In Search of the Inner Shaman

Khadak

The New York Sun, October 12, 2007

There once was a glorious, splendid, self-confident epoch, back in the reign of the blessed Eisenhower, when a director from the West could shoot a film about remote, mysterious Mongolia with minimal authenticity, fearless inaccuracy, and cultural crassness so epic that it could feature John Wayne as the young Genghis, Susan Hayward as Bortai, a haughty Tatar princess, and the irradiated Utah desert as the land of the khans. "The Conqueror" (produced, appropriately enough, by remote, mysterious Howard Hughes) may have been a critical and box office disaster in 1955, but there is something about its trashy exuberance, ludicrous script, and unashamed sexism that make it a wild, if naughty, treat. Who could forget those seductive, sinuous dancing girls and the touch of Vegas they brought to that distant, turbulent steppe? Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth, the directors of "Khadak," that's who.

If "The Conqueror" is like one of those alluring, amazing, artificial, Technicolor desserts that used to bring a chemical grace to the dinner tables of Ike's America, so "Khadak," which arrives at Cinema Village today, is fat-free and eat-your-greens — appropriate fare for our grimly sensitive and relentlessly sanctimonious era. Be warned that it is, ominously and accurately, also billed as a "magical-realist fable," a description so reliably predictive of imminent tedium that both the Khan and the Duke would have trembled at the thought of the horrors to come.

The movie's confused and fragmentary narrative revolves around Bagi (Batzul Khayankhyarvaa), a young nomad herdsman. Glum, taciturn, and subject to fits, poor Bagi gradually discovers that his seizures are triggered neither by epilepsy nor irritation at this film's stumbling screenplay. Rather, they signify that he is a shaman. In "The Conqueror," that would have earned him a weird clown hat and a prominent role at court. As, however, this particular shaman has found himself trapped in "Khadak," he has to make do with time travel, the companionship of the beautiful Zolzaya (Tsetsegee Byamba), and the opportunity to uncover a possible government conspiracy to trick his fellow nomads into abandoning their traditional lifestyle in favor of jobs with a mining company.

If the storyline in "Khadak" is unconvincing, much of its cinematography is anything but. For all its faults, this is undoubtedly a visually striking movie, at times astonishingly so. Mr. Brosens and Ms. Woodworth (both of whom have backgrounds in documentary film) have been working in Mongolia for a number of years and it shows. The stark, vivid, and contradictory imagery of the Mongolia portrayed in "Khadak" bears little resemblance to the kitschy, made-for-export spectacle presented by the country's best-known director, Byambasuren Davaa. Ms. Davaa's movies ("The Story of the Weeping Camel," "The Cave of the Yellow Dog") may be wonderful to look at, but their underlying aesthetic, picture book prettiness, and superficial samplings of third-world exotica owe more to "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" than the realities of life in Ulaanbaatar (Ulan Bator) or, for that matter, the Gobi.

The beauties of "Khadak" are something more subtle, complex, and disturbing. To be sure, there are the inevitably lovely shots of windswept wilderness and lonely ger, but these are complemented by evocative footage of industrial machinery and the haunting remnants of an old Soviet settlement. Taken together, they make a compelling backdrop both to this movie and, frustratingly, the far better film it might have become.

Something similar could be said of the cast in "Khadak." For the most part, they do their best with the little they've been given (we'll draw a veil over the histrionics of Tserendarizav Dashnyam, an actress who puts the ham in shaman), but, in the end, there's just not enough material for them to work with. It's hard to avoid the impression that Mr. Brosens and Ms. Woodworth viewed their ac tors as little more than additional backdrop, puppets to be manipulated and posed rather than fully realized characters with inner lives all their own.

One reason for this may be these filmmakers' inexperience with fiction, but a more likely explanation is that they were more concerned with the content of their message than its delivery. And that message is routine environmentalist agitprop overlaid with the multiculturalist piety that is, in reality, a form of profoundly insulting condescension. Mongolia is a hideously poor country trying to escape both ancient backwardness and the cruel pastiche of modernization that was communist rule. To deny that this process is difficult, occasionally brutal, and often exploitative would be absurd. Even so, to suggest, as this film appears to, that the solution can be found with the help of eco-babble, ancestral superstition, and premodern agriculture is even worse. It's a point of view that reveals more about the self-loathing of certain sections of the Western intelligentsia than any real understanding of the needs and aspirations of the Mongolian people.

"Khadak" is therefore best seen as an example of an updated form of cultural imperialism, one made all the more egregious by its pretense to be just the opposite. Under the circumstances, why not stick with the honest dishonesty of the original? In Mongolia's case, I'll opt for "The Conqueror" and the pleasures of Susan Hayward's high camp Bortai, an alabaster-skinned, red-haired daughter of Tatary born in Brooklyn, filmed in Utah, and financed by Howard Hughes, that fantasist, fabulist, and jet-age shaman.

Campbell's Soup

Alastair Campbell: The Blair Years - The Alastair Campbell Diaries

The New Criterion, October 1, 2007

It was Henry “Chips” Channon, one of the most entertaining, and informative, of Britain’s twentieth-century political diarists, who asked what was more “dull than a discreet diary.” Quite. Yet in some ways it is the discretion of the diaries just published by Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former press secretary (and much, much more), which makes them so interesting. ]What’s in them, I suspect, matters far less than what’s been left out.

The published diaries amount to “only” 350,000 words out of the more than two million Campbell wrote between starting work for the then-opposition leader Blair in 1994 and resigning some nine years later. The full text is promised for another time, but for now Campbell has, he says, produced a volume focused on Blair himself: “I always intended … to be part of the mix that starts to shape the first draft of historical judgement around him.” Even the admission that this master media manipulator is now spinning history is itself spin. It comes across as candor, refreshing after a decade or so of, well, something else, but he’s only confessing to what everyone had already assumed.

Prior to publication, the diaries were also vetted to ensure that they did not breach secrecy laws or otherwise risk damaging the United Kingdom’s national interest. In addition, Campbell tells us “some conversations so private they will never see the light of day” have been excluded, as have a number of others which “the participants would have assumed to be confidential for some time.” All that’s reasonable enough, but it still leaves hundreds of thousands of words to account for.

Campbell cleverly highlights one area they cover with his claim that he has “no desire” to make the “hard” job of Prime Minister “harder for anyone … let alone Gordon [Brown],”phrasing of such marvelous insincerity that one can only applaud. In writing that, Campbell comes across as public-spirited, loyal, and admirably reticent. At the same time he makes it quite clear that he has the goods on Britain’s new leader, the dour, jealous Chancellor whose Gollum’s quest for the keys to Number 10 Downing Street helped create, define, undermine, and, eventually, destroy Blair’s premiership. Those expecting Campbell to have shed much light on the complex rivalry and partnership between the two men will be disappointed. Worse, bundling Brown offstage destroys any pretensions these diaries may have to offer a properly rounded picture of Blair’s leadership. It’s unfair to compare them to Hamlet without a prince, but less so to say they are an Othellowithout an Iago.

Whatever the sympathy Campbell may claim to feel for the latest holder of that “hard job” he writes so sanctimoniously about, he had none for Blair’s predecessor, the hapless John Major. Campbell was a prominent member of the coterie that orchestrated the destruction of a Conservative government that was nothing like as incompetent or as sleazy as it was smeared, caricatured, and, fatally, believed by the electorate to be. The Labour landslide of 1997 was the culmination of the most brilliant, and the most unscrupulous, election campaign the country had ever seen. Unfortunately, these diaries offer little fresh insight as to how this was done.

In one respect this doesn’t matter. The key element, the transformation of “old” Labour into “New,” has already been explained far better elsewhere. Campbell may have been at the center of these changes, but the portrait he paints of them is partial, admittedly incomplete, and clearly selective. Not for the first time, the reader is simply left to guess at what has been omitted, and why.

A significantly greater disappointment is how (relatively) little Campbell, a former journalist, has to say about the way that he enlisted Britain’s powerful media class as critical allies in the fight against the Major government. Yes, we are told a bit about the wooing of Rupert Murdoch, but there’s almost no discussion of the tactics for which Campbell became infamous, the brutally effective bullying, deception, and intimidation of the media rank and file. Neither does there appear to be much recognition that Campbell was pushing at an open door: a large percentage of the media class wanted the Tories out.

For Campbell to concede this would, I reckon, have meant accepting that his (undeniably enormous) contribution to the 1997 victory was slightly less than he believes. It would also make nonsense of his obsessive contempt, even hatred, for the media that gathered pace, rancid, vitriolic, and increasingly unbalanced, as the years went by. Given the position that Campbell held, this fury and this disdain are deeply disconcerting. What makes it even more remarkable is that media coverage of the Blair government was, as it happens, broadly supportive until the Iraq war.

The real problem, of course, was that any carping was unacceptable to those at the helm of the New Labour “project,” a project that was, at its core, both profoundly authoritarian and tinged with a gimcrack messianism. What must have made this criticism (such as it was) all the more galling was that it persisted despite the extraordinary efforts made to smother, bludgeon, blunt, and derail it. These went beyond the abuses of the opposition years (although those continued in office, unabated and, in these diaries, largely, and absurdly, unmentioned) and extended into the machinery of government itself. Within days of Labour’s win, and with the help of nifty legal and procedural footwork, Campbell was given the authority to tell civil servants what to do. The political impartiality of the civil service was one of the many British traditions to take a battering under the new regime. As one of Campbell’s shrewdest critics, the commentator Peter Oborne, has noted, “within two years of taking power … New Labour had sacked seventeen of the nineteen information chiefs in Whitehall, a staggeringly high turnover.” Draw your own conclusions. In fact, you’ll have to: Campbell has tellingly little to say on the subject.

None of this is to argue that there’s nothing in these diaries worth reading. On the contrary. Neither press secretary nor any of his later, grander titles do full justice to Campbell’s role. He was not only Blair’s principal propagandist and most feared enforcer, but also a key policy adviser, Bobby, in some respects, to Tony’s Jack. He was, therefore, a diarist in the right place at the right time. Whether it’s on Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Iraq crises, the response to 9/11, or the neatly drawn descriptions of British and international statesmen from Blair to Clinton to Yeltsin to George W. Bush, there’s plenty here to digest, even if not much of it is very new.

Finally, and try as hard as he might to avoid it, by the end of these diaries its author has revealed something of himself, above all that he (a former alcoholic with a history of depressive illness) is a man driven, even if it’s never exactly clear by what. There are the shreds of ancient socialist orthodoxy (a fanatical attachment to Britain’s failed state school system), and, almost certainly related to that, there is the class resentment left over from his misfit youth (which in turn dovetails neatly into the more iconoclastic aspects of the New Labour “modernization” of the United Kingdom). Then there is the delight—wild, baroque, and ecstatic—that he takes in hating those on his enemies list. The poisonous media, the wretched Tories, a Labour minister or two, whoever; it’s the hating that’s the thing. Or perhaps the secret lay in the exercise, and the narcotic, of power. In any event, whatever it was that drove Campbell, Blair saw that he could use it, and he did.

And as to what that says about Tony Blair, once again you’ll have to draw your own conclusions.

Oh Captain, My Captain! Kirk and me.

National Review Online, September, 28, 2007

It wasn’t on some alien world that we saw him, but in a Midtown Manhattan steakhouse. He wasn’t battling Romulans or Klingons, just a gigantic piece of meat; Porterhouse, if I had to guess. My parents had flown in on a Jumbo from England the day before and he, well, he had flown in on a starship from a distant galaxy and my even more distant childhood. “Look,” I said, “there’s Captain Kirk.”

“Who?” asked my father, the only remaining carbon-based life form within one hundred parsecs not to know.

“Oh dear,” sighed my mother, something of a Star Trek watcher herself in an understated, only-if-there’s-nothing-else-on sort of way.

Who was Captain Kirk? Who was Captain Kirk? Good grief. Not since a former girlfriend had disgraced me in the presence of Captain Picard (it’s a long story, but if I tell you that she also managed to “lose” the autographed copy of George Takei’s memoirs I gave her, you’ll understand that those were tricky times indeed) had I known such shame. What if he, The Captain, had heard? I was also alarmed. I know a lot of things about James Tiberius Kirk, and one of them is that it’s never a good idea to get on his bad side: Just ask replica upperclassman Finnegan (Shore Leave).

And then the memories came. Or did their best to. To be frank, I cannot recall the exact date of my first contact with the space ‘n Vegas of the theme tune, the hissing sliding doors, the cheeping, chirping sensors, the burbling transporters, and the choppy, grand rhythms of high Shatner dialog, but it would have been via the BBC around 1969 or 1970. I’d have been eleven or twelve years old and on a break from a British boarding school where the only permitted television fare was a rugby show hosted by an enthusiastic Welshman with very little to be enthusiastic about. If the Sixties were swinging they were swinging by me, by him and, almost certainly, by most of the population.

Olde England was not then as merrie as it once had been said to be. In fact it was, let’s face it, a little on the drab, crabbed and dingy side. And not only the weather was to blame. The postwar economic recovery was running out of steam, the labor unions were running wild, the taxman was running greedy fingers through the nation’s wallets, and we no longer seemed to be running an empire. But by night, television was showing images of another country where the natives spoke English, appeared friendly, and looked to be having a great deal more fun than we were. The Pilgrim Fathers voyaged to America on the Mayflower, I traveled there by TV.

I loved American television for its wild, goofy, frivolous, gadget-and-bullet, candy-colored, exuberantly plastic, manufactured, frivolous non-BBC joy. I thrilled to the exploits of Napoleon and Ilya, those jester James Bonds from U.N.C.L.E, I wore Bruce Wayne’s mask and cape (there was no Robin: my younger brother refused), I laughed along with F-Troop, and I knew that there was something I found very interesting indeed about Samantha the suburban sorceress. When Britons gathered round the telly in their millions to watch Coronation Street, an endless soap (it continues to this day) set in a depressed northern town, all I wanted was to hop on the last train to Clarksville, wherever that might be. If it was good enough for those sun-kissed blissed-out Monkees, it was good enough for me.

Capping it all, glittering, tantalizing, but oddly accessible, was space. If anyone was lost in there, it wasn’t those lucky Robinsons (yes, I envied them), but me. These were the golden years of NASA (and the rocket men of Baikonur too — I followed that program just as enthusiastically) and as I watched those glorious Apollos rehearse, dance and glide their way to, around, and eventually, on, the moon, the USS Enterprise seemed to be just over the horizon, a part of that same dream, and despite the best efforts of all those Vostoks, Sputniks, and Lunokhods, it was a very American dream.

And Star Trek was a very American show. Sure, Mr. Chekhov was up there in the old NCC-1701, along with Spock and the universe’s stagiest Scot, but everything about the Enterprise, from its name to its Iowa-born captain (we won’t mention the Canadian thing), suggested that those ambitious thirteen colonies had just kept on growing. Whatever the legal structure of the Federation (not something I would have thought about much either then, or for that matter, now), it was quite obviously just the United States writ large, Manifest Destiny boldly going where no Manifest Destiny had gone before, and I, sitting staring at the television was paying plenty of attention. This enchanting exciting country called America was not only fun; it also appeared to be going places.

It speaks volumes that the wonderfully entertaining Doctor Who, deservedly British TV’s most popular sci-fi hero of the era, was played as an eccentric vaguely Edwardian gentleman, whose travels through space and time could just as easily take him into the past as the future. While the original Star Trek offered occasional visits to yesteryear (Tomorrow is Yesterday,The City on The Edge of Forever, Assignment Earth, All our Yesterdays), its basic trajectory was always forward-looking : the Enterprise hurtled through the 23rd Century with few signs of the backward glances and nostalgic appeal that made up so much of Doctor Who’s very British charm.

Star Trek was also, at its core, an optimistic, and to me, more attractive, vision of what was to come than anything likely to emerge out of the U.K., a Mission Control future of engineering savvy, technical marvels, and big, impressive machines, something that I was specifically beginning to associate with that land of wonders apparently located on the other side of the Atlantic. Britain’s feeble attempt to send a man into space had been abandoned years before, our manufacturing industry was crumbling, our autos were a joke, and our technological showpiece, the Concorde, was over budget, behind schedule and, most dismayingly of all, a joint project with those unreliable people, the French. America, on the other hand, it was clear, worked, and I was impressed. British-made tricorders? Wasn’t going to happen. If I wanted the future, I knew where I’d have to go to find it. And in the end, I did.

Looking back now at the original Star Trek, it’s striking to see how much of it came freighted with a strong ideological subtext. A veteran of the Pacific War himself, Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, brought to the series a strong Greatest Generation sensibility, both sharpened and softened by the tough-minded liberalism of the two murdered Kennedys. Time and time again, the Prime Directive was superseded by Kirk’s willingness to use fists and phasers to push alien societies a little further along the way to life, liberty, and the pursuit of extraterrestrial happiness. This clearly reflected the self-confidence and sense of global mission that had prevailed in America since the Second World War, even if in at least two episodes (A Private Little War, The Omega Glory) it’s possible to detect hints of the way that the gathering Vietnam disaster would shake that faith.

I cannot be sure now how much of this I grasped back then, but I certainly understood that the crewmembers of the Enterprise (and not just those landing on Ekos in Patterns of Force) were descendants of the Yanks who had stormed the beaches of Normandy just a quarter of a century before. They may have been in strange uniforms and carrying ray guns but they were recognizably the American soldiers I knew from countless war movies, brave, profoundly democratic, free spirited, good guys trying to do the right thing. In reality, that wasn’t too much of a myth then, and, for all the flaws, mistakes, blunders and worse, I suspect that if you go to Iraq and Afghanistan today, you’d see that it’s not too much of a myth now.

And nor, I now knew for sure, was Captain Kirk. Not that my father, duly enlightened, informed, educated, and possibly a little bored, appeared quite as impressed as he should have been. To some people, a TV show is just a TV show. The conversation moved on, but then, as it happened, an hour or so later the Stuttaford and the Shatner parties left the restaurant at the same time. As we all walked down Third Avenue, I noticed my father (who is both a doctor and a journalist for the London Times) looking at the lion of Starfleet with sudden interest.

“You know what,” he said, “he’s bow-legged. He walks like a cowboy, not a spaceman. Fascinating. I must write that up.”

And you know what, he did.

Shamed again.

Hearts of Darkness

Robert Gellately: Lenin, Stalin and Hitler : The Age of Social Catastrophe

The New York Sun, September, 19, 2007

In the course of humanity's long, violent history, there was one brief, happy interlude, a decade or so on either side of 1900, when those fortunate enough to live in the more advanced parts of the planet were able to persuade themselves that barbarism had been banished from their culture, never to return. To those luckiest of men, the last true optimists, the barriers — psychological, political, and technological — that separated them from the savagery of the past were as reassuringly robust as the stout, solid bourgeois architecture then transforming their cities.

This self-satisfaction we now know was pure hubris, a lethal, beautiful, boastful illusion. Confronted in 1914 with the reality of industrialized warfare, that illusion died. As the war progressed, if one can use that word, the social and political restraints keeping man's atavistic ferocity at bay began to fray all across Europe, and nowhere more dangerously than in the Russian Empire. By 1917, this most backward, and therefore most fragile, of the continent's great powers was a society on the precipice. It only took the slightest of shoves, in the form of the Bolsheviks' opportunistic and initially bloodless coup, to topple it over into the abyss. The consequences were worldwide, appalling, and destructive on a scale that had never before been seen.

When in the subtitle of his new book, "Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler" (Knopf, 698 pages, $35), Professor Robert Gellately refers to an age of "social catastrophe," it is no exaggeration. But his use of that phrase also makes a more subtle point. The devastation of the era he describes (roughly 1914–45) went far beyond the physical, far beyond rubble, ruin, and mass graves. The very notion of society itself was torn apart. As for man's idea of himself, it had been changed forever, and not, in any sense, for the better. Man could now be certain that the barbarian within him would always be there, however advanced the civilization — tempting, terrifying and, given an opening, unstoppable.

While Mr. Gellately explicitly narrows the focus of his book to Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, its title still promises more than he manages to deliver. Rather than devoting himself to the wider implications of what he is discussing, Professor Gellately offers a conventional history within a largely conventional framework. For those in need of a serious, scholarly introduction to the subject, it's an excellent overview of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, but despite its great length — with footnotes the book runs to nearly 700 pages — an overview is all that it is. There's not a lot that's new about either the information or the arguments it contains.

Mr. Gellately worries that one aspect of his book may "disturb" some readers — the suggestion that Lenin was a monster to be ranked alongside Stalin and Hitler. As he himself might acknowledge, however, this insight is not particularly original: Historians Dmitri Volkogonov and Richard Pipes (to name but two he cites) have already covered much of this ground, and done so highly effectively. Nevertheless, despite their efforts and those of quite a few others, the real nature of Lenin's ideology remains poorly understood. In repeating the message that the story of Bolshevism is not one of good intentions gone awry, but of an evil that worked all too well, Professor Gellately is performing a very useful public service.

That the Bolsheviks were able to do what they did owed a great deal to the collapse not only of the old order, but of order itself. The rise of the Nazis was made possible by almost exactly the opposite, the desperation of a nation willing to try something, anything, to hang on to what it could of its former way of life. If that meant throwing democracy — and with it, the Jews — to the wolves, too bad.

Hitler's mandate was no blank check, however. As Professor Gellately explains in some of the most intriguing sections of his book, the prewar Third Reich was, in marked contrast with its Soviet rival, a "dictatorship by consent." Compared with what was going on in the USSR at the same time, the use of coercion was limited, largely predictable, and rarely truly murderous. The awful exception, of course, was the ever more hideous persecution of the Jews, but prior to 1939, even that was incremental, a slow-motion pogrom both camouflaged and reinforced by the language of bureaucracy and the law.

That Hitler found it necessary to proceed in this way was a paradox of his earliest years in power. The restoration of social calm was key to his popularity but difficult to reconcile with his long-term agenda of military adventure, unending conquest and relentless genocide. With the invasion of Poland, that paradox became an irrelevance, but neither the frenzy of war nor the intoxication of a victorious blitzkrieg, can fully explain the speed with which so many of the Wehrmacht's "ordinary men" either descended into barbarism or demonstrated their willingness to act as its accomplices. In some cases, it was merely a matter of days. That they did so was a sign that pointed the way to Auschwitz. It also suggested that, even before the tanks had begun to roll, the German people had already moved far, far down that most terrible of roads.

Disappointingly, Professor Gellately never fully succeeds in explaining what it took to make this possible. He takes refuge instead in the observation that, by the time World War II had concluded, it had "raised questions about the very meaning and future of Western civilization." That is right, so far as it goes, but it's too simplistic. The more troubling questions posed by that war are not limited to any one civilization: They concern the essential nature of mankind itself. And there's no comfort to be found in the answer, none at all.

In the Land Of Mammon

Robert Frank: Richistan : A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich

The New York Sun, August 15, 2007

Despite unprecedented social, political, economic, and cultural upheaval, there is, still, just a part of this country's vision of itself that is forever Bedford Falls. That was an idea of nation as extended community, diverse, but not too diverse, a land of opportunity, certainly, but one where no one was left too far behind, or ended up too far ahead. There was Potter, but he was an outsider, the moneyed exception that proved the modest rule, the rule that was also an ideal, of an America where everyone was in the same boat.

Robert Frank, the author of the entertaining, provocative, and dryly amusing "Richistan" (Crown, 278 pages, $24.95), was prompted to write his book by the realization that this was, quite literally, no longer the case. As the writer of the Wall Street Journal's "Wealth Report" (the existence of which tells you something about the times in which we live), his beat took him each year to Fort Lauderdale's International Boat Show, a "weeklong celebration of boats, beaches, and billionaires." There he met a Texas yachter who told him that "the American rich seemed to be floating off to their own country," a country that Mr. Frank has dubbed Richistan.

In Mr. Frank's view, today's new rich are busy creating their own virtual, self-contained nation, complete with their "own healthcare system (concierge doctors), travel network (Net Jets, destination clubs), separate economy (double-digit income gains and double-digit inflation), and language...They didn't just hire gardening crews; they hired personal arborists". Yes, there's a touch of hype in that description (if any journalist is going to make it to Richistan, he's got to sell a lot of books), and a touch of the nothing new, too: The very rich have always been different. It's just how that's changed.

That said, there's no doubt that Mr. Frank is on to something. The key, as he explains, is the remarkable growth in the numbers of America's rich. In 1995 there were nearly 4 million households with a net worth of more than $1 million. By 2004, that total had increased to more than 9 million (both tallies are based on 2004 dollars). Now, as Dr. Evil discovered, and as Mr. Frank concedes, $1 million is not what it was. It's not a bad start though.

It's not just that there are more rich folk around. They are also richer, much richer, than they used to be. By 2004, more than 100,000 households enjoyed a net worth of more than $25 million. If you feel like a loser reading those words, it's no better writing them, believe me. Be that as it may, this wild, if uneven, accumulation of wealth is basically a sign of good times, a largely benign side effect of capitalism on the move. Mr. Frank clearly understands this. His description of the wonders, extravagances, and peculiarities of Richistan is essentially travelogue and guidebook, neither indictment nor paean, and despite the mega-yachts, megamansions, and the $899 pair of children's shoes (crocodile-skin Sperry Top-Siders, since you ask), there is no suggestion of Robin Leach.

Mr. Frank may poke some fun, but for the most part he takes Richistan as he finds it. Yet, for all that, it's possible to discern some faint hints of unease. The source of this, I suspect, is partly aesthetic and partly (for want of a better word) patriotic. So much ostentation may not only be in poor taste, but is it also a betrayal of older, more austere American values, a rejection of Bedford Falls?

Above all, it's likely to be the unevenness that worries Mr. Frank the most, an anxiety betrayed by the statistics of rising inequality that occasionally surface in his pages. Not all of these are breaking news: For example, most of the shift in the concentration of wealth in favor of the top 1% took place two decades or so ago. Nevertheless, the fact that the share of national income now held by the top 1% of earners is at a postwar peak is food for thought, especially at a time when the median income of American households is under severe pressure.

The rich may be pulling away from the rest of the population, but "Richistan" shows how the richest are pulling away from those who are just by-their-fingertips rich or, horrors, merely affluent. Mr. Frank explains how this acts as both carrot and stick to the toilers of Lower Richistan (net worths of $1 million to $10,000,000 million as they try to buy, as well as work, their ways to higher status. In 2004, some 20% of these treadmillers spent more than they earned. That's neither sustainable economically, nor is it a recipe for happiness. Where it may lead is major political change.

Politics is, frustratingly, a topic that is largely beyond the scope of this book. To be sure, Mr. Frank makes the obligatory reference to the swerves to the left that followed both the Gilded Age and the Roaring '20s, but there's little discussion of the extent to which the very existence of Richistan (not to forget the threat it represents to social cohesion) may help history repeat itself. Nor does he examine what may be Richistan's most significant, if somewhat perverse, contribution to this country's political development, one that may follow from the increase in inequality within Richistan itself, and, more dangerously still, its approaches. As that trend continues, there's a clear risk that some of society's best, brightest, and most influential will be left feeling that they have missed not only the yacht, but also the boat.

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.