been Milch’s point, that there was no Wyatt Earp, that both the hero of the legend and the sometimes heroic but flawed man in the history books are complete fabrications, and, as Guinn reports regretfully in The Last Gunfight, it is the case that a lot of what people think they “know” about Wyatt Earp is based on tall tales Earp told about himself in his old age.  In the show, the Earps ride into Deadwood claiming to have saved a stage coach from robbers.  It turns out that they faked the hold-up themselves in order to ride to the rescue and set themselves up as heroes.  It happens that there’s a historical basis for this in that when he was in Tombstone Wyatt and Doc Holliday were accused of actually robbing a stage with the intention of framing some outlaws whom they could then bring to justice, thus furthering Wyatt’s political career---Earp wanted the job of county sheriff.  That Wyatt and Doc robbed the stage was a lie spread, according to Guinn in The Last Gunfight, Earp’s chief political rival.  In the show, the Earps’ only reason for faking the hold-up is that they hope that folks will buy them free drinks and meals and maybe offer them jobs, any sorts of jobs, as long as they pay well and don’t require much work.  Anyway, that whole subplot is dropped immediately and the Earps end up just hanging around until it’s time for them to go.  For all they do or matter, they could be any pair of drifters brought in by the writers to cause trouble Bullock has to put an end to in order to remind viewers that while  Milch’s convoluted political and romantic subplots are working themselves out Bullock is still the hero of western.

In the first episode, Bullock makes the one and only direct reference in either of the two episodes to either the historical and legendary Wyatt Earp.  At this point in his life, the real Wyatt Earp had established a solid reputation as a lawman helping Bat Masterson keep the peace in  Dodge City and other cow towns in Kansas.  It’s not clear that this Wyatt Earp shares that reputation.  Bullock has heard that this Earp has worked in law enforcement through this Earp’s own boasting, and he’s confirmed it with an exchange of telegraph messages.  But he doesn’t appear to be impressed by what he’s learned about this Earp’s past exploits.  He merely says to Earp, “Not asking why you’ve put the work aside, I’ll only say that some that do---find themselves ready and uniquely able to work the other side of the street.”

I took this as a reference to the infamous Vendetta Ride.  Surprisingly---well, it surprised me when I learned this when I was a kid who hero-worshipped Hugh O’Brien’s Wyatt Earp---before the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the real Wyatt Earp never deliberately killed anyone in the line of duty.  He may not have killed any of the three men who died in the famous gunfight, which, you might know already, didn’t actually take place in the O.K. Corral but in empty lot off a back alley leading up to it.  Things happened so fast and were so confused and confusing that no one was able to sort out who shot whom for sure.  But in the weeks after the gunfight, surviving members of what’s sometimes, and wrongly, called the Clanton Gang, a loose band of outlaws and rustlers known in their day as the Cowboys, ambushed first Virgil and then Morgan Earp, crippling Virgil for life and killing Morgan.  Wyatt and Doc Holliday, with several friends, then set out to track down the cowboys they believed were responsible and gunned them all down, in some cases pretty much murdering them in cold blood.  That’s a true story that is well-told in the movies Hour of the Gun and Tombstone, so Milch isn’t bringing us any news by suggesting that someday Wyatt Earp may cross the line.  But it’s just the case that his version of Earp isn’t either heroic or villainous and there’s no reason to care or even to think that someday this character will be both a champion of law and order and a killer, so there’s no irony here and no potential tragedy either.

So much could have been done in these two episodes.

They could have been about Wyatt Earp learning how to become Wyatt Earp by watching Seth Bullock.

They could have been about Earp not learning how to become Wyatt Earp even though he has the example of Bullock right there in front of him to learn from.

They could have been about Seth Bullock learning how to be Wyatt Earp---that is, learning how to become more like the historical Seth Bullock---by watching Earp and deciding, That’s not the type of person I want to be.

They could have been about various combinations of all of the above, and clearly the costume designer and make-up artists thought the episodes were supposed to be about the mirroring of Earp and Bullock, either as dopplegangers, secret sharers, or good and evil twins, because they dressed and made-up the actor playing Earp to look like Timothy Olyphant, which has the effect of reminding us, in case we hadn’t noticed or had forgotten, that all along Olyphant has been dressed and made-up to remind us of Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp in Tombstone.

But whatever is there thematically in the Seth-Wyatt doubling is there only in the costuming and make-up and, a little bit, in the acting.

It’s not there in the writing.

Nothing comes of it in the plot.  But then nothing comes of anything in either episode.

These episodes are part of the third season, when the series fell apart and nothing came of anything in any episode.

I’m still not clear on what happened, but David Milch was developing another series for HBO at the time, the ill-fated John from Cincinnati and it must have taken a lot of his attention away from Deadwood.  The writers and producers he handed more of the work off to didn’t have his touch.  The show lost energy, drive, and focus.  Even the cursing got blurry, perfunctory, and lazy.  The third season was planned to build to a showdown between the citizens of Deadwood and the private army of the rapacious capitalist monster, George Hearst, but it seemed each episode was more about postponing that showdown than about moving the story forward to it.

Deadwood is---was---about progress, its path and its costs, and in the first season the chief obstacle to Deadwood’s progress from a tent city pitched in the mud to a real town is the residents of Deadwood themselves.  The question is, Do these people have what it takes to civilize themselves, which, Milch being both a cynic and a romantic (often a yin and yang proposition), means Are they ruthless enough to be and do what’s right and good?  So the threat to Deadwood’s future as a community is corruption from within.  In the second season, a threat to Deadwood’s progress arrives in the form of one Francis Wolcott who represents corruption from without.  Deadwood is threatened by an unholy alliance of government and moneyed interests that would turn it off course from becoming a community and steer it towards becoming, essentially, a factory manufacturing wealth for a few powerful men, led by the as yet unseen Hearst.

In the third season, Hearst comes to town to continue the threat in person.  But although he’s named after a real person, a mining engineer and entrepreneur who was the father of William Randolph Hearst, the founder of the newspaper empire, this Hearst is not much like the real George Hearst or like any actual human being.  He’s a monster, a fairy tale dragon in human form.  But he’s a dragon who for some reason can’t be fought.  He can only be held at bay through constant appeasement.  No knight in shining armor can be allowed to ride out to his cave and challenge him.  So every episode of the third season is about a stall.  In one way or another, we’re shown the cowed and craven villagers sneaking out to lay a tribute at the mouth of the dragon’s cave and then sneaking back, hoping the dragon will be content to leave them alone for another day.  In the final episode, the dragon demands one more tribute, a human sacrifice.  He wants to be fed a virgin.  A demand that ought to get him shot dead by Bullock or knifed by Swearengen or both at the same time and then fed to Wu’s pigs.  Instead, he’s fed his virgin and he leaves.  Which makes Hearst not only implausible as a human being but implausible as a dragon.  A steady diet of virgins is what dragons crave.  You can’t defeat dragons by giving them what they want because they’ll just expect more.

In short, if Hearst was meant to represent capitalism’s threat to community, he’s a threat that never should have gone away.  The only reason he leaves is so that the series can appear to have an ending.

I suspect that the theme intended for Season Three was the compromises communities have to make to keep themselves economically viable.  Season Four, which never came about but which I believe Milch meant to be the final season, might then have been about showing the effects of that compromise---Deadwood as a thriving, prosperous community that no longer had places for either Al Swearengen or Seth Bullock the western hero.

And it would have been interesting, and both comic and sad, watching Al and some of the other characters trying to live in this brave, new, civilized world, to watch Al at a loss trying to relate to Bullock the solid citizen and watch Bullock grumpily going about his day with nothing to look forward to but being a solid citizen.

And this would have been the season to introduce a new character, another dragon, but not a dragon out of Western fairy tales, a Chinese dragon, a life-force and a bringer of joy.

Teddy Roosevelt.

As I mentioned above, the real Seth Bullock and Teddy Roosevelt were friends.  They met and became friends when Roosevelt came out West to recover from his grief at the near simultaneous deaths of his mother and his wife and they remained friends until Teddy died.  Bullock was a pall bearer at the funeral.

Milch could have brought in Teddy as a kind of anti-Hearst, which wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch, considering Roosevelt’s future relationship with capitalists like him.  I’m talking about the TV show character named Hearst.  Teddy had a more complicated relationship with a real life Hearst.  In place of a dragon demanding tribute, the citizens of Deadwood would have had to deal with a dragon bringing them gifts, all of which, no matter how well-intended, would have been problematic because they’d all be bound up in Teddy’s ego.

It would have been beautiful.

_________________________

Probably post my review in the next week, but if you’d like to read ahead, The Last Gunfight is available from Amazon in regular and kindle.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Marshall Lance Mannion rounds up a couple of related reruns:

Hour of the Gun, a review.

I’m Doc Holiday! No, I’m Doc Holiday.

Jack Crabb gets “buffaloed” by Wyatt Earp.

Family Movie Night is Family TV Night tonight

Catching up on Season Three.

 

Favorite quote from Parker:  “You’re Santa. Respect the suit.”

Salute to John Rogers!

The last great places in America

Went to the hardware store this morning to buy some lawn bags and ask about having the blades sharpened on my lawn trimmer.  This is the hardware store here in town, which is a hardware store, not a Lowes, not a Home Depot, not even a Tru-Value.  I had to step over the owner’s dog to get to the counter.  She raised her head and shoulders and slapped the floor a few times with her tail to say hello then lay back down.

“She’s a real watchdog,” the owner said.  “She trips people come in here to rob us.  That’s her talent.  Also she trips customers.  She hasn’t learned to tell the difference.”

Magenta is nineteen months old.  She’s a chocolate lab, named by one of the clerks in the store after the paint color her coat turns in certain lights.  The owner says he’s owned labs all his life and Magenta, young as she is, is already the best natured and best behaved of any lab he’s ever known.  If you’re a fan of labs, you know that’s high praise. It’s not like saying she’s well-behaved for a terrier.

I learned from the owner that he sends out tools that need sharpening.  The guy who does it for him is good and charges a reasonable price and won’t touch anything that would be cheaper to replace than to have sharpened.  The guy’s a farmer and he’s “kind of tied up” at his farm this week, so he wouldn’t be able to get working on the trimmer until the weekend.  I asked the owner would it be all right if I brought it back Friday then so I could use it today, the blades aren’t that dull they won’t do the job at all.  The owner said sure, the guy’s flexible.  When he has something for the farmer, he gives him a call and the farmer swings by. 

I also learned that the owner has gotten out of the rental business.  My trimmer is a stand-up, hand-operated contraption, one of my favorite yard-working tools, but the blonde hates it.  She wants to buy a motorized one.  I refuse. I tell her I hate the noise.  She points they make electric ones.  They just make a different kind of annoying noise, I say.  They whine.  Really, though, it’s that  I can’t see spending a hundred and fifty bucks on a tool we’ll use maybe every other week for three or four months out of the year.  Now if she wanted a table saw…

So I asked about renting, just out of curiosity.  I’m also thinking of renting a power washer.  But the owner says he’s tired of listening to rental customers complain about tools and equipment that don’t work.  Actually, he says, it’s almost always the case it’s not the tool, it’s the operators.  They don’t know what they’re doing.  I believe him.  It’s been my experience that a person’s anger at a balky tool, machine, electronic device, or gizmo of any kind is directly proportional to their incompetence.  The owner said he can’t put up with it anymore, angry customers storming in---tripping over Magenta on the way in---slamming something down on the counter, and demanding their money back.  He used to make the mistake of checking the allegedly broken tool  and demonstrating that it works and how to use it properly.  That never went over well.  He’s decided it’s better all around, for his peace of mind and his business, if he just doesn’t bother with rentals anymore.

So I learned a few things.  I learned a little about chocolate labs, one in particular.  I learned how farmers pick up some money on the side sharpening lawn trimmers and lawn mower and saw blades.  I learned about the perils of the tool rental business.  That’s a lot to learn in one morning.  I paid for the lawn bags, remembered to pick up some ant traps while I was there, and left.

If when Saturday rolls around I tell you that today’s visit to the hardware store was the highpoint of my week, it won’t because I’m being sarcastic or because the week was all downhill from here.  It’s because local hardware stores are among the last great places in America.

Local hardware stores, diners, and public libraries.

Rick Perry’s Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat

I hear folks are talking up a Presidential run by Texas Governor Rick Perry.  I guess they see an opening for a candidate who combines the best of Will Ferrell’s impersonation of George W. Bush with Phil Hartman’s Ronald Reagan while bringing his own brand of Pat Robertson-inspired tent-revival religious hucksterism.  It’s a can’t miss combination for running against a field in which Michelle Bachmann is now considered a serious contender.

Last night Bachmann rode to glory in the Republican Presidential candidates debate by benefiting from the “I can say anything as crazy, radical, and dumb as Sarah Palin but my sentences parse” effect.

Perry is a religious man and likes to pray in public.  He invites us to pray along with him.

Pray for rain.  Pray for gay people to straighten up or go to hell.

He’s also something of a biblical scholar.

In a recent interview he used the story of Pharaoh’s dream to illustrate how we should deal with our current economic hard times. 

¹And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the river.

²And, behold, there came up out of the river seven well favoured kine and fatfleshed; and they fed in a meadow.

³And, behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the river, ill favoured and leanfleshed; and stood by the other kine upon the brink of the river.

⁴And the ill favoured and leanfleshed kine did eat up the seven well favoured and fat kine. So Pharaoh awoke.

⁵And he slept and dreamed the second time: and, behold, seven ears of corn came up upon one stalk, rank and good.

⁶And, behold, seven thin ears and blasted with the east wind sprung up after them.

⁷And the seven thin ears devoured the seven rank and full ears. And Pharaoh awoke, and, behold, it was a dream.

⁸And it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled; and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof: and Pharaoh told them his dream; but there was none that could interpret them unto Pharaoh.

Perry’s learned exegesis is:

I think in America from time to time we have to go through some difficult times — and I think we’re going through those difficult economic times for a purpose, to bring us back to those Biblical principles of you know, you don’t spend all the money. You work hard for those six years and you put up that seventh year in the warehouse to take you through the hard times. And not spending all of our money. Not asking for Pharaoh to give everything to everybody and to take care of folks because at the end of the day, it’s slavery. We become slaves to government.

Interesting take, considering that Joseph’s interpretation of the dream is about how the people will need to rely on the government to solve their upcoming problems:

²⁵And Joseph said unto Pharaoh, The dream of Pharaoh is one: God hath shewed Pharaoh what he is about to do.

²⁶The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one.

²⁷And the seven thin and ill favoured kine that came up after them are seven years; and the seven empty ears blasted with the east wind shall be seven years of famine.

²⁸This is the thing which I have spoken unto Pharaoh: What God is about to do he sheweth unto Pharaoh.

²⁹Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt:

³⁰And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt; and the famine shall consume the land;

³¹And the plenty shall not be known in the land by reason of that famine following; for it shall be very grievous.

³²And for that the dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice; it is because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass.

³³Now therefore let Pharaoh look out a man discreet and wise, and set him over the land of Egypt.

³⁴Let Pharaoh do this, and let him appoint officers over the land, and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the seven plenteous years.

³⁵And let them gather all the food of those good years that come, and lay up corn under the hand of Pharaoh, and let them keep food in the cities.

³⁶And that food shall be for store to the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land perish not through the famine.

The story is about how the government needs to intervene in the market and control the food supply to promote the common good.  Joseph recommends that the Pharaoh appoint the kind of government official whom when President Obama has tried to appoint them the Republicans have branded czars and filibustered.  The obvious choice for the job is Joseph, seeing as he appears to have God’s ear, and the Pharaoh, no fool, puts him in charge.  If Joseph had to have his nomination confirmed by the current United States Senate the Republicans would claim he wasn’t qualified, despite his letter of recommendation signed by Yahweh.

The lesson of Joseph’s interpretation of the dream is that during times of prosperity the government should put aside enough “grain” in order to have plenty on hand to keep the people from starving during lean years.

Applied to our times, the lesson would be, since economies tend to go up and down, when during a period of relative prosperity one President is able to put aside a surplus, the next President might want to think twice about immediately blowing it on massive tax cuts and by starting two wars he has no idea how he’s going to pay for.

For it to apply in a way that supports what the Republicans and far too many Democrats who have joined the Pain Caucus have been up to, Joseph’s advice to the Pharaoh would have had to go something like this:

Once the government has put away some money for lean times, hand it all over to the rich and greedy to blow on new cars and fancy vacations, then when the lean times come, after other rich and greedy types have stolen and squandered what middle and working class people had put away on their own in the form of their 401ks and equity in their homes, make sure the rich and greedy sill have lots of money to spend on new cars and fancy vacations before doing anything to help the middle class and working class.  No, scratch that.  Instead of doing anything to help them.  And if the rich and greedy still want more or if the middle class and the working class ask the government for help, tell the middle class and the working class that the lean times are their fault and demand they “tighten their belts” and share in the “sacrifice” by giving up the little bit they have left saved in the form or Medicare and Social Security and hand it over to the same rich and greedy types that plundered their 401ks and home equity to play games with.

Do not under any circumstances ask anyone who has too much to eat to give up even a little bit of it to help those who don’t have enough, even if those with too much are offering it!

I don’t know why it is that when Right Wing Christians want us to get back to biblical principles it’s always the Old Testament they reach for, and the oldest books in it, to boot.  It’s as if they don’t believe their personal friend Jay-sus did or said anything worth basing any principles on.

Genesis 41 does not say what Perry says it says.  In fact, to a large degree it says literally the opposite of what he says it says.  But then he doesn’t actually quote it.  It’s almost as if he hasn’t even read it, just remembers having heard the story somewhere.  Possibly he once saw a high school production of Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat or took in a showing of Joseph: King of Dreams and was on his way out to buy popcorn during that scene and had to ask his wife, “What’d I miss?” when he got back.

But this is typical of Right Wing Christian politicians and of many Right Wing Christians in general.  They don’t seem to have read the book they claim to believe every word in it was dictated by God and yet they’ll tell you that the Bible supports whatever it is they’re arguing for and you can’t convince them they’re wrong both on the point and the scripture.  You can quote them chapter and verse proving it doesn’t.  You can lay a copy down, open to the relevant passages, and have them read it out loud and they will go right back to making the same argument based on the same “biblical” principle.

That’s because words, even God’s words, don’t mean anything to them except what they need them to mean at the moment.  They don’t say things because they are true or correct or factual.  They say things because they sound true or correct or like facts.  They’ll say something because it sounds to them like a good argument, but they don’t care if it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. 

And this has become standard for all the Right’s arguments about everything, whether they’re based on biblical principles or their version of the Constitution or the writings of Ayn Rand or the speeches of Ronald Reagan.  They don’t care what any of their sources really say because they don’t care about words as words, that is, they don’t need words to have meaning only pleasing sounds. 

They don’t use words to mean only to be---to be comforting, self-satisfying, self-congratulatory music expressing the feeling that they are right and that God and Jay-sus are on their side and that screwing the people Jesus himself most cared about is all part of God’s plan.

_________________________

Paul Krugman, having what Mike the Mad Biologist calls his Creationist moment, wrote about this back in January:

The key to understanding the G.O.P. analysis of health reform is that the party's leaders are not, in fact, opposed to reform because they believe it will increase the deficit. Nor are they opposed because they seriously believe that it will be "job-killing" (which it won't be). They're against reform because it would cover the uninsured -- and that's something they just don't want to do....

Given that their minds were made up from the beginning, top Republicans weren't interested in and didn't need any real policy analysis -- in fact, they're basically contemptuous of such analysis, something that shines through in their health care report. All they ever needed or wanted were some numbers and charts to wave at the press, fooling some people into believing that we're having some kind of rational discussion…

Fundraising: all done, for a good long while, I hope

Wednesday update: Of course you're welcome to make a donation, it would still be a big help and much appreciated, but as I promised my fundraising drive is over. Thank you very much to everyone who donated. And thanks to one and all for your patience. I'll be at the play Sunday and will be able to make a few more trips down to review other plays over the summer, due to your generosity, kindness, help, and support.

Monday afternoon update: Almost there. Only 5 more donations to meet the goal. Please help me reach the goal. Thank you,folks!

New post on female love interests in non-Spielberg Spielberg movies below.

Reaching the end of the fundraising drive and I hope you don't mind if I make one last appeal. This drive has been a big help, thanks to those who have donated so far, and I've almost reached my goal of being able to make the next several trips to New York City, starting with next Sunday's to review Unnatural Acts at CSC. I figure that $200 will do it.

I don't like to make suggested donation amounts when I do this because I want people to feel free to give whatever they want, even, seriously, if it's only ten cents. Every little bit helps and is much appreciated. Whatever you give goes into the hat with other people's donations and it adds up. But I have said it before, the actual suggested donation is $1. I'm very lucky. I have a pretty good number of regular readers and if 1 out of 10 you were to donate a dollar, I'd be all set. So please donate whatever you feel you can swing.

But it is Sunday and traffic here on Sundays fluctuates wildly from week to week. Thanks to a link from Matt Zoller Seitz to yesterday's post about David Mamet I've had a higher number of conservatives stopping by than usual. They'd probably be shocked to find out how many of my readers spend their Sunday mornings in church with their families. But it's a busy day for the the unbelievers among us too. So what I'm hoping today is that there are 20 of you passing through who can swing a $10 donation. If you can, that would be great. All of this of course comes with the understanding that you'll only donate if you can afford it and you think this blog is worth it. There are many more deserving causes, a lot more deserving blogs, nobody's forcing me to do this. It's a big deal to me that you think it's worth the time and the effort to read my posts and I'm very grateful to all of you for sticking with the blog and happy to welcome every new reader. This is honestly a lot of fun for me and you and your kind attention are what make it fun.

So, this is it for the fundraising until November. Thanks again to everyone who's donated this time and during past drives. And thanks again to all of you for reading.

Newer posts below. I'm glad people are enjoying the Mamet post, but I hope you also check out the review of The Wilder Life. Actually, I hope you check out all my recent book reviews. (Links in the right-hand sidebar.) It's an interesting collection of books and I've had a good time reading all of them.

Goonies in love

Not the Goonies but an incredible simulation:  Super 8’s gang of young hero-filmmakers featuring Elle Fanning not playing the Smurfette.

Father’s Day next weekend, and the debate here in Mannionville is what movie the guys are taking dear old dad to see.

Mother’s Day was easy.  Thor.  Really.  The blonde wanted to go.  Just like she wanted to go see Iron Man 2 last year, Star Trek the year before, and Iron Man the year before that.

Our Father’s Day choices are between X-Men: First Class and Super 8, with Green Lantern held in reserve as a compromise.  The boys are pushing for X-Men, the blonde’s pushing for Super 8.  I’m pushing for Midnight in Paris, but nobody seems to be listening.  Excuse me?  Father’s Day?

Really, though, I don’t care which we end up at. It’ll be fun no matter which, just because of the company.  I was opposed to Super 8.  The trailer made it look like a cheap knock-off of a cheap knock-off of good knock-off of a Spielberg movie.

But Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz says that it’s not a cheap knock-off of a cheap knock-off of a good knock-off.  It’s not a cheap knock-off of a good knock-off.  It is the good knock-off.

Movies. Plural.  Watch out, spoilers galore.

But Matt doesn’t mention one of the things that bothered me in the trailer, probably because it’s a way Super 8 differs from a Spielberg movie.  The presence of Elle Fanning.

At first glance it looks as though Fanning’s character is the Smurfette in the movie’s little gang of 13 year old heroes.  But it turns out, she’s the love interest!

Think about this.  What Spielberg movies have a love interest?

Unh unh unh!  The Indiana Jones movies are George Lucas movies that Spielberg happened to direct.

There are Spielberg movies in which the main character has a wife or a girlfriend (There’s only one Spielberg movie that has as the main character a woman, his first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express.)  but she isn’t in the movie to provide romance, never mind sex.  Laura Dern’s character in Jurassic Park is the Sam Neill character’s former girlfriend and over the course of the movie they get back together, but that happens as a matter of course, almost off-screen, with a minimum of fuss and bother and almost no signs of affection or physical attraction on either character’s part.  Always is a love story but who remembers that one?  Spielberg’s next movie, The Adventures of Tintin, barely has any female characters at all.  That’s a feature of the comic books, but still.  The opera diva Bianca Castiafore is in it.  I don’t know how she’ll figure in the plot, which is based on The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure, but “The Milanese Nightingale” isn’t in either of those books.  In the books she is in, she’s not the love interest as much as she’s the threat of one.  She’s Captain Haddock’s nightmare of a married, which is to say, a sexualized life.  Tintin’s creator, Herge, had issues.  (Oddly, the cast list doesn’t include Professor Calculus.  This is odd because he’s a far more important character in the series than Castiafore and Red Rackham's Treasure is the book in which he makes his first appearance in the series.)  There’s only one movie Spielberg directed that I haven’t seen in whole or in part and that’s Minority Report.  Is there a love interest for Tom Cruise in that one?

Neither of the two Spielberg movies Super 8 most clearly and importantly pays homage to, E.T. and Close Encounters have anything like a love interest in them.  (Please, don’t bother with any Elliott and E.T. subtexts.  They are both little kids.)  As Richard Dreyfuss’ wife in Close Encounters, Teri Garr is the enemy, a sympathetic enemy, but still she needs to discarded.  It’s an anti-romance in that way.  And when he meets Melinda Dillon, Dreyfuss and she team up but they don’t couple up.  In E.T., the Smurfette role is taken by a very, very young Drew Barrymore and she plays Eliott sister.

I’m not going to speculate here about what this says about Spielberg, except to note that he’s always gravitated towards movie versions of boys’ adventure stories and one of the hallmarks of a boys’ adventure story is that the main character, no matter what age he appears to be, is a romanticized version of the ten year olds who read them, so of course those heroes are not really interested in mushy stuff.

What I’m wondering here is why Super 8, a Spielberg knock-off of the first kind, and therefore basically (and otherwise obviously) a boys’ adventure story, has any mushy stuff in it?

Why is there a love interest in a movie that’s mainly about and primarily aimed at 13 year old boys and girls?

Why is Elle Fanning the love interest and not just the Smurfette?  Why isn’t she more than a love interest or a Smurfette?

I have hazier memories of being 13 than I do of any other time of my life.  I’m not sure why.  I think it’s probably because I “remember” being thirteen as either part of being 11 or part of being 13, that is, I’ve sorted the memories into kidhood and teenagerness.  I know I was interested in girls.  I wrote and produced a play in which I deliberately gave me three main characters---boy detectives---girlfriends so that I could cast the three prettiest girls in seventh grade.  The prettiest was going to be “my” girlfriend too.  For the record, there was no mush involved.  Not even hand-holding.  It was all running away from ghosts and chasing after bad guys for all of us.  Those three girls refused to have anything to do with the play, however, and three other girls took the parts and it turned out, to my surprise and delight, they could act.  I am proud to say I learned several important lessons from this, the main one being that girls were like boys in having interests and talents and personalities in their own rights, apart from whatever roles we guys wanted to cast them in.  Another being that they could be interesting in their own rights, apart from how they looked and again apart from whatever role we guys wanted them to play.

I learned stuff about art and theater too, but I’ll save it for another day.

The point is, however, that even though I sort of wanted a girlfriend and managed to find a way to give myself a virtual one, I don’t remember love or even a thirteen year old’s idea of sex being something I watched movies for.  I would never have gone to a movie for the love story, of course, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have come out of any movie I watched for other reasons thinking, “You know what would have made that better?  If the hero had a girlfriend.”

That was pretty much the way it was for my friends too.  None of us watched movies or TV shows hoping that the hero would find true love.  Or any sort of love.  And I think we were typical of boys of that time, which wasn’t too much before the year Super 8 is set, 1979.

I have no idea what’s typical for thirteen year olds today.  Neither Oliver nor Ken has ever been exactly “typical” in any way.  Neither one has had a girlfriend or even gone on a date.  Ken has had his own reasons for steering clear of romantic entanglements.  Oliver, who is fifteen, has observed that the kids his age who are parts of couples are generally not happy about it.  Too much drama.  And the drama has a way of enveloping other kids around the couples.  His conclusion is that dating is like driving or drinking, something better left till when you are old enough to handle it.

But this is true for him now and was even more the case for him when he was thirteen, the girls who were the most likely prospects for girlfriends, the girls he liked and got along with best, were already his friends, and they had been friends since they were little. They’re pals, and dating your pal is just something that doesn’t occur to you, unless you’re a character in a dumb Hollywood romantic comedy and you suffer for it at the hands of a clumsy screenwriter.  I don’t think the concept of friends with benefits would occur to the average thirteen year old or, for that matter, make any sense to the average twenty year old.  I think it’s the idle dream of commitment-phobic and romantically inept adults.  When you’re young and well-adjusted, friends are friends and lovers are something other and that’s what makes lovers and the possibility of meeting and finding someone to love exciting.

But to get back to Super 8.  I can’t see why there’s a love interest because I can’t see who a romantic subplot’s in the movie for.  I don’t think kids that age care.  And plenty of them, particularly the girls, are going to wonder why Elle Fanning’s character can’t be the leader of the gang or at least the budding filmmaker instead of essentially the damsel in distress.  And a love story involving thirteen year olds can’t be there to attract adults to the movie.  At least, I hope it’s not there for that.  Adults are likely to wonder why if there has to be a love story it can’t involve either of the two adult main characters and, for that matter, why there isn’t an adult woman as a main character?  They might also observe that the thirteen year old hero has just lost his mother in an accident and that if he was going to be searching for a female presence in his life, he’d be on the lookout for a mother-figure not a girlfriend.

Please don’t tell me that Elle Fanning fills both roles.

So I can only think of three reasons for including the love interest.

One is that the director J.J. Abrams was being true to the times.  He was thirteen in 1979 and maybe the only way a girl could enter his boys world was as girlfriend.

Another is that this aspect of Super 8, like all the rest of it, is part of Abrams’ wish-fulfillment fantasy.  His primary audience for Super 8 is his own thirteen year old self.

See, kid, I’ve made you a hero and given you the prettiest girl in town for a girlfriend.  Now will you stop bugging me while I’m on the analyst’s couch?

But the third is the one I have a feeling is the most likely.  Abrams felt obligated to include a female character but he couldn’t imagine any role for one except as a love interest for his boy hero.    In other words, as a fortysomething professional, he still hasn’t learned the lesson I learned as a thirteen year old writing knock-offs of Hardy Boy Mysteries and The Ghost and Mr Chicken.

This seems odd, considering he was the producer of Felicity.  I never watched Lost because I was afraid of being sucked into the cult, but I was under the impression that it included quite a few strong, independent female leads.

But then there’s Star Trek.

Among the changes Abrams made to the original series timeline was making Uhura and Spock secret lovers.

So he took a character who was a strong, independent woman, a person in her own right with important responsibilities---even if it looked like all she was was a glorified telephone operator---the second most important of the secondary characters, after Scotty, or the most important if you count Scotty as the fourth main character, and turned her into…a girlfriend.

Adding nothing to the plot or the movie except a couple of really awkward scenes between Zoe Saldana and Zachary Quinto who exhibit zip chemistry between them.

I have to point out that Saldana/Uhura had way more going on with Chris Pine/Kirk and that this seemed not only lucky for the actors but deliberate, as if what’s being set up for the sequel is a love triangle that further reduces Uhura to girlfriendness.

And then there’s what Abrams does to Kirk’s and Spock’s mothers.

He disappears both of them, one of them literally, right before our eyes.

Kirk’s father dies heroically at the beginning of the movie, and Kirk is naturally haunted by his old man’s legacy.  But his mother survives.  And Kirk never mentions her.  The movie doesn’t tell us what happened to her after she and baby Jim were rescued.  We don’t know if she’s even still alive.  Kirk appears to have been raised by some less than affectionate male relative in Iowa.  We know from the original she was a scientist, so maybe she was off-world a lot when he was growing up.  (I think in the original series, though, both Kirk’s parents died when he was young and he was raised by his older brother.)  But like I said, Abrams doesn’t bother to tell us.  When Kirk asks Spock, the original Spock, what happened in the alternative, original, timeline, he wants to know about his father but doesn’t ask Spock anything about Ma Kirk.

Meanwhile, in another major change to the timeline, Spock’s mother, Amanda, who in the original series and one of the first set of movies, is shown to be an important presence in Spock’s middle-age, is killed off in a blink when Spock is still in his twenties, despite the fact she’s played by Winona Ryder.

There are no other significant adult female characters.

Now, go back over in your head the original series and the five real Star Trek movies based on it. (Yes, five.  Nobody counts the first one as a real Star Trek movie.)  While many of them were love interests, mainly for Kirk, but a few for Spock, Bones, and Scotty, remember how many adult female characters there were who were scientists, politicians, and other sorts of high-profile professionals, including at least one lawyer and a star ship commander.  Ok, she was a Romulan, but still.  In the pilot, Captain Christopher Pike’s first executive officer, Number One, was played with no explanation or apology by Majel Barrett.  In Abrams’ movie, Pike’s number one is Spock who in the pilot appears to be or less a proto-Chekhov or Sulu.

Expand the thought experiment to include the spin-offs and now you have among the female leads a doctor, another first exec, and another starship commander, this one a human and a member of the Federation and the star of the show.

The mothers have been disappeared from Super 8 too.

Makes me wonder.

I guess I’ll either get an explanation next week or I won’t, depending on whether or not X-Men wins out over Super 8.   

Re: the title of this post.  I know, technically, The Goonies is not a Spielberg movie.  But he produced it and it’s got his fingerprints all over it and as Matt Zoller Seitz points out it’s clearly referenced in Super 8.  Matt doesn’t list it as one of the best Spielberg knock-offs though or as he calls them the best fake Spielberg movies.

So, your turn.  Best real Spielbergs?  Best knock-off?  How old were you when you had your first real boyfriend/girlfriend?  Which should we see, Super 8 or X-Men: First Class?