Because I read a many books here at the Driftless Area Review, I can’t hope to give them all a thorough long-form review. Reviews in Brief are short-form reviews that offer a concentrated dose of information.
One doesn’t have to walk very far to see the impact of the shapeshifter on popular culture. As the last installment of the Twilight movie series lumbers through cinemas nationwide, it is important to take a step back from the marketing onslaught and Robert Pattison-induced hysterics. Werewolves and Other Shapeshifters in Popular Culture, by Kimberley McMahon-Coleman and Roslyn Weaver, approach the material through thematic analyses. The pair of Australian academics investigate how things like marriage, sexuality, disability, addiction, gender, and spirituality come to play within the novels and films.
The material covered is vast, including the Being Human TV series (UK and US versions), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series and comics), True Blood (books and TV series), Twilight (films and books), and the Vampire Diaries (TV series and books), among others. Included in the analyses are more obscure Australian novels like Jatta by Jenny Hale. For those oversaturated on the Twilight phenomenon, the “Works Cited” list offers some fascinating recommendations.
Werewolves proves its usefulness in its good timing. Coleman and Weaver investigate the numerous pop cultural pieces here, analyzing how specific treatments reflect attitudes of society at large. For those curious as to why Twilight is so huge with teens these days will find the thematic analyses illuminating. Make no mistake, not every TV series, film, or book covered here would fit into the Great Literature category, but it is a wonderful addition to the growing field of reader reception theory. (Similar reader reception studies have been done with romance novel readership.) The book is a handy resource for those interested in understanding pop cultural trends, but who have neither the time nor inclination to read through the primary source material.
The thematic analysis is an advantage but also a liability in Werewolves. The various rubrics (addiction, gender, etc.) put the primary source material through various lenses, all thought provoking. Conversely, the numerous lenses make the analyses thin and superficial. As a theoretical starting point in exploring shapeshifters in popular culture, the approach delivers. Unfortunately, the weakness shows itself most in the section on spirituality, itself a soft, mushy term acting as a catchall for ritual, religion, and cultic social behaviors. This is seen when McMahon-Coleman and Weaver apply Christian symbolism to the Twilight series. While spiritual and ethical issues like sacrifice, eternity, and morality get explored sufficiently, the analysis of spirituality in Twilight would have benefited immensely from a specific reading attuned to the uniqueness of the Mormon faith. The Mormon concept of blood atonement in a vampire novel series would have proved fascinating, along with the Mormon’s specific understanding of links between Native American and Jewish groups. In Mormon theology, Native Americans are descended from the ancient Jewish population. What does this mean in light of Twilight’s Native American shapeshifter characters, especially since those shapeshifters pass on their powers via hereditary transmission?
Werewolves is a great starting point for those interested in the significance of the shapeshifter in popular culture and how it reflects modern mores.
Overview: I’m currently reading five books. Each poses certain challenges (in some cases, self-imposed challenges) to me as a reader, reviewer, critic, historian, and aesthete. While New Year’s Resolutions get broken seconds after they’re uttered, these challenges will form an informal backbone to my reading schedule. As it stands, I want to increase the frequency of my blog posts from bimonthly to weekly. (The same goes for my other blog, Coffee is for Closers.) The positive responses from readers has really inspired me to do more.
As you’ll see with these challenges, I want to “raise the bar” with the Driftless Area Review’s content.
The Book: The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong
The Challenge: Woodward and Armstrong’s book chronicles the Burger Supreme Court from 1969 to 1975. The Supreme Court decided on many significant cases, including the Pentagon Papers, Roe v Wade, and others. Reading The Brethren has inspired me to write a multibook, deep-reading-style review, focusing on the Supreme Court. For this review, I will also read The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin, and Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices, by Noah Feldman.
As a historian, the review will pose a great challenge. The nice thing about the three titles is how each reflects off each other. The Brethren follows the decisions of Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, two long-lasting Justices and FDR appointments. Black died in 1971, paving the way for President Nixon to nominate and appoint William Rehnquist. The Nine examines the Court during the Dubya Years, including the consequences of Rehnquist’s death, Rehnquist having then been elevated from Justice to Chief Justice. The three books reveal the slow movement from a liberal to a conservative agenda. The differing genres will be interesting to evaluate, since Brethren and Nine are works of investigative journalism and Scorpions is popular history. It should prove to be an interesting project.
The Book: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 2, by Karl Marx
The Challenge: Currently back-burnered for more compelling books. Unfortunately, some sequels are worse than the originals. Unlike Marx’s first volume, Volume 2 is a slow, tedious, bone-dry work, more akin to an economics textbook. In addition, Friedrich Engels edited the present volume following Marx’s death. The work exists as an amalgamation of several of Marx’s notebooks. While the work presents relevant material on the operations of political economy, it is almost too dull to read. The challenge will involve trying to read it without falling asleep.
A further challenge involves me writing more essays in my series Essays on Capital. I want to continue this series, since the first volume presented a rich seam to mine.
The Book: Shadows Walking, by Douglas R. Skopp
The Challenge: Douglas Skopp’s self-published novel is a revelation, a well-written exploration of two doctor’s lives in Nazi Germany. I will review the novel on its own, but it will become part of a larger project. This project involves reading three massive, controversial novels about the Third Reich. Two specifically focus on the Eastern Front: Europe Central, by William Vollmann, and The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell. The third novel – The Tunnel, by William Gass – is technically a “university novel,” but the subject matter associated with the protagonist feeds into the works of Vollmann, Littell, and Skopp.
The final challenge will be psychological, since these four novels survey the darkest aspects of modern history.
The Book: Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, by Simon Schama
The Challenge: This is the second history by Simon Schama that I’ve read. I previously read Rembrandt’s Eyes, his magisterial double biography of Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt von Rijk. As with Rembrandt’s Eyes, Citizens is an epic account, mixing biography, pop culture history, visual culture, politics, foreign policy, and tax law into a compelling page-turner.
French history is a particular enthusiasm of mine. The challenge will be tempering this enthusiasm with the disinterested eye of a historian and bringing to bear my previous knowledge in French literature, historiography, and pop culture.
Blog Feature Revival
This year will see the revival of blog features on long hiatus. The first will be the return of The Art of Reviewing. French theorist Roland Barthes and prolific Gnostic Bardolator Harold Bloom are the first two on the docket.
The limited series 5000 Pages of Kissinger will conclude with my review of Years of Renewal, Kissinger’s final volume of his memoirs. I have the skeleton of a review in place that I wrote several months ago. The Arab Spring of 2011 and the nascent Occupy movement have made it a challenge to contextualize Kissinger’s work without seeming immediately outdated. Both Arab Spring and Occupy have overturned the Nixon-Kissinger paradigm of supporting US-friendly free market dictatorships and absolutist monarchies in the Middle East. These movements, along with the Tea Party movement and Ron Paul’s Small Government Neo-Isolationism, present opportunities for the government that acts in our name (if you’re a US reader of this blog) to reassess its global strategy, foreign policy interests, and free market cheerleading.
For decades, the Nixon-Kissinger paradigm had operated as a given within the global foreign policy architecture. That given is no longer true and no longer equipped to deal with the Middle Eastern calls for freedom and the end of economic inequality. As of this writing, the Arab Spring has become the symbol for freedom and liberation from oppression. The end-result of these protests and coups is still unwritten.
While I would like to this blog a major part of my life, creative projects and personal obligations inevitably get in the way. These include a random assortment of personal and professional business.
I am getting married in early October and planning a wedding is a time-consuming endeavor.
On the reviewing front, I have a small pile of books from the Permanent Press I want to get around to reading. I also have a couple novels from Archipelago Books I want to read and review.
My job is second shift and a temporary assignment. Like many, many others who have been displaced, abandoned, or simply eliminated from the free market economy, I have a very real and very pressing goal of achieving full-time employment. (The kind of employment associated with health benefits and paid time off.) Working second shift has made it more challenging to post reviews, but with any challenge, it can be overcome. On that note, if any blog readers like what they see and want to hire me as a writer, I’m all ears. My contact information is in the Submitting Materials section.
Finally, I am working on the last round of revisions for a science fiction thriller. I am planning to resubmit it to a small publisher who showed interest in the work. In my query letter, I described my story as “The Sopranos meet Dune.” I’m making this creative project a priority, since I am nearly finished with the revisions. Overall, I have been pleased, since the revisions have strengthened the novel.
An infrequent feature on classic books forgotten to the mists of time.
The name Lawrence Durrell is not a name mentioned with any frequency these days, but his work deserves a revival. The Dark Labyrinth, published in 1947, begins with a simple enough premise: a small group of tourists visits a Cretan labyrinth. In the ensuing narrative, the group gets lost with certain members getting rescued while others never return. With this basic plot, Durrell spins a tale chock full of philosophical rumination, surgical precision social satire, and capacious character development. The foredoomed tour group includes a failed artist, a harsh Christian missionary, a disgraced psychic, and a quaint Cockney couple on holiday.
The genius of the book comes from two sources: Durrell’s precise, nuanced use of language and his unorthodox plotting. Unlike Brideshead Revisited, the reader isn’t drowning in the super-sweet honey and amber prose, The Dark Labyrinth is light and propulsive. In terms of plotting, when the reader is expecting Durrell to zig, he zags. But O Dear Reader, the zags! A couple terms while reading, I quoted Hunter S. Thompson’s assessment of his drug-addled Samoan friend, “You’ve gone completely sideways on me, man!” Not something I’d expect from a Dean of the English Highbrow Novel, especially a novel written two years after the Second World War.
The Dark Labyrinth is worth reading (and worth reprinting, perhaps by New York Review Books or the Dalkey Archive). The novel presents the Artist in Embryo, along with his unique personal philosophy, a combination of Western physics and Eastern metaphysics (Einstein and Buddha). The novel is also a great entrepôt into Durrell’s vast oeuvre. This single, self-contained volume will lead to his travel writing and his more epic fictional works (the quartets and quintets).
The first part in a series dedicated to examining the science fiction and fantasy films from 1979 to 1989. The series will investigate whether these films possess certain ineffable qualities missing from today’s films of the same genres.
Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin? Willard: I’m a soldier. Kurtz: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.
Why are we beginning a series devoted to the science fiction and fantasy films of the 1980s with Apocalypse Now? Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam War film holds the key to unlocking what made Eighties science fiction and fantasy films so great. It’s an unlikely beginning, especially since John Carpenter’s classic horror film Halloween, was released the previous year.
Apocalypse Now, while still a War Movie, has several characteristics that make it closer akin to the Fantasy genre. There is a Knight on a Quest in search of a Mythical Object guarded by a Monster. In the film, the Knight is Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), accompanied by the crew of a small patrol boat. They travel up the Nung River in search of Colonel Walter P. Kurtz, at once the Object and the Monster. In addition, Apocalypse Now is a visionary film. To be a visionary, one has to look at the same thing but in an entirely different way. While the War Movie has a long and storied history, Coppola created a unique cinematic experience, cobbled together from a script by the conservative scriptwriter John Milius and narration written by war journalist Michael Herr. What resulted was a depiction of the Vietnam War as a hallucinatory carnivalesque nightmare. The effects of the Vietnam War on the domestic side would not be covered with this extended unflinching hallucinatory nightmare until Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).
At the time of its release, the closest antecedent to Apocalypse Now was Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967), itself an extended indictment of the ravages and excesses of industrial capitalism. In terms of science fiction and fantasy film, Apocalypse Now’s title is telling. Unlike, say, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome or The Dark Crystal, which are both post-apocalyptic films, the apocalypse is now. The soldiers in the film seem morally adrift and numbed to the world, only attuned to finding sex or the next drug fix. Chef reads a newspaper article about the Charles Manson murders, the murders mirroring the actual atrocities of My Lai. Surrounded by madmen, murderers, and mayhem, the world seems at an end. The apocalyptic setting and the horrific montages make the film much more than a faithful transcription of a Southeast Asian conflict.
The End is the Beginning is the End
Apocalypse Now came at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s unrivalled critical and commercial success. The film also represents the terminus of the American New Wave, Coppola belonging to a membership that included Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. Coppola’s success began in 1972 with The Godfather and continued with The Godfather: Part II (1974) and the Conversation (1974). Marlon Brando gives a landmark performance as Colonel Walter P. Kurtz, his presence a potent admixture of military and intellectual genius, Nietzschean amorality, smoldering sexuality, and tribal godhood.
The release of the film came during a revolution in the world of cinema. Gone were the days of the freewheeling director and hands-off producers. Apocalypse Now came two years after Star Wars (1977, George Lucas), a film that redefined the Hollywood blockbuster, and the Empire Strikes Back (1980, Irvin Kershner). While not a cinematic flop, the film’s cost overruns and numerous other issues would make produces much more reluctant to give a visionary like Coppola massive budgets and little creative oversight. The Eighties would see the rise of empty spectacle, family-friendly pap, and marketing juggernauts. Apocalypse Now is a self-contained epic, not a node in a massively orchestrated marketing and merchandising operation.
Apocalypse Now vs. Apocalypse Now Redux: a Defense for Both
In criticism, especially film criticism, an overarching trend exists where “the director’s cut” has more credence than a film released by the studio system. The phenomenon exists because of the Auteur Theory championed in academic circles and the larger trend of the search for Authenticity™. When discussing Apocalypse Now, fans, critics, and audience members become divisive regarding which version is better. Many see the original Apocalypse Now as the better film and Redux as a travesty. (Thankfully, Coppola’s film was about the Vietnam War and not a Jedi insurgency, thus giving the world a Director’s Cut without CGI dewbacks and Greedo shooting first.)
My opinion splits the difference. I enjoy both, but both versions are radically different films. Even at nearly three hours, the original Apocalypse Now possesses an insistent pacing and momentum. It is the more economical, pared-down film.
I enjoy Redux because it delves deeper into this nightmarish world. Characters are expanded, entire set pieces are added, and Captain Willard comes across as a different person.
The issue of pacing becomes more pronounced with Redux. Even the original is lacking in traditional battle scenes. After Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore’s (Robert Duvall) aerial assault on the Vietnamese village, the only military “action” are isolated skirmishes and the Do Long Bridge stalemate (less a battle than a siege).
The majority of the film is Captain Willard reading the Kurtz’s dossier. The normal narrative trajectory of a war film is the reverse: skirmishes leading up to a climactic battle. The film operates under a series of anti-climaxes. In the end, Willard finally reaches the Kurtz Compound to realize the Colonel is not there. When he does return, there are several conversations and finally Willard taking down Kurtz at the very end of the film.
Redux includes two extended scenes which were cut from the original: the crew meeting the Bunnies and the French Plantation Scene. In the latter, Willard tells Roxanne Sarrault (Aurore Clément) that he doesn’t intend to return to the United States following his mission. It’s a major difference and the film narrative becomes altered, since this throws into question why he should continue his mission?
The longueurs and anti-climaxes heighten the viewer’s sensitivities. The waiting, the meditation, and the visuals combine to create a cinematic experience both hypnotic and excessive. The artificiality of Carmine Coppola’s score plays off against the claustrophobic and ruthless nature of the Cambodian rainforests. The score becomes integrated into a whole by the editing, cinematography, and sound design.
The film is a non-traditional candidate for a science fiction or fantasy film, but it excels in its fantastic visuals and the meticulous worldbuilding. Standing at the crossroads of the American New Wave and Eighties Action Spectacle, Apocalypse Now prepares the way for films set after apocalypses (Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the Dark Crystal), those indicting the inhumanity of bureaucracy (Brazil), and the organized madness of modern existence (They Live, Buckaroo Banzai, Bladerunner).
“Interest in film, pop and television stars and science fiction peaks between the ages of 12 and 13.”
Media Genres and Content Preferences by Carmelo Garitaon and Jose A. Oleaga, Patxi Juaristi (The London School of Economics and Political Science).
One of the most challenging aspects of criticism is Taste. How is it formed? What differences are there between Good Taste and Bad Taste? Can these differences be investigated with an objective concrete analysis, or is it a phenomenon based entirely on subjective experiences?
The creation of Taste occurs when we grow up, sifting through the various cultural products we’ve consumed and deciding which, if any, we can determine as good. I consider myself a science fiction and fantasy enthusiast. I also grew up in the Eighties. The days of Hair Metal, Reaganomics, the Soviet Threat, and Garbage Pail Kids. I want to keep these two things in mind for the scope of this essay. I want to examine what I like what I like and why. The challenge will come from the twin threats of Nostalgia and Fandom, since each can switch off the critical faculties. It’s easy to bask in the fuzzy light of the Idealized Past. It’s also easy to consider the science fiction and fantasy genre in degrees of awesomeness. On the other hand, this examination of film from the Eighties will be a loose free associative ramble. I also aim to keep the tone celebratory.
Did the science fiction and fantasy films of the Eighties possess something ineffable that contemporary films lack? Or is this the creeping specter of Nostalgia blurring the reality of the situation?
Commentary on commentary on commentary ad infinitum … with footnotes.
What these essays are not:
A detailed exegesis on the various “editions” of the films. The subject will come up, but it won’t be the focus of the essay.
A defense that films from the past are somehow superior to films of the present. (“Things didn’t get bad until those kids drove their horseless carriages and listened to that damn jazz music.”)
An exhaustive explication of plot, character, and setting. Because I’m looking at several films here, the backgrounding will be minimal. Furthermore, I’m disregarding all spoiler warnings, since the last film examined was released in 1989. (I also haven’t seen every different cut of every different film under examination.)
While there are many films listed, this is not meant to be a comprehensive or definitive list. The list reflects my personal tastes and idiosyncrasies.
FILMS PROFILED
Cusp year: Apocalypse Now & Apocalypse Now Redux (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979; Redux, 2001)
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller and George Ogilvie, 1985)
Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985; “Fifth and final cut”, 1996)
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Terry Gilliam, 1988)
Willow (Ron Howard, 1988)
Cusp year: Batman (Tim Burton, 1989); Ghostbusters II (Ivan Reitman, 1989)
While one of the greatest space fantasy films of the 80s, I’m not examining it. With Lucas’s constant meddling and CGI distractions, he has permanently ruined Irvin Kershner’s epic work. Disqualified.
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you?
Tell the truth.
“Sweet Home Alabama,” Lynyrd Skynyrd (1974)
Years of Upheaval, the second volume of memoirs by Henry Kissinger, continues his personal account of public service, spanning the time of Nixon’s re-election to Nixon’s resignation following the Watergate scandal. The memoirs record a short span of time although it encompasses a plethora of geopolitical, domestic, and personal events. In the words of Homer Simpson, this volume has it all, “the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles.”
Riding on the triumph of the Paris Agreement, the document that began the peace process in Vietnam, Kissinger returned home to the United States. In a few short months, he witnessed President Nixon win the 1972 Presidential Election in a record landslide victory. The afterglow of re-election victory began to fade when papers began reporting about a burglary in the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The office was in the Watergate building. The imperious tough guy edifice of Richard Nixon, personifying the dam that held back the onslaught of international Communism, had a hairline crack in it. If Nixon could re-imagine Cold War foreign policy, with the help of Kissinger, his National Security advisor, surely this third-rate burglary needn’t worry a President who opened China, ended the Vietnam War securing “peace with honor,” and defused the menace of nuclear annihilation with détente.
Years of Upheaval chronicles Kissinger’s ascension to the post of Secretary of State, negotiating with the various parties in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur, and dealing with the challenges of foreign policy while executive power eroded in the prolonged hydra of scandals called Watergate.
Inside/Outside
The State Department: Now with 30% more ominousness.
Presidents privileged enough to have a second term usually reshuffle their staff. In this case, Nixon dismissed William Rogers and nominated Henry Kissinger for Secretary of State. Following his confirmation, Kissinger assumed the dual role of Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. President Ford later terminated Kissinger’s special situation, preserving Kissinger in the Cabinet position and letting Brent Scowcroft take over the role as National Security Advisor.
The recent maelstrom of current events, from the resurrection of the Far Right to the Wikileaks fiasco, makes this an invaluable book. A major component of its value it is specific bias. One usually associates bias with a lack of worth and this makes it easy to dismiss works that may merit reconsideration. This behavior happens all too often in our hyperventilating political culture with its calls for “fair and balanced” reporting, not listening to critics, and hating everything that falls outside our tunnel vision.
After one recognizes the bias of a work like this, one should work towards divining the grain of the bias. Because Kissinger specialized in foreign policy, it afforded him a unique position to witness the spreading Watergate fiasco. It also allowed him a means of justifying a way out of getting swept up in the scandal, containing the damage to “juvenile and illegal” activities perpetrated by campaign workers and those staffers associated with domestic policy. This memoir is self-serving in an entirely different fashion than the Haldemann Diaries or Chuck Colson’s Born Again.
The perspective is also unique in that the Secretary of State receives the resignation letter of the President. While Kissinger engaged in shuttle diplomacy, the executive branch suffered from multiple disruptions. Watergate began as the Vice Presidency became threatened by Spiro Agnew’s monetary shenanigans. The verbal warhammer of the Nixon Regime, Agnew uttered some of the greatest one-liners, usually penned by that paragon of tolerance, Pat Buchanan. Raging against the nattering nabobs of negativity and the impudent snobs, Nixon’s heir apparent left amidst accusations of bribery and fraud. The Silent Majority hadn’t yet metastasized into the Moral Majority. In another unique instance in this paranoid time, the circumstances gave Nixon the opportunity to nominate his own successor.
From an institutional standpoint, Upheaval offers a firsthand look at Kissinger’s transition from National Security Advisor to Secretary of State. The former is an advisory position with no confirmation necessary and an office within the White House. The latter involves Senate confirmation and is the most prestigious Cabinet position, heading the Foreign Service, and occupying a massive bureaucracy from Foggy Bottom (the Harry S Truman Building). The prestige and responsibility of the Secretary of State is further enhanced by Kissinger’s status as a foreign-born immigrant. (During World War 2, Kissinger worked in Army Intelligence, returning to Germany a decade after fleeing in the Thirties.) At the height of the Watergate scandal and the dissolution of executive authority, Kissinger acted as a “surrogate President for foreign policy.” Once Ford became President, Kissinger fell back into a more traditional capacity.
A Shalom and a Salaam
The Americans & Russians are sending bombing planes tanks
Chinese Egyptians Syrians help me battle for my righteous
house my Soul’s dirt Spirit’s Nation’s body’s
boundaries & Self’s territory my
Zionist homeland my Palestinian inheritance
The Capitalist Communist & Third World Peoples’
Republics Dictatorships Police States Socialisms & Democracies
are all sending Deadly Weapons to our aid!
“Jaweh and Allah Battle,” Allen Ginsberg, 1974.
White House Years provided a glimpse into the negotiations leading to the Paris Agreement and the end of US involvement in the Vietnam War. It was the foreign policy showpiece of the first volume. In Years of Upheaval, the Yom Kippur War is given the same showpiece status. Southeast Asia faded into the background only to have the Middle East flare up with Egypt and Syria attacking Israel. Kissinger took the lead in the disengagement negotiations with the dual aims of bringing about a coherent peace process and locking out the Soviet Union from exacerbating radicalism in the region. Existing as a geopolitical archaeology of sorts, one witnesses how the United States came to treat the grab bag of absolute monarchies and dictatorships as our allies. Like a sequel to World War 2 with the Soviet Union and United States exploiting “our Germans” versus “their Germans,” the despots and tyrants became “our Arabs” to combat the threat of Soviet expansionism, manifest in the loaded yet vague term “Arab radicalism.”
Despite the cynicism, hatred, and despair one feels towards this region and its seemingly unending conflicts, Kissinger’s account reveals the specific context that resulted in the resulting military and diplomatic actions.
In the early Seventies, the Middle East lay dormant with Israel sitting precariously atop conquered territories wrested from Arab hands in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The Arab nations, specifically Egypt and Syria, festered with resentment and impotence. The recent assassination of Gamal Abdel Nasser created a power vacuum Anwar el-Sadat filled. The United States did not consider Sadat a real threat or a leader of promise until the Yom Kippur War. According to Kissinger, Sadat did not send Egypt into war against Israel for conquest, but to prove that Egypt was not impotent against Israeli arms.
Herein lays the paradox facing any peace process in the Middle East. Israel, surrounded by hostile neighbors, maintains occupied territories of its three neighbors, as a means of maintaining security. Egypt and Syria have portions of their territory occupied by Israel. In order to assuage “the Arab street” – a euphemism for the sociopaths and maniacs who cloak a bloodthirsty ethos in “fundamentalist Islam” – and the more established oligarchies (usually military), leaders have to walk a fine line between appeasing the base and making sensible decisions. It is a delicate dance that can have fatal consequences for all involved.
Jordan is a special case. The West Bank, prior to Israel’s occupation, belonged to Jordan. Jordan, throughout this prolonged crisis, remained a stalwart ally of the United States. It did not press as hard as Egypt or as passionately as Syria, because it had to hold off the designs of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) under the charismatic leadership of Yasser Arafat. The rocky land and the half of Jerusalem dubbed “Palestine” belonged to Jordan. Kissinger, trying to keep this precarious situation as simple as possible, worked with King Hussein to block any unwarranted influence from the PLO during the peace negotiations.
In addition to this complicated set of challenges, the Middle East is a region that has several thousand years of political history and long-simmering blood feuds. The region came into existence following the arbitrary set of lines and arbitrary set of leaders concocted at the Versailles Treaty following World War 1. One can dig deeper and find Arab occupations, Turkish occupations, Crusader occupations, and on and on. Israel occupying the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt hearkens back to the Book of Exodus and big-haired Charlton Heston movies. Now it is Anwar Sadat saying, “Let my people go!” Instead of Hebrew slaves, it is an Egyptian Army surrounded on all sides by the Israeli Army, without supplies.
Prior to negotiations, Kissinger recounts the delicate task of supplying Israel. The airlift operation comes across like a transcontinental Rube Goldberg Machine, endlessly complicated by wary European nations, Soviet saber rattling, and a nation rapidly spinning into a frenzy over Watergate.
Charting this dangerous course ends with the historic Kilometer 101 meeting. In a tent in the middle of the desert, military negotiators from both sides begin the arduous task of actually taking to each other. The faint glimmer of hope presides when leaders from the belligerent nations meet in Geneva. Drawn together by the prospect of giving the region a lasting peace, one understands the motivation since the Middle East had been in perpetual warfare since 1949. Kissinger labored extensively with Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Israel to detach political issues from disengagement. As per usual with Kissinger, it involved the creation of a bogus-sounding organization under whose auspices the disengagement would take place. Kissinger did the same thing with the North Vietnamese when they pressured the United States to create a coalition government with representatives from the Communist Party.
The challenges to begin a Middle East peace process had become further exacerbated by the unraveling of executive authority due to Watergate. Under normal circumstances, the Secretary of State could use the tried-and-true tactic of carrot and stick. With Watergate eroding Nixon’s authority, Kissinger had less authority to cajole or threaten the leaders, even those like Sadat who actively sought an American alliance.
The Middle East represents a Gordian knot of paradox, atrocity, and war. Kissinger gives a succinct analysis of the history, diplomatic challenges, and personalities involved in the region. In that case, it is useful for anyone seeking to understand a complicated situation and its history that spans millennia.
The Valley of Bones
The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”
Ezekiel 37: 1 – 3
The memoirs of a government official in the upper echelons make it easy to forget what a high-stakes game diplomacy can be. Buried beneath mountainous prose that describes numerous meetings between dignitaries drenched in minutiae and bonhomie, the reader can become overwhelmed or bored. Middle East leaders, Arab and Israeli, that worked towards creating a working peace occasionally found themselves in the valley of bones.
Anwar Sadat met the fate of his predecessor in 1981 following his historic meeting with Israel. This ushered in the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. King Faisal, another personality in this volume, met his end with assassination in 1975. Yitzhak Rabin, who played a role in Golda Meir’s government, died at the hands of an Israeli religious fanatic in 1995. One laments that the yearning for peace often gets destroyed by the faith-based initiative of bloodthirsty fanatics, or, in Kissinger’s witty phrase, “apostles of the ordinary.”
Sadat’s martyrdom occurred shortly before Israel withdrew from the Sinai in 1982. Israel still occupies the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip (1967 to present). The growing influence of the Palestinian cause has complicated the peace process.
Besides the deaths of Middle Eastern leaders, the United States endured the impeachment crisis shortly after Vice President Agnew resigned. Amidst the chaos and bloodshed, Kissinger remains standing.
Strange Interludes
Interviewer (Eric): From the plastic arts we turn to football. Last night in the Stadium of Light, we witnessed the resuscitation of a great footballing tradition, when Jarrow United came of age, in a European sense, with an almost Proustian display of modern existentialist football. Virtually annihilating by midfield moral argument the now surely obsolescent catennachio defensive philosophy of Signor Alberto Fanfrino. Bologna indeed were a side intellectually out argued by a Jarrow team thrusting and bursting with aggressive Kantian positivism and outstanding in the fine Jarrow team was my man of the match, the arch-thinker, free scheming, scarcely ever to be curbed, midfield cognoscento, Jimmy Buzzard.
Buzzard (John): Good evening Brian.
“The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Goes to the Bathroom” (1.11), Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “Literary Football,” airdate December 28, 1969.
The inordinate length of this book allows for the occurrence of some strange interludes. One encounters situations from the menacing to the ridiculous. Because Kissinger is an Ivy League academic and a career diplomat, his writing comes across as lapidary, overdetermined, and always polite. He finds a way to say kind words about nearly everyone he meets, friend and foe alike. His description and justification of Nixon’s anti-Semitism or King Faisal’s anti-Zionism are marvels in grammatical acrobatics.
Following the afterglow of Nixon’s re-election, Kissinger is whisked to Hanoa, capital of North Vietnam, to hammer out the remaining minutiae in the Paris Accords. It is one of the strangest trips in American diplomatic history. Hanoi comes across like a small provincial town rather than a towering fortress, the monolith acting as bulwark against colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. The battle-scarred landscape and the empty streets say more about the agonies of the Vietnam War than any writer does. The entire experience has a strange otherworldly feeling, with Kissinger negotiating with Le Duc Tho and others in a building only a few blocks from the notorious Hanoi Hilton.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, during one of Kissinger’s many trips to Israel, he had the opportunity to visit Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem is the museum and memorial to the Holocaust located in Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. In an uncharacteristic act of silence, Kissinger says nothing about the experience. Theodor Adorno famously said, “There can be no more poetry after Auschwitz.” Given the monumental scope and horror of the Holocaust, it would seem trite or futile to attempt to write about it. The silence seems out of character with Kissinger’s gregarious nature and his penchant for cheerleading for American ideals and power.
The geopolitical context further complicates this visit, since Israel’s military conquests bring to mind associations of Germany’s quest for Lebensraum (“living space”). Additionally, Kissinger’s repeated endorsements of America’s quest for freedom and liberty come across as vacant gestures when openly courting the support of the brutal regimes of Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. The United States, in decades to come, will tie itself into an incomprehensible knot of alliances with both Israel and the Middle Eastern tyrannies. During Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy”, many of the pro-Soviet Arab tyrannies eventually tilted to become pro-US Arab tyrannies. (Or in the words of our youth, “frenemies.”)
Kissinger describes King Faisal’s position thus:
The speech on Communism and Zionism, however bizarre it sounded to Western visitors, was clearly deeply felt. At the same time it reflected precisely the tactical necessities of the Kingdom. The strident anti-Communism helped reassure America and established a claim on protection against outside threats (which were all, in fact, armed by the Soviet Union). The virulent opposition to Zionism reassured radicals and the PLO and thus reduced the incentive to follow any temptation to undermine the monarchy domestically. And its thrust was vague enough to imply no precise consequences; it dictated few policy options save a general anti-Communism.
During that meeting between Kissinger and King Faisal, the King asserts that Israel was the result of a plot between Jews and Communists, “put there by Bolshevism for the principal purpose of dividing America from the Arabs.” This kind of rhetoric may sound odd to Western ears in the mid-Seventies, with the rise of the Tea Party movement and Glenn Beck’s popularity, not so much.
The travels of Kissinger become accidentally hilarious when he describes a football (i.e. soccer) game he attended in Munich. It was the final game of the World Cup. He attended with Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the new Foreign Minister for West Germany. He describes the strategies of the soccer teams in foreign policy terms. While Kissinger does pepper his memoirs with the occasional joke or two, (at least one suspects those are jokes, since they are usually devoid of any humorous content). Germany “used the methods of the Schlieffen plan, of complicated maneuver with intricately plotted designs, almost irresistible when everything worked as planned and with the psychological impetus of a friendly crowd.” “The Dutch lost, despite an even more cerebral style of soccer that was beautiful to watch but lacked the final will to prevail.” (Oh, snap!) “England, once preeminent, now relying on condition and reputation to sustain its slightly old-fashioned, somewhat pedantic style, and therefore long since eliminated from the World Cup tournament.” Has anyone contacted Kissinger to provide color commentary for World Cup tournaments? Then again, if Kissinger provided commentary in a Madden-like video game for soccer, young kids everywhere might put down their Funyuns and Mountain Dew to actually go outside.
My Country for a Horse
“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Richard Nixon, The Nixon Interviews with David Frost, airdate May 19, 1977
“L’État, c’est moi” (“I am the State”)
King Louis XIV of France, attributed.
Watergate remains the other grand narrative in Years of Upheaval. It haunts his journeys like a grim specter. With executive authority rapidly evaporating, his power to negotiate became diminished. As per usual with political memoirs, he places a lot of blame on “professional Nixon-haters” and “McGovernite peaceniks,” while giving short shrift to the actual disturbing implications a scandal of this sort presents to the very fabric of participatory democracy. In the simplified folklore that passes for historical knowledge, Watergate remains the “Mother of All Scandals” both in terms of actual malfeasance and it is closer in living memory. Unlike the XYZ Affair and the Teapot Dome scandals, our parents and grandparents remember (or mis-remember) what happened. Watergate also put a close to a disastrous decade in foreign and domestic policy. The Vietnam War took down three presidencies, one by assassination (Kennedy), one a single-term catastrophe (Johnson), and one by impeachment (Nixon).
While it is easy to turn this is a partisan affair, Democrats gloating over Republican misbehavior and the ruthless Nixon finally being put down like a rabid dog, Watergate represents something more malevolent and disturbing than just electoral shenanigans. Despite the nature of the cause, placed under the umbrella of “national security,” Watergate destroyed the moral credibility of the Presidency. The enemy lists, the bugging, COINTELPRO, and using intelligence agencies to cover-up an investigation all reeked of political tyranny. This was behavior fitting for Pinochet, but not for a leader of a democracy. “The center will not hold,” to William Butler Yeats. Watergate was one step too far.
Unfortunately, the creeping forces of authoritarianism never quite held, since Nixon never went to trial. President Ford, in one of his first acts, preemptively pardoned Nixon. The ensuing impeachment trial would have grievously wounded an already divided nation, but the pardon created a dangerous precedent. It gave the President an aura of invincibility. Do whatever crimes and atrocities are necessary to secure your power and have your successor pardon you. Something no Jacobean dramatist could have dreamt up.
Legacies and Their Discontents
Senator Pat Geary: I despise the way you pose yourself. You and your whole fucking family.
Michael Corleone: We’re both part of the same hypocrisy, senator, but never think it applies to my family.
The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
Proverbs for Paranoids: 1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures. 2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. 3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. 4. You hide, they seek. 5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
From Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) by Thomas Pynchon
When the Nixon administration went supernova and collapsed in on itself like a dying star, the United States preserved his legacy in its foreign policy. Despite the scandal and humiliation of resignation, the world is still cast in terms of Nixon’s radical realignment. The push towards opening China is one of the reasons the Communist regime still exists. The Middle East remains allied with the United States, the tyrannies contending with the oppressed masses and the occasional terrorist flare-up that might damage tourism and military aid shipments.
Nixon’s foreign policy legacy should be seen by the successor administrations less as a prison (what it is now) than as a strategic innovation (what it could be). A border clash between the Soviet Union and China created the impetus to play the Communist giants off each other, making it possible for the US to extricate itself from the Vietnam conflict. Can the same be done with the tyrannical monarchy of Saudi Arabia, our nominal ally, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, a faux democracy? Nixon provided the necessary strategy with détente and linkage, defusing the confrontations of the Cold War, and leading it towards the inevitable endgame. With the Cold War finished, the legacy is the free market on a truly global scale, but the practical alliances created against the Soviets has created a rogues gallery of tyrants, dictators, and absolute monarchs who pay fealty to the United States. Is it time, now that markets are free, to work towards making people just as free? Maybe the politicians, only caring about their re-election and personal enrichment, see cheap commodities as a greater priority than individual liberty?
Another legacy of the Nixon administration is in popular culture. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s labyrinthine postmodern kaleidoscope of paranoia, perversion, and war atrocities, was published in 1973. In 1974, Francis Ford Coppola released the Godfather: Part II, a film that was both sequel and prequel to the Godfather. The second film charts the immigrant beginnings of the Corleone Family. Vito Corleone rises to power, while the film charts the Corleone Family in the Fifties and Sixties. Michael Corleone, heir of Vito, has power, wealth, and influence. Senators do his bidding and power is extended from New York to Nevada and into Cuba. Castro’s Revolution cuts short the Mafia plutocracy. Michael retreats to his eyrie in Lake Tahoe, consolidating power again in another periodic Mafia purge, whacking the disloyal. But the power corrupts him, rotting him from the inside, when he puts a hit out on his brother, Fredo. The Godfather: Part II is an American fable about immigration and the corruptions of capitalism. It also works as a metaphor of the Nixon Presidency with its paranoia, seclusion, and ruthlessness.
Two Personal Favorites: Spook Country (2007) and Domino (2005)
Spook Country
The toughest challenge for any author is to follow up a big hit with an equally big hit. Following the epic genius of Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon released the misunderstood novel Vineland. In the case of William Gibson, he experienced career resurgence with the release of Pattern Recognition, an “empathetic thriller” about advertising, intelligence, and an elusive video. Gibson set the novel in the present and it reads like a strange relic, an artifact set in a world after 9/11 but before YouTube.
Spook Country follows the same general template. Modern setting, strange characters, and a thriller plot. Unfortunately, not everything clicked into place. Despite the reprise of Hubertus Bigend, the showy yet elusive Belgian CEO of Blue Ant, and a plot involving intelligence and geospatial art events, the novel lacks the forward momentum of Pattern Recognition.
When measured against the genius of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country falls short. On its own terms, Spook Country still has a lot to offer a reader. One thing Gibson excels at is the description of modern commodities and emergent technologies. He would make an awesome reviewer for Wired or the Cool Hunter (thecoolhunter.net).
Because all the characters are a little off, it gives their descriptions of experience an added gloss of skewed intensity.
Each sentence has the economy of a Zen koan:
“How long was one expected to live one’s life in the tautly strung fug of Brown’s curdled testosterone?”
“The seats back there, upholstered in that gunmetal lamb, obviously reclined, becoming beds, or possibly chairs for high-end elective surgery.”
One longer passage is especially fascinating in its mash up of vintage sci fi tropes and the history of the Frankfurt School:
Milgrim doubted that Gray’s comforted Brown, exactly, but he did know that Brown could become relatively talkative there. He’d have the nonalcoholic piña colada with his franks and lay out the origins of cultural Marxism in America. Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia. Migrim always enjoyed this part; it had an appealing vintage sci-fi campiness to it, staccato and exciting, with grainy monochrome Eurocommie star-spawn in tweed jackets and knit ties, breeding like Starbucks. But he’d always be brought down, as the rant rolled to a close, by Brown’s point that the Frankfurt School had been Jewish, all of them. “Every. Last. One.” Dabbing mustard from the corners of his mouth with a precisely folded paper napkin. “Look it up.”
Spook Country is not a great novel, but it has touches of verbal brilliance in the otherwise sluggish plot. While not the best example of a thriller, it stands out as a lucid investigation of the commodity fetishism in late capitalism and the intersection of technology, art, and espionage. Sometimes its just better to find enchantment in the words.
Domino
Unleash the awesomeness!
Insane and insanely memorable scene in otherwise forgettable action movie:Tom Waits as the stigmatic preacher in Domino. Domino is remembered, if at all, as Tony Scott’s single most visually incoherent movie, but there’s a sequence at the end, scripted by Donnie Darko mastermind and all around nutter Richard Kelly, that stands out for its batshittery. Before sexy bounty hunter Domino Harvey and her motley gang head off to their doom in Las Vegas, they stop in the desert for a chat with a crazed prophet who happens to be bleeding from his palms. Of course he’s played by Tom Waits, and of course he spouts a bunch of gibberish about destiny, and it almost redeems the rest of the movie, which is basically a migraine-delivery system. (Matt Christman, Worse than Hitler, December 15, 2009)
Domino is the story of bounty hunter Domino Harvey. Tony Scott directs and Richard Kelly provides the script. Portrayed by Keira Knightley, Domino is a lone female in the male-dominated shadow world of professional bounty hunting. It is a journey in a legal gray space where criminal and lawman become interchangeable identities. Kelly complicates the matter by opting against the garden-variety biopic formula for a more hallucinatory telling, mixing autobiographical and fictional elements with anarchic glee.
The real Domino Harvey.
Unfortunately, like Spook Country, Domino fails in its goal. Domino’s hallucinatory journey becomes a migraine-inducing experience, director Tony Scott amping up everything. Cuts, process shots, and colors are thrown together in a manner usually associated with cinematic Antichrist Michael Bay. The story is great, but the direction is dizzying.
While still a cinematic failure, it remains a personal favorite of mine. Part of this enthusiasm stems from Knightley as a gun-toting badass in the mold of Gina Torres from Firefly and Claudia Black from Farscape. More characters like Domino Harvey would be a welcome addition to the action movie landscape. Spastic direction mistaken for storytelling would be a welcome subtraction.
Domino is a fun movie, just one that requires a motion sickness bag.
The AV Club has carved out a niche of reputable pop cultural criticism. Nathan Rabin has been profiled before in the Art of Reviewing. It focused on his unique style and examined his ongoing series My Year of Flops. Rabin’s bombastic style plays off his subject matter, whether it is a movie that bombed at the box-office or a hip hop review. Rabin has expanded his critical eye to include country music (Nashville or Bust!) and pop ephemera (THEN! That’s What They Called Music).
Movie flops, the NOW That’s What I Call Music! compilations, and country music constitute a growing countercanonical critique of pop culture. Each has a distinct relationship with “the popular.” Rabin dissects the commercial flops, placing them in three categories: Failure, Fiasco, and Secret Success. The categories are terms lifted from the agonizingly whimsical rom-com Elizabethtown. Box office receipts are misleading values, since film is a collective collaborative art form. A work of genius (say, 12 Monkeys) could succeed in technical execution, but flounder from a mishandled promotional campaign. Other works, like Bladerunner, become genre gold-standards even though they did not reap major box office sales. Time has rewarded Bladerunner, it has not rewarded Battlefield Earth, a badly executed trainwreck whose only appeal lay with cinema fans with a masochistic streak. Bladerunner could be considered a Secret Success, while Battlefield Earth is a Fiasco. A work that lacks campy outrageousness is simply a Failure. Fiascos have the morbid appeal of a car crash. Failures are just boring.
In Nashville or Bust! Rabin brings his critical acumen sharpened by listening to hip hop and translates it into fascinating profiles of country music stars. The connection is not an obvious one, especially since hip hop and country music suffer from being caricatured by mainstream pop.
Answering all the questions and cliffhangers from NOW! That’s What I Call Music 71.
Rabin explains his aims in THEN! That’s What They Call Music:
So I thought it would be interesting, edifying, and, yes, even a little arousing to listen to the entire NOW That’s What I Call Music! series in chronological order to see what the albums say, individually and collectively, about the way music has evolved and devolved, and to explore some of the weirder and more obscure nooks and crannies of pop culture. …
A strange spirit of musical democracy pervades the CD. It’s a curious world where one-hit wonders like Marcy Playground breathe the same rarified air as Janet Jackson and Radiohead. For a brief period, they were peers, at least where Billboard and NOW That’s What I Call Music! is concerned.
Part of the train-wreck fascination of NOW That’s What I Call Music! involves seeing familiar songs in bizarre new contexts. To cite volume one’s most extreme example, Radiohead’s “Karma Police” is sandwiched between Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” and Everclear’s “I Will Buy You A New Life.”
(“Introduction,” February 16, 2010)
THEN! That’s What They Call Music! provides a countercanonical critique of pop music. The NOW! series resembles a new Windows or Apple product, engineered for immediate obsolescence. Rabin gives these disposable products a critical reading, albeit one loaded with jokes. Unlike the movie flops, the NOW! CDs consistently sell out and remain popular. The critique does not simply exist to attack and belittle, but is used as a means to parse the random assemblage of the ephemeral and the eternal in pop music.
The three series have Rabin championing unpopular causes – country music, movie flops, and NOW! CD compilations – and using the criticism as a means of examining the vagaries of aesthetics and industrial capital.
“When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything outlandish.” – “Notes on Camp” [1965], Susan Sontag
“Need more clarification? To his fans Liberace was the epitome of cultured taste, but of course we know he was kitsch. However, unlike the not-quite-weird-enough musical stylings of ABBA, say, or the Village People, Liberace-style kitsch is so weird, so outré, that hipsters find it impossible to appropriate as cheese. Liberace didn’t make his work inappropriable on purpose; others, however, have. The director John Waters, for example, described his (excellent) early films, which lovingly celebrate kitsch in an extreme, even terrifying way, as “trash.” He did so in order to prevent hipsters from fake-appreciating his work — as they’ve done with, e.g., the films of Ed Wood. Deploying the term “trash” was a brilliant anti-ironic maneuver on the part of a master ironist.” – “Kitsch, Camp, and Cheese,” Hilowbrow.com [June 5, 2010], Joshua Glenn
Beneath every hipster opinion is a root of contempt. For the popular, for the mainstream, the straw men are various and sundry. A similar position of championing the unpopular involves camp and kitsch. Unlike the fake-appreciation of hipsters for Pabst Blue Ribbon and the accoutrements of working class garb, fans of camp and kitsch embrace certain cultural products with a passionate sincerity. Camp and kitsch, while similar, are not the same, although the popular press and consumers often confuse the two.
Camp reappropriates culturally disreputable works in a kind of counterintuitive appreciation. A work that is generally abhorrent and awful (example: Zak Snyder’s 300) can be repurposed. As a standard action film, 300 represents the nadir of the genre. But what if one watches it as a comedy? The Heavy Metal Librarian asserts:
I predict that, in ten years, 300 will have the same type of following that Rocky Horror Picture Show has today: ie, it will be aired after midnight at theaters in college towns all over the country, attended by audiences of gay men and people dressed up in costumes from the movie, who will recite the dialogue word for word, throw popcorn at the screen, and laugh uproariously at parts that are supposed to be deadly serious. After all, the only real difference between the two movies is that the latter is intentionally campy. (from the post, “Wank the Spartans”, Heavy Metal Librarian, September 14, 2009)
300 is unintentionally campy and pretty hilarious when read that way. Sontag differentiates the Camp from the bad by the outlandishness of its execution. 300 fits the bill. The Heavy Metal Librarian catalogues 300’s outlandishness:
300 is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen in my life.
I was reminded of the film’s brilliance when it made its television debut this past weekend. Seriously, it’s perfect. What other movie gives you:
Howlingly bad dialogue (“because freedom isn’t free” sounds like something from George Bush’s wet dream)
Rampant homoeroticism (buff, chiseled, shaven-chested Greeks prancing around in underwear and capes) in an allegedly tough-guy war movie
An enemy, the Persians, who manage to simultaneously look like a cross between an al-Qaeda training video and a Gay Pride parade from Mordor
Said enemy led by Xerxes, a ten foot tall Rupaul clone obsessed with making people kneel in front of him
The undeniably homoerotic element in the movie is its most amusing aspect. After all, there exists a high correlation between people who think that Islamofascists are hiding under their beds and those who believe that Teh Homosexual Agenda is attempting to subvert their children. The fact that this crowd loved 300 constitutes further scientific proof of the Foley/Haggard Theorem (“The Degree of one’s Homophobia is Directly Proportional to the Depth of one’s Closet.”)
The same reading could possibly be made for John Wayne’s performance in The Green Berets, but most definitely for his turn as Genghis Khan.
Kitsch is a much harder beast to cage, since it is typified by terrible artistic production. Embracing Art Nouveau lamps and Busby Berkeley musicals can be Camp. Embracing Keane paintings and the Left Behind series is kitschy. Unless one sincerely believes the idiosyncratic Bible interpretation of the Left Behind series, it is a challenging work to champion, let alone read, on any level. Where Camp succeeds in surely executed outlandishness, Kitsch fails because of shoddy craftsmanship.
Camp
Kitsch
This brings us to a reckoning point: Sincerity. (The weasel word “authentic” will be avoided, mainly because of the associations with fake-authentic cultural products.) Can one appreciate a disreputable genre or film or book with sincerity without falling into the traps of Kitsch and Camp?
“In place of a hermeneutrics we need an erotics of art.” – “Against Interpretation” [1964], Susan Sontag
Challenges and Non-Responses
The job of the critic is, by turns, tastemaker, evangelist, and champion. The best critics harness the powers of intellection and enthusiasm to inform his or her readership on a work’s merits. If a work receives more merits than demerits, than, in a roughly mathematical fashion, the creator obtains a “good review.” This reviewer finds works with “mixed reviews” or polarizing reactions (see Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones) most attractive, since “mixed reviews” are not sure things. A tiny element of surprise exists when encountering the work. It could be awful, but it could also be great.
Hollywood’s economic base was not built on good movies.
The critic faces challenges when encountering works that are not contemporary or from a creator with a prestigious reputation. A book that has just been published offers a critic a tabula rasa. He or she can imprint first impressions and create a reaction that will be integrated into the cultural understanding of the work. There is critical reception, consumer (read: “popular”) reception, and overall sales. Hollywood has made millions on good remakes (Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven) and terrible remakes (Harald Zwart’s The Karate Kid). The balance between these three axes (critics, consumers, and sales receipts) will be the focus of this essay. Included are two works which I personally like, although both have been critically maligned, albeit not without good cause.
The challenges are myriad for any critic desiring to exhibit his or her worth to the critical community and the readership at large. If the critic has no taste, why bother reading the reviews? The subjectivities of taste can be intimidating, especially to two particularly annoying sub-species of readership.
The first sub-species are the Fanboys (and Fangirls). Critical taste evaporates and a hardcore evangelism permeates every reaction. Whether it involves CGI, the works of Ayn Rand, or Angelina Jolie raiding tombs, the works are transfigured from mere pop culture artifacts to quasi-religious relics. This is glaringly evident in champions of J.R.R. Tolkien. Only a philistine would dismiss Tolkien’s place as founding father of modern high fantasy. On the other hand, just because he was one of the first to write high fantasy, it does not mean Lord of the Rings is any good. I found the work an overlong tedious bore written in stilted language. Tolkien wrote in a style to emulate the cadence found in the King James Bible. One also sees manifestations of this fanaticism of reader reviews of Atlas Shrugged. The positive reviews are gushing. Many say it is the best novel ever written. To which any sensible critic would ask, “The best novel compared to what?” Rabid fanatical fandom is hard to deal with. Instead of Al-Qaeda strapping dynamite to their torsos, fanboys bomb discussion threads with bombastic rhetoric that veils an utter lack of critical sensibility.
Turnoffs: Judging people, things, etc.
The other sub-species are Egalitarians. Unafraid to offend anyone’s tastes, the Egalitarians short-circuit discussions with non-responses. These include, but are not limited to the following:
“You believe what you want to believe. It’s your opinion.”
“To each his own.”
“Twilight may be badly written, but at least it encourages kids to read.”
It is enough to make people gnash their teeth and pull out their hair. Literary criticism is not about the First Amendment. That is a given. The right to an opinion involves having one in the first place! Otherwise, the person renders the entire enterprise pointless. While these two positions are not necessarily politically analogous, the Egalitarian position crops up in many subscribing to the pieties of the Left. (Full disclosure: This author finds pieties of the Right and the Left absolutely insufferable. Political pieties are a waste of time. What matters are concrete results.)
Concepts like multiculturalism and tolerance have invaded the confines of aesthetic criticism making everyone suffer in the process. People have become afraid of criticizing a work on its merits and then being accused of racism, sexism, and other epithets. Works should be included in the Canon based on merit, not on tradition (defenders of Dead White Males) or on representation (defenders of everyone excluded in the Traditional Western Canon™).
In the determination of a work’s merit, exclusions will have to be made, but a work should also be judged on its own merits. Troma films have their own bent brilliance, despite their tiny budgets, broad acting, and lunatic plots. One can champion just about any cultural product (film, book, TV show, album, etc.) with sound arguments and sincere affection.
