Up From The Badlands

The New York Sun, January 20, 1996

Legends that appear only rarely need to make sure that when they do so, it's special. Halley's comet pulls this off. Barbra Streisand does not. The brilliant but reclusive filmmaker Terrence Malick falls somewhere in between. Since first attracting attention with his debut feature, the spare and unsettling "Badlands" (1973), the enigmatic Mr. Malick has developed a reputation as a director of genius that, remarkably, rests on just four films, each of which divided critics and, assuming (as seems likely) "The New World" goes the same way, disappointed at the box office.You can see the whole lot in less time than it takes for Frodo finally to throw away that wretched ring: A full Malick retrospective could be finished in less than a day.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music is taking a more leisurely approach. Its "Month of Malick" began January 18 and will last until February 1. It includes the key elements in the canon - "Badlands,""Days of Heaven" (1978),"The Thin Red Line" (1998), and "The New World" (2005) - as well as, for completists only, "Pocket Money"(1972),a piece of dreary 1970s picaresque for which Mr. Malick wrote the script, and Carole King, God help us, the theme song. Don't bother with "Pocket Money," but any of the others is enough to prove that Mr. Malick's is a unique talent, while two of them, "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven," are unquestionably the product of an extraordinary vision that has rarely been matched in American or, indeed, any cinema.

To be sure, a good part of the Malick mystique stems from a rambling,eccentric resume almost guaranteed to generate the label of genius. Start with the fact that his first work was an English translation of Heidegger's "Vom Wesen des Grundes" (Mr. Malick studied philosophy at Harvard and Oxford and taught at M.I.T.) published by Northwestern University Press, throw in the 20 years of silence, Paris, rumor, and abandoned projects that followed "Days of Heaven," add a reluctance to give interviews, be photographed, or disclose very much about himself, and it's no surprise that comparisons with J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon (actually, any hermit icon will do) were quick to be made.

The notion of Mr. Malick as a man apart is only reinforced by the way in which his movies so often maintain an emotional distance from their subjects. In "Badlands," his masterpiece, a film loosely inspired by Charles Starkweather, Caril Ann Fugate, and their Eisenhower-era killing spree, there is no judgment and little passion, just unblinking, meticulous observation as bleak, unyielding, and remorseless as the landscape in which it is shot.

Its deadly, deadpan protagonists, Kit (Martin Sheen, never better) and his young girlfriend, spooky, strange Holly (Sissy Spacek, weirder by far than in "Carrie") reveal little about themselves, not that there is a great deal to reveal. Our own involvement in their fate is further limited by the use Mr. Malick makes of voice-over (something heard in all his movies) to tell their story, another device that reminds us that we are not there in the badlands: We are just part of an audience, spectators, nothing more.

This sense of detachment continued into "Days of Heaven," a love triangle set amid the wheat fields of early-20th-century Texas. Once again framed (and held at a distance) by the words of a narrator, this time in the haunting, scratchy voice of a disconcerting urchin (Linda Manz) from the slums of Chicago, the story unfolds against the astonishing, gorgeously shot landscapes that are the director's trademark. But, just as typically for Mr. Malick, these also serve to underline the grubbiness and insignificance of the human drama that transpires. We may be gripped by the doomed relationship between Bill (Richard Gere), Abby (Brooke Adams),and "the farmer"(tellingly, this character, played by Sam Shepard, is never even given a name), but in the greater scheme of things, their tragedy counts for nothing.

Judging by "The Thin Red Line," the beautiful, intriguing, but ultimately absurd movie that marked the director's long-awaited comeback, not much changed for Mr. Malick in those two intervening decades. As usual, his film looks lovely (even if it occasionally topples over into Sierra Club kitsch), but its protagonists have to take a distant third place behind first-rate cinematography and fourthrate philosophizing.

With the exception of a ravaged, raging lieutenant colonel (Nick Nolte) and the saintly, selfsacrificing Private Witt (Jim Caviezel, limbering up to be Jesus), the members of the cast are barely differentiated and serve largely as examples of certain stock types: the cynic, the softie, and so on. Still, they shouldn't be offended. Even World War II (the film is set during the battle for Guadalcanal) is reduced to a generic conflict, little more really than a platform for Mr. Malick's musings on war (he's against), mankind (not a fan), and the meaning of life itself (quoting Witt's maudlin speculation about whether "all men got one big soul" is as much as I can stomach writing down, but it tells you all you need to know).

In one respect, at least, on this occasion Mr. Malick qualifies his general misanthropy with the rather biblical suggestion that we are a fallen species instead of one that was bad from the beginning. Early in the movie, Guadalcanal's native inhabitants are shown living harmonious (literally, there's a lot of singing), happy, unspoiled lives in marked contrast to the brutish, supposedly civilized men who descend upon them and then proceed to wreck Eden. In essence, this is also the theme (along with yet more dollops of the reheated transcendentalism that casts its sickly pall over "The Thin Red Line") at the heart of "The New World," Mr. Malick's latest film.

This muddled but sometimes mesmerizing movie is far more evenhanded in its treatment of Jamestown's English settlers than some critics have suggested, but its highly romanticized depiction of an American Indian culture that is all Rousseau and no Hobbes again shows Mr. Malick to be a director too ready to abandon subtlety for cheesy hippie didacticism. That's not to say it's a bad film. Far from it (among other achievements, Mr. Malick has coaxed surprisingly touching performances out of both Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas and Christian Bale as the man she ultimately marries).

But it would have been a much, much better movie had Mr. Malick been able to abandon his fantasy of an Eden that never was: Humanity lives in the badlands. Always has. Always will. And we need Mr. Malick back there with us to show how it's going to be.

Wonkette Jumps the Snark

Ana Marie Cox: Dog Days

New York Sun, January 6, 2006

If you need any confirmation that the glum little town that passes for this nation's capital is hopelessly obsessed with itself, take a look at "Dog Days" (Riverhead Books, 288 pages, $23.95), the Washington frolic and first novel by Ana Marie Cox, the below-the-Beltway blogger better known as Wonkette.

To get the most out of this book, you need to know beforehand what Ms. Cox has been up to on her blog. Sleazy, sarcastic, funny, and salacious ("Politics for People With Dirty Minds"), Wonkette first began lurking around computer terminals back in January 2004, a remote era lost in blogging antiquity when Assad's goons were still hanging out in Lebanon, Jennifer was still hanging with Brad, and John Kerry had not yet been hung out to dry. Following hot, and not a little sweaty, in the wake of Gizmodo (gadgets), Gawker (gossip), and Fleshbot (porn),Wonkette became the latest in a stable of blogs set up by British entrepreneur Nick Denton, its shtick an oddball mess of politics, D.C. rumor, sex, and satire. Throw in the excitement of an election season, along with Ms. Cox's striking good looks, and it's no surprise Wonkette soon shone as a blogosphere star.

The site reached some kind of peak, or nadir (take your pick) in mid-2004 with the saga of naughty Jessica Cutler. She was the senatorial staffer who chronicled her exhausting, grubby - but sometimes financially rewarding - romantic adventures on a Web site,Washingtonienne.com. Wonkette catnip! Ms. Cutler lost her job, but won notoriety, a book contract, and a Playboy spread, and, as she did so, Wonkette reported the disgraceful details to an overexcited world. It was a perfect, if slutty, symbiosis: Wonkette helped make Ms. Cutler a celebrity, and Ms. Cutler attracted readers to Wonkette.

Since then, despite continued critical acclaim (winner of a 2005 "Bloggie" as "best political weblog!"), Wonkette has jumped the snark: Washingtonienne was a one-off, there's a while to go until the presidential election, and, worst of all, the anarchic spirit that characterizes Ms. Cox's blog at its best has all too often been drowned in dully predictable Democratic spin. Unfortunately, the same weakness sometimes surfaces in "Dog Days," a generally very funny book, where the feeblest jokes - more Carter, alas, than Carville - are those aimed at making fools of the Republicans, something the GOP is quite capable of doing for itself.

If nods to contemporary liberal orthodoxy are one problem with "Dog Days," a related flaw is the way in which Ms. Cox takes pains to observe other pieties of our prim and proper era. Given Wonkette's wicked reputation, "Dog Days" is a strangely moralistic tale that concludes (spoiler ahead, but the book's plot, loosely inspired by that loose Washingtonienne, really doesn't matter that much) with Melanie, its once-promising heroine, appearing to abandon adulterous sex and binge drinking in favor of a wholesome return to the Heartland.

As if that's not bleak enough, anyone so obsessive (yes, yes, I was) as to read this book's "acknowledgments" section will be shocked to stumble across the eat-your-greens, Jim Lehrer moment when its supposedly hard-boiled author takes the time to thank political campaign types "for working so hard for so little when so much was at stake. Campaigns can be foolish; what you're fighting for isn't. "Oh, please. Cynics, however, will note that, in exchange for a deal reportedly "in the mid-six figures," Ms. Cox will soon be quitting Wonkette to write what sounds like an eat-your-greens, Jim Lehrer book about the next generation of political activists. Maybe she just needs to ensure that some of them will actually be prepared to speak to her.

But if you're after filth unsoiled by repentance (and who isn't?), a better option is the bracing, brazen smut of Jessica Cutler's (fictionalized) account of her rise to infamy. With its hints of "Fanny Hill," "Heathers," and, so, so distantly, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," "The Washingtonienne" is a shamefully compelling read, its seamy attraction best understood, perhaps, as the literary equivalent of a lap-dance.

For all its crumpled sheets and dodgy assignations, "Dog Days" is something very different, even if we forget its sporadic descents into liberal jabber and Puritan guilt. At times it's as much a work of anthropology as of fiction. Ms. Cox cleverly, and entertainingly, dissects the workings of some of the capital's competing power brokers, hustlers, losers, and drones. And if the detail can occasionally be too much (believe me, it can), it will doubtless delight all those on the Potomac who like nothing better than reading about themselves. Adding to their insider fun, the book is peopled by more lightly disguised D.C. personalities than an Abramoff indictment, but, even if the rest of us won't catch all the references, there's plenty here to enjoy.

As for the story's flow, it is what it is: pleasantly readable, frequently implausible, and enough to lure the reader on to the next page. More important, despite managing to confine her own role (as the "blogger girl") in her own book to a modest minimum, an unusual achievement in any volume coming out of Washington, Ms. Cox also pulls off the trick, rare in a comic work of this nature, of bringing a number of her principal players to life. Melanie, an aide to a stiff, awkward presidential candidate with a suspicious resemblance to John Kerry ("He looks human!" someone had exclaimed. Kind of a low bar, Melanie had thought ... "), and her co-conspirator, Julie, a political consultant of some kind, are believable both as individuals and representatives of a type. Meanwhile, the wanton waitress who poses as the skanky, scandalous blogger "Capitolette" is enough of a character to be performed by Marilyn Monroe at her best, or Jessica Simpson at her worst.

But the greatest pleasures of "Dog Days" are the laugh-out-loud insults, terrific jokes, splendid one-liners, brutal asides, and unkind descriptions that reveal the telegram talents of a blogger in top form. Sure, it's an uneven read, but who could fail to be charmed by the cheerful tastelessness of a novel that describes the mating rituals in a city where "standards of attractiveness ... tracked to availability and not physical beauty" as being "like the Special Olympics of sex ... everyone's a winner!"

Jessica Cutler, that's who. On her (new) Web site, she has written that she did not "love" the book "as much as I thought I would."

Oh well.

A Legendary Lover, Brought Down to Size

Casanova

The New York Sun, December 23, 2005

New Mexico, August 2016  © Andrew Stuttaford

Even his name, Giacomo Casanova, with its lovely rhythms and hint of a sigh, sounds like seduction. Try saying it without smiling as you savor the memory or, more precisely, the legend of this trickster Romeo, bogus aristocrat, and genuine original, a man (perhaps character is a more appropriate word) about whom nothing was ever quite as it seemed, but who deserves better than the lame, preachy mess that is Lasse Hallstrom's dreadful new movie.

To start with, Mr. Hallstrom's "Casanova" fails miserably in its attempts to be sexy, which is, given its subject matter, a remarkable achievement, roughly akin to making a gladiator movie without swords, togas, or thumbs down. Secondly, with the exception of the occasional merciful interlude, usually involving the splendid Oliver Platt, it's simply not amusing: an embarrassing fault in something billed as a comedy. And while we're on the subject, Mr. Hallstrom, Mack Sennett is dead: Pratfalls are no longer funny.

All this is bad enough, but the greatest disappointment is that this Casanova is never allowed to be Casanova. The opportunity to represent the weird, wild, and, all too often, imaginary "real" life of a man more interesting, challenging, and bizarre than anyone encountered in this movie is wasted. The historical Casanova's confused, and confusing, shifts in identity ought to resonate in our own era of experiment, paradox, and uncertain attachment to the notion of objective truth. They ought to, but in this film they are not given the chance.

What we are subjected to instead is a plodding morality tale saturated with the Hallmark treacle and dismal contemporary pieties that ensure that "Casanova" will one day find a natural berth on television's Lifetime channel. To cut a short story shorter, after a few feeble twists, twitches, and turns of what passes for a plot, Casanova loses his heart to Francesca Bruni, an annoying protofeminist played by Sienna Miller, who is much more than one "n" away from being a believable Italian, let alone a feisty thinker centuries ahead of her time. It would, I suppose, be too much of a spoiler to reveal whether the legendary libertine finally succumbs to the questionable pleasures of monogamy, but, suffice to say, the real Casanova, who once announced that marriage was "the tomb of love," is now rolling around in his.

That's not to say this movie is without its pleasures. Reasserting his heterosexual credibility after the recent cowboy interlude, Heath Ledger is charming in the title role, a pleasure to watch, and a fine leading man, but slightly too young, hugely too nice, and way too uxorious to be convincing as the brilliant, complex, and cynical charlatan that he is meant to be playing. For better Casanovas, try Vincent Price's cameo in Bob Hope's ludicrous "Casanova's Big Night" (yes, really) or, if dim memory serves me well, Frank Finlay in the BBC series from the 1970s. Oliver Platt, meanwhile, ever the vaudevillian, steals every scene he appears in as Paprizzio, the lard king of Genoa, and Jeremy Irons doesn't come far behind. He does his usual saturnine thing with his usual saturnine competence, this time as Bishop Pucci, an agent of the Inquisition who combines Clouseau's skills with Beria's charm. Naturally, a beautifully filmed Venice, the Garbo of cities, does its usual thing, both as exquisite backdrop and, in its gorgeous, mysterious way, as an essential protagonist in the drama that unfolds.

And the overwhelming sense of this film as an opportunity missed is only sharpened by the occasional tantalizing hint that its makers did indeed have some idea of the enigma that explains (yes, yes, along with all that sex) why, more than 200 years after his death, naughty, elusive Giacomo remains a scandal, a legend, and an enchantment. In one clever scene, Mr. Hallstrom's hero ambles unrecognized by a puppet show dedicated to his purported exploits and rumored intrigues. It's a sly, effective reminder, reiterated in a different way later on in the movie, that the man was not the myth. It's a nice touch and one that the old rogue, writing his unreliable memoirs in the Bohemian castle that was his last refuge, would have appreciated.

Those memoirs, the extraordinary creation of a man who was, ironically, in all other respects a failure as a writer, have done more than anything else to make the idea of Casanova what it is today. Beginning with the fake, vaguely aristocratic, name that Casanova added to his own on the title page, they are a hilarious, disturbing, shameless confection of fact, fantasy, fiction, recollection, confession, philosophy, pornography, wisdom, stupidity, and mischief that throw history off balance and leave morality who knows where.

And as they do, they introduce us to the man that Mr. Hallstrom overlooks, to the man who became Casanova, rake, romantic, con man, entrepreneur, gambler, cleric, spy, jailbird, magician, snob, rebel, and so much more, or, perhaps, so much less. As for Casanova, he simply claimed, more than a little disingenuously, that the joke was on him: He wrote about Casanova to "laugh at myself" and, he said, he succeeded.

Mr. Hallstrom's "Casanova" would have reduced him to tears.

Never Forget

The New York Sun, December 22, 2005

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

In the end, perhaps, communism will be remembered not so much for what it left behind as for what it didn't. The decades of totalitarian rule annihilated cultures, brutalized civilizations, and crushed the hopes of generations. These were the plague years, a time of slaughter on a scale never seen before: The authoritative "Black Book of Communism" (1999) puts the death toll at around 100 million, and the tally of those who passed through the Gulag, the Lao Gai, and other lesser-known hells exceeds that.

While these horrors are generally acknowledged, it is grudgingly and tacitly; there has been no Soviet Nuremberg and has never been a proper reckoning. Wander today through the cities of the old communist bloc, and there is an uneasy sense that something is not quite right. It's even there in the architecture, haunting those buildings that have managed to hang on since the time before the red flag flew. Often now beautifully restored, they stand isolated and incongruous amid the stained concrete of communism and the gimcrack glitter of the cut-and-paste capitalism that followed. Elderly, elegant mourners at a slapdash, shabby funeral, these relics are quiet, reproachful reminders of the way of life annihilated by the builders of the radiant future. They are hints of a tragedy that deserves far more explicit commemoration.

In Russia itself, now presided over by a former secret policeman, recognition of the crimes of the past is a sporadic, compromised, and listless affair. Here and there, the determined visitor can certainly find an exhibit, a statue, a tumbledown camp barracks, but these are mere scraps of mourning, an insult to the dead, apallingly compounded by the current government's nostalgia for the communist era. Earlier this fall, a bust of "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky, the mass murderer who founded the Cheka - what became the KGB - was reinstalled in front of the Interior Ministry building in Moscow. He was being honored, one police spokesman said, for his work with orphans and street children. How nice.

Outside Russia, matters are often more straightforward. Communism can be portrayed, sometimes not quite accurately, as something imposed, some thing foreign. Thus newly freed Latvia was among the first to establish an occupation museum, while in Lithuania the cells of the Vilnius KGB were quickly opened up to give their dank, depressing glimpse of atrocity. In many other parts of the fallen empire, too, there are memorials, museums, archives, each designed to extract something, anything, from the wreckage of history.

It's a measure of the Kremlin's reach that one of these museums is located in an old, shabby wooden house, tucked away in a corner of Ulan Bator (Ulaanbataar), the capital of faraway Mongolia.And it's a measure of its nature that what's found inside is a record of cruelty that Genghis himself would have appreciated. The house once belonged to Peljidiin Genden, a Mongolian prime minister executed in Moscow on Stalin's orders in November 1937. (Genden's successor was to meet the same fate in the same city, just four years later.) Russia's Bolsheviks may have played a critical part in bolstering Mongolia's independence from China in the struggles of 1920-21, but within a short time, Mongolian self-determination was reduced to a lethal and contemptuously transparent sham.

In the 1920s and 1930s this nation at the ends of the earth found itself subjected to the prescriptions, psychoses, and millennial fantasies of a gang of revolutionary despots thousands of miles to the west. Class enemies had to be eliminated, the kulak threat dealt with, and agriculture collectivized. In Mongolia at that time, class enemies in the usual sense were few and far between, no capitalists were to be found, kulaks were inconveniently scarce, and collectivization would destroy a pastoral, nomadic culture that had endured for thousands of years. No matter.The plan had to be fulfilled. And it was.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

A large, angry painting on the first floor of Genden's house shows just how. It's a series of vignettes - part Bosch, part Bayeux - painted against a characteristic landscape of high plains and bright blue sky. In each, soldiers in the flat caps and jackboots of another country's revolution are shown, at times in unbearable detail, beating, shooting, interrogating, raping. A monastery is ablaze. A ger (a Mongolian yurt) is ran sacked. Death comes from hatchet, firing squad, or bullet in the back of the head. Bodies are left unburied, a feast for the vultures that wait. It is no surprise to be told that the artist's father perished during those years.The old order had little with which it could defend itself against the rage of the state. Weapons used in uprisings against the authorities are displayed in a glass case: pikes, some swords, a few old rifles and pistols; not much use,really,against machine guns, artillery, and tanks.

Elsewhere, the typical detritus of communist rule is on display: copies of long-forgotten edicts, photographs of long-forgotten trials, and, as always in such exhibits, the images of those who disappeared into the 100 million. Sometimes these are mug shots of the newly arrested - shock, terror, resignation. On other occasions the victims are recorded in earlier life, in a smart suit, at a conference, resplendent in the robes of a Buddhist priest - unaware of what fate had in store.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

The centerpiece of the Genden house is a waxwork tableau of an interrogation. An officer in the security forces sits facing a prisoner. The interrogator's face is harsh and unforgiving. The prisoner is slumped in his chair, head bowed. Skulls on display upstairs demonstrate where such interrogations often led. They were uncovered during the excavation of a ravine near Ulan Bator two or three years ago. In all, the remains of around 1,000 people were found, just a small portion of the tens of thousands butchered or imprisoned at this time. Buddhist monks were a particular target. In August 1938 one Soviet "adviser" wrote happily that "the top ecclesiastics had been eliminated" and that most of the country's temples had been reduced to "ash heaps." There are good reasons why Ulan Bator is today a formulaically drab Soviet city.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

The dictatorship fell in 1990, taking with it the statue of Stalin that had, incredibly, remained outside the national library until then (it later reappeared in a disco), but the murderous Georgian's local surrogate, Marshal Choibalsan, still preens on his plinth outside Ulan Bator's university, inspiring the youth of Mongolia to who knows what. Choibalsan's Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, scrubbed, buffed, and brought tactfully up to date, is prominent in the country's government.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

Still, Mongolia has made a better job of coming to terms with the realities of communism than most. Even here in the United States, the country that patiently, marvelously, and miraculously wore down the evil empire, the crimes of communism's past are regularly played down in a way that, if it were those of the Third Reich that were under discussion, would rightly be condemned.

And communism was never just a foreign scourge, irrelevant to those fortunate enough to live on this side of the Atlantic.Thousands of Americans died fighting the Cold War's hot wars in Southeast Asia, Korea, or the more shadowy conflicts elsewhere. Millions of others either fled the execution chambers and concentration camps of the Great Utopia or had family members who managed the same feat, if they were lucky, or found themselves trapped, or worse, if they were not.

Defeating this system was an American triumph. That it took so long was an American tragedy.Yet it is a part of the past that many in this country seem oddly unwilling either to acknowledge or, even, to understand. So, for example, the nonprofit Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was established by Congress as long ago as 1993, but it's only now that construction has started in Washington, D.C., on the memorial it has commissioned, a 10-foot bronze replica of the statue to democracy that so briefly graced Tiananmen Square. And it's a second-best solution. Plans for a $100 million museum similar to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have long since been abandoned: The necessary funds could not be raised.

A dollar for each of the dead was, it seems, too much to ask.

Ladies' Man: Kong and his women.

National Review Online, December 16, 2005

As all too many of us have discovered, to be unlucky in love is unlovely, but it’s only the saddest of suitors who ends up in a heap at the bottom of a skyscraper, riddled with bullets and circled by gawpers. Poor, mighty, helpless Kong. When he fell for Ann Darrow all those years ago, he fell hard: “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.”

So it was, but who can blame an ape for trying? Life on Skull Island was dull, dull, dangerous and dull. Sure, there was a constant supply of comely native girls to snack upon, tear apart, or do whatever it was he did with those sacrificial brides of his, but for the most part his existence was foraging for food and fighting off dinosaurs and nasty spider-like things. The arrival of a blonde deco goddess must have been a welcome distraction.

But who, exactly, was she? We’ll see how Naomi Watts fares in Peter Jackson’s new film, but screaming Fay Wray was never quite up to the Darrow of her creators’ dreams. For that, look to the 1932 novelization of the first Kong’s screenplay. In this eccentric epic, as in the movie, Carl Denham rescues Darrow from the shop where she had been caught stealing an apple. Miracle! She was the girl he needed for his new film: “Large eyes of incredible blueness looked out at him from shadowing lashes; the ripe mouth had passion and humor…Her skin was transparently white. That marvelous kind of skin belongs with the kind of hair which foamed up beneath her shabby hat. This was of pure gold. If Denham had been poetical, which he was not, he might have pictured it spun out of sunlight.”

Phew.

But if it is clear how audiences were expected to react to Ann Darrow what exactly was Kong meant to think about her “bright hair, her perfect face, [and] graceful well proportioned figure”? In a sequence so naughty it vanished for nearly 40 years, Kong gently peels off Ann’s clothes, piece by flimsy piece, pausing only to smell one delectable scrap, before returning to ogle, sniff, and toy with the prize lying prostrate and nearly naked in his hand. In his enthralling, entertaining, and essential history of the Kong movies, Ray Morton notes that director Meriam Cooper always claimed that the scene was purely playful, while Willis O’Brien, the special effects maestro who was, with Cooper, the creative genius behind the film, argued Kong saw Darrow “as a beautiful object”. The “removal of her clothes was akin to plucking the petals off a flower.”

Perhaps, in a more straitlaced time they just had to say that, but to be fair, the Kong novelization does back them up. Sort of. “Ann screamed again, Kong snatched at her. His hand caught in her dress and the dress tore in his huge fingers. More whiteness was revealed. Kong touched the smooth revelation. He pulled again at the torn dress. Then holding Ann tightly, he began to pluck her clothes away as a chimpanzee might undress a doll. As each garment came free into his hand, he felt it excitedly, plainly trying to find some connection between the frail tissue and the whiteness he had exposed.”

As I said, sort of. As I said, phew.

But a world able to accept the marriage of Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett ought to be sophisticated enough to recognize Kong’s feelings for what they really were. Understanding his besotted gaze, we can see how he protects the object of his impractical adoration and, ultimately, we warm to the sacrifice he makes. We may not have asked, but he has told. And those cynics who claim that Kong’s infatuation was no more than pre-Neanderthal lust need to remember the moment that Kong hurled a woman to her death when he discovered she wasn’t Ann. This was a one-girl gorilla.

Or at least he was before he got to Tokyo. Undaunted by his death, the King turned up three decades later in two Japanese movies for which no appropriate adjective has yet been devised. In the first, King Kong versus Godzilla (1962), he’s found on the Pacific island of Faro, where a tribe of Japanese in dark make-up had found a suitably Sixties way to keep him happy: narcotic red berries. Narcotic red berries are the only possible explanation for the confusing narrative that follows, but there is a poignant hint of Kong’s more majestic past when he takes foxy Fumiko Sakurai to the top of Tokyo’s capitol building. She escapes, but only after a narcotic berry spray knocks Kong into the merciful unconsciousness to which the movie’s audience has long, long since succumbed.

For all the turmoil on that tower, however, there was something a touch desultory about the fling with Fumiko. Apes prefer blondes. The makers of Kong’s next Japanese excursion, King Kong Escapes (1967) threw Susan Watson, a blonde lieutenant in the U.N.’s submarine fleet (who knew?), into the mix. It worked. As soon as Casanova Kong, by now living on yet another remote Pacific Island, saw the minx from Turtle Bay, it was love. He demonstrated this in ways sometimes reminiscent of the original King Kong, but sometimes, notably when rescuing Susan from a robot Kong, not. Mie Hama, the former Fumiko (who had in the meantime also been pawed by cinema’s other rampaging id, James Bond, in You Only Live Twice) also returned to the fray in this movie, this time as the villainous Madame Piranha, an agent for Red China whose presence was, I like to think, a reproach to Kong for the way in which he had now taken to playing the field.

If there was a touch of Teddy Roosevelt about the attitudes underpinning the first King Kong, so the movie that marked the franchise’s return to America in 1976 mirrored a suspicion of big business that was, along with an environmentalist subtext, hints of corruption in the White House, and refreshing honesty about the real nature of Kong’s interest in his latest blonde, very characteristic of its time. In the same way, the blonde, played by a Jessica Lange hot enough to bring Godzilla to his knees, was, in contrast to the passive Ann Darrow, an emancipated woman of the ERA era perfectly capable of telling her simian seducer what for. Hear her roar, monkey boy. More than that, the erotic attraction went both ways. Kong’s earlier sweethearts may have felt sorry for the big lunk, but that was it; with Dwan, there was, in the end, something…else. And if you think I’m wrong, just check out the look on her face when Kong, ahem, dries her off.

But Dwan may have been too forward for Kong, something of a reactionary when it came to the fair sex. In King Kong Lives (1986), he retreated to the safety of his own species, even fathering a little Kong with Lady Kong (who had, conveniently, been discovered living in Borneo) before dying his now traditional death at the hands of the US military. The potential human love interest, although blonde only to her highlights, was pretty Amy Franklin (Linda Hamilton), the doctor who gave Kong his artificial heart (don’t ask), but as the ungrateful ape seemed not to notice, the lovely Linda fled to CBS to play Beauty to a lugubrious lion-man, a Beast who actually paid her some attention.

Kong shunned Amy, audiences shunned Kong. Without the girl, the monkey was just a monster. And without much of a screenplay the monster was just an oaf. King Kong Lives died, but its classic predecessor remains unscathed, intoxicating, and immortal. With its groundbreaking effects, beguiling score, glorious cinematography and haunting clash of primitive and modern, the original King Kong will always endure, but it was the doomed, hopeless love for Ann Darrow that turned movie into myth and Kong into you, somehow, and me. That myth was so strong it could survive and even sustain the ludicrous liaisons and absurd exploits of the Japanese years, and it flourishes still: Any King Kong that ignores its lessons, its passion, and its tragedy will be in deep, deep trouble.

Over to you, Naomi.

A Marvelous Excursion in the Lion's Kingdom

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

The New York Sun, December 8, 2005

If there's one thing that Brits of the old school didn't appreciate, it was a fuss, and if there's one thing we know about the repressed, eccentric, and misogynistic C.S. Lewis, it's that he was a Brit of the old school. Nevertheless, it's easy to imagine that Lewis, a man who relished vigorous debate, would have enjoyed the fuss that has newly enveloped his Narnia in controversy, rancor, and - from the faithful - fresh adulation. As scolds scold, his vision is sexist, Anglocentric, and - fashionably - maybe even Islamophobic. The Narnia stories are, allegedly, cunning and deceitful propaganda for that nasty Jesus, an insidious trap for generations of unwary secularist tots. Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik even cast doubts on Lewis' grasp of Christian theology. Aslan should, he wrote, have been something less glorious, a donkey, perhaps, rather than a lion. Aslan an ass? As if.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the culture wars, great hopes have been pinned on the Disney version of the lion's tale. The film was co-produced by a billionaire Christian entrepreneur (Philip Anschutz and his Walden Media) and even endorsed by the odd but oddly influential Focus on the Family. Sensing that this movie may be a second coming of "The Passion of the Christ," other evangelical groups have discreetly dropped the boycott long imposed on Disney for gay days, the Weinstein brothers, and other offenses. Disney has returned the compliment, enlisting evangelicals and Christian marketing groups to help promote the movie.

But all this is to miss the point. The tales of Narnia were always intended as something subtler than allegory. It's easy for a child to read them and miss the Christian resonance altogether (age 8 or 9, I did). As Lewis recalled, the first inspiration for the stories was visual - not spiritual - a picture that came to him "of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood," and much of the force, and the wonder, of these books comes from the striking images they contain. These images, especially when reinforced by Pauline Baynes's marvelous illustrations, do so much to bring this fictional world to vivid, memorable, and compelling life.

In this, and not only this, this movie version of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," directed by Andrew Adamson of "Shrek" fame, is a terrific interpretation of Lewis's vision. An earlier attempt, the BBC's 1988 version (available on DVD in this country, but don't bother), was shipwrecked by puppet level performances, primitive effects, and a budget that cannot have exceeded £5, 2 pence, and a prayer. Stagy and contrived, it had the conviction of a pantomime horse, or, more accurately, lion, and belongs with Ralph Bakshi's atrocious "Lord of the Rings" in that special hell reserved for those movies that turn Inklings' dreams into dross. By contrast, the CGI that underpins Mr. Adamson's film will transport its audiences into a Narnia of witches, fauns, minotaurs, monsters (younger members of the audience will get a fright or two, which will probably do them good), giants, and talking animals as effectively as the train in the movie's early sequences carries the Pevensie children from the London Blitz into the depths of the lush, green English countryside (New Zealand, actually, once again passing itself off as the Shire), the heart of an Albion where landscape, legend, and history merge into myth.

These effects pass their toughest test in the film's climax, which is, if we're honest about it, a battle between two menageries. Handled incorrectly, this could easily descend into absurdity, but instead we're shown a stirring struggle that matches anything witnessed at Helm's Deep, and which does more than justice to that sense of the epic that plays so large a part in the enchantment that is Narnia.

As even the hapless nerds who plowed their weary way through the three most recent "Star Wars" films could tell you, though, special effects by themselves are not enough. The strength of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is that it not only features animals that can talk, it also boasts actors who can act. Almost without exception, the fine cast (even, such as in the case of Rupert Everett's delightful fox, when we only hear their voices) adds to the pleasure of the film, but it is Tilda Swinton's extraordinary Jadis who succeeds in stealing the movie despite failing to hang on to Narnia. With her almost translucent skin and austere, angular Scots features, Ms. Swinton is a natural to portray Lewis's witch:

"Her face was white - not merely pale, but white like snow or paper or icing-sugar, except for her very red mouth. It was a beautiful face in other respects, but proud and cold and stern."

And she is, as Ms. Swinton's commanding performance leaves no doubt, every inch a queen and in every thought and deed a force for bleak, relentless evil.

The young actors and actresses playing the four children who stand between the White Witch and her winter without end are more than up to the challenge, however. In particular, little Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley) is a beguiling, wide-eyed imp whose anarchic enthusiasm lights up the screen whenever she appears. Meanwhile her oldest brother, grave, responsible Peter (William Moseley), will delight the girls with his classic, slightly old-fashioned good looks and faint aura of the doomed subaltern of the trenches that C.S. Lewis so nearly was. And it would be invidious not to mention James McAvoy's charming, delicately touching Mr. Tumnus, the faun who is white rabbit to Lucy's Alice, and her introduction, and ours, to Narnia and the weird, heroic adventure that Lewis set out to describe.

It's a story to which Mr. Adamson and his writers have remained, quite rightly, almost completely faithful. They have, fortunately, avoided reproducing the feel of those passages in the original novel where Lewis comes across as a rather condescending vicar, but any changes or embellishments to the plot itself are minimal and, if it's not heresy to say so, an improvement. What's more, from the snowy wastes of the witch's domain to the glistening, gathering signs of thaw that signal that Aslan is indeed on the move, this unusually beautiful film also looks right: This is the Narnia that I saw when I read this book as a small boy nearly four decades ago, and there will be, I suspect, many others who will succumb to the same delighted nostalgia.

As for the book's message, such as it is, that's in the movie, as it should be, but why that should offend or upset anyone is beyond me. The film is never explicitly preachy, and the story itself stands on its own merits. Lewis, an inveterate (and, complained Tolkien, somewhat indiscriminate) miner of myth, knew that well-told sagas of quest, comradeship, war, self-sacrifice, and even resurrection have long gripped the human imagination. Under the circumstances, it's no great shock that "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was not to be the only excursion to Narnia, and it's not much more of a surprise that the combined "Chronicles" have now sold around 90 million copies.

Back to work, Mr. Adamson, your audience is waiting.

An Imperfect Enjoyment

The Libertine

The New York Sun, November 23, 2005

"The Libertine" is a fierce, intelligent, and compelling account of John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester (1647-80). It is also infuriating, not so much for what it is, as for what it could have been.

Perhaps this is inevitable. In the course of his brief, brilliant, dark shambles of a life, Rochester was a poet, a satirist, a wit, a lampoonist, a classicist, a thug, a drunk, a bully, a brawler, a hero, a coward, a lecher, a prankster, a kidnapper, a pimp, a penitent, a politician, an atheist, a jailbird, a courtier, an exile, and, curiously, an occasional importer of dildos. To describe - and explain - all that in two hours was never going to be easy, but, sadly, "The Libertine" (based on the 1994 play of the same name by Stephen Jeffreys) only covers the five years leading up to Rochester's death and never really tries to do so.

Adding to the sense of an opportunity missed, the movie makes little or no effort to show how the wicked earl was the perfect symbol of his torn, troubled age. Yes, with its startling juxtapositions of splendor and squalor, "The Libertine" skillfully portrays the uneven, unsettling, and treacherous surface of Restoration England, but it does too little to show the turmoil that lay beneath, turmoil that played no small part in making Rochester the man he became.

England in the 1670s was febrile, discontented, and restless, scarred by the recent civil war and unsure about what would come next. The monarchy may have returned after the collapse of a short-lived republic, but the old certainties had not. When the English revolutionaries decapitated the first King Charles, they also finally destroyed the idea that a king derived his authority solely from God. And if God's representative was no longer God's, what could hold society together? To the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (like Rochester, an atheist), the only feasible solution was an all-powerful state. To Rochester, the only possible response was "Who cares?"

His indifference extended far beyond political theory. With God a dead myth and the afterlife a shattered illusion, all that remained was to eke what enjoyment he could from an existence that was temporary, random, and pointless. Life was a joke, the punch line was savage, and the laughter hollow. Mr. Jeffreys's play hinted at all this, but the movie adaptation (on which he also collaborated) opts for disconcerting spectacle over troubling speculation, and the real inspiration of Rochester's wild ride is left in shadow.

Where the film does succeed, magnificently, is in its depiction of a man trapped in the obsessive pursuit of pleasures that only reinforced his self-loathing, rage, and despair and left him dead of syphilis at the age of 33. In the movie's deeply disturbing, hypnotic prologue, Johnny Depp's saturnine Rochester (another remarkable performance by this most remarkable of actors) warns the audience that we "will not like" him. It is just as clear that he does not like us. Nor, indeed, does he think very much of himself. His is a baleful vision, and it oozes the weary disgust that saturates the uncomfortable imagery of this bleak, demanding film. Rochester's circle of wits is made up of the corpulent, the malicious, and the grotesque, and his London is a primitive, merciless city, shot in drab, bleached, wan colors, where even the fittest are sick, and few survive for long.

These ideas descend into nightmare during the course of a scene inspired by Rochester's "A Ramble in St. James's Park," a poem of impressive obscenity that begins with the funniest two lines ever written on the subject of gossip - this is a family newspaper, so you will have to look them up yourself - and culminates in sour, desperate fury. A revolted Rochester is filmed stumbling through the mists, miasmas, and degradation of what was then London's naughtiest rendezvous (hopeful tourists should note that the park, these days, is not what it was). The frantic, rococo writhing, coupling, and who knows what is to Rochester yet another brutal reminder that you don't need God to make a hell.

But it's not all gloom, disease, and debauchery. "The Libertine" also offers a romanticized version of the liaison between Rochester and his teenage mistress, the actress Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton, in a rather earnest performance), that is part "Pygmalion," part feminist fable, and which conveniently manages to overlook its more, uh, mercenary aspects. To their credit, however, the movie's creators resist the temptation to apply today's dreary orthodoxies to the poet's relationship with the other Elizabeth, his wife, the Countess of Rochester (played to heartbreaking and aristocratic perfection by Rosamund Pike, a lovely actress so poised that she even brought a touch of class to last month's catastrophic "Doom"). While Rochester's girlfriends, boyfriends (oh yes, that too), mistresses, whores, and bastards put their strains on the marriage, the movie correctly leaves little doubt that the earl and his countess shared a real - and loving - affection.

This makes the cruelty of a critical scene in which Rochester humiliates his wife by refusing to stand alongside her for a formal portrait, posing instead with a monkey, all the more puzzling. So far as we know, Elizabeth never attended those sittings, and, typically for Rochester, the painting (it now hangs in London's National Portrait Gallery and shows him crowning a rather dissolute-looking monkey with a poet's wreath) was, primarily, a joke at his own expense. In Mr. Jeffreys's play, if not the movie, the artist understands: "Of all those bewigged men that I painted, bothering posterity with their long faces, he [was] the only one aware of his own absurdity."

On the whole, however, in terms of historical accuracy, "The Libertine's" sins are, unlike those of the earl, minor, mainly of omission, and usually excusable. Even if the idea that Rochester's farce "Sodom" was actually performed in front of an appalled King Charles II (a fine, louche, and cynical cameo by John Malkovich) is a fiction, it's a useful device to help illustrate the way in which the always complicated (and who does complicated better than Mr. Depp?) Rochester relished taunting the man who was his friend, patron, surrogate father, and, much more dangerously, monarch. It also gives "The Libertine's" director, Laurence Dunmore, an entertaining opportunity to demonstrate that there's more to British cinema's barnyard baroque than Ken Russell.

More seriously, the movie is too quick to pass over the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional drama of the poet's once-famous deathbed repentance. Right to his life's wretched, agonizing conclusion, Rochester remained trapped between the past and the future, teetering uneasily between the fear that there was a God and the terror that there was none, before finally toppling back into the faith of his fathers and the arms of his wife. Smug divines all over England were to celebrate the reprobate's return for decades to come.

And somewhere a monkey began to laugh.

Ghosts in The Machine: Spooky looks at the Met.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Perfect Medium

National Review Online, October 31, 2005

I'm not altogether sure that New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is taking its new, entertaining, and utterly charming exhibition dedicated to photography and the occult, entirely seriously. At the launch party for "The Perfect Medium" last month, giggling guests sipped smoke-shrouded potions to woo-woo-woo Theremin tunes, as vast projected images of the séances of a century ago shimmered silver-and-gray against the walls of a great hall that could just, just for a moment, have been in Transylvania. Up beyond the sweep of the Met's Norma Desmond staircase, a cheery crowd thronged past antique photographs of spirits, charlatans, and strange, vaguely unsettling, effluvia. As I peered closely, and myopically, at a mess of tweed and ectoplasm, there was a sudden, startling "boo" in my ear, and a pretty girl who had crept up behind me ran off laughing. As I said, unsettling. As I said, charming.

Unfortunately, the exhibition's catalog is, as such volumes have to be, straight-faced, straight-laced, and saturated in the oddball orthodoxies of the contemporary intelligentsia. With truth, these days, relative, and all opinions valid, it would be too much to expect an establishment such as the Met to say boo to a ghost and it doesn't. In the catalog's foreword the museum's director admits that "controversies over the existence of occult forces cannot be discounted," but he is quick to stress how "the approach of this exhibition is resolutely historical. The curators present the photographs on their own terms, without authoritative comment on their veracity."

Fair, if cowardly, enough, but a chapter entitled "Photography and The Occult" sinks into po-mo ooze: "The traditional question of whether or not to believe in the occult will be set aside...the authors' [Pierre Apraxine and Sophie Schmit] position is precisely that of having no position, or, at least not in so Manichean a form...To transpose such Manicheanism to photography would inevitably mean falling into the rhetoric of proof, or truth or lies, which has been largely discredited in the arena of photography discourse today," something, quite frankly, which does not reflect well on the arena of photography discourse today. Still, if you want a nice snapshot of how postmodernism can be the handmaiden of superstition, there it is. Standing up for evidence, logic and reason is somehow "Manichean", no more valid than the witless embrace of conjuring tricks, disembodied voices and things that go bump in the night. It's a world, um "arena," where proof and truth are reduced to "rhetoric," and, thus, are no more than a debating device stripped of any real meaning.

Thankfully the exhibition, principally dedicated to photographs of the spooky from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is itself free of such idiocies. The images are indeed allowed to stand "on their own terms" and, on their own terms, they fall straight down. They are, quite obviously bogus, balderdash, and baloney, slices of sepia stupidity that are magnificent proof of our species' wonderful curiosity and embarrassing evidence of its hopeless credulity. They were also very much the creations of their own time. After over a century of manipulated images, vanishing commissars and Hollywood magic, we are better at understanding that photography's depiction of reality can often be no more reliable than a half-heard rumor or a whispered campfire tale. One hundred forty years or so ago, we were more trusting in technology, more prepared to believe that the camera could not lie.

And we were wrong to do so. On even a moment's inspection the Met's ghosts, sprites, emanations, and fairies are as ramshackle as they are ridiculous, but all too often they did the trick. The work of the depressingly influential William Mumler, an American photographer operating in the 1860s and 1870s, may include a spectral Abraham Lincoln with his hands resting on the shoulders of Mumler's most famous client, the bereft and crazy Mary Todd Lincoln, but, like the rest of his eerie oeuvre, this insult to John Wilkes Booth was based on crude double exposure (or a variant thereof). Nevertheless, the career of the phantoms' paparazzo flourished for a decade or so, even surviving a trial for fraud (he was acquitted).

Or take a look at the once famous photographs of the Cottingley fairies (1917-20), absurd pictures of wee fey folk frolicking with some schoolgirls in England's Yorkshire countryside. Once you have stopped laughing, ask yourself just why, exactly, the fairies resemble illustrations from magazines. Well, it's elementary, my dear Watson, that's what they were (one of the girls finally confessed in 1981), but to the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a man who dedicated an entire book (The Coming of The Fairies) to the topic, and to many other believers, these fraudulent fairies were the real, fluttering, deal. Fairies were, explained Conan Doyle, a butterfly/human mix, a technically awkward combination that even the great Holmes might have found to be a three-pipe problem.

To be fair, by the 1920s, the possibilities of photographic fakery were no secret to the informed, but this made no difference to Sir Arthur, a convinced spiritualist who was to receive his reward by returning, like Holmes, from the dead (within six hours of his death, the author had popped up in England, moving on later to Vancouver, Paris, New York, Milan and, as ectoplasm, in Winnipeg). Conan Doyle believed what he wanted to believe, and so did his fellow-believers. Photographs could confirm them in their faith, but never overthrow it.

That's a recurrent theme of this exhibition. Yes, back then people were more inclined to give photographs the benefit of the doubt, but again and again we are shown pictures that were demonstrated at the time to be fake, something that did remarkably little to shake the conviction of many spiritualists that the dear departed were just a snapshot away. Even the obvious crudities and photographic inconsistencies could be, and were, explained as a deliberate device of the spirits—apparently they wanted to appear as cut-outs, illustrations, and blurs.

And it wasn't only photographers who egged the susceptible on. The idea that some gifted individual can act as an intermediary between the living and the dead is an idea as old as imbecility, but, after the dramatic appearance of New York State's rapping and tapping Fox sisters in the 1840s, the Victorian era saw a flowering of mediums, only too ready to impress the credulous with mumbo jumbo, materializations, mutterings, Native-American spirit guides (some things never change), transfigurations, grimaces, and tidings from beyond. Some were in it for the money, others for the attention, and a few, poor souls, may have actually believed in what they were doing.

The Met's show includes a fine selection dedicated to those mediums at work. Tables soar, chairs take flight, men in old-fashioned suits levitate, apparitions appear, and ghostly light flashes between outstretched hands. Most striking of all are the visions of ectoplasm snaking out of mouths, nostrils, and other orifices quite unmentionable on a respectable website. These grubby pieces of cotton, giblets, and who knows what were a messy but logical development, manufactured miracles for what was, in essence, a manufactured religion. Like the photographs, like dead Walter's mysterious thumbprint (don't ask), they were evidence. The immaterial had been made material, and in a supposedly more skeptical age, that's what counted. In great part, the enormous popularity of spiritualism in the later 19th century was a response to the threat that science increasingly represented to the certainties of traditional belief. Science had made Doubting Thomases of many, but spiritualism, by purportedly offering definitive proof of an afterlife, enabled its followers to reconcile ancestral faith and eternal superstitions with, they thought, fashionable modernity and the rigors of scientific analysis.

That the science was junk, and the evidence bunk, did not, in the end, matter very much. What counted was that old superstitions had been given a new veneer, and, if that veneer soon warped into a bizarre creed all its own, that's something that ought not to surprise anyone familiar with the nonsense in which mankind has long been prepared to believe—and still is. Any visitor to "The Perfect Medium" tempted to feel superior to the credulous old fogies now making fools of themselves on the walls of the Met should take another look at the metaphysical shambles that surrounds him in our modern America of snake churches, suburban shamans, mainstreet psychics, psychic detectives, pet psychics, psychic hotlines, spirit guides, movie-star scientology, alien abductions, celebrity Kabbalah, Crossing Over, Ghost Hunters, Shirley Maclaine, resentful Wiccans, preachy pagans, and (though I know this won’t be entirely welcome) don't even get me started on Intelligent Design.

Oh yes, "Happy Halloween," one and all...

Mad, Bad & Too Dangerous To Show

Byron

The New York Sun, October 21, 2005

There is something a little peculiar about the BBC's advance publicity for "Byron," a half-hidden hint of embarrassment, a discreet cough of discomfort, which suggests it's a touch worried that this glossy, entertaining new biopic might, like the unfortunate Lady Byron, be taken the wrong way.

Could it be that "Byron," which airs at 9 p.m. this Saturday on BBC America, is an unsuitably aristocratic topic for the obligatory, if strained, New Labour egalitarianism of the British broadcaster? Just in case it could, the BBC takes pains to quote earnest claims by "Byron" star Jonny Lee Miller ("Trainspotting" and Angelina Jolie), that the wicked Lord B. - a man who spent a lifetime milking his aristocratic status for all it was worth, and who was ready to use the poetry of social disdain against those who crossed him (such as his wife's governess, "born in the garret, in the kitchen bred") - "wasn't a snob."

Or was the relentlessly preachy and tiresomely progressive BBC worried that this largely sympathetic drama could be seen as condoning the sexism, and worse, of a man all too often capable of the epic cruelty of the incurably selfish? To name just a few of the women left wailing and wrecked in the Byronic wake, his wife was driven to leave him; his daughter Allegra (the mother, alas, was not poor Lady Byron) was neglected; and when naughty Susan Vaughan, one of his servants (and the mother of yet another Byron bastard) was impudent, and tactless, enough to enjoy a quick fling with Robert Rushton, Byron's, ahem, page (Byron, needless to say, had already done the same thing), she was fired.

None of this is likely to endear Byron to a modern audience; it didn't play too well even back then. Once again, the trusty Lee Miller tries to come up with the necessary unguent, but I'm not sure that it does the trick: "I certainly don't like the way he treated some people, but the lighthearted side of him surprised me." Oh well, so long as he was "lighthearted."

As it happens, the page and the maid had finished their frolics before the period covered by "Byron," the last 12 years of the poet's life, a time in which he found celebrity, scandal, exile, and, finally, redemption and an odd sort of martyrdom. Confining the story to Byron's most eventful years makes narrative sense, but it also comes with another advantage: It allows this drama's creators to sidestep the inconvenient fact that a good number of Byron's earlier lovers were too young, and too male, to be altogether seemly in a romantic idol.

The BBC may be intent on selling the idea of "a poet who lived fast and died young," a James Dean with quill pen and social conscience, but the real Byron ignored convention in ways that made Dean seem like a bishop. He also had a predatory side difficult to reconcile with current notions of what a liberal hero should be. Fully told, Byron's exploits would make very uncomfortable viewing indeed - which is probably why the writers of this production don't try to do so.

What we get instead is a glittering, fast-paced, well-written, wonderfully acted, beautifully scored, and entertaining historical drama; classic BBC, in other words. As usual with such productions, its audience of diligent and studious viewers is, as it should be, rewarded with gratuitous sex, landscape, nudity, architecture, and gossip. Yes, yes, with the exception of some coy looks, dark remarks, and a make-out session on a Greek beach, Byron's boys are banned, but that still leaves a lush, pouting parade of noblewomen, prostitutes, bluestockings, and groupies to lift their skirts for the smoldering poet.

Then there are the three women who defined Byron's final years in England. These were the two (principal) mistresses: Augusta (Natasha Little), his (half) sister, who was, awkwardly, related to him and married to someone else (their first cousin, confusingly), and his "wild antelope," brilliant, crazy Lady Caroline Lamb (Camilla Power), a cross-dressing, vengeful psychotic who makes "Fatal Attraction's" Alexis seem like Sandra Dee. And, oh dear, oh dear, there was the Unsuitable Wife, the pious and mathematically gifted Annabella (Julie Cox), who wandered out of Jane Austen's orderly England into the mayhem of Byron's psyche and found herself seduced, sodomized, scandalized, and spurned by the man she so foolishly married.

Natasha Little and Camilla Power both turn in strong performances, but it is the delicately attractive Julie Cox's touching portrayal of the heartbroken Annabella that lingers. Finally, we should not, could not, forget Lady Melbourne, Caroline Lamb's cynical but entertaining mother-in-law, and, typically for this story, Annabella's aunt. Lady Melbourne was never Byron's lover (she was 60-something, and even he drew the line somewhere), but as his confidante, meddler, and provocateuse she is interpreted with brio and malice by an on-form Vanessa Redgrave inspired, quite clearly, by the badly behaved granny she plays on "Nip/Tuck."

As for the sun around which all those pretty planets revolved, old Rhyming Byron himself, Jonny Lee Miller does a terrific job in conveying the charm, neuroses, poses and danger of this extraordinary man. Sick Boy, it turns out, makes a remarkably convincing peer of the realm. If there are any weaknesses, they belong to the script. There are, sadly, few signs of the wit that could flash from those "fluent lips" (check out his letters to see just how funny Byron could be), and we are left with too little sense either of his poetry or of quite why he became the icon that he did. What's more, his brave, significant, and ultimately fatal intervention in Greece's war of independence is downplayed into a muddy, soggy fiasco.

Nevertheless, despite these (and other) historical lapses and all the Bowdlerizing, this enjoyable production is an excellent introduction to Lord Byron, and, as he might have said, that's not a bad way to spend an evening.

Prime-Time Space Invaders

Invasion

Threshold

Surface

The New York Sun, September 20, 2005

Be afraid, very afraid. Someone somewhere, probably in a French newspaper, is soon going to make a big deal out of the fact that all three U.S. television networks are debuting series about extraterrestrial invasions of Earth. Much as the enjoyable, and perfectly straightforward, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" has long been reinterpreted as a parable of Cold War paranoia (it was nothing of the sort, of course), so "Invasion" (ABC), "Threshold" (CBS), and "Surface" (NBC) will undoubtedly be viewed as an expression of American unease at the threat posed by the alien civilization of Islamic extremism, and, yes, this too will be nonsense.

The coincidence that ABC, NBC, and CBS are offering viewers little green men - or eerie white lights ("Invasion"), or nasty spinning things ("Threshold"), or savage sea monsters ("Surface"), or whatever - owes a great deal to the success of "Lost" and has nothing at all to do with a malevolent and murderous crank firing off fatwas from a cave somewhere in Central Asia. That said, it's also true that since the days that all our species lived in caves, we have enjoyed frightening ourselves with tales of gods, monsters, ghosts, goblins, and ghouls. The evil menace from beyond the stars is just an old bogeyman in a new spacesuit, and as ABC, NBC, and CBS know well, he can still be a good source of chills, thrills, and ratings success.

"Threshold" boasts a hipster hip high dwarf (Peter Dinklage), a beauty who has appeared in both "Sin City" and "Spin City" (Carla Gugino), the return of Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner), and movie-standard production values. Despite all that, the storyline - involving aliens, secret government agencies, and offbeat protagonists - brought back too many memories of the much-missed Mulder and Scully, and it suffered by comparison. I'll give it another episode, but I'm unconvinced that this threshold is worth crossing. Turning to the next of these three shows, I should confess that I haven't actually seen "Surface," but as, by all accounts, it needs to sink very quickly, that's probably just as well.

That leaves ABC's "Invasion." Its creator, Shaun Cassidy, was responsible for the Mayberry-gone-bad of television's disgracefully underrated "American Gothic," one of the spookier shows of recent years and, as a former teenybopper idol (and the half-brother of another), he's someone who knows a thing or two about the dark side. "Invasion," sadly, does not live up to this promising pedigree, but does have, instead, a certain simple-minded charm. So pull out the popcorn, crack open a beer, and switch off your brain.

"Invasion" is not just cliched, it embraces cliche, and it does so with panache, verve, enthusiastically awful acting, and the hokiest use of sinister background music that I have heard in quite a while. We have the iconically-named American small town (Homestead, Fla.) under threat, we have the "typically" fractured American family (children shuttling between rancorous ex-spouses, new significant others on the scene, and so on), and we have the idiot American conspiracy theorist (played, confusingly, by someone trying to impersonate Jack Black) who is likely to be proved right in the end.

The sense that I had seen this all before didn't stop there. By the end of the first episode, there were dark "Body Snatcher"-style hints that neither the hero's ex-wife nor her current husband may be who she or he seems; the Jack Black impersonator had discovered that it's a bad idea to reach down into the swamp for a mysterious underwater light in the course of a scifi show; and a young child had searched the woods for her missing cat in the middle of a raging, lethal storm to, predictably, the wails - between recriminations - of those estranged parents of hers.

Awkwardly for ABC, that raging, lethal storm was a hurricane. As the devastation caused by Katrina became clear, the network pulled commercials for "Invasion," but ultimately decided that the show must go on. That was fair enough, although, ironically, the devastation portrayed in "Invasion" seems feeble when compared with the real horrors inflicted on the Gulf, and loses much of its power as a result. Equally, any Katrina survivors who see this depiction of a prompt, smooth recovery effort in the aftermath of a hurricane will be under no illusion that what they are watching is anything but fiction.

Nevertheless, while "Invasion" is certainly very far from being the best new sci-fi series now on television (that honor is reserved for the reworked "Battlestar Galactica"), those sparkling lights were intriguing enough to me to merit hanging on for at least one more episode. But be warned: Two weeks ago I took time out of a vacation to visit a UFO watchtower in Colorado, so my standards may be less demanding than yours.