The Talkies: Abbie Roads

...It's a self-esteem "issue"--and like most of those, it is a dead canary in the mine-shaft of humbug...

...Such a film is the Movie of the Month, Jules Dassin's classic of t95 S, Rififi (whose French title is Du Rififi chez les hommes...

...wonder how Neil LaBute feels about finding himself no longer In the Company of Men but in the company of the self-esteem peddlers...

...I am not going to die because some producer tried to take advantage of me...

...Unaccountably, Tammy Faye declined Bailey and Barbato's invitation to sing Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" over the closing credits, but that song is by now such a clich6 that it is used to inspire the washed-up football players in The Replacements...

...All they share is the passionately held belief that someone like them, rather than the white guys in suits in charge of the WTO or the World Bank, or the Democratic and Republican parties, ought to be running things...

...I am not going to die because some network executive called me fat...

...And what Margaret Cho wants is to feel good about herself...

...Making it again and again becomes a sort of cultural ritual...

...It tells the story of a jewelry store heist led by the splendidly Bogartian Jean Servais, and its centerpiece is a 3o-minute sequence without dialogue or music that still, though it has since been plagiarized by everyone from Dassin himself (in Topkapi) to Brian de Palma (in Mission Impossible), has the power to take the breath away...

...That was the point of the Hoffmanian catch-phrase, "Revolution for the Hell of It...

...As Jim J. Bullock, the gay co-host of Tammy Faye's short-lived comeback show, says, "The one thing you can say about Tammy Faye is she's a survivor...

...But the common strand in yippie and yuppie politics is the therapeutic culture...

...What an act of vandalism by Neii LaBute to his own excellent work...

...g,<" James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JamesBowman@home.com...

...I don't think it's giving away too much to say that neither Rififi nor life, even life in Bill Clinton's America, is a story of"survivors...

...You might think that there was intended some self-deprecating irony in such a title, but there is not...

...Rififi," judging by the comically dated night-club act in which it is a key concept, means something like "huffyburly"--an understatement (there's another rhetorical item that has lately grown a stranger) for the malign circumstance that gets us all in the end and shows so little solicitude for our desires, even our desire for self-esteem...

...ident Gore we shall have more Clintonsble government-for-the-hell-of& Like his master, perhaps like his opponent too, Gore just wants to be president, to act the part...

...In other words, as the title of Margaret Cho's new film puts it, I'm the One That I Want...

...fou don't need a man to be happy...

...Hofflnan, it's true, did have some political convictions, but none of them was half so strong in him as the conviction that he should be the center of attention and leader, in the public eye, of an anarchic but jolly gang of radicals...

...Not surprisingly, although the film -Steal This Movie, written by Bruce Graham and directed by Robert Greenwald-- gives Hoffman undeserved credit for the successes (or what he regarded as successes) not only of the antiwar movement but of the civil rights, women's rights and environmental movements as well, it is entirely silent on the one genuine accomplishment he can claim...

...Gosh...

...Of course, in the world we all live in we notice that most women, judging by their behavior, don't really want to do without men...

...And the ending makes it clear that this is The Moral of the Story...

...This was to take what had always been a part of political life, its theatrical element, and make it into the whole thing...

...Even their apparently most passionately held beliefs, such as their commitment to legal abortion or affirmative action, or their adamantine stand against school vouchers, are merely the non-negotiable property of three of the key constituencies of the Democratic Party...

...q~at he'll do once he is president he can leave to the pollsters to decide...

...Margaret is the one that Margaret wants too...

...Al Gore's passionate kiss of his charmingly named consort, "Tipper," on the occasion of his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention was a sort ofbourgeoisified version of an Abbie Hoffman moment...

...And, he should have added, Bill and Hillary...

...Thus Time magazine, with its unerring instinct for fashionable cant, asked next to a picture of the cast of "Sex and the City" on its cover last month: "Who needs a husband...

...Of course the old-time practitioners, like Dassin, of noir film-making often had a political agenda...

...The fate on which human aspirations were broken inevitably had "bourgeois morality" stamped on it...

...But that doesn't really matter...

...What an act of vandalism by Neil LaBute to his own excellent work...

...The politics of "diversity" so expertly practiced by the Clinton administration is based on precisely this therapeutic assumption: that it matters less what the administration actually does than that it should be done by women, blacks, homosexuals, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians in some significant numbers...

...Perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on him for that...

...Fortunately, every now and then one of the great fihns of the increasingly distant past is refurbished and re-released to show us what the artistic universe used to look like before the shrinks threw everything out of it but our own sacred desires...

...But they do like being told with some frequency that they can do without them...

...The Eyes of Tammy Faye by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato nicely slots Mrs...

...Neither Clinton nor Gore has any serious political opinions of his own...

...We all share, to some extent, the ideological and therapeutic assumptions of the age...

...Not really...

...An extended if less than hilarious comedy routine on the subject of contemporary sexual--especially homosexual--mores that has been rather uninterestingly committed to film, the picture is utterly in earnest when it comes to the subject of what Margaret Cho wants...

...That is how we know he has no convictions: because there is nothing on whose behalf he is willing to fail...

...The important thing from the perspective of the anesthetized present is that God, be he the loving Father of traditional belief or the inexorable fate of the noir films, is something external to ourselves and not, as he has since become, something for us or our therapists to make jump through the hoops of"feeling good about ourselves" at will...

...The American Spectator - October 2000 67...

...Here we thought that Betty's traumatic disorientation on witnessing the murder of her husband, Del (Aaron Eckhart), and her retreat into a soap-opera world which offered her the reassurance of its banal verities amidst terrifying realities was a kind of metaphor for the human condil~on in our times...

...His less respectable successors are the Seattle protesters of last year who reappeared at both major parties' conventions this year, no two of whom can agree on what their "movement" stands for...

...Moreover, the claim, once made, nmst continue to be made lest the claimant's all-important victim-status be sacrificed...

...At its climax, the film's comic hit-man, Charlie (Morgan Freeman), comforts his wouldbe victim, the severely addled but thoroughly charming Betty (Renee Zellweger) by telling her that (guess what...

...Obviously, the former co-proprietor of the PTL club, like the president, is not the one to know or care about any ironies involved through the benefits to herself of her compassion...

...William Dean Howells said that Americans like a tragedy with a happy ending, and this is very much what we get, over and over again, by fitting ourselves, as Neil LaBute has done here, to the popular moral universe of our time...

...It was also an advertisement that under PresJAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Surviving" in this sense, as in that of the hugely popular TV show "Survivor," takes on its mystique as the ultimate confirmation of self-esteem...

...Although the fi]mmakers appear to know this, assuring us at one point that "every one of those impromptu actions was carefully planned on Abbie's part," they do not make the obvious link to Clintonism and its calculated spontaneities of feeling...

...His new film, Nurse Betty, is well-written, well-acted, superbly well-made, very funny--and it comes down in the end to a re-statement of this very same self-esteem mantra...

...After the [nuclear] holocaust there will be roaches, Talnmy Faye, and Cher...

...Both Margaret Cho and Tammy Faye Bakker are what are commonly referred to as "gay icons'--because both have gone out of their way to say nice things about gays and both are (or can be taken to be) living evidence of the cruelties of men towards women, always a subiect of absorbing interest to gays and lesbians alike...

...Clinton, like Tammy Faye, hangs on no matter what...

...Messner (which is the married name that T~mmy Faye is using these days) into this therapeutic culture that may be all that is left of feminism at the turn of the millennium...

...I am not going to die because my sitcom got canceled," she solemnly claims...

...Especially the last...

...This power, I think, comes from the fortunate collision of our admiration for human ingenuity and our deep and ineradicable sense that in the end it is all for nothing...

...Perhaps he feels towards this familiar feminist dogma rather as his heroine feels towards her soaps: that nothing can happen to you so long as you keep within the comfortable if unreal certainties that both have to offer...

...She just has some characteristically female self-esteem issues...

...Even Tammy Faye has her limits...

...So that's what the film has been about...

...Like Abbie Hoffman, she can be seen as one of the models on which Bill Clinton founded the 66 0 c t o b e r 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator 199o's politics of theatre, particularly when her voice quavers and she talks about putting her arm around AIDS patients to "show them you care...

...Thus will the "selfesteem" of these hitherto disempowered groups (if not, as in the case of blacks before 1964 and women before 192o, disenfranchised ones) be enhanced and their happiness and sense of security increased...

...Didn't we already answer that one back in the days, thirty years ago, when sweatshirts and posters were telling us that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle...

...He had nothing in particular that be wanted his revolution to accomplish, he just fancied himself in the role of revolutionary...

...T his political campaigning season is the ideal time for the release of a new movie about the life of Abbot "Abbie" Hoffinan, who did so much to create the s@e of postmodern politics perfected since his time by Bill Clinton and (it seems) increasingly taken for granted by both major parties...

...And if those assumptions are, as I believe them to be, artistically ruinous, then we shall just have to do without art...

...In case you hadn't heard, fat is a feminist issue...

...And, like it, it is something that needs to be repeatedly asserted...

...People who really have what the feminists mean by selfesteem--that is a sense of self-confidence and independence-do not need to claim it so insistently...

...The point is made nonetheless...

...Power for both is conceived of not in terms of any purposes it may have external to its possessors but in terms of comfort and reassurance to their psychic insecurities...

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