The Once and Future King

For a foreigner who has taken a liking to the Filipino people, poking around in their politics isn’t a good idea. Decades of appalling corruption have turned this democracy, founded on July 4, 1946, into an unfunny and unedifying farce. It was the term “kleptocracy” – "rule by a class of thieves," first coined in 1819 in reference to Spain – that American Congressman Stephen Solarz used to characterize the Philippine system of government in 1986. His 2010 obituary states: 

His most well-known battle was in 1986, when Solarz held highly publicized hearings to prove that Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos had looted the Philippine treasury of millions of dollars to buy real estate in the United States. He led the congressional movement to withhold military aid to that country until Marcos could be driven out and Corazon Aquino installed as president. During the hearings, Solarz accused Marcos of running a "kleptocracy" and enriching himself and his wife at the expense of his country's citizens. Solarz said in March 1986 after a visit to Manila that Versailles, the palace of French King Louis XVI, looked like an "Appalachian hovel" in comparison to Malacanang Palace, where the Marcoses lived.(1)

On May 9 Filipinos will go to the polls to elect their 17th president and, barring a seismic shift in popular opinion in the next 10 days, the winner will be: Ferdinand Marcos. Again. Of course, not the former dictator who made off with somewhere between five and ten billion dollars when his family was airlifted out of the country in 1986. That man died of cancer in Hawaii three years later. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr, who now goes by the nickname of Bongbong,(2) is the only son of the man who remains the personification of poltical corruption and he is way ahead in the presidential race. Bongbong, his mother Imelda (now 92) and his sister Imee returned to the Philippines in 1992 after Cory Aquino’s term as president ended. Cory had spent much of her time in office taking revenge on the Marcos family by going after some, though not all, of the money Marcos had salted away in international banks during his twenty years as president.(3) Cory’s vengeance was also personal: her husband, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr. was murdered at Marcos’s behest. 

It is well to refresh our memories of exactly what happened in 1986. After mass protests in February of 1986 – now known as People Power – the Marcos family had to be evacuated from the presidential palace by four US Air Force helicopters. The entire evacuation operation was at the direction of US president Ronald Reagan, who was a “personal friend” of the family. The helicopters transported the family to Clark Air Base north of Manila where they were transferred to a C-9 and a C-141 – two enormous transport aircraft. Fifty-five people were among the Marcos retinue. The aircraft landed first in Guam, where Ferdinand Sr underwent a medical exam, and then flew on to Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. It took US Customs agents in Hawaii five hours to inspect 278 crates that had been transported with the family. Of the 278 crates 22 contained more than 27.7 million Philippine pesos in newly minted bills (more than a million dollars at the 1986 exchange rate). There was also a Gucci briefcase with a solid gold buckle that contained 24 1-kilo gold bars. The briefcase was labelled “To Ferdinand Marcos from Imelda on the Occasion of our 24th Wedding Anniversary.” (The anniversary was in 1978.) Customs impounded everything, allowing the family to keep $300,000 in gold and another $150,000 in bonds because these items were carried in their personal luggage and were declared on their customs cards. 

Bongbong was 28 years old at the time of his family’s exile and he, as his family’s representative, immediately got involved in the moving of their fortune which was secreted in banks in thirteen countries – Vatican City among them. Cory Aquino’s very first executive order was the establishment of the Presidential Commission on Good Government. Agents were appointed to locate the Marcos’s ill-gotten wealth and were authorized to get it back. Since Marcos was the world’s expert on corruption, he knew exactly what to do to block the Aquino government’s efforts to sieze his assets. Aquino’s 2nd executive order was to freeze all of Marcos’s assets in the Philippines. 

The Philippine government contacted Marcos’s Swiss bank directly about the retrieval of a portion of their stolen fortune. The banks, even without the permission of Marcos, froze the account and began the process of transferring more than $200M to accounts of the Philippine government. Out of an estimated total of $7.5B. I won’t go into the truly incredible details about what became of the $200M+. Let it suffice that other actors in the Philippine government stole it from the Philippine people once again. In 1998, Imelda Marcos told the Philippine newspaper The Inquirer: 

“We practically own everything in the Philippines—from electricity, telecommunications, airline, banking, beer and tobacco, newspaper publishing, television stations, shipping, oil and mining, hotels and beach resorts, down to coconut milling, small farms, real estate and insurance.”

Imelda subsequently served nine years in the Philippine House of Representatives (2010-2019), filling the seat vacated by Bongbong, who moved on to the Philippine Senate. Bonbong ran for Vice President in 2016 but lost by a narrow margin to Leni Robredo. Robredo is currently running second behind Marcos for the office of president in opinion polls. Hoping to block Marcos’s victory on May 9, other candidates have bowed out of the race and moved the support of their parties behind Robredo. During Bongbong’s terms as senator, the Marcos family has brought their resources to bear on a campaign to rewrite Philippine history and whitewash his father’s crimes. 

I have written on this blog before about the antics of this quite mediocre family, about Imelda’s shoes, about the efforts to move Ferdinand Sr’s corpse, which had been embalmed in a glass case [see above] into a Manila cemetery where former Philippine presidents are buried. Those efforts were rewarded when President Duterte, who claims that Ferdinand was the Philippines’ best president, removed the last obstacles and the body was moved, with full state honors, to the Cemetery of the Heroes in 2016. 

Bongbong could've let himself entirely off the hook by simply proclaiming that he is not his father. Instead he has insisted, contrary to historical record, that his father acted all along in good faith in order to lead the nation to prosperity, but that his enemies had prevented him from succeeding. Since, as George Orwell wrote, “history is written by the winners,” there is a good chance that the history of Ferdinand Sr’s notorious administration will be rewritten. 

It’s difficult to gauge what the average Filipino wants from their elected officials in return for their votes. All we can tell for certain is that what they got from every one of them in the past probably wasn’t what they expected. The current president, Rodrigo Duterte, was elected by a landslide (in a country where actual landslides are practically endemic) on the promise of slaughtering every single drug user and drug dealer in the country. Duterte failed to uphold that promise, thank God. He will leave office with an investigation into his possible crimes against humanity being conducted by the International Criminal Court. Filipinos, however, seem indifferent to international affairs and tribunals. 

Could Bongbong possibly be out for revenge on a country that drove his father out of office and allowed him to die in exile, and a government that harried his family from court to court for the retrieval of by now untold sums of money? 

(1) The Cleveland Plain Dealer Nov. 30, 2010.

(2) Filipinos are fond of sometimes childish nicknames. For instance, there is a popular actor and former underwear model who goes by the name Dingdong Dantes. His wife refers to him simply as “Dong.” 

(3) According to the Philippine constitution, amended during Cory Aquino's term, an elected president can serve only one six-year term.

The Gay Gaze

“He who is inclined to lust is merciful and tender-hearted; those who are inclined to purity are not so." (Saint John Climacus). 

In his 1972 television series Ways of Seeing, John Berger introduced a definition of what later became known as the male gaze. Simply put, it is the way in which men monopolize the visual representation of women in art and in photographic media. 

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight. 

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man. Everything is addressed to him. Everything must appear to be the result of his being there. It is for him that the figures have assumed their nudity. But he, by definition, is a stranger – with his clothes still on. 

In the art-form of the European nude the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects, usually women. This unequal relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the consciousness of many women. They do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity. 

Even when an artist has painted lovers, the woman doesn’t look at her partner, she looks away or she looks directly at the viewer. The same effect can be seen in pornographic videos that feature what’s called the POV – “point of view.” The woman in the video who is having sex with the man doesn’t look into his eyes but into the camera. 

Feminist theory expanded on Berger’s ideas, which weren’t merely applicable to painting or photographs: the male perspective is in evidence everywhere around us. Lately – in the last fifty years – the ubiquity of the male gaze has been challenged by a growing number of women artists, filmmakers, and novelists who have presented to viewers that are no longer presumed to be male another order of experience. 

John Berger warned that the deliberate shifting of this traditional dichotomy away from the standard of centuries of European art can be disruptive: 

Women are depicted in a quite different way from men – not because the feminine is different from the masculine – but because the “ideal” spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him. If you have any doubt that this is so, make the following experiment. Choose … an image of a traditional nude. Transform the woman into a man. . . . Then notice the violence which that transformation does. Not to the image, but to the assumptions of a likely viewer. 

The “violence” that Berger mentions, the juxtaposition of the object and the spectator, the shaking up of assumptions, is one of the ways artists are trying to wrest us away from the male gaze, which has long since become immensely boring. Since 1988 Alan Hollinghurst has been writing some of the best novels in English. He is gay and explores gay life in his work. Edmund White called Hollinghurst’s first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library “the best book on gay life yet written by an English author.” (Never mind Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, published in 1964.)  

Hollinghurst’s next novel, The Folding Star is narrated by a 32-year-old gay Englishman who arrives in a highly idealized ancient Flemish citadel to teach English to two teenaged boys. Edward Manners is quite average in appearance, bespectacled, somewhat overweight, intensely self-aware. He falls in love with one of his pupils, 17-year-old Luc Altidore and some critics have likened Edward to Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, while others threw in Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita. I think neither comparison makes much sense. The only resemblance is Luc’s making the first move, just as Lolita does with Humbert. 

Before he can have Luc, Edward has to engage in some amateur detective work to find out Luc’s sexuality. And because of his position, Edward finds he can’t avoid duplicity - but then, subterfuge was always a part of closeted gay life. Given the exotic historical setting, an ancient city replete with its own canals, and the scholarly work Edward has undertaken, one could almost view Luc as Edward’s Aspern Papers. When Henry James’s unnamed narrator is offered the much sought-after letters by Miss Tita in exchange for his marrying her and he runs away, I laughed out loud. If I wasn’t apprized of James’s sexuality before I read the book, the scene would’ve been far more puzzling than it already is. 

The Folding Star is hardly an erotic novel, yet the word “cock” appears fifty-five times. Despite several erotic scenes, including Edward’s recounting of his first time, the novel doesn’t belong to the erotic genre at all. What really animates the book, and Hollingsworth’s writing, is Edward’s love. As Edward puts it, “My life seemed to be one of understandings based on sex and misunderstandings based on love.” Almost heroically, Hollinghurst makes the explicit erotic accounts bearable through art. His success is against formidable odds, as Richard Howard told an interviewer about translating French into English: 

Almost all of our language that has to do with the body and its functions is problematic. The French language accommodates the corporal without judging it--it deals with the body quite readily. The French have a verb, se figer: Baudelaire talks about le sang qui se fige, and one has real difficulty deciding between drying, stiffening, clotting, caking, whatever blood does. In English we frequently miss the right word for what the body does, or the right descriptive word for the body and its organs, so that much pornography is lowered into the gutter or sidelined into the laboratory by our necessities in English. (1)

What I found most alluring about The Folding Star was its evocation of a “dream-Belgium”: 

I knew nothing about this country, to me it was a dream-Belgium, it was Allemonde, a kingdom of ruins and vanished pleasures, miracles and martyrdoms, corners where the light never shone. Not many would recognise it, but some would. I seemed to have lost Luc in it. It was his wildness that had brought me to him and now it had taken him away. I studied my situation with a certain aesthetic amazement.... This was what Helene had hinted at on our evening walk—it seemed the embodiment of something I had always felt about the old town, and found shadowed forth in many of Orst's eerie lithographs, a sense of dying life, life hidden, haunted and winter-slow. 

Hollinghurst’s quite dreamlike descriptions of Belgian weather, the mysterious gloom that surrounds houses and landscapes, reminded me powerfully of a forgotten Belgian film called Belle, released in 1973, with which I have been haunted for forty years. 

There are two more beautiful evocations that, among others, will stay with me: 

For a long time I watched the candle burning, the flame tugged away by a harmless draught. When I blew it out and saw the thin-walled cup of wax at the tip cool into darkness I thought how for centuries the world had fallen asleep with that sweet singed smell in its nostrils. 

Edward Manners also passes on to the reader his impeccable taste in music: 

At school we were played some bits of Janacek, which were the most convulsively life-like music I had ever heard. I gathered up the scraps of Supraphon record-sleeve information, cryptically condensed and obscured by translation, that were all that could be found out by an English boy, and was amazed by the lateness of his flowering and the fact that this bristling old gent should be the one to confirm everything I felt at seventeen about life and sex and being out at night with winds and stars. 

Hollinghurst placed a poem at the beginning of the book by the symbolist poet Henri de Régnier that neatly evokes the novel’s plot: 

Les grands vents venus d'outremer 

Passent par la Ville, l'hiver, 

Comme des étrangers amers. 

Ils se concertent, graves et pâles, 

Sur les places, et leurs sandales 

Ensablent le marbre des dalles. 

Comme des crosses à leurs mains fortes  

Ils heurtent l'auvent et la porte 

Derrière qui l'horloge est morte; 

Et les adolescents amers 

S'en vont avec eux vers la Mer! 

[The great gusts coming from overseas 

Pass through the city, in the winter, 

Like bitter foreigners. 

They make plans, solemn and pale, 

In the plazas, and their sandals 

Silt up the marble flagstones. 

As if their strong hands hold rifle butts, 

They slam into the awning and the door 

Behind which the clock has stopped. 

And the bitter adolescents 

Go with them to the sea!]

(1) Paul Mann, The Translator's Voice: An Interview with Richard Howard

The Trouble With Being Dead

Richard Howard died on March 31 at the age of 92. He was a fine poet, literary critic, and made perhaps his greatest impact on the age as a translator of dozens of French authors, among them André Gide, Jean Giraudoux, and Roland Barthes. I have in my possession a hardback copy of his translation of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s novel Le feu follet, an idiomatic title that he called The Fire Within. (It was made into a great film by Louis Malle in 1962.) 

But long ago, when I was settled into my position as a professional college student, I read a review of another translation by Howard of a book by a Romanian writer living in Paris named E. M. Cioran. The book’s title was The Trouble With Being Born. Howard’s translation was first published in 1976, but his translation of another Cioran book called The Temptation to Exist in 1968 prompted him to state: “I have translated some hundred and fifty books, and of them all, The Temptation to Exist has afforded me the most crucial experience.” 

Cioran wrote about himself: "I was born on the 8th April 1911 in Rasinari, a village in the Carpathians, where my teacher was a Greek Orthodox priest. From 1920 to 1928 I attended the Sibiu grammar school. From 1929 to 1931 I studied at the Faculty of Arts at Bucharest University. Post-graduate studies in philosophy until 1936. In 1937 I came to Paris with a scholarship from the French Institute in Bucharest and have been living here ever since. I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual. On the other hand, I have not disowned my Rumanian origins; had I to choose a country, I would still choose my own. Before the war I published various essays in Rumanian of a more or less philosophical nature. l only began writing in French in about 1947. It was the hardest experience I have ever undergone. This precise, highly disciplined, and exacting language seemed as restrictive to me as a straitjacket. Even now I must confess that I do not feel completely at ease with it. It is this feeling of uneasiness which has led me to ponder the problem of style and the very anomaly of writing. All my books are more or less autobiographical-a rather abstract form of autobiography, I admit." 

The Trouble With Being Born was the first of Cioran’s books to find me. It’s a book of aphorisms – one-liners, a paragraph at most, that address one subject at a time. They are divided in the book into twelve sections, but they aren’t necessarily grouped or organized around one idea. They cover a lot of ground. 

Richard Howard tried to define the aphorism: 

“A wisdom broken” is Francis Bacon’s phrase for the aphorism — the very word has horizon within it, a dividing-line between sky and earth, a separation observed … And there is a further identification to be heard in Eliot’s line: “to be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk/among whispers”: something subversive, something perilous, always, about the aphorism, from the pre-Socratics to Chazal. 

Since I first opened the book forty-five years ago, some of the aphorisms have stayed with me – shadowed me. They have been confirmed, but not necessarily by experience. Nothing I have since learned or have lived through has disturbed their power. They are as true as I remember them. Here is my selection. 

1 

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass – which is better than trying to fill them. 

To have committed every crime but that of being a father. 

Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what’s the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say? 

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures? 

I think of so many friends who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem beginning with the problem of death. 

2 

It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late. 

“What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.” 

3 

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot. 

She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens I shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of indifference to us. 

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one is we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy. 

I have killed no one, I have done better: I have killed the Possible, and like Macbeth, what I need most is to pray, buy like him too, I cannot say Amen. 

4 

According to the Bible, it is Cain who created the first city, in order to have, as Bossuet puts it, a place wherein to elude his remorse. What a judgement! And how many times have I not felt its accuracy in my night walks through Paris! 

5 

We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon – this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing. 

“Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.” This old proverb makes all judgement impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place. 

Not the fear of effort but the fear of success explains more than one failure. 

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation. 

“Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred.” (Buddha). . . . Which is to say, to every man alive. 

6 

When I lie awake far into the night, I am visited by my evil genius, as Brutus was by his before the battle of Philippi. 

What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there. 

A burial in a Norman village. I ask for details from a farmer watching the procession from a distance. "He was still young, barely sixty. They found him dead in the field. Well, that's how it is. . . . That's how it is. . . . " This refrain, which struck me as comical at the time, has haunted me ever since. The fellow had no idea that what he was saying about death was all that can be said and all we know. 

Years and years to waken from that sleep in which the others loll; then years and years to escape that awakening . . . 

To live is to lose ground. 

A book is a postponed suicide. 

7 

Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory will ever be found again. 

We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth's surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion. . . . Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does. 

Man accepts death but not the hour of his death. To die any time, except when one has to die! 

No one has been so convinced as I of the futility of everything; and no one has taken so tragically so many futile things. 

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser. 

8 

The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools. 

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor. 

The white race increasingly deserves the name given by the American Indians: palefaces. 

When we think of the Berlin salons in the Romantic period, of the role played in them by a Henrietta Herz or a Rachel Levin, of the friendship between the latter and Crown Prince Louis-Ferdinand; and when we then think that if such women had lived in this century they would have died in some gas chamber, we cannot help considering the belief in progress as the falsest and stupidest of superstitions. 

In the long run, tolerance breeds more ills than intolerance. If this is true, it constitutes the most serious accusation that can be made against man. 

Monkeys living in groups reject, apparently, those which in some fashion have consorted with humans. How one regrets that Swift never knew such a detail! 

The future appeals to you? All yours! Myself I prefer to keep to the incredible present and the incredible past. I leave it to you to face the Incredible itself. 

Hitler is without a doubt the most sinister character in history. And the most pathetic. He managed to achieve precisely the opposite of what he wanted, he destroyed his ideal point by point. It is for this reason that he is a monster in a class by himself - that is, a monster twice over, for even his pathos is monstrous. 

Torn between violence and disillusionment, I seem to myself a terrorist who, going out in the street to perpetrate some outrage, stops on the way to consult Ecclesiastes or Epictetus. 

According to Hegel, man will be completely free only "by surrounding himself with a world entirely created by himself." But this is precisely what he has done, and man has never been so enchained, so much a slave as now.  

Wherever civilized men appeared for the first time, they were regarded by the natives as devils, as ghosts. specters. Never as living men! Unequaled intuition, a prophetic insight, if ever there was one. 

X maintains we are at the end of a "cosmic cycle" and that soon everything will fall apart. And he does not doubt this for one moment. 

   At the same time, he is the father of a – numerous – family. With certitudes like his, what aberration has deluded him into bringing into a doomed world one child after the next? If we foresee the End, if we are sure it will be coming soon, if we even anticipate it, better to do so alone. One does not procreate on Patmos. 

9 

Deep inside, each man feels – and believes – himself to be immortal, even if he knows he will perish the next moment. We can understand everything, admit everything, realize everything, except our death, even when we ponder it unremittingly and even when we are resigned to it. 

10 

Supremacy of regret: the actions we have not performed constitute, by the very fact that they pursue us and that we continually think about them, the sole contents of our consciousness. 

Mine still, this moment passes by, escapes me, and is buried forever. Am I going to commit myself with the next? I make up my mind: it is here, it belongs to me – and already is long since past. From morning to night, fabricating the past! 

We cannot do without the notion of progress, yet it does not deserve our attention. It is like the "meaning" of life. Life must have one. But is there any which does not turn out, upon examination, to be ludicrous? 

Trees are massacred, houses go up – faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth. 

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays. 

Nerval: "Having reached the Place de la Concorde, my thought was to kill myself" Nothing in all French literature has haunted me as much as that.

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

12 

To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them. 

No matter how many autumns I observe the spectacle of these leaves so eager to fall, it still surprises me each time – a surprise in which "a chill down the spine" would prevail were it not for the last-minute explosion of a gaiety whose origin I cannot account for. 

When you live past the age of rebellion, and you still rebel, you seem to yourself a kind of senile Lucifer. 

"What's wrong – what’s the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for. . . .

Q&A

Reviewing Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast last month made me draw a comparison between Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version of the Agatha Christie novel. Branagh owed a great debt to Lumet’s film for its cast of luminaries of the day, like Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, and Vanessa Redgrave. Branagh countered with the present day’s idea of movie stars, like Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Penelope Cruz. Despite the advantages of CGI (which Branagh used unashamedly), Lumet’s analog version, which I saw in a theater in 1974, now seems alluringly bright in my memory. 

Ever since Serpico, Sidney Lumet had been going after dirty cops. Frank Serpico and Danny Cielo, the protagonist of Prince of the City, were actual people who gave up their careers as New York City police officers by testifying in court against their fellow cops. Aloysius Francis “Al” Reilly, the young deputy district attorney in Lumet’s Q&A (1990), is the fictional creation of Edwin Torres, a former New York state Supreme Court justice who turned to writing fictional thrillers (Torres also wrote Carlito’s Way). Reilly is green, idealistic, the son of a career cop killed in the line of duty. Nick Nolte plays Mike Brennan, a legendary cop, the “first one through the door, the window or the skylight,” and a monstrously brutal and corrupt man. Brennan kills a Puerto Rican drug dealer and an investigation is ordered by the homicide District Attorney, Kevin Quinn. He appoints Reilly to the case. It doesn’t take him very long to discover just how dirty Brennan is and his investigation eventually implicates Quinn, who is preparing to run for state attorney general. Quinn once belonged to a street gang and murdered a rival gang member. Brennan was directed by Quinn to murder all of his former fellow gang members. 

Q&A is about two things – the sometimes displaced loyalty of cops to one another and the pervasive racism among them. Their racism is evident in the racial slurs or “epithets” that pepper their talk. Brennan is the worst offender, even though fellow cops deny it, claiming that Brennan hates everyone and is an “equal opportunity hater.” 

Three actors dominate the film. Timothy Hutton was never a commanding presence but early on in the film it becomes clear that his lack of presence was the reason he was cast – just as Reilly’s inexperience was the reason he got the job on the Brennan case. In other words, he was being set up for failure. Hutton does well with his Bronx accent and is evidently tough enough. Armand Assante plays Puerto Rican gang lord Roberto “Bobby Tex” Texador with panache. He handles the ethnic bravura of the character with ease, coming off as Hispanic much better than Al Pacino did in Scarface (both Assante and Pacino are Italian-American) and without having to go over the top. He is confident and proud in his position, especially when he figures out that his wife is an ex-girlfriend of Reilly’s. 

But the movie is centered, overwhelmingly weighted, on Nick Nolte as Brennan. The way he exploits his size and takes hold of everyone he’s talking to, whether it’s a fellow cop or a transvestite prostitute, is instinctively intimidating. He told Marc Maron in an interview that he wore lifts in his shoes that shifted his weight forward and grew his moustache so that it concealed his mouth when he spoke. 

Lumet’s daughter, Jenny, plays Nancy Bosch, a Puerto Rican whose father is black (Jenny Lumet is the granddaughter of Lena Horne) with sufficient conviction. It was Reilly’s reaction to the discovery that her father was black that drove her away from him. And Patrick O’Neal is all respectable veneer as Quinn. When Reilly threatens to expose the truth about his past near the film’s conclusion, his threat to take away the pension that supports his widowed mother is delivered so coldly, and the way he responds when Reilly mentions going to the press by singing “Que sera sera” tells him just how invulnerable he has made himself. 

A number of other actors smoothly inhabit their roles, especially Luis Guzmán as Detective Luis Valentin and Paul Calderón as Roger “Dodger” Montalvo. And in the role of Jose Montalvo, a transgender entertainer who is murdered by Brennan, International Chrysis (her stage name) is compelling. It was her final appearance. She died of complications from a botched breast implant operation a month before the film’s release. 

Perhaps because it’s based on a work of fiction, Q&A doesn’t have the power of Prince of the City. By the time the chief assistant DA Bloomenfeld tells Reilly that the case against Quinn has been dropped because it’s “too big”, I could see it coming. But Reilly should’ve seen it coming, too. After everything he’s seen and heard in the Brennan investigation, it doesn’t follow that he would just quit and fly to a private island off Puerto Rico to woo a grieving Nancy. The film ends inconclusively as he reaches out to touch her hand. 

More than most other films, Q&A lives in its locations. It’s New York as a native sees it and feels it. You hear street names dropped that sound familiar only because of the hundreds of movies that have been set in New York, even if they were filmed elsewhere, like a Hollywood sound stage. Lumet’s cinematographer, Andrzej Bartkowiak lights the world of the film with as much verity as he lit Boston in The Verdict. In his review Stanley Kauffmann, another New Yorker, put it succinctly: 

Lumet has a gift for seeing New York, inside and out—particularly when he has Bartkowiak’s camera, as here and in Serpico and Prince of the City. If you want glossy New York, see Woody Allen’s Manhattan. If you want the New York that makes people’s faces look the way they do in the subway, see Lumet.*

* The New Republic, May 21, 1990.

The Wrong Goodbye

Jack Davis poster art

Chandler fans will hate my guts. I don't give a damn. Robert Altman 

(I’m not a Chandler fan, so I don’t hate Altman’s guts. But I’m not an Altman fan, either.) 

A movie adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Goodbye had been in the works since 1965. Chandler’s Marlowe novels were selling consistently, and the success of the movie Marlowe (1969), which was based on Chandler’s novel The Little Sister, proved that the decades-old material could be updated (even if the movie was mediocre and James Garner was a poor substitute for Humphrey Bogart; clearly, Marlowe’s LA could only be updated at a heavy price). 

Eventually, a screenplay was derived from The Long Goodbye, Chandler’s longest novel (125,000 words), by none other than Leigh Brackett, the same writer who worked with William Faulkner on the script for The Big Sleep in 1946. The producers, Jerry Bick and Elliott Kastner, got Robert Altman, who was trending heavily at the time, on board. He worked with Brackett on the script and agreed that the only way the movie could be done was as a satire – an old fashioned private eye’s thoroughly dim view of an LA that Chandler never lived to see. If Chandler’s vision of the hills and canyons of Southern California was jaundiced enough in 1952 (the year The Long Goodbye was published), Altman’s could be realized only by finding what was inherently ridiculous in the setting and the people who called it – however reluctantly – home.

Altman decided to make Marlowe into what he called “Rip Van Marlowe” – the private eye who’d slept for twenty years and awoke in 1972. So his Marlowe spends almost the entire film wearing a dark suit while incessantly lighting and smoking cigarettes. He also drives a 1948 Lincoln Continental Cabriolet everywhere and lives perched atop a building in what might be Laurel Canyon (where Marlowe lived in the novel). 

Altman’s choice of Elliott Gould for the role was inspired. In his very first scene he gets out of bed at 3 AM to feed his cat. Having run out of canned cat food, Gould prepares something that looks like cottage cheese and raw eggs. The cat knocks the dish onto the floor. So Gould goes out to shop for the only brand of cat food that his cat will eat. When he can’t find it, and brings home a different brand, Gould closes the kitchen door while he transfers the wrong brand cat food to an empty can of the favorite brand. He lets the cat in the door and pretends to open the can, but when he offers it to the cat, it disgustedly leaves the house through an improvised cat door with the words “El Porto del Gato” written on it. It’s the last we ever see of the gato. 

Just after the cat’s exit, Terry Lennox enters Gould’s house. We get mixed signals from Altman about Terry Lennox. He probably murdered his wife (when we first see him he has fresh scratches on his left cheek and blood on his hand), but he deliberately incriminates Marlowe by getting him to drive him to Tijuana. This gets Marlowe three days in jail when Sylvia Lennox’s bloodied body is found and Terry’s movements lead straight to him. Terry has since committed unconvincing suicide in a Mexican town after writing a full confession. This satisfies the police, but not a Jewish mob boss named Marty Augustine to whom Terry owes a lot of money. He visits Marlowe demanding the whereabouts of his money. To convince Marlowe of his capricious brutishness, he smashes a Coke bottle on his girlfriend’s face. 

Augustine next pays a visit to Roger Wade in Malibu (Robert Altman’s own Malibu house was used for the shoot) to demand repayment of money he owes him. Eileen Wade, Roger’s wife, had hired Marlowe to find her missing husband. A chronic alcoholic, the only lead Roger leaves is a note he had written mentioning a “Doctor V.” Marlowe tracks him to a private clinic run by Doctor Verringer populated by various pixilated patients. Marlowe finds Roger in a private cabin where Verringer is demanding that he sign a check for an amount of money that Verringer says he owes him. Marlowe makes his presence known and persuades Roger to leave with him – without signing the check. 

Some of the novel’s convoluted plot is intact in the movie, but much is not. Leigh Brackett justified her omissions by insisting that the book was “riddled with clichés” and far too long. The cliché complaint is curious because Marlowe is a walking/talking cliché, but the reactions he elicits from the people around him showcase the utter absurdity of drunken writers, the fidelity of their long-suffering wives, the brutality of mob bosses (and the vanity of their bodyguards), the stupidity of cops, dictatorial doctors who only cure for a fee, the timeless refuge of Mexico, and even the perpetual nudity of aspiring dancers. The cinematography, by the illustrious Vilmos Zsigmond, is nostalgically diffused. Altman wanted the camera to be like an eavesdropper, peering through windows and pacing around a stationary subject. But Altman’s greatest stroke is in the casting. Besides Gould as the last word in private eyes, Mark Rydell plays Marty Augustine, a Jewish gangster who wears a star of David necklace. He is terribly funny because he is far too reasonable. Sterling Hayden plays Roger Wade and can’t help coming across as another Hemingway impersonator. Much of his dialogue had to be improvised because Hayden was four sheets to the wind during shooting. Nina Van Pallandt’s somewhat faded beauty, as Wade’s wife Eileen, is perfectly at home in Southern California. So is Henry Gibson as Dr. Verringer. When he confronts Roger at a beach party and savagely slaps him, demanding payment of his money, one expects Roger to crush him. He smashes a bottle, but stops and then sheepishly takes the doctor inside to sign a check over to him. And in an uproarious scene, Augustine tries to convince his bandaged girlfriend of his sincerity by telling everyone in the room to take off their clothes. One of his bodyguards is an uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger, who breaks an actor’s cardinal rule by momentarily looking directly at the camera when he starts to strip. One more brilliant moment: when Roger drowns himself in the ocean surf, Marlowe removes his tie before swimming out to try and save him. The family dog, an obnoxious doberman, also swims out and saves his master’s walking stick! 

The Long Goodbye is one of overrated Altman’s best films, whose métier was – clearly – satire. He took a piece of classic noir and punched it so broadly out of proportion that it was barely recognizable. The last moments of the film, however, show us a Marlowe completely out of character, yet completely convincing. Stanley Kauffmann recognized the resemblance of the final shot with that of The Third Man, when Anna (Alida Valli) walks straight past the waiting Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten). I thought Altman's version was beautiful because this time it's Holly Martins (Marlowe) who walks past Anna (Eileen Wade) on the dusty road.