Inspiration message of the day...

From Tom Spurgeon:

By the way, the thought that no one will have anything funny to say about a new president is deeply stupid, in comics or in other media. Not only do opportunities reveal themselves, you don't have to mock somebody to make them the focal point of humor. That SNL sketch from the 1970s where Jimmy Carter talks someone down from a bad acid trip is worth every single piece of easy savagery in which that show's wallowed in the last several years. The heart of comedy is revealing truth, not expressing contempt.

Anti-Fascist

Speaking of Noah -

Just like I'm trying to call attention to the problems with critics using the phrase "transcend the genre" (or its variations), I'd like to suggest a moratorium on using the word "fascist" to describe some aspect of a work of art/pop culture/etc. unless, you know, it actually is fascist. That is, a lot of critics and culture vultures seem to use the word "fascism" as a catch-all term for almost any kind of political/moral ickiness and/or a synonym of "anti-liberal". (Pauline Kael was a big offender here and maybe we can blame her pervasive influence. But, as the song goes, those were different times.)

For instance, over here, Noah writes that old-timey super-hero comic book artist Fletcher Hanks "is a law-and-order fascist."

So, what makes Fletcher Hanks a law and order fascist as opposed to an adherent of some kind of home brew Nietzscheanism? Maybe there is something there: I haven't read all of the comics, so maybe Hanks does make an appeal to nationalism to argue for centralized, authoritarian state control of the justice system. Barring that, though, the word "fascist" just muddies the waters.

I had the same reaction to Matt Zoller Seitz's recent comment on this piece:

[That] piece goes on my list of "Pieces I Wish I'd Written," for how deftly it summarizes a persistent and supremely annoying tendency in movies of all types. I hate, hate, hate it when the movie itself validates a character's behavior or viewpoint, whether through approving music cues, reductive characterization of the hero's adversary in a scene, or cutaways to some third banana observing the hero's bad-assness and exclaiming, "He's goooood!" It all falls under the heading of kissing the audience's ass -- providing objective confirmation of their fantasy of being smarter, handsomer, braver and tougher than they actually are, and Telling Off the Dummies...

I enjoy "Terms of Endearment" and other Brooks films for their likable performances and clever repartee, but cannot defend them as art because of their penchant for pulling crap like that. Aurora is an out-of-control bitch in the hospital scene of "Terms of Endearment," but the movie endorses her showboating fury simply because she's the heroine and our audience surrogate and maternal Life Force fantasy; it doesn't just ask us to understand and empathize, it all but commands us to cheer, with the same corrupted brand of populism displayed in the "You're not from New York" scene cited [in the piece]. It's this kind of mentality that makes virtually all of John McClane's government/law enforcement counterparts in the first couple of "Die Hard" movies out to be pompous dolts, and that encourages us to cheer Erin Brokovich as she smugly dresses down her boss and coworkers in the manner of a diva movie star chewing out an assistant who failed to purchase her preferred flavor of Starbucks frappucino. It's this type of mentality that is primarily responsible for four out of five Robin Williams comedies about the wacky iconoclast sticking it to The Man.

Touches like these confirm Norman Mailer's belief in America's latent potential for fascism.

Although I'm with him most of the way, I think it is a pretty big leap from Terms of Endearment and crappy Robin Williams movies to fascism, latent or otherwise. And while I agree with Mailer, my agreement is kind of trivial: why shouldn't Americans have the latent potential for fascism? Are we so different from the Italians, Germans, French, Hungarians, Romanians, etc.? The idea that we are exceptionally prone to fascism strikes me as naive as the idea that we are somehow exceptionally immune to it*.

*This is a variation on a point that Sean Collins often makes.

Antiwar.com

Antiwar.com is a great site and, I think, a necessary one, so it's unfortunate that they're having trouble raising funds. Take a look and if it's the kind of writing, reporting, and advocacy that you think is valuable, please think about giving them a few bucks to keep their operations running. It would be a shame to lose this resource now, when we're entering into an election cycle where all the candidates show such a fondness for overseas intervention that you'd think that the last four years haven't happened.

Communism at the movies...

Even so, there are a few more films depicting the crimes of communism than Mr. Boaz allows. If they are less well known, that may be because they have smaller audiences, perhaps because the Cold War ended with a whimper rather than a bunker. All of this may in turn explain why there are fewer movies made about the evils of communism: the stories are very dramatic and powerful, but the collapse of communism came about in large part because the system simply broke down and the many peoples who laboured under that yoke finally threw off the yoke themselves [bold mine - JH]. Sad to say, but great stories about foreigners successfully struggling against their repressive governments are not the source of big box-office results. What kind of anticommunist movies sell over here? Rambo. Now you can probably see why there aren’t more of them being made.
--Daniel Larison commenting on this piece from David Boaz

Hmmm... For some reason, this makes me think of Ron Edwards's Spione (which I am anxiously awaiting).

A Fairly Short Post on Gore Vidal's Burr and Lincoln

Gore Vidal's "Narratives of Empire" books are by no means obscure - they're in print, easily available, and Vidal is perhaps America's most prominent "man of letters" - but I can't help but feel that they're a little underrated. At least these, the first two in the series, are among the most impressive (not to mention most enjoyable) "big" novels from the last 40 years or so that I've read. (By "'big' novels", I mean novels that have a great deal of ambition in terms of scope and themes and also have a subject that is a fit match to that ambition).

Lincoln is, understandably, the more serious installment, dealing, as it does, with the most important event in American history. Vidal's take on Lincoln is refreshingly ambiguous. But the book really shines when it comes to its depictions of the other politicians in war time Washington. My favorite: Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury and Lincoln's chief Republican rival. Burr is more gossipy and, through Burr, Vidal seems more interesting in tearing down idols. It's hard to decide who comes off worse, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson (right now I would say Jefferson), both of whom seem to be competing for the title of America's Greatest Hypocrite.

Vidal's take on politicians, in general, is one that I find myself nodding along to. It's certainly cynical: their great ideas and great statesmanship sometimes seem to get lost in the shadow of their even greater ambition. But, at the same time, the cynicism never turns mean-spirited. Vidal's irony is too sure and his touch too light for that. And he certainly seems to have some kind of admiration for these men and an appreciation for the feats they undertook to realize their ambitions.

Michael Blowhard floated the theory that the function of big novels like these was taken over by TV miniseries. I'd suggest that it's been taken over from those miniseries by shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Deadwood (which is Shakespearean in the same American way that these books are, but on a smaller scale and with a grungier cast). As much as I like these series, I can't help but feel that pop culture has lost something with the waning of the "blockbuster novel". These books operate on a scale and with a level of detail and intellectual sophistication that remains out of the grasp of even the best TV shows.

Blog Chat: Cinephiles?, Gateways, Plagiarism, More Children of Men

Andy Horbal asks this question over on his blog:

Do you
A) identify with
B) feel alienated by
the term cinephile? Or would you choose
C) none of the above?

I chose B): to me "cinephile" sounds too much like "audophile" which I (perhaps unfairly) associate with people who are really into their stereo system. I prefer "film buff", partly because it's a lot more casual sounding.

Blake Bell has a thoughtful post on the mainstream comics industry's delusions about coming up with gateway comics.

Eddie Campbell has a (perhaps) provocative post about plagiarism, Roy Lichtenstein, and IP. He quotes R.G. Collingwood:

Let all such artists as understand one another, therefore, plagiarize each other's work like men. Let each borrow his friends' best ideas, and try to improve on them. If A thinks himself a better poet than B, let him stop hinting it in the pages of an essay; let him re-write B's poems and publish his own improved version. If X is dissatisfied with Y's this-year Academy picture, let him paint one caricaturing it; not a sketch in Punch, but a full-sized picture for next year's Academy. I will not rely upon the hanging committee's sense of humour to the extent of guaranteeing that they would exhibit it; but if they did, we should get brighter Academy exhibitions. Or if he cannot improve on his friends' ideas, at least let him borrow them; it will do him good to try fitting them into works of his own, and it will be an advertisement for the creditor. An absurd suggestion? Well, I am only proposing that modern artists should treat each other as Greek dramatists or Renaissance painters or Elizabethan poets did. If any one thinks that the law of copyright has fostered better art than those barbarous times could produce, I will not try to convert them.

I bet you can find this kind of cross-pollination with the folks making videos for sharing on YouTube, too. Hmmm... Thinking about it, the line between the people producing original content for YouTube and the people just uploading found/captured videos looks pretty fuzzy.

And Sean Collins responds to my post on Children of Men. Once again, I find myself not only agreeing with Sean, but wishing that I had put it this way myself first:

...I still found the dystopia convincing and frightening, and I think that at least in part that comes from approaching those elements as horror... Children of Men fails as a dystopia that one could logically arrive at from its constituent elements, I think, but succeeds despite that because of the way those elements add up as a big frightening collage of Things That Are Horrifying. Domestic terrorism, ecological and economic breakdown, torture, prisoner abuse, large-scale human rights violations by a Western nation, internecine warfare between "freedom fighters," increased video surveillance, assassinations, plausibly deniable action by the government against journalists and dissidents, Abu Ghraib, Vladimir Putin, the drug war, limited nuclear exchanges, pandemics, Islamic fascism, urban warfare, intrusive media and advertising presence, euthanasia, and (I think this is the real emotional key to why the film works and I haven't seen anyone comment on it) the constant presence of animals in great danger, as undiluted an conveyor of helplessness as it gets--put it all together and it works in the same way that, for example, The Shining takes axes and ghosts and corpses and haunted houses and child abuse and rivers of blood and isolation and psychics and puts them all together and that works.

The more I think about Children of Men, the less my quarrels with its ideas seem to matter. Usually, it goes the other way around for me, as it did with The Queen, which I saw around the same time, where the nagging, nay saying voice in my head was relatively quiet while I was watching the movie, but grew louder the more I thought about it.

On the other hand, I still think there's something a little underhanded about the way Cuaron et al. do a complete 180 on the novel's take on immigration. And it's the fact that the novel makes more sense regarding this issue that keeps me a little bit suspicious of Cuaron's choices.