The Rally Effect Wags the Dog

“The sonuvabitch got what he deserved.”

I sipped my drink and grunted, neither agreeing or disagreeing.

We were sitting in the bar at a local restaurant, watching the TV news.  The place is a little out of the way, and even in the midst of ski season it was devoid of customers except for me and the other guy as we waited for the kitchen to open.

The segment we were watching dealt with the targeted killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.   Soleimani, as you undoubtedly know by now, was the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force.  In recent years, he has been a key player in Iran’s support of Syrian strongman Bashir al-Assad and a leader of Shiite militias in the war against Islamic State in Iraq. 

President Trump’s justification for ordering the killing was that Soleimani posed a threat to American lives.  The unrest in Baghdad in past weeks, which included an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve, is simply the latest symptom of the power vacuum created by the 2003 invasion and should have been little surprise to anyone.  Similarly, Iran has actively meddled in regional politics as far back as its support of Hezbollah in the 1980s Lebanese Civil War. 

In short, business as usual.  Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon exist at the intersection of a number of religious and ethnic groups making national unity impossible absent a one-party state with a strongman at its apex.  And yet the United States and other Western powers assume they can maintain order and security while fostering Western-style democracy.  In Iraq’s case, the U.S. withdrawal in 2011 practically ensured its Shiite-majority government would become a client of Iran.

Soleimani and the Iranian leadership doubtlessly welcomed the deepening of anti-American sentiment among Iraqis.  Iran has engaged in state-sponsored terrorism in the past and Soleimani’s high-profile presence in Iraq was not encouraging, his role in defeating ISIS notwithstanding.  However, I’m inclined to take Mr. Trump’s assertion with a grain of salt.

This isn’t the first time a U.S. president facing an impeachment trial has leveraged a foreign policy crisis.  Bill Clinton was one lucky so-and-so as 1998 drew to a close.  Saddam Hussein had threatened to expel U.N. weapons inspectors, triggering U.S.-led airstrikes.  The Kosovo War for independence was well under way.  And, over the summer, al-Qaeda made its international debut by detonating car bombs outside our embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. 

You don’t want to change commanders in chief in the midst of a perceived national security crisis.  This is arguably one of the reasons the Senate merely censured Clinton.  (I think, too, that the Republicans would have preferred not to have gone into the 2000 election facing an incumbent President Gore.  But that’s just one of my crank theories.)  It didn’t hurt that Clinton’s approval numbers actually went up before the trial.  I haven’t seen this week’s polls, but the White House is surely counting on the rally effect to further cement Trump’s apparent acquittal whenever the Senate decides to hold the trial.

The timing of Clinton’s sudden emergence as a quasi-war leader didn’t go unnoticed by a skeptical media.  The resemblance to the recently released Dustin Hoffman movie Wag the Dog was uncanny and was frequently invoked as the impeachment trial drew nigh. 

For those of you who have never seen a movie made before the turn of the century, the plot goes like this: An unpopular president facing defeat at the polls cooks up a hoax war with Albania on the advice of his spin doctors.  Hilarity ensues.

Wag the Dog was just okay as a comedy, but the film’s conceit wasn’t lost on the chattering classes.  Even journalists sympathetic to Clinton invoked its title when discussing how foreign policy had suddenly become so important to an administration more concerned with domestic issues.

The killing of General Soleimani was handled in the maladroit, hamfisted fashion typical of the Trump administration’s foreign policy.  It’s so all over the map it doesn’t know which direction it’s going if it ever did.  But I think that makes scant difference to the base.  Something went bang, and a brown-skinned Muslim was dead.

Which was probably what my bar companion meant with his remark.  I guess I could have provoked an argument by pointing out the nuances of Middle Eastern politics, or that if Soleimani had committed war crimes he should have been afforded due process and put on trial.  But why spoil the prospect of a good meal?  I sipped again at my drink and perused the menu.  The news moved on to another story.  Out of sight, out of mind…for now.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Xmas Flix

I have spent the past two weeks holed up at home.  When you live in a resort town whose principal industry is catering to well-heeled skiers and snowboarders, Christmas is the season for some of us to hunker down.

It hasn’t helped that it has snowed pretty steadily; no sooner would one storm pass through then another followed.  Out of curiosity I’ve been monitoring road conditions on the state highway department’s website.  (I say “out of curiosity” because ordinarily I do so for my own safety since I drive over mountain passes to get to work.)  Despite the heavy snow and whiteout conditions, the flatlanders were undaunted.  Over the past few days the highway patrol has been metering traffic coming up from the foothills due to congestion.

I have ventured out exactly once since the college winter hiatus began.  I was out of liquor.  True to form the supermarket was packed with families in bulky ski outfits.  After waiting fifteen minutes in the checkout line, I was finally able to set my items down on the conveyer.  The lady in front of me made note of my purchases—a liter of bourbon, a liter of scotch, and two bottles of a sleep aid.  Smiling, she gave me a knowing look and said, “Family, huh?”

“Yeah, family.”

Actually, no.  In fact I’ve been dodging voicemails all week from my relatives, whom I make a point of keeping at arm’s length.  If they were your relatives you would, too.

Needless to say, I’m not much for Christmas.  I am not a guy who decks the halls.  You won’t find a tree or a single holiday decoration in my house.  I despise the crass commercialism of the season.  My only concession this year was to send checks to my two sons.  Let ‘em do their own shopping.

There is one exception to my antipathy.  There are certain films which are must-see viewing for me this time of year.  My absolute favorite is Scrooge, the adaptation of A Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim.  Somehow I missed that one this year.  Not to worry, there are two more titles which hold a similarly warm place in my heart.

The first is the venerable It’s a Wonderful Life.  It’s kind of strange that I would have an affinity for this kind of movie.  Fantasy stories don’t really appeal to me.  The dialogue is unbelievably corny, even for a Frank Capra film.  And even as a kid I found the idea of angels, let alone guardian angels, absurd.   

No matter, I was sure to catch NBC’s customary Christmas Eve airing.  (It’s a Wonderful Life is in the public domain which means it’s freely available online.  But somehow it just feels right to watch it on TV every December 24^th.)  As I watched, I tried to figure out just what it was I liked about the movie.  I still don’t have one definitive answer but I think I can pin down a few things.

Capra excelled at encapsulating classic Americana.  Bedford Falls was nothing like the small town I grew up in.  The neighbors were much friendlier and considerate than mine.  People in the movie behaved as if they lived in a community and looked out for each other.  And what small town boy wouldn’t have wanted to marry a girl like Mary Hatch?  (Or Donna Reed, for that matter?)  Notwithstanding the idyllic nature of the town, however, I could certainly identify with protagonist George Bailey and his yearning to escape and see the world.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of It’s a Wonderful Life is the David and Goliath story of George and the Bailey family’s tiny building and loan consistently thwarting the designs of wealthy banker Mr. Henry Potter.  George was the epitome of the stammering, sincere Everyman character James Stewart perfected.  Likewise, Potter was typical of the crabby old men Lionel Barrymore played toward the end of his career.  (The wheelchair Potter occupied was a necessity for Barrymore, who suffered from crippling arthritis.) 

The symbolism of the contest of wills between the two men is subversive in the contemporary cultural context.  Potter is just the kind of individual held up as an exemplar for today’s economic elites.  A “job creator” who treats his employees as disposable vassals, Potter is devoid of sentimentality.  His resort to common theft to bring down his rival would nowadays be seen as a minor peccadillo.  On the other hand, George would be held up as a poor businessman because he puts people ahead of profit.  To portray Potter as the bad guy sets American cultural values—our actual values, not the ones we purport to hold—on their ear.

Stripped of the spiritual mumbo-jumbo and its over-idealized take on small town America, It’s a Wonderful Life is an anachronism with the right message for our age.  That’s why I like it so much.

My second must-see classic is a movie I’m actually old enough to have seen in a theater during its first run.  I was dragged unwillingly to see A Christmas Story as a high schooler during a custodial visitation weekend with my father and stepmother.  I was expecting a stinker, given my dad’s taste in cinema.  (He particularly loved Burt Reynolds' movies from the ‘70s and ‘80s, each of which was essentially a protracted car chase scene.)  Any movie we saw also had to have a plot and character development simple enough for my stepmother to follow.  (After seeing Sophie’s Choice, she complained of not understanding what it was about.  I don’t know why dad married her, but it certainly wasn’t for her smarts.)

Having set my expectations low, I ended up being bowled over by A Christmas Story.  It definitely helped that it was adapted from several of Jean Shepherd’s short stories about his Indiana childhood.  I’d just discovered Shep, having been recommended to me by my English teacher, and I was already familiar with the adaptations of the Ralph Parker stories aired on PBS’s American Playhouse back when the network still offered a respectable volume of quality programming.  (Note: Endless rebroadcasts of Downton Abbey are not an acceptable substitute.)

More time would pass before I learned of Shepherd’s career as a proto-hipster with a late night radio show in 1950s New York City.  Jean Shepherd’s Night People was a freeform program which garnered a cult following among college students.  Shep would speak to his listeners as if they were discerning cultural coconspirators against what he called “creeping Meatballism;” that is, the pervasiveness of the prosaic tastes of the square “day people.”  

Shepherd’s audience was a loyal one.  John Cassavetes’ first feature, Shadows (1959), was financed in part by contributions from the “Night People”—an early example of crowdfunding.  Shepherd also liked to tweak his audience’s noses now and then.  After discussing a racy, albeit nonexistent novel titled I, Libertine, on his show there were so many inquiries about where the book could be bought that Shepherd upped the ante by hastily writing an actual novel under the nom de plume Frederick R. Ewing.  Shep’s photo, captioned as author Ewing, adorned the dustjacket.

It is most unlikely that a program like Night People would be commercially viable today.  Even Shepherd made the migration to public broadcasting in the 1970s.  However, much of the entertainment content on public radio, such as This American Life, The Radio Reader, or The Moth Radio Hour, tend to speak to the interests and concerns of liberal suburbanites.  It’s all good programming, but it doesn’t take many chances.  Meatballism triumphant. 

But, back to A Christmas Story.  Shep is at his best here, playing it straight.  Directed by Bob Clark, whose best known other movie was Porky’s, A Christmas Story is a paean to childhood wonder and anticipation.  Set circa 1940 in northern Indiana, nine year old Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley) lives with his father, The Old Man (Darren McGavin), his mom (Melinda Dillon), and his whiny younger brother Randy (Ian Petrella).  The voiceover narration is provided by Ralphie as an Adult (Shep Himself).

The plot is episodic.  The A-plot chronicles Ralphie’s dogged quest to receive a Red Ryder BB gun as a present.  At every turn, Ralphie is discouraged with the warning, “You’ll shoot your eye out!” by everyone from Mom to his teacher to the department store Santa.  But family comedies must have happy endings, and we learn at the end that The Old Man came through for Ralphie with a surprise extra gift Christmas morning.

A Christmas Story works because it’s relatable, showcasing Shepherd’s talent for wringing humor from the most ordinary childhood and family experiences.  (Paradoxically, Shep wasn’t much of a family man.  He was married four times that we know of, and he never bothered with his children again after he left them and their mother.)  Everything from Ralphie’s friendship with Flick and Schwartz (recurring characters in the Ralph stories) to dealing with bullies Scut Farkus and Grover Dill to the discovery your favorite programs are just vehicles to sell stuff are all familiar notwithstanding the retro setting of the film.

The B-plots are gems in themselves.  The Old Man wins a “major award” for solving crossword puzzles, which turns out to be a lamp in the shape of a woman’s leg clad in a fishnet stocking with a lampshade as a skirt.  Mom disapproves and the major award is shattered when it “accidentally” falls to the floor.  Ralphie sends off for a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring which turns out to decode nothing but radio ads for Ovaltine.  Ralphie rats out his pal Schwartz when he utters the F-word after a mishap helping The Old Man change a flat tire.  Christmas dinner is ruined when the neighboring Bumpus hounds enter the Parker kitchen and tear apart the unattended turkey.

I don’t think I really expected A Christmas Story to become a holiday perennial, but it’s easy to understand why it’s stood the test of time.  It’s certainly the best known of Jean Shepherd’s works among the general public.   And it’s a damned shame his other writings and broadcast work have kind of fallen into obscurity since Shep died in 1999.  But then, Shepherd never held himself out as an artist for the masses.  The definition of hipness is fluid and ever changing.  So there is the probability that Shepherd’s humor doesn’t translate well anymore.

I have my fingers crossed for a revival notwithstanding.  And in the meantime, we’ll always have A Christmas Story.  Particularly when TBS airs it repeatedly every Christmas Day.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar  

Please Back Off

I’ve just finished watching Won’t Back Down, last year’s movie about parents who defy the odds to improve their kids’ education.

Won’t Back Down, financed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and businessman Philip Anschutz, promoted by Michelle Rhee, and touted by conservative school “reform” advocates, makes its point in a predictably hamfisted fashion so that even the densest teabilly Wal-Mart shopper can figure it out.  I thoroughly hated it, as I expected to.  The story was inspired by a real-life incident a couple of years ago where parents used California’s parent-trigger law to convert a failing public school into a charter institution.

The producers signed a raft of well-known names for the project.  Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the main character, Jamie, while Viola Davis plays Jamie’s ally, Nona.  Clearly the project was well-financed, considering they also brought on Ving Rhames and Holly Hunter. 

Despite the strong cast, I was underwhelmed by the acting.  There was very little chemistry among the actors, and I just wasn’t convinced by their performances.  Also, and I can’t explain why, the Gyllenhaal siblings have always rubbed me the wrong way.  And so I couldn’t help but chuckle at thought of Maggie Gyllenhaal, a paragon of liberal smugness, cynically accepting the lead role in a right-wing propaganda flick.  Really, Maggie?  Did you need the money that badly?

Back to the film: Jamie is a plucky single mom who works two jobs while raising a daughter with learning disabilities.  Frustrated by her little girl’s lack of progress in school, she joins up with burned out elementary school teacher Nona after discovering a loophole in the law which allows parents and teachers to take over a school if it is failing.

Gyllenhaal and the scriptwriters self-consciously strive to imbue Jamie with an air of blue collar authenticity.  Jamie speaks in malapropisms while letting her daughter watch TV and munch Snickers bars after school.  She’s awed by Nona’s neatly kept home.  Her sense of boundaries is poor at best as she importunes parents, teachers, and administrators alike to do what’s right for her daughter. 

Won’t Back Down is a mostly conventional buddy film / fight-the-system tale.  Predictably, it concludes with the obligatory corny feel-good scene I remember in every Eighties inspiring teacher movie from Stand and Deliver to The Dead Poets’ Society.  But that’s not its worst sin.  At least twice in the film, Jamie quotes Gandhi’s purported aphorism, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” as justification for her efforts.  It’s like when wingnuts such as Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck quote Martin Luther King; it just comes off as vaguely sacrilegious.

At its heart, Won’t Back Down is an odious anti-union, anti-public education screed.  Throughout the movie, Jamie and Nona are stymied at every turn by two-dimensional cardboard cutout foes in the form of a sclerotic school bureaucracy, a do-nothing board of education, and a union which protects incompetent teachers through tenure.  (A “job for life after two years,” as one character puts it, perpetuating a cherished conservative myth.)  Unionized teachers, we’re given to understand, have no incentive to educate beyond collecting their inflated taxpayer underwritten salaries.  

While Won’t Back Down is a poorly made hack piece which will be soon forgotten, I wish I could say the same for the movement that spawned it.  We are on a slippery slope toward school privatization and teacher deprofessionalization because of the moneyed conservative forces working toward this end.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one well-known culprit.  The Walton Family Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation are two others.

But the worst of the rogue’s gallery of charitable foundations, to my mind, is the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.  Mr. Broad, who made his fortune in insurance and by building innumerable subdivisions of tacky tract houses, did what any other egotistical plutocrat would do when faced with the prospect of paying taxes.  He simply donated a fair chunk of his wealth to a charitable foundation he created then devoted himself to doling it out as a means of wielding power.  Among its programs, the Broad Foundation sponsors an “academy” to train school administrators for the new reality of K-12 education, which is that public schools must produce a uniform “product” regardless of students’ widely varying individual aptitudes.  The test will tell: Poor scores equal unemployed teachers.

Eli Broad suffers from the same conceit other wealthy individuals share.  Because he was successful at business, this makes him an expert in every other field of endeavor.  This is especially true when it’s a service provided by the public sector.  As we all know, government’s sole raison d’être is to siphon off the hard earned wealth of job creating entrepreneurs.  Therefore, it can only be made efficient when business people either privatize, or at least apply private sector practices to, government work.  (Never mind the non sequitur underneath this assumption; there’s no moneymaking potential in taking the liberal arts courses where you would learn what one is.)

The Broad Foundation is gradually making inroads into higher education.  My alma mater recently opened a new field house built with money donated by the Broads.  To my deep distaste, the president of the endowment foundation of the college where I work is the CEO of a real estate development company owned by Eli Broad.  I believe these are harbingers of a larger trend.  It won’t be long before pressure is brought to bear on college presidents and boards of trustees to scale back or eliminate general education requirements and non-vocational majors in favor of the University of Phoenix model of workforce training.  It’s never a good idea to encourage the life of the mind when the kind of people you want working for you are narrowly trained technicians who don’t ask a lot of probing questions.

If there is a hell, I hope there is a special corner reserved for Eli Broad.  As it is, the evil he’s done in his lifetime will be perpetuated through his foundation.   And I am not one of those progressives who put their faith in the secular eschatology of revolution.  Sometimes the bad guys win.  The hardest part is when everyone around you is convinced they’re the good guys and are cheering them on to victory.

Just like in Won’t Back Down. 

     

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

A Holiday Classic Revisited

The winter solstice has passed and we in the northern half the globe can look forward to longer days and the promise of spring.

The prospect helps me overcome my deep seated dislike for the corporate bacchanalia of Christmas.  The one exception to my antipathy is lifelong my love of TV holiday specials and Christmas movies.  I’m particularly fond of A Christmas Carol in just about any of its film or television adaptations.  But my hands-down, all-time favorite of these is the 1951 film Scrooge starring Alastair Sim. 

Scrooge was a popular holiday programming staple when I was a kid in the Seventies.  I don’t think it’s seen as much nowadays, despite the wide variety of broadcast, cable, and online outlets.  But you can find just about any old movie on YouTube, and so the other day I watched Scrooge for the first time in many years.

What stood out for me, what I hadn’t noticed in past viewings, was that the film’s emotional impact stems not so much from its evocation of Christmas cheer and hearth and home typical of nearly all holiday stories but from its emphasis on Charles Dickens’ not-so-implicit critique of early capitalism.  For all its atmospheric shadow and fog and Alastair Sim’s rubber-faced mugging at the camera and for all the heavy-handed simplicity of the familiar redemption tale, where Scrooge differs from other adaptations of A Christmas Carol is the supplementary exposition screenwriter Noel Langley and director Brian Desmond Hurst added to the plot.  

The vignettes Ebenezer Scrooge revisits with the Ghost of Christmas Past are such convincing antecedents to the man that one must remember that half of them were never part of the novel.  Certainly, the dialogue reveals the social Darwinism which characterized the Victorian age.  When young Scrooge and young Jacob Marley agree that society would soon undergo rapid and violent changes and that only the strong would survive, they concisely sum up the worldview of the new merchant elites on both sides of the Atlantic. 

I suspect that one reason for the embellished backstory was the temper of the times in Britain when Scrooge was made.  Although much of the luster of socialism’s promise tarnished in the six years following Labour's 1945 election victory, it appeared that the inherent evils of capitalism had at least been checked.   Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the film’s popularity declined in the era of Thatcher and Reagan.  To imply there’s something wrong with unbridled capitalism is a secular heresy nowadays.  (In the immortal words of Maggie Herself, “There is no alternative” to the free market, and “There is no such thing as society, only individuals and families.”)  When the most elemental gains of 20^th century social democracy such as social insurance and the right of workers to organize are presently threatened, a reminder of how bad the good old days were might have a salutary effect. 

On the other hand, the message can be too obvious at moments.  Consider the scene in which Mr. Jorkin (Jack Warner), a character invented for the film, is confronted with his embezzlement of company funds by his business partners.  Lines such as Jorkin’s “We’re all cutthroats under this finery” and the partners’ willingness to accept Scrooge and Marley’s bailout offer to avoid scandal can touch a sensitive nerve or two in the context of recent events.  Nevertheless, the exploits of Scrooge and his colleagues, both in novel and in Desmond Hurst’s film, raise questions about the relationship between virtue and wealth.  When Mr. Fezziwig loses his family firm to the rise of the new “vested interests,” one reflexively thinks of the small businesses crushed whenever big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart come to a new town.  At one point Langley’s screenplay has Fezziwig deliver an earnest oration on trade as a way of life rather than as mere pursuit of material gain.  It's unlikely such sentiments rest in the hearts of today's b-school graduates. 

                 
Despite the moralism of his tale I think Dickens pulled a punch or two, perhaps in deference to the sensibilities of his well-heeled readers.  After all, Bob Cratchit did not toil in the dark Satanic mills of the early Industrial Revolution.  His compensation of 15 shillings a week (or £39 a year) was a fair wage for the time, and it did enable him to support a large family and send his eldest daughter away to school. Living in a pre-consumer economy where most monetary transactions concerned food, shelter, and raiment meant that Bob’s pay could provide a decent life even if it wasn’t necessarily a life of leisure. 

If Dickens intended to illustrate the hardships of economicl inequality, he would have done far better making Cratchit a mill worker or coal miner living in a hovel with his ill-clad and underfed progeny.  The various film renditions of A Christmas Carol inevitably carry over this flaw in the dramatis personae.  Scrooge succeeds partly due to director of photography C. M. Pennington-Richard’s use of shadowy atmospherics to evoke a seedy London cloaked in a miasma of fog and coal smoke.  (Had he wanted to add verisimilitude he could have moved filming off the Renown Pictures soundstage onto the streets of postwar London and probably achieved the same effect.)  Visuals aside, the film’s characters (save Scrooge) tend to be quaint cut-out caricatures drawn largely to impart the warmth of an archetypal old-time Christmas.

Similarly, the Cockney of supporting characters such as that of Scrooge’s charwoman seems calculated to evoke nostalgia for a time and place none of us have lived in.  Listening to Kathleen Harrison’s aitch-dropping, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard screech, I was strangely reminded of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.  I don't mean as a literal comparison, but in the sense that both make us think of the Victorian years as a time of cloying charm rather than pointing up the rough, often brutish lives experienced by England’s proletariat. 

That said, perhaps I’m analyzing too much.  Watch the movie when you have the chance.  Happy holidays.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

It’s a Meaner World

The past several days have brought more bad tidings in the aftermath of the Colorado theater massacre.  This time it was an attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin by a white supremacist.  Meanwhile, Jared Lee Loughner, the Arizona gunman who killed a federal judge and wounded then-congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, as well as killing or injuring several bystanders, has pled guilty in order to escape trial and a possible death sentence.  Atrocity blurs into atrocity as weeks and months drift by, jumbling together in the popular consciousness.

And these are just the big events that get widespread news coverage.  Every community in the country suffers less lurid tragedies on a fairly regular basis.  Even as I write this, a local news station is covering a the story of local man who, for whatever unreason that wormed its way out of a feverish brain, has taken his kids hostage and barricaded himself in his home.

Violence, of course, is a commonplace in our cultural lives, as “American as cherry pie,” as H. Rap Brown memorably put it.  (That Brown is serving a life sentence for murder gives his truism all the more credibility.)  Gratuitous violence is apparently a historical pastime, being part and parcel of such patina-tinged myths as Old West outlaw John Wesley Hardin shooting a man for snoring.  Violence is the language of the rugged individualist who must answer his challengers, of loners who face a hostile environment in the same way America must face a hostile world.  

As with other art forms, film mirrors the culture that produces it.  With its emphasis on visual patterns to tell a story, film is particularly conducive to communicating graphic violence.  Add to this gradual decline of narration in mainstream American film since the 1970s brought on by our growing dependence on sundry electronic media.  The multiplicity of distractions has undermined our ability to follow complex (or multiple) plotlines.  And so the art of American film has come full circle: The narrative conventions established by D. W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation have given way once more to fleeting images meant to leave emotional impressions rather than tell a story.  

Conventional narrative, then, is becoming a thing of the past, sacrificed to moviegoers’ short attention spans.  To attract paying audiences, most successful mainstream films in the past decade have relied on varying formulae of CGI effects, comic book characters, improbable stunts and pyrotechnics, fart jokes, and teens or twentysomethings hooking up.  Films with actual storylines and fully developed characters are relegated to art houses.  It’s not terribly surprising that the Colorado theater shootings took place at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises; in fact, the one thing that James Holmes and his victims seem to have had in common was execrably bad taste.

While bad taste is common, it’s not universal.  The occasional gem does make its way onto the big screen. The debasement of human relationships—of human decency—in contemporary America is the theme of Bobcat Goldthwait’s dark comedy God Bless America, which melds the sensibilities of Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down with those of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy with shades of Taxi Driver thrown in for good measure.  The middle aged protagonist (a sad-eyed Joel Murray) has had enough of the narcissism and incivility of the people around him and goes on a killing spree against entitled reality TV stars, loudmouthed conservative pundits, would-be pedophiles, and double-parkers.  Our antihero is joined by an equally disaffected teen, a sociopathic Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Tara Lynne Barr) who becomes the Bonnie to his Clyde.  God Bless America climaxes in a hostage standoff on the set of an American Idol-style talent show, with the ill-starred couple falling in a fusillade of police bullets on national television as the screen fades to black.

Goldthwait’s satire is unnervingly spot-on, to the point where I visibly winced at the sight of Murray’s character gunning down a bunch of teens chattering on cell phones in a movie theater screening, of all things, a documentary on the My Lai massacre.  Fiction mimics fact mimics fiction, seemingly ad infinitum.  The verisimilitude of film is intensified by the emotional impact of real life events.

It also gives new life to the chicken-and-egg riddle of whether mass media images trigger violence or are merely reflect an already violent society.  Movie violence has been accused of inspiring copycats for decades.  The 1974 “Hi-Fi murders” in Ogden, Utah were inspired by a scene in the Clint Eastwood movie Magnum Force in which a pimp exacts revenge on a wayward hooker by forcing her to drink a bottle of Drano.  John Hinckley was driven to shoot President Reagan by the exploits of Travis Bickle, Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver.  Occasionally movies are influenced in turn by real events, as in the case of Sidney Lumet’s Network evoking the actual on-air suicide of Florida TV newswoman Christine Chubbuck. 

The 1990s saw a surge in movie and TV copycats.  Natural Born Killers has been cited as the model for several teen spree murders, including the Columbine massacre.   The subway tollbooth arson scene in Money Train is said to have prompted an actual firebombing of a New York City tollbooth.  Even MTV’s cartoon series Beavis and Butthead was implicated in the case of a small child who set a fire in imitation of one of its characters. 

Arguably, media violence is catalyst rather than cause; folks predisposed to violence merely need an excuse to do wrong.  However, this and similar theories, such as the purported link between pornography and sexual violence, suffer from weak causality.  Although I’m loath to draw a parallel with the claim, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” the motive to harm comes from within.  When violence becomes an internalized social norm, it is bound to inspire individuals to employ it as a first and last resort.  It’s still a mean world, regardless of whether it’s on celluloid, in digital, or in the flesh.  Expect it to remain so until our values change for the better.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar