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...When Douglas at last has Sally cornered, instead of cringing in terror as both he and we might have expected, she defies him...

...Hopke concentrates on the sexual aspect of the imagery to the exclusion of its other aspects...

...Are we to believe that entrepreneuring in the arts is less exploitative than in merchandising because Art is more spiritual than Commerce...

...sometimes it dangles by the hair from Judith's fist...

...think about it) words--e.g., mass media, manipulation, suggestibility, selfdeception, pudenda, make-believe, trendiness--that are more to the point in talking about Chicago than hazy references to Germanic authorities...

...At the risk of seeming to hint darkly, I must note that Hopke finds phallic symbols where there are none and misses the business...

...yet this was not the crux of my major objection...

...After Chapman shot Lennon, he sat down on the curb outside the Dakota and read J.D...

...Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye while waiting for the police...

...The Dinner Party is womandominated to the point of sacrifice...

...and true to Sally's word, Bacall went into Woman of the Year on Broadway as soon as The Fan's shooting schedule was completed...

...So is the sentimentalizing of a labor stratagem that utilizes piecework and a pool of female labor in much the same way that manufacturers of clothing and micro-electric components utilize unskilled women...

...The same could have been said of John Wanamaker's career...

...At onepoint, for instance, the movie's title character, Douglas (Michael Biehn), complains in a fan letter that $ally's secretary (MauII II I l l l l I II I 9 reen Stapleton) keeps sending him the same old photograph of Sally, the one where she's atop the piano being played by Harry Truman...

...I've had enough of this reign of terror...

...This it is that prompted the collective sigh of relief I heard when Sally turns on Douglas...

...Like Bacall, the film's Sally Ross is a star of stage and screen who lives in a West-Side Manhattan coop-Bacall is a resident of the famed Dakota--and Sally's apartment is full of Bacall's memorabilia...

...I will not be a victim...

...If a bravura performance can save this actress, the scene implies, maybe our ordinariness will somehow protect us...

...she declares...

...Here is where art blurs into real life...

...The equation Sally makes between her and us blends with the one the movie makes between a fan and an assailant...

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...PHILIP SCHARPER CROSS CURRENTS 103 Van Houten Fields West Nyack, N.Y...

...sometimes, as in Botticelli's interpretation, it lies on a plate like a ham--an incomparable image of impotence, of power brought low...

...But in this case the movie's timeliness --or, rather, its untimeliness--casts a strange, disconcerting light over the landscape around it...

...His attack on Lennon was obviously motivated, at least in part, by desire to escape from the reality of his own life into the pure art of media coverage and notoriety in which he imagined Lennon lived...

...Its current, inevitably brief appearance in the theaters illuminates our culture the way a military flare floating back to earth lights up for an instant the alien terrain below...

...Besides, no matter the supposed intention behind Chicago's thumb-sized knife, the effect--and art is nothing if not rigged for effect--is to trivialize and make laughable the act that it represents...

...In her self-defense was a release from the incessant anxiety that goes with being a fan, a waiver of the responsibility that the attack on Lennon, or Reagan, would instill in us...

...While I rejected ones that are there...

...It lets her strike an effective pose with Douglas...

...Genitalia are as amenable to artistic intepretation as a hand or a clavicle...

...This twist is a bit of high movie melodrama, pure, marvelous, unabashed hokum of the sort that makes a thriller like this enjoyable and, as a rule, forgettable...

...As demented as Chapman's act was, even Lennon's most dedicated fan can't help feeling some share of the blame...

...MAUREEN MULLARKEY ~1 ~ I I Screen III I - II1 IIII II [I L ROOMS AT THE TOP A DISCONCERTING FAN DANCE T HE CLOSENESS with which The Fan parallels events in the real world must give the film's star, Lauren Bacall, the heebie-jeebies...

...Actually, Bacall has been too true to Sally's word, for "cockamamie" is an apt description of her Tony-award-winning turkey...

...Out of the hundreds who worked on The Dinner Party at their own expense, there were only four paid linch-pins, three of whom were men...

...And this is what The Fan offers the public some respite from...

...I dismissed it because it was simpering, banal and, no, not all that different from misogynistic male representations...

...The character of Hopke's complaint--opening with reference to my sexuality and closing with comment on my presumed background--leaves me thinking here is a man sorely threatened by impiety as well as by the sexual content of The Dinner Party...

...Hopke insists on ignoring the distincThe emblem of earthly (male, if you, tion between a transient body of volunlike) power in depictions of the Judith story is the head of Holofernes...

...Then her jumbled-up speech merges into a larger confusion between fantasy and reality that hovers over the film because of Lennon's murder...

...Scriptwriters Priscilla Chapman and John Hartwell have adapted a Bob Randall novel so that it fits Bacall's career...

...Nonetheless, Sally's speech makes a cunning appeal to us when she identifies celebrities like herself with ordinary people, like you and me, who might some day be hostages on an airplane or casualties in a bombing...

...Like the dance numbers in the movie, those Bacall does in the show consist primarily of her being trundled around the stage by chorus boys like Mae West on her couch...

...Could it be that Hopke is afraid of being thought a prig or a chauvinist or a philistine if he refuses to swallow whole everything put to boil in the feminist pot...

...A quarterly review to explore the implications of Christianity for our times C R 0 ~ "there is no journal that better re...

...Douglas in fact ends propped up, dead, in a theater seat, as if he were part of the audience watching the play...

...But The Fan gives her an opportunity to turn her shortcomings to her advantage...

...Although this is all just superstitious reasoning--the two types of "terrorism" ~'en't the same--it gives us a vested interest in believing that what she says could succeed with Douglas...

...In terms of notoriety, however, Chicago is profiting nicely--while the women, who worked on it are still anonymous...

...A threatened male is just the kind I would expect to find toadying obediently to the (Dinner) Party line...

...Yet on the night I saw the film, this seemed to be the point where The Fan hooked up with the audience's feelings most powerfully...

...All it could find were unpaid female workers...

...The scene in which he finally, inevitably, has her alone and at his mercy is where the movie departs from reality, for Sally manages with a little pluck and bravura to turn the tables on her assailant...

...If no one is getting rich on The Dinner Party it is because of the gigantic costs of assembling, disassembling, crating, shipping and storing such a mammoth piece...

...Chapman is somebody made in the image Commonweal: 434 of Sally's fan Douglas, who ends up stalking her with a knife...

...This is The Fan's most ghoulish, stylish touch, and in seeing Douglas thus, as a mirror image of ourselves watching the movie, we are drawn into complicity with him...

...It's the bad effects of early training as a fashion model...

...In the wake of Lennon's murder--in spite of it--the movie offers reassurance that the celebrities we create can ultimately fend for themselves...

...This is the paradox that inheres in all celebrity worship, of course, the fan's feeling that he is somehow killing his favorite star with his love...

...She speaks on behalf not only of herself, but of all the "innocent" people who are sick of "terrorism...

...At dinner with her ex-husband (James Garne0, Sally announcr "I've decided to do this cockamamie musical next...

...When Sally sees that her audacity has given him a second's pause, she keeps talking for the same reason that the snake charmer keeps playing his flute and swaying back and forth...

...Trying to graft old myths onto the structure of modern metaphors is sticky teer labor and a fixed core of salaried expertise...

...You're pathetic," she hisses, and the audience gasped and applauded with relief...

...The moment at which all these resemblances undoubtedly came too close for Bacall's comfort was the one, shortly after she finished work on The Fan, when Mark David Chapman shot and killed Dakota neighbor John Lennon right in the building's entrance...

...It's curious that a project purporting to celebrate the abilities of women couldn't find a live female potter or industrial designer or tapestry expert with sufficient knowhow to justify a salary...

...Her weakness as an actress--the same one she has a dancer--has always been that she's too fond of striking poses...

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...The problem here is its inane solemnity...

...He mistook Lennon for Sally Ross, someone who lives in a movie, and he thought that by killing Lennon, he could live there too...

...What the man doesn't realize is that he is firing away with an unloaded gun...

...I'll bet that line was what sold Bacall on the script for the movie...

...That's not my idea of hair-splitting...

...Robert Hopke clearly considers his own letter a hot tomato--witness that flourish for a signature...

...Sometimes it rests vulnerable and unsuspecting on a pillow...

...It's doubtful whether this kind of rhetoric would work on real psychopaths, who, like Chapman, don't give their victims a chance to speak anyway...

...The Fan is a taut, slick thriller, the sort of film whose pleasure ordinarily lies in its having no significance whatsoever for us...

...JAMES LUTHER'ADAMS ~ U HarvardD iL:,iUnTttHyS EcRho'AoDBl AuMlleSt# ~ '~[~.rhaps the one necessary journal for Catholic intellectuals...

...Chicago's misemphasis on female sexuality, as if it were the dayspring of nongenital achievement, I did not dismiss the sexual content of the work because it was sexual...

...Judith's knife reads better as a symbol of justice and vengeance, of those powers of transcendence that derive from no man--just the object for Chicago to have made much of...

...If only we had not made Lennon a prominent object of desire, maybe Chapman would not have found him an inviting target...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...veals the creative ferment working at the su b-sur fac'(~ of contemporary Christendom...