THE TALKIES: Passion Without Reason
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES James Bowman Passion Without Reason p mUBLIC SUFFERING IS THE PREROGATIVE of the celebrity. In fact, you could almost say that public suffering is what makes him a celebrity. I...
...But then I reflect, yes they probably can...
...Art thou a man...
...There's always been something hilariously camp about the Man of Steel as he goes about leaping tall buildings in a single bound in his cape and fetching blue unitard with the red underpants on the outside...
...As we would expect of this interplanetary visitor, he didn't have much of a human side himself but left all that kind ofthingup to his alter ego, the not quite plausibly human Clark Kent...
...is one of many reminders that the truth of lived experience often comes without context, just like Mr...
...I know I'm in a small minority of conservatives and TAS readers on this one...
...But I wonder if Mel's many fans--whom I expect to continue being his fans in spite of his own recent martyrdom to drink and compulsive bigotry--weren't made just a trifle uneasy when his interminable flagellation scene was reprised in this summer's Superman Returns...
...I MENTION THE TROUBLE I GOT INTO over The Passion of the Christ partly because I suspect I'm about to let myself in for more of the same by criticizing Oliver Stone's World Trade Center-and for the same reason: namely, that it's all passion and emotion with very little in the way of context...
...Approaching that experience in his way makes for a lot of effective if fatiguing cinema, but it is also a cop-out...
...Also something titillating and romantic...
...His (or her) suffering is not merely private but undertaken on our behalf, and on that of all who suffer...
...Lois Lane might have been carrying a torch for him, but it was always pretty clear that he could take her or leave her alone...
...SEPTEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67...
...Only thus can he prevent it from becoming nothing but the pornography of pain...
...Thy form cries out thou art;/Thy tears are womanish...
...But every day I hear people crying for one...
...You might not think so, but it's a natural cinematic subject for Oliver Stone...
...He pretends not to know for the sake of giving us the point of view of the poor sufferers at Ground Zero who didn't know at the time what those of us with a bit of perspective on those sufferings learned about Islamic fanaticism in a day or two...
...He takes her up far above the city and asks her if she hears anything...
...And besides, the religious significance of crucifixion and other forms of genuine martyrdom has itself become obscured by the fashionable wallow in public suffering...
...Singer's film gives more space to the resurrection than Mr...
...I hear everything," he tells her...
...Friar Lawrence rebukes Romeo as he lies "weeping and blubb'ring" at the news of his banishment from Verona and Juliet...
...His new book, Honor: A History, has just been published by Encounter Books...
...There is nothing like self-pity for insulating a person from reality...
...As everyone will know, the film tells the true story of two New York Port Authority policemen, John McLoughlin (Nicholas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pefia),who were trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and eventually pulled out of it alive and reunited with their anxious and loving ramilies...
...You wrote that the world doesn't need a savior...
...With the advent of the celebrity era, however, even Superman had to be humanized...
...There was now no longer any need for 66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR S~PTEr',~Bs 2006 JAMES BOWMAN Clark Kent, though he was kept around, ever less plausible as a disguise for Superman, as a kind of running, self-referential gag...
...As it does with Madonna with her MDS orphans, such ostentatious compassion is there to demonstrate the god-like figure's entitlement to his place in the pantheon...
...The god-like figure was now expected to condescend to the mortals he lived among and show that, like all celebrities, he was "just like us"-only more so...
...All of us who remember 9/11 will naturally share in that in our small way, which adds even further to the film's undoubted emotional impact...
...It was, perhaps, one thing when van Gogh or Gaugin portrayed the suffering Christ with his own features, but when Madonna, as part of her new "Confessions" tour and continuing the theme of fake divinity first announced with the adoption of her assumed name, puts on a crown of thorns and has herself hung on a mirrored, disco-ball cross while singing (or pretending to sing) "Live to Tell" in front of a monrage of African AIDS orphans, we can't help thinking that the martyrdom conceit must have just about played itself out...
...It doesn't note that there is something of a falling off there...
...But once his invulnerability included an invulnerability to emotions as well as bullets...
...Many of Mr...
...She doesn't...
...Out there...
...That, to me, was the meaning of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ...
...The celebrity culture indulges itself in such myth-making because it needs to explain to itself, and to justify to itself, the world of the lesser deities of the silver screen that it has created to take the place, as I pointed out in our last issue, of the real saints and martyrs and heroes that have now been mostly debunked...
...There's only one moment when the emotion is put into any kind of political context (and it is a political context that it needs), which is when the one hero in the film who acts instead of suffering, Marine Sergeant Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), says to the camera: "We're going to need some good men out there to avenge this...
...Having Will Jimeno being pulled out of their ruins only to ask: "Hey...
...An exhibition this summer at the National Gallery in London called "Rebels and Martyrs" traced the history of the Romantic association between art and the emotions of the a r t i s t - a history that runs in parallel to the history of celebrity...
...We also get to witness Superman's all-encompassing compassion...
...And that's not to mention his passion and martyrdom at the hands ofLex Luthor (Kevin Spacey...
...He doesn't even say where "there" is...
...As played by Christopher Reeve back in the 1970s and by Brandon Routh in Bryan Singer's new film, he became all about the emotions...
...As the exhibition catalogue points out, today's celebrities are the heirs of the romantic rebels and artists of the Victorian era, when the fashion for such beings began...
...The reason for this is the residual cultural expectation, left over from the old and now nearly extinct honor culture, that men but not women will be stoic and not show that they suffer...
...Stone doesn't quite know how to fill...
...At least Mr...
...To the extent that this expectation survives, there is still something slightly shocking about manly tears and cries of pain...
...Where'd the buildings go...
...I use the word "him" in that sentence not only because I wish to uphold the English language's long tradition of using the masculine as what arians call "the unmarked gender,"but also se, when it comes to public suffering, the male variety has much more resonance...
...Stone's movie...
...It's not the only way his Christ-figure is more Christ-like...
...His passion for Lois could make him reverse the rotation of the earth and, in his latest incarnation, he's become the one who's carrying the torch for her...
...James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The American Spectator's movie critic...
...Are our boys in Afghanistan and Iraq-where the real-life Sergeant Karnes was later to serve two tours of duty-avenging it...
...Sure he leaves out the left-wing politics and conspiracy t h e o r i e s - a fact for which I join my fellow conservatives in being profoundly grateful--but he's always been a director with a strong appetite for strong emotion...
...And here he's got it in plenty--not only in the suffering of the men themselves but in the extreme anxiety of their families about them...
...Yet the absence of the politics and the conspiracies also creates a void at the center of the film that Mr...
...And who does he think caused this suffering, and why...
...I wonder if even Madonna's biggest fans can possibly regard the sight of her suffering for the sins of the world as anything but ludicrous...
...Stone's friends on the left think not...
...Gibson's did...
...That, at any rate, is how I remember him being played by George Reeves, whose steeliness was as much of the physiognomy as it was of the physique, in the 1950s TV series...
...what does he think...
...For the celebrity filmmaker must be like god in at least one way, by giving meaning to the suffering he shows us...
...No letters or e-mails please...
...Lois may think that she's "moved on," as she tells him, that "the world doesn't need a savior, and neither do I." But Superman knows different...
Vol. 39 • September 2006 • No. 7
