Thursday, February 28, 2019
The Road Not Taken
This piece was originally published at getunderground.com on 3/15/07
Date: March, 2007
Location: A parallel universe, where every vote counts
He leans over the podium all folksy with one arm braced, bent at the elbow, his head tilted at the slightest angle. A Cheshire cat grin inhabits his features, though he's quite possibly the dumbest person in the room. A member of the press stands up and asks a question about a war of choice sold on lies that has spiraled downward into bloodshed and chaos. The man at the podium tries his damndest to remove the smirk from his face as he responds in incomplete sentences littered with canned catchphrases, mispronunciations, and zombie-like repetition of his favorite word, "terrorist," a word that settles all matters in his uncluttered mind.
The assembled media dutifully stenograph the response for millions of readers on strict spoonfed diets as another so-called reporter is called on with a cute nickname, a habit the leader of the free world picked up during his time in college sports, when he watched athletes from the sidelines as a cheerleader at Yale. The nickname is meant to establish an illusory familiarity that reflects the privileged president's common touch. The question is about Medicaid cuts in the president's budget.
The man behind the podium suddenly stands up, in umbrage that he, a good Christian, could be accused of not caring about the poor. He shakes his finger in the air and preaches in fragments of how tax cuts for the richest of the rich will grow the economy and trickle down to the neediest. Moreover, he continues, as foam flecks at the corners of his mouth, a nation under attack has no choice but to shift spending from social programs to national DE-fense. "I'll stop at nothing to protect the American people," he says with a crowning fist-slam to the podium.
I bolt upright in bed and turn the light on. I've had this nightmare for going on six years now. Calmly, to restore my sanity, I recall the facts: in December of 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, in keeping with past decisions, refused to encroach on states' rights and allowed a proper recount to be done in Florida. A later study of the ballots would show that Gore would've won by tens of thousands of votes had voter intent been directly reflected in the actual vote count, but due to the mass disenfranchisement of minorities and a faulty ballot design in Palm Beach that cost Gore 6,500 votes, Gore had squeaked into office by just 112 votes.
Not much more than a year into his presidency, Gore led the international coalition that rousted the medieval Taliban and its Al Qeada allies from Afghanistan, and kept them out with a long-term troop commitment. On the domestic front, Gore was stymied by a Republican House of Representatives, so he continued Bill Clinton's practice of enacting policy changes through administrative re-writes and executive orders. A competent, clean and open administration buoyed by the national unity received and massaged after 9/11 narrowly won Gore a second term in 2004, though the Republicans took the Senate back due to Democratic retirements in the South.
All this thinking gets me keyed up so I roll out of bed, grab a towel and walk out to the bathroom.
As my legs move freely and my bare feet feel the cold hardwood floor, the nightmare continues to recede into the bulky file of historical what-ifs.
In the bathroom the water comes on; I train the shower nozzle over my palm and turn the heat up. The warmth runs over my hand and through my body. As I disrobe and step under the flow, I touch the wall as one last check. It does not move.
By late morning I saunter out into a typically immaculate March San Francisco day: warm temperatures, a sky blue but for wispy white jet trails, a light breeze whispering in from the ocean. I buy a Sunday New York Times at a corner liquor store and head to my favorite cafe. The place spills over with twenty and thirty-something bohemians and poseurs hiding behind banks of Apples, and the line to the counter is ten people deep. Everyone's out today, doing something fun (there haven't been so many weekend mega-protests these past few years.) I see a table open up so I ditch the line, spread my newspaper over the table, and drape my jacket over the adjacent chair.
Five minutes later I sit down with a depth charge and begin to read all the news that's fit to print. I have major concerns about the future of the planet, but the United States, at least, seems to be moving in the right direction on many fronts. On the inside of the front page, in the news summaries, I scan the latest developments in Washington. On page A6, there's an article about President Gore's unwillingness to play ball with the Republicans on a "TORT reform" measure that will screw consumers and downsize corporate accountability, a "bankruptcy reform" bill that will further victimize poor people with burgeoning health bills, or staggeringly expensive tax cuts for the rich. Gore's fiscal discipline has helped produce a growing budget surplus that is shoring up Social Security for the tidal wave of Baby Boomers about to retire.
On page A11, there's a lengthy piece on the aggressive actions Gore's EPA has taken in court to sue polluters and protect wetlands, forests and the Endangered Species Act from parasitic business interests. On page A12 there's an analysis of Gore's latest budget proposal, which includes big increases for healthcare, childcare, education, public transit, stem cell research, and alternative energy sources, and on page A16, there's a story by Linda Greenhouse on Gore's two Supreme Court picks, who have narrowly saved Roe v. Wade, Affirmative Action, labor rights, and a whole host of fundamental freedoms from the right-wing chopping block.
Once I've plowed through the news section I read the editorials, but they don't have a lot of gravity. The country is at peace, the economy is recovering, and Gore's steady centrism, with some pitches to the left, doesn't create the kind of toxic political environment that inspires pungent commentary (other than among talk radio Neanderthals and their utopiated mirror image brethren on the chimerical left).
I start in on the Book Review section, get through about half of it, and bail.
At home I flop down in my papasan chair and turn on the tv. I rip through seventy or eighty or who knows how many channels past sports events and cooking programs and sitcoms and reality tv and talk shows and World War II docs until I come to C-Span.
Standing at a podium is Tony Blair, the popular Prime Minister of Great Britain who is likely to win a third landslide when he calls England's next election. Not ten feet away is Al Gore, standing razorback straight and stiff in a navy blue suit with his hands folded in front of him, laughing, nodding or clapping on cue, as if by computer command.
Gore and Blair are doing a world tour to promote the Kyoto Treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. Kyoto does not go nearly far enough, but it's a start, and I'm not in the habit of blaming politicians for their constituencies' sense of resource entitlement--Gore's proposals to raise CAFE standards and the gas tax were rejected without debate by Republicans (and red state Democrats) in Congress because the majority of Americans refuse to take the higher ground until they feel a pinch in their pocketbook. This deeply ingrained cult of selfishness and the political and media organs that sustain it box Gore out on his left: much as I wish otherwise, the center of gravity in America's political sphere is peopled by Protestant soccer moms from the Midwest and Catholic NASCAR dads from the Southwest, not secular San Francisco liberals.
The Kyoto initiative is but one of many international agreements Gore has signed or negotiated, along with treaties restricting germ warfare, torture and offshore tax havens and agreements promoting sustainable development and protecting women's health in the third world. Gore's humble, cooperative stances have solidified the vast international good will generated by 9/11 and reinforced the multifaith global drive to crush Al Qeada. Like Clinton, Gore tends to encounter throngs of well-wishers when he travels abroad, and soon I can see why, as he steps up to take questions from the press.
Though Gore has won two victories at the ballot box and led an administration free of major scandals, the "liberal media's" hostility toward him continues unabated, as evidenced by the adversarial tone of the opening question, about the most recent cat and mouse game being played by Saddam Hussein, who refuses to allow inspectors into Iraq to check for nuclear weapons.
"Mr. President, Republicans John McCain and Rudy Giulani have accused you of weakness in refusing to confront Saddam Hussein..."
Gore's attention to the question trails off as he smiles to himself at the latest macho posturing from the right, yet he continues to look the questioner straight in the face out of political protocol. Gore's answer is a miniature essay on the reasons an invasion of Iraq will not work, including religious differences going back over a thousand years, a lack of resources while our troops protect Afghanistan, the enormous costs such an invasion would entail, and the fact that Saddam Hussein in no way represents an imminent national security threat.
On one level I can't help but indulge the frame of reference of all too many ADD-addled voters: he's the same old wooden, dorky Professor Gore, speaking slowly with exaggerated elocution, cautious about every word, explaining every detail like he's talking to an idiot- what comedian Will Durst once referred to as "the human dialtone."
And yet, rising above simplistic and shallow surface reads to higher truths, I appreciate that the words come in long, complete, perfectly-formed sentences, one thought seamlessly flowing into the next, reflecting a lifetime of learning and observing and questioning and expanding and most importantly, a firm grasp of the way his decisions affect the public and the grave moral responsibility that resides in this power. Would that we were always so fortunate.
Date: March, 2007
Location: A parallel universe, where every vote counts
He leans over the podium all folksy with one arm braced, bent at the elbow, his head tilted at the slightest angle. A Cheshire cat grin inhabits his features, though he's quite possibly the dumbest person in the room. A member of the press stands up and asks a question about a war of choice sold on lies that has spiraled downward into bloodshed and chaos. The man at the podium tries his damndest to remove the smirk from his face as he responds in incomplete sentences littered with canned catchphrases, mispronunciations, and zombie-like repetition of his favorite word, "terrorist," a word that settles all matters in his uncluttered mind.
The assembled media dutifully stenograph the response for millions of readers on strict spoonfed diets as another so-called reporter is called on with a cute nickname, a habit the leader of the free world picked up during his time in college sports, when he watched athletes from the sidelines as a cheerleader at Yale. The nickname is meant to establish an illusory familiarity that reflects the privileged president's common touch. The question is about Medicaid cuts in the president's budget.
The man behind the podium suddenly stands up, in umbrage that he, a good Christian, could be accused of not caring about the poor. He shakes his finger in the air and preaches in fragments of how tax cuts for the richest of the rich will grow the economy and trickle down to the neediest. Moreover, he continues, as foam flecks at the corners of his mouth, a nation under attack has no choice but to shift spending from social programs to national DE-fense. "I'll stop at nothing to protect the American people," he says with a crowning fist-slam to the podium.
I bolt upright in bed and turn the light on. I've had this nightmare for going on six years now. Calmly, to restore my sanity, I recall the facts: in December of 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, in keeping with past decisions, refused to encroach on states' rights and allowed a proper recount to be done in Florida. A later study of the ballots would show that Gore would've won by tens of thousands of votes had voter intent been directly reflected in the actual vote count, but due to the mass disenfranchisement of minorities and a faulty ballot design in Palm Beach that cost Gore 6,500 votes, Gore had squeaked into office by just 112 votes.
Not much more than a year into his presidency, Gore led the international coalition that rousted the medieval Taliban and its Al Qeada allies from Afghanistan, and kept them out with a long-term troop commitment. On the domestic front, Gore was stymied by a Republican House of Representatives, so he continued Bill Clinton's practice of enacting policy changes through administrative re-writes and executive orders. A competent, clean and open administration buoyed by the national unity received and massaged after 9/11 narrowly won Gore a second term in 2004, though the Republicans took the Senate back due to Democratic retirements in the South.
All this thinking gets me keyed up so I roll out of bed, grab a towel and walk out to the bathroom.
As my legs move freely and my bare feet feel the cold hardwood floor, the nightmare continues to recede into the bulky file of historical what-ifs.
In the bathroom the water comes on; I train the shower nozzle over my palm and turn the heat up. The warmth runs over my hand and through my body. As I disrobe and step under the flow, I touch the wall as one last check. It does not move.
---
Five minutes later I sit down with a depth charge and begin to read all the news that's fit to print. I have major concerns about the future of the planet, but the United States, at least, seems to be moving in the right direction on many fronts. On the inside of the front page, in the news summaries, I scan the latest developments in Washington. On page A6, there's an article about President Gore's unwillingness to play ball with the Republicans on a "TORT reform" measure that will screw consumers and downsize corporate accountability, a "bankruptcy reform" bill that will further victimize poor people with burgeoning health bills, or staggeringly expensive tax cuts for the rich. Gore's fiscal discipline has helped produce a growing budget surplus that is shoring up Social Security for the tidal wave of Baby Boomers about to retire.
On page A11, there's a lengthy piece on the aggressive actions Gore's EPA has taken in court to sue polluters and protect wetlands, forests and the Endangered Species Act from parasitic business interests. On page A12 there's an analysis of Gore's latest budget proposal, which includes big increases for healthcare, childcare, education, public transit, stem cell research, and alternative energy sources, and on page A16, there's a story by Linda Greenhouse on Gore's two Supreme Court picks, who have narrowly saved Roe v. Wade, Affirmative Action, labor rights, and a whole host of fundamental freedoms from the right-wing chopping block.
Once I've plowed through the news section I read the editorials, but they don't have a lot of gravity. The country is at peace, the economy is recovering, and Gore's steady centrism, with some pitches to the left, doesn't create the kind of toxic political environment that inspires pungent commentary (other than among talk radio Neanderthals and their utopiated mirror image brethren on the chimerical left).
I start in on the Book Review section, get through about half of it, and bail.
---
At home I flop down in my papasan chair and turn on the tv. I rip through seventy or eighty or who knows how many channels past sports events and cooking programs and sitcoms and reality tv and talk shows and World War II docs until I come to C-Span.
Standing at a podium is Tony Blair, the popular Prime Minister of Great Britain who is likely to win a third landslide when he calls England's next election. Not ten feet away is Al Gore, standing razorback straight and stiff in a navy blue suit with his hands folded in front of him, laughing, nodding or clapping on cue, as if by computer command.
Gore and Blair are doing a world tour to promote the Kyoto Treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. Kyoto does not go nearly far enough, but it's a start, and I'm not in the habit of blaming politicians for their constituencies' sense of resource entitlement--Gore's proposals to raise CAFE standards and the gas tax were rejected without debate by Republicans (and red state Democrats) in Congress because the majority of Americans refuse to take the higher ground until they feel a pinch in their pocketbook. This deeply ingrained cult of selfishness and the political and media organs that sustain it box Gore out on his left: much as I wish otherwise, the center of gravity in America's political sphere is peopled by Protestant soccer moms from the Midwest and Catholic NASCAR dads from the Southwest, not secular San Francisco liberals.
The Kyoto initiative is but one of many international agreements Gore has signed or negotiated, along with treaties restricting germ warfare, torture and offshore tax havens and agreements promoting sustainable development and protecting women's health in the third world. Gore's humble, cooperative stances have solidified the vast international good will generated by 9/11 and reinforced the multifaith global drive to crush Al Qeada. Like Clinton, Gore tends to encounter throngs of well-wishers when he travels abroad, and soon I can see why, as he steps up to take questions from the press.
Though Gore has won two victories at the ballot box and led an administration free of major scandals, the "liberal media's" hostility toward him continues unabated, as evidenced by the adversarial tone of the opening question, about the most recent cat and mouse game being played by Saddam Hussein, who refuses to allow inspectors into Iraq to check for nuclear weapons.
"Mr. President, Republicans John McCain and Rudy Giulani have accused you of weakness in refusing to confront Saddam Hussein..."
Gore's attention to the question trails off as he smiles to himself at the latest macho posturing from the right, yet he continues to look the questioner straight in the face out of political protocol. Gore's answer is a miniature essay on the reasons an invasion of Iraq will not work, including religious differences going back over a thousand years, a lack of resources while our troops protect Afghanistan, the enormous costs such an invasion would entail, and the fact that Saddam Hussein in no way represents an imminent national security threat.
On one level I can't help but indulge the frame of reference of all too many ADD-addled voters: he's the same old wooden, dorky Professor Gore, speaking slowly with exaggerated elocution, cautious about every word, explaining every detail like he's talking to an idiot- what comedian Will Durst once referred to as "the human dialtone."
And yet, rising above simplistic and shallow surface reads to higher truths, I appreciate that the words come in long, complete, perfectly-formed sentences, one thought seamlessly flowing into the next, reflecting a lifetime of learning and observing and questioning and expanding and most importantly, a firm grasp of the way his decisions affect the public and the grave moral responsibility that resides in this power. Would that we were always so fortunate.
Ex Post Facto
Originally published at getunderground.com on 2-16-2007
Expressing a view held by many cineastes, Jason Ankeny of Allmovie.com calls Scorsese "the most renowned filmmaker of his era" who "virtually defined the state of modern American cinema during the 1970s and 80s," yet Scorsese has not won a Best Director award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
There are the obvious reasons, such as the fact that more than 90% of Academy voters reside in Los Angeles, while Scorsese is the quintessential New York filmmaker, and the Academy's lifetime membership, which guarantees that a good portion of the kingmakers will be ten to twenty years behind the curve. Then there's Oscar's tendency to favor flavor-of-the-moment movies with commercial payback for the industry over ageless art films with mere aesthetic appeal: Scorsese is joined in his Oscar drought by Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman.
Though the Oscar statuette was originally referred to as the statue of merit, Oscar predictions are not unlike the run-up to presidential elections, in which substantive comparisons of the nominees is passed over for horse-race speculation on the mind of the Academy. What does a probe inside this mind reveal? Follow me on a tour of the ghosts of Oscars past.
Ambiguity bites
Authenticity is one of Martin Scorsese's trademarks. Where many lesser filmmakers fall back on implausible plot twists, diversionary romantic threads, or scenes of rigged poignancy to make disturbing subject matters more palatable, Scorsese's most moving narratives are direct and unrelenting, free of sugarcoating for the faint of heart.
Martin Scorsese's first Oscar misfortune was releasing his masterpiece, Taxi Driver, in the year of America's bicentennial. Coming on the heels of Watergate and a disastrous war that tore the country apart and killed two-three million people in Indochina, three sharp, socially-conscious movies garnered Oscar nominations: 1) All the President's Men, about two dogged investigative journalists who helped bring down an insidious and corrupt administration; 2) Network, a prophetic examination of the spoonfed infotainment that would soon render television news useless if not downright dumbing-down dangerous; and 3) Taxi Driver, the film to beat all films about urban alienation and one of its then-new by-products - the angry white man who goes postal.
Yet on Oscars night, Rocky, a decidedly middleweight Horatio Alger-tearjerker about an amateur boxer-cum-loan shark of principle (who refuses to take the coat off a deadbeat's back) swept the Best Picture and Best Director awards, against all odds and laws of nature.
Taxi Driver, the Palm d'Or winner at Cannes that features the best performance of Robert De Niro's career, Harvey Keitel as one of the most convincing pimps ever, Jodie Foster as Keitel's teenage whore, a brilliant screenplay from Paul Schrader studded with timeless lines ("All the animals come out at night: queens, fairies, dopers...sick, venal...some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the street" and "You talkin' to me?"), an endless stream of colorful and dynamic camera shots, an alternately sultry and chilling soundtrack from old-school master Bernard Herrmann (who died right after he finished the score), is on every best-of list worth its salt, yet it didn't win a single Academy award, and wasn't even nominated in the Best Director, Best Cinematography, or Best Screenplay categories.
Taxi Driver's goose egg and Rocky's coronation were bound together by a bourgeois Academy's unwillingness to acknowledge that the breakneck land of opportunity had its share of casualties, in this case a Vietnam vet named Travis Bickle, just more human flotsam tossed to-and-fro by the endless ripples of imperial overreach.
Taxi Driver's ending sealed its fate. At the end of Rocky, our beloved and beknighted pugilist personifies the American dream as he stands in the ring bloodied but not beaten, hugging his loyal, kind, angelic girlfriend, and in case the viewer hasn't gotten it by that point, the music swells on cue. Subtext: a national pat on the back that anyone in America can make it if they have enough heart (even if they're a few fries short of a happy meal.)
The ending of Taxi Driver, on the other hand, was bizarre and open-ended. Travis Bickle has just killed three men, albeit cockroaches with hardware, in one of the bloodiest scenes on film, yet he comes out a media hero who pals around with the other cabbies as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Is it a happy ending? An ironic jab at the artificially happy endings Hollywood routinely grafts on to score at the box office? Is Travis reformed, or will he kill again? Seeds of doubt leave the Academy cold.
Antiheroes rarely make Oscar history
Scorsese's next contribution to the American film canon was 1980's Raging Bull, based on the life of Jake La Motta, a middleweight boxing champion from the 1940s who brutalized people in the ring and out. La Motta, played by Robert De Niro, challenges his audience's sympathies from the opening bell. He talks to his first wife as if she is a servant, then cheats on and leaves her for a 15 year-old blonde from the neighborhood. For a time it appears that maybe his new love will settle him down, but inevitably La Motta's crazed obsessions lead him to actions so violent and out of proportion that he shatters whatever mixed, if haltingly respectful, image you had constructed of him in your mind.
Scorsese offers us no back story cues into La Motta's animalistic rage, no Storytelling 101 flashbacks to make the audience feel like they can understand, after all, and La Motta shows little capacity for understanding himself or the pain he has caused.
Once out of the ring, La Motta gains a lot of weight, tells bad jokes, and flirts with underage women at his night club. Only at the very end of the movie is there any sense that he realizes the mistakes he has made, and even then you're not so sure.
Raging Bull, which like Taxi Driver has a 100% score from the critics at rottentomatoes.com, is often referred to as the best film of the 80s,but at Oscar time the only victors were Best Actor Robert De Niro (who gained 50 pounds to play the middle-aged La Motta) and Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's long-time editor.
1980's big winner was Ordinary People, an honest and well-made movie with less verve. Unlike Raging Bull, Ordinary People has a protagonist (Conrad) that anyone can sympathize with: he is an introverted kid who is tormented because he has witnessed the death of his reckless older brother (who he looked up to) in a boating accident, which has saddled him with feelings of loss and guilt (because he survived) that are exacerbated by a distant mother who was very attached to her oldest son, and a sunny father who can't put everything back together again.
Conrad's suffering is plain for all to see. Where La Motta is an old school male whose pain and confusion are projected in violence, Conrad is a thoughtful, sensitive soul who feels and cares deeply, too deeply, and even agrees to see a psychiatrist to try to get his head together. By the end of Ordinary People, the psychoanalytic roots of all the family's problems have been completely explored and explained, which, along with a postcard ending, proved comforting to Oscar voters.
The Importance of Being Earnest
In the late eighties, Scorsese took on a project perfectly suited to his talents and background: an adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, a non-fiction book about mobsters in 1960s and 1970s New York.
From the trunk slammed shut in the opening scene punctuated by the line "I always wanted to be a gangster," Goodfellas leaps off the screen with angular, hypercaffeinated camera shots, crisp dialogue, gallows humor and pitch-perfect characterization, down to the most minor characters.
Scorsese's tour de force won both Best Picture and Best Director at the British Academy Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle, the L.A. Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics, yet the Academy handed Goodfellas just one Oscar, to Joe Pesci for Best Supporting Actor.
The big problem with Goodfellas, in Academy groupthink, was the lack of redeeming characters (though the fellas were so named for their camaraderie and loyalty to each other) and themes, the main one being that a life of crime can be a surer way to the American dream than the hallowed ground of sweat and toil and sacrifice.
1990's big winner was first-time director Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, an ambitious, epic Western with rich vista shots, a leisurely pace, and a soaring musical score. Historically and politically the film has much to offer, as the blood of Indians is invisible in American history textbooks, and is so at odds with the bullshit beacon of freedom and democracy narratives spouted by the right and too often taken at face value.
On the other hand, the film has its drawbacks, including crude dualities (cartoon-like, uncivilized white men opposite archetypal wise old Indian tribesmen), hokey symbolism (Costner's relationship with the unusually friendly wolf, who is later carelessly shot by an evil white man), and, unlike Goodfellas, which finished strong, Dances leaks air so bad over the last thirty or forty minutes that you're lucky to be awake when Costner escapes with his squaw at the end.
Costner, whose next directorial venture was the spectacular flop Waterworld, deserves accolades for bringing these subjects to light for a mainstream audience, but film awards are supposed to be given out for bravura filmmaking, not overdue history lessons, right? Not necessarily.
Penance?
This year, Martin Scorsese's The Departed is nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director (Scorsese's 6th nomination), the latter of which looks like a good bet, if not a slam dunk. In the months leading up to the Oscars, Scorsese has built a tremendous buzz with 14 Best Director wins for The Departed already, including a Golden Globe and The Directors Guild award, which almost always foreshadows an Oscar win, though in lacking a black-and-white good guys-and-bad guys frame or a focus-grouped heart-tugging ending (if not a clever ending), it's unlikely The Departed will win Best Picture.
As a long-time Scorsese fanatic, I'm happy to see the acclaim, and am rooting for my favorite living director to finally get Hollywood's imprimatur, yet the sudden avalanche of awards feels misplaced, like the Nobel given to Gunter Grass forty years after he wrote the seminal The Tin Drum, or the 8 Grammy awards bestowed on Carlos Santana in 2000 for an album that was but a pale and trendy ghost of the early, great Santana albums.
While Scorsese deserves commendation for being so productive into his sixties, his output since Goodfellas has lacked a certain je ne sais quoithat even his second-tier pre-Goodfellas movies like The King of Comedy, After Hours, and The Last Tempation of Christ had. It's hard to work up the excitement for Scorsese releases these days that one does for upcoming works by director Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) or screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
The Departed is a slick, entertaining mainstream movie with a spring in its step, a great cast, and the usual kinetic Scorsese camerawork, but unlike Scorsese's smaller, more personal movies from back in the day, which spotlighted fully human oddballs and interesting characters, the dramatis personae of The Departed are secondary to the storyline, which is so drawn out and convoluted that it's hard to care by the end.
Where Scorsese's best films can be mined repeatedly for riches, The Departed can be fully absorbed in a single viewing. Once you put the plot together, toward the very end, there are few subtleties or mysteries to be found.
There are worse ways to spend an evening, like, say, paying ten dollars to watch 95% or more of the other mainstream movies in any given year, but, if Scorsese wins Best Director, it will be hard not to conclude that Oscar's Johnny-come-lately voters are just making up for their shameful oversight of his earlier masterworks.
In the end, a statue of merit award would be at least a small personal triumph for Martin Scorsese, a lifelong film historian, as well as a sign that maybe there is some design, some justice, to the universe, but Scorsese's real merit will shine through when his organic, character-driven narratives, arresting camera eye, snappy dialogue, knife's-edge editing and brutal honesty are reincarnated in the works of future filmmakers for whom awards ceremonies are nothing next to art for art's sake.
Expressing a view held by many cineastes, Jason Ankeny of Allmovie.com calls Scorsese "the most renowned filmmaker of his era" who "virtually defined the state of modern American cinema during the 1970s and 80s," yet Scorsese has not won a Best Director award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
There are the obvious reasons, such as the fact that more than 90% of Academy voters reside in Los Angeles, while Scorsese is the quintessential New York filmmaker, and the Academy's lifetime membership, which guarantees that a good portion of the kingmakers will be ten to twenty years behind the curve. Then there's Oscar's tendency to favor flavor-of-the-moment movies with commercial payback for the industry over ageless art films with mere aesthetic appeal: Scorsese is joined in his Oscar drought by Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman.
Though the Oscar statuette was originally referred to as the statue of merit, Oscar predictions are not unlike the run-up to presidential elections, in which substantive comparisons of the nominees is passed over for horse-race speculation on the mind of the Academy. What does a probe inside this mind reveal? Follow me on a tour of the ghosts of Oscars past.
Ambiguity bites
Authenticity is one of Martin Scorsese's trademarks. Where many lesser filmmakers fall back on implausible plot twists, diversionary romantic threads, or scenes of rigged poignancy to make disturbing subject matters more palatable, Scorsese's most moving narratives are direct and unrelenting, free of sugarcoating for the faint of heart.
Martin Scorsese's first Oscar misfortune was releasing his masterpiece, Taxi Driver, in the year of America's bicentennial. Coming on the heels of Watergate and a disastrous war that tore the country apart and killed two-three million people in Indochina, three sharp, socially-conscious movies garnered Oscar nominations: 1) All the President's Men, about two dogged investigative journalists who helped bring down an insidious and corrupt administration; 2) Network, a prophetic examination of the spoonfed infotainment that would soon render television news useless if not downright dumbing-down dangerous; and 3) Taxi Driver, the film to beat all films about urban alienation and one of its then-new by-products - the angry white man who goes postal.
Yet on Oscars night, Rocky, a decidedly middleweight Horatio Alger-tearjerker about an amateur boxer-cum-loan shark of principle (who refuses to take the coat off a deadbeat's back) swept the Best Picture and Best Director awards, against all odds and laws of nature.
Taxi Driver, the Palm d'Or winner at Cannes that features the best performance of Robert De Niro's career, Harvey Keitel as one of the most convincing pimps ever, Jodie Foster as Keitel's teenage whore, a brilliant screenplay from Paul Schrader studded with timeless lines ("All the animals come out at night: queens, fairies, dopers...sick, venal...some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the street" and "You talkin' to me?"), an endless stream of colorful and dynamic camera shots, an alternately sultry and chilling soundtrack from old-school master Bernard Herrmann (who died right after he finished the score), is on every best-of list worth its salt, yet it didn't win a single Academy award, and wasn't even nominated in the Best Director, Best Cinematography, or Best Screenplay categories.
Taxi Driver's goose egg and Rocky's coronation were bound together by a bourgeois Academy's unwillingness to acknowledge that the breakneck land of opportunity had its share of casualties, in this case a Vietnam vet named Travis Bickle, just more human flotsam tossed to-and-fro by the endless ripples of imperial overreach.
Taxi Driver's ending sealed its fate. At the end of Rocky, our beloved and beknighted pugilist personifies the American dream as he stands in the ring bloodied but not beaten, hugging his loyal, kind, angelic girlfriend, and in case the viewer hasn't gotten it by that point, the music swells on cue. Subtext: a national pat on the back that anyone in America can make it if they have enough heart (even if they're a few fries short of a happy meal.)
The ending of Taxi Driver, on the other hand, was bizarre and open-ended. Travis Bickle has just killed three men, albeit cockroaches with hardware, in one of the bloodiest scenes on film, yet he comes out a media hero who pals around with the other cabbies as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Is it a happy ending? An ironic jab at the artificially happy endings Hollywood routinely grafts on to score at the box office? Is Travis reformed, or will he kill again? Seeds of doubt leave the Academy cold.
Antiheroes rarely make Oscar history
Scorsese's next contribution to the American film canon was 1980's Raging Bull, based on the life of Jake La Motta, a middleweight boxing champion from the 1940s who brutalized people in the ring and out. La Motta, played by Robert De Niro, challenges his audience's sympathies from the opening bell. He talks to his first wife as if she is a servant, then cheats on and leaves her for a 15 year-old blonde from the neighborhood. For a time it appears that maybe his new love will settle him down, but inevitably La Motta's crazed obsessions lead him to actions so violent and out of proportion that he shatters whatever mixed, if haltingly respectful, image you had constructed of him in your mind.
Scorsese offers us no back story cues into La Motta's animalistic rage, no Storytelling 101 flashbacks to make the audience feel like they can understand, after all, and La Motta shows little capacity for understanding himself or the pain he has caused.
Once out of the ring, La Motta gains a lot of weight, tells bad jokes, and flirts with underage women at his night club. Only at the very end of the movie is there any sense that he realizes the mistakes he has made, and even then you're not so sure.
Raging Bull, which like Taxi Driver has a 100% score from the critics at rottentomatoes.com, is often referred to as the best film of the 80s,but at Oscar time the only victors were Best Actor Robert De Niro (who gained 50 pounds to play the middle-aged La Motta) and Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's long-time editor.
1980's big winner was Ordinary People, an honest and well-made movie with less verve. Unlike Raging Bull, Ordinary People has a protagonist (Conrad) that anyone can sympathize with: he is an introverted kid who is tormented because he has witnessed the death of his reckless older brother (who he looked up to) in a boating accident, which has saddled him with feelings of loss and guilt (because he survived) that are exacerbated by a distant mother who was very attached to her oldest son, and a sunny father who can't put everything back together again.
Conrad's suffering is plain for all to see. Where La Motta is an old school male whose pain and confusion are projected in violence, Conrad is a thoughtful, sensitive soul who feels and cares deeply, too deeply, and even agrees to see a psychiatrist to try to get his head together. By the end of Ordinary People, the psychoanalytic roots of all the family's problems have been completely explored and explained, which, along with a postcard ending, proved comforting to Oscar voters.
The Importance of Being Earnest
In the late eighties, Scorsese took on a project perfectly suited to his talents and background: an adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, a non-fiction book about mobsters in 1960s and 1970s New York.
From the trunk slammed shut in the opening scene punctuated by the line "I always wanted to be a gangster," Goodfellas leaps off the screen with angular, hypercaffeinated camera shots, crisp dialogue, gallows humor and pitch-perfect characterization, down to the most minor characters.
Scorsese's tour de force won both Best Picture and Best Director at the British Academy Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle, the L.A. Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics, yet the Academy handed Goodfellas just one Oscar, to Joe Pesci for Best Supporting Actor.
The big problem with Goodfellas, in Academy groupthink, was the lack of redeeming characters (though the fellas were so named for their camaraderie and loyalty to each other) and themes, the main one being that a life of crime can be a surer way to the American dream than the hallowed ground of sweat and toil and sacrifice.
1990's big winner was first-time director Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, an ambitious, epic Western with rich vista shots, a leisurely pace, and a soaring musical score. Historically and politically the film has much to offer, as the blood of Indians is invisible in American history textbooks, and is so at odds with the bullshit beacon of freedom and democracy narratives spouted by the right and too often taken at face value.
On the other hand, the film has its drawbacks, including crude dualities (cartoon-like, uncivilized white men opposite archetypal wise old Indian tribesmen), hokey symbolism (Costner's relationship with the unusually friendly wolf, who is later carelessly shot by an evil white man), and, unlike Goodfellas, which finished strong, Dances leaks air so bad over the last thirty or forty minutes that you're lucky to be awake when Costner escapes with his squaw at the end.
Costner, whose next directorial venture was the spectacular flop Waterworld, deserves accolades for bringing these subjects to light for a mainstream audience, but film awards are supposed to be given out for bravura filmmaking, not overdue history lessons, right? Not necessarily.
Penance?
This year, Martin Scorsese's The Departed is nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director (Scorsese's 6th nomination), the latter of which looks like a good bet, if not a slam dunk. In the months leading up to the Oscars, Scorsese has built a tremendous buzz with 14 Best Director wins for The Departed already, including a Golden Globe and The Directors Guild award, which almost always foreshadows an Oscar win, though in lacking a black-and-white good guys-and-bad guys frame or a focus-grouped heart-tugging ending (if not a clever ending), it's unlikely The Departed will win Best Picture.
As a long-time Scorsese fanatic, I'm happy to see the acclaim, and am rooting for my favorite living director to finally get Hollywood's imprimatur, yet the sudden avalanche of awards feels misplaced, like the Nobel given to Gunter Grass forty years after he wrote the seminal The Tin Drum, or the 8 Grammy awards bestowed on Carlos Santana in 2000 for an album that was but a pale and trendy ghost of the early, great Santana albums.
While Scorsese deserves commendation for being so productive into his sixties, his output since Goodfellas has lacked a certain je ne sais quoithat even his second-tier pre-Goodfellas movies like The King of Comedy, After Hours, and The Last Tempation of Christ had. It's hard to work up the excitement for Scorsese releases these days that one does for upcoming works by director Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) or screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
The Departed is a slick, entertaining mainstream movie with a spring in its step, a great cast, and the usual kinetic Scorsese camerawork, but unlike Scorsese's smaller, more personal movies from back in the day, which spotlighted fully human oddballs and interesting characters, the dramatis personae of The Departed are secondary to the storyline, which is so drawn out and convoluted that it's hard to care by the end.
Where Scorsese's best films can be mined repeatedly for riches, The Departed can be fully absorbed in a single viewing. Once you put the plot together, toward the very end, there are few subtleties or mysteries to be found.
There are worse ways to spend an evening, like, say, paying ten dollars to watch 95% or more of the other mainstream movies in any given year, but, if Scorsese wins Best Director, it will be hard not to conclude that Oscar's Johnny-come-lately voters are just making up for their shameful oversight of his earlier masterworks.
In the end, a statue of merit award would be at least a small personal triumph for Martin Scorsese, a lifelong film historian, as well as a sign that maybe there is some design, some justice, to the universe, but Scorsese's real merit will shine through when his organic, character-driven narratives, arresting camera eye, snappy dialogue, knife's-edge editing and brutal honesty are reincarnated in the works of future filmmakers for whom awards ceremonies are nothing next to art for art's sake.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Peace and the Global O
Originally published at getunderground.com on 12/15/06
The Christmas and the New Year come upon us and we feel peaceful, at ease. We think of family and friends and fireplaces and new beginnings and new paradigms and new presents and things that you could buy but it’s so much nicer when someone else does, and as you load your eggnog heavy with brandy (ten days shy of January 1st) and stir it in the swirl forms at the neck of the spoon and you realize denial will never work.
Tip the cup and the rum warms your throat as you look out the window and mull over the fact that other than the occasional wire story that blips on the edge of your consciousness, like the yellow light that you just sped through, invisible in the major media and scarce in the alt-media…
…an American armada known as the “Ike Strike Group,” with cruisers and destroyers and the Eisenhower, a nuclear aircraft carrier, stands at the ready in the Persian Gulf off Iran’s west coast, able to rain hell on Iran within 24 hours of Calamity George’s order. {Rumor has it that American and Israeli Special Forces have already worked into the Iranian interior.}
Iran has begun to enrich uranium, a potential gateway from initial developments of peaceful nuclear energy to fearsome nuclear armaments. Western powers want to force Iran’s hand with economic sanctions, but Russia and China are blocking sanctions in the UN. At the same time, as he (threateningly) waves his blooded and blunted sword aloft, George W. Bush refuses to talk to Iran unless they agree to stop enrichment. Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, refuses to kneel in fear, claiming the centrifuges are for peaceful purposes, while playing on anti-US nationalism born of the 1953 CIA coup that replaced a democratically-elected leader (who wanted to nationalize oil) with 26 years of the brutal Shah of Iran. Adding fuel to the fire, Ahmadinejad struts and swaggers on the world stage, holding conferences questioning the Holocaust and throwing off comments about his desire to wipe Israel off the map, which only increases the likelihood that Israel will do the dirty work with U.S. financial and logistical support, as Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is (hot) to flex his muscles after his dissatisfying invasion of southern Lebanon.
To destroy Iranian nuclear sites, the U.S. is considering using ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, known as ‘bunker busters’ for their ability to sheer through rock, where the Iranians have hidden their sites. The use of nukes has been strongly opposed by many top military brass, including the Joint Chief of Staff, some of whom have leaked confidential information to veteran reporter Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker to raise public awareness before it’s too late. As one four-star general told Seymour Hersh: “The system is starting to sense the end of the road and they don’t want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say ‘we stood up.’”
If the first use of nuclear weapons in 60 years doesn’t trigger that little voice in your head, there’s always a simple, reliable cost-benefits analysis. Against whatever benefit can be gained by killing a nascent Iranian nuclear program (that the CIA determines is nowhere near to producing a nuclear bomb), assuming the U.S. or Israel is successful finding the installations, is the potential to inflame the long-dissed and long-pissed Muslim world even more than we’ve done over the past six years, which would render the (nuclear) non-proliferation treaty instantly obsolescent while causing widespread environmental damage in Iran and triggering vastly accelerated death and destruction across the Middle East, from the Israeli cities getting bombed by Hezbollah to a steep increase in brutal attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq to Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf’s control of nuclear weapons teeters on the brink. Iran’s contributions to the world oil supply would be seriously disrupted, which could greatly weaken world markets, while the over one million refugees in Iraq would be joined by untold numbers in Iran. Whatever legitimacy the U.S. ever thought it had as a beacon of democratic values would slip even further down Calamity George’s slippery slope, while the shot in the arm provided to suicide recruitment could very well play in a city near you.
You stop pacing and (drain) the rest of the nog. Looking into the bottom of an empy cup, you ask yourself: now that he’s getting his ass kicked, would Bush really do something this reckless to distract the public? You kick yourself for asking the question, or maybe you don’t. Game, set and match?
---
Paul and Donna have a plan.
Three years ago, not long after Saddam’s statue tumbled on the half-hour at CNN, Donna Sheehan (no relation to Cindy) led a group of women from the group Baring Witness in a war protest in which they laid out naked on a San Francisco beach and spelled ‘make love, not war.’ An accompanying article in the S.F. Chronicle presented the protesters as fun but out of touch, with comments like ‘Despite the waning conflict in Iraq” and “while the war in Iraq is winding down” that may land the writer on the dunce of the decade honor roll.
In the time since, these nude actions came to number 75 and spread to 26 countries around the world, as it became ever more obvious just how right the war critics were and are to oppose future colonial power moves.
As novel as these actions were, Donna and her partner, Paul Reffell, have topped themselves with their new event, whose organizing prowess is reflected in coverage on CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, and 26,000 hits a day at their web site.
The First Annual Solstice Synchronized Global Orgasm for Peace is a call to peaceniks (and anyone else with a modicum of sanity) around the world to have an orgasm on December 22nd, the end of the winter Solstice and the longest day of the year in Iran. Participants are to focus on world peace during and after climax.
Paul and Donna, students of evolutionary psychology, see war as a ‘distinctly male phenomenon,’ a case of ‘my missile is bigger than your missile,’ wherein men throw their weight around to impress potential mates. Through the Orgasm for Peace they hope to drain much of this aggression December 22nd by transforming the earth’s energy field. As Paul describes it: “It sounds naïve. But most people believe in the power of positive thinking, or prayer, or meditation. And when you walk into a room full of people, you can sense the ‘vibe’ of the place, which is the result of how people are thinking, feeling and interacting. Who knows what could happen on a global scale?”
The Global Consciousness Project out of Princeton, which has measured consciousness variation after large events like 9/11, will measure the, er, results of the Global O. by collecting data from a global network of random event generators in five minute increments. As the event planners say: “We hope the effect will be at least a lightening of the global mood. We wish that the effect could be so great as to cause the energy field to become so positive that people will begin to think and act less negatively.”
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Not everyone is convinced. Even Paul and Donna don’t want to assume victory over the warmongers just yet. Asked whether recent developments indicated a shift toward anti-war sentiment in the U.S., Paul said: “I don’t see anti-war sentiment growing, I see anti-spending-our-money-on-them-instead-of-us sentiment growing. The American majority will not be anti-war as long as there is the perception that war is an honorable solution, that men who are trained to kill to order are heroes and that every war we fight is for the betterment of humanity.”
But no matter what you think, unless you really see an attack on Iran as a good idea, you can’t blame ‘em for trying. Is there a better way to spend the Friday before Christmas?
One thing we can count on: around September 22nd there will be a small boom in (sign) births, the sign that brought us peacemakers like John Coltrane (list…),
A reminder that no matter what happens this time around, perhaps some day a new generation can get this shit right.
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