My Ramblings on "There Will Be Blood"

I saw "There Will Be Blood" over the weekend, and I had a reaction to it I did not expect: incomprehension.

In this post I'm going to float some ideas I had about the movie and maybe get a conversation going with some of you who saw the movie. I think there's a lot of stuff going on in this film, a lot of themes and a lot of layers even, and I think there is more than one way to interpret the film. Of course, for those who have not yet seen the movie and still wish to, probably best not to read this post because I'll be dealing in spoilers indiscriminately. To you people I say go see the movie or just check back for the next post. So let's get into it.






[SPOILERS AHEAD!]





Okay. Just us now.

First, let me say I really liked the movie. I haven't been able to get it out of my head since I saw it Friday night. Daniel Day Lewis is fantastic as the megalomaniacal Daniel Plainview. I liked in particular the first dialogue-free sequence leading up to the first oil strike. We know everything we need to know about Daniel Plainview in that sequence. The cinematography (which was also nominated for an Academy Award) is striking. The shot of Plainview hunkered down and munching on some bit of food while a twilight thunderstorm flashes in the distance behind him was probably the best shot I saw all year. And the music by Radiohead guitarist Brian Greenwood got me right where I lived by sounding exactly like a lost track from the "Shining" soundtrack. I could go on about what's great about this movie, but I'm more interested right now in what the hell it all meant.

I've been very careful not read anything about this movie -- no reviews, no actor interviews, none of the source material, etc. -- so I came to this movie absolutely fresh. When the end came, I was caught short. My reaction to the film's final line, "I'm done!" and the immediate cut to black following was a lot like my initial reaction to seeing "The Big Lebowski" back in Winston. I didn't quite know what to make of it. I suppose that puts "Blood" in good company. But I felt pretty dumb as the credits rolled. "There Will Be Blood" tied "No Country for Old Men" (another movie with an ambiguous ending) for the most nominations, so in addition to all the critics who loved this thing, there are a whole lot of Academy members who loved it and seemed to get it right away. I felt left out. So what was P.T. Anderson saying in this film?

Is it that capitalism is, at its core, a dehumanizing entity? After a few days thought, this is the best I've got for this. But there are some moments and throughlines in the film that muddy the waters a little. I think this movie defies any short and sweet interpretation.

The film starts with Daniel Plainview on his own. He lives by himself and works by himself. He is a man with a pick-axe working at a hole in the ground. Making it bigger. And though he seems so much a part of the earth as to be elemental in these first scenes, he doesn't seem unhappy. Or even exhausted. He seems deeply absorbed and even contented in his self-sufficiency. You can see a smile of pride when he manages to drag himself, broken-leg and all, over miles of rocky terrain to sell the bit silver (or was it gold?) he'd just mined. This sequence also establishes nicely Plainview's later hostility to God and religion. Clearly Plainview's never asked anyone, including a deity, for help with anything, and so distrusts those who would depend on anyone or anything besides themselves and their own hard work to get them through.

Some years later we see Plainview doing well enough to hire others. But even though Daniel now has others to interact with, hardly any words are spoken. One gets the impression that, perhaps, Plainview views his employees as units of work rather than people. Has the dehumanizing effect of Capitalism already begun to show in Plainview? Or is that Plainview is already an avowed Capitalist and we just see it more clearly the richer he gets?

An accident gives him a son and an heir. There are a few storylines and overarching conflicts in the film, but the primary one is between Daniel Plainview and his son. In these first scenes of Plainview with the infant and then the toddler (in that great scene in the train), we watch Plainview begin to question the wisdom of his solitary existence. When we see Plainview and his son twelve years on trying to buy more land to drill, we see a couple of things at once: 1.) Plainview's grown prosperous and is more articulate and savvy than we might have first suspected watching him whacking rocks in his makeshift mine, and 2.) his son has deepened his passion for work and making money because now he has someone he loves to pass it down to.

Plainview takes great pains to mentor the boy and include him in his work, even when he's making his son a party to the impending swindle of the Sunday family. After the accident at the derrick that results in the son going deaf, Plainview's attitude towards the boy changes. His feelings of powerlessness are alien to him and he begins to take the resentment he feels out on the boy by widening the gulf his son's deafness and Plainview's inability to fix that deafness has opened between them. Is this distance between them meant as a comment on how Capitalism has shaped Plainview's worldview so deeply that when his son ceases to be viable as an asset, Plainview ceases to love him?

When the long-lost half-brother arrives, Plainview's hopes for a viable familial partner are renewed. The son sees how his father has taken a shine to this interloper and sets their shack/house on fire in wordless protest. Speaking directly to the main theme of the film, does Anderson intend the son to represent the worker lashing out at the injustices inherent in the system?

And when the half-brother is proven false, Plainview brings the son back. Does he do this because he is as repentant as he proclaims in church, or is it because, in the absence of a trustworthy family member, a broken one will do? Do Plainview's nebulous relationships with his son and false half-brother speak to his interest in an heir and a buying into the traditional Capitalist ideas of creating wealth and finding ways to perpetuate it, or is it more simply a quest for some idealized vision of family? And if that's the case, how does this central character arc tie neatly into some expression of the director's meaning?

In the penultimate scene, the son, now grown, visits his father, now slightly bonkers, in his father's mansion, to announce his intention to break off from his father's company. Plainview's reaction is cruel and pitiless. He disowns his son, tells him he's adopted (which was news to him), and says "now you're a competitor," as if to say, "You're no longer my son."

Which brings us to the long final scene, which takes place in Daniel Plainview's two-lane private bowling alley. Eli, the faith-healing Reverend that Plainview disliked so, returns. He's gotten into radio and has become one of the first televangelists (a radiovangelist?). But he's also lost everything in the Crash, and wants to sell Plainview a plot of land with oil beneath it. Plainview agrees but only if Eli renounces God and himself as a vessel for His message. In a reversal of an earlier scene where Eli forces Daniel to admit he "abandoned [his] boy" in front of his congregation in exchange for the pipeline rights to the same plot of land, Eli does as instructed. In a cruel twist, Daniel then informs Eli that he already got all the oil out from beneath the plot of land in question, and then proceeds to twist the knife in all the deeper. The scene culminates in Daniel bludgeoning Eli to death with a bowling pin. His servant comes on the scene and, apparently undisturbed by the carnage, asks after his employer. To which Plainview says, "I'm done!" And that's the end of the film.

Of course this has to do with Daniel's son, but how? Yes Daniel hated Eli for what Eli made him do, admitting to the sin of abandoning his son, but what does it mean that Daniel killed Eli for it? That Daniel never brooked any disrespect? This seems to bear out. Take, for instance, the scene where the Standard Oil man tells Daniel how sorry he is for what happened to his son. Daniel takes this as a commentary on his parenting skills and threatens to cut his throat over it. The false half-brother disrespected Daniel by lying his way into Daniel's confidence -- Daniel kills him for it. Eli humiliates him at the Baptism and, years later, Daniel kills him for that.

Or are we supposed to take Daniel's murder of Eli more symbolically? Perhaps Daniel, the Capitalist, made insane by his devotion to greed, kills Eli because he discovers that, in his heart, Eli, the embodiment of Religion, is just another capitalist. And does Daniel kill the Capitalist in God-fearing clothes because Daniel has a "competition in [him]" that incites his primal urge to do literally what Capitalists do metaphorically, or does he kill Eli because he suddenly sees in Eli what he hates most in himself, and lashes out? By portraying two of Capitalism and Religion's most skillful practitioners as corrupt beyond all reckoning, is Anderson implicitly equating the two as irredeemably evil institutions? But if so, doesn't this idea fail to account for Anderson's emphasis on the relationship between Plainview and his son, a relationship that seems to exist outside of the larger concepts of Religion and Capitalism? For one, religion doesn't really play a role in that relationship, and two, the idea that Capitalism alone (i.e. Plainview's driving ambition) was the primary force behind the poisoned relationship between Plainview and his son doesn't quite encompass what was portrayed on-screen.

Does Plainview's quest for his elusive idea of "family" indicate a larger quest for meaning? Does his failure to find that meaning sour him on life? Does he distrust Eli and ultimately murder Eli because he sees how Eli cynically uses man's search for meaning for monetary reward?

Anyway, enough of all that.

I think I absorbed the film, and felt what I was meant to feel, but to comprehend it, something's missing for me. Some way of reading it that will make form, content and meaning all gel in my mind. I guess I'm just excited to hear what you all thought of it, and what you thought the movie meant. Like what did the line, "I'm done!" really mean, for example. I think "There Will Be Blood" is dense and its rewards not altogether apparent on a single viewing, but I think it's definitely worth thinking and writing about to get at the film's meaning. Which feels pretty rare for an American film. I'm not sure I liked "Blood" more than "No Country", but I felt like "Blood" drew from a much deeper well than did "No Country," and that's in its favor.

Sad News

Word is coming down the wire right now that actor Heath Ledger has died.

These are very preliminary reports that don't speak to the circumstances surrounding his death, so there's a chance they're not true, but if they are, this is a real tragedy. The guy's a great actor and the early footage of his work in the upcoming "Dark Knight" looked good enough to put him even more securely onto the A-list of Hollywood talent.

Ledger was 28 years old.

[Late Update: The New York Times has more information, including how Ledger was found, and a clue as to the sad cause of death. How depressing.]

Obama Needs to Get Smart

If Obama wants people to stop calling him a closet conservative, he's got to stop saying stuff like this:

"The Republican approach I think has played itself out. I think it's fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time over the last 10 or 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you've heard it all before. You look at the economic policies, when they're being debated among the presidential candidates, it's all tax cuts. Well, we've done that, we've tried it."

(sigh) And this the day after I defend his seemingly neutral Reagan comments.

Taken altogether, it's clear he's saying in the above statement that the Republicans had their shot to try out their crazy ideas for 10-15 years, and their ideas all failed, so now let's give the Democrats a turn. Which is hard to argue with. And he's careful not to characterize the ideas because he doesn't want to offend anyone old enough to vote. But to say that Republicans have been the "party of ideas" is to imply that the Democrats haven't had ideas during that same time, which is patently false. I think Obama's looking ahead to the general election, knowing he's going to have to defend a pretty liberal voting record and trying to soften it with some non-offensive statements about Republicans and Republican icons (i.e. Reagan), but this doesn't make good political sense. He's got to win the nomination first, and anything that even smacks of admiration for Republicans is death in a close primary fight. Hillary and Edwards have been beating him over the head with his recent spate of lofty, almost disinterested-sounding statements and, leaving aside for a moment whether the statements are true or not, it's just not good politics. It's dumb politics and he's got to be smarter to win this thing.

Of course, Hillary mischaracterizes what he said, saying, incorrectly, that Obama said Republicans had "better" ideas, which he did not say, but one can hardly blame her for taking the club Obama gives her and beating him over the head with it. She's trying to win too.

The Obama campaign responds to Hillary's response, some might say lamely, here.

Also: further developments on the Ron Paul newsletter story. Apparently, Ron Paul was close to naming who he believed was responsible for writing some of the more unsavory items in those newsletters, but opted not to. Even if it becomes clear that Paul was responsible for writing exactly none of those racist articles, I think he needs to come out and explain why he let those newsletters go out under his name for decades and decades without a lawsuit, or even a word of protest.

And fellow blogger Peter Fedak has seen "Cloverfield." His teaser review is quite brief.

Obama Gets More Endorsements!

His case to be President of the United States just keeps getting stronger.

Today, Senator Pat Leahy from Vermont, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and all-around awesome guy, endorsed Barack Obama for President.

If they made Senate baseball cards, Leahy's would be the one I'd never trade. This is the guy who did his best to make Alberto Gonzales cry when he testified last year. (In the end, he only humiliated him. I'll take it.) This is the guy who worked hardest to get to the bottom of not only the US Attorney firing scandal, but also the illegal wiretapping program, and the more recent torture tape destruction scandal. This is the guy who made Dick Cheney so mad that the face-shooting VP from Texas was helpless against the urge to instruct Leahy to "Go fuck [him]self". Put another way, Leahy's smart, dedicated, and he's on our side.

Obama's got a lot of endorsements, but Leahy's, along with Bill Bradley's endorsement (my pick in 2000), and John Kerry's endorsement, mean a lot to me. After all it was John Kerry who, when advised by Bill Clinton in the waning days of the 2004 campaign to support some of the anti-gay marriage amendments on the ballot in various states, said flatly "no." Did he want to win the White House? Yes. But did he want to become a calculating, hypocritical prick to get there? No, and how admirable it was that he didn't. Kerry was the only guy I heard of before or since who believes, and has said out loud, that our "war" on terrorism isn't a war in the conventional sense, as Bush and Co. seem to believe, but a battle against a vast criminal enterprise. When someone who's that forthright and honest tells me how to cast my vote, I listen up. When Kerry AND Leahy want the same guy to be in the White House, that's hard to vote against.

I also believe that Al Gore, if he were free to endorse any of the Democratic candidates without fear of widening a rift between himself and the Clintons, would endorse Obama for President. And I know that endorsement means a lot to a lot of Democrats who don't know who's who in the Senate.

As we move through the primary season I feel like in order to be a good citizen I have to continue to weigh the evidence for and against the three candidates to make sure I'm not being too naive in my support of Obama. Even though every time I see Obama, whether it's in a debate, or in an interview, or in a speech, I like what I see. But these contrary voices keep sounding on the periphery, trying to change my thinking. For instance, liberal NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman has made a habit of penning very cogent anti-Obama columns, accusing him of being either too nice to fight the battles to be fought, or that he's to the right of the other candidates, which is every liberal's worst fear: electing a closet conservative. When writing about the candidates' plans to deal with the coming recession, Krugman had this to say about Obama:

"The Obama campaign’s initial response to the latest wave of bad economic news was, I’m sorry to say, disreputable: Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser claimed that the long-term tax-cut plan the candidate announced months ago is just what we need to keep the slump from “morphing into a drastic decline in consumer spending.” Hmm: claiming that the candidate is all-seeing, and that a tax cut originally proposed for other reasons is also a recession-fighting measure — doesn’t that sound familiar?"

Gets any red-blooded Obama supporter right where they live: suggesting Obama's like Bush. There has to be some reason the conservatives are holding their fire against him, right? There has to be something else there they like other than the smile, right? Maybe some policy, too? It's enough to make you paranoid. About the other two Dem candidates, Krugman says Hillary "knows what she's talking about" and Edwards:

"...has been driving his party’s policy agenda. He’s done it again on economic stimulus: last month, before the economic consensus turned as negative as it now has, he proposed a stimulus package including aid to unemployed workers, aid to cash-strapped state and local governments, public investment in alternative energy, and other measures."

Does Krugman have a pro-Clinton bias? Maybe, but I think he prides himself on his realpolitik outlook on the political landscape and thinks Clinton has the street-fighting chops to take on the Republicans, an Obama doesn't. And he probably has a point. But then I look at some of Obama's past votes and I swing back into his camp. Almost alone among Senate Democrats, Obama voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice John Roberts. Clinton voted for him. Obama also voted against confirmation of Samuel Alito, Attorney General Mike Mukasey, and against the current head of the CIA, Michael Hayden, because of his role in designing and implementing the illegal wiretapping program. What's not to like?

Voting came up in the recent Democratic debate in Las Vegas, and Obama came out quite well. Yes, he was opposed to the Iraq war while Clinton and Edwards voted for it, and yes that's evidence of his superior judgment, but Obama wasn't in the Senate then, so he didn't actually have a vote to defend. But on the big bankruptcy bill that went through Congress -- the sweetheart deal for credit card companies that made it that much harder for people to declare bankruptcy -- Edwards and Clinton both voted for it and had to defend their votes. Obama, by contrast, didn't have to apologize for yet another bad vote. He saw that bill for what it was back when it counted and voted no. I do think Clinton got some good, substantive licks in on Obama for a vote he cast for a big energy bill, "Cheney's energy bill" I think she called it, but I think Clinton's vote for the bankruptcy bill was the bigger mistake.

Now, I know this may only help to solidify Papadeas's opposition to Obama, but NY Times conservative columnist David Brooks made a good point about the difference between the top three Dem candidates in a column he wrote after the Democratic debate:

"The third thing that happened tonight is that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards disgraced themselves in the minds of debate-watchers everywhere. At some point in each campaign, candidates are asked to name their greatest weakness. Only the lamest political hacks answer that question this way: Goshdarn it, I just care too much. I am too impatient for good things to happen.

Giving that answer is an insult to the art of politics. And yet Edwards and Clinton both gave that answer. They didn’t even give artfully disguised versions of that answer. They gave the straight, unsubtle kindergarten version of that answer. Obama, honestly, admitted that he’s bad at organizing his paperwork. Truly, here is a man willing to stand for change."

Watching that moment in the debate, I remember thinking how Edwards and Clinton had squandered a golden opportunity to be honest, or at least appear so. Instead, Edwards lamely chided himself for getting too emotional about some things, even though a week earlier he'd admonished Hillary Clinton for getting too emotional at the diner in New Hampshire. Not a good moment. And then Clinton missed out on a chance to further "humanize" herself by giving a transparently calculated answer that, even worse, had a subtle shot at Obama in it. And people wonder how she got a reputation as "calculating."

I think that her politically sharp but generally tone-deaf answer to that question actually goes against the meme that Hillary is the most politically savvy of the three candidates. After seven years of a President who couldn't a.) give a straight answer to a question to save his life, or b.) think of a single mistake from his first term in office, I think the smart and politically savvy play in 2008 is for a candidate to be candid and open about past mistakes. Sen. Clinton doesn't want to be that candidate, and that's one of the main reason I'm not excited about her candidacy.

Obama's the guy.

And Obama wins a court battle in Nevada.

And Kucinich is a putz. And so are some of his supporters.

Anyway, that's long enough.

"The Road" and "Blood Meridian" Coming to Movie Theaters

First, some interesting movie news. Variety is reporting that Charlize Theron is joining the cast of "The Road," an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel. Those who've read the novel may be surprised by this news, as I was, because McCarthy's novel follows a father and his young son as they trek across a post-apocalyptic landscape. There are hardly any other characters, and most of these are male. So where does Charlize fit in? In the book, there's one scene of flashback between the father and the mother that's very powerful. Charlize will play the absent mother. Though I haven't yet read the adaptation, the screenwriter has apparently expanded her role by creating multiple scenes of flashback. As of now, Viggo Mortensen will play the father, which sounds like very good casting to me. Looking behind the camera, the guy who directed the almost unbearably heavy "The Proposition" will direct. Hmm. I wonder if the people at Dimension (who's producing "The Road") happened to read this bit from a certain blog:

"The director [of "The Proposition"], John Hillcoat, allowed time for scenes of bad men contemplating sunsets and saying ponderous things about them. I saw shades of Terrence Malick (and by extension DDG) in this, but I also saw quite a bit of Cormac McCarthy, specifically his novel, "Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West". In that novel, McCarthy describes a band of killers engaging in a kind of genocide as they murder whole settlements of native peoples. These scenes of horror are punctuated with scenes around the campfire depicting the uniquely psychotic leader of the crew, Judge Holden, having Socratic dialogues with his awed and blood-stained compatriots. There is a bit of "the Judge" in Charlie Burns's older brother, Arthur, who quotes high-falutin' poetry and seems possessed of a sensitive soul even though he's buried it long since under the weight of his crimes, and I liked that Cave and Hillcoat made the effort here."

So then they up and give the dude "The Road" to direct. The influence of the Inanities is not to be underestimated.

Which actually brings me quite succinctly to this: i09, the new science-fiction blog from the people that brought us Gawker and Kotaku, reports (in this blog post) that Ridley Scott is all set to make Cormac McCarthy's aforementioned classic Western/horror novel "Blood Meridian." So Judge Holden himself will be coming to a theater near you. Who will they cast? Where will Ridley find a muscular seven-foot tall actor willing to shave or pluck every last bit of body hair? Barring the discovery of some beautiful freak wowing audiences at a dinner theater somewhere in the midwest, I guess they'll just have to cast someone we've all heard of and cheat him the way Darabont did with Michael Clark Duncan in "Green Mile." Should be interesting, and the fact that Ridley Scott will direct the film certainly ups its chances of being excellent by factors of ten.

Galifianakas!

This. Is. Hilarious.

Check out this video from Funnyordie.com featuring Michael Cera and a fake interviewer dude named Zach Galifianakas. Cera may only be capable of putting on his halting and awkward adolescent persona, but he's damn good at it.

I almost guarantee laughter. If you're around my age and male, that is.

A Fun Political Quiz!

This is pretty cool. Want to know where you stand on the political spectrum? (As if you didn't already know.) Click here to go to a handy-dandy Electoral Compass to discover where your views place you on economic and social issues. And, as an added bonus, Electoral Compass will tell you which candidate most closely aligns with your views. I'm just as left as you want on both social and economic issues (no surprise there), and Obama turns out to be the candidate closest to my placing on the chart.

Anyway, give it a try and post up who you're closest to, and who you're farthest from (Fred Thompson in my case).

By the way, I got this off of Andrew Sullivan's blog. Check out his entry here. He was closest to Ron Paul.

Responding to Obama's Critics

This post started out as a comment on Paul Papadeas’s comment on my previous blog post, but then it got long and I thought I ought to just throw it up on the main page. Why throw out all of this amazing writing, right? Right?

I’ve actually been wanting to write about Obama for some time now, particularly why I support him, but haven’t done so yet. Laziness, maybe. But Paul’s comment got me thinking of all the reasons I do like Obama, and why I think he’d be a fine choice for President. Also: there’s not a lot of anti-Obama stuff out in the MSM, and, helpfully, Paul’s gathered a bunch of it all in one place, so I have something to argue against, which is a pretty easy way to lay out one’s support of something. So here is a link to Paul’s comment. Scroll down; it’s the fourth one. And below is my response. So anyway, thanks Paul for starting up an Obama discussion.

So! About halfway through your comment, Paul, you provide a list of links to web pages with anti-Obama sentiments contained therein. I think the only person on your list who can reasonably be said to have laid a glove on Obama is Paul Krugman. I’ve read a few of Krugman’s columns on Obama and his main problem with Barack is that Krugman thinks Obama’s emphasis on unity between red and blue states is exactly the wrong tack to take after eight years of this awful administration. In that, I think he may have a point. There's a debate to be had there.

But as for ZNet writer and “black militant” Paul Street to accuse Obama of truth-twisting simply because Obama said, "Don't tell me I'm not coming home to Selma, Alabama. I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me,” even though he was born four years before the Selma marches and six before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, is ridiculous. If Paul Street wants to deride Obama because of his too-safe "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature for example, fine, but it’s difficult to go after Obama as just another lying politician. Yes, Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, hardly a hotbed of racial unrest, and yes it was years after the Selma marches, but for Street to ignore the metaphorical point Obama was actually making about how far he’s come and why, reveals Street to be a partisan with his own agenda, and appallingly dismissive of the civil rights movement.

Looking through Paul Street's indictment of Obama I'm struck by how lazy and un-indicting it actually is. Take this:

"Around the same time that [Obama] was making historically idiotic claims about owing his existence to the Civil Rights Movement..."

If Street really means to suggest that had Martin Luther King, Abernathy, Bayard Rustin and thousands of others involved in the Civil Rights Movement NOT put pressure on the federal government to enact the Civil Rights Act, we would still be seriously considering a black man as a presidential candidate in 2008, then he just threw a sandwich board over his head that read, in big red letters, "NOT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY." Actually, in the 21^st century, “black militant” does that pretty well all by itself.

I don't believe Street's lazy denunciation of Obama is in any way illuminating to those on the fence about Obama's candidacy.

I think you ought to give Obama a second look, Paul. I don’t think you’re being altogether fair. I have more and I’ll post it up later; I don’t want these posts to be so long that no one reads them.

Hillary Takes New Hampshire

And Hillary wins. Congratulations to her on a great comeback win. Despite the punditocracy's unanimous opinion that Hillary's candidacy was all but over, the race for the nomination is a real race now which makes things exciting from a political standpoint.

The second biggest story of the night was the massive discrepancy between the polling going into today and the actual result. I think a lot of factors went into Clinton winning -- her show of emotion yesterday, her husband's fiery answer to the Obama Iraq war question, New Hampshirians' contrarian streak -- but I think the "Bradley effect" did a bit to give Obama supporters false hope and to lower expectations for Hillary so tonight's win seems all the more miraculous. She's in a good position to go forward.

Just goes to show that no one knows anything about this race.

Primary Update

With 15% of the votes counted, Hillary's winning New Hampshire at the moment. She's at 40% to Obama's 36%. t's not a big percentage of precincts reporting, but Obama hasn't been ahead once as the votes are slowly being tallied. As a guy who enjoys me some politics, I'm happy because a Hillary win means the race goes on. As an Obama supporter, this isn't good news for my candidate. Was it the show of emotion yesterday to remind voters how they felt about her during the first weeks of the Lewinsky scandal? Or are the New Hampshire oldsters telling the Iowa youngsters to go to hell?

And McCain wins, as expected. The Republican race is more competitive and interesting that the Democratic race, that's for certain. No one knows how that's going to go, but I think McCain's got the best shot. South Carolina will give us the best indication yet as to how the GOP's going to go.

More when the final projection comes in.

Damning New Information About Ron Paul

A pretty damning story today about Ron Paul in The New Republic. James Kirchik, the writer of the story, has discovered a trove of newsletters put out by Ron Paul-led or Ron Paul-affiliated groups, with titles like "Ron Paul's Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, [and] The Ron Paul Survival Report" from 1978 on. Inside these newsletters Kirchik discovers years of racist, homophobic, and anti-gay comments, as well as a host of statements regarding even sillier conspiracies than the ones he cops to in public. Like the '93 WTC attack may have been planned by agents of Mossad. For instance.

The only reason these comments are difficult to pin directly on Paul is that almost all of the newsletters' poisonous essays were written without a by-line. But many were written in the first-person which implies that either Ron Paul was writing a lot of these himself, (which is nightmare scenario #1 for the Paul campaign), or the people who ran the newsletters intended for the reader to make that inference. This from Kirchik's article:

"When [Kerchik] asked Jesse Benton, Paul's campaign spokesman, about the newsletters, he said that, over the years, Paul had granted "various levels of approval" to what appeared in his publications--ranging from "no approval" to instances where he "actually wrote it himself." After I read Benton some of the more offensive passages, he said, "A lot of [the newsletters] he did not see. Most of the incendiary stuff, no.""

If we take Benton and Paul at their word here, which is not easy to do after reading this article, then we must ask why Paul never asked that his name be taken off of the newsletters, or why he did not distance himself from those who ran and operated the newsletters. He's had since 1976 to disavow any association with the content of those newsletters and, as far as I know, he hasn't yet done this.

The reason I take this seriously is not just because "The New Republic" is a nationally-recognized and serious-minded publication, but because the worldview espoused in these newsletters (and click here to see a quick and dirty run-down of the worst of the written statements) seems like a more extreme version of the worldview he's espoused during this campaign. For example, he said a couple Sundays ago on "Meet the Press" that the Civil War should never have been fought. His justification seemed to be disgust, 150-years after the fact, over the number of lives lost. He asserted that the federal government could have purchased all those slaves and freed them rather than go to war over them. But this heretofore undiscovered association with the vitriol in these Ron Paul-titled newsletters puts Paul's thinking on the Civil War into a different and far less appealing light.

Yes, the article is damning, but I'm still open to an equally illuminating story detailing how Ron Paul's racist and homophobic (among other things) associates used and abused Ron Paul's name for their own agenda without the knowledge or approval of Ron Paul. I've always kind of liked Ron Paul, just as a guy if not so much as a candidate, and I would much prefer him to be slightly doddering enough to let people take advantage of him like this than the kind of guy who'd put out this sort of thing and actually believe it.

UPDATE: Ron Paul responds to the charges.

"The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.

In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person's character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: ‘I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.'

This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It's once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.”

So the slightly doddering Ron Paul is the truth, or at least what Paul's copping to. I do appreciate the sentiment with which he writes the second paragraph, but I have to say that this response is not terribly reassuring to me. Though Ron Paul-backer Andrew Sullivan (who reacts negatively to the New Republic story here) says that some of the quotes don't sound anything like Paul (the homophobic comments he cites as examples), and it's true they don't match up at all with the Ron Paul we've been hearing during this campaign. But at some point, to clear the air, I'd like to know which articles Ron Paul did write over the 30 years his newsletters have been going.

I hope to hear a more thorough answer to the charges from the Ron Paul campaign.

A Bunch of Political Stuff

The New Hampshire primary is today. Voters in the small New Hampshire town of Dixville Notch cast their votes just after midnight this morning and it's looking like so goes Dixville Notch so goes New Hampshire. McCain won for the Republicans (he got 4 votes) and Obama for the Democrats (he got 7). The story's here. ("West Wing" viewers may remember an episode in which Dixville Notch featured prominently -- in that episode, Pres. Bartlet's campaign lobbies vigorously to get one person in Dixville Notch to cast a second vote for the President.) Not to imbue this tiny election with too much significance, but the polling in the entire state is reflected by the Dixville result. I'm not expecting any surprises tonight and neither, it seems, are the candidates. Romney and Clinton are both playing up coming in second tonight.

Also related to New Hampshire and the Presidential campaign are these videos that are directed to certain readers of the blog.

1.) This one's for Heath. These are Ron Paul supporters heckling Sean Hannity in New Hampshire. There's plenty to despise about Sean Hannity, but it isn't Hannity's fascist heart or his off-putting cube-like head that's putting these folks into a rage. It's the fact that Fox News excluded Ron Paul from the New Hampshire debate despite the fact Ron Paul outraised most of them, and beat Giuliani outright in Iowa. Incidentally, Giuliani was not excluded. The funny part of this clip is how the atmosphere is decidedly Pakistan until Hannity escapes into his hotel lobby. The shouting dies down immediately and a silence grows and then the supporters applaud for themselves. It made me laugh.

2.) This one's for Mom. This is Bill Clinton railing persuasively against Obama. He mentions a couple of mailers he alleges Obama's team put out that were intentionally ignored by the press. The first of the mailers sounded crazy and bad, and the second seemed to allege that Clinton was a crook. I hadn't heard anything about these things, but if true, I would have liked to have heard about it. My guess is that the press ignored them because they couldn't tie the senders of the mailers directly to the Obama campaign. I don't know. Clinton also goes after the foundation of Obama's argument regarding his judgment: his opposition to the Iraq War from the very beginning. Bill's argument isn't a bad one, but he blames the media for not asking Obama questions about other statement he made, like "I don't know how I would have voted," when speaking about the vote on the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq that's got Hillary in so much trouble over the months.

One other thing about this video: I was a little put off by how Clinton treats the questioner. The guy is asking a polite question in a civil tone about Clinton's thoughts regarding Obama's claims about "judgment" as well as a misstep by Mark Penn, Hillary's lead campaign strategist. Though Bill is equally civil, he also makes it apparent that he views the questioner as an opponent who's taking "shot[s]" at the Clinton campaign. I felt like the audience member was asking, in part, to show he was keeping up with the inside story, not because he was a partisan for one candidate or another. Clinton, however, seemed to view him as a covert agent for Obama. See what you think.

3.) This one's for curmudegeonly Speck as he's unimpressed by any of the current candidates. Independent New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and some independent pals like Chuck Hagel are leaving the door open for an independent run. This does seem weird to me that they're still talking about this. Obama and McCain are surging and they're both well-liked by independents. I don't see how Bloomberg or Hagel can change the dynamic in their favor.

In non-campaign news, the New York Times recently hired possibly my least-favorite conservative pundit, Bill Kristol, to be a regular columnist. The guy from the Project for the New American Century who helped stamp on the gas pedal to get us into Iraq? Yeah, that guy. Well Talking Points Memo discovered a big error. Kristol attributed a quote to extra-nutty wingnut Michelle Malkin regarding Mike Huckabee. Turns out the actual writer of the quote was none other than second-class intellect and wingnut morality policeman Michael Medved. Leaving aside the mistake for a moment, these are the people Kristol's quoting for his column in the paper of record? In the big picture, this screw-up isn't a huge deal, but anything that diminishes Bill Kristol is worth noting. Why all these warm-mongering neocons weren't run out of town on a rail, I'll never know.

Anyway, I'll be watching the returns tonight and I'll post up a lil' something after the results.

OBAMA!

The networks are all calling it: Obama wins Iowa. Clinton and Edwards are fighting it out for second place. Obviously, I'm really happy about this, but I know it's not over by any stretch. Clinton's chances in New Hampshire are still pretty good, but Obama will likely benefit from a serious slingshot effect from Iowa and come in and do similar numbers in New Hampshire. If Hillary had won tonight, the nomination would have been hers, period. Obama wasn't able to come back from an Iowa loss. But tonight's Obama win doesn't necessarily signal an Obama nomination. Hillary's got a great organization and the establishment's behind her, so it's too early to count her out, but this is a very big deal for Obama.

And on the Republican side, Mike Huckabee won for the Republicans. The big message Iowa sends by choosing these two candidates is that the country wants change. Two terms of Bush has disgusted just about everyone in the country by now, and the "experience" candidate or the "establishment" candidate isn't going to cut it this cycle. But even though Huckabee skews slightly left on some issues, it's a little frightening to me that the Iowa evangelicals thought the answer to our current fundamentalist president is an even more fundamentalist president. Born Again Bush thinks public schools ought to "teach the controversy" when it comes to "intelligent design" versus evolution. Huckabee just straight up doesn't believe in evolution. It's a little frightening to me that Iowa Republicans think the answer to a president who couldn't point out Iraq on a map before he invaded it is to nominate someone who responds to questions about the assassination of Bhutto in Pakistan with assurances that he'll crack down on Pakistanis coming into the US. What?

Anyway, a good night for Obama and real change in the country.

Also: my predictions were right on. Word.

The Author of "Black Hawk Down" Gives "The Wire" a Piece of His Mind, and Thoughts on Iowa Caucus Eve

1.) I've written about David Simon's HBO show "The Wire" here on this blog before. The show's critical reception has been, as far as I know, universally positive. Today, however, Mark Bowden, writer of the excellent "Black Hawk Down", published a somewhat contrary take on the show on TheAtlantic.com. His essay's pretty interesting, but I'm not sure how persuasive his points are. His primary complaint with the show seems to be that Simon omits the good things that are happening in Baltimore's crime-ridden neighborhoods -- like good citizen residents standing up to the dealers for example -- and that Simon is too determined to paint Baltimore in the colors of bleakness to be truly committed to verisimilitude. I think the relative amount of bleak in "The Wire" is too fine a point to get Bowden so worked up. It could be argued that "The Wire" inspires indifference to the plight of the inner city because it skews more hopeless than hopeful, but when a show is making the effort to ask why inner cities have been so hopeless for so many decades, I think Simon can be forgiven for not focusing too long on the so-called bright spots. That idea smacks too much of what the right-wing was always (and stupidly) asking the press to do in the worst years of our Iraq debacle: go out and find the "good stories".

Bowden also thinks Simon is a petty kind of guy complete with a Nixon-style enemies list, grudges galore, and a driving urge to settle scores. I don't think Bowden's essay even chips the monument the television critics have built in honor of "The Wire", but it's interesting to get a contrarian take on something so lauded. The final season of the show begins this month. If you get HBO, check it out. This season the show focuses on (and takes to task) the media, specifically big-city newspapers.

2.) So, finally, after what feels like an eternity of campaigning, the 2008 primaries begin tomorrow in Iowa. Even now, no one, and I mean no one, knows what's going to happen there. On the Democratic side, Obama, Hillary or Edwards could all have a game-changing night. On the Republican side, if Romney takes it, he's going to be all but impossible to knock out and I just can't see my way towards a Romney Presidency, so that's good news for us. If Huckabee wins, then Romney may be so weakened as to allow McCain to come in and claim the nomination for himself, which could be bad news for us. And Ron Paul could surprise the punditocracy by taking more caucus-goers than he's currently expected to; though it wouldn't have any real impact on the race, it would be kinda fun to watch. A good showing in Iowa might make it harder for Fox Noise to keep Paul out of the debate.

As for me, I still like Obama, and expect to vote for him when the primaries come to politically-meaningless Georgia. He seems forthright and honest and electing him might take some of the wind from the Republican attack machine's sails. I admit I have all the same worries other Obama supporters have, like will the Republicans be able to successfully run a racist strategy against Obama, as they've done in prior elections? And even if the Repubs run a clean campaign (fat chance), would America really elect a guy named Barack Hussein Obama to be President? Seems crazy on the face of it, but that's part of the allure of an Obama Presidency: true change. And I think that after Bush what we most need is change, and I think Obama best represents that goal. And he was just as right as rain on the central foreign policy question of the moment, Iraq. No other Democrat can say that.

I have to say, though, that John Edwards has been growing on me lately. I like the idea behind his promise to fight for change against intractable corporate interests; in this corporate era, I think we may need someone with a Rooseveltian (the first one) distrust of corporations. I think he may be a little too unashamedly populist to be my first choice (I don't view the world in quite so stark a way as Edwards), but if he did well tomorrow night, I wouldn't be sad about it. And the fact that Nader supports him makes him all the more attractive as a candidate.

I have mixed feelings about Hillary Clinton, and if she has a good night tomorrow, I worry about our chances of retaking the White House. Conservatives seem to have a thing for Clinton, and not in a good way, and where they might be persuaded to stay at home on election day in the general if Obama or Edwards is the nominee, Clinton might motivate them to come out to the polls in big numbers, just like they did in '04. If she ends up being the nominee, I'll support her, but I do worry that she might be the least inclined of the top-tier Dem candidates to roll back the clock on eight years of Cheney's beefed-up Executive.

Anyway, should be the start of an exciting political year. Anyone have any predictions? I'll put in mine just so I can be proven wrong in less than 24 hours.

Repub: Huckabee takes first, Romney second, McCain third.
Dem: Obama takes first, Edwards second, Clinton third.

[Editor's note: in the original version of this post, I wrongly referred to David Simon, the creator of "The Wire", as David Chase, the creator of "The Sopranos." I have corrected the error.]

Happy New Year!

A hell of a lot went on this year for me. I traveled overseas for the first time, I finished that goddamn book, attended three weddings, moved from one side of the city to the other, saw a lot of good movies and read a bunch of good books. Oh and my wife got her MBA and promptly landed a sweet job. Not too bad. I hope next year's at least as good as this one, but if it happens to be a bit less eventful, that'll be fine with me. Anyway, here's hoping all my readers (i.e. my friends and family) have an excellent 2008!

Time to watch the ball drop.

Happy Holidays Readers!

I'm coming down with something that promises to be just the most awesome sickness (right in time for Christmas!), but I still expect to enjoy me some food, presents, and family today and tomorrow. Hope everyone has a great Christmas and a Happy New Year!

(P.S. Go ahead and see "I Am Legend" if you're looking for something to do during the Christmas break. It's good times. And if you don't hate musicals, why not check out "Sweeney Todd"? True, they sing through almost the entire thing, but even with all that, it's still Tim Burton's best-made film since "Ed Wood" -- though I admit I never did see "Big Fish", so maybe it's only the best film since then. But remember, only see it if you like musicals.)

"Dark Knight" Trailer Hits

I've been waiting for this one for a long time. Here there be "Dark Knight" trailers.

And I can't help but think that the Joker/Batcycle standoff in the middle of a deserted Gotham street is intended to bring to mind a certain Joker/ Batwing standoff in a certain other film. Hmm. I know that's massively geeky, but, you know, this is Batman.

Anyway, it all looks great, and I can't wait to see it. What do ya'll think?

Michael Crichton's "Next"

A few days ago, I finished reading Michael Crichton’s latest novel “Next.” Originally published at the end of 2006, it's recently shown up on bookshelves in paperback. Being a longtime fan of Crichton's, I picked it up, expecting a quick, fun read -- a quick way to pad my 2007 reading list. Quick and fun, however, it was not.

Throughout my reading of it I often closed the book and stared, dumbstruck, at its cover, astonished that such unassuming covers could contain within them such awful trash. Though it sounds like the first line of a sulking fifth-grader's book report, I feel it needs to be said anyway: "Next" is one of the worst books I've ever read. There.

The copy I bought is one of those new tall mass-market paperbacks that are supposed to be easier to read than their stubbier brethren. The mass-market edition of “Next” was printed in a variety of lurid colors; I picked up the white version, not wanting to see a blazing lime green cove, for example, blaring out of my bookshelves for years to come. The logo, as pictured, is a monkey with a bar code over it. Quite graphic and interesting. There are a couple of blurbs at the bottom of the book. The first cites the Washington Post whose reviewer apparently called “Next” “chilling.” The Philadelphia Inquirer says “Next” is “spectacular.” Inside are pages and pages of positive reviews from a sampling of the nation's newspapers. Never before has the sense that I’ve read a book wholly different from the book the reviewers critiqued been so palpable.

I picked up “Next” thinking that, with his anti-global warming screed “State of Fear” out of his system, Crichton has returned to his techno-horror origins a la “Prey” or, even better, “Jurassic Park.” Not so. I never read “State of Fear” (one of the few Crichton novels I can say that about), because the “plot” was too ridiculous even for me. This from the New York Times review (an organization Crichton loathes, for the record) :

“Nicholas Drake, head of an environmental group called the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF), who has conspired with radical eco-terrorists to trigger a series of climate-related catastrophes. Drake believes the disasters will convince the public that global warming is an imminent crisis that can be averted only by writing big fat checks to NERF.

That’s real, folks. Read the review here. You kind of have to read it to believe it.

In my view, the fact he wrote a book in which the above scenario was handled seriously is pretty embarrassing, which is why, out of deference to the old Crichton I grew up reading, I politely passed that book right on by. Sadly, his new novel "Next" suggests that the wild-eyed, crazy-haired right-wing zealot Crichton who wrote "State of Fear" is here to stay.

As screeds go, “Next” tweaks the lizard-brain as hard and as tastelessly as the best of them, but it is not nearly as targeted as “State of Fear”, a book that lasered in on environmentalists as its primary villain, and dangerous liberal-ness as their enabler. “Next” seems to target, with equal ferocity, human amorality in genetic engineering, and humanity itself. His view of humanity in “Next” is so dim in fact that the visceral reaction Crichton intends "Next" to evoke in the reader is less a feeling that the future is a frightening place, and more a general feeling that the only good human is a dead human. Once the lizard brain retreats, however, and the intellect re-emerges, the question that may come to mind is, "Who made Michael Crichton so mad?” There is, after all, a lot of anger in this book.

The plot, such as it is, doesn’t follow a single, or even a couple narrative lines, but rather a series of scenarios that all seek to expose injustices in the still nascent field of bioengineering. Written in his customary ultra-short chapters, the story bops from one outrage to another. In one story arc, a family in the suburbs has to adjust to life with a human/chimpanzee hybrid who acts like a precocious though unusually agile boy. (The geneticist father inadvertently created the "humanzee" at work.) In another plot thread we follow a gray parrot with human-like intelligence on a road trip of sorts. These are the most traditionally Crichton-esque of the stories and are, generally speaking, politically neutral and innocuous.

The novel’s other plotlines, however, deal with humans using and abusing genetic technology advancements for their own personal gain. These sections of the book are the most difficult to read because they are the most misanthropic. In these sections, all the characters are so one-dimensional as to be less than caricatures; Crichton uses them to make his political arguments with all the subtlety of a knife in the ribs. Crichton’s misogeny is on full display: his women are all either daft, spiteful, or plain old murderous. His male characters are all one of a dozen variants of unscrupulous bastard.

Notions that would make most people blanch and consult their consciences don’t phase these awful characters in the slightest. For example, a valuable cell line collected by the University of California from a patient as waste material is patented by the University, which they then sell to a private company for billions. An act of industrial sabotage contaminates the cell line, and the aggrieved company, with the help of the courts, sends a bounty hunter to track down the original patient (or one of his direct relatives if he’s not around) and forcibly confiscate the cell line. Detain, restrain, and extract tissue. The reason: the courts have decreed that the company owns the patient’s cell line, not the patient. Instead of dealing with the issue in an honest way, Crichton decides to play on our worst fears about the judicial system, painting it as a monolithic, dusty bureaucracy that will, if asked, come after regular folks and take their dignity, their money, and finally their body parts.

Or how about the divorce attorney who orders his client’s spouse to have a full genetic work up, the kind of test that often reveal the disease that will eventually kill a person. In order to escape the test, which may be administered against her will, she must flee and relinquish her children to her weaselly husband. Both the husband and the divorce attorney practically twist their mustaches as they hatch their plans. I think it'd be hard to find fiction this bad if you went out and looked for it.

According to the New York Times, these stories, or some variant of them, check out. Something like what Crichton describes in the book actually happened. But in the hands of Michael Crichton, cautionary tales like this come off more like the alarmist hack work of Sean Hannity doomsaying about the coming jihadist holocaust then the firm, wonky warnings sounded by Al Gore (who Crichton, no doubt, believes is himself a demagogue). The difference between the writers is in how they view their audience. Gore believes his audience can be persuaded by a clear presentation of facts; Crichton, on the other hand, believes his readers can only come around to his way of thinking by terrifying them into lockstep.

But not all of Crichton's caricatures are merely venal; when he really wants to score a political point, he creates ridiculous straw men, which become the villains Crichton happily knocks down. Take the hippie environmentalist character Mark Sanger, heartbroken at the thought of sea turtles being eaten by hungry jaguars on Costa Rica. Read how Crichton describes Sanger’s environmentalist credentials:

“Back at home in Berkeley, Sanger sat in his loft and pondered what to do. Although Sanger told people he was a biologist, he had no formal training in the field. He had attended one year of college before dropping out to work briefly for a landscape architecture firm, Cather and Holly; the only biology he had taken was a course in high school. The son of a banker, Sanger possessed a substantial trust fund and did not need to work to support himself. He did, however, need a purpose in life. Wealth, in his experience, made the quest for self-identity even more difficult.”

And then:

“Recently, he had started to define himself as an artist, and artists did not need formal training. In fact, formal education interfered with a the artist’s ability to feel the zeitgeist, to ride the waves of change rolling through society, and to formulate a response to them. Sanger was very well informed in his opinion. He read the Berkeley papers, and sometimes magazines like Mother Jones, and several of the environmental magazines. Not every month, but sometimes. True, he often just looked at the pictures, skimming the stories. But that was all that was necessary to track the zeitgeist.”

Can’t you just feel the curmudgeonly hatred radiating off of those words like heat? Is it ever pleasurable to read fiction by a writer who literally hates one of his characters? In John Irving’s “Cider House Rules”, Irving presents the character of the train station agent as an idiot unaware of his own idiocy, which is harmless in and of itself. But the way Irving writes him it’s clear he deeply dislikes the station agent. The pages featuring this character are uncomfortable reading and succeed only in pulling the reader out of the narrative. But imagine pages upon pages of writing like that, featuring one hateful character after another. That’s “Next.”

Crichton expresses his own intemperate hate for environmentalists by creating an illiterate, thoughtless, and reckless loser to stand in for all of them. Here’s another choice tidbit between Sanger and a Costa Rican naturalist (the italics are mine):

“No, Senor Sanger, this is always the way it has been since my father and grandfather, and grandfather before. They always spoke of the jaguar attacks in the night. It’s part of the cycle of life.”

“But there are more attacks now,” Sanger said. “Because of all the pollution . . .”

In Crichton’s view Sanger, and by extension all environmentalists, are blithering idiots who are all heart and not an ounce of brain. I don’t know if this example demonstrates Crichton’s hate for environmentalists, or if it shows his complete inability to "get inside the head" of another human being. Though I think the latter's definitely a problem for him as a writer, I think the problem is more the former – Crichton is too keen to demonize them then to try and understand them, as is made quite clear in the next example:

"Ramon Valdez said, 'Jaguars must eat, too. I think better a turtle than to take a human baby.'

That, Mark Sanger thought, was a matter of opinion."

Absolutely poisonous. Sanger's not just thoughtless and stupid, he actually believes the life of a sea turtle matters more than a human baby's. Sounds like Sanger's almost as misanthropic as the guy who created him.

But it gets worse.

Chapter “045” begins this way:

"Alex Burnett was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers."

Yes, apropos of nothing, halfway through the "novel," Crichton inserts an infant-rape vignette into his story about genetic research. And it’s just as extraneous to the plot as it sounds. But it gets worse.

This from the New York Times:

“But one of ["Next"]'s minor characters — Mick Crowley, a Washington political columnist who rapes a baby — may be a literary dagger aimed at Michael Crowley, a Washington political reporter who wrote an unflattering article about Mr. Crichton this year. Certainly Mr. Crowley thinks so.

“In a “Washington Diarist” feature that was to be posted last night on The New Republic’s Web site, tnr.com, and published in the magazine’s Dec. 25 issue, Mr. Crowley says he is the victim of “a literary hit-and-run” because of a 3,700-word article in The New Republic in March.”

I’d say “literary hit-and-run” is putting it nicely. How does Crichton expect us to take him seriously as a novelist when he’s capable of such vile and transparently vindictive juvenilia? What’s sad about this is that, despite his terrible writing, there remains the vestiges of a serious mind chugging along in that ole Crichton noggin’.

At the end of "Next", in a section entitled, “Author’s Note," Crichton states in plain language five things that ought to be changed based on research he did for this book. And here’s the surprising thing: they seem to make sense. “Stop patenting genes,” is his first suggestion. He then lays out a concise case for why this ought to be done, and, wonder of wonders, he’s persuasive! When he isn't subjecting the weary reader to political opinion disguised (loosely) as bad fiction, Crichton is on firmer ground. But even here his he begins to fail.

The fourth conclusion/suggestion is strange because, prior to his making it, he’s appeared to come down strongly against it with the full weight of the preceding novel. “Avoid bans on research," he says. Right. We wouldn't want to discourage the future John Hammonds of the world from creating their "amusement parks," now would we?

In “Next”, unfettered, unrestricted research of the kind he says he supports, results in the creation of the aforementioned “humanzee.” In all the scenes relating to it, the humanzee is depicted as a kind of lovable abomination, pitiable in that he doesn’t belong in either the human world or the ape world. Crichton’s clear implication is that the humanzee shouldn’t exist, and that the experiments that brought him about ought not to have been done.

In other scenes, an unscrupulous researcher makes an inhalant that carries something called the “maturity gene” in it. The researcher’s brother, a drug addict, takes it and suddenly grows up: he quits drugs, cleans up, gets a good job, and matures all at once. Of course, one side effect is that recipients of the spray die inside of a year.

In Crichton’s hands, all of this is just so much pabulum, but the subtext of the entire book is that as research moves us further and further onto shaky moral ground in the field of genetic research, as scientists are able to do more and more things, humanity enters into a strange and frightening world. So maybe banning research would, as Crichton believes, be ineffectual, but why intentionally depict a world of unbanned research that is so frightening? Did Crichton forget which side of the argument he was on?

There are other examples where Crichton’s novel-length propaganda doesn’t quite line up with what he actually thinks (like the stem cell issue for one), but his appeals to the intellect at the finish of the book are too little too late. He’s already insulted the intelligence of his readers with the preceding dumb-as-shit book; even his right-wing readers should feel insulted, and probably do.

And lest anyone think that this is just another example of a diehard liberal coming down hard on a previously neutral author that's dared express conservative thoughts, I'd say that's untrue. Crichton has always skewed slightly right, and I read him anyway. A little slant is cool with me. But what's happened to Crichton is of a different order. It'd be as if Stephen King, who's always skewed a little left, suddenly wrote a novel in which a group of evil Pro-Life activists devised a scheme to abort thousands of babies to end, once and for all, the "abortion holocaust." Weird, right? Off-putting right? Even to his liberal-leaning readers.

I’d say with the publication of “Next” Crichton has moved full-bore into the realm of right-wing ideologues. Writing “State of Fear” to say that global warming was a giant scam was no fluke. Crichton now looks at the printed word the same way Hannity and Coulter and propagandists of that ilk do: just another way to disseminate their political views. The suggestion I have for readers and critics is this: don't look at Crichton the way you used to: the guy who told us about the future of technology before it arrived. Though a remnant of that Crichton still exists, that is no longer where he's at, which is, for me, a sad downturn for a once interesting writer.

Why Isn't Drew Doing All Movie Posters?

If the film ends up being half as awesome as this Drew Struzan poster, 2008's going to be an amazing year at the movies. Click here for the official site where you may download this poster for your desktop or somesuch. Looks like there'll be more posters coming down the pike; with any luck they'll all be done by Struzan.

"No Country for Old Men"

As you might recall, some days ago I went to the movies and saw "The Mist" and "No Country for Old Men" in one evening. You can read my long-winded take on "The Mist" here. That one was full of spoilers as I was itching to talk about the ending. No spoilers in this one, so read on without fear, O ye uninitiated!

The second billing in my double feature was, inarguably, the better film. Nothing against "The Mist", but "No Country for Old Men" was a return to form for the genius Coen Brothers, easily one of their top five films, and that's hard for any movie, even a Darabont movie, to top.

I read the eponymous Cormac McCarthy novel when it came out way back in 2005 and I was blown away by it. I'd never read anything that was so satisfyingly lurid, but written in such a spare, poetical way as to suggest literature. Or at least nearly that. And, along with Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh was the literary villain I most wished I'd thought of first. You can read that dusty post here.

Briefly, "No Country" is set in 1980, and concerns Llewellyn Moss, a welder who finds a big satchel filled with two million dollars out in the desert plains of West Texas. The owners of that money hire an uncontrollable but highly effective psychotic named Chigurh to retrieve that money, and his quest and his strange but oddly consistent ethics require him to leave a trail of bodies in his wake, most of them aerated by his trusty pneumatic cattle gun. But, as we come to find, the film really belongs to Ed Tom Bell, the county Sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones (who ought to get a Best Actor award for this film to go with his Best Supporting) who sees in Chigurh's senseless carnage the end of something essential in the world.

So why is this a "return to form" for the Coen brothers? In some form or another, nearly all of the Coens' films have dealt with crime, often focusing on desperate, but comical characters who feel driven to step afoul of the law. "No Country" is a return to form in that it's a crime movie and because, like "Fargo"(1996) takes itself and its characters seriously. But "No Country" also transcends that "form" because it represents a first for them: a straightforward crime movie adapted from a straightforward piece of crime fiction. Though there are funny moments in the film -- the humor almost always coming from the characters' sardonic wit -- the Coens never attempt to leaven the overall darkness of the film with scenes that display their signature sense of humor. They've put themselves aside for this movie, and in being so respectful of McCarthy's novel, the Coens may have made the film that, so far, best exemplifies their sensibilities as filmmakers. If "Vertigo" is Hitchcock's most Hitchockian film, and "Goodfellas" Scorsese's most Scorsesian film, then "No Country for Old Men" may prove to be the Coens' most Coensian movie. And if this turns out to be the best film they make, then it's due in large part to the work of the cast and crew they assembled.

Crew: I'd say Roger Deakins turns in Best Cinematography Award-level work here. Other DPs seem almost desperate to put their particular stamp on a film. Deakins' stamp is this: if a film seems perfectly shot, if every composition and every lighting choice seems thoughtful, if every frame is designed for maximum impact, then you're seeing a Roger Deakins movie. Another Coens stalwart, Carter Burwell, does great work here. I don't remember a note of it, but like we were told in film-school, a good film score's supposed to be unobtrusive. I'm sure the "No Country" score will prove to just as brilliant whenever I get a chance to listen to it by itself; or maybe the second time I watch the movie.

The cast: Josh Brolin, he of "Goonies" fame (he played Sean Astin's older brother), has grown up into the consummate alpha male film actor: big-shouldered, square-jawed and just as at home in a white hat as in a black. Maybe that's why he wears the grey-hat of this film so well. He's so good in this you forget he's Josh Brolin. Javier Bardem was not remotely who I imagined in the role of Chigurh when I read the novel, but he does very well in a role that would have been a homerun for nearly any serious dramatic actor. But it's Tommy Lee Jones and his character's sad arc that make me love this movie.

Jones' Ed Tom Bell is interesting for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the fact that Ed Tom is the antithesis of Sam Gerard, the character he played so perfectly in "The Fugitive" (1993) and the role that made him famous. In some respect, these films could act as Tommy Lee Jones bookends. These characters, both lawmen, are antithetical to one another in that Ed Tom has allowed himself to absorb his work, to feel it on an emotional level, and all the horror and base human cruelty that entails. The mental hardship of that absorption has taken its toll on Ed Tom, a toll Jones makes subtly clear by the gentle way he speaks and his weary, perpetually astonished demeanor. By contrast, Sam Gerard seems largely unaffected by the terrors of his work. When Kimble points a gun at Gerard's face and tells him, "I didn't kill my wife!" Gerard replies without thinking, "I don't care!" And he means it. Later in the film, Gerard has to risk a deputy's life to get a bullet into another fugitive that's taken that deputy hostage. As if to underline Gerard's emotional indifference, he expresses no regret afterwards, saying to his deputy that he doesn't "bargain" with suspects. Though these lawmen's methods may not be antithetical, their psychological capacity is, and "No Country" seems to suggest that feeling human beings in law enforcement must cut out a part of themselves to do their job over the long-term without feeling tortured by it; furthermore, the film suggests that psychologically self-limited people are the only ones who can catch the psychologically limited on the other side of the law. Gerard managed, with great success, to limit his absorption of his work; Ed Tom did not, and the years have hollowed him out.

In some ways, this notion of incompleteness of the soul suggests that the purely good, the psychologically unlimited, like Ed Tom, aren't up to defeating pure evil. Chigurh represents that evil, or Chaos; even though he seems weirdly ordered in his thinking, and though he imitates order in how carefully he goes about his business, he is Chaos. Ed Tom is Order and though Order goes through the motions, Order is always overmatched. (McCarthy highlights this duality by making their first names, Ed Tom and Anton, phonetically identical.) So as Order succumbs to Chaos in the world of "No Country", the Coens have, more persuasively than in any of their other films, managed to succinctly express their pessimistic worldview; in fact, they do it so well, that it's tempting to hope that they abandon their quirky comedies forever and continue to make movies this stripped-down and unadorned.

I'd write more but it took me long enough to come up with this, such as it is, and I've already reached my daily fatuousness quota.

Anyway, reading through that old post I wrote after I first read the novel, I saw that I included a big chunk of a scene from that book that was probably my favorite from the novel. Reading it now I see that the Coens let it stand in the film adaptation word for word, only truncating it for time. I'm just going to repost that snippet of dialogue from the book right here right now. It's just too good.

[Bell says] Do you have any notion of how goddamned crazy you are?
[Chigurh says] The nature of this conversation?
The nature of you.
Chigurh leaned back. He studied Wells. Tell me something, he said.
What.
If the rule you followed led you to this of what use was the rule?
I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm talking about your life. In which now everything can be seen at once.
I'm not interested in your bullshit, Anton.
I thought you might want to explain yourself.
I don't have to explain myself to you.
Not to me. To yourself. I thought you might have something to say.
You go to hell.
You surprise me, that's all. I expected something different. It calls past events into question. Dont you think so?
You think I'd trade places with you?
Yes. I do. I'm here and you are there. In a few minutes I will still be here.
Wells looked out the darkened window. I know where the satchel is, he said.
If you knew where the satchel was you would have it.
I was going to have to wait until there was no one around. Till night. Two in the morning. Something like that.
You know where the satchel is.
Yes.
I know something better.
What's that.
I know where it's going to be.
And where is that.
It will be brought to me and placed at my feet.
Wells wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It wouldn't cost you anything. It's twenty minutes from here.
You know that's not going to happen. Don't you?
Wells didn't answer.
Dont you?
You go to hell.
You think you can put it off with your eyes.
What do you mean?
You think that as long as you keep looking at me you can put it off.
I don't think that.
Yes you do. You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it. I'm trying to help you.
You son of a bitch.
You think you wont close your eyes. But you will.

Damn but is that some great stuff.

Finally, I have a question for those who've already seen it.

[SPOILER BELOW!!]










[SPOILER!]

Q: On the night Ed Tom goes to the motel that was the scene of the big gun battle, Ed Tom goes into a hotel room. They cut to a shot of Chigurh in a sliver if light watching Ed Tom's shadow moving about outside. Ed Tom goes in and finds nothing. Where was Chigurh? Was he in the adjacent hotel room, or was in another part of the hotel room that Ed Tom didn't look in? Or did Chigurh just disappear?

So, you know, lemme know.

Sherri Shepherd says, "Nothing predates Christ", King says "Make Mine Lindsay and Britney," and Bush says, "Only Last Week."

I was thinking just today, "What would be a good easy blog post for a lazy blogger like me?"

And then Sherri Shepherd of "The View" gave it to me.

You may remember her from this very blog back when she said she didn't "know" if the world was flat. After I got over my feelings of unctuous superiority, I let it go, figuring Shepherd, who seems amiable and not unduly stupid on the show, had just got into a defensive crouch on Christianity, and lost her way during the argument with a silly rhetorical dead-end. This, from Wikipedia, seems to confirm that: "The very next day, Shepherd explained that she never had to defend her religious beliefs before, and that she became overwhelmed with the many questions that were being thrown at her. By the time Goldberg added her question, Shepherd was nervous and did not fully comprehend what was being asked. She stated that she knows that the world is round."

This clip, however, seems to contradict the idea that Sherri really does know the world is round, or, for that matter, anything else other then Jesus is the Lord our God. In her defense, she was raised in the Jehovah's Witness cult before becoming a Born Again, so I have sympathy for her, but it's still a little worrying to see such a lightless worldview spoken aloud, and to know that others share it.

Click here for the clip, and tremble.

Also, Stephen King has cast his vote for who he thinks should be Time's Person of the Year. He nominates Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. He thinks they'd be a good choice because, "[they] symbolize the media's growing obsession with issues of personality over substance. People care more about the details of Spears' child-custody case than they do about where the billions the U.S. government has poured into Iraq have gone. It's time for a discussion about whether the news media have chucked their responsibilities and run off to Tabloid Disneyland."

This seems like a good idea. Since Time magazine has punted on choosing an actual person the last couple times, last year's choice goofy choice being "You", and a year or two before that the syrupy "the American Soldier", I think a protest Person of the Year might be good for us. Like King, I'd like the media to have a more serious discussion then they've been having about themselves, though I may be more pessimistic than Steve because I don't think that, ultimately, a new discussion on the current state of Infotainment would do anything to amp up the Info and diminish the 'Tainment.

Finally, the CIA released its NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) on Iran's nascent nuclear weapons program, and it states that the consensus among all 16 US intelligence agencies is that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Bush said in a press conference today that he only learned about the NIE findings "only last week," even though there's mounting evidence Bush knew about the NIE much earlier and, along with Vice President Cheney, had been working to quash and alter its findings. If this is the case, then Bush's comments in October of THIS YEAR about a nuclear-armed Iran posing a threat of "World War III", or Cheney's comments, also in October of THIS YEAR, in which he said that if Iran, "stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences," exposes these men, once again, as shameless liars. It may be that Bush's statement this morning that he only learned about the NIE "last week", may become a scandal all of its own. It's clearly a lie, but if any one comes up with hard proof of it, he may have to face the music. But then again, Bush has been confronted with so many of his lies and he's faced up to exactly none of them, so why would he face up to this one?

Oh, January 2009 seems so far away.