J. B. Biggley
[played by Rudy Vallee, left]: “Ideas? That's what I look for. I keep
hiring a lot of fellows who are supposed to have brilliant ideas, but not one
of them will ever do what I tell him.” — How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967), based on the
novel by Shepherd Mead, adapted into a Pulitzer and Tony-winning musical with
book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert, music and lyrics by
Frank Loesser, movie written and directed by David Swift
In an effort
to build industry word-of-mouth before awards season, the musical dramedy La La Land premiered to North American audiences for the first time in
September 2016, at the Telluride and Toronto International Film Festivals,
earning such rapturous approval that it became the film to beat for Best
Picture Oscar.The film’s
promoters forgot an important lesson, however: don’t peak too soon lest
naysayers pick it apart and allow competitors to overtake it. So it proved in
the end the following winter, when La La Land walked off with six
Oscars except the one most coveted: Best Motion Picture of the Year.
All of
that seemed far away when these early audiences responded positively. At
Telluride, for instance, the film was greeted with two mid-movie ovations (following
the freeway and Griffith Park sequences) and another 20-second one at the end.
What
elicited the affection of these and later audiences? Certainly stars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, displaying the same chemistry they brought
to Crazy Stupid Love and Gangster Squad, as well as a months-long
pre-shooting dedication that allowed them to surmount their lack of much prior
vocal and dance training.
But the
film also functioned as an irresistible double love story: not just between the
two attractive young people at its center, but with the city that served as the
focus of their entertainment dreams.
Writer-director
Damien Chazelle and cinematographers Linus Sandgren and Tom Cross might
not have produced the grittiest cinematic depiction of Los Angeles, but they
did produce one of the most heartbreaking: a place that forces you to choose
between love and ambition. “That's L.A.,” says Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian, a jazz
pianist struggling to open his own club. “They worship everything, and they
value nothing."
For one reason or another, I didn’t watch La La Land when it was released. It might have stayed that way except that, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed on YouTube a clip of an upbeat early song from the film, “Someone in the Crowd,” featuring Stone’s Mia stepping out with her roommates to attend a Hollywood party where they can be seen and network.
I was hooked, and I’m sure
you would be, too, if you haven’t seen the movie already.
Neither
Stone nor Gosling are professional singers or dancers, so you won’t find the
pyrotechnics in a Cabaret, All That Jazz, or Chicago. But
you won’t find the cynicism rampant in those Bob Fosse musicals, either. This
is unapologetic, heart-on-its-sleeve romanticism, with the lovers literally
soaring above ground in Griffith Observatory in the “Dancing in the Stars”
scene.
Moreover, Stone and Gosling, having trained intensively for their roles (with Gosling, a neophyte on the piano, practicing for months so he could perform the jazz tunes himself with no CGI or hand double) acquit themselves marvelously.
And
Chazelle, with help from choreographer Mandy Moore, have drawn the best
possible lessons from those MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, as
well as the poignant French 1964 “sung-through” musical, The Umbrellas of
Cherbourg.
What led Moonlight
to overtake La La Land in the Best Picture contest?
All the
advance word-of-mouth for the latter also provided opportunities for backlash,
focusing on how the film seemed crafted to capitalize on Academy voters' penchant for rewarding movies about actors (most notoriously, Shakespeare in
Love over Saving Private Ryan); on how it was more a retro musical
than a movie with original content; and how, in violation of jazz history, it
depicted a white musician induced to compromise his pursuit of pure craft by an
African-American tastemaker (John Legend, inexplicably playing guitar onscreen
rather than his familiar piano).
On the
other hand, Moonlight came to embody an underdog spirit—particularly
following the November 2016 Presidential election, when the film’s entirely
African-American cast (a first in the Academy’s nomination history) and its LGBTQ
theme represented defiance of what Hollywood deemed Donald Trump’s reactionary
politics.
I have not
seen Moonlight so I can’t comment on its merits versus La La Land.
But the atmosphere of fear now sweeping the entertainment industry constitutes
a far different environment from what existed a decade ago, it’s possible that
a different Oscar voting outcome might occur today.
I suspect that the moviegoing public would, if given a chance, vote for La La Land, in any case. Box-office grosses are never to be confused with value.
But during
their theatrical runs, La La Land grossed $504.6 million worldwide,
while Moonlight pulled in a considerably more modest $65.3 million, even
with the help of that Best Picture statuette from the Academy.
Homer Simpson [voice
of Dan Castellaneta]: “Frosty Krusty Flakes are what got him [Bart] where
he is today. It could be one of these chemicals here that makes him so smart.
Lisa, maybe you should try some of these.”
Marge Simpson [voice
of Julie Kavner]: “Homer!”
Homer:
“I'm just saying, why not have two geniuses in the family? Sort of a spare in
case Bart's brain blows up.” —The Simpsons, Season 1, Episode 2, “Bart the Genius,” original air date Jan. 14, 1990, teleplay by Jon Vitti,
directed by David Silverman
There are a couple of reasons why I thought of using this quote today besides, most obviously, because of Labor Day.
After 10 years, I finally got around this past week to watch La La Land. For much of the movie, Emma Stone’s character Mia has her dreams of being an actress dashed repeatedly, in just the “discouraging and humiliating and disappointing” fashion recalled by Ms. Field.
I also recently read a book called Hollywood Unions, edited by Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola. It covers numerous occupations, most like the blue-collar, less prestigious jobs in which Field’s parents struggled to make ends meet.
Unions represent an estimated 331,000 workers in the film and television industry, most of whom will experience economic uncertainty rather than the glamour of Oscar night. Even the most successful actors will be quick to say that they might be lucky to receive one call-back out of 100 auditions.
Less than
a week after assuming control, Raines threw the paper’s overwhelming resources
into the biggest story that he and other journalists had ever covered: the 9/11
terrorist attacks.
At first,
it seemed to vindicate his philosophy of
“flooding the zone,” or devoting saturation coverage to a major news event, day
after day. In his first year at the helm, The Times won Pulitzer Prizes,
including the first given to its metro desk since the 1950s.
But more
than he or his acolytes realized, all that celebration and self-congratulation
were not entirely warranted.
First, the
staff responsible for producing the prize-winning stories (including its
ongoing special section, “A Nation Challenged”) had been largely picked and
guided by predecessor Joseph Lelyveld.
Second, as
noted in Eric Boehlert’s Salon post-mortem on the scandal that ended
Howell’s reign, top editors’ direction of the DC bureau’s news coverage “represented
an unprecedented attempt to micromanage the newspaper and infuriated editors
and reporters, many of whom began to flee to other papers and other jobs.”
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the newspaper who had selected Raines for the top editorial post, should have taken more seriously a December 2022 Newsweek article warning of newsroom rumblings about this direction.
He must have
sensed that, for all his friend’s talent (a Pulitzer Prize winner himself, for
a 1992 Times Magazine essay about his family’s maid, Grady Hutchinson,
in the segregated South of his childhood) and experience (bureau chief stints
in Atlanta, London, and Washington), Raines needed to relax his management
style.
According
to Ken Auletta’s June 2002 New Yorker profile, “The Howell Doctrine,”
Sulzberger not only cautioned Raines that he could not employ the star system
he had used as Washington bureau chief, but confided in associates "that
he would have blocked Raines’ promotion [to executive editor] if Sulzberger was
not convinced that he had changed.”
But you might as well ask a leopard to change its spots. It wasn’t enough that Raines thought he had a mandate from Sulzberger to make the paper “smarter, livelier, and more appealing to the geographically diverse and demanding national audience on which its future depends,” as he put it in a May 2004 Atlantic Monthly account of his tenure.
He also saw a conflict between “the
senior editors who endorsed these improvements and traditionalists on the
newsroom floor and among mid-level managers.” The latter, he claimed, “wanted
the paper to stay the way it was.”
The
members of the latter faction went unnamed. There is every
reason to think that the claim was fatuous, a grope in the dark by a former
journalism giant too blind to understand how his own failings led to his
departure from the job he craved and the paper he loved.
In his
first day on the job, Raines thought he was sending a symbolic signal to staff
by putting on his desk a copy of the Charles Gaines 1972 novel Stay Hungry,
the application of which seemed obvious to him in a competitive news environment.
But he
missed the other signals that the newsroom picked up about his imperious manner
in fielding questions at breakfasts and lunches, including an expression that
even friends thought made him look like “an angry hawk.”
Terms
other than “flooding the zone” might better describe the coverage that Raines
soon assigned to some topics, with the most polite being “crusade.” “Obsession”
would fit even better. “Hobbyhorse” might have worked especially well in some
instances:
* The
verdict was most mixed on the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal. No
doubt, an institution to which one in five Americans belonged at the time
needed to be scrutinized, and there was no doubt that exposing the misdeeds of
individual priests and the coverup by the hierarchy prevented countless future
crimes. But the number of collective column inches, the lack of oversight on
individual stories, and the secular viewpoint of the paper’s staff and
readership raised real questions about objectivity and even anti-Catholic bias.
(For instance, assuming that TV showrunner David Kelley was “raised Catholic,”
it headlined a review of one of his scripts about the abuse scandal, “A
Catholic Writer Brings His Anger to 'The Practice'”—and needed to run a
correction when it turned out that Kelley was, in fact, raised Protestant.)
Moreover, Raines’ motives for propelling the coverage were hardly pure; Martin
Baron, executive editor of The Boston Globe, later told Roy Harris for a 2008 article for Poynter that he heard his
counterpart at the Times was “annoyed that we were onto the biggest
story of the year and seemingly headed to a Pulitzer,” and determined that his
paper would cover it at the national level and consign the Globe to
local stories about the scandal.
*The Bush
administration claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of
mass destruction was certainly covered in depth, but without the skepticism it
deserved. A 2004 “Editor’s Note,” after an internal investigation, concluded
that Judith Miller’s stories on this justification for the war buildup that “information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now,
was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged” by senior
management at the time—an assessment that Raines predictably took issue with.
* Campaigning
incessantly for the Augusta National Golf Course to open to women was
hardly the most consequential story in Raines’ tenure, but it was certainly the
one that provoked the most ridicule. The revelation of spiked columns by two
writers who disagreed with the position only made matters worse.
But the Blair
fiasco represented a fundamental challenge to the Times’ credibility
that could not be ignored.
What
Raines’ friends and defenders downplayed, in noting that other journalists were
not forced out of their positions or faced such dire damage to their
reputations for their misdeeds, were the sheet multiplicity and breadth of
Blair’s transgressions, including fake quotes; locations supposedly visited
even as he sat in his Brooklyn apartment; details invented from photographs and
other news reports; and passages plagiarized from other reporters.
An exhaustive, nearly 7,500-word post-mortem that, to his credit, Raines authorized, concluded that at least 36 of Blair’s final 73 stories filed before his resignation were tainted by fraud.
Worse, high-level figures such as Washington editor Jill
Abramson and metro editor Jonathan Landman had been raising red flags, with Landman even warning, in a blunt April 2002 memo, “We have to stop
Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”
Five works
elapsed after Blair's firing before Sulzberger took further
action. When Raines could not contain the mushrooming scandal or the newsroom muttering
that had now become a cacophony, he and managing editor Gerald Boyd were forced
to resign.
The
disappointment must have been enormous when Raines finally grasped that he
would function as an agent of change at the Gray Lady in a far different
fashion than he expected.
Largely because of the Blair scandal, the Times instituted the ombudsman position (or, as they called it, a “public editor”), an independent watchdog who investigated reader complaints of inaccuracy and unfairness.
Six journalists performed that
function for the next 14 years, until the paper decided that the rise of social
media helped maintain accountability. (I still think that was a mistake.)
In Andy
Robinson’s July 2017 retrospective on the position in the Columbia Journalism Review,
Margaret Sullivan, the penultimate Times public editor, noted the
scandal epitomized “so many issues that were and still are happening in
newsrooms: the effort to diversify the staff, people who find mentors, the
pressure that reporters are under, the intense pressure that they’re under at
places like The New York Times, the things that can go wrong, the way
that in the new age you could simply be talking to your editor on your cell
phone, and they wouldn’t know where you were.”
I first
encountered the work of Lurie in the mid-Seventies, with her biting academic
satire The War Between the Tates. Though she had written four prior
novels, this was the first to attract widespread attention—enough for it to
land on the bestseller lists and to be adapted into a 1977 TV movie starring Elizabeth
Ashley, Richard Crenna, and Annette O'Toole.
For anyone
wanting to know what how the nation’s campuses were roiled in the late Sixties
by the Vietnam War, women’s lib, and the sexual revolution, this insider’s
take, with its cool irony, remains an excellent place to start.
Many
neophyte authors follow the mantra “write about what you know,” but I was
unaware until I started researching this post just how closely Ms. Lurie
followed that.
Several of
her novels (including The War Between the Tates) feature characters from
Corinth University, a school that shares a classical association and upstate
New York setting with the institution where Ms. Lurie taught for decades,
Cornell University.
Her female
protagonists (the same age, within a few years, of Ms. Lurie) are often
involved with children’s literature—her academic specialty. She couldn’t help
but regard with tart disdain how these books were viewed by her colleagues, as
in this passage from Foreign Affairs:
“For the
truth is that children’s literature is a poor relation in her department
–indeed, in most English departments: a stepdaughter grudgingly tolerated
because, as in the old tales, her words are glittering jewels of a sort that
attract large if not equally brilliant masses of undergraduates. Within the
departmental family she sits in the chimney-corner, while her idle, ugly
siblings dine at the chairman’s table –though, to judge by enrollment figures,
many of them must spout toads and lizards.”
With all
of that said, readers should be careful not to construe her fiction as directly
autobiographical. Maintaining the kind of ironic distance she was able to keep
towards her characters would have been difficult, if not impossible, if they
derived entirely from her experiences and emotions.
For
instance, like Erica Tate in The War Between the Tates, Lurie suffered
through the collapse of her marriage to another academic. But, while the
marital conflict in the novel was brought to a boil by an extramarital affair,
Lurie’s marriage deteriorated as her first husband underwent a conversion to
Roman Catholicism—a spiritual orientation that, as the child of religious
skeptics, she had little or no use for.
Over the
years, I have wondered why Ms. Lurie was unable to sustain her mid-career
popularity. Some of it may relate to the fact that creators of so-called
“literary fiction” don’t work in genres where they can become “brand authors.”
But I
suspect most of the problem instead rests with her frequent recourse to the
academic environment she knew so thoroughly—a setting outside the experience of
many common readers in the U.S. Throughout most of her career, her popularity
was higher in the U.K., where writers such as A.S. Byatt, Kingsley Amis, David
Lodge, and Iris Murdoch have enjoyed success with “campus novels.”
Readers
who do try Ms. Lurie will find a fiction writer able to put her literary
influences to use in contemporary contexts:
*Her
consistently wry narrative voice (you can practically see her narrators
raise their eyebrows) is reminiscent of Jane Austen.
*With his
“international novels” (featuring encounters between innocent Americans and
more jaded British), interest in artists, and midlife fascination with the
supernatural, Henry James provided Lurie with another template.
*And her
intense study of children’s literature led Lurie to plumb the complex
personalities and frequent fears of the very young.
Above all,
Lurie exemplifies the tendency of so many writers—no matter their time or
nation—to write from a personal wound. With Lurie, that wound began even before
childhood, in birth. As she wrote in a 1982 essay for The New York Times Book
Review:
“I was a
skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a
birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my
mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of
sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, ‘too clever for her own
good,’ but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn't seem
to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person
chosen for any team.”
The
precocious but lonely child took refuge in books, especially, at that young
age, fairy tales. To her joy, she discovered her own personal superpower: “With
a pencil and paper I could revise the world.”
It made
the difference in her life, which ended six years ago in a hospice in Ithaca,
NY.
Lurie
would be delighted to know that admirers of her fiction are celebrating the
centenary of her birth on both sides of the Atlantic this month. In New York
City, the 92nd Street Y will host “Alison Lurie at 100” on Tuesday, September 15, featuring authors Bruce Handy,
Joanna Rakoff, and Micah Perks in conversation with Cody Upton.
And in London,
the British Library hosts “An American in London: A Celebration of Alison Lurie”
on September 29, with speakers including Amanda Craig, Elly Griffiths, and Dame
Margaret Drabble.
Unlike Britain, most U.S. museums charge admission
fees. But Sir Ben’s point remains well taken: museums are a “tremendous
force for public good” in terms of what they can teach visitors. Let’s keep it
that way.
In the two
decades since Terkel’s remarks, I would have to say that the “assault upon our
intelligence” has grown more relentless, and, in important ways, has even
breached longtime defenses.
Army Major
General Chris Donahue represented not just just the last U.S. service member to
leave at the end of a chaotic two-week period, but also the failure of
America’s two-decade effort at nation-building in the country that harbored the
9/11 terrorists.
More than
a few officials bore responsibility for this ignominious end to America’s
longest war, but the one left holding the bag was President Joe Biden. Coming
eight months into his administration, the images of civilians
clinging to a military transport plane and a suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S.
service members demoralized TV viewers who had never seen or had forgotten
similar scenes of disarray in Saigon in April 1975.
Biden’s approval rating fell from 49 percent at the start of August 2021 to 43 percent
a month later, according to Gallup polling, and never really recovered after
that.
Periodically,
American foreign-policy or military failures lead to the question, “Who lost
it?”, as occurred in China and Vietnam. The Biden administration was certainly
responsible for setting up a symbolic but arbitrary withdrawal date (the
anniversary of 9/11) that left inadequate time for planning an orderly transfer
to complete Afghan military self-reliance.
But
multiple mistakes, as early as America’s initial airstrikes in October 2001,
ensured that this would be a waste of American blood and treasure, including:
*Failing
to catch Osama bin-Laden quickly: In an August 2021 Wall Street Journal
analysis, Eliot Cohen thought that several brigades of light infantry were
needed to finish off al Qaeda. Instead, bin-Laden eluded capture and remain
the symbol (if not operational leader) of the terrorist network until he was
killed a decade later in a raid into Pakistan.
*The Iraq
War diverted needed men and equipment from Afghanistan. Five years ago, Jonah
Blank, a former policy adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
observed in an article for The Atlantic, “the original sin of the war in
Afghanistan was going to war in Iraq.” Bush advisers sought to convince the
American public that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a destabilizing force in
the region, but he did not have weapons of mass destruction, as they claimed.
The result of the change in focus was detrimental to the U.S. long-range
campaign in Afghanistan, according to Blank: “Too light a troop presence in
Afghanistan meant that security was never truly established; too little money
actually delivered meant that the fledgling government was never able to prove
its credibility to its own people; too little focus from U.S. policy makers
meant that a highly centralized governing structure, imposed on a
never-before-centralized nation, could not be prevented from degenerating into
nepotism, ineffectiveness, and rampant corruption. Failure to provide enough
troops, money, and focus on the front end resulted in exponentially more
troops, money, and focus down the line."
*Misguided
drone use. Some military experts thought that, after instituting a troop
surge following his inauguration in 2009, Barack Obama’s announced mass drawdown
five years later occurred when Afghan security forces were still inadequately
trained. But his authorization of more drone attacks was arguably worse, leading to civilian casualties
that turned much of the population (along with then-Afghan President Hamid
Karzai) against the continuing American presence.
*Corruption
in the Afghan government: As early as August 2012, in a statement to the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations,
Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institutions warned, “Afghans have become
disconnected and alienated from the national government and the country’s other
power arrangements,” resenting “the abuse of power, impunity, and lack of
justice that have become entrenched over the past decade.”
*Lies
and concealment among American political and military leaders about progress in
the war: In December 2019, the Washington Post revealed that American officials, fearing the consequences
of what might ensue once Americans left Afghanistan, misled the public by spinning
casualty counts and other data. Behind the scenes, it was another story, with
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, throwing up his hands in a
September 2003 memo: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are.”
*Donald
Trump left a skeletal American force in the country just as Biden was to be
inaugurated. The administration announcement that only 2,500 troops would remainat that point came despite the lack of an agreement between Taliban and Afghan
government negotiators—and a warning by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg
warns that too rapid a drawdown could expose the Afghan regime to collapse.
The public’s
overwhelming feeling of futility at the Taliban’s resumption of control was
palpable. But a few other aspects of the conflict got lost along the way:
*American
concern about oil at least partly accounted for bin Laden’s murderous rage.
George H.W. Bush ordered American troops placed in Saudi Arabia to counter a
potential threat after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Those forces remained in the
kingdom even after the successful conclusion of Operation Desert Storm to
enforce no-fly zones protecting the Kurds. Bin Laden cited that presence as a
primary reason for waging jihad against the U.S.
*Questions
remain about the full extent of Saudi involvement with 9/11. Though the
administration of George W. Bush never specifically claimed that Saddam Hussein
collaborated with bin Laden on 9/11, officials mentioned the dictator and terrorist
so often together that many Americans jumped to that conclusion. They were far
more pointed in claiming there was no high-level Saudi government support for
the attack. But most of the 9/11 hijackers (as well as bin Laden himself) came
from the country. A lawsuit by 9/11 victim families turned up a growing body of
circumstantial evidence that the Saudi government was being disingenuous about these
connections.
*The
overarching War on Terror distracted from countering the growing Chinese threat
in Asia. The phrase “War on Terror” itself provided the Chinese regime with
vocabulary to justify cracking down on the Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. Moreover, military and intelligence resources that the Bush
administration could have devoted to monitoring Chinese saber-rattling in the
Far East were devoted instead to Afghanistan and Iraq.
(The image
accompanying this post, of U.S. Army Soldiers assigned to the 10th Mountain
Division standing security at Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul,
Afghanistan, was taken on Aug. 15, 2021, by Sgt.
Isaiah Campbell.)
The image accompanying
this post of Mila Kunis, speaking at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con International
in San Diego, CA, was taken on July 12, 2012, by Gage Skidmore of Peoria, AZ.
Margaret Atwood developed a
reputation as a master dystopian novelist with The Handmaid’s Tale, but
I’m afraid that her soothsaying capabilities have failed in at least one
respect. Had she substituted “appreciation” for “interest” in the above
paragraph, I would have had no quarrel with her prediction.
Yet it
turns out that Donald Trump is very much interested in American art and culture.
It all goes back to what conservative Republican and former speechwriter Peggy
Noonan called in her recent Wall Street Journal column “The Art of the Self-Deal.”
In other
words, whatever or whoever trumpets his name, money, and allies, meets with his
approval. But whoever interferes with any of these, he will go beyond the
already vast powers of his office to crush them.
Count
among the latter Army Chief of Staff Randy George, fired without explanation
earlier this year by Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. Perhaps not so
coincidentally, George had refused to kill a probe into an unauthorized Apache
helicopter flyover near the Nashville estate of Kid Rock, according to this Hollywood
Reporter account from earlier this week.
In implementing
plans by his Orwellian titled Department of Government Efficiency to terminate
funding for more than 1,400 National Endowment for the Humanities grants
totaling more than $100 million, Trump hoped to demoralize key portions of
academe.
But the
algorithms that triggered many of the cuts were so ridiculous that a federal
judge ordered the grants’ reinstatement in May—and even Brian T. Allen,
writing for the venerable conservative magazine National Review, was
forced to concede, “Entrusting the cancellation of grants to twentysomething
tech nerds was a big mistake.”
Moreover, the Kennedy Center controversy continues. Trump couldn’t stop with replacing
former trustees with ones of his choosing, all of whom bent over backwards to
rename that much-loved Washington performing arts center in his honor. More
recently, he has threatened, if it’s not allowed to proceed with plans for a
renovation that might not even be needed, to simply knock the whole building
down.
Even
before becoming President, Trump wanted his name on all his business ventures,
as part of his branding effort. It’s a different matter when he’s talking about
buildings that, properly speaking, belong to the people of the United States
and not him and that traditionally honor retired or, better yet, dead American
figures.
Nevertheless,
he has no compunction about plastering his name and/or image not just on the
Kennedy Center but, among other initiatives, on the Interior Department’s
“America the Beautiful” pass, the State Department’s Institute for Peace, or
limited-edition U.S. passports.
When
late-night comics predictably mocked the President (as they should, and as they
have done with other incumbents of both parties), Paramount yielded to FCC
pressure over its planned merger with Skydance Media to cancel Stephen Colbert’s longtime perch on CBS—and Jimmy Kimmel only narrowly avoided a
similar fate at ABC.
Anytime
something happens, Trump always wants to make it about him. Poor Dolly Parton
couldn’t pass away without the President claiming to conservative commentator Glenn Beck, on scant evidence, that the country-music icon “really liked me, I will tell you!” (If she did, she kept it very well hidden—rejecting the
Presidential Medal of Freedom from both Trump and Biden, so as not to alienate
either Republican or Democratic fans.)
I guess we
should probably qualify Ms. Atwood’s statement above in another sense. When she
is referring to “the arts,” it is true that Trump could care less about, say,
literature, classical music, or the visual arts. But he may be our most
show-business President in the same sense that Lincoln was our quintessential
war President.
His second
term continues the pattern from his first in commanding the nation’s attention 24/7.
That is not a compliment: no society can be counted as well when its citizens
cannot carve out for themselves a private realm where the mind is not dominated
by images from the state.
Unfortunately,
this second term has abundantly proved that Atwood was overly optimistic that
Trump wouldn’t notice the presence of arts programs.
But she
was absolutely correct in believing that “Nothing is predictable except
unpredictability”—at least when it comes to a wildly capricious President
intent as much on self-aggrandizement as on retribution towards opponents.
(The
image accompanying this post, of Dolly Parton accepting the Liseberg Applause
Award 2010, was created on Nov. 16, 2010, by Curtis Hilbun.)
Forty years ago today, the crime referred to in the above paragraph, “The Preppy Murder,” occurred in Central Park. In the attempt to create “entertainment” out of a story, the media’s use of “preppy” represented a misnomer.
That would not
be the only distortion involving the case. To the shame of the American legal
system, the next one perpetuated sexism that violated female victims all over
again.
It has infuriated me that, though account after account eventually got around to the exact background of the accused, Robert Chambers, the words “preppy killer” and “privilege” appeared to leach out these subtleties.
His mother was an
Irish-born private nurse who struggled to scrape together enough to pay (with the help of
scholarships) his way into several private schools, including York
Preparatory School. Though trying to pass in the circles of wealth, Robert possessed neither the affluence nor the self-assurance that came with the term
“preppy.”
Thank God the press didn’t have an equivalent term to latch onto in the early 1900s, when Chester Gillette, a poor relation of an industrialist, took his pregnant girlfriend on a lake in upstate New York, clubbed her while out alone on their boat, and left her to drown.
In fact, Gillette briefly attended a prep
school in his youth, but in all the subsequent accounts of the case—the
breathless newspaper reports as well as, in fictional form, Theodore Dreiser’s
novel An American Tragedy and the Montgomery Clift film A Place in
the Sun—that aspect of his life was not emphasized, unlike the Chambers case. (I examined that
earlier crime in this blog post from 18 years ago.)
What did come up was the moral vacuity that led the social-climbing Griffith to that point.
It is that same soul emptiness, it seems to me, that lies unaddressed, after
acres of newsprint and hours of news footage, in the story of how Chambers
ended the life of Jennifer Levin, the 18-year-old with whom he left the
Upper East Side bar Dorian’s a little after 4 in the morning. Less than two
hours later, she was found dead in Central Park, strangled.
It would, then, have been fine to call the person who took her life “The Central Park Strangler,” as some news outlets did, because that's exactly the act that occurred.
But editors needed a way to convey the
morbid fascination with a tall, well-dressed, handsome youth. “Preppy” did the
trick.
Then
Chambers—first in accounts to the police quickly picking apart his story, then
through his attorney Jack Litman—began with a contortion act of his own. While
engaged in intercourse with him in the park, she had “hurt” him, he claimed,
and an “accident” occurred when he tried to disengage.
The
shamelessness of the statement was breathtaking: not only was her capacity to
“hurt” him limited because she was nearly a foot shorter and 100 pounds lighter
than Chambers, but the scratch marks on his face indicated that she had engaged
in a desperate struggle against him—and now, being dead, the victim had no way
to dispute his story.
Litman employed the same defense he used nearly a decade before in staving off a
murder conviction for client Richard Herrin for killing ex-girlfriend Bonnie
Garland—i.e., insinuate that the victim, in her relationship with the
defendant, was responsible for her own death.
The judge
in the Central Park case dismissed Litman’s motion to introduce Levin’s diary as
evidence at the trial. But the lawyer had already characterized it to the press
as a record of her encounters with other young men. Moreover, for a New York
Magazine cover story about the case, he made sure to contrast Chambers’ past as an altar boy with Levin's dating history.
Litman
sowed enough doubts about Levin’s character to induce a jury deadlock for more
than a week on the second-degree murder charge against Chambers. Rather than
put the Levin family through the trauma of another trial, prosecutor Linda
Fairstein agreed to Litman’s proposal that Chambers plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter.
Then, with
the trial over, a video emerged that depicted the former altar boy in a rather
different light: out on bail, at a party surrounded by women, twisting the head
off a doll before pronouncing, in a high-pitched voice, “I think I killed her.”
It was too
late to affect jury deliberations, though it certainly may have led some members
of the public to rethink their fascination and even support for the clean-cut
young man. It certainly would have lent credence to the charge that he displayed depraved indifference to human life.
Even after
serving the full 15 years of his sentence, Chambers was not done with the law.
Arrested again in 2004, this time for drugs, he served 100 days in Riker’s
Island, then was arrested a third time in 1907, for drugs again. He did not leave Sullivan
Maximum Security Correctional Facility in upstate New York until three years
ago.
Ironically,
he spent more time as an involuntary guest of the state for his substance abuse
problems than he did for taking Levin’s life.
After
seeing her daughter traduced by the defense and the media, Ellen Levin became a
victim’s-rights advocate, lobbying for “rape-shield” legislation that limited
defenses’ attempts to discuss a victim’s prior sexual history.
Unfortunately, today, even
after the MeToo movement—and perhaps as backlash to that social phenomenon—defense
lawyers still resort to smearing victims, justifying it, as Litman did 40 years ago, as part of their responsibility to represent clients, no matter how
unpopular those defendants or those tactics might be.
In that
sense, the “crime as entertainment” that Carpenter noted 36 years ago remains a
staple of the court system—only this time the drama is a legal horror show. And the public
fascination with good-looking defendants continued with Luigi Mangione in the
first months after his arrest for murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian
Thompson.
I experienced the same sense of deja vu when I read the title of a YouTube video from Australia about the latter case: "What would drive a young, privileged white man to kill?"
