The Talkies/Washington Gigolo

...r HOW DOES THE STATE IMAGINE...

...And by suggesting that political consultants have complete control over the platforms of the candidates who hire them, it also exaggerates their importance...

...John the information...

...Send appropriate sum together with your name and ad-dress to: Video Dept...

...A democracy wisely provides an electoral process whereby most of the top officials must periodically run the risk of replacement...

...On the other hand, Matt Salinger, as the wide-eyed Ohio challenger, does his best with a plastic role...

...This kind of gross disregard for the story line, not incidentally, is also a good indicator of pornography...

...No one in the movie has very much of it, or is obsessed with pursuing poweras an end in itself...

...it wants to arouse its audience with shots of sleek space-age offices, video equipment, and private jets...

...Each set is equipped to receive a three-way power source (1) the standard 110 AC household current, (2) cigarette lighter of your auto, boat, etc., (3) regular D size flashlight batteries...

...It is an awesome sight, in Washington, D.C., around five o'clock, to see the armies of government workers swarm like locusts into the sunlight...

...John is nearly killed by a faceless assassin driving a Mack truck...

...It is the United States mails, with the myriad routes and mechanisms that the service implies, not to mention the basic honesty and efficiency and non-interference of its thousands of employees, that enable me to live as I do, and to do what I do...

...I was early introduced to the flag called the stars and stripes, and to the eagle with his claws full of arrows, and the symbols for dollars and cents, and the map showing our westward expansion...

...If he has a single passion, it's money, and the things you can buy with it...

...and V.H.F...

...What's fascinating about these movies is that unlike Washington films of the past, they aren't concerned with cynicism and corruption, like Mr...

...For $25,000 a month plus expenses plus 15 percent of your media budget, he'll get you elected senator, governor, you name it...

...Communications, 2940 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90006, or for fastest service from any part of the country call 1-800-824-9988 for Video Dept...

...St...

...channels...

...John declares...

...Just as bone counters every injury with the production of more calcium, more bone, so government tends, under every stimulus, to ex-tend its connections with its citizens and the services it proposes to render them...

...Like the film's lighting, Gere's Jacob Weisberg is a reporter/researcher at the New Republic...

...I never see a blue mailbox without a spark of warmth and wonder and gratitude that this intricate and extensive service is maintained for my benefit...

...channels (2 through 83...

...John does...

...Automobile seatbelts become mandatory by law and by law warnings from the surgeon-general are printed on cigarette packages...

...John is alleged to have an 85 percent success ratio...

...Expensive objects are intended to provide all the excitement modern voyeurs crave...

...only when the territorial enlargement is made to seem necessary to conserving what already exists is the effort of tribal aggression enthusiastically undertaken...

...This is above all true for writing, which can be cheaply produced and since the invention of printing has been a popular art, an art that seeks to draw its support from below and not from above...

...The imagination of the modern artist, on the contrary, is committed not to conservation, which is carried on by the libraries and museums devoted to his art, but to exploration and danger,to expansion...

...Each day's mail brought potential treasure...

...The trappings of power—suits and desks—themselves become the subject matter...

...When St...

...His doubts culminate in a maudlin confession to an idealistic young candidate he is supposed to be working against...

...Lumet more aptly might have called his film Greed—the ambition he confuses with power...

...His career is a case study in victory through defeat...

...as part of a week-long PEN Conference on "The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State," held in New York last January...

...Its instinct is conservative, I would say, more than, as is often charged, expansionist...

...The state imagines solidarity, and resists secession and nonconformity, which is secession on the personal scale...

...but the numerous workers beneath them are no longer subjected to such a risk...

...What real-life political consultant would show weakness when intimidated, as St...

...As he repeats again and again: once elected, "you can do whatever you want...

...By accepting their own assertions of skill, the film inflates still further the reputation political consultants enjoy as wonder workers...

...Power, and a remarkably similar cur-rent film called The Imagemaker, are doubtless forerunners of a new political cinema...

...Gene Hackman, as St...

...As portrayed by the somnambulant Gere, he's not very interested in anything...

...But the film underestimates the whorishness of the whole flock of consultants, lobbyists, and publicists, whether conservative or liberal, that are turning Washington into a greed circus...

...And it's partly because Gere is so well cast that this message is so unconvincing...

...John neither talks about power nor seems interested in attaining more of it...

...art, like a youth, hopes that each day will bring something new...

...He confronts the Ohio candidate's henchman, complaining of harassment...

...John's office and bar—a playground of silver bakelite—is drenched in corporate wealth...

...SEE AMERICA IN AN RV Call American Safari toll free 800-327-9668 In Fla...

...Nor does he bring it up with his exwife/muckraking journalist, played by Julie Christie, who helps him unravel the candidate's dirty deeds...

...Which of them ever dropped a client whose "hardball" tactics were too tough...

...His low-blow commercials never backfire...

...John, played by Richard Gere, flying on his private jet and banging drumsticks to the bombastic jazz he hears through his Walkman...

...John is a whore, a Washington gigolo...

...Smith Goes to Washington, or with intrigue and conspiracy, like All the President's Men...

...The place where my personal hopes and dreams and the intentions and pro-visions of the state intersected most vitally was the postal system...

...This is plenty, and this is enough...

...A must for every car, boat, tent, sports event (see other games while you are in the stadium), mobile home, kitchen, bathroom, office, etc...

...John tells Ralph, his wheelchair-bound Orthodox Jew/computer whiz, to run a check on the corrupt Ohio candidate trying to hire him...

...the artist for millennia has been in league with the state, and has chiselled its propaganda and its gods on the appropriate temples and mausoleums...

...Power's plot is mostly loose ends...

...At one point, St...

...Many political con-sultants are con men, most talented at convincing candidates that they can't win without paying their ransom...

...his part is written so badly that it's hardly possible to distinguish his idealistic speeches from the cynical rhetoric of his opponent...

...residents call collect 1-213-735-9363), before midnight seven days a week...

...In the new versions, all political themes and plot lines are subordinated to someone's vision of corporate luxury...

...The inappropriate, futuristic set for St...

...In its portrayal of a political consultant's sleazy world, the movie looks like a three-dimensional copy of Fortune or Manhattan, inc., glorifying the greed it pretends to deplore...

...John opens the envelope on his jet, he's dismayed to find only shredded paper, so he tells his chubby assistant/concubine, played by Kate Capshaw, to get another copy...

...The movie embodies our current fascination with the lives of corporate executives and the national longing for a peek inside the real Washington...

...In-deed, Power qualifies as what Michael Kinsley has dubbed "executive porn...

...In those days when a postage stamp cost three cents, I sent letters to great and distant men, cartoonists and writers, some of whom deigned, to my eternal gratitude, to respond...

...the printed journals—the newspapers and magazines—that represented to me a world where I wished to locate my future...

...Apparently David Himmelfarb, who wrote the screenplay, has loosely modeled St...

...WASHINGTON GIGOLO by Jacob Weisberg Sidney Lumet's new film Power won't be remembered as an artistic achievement, but it may survive for unwittingly capturing the mood of the 1980s...

...But oozing comes so naturally to Gere that his supposed conversion appears utterly implausible...

...this is because its imagination is composed of the wills of thousands of its administrators, almost none of whom wish to lose his job...

...Low-angle photography reinforces the idea, making the furniture look more imposing, more the embodiment of megabucks...

...Power, in the Orwellian sense of the term, is not even a theme...

...by John Updike Our title challenges the literary man's traditional duty to be concrete and real...

...This article was his contribution to a panel on "How Does the State Imagine...

...in 1986...

...Have credit card ready...

...107-T (Calif...

...John as more hustler than gigolo...

...But an alternative patron to autocratic government, an affluent and varied popular audience, has arisen, and the notion of a perpetual avant garde with it—the notion of an art wherein change, like that in fashion or the climate, is amusing and desirable in itself...

...Also comes with a LIFETIME guarantee that it must perform 100% anywhere or your money back...

...presence is more fluorescent than in-candescent...

...John actually forsakes his lucrative business—at the end of the film it seems he'll go back to his clients...

...The state, like a child, wishes that each day be just like the last...

...I send manuscripts away, I sometimes get praise and money in return...

...Julie Christie flails wildly...

...Caught up in the conspiracy of an Ohio candidate and his Arab backers to extort, bludgeon, and buy their way into office (an OPEC conspiracy against solar energy...

...Early in the film St...

...Each set is equipped with the new 82 channel tuner (rather than the old fashioned mechanical tuners), giving pinpoint accuracy and brilliant, clear, crisp pictures both indoors and out, with an extra long, 7 section, built-in rotating telescopic antenna, giving extra wide range reception of both U.H.F...

...305-531-4202 1 J THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 31 with Power, since it questions the ethics and not the efficacy of their tricks...

...Later in the film, candidate and henchmen discuss whether they should worry about St...

...Communications will send the above television sets to anyone who reads and responds to this test before the next 30 days...

...Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products, an actual audience for their performance...

...his phone has been tapped, he says, and clients have dropped him...

...THE TALKIES...

...But it's never mentioned again, and St...

...None that I've heard of has his own jet...

...But the candidate's malevolent henchman, overplayed by Denzel Washington, finds the letter first and mutilates it...

...Like almost everybody in the world I was born into a tribe, with its rites and obligations and mystic signs...

...Lumet should be taken to task for his credulity...

...And Lumet gives the sleazeballs too human a face...

...John's sodden former boss, makes an elemental acting mistake by overplaying the drunkard's wobble...

...Compared to a human individual, the state is a relatively rudimentary organism...

...All this, of course, for the cause of tribal well-being...

...However, a state will almost never, without a fight, submit to its own diminishment...

...We might also ask why this film is called Power...

...It desires, we must conclude, its citizens to be in touch with one another...

...John agrees to represent the candidate without finding out about the Arabs...

...But Erich von Stroheim already used that title, and not even a political consultant could convince moviegoers to overlook the irony of a Hollywood film criticizing that motive...

...Limit 2 sets per address...

...It was not always so...

...Instead of being suckered by their pretensions, Lumet should have examined the history of someone like Pat Caddell more closely...

...Now, what do these hollow blue monuments on streetcorners from here to Hawaii tell of how the state imagines...

...this is true of its government as well...

...My guess is that the film was edited down from a much longer version without regard for narrative consistency...

...John on political consultants like Pat Caddell and Roger Stone...

...If he really wanted to damage the profession he so disdains, he should have portrayed Pete St...

...Its workers, whom in my small town I knew all by name, brought to the house John Updike's most recent novel is The Witches of Eastwick...

...John's own politics are malleable, and he hopes his candidates are too...

...It seems to me the writer's imagination and the imagination of the state have opposite tendencies and should keep a respectful distance from one another...

...Gauged against the real world of political consultants, Power is an exaggeration...

...I do not know why, in 1967, the United States government felt obliged to create endowments to encourage and fund the arts and the humanities...

...As he hops from stop to stop, advising no less than four candidates on the latest computer-assisted direct mail technology and demographic analysis (defining eighteen target groups for one candidate, including "pools and patios"), Gere emanates a sleepy cool, giving flesh to Lumet's somewhat exaggerated message that electronic warfare has entirely superseded down-and-dirty political streetfighting...

...John becomes suddenly disenchanted with the game he's been playing...

...Consultants are distorting the American political process, St...

...the tribe seeks interconnection and consolidation...

...This is still true for me...

...AMERICAN DOCUMENT...

...and V.H.F...

...The individual options of altruism and self-sacrifice and weary withdrawal and anorexia are too intricate and perverse for it...

...The supporting actors try to make up for the half-baked plot and Gere's vacuum-like presence by overacting...

...Ralph links the candidate to the Arabs and sends St...

...Salary figures replace sex and violence as a means of titillation...

...The audience is supposed to revel in the cut of the suits Gere wears so well, and the fact that his suspenders aren't the clip-on variety...

...No exceptions...

...Add $7 handling for each set requested...

...In truth, the link between the magic of political consultants and winning at the polls is unproven, to say the least...

...And while they earn far more than their services are conceivably worth, not even Stu Spencer charges $25,000 a month...

...Each set is manufactured to rigid specifications of new space age solid state micro-circuits, powering a full 5-inch picture tube that receives alt U.H.F...

...Myself, I ask mainly that my tribal officials keep the mails operating—no small task, and one where many tribes fail—and continue to safeguard the freedom of expression that my particular state's founders rashly promised its citizens...

...107-T, U.S...

...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986...

...It can imagine only a continual health, the vigor of a gently inflationary status quo...

...Despite the movie's antagonism, political consultants will be delighted 5 INCH BATTERY OPERATED TELEVISIONS TAKE IT EVERYWHERE $67 Call Free Before Midnight 7 Days A Week As part of an advertising test U.S...

...He neglects to mention that someone has tried to kill him...

...Case in point: conservative lobbyist Robert K. Gray recently signed up to represent the Marxist government of Angola...

...Not that St...

...John knowing too much...

...He tells them what voters want to hear and how to say it into the camera...

...it's like Mephistopheles becoming a moralist and hanging up his trident...

...Caddell has represented McGovern, Hart, Mondale, and New Coke, among others...

...The film opens with a shot of media wizard Pete St...