Glen Beck and "Black Lives Matter"

Having created Donald Truck, the media is now in full panic mode, piling on to destroy him.  Cable news wanted to enhance its ratings and put a little pizzazz into its political coverage; the pernicious outcome of this approach to political reporting is now on full display and, so, of course, the responsible parties are asking for a "do over."  (Given the state of the electorate, probably the less news and the more wonkishly boring the better -- if she weren't a liar and a crook, Hillary Clinton would be, in my estimation, the best possible candidate.  Very few people would vote; the febrile temperature of the Republic would lower and events wouldn't woozily stagger from crisis to crisis.)  In any event, news media are now lining up for interviews with anyone who ever flew the Republican banner but will publicly utter the words "Never Trump!"  The Holy Grail of interviews, of course, is a Republican elder not only unwilling to vote for the orange-haired lout, but, also, espousing support for his nemesis -- unfortunately, these folks are presently rare as hen's teeth. 

Scott Simon hosts a weekend morning show on public radio -- it's mostly inoffensive liberal stuff:  earnest and sorrowful accounts of the state of race relations in this country, gee-whiz! style sports reporting, interviews with soft rock and third-world musicians touted to be the next great thing but who vanish without a trace after their ten minutes of public radio fame, predictably left-slanted coverage of climate change and poverty and welfare reform:  some mornings, you are left with the comforting conclusion that there are almost no White people left in the country, although everything you see outside your car window, waiting for your breakfast burritos, belies that impression, and poor Scott Simon mewling on-air sounds like the whitest of all White men.  Accordingly, it was with some interest that I listened to Glen Beck in conversation with Scott Simon on National Public Radio -- what could this be about?  Predictably, Beck was invited on the air to denounce Donald Trump -- something that he did eloquently.  Beck has a made-for-radio voice, deep, resonant, intensely persuasive.  The contrast with Scott Simon's high-pitched giggly whine was astonishing.  In most aspects of life, an absence of comparators makes the mediocre seem better than they deserve.  Listening to Beck in comparison to Scott Simon was eye- (or I should say) ear-opening:  Beck's  voice had a primordial unsettling authority that made Simon's words shrink into insignificance.

 I don't know anything about Glen Beck except that I reflexively dislike him -- it's my impression that he's some kind of a hard-right kook.  However, nothing that he said to Scott Simon supported this perspective.  And, in fact, he said one thing that was so helpful that I am going to repeat his words in this space.  Beck spoke about the contrast between the slogans "Black Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter."  Surprisingly, he criticized the latter motto as implicitly racist.  I think that many people have come to that same conclusion.  Whenever there is a protest about the police shooting a Black man, Black Lives Matter demonstrators take to the street.  They are, then, met by counter-demonstrator shouting "All Lives Matter" or even "Blue Lives Matter" -- referring, of course, the uniforms that cops characteristically wear.  Intuitively, I understand that this counter-protest draws a false equivalence and is specious, but I have never figured out exactly why I hold this view and haven't been able to articulate an argument supporting my perception.  Worse, I have heard activists with Black Lives Matter melt into helpless and incoherent sophistry when asked to define what's wrong with the phrase "All Lives Matter."  To his credit, Beck provided a helpful parable.  He said that the listener should imagine being at a Sunday dinner with a half dozen people.  Everyone but you has been served a big, heaping helping of apple pie.  When you protest that you haven't received your due share of the pie distributed at the table, your Aunt sanctimoniously replies "All Pies Matter."  For me, this little fable is exceptionally helpful in explaining why the slogan "All Lives Matter" is pernicious and an untruth.  (And consider this tweak to the fable -- your Aunt actually reaches across to your pie and takes it away to put in front of her plate.  Then, she meets your protest with the phrase "All Pies Matter."  This is the equivalent of the Blue Lives Matter movement.) 

I don't have any illusions about "Mr. Beck" as Scott Simon called him.  He's a consummate media personality -- he understood that people exactly like me would be listening and that the occasion called for him to say something conciliatory, something that would reach through my prejudice against his views, and soften my reflex attitude of visceral distaste.  But he succeeded with this endeavor and, in this season, of political incompetency, any success in communication should be celebrated.   

The Gear Daddies at the Mower County Fair

　

　

　

The knee that I ruined on a Chicago curb was suddenly sore. It was a nasty, gouty pain encircling an unstable hollow place. Indeed, at first, I thought that it was another gout attack but couldn’t remember anything unusual I had eaten in the preceding few days. Climbing stairs was agony and bending my leg in the car hurt. In the end, I ascribed the soreness to two things – the general, unpredictable physical suffering of old age and a change in the weather.

When I was a little boy, I remember that the weather seemed to be different every day. In the summer, one afternoon might be parched with deserts of asphalt and gravel glinting maliciously like broken glass and, then, the next morning would feel like football weather, even early November, with icy rain falling and, then, a moderate day sweet as an apple would follow and, in turn, be succeeded by a stormy night full of clouds folded in menacing packages around bursts of lightning. In the winter, it snowed every day except that every day was also clear and cloudless so that every calorie of heat leaked away from the earth into outer space. The weather doesn’t take this form any more – instead, we have systems that seize hold of the terrain, lock themselves in place, and fortify their positions. This entrenched weather doesn’t readily yield to anything different. If it is uncomfortably hot and steamy, you can bet that the tropical weather will last for a week or ten days. If it’s cold, the chill will linger until the trees start to change in mid-July. And when it rains, the clouds cling close to the earth so the downpour can last for days.

The ten days before the Gear Daddy’s big concert at the Mower County Fair were sultry – the humidity was high enough on several afternoons to trigger heat index warnings. But, then, midweek, the monsoons came. First the rain was tears leaking from the dark clouds, hot, syrupy stuff. It poured for a white hour or so, and, then, drizzled all night long. The next day, Thursday, it was still moist outside and very warm and the trees trickled water into the gutters and there was dense fog at the end of the streets. Then, the sun came out for a short while and kicked the water back into the low-hanging clouds and it began to rain once more, spotty bursts of rain falling unpredictably and, then, again, a night musical with drizzle in the trees and downspouts. All day Friday, rain fell – now becoming colder and harder, pelting rain with an edge. How could there be a concert in this stuff?

By 5:00 pm, the rain had stopped but the streets were still wet and the sidewalks littered with deadfall and leaves splashed off the trees by the earlier downpours. I walked the 12 blocks from my house to fair. Some of the intersections where the storm sewers had overflowed were still flooded. The ferris wheel and the brightly lit rides at the county fair’s small carnival glared against low, dark grey clouds scudding by overhead.

To reach the grandstand, you had to walk through the beer garden where each entrant was issued one 16 ounce free beer or one bottle of water. Some of the audience members were wearing windbreakers. A few sets of light-weight aluminum bleachers were set up on the demolition derby track in between the grandstand and the stage, another aluminum scaffold erected about 120 feet from the grandstand bleachers. Earthmoving graders had attacked the track an hour earlier, scraping the surface puddles and top six-inches of mud into oozing mucky windrows around the edges of the field. Beneath the mud, the earth was a scuffed grey-brown, slippery-looking surface, moist but not wet and without pools of water. The big puddles had been displaced into a shallow muddy lake at the base of the grandstand and extending its length. Other shallow ponds, big as swimming pools stood at intervals in the field. Behind the scaffold stage, cars and pickups were parked and the small trailers where the carneys and food stand people lived during the week. Many of the cars and pickups were mired in the mud and, from time to time, a front-end loader would dig around the vehicles or a tow-truck with blinking lights would come to haul someone out of the swamp. (The Gear Daddies seem to attract rain in Austin – I remember a show called "Down by Iowa" at the fair grounds almost 20 years ago that deteriorated into a Woodstock-style mud festival.)

Six Mile Grove opened for the Gear Daddies. Six Mile Grove, said to come from the small town of Lyle on the Iowa border, is a perfectly competent, well-rehearsed country-western band. I paid attention to their first couple of songs and they were briskly executed country rock, a notch more amplified than what you might hear on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion show. The songs had a little bit of an Oklahoma twang – after all, Lyle is as far south as you can get as long as you stay in Minnesota – and I admired them. Unfortunately, the plight of a warm-up band is a sad one. No one really wants to hear them play and, as Six Mile Grove’s set lengthened, of course, the audience wanted them to finish, vacate the stage, and cede the place to the Gear Daddies. As a result, a warm-up band has a claim to your attention for the first 20 minutes of their gig – after that, everything is pretty much superfluous and the hard-drinking crowd at this show vacated their seats en masse to buy beer in the adjacent beer garden. Six Mile Grove played with increasing desperation, amping up the music and virtuosity, but it didn’t matter – no one wanted what they were selling; they ended up with a kind of droning space-rock with Hank Williams inflections, a mix between Lyle Lovett and Captain Beefheart.

As Six Mile Grove played, the sky put on an exemplary show to compete with them. The heavy cloud cover burst apart, dissolving into vaguely stallion-shaped clouds that raced overhead, only a few hundred feet off the ground. The clouds reared and plunged, moving at improbable speed from north to south – it was as if we were witnessing a celestial army in defeat, retreating in disarray from a battlefield. Then, the western sky, previously a dull grey, ripped itself open to reveal a vast and far country, suffused with lurid red light – the clouds looked like striated heart tissue, bright scarlet and stretched across the western horizon. These streamers were furrowed by clefts full of sky of the most delicate cerulean, the tint that you might glimpse and never be able to properly describe in the glaze of an exquisite Japanese vase. The sun ignited the puddles and made them reflect the wan defeated cloud cavalry trailing by overhead and the metal roofs of the livestock barns were ablaze with light. The panes of glass in the tractors and earthmovers parked around the infield were glorified and the sudden change in the weather, the onset of blue skies, made the audience, already hard-drinking, exhilarated, so that they drank all the more.

It would be picturesque to say that the Gear Daddies made the music of my youth. But this is inaccurate. The Gear Daddies formed and flourished in the 80's – their run of good luck was, more or less, exhausted, I think, around the time of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. When I was in college, I defined myself by listening to Tom Verlaine’s Television, Richard Wagner, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, the Rolling Stones and Beatles, Exene Cervenka and Lone Justice and, of course, Bruce Springsteen. (Now that I am an old man, I mostly tune my radio to talk shows and, occasionally, listen to a little bit of Warren Zevon.) The Gear Daddies were the music that accompanied the prime of my life – the confused period of my first marriage and the infancy of my children, many court hearings and trials and the effort to establish myself as a lawyer, too much drinking, too much rage and anger, poverty most of the time, worries about money, the loss of my avocation as a writer. The Gear Daddies produced the last music to which I have listened to carefully, attentively, as something that spoke specially to me. And so, when I heard this music played, memories flooded me, and regrets as well, and I felt like I should weep until my eyes were sore, but, of course, an old man doesn’t cry and hasn’t enough juice, left in him, even, to wet his cheeks with tears. The whole experience, of course, was densely meaningful to me, encoded with so much personal recollection, that I can’t possibly provide an objective account of the concert or it significance to me.

I should say that Marty Zellar, the lead singer began with a signature tune, "She’s happy". It’s a great song, although I always thought that the lyrics were slightly patronizing when Zeller sang them when he was 25. He’s now in his late forties, I suppose, maybe, older and I no longer hear the words as condescending. The singer has grown into his lyrics – the words now seem true and just to me, a secret, gnostic gloss on Lou Reed’s "Sweet Jane". (The lyrics to "She’s Happy" include a chorus that says: "some say that life’s useless,it’s boring and dull," a phrase that derives directly from Lou Reed’s song – I know that at the time "She’s Happy" was composed another band in Austin that influenced Mr. Zellar was performing a powerful cover version of "Sweet Jane.") Zellar followed with the obligatory Zamboni song, a novelty tune that has made him moderately famous – he made a snarky remark after performing the song to the effect that the audience could leave now, having heard, I suppose, Zellar’s most famous composition. Next, the band played a cover of Prince’s "Little Red Corvette", a tribute to the late, lamented Minneapolis musician – Marty Zellar remarked that he had read an interview with Prince in which the artist said that he had been in Austin to hear his father’s big band play at a dance at the Terp Ballroom. (The old Terp by the river side has been a ruin, an evangelical church, a ruin again, a Mexican restaurant and ballroom, and, even, a place where Mexican immigrants play indoor soccer games in the winter. In short, in the 37 years that I have lived in Austin, the Terp has been everything but a ballroom.) The comment by Prince is probably apocryphal – I would have to work out some dates to confirm it – but I hope it is true. Next, Zellar and the band played the poignant "Statue of Jesus" – also a song rooted deeply in Austin’s landscape: the tune refers to an effeminate and ghostly-looking image of Jesus standing in a niche at the big brick Catholic Church that define the north-south axis of the town. Billy Dankert performed a rousing rendition of a Gear Daddies song that he wrote: "Blues, Mary." Zellar, then, did a song that I didn’t recognize and, thereafter, "Heavy Metal Boys". Over the years, "Heavy Metal Boys", like "She’s Happy" has evolved – originally, the song was satiric, an attack on Austin’s "small-town people". Zellar now performs the tune very, very slowly as a dirge and it was wonderfully effective, and terribly sad, an elegy from which the contempt has drained away. Midway through the set, Zellar lost his way and seemed, for a moment, to be angry at his audience and the venue and these fairgrounds with snorting pigs and crowing roosters and big, mournful cows only a hundred yards away. The band tinkered with some covers, played only enough of a tune to whet the crowd’s appetite and, then, stopped so that the musicians could banter with one another and members of the crowd. It was a little unseemly and went on too long and there is always a sense with Martin Zellar that his detestation of the small town where he was raised is authentic and, even, insulting. However, the and retreated from taunting the audience with a powerful version of the hymn-like prayer "Strength" and, then, several upbeat tunes including "The Color of her Eyes" and "Just another stupid boy" – both wonderful songs. In their best music, Zellar snarls out his lyrics so that they hit you right between the eyes, then, the guitars all chime together like a bell ringing, and the filigree of the steel guitar decorates the whole thing like smoke curling off a vivid, bright fire. In concert, the Gear Daddies depend heavily on the steel and lead guitar of Randy Broughten – his contribution seems less significant in the band’s recorded work. Broughten has some rock-and-roll charisma, and, although he’s generally a modest performer, he can crank out tasteful, understated, and completely serviceable guitar solos. (A lot of the on-stage banter involved Mr. Broughten – he’s ten or twelve years older than his bandmates and met them when he was substitute teaching a high school class in which Marty Zellar and bass guitarist, Nick Ciola, were enrolled.)

After "Stupid Boy," the band left the stage. A small drone had parked itself over the stage, advancing away from where the sunset had flared and gone. Behind Buffy the Cow, the Fair’s house-high fiber glass mascot, someone had lit a bonfire and a big column of orange fire roared upward into the darkness. The audience was full of Austin’s leaders – politicians, lawyers, doctors, some accountants, college professors, and, of course, also large contingents of has-been bikers, former juvenile delinquents, and off-duty cops. (After following the Gear Daddies for several years in Austin’s squalid, if lively taverns – bands had to play from 8 to 1:00 am with only a ten minute break per hour and there was never a cover charge -- I was appalled to travel to the Twin Cities and see the band packing fashionable downtown bars at 10 dollars a head door-charge with loathsome frat boys staggering drunk and punching at one another. These places were so crowded that they relied on the cover-charge for revenue and didn’t even bother selling anyone a drink.) Everyone was at the show and the grandstand was packed and the bleachers in the field below perched on the edges of the lagoons were also crowded, women standing on them and swaying back and forth, and, as well, the entire dirt field between the grandstand and the stage was also crowded, elbow to elbow with people, long lines at the porta-potties – to use the German verb, es wimmelt (that is, the crowd writhed to the music). Lots of beer had been consumed at 4 dollars a can and most of the audience was very drunk and a lot of the women were dancing with one another and obviously sexually aroused. When the band vacated the stage after "Stupid Boy", the crowd clapped and, then, roared and, then, tried to knock down the grandstand bleachers with rhythmic stomping and so the Gear Daddies returned and played a very effective and generous encore – "My Baby does the Hanky Panky," "Drank so much I just feel stupid," a moving cover of Elvis Presley’s "I can’t help falling in love with you", and, finally, the anthem, "218" named after the highway that leads from Austin to Iowa and, also, from Austin to Minneapolis, like Highway 61, a place to be always revisited as both the road that leads to one’s home and, more importantly, perhaps, the route by which you make your escape.

I was supposed to meet members of the Gear Daddies in the beer tent, but it was too crowded and chaotic, and, after standing around for 45 minutes, I walked back home. I stopped at a food truck and bought a foot-long hot dog with onions – it was superb – and a sack of kettle corn.

Braindead

It was the torture episode on CBS's political satire, Braindead, that convinced me that this series is unique and well worth following.  The heroine, Laurel, is in the custody of the FBI and various governmental agencies want her tortured -- of course, as is generally the case, the nature of the information that they wish to elicit from her is uncertain:  the torture is more or less for the sake of torture.  Laurel is an aide to rabidly liberal senator and she has stumbled onto an alarming secret.  In a series of Kafkaesque scenes, Laurel is confronted by bizarre accusations, said to have asserted with known Jihadists, and, then, solicitously and politely interviewed by government physicians and their henchmen to determine the nature and exact amount of torture to which she can be subjected without risk of death -- the government doctors are exceptionally kind and professional, much better than the Mayo Clinic physicians with which I have had contact, but, of course, their agenda is completely contrary to all medical ethics.  After the interview, Laurel is strapped to a table and a very gentle-looking, if efficient, torturer gets ready to administer something called "controlled immersion" -- that is, the new version of "water-boarding" that the political administration has approved.  (This is so that the FBI officials can claim that they don't "torture" or "waterboard" when they are compelled to testify to oversight committees.)  As it happens, Laurel's brother is a senator and he gets wind that his sister is in custody -- he reneges on his earlier approval for the torture once he concludes that Laurel will be the subject and, then, convenes an emergency security counsel meeting.  When the vote seems about to go against him, he embarks on a desperate filibuster and, at the last moment, a couple of Laurel's friends, also investigating the mystery, intervene in a surprising and comical way to save her.   The torturer is nothing but friendly and regretful -- the very opposite of a sadist:  he offers to give Laurel a ride home and, then, shakes her hand when he lets her out of his car, indicating how thankful he is that the didn't have to torture her.  This episode of Braindead, although very funny, is also terrifying -- the Kafkaesque machinations of the FBI and other security apparatus are deeply alarming, and, I assume, mostly realistic:  the people in charge of the torture refuse to explain the threat or, even, who is in custody and simply revert to slogans like "ticking time bomb."  The pompous posturing of the senators, whose performances are being filmed for CSPAN, are shockingly true to life.  And the episode's race against time plot is fantastically gripping -- because the mechanics of the whole thing are so convincingly portrayed, you feel Laurel's peril in the pit of your stomach.  When she is rescued, the sense of relief felt by the viewer is palpable -- this is one of the rare TV shows in which viewer becomes emotionally invested. 

I was resistant to Braindead initially because of the series' look.  The show is efficiently shot and looks, more or less, like a standard version of a cop or lawyer show, something on the order of NCIS or Law and Order -- the lighting is clear and schematic, there is zero Stimmung or atmosphere, and the actors are all pretty as can be, almost glossy in their miniature movie star way.  There is a lot of sex implied in a smarmy way but not really shown -- after all, this is network TV.  Much of the dialogue is clunky and expository.  The show's premise is derivative -- it's a Washington-based version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Aliens in the form of ants creep into people's ears and begin devouring their brains.  Ultimately, the ants take over the person and, if they all fart at the same time, the victim's head explodes in a raspberry-colored mush.  The show's political satire, however, elevates this material from the quotidian -- the first effect of ant infestation is that people start listening voraciously to the Cars "You Might Think"; this is because the bass line apparently communicates something to the ants.  Then, the victim becomes rabidly partisan -- if the victim is a Republican, he becomes a parody of Jesse Helms or Orrin Hatch, mouthing bigoted nonsense; Democrats turn into ranting maniacs that make Bernie Sanders' seem conservative.  Of course, no one will listen to anything that the other side is saying and, so, the insect-controlled senators simply rant at one another in a government that has ground to a complete deadlock.  The senators, themselves, are a vile lot -- even Laurel's reasonably conscientious liberal brother immediately signs the torture order before he knows that it involves his own sister.  There are craven, servile interns, hyper-vigilant secretary-receptionists, and megalomaniacal government officials and deceitful press secretaries whose every word, including "if" "and," and"but" are lies.  Tony Shalhoub plays an avuncular, even charming, senator with the secret demeanor of Caligula -- he's the show's villain and does an excellent job with the part, channeling his inner Nixon in combination with Ted Cruz.  Shalhoub's character harbors the queen ant and, periodically, she comes out of his ear to strut down his arm to lay more eggs and, thereby, spread the contagion.  And in about every episode, someone's head gaudily explodes, a form of "bio-terrorism" promoted as the outcome of "radical Islamic Jihad".  (Some of the plot turns seem to have been scripted by Wilhelm Reich -- the insects can only be driven out of the brain by activating the libido and other pleasure centers:  when Laurel gets infected,  she has to have hook-up sex with another senate aide, all the while snorting cocaine and feasting, while engaged in coitus, on whole bars of Toblerone and buckets of fried chicken; needless to say, she's pretty embarrassed to encounter the man with whom she hooked-up the next day. This is a smart, cleverly plotted show that deserves your attention -- it is a CBS prime-time show, airing on Sunday nights in opposition to HBO's addictive The Night of.  But you can catch the show's past episodes on "on demand."

My Friend Ivan Lapshin

My Friend Ivan Lapshin is a movie released in 1984 directed by the great Alexei German.  The film is apparently exceptionally popular in the former Soviet Union.  Indeed, the movie may be the most successful of all Soviet films in terms of its audience appeal.  The film's appeal is hard to understand -- My Friend Ivan Lapshin poses many challenges to an audience, although, perhaps, these are less severe for people raised under the Communist system.  The narrative is only obliquely presented -- as in all of German's later films, the distinction between plot and random circumstance is hard to make.  Images that are highlighted or that remain in the viewer's mind are, often, inconsequential (or, even, distractions) to the plot.  On several occasions, we see a very striking boy with big ears and glasses in a wheelchair -- the boy smiles warmly at the camera.  His presence seems to be significant -- German's ceaselessly roving camera has twice taken notice of him.  But, as far as I can tell, the boy has nothing to do with the story and does not figure in the plot -- to borrow Barthes' term, he is a punctum, a point of interest for the eye that signifies nothing other than that the film must take account of intractable reality.  Things always take place around a narrative that have no bearing on that story and German, often, highlights these images or events.  In one of the final scenes in the film, we see the hero Ivan Lapshin walking away from the camera -- he has been disappointed in love and the scene is a sad one.  In the middle of the town square, a woman is having difficulty with an enormous bear-like dog incongruously named "Tiny."  The dog will not obey her commands.  As Ivan Lapshin walks past her, departing, in fact, from the film that bears his name, the woman's difficulties with her dog become central to the image -- they distract us from the hero's exit.  But the woman and the dog don't figure in any other parts of the film -- she seems to be inserted as a warrant of authenticity:  this film shows us the truth because it dares to present aspects of life in the town that can not be assimilated to the story told by the movie. 

My Friend Ivan Lapshin bears many stylistic similarities of German's monstrous and great Krushtalyov, my car!  The characters live in a chaotic boarding house, six men crammed together in a claustrophobically narrow and cluttered space.  The film posits itself, like Krushtalyov, as a memoir -- although not one as lacerating as the story told in the later film.  Both pictures feature long and complex takes in which the camera roams through landscapes that seem to have been designed by Bosch or Brueghel -- the landscapes are swarming with all sorts of picaresque detail, every kind of human activity.  If something intriguing is occurring in these landscapes, the camera will jerk to the side and pause to record this event before, then, returning to track the affairs of the film's protagonists.  My Friend Ivan Lapshin is an affectionate elegy for the mid-30's in a small town somewhere north of Leningrad.  The plot is apparently derived from several short stories about Ivan Lapshin written by German's father, Yuri.  At the start of the film, we glimpse the director moving among this records and books in his Leningrad flat:  we see his grandson sitting in the darkness on the stairs and the images are in color, a Rembrandt-styled dense and shadowy brown.  From the top of the stairs where German's grandson is working, we look down into sun-dappled study where the director's father is sitting -- he looks up at us and the image fades to black and white, beginning the narrative that takes place in 1935.  We see the director as a small boy and are gradually drawn into a very diffuse series of events that constitutes the movie's slender plot.  Lapshin is a Soviet police officer who has come to the small-town, possibly to pursue a vicious master criminal named Sololyov.  It's winter time and, for the film's purposes, the town consists of a long, narrow and grim-looking police-station, a big public square with a wooden arch lit with Christmas lights, and the crowded, smelly boarding house where Lapshin lives with his fellow policemen.  A group of actors comes to town to present some kind of propaganda production, a play involving a rebellion against the wealthy by the proletariat.  One of the actresses, Natasha, flirts with Lapshin, a shell-shocked veteran of the Civil War, and asks to meet a real prostitute so she can perfect her performance in that role in the play.  Lapshin oblilngly introduces her to a whore, Kate Napoleon, so that the actress can study that woman's demeanor.  (Kate Napoleon is plain, weirdly demure, and shows no signs of any kind that she is a prostitute -- probably exactly as a real prostitute would present herself when not plying her trade; amusingly, the only performance said to be weak in the play is that of the actress impersonating the prostitute.)  Lapshin's friend is another cop called Khanin.  Khanin's wife has just died from diphtheria.  In a frightening scene, Khanin tries to kill himself but every time he shoves the gun down his throat, he gags uncontrollably.  Lapshin intervenes and Khanin doesn't commit suicide.  Later, Lapshin climbs into Natasha's rooms, using an unstable-looking ladder.  He confesses his love to the actress.  She tells him that she loves Khanin.  Disappointed Lapshin goes back to his crowded boarding house and, on an impulse, dips his hand in boiling water while he is doing his laundry.  Later, the police conduct a raid in the mist on the master criminal Sololyov's headquarters -- a big wooden house that is also a chaotic, confusing sort of apartment building with a half-dozen people in every chamber.  A bad guy stabs Khanin and we think that the policeman is going to die.  But he recovers.  Khanin later rejects the advances of Natasha (he is still in love with his dead wife, Lika).  Although Khanin has rejected Natasha, the actress is not ready to accept Lapshin's love.  Instead, she departs for Leningrad on the first steamer capable of breaking the spring ice on the Neva River.  We see the steamer leaving the town, this time shown in color, and German, as narrator, tells us that the city is much larger now and has many tram-lines whereas there was only one when Lapshin was in town.  And, on that note, the film ends.

The mise-en-scene in My Friend Ivan Lapshin is fantastically complex and discursive and I will have to watch the film again to better understand it.  There is no doubt that the picture is some kind of masterpiece but it resists interpretation and the story, like some narratives by Chekhov, is all atmosphere and really very little event.  German is one of the greatest directors of the 20th century -- all of his films, like those of Tarkovsky, are brilliant and memorable and repay close attention.  Therefore, these remarks must be accounted preliminary only.  The film has a number of scenes that I didn't understand on first viewing -- in particular, there is one horrifying sequence in which people come from within an underground pit, climbing laboriously up a narrow trench in which there are stairs.  Several of the people are either dead or some kind of living corpses and they are taken away in an open truck in the middle of winter (from Krushtalyov, my car! I interpret these people to be political prisoners, but I don't know for sure) -- I have no idea what this sequence means and will have to watch the movie again to see if I can figure it out.  Like Tarkovsky's films, German's movies are rapturously beautiful but also incredibly squalid -- the little town is a wretched backwater and you can almost smell the poverty on-screen. 

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

An ambitious brash comedy, Frank Tashlin's 1957 Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? has almost too many satiric targets?  The film mocks Madison Avenue advertising culture -- it's a proto Mad Men critique of consumerism and its discontents without the melodrama in the TV series.  The fifties' fad for big-bosomed blonde sex bombs is both mocked and exploited in the reliably grotesque figure of Jayne Mansfield.   There are parodies of TV and radio pop-culture.  And the film manages a circumspect, but penetrating, indictment of masculinity as constructed by Eisenhower era society -- Tony Randall plays a hapless nebbish, a weak man and wannabe macher with infantile tendencies:  one of the film's many Freudian jokes is that Randall, who has no control over the women in his life, can't even figure out how to puff on a pipe.  Assuming that pipe-smoking represents an infantile oral fixation, a retrograde (or atavistic) sexuality consistent with the film's obsession with breasts, Randall's character, bearing the manly name of Rockwell Hunter, has even't achieved that level of erotic development.  In his later films, the somewhat saturnine Tony Randall played debonair, sophisticated, and worldly men -- in this picture, Randall is continuously aspiring to the masculine dimensions of his hard-ass name without every achieving those aspirations.  By the end of the film, he still hasn't figured-out how to successfully smoke his pipe -- "I can't get it lit," he wails, a sorrowful complaint in the world that equates smoking with sex.

The film's plot is complicated and has some of the flair of a Shakespearian romantic comedy -- after several erotic mésalliances and misunderstandings, the movie ends with three-matched pairs of lovers assuring the audience the love and happiness are indeed possible in the Capitalist purgatory that the film presents.  Rock Hunter is a low level ad man who's highest aspiration is anal -- he wants to shit in the locked executive toilet with its green-jade counter-tops. (When he is mistreated by management, he calls his boss a "poop.")  Instead, Hunter finds himself on the verge of being fired -- the advertising firm's largest client, Stay-Put lipstick, is disgruntled and about to cancel its contract.  Through some clever, if obvious, plot contrivances, Hunter is propelled into the presence of the peroxide-blonde sex bomb played by Jayne Mansfield.  Mansfield's character is upset with her lover, played by the ridiculously buff and handsome Micki Hartigay (Mansfield's husband in real life), a "jungle man" -- that is, the star of a Tarzan-styled TV show set in the jungles of Africa.  In order to make Bobo, the "jungle-man", jealous Mansfield pretends to be in love with Rock Hunter -- she squeals repeatedly at a pitch that must be a torment to bats and dogs and sighs voluptuously.  When he says that Jayne Mansfield will be the "titular" head of his company, she is thrilled by the word and, impulsively, kisses him.  In a reprise of the famous milk shot involving Phil Silvers in The Girl Can't Help It, the popcorn in his pocket ejaculates all over his suit and the floor.  Hunter negotiates with Mansfield's sex bomb to induce her to become a commercial endorser of Stay-Put lipstick, a stratagem that saves the advertising agency and, ultimately, results in Hunter being given the key to the executives-only toilet.  In the course of these negotiations, the blonde bombshell actually convinces herself that she is in love with the unprepossessing Hunter.  Of course, Hunter has a chaste, girl-Friday fiancée who is appalled by Hunter's apparently sexual relationship with the sex bomb -- her jealousy compels her to obsessively do push-ups to improve the musculature in her breast, while padding her bra and slinking around with the velvety "jello on springs" gait that Mansfield uses; the girlfriend even imitates Mansfield's ear-splitting ultra-sonic squeal.  Already a caricature, Mansfield's character is caricatured again by the girlfriend's malicious mockery.  The film posits a world in which everything is for sale -- Mansfield's sexuality is just a device to peddle products and the film interrupts itself time and again for overt, gaudy product placements:  TWA airlines gets a prominent placement and Mansfield's other projects, The Girl Can't Help It and The Wayward Bus, are relentlessly promoted.  The movie begins with a parade of grotesque advertisements -- radioactive dishwashing soap, a washing machine that turns out to be a man-eater, beer made from the finest "swamp water," a snap-crackle-pop cereal that will give you strength "when you stand in the unemployment line."  Clearly, all is not well in TV and movie consumer-land.  Randall breaks the fourth-wall for an intermission presented as a sop to the "TV fans" who like to have commercial breaks in their entertainment and the show ends with a nightmare parody of a late fifties TV variety show.  It's all brightly lit, completely and overtly visible, parody, at times slipping into surrealism -- in the film's climax, Rock Hunter wanders around the offices of the advertising agency, suddenly transfused with weirdly psychedelic lighting, and, ultimately, proclaims the film's credo, an odd variant on Henry Fonda's closing soliloquy in The Grapes of Wrath.  In Ford's iconic film, Tom Joad declared that he was a representative of the People and that their collective will would ultimately be invincible.  In Tashlin's no less iconic movie, Rock Hunter proclaims that he is just "an average guy (but nonetheless part of the great community of consumers):  "we are the great market, the consumers, the Nielsen family watching TV, the people who elect the President."  Having defined his every-day heroism as being a consumer, Randall abandons advertising, flees the blandishments of Jayne Mansfield, reverts to his pretty, if mousy, fiancée, and ends up raising chickens on a small farm.  The distance between the late 30's vision of collective man -- a heroic labor-organizing Communist -- and the late 50's protagonist, who defines himself proudly as nothing more than an "average guy" consumer --could not be more pronounced and, perhaps, more dispiriting.  And this melancholy implicit to the whole film, perhaps, explains some of its stranger elements.  Two odd themes predominate:  first, no one is doing what they want to do -- everyone has been forced into a role that they despise; this theme has Freudian implications since the movie suggests that overbearing fathers have some role in requiring their sons to succeed against their own better instincts -- the head of the advertising firm, for instance, only wants to breed and show roses but has followed his father into the disreputable family business.  The second odd theme in the film is the ancient notion that Eros is a mischievous and blind god -- Jayne Mansfield's love for the incompetent and childish Tony Randall is inexplicable, but, perhaps, the most realistic thing in the film.  (After all, after marrying Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe turned to Arthur Miller).  Joan Blondell who plays Mansfield's factotum and confidante has a long speech in which she describes her helpless love for a milk man -- milk and milkmen seem to be an obsessive leit motif in Tashlin's films.  Manfield herself admits she is searching for her first lover, the man who decisively shaped her erotic tastes -- at the end of the movie, we see him:  it's Groucho Marx, sneering and elderly and brandishing his phallic cigar. 

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? began life as a Broadway comedy and it is sharply written.  A silent movie star fails in the talkies "because she didn't speak English.  She was from Texas."  When Hunter gets his longed-for promotion, his mentor says:  "At last you've outgrown your education."  Someone tells Rock Hunter that "success will fit you like a shroud."  There are several Hollywood "in" jokes:  Mansfield says that her next film project will be "a Russian movie about two brothers."  She is referring to her great rivals plan to produce a film of The Brothers Dostoevsky in which Marilyn Monroe planned to play Grushenka. 

Film Essay -- Love and Anarcy, a film directed by Lina Wertmueller

　

　


Long names

Lina Wertmueller’s films have long names. Invariably, these names were shortened when the pictures were premiered in the United States. A perceptive critic might observe that Wertmueller’s Leftist cinema is influenced heavily by the theater of Bertolt Brecht and the German playwright also favored lengthy titles with a didactic inflection. The actual title of the film released in the United States as Love and Anarchy is A Film about Love and Anarchy: this morning at 10 am on the Via de Fiori (Flower Street), in a noted brothel...

Identifying the Brechtian influence on Wertmueller’s films is an interesting exercise. But it is probably wrong with respect to the long names by which this director christens her films. My suggestion is that the long and unwieldy names are a trademark referring to Wertmueller’s own grandiose name: she was born Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmueller von Elgg Spanoel Braueich. Of course, this is not entirely an Italian name. Wertmueller was born in Rome in 1928 to Swiss nobility. However, she is, perhaps, the most fundamentally "Italian" of all directors from that country – the most passionate, vehement, and wildly expressive of all the Italians making films in the sixties and seventies. Indeed, she was so flamboyant in her personae, and her films were so uniquely and vibrantly personal to her, that she was caricatured no less than twice on Saturday Night Live in the mid-seventies. (Larraine Newman did the impersonation.)

Heavily influenced by Fellini both personally and professionally, Wertmueller affected big round glasses. She wore tight slacks and blouses. Her Wikipedia page show her sprawled across a kind of chaise lounge with a large statue of a sphinx adorning the windowsill of the room where she is photographed – her huge white glasses and extravagant posture make her look like a depraved Southern California real estate agent.

　



A Puzzle

Wertmueller made some of the most well-known and famous pictures released in the seventies. At one time, she was the star of the International Art Film circuit. Some of her films were enormous box-office hits both in Europe and North America – indeed, one of her pictures, Swept Away, was so influential and controversial that it was remade as a vehicle for Madonna. But after the decade of the seventies, Lina Wertmueller’s star seems to have gone into eclipse. She continued to make movies and, indeed, has been prolific but none of her films directed after the late seventies have been commercially released in this country. The first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for directing was, by and large, forgotten in the United States. People are always surprised when they learn that Wertmueller is still alive.

Wertmueller was a rebellious girl and, repeatedly, expelled from private schools where her wealthy family enrolled her. She was supposed to attend the university to become a lawyer, but, instead, spent her time in theater. She wrote plays and toured Europe with a Communist puppet theater. In the early sixties, she finagled her way into Cinecitta Studios where she worked as an assistant director on Felllini’s 8 ½. Her proficiency in that work led to a number of solo directing assignments. Her first film, The Lizards, was the type of movie obligatory to young Italian directors – a neo-realist study of crime and poverty in the South. Thereafter, she made pictures in a variety of genres, directing a comedy, two musicarello comedies (these were like beach party of Gidget movies), and, even, a spaghetti western, The Belle Star Story.

Her breakthrough film was The Seduction of Mimi (1972), the first of her pictures starring Giancarlo Giannini. This film featured Wertmueller’s trademark mixture of lurid and explicit sex, operatic emotion, and Communist politics. A major hit, The Seduction of Mimi (1973) was followed by Love and Anarchy, also a vehicle for Giannini. These two films established Giannini as matinee idol of international proportions. Wertmueller’s next film, All Screwed Up, did not star Giannini and was, therefore, less successful commercially. Wertmueller returned to her collaboration with Giannini with the film Swept Away (1976), probably the most financially successful of all of her pictures. (Swept Away played for extended runs in all major American cities – it was so scandalous that everyone had to see it; the film was highly fashionable and regarded as a picture as important as Last Tango in Paris.) Wertmueller’s most ambitious film is The Seven Beauties, a concentration camp epic also starring Giancarlo Giannini. Although some influential critics (notably Pauline Kael) derided The Seven Beauties, many writers acclaimed the picture as a masterpiece and it was nominated for an Academy Award – Giannini won just about every acting award available for his performance as the picaresque hero, a man who uses his sexual allure to escape death in a concentration camp.

Invited to Hollywood, Wertmueller made her first picture in English, also starring Giannini and the starlet du jour, Candice Bergen, The End of the World in our Usual Bed in a Night full of Rain (1978). The movie flopped and, indeed, it was the kind of catastrophic flop that caused many critics to feel that Wertmueller’s fame was a kind of fraud, the sort of failure that casts a long and harsh light on the film maker’s earlier pictures. She returned to Italy, directed a crime thriller that was modestly successful in Europe but without the scandalous provocation that had characterized her earlier films. Since that time, she has made an additional 12 films, many of them apparently mafia dramas, some musicals, and romantic comedies. Her last picture, Too Much Romance – it’s time for Stuffed Peppers was released in 2004. Although none of these pictures were commercially shown in the United States, and, indeed, I don’t think any reached the "art-house" or international film screens (consisting of two or three theaters per major city) these movies were all well-funded, major productions starring important Italian actors like Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastrioanni. For some reason, however, exhibitors regarded these films as uninteresting to American audiences and so they have not been shown in this country.

What happened? I have two hypotheses. First, Wertmueller films in movies in huge close-ups – she is addicted to placing her camera about eight inches from the faces of her performers. The stars of Wertmueller’s films in the seventies, Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangelo Melato, have incredibly expressive and memorable faces. Simply put, Wertmueller’s success in the mid-seventies is largely related to Giannini’s wet and enormously melancholy eyes and Melato’s equally expressive, if strangely hooded, and protuberant eyes. Even critics who were disdainful of Wertmueller’s aggressive vulgarity, her pretentious, over-the-top melodrama, commented on the astounding beauty of her actors – the whores in Love and Anarchy have the pale, ethereal faces of silent movie stars. In the scenes in which they are together, Giancarlo Giannini and Marieangelo Melato have an indefinable chemistry, an erotic charge that is palpable to the viewer. (This is also true of Lina Polito, one of the most beautiful actresses who ever lived; she plays the whore Tripolina who falls in love with Giannini’s miserable and trapped would-be assassin.) Wertmueller’s films from the seventies presented an extraordinary visual spectacle and, of course, the most enduring appeal of film has always been its erotic aspects – bluntly stated, Wertmueller’s movies made in the seventies were highly charged with sex appeal and female audiences swooned over Giancarlo Giannini.

Second, Wertmueller’s films are overlong and, sometimes, poorly scripted – people speak in political slogans or melodramatic hyperbole. Some films are better with subtitles. The subtitle keeps the audience from otherwise laughing at dialogue that would seem pretentious or vapid or both if spoken in the native language of the viewers. It’s no accident that Wertmueller’s first film in English bombed.

There is a third factor: audiences are more willing to accept a radical and disquieting political message if that message is delivered in a foreign language and from an exotic milieu. Wertmueller’s two greatest hits, Swept Away and Seven Beauties, are politically disorienting and weirdly misogynistic – indeed, it has been asserted that Swept Away is one of the most politically incorrect films about male-female relationships ever made and many critics, although acclaiming the movies’ erotic appeal, were deeply uncomfortable about its plot. (The film concerns a privileged and wealthy trophy wife of a capitalist who is swept away in a storm to a remote desert isle; the only other survivor of the shipwreck is a Communist sailor. The sailor proceeds to beat the woman into submission, raping her repeatedly, abuse that she extravagantly enjoys since she is suffering at the hands of Giancarlo Giannini – the sado-masochism in this film is so overwhelming that it appealed to Madonna; she remade the film under the direction of her then-husband Guy Ritchie in 2002. The picture featured Adriana Giannini, the son of the star of the 1976 film – predictable, the film was an embarrassing failure.) As far as I can determine, Wertmueller’s later films are far less scandalous and, thematically, more audience-friendly – and, therefore, less interesting to international audiences.

　



Giancarlo Giannini

Male beauty morphs with age into handsome dignity – at least, this is how aging men are regarded in the male-dominated cinema. Giannini continues to be active in films. He has played a debonair assassin in several recent James Bond films, including Quantum of Solace.

Marieangelo Melato also made a number of films, although only in Italy – she died of pancreatic cancer when she was 71.

The transcendentally beautiful, Lina Polito, never achieved much fame. By 1976, she was appearing in soft-core pornography, films like The Deported Women of Special SS Brigade. She has appeared sporadically in made-for-TV movies, lent her voice for Italian cartoons, and had continuing roles in television series.

　



Errico Malatesta
Love and Anarchy concludes with long quote from Errico Malatesta. Malatesta was born in Italy in 1853 and died in Rome in 1932. He was a life-long anarchist and international nomad, often arrested and jailed, sometimes deported. He worked editing anarchist publications in Italy, London, South America, Egypt, and the United States. During his life, he spent about ten years in prison.

Malatesta believed in violent revolution. He was friends with Bakhtin and may have been involved in the conspiracy resulting in the assassination of the Italian King, Umberto I. The King was killed by an expatriate Italian anarchist from Paterson, New Jersey who had ties to Malatesta. 　

Heavily bearded, scruffy, and with Byronic cast to his features, Malatesta is the stereotypical bomb-throwing anarchist.


　


Style

Wertmueller’s major films are shot in a raucous, over-emphatic commedia dell’arte style. Her direction punctuates points with big close-ups. Long shots emphasize picturesque locations and scenery. Her film’s are edited for clarity of narrative. She sometimes uses silent film techniques – for instance, early in Love and Anarchy, Wertmueller cuts to the old man killed by the Fascists to show what Tunin is thinking. Wertmueller’s film draws contrasts that are schematic if broadly effective – the place most conceptually remote from a Fascist rally is a brothel: accordingly, the film’s action plays out in the brothel establishing a space where desire and pleasure are more important than duty and self-sacrifice. Wertmueller begins the film with a pan across a landscape flooded with water – small ribbon-like islands exist here and there in this watery panorama. We see someone running along one of the ribbons of islet – the person running is trapped: the slender sliver of island comes to end in the water and there is no egress. From this broad landscape, Wertmueller tightens the focus and reduces the space in which her characters can act – the film immediately encloses its characters in the labyrinthine world of the brothel, a maze devoted to pleasure. In the end of the film, Tunin is shown half-dead in a stone cell that comes to sharp point at its corner – Tunin is shoved into that corner, filmed from overhead, as the thugs beat hilm to death. Like the running man in the opening scene, he has been literally "cornered." The broad landscape of the film’s opening scenes has been narrowed to the vertex between two impermeable, hard, and blood-stained walls. (Curiously, after the credits, Wertmueller shows another shot of the landscape that opens the scene: the meaning of the landscape has been altered by Tunin’s horrific death and now bears an elegiac aspect – even at the outset of the film, however, the range of motion available to the film’s characters is significantly limited by the water isolating the land into fragments, that is, islands.)


　

　


Lina Wertmueller is just one of the boys

Love and Anarchy was intensely criticized by the Marxist press in Italy as being "apolitical" – presumably, the Marxist critics hoped to see Tunin shoot Mussolini. Some writers thought that film’s contrast between the private and public realms was "cartoonish" and primitive, thereby, vitiating the movie’s political effectiveness. Love and Anarchy are literal combatants when Tripolina and Salome fight over whether to wake the sleeping Tunin to his destiny as an assassin. Since it is broadly apparent that Wertmueller’s objectives are not political these criticisms seem beside the point. Wertmueller is not Brecht and does not intend to move her audience to action. In fact, Love and Anarchy is defeatist and suggests that political action, particularly against a well-funded and strong opponent, can never be effective.

The more interesting charge leveled against Love and Anarchy and, indeed, all of Wertmueller’s films is that she is a sexual reactionary and not a true feminist. (This argument becomes overheated to the point of hysteria in essays relating to Seven Beauties and Swept Away – but the same points can be made about Love and Anarchy.)

Feminist critical response to Wertmueller’s films tends to be laden with rebarbative jargon. Here are some of the words that I gleaned from a recent feminist essay about Wertmueller’s movies: her pictures are said to have as their subject "the specularization" of the female – this means that her films deliver the spectacle of nude or semi-clothed women for our delectation: the movies are about looking at how women appear. Debate rages as to whether Wertmueller’s mise-en-scene is

"androcentric" or not – that is, focused mostly on men to the exclusion of women. Films that delight us with images of naked women induce "scopophiliac" reactions – "Scopophilia" is a sexual pleasure derived from looking. One text uses the word "somaphany" – a term that is not defined in English, but which would seem to mean something like the revelation ("phany") of "soma," an intoxicating liquor derived from a mysterious plant that confers immortality, at least according to Sanskrit scriptures. "Somatic" also means "bodily" but with the exception of the "germ cells" – that is, reproductive cells. (What this possibly means with respect to Love and Anarchy remains mysterious to me.)

Wertmueller is sometimes derided for not being sufficiently "feminist". Her films are not adequately attuned to the realities of the female experience. She is a woman who makes movies like a man. Certainly, Wertmueller’s own statements have contributed to this perception. In one famous interview, Wertmueller said:


For laughter is the Vaseline that makes the ideas penetrate better. Not in the ass, but in the brain. In the heart.
The notion of ideas being introjected into the audience’s brain via some kind of lubricated phallus is not exactly feminist friendly. After this essay, a feminist critic noted that "after all, Lina Wertmueller is just one of the boys."

In HBO’s excellent new series, The Night of, a young man who has been thrown into jail on Rikers Island in New York is counseled by an older, more experienced, inmate: "You have to look people in the eye but without looking them in the eye." The older man, then, proceeds to give an exhibition of what he means – looking intently at the younger inmate, but at an askew angle out of the corner of his eye. This dialogue exemplifies the power of the "gaze" – and embodies the question of who has the right to gaze at whom. To gaze is to look "steadily, intently with fixed attention." According to the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, the gaze privileges the person who exercises it – looking is inevitably hierarchical: some people have the right to look at others but not vice-versa. The guards in a prison have the right to subject the inmates to close scrutiny, but are likely to react violently if an inmate gazes at them. Military discipline authorizes the commanding officer to closely scrutinize his or her soldiers; the soldiers, however, understand that it would be a breach of military etiquette and, potentially, disrespectful for the recruit to "eyeball" his/her superior officers.

Transposing this analysis to the realm of gender, we might argue that men who have paid to observe a striptease "control the gaze" in that environment – the man has paid for the privilege of scrutinizing every aspect of the woman. He may react adversely, perhaps, even violently if a woman turns her gaze on him – he is supposed to looking intently at her, not vice-versa. In 1972, the British Marxist, John Berger, presented a series of TV programs for the BBC, simultaneously the subject of a book, Ways of Seeing. Berger argued that in renaissance art, "men look – women watch themselves being seen". In most cases in Western art, the woman is the subject of the man’s gaze and, therefore, objectified as subordinate to him.

Laura Mulvey’s famous essay, "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema" (published in 1973 in the London Marxist journal Screen) is a pioneering application of these ideas to Hollywood films. Mulvey says that classical Hollywood cinema, the product of a capitalist market economy controlled by men, "is constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer." The male spectator is "privileged to possess the objects of his gaze, typically women." Film, therefore, is a spectacle in which men look at women; to the extent that the woman is allowed to see, she gazes at herself, or other women, through a male perspective. Since, women are the objects of sight and not, themselves, seeing actors "the female actor is never meant to represent a character that is directly responsible for action or her own fate" – instead, she is "acted upon." Cinema is a mechanism for inducing scopophiliac pleasure in the men watching the movie – all narrative Hollywood film is akin to pornography, a system of gazes that reduces women to gazed-upon sex objects. Film encodes three gazes – the gaze of the cameraman (who is usually male) filming a man gazing or beholding a woman; the image of the man looking at the woman is, then, gazed upon by an audience of both men and women, however, from the perspective of the man. (Mulvey much later admitted that her widely influential 1973 article was intended to be "polemical" and that much of what she argued was over-simplified for that purpose – her more recent work, particularly that after 2011, acknowledges the possibility of the female gaze as well in pop culture cinema.)



Feminist analysis of Love and Anarchy show that the film is constructed in "androcentric terms" – the system of shots is encoded around Tunin’s gaze. We first see the brothel through Tunin’s eyes – thus, the male gaze remains central to the film. Generally, Tunin is shown to be looking at women – they don’t always return his gaze. (In this context, it should be said that other critics turn this equation on its head: I have earlier commented on both Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangelo Melato’s large, protruberant eyes. Tunin looks on her but she looks back and I’m not convinced that Giannini’s gaze is necessarily dominant in the film: rather, I think the whores may "look" Giannini to death, he is gazed into "castration" and can not act because he has taken refuge in a brothel and the women in that place, I think, are empowered to return the looks that he bestows upon them.)


　


A Fantasy

In late October 2016, Jethro, a Mormon from Boise, Idaho, concluded that the safety of this Republic required that he assassinate Donald Trump. Jethro knew that Trump was going to barnstorm in Elko, Nevada and so he went to that place. A snowstorm delayed Trump’s arrival in the little town and, so, the young man sought refuge in one of the licensed brothels that small community. Expecting to die in the morning, the young assassin spent the night in amorous pleasure.

When Trump’s motorcade stopped at the High School on College Street (the home of the Warriors), Jethro shoved through the crowd and fired four shots from his revolver into Trump’s head and neck. The Secret Service returned fire and riddled Jethro with bullets.

Ivanka Trump, traveling with her father, was grazed by one of the shots and lightly wounded. She knelt over her dying father and his blood darkened her white dress and cashmere sweater. Covered with the presidential candidates’ blood, she appeared before the news media, vowing that her father’s battle to make America great again would not perish with him. In January, 2017, Ivanka Trump became the first female President of the United States.

　

Jason Bourne

Forty years ago, I saw a film by Jonas Mekas, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.  The movie consisted of tiny snippets of super 8 film edited together to make a dizzying montage -- faces, bits of weather, parties, buildings, everything cut together as mere glimpses, each picture passing in the blink of an eye.  I recall that the film was interesting at first, but, ultimately, exhausting and tedious:  the eidetic (remembered) image impressed upon the eye conflicted with each new transient image and, ultimately, my recollection of the film is that of a chaos, a cloud of impressions never settling into any thematic or narrative coherence.  Paul Greengrass' big-budget action film, Jason Bourne, applies Mekas' technique to a violent international thriller.  For a half-hour or so, the film is grimly effective.  But, in the end, the picture is merely exhausting and mind-numbingly repetitive. 


Everything in Jason Bourne proceeds at a hysterical, helter-skelter, breakneck speed.  Greengrass is credited as director but, in fact, the film's most noteworthy achievement is Christoper Rouse's editing -- Rouse actually manages to develop something that periodically looks like a narrative from this vortex of quarter-second and half-second shots.  Although the movie's action sequences are just blurs of action, a fist-fight comprised of sixty or seventy separate shots, the audience has an impression, faint and imperfect, but, nonetheless, an impression of what is going on -- of course, the standard action-movie pleasures of tracking graceful action across an articulated landscape or background are entirely absent in this movie, but you can figure out approximately what is happening.  The beauties of choreographed action sequences are not only withheld by this style of film-making but, also, most of the other pleasures that a suspense thriller offers:  there's no acting since a performance atomized into a thousand half-second shots doesn't require anything but posing; the dialogue is sub-literate when you can hear it and there is nothing resembling suspense:  the audience doesn't have time to catch its breath let alone develop any empathy for the characters.  Near the end of the film, Jason Bourne encounters his nemesis, Tommy Lee Jones -- for an instant, the frenetic cutting slows to, maybe, a shot every two seconds. In one of those two second images, the camera portentously moves forward pulling close to Tommy Lee Jones' haggard features -- in the context of all of this chaotic, half-second imagery (without any camera motion other than the wobble of the hand-held camera), the sudden zoom or dolly inward to Jones' face feels as archaic as an image from an early silent film:  for an instant, we feel like we are in a conventional movie and, suddenly, the banality and aggressive idiocy of the whole enterprise breaks through the cocoon of the picture's wall-to-wall action. 


Jason Bourne is an elaborate chase movie from first frame to last.  The problem is that the chase just keeps getting repeated.  The bad guys and Jason Bourne (with his doomed female helper) first convene for a chase through Athens -- this is the best sequence in the film because the audience has not yet been sated by the non-stop action.  Bourne and the bad guy, Vincent Cassel, zoom around in the Greek capitol where everyone is throwing Molotov cocktails off rooftops -- the whole thing is a pyromaniac's delight and fairly exciting.  The characters, next, get together to reprise their first chase in Berlin -- this is just more of the same without the streetfighting and bonfires.  Then, the female lead persuades her boss, Tommy Lee Jones, that she needs to meet face-to-face with Bourne in London -- so she joins the bad guys, their henchmen, the corrupt CIA officials, and Jason Bourne for a chase through that city.  Again, it's just more of the same.  The whole party, then, adjourns to Las Vegas, where Tommy Lee Jones and his bodyguard now join the conclave and everything just repeats in that city.  After Tommy Lee Jones gets killed, there's a wholly pointless coda involving a high-speed chase through Las Vegas that makes no sense and, then, a brutal fist-fight in which the hero gets a rubber band twisted around his neck before killing his adversary, somehow, with what looks like a large paper-clip.  By this point, the audience has long since ceased to care about who is killing whom.  Throughout the picture, I kept worrying about when the characters had time to visit the rest-room -- although Bourne slaughters a few bad guys in a toilet somewhere no one seems to have time to even urinate in this festival of slaughter.  People are continuously sending one another texts to the effect of "Let's meet at XYZ place in ten minutes" -- a location always at least fifteen minute hike (five minute high-speed chase) away.  I kept hoping someone would say:  "I have to go to the bathroom first -- can we make it twenty minutes?"  In one scene, Bourne gets off a plane at Berlin, takes a cab, and goes to a shabby, industrial looking neighborhood -- it's about a two minutes scene rendered cubistically into 45 shots or more:  fragmentary glimpses of street people, odd images partly occluded by poles as if someone were spying on the action, dizzying POV images, street vistas from cranes, shots taken from street surveillance cameras, jagged handheld tracking shots.  The episode delivers a hysterical charge, but, in effect, it's completely meaningless -- we don't need one shot, let alone 45 to get Bourne from the airport downtown; the director could have just cut from the airport to Bourne entering the Berlin warehouse where the next fight will occur.  Somehow, the film manages to seem both overstuffed with action, yet, also packed with entirely meaningless padding. 


The hero is played by either Brad Pitt or Matt Damon -- I can't recall which.