The Ex-Files

National Review Online, May 17, 2002 

It has been a rough couple of months for fans of 1990s television. Waifish Ally is waving goodbye, ER's noble Mark Greene has already passed beyond the help of the most dedicated trauma surgeon, and even simpering Steve from Blue's Clues has abandoned his cerulean canine in favor of a beard and a band. Sunday, though, will truly see the end of an era. With the airing of its final episode, the X-Files will x-pire. Like Samantha, Fox Mulder's abducted sister, the series will be sorely missed. Its tales of alien mayhem and spooky intrigue are a dark, twisted delight, an unreality show that took paranoia to prime time and made suspicion a star. Brilliantly written and beautifully shot, the X-Files is film noir for color TV. Chiaroscuro interiors echo themes of a world lost in the shadows of conspiracy and moral ambiguity, while the series' pale landscapes are vistas of a not-quite-normal America, a place where everything is bleached out, other than the bizarre.

And, half-lit in the gloom, or, sometimes, seen as no more than a blur, there emerges a cast of characters to savor (occasionally, given the writers' rather unhealthy interest in cannibalism, quite literally so): monsters, mutants, maniacs, murderers, mechanical cockroaches, prehistoric mites and, most frightening of all, white men in suits. But there's no need to worry too much. If they can actually manage to avoid death, disease, demons, alien bounty hunters, abduction and walking off the show, Mulder and Scully will be around to protect us.

Strangely romantic heroes in an unromantic age, this oddly matched duo search for truth in a maze of lies. The eccentric interplay between them only adds to the show's offbeat appeal. Working with the exasperating Mulder, poor Scully finds herself in an often-thankless role. Sancho Panza and Doctor Watson would feel her pain. Played by Gillian Anderson, a strikingly attractive redhead (Doctor Watson would have approved), Dana Scully is the scientist, balanced, skeptical, and altogether quite sane. None of these adjectives apply to David Duchovny's Fox Mulder, a man with the soul of Don Quixote, the beliefs of Shirley Maclaine, and the mind of Sherlock Holmes. He is clever, cranky, obsessive, and inspired. Crumpled and faintly saturnine, there is also something of Sam Spade about him, but without the booze or, usually, the broads (despite getting lucky with a trainee vampire, Mulder's love life — and death (but that's another story) — is generally confined to pornography).

The X-Files has been a critical and popular triumph. At its peak four or five years ago, the show was regularly drawing audiences of around 20 million in the U.S. and it has been broadcast in well over a hundred countries (although what they make of it in Yemen is anyone's guess). With success came spin-offs (the X-Files movie, the Lone Gunmen TV series, various X-Files novels, video games), paraphernalia (t-shirts, action figures, trading cards, an "X-Files Ken and Barbie," comic books, posters, CDs, calendars, and no fewer than six "official guides") and, of course, learned tomes (Conspiracy Culture from Kennedy to the X-Files, Deny All Knowledge: Reading the X-Files, and a lengthy (and invaluable) section in Paul Cantor's Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization).

Launched in 1993, the series was also one of the first cyber-sensations. Its conspiratorial themes and otherworldly subject matter were at one with the weirdness of the amazing, expanding web. The brave new show and the brazen new medium echoed each other, and as the thoughts and the ideas bounced between them, rapidly amplifying and becoming ever more absurd as they did so, they helped create an intellectual climate in which the X-Files could thrive.

This new means of communication was also used to create some old-fashioned buzz. As science fiction with more than its fair share of gore, the X-Files attracted its first viewers among exactly the same 18-34 (largely male) demographic that was the source of the Internet's most enthusiastic early adopters. Word of mouth recommendation was said to be the most effective advertising. Word of web turned out to be even better. It is impossible to quantify the contribution made by the Internet to the build-up in the X-Files' audience (from an average of around seven million in the first season to the high teens of millions two years later), but the show's creators were always careful not to neglect the geeks' dank ghetto, a recognition that reached its height when they listened to cyber-feedback and made heroes out of the Lone Gunmen, three nerds whose idea of fun was "hopping on the Internet to nitpick the scientific inaccuracies of Earth 2."

However, it is not necessary to be Clyde Bruckman (the insurance salesman with the ability to predict the manner of someone's death) to realize that the X-Files would eventually have to close. The truth may still have been out there, but fewer and fewer have seemed to care. The number of viewers has fallen to around 8-9 million, and Agent Mulder hasn't been seen for weeks. Scully seems distracted and disengaged, a woman with more than autopsies on her mind, played by an actress who has now been in a period film (House of Mirth! Edith Wharton! Costumes!) and may be a tad too grand these days for little green men. And, yes, before anyone writes in, I know that aliens are gray. The more recent recruits, Agents Doggett and Reyes, are New Coke to Fox and Dana's Classic, perfectly acceptable, but not really worth the effort.

As even the makers of M*A*S*H eventually realized, no series can last forever. What was once original goes stale, innovation turns into a formula that even alien DNA cannot keep alive. While the X-Files has never been shy about repeating itself (we have seen a mutant that munches on human livers, a mutant that feasts on human fat, a mutant that is hungry for human hormones, and a mutant that browses on human brains) there comes a moment when there really is nothing else to say.

More than that, the X-Files is a product of a time that has passed. It is a relic of the Clinton years as dated as a dot-com share certificate, a stained blue dress or Kato Kaelin's reminiscences.

It's the attitude, stupid. Typical of that era, the X-Files combines credulity (too many episodes show alarming signs of a New Age "spirituality") with cynicism, irony, and a notable sense of detachment. This is a show where, for all the drama, no one seems genuinely involved — even with each other. There has clearly been an attraction between Mulder and Scully almost right from the start, but for many years they could not be bothered to do very much about it (Scully now appears to have had a child by Mulder, but that's a more complicated matter than it may first seem). Meanwhile, the underlying plot has twisted and turned, sometimes into deliberate self-mockery, sometimes into incomprehensibility, sometimes into real suspense. There are episodes that teeter between horror and comedy, while there are others (some of the most effective, interestingly enough) that are just played for laughs. This is Po-Mo Sci-Fi, a wild, self-referential, but essentially meaningless jaunt into the unknown. It is Seinfeld with flying saucers, another show, ultimately, about nothing. Nothing serious, anyway.

Nothing serious? Apart, that is, from the existence of a vast conspiracy involved, somehow (more details on Sunday?), with covering up, and perhaps assisting, the planned alien colonization of this planet. But aliens were the pet rocks of the mid-90s, and it's too soon for nostalgia. The X-Files' continuing obsession with our gray-skinned tormentors is, well, so over. The same is true of its conspiratorial premise and all those suggestions of an irrevocably untrustworthy and malevolent government. While Chris Carter, the series' creator, seems to see himself as a left-libertarian (it is not necessary to be an Earth 2 nitpicker to detect in the X-Files a worldview a little closer to that of Oliver Stone than the Cato Institute), it is not surprising that the show found a mass audience in that now bygone era, the epoch of Reno amok and the Gingrich revolution.

Of course, there's no real mystery as to why Chris Carter had to turn to aliens, the feds, and sinister "syndicates" for his dark side. As he once put it, "With the Berlin Wall down, with the global nuclear threat gone…there is growing paranoia because…there are no easy villains anymore." At the time, viewers seemed to agree, but we have since been taught that such an assumption was hopelessly, tragically wrong. With Duchovny largely absent (he'd had enough: E.T. was not really to blame), the X-Files would have been set for decline even without 9/11, but you would have to be Norm Mineta to avoid noticing that ratings fell almost 25 percent between the May 2001 season finale, and the ninth season's premiere last November. The X-Files was a show for self-indulgent, more complacent times, an entertainment for before. That is something that makes one aspect of the series' 1993 debut seem, now, eerily appropriate.

Its date — September 10.

I See Dead People

National Review Online, May 2, 2002

When the dead are art, then art is dead. Corpses belong on the battlefield, in the morgue or underground, but not in an art gallery. Images of dead bodies, paintings, drawings, even photographs, are a different matter, but that is death at one remove, extinction at a decent distance. At the Atlantis Gallery, a loft-like exhibition space in London's East End, there is no such discretion. There they have the real ex-McCoy: Genuine corpses and the bits and pieces that once belonged inside them, all on view for the price of £10 ($14 U.S.) a ticket (discounts for children!). This is a cadaver circus, the best exhibit of the ex to the west of Lenin's mausoleum, and, judging by the long line that snaked down Brick Lane, quite a lot more popular.

The gallery's new show, Body Worlds, is dedicated to the work of the "Plastinator," a fedora-wearing German doctor with the vaguely sinister name of Gunther von Hagens. Over the last 25 years grisly Gunther has been working with "plastination," his patented technique for preserving the dead. Basically, it involves the doctor saturating the deceased's tissue with special plastics while cackling madly in a castle somewhere in Transylvania (OK, I made up the last part). Results will vary depending on the resin used: A plastinated lung was soft to the touch, a squishy gray sponge for a bath time in Hell, but a thin cross-section from the chest cavity was hard and rather shiny, translucent, red and white, a little like prosciutto left out in the sun for slightly too long, and then, for some mysterious reason, laminated.

These small samples were only a foretaste, a mere snack for Hannibal Lecter before the exhibition's full-bodied main course. For the show's real novelty is that plastination allows entire corpses to be displayed in "upright, life-like poses". The process solidifies what it preserves, but before the tissue finally sets, it can be posed in interesting ways. It's a bit like molding a Barbie doll except that the ingredients include human as well as plastic. What's more, there is another advantage: "preserved muscles can take over supportive functions." In other words, when plastination is complete, von Hagens's "specimens" (that's what he calls them) can stand on what is left of their own two feet.

But there's a catch. The Plastinator's definition of a "life-like" pose is, well, not exactly mainstream. The specimens do not look like anybody you would ever, ever hope to meet. They have been "anatomically prepared." I'll say. Von Hagens is a man who is comfortable in other people's skin. This jolliest of ghouls (he seems always to be smiling) is a slicer and a chopper, a Silly Putty vampire who treats the dead like Play-Doh. When plastination's promoters claim that the process allows "entirely new forms of anatomical display" they are not kidding. Body Worlds is more Doctor Phibes than House of Wax and so before I go any further, can we agree that those remaining readers of a sensitive disposition should now abandon this article and do something more cheerful with the rest of their day?

Now that the wimps have gone, let's cut to the chase, for that is what von Hagens likes to do. By the time that he has finished with them, his "anatomically prepared whole bodies" are nothing of the sort. If there is one thing that these bodies are not, it is "whole." To start with, most have been skinned. The idea is to reveal what lies beneath. To emphasize this point one luckless individual is shown holding up the bundle that was once his skin. It is complete, all in one piece, right down to the limp glove-shaped flesh that must have once encased its owner's hands. The skin's former occupant, meanwhile, is reduced to a red-brown-white mass of sinew and bone, politely proffering his discarded epidermis as if it were a garment being passed to a coat-check girl. Other delights include the filleted Muscleman and a startled-looking fellow who has been bisected absolutely everywhere, a posthumous worse-than-Bobbit for all to see.

It is difficult to believe that these displays add much to scientific knowledge, or would even be particularly innovative in an anatomy lesson. We live in hypocritical times, however, and attempts are made to portray the show as serving some sort of educational purpose. These are the didactic dead, complete with surgeon-general moments: A blackened lung or two (those wicked smokers) and a wizened liver (those naughty drinkers). Von Hagens also likes to talk grandly about "the democratization of anatomy." Everyone has a right to peek.

And then there is that last defense of the intellectually indefensible, the claim that the exhibition is "art." Von Hagens himself is carefully ambiguous on this subject. At times he will say that there is nothing artistic about his specimens. Their poses are, he explains, merely a teaching device. But then his vanity begins to seep in. He concedes that he is, perhaps, "a skilled laborer in the field of art." Reference is made to creativity, Renaissance traditions and "aesthetic-instructive presentations." Even his fedora is more than a hat. Von Hagens muses that it "symbolizes… internalized individualism…born of the conviction that an unusual outward appearance fosters non-conformist thinking." A mini-Mengele? Maybe, but there is also a touch of Dieter from Saturday Night Live.

The clearest evidence of von Hagens's artistic pretensions can be seen in his most "aesthetically" displayed specimens. The Chess Player contemplates the board, his exposed brain a reminder that this is someone long past checkmate. Nearby, a pregnant woman reclines in a ghastly parody of a provocative pose, womb cut open to reveal the eight-month fetus within. The skeleton of The Runner is suspended in motion, tendon and sinew flowing out behind him in an impression of speed. Rearing Horse With Rider features the husk of a stallion mounted by the remains of his rider, a man with a brain in each hand, one human, and the other equine. Art? No, just a savage form of carney kitsch.

This sense of the freak show increases in the section devoted to the unborn. The smallest are tiny, just wisps of life in a jar. Others, deformed and misshapen, are deeply disturbing, none more so than a pair of Siamese twins, two awkwardly joined gray homunculi, discomfort still visible on their pinched, twisted faces, good value, I suppose, for £10 a ticket.

The dead, of course, will never discover what happens to the bodies they left behind. What they don't know won't hurt them, but will it hurt us? Mankind is an inquisitive species: It is part of our genius. The exhibition was interesting, if morbid. And I am not alone in thinking so. Over eight million people have seen this show in different venues across Europe, but that large a number somehow makes the phenomenon more troubling. Societies that lose all sense of reverence for the dead will lose it also for the living. There is a small memorial slab (plastic, naturally) "to the body donors" at the entrance to the exhibition, but the show's cheerful, inquisitive visitors were clearly there for recreation, not a requiem.

And there's cash in these carcasses. Body Worlds is big business. According to the London Sunday Times, since its European debut the show has netted around $70 million. There are souvenirs for sale, no, not what you might think, but DVDs, mouse pads, posters, even a tee shirt featuring a plastinated rabbit, a Thumper beyond Uncle Walt's worst nightmares.

Plastination makes this all possible, and it provides the essential alibi. It sanitizes death. Von Hagens describes his "beautiful specimens" as "a sensuous experience…frozen at a point between death and decay." Well, what is the case is that the very strangeness of Von Hagens's grotesque tableaux eliminates almost any empathy that the spectator might feel. These dismembered and rearranged beings lose their humanity at the same time as they expose it. They are alien, almost literally so: Without much in the way of faces, their heads bear more than a passing resemblance to the invaders in Mars Attacks. There are some occasional traces of a lost exterior, a scrap of hair, perhaps, or a yellowing fingernail, but, for the most part (the fetuses are a striking exception), Von Hagens transforms "his" people into creatures of such peculiarity that it is easy to forget what they came from. That this is necessary for the show's visitors (and it seems to be) should come as a relief: It would suggest that we have not yet completed our descent into cultural barbarism.

Can the same be said for Von Hagens himself? I'm no psychiatrist, but he goes about his business with a gusto that is not altogether wholesome. To the extent that his work involves consenting cadavers (donor forms are available at the exhibition), it is difficult to object other than on the grounds of good taste. No one, after all, was made to go to the show, or to be in the show. Or were they? There are troubling stories (mostly denied), reports of bodies being bought, of a consignment of corpses shipped in from Siberia. To the extent that these tales are true, they are deeply disquieting (the fact that the Plastinator now works mainly out of China is not reassuring), but even if the rumors are false, their mere existence reveals unease about this exhibition that it will take more than resin to resolve.

As for me, I won't be eating prosciutto for a while.

Sunday School for Atheists

National Review, March 25, 2002

The His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman was, some said, the moment that literature for the young finally came of age. On January 22, Philip Pullman, a children's writer (although he objects to that label), was awarded Britain's prestigious Whitbread prize for the final installment of his best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy. In the opinion of the judges, The Amber Spyglass was Britain's book of the year. It was an unprecedented honor for a work aimed at younger readers, but Pullman is a man who must be getting used to praise, and not just in Britain. His writing has been described as "very grand indeed" in the New York Times, while reviews in the Washington Post have included adoring references to the "moral complexity" and "extravagant . . . wonders" to be found in Pullman's work.

There can, indeed, be little doubt that the first book in the trilogy. The Golden Compass, is a masterpiece, a sparkling addition to the canon of great children's fiction that leaves poor Harry Potter helplessly stranded in the comparative banality of his Platform 9-3/4. Within the time it takes to read his first few, skillfully drawn pages, Pullman takes us into a beguiling parallel universe. His spikily endearing heroine, 11-year-old Lyra, lives in an England that is a curious blend of the Edwardian and the modern. It is a place where the boundaries between what we would think of as the natural and the supernatural are blurred, no more distinct than the fraying edges of the alternate realities that Pullman describes so well. In Lyra's world every person has a daemon: a companion in animal form, part soul, part familiar spirit. There are witches in Lapland, and the most feared warriors in the North are a rampaging race of armor-clad bears, ursine Klingons who have fallen into decadence under the rule of a corrupt and vicious usurper.

In constructing this captivating, fascinating fantasy, Pullman has pillaged the past and looted from legend. He is a magpie of myth, an author whose work borrows from saga, folklore, and some delightfully obscure parts of the historical record, and, oh yes, he can write.

Lyra raised her eyes and had to wipe them with the inside of her wrist, for she was so cold that tears were blurring them. When she could see clearly, she gasped at the sight of the sky, The Aurora had faded to a pallid trembling glimmer, but the stars were as bright as diamonds, and across the great dark diamond-scattered vault, hundreds upon hundreds of tiny black shapes were flying out of the east and south toward the north. "Are they birds?" she said. "They are witches," said the bear.

That literature of this, well, literacy is being written for the young (Pullman's target audience begins at around 11, Lyra's age) is wonderful. And finding a large market for it in this grunting, ineloquent era is little short of a miracle. More than a million copies of Pullman's books have been sold in the U.S., and the same again in his native Britain.

Their author, however, would be a little uneasy to hear the use of that word "miracle." For he is, alas, a man with a message, and by the end of the trilogy the message has drowned out the magic. Narrative thrust is abandoned in favor of a hectoring, pontificating preachiness-—which has itself probably played no small part in the rise of Pullmania among the chattering classes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Pullman, you see, is a man with an apse to grind. He hates the Church, and he hates it with a passion. This is an unusual fixation for someone from the scepter'd isle; most of the English are rather relaxed about religion, tending to lack strong views about the matter one way or the other. Our predominant faith is a benign, "play nice" agnosticism, vaguely rooted in the Anglican tradition. Metaphysical debate is as foreign to us English people as a sunny day in November.

Philip Pullman is made of more strident stuff. He wants, he once told the Washington Post, "to undermine the basis of Christian belief." This is an immodest ambition even for a winner of the Whitbread prize, and the rationale behind it seems crude, no more sophisticated than that of the high-school heretic, and gratingly simplistic from such a clever writer. The history of the Christian Church is, Pullman intones, a "record of terrible infamy and cruelty and persecution and tyranny." True, to an extent; but the full story is a little more complex than that. It is no surprise to discover that C. S. Lewis is a particular bogeyman: Pullman claims to hate the Narnia hooks "with deep and bitter passion." Among other offenses, Lewis apparently celebrated "racism [and] misogyny"—a choice of thought crimes that reveals the supposedly skeptical Mr. Pullman as a loyal follower of a very orthodox form of political correctness (the inquisitorial piety of our own time). PC's dismal spoor can be found throughout his books, a spot of class hatred here, a little global warming there.

And, above all, there is his omnipresent attitudinizing vis-a-vis religion. It's not so much the role of a wicked Church that is the problem (malevolent clergymen with twisted creeds are nothing new in fiction), but the tiresome little lectures that come with it. So, for example, in The Subtle Knife a speech attacking the sinister Church of Lyra's world becomes an attack on all churches everywhere: "Every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling." There is plenty more of the same, crude, nagging, and bombastic, its form objectionable, whatever one might think of the content. In writing his tales of Narnia, C. S. Lewis may also have been a man on a mission, but at least he had enough respect for his readers to prefer allegory and parable to assertion and propaganda. It is worth remembering that, compared with Pullman, Lewis was writing for a much younger audience, children of an age at which it is quite possible to read and reread the Narnia adventures and miss most or even all of the Christian references; aged eight or nine, I did. Nevertheless, Lewis was content to leave his message oblique; Pullman never allows his readers such freedom.

Despite these concerns, the second book. The Subtle Knife, remains imaginative and alluring if less startlingly original than its predecessor, and still able to survive increasing amounts of its author's pedestrian philosophizing. By the end of The Subtle Knife, however, it is becoming painfully apparent that Pullman's overall theme (basically, a variation on Paradise Lost) is unlikely ever to soar; a devastating weakness in a work that, like many epics, is structured as a quest. The Amber Spyglass, the allegedly grand finale of the series, is intended to bring resolution, but it is difficult to care. The object of Lyra's quest remains (at best) obscure and (at worst) highly pretentious, an unholy grail that simply does not engage the imagination.

When I asked 11-year-old Holly, the daughter of some friends, what she thought of these books, she said that they were "well-written." The story itself didn't quite catch her attention.

Dust is to blame; The Amber Spyglass is a book in which, despite some sporadically spectacular passages, any real sense of excitement is, quite literally, ground into Dust. Scattered over page after wearying page, this endlessly discussed "Dust" is the substance that represents consciousness in Pullman's universe, but it runs the risk of inducing unconsciousness in his youthful and, doubtless, exhausted readership.

And there is, unfortunately, no escaping it. For there is Dust to be found in every nook and cranny of this wordy, wordy, wordy culmination of Pullman's three-volume morality play, which is, at its core, nothing less than an assault on the notion of Original Sin. In the end, the assault takes very literal form: After a battle that rather uneasily combines elements of Star Wars with the Book of Revelation, God (or, at least, an entity who is clearly meant to the the Christian God) is overthrown, the underworld is liberated, and a "Republic of Heaven" is proclaimed.

The true nature of this apparently marvelous republic is never made clear. It may be the materialist heaven on earth, but there are also hints that it could be the New Age's goblin-infested alternative, that empty-headed, shallowly superstitious zone where everything, and nothing, is sacred. It makes for a somewhat frustrating conclusion to this very frustrating trilogy, a flawed, fascinating creation of great promise that is eventually brought down by its tendency to go too far—much like naughty old Adam himself, as Philip Pullman would never say.

Ode to Troy

National Review Online, March 21, 2002

"Now. Hear. This."

Bellowed onto a bare stage in New York's West Village, the words are an order, an incantation, and a greeting. They are a shout across time, an introduction to a story that has been told for almost 3,000 years, the story of the anger of Achilles and the prelude to Troy's fall. Homer's Iliad is a primeval tale that never seems to grow old, a source of ancient legend and contemporary truth. It is one of the monuments of our culture, a core text, venerable and venerated, and yet, despite the passing of millennia, it is a saga that remains fresh enough to be reexamined, retold, and reworked

This is what the British poet Christopher Logue has been trying to do with his own extraordinary "accounts" of Homer's epic. These are not translations (Logue knows little Greek), but reimaginings, based on what has come before, but not confined by it. And no, they are not an example of today's usual crass modernization, the "updating" staler than the classic it is designed to replace. Logue's work is steeped in the past, but unafraid of the present. Angry goddesses, he tells us, "had faces like 'no entry' signs [as] they hurried through the clouds." And somehow, we know what he means.

In War Music, a show playing at New York's Wings Theatre until March 30th, Verse Theater Manhattan is now presenting an adaptation of Logue's work. It is a stark, unencumbered production (no scenery, no props). The audience's attention is focused on what matters — the words. War Music is a performance that hovers somewhere between a poetry reading and drama. Moving, brutal, and chilling, it succeeds as both.

The play picks up the story at the point where the Greek warrior Patroclus has gone to try and convince Achilles, his friend and commander, to rejoin the fight against Troy. Patroclus fails, but succeeds in persuading the sulking hero to lend him his armor and his troops. A living El Cid, Patroclus dons Achilles's armor, terrifies and then routs the enemy.

Nothing was left of Hector's raid except
Loose smoke-swaths like blue hair above the dunes,
And Agamemnon's ditch stained crimson where
Some outraged god five miles tall had stamped on glass.

But Patroclus himself will not survive the day. With the god Apollo against him, he is brought low before the walls of Troy and then butchered by Hector, the city's most formidable defender. Looking to avenge the death of his friend, Achilles then manages a grudging reconciliation with his fellow Greeks. The army is rallied. War Music draws to a close with this greatest of heroes setting out in his chariot for battle.

The chariot's basket dips. The whip
Fires in between the horses' ears;
And as in dreams, they rise,
Slowly it seems, and yet behind them,
In a double plume, the sand curls up,
Is barely dented by their flying hooves,
And the wind slams shut behind them.

Hector, we now know, is set to be slaughtered.

I attended the premiere of War Music in Manhattan just over six months ago. One of its producers is a friend, and the warm summer evening was a celebration of a successful debut. More than that, it was an affirmation, a tacit acknowledgement of the West's fragile, yet triumphant cultural continuity. Crossing the years and an ocean, this age-old tale of heroes and gods had been brought from the Aegean to the Hudson, to be performed in a city that, as Troy once was, is famous for its towers. Four days later, two of those towers were gone, vanished, like their predecessors, into fragments and history. Carnage had come to visit, concealed, once more, in reassuring camouflage: in airliners, this time, rather than a wooden horse.

The Wings Theatre is not that far from where the World Trade Center used to stand. In the aftermath of the attacks, the theater's neighborhood was cut off from traffic. With the exception of some benefit performances for the Red Cross, the play was suspended. This current production is a re-launch, lightly tuned up, but heavy now with additional meaning, its savage story of battle, sacrifice, and courage inseparable from images of GIs fighting in faraway mountain caves or of firemen gathering in the lobby of a doomed skyscraper.

The main change to the play since September is that the actress who played Achilles has been unable to resume her role. The actress? An actress playing Achilles? Ah yes, perhaps I should have mentioned this before. All the roles in War Music are divided up between three women, a casting decision that might have surprised old Homer, but brings a fascinating additional dimension to this production. It is a device that succeeds, except when the actresses attempt a war cry. Women cannot roar. Helen Reddy was wrong.

The war cries are themselves a rare example of (attempted) realism in a play that goes to some lengths to avoid it. The sex of its cast is only one example. War Music is as stylized as a Doric frieze; the performers move across the stage in precise geometrical patterns, remorseless as destiny. The three women (an echo, perhaps, of the three Fates) seem to both play and preside over their characters, leaving an impression of individual dispensability in the service of the rules of a greater drama. This sense is reinforced both by the occasional use of third person narration when within character, and the fact that each woman plays more than one part.

This is not to reduce the actresses to ciphers. Far from it. All three give strong performances. Two moments, particularly, stand out.

The first, early on, shows Patroclus imploring the reluctant Achilles to rejoin the fray. It is a delicate, cleverly drawn scene, made more intriguing by the fact that both men are played by women. As a woman, the attractive, strong-featured Jennifer Don can show us both Achilles the warlord and Achilles the lethal, pouting primadonna without ever descending into the high camp that would almost certainly dog a man asked to perform the same role. Similarly, the slight, short-haired and somewhat androgynous Jo Barrick conjures up a convincing portrayal of Patroclus the warrior and Patroclus the coy flirt in ways that a male actor, burdened by contemporary notions of masculinity, would find extremely difficult — at least within the confines of a single character. The conversation between Achilles and Patroclus is, at one level, an exchange between soldiers, and, yet, at another it is clearly much, much more. In Agamemnon's military only a fool would need to ask, and it would be quite unnecessary for anyone to tell.

The second highlight also features Barrick, this time as the goddess Hera, Zeus's wife (and, the audience is reminded, his sister too). It is a performance that illuminates the horror at the heart of Homer's vision, a glimpse into a universe where divinity is not, as twenty-first century man might fear, absent or indifferent, but is, instead, actively malevolent. Cajoling, cunning and cruel, Barrick's Hera seems to come from Hell not Olympus, as she sweet-talks Zeus into abandoning his son Sarpedon to death at the hands of the Greeks. Later on we see a return to this theme as the goddess incites Menelaus ("the redhead?" asks Zeus indifferently) to further acts of slaughter, pointing out random victims for destruction, with a casual, capricious joy.

King human. Menelaus. If you stick
Him, him, and him, I promise you will get your Helen back.

And yet despite these repeated and destructive interventions, it is striking how mere mortals continue to persevere. They accept the notion of an unkind fate, yet attempt to defy its reality. That is their tragedy, and their glory. These are men who want to be remembered well.

War Music's fierce, terrible beauty makes it a text for our times, and so do the circumstances of its restaging. The return of this play to the vicinity of atrocity is yet another victory over the barbarians. In a small way, it echoes the greatest of all Homer's epics: not the poems themselves, but their very survival. Preserved for nearly thirty centuries, his stories still speak to us, and because they have endured to do so, they are a reminder of what our culture's traditions and memory can mean.

Without knowing our past, we are nothing, and in honoring the past, we give our civilization a future.

Embassy Sweet

National Review Online, March 11, 2002

If you want to see yet another unexpected consequence of our new, more disturbing era, take a look at The American Embassy, which premieres on Fox tonight. As a result of 9/11, this fledgling show already faces a once unimaginable identity crisis and a number of difficult decisions about what it wants to do when it grows up. Back in the more frivolous times when it was first imagined (the initial episode was filmed a year ago) everything was all so straightforward. The new series (then planned to be called Emma Brody) was clearly intended as a replacement, or at least a dietary supplement, for Ally McBeal. Ally is losing viewers at about the same pace as Calista Flockhart is shedding pounds, and it must have seemed like a good idea to take the same recipe (attractive, slightly neurotic yuppie, unlucky in her relationships) and try to bulk it up with a foreign location (London!) and a potential love interest (not Robert Downey Jr.!) able to pass a urine test.

And indeed, The American Embassy may succeed on those terms despite creaky dialogue and story lines so derivative that this show's premiere already feels like a rerun. As a not-quite innocent not-quite abroad, Emma (pleasantly played by Arija Bareikis), the not-quite Ally, makes an appealing heroine. Other elements shamelessly borrowed from the McBeal playbook include girly introspection, a wacky office, occasional pratfalls, and large amounts of slightly goofy sex for people other than the heroine.

The closest (in the first episode, at least) that Emma comes to consummating a relationship, and it is pretty close, is in an airplane lavatory. At the last moment, however, the mile-high club is exchanged in favor of the mile-sigh club as Ms. Brody decides this brief, but passionate, encounter has to end respectably. The restroom Romeo is a future colleague and thus, under the rules of today's stern morality, untouchable. For the time being, anyway. As is traditional in these dramas, we can expect plenty of "will they/won't they" suspense over the months to come. In the meantime, viewers are left to wonder why exactly it was that the scriptwriters chose to burden this supposedly romantic character with the unappetizing last name of "Roach."

What is different, of course, is the series' international location, which does, it has to be admitted, add a certain inaccurate glamour to the whole production. Emma is starting work as a vice consul at the U.S. embassy in London and her adventures take place in a charming, storybook city, a Windsor wonderland beyond the boasts of the most brazen travel agent, a fairytale capital of, as Ms. Brody describes it, "backwards traffic and awe-inspiring grandeur." I noticed no fewer than 20 shots of the houses of Parliament, a couple of views of St. Paul's cathedral, a glimpse of Tower Bridge and, as would be expected, an ogle of Buckingham Palace.

This "London" is a fantasy metropolis (trust me, as a former Londoner, I know), something that may lead to bitter disappointment when the first The American Embassy fans show up on Oxford Street, and are confronted by a city that is somewhat grubbier than this show would have them believe. Emma inhabits a London without burger joints, public housing and, it would seem, any architectural development since the Edwardian age. A subplot of the first episode concerns a missing child. Has she been murdered? Is she sleeping under a bridge, or prostituting herself for a line of coke and a slice of bread? Not a bit of it. She turns out to be holed up in a houseboat moored in "Little Venice," a picturesque canal quarter in the west of the city. This is not a show for fans of gritty urban realism.

Even the U.S. embassy itself has gone through a mysterious, and flattering, transformation. America's diplomats turn out to have been moved from the glass and concrete box that can, in reality, be found in Grosvenor Square to altogether more picturesque surroundings, a rather elegant redbrick establishment that, like so much of Emma Brody's London, I found myself recognizing without quite being able to place. Also, can it really be right that her supposed flat is located in a building that looks suspiciously like that wonderfully gothic hotel near St. Pancras railway station?

If Emma's London conforms to the popular stereotype, so do Emma's Londoners. We get to know three, all guys, in the course of the first episode, a transvestite, an aristocrat, and a wimp, which pretty much sums up the traditional American view of the rich range of British masculinity (Full disclosure: Not only am I a former Londoner, I am a British former Londoner). Cross-dressing Gary is Emma's loveable neighbor, smooth Lord Wellington is the potential suitor, a well-bred rival for the lecherous Roach. Finally, there is the local recruit, an embassy clerk with narrow shoulders and a faint resemblance to a Harry Potter gone to seed, who is, at one point, addressed by his American boss as "Brit Man."

Brit Man? Yes, with its foreign locations, exotic natives, and teasing nicknames, there are ways in which this series can sometimes, appear a little, well, colonialist, with the embassy staff in the imperial role, a role that includes living a life largely divorced from that of the inhabitants of the country in which they find themselves. Perhaps it is the same for all diplomats everywhere, but these Americans appear to live an insular existence, seemingly content to socialize amongst themselves, secure in their little corner of a transplanted homeland, happy to play (American) football in front of the Victorian splendor of Hyde Park's Albert Memorial.

Then, right towards the end of this first episode, the outside world comes crashing in. A terrorist bomb explodes outside the embassy. This highly effective sequence was shot some time before the events of last September, but it gains added power from them. The footage turns from color to black-and-white and back again. Scattered scraps of paper float through the air in what is now an eerily familiar nightmare. We see, poignantly, that the flag still flies over the assaulted building, but there are corpses on the sidewalk. The shock of these concluding images is heightened by the contrast with the carefree nature of what has preceded. These scenes may have been filmed as fiction, but they will be viewed as history.

And that is where the once innocuous decision to locate the series in an international outpost of American power has left its producers with a problem not faced by, say, the more domestic (even if it is set in the city of Ground Zero) comfort programming of Friends. In a year of living dangerously, the emotional intrigues of a young vice consul abroad may no longer be enough to convince or satisfy the necessary audience. This may have already been acknowledged by the decision to change the show's name from Emma Brody to the more serious-sounding The American Embassy, a place, claims Fox, "where the challenges of America's controversial role in the world of nations are an everyday reality." The focus seems set to shift away from personal to international affairs as we are promised "an array of stories of much greater complexity than one could ever imagine."

Whether this is what is delivered, and, more importantly, whether we want to watch it, will be one small measure as to whether we, and our popular culture really have changed in the aftermath of that blue, bright, murderous morning.

A Fundamentalism of Their Own: With the Atheists in Boston

National Review, February 6, 2002

On Good Friday, when others were in church, I visited an atheists' convention. Choosing to hold the gathering—the 28th National Convention of the American Atheists—over the Easter weekend was, their president explained, not much more than a matter of favorable hotel rates. Ellen Johnson smiled as she said this: It was not a claim that a skeptic would expect anyone to believe. So America's infidels gathered in their doubters' redoubt, a nondescript Hyatt on the grounds of Boston's Logan airport, transformed for a few days into a heretic Vatican. Around 250 souls (maybe that's not the word) had turned up for the fun, typically bright, somewhat eccentric sorts, often with the style sense of faculty members at a failing community college. Guys, shoulder-length hair does not work with bald on top. Oddballs? Well, the affable man sitting next to me did spend a surprising amount of time busily crossing out the word "God" from his dollar bills. Cranks? Judging by the pamphlets on display outside the main auditorium, quite possibly, although, to be fair, I did not witness anyone actually picking up a copy of The Unpleasant Personality of Jesus Christ.

It was not, it has to be said, a conservative crowd. Mentioning George W. Bush in a speech was better for jeers than for cheers. I did run into one likable rightist. “National Review, eh? There aren't many of us here." Not that it worried him. As a nonbeliever from the South, be was used to being in a minority', and he was enjoying the opportunity' for a little secular chitchat. Why the atheists? Well, the humanists were "just too touchy-feely." He had a point. Apart from one appalling moment when a hunched-shouldered woman whimpered that she was "afraid," there was none of the mush-'n'-gush that so often mars public gatherings nowadays. Refreshingly, too, there was little talk of "the children," although the enthusiasm that greeted the recital of an essay on school prayer by the young daughter (she's against) of an atheist from Alabama (so's he) had more than a touch of the Laura Bush about it.

That isn't to say that emotion was not on display. This was not a gathering very typical of the roughly 10 percent of all Americans who have no religious faith (a larger group than Jews, Muslims, Lutherans, or many others). For the most part, such secular folk keep their concerns to themselves. They are, spiritually speaking, part of the Leave Us Alone coalition, indifferent to theological controversy and free from transcendental torment. The Hyatt's heathens were made of more awkward, angrier stuff.

Given their background, that's not surprising. American Atheists is the organization (it has fewer than 5,000 members) founded by the "most hated woman in America," Madalyn Murray O'Hair, whose litigation brought an end to organized school prayer. She was a famously confrontational character, and even today her successors are a touch irritable. Contrary to rumor, there are no horns on their heads, but watch out for the chips on their shoulders. These are the Wahhabis of atheism, disbelief's true believers. Oppressed by their sense of oppression, they also show signs of succumbing to the temptation of that most pernicious of contemporary cults, the cult of the victim.

There were tales of social anxiety, embarrassment, and snubs, regrettable certainly, but hardly the Inquisition. In listening to the anguished protests against trivial slights, it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that this was a group that had lost all sense of proportion. On September 11, the United States was subjected to murderous assault at the hands of religious extremists. In addition to the carnage, bin Laden's war represents an attack at the ideological and spiritual level: It is a challenge to the West and to its enlightenment. Hog-tied by the pieties of multiculturalism and constrained by a perceived need to appease Muslim "allies," this country has proved incapable of mounting an intellectually effective response. If ever there was a moment for a clear, sensible leadership from supporters of the secular, it is now.

Judging by their convention, however, this is not something that we can expect anytime soon from America's atheist activists. In discussing the aftermath of 9/11, the convention's focus rested not on Islamic fundamentalism but on safer, stupider topics, grotesque in their self-indulgence and irritating in their irrelevance; the iniquity of "God Bless America" (the G-word is, apparently, a problem in a national song) and government's supposedly disgraceful role in the use of religion to comfort a wounded nation. The overthrow (by the reviled George W. Bush, no less) of a real theocracy, that of the Taliban, barely rated a mention. In their obsession with wicked old Christianity, these atheists seemed to be lost in yesterday's struggle. They were ready to fight the Kaiser, but it is Hitler who is now in town.

There were, it was true, a couple of lectures that dealt with the threat from Islamic extremism. The first, on "holy terror," had the merit of making the point that there was a need to defend and to promote Western culture, a rare assertion in contemporary America. The second was a talk by "Ibn Warraq" (prudently, he uses a pseudonym), the author of Why I Am Not a Muslim, a book with a title and theme echoing that of Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian.

Brought up a Muslim on the Indian subcontinent, Mr. Warraq is a slightly old-fashioned figure, a shabbily genteel man with more than a hint of India's mid-20th-century intelligentsia about him. His talk (blunt in language and sharp in logic) was a fascinating analysis both of the roots of Islam and of its association with today's religious violence. How accurate it was, I'm not expert enough to judge, but it is worth remembering that Lord Russell never had to conceal his real name. Certainly, in its analytical and textual rigor, Ibn Warraq's lecture was a considerable improvement on the patronizing sugarcoating that usually passes for discussion of Islam, the "religion of peace."

Revealingly, though, the time dedicated to these two talks was no greater than that allocated for slapstick: a presentation on religious kitsch ("Bibleman" has, appropriately enough, so far as skeptics are concerned, to be seen to be believed) and a guide to some of the more demented Christian websites. Both these lectures were amusing enough, but the emphasis placed on them suggested an audience more comfortable with taking cheap shots than concentrating on what really matters. A talk on the cloning controversy revealed the same flaw. The opportunity for serious argument was lost in the course of an endless joke involving foreskins, nuns, and a hermaphroditic divinity. The joke wasn't funny and, in the context of a convention of atheism, was about as shocking as a striptease in a brothel.

It was also a wasted opportunity, but perhaps this was at least partly inevitable. Any convention, unless choreographed by Elizabeth Dole, is bound to include some partisan entertainment to rally the troops. Nevertheless it was a shame. There is a need for a more frank discussion about those areas where the dictates of religion and the requirements of science come into conflict, but such a happy moment seems a long way off. After all, even debates between faiths are off-limits these days, deemed too tricky for our era of moral relativism and exquisite PC sensitivity. The virtue of good judgment has been turned into the vice of "judgmentalism," and we live with the result: an era of religious hucksters and New Age nonsense, a time of woolly thinking when no distinction is made between the writings of St. Augustine and the babblings of some two-bit West Coast Wiccan.

Could atheism be an antidote? You do not have to be a nonbeliever to see that its theoretically rational philosophical method could play a part in restoring notions of reason and objectivity to a society that regards both with suspicion. It the Boston atheists are any indication, however, you do have to be an optimist to think that this could happen. Fundamentalism, it was obvious that weekend, does not depend on a god.

Still, here were times when the convention showed what could be. There was Mr. Warraq's talk, for instance, and, perhaps most striking of all, a lecture by Michael Cuneo, a professor from New York City, an expert on delusions of devilry, and those who prey upon it. In an amusing presentation, he spoke of ceremonies that combine the best of The Exorcist with the worst of Elmer Gantry. This was skepticism at its good-humored, informative best, an inspiration, one would think, to the Hyatt's godless horde. But there was one small irony.

Prof. Cuneo teaches at Fordham, a Jesuit university, and, yes, he's a Catholic.

Fashion Victims

National Review Online, February 26th, 2002

Over in Europe, as George Bush has been reminded only very recently, the chattering classes are uncomfortable with the notion of evil. As an idea it is just so, to borrow a word from the French foreign minister, "simplistic." However, even allowing for the old continent's tawdry attempts at world-weary sophistication, it is disappointing, to say the least, that a disgusting event in London last Wednesday passed with little notice, no criticism and, here and there, some applause. It was a spectacle that combined shallow frivolityand deep, deep moral relativism and, of all unlikely places, it occurred at a show during the British capital's Fashion Week, at the catwalk debut for a collection created by Helga and Eva, 24-year-old twins from Austria.

Helga and Eva claim to find their inspiration in their country's past, including, they say, the Third Reich. They have already enjoyed some success. Their label was included as part of Fashion Week's "New Generation," a group of young designers sponsored by a leading British retailer.

In what was, doubtless, intended to be a witty gesture, invitations to see the twins' collection were based on Nazi-era passports. At the show itself, the musical backdrop contributed to the totalitarian theme with a soundtrack that combined classical tunes, Wehrmacht chants and folk songs, all overlaid with Led Zeppelin. Jimmy Page's heavy metal was included, apparently, as a gesture to contemporary western culture.

The collection featured designs based on both the industrial and political aesthetic of the former dictatorship. On display that Wednesday were cloaks and knitted sweaters, all, naturally, in parade-ground brown, and often emblazoned with the regime's most famous symbol, the swastika. In a neat touch, jackets and dresses were edged with little Iron Crosses.

The London press seemed to like what it saw. A commentator in one leading daily said that Helga and Eva had brought the old despotism's fashion sense "in from the cold", while another newspaper ran a friendly piece in which the writer noted that the twins' collections were available at a number of expensive British stores. American fans of designer tyranny will be thrilled to know that these clothes can also be found in New York, Boston, and LA.

Interestingly enough, the prospect of Helga's and Eva's show did not seem to worry Britain's Labour government, usually so sensitive to the slightest hint of political incorrectness. The night before the collection's launch, there was a party in honor of Fashion Week hosted by Tony Blair's wife, Cherie, and the secretary for trade and industry, a busy lady, who doubles up as the U.K.'s "minister for women."

To be fair, these two grandees may have had no idea what would be strutting down the catwalk the next day, and, so far as I know, there was no foretaste of the totalitarian treat to come. It was an evening of chandeliers, not searchlights, of velvet ropes, not manacles. There were no guard-dogs, no watchtowers, no burial pits. The waiters wore shoes, not jackboots, and carried drinks, not guns. Guests were permitted to arrive by taxi rather than cattle truck. There were no amusingly staged beatings or faux executions to sit through. Best of all, everybody was allowed home alive at the end of the evening.

How very different it was 60 or 70 years ago, in that era desecrated by men marching under the symbol now found to be suitable for an expensive knitted sweater. The twins' art is, consciously or unconsciously, a celebration of cruelty, an insult to slaughtered millions, many of whom ended their lives dressed in the only real totalitarian style, the rags and tatters of concentration camp clothing. That two designers can borrow evil's insignia to make a fashion statement is yet another dismal reminder of how little mankind has really understood the nature of 20th-century mass murder.

At this point, I should, however, admit that I have changed a few details in this story, none of which ought to make any difference, but, strangely, they seem to.

The twins' real names are Natasha and Tamara Surguladze. They do not come from Austria, but from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Their Tata-Naka label features designs inspired not by the Third Reich, but the USSR.

Oh, so that's all right then.

The London Daily Telegraph described the scene:

Graphic prints were based on original propaganda motifs from the "industrial art" movement championed by Lenin and Trotsky. Others featured the Cyrillic letters CCCP, which represented the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Sweeping cloaks and knitted sweaters in "Red Square red" were emblazoned with the symbol of the Russian revolution, the hammer and sickle, while glittering Russian stars clasped the edges of jackets and dresses…The "Mother Russia" theme was reflected in the invitations, based on the old USSR passports…and in the music, a garage mix of Shostakovich, Red Army chants and folk songs, overlaid with Led Zeppelin.

And, no, this is not all right.

Yet, somehow, people think that it is. Fascist fashion would shock. Communist chic does not. To wear the swastika has become, quite rightly, a taboo, but the hammer and sickle is, in the hands of Tata-Naka, no more than a vaguely "daring" image, a mark of Cain reduced to a potentially lucrative logo. Quite why this should be the case is difficult to grasp. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were as bad as each other. Trying to find a moral distinction between those two charnel-house states is a pointless exercise in political theology — about as useful as debating how many devils can dance on the head of a pin, and rather more dangerous (it is a partial explanation for the failure to hold a Soviet Nuremberg). Nevertheless, that is exactly what we tend to do — on those rare occasions when the issue is discussed at all. And the usual conclusion, that Hitler's Germany was easily the greater (and history's greatest) horror, has developed into a part of our culture's conventional wisdom, a facile nostrum that removes the need to ask the necessary questions about other monstrous savagery.

It is an illusion that soothes, and it accounts for the fact that most readers of this article were, I suspect, more than a little relieved to discover that the twins had taken their design hints from the creators of the Gulag rather than the architects of Auschwitz.

Well, weren't you?

Raising the Clark Bar

National Review Online, January 13, 2002

The last months of last year were a frightening time for this country. Former certainties seemed shifting and elusive, no more substantial than the dust of two towers once destined to stand for centuries. In their search for reassurance many Americans seemed to turn to the security of a sometimes imagined past, with all its perceived strength and sense of a now lost normality. Televised tributes to Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball were surprise successes, while the usually youth-oriented WB network enjoyed high ratings for a new show dedicated to a hero first spotted in a quiet town in Kansas over 60 years ago.

You remember him. That tall dark-haired fellow with a firm jaw and rock-solid principles, a little staid, perhaps, even if he did wear tights, but always someone who it was good to have around in a moment of peril. Well, just when we need him, Superman is back. He has not yet made it to Metropolis, but WB's Smallville is proving a perfect venue for the Man (or, at least, High-School Student) of Steel.

This latest incarnation, as has often been the case in Superman's somewhat tangled biography, involves a considerable reworking of his previously known history, but this is unlikely to worry a fan base which has previously weathered conflicting versions of, amongst other minor points, their idol's powers, family, childhood, vulnerability to kryptonite, and (poor Lois!) marital status.

WB's take on the myth centers on a young Clark Kent, growing up in the unambitiously named Smallville, Kansas. This Smallville is, as in earlier versions of the super saga, a nostalgic slice of the Heartland, a dreamscape of rolling prairie, grain silos, and red-painted barns, but brought subtly, and undidactically, closer to early 21st-century realities. The coffee shop serves lattes, many of the local farms are in financial difficulty and the high-school principal's last name is Kwan. Clark's social circle is also more diverse than in the past, and now includes feisty, and vaguely feminist, Chloe (Allison Mack). Meanwhile, two familiar characters, redheaded love interest Lana Lang and blond Pete Ross both appear to have taken a spin in Dahr-Nel's Plastimold (a machine which, Nixon-era geeks will remember, was used by Lois Lane to alter her ethnicity in a 1970 story, the remarkable I am Curious (Black)). These days, likeable Pete (Sam Jones) is African-American and Lana (Kristin Kreuk) is played by a raven-haired beauty of partly Asian heritage.

Mild-mannered Clark himself is largely unchanged, although in a skilful performance the almost ludicrously handsome (this is the WB) Tom Welling manages to portray him without the nerdiness that will make his adult self the laughing stock of the Daily Planet newsroom. Other basic plot details follow the traditional pattern. The emerging Superman is still the orphan from outer space being raised by the kindly Ma and Pa Kent (in an enjoyably anarchic piece of casting, the role of Martha Kent is filled by Annette O'Toole, Lana Lane from Superman III). Clark's unusual talents continue to remain a secret, carefully hidden from a dangerous world by his protective adoptive parents. On occasion, however, he has to use these powers, for idyllic Smallville is not as safe as it first seems. Clark's capsule was not the only galactic debris to have landed near this tranquil Kansas town. The same night as Clark's earthfall, the whole area was bombarded by other remnants of his shattered planet in a meteor shower of such ferocity that Lana Lang's parents were killed and a nine-year-old Lex Luthor became a candidate for Rogaine. Even worse, twelve years later, fragments of Krypton are still scattered all over the neighborhood with, all too often, the nasty habit of endowing someone who encounters them with unpleasant, and usually lethal, powers.

It is a clever narrative device, rooting the action firmly in Clark's hometown. Like Buffy The Vampire Slayer's suburban Sunnydale, farm-belt Smallville becomes an appropriately sized arena for a superhero on training wheels. A fireball-tossing football coach is extinguished, a high-voltage villain is short-circuited, and an insect boy's sinister schemes are nipped in the bug, but these are all relatively small fry, vaguely believable so far as super-powered human mutants go. The same could never be true of the far greater evildoers that Clark Kent will encounter later in his career, which is why, when it came to the bad guys, Christopher Reeve's Superman movies tended to descend into camp. By contrast, like most successful science fiction, Smallville can be, and is, played straight.

This low-key approach also leaves more room to explore the nature of Smallville's inhabitants. There is little of the sort of characterization usually labeled, well, "comic book." Even the twentysomething Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) is presented as a complex, complete individual. He is a fairly sympathetic figure, fruitlessly trying to work out "issues" with his megalomaniac father, while at the same time being unfairly snubbed by the rather stern Pa Kent (John Schneider, no longer so easygoing as in his days as Hazzard County's Bo Duke). Only when Luthor encounters a clairvoyant are viewers given a warning of the horrors to come. Of course, as would be expected from the Dawson's Creek network, much of the drama revolves around adolescent angst. There's a hint of Archie about this Superman. In a nice touch, shy Clark finds that his adored-from-afar Lana quite literally makes him go weak at the knees (her kryptonite necklace is to blame), a perfect metaphor for the awkwardness of high-school romance. Lana, meanwhile, thinks that she loves the dreadful Whitney (Eric Johnson), a WASPy jock with the sort of preppie good looks that will almost certainly ensure him a future role as the date rapist in a Lifetime movie.

But the core of the show is, properly enough, Clark, and a great deal of its charm comes from the degree to which we are shown a very human side of the man who will be steel. There are, as one of the writers has explained, "no tights [and] no flights." Young Clark's powers are underplayed and the red cape, mercifully, is absent. We are free, instead, to concentrate on Clark Kent himself. This is only right, for it is the existence of his very human alter ego that has always helped make Superman the most enduring and endearing of all comicdom's superheroes. In Smallville, as elsewhere in the canon, Superman is shown living an ordinary, rather humdrum existence among the rest of us, concealing his extraordinary abilities until the arrival of those dangers that call upon him to use them. Job done, he then returns to his everyday routine. Adding to his appeal is the fact that this is also an archetypically American story. Superman is an immigrant, a refugee from a ruined older world, who successfully adopts the values of the corn-fed heartland that becomes his real home.

Much of the interest in Smallville itself comes from the fact that the early signs of what lies in store for Clark are already becoming visible. He is on Earth, the Kents repeatedly explain, for a purpose, even if that destiny is still not yet manifest. The easy option (football stardom, in one episode) is not for him, and nor, it is understood, is the dark side. This Superman will be no Nietzschean lout. In the meantime Clark wrestles with the conundrum as to who he is, and what he will become. In the end, of course, we know that he will embrace his humanity, his extraterrestrial strengths, and the responsibilities that come from both. Except in the most literal sense, it is not Superman's powers that make him special, but what he chooses to do with them.

It is a potent, and benevolent message, and one that should always find an audience in this most optimistic of nations. Its traces were even visible in a New York Post cartoon published in the bleak days immediately after the World Trade Center attack. It shows a Ground Zero fireman being asked for an autograph by an awestruck clutch of superheroes. These include Superman, which should be no surprise. As Clark Kent would always agree, heroism can take many forms. Yes, some heroes may leap over tall buildings.

But, in real life, others run into them.

Henry Potter Gets His Due

National Review Online, December 22, 2001

He is, of course, the original H. Potter, a silver-screen legend long before young Harry was even a twinkle in a witch's eye. You know him better, perhaps, as "Mister Potter," stern-browed, stentorian, scowling and shrewd, the true star of that annual tryst for our tear ducts, Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. Forget, for a while, ingratiating George Bailey, batty Uncle Billy, and Zuzu's precious petals. This Christmas, why not focus instead on Mr. Capra's greatest creation, Henry Potter (no one called him Harry), the J. P. Morgan of Bedford Falls, a Main Street mogul with an empire to build? Played by Lionel Barrymore with a savage gusto, Potter is a titan among pygmies, a force of nature so overwhelming that, despite his wheelchair (in real life, tragically, Barrymore suffered from a disabling form of arthritis) no one else has a chance. We catch our first sight of him early in the movie, clattering along in an old-fashioned coach and horses. It is a glimpse of glory.

"Who is that," asks Clarence the angel, "a king?"

It is an understandable mistake, but the reply (from a more senior seraph) reveals the terrible truth.

"That's Henry F. Potter, the richest and meanest man in the county".

If It's A Wonderful Life is the New World's answer to A Christmas Carol, then Potter is its Scrooge, but he is a very American Scrooge, bigger, badder, and bolder than his cold-crabbed counterpart across the Atlantic. To start with, he likes a bit of luxury. Potter will spend money, so long as it is on himself. From what we read about Scrooge, we know that he was prepared to lavish little on heating ("[he] had a very small fire") and not much on accommodation ("a gloomy suite of rooms" in an office building, apparently). Potter, by contrast lives in some splendor. He employs a manservant and dresses stylishly. In his office there is a large bust of Napoleon. Potter is a man who likes to dream.

We never discover the full extent of his business activities, but it is obvious that, locally, he is the economically dominant figure ("This town is no place for any man unless he is prepared to crawl to Potter") and it has to be admitted (although in Capra's biased script no one ever does) that, with the help of his wealth, Bedford Falls has become a pleasant, if slightly dull place. These days this crippled Croesus would be praised as a role model and profiled in People as an inspiration to the "physically challenged." Without even the help of the ADA, Potter has triumphed over disability and made a large fortune. He is a lender of last resort, and, for some poorer citizens, a landlord. Of course there are complaints about the standards of his rental property, but what tenant does not like to grumble?

He is not, it is clear, overly sentimental ("I am an old man and most people hate me, but I don't like them either, so that makes it even"). A Rumsfeld in a Rockwell town, Potter is not a man to mince words. References to the "rabble" and the need for working-class thrift would point to politics that are reassuringly conservative if not exactly compassionate. His approach to commerce is sound. Charity and business should not be muddled up, credit must be checked and loans repaid. Like Warren Buffett, he is a longer term, contrarian investor, prepared even (at a price) to back Bedford Falls' failing banks in a moment of crisis. Unlike Scrooge he will reward a potentially valuable hire. The deal Potter offered George Bailey, $20,000 a year for three years, was extraordinarily generous, unthinkable from miserly Ebenezer, an employer who begrudged his clerk a lump of coal. Given the opportunity, in that alternative timeline where George Bailey never lived, the energetic and enterprising Potter even manages to transform his sleepy hometown from a PBS sort of place into a WB city, the glamorous, glittering Pottersville, a Yankee Las Vegas complete with Midnight Club (Dancing!), Bamboo Room (Cocktails!), and burlesque (20 gorgeous girls!).

George Bailey, however, did exist, and Pottersville is never to be. Quite why the survival, under his control, of the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan should have made such a difference is never made clear. Potter's financial strength cannot have been dependent on the income derived from renting to the likes of Giuseppe Martini, so losses to competition from George's Levittown, the immodestly named Bailey Park, seem unlikely to blame. Perhaps this mystery is to be expected. There is no room for economic logic in a fairy tale or, for that matter, the operations of Bailey Brothers. The building and loan is as much Barnum as it is Bailey. It appears to flourish despite a limited capital base (a shortfall of $8,000, ultimately, is enough to cause a near terminal crisis), nepotism, commingling of personal and bank funds, and a staff that appears to consist only of a bird and a birdbrain as well as Cousin Eustace the shock-haired clerk, a secretary (another cousin, naturally), and, of course, George Bailey himself.

Now George, it is true, is not quite as bland as is sometimes claimed. There are moments of redeeming vice. He is a grown man who picks up a girl at a high-school dance and then tries to impress her with an act of petty vandalism at the old Granville house. This night of shame reaches its dismal nadir when Bailey threatens to leave his date undressed in a shrubbery, a potential public humiliation that would have had terrible consequences in such a small community. Running through the movie there is also the question of uxorious George's curiously ambiguous relationship with Violet Bick, the woman who put the fallen in Bedford Falls, culminating in the occasion when he offers the hussy a "loan" to get out of town. But, these peccadilloes apart, George Bailey is unquestionably a fine fellow, dutiful, decent, and a lifesaver, a Clark Kent without the cape, a modest hero for a straightforward age. It is a testimony to the power of Capra's good guy that, more than 50 disillusioning years later, we are still rooting for him to win.

But not without a backwards glance at old Potter, cruel but compelling, appalling yet attractive, a man who doesn't really need the assistance of trick furniture to dominate his every encounter with George Bailey. His charisma is an old, but effective, cliché. For the most part, as viewers of the bin Laden video were recently reminded, wrongdoers are rather dull, pedestrian types, but whether it is Milton's Lucifer or Oliver Stone's Gekko, the vibrant fascinating villain has become a stock character, a rationalization, perhaps, of our tendency to give in to evil's temptations.

Frank Capra himself seems to have succumbed to his creation's wicked allure. For, while the director does show the financier's descent into outright criminality (the theft of the $8,000 left lying around by Uncle Billy), this squalid behavior seems to bring Mr. Potter little in the way of adverse consequences. Although thwarted in this final attempt to ruin the building and loan, Potter survives the movie unscathed. He gets to keep the $8,000 and unlike the craven Scrooge, he remains proud and unrepentant.

There will, it is clear, be no turkeys from Henry F. Potter for the Cratchits of Bedford Falls.

Rummy and Juliet

National Review Online, December 11, 2001

He is a mauler of mullahs, and a colossus in Kabul, but for the secretary of defense these triumphs may only be a beginning. Squinting through his glasses for media briefing after media briefing, this gray-flannelled generalissimo is America's newest TV sensation. What's more, with every appearance, some say, he is making additional conquests, not of Herat this time, but of hearts, the hearts of women all over America, each beating a little harder at the thought of a man who, these ladies like to believe, doesn't need the help of a B-52 to make the earth move. Donald Rumsfeld, it seems, has become a romantic icon, a History Channel guy who is going to wind up on Lifetime. We shouldn't really be surprised. Chicks dig chiefs, or, to use Henry Kissinger's more elegant phraseology, " power is the great aphrodisiac." In a celebrity-saturated culture, Secretary Rumsfeld may also be benefiting from a subliminal association with an already-established idol, one called Cruise (the actor not the missile). There are, after all, some remarkable similarities between the two men. Both are a little on the short side, both were high-school wrestling stars, Tom Cruise played a naval aviator, and Donald Rumsfeld was a naval aviator. Could it be that in the fantasies of his followers, Rummy is really Maverick?

It took Larry King to try and bring discussion of some of these issues out into the open. Interviewing the defense secretary the other night, CNN's most courageous investigative journalist came out with the question that no one else in America had dared to ask.

"Secretary Rumsfeld…Do you like this image? You now have this new image called sex symbol."

It is safe to say that, unless there was more to Robert McNamara than met the eye, this is not a question that has ever previously been put to a wartime secretary of defense, but there was no need to worry. As we all now realize, Mr. Rumsfeld is someone well equipped to deal with an unexpected challenge, and his response to this latest media impertinence was calm and to the point.

"Oh come on."

As fans of Rummy's press conferences will know, follow-up questions can be dangerous (to the journalist). Larry King, however, is no member of the milksop Pentagon news corps. Eager for martyrdom, he persevered with his line of inquiry, fearlessly claiming that Mr. Rumsfeld was indeed "the guy." At this point, it would be reasonable to hope that the defense secretary would, as befitting his job description, stick to his guns. Our hero wavered. And who can blame him? Told by the seven-times married Mr. King that, when it comes to love-god status, you are now "the guy," it must be difficult to resist.

So, Mr. Rumsfeld admitted that he could be a sex symbol, but "for the AARP." He was, he explained, "pushing 70 years old".

And then came the moment, horrible to watch, when Larry King went too far. He suggested that the hammer of Kandahar was "kidding" about his age, an assertion that brought a stern response.

"I'm 69 and a half years old. Don't give me that stuff."

The Rumsfeld we all know and fear was back. An alarmed Mr. King hastily moved on to safer subjects, such as the role of Kuwait in the current conflict. There was no more analysis of Rummy's attractiveness on TV that evening, and there has not been much since. So far as mainstream media are concerned, this important topic remains largely hidden under a broadcast burqa, driven there either by fear of savage Rumsfeld reprisal or by liberal reluctance to admit that the GOP had finally found a politician who some women actually liked. Newspapers have been no more forthcoming.

So what then is the truth about the defense secretary's sex appeal? The Internet, usually so helpful when it comes to study of this kind, was of little assistance. An initially promising Google check revealed 134,000 entries under "Donald Rumsfeld" (well behind his popular doppelganger "Tom Cruise" (399,000) but closing in on "George Clooney" (143,000)). On closer examination, however, these sites seemed to focus on trivia such as the war, terrorism and the future of the nation. If there were any Rumsfeld fan pages, they were hidden in cyberspace's equivalent of the caves of Tora Bora.

The inevitable next step in this research, from the web to real women, can often be difficult for those of us who surf the Internet, and it was not made any easier by the harsh budgetary constraints within which anyone who deals with NRO has to operate. Plans for a nationwide survey, scientifically compiled by, say, Gallup and broken down by region, income group, age, ethnicity, political affiliation and tendency to watch C-Span had to be shelved in favor of a random series of questions addressed to a far smaller and entirely unrepresentative sample of the fairer sex. However, even after removing the rather over-enthusiastic replies of a few female conservative journalists (this is a family-oriented website), the conclusion was clear: When it comes to the ladies, Rummy has got what it takes.

The revelation that Secretary Rumsfeld remains married, after nearly half a century, to his childhood sweetheart was, to this group, both encouraging (as to his qualities) and disappointing (as to their prospects). Other, less-daunting objections were swiftly swept aside by Rummy's would-be Juliets. Yes, it was conceded, he could be a little brusque, but a straight-talking manner is these days apparently more seductive than a bulk-bought copy of Leaves of Grass.

The "AARP issue" turned out to be even less of a problem. The much younger "Betty" (Chicago, Illinois) offered to "share [Rumsfeld's] early bird special any time." If anything, the defense secretary's age appears to add to his allure. In tough times, daddy is back, and so, incidentally, are his clothes. The always stylish "Susanne" (Pelham, New York) appeared pleased by "her" Donald's fashion sense, a development that may suggest that the next time Naomi Wolf is advising a politician how to dress "alpha" she should steer him away from earth tones and towards Gerald Ford-era gray. So great is the appeal of Adonis Rumsfeld that, Freddy Krueger-like, his power even reaches into the subconscious, and, more specifically, the dreams of "Kathleen" (Washington, DC), an experience she described as "invigorating."

The only sour note in this entire investigation came from a disappointing source, Vice President Dick Cheney. Speaking to US News & World Report from his now traditional "secret, secure location." Mr. Cheney conceded that the defense secretary was "a babe magnet" but only "for the 70-year-old crowd." (He repeated the slur Tuesday night in a Fox News interview.) Well, if that's not a Lieberman moment, what is? Coming from Mr. Rumsfeld, those careful words of qualification were appropriately modest, but from the mouth of Dick Cheney, they sounded a little just a teeny bit envious.

Mrs. Cheney's comments were not recorded.