Appreciation

One of the most telling details that has emerged from what people are calling the Michael Jackson Death Trial is how many people depended on Jackson as a source of income and to what extent he was an idol as well as a cash cow.

The accused Dr Conrad Murray's witnessed behavior during the moments when he found that Jackson had expired betrayed the near-frantic reactions of a man who was trying to resuscitate a corpse, not because he cared about the vital human being who had given up the ghost quite unexpectedly under his care, but because of what he was figuring that he had to gain by keeping Michael's heart beating and what he stood to lose if he did not. The image of Murray whipping a dead horse sprang to mind as accounts from EMS crews and emergency room doctors were certain that Jackson was clinically dead while Murray was insisting that they keep trying to resuscitate him.

Viewers of the concert movie This Is It (an ironically crass title) were spared, through careful editing, the recorded moments when Jackson betrayed how actually fragile his health was while he put himself through rehearsals for a concert tour he himself announced would be his last.

Another inadvertent revelation of Murray's trial is that his obvious incompetence and unscrupulousness were the conditions of his employment as Michael Jackson's personal physician. A more competent and scrupulous doctor simply wouldn't have prescribed all the drugs that Jackson insisted on having, no matter how much Jackson offered to pay him.

I watched an incredible interview the other day with one of Jackson's business advisers who, while claiming to have been a close friend of his, spoke with unconcealed and unrestrained pride about the dead man's ongoing Net Worth. Despite the expiration of the mortal Michael Jackson, the Estate of Michael Jackson lives on, and even grows, continuing to enrich all the people named in his will but also the many employed in the management of his legacy.

In his final days, Jackson wasn't much different from Elvis - a drug-addicted wreck. At least Jackson wasn't found dead on the toilet. When the Arthur Penn film Bonnie and Clyde became an unexpected hit in 1967, cartoon appeared in a popular magazine that depicted two prison inmates, one of whom says to the other "Bonnie and Clyde! Bonnie and Clyde! All I hear is Bonnie and Clyde. The saying is true, you're never appreciated until after you're dead!" In Jackson's case, he has appreciated in more than one sense.

Stuffed Animals

The news last week that a remake of Sam Peckinpah's powerful film Straw Dogs (1971) was in release infuriated me so much that I decided to revisit the original, if only in memory. "Why not rewrite The Sun Also Rises while you're at it?" I thought. The same people who say they revere certain classic films, while engaged in remaking them, are showing a funny kind of reverence. It shows just how little they take film seriously. Remake a piece of skilled trash like Psycho, as Gus Van Sant did, by all means. Or simply admit that you're only doing it for the money and because you can't come up with an original idea of your own. The truly sad part is that a majority of people aren't likely to seek out the original, simply because the remake just isn't compelling enough. Score one for the philistines.

I noticed from the preview that the remake is set in good old Hicksville, USA rather than the English village in the original. This perhaps gives the story an unfortunate Deliverance-like bias against red state rednecks ("Squeal like a pig!"), small towns and farmers. It would certainly give the new film an unintended political slant. But Peckinpah was trying to tell us what he thought about men and women. He wasn't giving us a travel advisory. I never had the feeling that he was making a general statement about English people, even if the censors may have taken it that way.

In Peckinpah's film, the hero, played by Dustin Hoffman, is a pacifist university mathematician who has come to a small English village (called Wakely, but the film was shot in St Buryan, Cornwall) for some peace and quiet while he works on a new theorem. With him is his newlywed wife (Susan George) who is a native of the village. Hoffman hires some local men to help renovate parts of his old farmhouse. Unbeknownst to Hoffman, his wife and one of the men are former lovers. The film becomes a contest of wills, with Peckinpah imposing a quite primitive view of men and women. (Peckinpah had been reading books by Robert Ardrey on human behavior when he wrote the script.)

The hired hands devise a scheme in which they take Hoffman out hunting while his wife's former boyfriend reclaims her in the film's most objectionable scene. Peckinpah depicts how the wife shows pleasure as she is being raped. The scene caused an uproar precisely because it was presented so powerfully. Pauline Kael called the film a "fascist work of art" - supposedly because it tries to impose its own lurid views of human sexuality on the viewer.

I remember the telling moment when a clash of cultures takes place in a single image: Hoffman kills a bird but comes close to tears when he sees it lying dead before him. The symbolism was made all the more moving by Hoffman's unexpected access of emotion, while cross-cutting shows us his wife being brutalized back at his farm.

The trailer for the remake shows how much of the original was retained: the bear trap, the pots of hot oil, Hoffman beating one of the men with a poker like he's teeing off at St Andrews while mad bagpipe music blares from his stereo.

Dustin Hoffman was excellent as the timid hero, whom Peckinpah helps discover the animal within. Susan George, like many another daughter of Albion, had imperfect teeth that made her seem all the sexier. But one of the best elements of Peckinpah's film was the extraordinary music of Jerry Fielding (he won an Oscar for it - but big deal). He had worked with Peckinpah since his days on the television show The Rifleman and wrote excellent scores for many of his films, including The Wild Bunch, Junior Bonner, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. John Simon noted that his music for Straw Dogs was influenced by Stravinsky's "Dumbarton Oaks Concerto". I found it worthy of Stravinsky himself.

The Great Divide

Since the 2000 presidential election, in which Democratic candidate Al Gore won the popular vote, but Republican candidate George W. Bush won the most electoral college votes (and won the election), the fact that there are two Americas has become obvious.

Several issues make the divide between the two Americas seem particularly unbridgeable, and, appropriately I suppose, have to do with matters of life and death. Abortion, with supporters calling themselves "Pro-Choice" and opponents calling themselves "Pro-Life", has inspired its more extreme opponents to murdering abortion doctors and blowing up abortion clinics.

Currently, abortion is legal in every state of the U.S. since the Supreme Court decision of Roe v Wade in 1973. Whatever its legal status, abortion is carried out everywhere and all the time by women who, for whatever reason, do not wish that their lives should be changed permanently by an unplanned pregnancy. I suppose that if it were to be banned in the U.S., its opponents would have the strange satisfaction of knowing that they will have succeeded in making abortion so risky that it could potentially cause the deaths of the mothers as well as the fetuses.

In a bizarre twist, many of the people who are against abortion are also enthusiastically for capital punishment. They continue to believe that it is a deterrent, despite proof to the contrary. People simply don't commit crimes in the belief that they will be caught and punished.

Capital punishment has its supporters in tyrannies like China and North Korea, but also in the United States, which is alone in the Western Hemisphere in its observance of the practice. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment in 1976, but 16 states have abolished the practice.

Last week, it seemed that the whole world was watching as Troy Davis became the latest victim of the moral turpitude of some Americans. Our sudden knowledge of the existence of this man was quickly upset by the state of Georgia's determination to expedite his nonexistence. If the cruelty of the event wasn't already obvious, it was delayed for three hours while a last minute appeal to the Supreme Court was being considered. Since the execution was by lethal injection, Troy Davis likely laid there on the table with the i.v. in his arm the whole time. That's like if he'd been hanged, he'd have had the noose around his neck and been standing on the trap door for 3 hours.

I have made my feelings on this subject abundantly clear before now. People who despair of their countrymen ever coming around to their thinking on the subject have to persevere. I recall when some avowed liberals moved to Canada when George W. Bush was reelected in 2004 because they found the political and moral atmosphere in America to be poisonous. Certainly their departure gratified those on the other side of the divide. But America is my country. And my side is winning.

Remastering the Film: Louis Malle

Having for various reasons conspicuously passed over some of the big names of the nouvelle vague on my list of Masters of Film, I hope that it doesn't appear spiteful of me to put Louis Malle in place of them. He was too often associated in people's minds with the movement, despite having nothing to do with Cahiers du Cinéma. He learned from them, as everyone did, but he would eventually surpass their accomplishments - even though he made the Big Mistake (answering the call of Hollywood) that Truffaut and Chabrol were smart enough to resist. Malle began in documentary film, co-directing Le Monde du Silence, with Jacques Cousteau in 1956. It won a Palm d'or at Cannes. His first fiction film was Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud (1958), known as Lift to the Scaffold in Britain and Elevator to the Gallows in the States. Fantastically cool (Malle persuaded Miles Davis to do the music), Vernon Young called it an improvement on Hitchcock. I call it "definitive". 

Elevator starred Jeanne Moreau. Malle cast her again in his next film, The Lovers (1958), a huge hit in France and abroad, due to its Gallic honesty about sex. Moreau was never more alluring. Feeling the tide of the New Wave, Malle next tried his hand at a Marienbad-like experimental film, Zazie in the Metro (1960), based on the Raymond Queneau novel. It was spirited but ultimately unsatisfying. Malle tried to recoup some of the commercial success and notoriety (in the States) of The Lovers with A Very Private Affair (1962) (simply Vie privée in French), starring Brigitte Bardot. 

Just when he seemed to have gone commercial, out of nowhere Malle made his masterpiece, Le Feu Follet (1963)(1). Though its subject was forbidding, the film's beauty is indisputable. Maurice Ronet's performance as a man who's run out of time was unsurpassed. For the next five years, Malle seemed to enjoy being a successful professional director (evidently something that Truffaut enjoyed tremendously - to the detriment of his art) without having much to say. In 1968 he took off for India with a small crew and returned with more than thirty hours of film. He managed to reduce it to a feature film released the following year, Calcutta. If the film seems rather lost, it certainly reflected Malle's reaction to the phantasmagoria he found in India. More footage was put together and shown on British TV in seven episodes as Phantom India (1969). The Indian government objected to Malle's completely open-eyed look at their country, and banned the BBC from filming there for several years. 

Malle's next feature film was a return to his stride. Le Souffle au Coeur (1971) was known - slightly inaccurately - as Murmur of the Heart in the States. Set in Dijon in 1954, the film has everything going for it, including the return of Lea Massari, the girl who disappeared in Antonioni's L'Avventura. The film gets more than a little flippant, however, when it suggests that a boy's sex with his mother is no big deal ("It'll be our secret. I'll remember it without remorse, tenderly. Promise you'll do the same."). And the actor at the center of the film, Benoît Ferreux, is not very good. The soundtrack, however, is all Charlie Parker and Sidney Bechet. 

Malle had helped produce the Marcel Ophuls documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1968), and his fiction film, Lacombe Lucien is a beautiful counterpart to it. It examines some of the confusion and collusion of the French during the occupation. Pauline Kael used Hannah Arendt's line about the "banality of evil" to describe the film's titular character. Malle later wondered at his choice for the lead, Pierre Blaise, who became a star but was killed in a car accident the following year. The film is a beautiful tribute to him and it was Malle's last great film. 

After a few documentaries (Human, Too Human, 1974, stands out in my memory, suggesting that industrial robotics are extensions of our bodies), and a forgettable foray into surrealism, Black Moon (1975), Malle departed France for Hollywood in 1975. The move was not unlike those of many other artists, and the results were the same. Some of his American films were successful, but none of them are the equal of Le Feu Follet or Lacombe Lucien. In fact, it is often hard to believe that the puerile Pretty Baby or Atlantic City were the product of the same intelligence that gave us Elevator to the Gallows or Calcutta. Not even a return to France in the late '80s (Au Revoir les Enfants and Milou en Mai) could resuscitate Malle's deceased muse. Malle told interviewers that he left France because he didn't want to end up like Truffaut, who made Day for Night in 1973, a film about the making of a film. What Malle failed to notice was that his last film, Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) is a film about the rehearsal of a play. 

(1) Based on the novel by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, the title is an idiomatic term that corresponds to the English "will-o-the-wisp".

Sensitivity Training

I watched Morgan Freeman on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight last Friday (Saturday morning here). I think Freeman is a fine actor when the part calls on him to be, as in Glory, Driving Miss Daisy, and Seven. At one point in the interview he said that the Tea Party were being racist when they claim they will do whatever it takes to ensure that Barack Obama will be a one-term president.

"[The Tea Party's] stated policy, publicly stated, is to do whatever it takes to see to it that Obama only serves one term. What’s, what does that, what underlines that? Screw the country. We’re going to do whatever we do to get this black man, we can, we’re going to do whatever we can to get this black man outta here."

While I might be satisfied with the interpretation of the Tea Party's avowed goal that it is nothing but the usual election rhetoric, and that perhaps Freeman, like other black Americans of his generation, might be seeing and hearing racism where none was intended, I am inclined this time to agree with him, with one distinction.

I have examined this subject before, and I believe that, while some white Americans are often surprised when a black American makes the charge of racism against speech and behavior that appears to them to be quite innocent and innocuous, it is due to the fact that white Americans are oblivious to racism simply because it is never directed at them and because they have never lived under the cloud of racism all their lives.

When I lived in Des Moines several years ago, I worked for awhile for a private security company that was contracted by the city to patrol the downtown skywalks. My uniform made me look more like a cop than those worn by the city cops, since my shirt and pants were navy blue rather than dark blue, and the patch on my arm was a shield, while theirs was a circle. My job was to walk the skywalk, all five miles of it, and make sure that no one was there between the hours of midnight and 4 AM. If I found anyone there, I had to help them along to the nearest exit or call for police backup if they refused.

One night I was walking through a bank building when it was about five minutes 'til midnight and a black man was walking toward me. As soon as he was within about ten yards from me, I asked "Do you have somewhere to go, sir?" That was my line. When the answer was "yes", my next question was "Well you had better get there before midnight because the skywalk is closing."

But the black man didn't answer me. He didn't even look at me. When I asked him the question a second time as he passed by me, he didn't respond then either. Finally I turned around and raised my voice, asking the question for a third time. The black man spun around and hissed the word "yes", and gave me a look, a look that said, "I am holding you personally responsible for 350 years of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation." Then he went on his way.

How did I know that look? Where had I seen it before? Or was I simply reading all that into the black man's expression because I have a guilty conscience about all those things? I could've just attributed it, like white people always do, to the racial chip that some black people have placed precariously on their shoulders, quick to respond whenever the slightest contact makes it fall. My co-workers, all white people like me (1), certainly assured me that it was the black man's problem, not mine.

I was only doing my pinchey job, even if the uniform I was wearing, the badge and the duty belt, stood for something the black man instinctively hated. Since it was me in that uniform, standing behind that badge, all his contempt was directed straight at me. And I wanted nothing more at that moment, as I turned and, suddenly exhausted, walked away, was to tear that uniform off and never put it on again.

Wasn't the Tea Party created some time in 2009? And wasn't Barack Obama sworn in as the first black American president in January of that year? Is there some connection between an extremely conservative political group declaring its existence a few months after the inauguration of Barack Obama? If it is merely a coincidence, it is one of the most unfortunate coincidences in history. While I often get the feeling that some of the Tea Party's loudest voices, who have been calling Obama a socialist, a fascist, and questioning the validity of his nationality ever since he took office, are simply using all those words and tactics because they can't bring themselves to use another word, a word that is also a slur (and to them, calling someone a socialist is one of the worst insults they can imagine) but which is no longer acceptable for use by white people, I think Morgan Freeman may be confusing the words "racial" and "racist". Is alot of the Tea Party's rhetoric racially motivated? Probably. Does that also make it racist?


(1) Latest statistics show that Des Moines is 82.3% white. The Tea Party is estimated to be 79% white.

Taking Sides

Given that the former Palestinian Liberation Organization is closer, politically, to the militant Irish Republican Army (indeed, the PLO and IRA once trained together in Syrian and Libyan terrorist training camps), I feel somewhat qualified to comment on the imminent bid for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.

Until quite recently, the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland seemed at least as intractable as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As long ago as the 16th century, when Henry VIII reformed the Church of England, Protestants have been settling in Northern Ireland. When the Republic of Ireland was created in 1949 (Israel was established only a year before), six counties in the north were retained as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Radical Irish Republicans, who wanted the island united under the Republic, saw the protestant loyalists in the north as invaders and eventually formed the Provisional IRA in 1969 (the Arab-Israeli War was in 1967), which conducted acts of sabotage at first, which increased in frequency and savagery when the "Troubles" began in Northern Ireland after the Battle of the Bogside in 1969, provoking the British government to deploy its army two days later to prevent rioting from escalating into outright civil war.

For many years some Irish-Americans supported the IRA either openly or covertly, believing that the cause of the Troubles was a war of occupation being carried out by the British Army, and that the only solution was to convince the British government to withdraw their troops. More astute observers, however, understood that if the British Army were to suddenly withdraw, a brief but bloody civil war would take place, causing thousands of refugees to flee the violence into the Irish Republic or to nearby Scotland.

I came of age during the Troubles and was dimly aware of their implications. I had a copy of the 1916 Irish Rebellion Declaration tacked to the back of my bedroom door, and I listened to Irish rebel songs, foremost of which was Paul McCartney's stridently obtuse anthem "Give Ireland Back to the Irish". After several years of watching the ups and - mostly - the downs of the Troubles from the safety of America, I had to simply quit and accept that nothing was as simple as I once thought. I endured too many Irish-Americans who talk about the "old country" as if there were any such place, drinking their black-and-tans on St. Patrick's Day. I once believed there was enough hatred between the Protestants and Catholics to fuel the conflict for another five hundred years. I began to be thankful that my maternal great-grandfather got on that boat and left Ireland behind for good. When he arrived, he told the immigration official his name, which sounded to the man like "Cassiday". He had the good sense to drop the "O" as well.

But sometimes even revolutionaries want nothing more than to live a normal life. A new generation in Northern Ireland, fed up with the violence, has decided that they are ready to accept some form of coexistence, even if some of the old inequalities persist. In a move that would've been thought inconceivable even in the mid-1990s, the IRA announced they were renouncing violence altogether, and the "Good Friday" Agreement was approved in a referendum in 1998. That agreement still stands as of today. The Irish are united in their rejection of violence and their commitment to coexistence. For me, it has been an almost incredible blast of fresh air from a country whose history has been a litany of doom and gloom for too long.

Coexistence in Israel is by now an impossible dream. A separate state for Palestinians is the only conceivable solution at the moment. Along with disappointment, this state of affairs leaves me feeling quite a bit resentful toward both sides in the conflict, since successive American governments have made such a big deal out of it for so long. I am sick and tired of the same news year-in and year-out from Israel. The U.S. has invested so much in Israel (not to mention Mubarak's Egypt, Assad's Syria, and Gaddafi's Libya) that it's a shame they cannot occasionally do what we ask them to do. I also feel that, if the Irish in Ulster can get over everything they've been through in the last forty years and get along with one another, so can the Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis seem to be saying, with some justification, "since you couldn't coexist with us for two thousand years, we will not coexist with anyone either!" But, try as they will, they can't make the Palestinians go away.

Recently, Israeli citizens took part in a mass (nude) demonstration on the shores of the Dead Sea to make a point about the environmental problems facing the body of water. A few weeks ago, they protested in much greater numbers, fully clothed, against the rise in the cost of living in Israel. If that many Israelis were protesting the existence of the biggest open air prison in the world - Gaza - perhaps their leaders would be more willing to negotiate with the Palestinians.

Up All Night: American Graffiti

First films made by some fledgling American directors have been about the pain but also the necessity of leaving home. Think of Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971), Barry Levinson's Diner (1982), and George Lucas' American Graffiti (1973). The origin of all these films is usually overlooked. It was Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953).

After successfully transposing his student short, THX-1138, to a more sizable budget feature film in 1971, George Lucas turned away from the future to the past. While some may think that it can't have been all that hard in 1973 to recreate one summer night in 1962, it must've seemed like ancient history to Lucas. While redolent of the period, American Graffiti also contains sad hints of the obsequious time in which it was made. The rueful end titles announce that Terry ("Toad") Fields was reported MIA in Vietnam, and "Curt Henderson is now a writer living in Canada".(1) During the Vietnam years, ROTC meant "Run Off to Canada".

American Graffiti (2) dramatizes twelve hours in the life of a California town (Modesto) at the end of summer, 1962. The tagline was "Where were you in '62?" I was four years old in Albany, Georgia. The film is not just another plunge into treacly nostalgia. It brings the time and the place to life with subtlety and imagination. For me, it remains George Lucas' best film.

"Cruising" is the activity in which every young person in the film engages. And nearly all the film's action, after the "sock hop" at the high school is over, takes place on the nocturnal streets of the town. The beauty of the passing old Chevys, Buicks and Lincolns, as they seem to revolve around a center like a record on a spindle, is a fascinating and enduring image.

But the genuine stroke of genius for the film was hiring Walter Murch, who created, with Lucas, a soundscape as rich and detailed as the imagery. In interviews, Murch spoke of "worldizing" the soundtrack:

The acoustic treatment of worldizing it, so that it seemed to be something that existed in real space. The idea was that every teenage car in this town was turned to the same station, and, therefore, anywhere you went in the town, you heard this sound echoing off the buildings and passing by in cars.(3)

Lucas' fascination with Wolfman Jack and his large collection of vintage records gave him an opportunity to create with Murch a radio show that was typical of the ones he heard at the time. They hired Wolfman Jack and recorded a two hour show, and interspersed the music, along with the dialogue scenes and incidental sounds. Purchasing the rights to all the songs was a large portion of the film's $775,000 budget.

As the night deepens, the action slows and the songs on the soundtrack become ballads. Just as the dawn is breaking, John Milner wins the long-anticipated race, Carl talks with his blonde dream girl on a pay phone for the first and last time, and Steve and Laurie are reunited as Steve resolves never to leave her and go off to college. The end titles tell us that John was killed by a drunk driver the following years and Steve became an insurance salesman in Modesto.

The hero of Fellini's film, Moraldo, spends the film coming to the difficult decision, and awaiting the right opportunity, to leave his friends and family behind in his small town. When he finally does so, he gazes from a window of the train at the passing town and images of his friends, asleep and oblivious of his leaving, pass before him. American Graffiti ends with Curt boarding a plane and leaving Modesto for college. He listens to a radio as Wolfman Jack signs off, and notices far below on a deserted highway the white Thunderbird.


(1) Because he didn't want to prolong the titles, Lucas left out the names and fates of his female characters, prompting Pauling Kael to accuse him of "chauvinism".
(2) Among the titles that the studio (Universal) flirted with in post-production was Another Slow Night in Modesto.
(3) The entire Murch interview can be found here.