A few weeks ago I went to a showing of the wonderful 1944 noir Phantom Lady introduced by noir historian Foster Hirsch. Hirsch talked about how much he loves the obvious studio sets that the film uses to recreate nighttime New York and how the artificiality of those sets allow him to dream. Of the irrationalities and inconsistencies in the plot he told the audience that if that was what they chose to focus on, “Get over it.” Hirsch’s words sound blunter in print than his tone was in person. But that offhand remark was saying something important. Hirsch was saying that some movies—and they don’t have to be great ones--are capable of casting a spell that’s stronger than the nuts and bolts of plot. I was once at a party where a literary type (often the dumbest kind of smart people when it comes to not understanding movies) was complaining that Tim Burton’s Batman made no sense. “Yes, it does,” said a friend, “it makes visual sense.” Nearly forty years later, I can still remember the look on the complainant’s face. Clearly, the notion of visual coherence had never occurred to him.

What Foster Hirsch and my friend were extolling was something that will never be understood by the type of people Hitchcock dismissed as “the plausibles,” the sort too mingy and unimaginative to see the art and audacity in front of them, too full of the pedantry that passes for common sense to give themselves over to the crazy glory movies can sometimes achieve. Pictures that risk that kind of craziness, that extend what movies are capable of even when they exist within the conventions of a familiar genre often get this kind of picayune treatment. Conversely, pictures that attract a certain critical prestige or are dealing with a hot social issue can get away with implausibilities that violate their basic conception. No one wondered why the white racists in Get Out would want to live inside black bodies in a world where white supremacy still ruled. The drab, wildly overpraised The Seed of the Sacred Fig expected us to believe that a man who’d spent thirty years as a lackey for Iran’s theocratic dictatorship would be shocked to find that regime manufactured evidence against people they wanted out of the way.

John Boorman’s 1977 Exorcist II: The Heretic has long been a target of people who, possessed of a preening overestimation of their common sense, delight in pointing out just how ridiculous they find it. (Some of them are still pointing it out 49 years later.) When the movie opened in June 1977 it was not only the most expensive movie Warner Bros. had ever produced (just in excess of thirteen million) but the sequel to the studio’s most successful film ever. And it was a notorious bomb, its title becoming shorthand for the most egregious type of folly. The movie was critically savaged. Audiences primed for an even greater dose of shock than William Friedkin’s original had given them went further. In one theater in Westwood the audience became so angry that seats were ripped up and thrown at the screen. By the time a version shorn by Boorman of almost sixteen minutes opened in Europe in September, Exorcist II was not being shown on a single U.S. screen. (Boorman’s original cut is thankfully available on Blu-ray.) The movie almost ended John Boorman’s career, rehabilitated four years later when his longtime dream of making a movie based on the King Arthur legend resulted in Excalibur, a commercial and critical hit.

Whatever you think of Exorcist II, you need to understand just how different the Hollywood in which it was made is from the fully corporate entity that still calls itself Hollywood today. Boorman had enjoyed an enormous critical and commercial success with the 1972 Deliverance. Because of that, Warner Bros. offered him a chance to direct its planned film of William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist. Repulsed by the book, Boorman turned it down, telling Warner’s head of production John Calley that it seemed to him about the torture of a child. (He thinks similarly about the film Friedkin made.) When Boorman was offered Exorcist II, he made no secret of that distaste and told Warner’s he intended the sequel to be a riposte to the original. And in something that could only have happened at a time when the studios were allowing the most talented filmmakers freedom to make the films they wanted to make as they wanted to make them, Warners agreed to hire a director who hated the film he was making a sequel to, the biggest hit in the studio’s history.

What happened next is the subject of David Kittredge’s scrupulous and rich and finally heartbreaking documentary Boorman and the Devil which takes us, briskly and thoroughly, through the story of the movie’s production and release. That this documentary exists tells another part of the story: the gradual, and by no means complete, rehabilitation of the film’s reputation. Some of the people interviewed here, a fellow who attended the disastrous first preview screening as a teenager and others who saw it in its initial run, are still happy to laugh at it. Others, notably those who worked on the film, don’t particularly like it but their reaction can’t be separated from the hard work they put in and especially by their respect for John Boorman. Of the critics interviewed by Kittredge, Bilge Ebiri admits to respect for the chances Boorman took. Stephanie Zacharek and the film historian Joseph McBride are willing to flat out proclaim it a great movie.

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There are songs and performances I find so painful that I can only listen to them on days when I’m feeling strong. And even on those days, I find myself torn between wanting to hear the beauty of the songs and not wanting to put myself through them ripping me up inside. I’m talking about Sinatra’s version of “Cottage for Sale” (the jaunty Nat King Cole version is no sweat to hear, same with “No Milk Today,” Herman’s Hermits pop rewrite of the number); Johnny Cash’s “Give My Love to Rose”; the Replacements “Here Comes a Regular”; the version of Tom Waits’ “Martha” that Bette Midler performed years ago on SNL. None of them do me in the that way that “Down From Dover” does, the song written and recorded in 1970 by Dolly Parton who died today at 80.

The song appeared on Dolly’s fifth solo LP, The Fairest of Them All. I first heard her sing it in an ‘80s HBO broadcast of a London Concert. It’s the story of a young country girl who falls in love with a man who gets her pregnant and then goes away in the winter promising he’ll be back before she gives birth. Winter has turned to spring which has turned to summer. Fall is here, the trees are bare, and there’s no sign of him. Her father has sent her away before she comes to term telling her he couldn’t bear the shame an out-of-wedlock child would bring on him. The chill in the air can’t match the chill the singer feels as she begins to realize all the promises her lover made were lies. The song ends with her giving birth to a stillborn baby girl and the crushing certainty that she is alone.

You can imagine the Sandy Denny version of Fairport Convention treating the number as an ancient ballad from the time when dread was the air people breathed. And you can imagine one of riot grrrl bands taking the singer’s abandonment and pain as the basis for a blistering blast of rage and resentment. But while Dolly’s version takes place in a place remote from most listeners, the smoky mountains of Tennessee where she grew up, what strikes you listening to it is that it’s happening now, as you’re listening, every bit of the story recited matter-of-factly as if that’s the only way the singer could keep from feeling disgust at her own foolishness, every fear for the future stated just as plainly, as if that’s the only way this young woman has from surrendering to the curse awaiting her. By the time she sings of her baby girl’s still birth and she ends with the lines

And dying was her way of telling me
He wasn’t coming down from Dover

you’re in a state of shock, the way you are when you get to the “done because we are too many” chapter of Jude the Obscure. You can’t believe the blasted honesty of it, not so much that this honesty has been shared with you, listening to the record, as that the singer has been this honest with herself. The songs ends with the words “from Dover” echoing in the background, receding so dimly it’s as if even ghosts can’t be bothered to stick around. It’s a moment of total abandonment, total loss.

It may seem perverse to choose this song to remember a performer who gave people so much joy, and someone who was genuinely loved because of that joy. But Dolly also possessed the gift of select artists—D.W. Griffith, Dickens, the great opera singers and composers—to take what could be merely sentimental and to suffuse it with such unbridled emotional power that it became overwhelming, that the pain and sadness and tragedy on display became transcendent, became something that made you feel fully alive, wounded and from the moment you experienced it never free of the hurt it had inflicted, but a larger person because you did experience it.

I once worked with a group of younger guys, stone music fans, who, though I was older, showed me the love of treating me like the little brother you love to tease. They used to put on Dolly’s “Coat of Many Colors” because they knew it would make me cry—as it had when I was lucky enough to hear Dolly sing it at a small show at Joe’s Pub in New York one night in the zips. Beautiful as that song is, “Down from Dover” leaves me in a darker, deeper place, a place without the release of tears, witness to a soul who has just declared a truth you can’t imagine facing up to and surviving. That Dolly had 56 years left after that declaration says more about her strength as a performer than anything else I can think of. She has earned her peace.

My father hated bullies and bigots. Hated them. It wasn’t a case of a working-class white man born in 1930 undergoing some kind of enlightenment. It was an instinctive disgust with cruelty and unfairness. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t have encounters that reinforced that instinct. When he was in the Navy in the early ‘50s in Newport News, Virginia, he got up to give a bundle-laden Black woman his seat on the bus. She refused and the other White people on the bus told him that he had no business doing that. As encounters with racism go, it was far less worse than things he could have seen in that place in those years and I think he would have been the same person if he hadn’t seen it. But he never forgot it. A few years later, talking to his old-school Bible-thumping grandfather Dad asked him if he believed he’d stand before Jesus when he died. Speaking from that rectitude that has no doubt of its own righteousness, his grandfather didn’t hesitate to answer, Yes. Well then, my Dad continued, when he asks you if you’ve loved your fellow men and you tell him yes, what are you going to say when he asks why you spent so much time running down Black people. The old man shut up.

My father loved his years in the Navy (he signed up to avoid being drafted for Korea). He didn’t see action but he did see the world—Tunis, Naples, Madrid, Cannes, and his favorite, Istanbul. He often talked about how he wished he’d reenlisted, though my mother and I were glad he didn’t. At his graveside, when a serviceman handed me the flag he and a colleague had just folded, “on behalf of the President of the United States and a grateful nation,” I knew Dad would be proud of the latter and loathe the former. There are only a few things I regret my father not getting a chance to do and a few things I regret he had to experience; one is that a man who was an instinctive democrat died with this pustulent as president.

My friend Barb, who loved my Dad (since his name was Charlie, too, she always calls him Big C), pointed out this week that he’d have hated what the Department of Defense (I’m not calling it the Department of War because Trump wants to cosplay soldier) is now doing to the family of Doris “Dorie” Miller. Miller was a Mess Attendant Third Class on the U.S.S. Arizona which was stationed at Pearl Harbor in December 1941. When the Japanese attacked Miller couldn’t get to his battle station but aided wounded soldiers, including his CO, and took control of an anti-aircraft gun, on which he’d had no training, to fire at incoming Japanese planes. He fired until he ran out of ammo and helped sailors to shore as the Arizona sank. He was given the Navy Cross by Admiral Chester Nimitz in 1942 and, almost a year after Pearl Harbor, was killed by a Japanese submarine attack.

The Navy had intended to name an aircraft carrier under construction for Miller. This past week his family found out (but was not informed by the Navy) that under the direction of Pete Hegseth the ship is being named for Trump instead, something that has never been done for a sleeping sitting president, and certainly never been done for a draft dodger. Of course the only reason Hegseth is seeking to do this is because Dorie Miller was Black. Which is the only reason he has sought to wipe the histories of Black military heroes (including Jackie Robinson) from websites and to rename bases after traitors—though Hegseth claims that places like Fort Bragg and Fort Benning are now merely honoring serviceman who just happen to have the same last name as the Confederate scum the bases were originally named for. The claim is that this is an attempt to get rid of DEI initiatives, which is a convenient cover for the transparent White nationalism of Hegseth and the trash he works for.

The Navy my father served in and the country he served for had, at the time he was enlisted, not begun the still-unfinished reckoning with race that would emerge into the national consciousness in 1956, a few years after his service ended. The yearbook for his ship, the U.S.S. Yellowstone, shows his black colleagues segregated into one group, even though Truman had ordered the armed forces to be desegrated in 1948. Dad remembered a hot day in Virginia where a CO ordered him and a few other sailors to stock a jeep with hot dogs and beer and soda so they could have a day at a local beach. When the CO told a Black sailor with them that he couldn’t go because it was a segregated beach, everyone refused to go and instead they took the afternoon off hanging out together on base.

My father, unlike my mother (and unlike me as I inherited my temperament from her) had a long fuse. It took a lot to get him mad. I know of only one instance, before I was born, where he threw a punch (it was directed at a district manager for the supermarket chain he worked for and came after the d.m. had repeatedly demeaned him; anyone who has ever worked retail knows that most people drawn to the role of district manager would benefit from regular punches to keep them in line). But nothing made his blood boil like bullies and bigots. Giving my Dad’s eulogy, his pastor, Chris, who did more for my parents during their last years than I will ever be able to repay, said of him, “Charlie hated the way we treat black people in this country. He hated the way we treat gay people.”

It’s part of what has demeaned this country, demeaned us all, that had he not died in 2017, this essentially loving and generous man would have found plenty to hate about the country he once served. Certainly smug, greasy Pete Hegseth, is just the sort of bullying coward on whom my father would have wished a beatdown. If America is to be America again, as Langston Hughes wished, the national restoration that must follow this era of moral catastrophe—but is not guaranteed—has to be more than assigning fitting names to aircraft carriers and Army bases. It has to mean honoring men like Dorie Miller by making and preserving a country worthy of them.

This piece originally appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books on February 20, 2017. Steve Erickson’s novel Shadowbahn was written as a nightmare vision of America before the 2016 election. By the time it was published in 2017, it read as prophecy. That feeling has only grown in the intervening nine years. It remains one of the peak achievements of the most imaginatively gifted living American novelist.

THE TENSION in Steve Erickson’s staggering new novel Shadowbahn is between endless possibilities and crushing dread. This is a book in which the vastness of American ambition and dreaming can take your breath away and then, only a few lines later, make you tremble with the sense that we are always living a hair’s breadth away from catastrophe. Shadowbahn filled me with exultation and terror. At one point, Erickson refers to the president as “she.” When I read the novel for the first time, last fall, that one word, in the context of the book’s portrait of a nation in shards, felt as if the author was both giving cause for hope and saying that even in the midst of hope there still exists the potential that the United States could destroy itself. Reading Shadowbahn again now, that pronoun already the mark of a vanished past that might as well be ages ago rather than just three months past, the book seems to be describing a cataclysm already taking place.

The impetus for Shadowbahn, which opens in 2021, is the reappearance of the Twin Towers in the Badlands of South Dakota. They look as they did before destruction, but are empty, as if all those people weren’t murdered but instead just walked away. What follows springs from Erickson’s realization that everything in American life is doubled or shadowed or forever in peril of being swamped by its opposite—including democracy itself. Democracy can never be resolved, being simultaneously a celebration of the collective strength found in equality as well as a rationale for those who, unable to be satisfied with merely being equal, set out to propel themselves far beyond any notion of community, except for those their imaginations call into being. Just how impossible it can be to separate the impulse toward community from the impulse to individuality may be summed up by the words of a young Memphis truck driver named Elvis Presley who, when asked by the Sun Studios receptionist Marion Keisker who he sang like, replied: “I don’t sound like nobody.” What did he mean? Was that a working-class boy’s expression of humility, or a version of what John Lennon would say 16 years later: “I came out of the fuckin’ sticks to take over the world”?

The reappearance of the Towers gives Erickson the chance to ring variations on the freely parroted bromide that followed 9/11: Nothing will ever be the same—a line much of the United States immediately set about proving false. Those locked into the shibboleths of the right and the left acted as if they knew exactly what they were dealing with (evil Muslims for the former, the perfidy of American foreign policy for the latter) and adopted the attitude that least challenged their beliefs.

Erickson takes the empty words at face value, giving us a world in which 9/11 has reordered not just what came after, but also what came before. On the 93rd floor of one of the towers, a man awakens to find himself just beginning his life as an adult. The man is Jesse Garon Presley, Elvis’s stillborn twin. In this scenario, Elvis is the one who died, but Jesse, wandering the empty offices of the abandoned Tower, hears his dead brother’s voice in his head. He knows he can’t hope to match that voice, and he knows his very existence has prevented that voice from coming into being. The sound follows him everywhere through the deserted rooms, even hovers on the edges of his sleep. And sleep holds worse torment: nightmares of his mother, her thighs bearing the blood of childbirth, saying to him: “Only he could sing like that […] and you ain’t nothing but the shadowborn that did precede him.” This is the horrible comedy of American life, the longing for success and the constant reminder of being second-rate.

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Sometimes reading film critics, especially younger ones, I wonder if they have any knowledge of the world outside of movies. Scan the reviews of the new romantic comedy One Night Only and again and again you’ll find the movie’s premise dismissed as preposterous. In the picture, which is set two or three years into the future, a right-wing government has succeeded in passing a law outlawing sex between unmarried people. The only reprieve is a once yearly dusk-to-dawn period where single people are allowed to have sex but are required to use condoms. The movie’s would-be Romeo is Owen (Callum Turner) a pizzeria owner who, near the start of the picture is told by his girlfriend that she wants to use the night to sleep with someone else. (That’s more of a defiance of the ban than anything anyone else does in the movie. It’s a contradiction that a movie in favor of sexual freedom would look askance at her choice. Luckily, as Maya Hawke plays her, she’s in the Ralph Bellamy tradition of the romantic partner who we immediately see is all wrong for the hero or heroine.) His Juliet is Allie (Monica Barbaro) a singer making her living vocalizing on commercials for the latest wonder drug. And the course of the movie is how these two come to realize the other is the one they are meant to spend this night with.

As a premise for an essentially sweet-spirited romantic comedy, a government-enforced sex ban has problems, proving to be almost as much albatross as inspiration. But preposterous? The day One Night Only opened Erica Schwartz, Trump’s nominee for head of the CDC, since confirmed, announced that the center would from now on be in the business of “abortion surveillance.” Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of Project 2025 has been pushing policies that defund organizations or programs that serve the sexual health of single people--contraception, abortion, treatment of STDs. Overturning Roe v. Wade Clarence Thomas said the government should revisit the 1965 Griswold decision which allowed access to contraceptives. So what world are these critics living in? From overturning Roe to the attempt to outlaw the morning after pill to the attempt to erase trans people, how has the present regime not shown its intent to control the bodies of the people it hates? If there’s anything preposterous about the movie’s premise, it’s that the far right would allow any exception to their policies and that they’d promote contraception.

One Night Only, which was directed by Will Gluck and written by Travis Braun, can’t quite escape the grim Draconian shadows of that premise. But one of the smart choices it makes is to not make the New York City it shows us look grimly futuristic. If we’ve learned anything in the past ten years it’s that an authoritarian almost-dictatorship looks pretty much like the world we were always living in. That’s the insidiousness of it. Or as the poet Jorie Graham writes in her majestically bleak new collection Killing Spree:

the atmosphere

stayed the same

or enough to seem

the same.

Part of the reason One Night Only may throw people is that even with that premise, New York hasn’t looked this good in any comedy in years. The cinematographer Yaron Orbach gives the city a sunny sense of space and freedom in the daytime scenes, as if the concrete itself were adding a bounce to every New Yorker’s steps. And the dark of the city night here isn’t threatening but welcoming, a velvety, twinkling urbanscape in which to pursue romance, or just the boost of a no-strings-attached frolic. And as this night of libidinous license goes on, the characters dropping into one of the lounges that seem to exist on every block for those looking for a partner or those just taking a break from the hunt, we are seeing New York as it should be: a city that really doesn’t sleep. (Unlike its current incarnation in which, after seeing the picture, my girlfriend and I were unable to get drinks at two different restaurants because they were shutting at—I swear to God--9:45 PM).

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The first time you hear the Chantels’ “If You Try,” and every time after that, whether you register it or not, part of your brain is thinking that no one who produces a sound like this can ever die. I’m talking specifically about the lead vocal by Arlene Smith, 16 when she recorded it in producer George Goldner’s New York City studio, who died last week at 84.

“Maybe” was the big hit off the Chantels’ debut album We Are the Chantels when it was released in 1958 (number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100, number 2 on the r&b charts) but it’s “If You Try,” which closes the album, which some of us have never gotten over.

There’s a certain type of vocal which finds strength by completely surrendering to vulnerability. This isn’t what divas do. Divas offer a simulacrum of suffering and heartache, the main goal is to wow the audience and secure their worship. The message, as the critic Robert Warshow once wrote of Charlie Chaplin is “Love me” which, as Warshow noted, begs the question, does the artist love us? And the answer is, yes, but for what we can give them, adoration.

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Writing about Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage,” Greil Marcus called it “a song so brilliantly conceived, so carefully written, so indelibly arranged and sung, it made most everything that surrounded it on the radio seem faintly obscene.”

That’s how The Garden of the Finzi-Continis makes me feel about most movies…

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It’s hot in New York City, not as miserable as it can get but hot. Enough so that if you’re dressed for something that requires you look presentable—in my case, trying to find a second part-time job--you’re overdressed for the heat. Today, after two unsuccessful in…

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Atheism—which, like what it opposes, is a form of belief that insists on the truth of what it cannot possibly know—puts forth a vision of those who believe in God as submissive, supplicant, cowed, as fearful of the supreme being they worship as they are reverent.

The protagonists in Edward Lewis Wallant’s novels The Human Season (1960) and The Pawnbroker (1961) are furious believers. It would never occur to them not to believe in God, but what compels that belief is that they have experienced tragedy on both the personal scale and the historic scale. Berman, the Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant plumber of The Human Season is entirely upended to find himself widowed at 49; Sol Nazerman, a former professor turned Harlem pawnbroker, has lost his beloved wife and family in the Holocaust. The cries of pain that express themselves in rants, though, are always in defiance of God, never in denial. In Wallant’s novels, to believe in God is not to receive a promise of salvation and thus a release from suffering but to become both God’s witness and, as much as is humanly possible, His agent. Which means possessing an intense awareness of the pain of being human, which both encompasses and supersedes their own pain, ameliorating that pain when they can, and being burdened and blessed with the realization that human pain is inseparable from the overlooked pleasures of the world God created. Not the overwhelming wonders always cited as divine creation but the things so common they have ceased to inspire wonder. Towards the end of The Human Season, Berman, unstinting in his work ethic, gives himself a rare day off to take a bus trip from his home in the suburbs of New Haven to the seaside. He watches the people around him, the children, the young women in their bathing suits, an old arthritic woman bobbing up and down, “a beatific expression on her ancient face.” And what Wallant describes welling up in him, overpowering him, is not joy but instead “bedlam . . . tears, laughter, anger, circulating too fast to ruffle his face with its absent smile.” The weather is both beautiful and punishing, sunny but so hot Wallant describes the air itself as “breathless.” What follows is a drenching summer storm, pouring down from a black sky that might be a baptism but a baptism into the intermingled existence of hurt and balm. What Berman comes to understand, as does the teenage protagonist of Wallant’s The Children at the Gate (1964), is that this “would be the death of him, [and] would be the life of him too.”

Born in New Haven, Wallant was part of the wave of Jewish-American writers that produced Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud and, a few years before them, Norman Mailer. He was a gunner’s mate in the Navy during World War II and worked in advertising as an art director. While working he studied literature and writing at the New School. The New York City of his books, a great and battered polyglot city was the city he encountered working and studying there and that’d depicted so clearly, lovingly at times, though without a trace of sentimentality. Wallant is in all ways a man out of time. Not just because he has been dead sixty-four years, having died of an aneurysm, at 36, leaving behind a wife and three children, and two unpublished novels, The Children at the Gate and the 1963 The Tenants of Moonbloom, but also because his fiction, so redolent of human suffering, is distinctly out of place in a culture that has come to equate compassion with the belief that victims are so weak, so permanently scarred, that the only existence open to them is a permanent state of debilitation, and that they can’t be expected to acknowledge anyone else’s pain. What is so hard and so profoundly compassionate about The Human Season and The Pawnbroker is Wallant’s insistence that even the worst doesn’t excuse us from engagement with the world, doesn’t excuse us from seeing and acknowledging and easing the pain of others.

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In the late ‘70s a Boston music critic ended a review of a Rick Nelson concert by calling him, never the rebel you wanted, never the wimp you feared. Accurate and, the first part at least, a little unfair. Demanding every rock ‘n’ roll performer be a rebel says a lot more about the clichéd expectations of the writer than the limitations of the performer under consideration. Was Fats Domino a rebel? Were the Fleetwoods? The Spinners? The question to ask is did those artists stay true to themselves, did they give us a glimpse of pleasure or heartache that made us want more out of life?

I think you’d have to be awfully mingy spirited to turn up your nose at the rockabilly Nelson (then Ricky Nelson) turned out in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Everyone knows “Hello, Mary Lou” but there are also the glories of “Be Bop Baby,” “Believe What You Say,” the great “Waitin’ in School,” a song in the same spirit as Chuck Berry’s “School Days,” and “It’s Late,” on the same theme as the Everly Brothers’ “Wake Up Little Susie” and I like it better. (I know a college radio DJ who faithfully ended every edition of his late-night show with it.) The presence of the great guitarist James Burton in Nelson’s band is often used to beef up Nelson’s cred but as the wonderful critic Ed Ward once wrote “you can have the greatest backup band in the world, but if you ain’t got the talent yourself, nobody can save you.” (The observation is from Ward’s liner notes to the Ricky Nelson volume of United Artists’ Records invaluable Legendary Masters series.)

It wasn’t just in his music that Nelson had to prove himself more than a teen idol. In 1959 he made his movie debut in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, one of the great American movies, where he got to sing a sublime duet with Dean Martin, “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” and Hawks got criticized for including the song as though it were a sop to teen moviegoers. (As you’d expect of a director who had made a movie about the profoundly undemocratic belief that some people are expendable, Hawks said that when a director has talent available to him, he’d be a fool not to use it.)

Four years after Rio Bravo, Nelson was largely off the charts, his last top ten hit, “For You” coming in 1964 and there wouldn’t be another until 1972 when he hit number six in the Billboard Top Ten with “Garden Party,” a song almost designed to prove the foolishness of mistaking Rick Nelson for a wimp.

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In Samuel Fuller’s suppressed 1982 White Dog, as strong an antiracist movie as America has produced, a young woman played by Kristy McNichol nurses back to health a snow-white dog she’s injured with her car only to discover the animal has been trained to attack and kill people with black skin. Leaving FOUND posters over Los Angeles eventually results in…

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--Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male

It’s still possible, barely 24 hours after the third unsuccessful assassination attempt on Trump, that we will find out something that marks the accused shooter, Cole Thomas Allen as deranged. Trump, predictably, lost no time in branding him as a “whack job” and a “lone wolf.” And it’s certain that legacy media will do exactly the same, resorting to descriptives like disturbed and troubled, the polite journalistic euphemisms for Trump’s epithets. They will do this because mainstream journalists, like Congress and the judiciary, are still acting as if the current aspiring dictatorship can be dealt with by the old rules, rules that the Trump junta and their enablers have nullified by their open contempt.

The thing is at this point there is not a shred of evidence that Cole Thomas Allen was crazy or disturbed, that he would ever have been a danger to anyone but Trump and his cabinet. (Just as it has never been established that either Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed attempting to assassinate Trump in 2024, or Ryan Wesley Routh, who was sentenced to life for attempting to assassinate Trump in September of 2024—though he never even got off a shot—were crazy.) The message Allen sent to his family moments before his attempt is clearly not the meanderings of a crazy man. “I don’t expect forgiveness,” he wrote, “Again, my sincere apologies.” Allen also wrote, “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done,” which is no more than what could reasonably be expected from anyone with a functioning sense of morality. When Allen says that he is “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” he is speaking with more clarity, more honesty, more directly than most journalists, politicians, and judges have managed, not casting aspersions but describing precisely what the available facts establish about Trump. Nor is this a recklessly violent man. The message he sent says that he will not fire on the Secret Service unless he is fired on. And yes, it’s sheer luck that the agent he did shoot was saved by a bulletproof vest. But clearly this is not someone who was out to randomly kill.

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It wasn’t as bad as, earlier in the day, coming across footage of a CNBC host asking a guest how investors live with the uncertainty that comes from a sitting president announcing that an entire civilization would die that night—a question so grotesque you can imagine it coming from the mind of the deadliest satirist. But what the man at the movies shared with that host was, in the face of a promised war crime, a commitment to the selfishness that got us into this farrago in this first place.

Stupidity and racism and xenophobia all played their part in Trump’s reelection. But at the bottom of every vote for Trump—and in that category I include every gutless wonder on the left who couldn’t pull the lever for Kamala—was selfishness. The horrors that were waiting for immigrants or Americans of color or LGBT Americans under a Trump presidency, atrocities that anyone with a modicum of sense knew were just down the road, didn’t matter to people more concerned with the price of eggs, or cretinous enough to believe that Trump, a man whose first act as President in 2017 was to issue a ban on Muslims entering the country, would somehow be better for Gaza than Kamala.

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Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad

I knew exactly what was bugging me about Burke’s book

* * *

It’s not a stupid book or a dishonest one. What Burke is attempting to do is not just to introduce and delineate the terrorists who proliferated across the ‘70s but to chart the shift from the threat posed by left-wing terrorism, with its basis in Marxist-Leninism, to the threat from right-wing religious-based terrorism that, first showing itself on a large scale with the establishment of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, took hold across much of the Middle East. Burke is a writer for the Guardian and, for the most part, he steers clear of the condescending “now now” tone that has sometimes characterized that publication’s attitude to those alarmed and angry about terrorism. Burke is operating from the common-sense belief that, both for intellectual rigor and to strengthen your own safety, it’s crucial to know your enemy. He doesn’t believe understanding terrorists’ motivations means either agreeing with them or endorsing their actions. He understands the hellish problems started by the displacement of the Palestinians in 1948 but he doesn’t forgive the pervasive antisemitism of the response. No terrorist gets a pass in this book. Nor do the governments—in the east as well as the west—who have inadvertently underestimated, overestimated, or—either by appeasement or rashness—enabled the groups threatening them. By the time Burke gets to the terrorism propagated by Islamist fundamentalists, he is able to cite numerous intelligence assessments saying the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East was a localized phenomenon that western governments need not worry about.

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Thinking that if I hadn’t bought it, I wouldn’t have passed by the open door of a pop-up shop at just the right time to hear Frank Sinatra’s voice floating out.

Not you lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals

with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants,

nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition

is wedding Poetic Insight perpetu…

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This is a version of a piece which appeared in its original form in 2000 in the publication formerly known as Salon.

Rear Window makes me feel guilty. That may sound like an odd thing to say about a thrilling and witty picture. But while the 1954 Rear Window is surely one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best entertainments, there’s no getting around that it’s also an intensely discomforting experience.

Using the story of a wheelchair-bound photographer (James Stewart) who passes the time recuperating from a broken leg by spying out his window into the apartments of his Greenwich Village neighbors, Hitchcock made a movie that both encourages voyeurism and shames it, that refuses to condemn it or applaud it.

For Stewart’s L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries, looking into his neighbors’ apartments is as easy as flipping on the TV or killing an afternoon at a matinee. A daredevil photographer bored out of his mind by his six weeks of confinement, Jeff turns the lighted windows on the other side of the courtyard into his own private multiplex.

I’m hardly the first critic to point out that Rear Window can be seen as a metaphor for watching movies, but the metaphor only goes so far. There’s a big difference between peeping at strangers and watching a movie that’s been made for the express purpose of being watched. But Hitchcock was uniquely suited to explore what Grace Kelly refers to in the film as “rear-window” ethics.

Movies, because we watch them, are often talked of disapprovingly as a passive activity. That’s too easy. In some ways, Hitchcock’s whole career, his oft-quoted preference for suspense over surprise, was a black joke played on moviegoer passivity. An audience that possesses crucial information that the characters lack is both desperate to do something and excruciatingly aware of its inability to do anything.

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In outline, the 1984 Mrs. Soffel, the story of a prison-warden’s wife who falls in love with a killer condemned to death and helps him escape, is a melodrama. As realized by the director Gillian Armstrong, the screenwriter Ron Nyswaner, and especially, in the lead, Diane Keaton, the movie is something like a Victorian fever-dream tragedy. It even opens like a dream, the midnight blue titles against a black background, periodically interrupted by rapidly vanishing glimpses of factory chimneys belching smoke, industrial machinery so assured and ominous it appears to be operating by itself. This is the realm of imagination and dreams overtaken by the mechanical and prosaic. It’s no surprise when, right after those credits, we first see Kate Soffel wake screaming from an unseen dream.

The setting is 1901 Pittsburgh and Kate is married to Peter Soffel (Edward Herrmann), the warden of the Allegheny Prison, a gothic pile of a place with living quarters that follow suit. The rooms are draped in heavy dark brocade, stuffed with furniture that looks as if it was made with no provision for human comfort, all of it in dull greens and browns and golds from which any warmth or glow seems to have been drained. The stultified calm of these interiors is belied by the turmoil outside where protesters demand the release of Ed and Jack Biddle (Mel Gibson and Matthew Modine), two brothers sentenced to hang for their part in a robbery that left a grocery store clerk dead. The Biddles and their supporters claim it was their accomplice who committed the murder; the state doesn’t care.

When the movie opens Kate has been bedridden for months, restless and feverish. Kate seems to be suffering from one of those unnamed conditions that were once believed to be caused by the inherently nervous disposition of women. As Jean Strouse wrote in her biography of America’s most pedigreed female shut-in, Alice James, “Medical science at the time, viewing the human organism as a precarious balance between body and mind, nature and civilization, confirmed society’s assumption that the balance was even more unstable in women than in men. The female body seemed a fine, frail mechanism that could easily fall victim to excessive mental activity.” Shortly after the movie begins, Kate rises from her bed, claiming to be cured (as she believes God told her she would be in a dream), and what surprises Peter is his wife’s unexplained wellness. The sickness, it seems, was to be expected.

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1) The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)—The greatest American political film ever. A work in which paranoia is the only potential way to grasp the true horror of the present, in which those in power permit, even revel in, every possible desecration of the American experiment, …

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In…

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