Dangerous Litigation

Damages

National Review Online, August 7, 2007

If the summer schedules were once a sun-ravaged, derelict playground for television’s has-beens, no-hopers, bums, and re-runs, that’s no longer inevitably the case, at least so far as cable is concerned. In recent weeks, TNT has launched Saving Grace, a show starring Holly Hunter as a self-destructive detective being bugged by an angel, while AMC is offering up Mad Men, a series set in the golden age of advertising, a time of lies, treble martinis, and fumbling attempts at sophistication, a time when cigarettes soothed your throat and no liquor company would ever have dared tell its customers to drink “responsibly.” Meanwhile those prepared to fork out for truly premium cable can look forward to the glorious prospect of Fox Mulder gone wild as David Duchovny hunts the foxes of Showtime’s forthcoming Californication.

That sounds like challenging competition, but if there’s anyone tough enough to see it off, it’s Glenn Close or, rather, Patty Hewes, the litigation lawyer she plays to icy, intimidating and savage perfection in FX’s new Damages. After a stint as the LAPD’s Captain Rawling on The Shield, Close is already a highly decorated FX veteran, but this latest incarnation shows that there’s a casting genius at work at that channel. Ever since boiling her way up into public attention as Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest, one of the most horrifying embodiments of male (yes, male) guilt, resentment, and rage ever to stalk the big screen, Close has established herself as one of this country’s most formidable actresses. In England she would have been appointed dame; in America she just has to make do with vice president (Air Force One), First Lady (Mars Attacks!), chief justice (The West Wing), and Cruella de Vil (twice).

As the creators of Damages have obviously understood, this is an actress who is at her most alarmingly imposing when the character she plays is in control not only of those around her, but of herself. Alex Forrest may have been dangerous, but she was also dangerously unhinged, a wreck of a woman, desperate and, ultimately, weak, beaten off with little more than bathwater and a bullet or two. Compared with Close’s devious and manipulative Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons, wacky Alex was, so to speak, a loveable little bunny. That’s not to say that the wicked Marquise did not have her own vulnerabilities, more specifically, a rancid mix of over-competitiveness and frustrated, only half-acknowledged, desire that eventually triggers her emotional and social destruction. So it is with Patty Hewes: there are chinks in her armor too, in her case a troubled relationship with her adolescent son. Very The Devil Wears Prada, you might think: the strong woman plagued by trouble on the home front, retribution (or so it is hinted) for success at the workplace.

Fortunately, Damages is subtler than that. As we get to know Hewes’s principal adversary, Arthur Frobisher (a terrific Ted Danson, a long, long way from Cheers), we discover that he too can be hurt through his offspring. Frobisher is an Enron-style entrepreneur who has not only been acquitted at his criminal trial, but has also managed to hang on to his billions. Patty Hewes, representing Frobisher’s former employees (who have, as is the way of such things, been left with pink slips and empty retirement accounts) is after that money. The imminence of yet more embarrassing litigation is proving too much for Frobisher’s wife, and she’s threatening to leave, taking their children with her. That would be bad news for Frobisher financially and legally (his loyal spouse has been a courtroom ornament and splendid p.r.), but what really frightens him is the thought of losing his kids. Judging by one Sam Malone interlude in a car (sort of; teetotal Sam would not have snorted the cocaine), Frobisher could get over his wife. His children would be a different matter.

Rapacious businessman? Wronged employees? We’ve been here before. Despite this, Damages shows remarkably few signs of falling into the trite, exhausted routines of the standard tenacious-lawyer-versus-greedy-capitalist morality play. Frobisher is ruthless, and richer than most studio executives and thus, by Hollywood convention, not only guilty, but bad, bad, bad. Nevertheless both the screenplay and Danson’s performance hint that there’s more to this evildoer than the usual by-the-numbers villainy. As for Patty, well, she’s rich too, and something of a monster, a brutal, controlling, ends-justifies-the-means gal, capable (at the very least) of intimidation, deceit, and — shades of Cruella — arranging for the killing of a dog belonging to a potential witness. What is it about Glenn Close and pets?

Quite how all this will resolve itself is, at this stage, a mystery (and, after two episodes, I’m gripped enough to want to find out). Its resolution will, apparently, revolve around the fate of Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), a young attorney recently hired by Hewes & Associates. Damages opens with images of her fleeing a smart Manhattan apartment building, covered in little more than blood and a raincoat. Most of what we see in the show turns out, in fact, to be flashback, set in the months leading up to that terrified, terrifying dash through the streets. In a clever twist, however (and Damages is nothing if not clever), the narrative moves on two separate time tracks. While the bulk of the story is, in essence, an extended flashback, that flashback is sporadically punctuated by footage that shows what happens after Ellen’s flight ends up with her in the hands of the police.

At first the cops assume that she is the victim of assault, so sad, so everyday, but then their inspection of her apartment quickly reveals a battered, bludgeoned corpse. Is Ellen a victim, a perp, or both? Viewers are put in the entertaining position of following the police investigation while simultaneously watching the events that preceded it, events that may enable them to decode the riddle ahead of the detectives working on the case.

It’s when it comes to the recruitment of Ellen, and her subsequent involvement with Patty’s scheming, that Damages stumbles, if only slightly. Ellen is bright, she’s driven, she’s of fairly modest origins, and, as this aspect of the tale unfolds, it becomes evident that she’s taking the audience into familiar, somewhat clichéd territory. In deciding to join Hewes, she naturally ignores the warnings of the silver-haired mentor, shrewd, decent and old school, at the white-shoe firm where she had previously interned, a mentor of the type played two decades ago in Wall Street by Hal Holbrook, who was, course, ignored in his turn by bright, driven, humble origins Bud Fox.

As is traditional in these dramas of associate temptation (The Firm, The Devil’s Advocate, take your pick; there are plenty to choose from), Ellen’s new employer does things like buying her fancy clothes, and finding her a spiffy apartment. By contrast, her future in-laws (regular folks, playing by the rules) can only come up with a voucher for two at, good grief, the Olive Garden (and if you think that you detect a touch of condescension from the scriptwriters you’d be right), at which point the sole remaining question, experienced viewers will realize, is just how low will Ellen be willing to go. Judging by the carefully calibrated manner in which Rose Byrne is handling the role, I’d guess quite a long way. Mind you, if the alternative is a life where the Olive Garden is the acme of fine dining, who can blame her?

But, however clichéd this aspect of Damages may be, it doesn’t seriously detract from the enjoyment of watching a first-rate cast helping an ingenious storyline twist and turn its way through feint, subterfuge, conspiracy, and murder. Above all though, see this show for Glenn Close, an actress in her element, and in control, her strong, expressive face, sometimes smiling, sometimes not, but always a mask, necessary camouflage for a predator tracking her prey in the avenues, mansions, and office suites of our new gilded age.

Brava!

1688 and All That

Michael Barone: Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers

National Review, July 30, 2007

Clio, that most elusive of Muses, can be glimpsed, but never caught. The interpretation of history is forever in flux, as much reflection of the present as window on the past. There are few better examples of this than England’s turbulent 17th century. Depending on whom you asked, and when, its conflicts were painful, but ultimately progressive; painful, but ultimately reactionary; or painful, but ultimately pointless. The natural response to the publication of yet another interpretation of one of the pivotal events of that century, the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, is to ask, what now?

According to Michael Barone, the answer is star-spangled Macaulay, classic Whig history with a distinctly American accent. The Glorious Revolution was, he writes, America’s “first revolution,” “a reference point” and “a glowing example” for the American Founders. The ghosts of P. T. Barnum and Betsy Ross will be unable to resist a smile at those words. To describe England’s last revolution, a characteristic mix of royal infighting and aristocratic maneuver, as American is, in its endearing exaggeration and patriotic pride, more typically American than anything that actually happened in 1688. That said, Barone’s broader point holds true, but with one important caveat. The Founders were inspired by the Glorious Revolution, but less by its reality than by its myth. The same may well be true of its latest chronicler.

That hasn’t stopped him from writing an excellent, well-researched overview of the prelude, consummation, and consequences of the revolution that is his topic and his totem, the revolution that saw off James II, England’s last Catholic king, and with him the last serious chance that the nation would succumb to absolute monarchy. Our First Revolution is no small achievement. The history of England in the 1680s is one of whirligig allegiance, helter-skelter intrigue, and perilous diplomatic gamesmanship. To retell it, as Barone does, in a manner that’s both informative and easily accessible to the general reader, demonstrates a way with a story that would be beneath the dignity, and beyond the skills, of many academic historians.

That’s not to say that the book is without its flaws. The most significant is, somehow, also very American. Barone is a product of a country that is, in a number of respects, history’s happiest accident, so it’s perhaps not surprising that, despite some hints to this effect, he cannot quite bring himself to admit the extent to which the Glorious Revolution was the product, not of optimism, but of pessimism. Its inspiration lay not in the quest for freedom, but in the fear of a return to the disorder of the six or so preceding decades, decades that had seen an intellectual, moral, and political unraveling so profound that it led to warfare, regicide, and dictatorship. When Hobbes, the finest philosopher of the age, wrote that the absence of a common, recognized authority would mean war (“and such a war as is of every man against every man”), he was writing from experience: Barone notes that the English civil war claimed perhaps 190,000 lives, as a percentage of the population more than that accounted for by the Kaiser or Hitler. In Scotland and Ireland the toll was still worse.

Despite that, Barone feels able to dismiss the upheavals of civil war and republican government as something of an irrelevance. This is to ignore the fact that the anxieties that fueled the Glorious Revolution were a direct response to the savage lessons of those earlier years. And so was the willingness to overthrow a monarch, or even monarchy itself, if that’s what it took to keep the peace.

Those lessons began in the 1620s. On one side the Stuarts, James I and, more fatefully, his son Charles I, were trying to create a modern centralized despotism of the type rapidly gaining ground across the Channel. On the other were England’s merchant class and much of its gentry, jealous of privileges and liberties dating back to the Middle Ages. Charles tried to trump these ancient traditions with superstition: the belief that a king ruled by divine right. But a century into the Reformation, the Almighty was not what He once had been. Kings might rely on God, but did God rely on kings? And if God did not rely on kings, what did He have to say about the rest of the social order?

In their attempt to find out, the English rejected Charles, they rejected the egalitarianism of the mid-century radicals, they rejected Puritan excess, they rejected Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and they rejected military rule. In 1660 they returned, exhausted, to monarchy and Charles II, a cheery cynic who understood that faute de mieux was as good a reason as any to be accepted as king. It’s a measure of his political skills that Charles (who had no legitimate children) was able to ensure that his brother James, a devout Catholic, would succeed him. It’s a measure of his perceptiveness that he thought that his dour and stubborn sibling would hold the job for less than four years. In the event, James II, who came to the throne in 1685 dreaming of Catholic restoration and hog-tied parliaments, hung on for just over 46 months. By early 1689, he had been replaced by William of Orange, a safely Protestant Dutch prince, and William’s wife, Mary, who was not only a safely Protestant English princess, but James’s eldest daughter, a Goneril all his own.

It may fit a little awkwardly with his overall thesis of 1688 as a signpost pointing to the liberties of an independent America, but Barone doesn’t dodge the degree to which religious intolerance was responsible for James’s downfall. The U.S. Constitution may have provided for absolute religious freedom, but its architects lived in a more safely secular environment. Wary survivors in an age of religious fury, the revolutionaries of 1688 enjoyed no such luxury. Religion needed to be tamed, fenced-in, watched. They feared that toleration of some expressions of religious belief might come at too high a price. In that sense, the First Amendment would, to them, have looked like a suicide pact. A militant Catholicism was not only resurgent on the European mainland, but had become the ideological enabler of despotism. Not to resist James’s attempts to foster a Catholic revival would have been madness. When the king demonstrated that he was prepared to use the tools of absolutism to get his way, he merely proved his opposition’s point.

Barone faces a similar problem in discussing the revolution’s immediate aftermath. The passages in which he describes it come across as a little confused, incoherent, and ambiguous. There’s a good reason for that: These events were confused, incoherent, and ambiguous. Barone’s difficulty is that he needs them to form a clear path to Philadelphia. What he gets instead is a muddle. What he misses is that that was the idea.

William’s motive in coming over from the Netherlands to grab the crown was partly dynastic, but primarily strategic. He wanted to lock England into an alliance against Louis XIV. The rest, so far as he was concerned, was conversation. That left those who supported him with the job of securing social peace and, while they were at it, their own privileges. With despotism discredited (its very arbitrariness made it the antithesis of order), and a republic looking too tricky to contemplate, they tried to dream up an answer to the question of where sovereignty really lay. This led to some fine-sounding declarations ambiguous enough to satisfy just about every faction. These efforts were then supplemented by years of piecemeal legislation — ad hoc, gradualist (after an initial flurry), and pragmatic — that helped shape a new constitution without ever defining it. The most satisfactory answer, it was discovered, to the big questions, was silence. It’s difficult to think of anything less like the spirit of Philadelphia in 1787.

To find a connection it’s necessary (and a touch anachronistic) to treat the Glorious Revolution settlement as a whole, but that’s what the American Founders seem to have done. To them these laws (which included the promotion, ironically, of greater religious toleration, the enactment of a bill of rights that was an obvious predecessor of its American namesake, and provisions designed to promote the independence of Parliament) were a precedent. They were both a fumbling codification and, in their apparent success, a definitive proof of the notion that sovereignty was too potent to be entrusted to one person or, indeed, one institution. Look at this another way, however, and liberty becomes a practical means, not an idealistic end — a crucial distinction largely invisible to those who used the romantic myth of a Patrick Henry–style 1688 as a rallying cry for the English in America nearly a century later.

Nevertheless, the fact that this dispersal of sovereignty was accomplished by bestowing rights and freedoms upon a significant portion of the population was not a myth. As Barone convincingly shows, the fragmentation of the old order left a space for the growth of free enterprise and freer enquiry, a space in which the ideas that became America could flourish, a space that was, essentially, an accident, the happiest of accidents.

Fathers, Sons, And Bogeymen

This  Is England

The New York Sun, July 25, 2007

Don't be put off by agitprop, achingly self-conscious blue-collar grit, and accents that may mystify some on this side of the Atlantic: "This Is England," the latest offering from the up-and-coming British director Shane Meadows, is a sometimes exhilarating, sometimes wrenching and, at its best, profoundly moving coming-of-age tale that also manages to find room to ponder questions of friendship, fatherhood, group loyalty, masculinity, and national identity. That's not bad for 98 minutes.

What's more, this is a film with a brilliantly evocative sense of time and place. "This Is England" offers the England of 1983, an era of great transition. As the origins of the movie's title (borrowed both from a classic World War II documentary and an even more melodramatic than usual offering from the Clash) suggest, it was a country on edge, and at the edge. The most difficult part of Margaret Thatcher's harsh, necessary cure was, we know now, over. Back then, however, it was by no means clear that the treatment would work, particularly in beaten-down provincial towns of the type where "This Is England" is set-- places that rapidly found themselves becoming post-industrial at a time when post-industrial was a euphemism for "nothing to do."

It is one of the ironies of history that, if there's one thing that came to symbolize Britain's brighter future, it was the Falklands War, a conflict rooted in Britain's imperial past, a conflict that Mr. Meadows has called "suspicious." Oh, whatever, Shane, whatever. The fact remains that victory in the South Atlantic was a reassuring reminder that there was life in the old lion. Still more important, it ensured Ms. Thatcher's re-election, something that Mr. Meadows probably still regrets. Get over it already, Shane: It's done.

It is one of the ironies of "This Is England" that triumph in those distant islands has brought only misery to the film's hero, 12-year-old Shaun (the remarkable Thomas Turgoose). Already something of a loner, Shaun has been left adrift by the death of his father in combat in the Falklands. Try as she might, his mother cannot fill the gap left by a much-missed dad, who survives only in vacation snaps and in one ramrod, khakiclad portrait, as Tommy Atkins, iconic and doomed.

After a bad day at the local Comprehensive (in his painfully-dated flares, he's ineligible for membership in any of the schoolyard's tribes), poor, battered Shaun is making his way home. Wearily, your poor, battered reviewer braced himself for the inevitable rain, concrete, and misery of almost any British film set in the depths of the Thatcher terror. What happens, instead, is that Shaun encounters a small band of skinheads-- lost boys (and girls) lurking, as lost boys (and girls) should, under the ground (well, in an underpass anyway). Before too long, the loner finds himself adopted into a tribe all his own.

Despite its daunting exterior, the tribe, genially presided over by the kindly and charismatic Woody (wonderfully played by Joe Gilgun), is benign. The time it spends together is purposefully aimless, purposefully companionable and just a bit daft. This reaches its peak in one oddball, joyful excursion that is transformed into something almost ecstatic by the bewitching ska rhythms of the film's skillfully compiled soundtrack. It concludes with the trashing of some empty municipal housing, but it's difficult to mind too much. As J.M. Barrie would have explained, lost boys can make for a rough crowd.

A rose-tinted spectacle? Yes. But one that is forgivable in such a nostalgic, openly autobiographical movie, particularly as, in contrast to what comes next, it serves an obvious dramatic (and too obviously didactic) purpose. Every Eden must have its serpent, every lagoon its Captain Hook. Sure enough, Shaun's skinhead idyll is soured by the arrival of Combo (a subtle, horrifying and ultimately heart-breaking Stephen Graham). A "first generation" skinhead now in his 30s, Combo is fresh from prison and ready to reassert his authority. He's a malign, thuggish Falstaff to Woody's gentle Prince Hal. Too weak to stand up to him, too strong to go along, Woody quits the group, taking his girlfriend and a few others with him. It's a measure of Mr. Meadows's sensitivity as a filmmaker that we see that this is the last thing that Combo wants.

Woody may have departed, but Shaun remains. In effect he abandons the mentor who befriended him for the brute power of a man who is, significantly, about the same age as that father now lying in a military graveyard. Combo appears content to fall into some approximation of the paternal role, but he comes with an unlovely agenda. He's with the National Front, a racist, proto-fascist political party that defaced the British political landscape at the time. For a while it looks as if Shaun might prove an all-too-apt pupil.

In reality, the National Front was always more of a bogeyman to be brandished by the left than a serious electoral menace, and it's as a bogeyman that Mr. Meadows uses it in this movie. Taking his film solely as a period piece is, I suppose, fair enough; but if it's contemporary political resonance he's looking for, it falls flat, too dated to be persuasive: Those best described as "fascists" in modern Britain are more likely to be interested in fatwas than führers.

If Mr. Meadows's politics tend to the one-dimensional, his skills as a director (and writer -- the screenplay is his as well) are anything but. Combo is a vicious bully, but, it turns out, there's more to him than that. Deeply conflicted and flailing desperately in a world that has left him behind, he is no cartoon Brownshirt. How Shaun reacts to him is the central drama of this fascinating, complex film, and this is a drama that will not date, so long as there are fathers, sons, and the need for a tribe.

Stench & the City

Emily Cockayne: Hubbub

The New York Sun, July 11, 2007

If there's one voice that can be heard above the hubbub described in Emily Cockayne's aptly titled new book, it is the voice, splenetic, dyspeptic, and thoroughly fed up, of the grumbler in high dudgeon. For all their traditional stoicism, the English have always known how to complain, and to do so with an acerbity and wit that leaves more famously querulous nations (yes, Jacques, yes, Pierre, I'm talking about you) looking like little more than whiny schoolchildren.

When it comes to the topic of "Hubbub" (Yale University Press, 335 pages, $35), the squalor, grubbiness, and general unpleasantness of everyday life in the cities of 17th- and 18th-century England, there was, as its author shows, plenty to gripe about. And to help her, she's recruited an awkward squad of sourly eloquent grumblers, from Samuel Pepys to the "slightly deranged" vegetarian and would-be "boghouse" reformer Thomas Tryon (who died in 1703, allegedly and appropriately, of "Retention of Urine") to the "notoriously peevish" Oxford antiquarian, Anthony à Wood (1632–95).

Here, for example, is what Matt Bramble, the fictional alter ego of the reliably grumpy Tobias Smollett (1721–71) had to say about a society ball in Georgian Bath:

Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, assafoetida drops, musk, hartshorn, and sal volatile; beside a thousand frowzy streams, which I could not analyse.

Imagine that? You'd probably rather not. But after working your way through the vivid, splendidly horrible pages of "Hubbub," a book that so revels in the nastiness it describes that most of its chapters appear to have been named after Snow White's worst nightmare ("Ugly," "Itchy," and "Mouldy" are just three of their dank and dismal number), you won't be able to avoid doing so. Not only that, you will understand that the stench of assafoetida drops was merely one of the lesser assaults on the senses of poor Mr. Bramble. That party was about as good as it got. Beyond the masterclass theater of ballroom and grand house lay the smoky, reeking cityscapes of early modern England, territories where the medieval was only yesterday, and could, quite easily, have become tomorrow.

It was a muddy, desperate world of licentious fustilugs, determined dog-skinners, essential gunge-farmers, and rootling "piggs," of dissolute rakehells, and the drabs who serviced them, a world of urban dunghills and city "hog-styes," a world inhabited by people marked by tetters, morphew, "psorophtalmy" (eyebrow dandruff, since you ask), and pocky itch, and clothed in grogram tailored by botchers. If you suspect that one of the many pleasures of "Hubbub" is the exuberant vocabulary that so enriches the texts cited by its author, you'd be right. Delightfully, it's an exuberance that has infected Ms. Cockayne herself: She must be one of the few 21st-century writers to use words such as axunge, muculent, and smeech.

This evident, and endearing, empathy for the period of which she writes is more than a matter of language. Yes, it's true that, in a refreshingcontrasttothecarefully picturesque, fiercely scrubbed picture that is the hallmark of BBC manufactured-for-export flummery, the dryly amusing Ms. Cockayne "unashamedly" highlights the worst of urban life of the time. Nevertheless, it's also evident that she is, as she says, determined to guard against what historian E.P. Thompson has called the "enormous condescension of posterity." Some aspects of their ancestors' life might revolt modern Englishmen, but may have been a matter of indifference, or even enjoyment, to their grimy forebears.

At the same time, it would be even more condescending to believe that the citizens of the septic isle were simple fatalists, passively accepting the muck, chaos, and disease that surrounded and, not so occasionally, engulfed them. As Ms. Cockayne's grumblers, not to speak of countless lawsuits against slatternly neighbors and slovenly tradesmen, reveal, they were anything but. Life could be better. Life ought to be better. Life would be better.

This was an age, perhaps the first, of a self-consciously progressive modernity. Raging in the 1740s against the state of the British capital's streets, Lord Tyrconnel sneered that they gave the impression of a place populated by

a herd of barbarians. … The most disgusting part of the character given by travellers, of the most savage nations, is their neglect of cleanliness, of which, perhaps, no part of the World affords more proofs than the streets of London … [the city] abounds with such heaps of filth … as a savage would look on with amazement.

Running through that speech is the implicit understanding that Englishmen had left barbarians and barbarism behind. Englishmen could do better. Englishmen ought to do better. Englishmen would do better.

So, eventually, they did. Twenty years later, parliament passed a series of laws designed to tidy up those streets of shame and much more besides, laws that were just part of an accelerating, if uneven, modernization that quite literally paved the way for industrial revolution and economic triumph.

And some of the credit for this must go to the grumblers. If necessity is the mother of invention, then discontent is the father. So buy this marvelous book, the most engaging work of social history I have read in years, and let Ms. Cockayne introduce you to a cast of characters you will never forget and a past we have failed to remember.

One tip: "Hubbub" is best enjoyed after eating, not before.

A Room With a Bloody View

1408

The New York Sun, June 22, 2007

I like hotels: the soothing anonymity, the agreeable sensation of watching people pick up after you, the questionable pleasures of pay-per-view. Needless to say, Stephen King, a writer at his best when conjuring up evil from the everyday, disagrees. In the prelude to his short story, "1408," he explains why hotel rooms are "naturally creepy": "How many people have slept in that bed before you? How many of them were sick? How many were losing their minds? How many were perhaps thinking about reading a few final verses from the Bible in the drawer of the nightstand beside them and then hanging themselves in the closet beside the TV?"

If you feel the same way, and you're reading this while slumped, quivering, and sweaty, in a Hilton, Hyatt or, God help you, Bates Motel, I'd prescribe clonazepam, not "1408." The latter is an effective, gripping tale, classic King, clammy and troubling, set in a hotel room so nasty that not even Basil Fawlty would dare explain it away. And if Mikael Håfström's new movie adaptation of the story has made it to that beckoning pay-per-view, keep clear. It'll only make matters worse.

Not that Mike Enslin (John Cusack, in a terrific performance) would. Mike is a once-promising novelist who now earns a good living churning out potboilers designed to discredit tall tales of hauntings, specters, and otherwise misbehaving dead. He's looking to conclude his latest book, so the arrival of a mysterious postcard hinting that room 1408 in Manhattan's Dolphin Hotel merits investigation proves to be an irresistible temptation. As a skeptic in a Stephen King story, Mike should know better, especially after being warned off by Gerald Olin (a splendidly forbidding Samuel L. Jackson), the Dolphin's manager. Gerald really, really doesn't want Mike to stay in 1408. Mike pays no attention, even after the solicitous Gerald plies him with good wine and a bad dossier. And what a dossier it is, choc-a-bloc with dangling corpses, bloody mutilations, and finales too disgusting to mention. It's not a question of ghosts, explains Gerald. It's just an "evil f------ room."

But Mike won't be deterred. Evil or not, the room is vacant. Under the law, he's entitled to book it (something to do with civil rights, apparently), and book it he does. This turns out to be the worst decision involving a hotel and a tale by Stephen King since Jack Torrance accepted that job at the Overlook.

As to what happens, you'll have to find out for yourself. Suffice to say, a bit of trouble with the heating (we've all been there) is the least of our hero's problems. If some of those problems (a sinisterly malfunctioning clock radio, attack by faucet, oozing walls à la " Barton Fink") are a touch clichéd, they don't detract much from what is, if not a masterpiece, a thoroughly competent, perfectly enjoyable horror flick — something that comes as a relief after the mess the Swedish Mr. Håfström made of his first English-language film, a train wreck of a movie called "Derailed."

A more serious objection to the approach he has taken is his recourse to sporadically spectacular special effects. These come close to turning "1408" into a generically chilling thrill-ride of a type that we have taken far, far too many times before. Worse, insofar as they open up and broaden the imagery of the movie, they risk throwing away the sense of claustrophobia that ought to be key to any narrative revolving around the plight of a man unable to escape from one murderous room. That this doesn't happen owes a lot to Mr. Cusack, who is horribly convincing as somebody caught in a trap that not only threatens his life, but also destroys the belief that has come to comfort, define, and enrich it — his conviction that the paranormal is delusion or fraud and that there's nothing that goes bump in the night.

It's no surprise to learn from an interview with Mr. Håfström on www.bloody-disgusting.com (you missed it?), that Mr. King has singled out Mr. Cusack for praise. The author was also, apparently, "very pleased" with the film as a whole. Given the mess that so many others, including, uh, Mr. King himself, have made of transferring his work to screen from print, it's a reasonable response. Even if the master of horror's judgment in this respect is not always sound (famously, he had major objections to the finest King movie of all, Stanley Kubrick's interpretation of "The Shining"), "1408" is a pretty good take on the original story. It's no "Carrie," but it's a long, long way from "The Lawnmower Man."

And if, in the end, it fails to deliver quite so much as the page-turner from which it has sprung, this was probably inevitable. The genius of Mr. King is more verbal than visual. It lurks in that curious mish-mash of the vernacular, the macabre, and the supernatural that he has made his own. In its blowsy excess, cornpone optimism, and bleary disillusion, it's as American as a slightly sour apple pie, yet it's so distinctive that, as Mr. Håfström is the latest to remind us, it is almost impossible to reproduce.

Nevertheless "1408" is well worth checking out. Just don't check in.

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.