The American Culture

ABC's new series Big Shots (Thursdays at 10 pm EDT), which premiered last night, is clearly intended to be a male version of Desperate Housewives. Think of it as Desperate CEOs.

The central characters of the program are the heads of four corporations, and the hook is that although their businesses are doing well, their personal lives are a mess.

One is enormously henpecked, another is divorced and being set up for a gross public humilation and has a young-adult daughter who openly hates him (or seems to), another is cheating on his wife, and the other's wife has been cheating on him with his boss.

Get the irony? At work they're Masters of the Universe, but at home they're ineffectual schlubs.

Yes, the show is that plausible and meaningful. 

As noted earlier, Big Shots is part of the current TV season's trend toward the feminization of adult males. As one of the Big Shots says in the pilot episode, "Men—we're the new women."

The message Big Shots sends is very simple and direct: even the most powerful men in the world cannot control the women in their lives, so you weakling middle-class losers definitely have to bend your knees to Girl Power or be destroyed.

That frightfully misogynistic vision may be true in Hollywood's fevered dreams, but in the real world the Donald Trumps at the top dump their wives the moment they become the least bit annoying or, worse, no fun any more, and any infidelity on the women's part brings instant destruction thanks to brilliantly crafted prenuptial agreements.

In addition, even in the middle and lower classes the situation is not as Big Shots makes it out to be. Men and women do not have to exist in a state of mutual competition as if marriage or other male-female relationships were a zero-sum war in which any gain by one is a loss for the other. On the contrary, in a real loving relationship, a gain for one party is a gain for the other. And a good many people do live that way.

That sort of insight is entirely missing from Big Shots.

What is even less forgivable is that the plot contrivances are not convincing, funny, or interesting. A couple of the central characters are somewhat likeable, but the show turns even that into a negative: watching them endure disasters and humiliations without any redemptive outcome inspires neither pity nor fear but only frustration and annoyance.

And so it is with Big Shots in general.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Critic John J. Miller has published a very informative interview with Robert E. Howard scholar Rusty Burke on National Review Online, which merits attention.

The excerpts below provide a good sense of why the underappreciated writer of the Conan the Barbarian stories deserves more consideration. Howard wrote for the pulps in a variety of genres, and modern-day readers are rediscovering his non-Conan writings and realizing that he was above all a master storyteller.

Particularly praiseworthy is Burke's emphasis on the importance of story in narrative fiction, which reflects criticisms made in the prior century by G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other such luminaries:

He’s a great storyteller. I think that’s really the first obligation of any great writer—to tell a good story. Howard generally grabs the reader in the first paragraph and then keeps the story moving along so quickly that you just get swept up in it. He perfected a number of techniques to keep things moving, one of which was providing just enough descriptive information that the reader could fill in the details with his own imagination: I think this makes for greater reader involvement in the story, letting you feel like you’re actually seeing what’s there rather than just having it described to you. Of course, this greater level of reader involvement also leads to some furious disagreements when different readers propose different visual interpretations. But that emotional investment we make in Howard’s fiction is part of his success. Most observers agree, though, that one of the reasons Howard could get by with minimal descriptions was that he was a natural poet, and could use just a few words to set a scene quite evocatively.

Burke argues that Howard had an essentially conservative view of civilization as prone to cycles, not progress and perfectibility:

The idea that is most often mentioned is his notion that civilizations always inevitably rise and fall: a young, vigorous race or nation of “barbarians” fights its way to civilization, sometimes building on the ruins of a decayed society it displaces; inevitably, though, when the people become comfortable, when they are no longer working constantly to build their society, they become first complacent, then indolent, and finally decadent, from which point the society decays to the point that a new young race of barbarians can overthrow or displace it.

Howard also saw that violence was the inevitable result of breakdowns in “civilized” societies. In his view, humans are really just apes who learned how to build things: when our societies begin to break down, we revert to our innate savagery. I’ve just been re-reading Leo Grin’s essay “The Reign of Blood” and I think he’s right that Howard sees man’s primal emotion as hate, and so when confronted with forces we see as hostile we see them as “something not only to be battled but to be hated.” I think anyone who has looked at what happens on the frontiers between societies in conflict would have to agree that Howard’s views were pretty dead-on. Even when the initial contacts are not hostile, man’s tendency to turn hatred on perceived threats frequently serves to escalate into conflict and ultimately violence. At the end of the Turlogh O’Brien story “The Dark Man,” a priest asks “Almighty God, when will the reign of blood cease?” “Turlogh shook his head. ‘Not so long as the race lasts.’” It seems a bleak and pessimistic view, but on the basis of our history to date, it also seems a realistic one. 

Burke also quashes the suggestion that Howard glorified violence in his narratives:

He did no such thing. There is no glory in Howardian violence. It’s a grim and bloody business, and when the fighting is over, generally his protagonists recognize the ultimate futility of it, that nothing is really won. The impermanence of man’s achievements in the face of an uncaring cosmos is a constant refrain throughout Howard’s work. But one of the things most critics notice is that Howard’s characters, even when they recognize the futility of the struggle, still refuse to give up. In a way, he’s the poet laureate of the Last Stand and the Doomed Cause.

I'm more of an optimist, and though I don't believe in perfectibility of human beings or human societies, I must agree that there is a distinctive appeal in Howard's work, and that it has much to do with the things Burke describes.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Filmmaker Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma) is a common type of modern American: vulgar but religious. His movies include large doses of vulgarity and profanity accompanied by an evidently sincere search for the sacred. His new CW series Reaper, which premiered this past Tuesday in its regular timeslot of 9 p.m. EDT), is both raucous and religious, and is one of the best things he's done.

The reason they did so is the bad news: Sam's parents sold his soul to the devil long before he was born, and the Evil One gets to collect when Sam turns twenty-one.

(They had very good reasons, of course. They're actually quite nice people and love Sam dearly.) 

Naturally the first episode begins on Sam's twenty-first birthday, and he finds out the awful truth: he must serve out the rest of his life as the devil's bounty hunter, tracking down souls that have escaped from Hell and returning them to their proper place of torment. In between captures, he gets to live his normal life working at the retail store, hanging out with his buddies and trying to win the love of coworker Andi.

These escaped souls are pretty formidable, as you may imagine, and Sam is terrified at the enormity of the assignment. Of course, the Evil One doesn't send poor Sam out into battle entirely defenseless: in each episode he gives Sam a different device to use for trapping the escaped souls. In the pilot episode, it is a Dirt Devil portavac.

Oddly enough, this terrifying new job actually gives Sam's life some real meaning for once—sending evil souls to where they belong actually turns out to be very satisfying and important work.

It's rather like the CW program Supernatural but a good deal more cheerful.

If all of this sounds either amusing or meaningful, you should give Reaper a try.

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In times of what we might charitably call flexible morality, the most effective moralists are those who people don’t even realize are moralists.

Moliere earned acclaim as a wicked wit by brilliantly lampooning the hypocrisies of seventeenth century France, Jonathan Swift was widely admired while skewering the pretensions of the Enlightenment, and Aldous Huxley received accolades from twentieth century intellectuals while mocking their utopian schemes.

A more humble but equally intentional modern purveyor of this sort of stealth moralizing is the new ABC-TV series Dirty Sexy Money, premiering tonight.

The show presents plenty of the muck the title promises, but it also has a sound moral foundation just under the surface sleaze.  In the first dialogue scene of the initial episode, Tripp Darling (Donald Sutherland), patriarch of New York’s wealthiest family, quickly raises the issue of moral probity when he tells charity-oriented lawyer Nick George why he wants him to serve as the family’s attorney after the death of Nick’s father, who was the Darlings’ trusted counselor for forty years (a revealingly Biblical number): “You have a moral center,” Tripp says. “I miss having that solid citizen by my side to tell me which way is up. And I trust you.”

Nick, ego and moral passions equally inflamed, takes the position after getting the proposed salary increased to $10 million a year with a goodly amount to go to his charitable organization. Naturally, it turns out that even that much money is insufficient compensation for all the folly he must endure.

Tripp’s daughter Karen says that Nick is the only man she ever loved, and keeps trying to seduce him even though he’s happily married to another woman and she’s about to marry for the fourth time. Younger daughter Juliet has even more serious problems, attempting suicide after finding out that her father has bought for her an acting role she thought she had earned. Tripp’s enigmatic wife, Letitia (Jill Clayburgh), is all good manners and icy remoteness.

Eldest son Patrick, the attorney general of New York (in a superb performance by William Baldwin), is married and has children but is in love with a transvestite. Middle son Brian is an Episcopal priest with a bad temper, worse manners, and a secret illegitimate child. Youngest son Jeremy, Juliet’s fraternal twin, is a classic playboy wastrel.

Their disturbances are presented in largely comic terms, but the producers, led by series creator Craig Wright, create a serious undertone by frequently showing the characters in tightly enclosed spaces, especially in limousines, to create a strong sense of entrapment. Conversely, when a minor character severs her connection with the family by abandoning her illegitimate son to the boy’s father, priest Brian, the scene takes place in the open spaces of a public park.

As is common in satires, the characters continually lie to one another in order to sustain a façade of respectability. Ironically, Juliet is a virgin who lets everyone think she’s a slut, because “It’s easier.” A possible reason why she stays away from men is her apparently unnatural feelings toward twin brother Jeremy.

Similarly, Patrick pretends to be a conventional husband and father while having homosexual affairs, which mean much more to him than his married life. Brian is a married Christian minister who has had a child by another woman and takes the boy into his family by pretending that the lad is a Swedish orphan. Jeremy pretends to enjoy his latest girlfriend when he cannot get his mind off of twin sister Juliet. Nick’s father, celebrated for his integrity, actually had a forty-year affair with Letitia Darling.

And patriarch Tripp may have the worst secret of all: possible complicity in the murder of Nick’s father.

In sum, the Darlings behave like human trash but have enough money and a good enough lawyer to insulate them from all the consequences — except the enormous meaninglessness of their lives. Juliet, for example, moans to her mother about how desperate she feels because nothing she does has any affect, positive or negative, on anybody: “It makes me feel so stupid and lame to have everything taken care of all the time. I want to be a human being.” “And some day you’ll be one,” says Leticia, referring to an imaginary point in the future when Juliet, who is physically an adult but just a child in terms of moral maturity, will leave home and take care of herself.

Similarly, while whining about the fact that he must hide his homosexuality, Patrick says, “Funny thing is, I’m not allowed to be loved for who I really am. Poor people — nobodies — regular beings that only God sees, they can be loved for who they are, but not me. Because . . . I’m a scion. I’m a Darling twig, a tender shoot that’s stuck to a tree that I cannot live without.” In Patrick’s fevered imagination, the poor are free and the rich are enslaved.

This self-pity is entirely unjustified, of course, for the Darlings’ situation is entirely self-imposed. Patrick is right to observe that his real problem is his unwillingness to be removed from the tree and planted in free ground of his own. He doesn’t want to tell the truth about himself because he doesn’t want to suffer the consequences of his choices. Thus money doth make cowards of us all.

Like the best moral stories, Dirty Sexy Money sets hard choices before its characters and invites us to evaluate their responses and think about whether we’d have the courage to do better. The dirt, sex, and humor are there to make the medicine go down so easily that we hardly realize it’s actually good for us.

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Cronenberg's noble failure shows importance of a strong story. 

It is successful at that: like Leone's overrated would-be crime epic, Eastern Promises is overlong, pretentious, and boring.

There is much to be admired in the film, to be sure. The actors and actresses turn in excellent performances, and the setting—Russian gangs in London—is an interesting one. Plus, director Cronenberg is appropriately interested in his characters' motivations and evaluations of the situations at hand.

His failure, as with Leone's film, is mainly on the level of story and pacing.

The plot has a reasonably workable main story line, though there is nothing at all original about it. What the film most sorely lacks is some good subplots; what little there is of them is handled perfunctorialy.

That keeps the size of the cast down—and hence the expense, which is a good thing—but Cronenberg and writer Stephen Knight fail to create sufficiently interesting additional conflicts among them, beyond the central ones. The subplots, like the main story, are largely cliched: the man who is in fact evil behind his facade of bourgeois respectability, the gang boss's hedonistic son who may not be strong enough to take over upon the father's imminent retirement, the amitious driver who wants to be a real gangster, the humble working woman whose effort to do a good deed plunges her into an exceedingly dangerous situation, etc.

There are two attempts at incorporating major plot twists, but alas each is thoroughly predictable long before it happens.

Interestingly, the MSNBC reviewer dislikes the second twist for being so abrupt as to take viewers out of the film, destroying the all-important suspension of disbelief. He must not have been paying much attention during the previous 90 minutes, as any reasonably perceptive person would have seen this plot twist coming a good hour earlier. But, alas, so people never know, as Paul McCartney once wrote.

Cronenberg's film at least avoids the Marxist silliness of Once Upon a Time in America, and is 129 minutes shorter, both of which make it a better experience than its model. But it could have been so much more enjoyable and enlightening if the director and writer had been less interested in character and more interested in story.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed in his personal notebook, ACTION IS CHARACTER. Without a strong story, there is nothing interesting or enlightening for the characters to do. And without that, there are neither fully formed characters nor any real insights. That is the real problem with Eastern Promises.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The new CBS TV series Cane is something of a return to the 1980s primetime soap opera style of Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, and the like: a wealthy family imperiled by external enemies that would destroy their business, and wracked by internal rifts as those who share the family financial interests jockey for power.

Cane tries to change things up a little and make the concept more interesting by dealing with a Cuban immigrant family that produces one of the top-selling brands of rum in the United States. The series also includes much more overt violence and cruelty than its 1980s predecessors did.

The explicit violence is evidently intended to make the show more "gritty" and "real." Instead it just makes it more stupid and vulgar.

What made those earlier shows watchable was that they had a sense of fun, a breezy, stylish approach to their sleazy subject matter. But scummy story material handled in a scummy visual and performing style is just, well, scummy. That's Cane.

In addition, the show has a decidedly unseemly political-cultural subtext: all but one of the caucasian Americans are corrupt and evil, whereas only about half of the Cubans are bad, and even most of those are forced into their wrongdoings by the evils of the caucasians.

In the pilot episode the depiction of ethnic strife, with the narrative clearly siding with the Cubans, passes beyond depicting ethnic strife to something very likely to foment it.

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A new exhibit opening Friday at Northwestern University's Block Museum of Art brings the astonishing news that the film director Alfred Hitchcock actually used the assistance of others in making his movies!

Can you believe that?

Today's Chicago Sun-Times breathlessly reports that "the director's claim to sole authorship of his movies comes in for heavy scrutiny" in the exhibit, which allegedly "reveals Hitchcock as a master collaborator who relied, often heavily, on crack creative teams to help bring his suspenseful visions to life."

This is one of the biggest duhs I've ever heard.

Everyone who knows anything about movies knows that Hitchcock worked closely with top film professionals in creating his films. That's how movies are made. All kinds of people contribute their expertise, and they're paid a great deal of money because the production companies believe these experts do in fact contribute to the success of the project.

Hence, when the museum's curator, William Schmenner says that the exhibit "Gives the lie to some of [Hitchcock's] more incendiary public comments," he's not just exaggerating the importance of his exhibit, he's actually deceiving people about one of the greatest film directors of all time. Hitchcock never claimed that he worked entirely alone and did not use the talents of the people around him. It would have been perfectly silly for him to suggest such a thing. And it is perfectly silly for Schmenner to suggest that Hitchcock failed to give appropriate credit to his collaborators:

Hitchcock himself described the process a few years later: "We went into a huddle and slowly from discussions; arguments; random suggestions; casual, desultory talk, and furious intellectual quarrels as to what such and such a character in such and such a situation would or would not do, the scenario began to take shape."

The fact that Hollywood filmmaking involves a huge amount of collaboration with experts in various aspects of production is widely known, and Hitchcock never pretended to be an exception to that rule. He only characterized himself as the ultimate creative force behind his films, and he most certainly was that.

The important thing in establishing authorial responsibility in moviemaking is that the vision in each film was his, and the museum's curator admits this:

"In fact, for Hitchcock to make the movies he wanted to make, he had to be able to do both things: to be ultimately responsible for the film and to shepherd his vision through the collaborative process," Schmenner says. "That's why he was a genius."

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Here's a big non-surprise: the spate of antiwar films Hollywood has begun to release in recent months has laid a big egg at the box office. David Kahane has outlined the situation in National Review Online, documenting the painfully obvious "antigun, antiwar, anti-Rethuglican" messages in Shoot ‘Em Up, In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, and Grace Is Gone and mentioning the the upcoming The Kingdom, Lions for Lambs and Rendition, and recent films such as Syriana, Shooter, Jarhead, and A Mighty Heart, "all passionate indictments of one thing or another vaguely connected to the military-industrial complex and the so-called “War on Terror.” Kahane observes:

Now, what do all these films have in common—besides being passionate indictments?

They all flopped. Or will, soon enough. (Except for, maybe, The Kingdom, which apparently has an appalling whiff of vigilantism.)

Kahane then sarcastically critiques the nation's movie audiences in the guise of a "progressive" Hollywood insider:

What the hell is wrong with this country? We support the troops, showing them as the dysfunctional, murdering, drug-addicted, red-state crypto-rapists in need of psychoanalysis we all know they really are. Hey—even the Marine officer in Alan Ball’s award-winning American Beauty a few years back was humanized by making him a sadist and a closet queen. And this is the thanks we get? . . .

So who cares if the American public is so benighted that it won’t go to see our antiwar films this season? Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, a woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do and a gay/lesbian/transgendered/bi-curious carbon-based life form’s gotta do what a gay/lesbian/transgendered/bi-curious carbon-based life form’s gotta do. Thank the top dog of your own personal belief system—or Nobody at all!—that we had a record summer this year, the Summer of the Threequel, to finance our consciences!

It's true that Hollywood people generally pursue the respect of the progressive left, even though it never pays in box office receipts. They're able to do so, as Kahane notes and as I and others have observed in the past, simply because the industry makes huge gouts of money off the vast general run of more politically innocent, centrist, or rightist films they make.

With the vast amount of money they get from those movies, the studios can afford to waste a comparatively small amount on their most valued contractors' lame conscience projects. But it's still a huge waste of money and a blatant disservice to their stockholders and to paying customers across the nation.

In contemporary Hollywood, even basic greed isn't enough to make people bow to common sense.

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The current race controversy in Jena, Louisiana, is, as is the natural order of things, only being worsened by the invasion of evil nitwits from outside the town attempting to intensify the grievance culture that already oppresses American blacks today.

The facts of the story are fairly simple: the town of Jena has yet to find a way to create some sense of harmony among people of different skin tones in the local high school, and—after a series of unpleasant incidents including the hanging of nooses on a tree (evoking fears of lynchings), the burning down of the school, and a physical assault on a young black man trying to enter a mostly white party—six young men were charged with attempted murder for beating a classmate unconscious and then kicking him repeatedly as he lay helpless on the ground.

The only one of the assailants to stand trial so far was convicted of aggravated second-degree battery and faces up to 22 years in prison, although he is certain to be sentenced to a lot less than that.

What has made this a big story, of course, is that the assailants were black and the victim was white.

Hence, in many people's eyes the assailants are entirely justified in battering a defenseless and outnumbered schoolboy, and the victim is guilty because people were lynched more than a half-century ago in the American South.

The innumerable gaps in that line of reasoning should be apparent to even the most blinkered of white-haters.

Nonetheless, a number of wealthy race baiters—repugnant characters such as Al Sharpton, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Southern Poverty Law Center—have descended upon Jena to take political advantage of the self-image of American blacks as being horribly oppressed by whites today and of white guilt over this presumed horrifying reality.

This image of oppression is dead wrong on the facts. This nation has made enormous progress in race relations during the past century, and while there certainly remain jackasses who hate people of other skin tones, such attitudes are roundly despised, and hence it is hardly a social crisis.

What is most important, moreover, is that the United States has almost fully purged race from its laws, and where it remains it is to make things easier for black Americans, not harder.

As a result of this progress in reforming national and state laws over the past half-century or so, black incomes have been on the rise, and have been rising more quickly than those of white Americans.

That is a very good thing, as it means black Americans are catching up to the nation as a whole and will soon no longer be distinguished as being predominantly of lower incomes—if they are allowed and expected to take responsibility for themselves and reap the benefits and risk the dangers of their individual choices.

Race-baiting and white-blaming are thus immensely damaging to the prospects of black people in general to make something of their lives, as it creates a false and enticing excuse for failure.

The most cuting-edge voices among the black community are adamant about not excusing transgressions, regardless of how much some people may wish to justify them.

Bill Cosby, by no means a Republican or political conservative, has come out against the very type of excuse-mongering that the race-baiters' characterization of the Jena situation exemplifies. The persistence of racism in the United States is very minor compared even to the very recent past (meaning three or four decades ago, a quick blink in terms of our national history), and what remains of it is equally distributed on both sides of the racial divide.

In today's National Review Online, Thomas Sowell succinctly identifies the intellectual corruption at the heart of the rush to defend the "Jena six":

Liberals’ skills at moral equivalence have been so finely honed during the long years of the Cold War that they have turned this into a case of “unequal treatment,” based on race — as if putting a noose on a tree is equivalent to stomping somebody who is unconscious.

Sowell then astutely points out the natural consequences of this intellectually corrupt position:

The last thing the south needs is a return to lynch-mob justice, whatever the color of whoever is promoting it.

Back in the 1950s, when the federal courts began striking down the Jim Crow laws in the South, one of the rising demands across the country was that the discriminators and segregationists obey “the law of the land.”

But, somewhere along the way, the idea also arose and spread that not everybody was supposed to obey “the law of the land.”

Violations of law by people with approved victim status like minorities, or self-righteous crusaders like environmentalists, were to be met with minimal resistance — if any resistance at all — and any punishment of them beyond a wrist-slap was “over-reacting.”

College campuses became bastions of the new and sanctified mob rule, provided that the mobs are from the list of groups approved as politically correct. Otherwise, even an injudicious remark could bring swift and certain punishment under “speech codes.”

The politics of condoned law-breaking is part of the moral dry rot of our times. So is settling issues in the streets on the basis of race, instead of in courts on the basis of law.

As Dr. Sowell observes, such conditions harm both blacks and whites alike.

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As a lead-in to its hit series Heroes, NBC is running a new show called Chuck on Mondays at 8 p.m. EDT. The show seems thoroughly fluffy and escapist on the surface, but has some interesting thoughts behind it.

It deals with themes including security in the post-9/11 world, the rights of individuals vis a vis the state, and the perpetual thorny issue of how to meet cute girls—all with a very light, comedic touch.

The opening scenes of the pilot episode comically establish Chuck Bartowsky (Zachary Levi) as a young man of positively stunning ordinariness, as he works in the Nerd Herd at a Buy-More store, fixing computers and cell phones and being bullied by a jerk coworker who has the inside track on the open assistant manager job.

Soon, however, a beautiful woman, Sarah Kent (Yvonne Strzechowski) becomes interested in him—but of course not for conventional reasons. He is, after all, a nerd.

After Chuck uses his computer knowledge to disarm a bomb and save the life of a diplomat, he stands up to the leader of the NSA team and telles him he won't be bullied, saying, "You need me."

The theme here—knowledge is power—is one that has turned up in numerous theatrical films and TV movies and series in recent years, particularly since the 9/11 attacks. Some typical examples are National Treasure, the two Librarian movies that appeared on Turner Network Television in the last couple of years, and the TV series House, John Doe, and Numbers. In each case, the solution to the characters' problems—or those of people they are trying to help—is not in brute force or strategic ingenuity, nor in some innate capabiity of the hero (other than significantly above-average intelligence) but in the possession and proper use of arcane knowledge. Judging by the pilot episode and information about coming installments, Chuck is an amusing addition to the trend.

CBS goes in the exact opposite direction in the new series The Big Bang Theory, in the second slot of a two-hour comedy block as counterprogramming against Heroes and its comic-espionage lead-in, Chuck. In Big Bang Theory, the two lead characters are uber-nerd genius scientists who can solve complex mathematical equations but can't figure out how to seduce their beautiful new neighbor.

Haha, right? But there is some goodness in it after all. Ultimately the two men find that just being nice is the way to her heart, and a nascent friendship begins to blossom. Exactly how this premise can be sustained over time is anyone's guess, but the jokes in the premiere episode were very funny, and I suppose there are more where those came from.

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The Hollywood actress known in print as Anna Nimouse notes today on National Review Online that the excellent ABC-TV miniseries The Path to 9/11, which gathered huge audiences on when it aired over two nights last September, has yet to be released on DVD, and no plans have been announced to do so.

It was slated for release in January of this year, then delayed until June, and since that date passed Disney/ABC has neither released the film nor said anything about it.

Nimouse concludes that Disney is holding off on the release in deference to Hillary Clinton, whose husband Bill Clinton does not come off very well in the film. Neither does George W. Bush, as I noted in my critiques of the film, but Laura Bush isn't running for president. Nimouse writes,

Incredibly, the Clinton gang, with Bob Iger, might be the reason there is no scheduled release of the DVD of this fantastically successful show. Is Bill Clinton in bed with a mouse? (Sorry…) More importantly, is the mouse afraid for its broadcast license?

More important, in my view, is the corporate irresponsibility of Disney's clearly unnecessary delay in getting The Path to 9/11 out on DVD:

Otherwise, where is the fiscal responsibility of Disney/ABC to their stockholders? With 28 million viewers one might reasonably expect sales of a third of that, or roughly $200 million in proceeds. That’s money that would eventually make its way into dividends in some retirement accounts. I smell a class action lawsuit brewing. By not releasing a highly successful film on DVD, when even Poseidon (an incredible $160 million flop), was released on DVD not even four months after its theatrical release, the Walt Disney Company seems to be purposefully not trying to make money, and that’s a breach of fiduciary responsibility.

One wonders, if Hilary weren’t running for president, would Disney be showing more of a profit? Two hundred million dollars is a lot of money to allow your company to leave behind because of a personal friendship or political partisanship. In fact, it’s downright scandalous.

If I were a Disney stockholder, I would be pretty angry about this. 

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The tendency of the nation's schools to suppress boys' natural ways of seeing and doing things and force them to adopt feminine attitudes and behaviors, brilliantly documented by Christina Hoff-Sommers in her 2001 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, is becoming increasingly evident in the culture.

Three recent articles document some of the consequences as young men mistreated by our educational system advance into society and try to become men when they simply don't know how and have been taught to disrespect masculinity and suppress it in themselves.

AP, for example, notes that network TV's new primetime schedule "puts the softer side of men on display":

In a number of broadcast ensembles premiering this fall, men are opening up about issues beyond sports, money, power and sexual conquests. They’re expressing their feelings—often to other men—on fatherhood, intimacy and love.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, but it does indicate a feminization of the American male, as the AP story explicitly notes:

Although the idea of the metrosexual man focused on outward appearances, where men were as conscious about the way they looked — and smelled — as women, “now it seems they can, on the inside, feel a little bit more like girls and that’s still OK,” adds [Nicole Vecchiarelli, entertainment director of Details, a men’s fashion and lifestyle magazine].

The men in “Big Shots” are very in touch with their feminine sides. Vartan, Dylan McDermott, Joshua Malina and Christopher Titus play high-powered Manhattan CEOs with everything in the world they could want, except for stable relationships at home. In the pilot, the men groan so much about their dysfunctional marriages, their need for intimacy and fidelity, McDermott’s character declares: “Men. We’re the new women.”

On the other side of the coin, salon.com notes, "Women are the new men on TV."

When you turn on your television this fall, you'll be watching more women kick more ass than you can possibly imagine—physically, economically and sexually. Hard-bodied and smart, rich and aggressive, confident and independent, the chicks who populate the prime-time lineup are being cast in roles that once belonged almost exclusively to men. These broads are cops and lawyers and masters of the business universe. . . . Julianna Margulies will star as a nasty Nancy Grace knockoff, Angie Harmon as a police lieutenant, Lucy Liu as a publishing executive, and Patricia Heaton as a news anchor; there's a new "Bionic Woman" and a whole show about the world's leading incubator of the future, "The Terminator's" Sarah Connor. The flinty Cagneys, Laceys, Murphys and Buffys of yore aren't the exceptions in the new TV season; they rule

And the men? They're not doing so well, Salon reports:

So what happened to the men? Nothing good, that's for sure. Here, for instance, is what happens when Lucy Liu's character, Mia, on ABC's "Cashmere Mafia," wins a work contest, and big promotion, over her boyfriend and colleague Richard: He breaks up with her, tail between his legs. "I thought I'd win and buy us a place and take care of you," he explains. "And now that it's reversed I just can't see us ... I'm 40 next month. I want someone to come home to. I'm going to want kids, and we're just going in opposite directions." . . .

In the face of professional and sexual equality between the televised sexes, these fictional guys are cowed, angry and generally emasculated by the successes of their female counterparts.

The trend Sommers identifies in The War Against Boys, of course, would affect both males and females, as the latter also get the lesson that masculinity is evil. Predictably, then, almost as if TV producers, writers, and programmers had some great vendetta against masculinity, the men in many new TV shows are viciously abused for public entertainment, in the modern equivalent of bearbaiting:

Among the degradations about to be heaped on television's men? There are guys whose wives cheat on them, whose girlfriends get promoted over them, whose mates make more money than they do; guys who get left out of baby-making, who date women with penises and at least one who gets anally raped by a monkey.

In the new ABC comedy Carpoolers, Salon observes,

Part of the horror of this show is how it—and not the specter of the high-earning wife—is actually stripping its heroes of anything resembling self-respect or masculine dignity.

The Salon writer characterizes all of this as reflecting men's anxieties about women's success in the workplace, but that seems a rather absurd explanation as it is at least a couple of decades too late. A much better explanation is Sommers's observation of society's denigration of masculinity.

In these extremely unromantic times (Is there anything less romantic than having sex while wearing a condom?), in which serial monogamy followed by divorce-prone marriage has become the norm, living happily ever after has become a less and less believable fantasy. By contrast, “best friends forever” is not just a live possibility, it’s one that is widely lived. And when romantic relationships are impermanent, life-long friendship becomes one of our few consolations. Admittedly, such an interpretation is an awfully heavy take on light entertainment. But if one looks past the full-frontal vulgarity, even the most immature comedies might be capturing a contemporary truth: Outside the family, anyone looking for undying words of devotion might just have to settle for “I love you, man.”

More to the current point, however, Shubow also sees these films as reflecting a general feminization of the culture, as Sommers' research would predict, and a consequent inability of young men to accept the role and responsibilties of becoming adult males (Shubow does not make that causal connection, so I will): 

why is this new sub-genre being born now? One explanation can be found in the greater social acceptance of men sharing their feelings, an aspect of the more general feminization of the culture. (Though it may seem counter-intuitive, that larger trend might help explain why porn-addicted, video-game-playing, man-children are the subject of so many recent comedies like Knocked Up; The 40 Year-Old Virgin; You, Me, and Dupree; and Failure to Launch. Not having been effectively socialized into masculinity, adult males have become less manly but more boyish.) 

The war against boys seems to have created two main character patterns for the young adult male of our time: weenies who want only to be left alone to drink beer and play video games with their weenie buddies, and thugs who in rebellion against their unnatural education are perpetually concerned with proving their toughness through increasingly loutish behavior.

The fact is, people learn what you teach them. And the consequences of the war against boys, which is after all just part of a broader social war against masculinity in general, are starting to be seen in the culture and in the world at large.

We should hardly be surprised that the results are anything but pretty.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

 
Back to You is an idea devised in TV programmer's Heaven: get the star of Frasier and the co-star and only likeable character in Everybody Loves Raymond, mix them together any old way, and voila, a sitcom hit is born.

We'll have to wait and see whether audiences like Back to You, starring Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton as two bickering news anchors in Pittsburgh and created by the same people who made Frasier. As is inevitable with sitcoms today, the premiere episode of Back to You included numerous weary double entendres, but they passed by without doing too much damage because there were some good things going on.

Grammer and Heaton really must be talented performers, as they manage to make their cliched, cartoonish characters appear almost human. Grammer plays a preening, egotistical anchorman, and Heaton plays his spunky but vulnerable co-anchor (or is she vulnerable but spunky?).

But there are some real issues bubbling up under all the nonsense. The show takes some nice satirical jabs at television in general and the news media in particular. An especially amusing and telling moment occurs when field reporter and would-be anchor Gary Crezyzewski (Ty Burrell) does a live report in what appears to be a hurricane outside an empty courthouse where nothing is happening but some big trial took place several hours before. The TV news penchant for visuals over real news values is appropriately and amusingly skewered.

But the personal side of the show is the most interesting part of it. Grammer's character, Chuck Darling, left the mid-sized TV market of Pittsburgh a decade ago for greener pastures, eventually ending up in the big time as an anchor in Los Angeles and on the track for a network position. However, a childish tirade unintentionally caught on air (a la the 1957 Elia Kazan film A Face in the Crowd) and then seen by millions via YouTube gets him fired, and he ends up back in Pittsburgh with his previous co-anchor and one-night lover, Kelly Carr (Heaton)—that night having been the eve of his departure for Los Angeles.

It turns out that Kelly has had a daughter, whose father she refuses to identify, and has struggled for nearly a decade as a single mother. As the episode begins, Darling appears to have learned little from his on-air disaster in Los Angeles and subsequent fall from grace, acting as arrogantly and narcissistically as ever.

It's clear, however, that he desperately wants the approval of his coworkers, and of Kelly most of all. This is a good if not brilliant observation of human character and obviously will be a driver for the plots of future episodes, but the producers wisely introduced a nice twist in this initial installment. Chuck is impressed by Kelly's devotion to her daughter and the strength it takes for her to raise the girl alone, and when he meets Gracie Carr, he finds himself strangely caring for her.

Or not so strangely at all, it turns out. I'll leave it to you to find out why, and conclude by saying that Back to You deals with issues of personal responsibility and our capacity for moral growth in a surprisingly intelligent way. Not bad for a gimmicky sitcom. Not bad at all.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 06:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The new Fox TV reality program Kitchen Nightmares is, like the Fox summer reality series Hell's Kitchen, an American version of a British program featuring the charismatic and terrifying UK chef Gordon Ramsay.

As with Hell's Kitchen, the new program takes the concept of the UK version and amps everything up to eleven. The spoiled food is uglier, the facilities are in more dismaying disrepair, the kitchens are filthier, and the villains are even more pathologically unfit for their positions. There have been accusations that the producers have faked some of the more florid horrors depicted in the series, and that is a matter for the courts to sort out. From a viewer's perspective, however, what we see in the program most certainly tells the truth about various aspects of the American character of our time.

Whereas the British series showed Ramsay working with business-ignorant knuckleheads whose mismanagement of their restaurants showed the weakness of Britain's entrepreneurial culture—with owners assuming that customers will come flocking for inferior and in some cases dangerous products—Kitchen Nightmares concentrates on character problems, which seem to be the great American disease of our time.

The main problem is simply self-control. In the premiere episode, which was shown on Fox last night at 9 EDT, the manager of a family-owned Italian restaurant did no work at all, skimmed huge amounts of money on a regular basis even when the resturant was operating at a loss (which was most of the time), and regularly threatened both bill collectors and kitchen staff with grevious bodily harm—he's a huge, muscular guy who is both immensely vain and going to seed.

Ultimately, after a good many ghastly revelations and amazing personal conflicts among all parties, plus a jarring sequence reminscent of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (in which the owners go all gooey and weak-need at Ramsay's supplying them with a new, actually functioning kitchen), Ramsay gets the group working together to put out a new, homestyle menu and stop poisoning people.

Even the thuglike manager changes his ways, and all is well at the end. It's a very American story in which the central characters ultimately put aside their selfish ways and learn to work together for the greater good. It's also not the least bit convincing, as one must seriously doubt that the manager will remain on good behavior for very long.

But that' a matter to be taken up by the inevitable American remake of the British series Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares Revisited, in which he returns to the restaurant after six months to see if the lessons took.

Character will out, after all, and Kitchen Nightmares does a good job of presenting that reality, regardless of how true the details may turn out to be.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Based on a superb short story by Elmore Leonard and preceded by a taut 1957 version directed by Delmer Daves and starring Glenn Ford as the outlaw and Van Heflin as the cash-strapped rancher who tries to bring him to justice, the new film features fine performances by Russell Crowe and Christian Bale in the roles of outlaw and rancher, respectively.

Crowe makes a superb villain, and is better than Ford was in the 1957 version. Crowe plays the character as superficially charming—superficially very charming indeed—but thoroughly heartless under the deceptive facade. As such he is in earthly terms as dangerous as the devil himself.

Bale excellently portrays his character's anxiety over the possibility of losing his ranch and being unable to support his wife. Also interesting is his relationship with his adolescent son, who is not exactly impressed with the rancher's level of success in life and is initially attracted by the outlaw's impressive ability to get things done and grab what he wants.

Bale gives his character a stolidness reminiscent of Gary Cooper while expressing the character's deep worries with the subtlety of a Randolph Scott rather than the openness of a Jimmy Stewart, which I think is a very good choice. This film adds more evidence that Bale is one of the best movie actors of our time.

Ultimately, Bale's character must choose whether to make a Christlike sacrifice of his own life in order to provide for his family, and the film does a good job throughout of exploring in fairly reasonable depth the various moral issues it brings up—which is a typical strength of the Western. Insistent traditionalists may not be entirely satisfied with Bale's character as a hero, but I think he is indeed a real hero, at least by the end of the film, and that he is a good man at heart throughout the narrative.

A central theme of the film is money and how people respond to its lure, which is true of most classic Westerns, though most people probably do not realize that about the genre. In 3:10 to Yuma, the theme is powerful both in its importance to the central narrative and in a recurrent, subtle motif of showing various monetary transactions, and less subtly but quite effectively in Bales' character's repeated fondling of a piece of jewelry he owns that could get his family out of debt but which he will not part with because it means too much to him.

The ending of the film involves some behavior by Crowe's character that seems wildly inconsistent with his characterization thereto and what one would expect of him, but if I recall correctly it's simply a more elaborate presentation of what Ford's character did in Daves's film. Ultimately a line of dialogue does explain why Crowe's character appears to have had such a radical change of heart, but until then it seems more than a bit odd and is rather jarring.

That said, 3:10 to Yuma is a good, solid modern Western with interesting characters and moral conflicts and two superb performances by Crow and Bale.

Recommended.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The new Fox police drama K-Ville premiered last night at 9 EDT. It's a fairly standard cop show, and the presumed angle of interest is that it's set in post-Katrina New Orleans. The show indicates that the city is still a mess and that the people there are highly disturbed, some by trauma and some just because many of the good people moved out and have yet to return, while the dregs remained.

The premiere episode included a good deal of the usual boohooing we hear about New Orleans, how nobody cares about it, yadayadayada. Of course, like the others in the media who complain about this and claim it's a product of racism, the show's producers and characters fail to see the irony in their complaints being aired while we never hear anybody griping about desperate needs in Mississippi and Alabama and in other areas of Louisiana that were hit hard by the storm. Oh, well, consistency is a hobgoblin, isn't it?

In addition to this whining undertone, K-Ville includes all the standard anxieties and personal problems necessary for the  central characters of a good policier these days. This convention is becoming increasingly boring, I must say. In addition to all this weepy personal drama, K-Ville has some jerkily photographed action scenes meant to pep things up, and they do accomplish that, if only through the negative means of momentarily reducing the amount of whining by the central characters.

What is quite good about K-Ville is the actors playing the central characters. Anthony Anderson is always appealing, and Cole Hauser makes an excellent partner, as his stolidness and mysterious attitude make a good contrast with Anderson's skittishness and emotionality. Now if only they'd leave their personal problems at home and concentrate on catching crooks. It's enough to make one want to watch reruns of The Dukes of Hazzard . . .

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 03:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The philosophically inclined blogger Pascal Fervor has recently been trying to recover the word progressive from today's radical political activists who have taken it to provide an appealing label for a highly oppressive program of action.

Pascal writes:

The people who have been granted (by the PC crowd) the leave to wear the label Progressive are anything but. In addition to having long ago become the home for those whose lust for power may well set a new standard for perversion, they are well on their way to making a pejorative of the word progress just as they have made an unbearable burden for anyone who is truly liberal. Those who would wish we will not progress could not be happier.

More and more I run across both writers on the Internet and casual conversants who see that "Progressive" must be put in scorn quotes whenever we refer to those who claim that label.

This is unacceptable. This is Orwellian Newspeak being thrust upon us because we people who must speak with each other in order to counter this road to serfdom and a new dark age do not control the mainstream news media's effluent.

Pascal says that this larceny of the language helps the statists accomplish their goals, as it undoubtedly does. As a remedy he suggests the following:

I think I stumbled on the best way verbally to deal with our tormentors: call them Postmodern Progressives.

Unfortunately, the term he suggests is rather awkward and will never gain traction in any case, because, as he notes, the media like the progressives' goals and want to further them.

However, I strongly disagree that we should want to claim the term progressive for reform-minded persons on the right anyway. Pascal argues that he and other good people on the right want society to progress, and that the comandeering of the word progress by a group of people with a very limited (and in Pascal's view, wrong) idea of progress is a bad thing.

But as blogger Tom Van Dyke notes in a comment on Pascal's site:

The central point, in my view, is one's philosophy about human nature. If it is perfectable, then "progress" in a real sense is possible.

If it's fairly constant, then the best we can do is manage the chaos of conflicting interests. (Which was Madison's theory of the constitution---to set all the interests against each other to achieve equilibrium.)

As devil's advocate on this, I can't make the case---even as a conservative---that conservatism is, should, or can be progressive. If we may tap Burke here again, "A nation without the means of reform is without the means of survival," I can say that I'm able to believe in reform far more than progress, and myself would prefer such an appellation.

I agree with Tom here, and would push the matter farther. What Tom is pointing out is that the very idea of social progress is in itself wrong, corrupt, and corrupting.

Hence I argue that the takeover of the word progressive by today's blatant statists is a good thing. The American Progressives of the early twentieth century were a highly deleterious political, social, and cultural force, in my view, not a good one at all. They pushed for statism and paved the way for the American ills of the benighted century just past. They were villains, not heroes, and if the use of the term progressive by today's statists taints the progressives of the past and their goals, that is a very good thing indeed.

I think that today's self-proclaimed Progressives have a legitimate right to the term, and I say that we should be delighted to let them have it, for it exposes the true foundations of progressivism.

Allowing the word progressive to become an epithet for crazies is thus greatly to be desired.

Reform, by contrast, is a good word because it suggests a desire to recast something to a beneficial condition that has existed in the past and always can be. As such it recognizes a sense of limits imposed by human nature while acknowledging that current conditions may be far from ideal.

The word liberal is also a good one that should be retrieved, as you all know I've argued over the years, for it recognizes the impulse to let people regulate their own lives as long as they don't hurt others (and to take care of those not competent to regulate their lives, such as children), which is a mindset that is all too rare and desperately needed today.

So let's indeed describe today's statists as progressives, I say. Let them and their repugnant ideas stew in their own rhetorical juices.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a fascinating article about the biology of sexuality, dealing particularly with questions of the level of choice in what has come to be called sexual orientation, that disputes the current pro-homosexual intellectual consensus on the issue, in the left-wing magazine Mother Jones, of all unlikely places.

What is most interesting about it is that the article strongly questions the premise that sexual orientation is decided by biology, and entirely rejects the notion that it is a matter purely of genetics.

For the progressives to jettison that premise, of course, would be a big change indeed.

The article's author, practicing psychotherapist Gary Greenberg, says explicitly, "Sexual orientation, as we have come to call this biological essence, was invented in order to secure freedom for gay people."

The article considers the matter of reparative therapy, in which therapists try to help unhappy homosexuals overcome their unwanted sexual urges, and Greenberg makes it very clear that he thinks the motives of most people who advocate such therapy are bad. However, he also notes that the reparative therapy movement is not entirely a Christian subculture and that it has real scientific foundations.

Even more importantly, Greenberg equally questions the motives of those on the other side who insist that (1) there is such a thing as a sexual orientation that is largely immutable for one reason or another and (2) that this identity is caused largely by one's genetic makeup.

Greenberg explicitly rejects both of those claims, arguing instead for a theory that sexuality is fluid and dependent on many factors, and that as a consequence,

sexuality, profoundly mysterious and irrational, will not be contained by our categories, that it is time to find reasons other than medical science to insist that people ought to be able to love whom they love.

Self-reconstruction is what people in my profession (I am a practicing psychotherapist) specialize in, but when it comes to someone like Aaron, most of us draw the line. All the major psychotherapy guilds have barred their members from researching or practicing reparative therapy on the grounds that it is inherently unethical to treat something that is not a disease, that it contributes to oppression by pathologizing homosexuality, and that it is dangerous to patients whose self-esteem can only suffer when they try to change something about themselves that they can't (and shouldn't have to) change. Aaron knows this, of course, which is why he's at great pains to prove he's not pulling a Ted Haggard. For if he's not a poseur, then he is a walking challenge to the political and scientific consensus that has emerged over the last century and a half: that sexual orientation is inborn and immutable, that efforts to change it are bound to fail, and that discrimination against gay people is therefore unjust.

But as crucial as this consensus has been to the struggle for gay rights, it may not be as sound as some might wish. While scientists have found intriguing biological differences between gay and straight people, the evidence so far stops well short of proving that we are born with a sexual orientation that we will have for life. Even more important, some research shows that sexual orientation is more fluid than we have come to think, that people, especially women, can and do move across customary sexual orientation boundaries, that there are ex-straights as well as ex-gays. Much of this research has stayed below the radar of the culture warriors, but reparative therapists are hoping to use it to enter the scientific mainstream and advocate for what they call the right of self-determination in matters of sexual orientation. If they are successful, gay activists may soon find themselves scrambling to make sense of a new scientific and political landscape.

In addition, Greenberg undermines another important alleged scientific foundation behind calls for greater public acceptance of homosexuality, by favorably quoting a reparative therapy advocate who points out that intolerance by heterosexuals is not the root cause of dissatisfaction and unhappiness among homosexuals:

[He] cites a study from Denmark—the first place that legalized civil unions and perhaps, he says, the most gay-friendly place in the world—in which gay people turned out to have mental illness at a higher rate than straights, which proves, he says, that an intolerant society is not the culprit when gay people suffer.

Aaron, Greenberg says, is "more concerned with a different kind of intolerance: 'Not all homosexual men want to lead a gay lifestyle. Gay activists shouldn't be threatened by that. I mean, here I am, as a liberal, telling gay people to accept diversity.' "

That would be an impressive change indeed, and a highly salubrious one.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The results announced at last night's Primetime Emmy Awards for what passes as television excellence are available for your perusal here.

The Sopranos won for best dramatic series, to no one's surprise.

Fox, which broadcast the ceremony, implemented a tape delay of several seconds in order to avoid any untoward events other than the general idiocy of the thing. AP's TV writer mocked the decision, as I'm sure others will:

Not so great was Fox's clunky, overeager "live" editing. In this era of FCC pressure and network timidity, viewers were reminded at least three times that the show was on a few seconds' tape delay, with a trigger-happy censor sanitizing the dialogue by awkwardly inserting an eerily quiet wide shot of the Shrine interior.

Getting the silent treatment: a crack by presenter Ray Romano about his former co-star Patricia Heaton sleeping with new co-star Kelsey Grammer; winner Sally Field taking the Lord's name in vain; and "Grey's Anatomy" star Katherine Heigl, who mouthed a certain four-letter s-word when she heard her name announced as a winner.

Yes, how awful that the viewers missed those classic shafts of wit.

However, the AP writer did enjoy the show overall—which proves he's a dingbat.

Posted by S. T. Karnick at 07:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I never watch award shows these days—haven't done so for about a half-dozen years—and I'll be keeping my record intact this Sunday night when some network or other broadcasts the Primetime Emmy Awards for television programming.

However, Rebecca Cusey of National Review Online does apparently still follow these things, and her choices for who should win the major awards this time round are interesting and pretty sensible.