The Talkies/The Banality of '90s Evil
Bowman, James
with the caption reading, "This is the essence. This is the source of our strength and the token of the inevitable, full victory of Communism." And this is sponsored by the same MossovietMoscow City...
...When the three pals have triumphed over adversity and brought the herd in all by themselves, they deliberately subvert that Rocky moment by riding in to the tune of "Bonanza...
...The wartime defenders of Leningrad, Seleznev exclaims, fought for the city of Lenin, not for St...
...The dead, after all, tend to be reliable fellows who vote exactly the way the party wants them to vote, something that can no longer be expected from the fickle living...
...I think...
...It was imposed in the eighteenth century in violation of the Russian language and Russian consciousness...
...And this is sponsored by the same MossovietMoscow City Council—that, out of sheer habit, retains its No...
...All right, 0 cruel Lensoviet, says Seleznev, if you are still planning to go ahead with your unholy referendum, issue not just one ballot per person but one for each man or woman who died in the siege and defense of Leningrad...
...The old woman's hard-edged clarity of purpose in obtaining absolute dominance over those around her by exaggerating her own infirmities never wavers and shows her to advantage against the background of the soppy niceness of her family, who have taken her in...
...She never tries very hard to destroy his romance with an undertaker's daughter (Ally Sheedy), and in the end she relents and lets the boy (age 38) go to his lovely mortician, who is supposed to be plain and shy but is neither...
...And this one is more enjoyable than most...
...Petersburg...
...Presumably that is the full extent to which a gentleman is now permitted to assist a lady in distress, even in the Wild West...
...At least since Coleridge wrote of the "motiveless malignity" of Iago, novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters have had to work very hard to make evil believable—or at least dramatically acceptable...
...Spike Lee's Jungle Fever takes a less facile view of the evil of bigotry, but bigotry is here, too, most of what is meant by evil...
...It's just like the old folks always said it would be...
...It collapses under the weight of its own lack of verisimilitude...
...Petersburg debate came from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who submitted an appeal to "residents of the City on the Neva river" to the TASS bureau in New York (TASS, May 29...
...Morrow himself suffers from moral illiteracy, and his piece is a credit to God's mercy towards the afflicted...
...here it is the real thing...
...They resolve to take a vitamin supplement...
...THE TALKIES THE BANALITY OF '90s EVIL R ecently, Time magazine asked its readers "Does Evil Exist...
...An unexpected contribution to the Leningrad-vs.-St...
...Too little in this case...
...A "Viewpoint" article by one Gennady Seleznev (May 14), "Let Us Defend Leningrad," argued that the namechange would be an insult to "war and labor veterans and siege survivors," who are having a rough time as it is: "They are no longer honored, deprived of basic privileges and aid, ignored and constantly humiliated . . . by heart attack-threatening revelations about the uselessness of their heroism in the defense of Leningrad and the senselessness of the October Revolution itself...
...It is as if it were due to vitamin deficiency...
...Only the redoubtable Sandrine (Isabelle Nanty), whom they hire to look after her when they go on vacation, refuses to be manipulated and so excites not only respect but something like love in a lonely old woman's granite-hard heart...
...One of the funniest scenes I have seen at the movies in a long time is when 'Fade Danielle and Sandrine abandon the family's beloved 14-year-old cocker spaniel in a Parisian park...
...Now there's a creative idea: voting ballots for the dead (it worked in Chicago, didn't it...
...Chesterton did speak of tradition as the democracy of the dead, though I doubt he meant anything quite so literal...
...For a central premise of the film is that such yuppie-talk is superficial...
...That he is...
...Evil is comic here too, but not by way of self-conscious caricature, as in Robin Hood and Batman, or the exoticism of the mob ethos, as in GoodFellas...
...He is also, as Novak acknowledges, an eloquent and effective spokesman for wrongheaded conservative causes, like protectionism...
...Three friends from New York (Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby), all suffering from some sort of mid-life crisis, go on a cattle drive from New Mexico to Colorado and, with even more ease than Maureen O'Hara is cured of her prejudices, find themselves...
...Others may have charged Patrick Buchanan with anti-Semitism...
...I, too, would like to cast my vote and persuade you that this name should not be restored...
...Additional letters on Mr...
...Her eventual acceptance of a half-Sicilian, half-Polish daughter-in-law proceeds pari passu with her increasing tolerance for the romantic attentions towards herself of a Greek (Anthony Quinn, doing another of his Zorba impressions...
...The devil in the medieval mystery plays was always a comic figure...
...Peter City...
...Novak's lengthy refutation of a nonexistent allegation of anti-Semitism risks leaving in readers' minds the impression that he believes the true animus behind any criticism of Buchanan, whatever its actual content, must be Jewish paranoia...
...The terror of the gentle giant Candy that his mother will have some gruesome accident because he has been insufficiently attentive to her is illustrated in tedious fantasy sequences that, I think, are supposed to be funny...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) judging me by mine...
...There is a complex irony here, for Candy himself lives a life dominated by an old lady: his mother (played in the comeback performance of the year by Maureen O'Hara), whose moral and psychological strangling of him with the bonds of guilt includes encouraging him to eat unhealthily so that he will be unattractive to women...
...vitamin deficiency...
...Near the beginning of Chris Columbus's Only the Lonely, for example, John Candy and James Belushi are transporting in the back of their police van a villain who has strangled some old ladies for their Social Security money...
...Buchanan published two columns this spring that attempted to read out of conservatism the "neoconservatives," whom he condemned for their devotion to "Big Government, minority rights and global-ism...
...1 mandate for Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin (see TAS, November 1990...
...But Buchanan's distinction between true conservatives, who must be isolationist and protectionist "America Firsters," and bad globalist neoconservatives is not just intellectually incoherent...
...Unfortunately, Rickman's performance is the only good thing about the film...
...I certainly did not...
...It doesn't do to be too disapproving of Hollywood's sentimentalism and easy moral uplift...
...Only casually does Novak address the critique of Buchanan that this magazine in fact printed: Buchanan, Novak insists, is "an eloquent and effective spokesman for mainstream conservative causes...
...Bad guys who are not psychos tend to be ciphers, mere fodder for the portable cannons of Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger...
...And, on mother's side, the wickedly selfish and manipulative behavior is really only skin-deep...
...Here it is the stranglee who has the vitamin deficiency...
...Frum's article will appear in next month's issue—Ed...
...and an odd sort of respect accrues to Davis, the religious nutbar who shoots his own son, because he is the person in the midst of a moral chaos whose sure sense of the opposition between good and evil allows him to be uncompromising...
...Any more than that and the audience might not be quite so ready to believe that being closely in touch with the state of nature is a wholly beneficient and healing experience...
...Of course, that has not stopped a search for it by wiser men than Lance Morrow—to wit, a bunch of movie screenwriters and directors...
...The interracial romance between Wesley Snipes and Ana-belle Sciorra is connected with the drug addiction (and consequent lying and thieving) of Snipes's brother (Samuel L. Jackson) only by the fact that their stiff-necked religious parents (Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee) violently disapprove of both...
...But why restrict the application of this great principle to the Leningrad/St...
...The question should have been: Can ace scribbler Lance Morrow essay some 3,500 elegant and not too hollowly reverberant words on the subject without ever distinguishing between evil and suffering...
...Only the Lonely has some lovely moments, but it dissipates its emotional energies in too many breakups and reconciliations...
...Beneath the patina of sophistication imparted by post-industrial urban life there still exists a more authentic, elemental world in the context of which the very 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 idea of "nineties behavior" looks rather silly...
...Here, if evil is not caused by vitamin deficiency it is a no less temporary infirmity and as easily remedied...
...What motives lie behind this practice I cannot, and did not, say...
...Popular entertainment, in fact, has a long history of coping with its anxieties and taboos in this way...
...A referendum on renaming the city is unspeakably cruel to "the people whose hearts break from the sheer thought of such a sacrilege to the memory of the fallen...
...You cannot watch that and not know both that evil exists and that it lives very intimately among us...
...That is about as subtle as this film gets...
...If you are you will never enjoy going to the movies...
...And the nastiest of them all, deliciously played by Jack Palance, naturally turns out to have a heart of gold...
...In reply, I pointed out two things: First, Buchanan himself is very far from being a consistent advocate of Small Government...
...At least Crystal realizes that this is a joke...
...Mother Muldoon is given to offending the non-Irish by calling them dagoes or polacks and has to be severely scolded by a (Polish) priest by James Bowman with a reminder that this is the nineteen nineties...
...So it is appropriate that the medieval costume drama of Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, should make a comic caricature like Jack Nicholson's Joker in Batman of Alan Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham...
...His question arrests the attention, even though, as some philosopher or other has observed, its answer is never to be found in Time...
...Second, if we take Buchanan's definitions of conservatism seriously, we have to anathematize not just the Commentary editorial board, but also virtually every contemporary conservative of any note...
...Martin Scorsese in GoodFellas came close, but he was really working a different tradition: that of evil as comic...
...Even they know that they are still only playing at being cowboys...
...It is clever, has a lot of good jokes, and is relatively unpretentious...
...Two weeks later, Pravda explained to its readers that the adoption of the name "Leningrad" after Lenin's death in 1924 was not, as certain slanderers claim, a dictatorial imposition by the Bolsheviks but a perfectly legitimate response to the will of "workers, peasants, Red Army men, and young people...
...Meanwhile, on June 12—the same day that citizens of the Russian republic elected their own president—residents of Leningrad voted to change the name of their city back to St...
...As might have been expected when they put Kevin Costner in the title role, this is a New Age Robin Hood who has the right ideas not only about the redistribution of wealth but also about women's rights and racial and religious prejudice...
...How about the presidential elections, too...
...if, as was the Czar's original intention, it is to be named after St...
...In fact, it seems to be little more than a subspecies of insensitivity...
...Evil here, in the form of a couple of drunken cowboys called Jeff and T. R., is only allowed a moment in which to appear genuinely threatening before it is reduced to the comic and simply disappears...
...The reason for this is that, paradoxically, it allows us to see wicked people as people: once you discount their mental abnormalities, which live within them like the devils they were once thought to be, you can give them a little character on top...
...But there is again, too, the more general problem of accounting for evil in the movies...
...Peter, the proper Russian name is "Sviato-Petrograd," Russian for St...
...Shouldn't Peter the Great get a ballot, too...
...Unfortunately, it is another central premise of the film that this more genuine world can be trolled for its catch of wisdom during a two-week vacation, after which yuppie heaven will be just the same, only better...
...Nor do I remember hearing him complain about the Bush Administration's "war on drugs" and its curbs on financial privacy...
...If acted upon, it would bring into being a conservatism that could not govern and would not deserve to...
...Candy says he has read somewhere that people do such things because of a "chemical imbalance," which Belushi likens to a James Bowman, TAS's movie critic is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...One of the film's most memorable moments comes when the nice, respectable family sit in conference assembled and it suddenly dawns on them, with a mixture of shame and incredulity, that elle est mkhante—she is nasty...
...That's it...
...Chatiliez manages to make it both real-looking and familiar, not safe and comfortable for us by an accompaniment of cacklings from an obvious stage villain like the Sheriff of Nottingham, who at one point orders that Christmas be cancelled...
...Jeff and T. R. may be a little Neanderthal in some of their sexual attitudes, but it is really only the liquor that turns them nasty...
...By all means, let's thrash that issue out...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 35...
...It aspires to be a Spielbergian action picture, but the accumulated implausibilities of both the incredible escapes and feats of derring-do and a gang of medieval hippies defeating a merely clownish evil by grooving on peace and love are too much for it...
...In fact, that is notably more sub-tle than this film gets...
...The problem never worried earlier writers much, though Shakespeare took more trouble than most to account psychologically for the evil that his audience seems to have been ready to accept as a given...
...The very word, which is often used of children or animals, suggests a cringing, mealymouthed way of characterizing unspeakable behavior and reinforces our sense of the pathetic limitation of the family's moral vision...
...In the course of a 3,000-word article I made one passing reference to Buchanan's practice of baiting Jewish sensibilities...
...Above all, it doesn't allow us to take the mother seriously...
...The trade and foreign investment controls that Buchanan favors are the deadliest form of statism...
...There even seems to be a sort of protocol now to the representation of such characters, since Ron, like Hannibal Lecter, requires a young investigator to divulge deeply held private feelings in return for his helping to solve a crime...
...What a laugh the guys all got out of whacking people...
...T he latest scion of the psychopathic I stock is Ron, the retired pyromaniac played by Donald Sutherland in Ron Howard's Backdraft, which is worth see-ing for the special effects but whose plot is incomprehensible and whose characters are one-dimensional...
...she commands our admiration in spite of ourselves...
...As it turns out, the two halves of the film do not fit together well at all...
...Yes, arguments about how much government is tolerable and how interventionist American foreign policy ought to be are vital to defining a convincing post-Reagan conservatism...
...The name change, pushed by the city council's current radical leadership, had already ruffled some feathers, particularly at the editorial offices of Pravda...
...I have heard," writes Solzhenitsyn, "that your city is preparing for a referendum on restoring the name of St...
...And in pictures these days, anything between the psychopathology of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs and something as convenient as the liquor or vitamin deficiency theories seems not to play very well...
...Love does not conquer all, and the crackhead comes to a bad end...
...Petrograd, he goes on to say, is the right name if the city is to be named after Peter the Great...
...T he progressive belief that morality 1 is a function of chronology is one way to make immorality easier to account for...
...To see one from the inside, as we see Iago and Edmund and Macbeth, is something that we are almost never allowed...
...Here, as in Only the Lonely, the evil presence is that of a viciously manipulative old lady, beautifully portrayed by Tsila Chelton...
...More than one is too many...
...My article was an intervention in a quarrel Buchanan started...
...I just wish they could have got through their adventure without the help of a cute baby calf called Norman, rescued by Crystal from his condign destiny as veal steak...
...No more than Maureen O'Hara are they nineties people, but here it is the older generation that has the last word...
...Petersburg (which it was called prior to 1914, when Germany became an adversary and the German-sounding name of the then-capital of Russia was Russified to Petrograd...
...Just as Only the Lonely uses it to give manipulative behavior a whiff of brimstone, so Jungle Fever attaches it to a story of drug-inspired evil and invites us to decide which is worse...
...Something similar is at work in our film of the month, Etienne Chatiliez's Tatie Danielle, which is one of those movies (and what a lot of them there are) that only the French could have made...
...In the same way, in City Slickers, Billy Crystal confronts a couple of thugs who are sexually harassing a young woman by saying, "C'mon guys, this is not nineties behavior, I gotta be honest with you...
...Ah, Hollywood...
...Petersburg (and certainly not for anything as puny as their lives...
...Petersburg referendum...
...But here it is not so easily wished away...
...Like Milton's Satan, she dominates our disapproval as well...
...Many of the "neoconservatives" I suspect Buchanan has in mind—with his habitual prudence when dealing with powerful people, he does not name names—are indeed excessively partial to Big Government...
...The same ones, perhaps, who clamored in 1982 that the town of Naberezhnye Chelny be renamed Brezhnev, then had secondthoughts six years later and demanded the town's original name back...
Vol. 24 • August 1991 • No. 8
