The Talkies/Pop's Diner

...Diner presents an array of charming, basically sympathetic characters who engage in the forbidden pleasures of male bonding, sex jokes, and what Kauffmann calls "the deer-park mentality...

...Another character, Eddie, who is an avid football fan, makes his fiancee pass a t e s t on the subject before allowing the wedding, where the bridesmaids wear the colors of the Baltimore Colts...

...256 pages...

...Right away a c h a r a c t e r named Boog, who sports a magnificent DA, places a bet with his diner buddies that the local ice maiden will touch his penis while watching a movie (which just happens to be A Summer Place with Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee: a classic piece of late-fifties titillation...

...Gordon Haft of the Dartmouth Review recently came out of the regalia closet...

...I saw Diner in the aforementioned theater when it was full of college students, and couldn't help noticing how utterly delighted they all were by this outrage to t h e i r 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 carefully nurtured antisexist sensibilities...

...The guys in the diner are lovable, and even the girls surprise us at the end when, at Eddie's wedding, the bouquet is thrown and they all reach up with delicate whitegloved hands: not to catch it, but to keep it airborne long enough to land on the table where our heroes are sitting...

...And the shapes of things, notably cars, are photographed from an unusual middle distance which accentuates every bulge of chrome and obliquity of tailfin...

...for his pains, the American professor was dubbed by the old pretender in 1975 a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Proscribed Legitimacy...

...A few men and women of intellect and imagination, though inwardly dissenting, will outwardly conform to custom in order not to give offense to relatives, or else they will cultivate their gardens alone...

...Eliot, believes that nations which have a king should continue to have one...

...This is the element of satire, and of course we should expect it from a man who (judging from his remarks) belongs to a whole generation of reconstructed male chauvinists, not to mention the women who worked so hard to r e c o n s t r u c t them...

...Anglican Catholics, those Non-Jurors of the present, who refuse to swear by the do-it-yourself liturgy and the bisexual priesthood of modern Episcopalianism, have a habit of naming their parishes after such royal saints as Charles and Edward the Confessor and Margaret of Scotland...

...even cynical leftists who, during Vietnam, refused to stand for the national anthem at high school assemblies will play Frisbee and light up a joint...

...Kirk, who has characterized himself as a Bohemian Tory, advocates the politics of prescription, and, like his mentor T.S...

...Andrew's University in Scotland became head of the local f Over 100,000 copies sold worldwide...

...Sir Frederick Wilhelmsen continues to lead Carlists, both in Spain and Latin America, whose political aims have not yet been reached...

...Levinson couldn't say it any better himself, although he tries: "Today women have an awareness of themselves...

...For them, July is the cruelest month: After Independence Day comes Bastille Day, and then the anniversary of the Czar's murder, to say nothing of the July monarchy...

...Barry Levinson is c e r t a i n l y not the f i r s t filmmaker to look back on his youth and say, "Gee, how unenlightened we all were...

...Since there are bishops (and the Anglican Catholics breed them prodigiously), they infer, there must be a king somewhere...

...Placing a soup can in an art gallery invites us to laugh at the soup can, but also at the art gallery...

...Capitalism shows that if we are to SOlve the problems of poverty, unemployment, pollution, unclerproductivity, and crime we must work towards a true capitalism...

...Capitalism is an international best-seller...

...Surely by Martha Bayles the popcorn caper, and a fifth c h a r a c t e r selling his date for five dollars at a dance, belongs to a more pubescent stage of development than anxieties about marriage--or in the case of Boog, a certain gallantry based on sexual experience which he displays toward the end of the film...

...We'll just stand there and smile...

...Anyone who has read a review of this movie will Martha Bayles is film critic o f The American Spectator...

...MaslerCard...

...They live vicariously through the study of British and Canadian politics...

...some, with varying degrees of seriousness, advocate an American throne and would unwrite 1776 altogether...

...Some laughed so hard they almost choked on their cookies...

...Satire is quickly blunted by nostalgia and appreciation...

...And the fact that he does so may be the s e c r e t of his success...

...I t ' s hard not to feel at this stage that the whole thing is a put-on - - o f everyone, including Pauline Kael and Stanley Kauffmann...

...And when it does, it comes closer to the satirical side of pop art...

...Already translated into six languages, Tomorrow...

...lqx' Ir6efmt It.s~l l~i-,di~" / / . , a ~ The Economics of Economic Freedom by Henri Lepage " . . . a remarkable tour de f o r c e . . , comprehensive, accurate, and yet accessible to the general public...

...Most American royalists are Anglophile Jacobites...

...Some have reconciled themselves to the Whig constitution of 1787, but give free rein to their fantasy outside the national border...

...By throwing t o g e t h e r every leer, fear, and adolescent prank he can think of, Levinson f l a t t e n s his characters into a set of predictable a t t i t u d e s : a cartoon version of a period in his life that, in o t h e r r e s p e c t s , he obviously wishes to render in depth...

...For I suspect that today's young audience enjoys Diner precisely because, along with the yellow, the solemnity has been filtered out...

...True patriots will roast hot dogs and risk dismemberment from the use of firecrackers...

...2000, preferably a cadet of the House of Windsor...

...Guys have the beginning of an awareness of women...

...Amid smirks and guffaws, Boog accomplishes the task inside a popcorn box strategically placed on his lap--and everyone over thirteen in today's movie audience affirms that this is not an e n l i g h t e n e d way to r e l a t e to a woman...

...And there used to be a Reverend Wiebe in San Francisco, allegedly Episcopalian, who established a Monarchist League of America whose manifesto advocated the installation of a king in America by A.D...

...I once knew a prot~g~ of Russell Kirk, a fellow American, who while studying at St...

...From the trendy Empire Diner in Manhattan to the photo-realist paintings of John Baeder, the roadside diner has gone the way of the BurmaShave sign and the Superman comic: It has become transmuted into art...

...know that its theme is not merely objects...

...CAPITALISM The Economics of Economic Freedom by Henri I,epage A Conservative Book Club Selection $14.95 From your local bookseller or: Open Court Publishing Company Box 599 La Salle, IL 61301 Toll-Free Number: (800) 435-6850 VISA...

...They were also watching a movie about their parents' generation, which no doubt added to their amusement...

...sen...

...Among these are Russell Kirk and Frederick WilhelmT. John Jamieson is a Paul Elmer More Scholar residing in Livonia, Michigan...

...For the essence of pop art--and pop nostalgia--is not really satire, as many people think...

...When artist and critic agree, how can the audience fail to go along...

...Shrevie, who is already married, warns Eddie that when a couple can get unlimited sex, there's nothing left to talk about...

...Daniel MacGregor of Chicago is the American correspondent of Monarchy Canada, the well-produced magazine of the Monarchist League of Canada...

...It is strange how we Americans tend to fixate on certain objects, like diners, which are too old to look new, but too gimmicky-commercial to look old...

...Wilhelmsen, the great Thomist of the University of Dallas, actively involved himself in the movement for the Spanish restoration-except that his candidate was not Juan Carlos, but FranciscoJavier of Bourbon-Parma, the Carlist claimant...

...In the words of Pauline Kael: "Diner is a g r e a t period p i e c e - - a look at middle-class relations between the sexes just before the sexual revolution...

...it a p p r e c i a t e s . Diner looks back with great sweetness and affection on rock 'n' roll, pink flamingos, and stores where you can't buy a TV set without a hi-fi built in...

...Charles the Martyr which publicly deplored the regicide as the foundation of twentieth-century totalitarianism and issued buttons bearing the legend, "RESTORE THE MONARCHY...

...When the same kind of transmutation is effected by both a change of context and the passage of time, the best phrase for it is pop nostalgia...

...But at that time t h e r e w a s n ' t any awareness...

...In Boston, Diner is playing at the sort of theater that sells home-baked cookies and d i s t r i b u t e s copies of K a e l ' s review to its patrons, so that by the time the lights go down, we are all p r e p a r e d to sit back and watch the sexism...

...In their frustration with the current constitutional arrangement, which most of them regard as a necessary evil, these American royalists have created an international historical cult which embraces all forms of the lost cause of legitimism and which champions every dynasty...

...TOMORROW...

...It may be that Levinson has pulled an Andy Warhol without fully realizing it...

...Somewhere along the way they seem to have heard that James I once said, "No bishops, no king...

...But that is another reason why the pop nostalgic approach is so effective: Like pop art, it gives the appearance of satire without being awfully clear about what, in fact, it is satirizing...

...Barry Levinson's hit movie Diner, about five young men coming of age in Baltimore in 1959, applies pop nostalgia to the details of the era's material culture...

...and American Express cards accepled Please add $1 75 lot shipping and handhng |o all orders J THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 27...

...A fourth character expresses concern that his girl will have to quit a job she enjoys to marry him--to which one of the buddies r e t o r t s , "Aw, why complicate the issue by dragging her into it...

...I must say that at f i r s t it seemed odd that these incidents are all supposed to be occurring within the same b r i e f span of days, to young men all in their early twenties...

...He may, however, be the first to depict unenlightenment in this p a r t i c u l a r pop nostalgic way...

...The attitudes behind these pleasures are spoofed...

...Then I realized that this is pop nostalgia at work, not just on the visual level, but on the n a r r a t i v e level...

...By trying to make fun of both, it doesn't say a whole lot about either...

...Stanley Kauffmann speaks for all such people when he deplores " t h e American male's hatred / fear of women," and solemnly reminds us that " c l e a r signs of contemporary change in these a t t i t u d e s are growing, but those attitudes in their earlier, pure state are the locus of Diner...

...and elder literary statesman Austin Warren would like to be ruled by a native dynasty either of Jameses or Adamses...

...Hayek, and members of the "Public Choice" School--have reshaped the science of economics into a comprehensive approach to the study of human problems...

...Jay Stribling of El Paso helped found while in college a Society of St...

...but in a way, so is the idea that people who behave in such ways are so terrible...

...It is important to recall that, with regard to objects, pop nostalgia does not really deride...

...My evidence for this is s c a n t y - - just an impression, from teaching college freshmen, that although they offer lip service to the values of the women's movement, the p r e s e n t student cohort is just a little bit sick of it all...

...But if we know what's good for us, we won't point that out...

...Local demagogues will invoke the ghosts of Washington and Jefferson and modestly concede that, in their case at least, "democracy works...

...From the dark red lipstick of the women to the streamlined stainless steel of the diner where the men spend t h e i r nights, the fifties look much more aesthetic with all the yellow filtered out...

...For one thing, it alters our perception by using a modern palette, cool and blue, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the warm, garish colors found in films made during the fifties...

...women as the hunting preserve of men...

...M i l t o n Friedman The last 20 years have witnessed a stunning revolution in economic thought...

...AMERICA'S ROYALIST UNDERGROUND by T. John Jamieson The principal feast of the American civil religion is upon us...

...Some say that this is the essence of pop art: that when a Campbell's Soup can is placed in an art gallery the familiarity wears off, and we can appreciate its purely visual qualities...

...Unfortunately, however, we are living in an age where pop nostalgia is considered a valid way to look not only at objects, but at people...

...Tomorrow, Capitalism explains in layman's language how the economic trailblazers in the vanguard of this revolution--Gary Becker, Ronald Coase, Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and F.A...

...Tomorrow...

...An intelligent survey of economic ideas that promises to improve the "wealth of nat~o0s," Tomorrow, Capitalism is about the very foundations of a free society...

...A capitalism where economic and social policies are decided in a free market unfettered by centralized and intrusive government...

...There was no understanding at all...

...These are Tories, adherents of the politics of throne and altar, feeling no less American and no less patriots for knowing what the civil war of 1775-81 was really about...