The Talkies: They Went Thataway

...Furthermore, he's got an almost equally unpleasant son, Caleb (Paul Walker), for whose crime in killing (as he thinks) an investigative reporter on the point of exposing the Skulls' rituals daddy is covering up...

...If the Acadcmy had really wanted to take a swipe at &nerican suburbia, they should have honored Mr...

...And Dan does step forward with his best shifty-eyed, lip-smacking Nixonian manner to do his villainous duty and send poor Hurricane back to chokey...

...Only our hero, Luke McNamara (Joshua Jackson), a poor but honest New Haven townie tapped for the Skulls because he is a champion rower, stands up against these monsters, and for truth, justice, co-education, and the good old American T-shirt...

...How can we have any heroes when all they have to cut their teeth on are the meager malefactors and wimpy wrong-doers that now populate our screens...

...These things are fairly paltry temptations to a kid who's clearly on his way to the top anyway...

...Now, at death's door, they're making up for lost time...

...Yet one reason why evil has fallen on such evil times lately is that, in the view of the reflexive, left-wing politics dominant in Hollywood, money and social prestige--at least when they are in the hands of white males not connected with the motion picture or entertainment industries--are automatically tainted...

...How did I miss out on that...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on TAS Online at www.spectator.org...

...About ten to twenty years older, most of them, than those of the generation usually thought of as having brought about the sexual revolution of the 196o's, these are the people who were young-marrieds at the time, trying to be faithful and responsible citizens, who must have thought as they watched accounts of hippie love-ins on TV, "Damn...

...Both imply bad taste and literary excess and must be toned down for us wherever they appear...

...hero's sufferings...

...evil is not...

...For just a moment our disgust is like the frisson that evil used to give us...

...We might add to these the bizarre little Polanski fihn called The Ninth Gate, in which the devil himself contrives to appear as a crashing bore--like one of those conspiracy-minded cranks obsessed with numerology, and secret ciphers and other sorts of Hermetic mumbo-jumbo...

...She is like thosc fifteenth-century paintings of skeletons in seductive poses meant to portray the false allurements of sin...

...And why should he...

...H annah Arendt's famous phrase about the "banality of evil" was meant to point out the contrast between the tremendous evil of the Holocaust and the bourgeois familiarity of so many of its perpetrators...

...Why is this...

...Such, at any rate, were my thoughts on watching the Movie of the Month, The Lifestyle: Group Sex in the Suburbs by David Schisgall, a documentary about "swinging"-- or, as one ofthc participants puts it, "sport-f--king"- among suburban over-sixties in Orangc County, California...

...Who can be indignant at a corpse...

...As my collcague Mark Steyn pointed out in last month's TAS, the portrait of suburban conformity in the dreadful American Beauty was at least 4o years out of date...

...Like the makers of these fihns, we can only make half-hearted attempts at indignation towards an evil that is not exotic but familiar, even domestic...

...But why does Dan's character do it...

...I simply am not there...

...Like the polluting utility company in Erin Brockovich or the racist detective in The Hurricane, these smug, formally dressed, cigar-smoking, rich white 74 May 2 o o o " The American Spectator guys in their exclusive club don't have to do anything to stand for evil in Hollywood's simplc moral universe...

...But although the Skulls and the Mandrakes are capable of setting Luke some pretty stiff physical challenges, they present him no moral challenge at all...

...Litton Mandrake (Craig T. Nelson), the bad guy in The Skulls, seems at first glance to have everything you could want in a movie villain: He's rich, arrogant, and a judge yet also a member of a secret, allmale society at Yale that thinks itself above the law...

...Not a bit of it...

...Yet without their rich and robust presence, life, like the movies, has become a bit of a bore...

...Even so reliable a villain as a multi-billion dollar industrial titan which is poisoning good, decent working folk is hardly visible in Steven Soderbergh's Erin Broekovieh, also based on a line story...

...A hint as to which explanation the movic favors comes in its concluding scene with a gratuitous swipe at Ronald Reagan, whose presidency is obviously meant to symbolize in ways that will be tediously familiar to most of nay readers this hellish world of interchangeable consumers in designer suits with nothing identifiably human about them...

...The controversy about the Oscar nominations for The Hurricane this year concentrated on the film's factual inaccuracies, including its creation of a villain, played by Dan Hedaya, who apparently had no counterpart in real life...

...But death, like evil, is out of style...

...True, that good old reliable movie stand by, thc serial killer, is still lurking in thc wings and makes his appearancc once again in American Psycho, Mary Harron's faithful adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis's novel...

...Nobody really notices...

...Schisgall instead...

...Well, no...

...Or so most people would say...

...As a result we have a curiously fiat, one-sided movie devoted entirely to the lAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...As long as no one gets hurt, man, what's the problem...

...Thus when Bateman tearfully confesses to his lawyer that he has taken an axe to Paul Allen (Jared Leto), a colleague he is jealous of, and then tried to make it look as if Allen had suddenly dccided to fly to London, the lawyer says he knows it's a joke because he has just had dinner in London with Paul Allen...

...Nor indeed is anybody else in this movie...

...People are interchangeable, like the consumer g(x3ds with brand names that they all spend their lives lusting after...

...Soderbergh, like Jewison, is uninterested in the bad guys he has created, hustling them on the stage to do their rather unimpressive villainies and then hustling them off again once they have served their purpose...

...Did the plot require Hurricane Carter (Denzd Washington) to endure some further outrage from the police and the white-dominated law-enforcement machinery of northern New Jersey...

...James Bowman welcomes e-mail at ]amesBowman@home.com...

...He begins the film by telling us in voiceover that, although there is "an idea of a Patrick Bateman" there is "no real me...

...But what happens when the evil itself becomes as ordinary as those who perform it...

...Maybe those of us who are married and who believe in fidelity to one's spouse ought to be roused to fllry at the flagrant and serious immorality of the swinging"lifestyle," but it is hard to work up the energy...

...But what bothered me more than its fabrication of a bad guy was the feebleness of that fabrication...

...Why does he hate Carter so...

...In our victim-obsessed times, suffering is interesting...

...Well, In our victimobsessed times, suffering is interesting...

...Did he dream his own violent career, or is the world just too busy to notice it...

...Or maybe it's because the people in the film seem as much historical figures as the whores and bucks of Regency England...

...Its serial killer, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), is no scruffy, lunatic loner (as, for instance, this year's Oscar winner, Kevin Space),, was in Seven) but a politically emblematic figurc: someone whose "murders and executions" are meant to be seen as homologous as well as homophonous with the "mergers and acquisitions" he works among in Wall Street...

...Evil itself lacks the imagination to lust after anything but money and a certain social prestige, things that can be obtained fairly easily, at least by Ivy Leaguers, without resort to any evil at all...

...Further still, not only the Mandrakes but all the Skulls go around in white tie and tails...

...Too true...

...Reagan's legacy can look after itself, but one perhaps unintended consequence of portraying the world asso saturated with evil that individual atrocities go unnoticed is that evil is as familiar, dull, and unattractive as it is in the other movies we have mentioned...

...The American Spectator _9 M ay 2 o o o 75...

...And this is far from being an isolated example...

...Likewise, thc headless corpses that Bateman left in Allen's apartment simply disappear and the apartment is re-let...

...Evil is not...

...Neither Norman Jewison nor the film he directs has any interest in questions like these...

...Are they even marshaling an aggressive legal defense featuring a brilliant but unscrupulous lawyer whose slashing courtroom performance we can boo and hiss at...

...That is why he can kill as many people as he does and get away with it...

...When they try to bribe him with money, a vintage Thunderbird, and acceptance to the law school of his choice, he never for a moment considers betraying his friend, the dead reporter, and joining in the coverup...

...By what force of personality or intellect or sheer malevolent will does he manage to manipulate the presumably non-malevolent officers of the court by whom he is surrounded so as to make the Hurricane's life a decadeslong misery for him...

...The word "American" in the title, however, as in that of this year's Oscar winner, American Beauty, is a tip-off to the movie's political agenda...

...Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come," says Hamlet as he looks at Yorick's skull...

...So of course the film-makers who make use of them as narrative short-cuts don't bother to make them do much of anything to earn their keep, as it were, as proper villains...

...Pacific Gas & Electric's counselors do nothing but sit grim-faced as the judge scolds them for attempting to have the case against PG&E dismissed...

...His boy Caleb is as dull as he is, and the fraternal bond, such as it is, between him and Luke (his Skull "soulbrother"), or indeed between any other members of the society, does not appear here as being much to sacrifice...

...Like Litton Mandrake, this rather camp Prince of Darkness has seemingly nothing much to offer us that anyone would want...

...Not that one comes away from his film shocked and horrified by the spectacle of old people having indiscriminate sex ata suburban barbecue the way other people have a game of volleyball...

...And why should Luke want what the Skulls have to offer him if in the end it only means becoming a boring thug like Litton Mandrake...

...Are the wicked corporate types killing or intimidating witnesses to save themselves a few paltry bucks...

...They take for granted not only his villainy but the reasons for it and the reasons for his success at it...

...This society is clearly modeled after Skull and Bones, famous for having as members both the elder and the younger George Bushes, and so is as redolent of sinister things as Mandrake's name...

...Maybe because of the general banalization of evil, or maybe because we have come to accept, tacitly if not explicitly, a New Age sort of libertarian morality...

...And it's hard to blame them, particularly when you see the 8o-year-old lady in leather gear standing up on the stage at the swingers' fancy dress ball and saying: "I'm Carmen and I'm your future...

...Maybe it becomes no evil at all...

...Step forward, Dan...