The Talkies: Pop Goes the Philosopher

...The picture is a kind of raw, de-glamorized cross between The Full Monty and Trainspotting and could well depress you for weeks...

...The most sympathetic of them are Fernando (Pedro Cardoso) and Andrea (Fernanda Torres) who are given the noms de guerre of Paulo and Maria...

...Barreto shows much skill and artistic restraint in presenting events as they were and not through the prism of ideology...

...Every guest plugs his book or his movie, banters with the host, exits to the polite applause of the studio audience and counts his money from book sales and lecture fees...

...Barreto's kidnappers are perfectly nice middle-class kids infected with the ideological bug and tragically eager to play at "revolution...

...It tells the story of the kidnapping of the American ambassador to Brazil, Charles Burke Elbrick, in September 1969 from the point of view of one in sympathy with the young, left-wing kidnappers, now grown to the kind of maturity that young, left-wing kidnappers all too seldom attain...

...Of course he is given good liberal attitudes, claiming to oppose the Vietnam war and to believe (as he doubtless does) that the Brazilian dictatorship is a mistake, "a short term solution" to the problem of political stability that will bring about long term problems and make the people hate it...

...Ayn Rand understood the celebrity culture early on...

...The insight that the masses on whose behalf the kids claim to act are politically so retrograde as to put beside the heroes of the workers' struggle those of the capitalist technocracy they are trying to bring down is a moment of perfect historical perspective...

...It may not be the same thing as knowing what is the life of virtue, but it is the next best thing: a philosopher's guide to how to live in an age when virtue, like everything else, is just a commodity...

...Live Flesh by Pedro Almodovar is selling—more simplistically but with greater charm and wit—the venerable old myth of sexual liberation as alternative and antidote to fascism...

...Paulo has to go out for pizza and other take-out food in such quantities that he excites suspicion and soon leads the police to their doorstep...

...I t is rare indeed to see a film these days that may be said to bring with it its own sense of historical perspective, but Four Days in September by the Brazilian director Bruno Barreto seems to me to fall into this category and therefore to deserve to be our Movie of the Month...

...He also offers us wonderfully touching and funny moments as the amateurish but still very dangerous kidnappers almost give themselves away by forgetting to lay in a supply of food...

...Nevertheless, it is full of revealing moments for the alert viewer...

...For what lives on in the aftermath of philosophy is the ethos of the talk show...

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

...The other kidnappers are known to us only by their pseudonyms, and there is a wonderful scene, when Paulo and Maria think they are going to be captured and express a hitherto suppressed love for each other by violating all party discipline and revealing the real names...

...He shows us the notebooks in which, as a young woman just off the boat from Russia, Miss Rand chronicled her own movie-going and her lists of favorite movie stars (Conrad Veidt and Gary Cooper vied for top spot), and we can play "Where's Waldo" trying to spot her face among the crowds of extras in JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings...

...4t} James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...

...But, temporarily at least, torture helps to confirm them both in their sublime ignorance of the fact that, as the torturer says, those on whose behalf they gave their youth were "scum" whose regime, if it ever came, would be far worse than that of the dictators...

...Barreto may not have intended to give his summing up to the torturer, but it is one measure of his film's success that it can be read this way...

...It is a moment which in its own way looks forward to her triumphant appearance on the "Donahue" show sixty years later...

...By contrast, Gary Oldman in Nil By Mouth has created a much more pessimistic, almost despairing view of the tenacity of the patriarchy, and yet with the kind of surreptitious pride in its masculine mystique that seems to survive (in the movie industry at any rate) only in the United Kingdom...

...Ayn Rand's thought represents the culmination of Emersonian egotism ("I will not die," she quotes, not remembering who said it...

...And they are a part of it too: the end...

...Those guys are my heroes," he says—"them and the astronauts...

...One of these expeditions also provides another example of the incongruousness of Brazilian political realities as a taxi driver, unaware of whom he is driving, starts talking about how much he admires the bravery of the kidnappers he has been hearing about in the news...

...The real cutting-edge directors seem to have little else to offer, as I noticed in last month's review of Fallen Angels, and that fact is in itself a datum of some historical significance...

...As a young woman in Soviet Petrograd, she was oppressed by a stifling statist ideology, says the voiceover narration...

...it's the world that will end") in practice as well as in theory...

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

...Alan Arkin does a marvelous job in the role of Ambassador Elbrick...

...Without really intending to, that is, Paxton shows us the true nature of the Randian paradox of an elite philosophy for the masses...

...Not that we don't have our own successor versions of Marxism to endanger the world in the 1990's, but a movie like this allows us to hope that the less violent but almost as socially destructive ideologies of our own time will look at least as sad and deluded as this does after thirty years...

...For the policemen and torturers working for the Brazilian dictatorship are here presented with some sympathy and a strong element of "banality of evil" thinking...

...That this star-struck refugee from Communism should go on to become the Pied Piper of baby-boom teenagers and the Nietzsche of suburban America suddenly makes perfect sense...

...66 April 1998 • The American Spectator Whether we approve or disapprove of the myths on offer in the movie marketplace, we ought to be able to recognize them when we see them—even if they come in job-lots as tediously stylish reworkings of that old favorite, the tortured romantic-existentialist hero who is the nearest thing we have to a pattern of virtue for our own time...

...but "then she discovered operetta...

...Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life may be just part of the marketing campaign that began with Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, but marketing of one kind or another is what movies are for these days...

...Yet here is the batrachian Ayn, black eyes darting mesmerically, stunning Phil and Tom (and Johnny and Merv) and their appreciative audiences with what they would doubtless describe as her "profound" insights into the human condition...

...One torturer says to his girlfriend of the young revolutionaries that "Most of them are innocent kids with big dreams"—an opinion shared by the hardened Communist veteran who takes charge of their operation and ultimately by the kids themselves when, after the kidnapping is over, Paulo speaks to Maria of "a dream that failed," and laments that "we were shouting into the wind...

...It is, as she herself would have been the first to acknowledge, a magnificent tribute to America as the land of opportunity that this largely unlettered Russian girl could spot a niche in the intellectual market for an exploder of various sorts of fashionable left-wing cant—the sort of job that was done much more effectively in print a generation earlier by H.L...

...THE TALKIES by James Bowman Pop Goes the Philosopher M ovie-making, as I am not the first to notice, is myth-making, and the wise movie-goer will bring with him along with his popcorn and jumbo-sized soft drink a sense of history—that is, real life —to provide a context for the myths of the multiplex...

...The movies provided her not only with the imagery of a romantic individualism that was passé everywhere else, but with the celebrity culture that she was able to exploit in order to become the most successful (in box office terms, of course) philosopher of the century...

...Imagine Immanuel Kant or David Hume submitting to a duel of wits with Phil Donahue or Tom Snyder...

...Of course it helps that that ideology—the crude, middle-class, Marcusian Marxism of the so-called "urban guerrillas" of the 1960's —now seems as dead as its close ideological stable-mates, Red Guard Maoism and Castroism...

...Marvelous stuff...

...And in a way the film itself is an ironic proof that Elbrick was wrong, since even appalling sorts of repression and torture buy enough time for what looks like forgiveness and understanding from its victims...

...This last-named atrocity is a particularly good example of the usefulness of historical perspective, since it purports to be an updating of Dickens's classic novel but has completely excised from the story every last vestige of Dickens's moral sense...

...The necessity for such a context is as great in the case of ostensibly historical documentaries as it is for the more overt sorts of myth-making, as we see in Ayn Rand: A Sense ofLife by Michael Paxton...

...But this, even if it were not true of the historical Ambassador Elbrick, would be dramatically necessary so that the young revolutionaries would be forced to confront the disparity between their crude ideological categories and the real world they so unsuccessfully classify...

...Mencken — and win from it not just fame and fortune but the accolade of people like Michael Paxton who consider her ideas "part of the history of philosophy...

...This month we may add to the pantheon of martyrs to the self Rufus Sewell in Alex Proyas's amusingly bad Dark City, Chow Yun Fat in Antoine Fuqua's visually compelling Replacement Killers, and even Ethan Hawke's unmitigatedly awful portrayal of the hero of Great Expectations by Alfonso CuarOn...

...To take a few recent titles more or less at random, Mrs...

...What purports to be a factual account of the life of Miss Rand is in fact hagiography, exclusively given over to recording the commentary of followers and disciples of the late novelist and pop philosopher...

...Their delusion is all the more dangerous for not seeming stupid or vicious but as a kind of blind groping after meaning...

...She is the exemplar as well as the prophet of thatgreat democratic vision that so inspired Emerson—every man his own philosopher—and that has ultimately put the old-fashioned kind of philosophers out of business...

...That is why a historical perspective on movie myth-making is so useful...

...It also brings before us with almost mythic force a foreshadowing of the celebrity culture which, as Ayn Rand must have sensed, would ultimately overwhelm the iconography of revolution and counter-revolution alike...

...Dalloway by Marleen Gorris is marketing the myth of Bloomsburian sensitivity, which is an adjunct of the feminist myth of progress towards a gentler, more feminine world from which nasty masculine activities like war have been banished...

...The American Spectator • April 1998 67...