A Magical Mystery Tour

Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era

The New York Sun, June 7, 2007

At one time or another, most of us have gone through that gray-faced morning routine: the shameful stumble through the shambles of a living room reduced to a wasteland of empty bottles, dirty glasses, and elusive memories, you know how it goes. The night before had been fun, you think, you hope, but what was it, exactly, that had happened?

And so it was with that starburst we call "the '60s." For a few brief, blinding moments, there was illumination, chaos, and destruction, sometimes creative, sometimes not, sometimes fun, sometimes not. When it all ended, we were left with the paradox of a world transformed, but little recollection of what had taken place, or why. As the saying goes, "If you can remember anything about the '60s, you weren't really there."

Now, 40 years on — 40 years after the sublime "Sergeant Pepper," 40 years after grubby Haight-Ashbury — the Whitney Museum of American Art is hosting "Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era." The exhibition is a botanical garden planted with flower power's best: posters, paintings, film, photography, album covers, crazed architectural blueprints, various installations that I cannot begin to describe, and other madcap cultural detritus all designed to place psychedelia within its wider intellectual framework. That this show's organizers have found a degree of coherence within the acme of exactly the opposite is no small achievement, but anyone hoping for a broader history of the 1960s will be disappointed. To the extent that larger historical themes can be detected, it is only as muffled echo or fun-house reflection, a presence barely visible through the fog of narcissism, self-congratulation, and intoxication that did so much to define artistic expression in those times.

The show itself is entertaining, playful, informative, visually striking, and comes glowing with a nostalgic enchantment guaranteed to delight many more than just those ancient enough to have spent three muddy, magic days at Max Yasgur's farm. The psychedelic moment may have been just that, but its afterlife lingered on. Even when that, too, had faded away, the symbols of the summer of love were quickly repackaged as nostalgia. You no longer have to have lived through the 1960s to miss them. The average age of the large crowd at the Whitney the Saturday that I came to gawp was well below 50, and many of those younger visitors, I reckoned, had been drawn there by more than just morbid, malicious fascination with boomer folly.

What's perhaps most interesting about this exhibition is the way that, implicitly more than explicitly, it ties psychedelia to what had come before. If this was an avantgarde, it was one with its eyes fixed firmly on the past. Superficially, this was simply a question of style. The curves of psychedelic illustration owe an obvious debt to the sinuous twists and seductive sexual suggestion of Art Nouveau, but the homage to earlier times, or at least, an imagined version of earlier times, ran far deeper than that.

Across the Atlantic, English psychedelia referred back constantly to the lost whimsy of the Victorian nursery, while back home, the vanished Arcadia seemed to have been located somewhere between late wigwam and early Klondike. As for "Sergeant Pepper," arguably psychedelia's most enduring monument, it came saturated in the sounds and sights of the prelapsarian, pre-1914 music hall, and packaged in a sleeve (naturally, it's on display at the Whitney) that famously mixed fanboy enthusiasm with hallucinatory historical eclecticism.

To harp on the past in this way is to suggest a profound discontent with the present, and, despite the prosperity of the mid-1960s, discontent there was. The psychedelic experiment aimed to derail the rationalism that was widely (if inaccurately) believed to lie at the heart of 20th century war, oppression, and alienation. The acid colors and ecstatic twirls of psychedelic art were an act of revolt against the clean lines, clarity, and stripped-down aestheticism of modernism. If the words on posters, such as those for the Fillmores (East or West) that make up a central part of this exhibit, were often barely decipherable, that was the idea.

The irony is that not much of this was particularly novel. For instance, it's a shame that there is little at the Whitney to suggest that an attachment to Eastern religion, concocted or real, fanatic or dilettante, had been a staple of a counterculture steeped in the rejection of reason for nearly a century before the Maharishi made monkeys out of Beatles. As for all those happenings (the Whitney has Jud Yalkut's film of "Kusama's Self Obliteration" as one notably entertaining specimen), it would have been instructive to note that there was nothing about them that would have shocked the salons of silver age Saint Petersburg.

What was different was the extent to which this particular celebration by the Western art world of the ecstatic, the irrational, and the Dionysian was first fueled by drugs (to furnish the vision) and technological know-how (to realize it), and then nourished by affluence and sped-up by mass media into the arms of popular culture and the maw of big business. The intelligentsia had found an audience for their games far beyond the salon, an audience that had trouble even spelling the word "Dionysian" but knew a good party when it saw one.

Despite a regrettably small section dedicated to Andy Warhol, chilly and prescient, an examination of the aftermath of the psychedelic explosion turns out to be largely beyond the scope of this show. The visitor is left with only insinuations of disaster, hints of disillusion, and suggestions of astonishing change, mere scraps of a fascinating story that the Whitney doesn't really attempt to tell. That's frustrating, but it shouldn't deter you from turning up and tuning in to what is a remarkable exhibition. Feed your head.

Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall

Frederick Taylor: The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–89

The New York Sun, May 30, 2007

Berlin, August 1978, © Andrew Stuttaford

To cross over into East Berlin in the 1970s, as I did on a couple of occasions, was to take a trip that, even then, seemed like a voyage back into a lost, almost unimaginable era. The rampaging ideologies, cruel and convinced, that had done so much to wreck Europe were in retreat across the western part of the continent, their fervor dimmed by exhaustion, bitter experience, sweet, if uneven, prosperity, and, credit where credit's due, careful American supervision. In East Berlin, by contrast, it was still 1945 or, if you prefer that date of a future that already appeared to have passed the West by, 1984.

There were occasional ruins and countless bullet holes, relics of Hitler's Götterdämmerung; there were the apartment blocks that proclaimed a utopia with no room for humanity, and then there was that sense, deadening, clammy, gray, of an oppression that Winston Smith would have understood all too well. Not just a sense, a reality: the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, was more than 100,000 strong, with at least another 200,000 informers, all for a population of just 17 million.

And then there was that wall, a symbol of horror, tyranny, and finally, deliriously, liberation. In his highly readable new book, "The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–89" (HarperCollins, 512 pages, $27.95), Frederick Taylor attempts to combine the tale of the Berlin Wall with a more general history of the German Democratic Republic, an approach that is understandable, yet sometimes a little frustrating: Mr. Taylor's account is very far from being a comprehensive study of what was one of the last century's most peculiar, disturbing, and interesting states.

Nevertheless, there's an undeniable logic to looking at the "other Germany" from the perspective of a wall that was both an admission of its failure and the key to its survival. While Mr. Taylor has no sympathy for the communist regime, the picture he paints is more complex than the usual Cold War cartoon. The wall was, he shows, the desperate response of the dictatorship to the prospect that its state would collapse from within, emptied out by the lure of West Germany's remarkable economic recovery. For many East Germans freedom and an increasingly higher standard of living were there for the taking. All it required was a train ticket to East Berlin, and a little luck.

For all of Berlin, East and West, was supposedly still under the shared control of World War II's "big four." As a result, the border within the city continued to be porous in ways inconceivable elsewhere on the intra-German frontier. In the first 12 years of its existence, the GDR lost around a sixth of its population to the west. As the 1950s progressed, and the barbed wire and death strips went up around the rest of East Germany, Berlin was the escape hatch, the way out. This was unsustainable. If that hatch wasn't locked tight, East Germany would collapse, and if East Germany collapsed, it would almost certainly take the fragile Cold War truce down with it.

As 1960 turned into 1961, the rush for the exit only intensified. Torschlusspanik ("panic that the door will be closed") gripped the GDR. If anything, however, the panic was underdone. The door wasn't just closed that year. It was bricked-up. In chilling, precise detail, Mr. Taylor explains how the regime made its preparations (meticulous, cynical, and, somehow, very German), kept the Soviets onside (one of the many strengths of this book is its focus on the tricky relationship between the Kremlin and East Berlin), and then succeeded in incarcerating an entire nation in the course of one August weekend.

Critical to that success was the passivity of Britain, France, and America, nominal guarantors of a nominally united city. As Mr. Taylor makes clear, they huffed, and they puffed, but they never tried to blow that wall down. To have done so would almost certainly have meant war, and who was prepared to risk Armageddon for the right of East Germans to travel? It was an exercise in Realpolitik that condemned millions to imprisonment in their miserable abomination of a republic for nearly 30 more years, but the obvious implication to be drawn from Mr. Taylor's narrative is that this was the correct thing to do. And so it was.

That is not the same as saying that this was a morally straightforward decision, yet to read this book carefully is also to see the traces of another story, that of the West German politicians (mainly on the left) who appeared to have few qualms about accepting, and perhaps even liking, the idea of that socialist sibling of theirs. When in 1987 Gerhard Schröder pronounced (with, it seems to me, unseemly relish) that reunification was a "big lie," he was not, as Mr. Taylor reminds us, alone.

Fortunately, the future chancellor got it wrong. Two years later, time caught up with East Germany. When it did so, it came rushing in at a pace that suggested it was desperate to make up for those wasted, frozen decades. Mr. Taylor describes those lovely, wild, exhilarating weeks movingly and with undisguised enthusiasm. But, while he does mention some of the difficulties and ambiguities that have followed reunification, it's difficult to avoid the feeling that his head, like his heart, remains caught up in the optimism of 1989–90. History, however, moves on, remorseless, relentless, and forgetful. As Mr. Taylor himself notes, the PDS (essentially the old East German Communist Party in unconvincing democratic drag) is now an important part of the coalition that runs Berlin.

Some people never learn, and others never give up.

A Nation Safe for Autocracy

The New York Sun, May 30, 2007

Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, August 2000 © Andrew Stuttaford

Much as blood and soil may help, it takes more to make a nation than a happy coincidence of genes and real estate. Today's nation-states are, whatever they may claim, purpose-built, as artificial as they are organic. Many may now have developed a genuine sense of self, but that identity is often rooted in myth as much as history, in fantasy as much as fact, and in forgetfulness as much as memory.

Nowhere is that more the case than in those states where the past is as awkward as geography is inconvenient. Imperial Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, was an emerging power of jumbled ethnicities, shifting borders and a culture uncertain whether its dominant influence was Byzantium, the Mongols, "Europe" or, more prosaically, distance, backwardness, and poverty.

It was frustration over Russia's failure to adapt to modernity that led Peter the Great to turn westward in the early 1700s. Unfortunately for his successors, as the West itself evolved in a more democratic direction, it became increasingly obvious that the course set by Peter, modernization on Western lines, must in the end lead to some dilution of Romanov control. The liberal Decembrist rising against the incoming Tsar Nicholas I in 1825 may have failed — the new emperor brushed it aside with the traditional handful of executions and Siberian exile all 'round — but it was a clear sign of trouble to come.

If autocratic rule was to survive, Peter's idea of a westernized Russia had, Nicholas understood, to be replaced with something more congenial to absolute monarchy. This, in a sense, is where the New York Public Library comes into the picture. Its Wachenheim Gallery is currently featuring a fascinating exhibit dedicated to the work and impact of Fedor Solntsev (1801–92), an artist who made a significant contribution to Nicholas's new project, the fabrication of a notion of a nation safe for autocracy. The exhibition is small (it's confined to just one room), but its implications are not. The idea of an exotic, ageless Muscovy, distinct from, and morally superior to, the rest of Europe has shaped both Russia's history and its perception of itself up to the present day. Besides, the show's almost ecclesiastical setting — hushed, intense, and darkened, presumably to protect some of the artwork — is not inappropriate to showcase a man recruited by a tsar who liked to sum up his own vision of Russia with three nouns: "Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationality."

Operating at the intersection of ethnography, archaeology, art, and propaganda, Solntsev traveled throughout Russia's ancient heartland recording the artifacts, architecture, and costumes he saw there. He then used their images to build up a picture of the country's past that, with diligent editing, could be shown to have been the story of one people, united around church and monarchy. Just a few years before, Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), the influential nationalist historian, had written that poets, sculptors, and painters could contribute to the creation of patriotic feeling. Solntsev proved Karamzin's point, and helped make the tsar's too. This was underlined by Nicholas's decision to fund the publication of "Antiquities of the Russian State" (1849–53), six volumes showing Solntsev's depictions (some are on display in this show) of the medieval artifacts that could be found in Moscow's Kremlin. Recently invented chromolithography meant that this skilled draughtsman's careful, almost photographic images could be disseminated in vivid color throughout the empire they were designed to promote.

Those six volumes represented the high point of Solntsev's career. His royal patron died in 1855. "Costume of the Russian State," a series of watercolors painted over the course of three decades and designed to show the traditional clothing worn in different parts of the tsars' domain, never found a publisher. By the end of his impressively long life, Solntsev was, in the view of the organizers of this exhibition, somewhat passé, a verdict that only appeared to be reinforced by the triumph of the Bolsheviks, barely 25 years later, and (it seemed) their irreparable break with the past. Less than two decades after the revolution, the cash-strapped Soviet government sold some of Solntsev's works to the New York Public Library. Like history itself, they were thought to be disposable.

But the real story is more complex than that. As is partly acknowledged by the exhibition's inclusion of designs by Natalia Goncharova for a production of "The Firebird" in the 1920s, Solntsev's influence on the arts, and the artistic interpretation, of Russia, was immensely important until, and beyond, a revolution that has, in this respect, proved to be little more than an interruption. By the 1930s, Russian nationalism, snarling and spiky, was back. The familiar iconography of onion domes, benign autocrats, and happy peasants reappeared shortly afterwards, along with the distinctively styled "Old Russian" design that accompanied it. It still flourishes today, nurtured by political support, fashionable taste, and genuine popular demand.

The fake, in short, has become real.

Mean Girl

National Review Online, May 25, 2007

New York City, May 2007 © Andrew Stuttaford

It was Friday night in New York City. I’d already drunk a couple of beers, so now was a good time for a quick rummage around inside Paris Hilton. I wasn't the first to do so, no, not even that evening, but what the hell? She didn't mind. Her eyes were closed, her face angular and serene, her back arched in almost Mannerist contortion, and her legs, ah her legs; they were akimbo, long, smooth, and inviting. I did, however, take the precaution of putting on a pair of slightly grubby white gloves before, well...

Well, since you ask, before carefully removing Ms. Hilton’s small intestine and toying, toying most gingerly, with her uterus.

I should explain. This wasn’t the real Paris, and shame, shame on any of you who thought otherwise. This was a facsimile, a rendering, or, more accurately, a tableau mort, showing her corpse, bare but for a tiara, cold, dead hands still clinging to cell-phone and martini glass. And as if this was not already enough to bring cheer to the stoniest of souls, the ensemble was completed by a forlorn Tinkerbell, the lap-dog and diarist, tiara-capped head (yes, hers too) a portrait of pathos, as she pranced and danced by the body of her fallen mistress.

According to the management of Capla Kesting Fine Art, the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, gallery where the ruins of Paris are now on display, the whole spectacle is an “interactive Public Service Announcement… designed to warn teenagers of the hazards of underage drinking.” Interactive? Yup, those teenagers-at-risk can perform an “autopsy” on the heiress or, at least, monkey around with her innards. The purported, and that’s the word, purpose is to give these youngsters “an empathetic view of drunk driving tragedy from the coroner’s perspective.” Scared straight, that sort of thing. This autopsy, lacking any hint of dignity, respect, or decorum (trust me on this), symbolizes the final destination of the DUI driver, and was, it is claimed, designed to strip away any hint of cool from Paris’s hard-partying ways. If you believe that, I have a collection of Hilton-designed pet wear to sell you.

Always quick to check out an empress’ new clothes, the Fug Girls, the Cagney and Lacey of the Internet’s fashion police, were among the first to point out that if this sculpture was meant to highlight how drunk-driving can really mess a gal up, it might be a touch counterproductive. “Paris herself,” they explained,”would probably take one look at the installation and drawl, "Dude, I look great. DUI death is hot." They have a point.

The man behind the autopsy, Daniel Edwards, was in the gallery that Friday evening. Surrounded by the goatees, cropped hair, and black tees of a typical Williamsburg soiree, he was a genial figure, beaming, and gleaming in the finest white suit/beard/long mane combo to be unleashed on the planet since that day John Lennon strode out across Abbey Road. I asked him just how serious he really was about his, uh, message. If I were a ruthless undercover reporter, I’d tell you what he replied. But I’m not (we were just having a nice chat), and I won’t. Let’s just say that the likeable Edwards is a man with a sly sense of humor.

Those wishing to understand what Edwards is trying to achieve should look instead at his recent oeuvre. It mumbles for itself. True, the sculptor’s (sadly premature) deathbed portrait of Fidel Castro was something of a misstep, but a casting of “Suri Cruise’s poop,” a bust of a highly eroticized Hillary Rodham Clinton and, perhaps most famously, a statue of Britney Spears giving birth, not to mention that Hilton cadaver, all suggest a master prankster at work.

It’s an impression that is only reinforced by the press releases that accompany the unveiling of each project. Pompous, humorless, and as self-satisfied as they are self-important, they come across as pitch-perfect satires of the stifling piety of the scolds, nags, and busybodies now tormenting this once free country. If dead Paris can be a “warning” of the dangers of DUI (and, yes, yes, before mad MADD e-mail me with angry reproaches, I know that drunk driving is a bad thing), then Edwards’s Britney is no less plausible as a monument to the singer’s decision (as it then appeared) to put motherhood ahead of career.

Frankly, Edwards should charge admission. A buck’s a buck, Dan, and it would add a little more Barnum & Bailey to installations designed, I reckon, to be a part of the celebrity circus they simultaneously critique. Or something.

Still, it’s impossible not to be struck by the macabre coincidence that the Williamsburg autopsy is not the only image of a dead or dying Hilton out there in the marketplace. On the same day that Paris’s guts were opened up for inspection in Brooklyn, Californians were given the chance to take a peek at a “poignant” and “relevant” depiction of the poor girl’s suicide. A press release from the Venice Contemporary Gallery gave the details:

Artist Jason Maynard’s sculpture, entitled "SuicideSocialite," is the final piece in his 10-year exploration of the cultural relevance and symbolic reference to candy. The sculpture of Paris Hilton depicts the heiress sprawled out on a chez lounge with her wrists slit and candy spewing out of her veins…the piece takes on the guise of neither the moral high ground, nor the role of a public service announcement. In reality, this sculpture speaks more of Maynard's masterful portrayal of the pinnacle of modern day mob mentality's ability to build higher and higher pedestals for their celebrity objects to sit - for the pleasure of seeing them fall.

If we ignore the tortured prose, questionable spelling (chez lounge?), and the candy, there’s no doubt that Maynard has a point. Whenever a celebrity stumbles, there’s a crowd out there ready to peer, to leer, and to cheer. That’s particularly true when that pratfallen celebrity is Paris Hilton. She may not be the nicest of people, and she has certainly brought her current legal troubles upon herself, but, after witnessing the rejoicing, the vitriol, and the sermonizing that swirl around her eagerly anticipated imprisonment, I’ll admit to feeling a twinge of sympathy for the inmate-in-waiting. Libertarian blogger Lew Rockwell went a little far when appearing (vaguely) to compare Hilton’s coming Calvary with that of Christ’s, but his thinking was as least charitable. The same cannot be said of all those who seem to have forgotten that the star of One Night in Paris ranks rather low in the evildoer hierarchy, a Martha Stewart more than a Madame Mao.

And incarceration alone is not punishment enough to satisfy the baying, self-righteous mob, sweaty, and prurient, that has surged from couch, blog, suburb, and trailer park to demand what it sees as justice. They want Paris to serve hard time, prison-movie style, and a frenzied media is just egging them on. To take just one example, on the cover of its May 21st issue, Star magazine promised exciting details of “Paris’ Prison Hell,” complete with “Lesbian gangs,” “Group Showers,” “Strip Searches,” and “Filthy Bedding.” While it’s good to see the disgraceful conditions that prevail in California’s penal system getting an airing, I doubt that was the motive behind the decision to package the story in quite the way that the Star (and many others) have chosen to do.

Matters reached their squalid climax (so far) thanks to the efforts of the dreadful Joe Arpaio. He’s the publicity hound who doubles up as a sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona: tents, prisoners in pink underwear eating bologna sandwiches, you know the guy. True to form, he jumped onto the tumbril, offering to host Paris in his desert Guantanamo, an offer that might well, it was speculated, include a stint in a chain gang. Blonde in shackles!

Mercifully, Arpaio’s offer was declined. Hilton, it now turns out, will likely only serve about half her 45-day sentence, and will do so in a unit reserved for those thought to be at risk from their fellow inmates. That this should be necessary is more an indictment of prison conditions than an expression of any particular privilege, but the news has still come as a severe disappointment to far, far too many people

That it does is, in part, a reflection of the very peculiar nature of Paris Hilton’s celebrity. I wish I could say that, in the words of the old joke, she had risen without trace. The reverse is true. Her spoor is everywhere. Since first lurching into view in the early 2000s, she has dazzled the populace and thrilled the media with cubic-zirconia glamour and undeniably genuine sleaze.

Normally, wannabes aiming for the big time hope to do so on the back of talent, looks, achievement, or, at the very least, a winning personality, but Hilton has built her fame — and made quite a bit of cash — on the basis of no obvious achievements, looks that are far from Jolie and a public persona that is dim-witted, bitchy, arrogant, and spoiled.

What she does have is a remarkable talent for self-promotion. In taking advantage of the desperate need of the now web-driven media for content, any content, however tacky, no, preferably tacky, she has served herself up as spectacle for those on whom she so obviously looks down. And it’s worked. “There is,” said Oscar Wilde, “only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about,” and talk, talk, talk, about Paris Hilton we do. If nothing else, this article is evidence of that. As some sort of experiment, the Associated Press tried to avoid publishing anything about her for a few days. In so doing they only added to her fame. She has become an object of fascination, derision, obsession, and, God help us, emulation. And that’s not going to change any time soon. Resistance, AP, is futile.

But if she’s become an icon — and she has — America’s sweetheart, she’s not. There’s something too joyless about her pursuit of pleasure, something too Heather about her pursuit of prestige and, despite occasional Horatia Alger moments, something too Gekko about her pursuit of loot. Sure, her antics are sporadically entertaining, gossip’s equivalent of a five-alarm fire, a really good train wreck, or a particularly bloody bullfight, but we also watch her as phenomenon as much as person. And as we do, we not only use her as a device to proclaim our own cleverness, moral superiority and apple pie niceness, but also, I suspect, as a symbol of, and a scapegoat for, the real excesses and imagined emptiness of this new gilded age. Put all these elements together and we can begin to understand why those grotesque depictions of her dead and dying — unthinkable, probably, in the case of any other celebrity — cause no complaint.

But that’s still no reason to put her on the chain gang.

Britain, Year Zero

28 Weeks Later

National Review  Online, May 15, 2007

Here’s the problem. This review was meant to be about 28 Weeks Later, the newly released sequel to the hugely successful 28 Days Later, but, quite frankly, there’s not a lot to say about it. Judged in its own right, 28 Weeks Later is nicely paced, reasonably exciting, competently made, and well acted (with Robert Carlyle, as so often, a stand-out). What’s more, it boasts a few thought-provoking moments, and has enough deaths-by-helicopter-blade to justify the price of admission alone. The difficulty is that it’s a sequel. It cannot just be judged in its own right. The awkward, inconvenient fact is that those 28 weeks (or should it be 24?) simply weren’t worth the wait.

To understand why 28 Weeks Later is, relatively speaking, such a disappointment, it’s necessary to take another look at its predecessor. That’s just as well, because 28 Days Later is a much more interesting movie — and much more fun to write about. Easily the most gripping horror film of the last decade, the most shocking thing about its 113 minutes is quite how good they are. Sure, 28 Days Later is relentless, fast-paced, and savage, but it also displays a depth, intelligence, and lyricism that would be surprising in almost any horror movie: To find these qualities in a zombie flick is little less than miraculous.

Yes, a zombie flick. Ghastly, primitive, and profoundly embarrassing, zombies are the Billy Carters of horror cinema’s already dysfunctional family. Conjured up by American pilferers of some of Haiti’s tallest tales, and given shape by racist fantasy, rock-bottom budgets, and bankrupt imaginations, these hollow-eyed, empty-headed hooligans have been shambling their way through movies for more than 70 years. They may have nothing to say, but their box-office persistence is eloquent testimony to the fact that the supposedly sub-human are not the only creatures to be thrilled by the sight of torn and bleeding flesh.

There have been exceptions, notably the spookily effective I Walked With a Zombie, but for the most part these films have been a disgrace, a bloody smear across the silver screen, dominated by brutal massacre, inarticulate and vicious stumblebums, and, in the case of some of the more recent efforts, the worst displays of table manners since George H. W. Bush threw up in Tokyo.

The titles of just a small portion of the zombie oeuvre (helpfully chronicled in Jamie Russell’s indispensable Book of The Dead) give the game away: At Twilight Come The Flesh-Eaters (apparently the only known example of homosexual zombie porn), Blood of Ghastly Horror, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Corpse Eaters, Curse of The Cannibal Confederates (Strom Thurmond’s “longevity” explained?), The Curse of The Doll People, Doctor Blood’s Coffin, Erotic Nights of The Living Dead (heterosexual zombie porn), I Eat Your Skin, Neon Maniacs, Orgy of The Dead (scripted by Ed Wood!), The Return of The Blind Dead, Zombie Holocaust, Zombie Bloodbath, Zombie Creeping Flesh, Zombie Flesh-Eaters, Zombie Lake (Nazis — a twofer!), you get the picture.

Compared with that drooling, lurching cinematic rabble, 28 Days Later wouldn’t have had to amount to much to be considered one of the better zombie movies, but its makers were more ambitious than that, something evidenced by the trouble that the film’s director, Trainspotting’s Danny Boyle, has taken to distance his film from the z-word. Well, he can say what he wants. 28 Days Later is steeped in modern zombie lore. Boyle’s zombies (oh Danny, that is what they are, even if they didn’t have to go through the whole dying thing first) are the result of infection (science awry, another familiar theme), rather than supernatural intervention, they chew on me and they tear at you, and they exist in a post-apocalyptic landscape that they themselves have created.

Superficially, the most obvious difference between Boyle’s vision and that of the principal zombie auteur, the legendary George A. Romero, is that Boyle’s zombies, unlike Romero’s lumbering slowpokes, can move very, very fast. Thus the violence in this movie is often depicted with flickering, jittery strobe-light glimpses of high-speed slaughter, panic and mayhem, giving it an almost hallucinatory feel, far closer to Spielberg’s Omaha Beach than anything witnessed on Romero’s slow-mo killing fields.

A much more important difference is the care with which both the ruined world (in this case, Britain) and its few surviving people are portrayed. When Boyle’s hero, Jim (a terrific performance by Cillian Murphy) awakes from the coma that allowed him to sleep safely through the days in which a virus, “the Rage,” changed almost all his countrymen into unreasoning, homicidal maniacs, he discovers an eerie London that is both still there yet has been lost beyond recall. For Boyle, the litter-strewn shopping mall that usually symbolizes the aftermath of zombie apocalypse is not enough. In a series of magical, beautifully shot images of the deserted British capital, he gives us vistas incorporating the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, all intact, all empty, their survival only underpinning what has been lost, their lonely, lovely splendor only emphasizing the desolation.

The use of beauty to contrast with, and therefore deepen, the impression of overwhelming catastrophe is an effective device. Boyle returns to it throughout the movie, above all in its astonishing, blistering climax. Its setting, the complacent grandeur of a centuries-old country house, and the role in which it plays in the narrative, shows us both the achievements of civilization and, by not-so subtle implication, its fragility.

Seemingly a last outpost of order in a land gone mad, the once aristocratic mansion has been occupied by a small detachment of troops who have succeeded in keeping the infected at bay. When that order, never more than an illusion, finally collapses it does so into a ferocious hide-and-seek between zombies, Jim, increasingly feral troops, and Selena and Hannah, two refugees promised to the soldiers by Major West, their commanding officer, as playthings and broodmares. The fact that this lethal drama unfolds in the midst of the remnants of a Palladian idyll only adds to the sense of moral and intellectual collapse.

All this is reinforced by the soldiers’ decision to kit out their prospective concubines (one little more than a child) in gorgeous red dresses, costume that both parodies and mourns an elegance that now only exists in memory. Add the irony that Jim has to resort to such extreme violence to save them that both Hannah and Selena think that their rescuer himself has become infected, and then throw in some extraordinarily effective soundtrack music, and the result is some of the most powerful footage in recent cinema.

That description might give the impression that 28 Days Later has succumbed to the dime store misanthropy that characterizes all too many zombie movies. You know how it goes. The surviving humans (who are usually bickering amongst themselves) contribute to their own destruction and, even if they don’t, they normally behave so appallingly that it’s difficult to feel much sympathy when they are eventually pulled to pieces by greedy zombie jaws. That’s also typically Romero’s approach, except that he tends to camouflage the misanthropy with community college leftism: Vietnam, inequality, consumerism, redneck brutality, blah, blah, yada, and blah.

Thankfully, Boyle takes a more innovative tack. The survivors of 28 Days Later are often sympathetically portrayed (in the case of Frank, the loveable cabbie, somewhat stereotypically so), and when they bicker and feud, we see that this is a fairly understandable response to the predicament in which they find themselves. The film’s most identifiable villains (if we put the homicidal maniacs to one side), those renegade soldiers, are shown to be the lonely, scared, and despairing victims of a nightmare that would erode the restraints of civilization within any man. Even their major’s own approach to the situation, a rapidly degenerating mish-mash of Sandhurst, Darwin, Broadmoor, and Nietzsche can be seen as initially well-intentioned, a desperate solution for desperate times even if, as becomes increasingly obvious, it seems more likely to lead to Salò than to salvation.

Perhaps the most striking thing about 28 Weeks Later (this time Boyle was an executive producer, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directed) is the way that good intentions gone wrong are also crucial to its narrative development. After a suitably horrifying preamble, the story basically begins with American troops re-establishing some form of normality in what is left of the U.K. As was hinted in the later stages of the earlier movie, the infection was confined to the British Isles. It’s now thought (ah ha) to have burned itself out (basically the infected were too maddened by their disease to look after themselves and starved to death). The few Brits to have survived the ordeal, together with those of their compatriots fortunate enough to have been abroad while the Rage, uh, raged, are now rebuilding their lives under benign, but somewhat oppressive, US supervision in the former financial district around London’s Canary Wharf, now known as the Green Zone. Ah ha indeed.

In a West now living once again in dread of devastating attack that scenario is bound to raise disquieting questions of just what would be left of life and liberty after. Then again, once the Rage returns, such concerns come to seem petty, the trivial obsessions of pampered folk who have forgotten their Hobbes. Needless to say, Uncle Sam’s response to the reappearance of the virus is panicky, brutal, pointlessly bloody, and as ineffective as it is counter-productive. The Green Zone falls, as, perhaps, green zones are always doomed to do. But before you rush to dismiss (or praise) these sequences (thoroughly gripping cinema incidentally) as a predictably unfair/much-needed critique of the current disaster in Iraq, it’s important to note that the sight of the Stars-and-Stripes forlorn and trampled amid the wreckage of the Green Zone heralds neither peace, nor liberation, but is a symbol of the triumph of elemental, irrational barbarism.

So, as I wrote at the beginning, 28 Weeks Later does indeed have its thought-provoking moments, but it’s unable to run with them for very long. The rest of the movie is, as mentioned above, watchable enough, and, as sequels to high-concept movies go, it’s far above Beneath the Planet of the Apes, but the creators of this saga need to learn from the decline and fall of the monkey franchise. There’s already talk of 28 Months Later, but that would be a bad mistake. It’s time to put a stake through the heart of these particular zombies, Mr. Boyle.

Oops, wrong genre, but you know what I mean. Bullet in the head. Helicopter blade. Do what it takes.

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.