Soviet Presswatch/Suicide Solution

...The prospect of an effective SDI, he believes, had an especially strong impact...

...Dikiy told journalist Andrei Golovkov, the center had an influx of a new type of patient: apparatchiks from Soviet ministries and departments who had tried to poison themselves...

...A fairy tale is an externalization of the inward darkness that innocence fears without knowing...

...But I was wrong...

...It's almost enough to make me forgive the fade from heavy metal to heavy muddle with the lush orchestral introduction to Im Abendrot, the last of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs...

...2) the Mandate No...

...Upon returning Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...

...Elvis is still the ultimate Hollywood juvenile delinquent and symbol of America's own rough innocence in the 1950s...

...1, assigned to Lenin, is not to be issued in the future to any other elected deputy of the Council...

...This music deserves better than to beused as a mere leitmotif of passion...

...He is killed not by a hit-man but by a hit-cripple and her boyfriend, who time their sexual climax to coincide with the murder in some kind of weird voodoo rite...

...They were caught in the act by several "conservative," i.e...

...The title refers to the self-inflicted death last February of 61-year-old Vladimir G. Sadovnikov—former head of the factory that produced SS-20 nuclear missiles who was decorated with the country's highest awards for his top-secret service...

...Even the currently iconoclastic council has renewed Lenin's mandate, apparently not worried that he will do much to block its free-market plans...

...Yet it is also somehow appropriate that the voice we do hear is that of Nicolas Cage as Sailor doing a very passable imitation of Elvis Presley, complete with screaming girls in the background (another fairy tale touch...

...Ivan P. Dikiy and his colleagues at the psychotherapy section of the All-Union Toxicology Center in Moscow...

...You don't have to be a Freudian to know that there's more to the Big Bad Wolf than an unconvincing portrayal of animal psychology and a contrived ending...

...In the same issue of Moscow News, a report by the Inter-fax news agency says that, in Moscow, one citizen Smirnov, the first Soviet to be arrested under the new law, has been referred for psychiatric examination to determine if he is of sound mind...

...And it has been that way ever since, for sixty-six years...

...It's like criticizing religion for being mystical or politics for being mendacious or seawater for being salty...

...Give them an inch . . . On the other hand, that recently passed law on the dignity of the presidential office is beginning to be applied in ways ominously reminiscent of the bad old days...

...Here sits the connoisseur of great s...

...THE TALKIES WILD METROPOLITAN FOOLS T et me say at the outset that I, too, Li got sick of the new David Lynch self-parody, Wild at Heart: it's nasty, brutish, and long, as one English reviewer put it...

...Her last words are of a lost lipstick—and then the blood gushes out of her mouth to cover her chin and neck...

...It is, in fact, a fairy tale...

...Zaslaysky lauds Reagan for his "remarkably systematic approach," and says that "as a result of his policies, the Soviet Union began to creak worse than ever," forcing Gorbachev to undertake a liberalization...

...The blood/lipstick comparison underlines once again the connection between sex and violence which the ingenue's quest for niceness tries to skirt...

...Eichendorff's lyrics are here excluded from the song—which is strange, because the voice that we never quite get to hear would have provided a great epigraph for a David Lynch road movie: How tired we are of traveling—Is this, perhaps, death...

...It seems that after first admiring Gorbachev as "a new Lenin," Sadovnikov soon started turning gloomy every time he watched TV...

...After a long search, he was discovered in the basement, where—in the interests of harmony—he remains...

...Nonetheless, the bust of Deputy No...

...At the time, [it] sounded like utter nonsense to me...

...You Must Be Out of Your Mind...

...Like the early films of Woody Allen it is rather a by James Bowman series of jokes loosely strung together than an artistic whole...

...Thanks to "Protocol No...

...He crossed the Atlantic and saw clean, cozy towns and smiling, calm, suntanned men and women...

...The other and unacknowledged genre to which Wild at Heart belongs is that of Rebel Without a Cause...

...from America, Sadovnikov told his family: "It's a fairy-tale country...

...A few months ago, a British politican told me . . . that the old actor had been talking nonsense anyway, and it all came true by sheer chance...

...I especially liked the visual pun of the luridly overdrawn villain, Mr...

...because their core of innocence and vulnerability is still so apparent—and because their elders are weak or sinister and almost invariably hypocritical...

...At this time you should relax, even close your eyes and imagine the taste of the salami...

...Moreover, I believe that the true originator of our reforms was none other than that old actor Ronald Reagan...

...1 no longer graces the hall of the Moscow City Council...

...Then everyone starts to eat the vegetables, still keeping their eyes on the salami...

...policy toward the USSR, the arms race, and ensuing economic tensions in the Soviet Union would lead to social upheavals, make the liberalization of the Soviet regime inevitable, and lead to . . . further democratic reform...

...What confuses criticism is that Lynch's innocents are a killer and a borderline nymphomaniac who have somehow managed to retain their belief James Bowman is TAS's movie critic...

...What is the point of criticizing a fairy tale for not paying enough attention to plot continuities or psychological verisimilitude or for being grotesque and morally simplistic...

...Another slice of the new political life in the workers' paradise is reported by the new, independent Siberian Information Agency (Moscow News, August 19): activists in the city of Tomsk are gathering signatures on a resolution passed July 21 at a meeting of the Tomsk Popular Movement...

...Like Woody Allen's, too, some of the jokes are good...

...The running references to The Wizard of Oz are overdone, like nearly everything else in the film, but at least they should leave us in no doubt about the kind of film it is...

...Communist, early risers, and a tug-of-war ensued...

...Having eaten the vegetables, you put the salami back in the refrigerator...

...Communist party committees, says he, are full of such people—not greedy parasites but sincere believers in Leninism who have come unmoored...

...Here, too, we like the bad kids, the juvenile delinquents (remember them...

...The Communists won this particular battle, but their triumph was short-lived: during the lunch break, Lenin vanished...

...Besides, these poor benighted apparatchiks were not merely apostasizing but aiding a system that reduced hundreds of millions to a condition where they too might contemplate suicide...

...rri he Moscow City Council may now 1 be in the hands of radicals like Zaslaysky, but at least one true Bolshevik remains in its ranks—though he's been a no-show...

...He said that a hard-line U.S...

...Golovkov's attitude may be the charitable one, but some gloating is not uncalled for...

...7 togo be sure, the picture doesn't hold 1 ether very well...

...To quit the party now requires a lengthy procedure, an ironic inversion of the usual rules for joining: the right to quit out of turn is reserved for war veterans and mothers of large families...

...It makes another appearance when Lula's mother, the comically caricatured wicked witch, covers her face in lipstick after arranging for the murder of her boyfriend...

...Together with The Wizard of Oz, his memory stands in this film for all the underlying niceness that these overgrown children still believe in, in spite of their appalling experiences...

...According to Golovkov, Sadovnikov's 1988 trip to the United States to inspect American missile factories was an additional blow...

...About two years ago, Dr...

...3 of the February 27, 1924 emergency session of the Moscow City Council," it was explained, "1) V. I. Lenin will remain forever on the list of Moscow City Council members as a deputy of the working class of Moscow...

...As Sailor and Lula walk away, the smashed car's directional indicator continues to tick, directionlessly, in the background...

...The girl wandering dazedly at the scene is already mortally injured but is muttering about how her mother will kill her for losing her purse, her wallet, her hairbrush—and what's this sticky stuff doing in her hair...

...Unlike Woody Allen's, however, some of the jokes also plumb the depths of pathos...

...Having lost a motion to have the bust removed, several radical deputies took matters into their own hands and removed it before the start of the morn-ing session on June 27...

...The inscriptions are not quoted, but the news brief bears the pointed title, "Insulting the President...

...When many government agencies were being shut down or trimmed, three or four people were coming in every day—and few survived...

...Reindeer, as he speaks to his wicked henchman, Santos, on the telephone about a couple of contract killings the two are arranging...

...All the same, I feel the need to say a few words in defense of this weird road movie about the weirdly named Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern...

...The significant incident in Wild at Heart is Lula's attempting to get some music on the radio and finding only an increasingly bizarre series of news reports about rapes, murders, assaults, necrophilia, and turtles eating cadavers in the Ganges...

...I don't get it: didn't I join the party just so I could travel to Paris, go places...

...And it's not as if David Lynch does not clearly signal his intentions in Wild at Heart...

...Many of his compatriots, however, may have a hard time finding it in themselves to be that sympathetic...

...On July 29, Smirnov, who has no job or permanent residence, walked up and down Kuibyshev Street in the Soviet capital, carrying a poster of Gorbachev by Cathy Young defaced with inscriptions that agents of the law considered to be "insulting and slanderous...

...Here is the 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990...

...Thus, the entire family sits at the table, looks at the salami and inhales its aroma for ten to fifteen minutes...

...There is, however, an ex-president Soviet radicals respect...

...Dikiy, since most party apparatchiks are treated in a special, closed clinic of the Soviet Ministry of Health...

...The salami will exude its unique aroma, so make use of it...

...It concerns the right way to eat salami: We suggest, in all earnest, placing a thin slice of salami on a large plate and surrounding it with various vegetables and dairy products...

...He adds that there was another time when the USSR stood at the crossroads between reform or "stabilization of the decaying regime"—and was influenced toward the latter by the policies of Richard Nixon...

...In an interview in the newspaper Demokraticheskaya Rossiya (Democratic Russia), published by the Democratic party of Russia with a circulation of one million, activist Ilya Zaslaysky, chairman of the local council of the Oktyabrsky District of Moscow, recalls: an old American actor who, nearly eight years ago, predicted the democratization of our country...

...Case in point: Komsomolskaya Pravda last August quotes a remarkable passage from a 1989 book, published by Moscow's Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard), called Eating With Appetite...

...For too many of those who have commented on it have done so under the mistaken impression that it is a realistic drama...

...While Golovkov has harsh words for the Soviet system, he is sympathetic toward Sadovnikov and others who bought into the Big Lie...

...Reindeer, who is eating his breakfast and watching a nude dancer while sitting on the toilet, says to Santos: "That was great s--- you sent in last month...

...To avoid confrontation in the country," it demands the resignation of the Soviet government and the president (and we know who that is), the dissolution of the current Supreme Soviet, the dissolution of the CPSU and the nationalization of its property, and the end of state support for the official trade unions...

...Golovkov urges compassion for such people—not the nomenklatura, but the millions of deceived rank-and-file party men and women...

...But I do not believe in such accidents...

...On August 1, Soviet Central television's late-night program revealed, in answer to a viewer's query, that Vladimir I. Lenin is still a deputy THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 37 on the council, representing a no-longer-existing voting district...

...A humorous fantasy by Leonid Treyer in Moscow News of August 19 waxes gleeful over the plight of Communists: a party member dreams that he is up for a trip to Paris, only to be told by an approval commission that "as of January 1, members of CPSU are nevyyezdnye"—a very Soviet word meaning something like "exit-incapable," not allowed abroad...

...According to a June 30 news brief of the independent news agency DS-Inform, it was taken out in a dizzying sequence of events...

...The extent of the phenomenon is unknown, says Dr...

...The accumulating ironies of the scene in which Sailor and Lula come upon a fatal road accident are unforgettable in spite of their obviousness...

...Sadovnikov was stunned less by the abundance and the choice of goods from all over the world than by the realization that the 'potential military adversary' .. . had already achieved something like his dream of socialism...

...In this manner, [8 to 10 oz.] of salami can last a family of three or four for as long as a month...

...That's the whole point about them: if they weren't those things they wouldn't be religion or politics or seawater but something else entirely...

...in love in a world that is portrayed as unremittingly violent and corrupt...

...After all, who can tell if the unfortunates in his story are driven to despair by the crumbling of their ideals or by the vanishing of their cushy party jobs...

...When Sailor finally finds some heavy metal music they both leap out of the car and do a wild and orgiastic dance by the side of the road as the sun goes down...

...The host concluded: "It seems to me that this is just the kind of case where no comment is needed...

...These cases are reported by Golovkov in an article in the weekly Ogonyok (July 30, 1990), "The Quiet Shot...

...To make things worse, the SS-20s were banned by the U.S.-Soviet arms treaty, and, though the factory was still producing a different type of missile (the SS-25), it was ordered to switch part of its operations to baby strollers, washing machines, and the like...