Screen:
Alleva, Richard
faith that the state seeks to regulate or forbid become less cen- quire more searching inquiries than the Supreme Court gener- tral, the state's burden of justification grows...
...This summer the mercenary, and uncaring slob to cybernate his potentially designated megahits are Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park and lethal amusement park...
...Six weeks later (Commonweal was a weekly then), the column was just as abruptly and unceremoniously ended...
...It was not until 1973 that the fate of Didymus seems to have Armistice intrigued anyone at the magazine-or elsewhere, for that matter...
...The First Amendment easy, in a nation committed to religious liberty, to understand was written for a world in which regulation was expected to why the risk that the religions might try to impose their relibe rare and would almost never impinge on religious liberty...
...infinitely dangerous monsters controlled merely by com- boy who insists that Slade and his whole world are nothing puters (those neurotic and unreliable machines...
...And why would a millionaire with his pick of the tence, the muscleman has the perfect rebuttal: "Of course not...
...He is never None of this makes any difference whatsoever to the thoucontent to merely photograph the amazing saurian inventions sands of kids who have lined up to see the movie...
...Deciding when horse combs, free ice cream, connect-the-dots puzzles, paperback to allow exemptions would place a tremendous burden on the books, and magic shows performed by apprentice prestidigitacourts-but there is no reason that the hard work of protecting tors...
...As befits a movie that features both actly what's going to happen and how to handle himself...
...At so the gunfire, the shattering of glass, the thud and thump moments like these, Action Hero invades the territory of and kapow never let up...
...It's not so much that you take them for real as that attracted to movement, why does he bolt from the adequate shelyou marvel at the deftness of the manufacture...
...Presumably, if they do not like the rule, they can work for of course, a real danger, although there is reason to doubt that somebody else...
...But the moviemakers have too much money ridgrowling attack dogs are "quite well-trained," then snaps his ing on this project to stop Arnold from being Arnold...
...But some of it is just Big age a decrescendo...
...Rubber spiders, plastic bracelets, seacome forward and meet the test I have proposed...
...And it is "f" word and daring his hero to say it out loud...
...The plot has Slade and the boy leave the celluloid just a small dose of conviction would carry the day...
...He is a master craftsman who knows how to tle, less interesting beasts...
...tics and its rhetoric...
...Slade feels his own reality but the boy keeps partially charged electric fences seems the brainchild of a producing evidence to the contrary...
...seems to be because the moviemakers are afraid to shift Big Fun must strain to keep on being Big Fun even when gears...
...THE FACE BEHIND THE PSEUDONYM Ir he year was 1942, and commencing with the with the publication of Deedy's essay, which among other perNovember 6 issue of Commonweal-10 cents...
...The more impelling interest, before it is allowed, through a seemingly neu- portant role is the one that society itself must play, in its politral policy, to trespass upon the central faith-world of a religion...
...If our commitment to the policy wins ship, but the Donahues are trying to make money...
...The Didymus columns were in effect lost to history as well as memory...
...But, though Slade concedes that finesse, but he knows the genre he's parodying and he's good breaking a window now hurts his hand, he pretty much carat giving the action movie gambits just the nudge they need to ries on as before...
...kick and, after all, comic sidekicks are sometimes killed off...
...Spielberg is growing more and more careless and even callous A little boy uses a magic charm to enter the latest movie in his storytelling...
...Witty and well-made as so much Airplane...
...How does he know that peculiarly self-destructive crackpot...
...The moment is meant to be funny but in or out of the paths of trucks...
...Of course these additional costssuch as the cost of not being able to discriminate-might be justifiable...
...When he isn't wowing us with cliffhanging of his celluloid hero, Jack Slade, played by Arnold...
...If their reli- every time, then we really have become the majoritarian tyrants gion will not let them make it by the rules the state has set out, against whom Tocqueville warned us a century and a half ago...
...and only but pop fiction...
...proudly, and revel in their measly rewards...
...He the huge brachiosaurus and the much smaller coelophysis, can't take too many risks because he's only the comic sidethere are both macro and micro stupidities in this movie...
...It is not possible to resolve here all the many cases that might arise from pursuing this approach, so I will limit myself to making two points...
...foreshadow, counterpoint, encapsulate, build a crescendo, man- Jurassic Park is Big Fun all right...
...can't they just put their money somewhere else...
...The kids read diligently, turn in their lists freedom should be easy...
...Besides, even were escape easier, on the religions...
...Watching monster vehicles grind come saurian snacks...
...ing club...
...drew illuminating distinctions between the naive hero November 13, 1942 and the tragic hero...
...tinent questions discusses Auden's larger relationship with at your local newsstand-there appeared, with- Commonweal, where he reviewed books and also published out fanfare, a new and highly ruminative column sections of his poems, the Christmas oratorio For the Time Being, under the unpretentious title "Lecture Notes...
...Instead, I found ably in a state of near-shock, to touch a live wire and suffer myself registering faint waves of unease each time I pulled death by electrocution...
...a small- the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, The er but equally vicious raptor wavers for a split second in its Last Action Hero, is a witty and well-crafted film...
...Abstruse and allusive, the columns were nevertheless marked by a rare directness and France of the energy of language...
...gious visions of the good life on secular society is more to be We live instead in a world in which regulation is everywhere, avoided than the risk that the state and its powerful conand the idea that the religious citizen can escape it, through a stituents might try to impose a secular vision of the good life careful search, is a fantasy...
...The noise and power of rigs comes across as sadistic...
...This is, ees...
...longer knows how to put real toads in his imaginary gardens...
...The accommodation test here proposed would only BIG STUPID FUN demand that the state offer more than an ordinary justification 'PARK' & 'HERO' for them...
...Yet the entrepreneur of Slade's FBI agent pal is really a slimeball...
...I've recently learned from readers the John McTiernan-Arnold Schwarzenegger Last Action Hero...
...convincing and poignant as well as eyeDid it work for me...
...At the end of ter of a large rock in order to run away in full view...
...dinosaurs are the very definition of Big Fun...
...onslaught on three humans and actually seems to grin as it Its basic idea is taken from Woody Allen's The decides whom to attack first...
...ions but in citizens' commitments...
...But the ob- One of the reasons that the asserted political influence of jection is a non sequitur...
...It doesn't matter...
...Instead suspense and unusual images, he is often bungling details of of being bewildered, the kid, a veteran moviegoer, knows exaction and characterization...
...Why can't this jolly old Santa Claus of a capitalist who gleefully al- Slade bring himself to do it...
...In his five The columns, the anonymous writer speculated on, among other heady topics, the metaphysical ambiguities of vanity...
...What was needed here was a sharp, comicturn them into the stuff of farce...
...it is vital that we ourselves, The welfare-state cases-those involving employment or hous- the people of the United States, before allowing our governing discrimination-might at first seem more difficult to re- ment to trespass on religious freedom, balance the depth of our solve...
...Auden's death...
...Not quite...
...As Deedy writes in the introduction to his forthcoming monograph, Auden as Did ymus (Paul P. Appel, MICHAEL WILLIAMS • DAVID BUR IIAM • I'I II.1PT IIARTUNC, Mount Vernon, N.Y...
...the sight of water trembling in a glass just before we hear the footsteps of the tyrannosaurus rex...
...VOLUk1 XXXV0 lOC NUMaER 4 That oversight, uncovered in 1973...
...The Jurassic Park, as written by Michael Crichton and win- agent is played by F. Murray Abraham and didn't he kill Mozart somely played by Richard Attenborough, is meant to be ba- in Aniadeus...
...And that is exactly what they get...
...The dogs immediately leap into pyramid formation...
...And so certain moments linger in the mind: Stupid Fun...
...world to pursue the villain into real life where bullets can RICHARD ALLEVA JACK DEEDY SOLVES A MYSTERY Who was Didymus...
...The young actors here are allowed not the strangeness of ancient animal life but the crushing mon- to bicker so obnoxiously that I finally wanted to see them bestrosity of big machinery...
...Indeed, it is not regulating and a society that does little...
...Jurassic Park is a slightly upscale version of those destruc- He is losing the human touch that made the fantasies Close tion shows...
...director John McTieman And yet this movie sadly confirmed for me the fact that and his scriptwriters add to what they steal...
...After all (one might object), in Smith and Lvng the moral commitment to the policy in question against the value government is acting against people who simply want to wor- of religious autonomy...
...Spielberg's are Now, micro examples...
...At the movies...
...Purple Rose of Cairo, but that's all right...
...Encounters and E.T...
...The case of the refusal of the Donahues to rent to an unmarried couple, hown terms of the cases, this would mean that before pun- ever, may be a simple one...
...faith that the state seeks to regulate or forbid become less cen- quire more searching inquiries than the Supreme Court genertral, the state's burden of justification grows less...
...But when I drove away from the children, pretend in full view of the kids, who are understandtheater, it wasn't birds I was rediscovering...
...the screeching of a car's Perhaps too many years of movie reviewing have wheels turning over in a rut suddenly answered by the re- turned my brain to mush but it seems to me that markably similar sounds of the king dinosaur's cry...
...best computer experts in the world hire an obviously sleazy, This is California...
...it finally exhausts rather than exThe movie's energy flags only in its last quarter, and this hilarates...
...Conviction carries the Thus, resolution of the cases involving the minimum wage day...
...And what has happened to Spielberg's kept reminding me of what Spielberg had evoked on screen: skill at directing children...
...more harm to individual freedom necessarily occurs when a More fundamentally, however, the objection misses the religion seeks to impose its vision of the good life than when critical difference between living in a society that does much an entirely secular political movement does it...
...I enjoyed myself, and popping...
...That's easy...
...First, it would be both a secular and a religious ig Fun" is what a children's lidisaster were religions by the dozen suddenly to come forward brarian I know promises to the claiming a free exercise right to engage in all the many forms f kids who join her summer readof discrimination that secular politics has decided to forbid...
...the association escaped the notice of Auden's bibliographers...
...of Last Action Hero is...
...Commonweal 13 August 1993: 19 McTiernan, who made Die Hard, may not have Spielberg's really hurt action heroes...
...Commonweal's former managing editor Jack Deedy recalls how he was in the office elevator with Edward S. Skillin, Paul Vignaux Commonweal's once editor and future publisher, a few days after W.H...
...the columns were "the best kept secret KATHLEEN CRAIG • JOHN 9)('i l"~ • F.1)WAKI) f. %EYE:S of Auden's literary life...
...Sometimes, though, it's more pathetic deflation, with Schwarzenegger being flung up than a nudge, as when the villain (played with wonderful sat- against a reality where muscles and wisecracks can only urnine self-mockery by Charles Dance) warns Slade that his go so far...
...ally likes to see the federal courts undertake...
...of Crichton's novel that the book's millionaire is a greedy Jurassic Park is all about dinosaurs, and for most kids megalomaniac...
...Protective Association, 1988), the state would have to meet a Still, in crafting a sensible understanding of religious autonomy, very high burden of justification, perhaps even show a com- the courts ideally should play only a minor role...
...ed with the central religious function of the church would re- Of course, these same kids know where Really Big Fun is 18: 13 August 1993 Commonweal to he had during the summer...
...will be fully corrected 20: 13 August 1993 Commonweal...
...You sense what he's thinking...
...They have of his engineers but insists on investing his moviemaking with come to see big beasts on the loose making mouthfuls of us litits own delights...
...And fingers...
...So ladle to the floor...
...Why does the hero, who has just discovered this is what's left of the awesome monsters: gentled by evo- his fatherly instincts while protecting Attenborough's grandlution into harmless birds...
...If the hero knows that dinosaurs are wonderful...
...Yet what does she give However, it would also be a secular and religious disaster were them once they turn in the lists we to rule out entirely the possibility that a few religions could of books they've read...
...Macro examples, first...
...And Big Fun is had by one and all...
...Why do the movie, the paleontologist-hero played by Sam Neill, hav- monsters who can't hear the loud chatter of humans hiding in ing survived several dinosaur attacks, bemusedly gazes at a a kitchen with echoing acoustics suddenly hear the drop of a bird flying past his vehicle...
...Then the boy tests Slade by writing down the sically sane, feyly charming, wholly benevolent...
...and tackled the theological assumptions separating natural and revealed religion...
...If, as the Donahues claim, their reishing an obviously central act such as the use of pey- ligious tradition teaches that they will be damned if they allow ote by the Native American Church (the Smith case) or fornication on their property, it is hard to see why anything other before destroying the land that makes a religious tra- than a compelling interest should allow the state to put them at dition possible (LVng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery risk...
...Commenting on the news, Skillin l)IL)YMUS C C t'AULDING BASIL MATTHEWS mentioned that Auden had written for the magazine under the I; l) WARD SK ILLtt JR • JAMES C .UJR'1-AGI I • MAX F1SC;i-11:R pen name Didyrnus...
...Because she believes in the importance of the program, so or labor-organizing rights for employees not directly connect- do the kids...
...and the Pulitizer prize-winning The Age q/'Anxiety...
...But when the little inquisitor adduces as further eviof the saurians have been testing the fences for nonelectric dence that there are no unattractive women in Slade's exissegments...
...That's also easy...
...Slade lives inlows his beloved grandchildren to be the first tourists in the side a PG-13 film world and PG-13 doesn't permit the -17' park even after he's been warned that the more intelligent word...
...All this demonstrates that Spielberg no each other to smithereens is entertainment for some people...
...the problem remains that religious people might wind up finding it more costly to participate in the market than others who SCREEN do not share their views...
...As with every fundamental human right, In those cases, it is not likely the burden could have been met, the ultimate security of religious liberty lies not in judges' opinso the decisions are probably wrong...
...I still think of Spielberg as a gifted entertainer...
...The basic idea of a park filled with Slade, of course, is invulnerable, but he's bewildered by this huge...
...Now that makes sense...
...how Judaism was like unto a young girl anticipating the appearance ommonweal of her lover while Christianity assumed the pose of a married woman...
...and Naked Gun...
...It in particular does not distinguish religious groups is so feared is that some people believe that Smith: the reason the state of Oregon punished the Native the religions, if politically empowered, might try to impose on Americans for using peyote was that they were state employ- the secular society their own versions of the good life...
...The per"Didymus" was the enigmatic pseudonym used by the author...
Vol. 120 • August 1993 • No. 14
