Our Low Dishonest Decade
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Our. Low Dishonest Decade Boogie Nights and The Ice Storm revive the 70s By John Podhoretz In the mid-'80s, I had an idea for a book modeled on Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen's wonderful...
...The sensational set design and costumes, which are observed with clinical detachment, are a fitting objective correlative for the characters—the bad taste of their outfits, hair, and furniture mirrors the moral squalor into which they are falling...
...The Ice Storm is meticulous, subtle, intelligent...
...Moore dreams of regaining custody of her young son, but gives up neither the career nor the cocaine habit that stand in her way...
...There is precious little nostalgia for the 1970s even now—why should there be fond memories of a decade in which America lost a war, communism seemed on the march across the planet, and every bad idea born in the disorder of the 1960s made its way from Haight-Ashbury and the Upper West Side of Manhattan into the wider culture...
...We see Reynolds watching the editing of the godawful title sequence to one of these movies: "It's the best work we've ever done," he says with misty-eyed pride...
...When I pitched the book to agents and pubJohn Podhoretz is deputy editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Alone among his fellow Americans, Paul Thomas Anderson seems nostalgic for the 1970s, or at least for the sex-without-consequences attitude that is given such harsh treatment in The Ice Storm...
...Maybe the 1970s seem like a dream because we have barely been reminded of them since their conclusion...
...A movie like The Ice Storm can't possibly work unless you look at Kevin Kline or Joan Allen and feel as though one of those characters has something in common with you...
...But The Ice Storm is, finally, a lifeless failure...
...The Ice Storm is a faithful adaptation of Rick Moody's good, precise little novel of the same name...
...Boogie Nights ends on a weirdly cheerful note, as Dirk returns to the porn fold and we get a last, stomach-churning glimpse of the member that made him a star...
...Boogie Nights is a really troubling movie...
...The sister is fooling around with a boy and that boy's prepubescent brother...
...A high-school dropout working as a busboy, he is being treated with vicious contempt by his mother and ignored by his father, and is saved from drudgery by Reynolds...
...It may be indicative of how warped the 1970s really were that the movie that gets the sexual politics exactly right—The Ice Storm—is a total bust, while the movie that gets the sexual politics appallingly wrong—Boogie Nights— is a triumph...
...Dirk dreams of stardom and, in true Hollywood fashion, does everything he can to blow it once he makes it to the pinnacle of the porn business...
...with the exception of the never-ending revivals and revisions of The Brady Bunch, pop culture has avoided the decade just as publishers avoided my book...
...They are all dreamers...
...it is a lie from beginning to end, a romanticized and false vision of what may be capitalism's most noxious industry...
...Rick Moody's novel is, without its author quite knowing it, among the most conservative books of our time...
...And on the night after Thanksgiving, quiet hell breaks loose as an ice storm sweeps the Northeast...
...On Thanksgiving weekend in 1974, 15-year-old Paul (Tobey Maguire) comes home from boarding school to New Canaan to find his family in genteel shambles...
...They have very little in common except that both deal with the demented sexual politics of the time...
...While The Ice Storm is a joyless study of joyless sexual libertinism, Boogie Nights is a wildly exuberant chiaroscuro of sexual degradation...
...The AIDS epidemic is the true, enduring legacy of the libertinism of the 1970s, and as Boogie Nights proves, Hollywood still isn't ready to face that fact...
...No longer...
...My book was going to have a narrower focus: It would be about the year 1979, and about how everything that went wrong during that year set the stage for the transformative conservative politics that followed...
...Nineteen seventy-nine began, you will recall, with evidence of a Soviet brigade in Cuba and mass strikes in England and continued with the election of the ayatollah in Iran and Communist revolution in Nicaragua...
...even so, his portrait of his parents is laced with humanity and understanding...
...lishers, they all thought it far too depressing and advised me to put the topic aside...
...Everything is going swimmingly in the 1970s, but the 1980s bring with them only heartache...
...Reynolds is forced to abandon film for the more profitable, less artistic videotape...
...Everyone does far too much cocaine...
...The movie follows the career of Dirk Diggler (the splendid Mark Wahlberg), a dim but cheerful teenager whose distinguishing characteristics are a rare ability to perform sexually on demand and an unusually robust manhood with which to perform...
...Holmes came down with AIDS and died in 1988, but not before he had infected many of his business associates...
...Dirk gives him a chance by coming up with the idea for a series of movies featuring a kung-fu fighting detective and his sidekick, who get the bad guys in between sex scenes...
...Lee's movie is, by contrast, clinical and cold, almost as though the only emotions Moody's characters provoke in him are contempt and quiet rage...
...The late Robert J. Stoller, whose writings on sexual deviancy are among the best psychiatric literature ever produced in this country, made a close study of the hard-core industry in his book Porn...
...And it ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the taking of the American hostages in Iran...
...Larry Flynt, Hollywood's last attempt to glamorize and domesticate pornography, Boogie Nights never actually shows us what these people do for a living, because just a few seconds of hardcore action and the honey-sweet world Anderson is at such pains to create would be exposed for the sad sham it is...
...Moody does not spare his characters, even though he is clearly writing about his own family and himself...
...Paul finds himself with two dope-addled classmates in a lavish New York apartment, both of whom overdose because of a plan of Paul's that goes awry...
...And that is the saddest irony of all, because Anderson based his main character on John Holmes, the real-life porn performer whose job literally cost him and countless others their lives...
...And Dirk...
...Ang Lee, who made the glorious Sense and Sensibility and Eat Drink Man Woman, is a rare movie director because he is a man with a genuine sensibility—a sensibility so fine, in fact, that he can find almost nothing in any of these characters to like...
...There was another panic when the orbiting Skylab began to fall toward earth, and nobody knew where or when pieces from it would land (they all ended up in the oceans...
...Who would want to read a book about a horrible year that was the culmination of a horrible decade...
...By the summer, there was an oil panic, and everyone in the country was forced to wait in long lines at gas stations...
...Anderson's movie is a paean to that attitude...
...Low Dishonest Decade Boogie Nights and The Ice Storm revive the 70s By John Podhoretz In the mid-'80s, I had an idea for a book modeled on Only Yesterday, Frederick Lewis Allen's wonderful instant history of the 1920s...
...And a child dies...
...Allen's book was written during the Depression, and it firmly established the enduring image of the previous decade: its flappers, rum-runners, a nation driven to ruin by financial and social excess...
...Allen, a terrific actress, just looks unhappy all the time...
...his portrait of a world undone by the idea of casual sex is a frightening one...
...Kline, a won-drously talented comic actor, is utterly at sea in this dramatic role...
...In Boogie Nights that world is presided over by a positively saintly director played by Burt Reynolds, who takes these lost souls under his wing and gives them a ready-made family that seems far nicer than the real families they come from...
...An actress who never, ever removes her roller-skates wants to get a high-school-equivalency diploma...
...And yet I have to say that Boogie Nights is a remarkable piece of work—engaging, involving, superbly acted, an amazing achievement for the 27-year-old Anderson, who may be the most talented writer-director to come along since Francis Ford Coppola's whiz-kid days in the late 1960s...
...Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson takes us on a two-and-a-half-hour journey through the world of hard-core pornographic moviemaking in the 1970s...
...The 1970s are the setting for two new movies— Boogie Nights, an epic set in the nondescript San Fernando Valley, and The Ice Storm, a miniature set in the affluent Connecticut suburbs...
...When Reynolds isn't making a movie—he makes one a month—he is throwing a perpetual poolside party at his house, where he lives chastely and in separate rooms with his female star, played by Julianne Moore...
...Dirk and a couple of guys get in over their heads during a botched drug deal in a dazzling sequence so intense and horrifying that it almost seems to have come from another movie...
...There is not a moment in this very long film when the camera is in the wrong place, a character says the wrong thing, or an actor makes a wrong move...
...His ineffectual father (Kevin Kline) is having an affair with a glamorous neighbor (Sigour-ney Weaver...
...Stoller concluded that the world of pornography was a world of alienation—that the people who made their living in it were driven by rage at conventional middle-class life and the desire to destroy it...
...His mother and 13-year-old sister are both committing petty acts of kleptomania at the local drugstore...
...His parents, together with all the parents of New Canaan, end up at a wife-swapping party...
...Even for those of us who came to consciousness during the 1970s, many things about those years seem like a weird dream, from the ugly clothing to the killer rabbit that attacked Jimmy Carter to the forced good cheer that manifested itself in the ubiquitous glyph known as the "smiley face...
...Only the actors playing characters who seem to enjoy their misbehavior—Sigourney Weaver and the young actor David Krumholtz in particular—are at all diverting...
...Another actor, who works as a stereo salesman when he's not filming, dreams of opening a discount electronics store...
...The movie's highlight is the wife-swapping party, in which a collection of drunken, middle-aged suburbanites turn into kids on a playground, choosing up sides—each man glassy-eyed with terror that he will end up with the one obese woman in the room...
...Reynolds dreams of art porn, hard-core movies that tell a story and deliver a message...
...The English actor Alfred Molina does such astounding work as a psychopathic freebaser in this scene that even though he is only on screen for about 10 minutes, he deserves every acting award there is...
...And the world he shows us is an utterly benign one, full of sweet, stupid people who are just too dim and innocent to do anything but sell their bodies for sex on the screen...
...Like The People vs...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 9
