Screen:
O'Brien, Tom
quently conscious of. When I talk with my students about the decade of the 1890s and the imposition throughout the South by state legislation of an institutionalized system of Jim Crow, I think...
...Yeah," Kline deadpans back, "it's a good thing it means nothing to us...
...I I.I ] I I HI I I I Screen TOUCHING THE HEM LOST HOPES & FALLEN LEADERS S EVERAL YEARS AGO a fellow teacher told me about a question asked in her political science class...
...In The Big Chill, before settling down, William Hurt upbraids Kevin Kline for being too friendly with the local police...
...The limo became his cortege into eternity...
...It went into making Ronald Reagan president, but then the lesser of two evils has never been palatable to Utopians...
...More importantly, when I think about the dignity and presence of a Marian Anderson, the voice and witness of a Paul } Robeson, the courage of a Roy Wilkins or a Martin Luther King, the skill at bat and grace a field of a John Lloyd, the coaching and promoting skills of a Bob Douglas, and the names of countless other Black Americans, no less deserving of accolades, whom I would not know if it were not for AI, the picture I have is shaped by a gift to me of a world that as a society we know too little of, and would benefit so greatly by knowing so much better...
...A young lawyer tells of idealistic days in Legal Aid, followed by better work with corporations...
...The main political event of the fall was richer but simpler: sixties nostalgia...
...In The Big Chill, the movie begins with his funeral, but that finality is checked by the way his passing provokes others to measure and change themselves...
...Indeed, the movie details a synthesis of "revolutionary" and bourgeois values, with Kline and his wife (a doctor played by Glenn Close) showing the way communally with their best friends...
...It went into a style that would not accept America as the country it was as a way of changing it...
...The Kennedy image, in short, provided a key to the nostalgia present in The Big Chill -- the feeling among youth not only that "we were better then" but also that "the Force" was with them...
...But this time the whole world isn't watching...
...Baryshnikov and Nureyev trained with the Kirov ballet and, despite their decision to work in the West, sustain the clarity, openness, and dramatic vigor of their early schooling...
...As usual, AI has a comment...
...In The Big Chill, after Glenn Close orders a curfew, she barks into the phone," When you're a mother, you can be mean, too," then comments to her lawyer friend, "Sometimes I can't believe the things I hear myself saying...
...The assembled friends recall college days ("when property was a crime") but go on, mostly, to discuss what has happened since, in particular where their hopes have gone...
...He didn't trade on the fact of his age...
...On commercial TV we have had a most momentous return engagement: the three-part, six-hour NBC "Kennedy" marking the twentieth anniversary of the assassination...
...Fairleigh Dickinson University Press will publish this year a book titled A Black National News Service: Claude Barnett and the Associated Negro Press, 1919-1945...
...As in the past --- say with the Great War Novels of World War One -- it takes more than a decade to get perspective on events, to evaluate what really happened...
...The Big Chill checks nostalgia with irony...
...Was it imagination, or wasn't that milestone marked by far more observance and nostalgia than the tenth...
...In both movies, mothers attempt to coordinate bourgeois parenting and private rebellion, and emerge only with uneasy solutions...
...It occurs to me that reversing the words to read journalist extraordinary sounds better...
...The Danish style emphasizes quickness in the legs and feet, an open but calmly composed torso and razor sharp clarity in poses, and the completion of steps...
...If Under Fire represents a current application of revolutionary optimism, it doesn't seem that hope, a theological virtue, has found its roots in the bourgeois soil of South Carolina...
...As he comments to Kevin Kline, the homeowner hosting the reunion, "Whoever would have thought of it, two revolutionaries making all this money...
...There is one final parallel between the two movies that helps answer the question, "Where did Alex's hope go...
...Dance . . . . i l I II PETER MARTINS MASTER OF OLD & NEW T HE RETIREMENT of Peter Martins from active performing is clearly a loss from the ranks of the principal dancers of New York City Ballet and from that handful of international male stars who set the standard of performance for all others...
...he acted in a good role for which he was now the fight age...
...Close lends her husband to the lawyer, a single woman who wants a baby but who finds that all men are" either gay or married...
...Where did Alex's hope go...
...Despite the differences, there are some parallel scenes worth noting in The Big Chill and Under Fire...
...The parallel involves views of law and order...
...I can only be thankful that this eighty-eight-year-old history-maker, reporter, and record straightener has chosen to share his world with me, and can only be conscious of an obligation I have to share it with my children, and with all the young people who come through my classroom...
...As Alex's story and Nick Nolte's actions indicate, it went into compulsive antibourgeois gestures that meant the real world would not be changed...
...In Under Fire the situation is not, at first glance, similar...
...In this respect, Alex's is hardly the only critical death in recent movies...
...The film becomes less somber than its morbid beginning, but always addresses the question posed by an old pastor who unsuccessfully tries to understand how a thirty-or-so man could kill himself...
...But there were many political movies this fall -- in addition to the nostalgic ones -- Hanna K., Silkwood, Under Fire, and the excellent NBC treatment of the murdered American churchwomen in El Salvador, Choices of the Heart...
...The NBC movie, for example, took this benign view: even admitting the Judith Exner affair, it highlighted Kennedy's hesitations about Vietnam, his (questionable) respect for Martin Luther King and animosity to J. Edgar Hoover, and his intimacy with his brother Bobby and his interest in civil fights...
...After the revolution succeeds, Nolte does not turn an American mercenary in to the Sandinistas, although he knows the man has mercilessly killed scores of people...
...I am flattered no end by your compliment in including me in the dedication as an extraordinary journalist...
...He graduated into the company with a reputation of being a vaguely discontented individual with exceptional technical gifts...
...After the shots, the only scene occurred at the hospital where doctors scrambled wildly to get a heartbeat...
...The last ten minutes of the Kennedy film were striking: they depicted the assassination, but not the funeral aftermath...
...His rule of six daily classes was only modified in the nineteen fifties and sixties by Vera Volkova, the Russian-trained dancer and teacher who became an artistic advisor to the company...
...But now the media is dominated by a different set of memories, based on the sixties, and the early seventies, the very time we were formerly fleeing...
...But as usual I have a second opinion...
...It avoids excess and Commonweal: 86...
...Accidentally, perhaps, but again appropriately, the Kennedy TV movie seemed to end just where The Big Chill begins: friends receive news of Alex's death, followed by credits flashing over his corpse which is being dressed for the funeral...
...Yet they were elegiac, containing almost no spoken words and documenting an exuberantly happy fide through Dallas where Kennedy seemed already cut off -- not only by our foreknowledge but his silence as he waved to the crowd and smiled at his wife...
...a housewife talks about her unfulfilled writing ambitions and her choice to marry an advertising executive...
...It was the kind of student question that makes professors cringe at first, but which they somehow never tire of repeating at faculty coffee klatch reviews of the decline and fall of general intelligence...
...Maybe it had to happen, one of those predictable cyclic turns in American fashion and faddism...
...In addition, it may be that the people who grew up in the Kennedy and Vietnam War years are now in positions of power in the movie industry and are using it to reflect on their past...
...According to the film's implausible and unhistoric but exciting plot, the revolution succeeds because people believe the leader is still operating...
...It was white American soldiers fighting black American soldiers on that April in 1919 when Christians were commemorating the resurrection of the Prince of Peace...
...Nuts...
...and my friend, A~lvin White, an extraordinary journalist...
...Anyhow, thanks...
...Whenever I ponder as an historian the meaning of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom...
...Even The Big Chill, which looks at the past more skeptically than most other treatments, examines the earlier period with nostalgia for something -some sense, as one character puts it around a communal dinner table, that "we were better then...
...In the nostalgic movies, the past is seen as a time not just when things were simpler, but more meaningful...
...Where," the pastor asks pleadingly, "did Alex's hope go...
...She told me that when she had once mentioned the Kennedy administration she saw a hand go up...
...But at the end Hurt is converted -- to try to settle down at least, and to accept the bourgeois earth of South Carolina as a potential home...
...A few years ago we waxed nostalgic for the fifties, with resurrected hula hoops, fascination with early rock and roll, slicked back hair, and the simplicities of an older vision of America which Ronald Reagan evoked and fed...
...Nolte plays a role in sustaining the revolution: he prints a picture of a revolutionary leader that the Somoza government claims is dead, but stages the shot to imply the leader is alive and well in the mountains...
...In both films, the dead, once-inspiring leader is wrapped in longing and elegy...
...In addition to creating the body of work that remains the special heritage of the Royal Danish Ballet, Bournonville also designed the basic pedagogy that governs the training of dancers in the school...
...The simple answer is time...
...On one view, if he did turn the man in, he might seem a revolutionary, and therefore the opposite of Kevin Kline...
...When and if it does, nostalgia has a future...
...The elaborate Kennedy anniversary and the NBC movie suggest the same thing: an urge to revive hope by touching the hem of the fallen leader...
...It is Hurt's performance that brings the sixties and early seventies most alive, with his lazy drawl and cynical gestures that seem drawn from a time warp...
...Dowell is totally the product of English dance training and embodies its ideals of precision, neatness, and finish...
...In both, mid-to-late thirty-year-old mothers call their daughters and tell them to behave conventionally while they themselve are engaging in unusual, even radical acts...
...When I try to convey to these same students a meaningful picture of the world war we entered in 1917 to make the world safe for democracy, I think about what AI has told me of his work as a stevedore in a labor battalion in France, and about the race riot he witnessed in that same France where so much American blood had been shed in the war to end all wars...
...Why...
...The Big Chill also asks the question which haunts the nostalgia-laden films this fall...
...a young actor talks of the days he roused the campus with charismatic speeches and measures them against his TV stardom in a harem-scarum detective series...
...The dedication page will read, to the three who count the most, Sally, Rebecca, and Matthew...
...Martins alone is something of a maverick...
...That's nitpicking...
...But perhaps these movies demonstrate that the "party of Hope," as Emerson once characterized the optimistic strain in the American tradition, lost its way in the sixties and early seventies, leaving us with only nostalgic longing today...
...Martin Sheen's Kennedy was seen in macho terms, to be sure, but he was also martyred hope, the Kennedy who articulated the old "whig" interpretation of history as one grand march from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence to the Alliance for Progress -- a march, one might say, the radicals simply extended into Aquarius...
...But on a deeper view, i regardless of the specific left-fight politics, he would be the same as Kline: he would have accepted the painful reality that there is such a thing as crime, that crime ought to be punished, that any society -- even a revolutionary one -- needs law and order...
...and more recently of Richard Nixon's New Federalism, and of Ronald Reagan's truly new federalism -- anything last practiced in this country during the administration of Calvin Coolidge deserves to be called new -- I find myself reminded of one thing or another AI has written on one of the hundreds of pages of correspondence through which he has shared with me the rich experience of a long life well lived...
...The Big Chill is about dropping into America...
...Kline offers stock tips to rootless druggie William Hurt, who interprets his restlessness as a matter of still "evolving...
...He recognizes the bourgeois necessity to be unliberal about crime...
...In Under Fire, after cautioning her child against risqu6 dresses, Nick Nolte's girl and writer companion takes off into the hills with him...
...to Morn and Dad who gave me the eyes to see them...
...Add the media fact and infantile fantasy that "the whole world is watching" and you understand much about nostalgia for flae 1960s, both good and bad...
...In both movies, there is a fascination with dead bodies, the corpses of the revolutionary leader...
...Excuse me," a student said, "but are we responsible for American history in this class...
...Last fall's movies have indicated that the irony was not on the student but the teachers, particularly those in the thirty-toforty age group whose narcissism has for so long sustained a feeling of being above history...
...Together with the films reflecting on the past, they suggest that someCommpnweal: 84 thing more profound is going on -- some longing for political commitment to counter the complacency of recent times, some hankering after a rebirth of communal spirit, some yearning for a clear line of direction and purpose at a time when in~ational issues have become so complex and even domestic ones seem to come down to mere coping...
...It went into discarding values like money, family, comfort, law and order - - as if their excesses invalidated their necessity...
...Characteristically, Nolte turns away from the mercenary in disgust, but not enough disgust to take meaningful political action...
...The system of training which formed him was essentially that of August Bournonville the great Danish nineteenth-century dancer, choreographer, and ballet master...
...in films, The Big Chill, The Right Stuff, and even, replaying their campus tour, G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary in the documentary Return Engagement...
...and of the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society of Wilson's White House successors...
...On public TV we have had the massive documentary of the Vietnam War...
...But the real resemblance lies deeper...
...The most important political factor on screen this fall was not the portrayal of John Glenn in The Right Stuff or the fuss over the TV movie The Day After...
...Of course commentators on many reviews of the Kennedy years noted that his heritage was complex, but all agreed on one thing: he inspired a great many Americans, most of them young, with a hopeful vision of the world...
...He was a professional fight to the end...
...TOM O'BRIEN (Tom O'Brien, a past contributor to Commonweal, teaches at the Manhattan School of Music...
...Kline screams back that the police are not pigs, as they had once thought...
...g URIOUSLY, THERE IS a resonance between The Big Chill and a film set in the present that may seem entirely opposite, Under Fire...
...When I talk with my students about the decade of the 1890s and the imposition throughout the South by state legislation of an institutionalized system of Jim Crow, I think about the stupidity involved in denying society the enriching contact it should and could have had with the talented black Richmond that produced Alvin White...
...In both, resurrection of the dead provides a sense of purpose or meaning or at least direction...
...Among them are numbered Mikhail Baryshnikov, Vladimir Vasiliev, Rudolf Nureyev, and Anthony Dowell...
...Under Fire about a photographer, played by Nick Nolte, who becomes radicalized during the Nicaraguan revolu10 February 1984: 85 tion and to some degree joins it...
...In Under Fire, the fake photo provides hope and illusion which keep the revolution alive...
...But even Kline -- for whom life has never been better -- is affectionately tied to the past: "There is no other music," he answers to complaints about the ~'old'' sixties tunes that he keeps playing, and he prides himself in group activities...
...The screenplay, in short, caught the event in all its brutal abruptness: we are left with a group of stunned figures over the body just before the (again silent) credits...
...Accidentally but appropriately, The Big Chill coincided with the Kennedy anniversary whose many commemorations -- on TV talk programs, eulogies, documentaries, and various films -- all seemed to ask the same sort of question: where did the Kennedy hope go...
...Vasiliev, who is the leading male dancer of the Bolshoi Ballet, maintains the brio and heroic attack of the Moscow school...
...He began his training in the Royal Danish Ballet School in Copenhagen...
...It starts with the suicide of one Alex, once a student who inspired and held together the group of friends who reconvene for his funeral...
...All are superb exemplars of their individual traditions...
...What did Stanley Kauffmann say about Frederic March...
...The realists in The Big Chill are hardly preferable to the doomed dreamers...
Vol. 111 • February 1984 • No. 3
