The Counterfeiters

...And the avant-garde would prefer that the entire book had confined itself to Buster Keaton...

...When we read that "a typewriter is itself a clerical system in which marked and markable objects are manipulated according to rule"--this statement is satire as it stands...

...That is where the element of condescension comes roaring into the movie, like a tornado crashing into a mobile-home colony in Tupelo, Mississippi...

...The implication, of course, was that the answer to his question was "nothing...

...Because the Augustan artist couldn't prove it, he fulfilled Lewis' dictum and turned to satire, a thousand varieties of satire...

...The Last Detail tries to make the audience see that life for some people is truly no more exciting than a train ride in the northeast corridor, but it does not succeed in showing any more than that life might be that dull if people were the kind of people in The Last Detail...

...Pope, like all counterfeiters, was afraid to subordinate genre to artistic purpose...

...with Eisenhower, we need only The Alternative May 1974 25 quote him verbatim...

...The problem is not simply, as ature in particular, has brought us since The Dunciad...

...You utter scholastic nonsense...

...Homer faced ignorance and declaimed...

...This isn't a duck, you say...

...R iew The Counterfeiters NEAR THE CLOSE of the seventeenth century something of a revolution shook the craft of English letters...

...For instance, in one scene, Nicholson tells ar} obviously bored girl how great it is to be in the Navy...

...If Rockefeller continues to focus his efforts along the lines suggested by the title of his Commission, he may well find his fourth bid for the White House as disappointing as the last three--not because his past is too "liberal," or his current maneuvers are too '~transparent," but simply because the majority of the party should be looking for more than another peddler of "critical choices...

...The Last Detail is a compendium of all the current clichds in moviemaking...

...But it is unfortunate that Rockefeller could not resist the temptation to lead his well-heeled Commission under the shopworn banner of "crisis...

...Often we don't have to change the counterfeited model at all...

...But we are supposed to see that the house is symptomatic of the same kind of care and rearing that produced a moronic kleptomaniacal sailor...

...Gulliver, the yahoos, and the Houyhnhnms are ideal enlightenment prototypes: empiric man, barbarized man, and rational man...

...The two guards, one white and one black of course, are played by Jack Nicholson and Otis Young...

...Whoever is writing the ~2Vlodest Proposal" is a brilliant economist...

...The two sailors selected to take the prisoner to prison are experienced navy salts, as familiar with the injustice of military life as Randy Quaid is innocent of it...

...We once ridiculed politicians by exaggerating their mannerisms of speech...

...These considerations are outside The Counterfeiters as Kenner has written it, foreign not to the topic but to the lightheartedness of his venture...

...That is supposed to be terribly meaningful...

...The cheap shots continue as the movie goes along, gradually dragging i t farther and farther into the realm of the wealthy person's fantasy of the poor person...

...My own bias, unlike Christian Centurfs, is that a project which secures the aid of Irving Kristol can't be all bad...

...He 26 The Alternative May 1974...

...It was directly connected with the fashionable empiricism of such figureheads as Newton and Locke, according to which traditional metaphor seemed childishly unreal...

...Hugh Kenner's The hol's mimicry of a Campbell Soup Co...

...and Time magazine notwithstanding, I believe his shift to the Right may involve something more genuine than an attempt to soothe suspicious, conservative Republicans...

...It is a man's job, he says, standing up on the bridge with the spray billowing all around, Suddenly he _9 notices her smirks and says, defeated by a teenage girl's mockery, that the best thing about his job is that he has a sexy uniform...

...This is the myth of the sharpster teaching the rube to be sharp...

...The movie then becomes, despite Nichoson's best efforts, an invitation for the audience to sneer at the life of people of inferior social station to those in the audience, few of whom, no doubt, think that beer is the world's greatest drink...

...Art historians will wish he mentioned a Baroque painting or a Mannerist bust...

...Warhol merely signs a soup can and le voila, un chef-d'oeuvre...

...It began when the metaphysical poets fell into obscurity and mysticism-their work dying the tortured death they always seemed to wish for i t - - and it ended when a totally different sort of writer took their place: the "Augustan," the eighteenth-century gentleman of Reason...

...Ever since science and technology rendered art per se an inferiol' reflection of nature, a vague and "prettied-up" way of saying something more clearly presentable as fact, the artist's defense :has been to counterfeit fact...

...Furthermore, I have a fair measure of respect for Nelson Rockefeller...

...Another example of failed cheap shots-by the time Quaid is near the end of his journey, he too has summoned the nerve to tell waiters to take back improperly prepared food...

...Counterunique attempt to solve the mystery, to feiting is one of the awful costs of modern show our imagination just where art, liter- civilization...

...For all we know, Averell Harriman's house might be messy and filled with empty whiskey bottles sometimes...

...He translated epics while he authored mock-epics...

...Indeed, all modern genres are part of this effort--from Swift's forged happened, as opposed to why it happened, "modest" proposal (political satire is born) is a mystery, for we are still dragging our- to Defoe's forged diary (the novel is born) selves through the age that Dryden to Wordsworth alias the unlettered natuheralded, namely, the age of art under the ralist (nature poetry is born) to Andy Warshadow of Reason...

...He is never really into his role...

...Finally, the most pathetic example of sloppy sentimentalism that does not fly: Quaid is taken to a place where he can make an identification bracelet that will designate him as any rank he wishes...

...Banfield cites some telling instances of crisis thinking at work--the best, perhaps, being that of the young rioter, who in the context of the 'tracial" and 'hlrban" crises became convinced that '%e was not a boy out raising hell but a victim of injustice fighting for a college education...

...The "story" unfolds as Nicholson and Young take pity on Quaid, despite his innocent kleptomania, and decide to show him some "fun...

...One of Kenner's favorites is the scientist Alan M. Turing who invented the Turing Machine...

...He somehow keeps his persona at some distance from his person...

...asCounterfeiters is a remarkable and perhaps sembly line (pop~ art is born...

...But it does not work because sending back food is insignificant as an accomplishment, and because we suspect that everyone connected with the film knows it...

...She lives in a miserable house in Camden, New Jersey...

...But since those characters ring so false, the movie says no more than that it is a hollow, boring movie about characters to whom one cannot relate...

...Will it be good art...

...More important by far, it is almost a parody of how to make a boring film...

...The house is messy and littered with empty whiskey bottles...

...It is not history or literary criticism, though it overflows with a humor well acquainted with both...

...today we face skepticism and deceive...

...We know, or at least we think we know, why this revolution took place...

...He is always a little bit above it, looking down upon it...

...Timothy Wheeler's examination of the "energy crisis" in last month's Alternative is an equally persuasive presentation of the virtues of the crisis mentality, in a somewhat different setting...

...That's how much fun it is to watch The Last Detail...

...You intuit that it lacks duckness (anatitas...

...Artistry itself is made to seem fortuitous...

...Ruskin wrote, that mass production competes with art in technique, but rather that mass production is a principle which competes with art in legitimacy...

...Nicholson is the man who can consider it a triumph of staggering proportions to get a cheeseburger sent back so that the cheese on it is properly melted...

...Jack Nicholson, however, is the master of self-delusion, a person who has made it to stardom by playing men who sometimes thought they were something better than they were, yet knew, in their heart of hearts, that they were no better than they feared...

...He is also the man who can lean back in the cheapest looking vinyl chair on earth, with his arms on its spindly wrought iron, in the waiting room of a seamy whorehousc, and look down at his shoes and say to his black companion, '~I guess we're just lifers, huhT' When he says that, he means that he is not only in the Navy for life, but he is in life, at a very low level, for life...

...Nicholson and Quaid make a slight detour to the home of Quaid's mother...

...Nicholson is repellent though because he is so obviously yet a third character--an actor looking down his and the director's and the writer's nose at the person he is playing...

...Robinson Crusoe is an exemplary middle-class entrepreneur...

...Kenner's shotgun-like wit, on the other hand, leaves wide spaces untouched...

...In the heyday of the Royal Society it was in vogue to be seen not with a sword or penquill, but with a magnifying glass hanging from your pocket...

...Objective truth," of course, had a strangle hold on that age, a hold that tightened until reality had no property save "extension, hardness, and color" (Locke) and language had become a mere labeling machine for atomized pieces of data...

...The world, concludes Kenner, is becoming one vast musde sans murs Where the proper person can transform almost anything into art...

...Counterfeiting is his last chance to be taken seriously...

...The Counterfeiters is a strikingly ambitious journey, and if it is guilty of bewildering gaps, so does it entertain and enlighten...

...One expects this mentality as a substitute for analysis from any number of journals and individuals--but not, one would hope, from the next Republican presidential nominee...

...Of the latter, little is known except that he is so good that butter wouldn't melt in his mouth...

...To identify a thing was to describe its function empirically...

...Art, according to Kenner, has fallen into just this paradox over the last three centuries, only the artist must distinguish not between a real person and a Turing-person, but between reality and increasingly sophisticated systems of knowledge...

...If they could be wooden and prosy students of Neoclassical doctrine, they could also be modern in a way that the later Romantics could not...

...It may, of course, be premature to criticize the Commission on Critical Choices on such grounds...

...The moral is clear: to solve a good counterfeit is to create a better counterfeit...

...Prove that it's not a duck...

...The artist's forgery must appear to obey a rational method and fool our squintingly rational gaze...

...Even Alexander Pope, who until his midtwenties shaped his career after Virgil's, speaks out as his urbane Horatian self not nearly so often as he crafts paltry substance with breathtaking style...

...When the sailors arrive, she is not there, and they open the door and look inside...

...To satirize something is to counterfeit it, to reproduce it (in the manner of Vaucanson's contraption) with such care that even its absurdity is manifest...

...Interspersed among commentaries on Pope, Swift, and Defoe are tireless sorties to a crowd as colorful as they come (including, for example, Buster Keaton and Charles Babbage and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin...

...At this point, the first three cheap shots of the movie are squeezed off in quick succession: ~The convicted sailor has been sentenced, for stealing $40.00 from a polio collection box, to eight years of hard labor, because polio is the pet charity of the naval base commander's wife...

...By quoting Wyndam Lewis on the frontispiecem'~echerever there is objective truth there is satire"---Kenner defines the essential predicament of Augustan literature...

...It also reflected an exhaustion of the intense introspection of the age of Reformation...

...This book is quite short (168 pages, better suited in all respects to paper than to hard cover...

...Counterfeiting is ndw an accepted form of art...

...The story of The Last Detail is that a moronic sailor, playe d by Randy Quaid, has committed a crime and must be transported by two other sailors from the Norfolk naval base to the brig at Portsmouth, New Hampshire...

...Kenner's important achievement is his much-needed emphasis on the Augustans as innovators trying stoically yet defensively to make sense out of a new world...

...With the passing of Cowley in 1667 the centuries-old role of poet as divine muse and preacher was no longer believable...

...He never got married becausehe had to support his ailing mother...

...Dryden, who was then just rising to fame, initiated the new role of poet as arbiter of good judgment and taste...

...Kenner cites the French philosopher Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782) who "exhibited in Paris a mechanical duck which could waddle and splash, beat the air with detailed feathered wings, wag its head, quack, pick up grain, ingest this with swallowing movements, and eventually excrete the residue...

...The Turing Machine is a computer programmed to disguise itself, in response to questions, as a human being...

...Nor do I doubt that the collective talents of the members of the Commission may yield some intelligent and even valuable work, in addition to the standard quota of pap...

...that it didn't come from an egg...

...In a world overflowing with rational systems, political, economic, religious--even classical literature had become a system, replete with rules--the good artist is a good mimic...

...It is condescending, dull, and pointless...

...The convicted sailor is a person who is so innocent and so dumb that he makes a cocker spaniel seem like Charles Colson...

...Now we in the audience know that Nicholson knows that it really is not so much fun to do those things...

...With a good enough program, a Turing-person is indistinguishable from a real person, unless we observers find a better definition of what a real person is than the one used by the machine...

...He is simply not convinced that it is fun, and it is beyond the range of his ability, at least so far, to persuade us that he is having a really great time...

...And it is not what you think it is...

...This question Kenner doesn't handle, though if it's the only art we might just as well ask, is it a tolerable civilization which produces such art...

...It is supposed to show us something about how '~they" live, but it really shows nothing at all...

...Literature students will wonder whatever happened to Milton...

...But exactly what by Hugh Kenner paper Doubleday Anchor $1.95 m, In other words, we test the Turing-fake against our own, superior fake...

...un" for Nicholson, Quaid, and Young is supposed to be having a really good time drinking beer in a parking lot in Washington, D.C., getting terribly drunk in a crowded hotel room in Washington, also on beer ('~rhe greatest drink in the world," says Nicholson), watching hare krishna chanters in New York, and then visiting a depressing house of ill repute in Boston...

...As long as the technological progress woven into our environment becomes ever less comprehensible to the intelligent mind, we can infer from Kenner that the urge to counterfeit will grow...

...It simply doesn't work...

...Neil Howe The Talkies by Benjamin Stein The Last Detail IMAGINE HOW MUCH fun it would be to ride from Norfolk, Virginia, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, by train and bus with a sailor who kept telling you jokes and stories you had heard before...

...A friend remarked, after seeing The Last Detail, that he wondered what had been left on the cutting-room floor when he saw what had been left in...