The Talkies: Therapeutic Nonsense

...They take our world hegemony for granted while idealizing an imaginary world of nature-loving savages who live in peace, engage in useful handicrafts, and scorn to tear up the bowels of Mother Earth for money...

...It's nothing to be ashamed of," the doctor feebly protests, whereupon Vitti and his lovably thuggish bodyguard, Jelly (Joseph Viterelli), proceed to beat him up...

...The film begins at the point where the girls, so retarded they are barely able to speak, have been cleaned up, shorn, and returned to their parents on their blind mother's promise to wash them...

...But I found Vitti's gradual assimilation to the therapeutic mainstream, while often hilarious, unconvincing as satire...

...How odd, then, that the men who shoot off rockets should be classed with such proto-hippies rather than the masters of war, just because they don't get their hands dirty and do get nicer cars and prettier girls...

...Though generally favorable, the review criticized the movie for celebrating the vulgarity of the rocket-boys' desire to "escape" from their West Virginia coal town, as symbolized by a sexy girl and a sexy car, which takes precedence over the rocketry by which they eventually do escape and which is the ostensible focus of the picture...

...Stormare and Bauer are as grotesquely exaggerated as any horned and cloven-hoofed devil out of a medieval mystery play...

...8mm is worse than most examples of the genre in supplying us with not one but two sickoes, played by Peter Stormare and Chris Bauer, who are at the cutting edge (as it were) of sexual nastiness...

...Juliette Lewis's mentally retarded character is specifically intended to evoke feelings of patronizing sympathy, the warmer because of the remoteness of her condition from our own...

...The therapeutic imperative, whose natural artistic domain is the TV soap opera, has now spread like a horrible blight to every imaginable cultural manifestation, and is endemic in the movies...

...Already the vogue for serial killers in Hollywood reflects a fascination with the idea of evil as illness...

...All of which I most devoutly believe to be true, though it is beside the point of my review, which was that the movie purports to represent something more lofty than the natural, hormone-fueled desire of teenage boys for money and fame and sex...

...More sympathetically than any Hollywood director could have dared to do, young Miss Makhmalbaf allows the father, a pathetic 65-year-old beggar, make his case for detention of the girls on grounds of honor (neither he nor his wife could have watched them and he feared they would be defiled by contact with boys), without, of course, ever advocating such a point of view...

...1,V James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JVBowman@compuserve.com...

...But the therapeutic mentality, in the arts at least, is itself a disease, producing a kind of anti-art in which heroism is reduced to victimhood, evil to illness, and the pity and terror that tragedy elicit to mere pity...

...It is nothing more than a stand-up routine by an intermittently charming but not very funny comedienne, the former "Pat" of "Saturday Night Live," raised to the level of a feature film by its subject matter...

...Schumacher tries to suggest an incipient change by making his hero smoke more cigarettes and forget to call home to his shrewish wife (Catherine Keener), but there is never the slightest possibility of the devil's appearing here, as he so often does in real life, in an attractive disguise...

...Thinking they're heart attacks, he consults a doctor, who diagnoses them as psychosomatic...

...These correspondents claim that I was wrong on two points, namely that all 16-year-old boys are susceptible to such allurements, and that boys in a grim mining town in West Virginia in 1957 would have been especially susceptible, and hardly to be blamed for being so...

...Like October Sky (indeed, like most of the movies Hollywood produces) the movie is directed We've become superior to those who've struggled...

...And who would be so humorless as to disapprove of that favorite contemporary comic theme, the very foundation for the popularity of "Seinfeld" and "Friends," of artificially prolonged adolescence...

...The devil changes you...

...It is designed to make us feel good about ourselves, rather than to evoke any genuine feelings for others...

...Dramatically, this desire gets in the way of the movie's more serious purpose, as both science and patriotism are overshadowed...

...One correspondent even insisted that the company repreJAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Who would be so lacking in compassion as to criticize a "survivor's" tale of a ghastly bout with cancer...

...The more luridly insane our villains, like Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, the better we like them...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS website—http://www.spectatororg...

...in which Julia Sweeney stands before the camera for an hour and a half and tells the story of her brother's illness with and death from lymphatic cancer, her own experience of ovarian cancer, and her parents' and brother's coming to live in her house in Los Angeles while the two cancers took their course...

...Or if Miss Sweeney's will be the paradigmatic comic film, Joel Schumacher's truly awful 8mm will be its counterpart among thrillers...

...sentative who told Homer that coal mining was "an honorable trade" really should be considered, as the film almost seemed to suggest he was, a villain...

...Despite all the humor at Crystal's expense, Ramis pretty clearly shares the therapeutic assumption that most of life's little unpleasantries, including the urge for power, are best treated as medical problems...

...Nicolas Cage pursues them despite a comically artificial warning from his Virgil in the underworld of violent pornography (Joaquin Phoenix) that "You dance with the devil, the devil don't change...

...It is not so lucky, however, for the culture, and in particular forthat part of it which finds expression on film...

...F or the movie of the month, I am once again forced to look abroad, to Iran, and the fascinating quasi-documentary The Apple by Samira Makhmalbaf, the 17-year-old daughter of Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Gabbeh...

...My name is in the papers...

...68 April 1999 • The American Spectator at an essentially childish mentality...

...Children must be taught sympathy and compassion for those to whom nature has been niggardly with her gifts, or those whom she has afflicted with a socially awkward sexual orientation...

...I would very much like to interpret Analyze This, directed by Harold Ramis (Groundhog Day), as a satire on the whole therapeutic culture...

...Like other pseudo-artistic enterprises, it is designed not to shock us with unexpected and hitherto unseen reality, but instead is an appeal to complacency...

...It tells the true story of twin 12-year-old girls, Massoumeh and Zahra Naderi, who were locked up behind bars by their father for their entire lives until neighbors complained and the authorities temporarily removed the children from the home...

...Luckily for American power and the relative peace it continues to maintain in the world, technical progress has allowed more and more of the dirty work of empire to be kept from the sight and smell of our high-minded intellectual classes, a fact which largely prevents their sentimental protests from being made with any urgency...

...Now] I am dishonored...

...Messrs...

...This is what it is to live by therapeutic rather than honorable standards...

...he asks the doctor menacingly...

...The social cancer that they represent is excised by Cage as self-appointed surgeon, and what amounts to the moral equivalent of an illness-of-theweek soap opera is tidily wrapped up...

...Such emotional manipulation is about as subtle as a coal mine and at least as toxic to the moral environment...

...As if the film's self-righteousness about the retarded were not bad enough, we get another injection of smugness for being also more tolerant than this comically old-fashioned mom of a second sister (Sarah Paulson), who is a lesbian...

...For of course it is something to be ashamed of in Vitti's world, where honor (in the anthropological sense) takes precedence over a concern for one's own—or indeed other people's—state of health...

...But the portrayal of such monsters could be seen as yet another way of making audiences more comfortable, rather than challenging them...

...Woe is me," says the old man...

...Also, it makes the wish of the father (Chris Cooper), that the young rocket-boy, Homer Hickam (Jake Gyllenhaal), follow him into the coal mines as a foreman, look merely perverse and incomprehensible...

...I suppose he could argue that the dishonor could not have been made any greater when he agreed to appear in the movie, but his astonishingly post-modern celebrity-seeking helps to suggest in another way the social canker that is eating away at the system of honor of which he otherwise seeks to portray himself as a lonely representative...

...Diane Keaton, as her overprotective mother, is likewise meant to stand for the prejudice and snobbery that we, wise and fortunate people, have happily overcome...

...Perhaps in the future all movies will be like God Said, "Ha...

...Of the industrial and military might built by the steel made from the coal dug by men like him, the world remains in awe, even though many of their sons and grandsons now see their forbears' sacrifices only in terms of the damage to health, theirs and others', and to the environment that was a by-product of its creation...

...by James Bowman Therapeutic Nonsense S ome of my patient correspondents—at least they will have to be patient as I am now about five months behind in answering my e-mail — have taken me to task for my review on the TAS website of October Sky...

...It is a brilliant film, and I only regret having to recommend it because so few of my readers are likely to have the chance to see it...

...Adults, if there were any left, might have been expected to go on to more advanced life lessons...

...The American Spectator • April 1999 69...

...Vitti is incredulous: "Do I look like a guy who panics...

...For example, The Other Sister, directed by Garry Marshall, is anti-art...

...Keaton's monster-mom actually believes her daughter might "outgrow" her homosexuality, if you can credit it—further cause for our tolerance's self-congratulation...

...More interestingly, the curious circumstances of the film's making—both the daughters and the father in real life played themselves in the movie—add an additional dimension to its meaning...

...Of course, the devil doesn't change him at all, though it nearly kills him...

...For the last 65 years no one knew who I was or where I lived...

...America's world power was first built not of rockets, but on the backs of men like Homer's father, whom the film comes perilously close to seeing as a mere sucker, already coughing with the black-lung disease that was to kill him some two decades later...

...It would be nice to think that somewhere in Hollywood there were a corner in which honor, even in such a dubious form as that associated with the culture of omerta, might still overcome therapy—here represented by lovable Billy Crystal as the psychiatrist Vitti is prevailed upon to consult...

...If evil is conveniently exiled to the exotica of psycho-sexual pathology, it helps us to feel morally, if not physically, insulated from it...

...It stars Robert De Niro as Paul Vitti, a notorious New York mobster who suddenly finds he's having panic attacks...