We know Terry Teachout loves Satchmo - but would Satchmo have loved Terry Teachout?

White conservatives and jazz . . . white conservatives and jazz . . .  hmmmm.

It's strange, is it not, that the avatars of the white hierarchy should so often love the music of the people (or the race, or the class, or what have you) that they oppressed for so long, and with so little pity?

These thoughts come to mind (again - I've pondered this before), as I've noted Terry Teachout's tub-thumping for his dramatic sketch of the great Louis Armstrong (at left), Satchmo at the Waldorf (which has met with lukewarm, but respectable, praise from other quarters).

Now I don't have much interest in Teachout's play, I admit.  My guess from his theatre reviewing is that he's not much of a dramatic technician (although I could be wrong), and the reviews of Satchmo have generally been filled with such puffery as "This play cuts deep."  (Uh-huh.)  On the other hand, I've read some of Teachout's writing on music, and he is, indeed, a passionate and perceptive critic of that art (he's much better on music than he is on drama).

But when I read that Satchmo at the Waldorf concerns itself at length with Armstrong's battles against racism - and other black musician's denunciations of him as an "Uncle Tom" -  I confess I flinched a bit.

Terry Teachout

I guess because while I am quite confident that Teachout truly and sincerely loves Armstrong's music, I can think of few writers more . . .  ironically placed to write about Armstrong's battles against racism than he is.

For Teachout's career trajectory has been almost entirely within the confines of the white conservative establishment: he did once do a stint at Harper's, years ago, but he's best known for his long tenure at the Wall Street Journal, and his pieces for Commentary and National Review.  In short, he works now for the publications and people who opposed civil rights for people like Armstrong, and who generally oppose the great man's legacy today.

And I guess I find that interesting.  More interesting than anything I've read about Satchmo at the Waldorf, to be honest.

And so I wish Terry Teachout had written about that, about how politically he opposes the community whose musical legacy he adores.  About how he idolizes a black artist whom other black artists called an "Uncle Tom" . . .  the irony's almost too intense!  And imagine Teachout trying to explain to Satchmo his own employment history!  Now that would have been unlike any play I've seen in years . . . I'm not saying that no such explanation is possible; but I'd really like to hear it - wouldn't you?

Although I realize such a confessional is basically a pipe dream - I mean, could Teachout be honest enough about his own internal contradictions to give them coherent dramatic form?  (Could anyone?)

But even the attempt would have been fascinating; I'd have paid full price to see that.

Update: Romney's tax return secrecy tied to his possible abortion profits

The Romney abortion-profit story has grown longer legs already - a synergy has been sparked in the blogosphere between it and another simmering Romney controversy. Indeed, even some Republicans are now speculating that the reason he has refused to release his tax returns is that they will show clear evidence of his personal financial gains from Stericycle, the medical waste company that has long done business with abortion clinics (and which Romney's Bain Capital funded).

The embarrassing links between Romney's personal finances and hot-button abortion-activist issues go further, though.  Reportedly Romney's personal trust owns a substantial amount of stock in Novo Nordisk, which conducts embryonic stem-cell research; other holdings include Real Networks, News Corp. and Time Warner, which provide adult pay-per-view networks and distribute porn to hotel chains. Even such anodyne Romney investments as Pfizer could cause him trouble, as Pfizer manufactures an abortion drug. And amusingly, though Romney's Mormon faith forbids alcoholic beverages, he also owns stock in distillers Anheuser-Busch and Brown Forman.  Something tells me this story could be a keeper.

More Republican racism (only closer to home); plus - did Mitt Romney make money from dead babies? And did David Koch buy the VP nomination?

Hot on the heels of the racist voter-suppression tactics of Republicans in Ohio, we learn of this recent episode in Vermont:

"A county Republican Party chairman in Vermont apologized Monday afternoon for a racist statement that had appeared on the county GOP's Facebook page. The apology came after Green Mountain Daily reported Sunday that the Rutland County GOP had posted the joke on their Facebook page, generating a series of negative comments. The post and comments have since been removed from the page.

The post read:

Just wanted to let you know -- today I received my 2012 Social Security Stimulus Package. It contained two tomato seeds, cornbread mix, a prayer rug, a machine to blow smoke up my butt, 2 discount coupons to KFC, an "Obama Hope & Change" bumper sticker, and a "Blame it on Bush" poster for the front yard. The directions were in Spanish. Watch for yours soon.

Green Mountain Daily also posted three comments that the Rutland County GOP had posted on the original Facebook post in response to comments opposing the joke -- which has been circulated on the internet. In one, the county GOP said "comedy is usually based in reality .... call it racist if you must ..... not too far off from the truth." The author of the comments for the Republican Party is not identified."

What a riot!


Meanwhile, though, some real funny business has begun to haunt the Republican ticket just prior to the Tampa convention.  Sites like Mother Jones, the Huffington Post, and Jezebel have been buzzing with the news that documents have recently come to light revealing that Mitt Romney was an active participant in the 1999 Bain Capital deal that funded the expansion of Stericycle, the country's leading medical waste firm, which disposes of waste from abortion clinics (among other medical institutions). Indeed, Romney is listed as the only Bain executive with voting power over $75 million worth of shares in the company. (Bain - and Romney - eventually sold their stake in the deal, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.)

Stericycle had a horrible safety record - it has had to reach settlements in several lawsuits with plaintiffs exposed to dangerous waste - but let's be honest, Republicans don't care about that; what they care about is abortion.  And it seems that Mitt Romney may have made money off it - or at the very least he helped underwrite the expansion of a very large company that made money off it, and walked away with a small fortune for his trouble.  Even if he was never involved in the business decisions at Stericycle, simply linking him to their business model would be utterly toxic to the Republican base (the company has recently been vilified by anti-abortion Republicans, who don't realize that the firm was largely funded by their nominee).

But that's not all.  Speculation has surfaced that David Koch, of the infamously evil Koch brothers, actually "bought" the Vice Presidential nomination for Paul Ryan with a donation of $100 million to a Romney Super PAC.  A vicious slur, you say?  Funny - the rumor's source is a Republican, long-time operative (read: dirty trickster) Roger Stone.  Hmmmm.  Stone details how the deal (probably?) went down at a Hamptons fund raiser on his blog.  Now perhaps he only has some sort of personal axe to grind against Ryan - or Koch.  But the story has already gained traction on the fringe - it has enormous resonance as the obvious end-game of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision - and of course even denying it would prove highly toxic to Romney.  So will it and the Stericycle story ever break into the mainstream news cycle? Will these obvious opportunities for investigative reporting receive even a fraction of the attention that Obama's birth certificate has?  All I can say is - wait and see.

Republicans are apparently only racist "off the record"

If you are an intelligent person, you already know this, but I'm posting it anyway, simply because it's somehow satisfying to watch evil people slip up.

 In case you haven't heard, the Republican Party's mask slipped just a leeetle bit last week in Ohio, when Doug Preisse, party chairman of Franklin County (the state capital), explained in an email that Ohio Republicans supported eliminating weekend hours for early voting because "I guess I really actually feel we shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban - read African-American - voter-turnout machine."

Ohio Democrats, of course, immediately labeled the email "patently racist."  But state Republican Party Executive Director Marty Borges quickly explained that Priesse "thought his comments...were off the record."

Oh, I guess that makes them all right then.  I mean we all already know Republicans are racist off the record, don't we?  (Nothing to see here, move along . . .)

And at any rate, Preisse doesn't seem too upset about the slip; he told reporters that "claims of unfairness" were "bullshit.  Quote me!"

Trying Wilde

Exhibit A in the three trials of Oscar Wilde.

The contrasts over at the Boston Center for the Arts these days couldn't be more intense. You can choose - as Boston's mainstream critics have all insisted you should - to be body-slammed in the Roberts Studio Theatre by the rock 'em-sock'em identity-politics of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.

Or, you can tiptoe into the Wimberley next door, and slowly be drawn into what could be the subtlest and most absorbing production of the year.

I'm talking about Bad Habit Productions' Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, which runs through August 26th behind the curtains (appropriately enough) of the Wimberley, right up on its stage, in a startlingly mature production from new director Liz Fenstermaker, who has generally drawn remarkable performances from a cast of some of the best actors on the fringe.

Now I know we need all kinds of theatre.  And Chad Deity and Gross Indecency do have some similarities (they're both about stereotypes - and closeted gay men, for instance!).  But only Indecency is about actual people - indeed historical figures - even though Moisés Kaufman's transcription of the records and recollections surrounding the destruction (or self-destruction) of Oscar Wilde pulls off a startling trick: it's over-stuffed with period detail, yet it remains essentially a mystery.
Now in Chad, playwright Kristoffer Diaz never leaves the blackboard; his idea of a "drama" is to pin the audience on the mat and deliver a funny, hip lecture; he tells you exactly what you should think every single minute.  Kaufman's M.O. is entirely different; indeed, he hints at so many possible explanations for the courtroom drama that sent  the most glittering literary artist of the belle époque to hard labor (for "gross indecency") that we leave the theatre all but scratching our heads over the whole tragic episode.

What leaps out at you about Bad Habit's take on the text is how deeply director Fenstermaker appreciates this paradox.  She understands that just as Victorian society operated as a kind of social maze, in which all modes of pleasure were tolerated as long as they remained disguised, so the historical record of the trials of Oscar Wilde is itself a kind of screen, suggesting but never quite revealing the true nature and intents of its protagonists.

Although at some moments, I wondered if Fenstermaker hadn't kept things too subtle - a few darker bolts of passion (and despair) might have flickered between Wilde (John Geoffrion) and the gorgeous source of all his woe, Lord Alfred Douglas (known as "Bosie," at left), who egged his older lover on to sue his father, the Marquess of Queensberry (yes, that was his actual title) for libel.  You may have heard of the Marquess (below right) elsewhere - he was so hysterically butch that he actually sponsored the code of rules for boxing that remains in effect today (its great innovation was requiring the use of gloves in the ring).

Queensberry took off the gloves when it came to Wilde, however. Determined to end the playwright's hanky-panky with his son (whose elder brother had died a few years before, in a shooting accident that itself may have been a gay suicide), he left him an insulting card at his club (the offending doc, at top), labeling the self-consciously florid author "a posing Somdomite" (sic).

Homophobic and illiterate - you couldn't ask for more, could you, in a dowager queen of the gentleman's sport of boxing.  But the Marquess (unexpectedly) had his complexities, too - his relationship with his son was tortured, but not impossible to understand, and he was more aware of the ubiquity of homosexuality in his society than you might imagine; Queensberry even asked that mercy (of a sort) be extended to Wilde before the legal machine had had its full way with him.

The Marquis of Queensberry

And you could easily argue it was Wilde who sealed his own doom - once he had initiated libel charges against Queensberry, it was inevitable his many dalliances with rent boys (and blackmailers) would surface.  He was a "somdomite" - yet somehow convinced himself that a witty command performance of his famous artistic "beard" could obscure that fact, even before the testimony of his sexual partners. Or did he imagine Queensberry's defense would be so inept, or so embarrassed before the facts of the author's activities in the London demi-monde, that it, like Wilde himself, would be unable to describe the love that dared not speak its name?

Either way, Wilde was guilty of a tragic self-deception - because once the evidence of his behavior had been laid before the Crown, he was immediately in danger of prosecution for the crime of "gross indecency" (sexual congress between men - but not women - had been outlawed in Britain only about a decade before).

Wilde still had his sympathizers, however, and the legal system lumbered at a suspiciously slow pace throughout his prosecution (one trial even ended in a hung jury).  Meanwhile artsy aristocrats fled London like lemmings as the proceedings ground on (the trains to Dover, and the ferries to Calais, were packed).  But Wilde stayed put, even when told he had only hours left before the summons for his arrest arrived.

The question is - why did he stay?  Bosie himself, the love object sparking the whole debacle, soon took flight for the Continent (as it was inevitably asked why Wilde was standing in the dock, but not he).  This is the one question which moves like a spectre behind the veil of Kaufman's text: how could this grand, delightful performer of the gay persona cooperate in his own punishment? Did a buried vein of self-loathing drag him to his doom?  Some hidden core of Catholic guilt?

These questions I suppose will always echo through the legacy of the case (and indeed, discoveries of various letters after Kaufman completed his text have only complicated certain mysteries around Bosie). Wisely then, this production leaves such enigmas to haunt us till the final curtain. In the meantime, we get to savor a series of poised and articulate performances that most of our local Equity houses would be hard pressed to match. John Geoffrion may not much resemble Wilde, bu he captures beautifully the delightful, self-satisfied sparkle of the wit (as many noted in amazement, Wilde could carry off dazzling epigrams even under cross-examination).  He also nails the vulnerable moment when Wilde first stumbles (letting it slip that he would never have kissed a certain man, because "he was not beautiful") - it  lets you know immediately that without the perfection of his self-performance, Wilde would prove utterly at sea.

As Bosie (both at left), newcomer Kyle Cherry is almost as good; he looks just right, and when coiled on a Victorian settee, this young actor exudes a palpably spoiled and unstable charisma. Meanwhile, as his antagonist, the Marquess,  David Lutheran is always effective - but sometimes I felt there was a more sympathetic, or at least complicated, dimension to be found in his dastardly deeds. Elsewhere the work was always polished, and often absorbing:  Gabriel Graetz brought just the right amount of professional zeal to the prosecution, while Matthew Murphy communicated a touchingly confused sympathy as the defense.  Character turns by Brooks Reeves and Tom Lawrence were likewise mature and convincing, while Joey Heyworth and Luke Murtha made a believably practical pair of rentboys.  But actually the entire cast deserves mention, so kudos to Morgan Bernhard, James Bocock, and Derek McCormack as well (and I shouldn't forget their dialect coach,  Susanna Harris Noon).  Bad Habit has made a good habit of noteworthy productions of British drama (An Ideal Husband, Arcadia); Gross Indecency now ratifies that sterling run as a triple crown.

A star-crossed Romeo and Juliet

A theatre company's reach should always exceed its grasp, I suppose - but that gap looms particularly large in the Happy Medium Theatre's current production of Romeo and Juliet (at left, which runs through August 25 at the BCA).  I have to be honest, this is a long haul of a show, because in their eagerness to jump into the big leagues, the Happy Medium folks seem to have hoped that the sheer greatness of this play might somehow sustain them, even though they lacked the casting or production resources to do it justice.  They did have local star Paula Plum on board as director, which I too thought would have helped - only Plum flounders quite a bit here, so in the end her presence is a wash.

Still, you only learn how to act Shakespeare by acting it, and even this counts at least as a first step in most of this cast's Shakespearean training, so you may want to support their work (just as long as you know what you're getting into).  To Plum's credit, she has cut the play aggressively, and generally well (aside from one odd scene where we see Lady Cap at the crock pot, and Lord Cap in an apron); her version, though it nods inconclusively toward racial issues, is basically traditional, and keeps moving, no matter what.  And Angie Jepson's fight direction (given the tight confines of this stage, she has chosen to work with daggers) is generally strong.

But as a student acting experience, I think the lesson to be learned here is: don't act Shakespeare this way.  Try not to shout, particularly in small spaces, and try to think of your characterization as an organic whole, with an internal coherence, rather than as a string of "bits" that will pull you through your scenes.  Avoid  "going for it," whenever you can; aim for subtlety as much as possible.

There are a few bright spots in the acting: Michael Underhill comes through, as he usually does, as Tybalt, and June Kfoury has what it takes to make a memorable Nurse (with more careful direction, she might have made it).  Likewise Joey Pelletier has his moments as Mercutio, but often falls prey to the show's gonzo tendencies; meanwhile William Schuller makes an effectively haunting Apothecary, and Sharon Squires conveys a memorable dignity as Lady (and Lord!) Montague, but somehow misses any of that poisonous ancient grudge everybody's talking about.  Alas, elsewhere inexperience and miscasting tended to overwhelm good intentions in this star-crossed show.

The Springsteen Paradox

Who's the Boss??

I drove by Kenmore Square this evening, and with the windows down I could just hear the garbled echo of what sounded like "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" bouncing off the walls of the buildings around Fenway Park.  Oh yeah, I thought to myself, Springsteen is playing in town; this must be the night.

Which only made me a little sad, frankly.  Don't get me wrong - when I was sixteen, I wore a deep groove in the grooves of Born to Run;  I listened to it over and over again, all summer long, in the days when songs - and albums - lasted.

Back then, I thought it was genius.

Now, of course, I think it's cheese - but what cheese!  And Bruce himself - well, I know Landau ruined him, that's true, but even now, when sometimes it seems as if he himself is the subject of "Point Blank," there are still a few good new (or newish) songs to be savored amid the inflated anthems.  And no, Bruce isn't any kind of force for cultural change - nor was he ever - but you get the feeling he at least has tried to hang onto the integrity of the romance his songs stood for.

And yes, part of that romance is - political romance.

So here's to Bruuuuce!  But these days, all I can think of when I think about Springsteen are the ugly mugs of Chris Christie and David Brooks.  You see recently it has come out that both these conservative hacks are . . . wait for it . . . Springsteen fans. Indeed,  in a recent Atlantic Monthly article, Jeffrey Goldberg detailed the (Republican) governor of New Jersey's desperate attempts to be blessed in some way (any way) by the Boss, whom he all but worships.  Okay, you may say - Chris Christie is a hearty, hypocritical asshole, yes, but he is white, he's from a blue collar background, and he's from New Jersey. He grew up in a culture that doted on the Boss, and he's still true to that lifestyle (just on a grander scale).


But David Brooks?  Brooks is a Canadian Jew (bet ya didn't know that, did ya) - but as his father was American, he grew up in New York City, in Stuyvesant Town - which was basically public housing.  That's right: David Brooks grew up in public housing. (Let that sink in for a minute.) Brooks has always claimed that he was "originally" liberal, but we all know him by now as that oleaginous conservative serpent, silver-haired and silver-tongued,  who is forever shedding his latest skin on the op-ed page of the Times.  If he shares any of Chris Christie's balls-out, Rust-Belt-white-trash bonhomie, you couldn't tell by looking at (or listening to) him.

And yet Brooks, too, is a huge Springsteen fan, and was recently moved to write about a trip to Europe to hear the Boss play live.  Yes, you read that right - Brooks flew to the Continent to follow Springsteen's tour through Spain and France because "They say you’ve never really seen a Bruce Springsteen concert until you’ve seen one in Europe."  (Seriously, who the fuck says that - Sasha Frere-Jones?)

But wait, it gets better - Brooks opines on the irony of Springsteen's European fan base being most passionate about "songs from the deepest and most distinctly American recesses of Springsteen’s repertoire."  Indeed, somewhere in "the middle of the Iberian peninsula," Brooks experiences something like a revelation:

I looked across the football stadium and saw 56,000 enraptured Spaniards, pumping their fists in the air in fervent unison and bellowing at the top of their lungs, “I was born in the U.S.A.! I was born in the U.S.A.!”

Okay, sure - that's ironic; they're like Spaniards (not Jewish Canadians!) who are really into American songs.  Wow.  But is this any more ironic than David Brooks himself waving his hands in the air and singing along (with Chris Christie, in absentia) to the songs of a man whose ideals both have labored all their adult lives to destroy?

Hmmm.

I suppose that as Oscar Wilde once opined, you always kill the thing you love.  Still, Brooks seems completely unaware that his own Springsteen fandom is by now far, far stranger than the enthusiasm of some innocent kids in Spain (who are probably far to the left of Springsteen, anyhow).  Indeed, Brooks's fandom couldn't be more weirdly hypocritical - he has, after all, flown across the Atlantic (business class at least, I'm thinking) and bought top-tier tickets (and hotel rooms in Barcelona, Provence and Madrid) to listen to Bruce Springsteen sing about down-and-outers in New Jersey. (Seriously, even Chris Christie saw him in Newark!)

Springsteen's senior class photo.

And I'm not sure why, but something about this phenomenon - let's call it "The Springsteen Paradox" - makes me very sad; the hypocrisy here is so deep, so unconscious, that it's almost eerie.  And it makes me wonder whether even genuine art, as supposed to pop art like Springsteen's, isn't a kind of political joke, too; I wonder whether half the people who wrap themselves in it aren't actually devoted to destroying everything that it's truly about, just as Christie and Brooks are.

So as I heard the last, blurry echoes of "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" disappear over the chasm of the Pike, I said a little prayer for Bruce Springsteen, something like: may the Lord save him - and all of us - from his greatest fans!  And I wondered whether the garbled sounds bouncing out of Fenway weren't somehow a statement in and of themselves.  Maybe Springsteen's music was always this distorted to many of his admirers.  Certainly David Brooks and Chris Christie never heard it clearly.

Coriolanus and the commoners on the Common

Coriolanus in triumph.  Photo: Andrew Brilliant.

I finally caught Coriolanus on the Boston Common (across two nights; it closed Sunday), and as usual I was slightly mystified as to why people lug out their lawnchairs once a year and swat mosquitoes while watching amplified Shakespeare.  But maybe that's just what the groundlings like to do on a midsummer eve, I dunno.

Well, the mob that watched the mob in Coriolanus saw pretty much what they see every year, at least: some cleanly-spoken, if over-amplified, verse (and as this is late Shakespeare, that's no mean feat), a production that tagged several perspectives on the play without deciding on any particular one, a few good local actors, and a fair amount of spectacle.  I think even the uninitiated could tell the show was about this Roman warrior dude who just couldn't bring himself to bow and scrape to the common herd, which led to their banishing him, only then he totally turns the tables on them, which is like ironic. Or something like that.

But as usual for director Steven Maler, little of the production cohered emotionally (or politically).  And actually, despite the roaring sound effects and a charge of riot police, there wasn't quite enough spectacle this time; Coriolanus works best when the lifestyles of its warrior class clash with the squalid conditions of Rome's lower 99%, but on the Common, everyone had to make do with Cristina Todesco's toppling fort of a set (a rare misstep for Todesco, btw).

And I wish I could say the acting made up for this gap, but it didn't, not really.  Last year's All's Well that Ends Well marked an uptick in the quality of the Commonwealth Shakespeare ensemble - I remember only the heroine, Helena, wasn't up to snuff.  This year many of the same performers returned, so I had some hope for Coriolanus (even though it's an even more difficult play than All's Well).  But this time around the local stars, strong as they are, could't really play to their strengths; Karen MacDonald can play solid brass when she wants to, for instance, but she's just too warm-hearted to conjure the cold steel of the vulpine Volumnia, Coriolanus's blood-thirsty mama-vulture,  and while Fred Sullivan, Jr. nailed his laughs, as he always does, he had his usual trouble conveying emotional attachment on stage, so as Coriolanus's father figure, Menenius, he never really connected with his protégé .


Such disconnects left the emotional heavy lifting to muscular lead Nicholas Carrière (above left), who's not only easy on the eyes but also totally credible as an athletic killing machine (the sine qua non of this role).  What's more, Carrière proved himself more than a hunk of martial man-candy; he spoke the verse well, and even had a flair for physical comedy - his was the funniest (and psychologically healthiest) Coriolanus I've ever seen; the performance never dripped with the unhinged contempt so many have brought to the part - nor did Carrière hint at anything like the frightening political dimensions of, say, Ralph Fiennes's proto-fascist figure from the recent movie.

But Coriolanus shouldn't be just an action figure, he should dazzle us with something like inhuman grace; and conjuring the character's sick connection with his mother - the source of the inflexible pride that is his downfall - seemed beyond Carrière and MacDonald, at least under Maler's direction.  To be fair, the dysfunctional complex at the bottom of this relationship is obscure even by Shakespearean standards - partly because Coriolanus never gets anything like a real soliloquy; the drama operates entirely on its political surface.  Still, this was the first time I've seen the play where I got the impression the actors weren't even trying to connect at some intensely perverse personal level.  So Carrière's Coriolanus joined the long list of Shakespearean characters - from Helena to Iago to Hamlet - who have strutted their hour upon the stage at Boston Common without ever getting at anything like their subtexts.

Oh, well!  There were at least a few sparks struck elsewhere in the supporting cast.  But alas, the talented Maurice E. Parent never caught fire as Aufidius, our hero's nemesis (perhaps because Maler seemed to suppress both his exotic differences, and fraternal similarities, with Coriolanus).  Meanwhile, as the scheming tribunes of the people, Jacqui Parker and Remo Airaldi got to have a little wicked fun, even if sometimes they were all but twirling their (virtual) mustaches - particularly as Carrière seemed like merely a dude with too much 'tude rather than a potential Il Duce.

Which leads me, I suppose, to how I'm supposed to be in awe of how relevant Coriolanus is to The Way We Live Now.  Only don't we say that about every Shakespeare play every year?  What struck me most about Coriolanus this time around was actually how much of it is no longer relevant to the postmodern political scene: of course we still want leaders we can "have a beer with" - sure - but we no longer expect them to actually go into battle, as Coriolanus did.  Genuine physical courage is no longer required - and that's a big difference.  I mean, if George W. Bush or Dick Cheney had ever actually risked their lives for their country, as they asked so many other Americans to do, would they be so obviously contemptible, and wouldn't our moral relationship with them be more complicated?  And would a real, honest-to-God soldier (like Coriolanus) ever have lied to his country (much less his brothers in arms!) about anything as risky as invading another country?  Indeed, watching this play, I was struck by a strange nostalgia for its ruling class, and their cruel but honest principles and their cold, tragic élan (if this production had managed anything like  élan, that is).  Damn - I thought - if only we had conservatives like Coriolanus!  If only we had Volumnia to deal with instead of Barbara Bush!  Sure, we might be living in an overt, rather than covert, oligarchy - but at least we'd know that the deaths of our soldiers counted for something.

And one last note - at the final performance, a seemingly unscripted meta-scene was enacted by a groundling who suddenly staggered on stage just after Coriolanus had been rejected by the Roman mob. Dazed, possibly drunk, and clad only in a pair of gym shorts, the fellow began to clumsily make like a Roman plebe, but he seemed both vaguely hostile and seriously out-of-it.  Here, I thought, was Unaccommodated Man, the poor, bare, forked animal of Lear's blasted heath - as security guards (not actors with riot gear, but actual security guards) rushed onto the set to subdue the interloper.  Meanwhile the actors fell silent and stared at each other, like unstrung puppets, unsure of what to do next.  The 99%!  Onstage!!  For a moment, the false political metaphors of the production were torn open; the mob of the present day had suddenly manifested itself on the boards of its phony Rome, and the air seemed to crackle with a sketchy kind of political electricity.  But the hand of the actual State descended quickly; the police had soon drawn the unwelcome visitor off into the shadows, and the actors, after conferring with management, trudged obediently back to their entrances.  The lights dimmed for a moment, and then came back up, and the players began hitting their marks all over again, shouting in "passion" and raging against the machine, right on cue; indeed, the whole show went on just as if nothing had happened.

Sorry, I know this is crude, but it's just too funny

Thanks Marie!!  Where did you find this?

Is Christopher Nolan the bane of 9/11 pop? (Part 1)

Why . . . so . . . serious, Mr. Nolan?

Was anyone really surprised when a masked figure stood up at the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, and opened fire on the packed auditorium?

I wasn't.

When I saw the news flash across my computer screen the next morning, I only felt a flicker of - well, recognition.  Something like: I thought this was going to happen. I had always known it was only a matter of time before the morbidity of Christopher Nolan (at left) leapt right off the screen and into "reality" - or whatever medium it is that the American public is experiencing these days.

Nolan's bleakness - or rather the persistence of his bleakness - is unusual in blockbuster pop; in Nolan's movies, generally the boy loses the girl (sometimes he even kills her), and society is viewed as completely corrupt - indeed, the very texture of reality itself is not to be trusted.  This is usually the stuff of fringe horror franchises, not billion-dollar tentpole events.  Yet overwhelming commercial success almost seems to stalk Mr. Nolan, even though there's little doubt that among the unhappy white boys who make up the latest generation of hip filmmakers (Tarantino, Fincher, Aronofsky), he is the darkest directorial knight around.

The general explanation for this state of affairs is that Nolan has tapped into the ethos of the 9/11 generation in a way that no one else has (in something like the way Tarantino channeled the fears of fatherless children of divorce back in the 90's).  And I think that's true, as far as it goes - certainly Nolan himself, you get the idea, wants us to get the idea that he is bravely working through the neuroses of a nation under terrorist assault.  Indeed, he's probably the king of what I've dubbed "9/11 pop."  But as his pop has literally gone pop, shall we say, the way that semi-automatic weapons do, I don't think it's too much to wonder - in the cultural marketplace, is Nolan actually conjuring the spirit of his hero - or his villain?

In short, is he more like Batman - or like Bane?

To answer that question, I think you have to look more closely at Nolan's appeal, at why loners like James Holmes might be attracted to his premieres for their last stands, at why his movies seem to attack and induce terrorism at the same time.  For while Nolan is constantly cuing us in to the meme that his movies are about a communal response to 9/11 - in fact some scenes from The Dark Knight Rises feel almost like reminiscences from that fateful day - they are also rather obviously absorbed in the kind psychological isolation that makes communal response, even community, period, all but impossible.

I mean just look at his heroes - they all live in hidden lairs, and operate behind masks of one kind or another - and trust in his films is (almost) always a booby trap.  Indeed, of Nolan's eight movies, I can't think of one that isn't drenched in an atmosphere of threat that bleeds into pathological paranoia; Nolan essentially pirouettes, like the little top in Inception, on that line.  What's more, his heroes' psyches - or psychoses - inevitably end up expressed in grandiose technological fantasias.  Batman in particular has access, thanks to Morgan Freeman, to a virtual armory of the very latest military high tech - a panoply of death devices that found its sad counterpart in the actual armory amassed by James Holmes.

It's Nolan vs. Nolan at the multiplex.

Now obviously the mood of the typical Nolan hero resonates with the movie-going public, which, as someone noted years ago, now bowls alone, and socializes most often through a variety of screens, apps, and avatars.  More than ever, "communities" are now artificial constructs, in which no one is necessarily who they appear to be, and in which the idea of a successful "politics" - which would depend on shared concerns - has been slowly but subtly undermined and invalidated.

What online communities turn to instead of politics, of course, is gaming (it's much easier to compete with an avatar than cooperate with one), and a number of critics are now pointing out that Nolan's scripts are best understood as games rather than narratives.  (I explained this years ago, btw, but it's nice to have the other critics catch up.)  And of course the kind of games Nolan's movies are most like are video games, in which players blast their way through battlegrounds of zombies or aliens (or car thieves), and which open up, as the player's skills increase, to progressively higher "levels" of menace and threat.

This moment of transition is, I believe, Nolan's basic cinematic trope; his movies are built on such jumps, they essentially cycle through chains of threat recognition.  The structure is clearest in his first hit, Memento (which rather than "moving backward," as many people thought, basically opened outward instead), but he and his screenwriters are clearly still depending on it.  Over and over again in The Dark Knight series, the hero achieves his "objective" (to borrow from game-design terminology) only to have the tables suddenly turn on him - that objective was actually a form of bait, and his achievement has only lifted him to a new level of danger.

What's more, I have an idea that the key to the popularity of Christopher Nolan lies in a strange parallel between the shock of 9/11 and this general M.O.  Indeed, I'd argue that consciously or unconsciously, Nolan and his collaborators have made a subtle connection between the crystallizing moment of that fateful day and the tropes of their cinematic games.  After all, on September 11, at the instant that the second plane smashed into the second tower of the World Trade Center, it was if the entire nation had jumped from one level of a game to the next.  Suddenly a whole menacing new level of play - the one on which Osama bin Laden had been operating all along - heaved itself into public view.

Now I personally don't feel the sensation of that moment, intense as it was, "means" much aesthetically or even politically; I don't think Osama bin Laden was some maniacal mastermind (surely the way he died contradicts that!), nor do I think he represented some sort of cosmic principle. And frankly, I don't think Nolan thinks so, either.  But I still think that moment cast a long, long shadow through pop culture.  And I am quite certain Nolan knows that it resonates with the cinematic tricks at the core of his appeal.  Indeed, I think he has been rehearsing (and nursing) that terrible epiphany for something like a decade.

But we'll explore that notion further - as well as the idea that perhaps The Dark Knight Rises reveals a flicker of light at the end of Christopher Nolan's neurotic tunnel - in the second part of this series.

Advice to Critics Young and Old, Part 1 - A Review is Not a Proof

People who are unsympathetic to The Hub Review often collar me with questions like "Who are you to say what is art? And what is art, anyway? Can't anything be art?"

Now these are valuable questions - although most don't go nearly deep enough. For instance, isn't "Who are you to say what is art?" really only part of the larger question "Who are you, period?"  And I'm still working on that!

I will note, however, that the people who ask me these kinds of questions almost inevitably then begin to harangue me with their own idea of what art is.  (Generally, it turns out to be what they like but I don't.)   To top it all off, they then inform me that their opinions count as "inclusive," "diverse," or "non-judgmental."  Uh-huh.

Now this is always privately amusing, but I've learned not to comment on it - I just nod (sometimes even with a smile); I know from experience that when my critics are faced with the internal contradictions of their positions, they will react with something close to fury.

But I will point out that I rarely make the overt claim that anything I'm reviewing is "art."  In fact, I'd never say "It made me cry, so it's art," as one former Globe reviewer basically opined (much less "It got me hard, so it's art," as another did).   It's true that when I am talking about acknowledged masterpieces by Rembrandt or Shakespeare or whomever, I will often blithely refer to these works as "great art." But that's simply reportage - time has crowned them "art," not me (and hence they're as good a definition of "art" as we've got).

(I know, I know - it is not "time," but rather the dead white male patriarchy, that has crowned these works as art, and you are a revolutionary dedicated to universal justice, so up with this you cannot put!  This is an argument for another day, but trust me it won't lead where you think it will; to get an idea of what I mean, ponder Michel Foucault's life-long thesis, "I Will Now Disprove the Influence of the Enlightenment by Applying the Ideals of the Enlightenment."  In other words, admit to yourself that yes, those Dead White Guy ideals are embedded in your critical apparatus whether you like it or not.)

Which leads me to today's topic in a new, ongoing series, "Advice to Critics Young and Old," which could be summed up as:

A review is not a proof.  And if yours is, then it's not a very good review.

Okay - a review should be full of argument - every contention or statement should have its implicit or explicit justification; you should always be asking yourself what the reader is (or should be) asking: "What's backing up that opinion?"

But thinking that you can therefore tie your individual arguments up into a kind of proof of a work's artistic greatness is, I'm afraid, a little naïve.  You're just going to have to leave that part to time.  A critic can hope to have influence over that eventual decision - but trust me, such sway will only derive from your arguments' value on their own terms (and not on their claims to a definitive conclusion).  If a critic is delighted with a work of art, his or her job is simply to articulate its cultural interest as best he or she can; and if the resulting argument is made insightfully enough, the work will be that much closer to joining the pantheon.

But a lot of critics seem to want to take a short cut to that pedestal.  Indeed, the naïve "proof" is one of the most popular forms of review - at least from naïve reviewers.

To give you a better idea of the kind of thing I'm talking about, here is a sample from a recent post on another blog (it doesn't matter which one, but okay, it's a review of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity on The Arts Fuse):

. . . the play unfolds organically: Gestures support words; Words support action. A flawless whole, the entrances, exits, the falls and the blows are choreographed with the same playful—if you forgive the pun—pursuit of excellence that defines the entire evening. Same for the lights—or rather, the moods they create. Same for the costumes. Now the costumes in professional wrestling are notoriously inventive and outrageously macho, what with the grotesque baklava type masks, etc. But with regard to the costumes as well, I felt the artistic discipline that elevates this show to the level of a work of art. (Emphasis added.)

Now why am I unconvinced by these arguments?  Perhaps because they amount to a circular stream of re-inforcing declarations: this whole production is flawless; the action is "choreographed  . . . with the playful pursuit of excellence" (??); the same goes for the costumes and lights - or rather "the moods they create" (even the audience's moods are playfully pursuing excellence?).  Needless to say, all this empty posturing can only lead to the emptiest stance of all - "This is art, because it is self-evidently excellent."

Now it's hard for me to see how this kind of writing is different from saying "I liked the choreography.  I liked the lighting.  I liked the costumes.  I liked the masks.  So this is art."  (If someone can explain the difference to me, please do.)  I will give this critic points, though, for confusing "balaclava" (a style of headgear that masks the face) with "baklava" (the tasty Turkish dessert made from nuts and honey).  That, at least, is cute, and undercuts the rest of the paragraph with a piquant innocence.  But reading the rest of the review is a waste of time, because this critic's desire to prove the production he has seen is "art" has led him to string together a series of idealistic (and vaguely corporate) gestures, rather than any actual descriptions or theses, as a mode of "proof."

A deeper point, of course, is that it's hard to prove any abstract contention without relying on other abstract contentions.  That's why it is best to analyze why something is interesting rather than why it is "great." But how does one argue for cultural interest?

Well, it helps if you define your context - the closest this particular writer gets to that kind of thing is in his amusing mention of the "baklava" on the wrestlers' faces.  This is actually (perhaps) the beginning of a valid critical point - the writer contends that this production accurately evokes the milieu it is trying to conjure (the world of professional wrestling).  And it may well do precisely that (I haven't seen it, although I saw the Off-Broadway production of this solid-but-nothing-special play).

But this would only validate the skill of the designer's representative skill, wouldn't it; we wonder why we couldn't just watch an average WWF telecast and glean basically the same aesthetic pleasure as we would from a highly accurate simulation of same.  Does the production take this representation a little further, perhaps?  Has something about the aesthetic of the WWF been heightened or analyzed, perhaps even satirized or undermined?  Has the very reason for (pointlessly) wearing a mask in an athletic event been somehow probed?

But all we learn from this reviewer is that these masks are being celebrated. Indeed, in general the sensations the WWF dishes out have been apotheosized, but not analyzed.  (Which is far from accurate, btw; I'll give the playwright this much, he does clearly intend to satirize the WWF.)  What's more, we learn that this very celebration is what defines the production as art; it is art because its subject - the WWF - is also art, and because the production has accurately rendered its subject, it too, perforce, is Art:

The Elaborate Entrance Of Chad Deity is about art. About a violent ballet, supported by utterly fantastic costumes. But such a summary makes the play smaller than it is. Ultimately the evening is indeed NOT about wrestling. It’s about the root, the very nature of art. About the love of craft; about wanting and needing to create.

You may have guessed by now why I chose this particular example: it recurses beautifully in its meaninglessness; it's fandom in a hall of mirrors; its final argument is even: this is art because it's about art - it's even about the ROOT of art.

But wait, there's more: not only is this production art, but everything is also art in its way:

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity reveals an obvious truth about all of our lives and the nature of art: that we don’t have to travel to far, exotic places to be awakened from the slumber of our everyday existence. We merely have to do what this playwright, this director, and this cast do: open our ears, our eyes, and especially our heart—and we will discover pulsing, inspiring life wherever we look.

I have to admit, I do admire the way this writer has the guts to parlay the void at the heart of his review into an all-encompassing nullity: art, it turns out, is wherever we look.  And therefore, of course, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity is art because. . . well, because it's exactly like everything else.

Okay, Siddhartha  . . . we get you.  But what if we want to, well, think a little bit about the World Wide Wrestling Foundation?  I mean, sure, yeah, wham, bam, thank you ma'am - the body SLAMS into the mat - YOW! - move over Shakespeare!!!  I read you, but . . . what did this play reveal about the WWF, aside from its awesomeness?  Did it conceal some sort of critique, some sort of content?

Because here's where we bump into that "working definition of art" supplied by, you know, Shakespeare and Rembrandt and Beethoven and those other dead white guys.  That stuff they left behind - and I won't call it art - does reveal things.  It is not pure sensation; in fact, we're debating its meaning even today, and therefore its essence is precious, and cannot be found "everywhere we look."

So - by your own arguments, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity cannot, actually, join their pantheon.  It can be "excellent," sure - but its excellence must be of some other type or quality.  It is not "art" in the way that "art" has been defined until now.

That is, unless you've got something else to say about it.

And thus the final lesson of this kind of review - declarations of absolute excellence can be dangerous; the unsubstantiated proof all-too-easily devolves into its own anti-proof.

Master Athol . . . and "the boys"

Peter Mark Kendall and Johnny Lee Davenport in "Master Harold" . . . and the boys.

Athol Fugard is a playwright with a great subject - the now-dismantled system of apartheid that held sway in South Africa for much of his life. Whether he is actually a great playwright is, I think, a different question - I don't think he is, not really. But then I'm not sure he has to be - for in the end his scripts are always transfigured by their terrible theme. Fugard approaches the question of racism so fearlessly (in his days producing theatre in South Africa he was pretty fearless, too), that when his dramas inevitably wind their way to their central dilemma, they are always suddenly gripping, simply because he conveys the horror of his topic so directly.

Hence the overwhelming pathos of "Master Harold" . . . and the boys, one of Fugard's greatest successes, now at Gloucester Stage in a solid (and sometimes intense) production through August 12, in which Fugard brought the problem of racism excruciatingly close to home.  The playwright has insisted the play is fiction, but his own first name is actually "Harold" (his full moniker: Harold Athol Lanigan Fugard) and the drama's setting, a struggling "tea room" in 1950, is not so very far from his own parents' first business (a general store), or the days of his own late adolescence.  I think it would be fruitless to probe Fugard's life for further detail, however - these autobiographical elements are by themselves enough to explain much of the play's extraordinary power.


For in "Master Harold" . . . and the boys, Fugard explores something subtler and more poignant than the social injustices (terrible as they are) of most racial dramas: he looks into his own heart to explore how personal emotional connection - even love - between the races in South Africa was inevitably crushed by institutionalized contempt.  Young, morally-unformed "Master Harold" is portrayed as no better than his class, or his race - but as he is saddled with a cruel and distant father (who's also an alcoholic and even a cripple - yes, Fugard can lay it on sometimes), he has inevitably turned to his parents' black employees, Willie and Sam, for emotional support.  To them, when they're alone together, Harold is "Hally," not "Master Harold" - and Sam in particular has become all but a father figure; indeed, one of his acts of generosity (the simple building of a kite) has come to symbolize for the young man something like freedom, and something like love.

Needless to say, however, neither thing can survive the racist reflexes of South Africa, and in a moment of terrible stress (the news that his hospitalized father is about to return home), Harold turns on - and demeans - his only support system in a shameful demand for ritual humiliation (left).  After all, Sam and Willie cannot love him, nor can he need their love - for in the eyes of his perverted world, "Master Harold" is better than they are.  The play closes with the faintest ray of hope that he can someday be forgiven for this - but Hally himself seems to realize that's a long shot.

It's a devastating finale, and brought off with harrowing grace by newcomer Peter Mark Kendall (who looks and sounds just right as Harold) and especially local light Johnny Lee Davenport (as Sam), while on the sidelines, Anthony Wills, Jr., provides attentive, sensitive back-up as Willie.  But on its way to those final heights, Benny Sato Ambush's production sometimes gets stuck in a few dramatic thickets of Fugard's own devising.  The script works eloquently, of course, as a confession in the abstract, but the devil is always in the dramatic details, which are here beset by obvious symbology (the radio plays "You're the Cream in My Coffee," for instance) and some bald dramaturgy (the phone rings obligingly whenever it's time for a little more exposition).

And there's a deeper issue with Fugard's conception, I think; the set is famously over-prescribed with realistic detail - but most of the items the playwright demands (like that song on the radio) are so overtly symbolic that they "poke through," as it were, the play's naturalistic conventions (despite an expert evocation here by designer Jenna McFarland Lord).  And director Ambush has allowed something like the same contradiction to work its way through the performances.  The actors nail their accents (at least to these ears), and certainly everyone taps into genuine reserves of feeling, but their delivery sometimes feels slightly over-scaled; there's hardly a moment that feels intimate, and completely unforced.  This matters less in the terrible finale, however - and of course it's always a pleasure to see Johnny Lee Davenport sink his teeth into a substantial part.  Peter Mark Kendall paints a deadly-accurate portrait of young "Hally" - who is by turns touchingly vulnerable and hideously arrogant - but it's the destruction of Sam's dignity (especially in the context of his love for his callow employer) that is the backbone of the show, and at this climax Davenport is riveting.  I'm really not sure why we haven't seen this actor as Othello, or, to be honest, Lear - or in any number of classical roles.  Perhaps our own staging conventions aren't quite as far from those of 1950 Johannesburg as we'd like to imagine!

Now why exactly did the state just hand Harvard $150,000 to upgrade the ART's lighting?

More cultural funding down the toilet.

Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or cry at the way this benighted state doles out its support for the arts.

A case i point: is there any fatter cat than Harvard University around, you might ask?  I can't think of one offhand - nevertheless, the state's MassDevelopment agency, under the stewardship of Marty Jones, has just seen fit to hand Harvard's ART $150,000 to upgrade its lighting and projection system.

I guess that's so Diane Paulus will be able to launch her next Broadway-bound money machine  (a reboot of Pippin, btw) with something like precisely the technical resources she can expect on the island of Manhattan (where it will inevitably land, with top ticket prices in the hundreds of dollars).

And thank God!  We were all so worried. I mean it's so irritating having to spend all that extra time in tech, when you could be off striking your next deal with the Gershwin estate!

I do wonder whether the lighting booth at the Loeb is really among the Commonwealth's top funding priorities, though.  I mean, I hadn't noticed that the Loeb's projection systems are noticeably below Boston standards!  But even if they are, I wonder whether other resources might have been available for their upgrade . . .

After all, Harvard is sitting on an endowment that even now is floating, after the economic tragedy of 2008 (which was, ironically enough, brought about in part by so many B-school grads, and the theories they were taught) at around $32 billion.  From which (I note) Harvard drew revenue of $1.2 billion last year.

$1.2 billion (pretty much tax-free, btw - a savings of something like, what, $180 million? - although I know Harvard tosses a few million to Cambridge and Boston as a consolation prize).  That's twice the size of Boston College's entire operating budget, and one-and-half times the size of Northeastern's.  It's a lotta clams.  Indeed, the $150,000 the state handed the A.R.T. is only a little more than one-hundredth of one percent of that total.  Wasn't there room in the budget of the greatest university in the world for a single lighting upgrade?

Apparently not.  So let's put it this way.  Harvard couldn't be bothered spending one-hundredth of one percent of its endowment revenue on this project.  Yet the Commonwealth of Massachusetts somehow thinks it's worth funding anyway.  With your money.

Hmmmm.  I think we just saw the 1% once again feathering its own nest.  I mean, it feels a little bit like MassDevelopment just remodeled Ned and Abby Johnson's TV room.  Only I think the shows are better over at Ned and Abby's place!

Those were the days . . .

. . . when a brilliant, aristocratic faggot had the balls to call William F. Buckley a crypto-Nazi to his face. On live television, no less!  And how Buckley reacts is priceless - he knows how absolutely accurately he has been pinned, so he responds with his own version of the truth - "Listen, you queer," he sneers, "Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face!"  Ah - a prime example of the fabled wit of William F. Buckley!  (Don't you agree, Terry Teachout and David Brooks?)  Rest in peace, Mr. Vidal.  If only you had an heir in the age of Roger Ailes!

Just another note about millennial cultural hypocrisy

Millennial criticism of DWG (Dead White Guy) culture - particularly Shakespeare - has become almost de rigeur on many blogs and sites.

So it's important to remember that Shakespeare is positively progressive compared to the attitudes of many, if not most, millennials.

Take the Web "community."  You might imagine, from the posts of many bloggers, that the Net is a brave new world devoid of sexism and other prejudice.  If only!  An article in the New York Times on the world of online gaming pretty much lays that illusion to rest.  Indeed, during a recent video game tournament, reporter Amy O'Leary explains, a female contestant named Miranda Pakozdi was subjected to the following sexist assault on camera:

Over six days of competition, though, her team’s coach, Aris Bakhtanians, interrogated her on camera about her bra size, said “take off your shirt” and focused the team’s webcam on her chest, feet and legs. He leaned in over her shoulder and smelled her. . . . Sexism, racism, homophobia and general name-calling are longstanding facts of life in certain corners of online video games. But the Cross Assault episode was the first of a series this year that have exposed the severity of the harassment that many women experience in virtual gaming communities.

It's perhaps even more telling that when another woman, Anita Sarkeesian, attempted to fund a study documenting depictions of women in gaming via Kickstarter, her inbox, as well as her accounts on Facebook and Youtube, were immediately overwhelmed with sexist abuse, insults, and threats. (One asshole actually created a video game in which participants could beat her avatar until the screen went blood-red.)  When a male gamer responded to this episode by posting an online pledge against bigotry, it received 1,500 signatures - before it was hacked and the names erased. You can gain some inkling of the depths of millennial sexism (if you really want to) by checking out the site Fat, Ugly or Slutty, which documents the insults and come-ons that female gamers routinely endure.

Kind of makes you feel a little better about The Taming of the Shrew, doesn't it. Seriously, how long do we have to put up with condescending millennial bullshit toward past cultural achievements that they themselves will never match? Women gamers claim that the world of gaming is, in fact, slowly changing in its attitudes.  Maybe.  But please, millennials - until you can do better yourselves - kindly shut the fuck up about Shakespeare, okay?

Would I have voted for Vertigo? No.

Kim Novak ponders taking the plunge in Vertigo.

Word reaches us that after half a century, Citizen Kane has finally been dislodged from its throne at the top of the Sight and Sound "greatest films of all time" list - to be replaced by Hitchcock's Vertigo (with Kim Novak, above), a film whose critical reputation has been building for years.

Vertigo cleared the bar by a substantial number of votes - and Kane is still ensconced comfortably at #2.  So the "decision," as it were, is neither arguable - nor the end of the world.  Still, I think most cinéastes are right now asking themselves - would I have voted the same way as the critics who contributed to that poll?  And I have to answer - no, I wouldn't have.  Not in a million years.  There's just no way Vertigo is a greater film than Citizen Kane.

Which isn't to say that Vertigo will ever cease to intrigue, even fascinate.  There are moments of startling brilliance (such as the suddenly-tunneling perspective of its "vertigo" shots), and a generally haunting, dusty-pastel mood that's unique in Hitchcock.  It's certainly a cornerstone of this director's achievement, and any analysis of his career must treat it as central.

But I think its ascension, if you  will, to the pinnacle of critical acclaim tells us more about trends in criticism than it does about Vertigo itself.  For to crown what amounts to Hitchcock's sexual confession as the greatest film ever made, you have to ignore its panoply of obvious flaws; some sort of unspoken criterion has to paper over its many gaps, and outweigh the hitches in this prime piece of Hitchcock.


For even in his prime, Hitchcock could be inexplicably clumsy, and there's plenty that technically goes clunk in Vertigo.  The film is an awkwardly paced mélange, for instance, of evocative location shots (of romantic tourist magnets in San Francisco) with oddly stagey sequences played out on obvious sets.  What's more, the screenplay - an amalgam of separate scripts by two writers, from a novel by two writers - alternately lurches and then treads water in dialogue that's often none too inspired.  (We won't even mention the laughable "dream sequence," by the way. In Hitchcock, these are always terrible.)

And then there's Kim Novak (a wicked comment on her performance, at left).  I just can't get around Kim Novak; I'm afraid I have to agree with the early critic who described her double turn in Vertigo as "little more than competent."  Not that there aren't a lot of Hitchcock leading ladies who could be described exactly the same way.  Sometimes their naïve acting can be forgiven for the erotic nimbus they project (Grace Kelly); sometimes all they really have to do is hit their marks and scream (Tippi Hedren); and sometimes they just muddle through, obviously lost, but doing the best they can (Doris Day, Julie Andrews).  Sometimes - sometimes - they make an impact with their own emotional presences, rather than as mere costume filler for their director's fetishes (Ingrid Bergman, Eva Marie Saint).  But this is rare, even for the most talented actresses among them.

And Kim Novak wasn't so talented (the rest of her career attests to that) - nor was she as lucky* as Hedren; she has to do far more in Vertigo than just hit her marks and scream.  Indeed, the role of Madeline/Judy is arguably the most complex and fertile in this director's entire oeuvre.

(*Note: HBO will soon be airing a cable film depicting Hitchcock's sexual harassment of Tippi Hedren on the set of The Birds.)

Not that Hitchcock cared, of course - and why should he have?  Many critics have lauded Novak's performance despite its embalmed (yet tentative) quality - but most of these have been heterosexual men (like the amusingly masturbatory David Thomson) whose critical faculties - sophisticated as they may be! - seem to originate somewhere south of their navels.  I don't deny female beauty can be intoxicating, and that plenty of performances have been built on it.  Still, once you get past the artistic statement of Novak's  décolletage, it's hard to discern in her stocky languor much in the way of persona - or presence.  Touchingly, she does strike some poignant sparks as Judy, the crass (and criminal) working girl who longs for love with Jimmy Stewart - you can tell Novak can relate to Judy.  It's as Madeline that she's a disaster, conjuring almost nothing in the way of haunting romantic personality, even as waves crash around her and Bernard Herrmann's remix of Tristan und Isolde circles like some swooning valkyrie.

And what makes this gap almost painfully obvious is that Novak's fumbling is set against what may, improbably, be Jimmy Stewart's finest performance.  We don't believe in Novak's Madeline for a minute, yet we're asked to identify with Stewart's utter intoxication with her, even as we appreciate that his nuanced torment is about as subtle as Hollywood acting ever got.  Talk about vertigo!

So what can outweigh the issues loading down Hitchcock's "masterpiece"?   What can paper over the gaps in its acting, script, and production?  Well, it's rather obvious that the ascension of critical theory itself is probably behind the film's accolades.

For Vertigo may have little to do with actual life as most human beings live it, but it has everything to do with Hitchcock's obsessive voyeurism, and its parallels in the voyeurism of most film critics - and the manner in which postmodern film theory feeds this complex.  Indeed, seen as a theoretical confession rather than a "movie," the flaws of Vertigo all but vanish; the clunky transitions between stage and screen conventions become objects of post-modern intrigue, for instance - moments of "breakdown" in which something ineffable is "liberated."  The self-pity becomes "tragedy," or at least as close to tragedy as Hollywood can get.  And Novak's bad acting can be excused on one level by the crudeness of her primary character "Judy" - although to be frank, Novak's lack of ability is probably the point of the whole exercise. The "personality" of both her "characters" become secondary; the whole idea is that she serves (and struggles) as essentially a sculpted (and plucked, dyed and costumed) object of Hitchcock's obsessive fantasy.

So in a way, Vertigo crowns not the achievement of the art of film in general, but rather the apotheosis of the auteur theory of film at its most sexist, and most self-referential (on both sides of the screen).  But then Vertigo isn't really about love or death, or even sex - it's about the movies, or at least Hitchcock's movies - and so it shouldn't be so surprising that movie critics should decide it's really the best movie ever made; after all, it's about them.

The fallen idol - Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane.

What's funny, of course, is that much the same could be said of Citizen Kane - after all, aren't the needy flaws of its outsized central character approximately the same as those of its outsized director and star (above)?  Isn't it obsessed with itself, and doesn't it, too, treat the problem of voyeurism in emotional (and political) life?

The difference, of course, is that while Vertigo devolves into a morbid vortex of withdrawal, and is essentially built of limited means, Citizen Kane is an exuberant, extroverted explosion, a veritable cornucopia of tricks, techniques, and cinematic ideas that never lets up, is brought off to near-perfection, and remains exhilarating till its finish.  If Griffith and Eisenstein invented film syntax, then Welles pushed it into a form of poetry that dances between a kind of hyper-theatrical space and the very limits of cinematic expressionism.  After reading the news from Sight and Sound, I watched both movies again last night - and Kane all but obliterated Vertigo; but then whenever I've seen it in a double feature (and I saw it that way several times many moons ago, back when there were double features), it always blew away its companion film, whatever the film was.  There simply is no other movie like it; sometimes, in fact, I think there's Citizen Kane - and then there's everything else.

And looking over the Sight and Sound list, I'm struck again and again by its eccentricity.  I've never been one to rate the miniatures of Ozu (whose Tokyo Story - admittedly lovely - is currently at #3) over the sagas of Bergman or Kurosawa, for instance.  But then I'm glad Renoir's Grand Illusion has at last been replaced here, as in most of these polls, by his superior Rules of the Game.  Other ratings likewise made me cheer or cringe.  Bergman and Kurosawa now trail Fellini, and only barely edge out Tarkovsky?  And seriously - Godard's Contempt at #21?  Clearly too many self-serious male film school grads participated in this poll!

Still, wasn't it ever thus?  Everything is temporary, after all.  Someday the critics will be less dizzy over Vertigo, and it too will fall from the heights.  And I don't think anyone needs to have read a review to respond to the wonders of Citizen Kane.  In fact I might just sit down and watch it all over again tonight.

At last, a clever way to close down the MFA mill?

Is this what most MFA programs amount to?

I've rarely been a fan of the HowlRound site, but they have posted an intriguing article by Marshall Botnivick which includes a very clever suggestion as to how to close down, or at least limit the size of, the current MFA mill: tie the size of college arts programs to the professional success of their graduates.

As I understand Botnivick, the idea is that the loaned portion of a student's tuition should not be paid upfront, but rather collected as an annual tithe over the first ten years or so of a graduate's professional career.  If a graduate can't find work in the field in which he or she paid to be trained, they are allowed to default on their loan - hence if a school doesn't produce working artists, it won't collect its tuition.

Hmmmm.  How many MFA programs - or tenured professors - would dare to take that challenge?  I wonder!