England's Arcadia

Juliet Nicolson: The Perfect Summer

The New York Sun, May 2, 2007

Of all the legends with which humanity deludes itself there are few more persistent, enchanting, and tormenting than that of a lost golden age. The Jews of the Old Testament pined for Eden, and the ancient Greeks dreamed of Arcadia. In the fantasies of many modern Britons, that vanished, magical idyll may have taken place on the island they call home, and not that many years ago, but that has only sharpened the sense of loss and tightened its grip on the English imagination.

This particular golden age was said to have been ushered in with a funeral, that of Queen Victoria. It ended, no less ironically, amid celebrations, as cheering crowds feted the declaration of a war that, everyone said, everyone knew, would be over by Christmas. Nearly half a century later, Philip Larkin described the days that followed in his poem "MCMXIV." He did so with a photographer's precision ("moustached archaic faces / Grinning as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark"), a poet's lyricism, and a historian's insight. Larkin concludes with lines that blend fact and myth into a lament for the timeless, prelapsarian Albion that had been thrown so carelessly away.

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word — the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages,

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.

Nostalgia for that brief heyday, its glitter, glory, and grandeur only gaining in retrospective magnificence from the years of slaughter and decades of decline that followed, is a reflection of the horror that the British feel about World War I, a conflict that became, and remains, the greatest trauma in their long history. It's a nostalgia, deep, sentimental, self-indulgent and infinitely sad, that can be found in books, in the cinema, on canvas, and just about anywhere else you may care to look. To give just a few instances, it's this nostalgia that inspired the unexpected power of "Another World, 1897–1917," by former Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. It's this nostalgia, misty and melancholic, that saturates "The Shooting Party," James Mason's elegiac farewell to the big screen, and it's this nostalgia, bitter sweet but undeniable, that runs through "The Go-Between," the only one of L.P. Hartley's novels still widely read today.

To understand this nostalgia is to understand the spirit in which Juliet Nicolson has written "The Perfect Summer" (Grove Press, 264 pages, $25) an evocative, gossipy, and, on occasion, profoundly moving description of five sunbaked months in the middle of 1911. To understand this nostalgia is to understand why this book has sold so well in England. Its success may say as much about the United Kingdom today as its contents do about that same country roughly a century ago. The narrative that unfolds in "The Perfect Summer" revolves around country houses, society balls, naughty debutantes, new money, newer mores, ancient aristocracy, artistic experimentation, wild gambling, the coronation of a monarch, and the meals, oh, the meals. A country house breakfast might include "porridge, whiting, devilled kidneys, cold grouse, tongue, ham, omelette, kedgeree, and cold sliced ptarmigan": Never such breakfasts again.

To be sure, the book contains dutiful references to the gross inequality and grotesque poverty that scarred this era, but with the exception of her vivid description of a series of bitter, and portentous, strikes (and what prompted them), it seems as if Ms. Nicolson, a scion herself of the English upper classes, probably only wrote the more hardscrabble passages as a sop to our own more egalitarian age. They represent brief eat your-greens interludes before she returns with evident relish to the richer, wickedly enjoyable fare that makes up the bulk of her book.

After all, she has to: The essence of an idyll is that it must be idyllic. What's more, this particular idyll has long been scripted to derive its emotional force from the way that it was destined to end on the Western front. The suggestion that this splendor might have crumbled regardless has no part to play in this legend. Nor do awkward statistics, such as that Britain lost many more people, albeit far, far less cruelly, through emigration in the decade or so before the war, than it was to lose in the trenches.

Pedantic folk searching for that type of analysis will have to look elsewhere. It has no more place in "The Perfect Summer" than Mrs. Bridges did "upstairs." This book, by contrast, simply asks its readers to lie back and think of an England that never quite was. So pour yourself some champagne and revel in the sybaritic trivia that Ms. Nicolson lays out so invitingly before us. For example, who could not enjoy discovering what really happened during all those country house Saturday-to-Mondays ("weekend" was considered a frightfully common term), especially as they were, it turns out, ideal venues for romantic intrigue?

Ideal, yes, but a hopeful Romeo still had to watch his step. Among the many delightful anecdotes to be found in this book is the tale of Lord Beresford, who was always, apparently, very careful to check that he was sneaking into the right room. There had, you see, been an earlier and most unfortunate occasion when this lord had leapt "with an exultant ‘Cock-a-doodledo,' onto a darkened bed, believing it to contain his lover, only to be vigorously batted away by the much startled Bishop of Chester."

Never such innocence again?

Victory at All Costs

Lynne Olson: Troublesome Young Men

The New York Sun, April 11, 2007

If there is one thing, and one thing only, to be grasped about Britain's failure to head off Hitler in time, it's that it was almost certainly inevitable. Unfortunately, this is something that readers of "Troublesome Young Men" ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $27.50), a new book that explains how Winston Churchill rose to power and appeasement fell, will have to discover from another, more balanced source.

What's more, to describe "Troublesome Young Men" as a "new" book in anything other than the most literal sense is to be too kind. Yes, the additional, if occasionally rather gossipy, focus that Lynne Olson puts on some of the critics of appeasement who rallied around Churchill is welcome (she's particularly good on the studied ambiguity of Anthony Eden, the former foreign minister who had resigned from Neville Chamberlain's government in early 1938), but for the most part, the story she tells is as dated as Chamberlain's frock coat. More morality play than serious study of the past, and riddled with the clichés of class warfare, it's a version of events that had already found its definitive form by 1940 with the publication of "Guilty Men," a fierce, best-selling tract by the pseudonymous "Cato" (in reality, a triumvirate led by Michael Foot, a young journalist who later became leader of the Labour Party).

"Guilty Men" was brilliantly written, brilliantly persuasive, and brilliantly unjust. Designed to saddle Britain's Tories with responsibility for the mess in which the country found itself after the collapse of France, while at the same time carefully exonerating the Left from any meaningful share of the blame, this cunning polemic succeeded to an extent that even its shrewd, deft, and manipulative authors cannot have expected. It helped pave the way for the crushing defeat of the Conservative Party (even with Churchill at its head) in the 1945 election, and it shaped the way that Britons thought of the disastrous run-up to the war. More than six decades later, it still does.

It's no surprise that it played so well. By making scapegoats of toffs and Tories, Cato spared the rest of the British people the embarrassment of asking themselves what exactly they had been doing while the threat from the Third Reich grew. It was, after all, a period in which Britons in their millions had not only participated in 1935's unofficial "Peace Ballot" (collective security, "effective" sanctions, you know how it goes), but had also, after three more years of Hitler, taken to the streets to celebrate the deal Chamberlain cut at Munich. Tellingly, Ms. Olson has nothing to say about the former. The latter she attributes to Chamberlain's manipulation of both the press and his own party.

To an extent she's right. Some of the most interesting passages in "Troublesome Young Men" are those that show how the prime minister was nothing like the ineffective weakling of popular legend, at least when it came to domestic politics. Despite that, Chamberlain could not (even had he wanted to) afford to ignore the concerns of an electorate ready to pay almost any price to avoid a fresh European war. Any price, that is, other than spending money soon enough on the rearmament that might have made a difference.

Might? Part of the appeal of "Guilty Men" was that it had no room for such shilly-shallying. To the armchair strategists that wrote it, all was clear. This should have been done. That should have been tried. It was an approach, helped by hindsight and the luxury of the hypothetical, which came with an additional advantage. Suggesting that the solutions to the conundrum posed by Hitler were obvious implied that the failure to adopt them (until too late) must have been the result of stupidity, stubbornness, naïveté, or something more malign. In essence, it presumes some sort of guilt. Like many before her, Ms. Olson has gratefully applauded that verdict.

In reality, the situation was far more complicated. There was indeed plenty of stubbornness, naïveté, and the rest of it to go round in the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments, but the idea that there were any easy answers to the problems that Britain faced is nonsense. For example, there was no significant political constituency for military action against Germany until at least the Anschluss, and even if there had been, how would it have been paid for? A few years after the worst of the Great Depression, there was little money to spare, especially for a nation already burdened by bills for the defense of an empire. As for the failure to cooperate with potential allies against Hitler (another key element in Chamberlain's rap sheet), one, the USSR, was a hostile, genocidal dictatorship with, as the Finns were shortly to demonstrate, a feeble army; another, France, was thoroughly demoralized; and a third, Poland, was to last less than three weeks when the panzers struck. And America, of course, was nowhere to be seen.

Even if we put moral considerations to one side, none of this necessarily justifies what was done at Munich, but it helps explain it. That Ms. Olson has largely chosen to ignore these issues is a shame. She's a skilled and lively writer, quite capable of handling complex topics in a way that would not deter the popular audience at which this book (with its occasional lapses into Harlequin baroque) is clearly aimed. As it is, "Troublesome Young Men," which finds itself on much firmer ground when its author turns her attention to the Phony War and Chamberlain's fall, is a fair read, but, all too often, an unfair history.

Ohhh, Henry

The Tudors

National Review Online, April 2, 2007

No television series boasting an opening sequence that includes a brutal assassination, ecstatic adulterous sex, the gorgeously bared breasts of Ruta Gedmintas, and an angry, thoroughly deserved, shout of “French bastards” will ever get too harsh a review from me. With HBO’s The Sopranos currently being whacked into syndication at the end of this season, Showtime is now trying to win viewers over with The Tudors, a tale drawn from the history of a family infinitely more dangerous than those departing New Jersey mobsters. Judging by the sex, violence, and splendor of its wickedly entertaining first few episodes it might just succeed.

Don't be put off by some of the comments made by Michael Hirst, the show’s creator, ahead of its debut last weekend. Seemingly desperate to reassure a potential audience more familiar with the lost underwear of the Bada Bing! than the lost Palace of Whitehall, he explained that The Tudors wasn’t “another Royal Shakespeare Company or Masterpiece Theatre kind of thing,” ominous, patronizing, and rather surprising words from the writer of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998), a subtle portrayal of the pre-modern roots, ritual, and appeal of monarchy.

Henry VIII himself, well, the actor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who plays him, also did what he could to harvest a few more coach potatoes. The Tudors, he announced, is “sharp; not a slow ten hours of period puke. Nobody wants a history lesson. It’s boring.” Yes, that’s right. That’s what he said. Another day, another actor saying something stupid, you know how it goes. However, to be fair to Rhys Meyers, The Tudors is fast-paced, and, at its best, it is as sharp as the headsman’s axe. However, by the deeply undemanding standards of the entertainment industry, it’s not too bad a history lesson either.

Let’s not overstate this: Showbiz being showbiz, and Showtime being Showtime, poor Clio emerges from The Tudors with disheveled hair, suspiciously rumpled clothing, and a great deal of embarrassment. To list the historical errors that litter this series would try the patience of the most indulgent editor, but for an understanding of their function, check out the treatment of the composer Thomas Tallis (Joe van Moyland, a remarkable resemblance incidentally). Tallis may have been a master of polyphony, but polyamory, apparently, was quite beyond him: He’s shown turning down two groupies (excited, I presume, by the thought of his canon), behavior that would be as shocking in The Tudors as an orgy in The Waltons, were it not for its eventual explanation. Tom’s gay! That’s a revelation that will surprise historians, but it could (possibly) boost ratings, and which do you think counts for more?

The same mixture of historical vandalism and commercial opportunism can be seen in the treatment of Henry’s older sister Margaret (played by the lovely Gabrielle Anwar in a rare escape from the made-for-TV movie wasteland she usually inhabits). The Tudors’ Margaret Tudor appears to be a composite character made up of a few fragments of the real Margaret, rather more of her younger sister, Mary, and then finished off with a titillating veneer of total fiction, wild fantasy and madcap speculation. These include the idea that Margaret smothered her enthusiastic, but unattractive bridegroom, the aged king of Portugal, a sort of Iberian J. Howard Marshall, with a pillow.

As a response to an arranged marriage to a hunchbacked, goatish monarch, a man more simian than regal, this would have been a perfectly reasonable response, but it never actually happened. Margaret Tudor’s first marriage was to a king of Scotland, not Portugal. He died, respectably, in battle. Now it’s true that Margaret’s sister Mary did manage to kill a much older husband (he wasn’t the king of Portugal either, but, poor fellow, of France), but she did it between the sheets, not with a pillow. A strikingly attractive young bride, she wore her unfortunate (if that’s the adjective) husband out after less than three months of marriage.

However, even if we allow for the impact of ACNielsen, there is something almost pathological about the extent to which this show’s creators have chosen to fool around with history. It’s as if the stories of the past are no longer quite good enough. There are traces of a similar attitude in the way that Hirst so relished savaging older versions of this tale with their “English actors in period costumes with elaborate and totally contrived mannerisms.” Of course, he has a point: the BBC’s Emmy-winning The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970) has aged very badly, but there’s something about the way he makes it that is both arrogant and shortsighted. Today’s realism has a nasty way of becoming tomorrow’s contrivance. Hirst may believe that his Henry is authentic, definitive, the one, but, give it a couple of decades, and The Tudors will almost certainly be no less dated than the BBC’s Keith Michell and those six carefully enunciating, excruciatingly stagy wives of his.

For all that, The Tudors does succeed in giving a good sense of an era at the hinge of history, a time when medieval certainty was being elbowed out by new, exciting and disconcerting intellectual experiment, and a more assertive, less Heaven-hobbled view of what it meant to be human. In The Tudors we see a glittering court filled with people who were, quite literally, full of themselves. It’s a peacock-splendid, hypnotic and frequently cruel spectacle, but one clearly pointed towards the future, away from a past that no longer had much to offer other than stagnation, mysticism, and the appeal of what always had been.

That said, there’s a decent argument to be made that the picture this paints is too generous. There is little in The Tudors to remind viewers that those great palaces were as dirty as they were imposing, grubby, magnificent islands in a sea of mud, squalor, and decay. It’s also reasonable to ask whether Henry’s entourage can really have been quite so good-looking as this series suggests. The Tudor court did indeed attract the young and the beautiful, but the casting of this show clearly owes more to the aesthetics of Abercrombie & Fitch than those of Hans Holbein.

Be that as it may, Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s performance makes the best possible case for the idea that the glitz and glamour of The Tudors might be quite helpful in explaining the events it describes to a contemporary audience. Too rigid an insistence on warts and all that can sometimes distract as much as it enlightens and is often no less an illusion than the alternative.

Besides, when it comes to the young Henry, there are not that many warts to conceal in the first place. Beyond his dark, hard, small, porcine eyes, he bore little resemblance to the bloated tyrant of later years. He was unusually tall, well proportioned (particularly proud of his calves, as it happens), athletic, good-looking, blessed by a head of red-gold hair, a seemingly perfect physical embodiment of the Renaissance man that, in many respects, he was.

Rhys Meyers looks very little like that. He is dark-haired, blue-eyed, much shorter than the king he is meant to be playing (if it’s a doppelgänger you’re after, there’s always Ray Winstone in his Henry VIII), his face that of a fallen angel, a Caravaggio fantasy, a mask of unsettling, compelling sensuality. However, within minutes of his first moments onscreen, the differences in appearance between king and actor cease to matter. In his youth, his energy and his magnetism, in the intelligence he conveys, and the sense of power that envelops him, Rhys Meyers is Henry, right down to the way that those eyes of his never cease to hint at the horrors to come.

And a strong cast doesn’t hurt. As Thomas Boleyn, Nick Dunning is cold, shrewd, and necessarily suave, cynically pimping out his daughters in the family interest. First Mary, then Anne, whatever it took. The always reliable Sam Neill is a watchful, calculating, Cardinal Wolsey, the butcher’s son who rose to become alter rex, Lord Chancellor of England, comfortable with power, and the dangerous games that came with it. As Sir Thomas More, Jeremy Northam is, perhaps inevitably, unable to shake off memories of saintly Paul Scofield and that hagiography for all seasons. Nevertheless, as a skilled and subtle performer, he does at least manage to smuggle a subversive note of smugness into his portrayal of an individual who was, in reality, a far more troubling figure than popular myth would suggest.

Then there’s Anne, seductive, dangerous, clever, fatal, doomed Anne. It’s true that the irresistible Natalie Dormer (the scene-stealing virgin in Lasse Hallström’s Casanova, come to think of it, probably the only virgin in Lasse Hallström’s Casanova) doesn’t have the large, sloe-black eyes for which Anne Boleyn was so famous. In all other respects, however, projecting determination, cunning and an unconventional, feline, allure, she is all too believable as the woman who beguiled a king, dethroned a queen, and changed the course of history.

For there can be no doubt that’s just what she did. To criticize The Tudors as soap opera, a Hampton Court, say, rather than a Melrose Place is to miss the point. In an age of dynastic power, the personal was political. Yes, it was absurd, and thoroughly demeaning, that the state religion of England was under foreign control, but that’s not why Henry VIII broke with Rome. The English King, Defender of the Faith no less, smashed ties that had endured for a millennium for one reason, and one reason only: his infatuation with Anne Boleyn. That comes across very clearly in The Tudors, and it’s why this series, for all its flaws, is not only a naughty treat, but a pretty good history lesson too.

Sorry, Jonathan.

Turning Myth Into Cartoon

300

The New York Sun, March 9, 2007

Hades, the ancients warned us, is dreary, morose, and subdued, its only pleasure a certain resigned tranquility. However, once news of Zack Snyder's "300," an account of the battle of Thermopylae, reaches the shades of the Spartan dead, even that sad calm will be gone. There will be shouts of rage, muttered, if laconic, threats and most ominous of all, the sound of swords being unsheathed as the finest fighting men of all time set off to hunt down Mr. Snyder, this son-of-a-Helot who should have stuck to the zombies he handled so well in "Dawn of the Dead."

"300" marks the second time the work of comic book maestro Frank Miller has been brought directly to the big screen. The first, 2005's "Sin City," a flawed masterpiece jointly directed by Mr. Miller and Robert Rodriguez, was undercut by poor plotting and incoherent showiness, yet redeemed by a wild visual élan. If "Sin City" was a flawed masterpiece, "300" is just flawed.

For that, much of the blame must lie with Mr. Miller himself. Best known for the way in which his "The Dark Knight Returns" revived DC's flagging "Batman" franchise, he is an artist most effective within genres characterized by excess and self-caricature. "Sin City," an inspired, loopy riff on hard-boiled fiction and film noir, worked in ways that "300," based on real events, never could.

It's telling that Mr. Snyder has described Mr. Miller's "300" as an attempt to turn history into mythology — telling because it reveals how little he understands what Thermopylae means. Fearless, implacable Leonidas already is myth, legend, and dream: He has been since those days in 480 B.C. when he, his 300 Spartans and a few thousand soldiers drawn from other Greek states, took on the vast army (numbering at least 250,000, though other estimates are far higher) assembled by the Persian king Xerxes to invade and subjugate Greece. In the end, Leonidas's tiny force was overwhelmed, but his heroic stand not only helped inspire the Greek victories that followed, but set an example that has shone, scarlet and bronze, grand and bloody, for the best part of 3,000 years.

Leonidas had, wrote Herodotus, "proved himself a very good man." No more needed to be said. The Spartan's deeds spoke for themselves. Compared with this, the bombast and bluster of the Miller version is simply tacky, a transformation of history not into myth, but kitsch.

Under these circumstances, Mr. Snyder's decision to stay so faithful to Mr. Miller's graphic novel ( Mr. Miller is an executive producer of the movie) can only be described as unfortunate. Even more dismayingly, the changes he has made are generally for the worse. Thus Xerxes's Immortals, his finest troops, are reduced to grotesques, stray orcs shipped in from Mordor. The rest of the Persian king's horde now features so many savage freaks and oddball beasts that Leonidas looks to be doing battle not with the might of Asia, but against the worst of Barnum & Bailey.

Yes, the manner in which the filmmaker has reproduced the look and feel of Mr. Miller's work is technically impressive (almost all the sets were "virtual"), but "300" would have benefited from concentrating less on the temptations of the digital backlot and more on old-fashioned storytelling. No less damaging, despite the occasional striking image, "300" is as aesthetically clumsy as it is technologically sophisticated. For the most part its visual style is an unhappy mix of Leni Riefenstahl and Iron Maiden, a ridiculous combination better imagined than seen. Despite some enjoyably gratuitous naked writhing (Oracle Girl!), bringing this tawdry vision to the big screen has almost nothing to be said for it, other, I suppose, than as another useful reminder that slow-motion shots of macho men walking together is a cliché that should have been killed off somewhere between "The Wild Bunch" and "Armageddon."

The cast does what it can, but it's not much. If most of the actors, including the bellowing, bellicose, and ripped Leonidas (Gerard Butler), appear to have been torn from the pages of a comic book, that is hardly their fault. They have been. On the plus side, Lena Headey as Leonidas's Queen Gorgo, fierce, foxy, and sort of feminist (well, they had to do something to persuade a few, you know, girls, to come to this movie), manages to deliver a performance verging on the three dimensional: She succeeds in emerging with dignity, if not clothing, intact.

Meanwhile, Rodrigo Santoro as a Xerxes of indeterminate ethnicity, omnivorous sexuality, and undeniable power manages to steal every scene in which he appears. His god-king may owe rather too much for comfort to Jaye Davidson's Ra in "Stargate," but the final sequences he shares on-screen with Leonidas appear to hint that the tensions between the two men may be erotic as well as military, a concept that cannot be faulted for its novelty.

Intriguing though that idea might be, if there is any genuine interest to be derived from "300," it lies in seeing the extent to which it reflects (or doesn't) the conflict that dominates our own era. The last time Hollywood tackled Thermopylae was "The 300 Spartans" (1962), a blunt Cold War allegory from a time when the threat from the east came from Moscow, not Mecca. This updated version is not so direct. It couldn't be: Mr. Miller's original work predates the fall of the twin towers. But look at the movie a little more closely and the imagery of our current troubles creeps into view, not least in the way some of Xerxes's warriors opt for the Al Qaeda/ninja chic more usually associated with Osama bin Laden's training camps.

Perhaps even more revealing is the way that, like the graphic novel, the movie fails to address the central paradox of Thermopylae: the fact that freedom's most effective defenders cared so little for individual liberty themselves. Of course, in our age of Guantanamo and Jack Bauer, that's a question that still resonates. If Mr. Snyder has chosen to dodge it, he's not the only one.

An English Saint Gets The Story He Deserves

Amazing Grace

The New York Sun, February 22, 2007

"The Lives of Others," the compelling new movie about East Germany currently in contention for an Oscar, is the story of two flawed individuals' quest for moral redemption, but Michael Apted's "Amazing Grace" raises the bar far higher. It tells the tale of William Wilberforce, an unquestionably good man who set out to redeem the honor of an empire and, in so doing, saved millions of lives.

Born in England in the middle of the 18th century to a wealthy merchant family, Wilberforce (ably played here by Ioan Gruffudd) rose to prominence in a nation that had discovered the virtue of reason and the rewards of science but had lost some of its conscience along the way.

A little more than 200 years before, an appalled Queen Elizabeth I had reacted to the news of an early slaving expedition with the observation that it would bring the "vengeance of Heaven" in its wake. As usual, Heaven remained indifferent. The slave trade flourished and Elizabeth's successors were quick to take their share.

If God appeared unconcerned and most Englishmen were prepared to either avert their eyes from the evils of the Middle Passage or to profit from it, Wilberforce was undaunted, working tirelessly for two decades to secure the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Satisfyingly, he lived long enough to see Parliament strike down slavery itself in 1833.

With an exception or two, the filmmakers are honest enough about Wilberforce's rejection of slavery to make clear that the roots of his disdain for the trade lay not only in inherent goodness, but also in his deep-rooted Christianity. Unfortunately, this honesty does not extend to trusting moviegoers with a sufficiently rounded portrayal of that faith. The real Wilberforce was a man of immense charm, but many of his fellow Clapham "Saints" were a joyless bunch, and so opposed, for example, to the idea of a good night out at the theater that they might even have objected to a film as uplifting as this one.

Taking Lives in Stasiland

The Lives of Others

The New York Sun, February 9, 2007

If there is nothing else to East Germany's credit (and, frankly, there isn't), that grim, gray dictatorship did succeed in provoking two of the finest films to come out of a reunited fatherland in recent years.

The first, Wolfgang Becker's sweet, enchanting "Good Bye Lenin!" (2003) used one family's crisis to examine both the year that Erich Honecker's then largely unlamented republic simply faded away and the way that layers of self-deception, "internal emigration," and illusion had helped its citizens to weather those penned-in decades of repression, futility, and waste. Nevertheless, as moving and wonderfully perceptive as that film was, it's impossible to watch it without detecting occasional traces of Ostalgie, the nauseating, sugarcoated nostalgia that some Germans (of East and West) claim to feel for a kinder, gentler Volksrepublik, which never, in fact, existed.

The second of these films, the novice director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's "The Lives of Others," shows no signs of falling into that trap. From its concreted landscapes to its muted colors to its clammy betrayals to the black Volvos of the party bosses prowling the streets of their wretched blind alley of a capital, this wrenching, stirring, magnificent movie portrays East Berlin as it was. In this, it undoubtedly helped that Mr. von Donnersmarck was brought up in the western half of the city and was a frequent visitor to the mysterious, unsettling land on the other side of the wall.

Adding further to the film's credibility, a number of the cast began their careers in an East German state that, nearly 20 years after its demise, retains the power to haunt their lives. During an interview last week, Mr. von Donnersmarck told me that Ulrich Mühe, the film's star, had spent more than he was paid for "The Lives of Others" in legal costs incurred after the actor's ex-wife sued to stop publication of a book linked to the film in which it was to be revealed that she had "allegedly" (as, I suppose, lawyers would insist we must say) informed on him to the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. Meanwhile, the father of another cast member was unmasked as a former Stasi officer following publication of the photographs of him that appeared in the press after he attended the film's premiere.

But then that's really not so surprising. East Germany was the most spied-upon society in history. Neither prisons, nor torture, nor executions, nor even that wall were enough to keep it all together. To supervise a population of 17 million, the Stasi, with some 100,000 officers, grew to be more than twice the size of the Third Reich's Gestapo, and, just to be sure, it recruited at least another 200,000 informers, probably many more. In her 2003 book on East Germany, the Australian author Anna Funder dubbed this police state that was more police than state as "Stasiland." She was right to do so.

It's as a model citizen of Stasiland, a skilled interrogator doing his brutal business, that we first encounter Mr. Mühe's Captain Wiesler. He is Stasi, a member of the elect, a true believer, and, yet, even in the movie's early stages, there are hints that all is not well. He is hunched, buttoned-up, withdrawn, his demeanor as much captive as guard. Contrasted with the deprivation that was the lot of most East Germans, Wiesler's bleak, spotless apartment might be a token of his privileged position, but it is little more than a cell. The only sign that anything remains of the captain's emotional life is a brief request to an appallingly unattractive prostitute (assigned to him, we must assume, by his employers) to stay with him a little longer. He knows enough to know that he is lonely.

"The Lives of Others" tells the story of what happens when, at the request of a government minister, Captain Wiesler puts famous playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) under close surveillance as someone who may be disloyal to the republic. Intellectuals, you know. Eventually, Wiesler discovers that the politician's real motive is sexual rather than ideological. He has his eyes on Dreyman's girlfriend (nicely played by Martina Gedeck) and wants Dreyman out of the way. And that's not the most important thing that our Stasi officer discovers. As (courtesy of bugs installed in the playwright's apartment) he sits listening day after day to the minutiae of Dreyman's life, the captain begins to find out some truths both about the evil of the regime he has served so loyally and, ultimately, about his own capacity for good.

Mr. Mühe's subtle, deadpan, and compelling portrayal of a bad man possibly stumbling toward redemption is one of the most profoundly moving performances I have ever been privileged to witness on-screen. He's ably supported by a cast that never seems to put a foot wrong. In particular, it's worth singling out Mr. Koch's Dreyman, a plaything of the regime as well as its playwright, a man who comes to realize that his carefully preserved detachment is no longer enough. Look too for the clever way that Dreyman's milieu is depicted as a licensed, micromanaged Bohemia that, like so many aspects of the German Democratic Republic, is at best a feeble facsimile of what was available in the West and, at worse, a dangerously comforting delusion.

"The Lives of Others" comes to America garlanded with the prizes it has won in Europe. It has now been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Win or lose (and it deserves to win), it's already achieved something far more significant than that little statuette.

Sometimes a movie or, even, for that matter, a TV show, can transcend its entertainment value and become a device that compels a nation to reconsider its history. When NBC's "Holocaust" was first shown in West Germany (roughly half the adult population caught at least one episode), it shattered that country's long-standing taboo on open discussion of Nazi genocide. Now "The Lives of Others" has forced large numbers of Germans to start facing the truth about what former dissident Wolf Biermann has referred to as their "second dictatorship."

Here’s Lucy

Dirt

National Review Online, January 9, 2007

Thanks to the combination of curiosity, camera-phone, the Internet, and, now, YouTube, the culture of celebrity, never that sane in the first place, has seemed to have taken another lurch deeper into the madhouse. In recent weeks those of us who could spare time from the Lohan implosion, the Kramer collapse, or the vital Simpson debate (Jessica or Ashlee?), and who were so inclined, could have seen much more of seedy Britney than nasty Kevin has managed of late, or, if we preferred, we could have contemplated the rise, fall, and possible rise again of this nation’s most recent “troubled” Tara, That’s Miss USA, not, for once, Ms. Reid.

Not enough for you? Well, there was plenty more where that came from. We could, as usual, have feasted on Nicole Richie’s missing meals, or, perhaps, taken a little time out to wonder about Kate Bosworth’s disappearing body and Cameron Diaz’s disappearing Justin. Then there were all those images, so, so, many of them, annoyingly blurry, frighteningly clear, snatched, deer-trapped-in-the-headlights, embarrassing, banal, sexy, grotesque, compelling, sort-of-interesting, sort-of-not: shopping trips, nipple slips, fashion disasters, velvet-rope battles, parking dramas, minor traffic accidents, and, repeatedly, and why not, Jessica Alba and her bikini. Oh yes, there’s Paris too. We’ll always have Paris, epicenter of global trivia, and, for that matter, the most successful grande horizontale since Pamela Harriman swam her last lap, even if, in a confusing development, Miss Hilton has now declared a moratorium on dating in favor of nights with Brigitte Bardot, her pet monkey.

But try as hard as they might, those who now drive these stories are not from television, newspapers, or even those mags that take the edge off the supermarket checkout line. The people to watch these days are something new, amateurs or freelancers dreaming of the big time, and, while they are at it, ripping, and riffing, off the more established media they both need and threaten. Even the once-mighty paparazzi are looking a touch passé, their Leicas, Nikons, and elaborate stakeouts now menaced by an observant passer-by with his or her Nokia, Samsung, or Motorola. The Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, may have exaggerated a little when he wrote about the appearance of an Army of Davids, but there isn’t much doubt that an army of Peeping Toms is among us and that, as a result, the gossip bazaar will never be the same again. Will we need People quite so much when the malicious are working their keyboards, online, on time, and, all too often, with that addictive extra slime?

The answer, in fact, almost certainly, is “yes,” but the magazine may have to take a different tack from the (generally) respectful approach that it now takes. There will always be a market for adoring, star-struck coverage (indeed in the U.K., the publishers of Hello have made a very good living doing just that, and then over here there’s Larry King), but gush about the “gowns” of Oscar night now has to compete with commentary like this (about an unfortunate skirt worn by the only truly convincing reason to have ever watched The OC):

When there's nothing left to believe in, believe in Mischa Barton. Because she will always wear something that cheers you up instantly. Take this joke of a skirt, for instance. It's like a clown repurposed a blazer and wrapped it around her waist. Amusing, but not in a complimentary, deliciously whimsical kind of way; it's more of a hideous Fisher Price "Baby's First Buttons" kind of funny. Mostly, I just want to tug it down so that I don't accidentally get a view of her birth canal. Still, at least we're laughing. Maybe for that, we owe her a debt of gratitude. Maybe we should all stand in front of her and join in a thinly harmonized chorus of "For She's A Jolly Good Fellow," led by Tim Curry, because the world needs more of him. And maybe, if we lavish her with enough giggles and praise, she'll back away slower than a gun-toting Mrs. Peacock, wary of our ulterior motives and never to be heard from in this capacity again.

I’d be expecting a little more bitchiness from People before too long.

None of this is to claim that that celebrity coverage was, in the past, as consistently fawning as some of today’s generation probably imagine. Just ask Fatty Arbuckle. Sure, there was Rock Hudson, but then there was Billy Haines too. Yes, there was a highly effective star machine, and those old studio chiefs certainly knew how to put a stop to unhelpful talk in the press about dangerous liaisons, dying marriages, and fatal car crashes. But by the mid-1950s, excitingly named scandal sheets like Confidential, Exposed, Whisper, and Private Lives boasted a combined circulation of more than ten million, and drove Hollywood to distraction, and, inevitably, the courts (to stave off an indictment, Confidential’s publisher, Robert Harrison, the “King of Leer” agreed to switch his magazine’s approach to flattery and puff pieces: naturally, circulation collapsed), not that, in the end, it was to do much good.

How, and why, so many people are so fascinated by celebrities is hard to explain. It’s something to do with mankind’s urge both to create, and to destroy, idols, it’s obviously also deeply rooted in our primate DNA, and it clearly owes a great deal to the fact that most of us live lives that are dull, dull, dull; vicarious thrills are better than none at all. Nevertheless, even if America’s obsession with celebrity has lasted a long time (and it has), its current incarnation seems more consuming, more demanding, more worshipful and more malicious than in the past. Almost certainly, that most reliable of scapegoats, the Internet, bears much of the blame. In creating its illusions of intimacy, access and authenticity, it persuades us that we ‘know’ these stars far better than ever before. At the same time, its limitless appetite for content makes celebrities out of D list riff-raff with “narratives” that would disgrace a trailer park, yet only add to the frenzy.

Throw in the fact that this new celebrity culture is both manipulated by the entertainment business and beyond its control, and there is obviously an ideal opportunity for a new Nathanael West or Ernest Lehman to tell us what’s going on. Instead, we got Courteney Cox. Her new TV series, Dirt (Cox is both star and executive producer), was billed as a show that would offer a revealing, clever, and sexy glimpse of gossip and its markets. Unfortunately, what we get is occasionally sanctimonious, slightly stale, and, rather too often, simply dull. Even the sex (Dirt is shown on FX, so viewers do get to see some) seems self-consciously “edgy,” contrived, and, at times literally, mechanical. Dirt may have been designed to appeal to the audience that FX has found with the wonderful Nip/Tuck, but it lacks the relentless perversity, carnivore morality, and wild melodrama that make a visit to McNamara/Troy a highpoint of the viewing week.

Of course Courteney Cox is as icily beautiful as ever, a John Singer Sargent portrait come to life and toned at the gym, as she plays the ruthless (yet curiously vulnerable) tabloid editor Lucy Spiller. She’s powerful, abrasive, and feared, but, as usual when we see women in such roles, there’s that pesky vulnerability and a Devil Wears Prada, what-has-she-given-up-to-get-where-she-has subtext to her role — clichés that subvert the very power that her character would ideally project. Was there a limit as to how unsympathetic a Lucy that the former Monica Geller was prepared to play? If so, that’s a mistake.

But if Cox has failed to see what fun, and what good box office, a truly vicious role could be, her show, so far, also seems to be missing an even more interesting opportunity, the chance to comment on what the Internet has meant to Lucy’s grubby universe. There’s a sense in which (judging by its first three episodes) Dirt’s underlying premise is, well, a little dated. That tabloids like Lucy’s are not quite as central to the gossip trade as they once were is not touched on, an odd omission given Courteney Cox’s own extensive experience, good and bad, of the sharp end of the celebrity obsession. True, Lucy’s two publications, Drrt (kind of like an upgraded National Enquirer, and, yes, that’s how it’s spelled) and Now (a Life/Newsweek hybrid) appear to be under great financial and competitive pressure, but we are never told why. Similarly, a conversation in which she tells one movie mogul that as much as he and his “Hollywood pals” hate to admit it, they need her, points to another worthwhile direction in which the show might evolve. An examination of the conflicted, and ever more complex, relationship between Tinseltown and those who make a living out of its dirty linen would be well worth watching. Sadly, with the exception of one rather lame sub-plot that I cannot be bothered to discuss, the episodes that I have watched show no sign that Dirt will go down that route.

That’s not to say that the show is entirely without merit. Very occasionally, some encouraging hints of what could be are allowed to surface. So, for example, in the first episode we catch Lucy at a Hollywood party eyeing an incident here, hearing a remark there, and, as she does so, we see (with the help of some clever graphics) how she visualizes the scandals behind them appearing on her next cover. It’s a nice touch. So too, a couple of cast members show promise. Hogwarts disgrace Ian Hart (that rotten Quirinus Quirrell) is impressive as “functioning schizophrenic” Don Konkey, Lucy’s favorite paparazzo and, it appears, only true friend. In a strangely understated show, his lurid hallucinations, virtuoso twitches, and fumbled prescriptions stand out. Sure, there may be a touch of Coney Island about the whole spectacle, but Konkey’s psychosis would make for compelling viewing even without the welcome bonus of his intriguing relationship with a rather pretty dead girl (Shannyn Sossamon). Nevertheless, it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that, as with Tony Shalhoub’s only marginally less twitchy performances in Monk, an initially watchable mental ailment will become increasingly less so as the series progresses, particularly if its peculiarities are used as a lazy substitute for a plot. Other than Hart, it’s also worth keeping an eye out for the progress of Alexandra Breckenridge as Willa, the ingénue reporter clearly on her way to the way to the dark side. Her early moments in the show have included deceit, drug use, and a slight suggestion of the Sapphic. Well done!

Finally, and rather surprisingly given the impressive tawdriness of the celebrity circuit, the stories that Dirt digs up add up to less than Page Six on a slow day: sports star cheating on his wife, starlet suicide, action star hires interior decorator (uh oh), and, wait for it, turns out to be gay, you know how it goes. It says a lot about Dirt, and, some would say, even more about our society, that the best story it has generated emerged not from the series itself, but from one of its reviewers. In short, Lucy Spiller’s battery-powered orgasms led a critic at the San Francisco Chronicle to publish an unfortunate and possibly (it’s debatable) unchivalrous comment about the fair Courteney. Jimmy Kimmel is also involved. As this is National Review Online, not Drrt, or, for that matter, the San Francisco Chronicle, I am not prepared to go into the distressing details, but, if, on the other hand, you are one of our more broad-minded readers, or just plain nosey, the offending review can be found here, Jimmy Kimmel’s dramatic encounter with the poor, possibly slighted Ms. Cox can be seen on YouTube (of course), and, in a desperate attempt to draw a conclusion to the whole shocking affair, the Chronicle’s caddish critic has now published an “erotic retraction” on his blog. Make of it all what you will.

As for me, I’m just pleased there’s going to be a fifth season of Nip/Tuck.

Battered Kingdom

Margaret Gaskin: Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940

The New York Sun: January 3, 2007

If, in 1932, nearly 15 years after the catastrophe of the "war to end all wars" had finally drawn to a close, any Britons were still foolish, complacent, or naïve enough to cling to their island nation's traditional sense of inviolability, Stanley Baldwin, the country's once-and-future prime minister, wanted to smash that illusion beyond repair. Speaking to the House of Commons in November of that year, he warned that the "man in the street [had] to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through."

And so, less than a decade later, the bomber did. Impatient with Germany's defeat (or, more accurately, failure to prevail) in the Battle of Britain, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to turn its attention from the few to the many. The duels in the sky during that lonely, legendary, dangerous summer of 1940, almost archaic in their occasional chivalry, were to be replaced by the more typically 20th-century spectacle of fire, ruin, and indiscriminate slaughter. The systematic assault on Britain's cities, then described and now remembered as "the Blitz," began in early September 1940. By the time the worst of it was over, roughly nine months later, nearly 45,000 were dead, with, perhaps, an additional 70,000 seriously injured. The horrors of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on an exhausted England (close to 10,000 killed) toward the end of the war were, of course, yet to come.

In writing "Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940" (Harcourt, 448 pages, $27), Margaret Gaskin has essentially attempted to tell the story of the Blitz through the events of a single night that saw the largest air raid on London up to that point. It was a 100-bomber onslaught that set off a firestorm designed to reduce the British capital's historic core, the City, to nothing more than rubble. Sadly, despite a careful, and often striking, selection of reminiscences and contemporary accounts (so far as it goes, the book is very well researched) that are often as moving as they are vivid, Ms. Gaskin's overall narrative fails to convince. To use a possibly unfortunate word, her "Blitz" is something of a dud.

In part that's due to a prose style that is sometimes orotund ("A lifetime in the hurly-burly of the public presses had honed the robust tongue in which [Winston Churchill rallied] his London tribe, his British tribe, his tribe of ‘English-speaking peoples'") or shopworn (Hitler's Berchtesgaden is, wait for it, a "spectacular mountain fastness"). But more troubling still is that the author simultaneously manages to cram in and leave out too much information. Readers will have to wade through (a surely unnecessary) World War II 101 ("As Hitler's master manipulator of truth, Goebbels took considerable personal pride in what his Führer saw when he looked at his beloved maps at the end of 1940"), but are deprived of many more directly relevant details surrounding the Blitz that could have put the events Ms. Gaskin is trying to relate into better context.

We are, for example, told remarkably little about the planning, events, and principal personalities on the German side and not much more about those organizing the defense of Churchill's battered kingdom. Nor is there a great deal of discussion about what the decision by Hitler to shift to a mass bombing offensive really meant. Destructive as the Blitz was undoubtedly to prove (oddly, Ms. Gaskin neglects to provide a full accounting of the toll) it was a sign that Berlin's hopes of a quick victory in the west had evaporated. Instead they were replaced by a strategy of attrition (according to Goebbels, some of the pilots involved saw it as an "aerial Verdun," a damning and telling phrase).

The chances that this would succeed, as the German leadership fully understood, were highly dependent on America's assistance to England being kept to a minimum (to be fair, Ms. Gaskin handles the increasing desperation of Britain's pleas to America very well). By leaving the aftermath of December 29 largely out of her book, however, Ms Gaskin makes it impossible to work out where that particular raid fitted into the broader history of the Blitz. Instead, she cuts to Winston Churchill's funeral a quarter of a century later, an epilogue to a drama seemingly without third, fourth, or fifth acts.

Indeed, with a death toll of roughly 200, the bombings of December 29 were far from being the most lethal of the Blitz. Far worse was to come the following year, culminating in the last great attack on May 10 that killed nearly 1,500. That said, the significance of the night Ms. Gaskin describes is that its blazing warehouses, doomed alleys, and tumbling buildings represented the death throes of the old City, the ancient, cluttered, rabbit-warren mercantile and commercial heart of the empire, the stamping ground of Dickens, Pepys, and Johnson. When, some 40 years later, I worked in that same area, the street names — Basinghall, Aldermanbury, Cheapside, Paternoster — may have been freighted with history, but all too often they were lined with nothing more than the drab concrete of utilitarian postwar construction.

And it's difficult not to think that alongside that old City there perished much of the moral restraint holding the British back from the idea — and the, possibly necessary, barbarism — of total war. Grasping this change, is, one would think, an essential element in understanding the meaning, and the consequences, of those months of destruction. Yet the only reference to this issue in Ms. Gaskin's text is a brief remark by Arthur Harris, the deputy chief of air staff. The Germans, he said, had "sown the wind." Indeed they had. Harris subsequently rose to head Britain's Bomber Command and, less than three years later, the firestorms of Operation Gomorrah had already devastated Hamburg. By the time the war ended, some 600,000 Germans had perished in Allied raids over the Reich.

Hitler had sown the wind and his people had reaped the whirlwind.