The Talkies: The End of Argument

...Would that it had been the only thing that Hayden and Co...

...Its characters are fragmented and monosyllabic (one is completely dumb), its stories multiple and incoherent, its dialogue minimalist, and its photography frenetic and out of focus...

...This po mo joke accounts for his po mo silence—except on the soundtrack, where He does most of the narration...

...And in the Village then, to be interesting was almost the same as being right...

...And, like so much of our politics, it consists almost entirely of striking attitudes...

...E-mail him at JVBowman@compuserve.com...

...Or hip if you prefer...

...He lives with his aged father and prowls the streets of Hong Kong at night, opening up businesses after their owners have gone home for the day and forcing customers to come in and buy goods and services they don't want...

...Dorman's film evokes such an age, conferring upon it in retrospect that trick of the moral light by which even the period of dictators and genocides may appear—at least by the time that its echoes reached New York—oddly innocent and wholesome...

...Respectably dressed but still repulsive-looking characters like Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin are allowed to open their mouths and show us why Kristol, Glazer, and Bell became more or less conservative (though Bell still calls himself a socialist in economics), and even Howe retreated from the politics of the time to write about Yiddish literature...

...she develops a curiosity about him...

...This means getting to know its tricky ways in a film like Fallen Angels...

...We didn't know he [Trotsky] was right," says Lionel Abel to Dorman's camera...

...S oon, that is, we shall all hold the same enlightened views on these subjects that Garry Wills and the New York Times do, and then arguing, if not all intellectual engagement with our fellow man, will have been rendered redundant...

...became unnecessary...

...We only knew he was interesting...

...THE TALKIES by James Bowman The End of Argument 0 n Super Bowl Sunday, when everyone in the country was talking about the Boy President's recently revealed amorous cavortings with a Miss Monica Lewinsky, the New York Times Magazine published articles by Garry Wills, Jacob Weisberg, and Robert Reich under the general heading, "Whatever Happened to Politics...

...Not long probably, since he hadn't anything to sell in it but things nobody wanted...

...What kind of employer needs to slaughter people wholesale like this we never learn, but the actions we associate with a madman are portrayed as being the product of calm and businesslike calculation...

...But the question of whatever happened to politics is easily answered...

...He and the others in a circle that grew to include many others in Manhattan during and after the war instead argued the big questions of the day, which no one doubted were matters of life and death...

...The subtext of an article like Garry Wills's about the end of politics is to proclaim victory on behalf of the new consensus of neoMarxist, "liberationist" ideologies of race, sex, and sexual orientation...

...The difference between that generation of the left and its successors can be summed up in Gitlin's remark that for the student left of the sixties, "Freedom was an endless meeting...

...But those who grew up arguing the world and who preceded them as the dominant party in American intellectual life, were for all their various ideological passions anarchists of ideas...

...He says of a girl that "She entered my shop...

...And I'm not sure I don't still hold to that...

...So Irving Kristol says of the Public Interest, "We started a magazine...

...Howe notes prissily that the anti-Communism of the time was "so uninflected, so coarse," that Kristol's earliest rightward turn amounted to offering "a back-handed apology for McCarthy...

...Gitlin, Hayden, and other hard-eyed radicals have spent their lives hunting down and killing If politics doesn't matter, why should anyone care...

...As near as I could tell, there are two stories which have little or possibly nothing to do with each other...

...Wills, Weisberg, and Reich offered very little in the way of an answer to the question posed on the cover and very much in the way of reassurance to nervous liberals that they will still make up the political mainstream, even when politics itself has become as &mode as bear-baiting...

...I wondered how long she would stay...

...His shampooing of a reluctant customer in a hair salon and later selling the same man, and his whole family, endless unwanted ice cream confections, are quite funny episodes, though of course completely gratuitous...

...The empire of cool is too powerful to take by a frontal assault44 Fallen Angels may be the most perfect postmodern movie yet...

...She has dyed her hair blonde so that the various men who pass through her apartment will remember her, but she can scarcely remember them...

...The other story is the comic tale of He Quiw (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a young ex-convict who was rendered dumb by a can of outdated pineapple when he was five...

...He helps her to hunt down her rival with a Molotov cocktail and, when they can't find her, to beat savagely a blonde, life-sized sex doll in her stead...

...Compared with those who lived in the shadows of war and revolution, of Nazism and Communism, young people today have nothing politically at stake...

...Even she does not see him face to face, but only leaves messages about his next assignment, finds him new places to live, and comes into the old places after he leaves in order to expunge every trace of his having been there...

...Those like me who are resolutely uncool and conscientiously unhip might consider declaring war on cool if it didn't seem probable that that would be seen as a cool thing to do...

...In slow motion...

...She masturbates as she lies amidst his ditry linen...

...V James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...

...Unfortunately, for reasons mentioned above, I can give little guidance about what you can expect to see...

...The first involves a moody hit man called Ming (Leon Lai) whose main task is to walk calmly into rooms full of people with a gun in each hand and shoot the lot of them...

...The one point of connection between the two stories (such as they are) is a good-time girl called Blondie (Karen Mok) who seduces Ming and who threatens to marry the ex-boyfriend of Cherry (Charlie Young), a friend of He Quiw's...

...And that's cool...

...could think of to do for the last thirty years, instead of pulling up heterodox arguments root and branch...

...Then, I suppose, our culture will consist of nothing but artifacts like the scaldingly hot new film out of Hong Kong by the director of Chunking Express, Wong Kar-Wai...

...Fallen Angels may be the most perfect postmodern movie yet...

...It was the only thing I could think of to do...

...Still, one may be allowed a certain nostalgia for an age when men were men and spent their time worrying about the Balance of Power instead of moral niceties like that...

...Cool attitudes in this case...

...Instead, we must try stealthily to undermine it...

...But their inability to find Blondie is meant to be emblematic...

...Certainly to be uninteresting was to be wrong...

...And why should they...

...In picking up the detritus of his cool but very solitary life —soda cans, matchbooks, etc...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web site—http://www.spectator.org...

...What wonder that political discourse is dominated by the debate over Our President's interesting theory that it doesn't count as adultery—indeed, it is not even "improper"—if it's only oral sex...

...Predictably enough, Messrs...

...It (or is it they...

...Meanwhile the economy is humming away and continuing to make even the famously forgotten lowest quintile of earners quite rich by their grandfathers' standards...

...Or there is only one tie, to the beautiful young woman he describes as his "partner" in the business (Michele Reis...

...But his loneliness, like Ming's violent life and death, are cool, and being cool will surely be all that's left to us when the arguing finally stops...

...When an old friend from high school accosts him on a bus he shows him a fake photo of a fake wife and a fake child in order to establish a fake existence, but he is really that perfect existential figure, a man completely without ties to the fellow creatures he so blithely murders...

...The American Spectator • March 1998 75...

...My son, who is a university student in New York, had seen it with me and could not but remark on the almost obsessive interest in writing and talking about politics that had united the film's four subjects—Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Kristol —when they were all students at the City College of New York in the 1930's and 4o's...

...Or so it seemed to me as I came out of the Movie of the Month, a documentary called Arguing the World by Joseph Dorman —a film which I can only regret that most of my readers will not be able to see until it turns up, as it probably will, on PBS...

...Politicians can only spend their time tinkering with taxes and entitlements as they strike compassionate attitudes...

...But, if the film itself is hot, it is intended as a showcase of cool...

...The hit man is required by his profession, and perhaps by temperament, to have no identity in the world...

...And that's cool, too...

...Everyone has a past, even a killer," says his voice-over narration, but everything in his life is devoted to eliminating his own...

...74 March 1998 • The American Spectator arguments with a real revolutionary fervor...

...However he came to think of himself as a world authority —to to rank with John Woo or Quentin Tarantino—on images of cool, Wong was certainly right in thinking so...

...All of these characters are transients in each other's lives...

...A meeting is not an argument...

...It unites them still (or did so until the death of Howe last year) JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement in spite of the very different courses their political lives took...

...anyway...

...I assumed theworld was coming to an end," says Kristol, "so there was no point in preparing for a profession...

...America's position as world hegemon is now unchallenged and likely to remain so for years to come...

...Some people try to convince us that we should be frightened of Saddam Hussein's germ arsenal, but the likelihood of Saddam's calling down upon his head another rain of smart-bombs like that which destroyed his expensively-assembled army seven years ago hardly seems exigent...

...Even worse news comes with the emergence of the New Left in the 1960's...

...By the time that our heroes get to the first prototype of our present culture wars in the 1950's, this vision of the blue remembered hills of their youth begins to fade...

...His other favorite things to do are to make endless videotapes of his father cooking, his father pottering about the apartment, his father on the toilet, his father sleeping—until his father dies and He reflects reluctantly that it is time for him to grow up...

...it is a means for controlling and ultimately silencing arguments...

...This was what one of the sixties types in the film, formerly of the ironically named Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, scornfully but with some justice calls "armchair liberalism...

...It's just a cool idea...

...No one he knows, my son observed, has that kind of political passion anymore...