Melania's Soup Can

"Campbell's Soup Cans" by Andy Warhol (1962)

Melania Trump, or whoever is responsible for the writing of her speech, has been accused of plagiarism.  But as Chris Christie said, “Ninety-three per cent of the speech is completely different" (“How Melania Trump's Speech Veered Off Course and Caused an Uproar,” NYT, 7/19/16).  Governor Christie was plainly looking at the glass as half full or 93% full, in comparison to the presumptive First Lady’s critics who looked at it as 7% empty. Of course there are many who might have said that with or without Michele Obama’s imprimatur the speech was as full of empty platitudes as that of its predecessor. “Values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond; and you do what you say” might be reminiscent of Polonius' "neither a borrower nor a lender be," but are not exactly up there say with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” or better yet the last lines of the second part of Goethe’s Faust, “Das ewig Weibliche zeiht uns hinan,” the eternal feminine lures to perfection.” If Melania had gotten on stage and started off with something like an unattributed form of Hamlet’s soliloquy critics might have taken pause, but doesn’t the regurgitation of trivialities falls merely into the category of that practice that’s big in the artistic community, “appropriation.” For instance Andy Warhol famously appropriated the Campbell’s soup can and made it into a painting that become one of the most emblematic images of the Pop Art movement? Let’s not fault Melania for stealing Michele Obama’s words, nor even Paul Manafort,  who according to The Times “pegged the number of suspicious words at 50.” The Times quoted the Trump campaign chairman as saying “and that includes ‘ands’ and ‘thes’ and things like that.” It’s like habeas corpus. There's no crime if you don't have a corpse.

The Nice Guys

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights dealt with the porn industry in the l970’s. It’s an example of one of a number of films which have attempted to exploit the heyday of a certain level of decadence with a mixture of nostalgia and parody. The Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling vehicle, The Nice Guys returns to a similar milieu additionally throwing in a conspiracy theory concocted by the big three Detroit carmakers together with a Justice Department official to rule against a mandatory pollution control device which will cut down on automobile profits. The plot piles one thing on top of the next. There’s a big time porn producer whose latest release is Pornoccio and an interchange when an actress at an industry event says “I told him if you want me to do that don’t eat asparagus.” Get it. The self-same producer is the eminence grise behind a work of experimental film which contains nudity and pornography in order to mask the message carried by the daughter of the Justice Department bigwig, Amelia (Margaret Qualley), who is out to blow the whistle on the corruption of capitalist society. It’s obvious that Shane Black, who directed, had trouble in juggling all these pregnant pieces of plot. But sometimes a film can be so bad that it’s actually good. The Nice Guys is like one of those Warhol films of the 60's (which may yet turn out to be a source of inspiration in the way the porn world of the 70's is here). It’s a classic comic cop caper film of the Rush Hour variety, only the script is so convoluted and devoid of an any dramatic or comic drive that the actors deliver their lines in a dead pan that turns the idea of narrative cinema on its head. If the director of Chelsea Girls were alive, he would probably have had encouraging things to say about the script.

15 Seconds to Infamy

Ubiquity is not tantamount to notoriety. In fact, it may be a recipe for anonymity. Due to Big Data, everyone has less than Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. In fact, 15 minutes of fame in our current technocracy is enough to create a hagiography since it’s such an anomaly. The bar has dropped in terms of fame, but the mass of men who live Thoreau's "lives of quiet desperation" exhale just a breath, a small cry which is quickly swallowed up by the next bottom feeder, with the food chain itself growing larger and more desperate at the bottom and increasingly rarified at the top. This is the essence of  Facebook whose narcotic is the enticement of a validation that’s quickly flushed into oblivion. It’s almost a paradigm of addiction with hope spiking a high, followed by the come down and the need for another dose of fleeting attention. Evanescence is the constant in this equation. And yes, it’s very much like flushing the toilet. You go on FB and flush your exultation into a chorus of wails and cheers. And here is the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics. The loudness and frequency of the cry (the number of flushes) is inversely proportionate to the amount of attention you will receive. So if you want to half your infamy, respond to "What’s on your mind?" on your Facebook homepage twice as frequently. It’s like the lynching victim whose cries for mercy only whet the appetite of the mob. We are all on our way to being silenced. Once you’re born you begin to die. But in the current environment naked attention seeking is a recipe for obsolescence. Indifference is a swarm of cyber bees attacking with their own poisonous bytes.

Jodorowsky’s Dune

Was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, “the greatest movie never made?” The South African director Richard Stanley makes that claim in Frank Pavich’s documentary about the ill fated project, currently playing at Film Forum. Writers, filmmakers and artists often fear they are putting a curse on an idea by talking about it before actually undertaking the work. One wonders if the same thing can be said about talking too much about postmortems, in which an unsuccessful attempt has resulted in a stillbirth. In the case of Pavich's Jodorowsky's Dune, one wonders if it might have been better to let sleeping dogs lie. The documentary brings to light the  deficiencies of a millenarian project that might better have lived on a as a great mystery and question mark. Jodorowsky if you remember had achieved notoriety with El Topo which played midnights at Chelsea’s famed Elgin theater and other art house venues during the 70’s. Jodorowsky had come to film through the avant-garde directing productions of Beckett, Ionesco and others in Mexico before producing early films like The Holy Mountain, whose mixture of provocation and hallucinogenic spirituality appears, from the clips show in the documentary, to have combined the kitsch of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater Company with the high strung camp of Warhol’s Factory. Jodorowsky shared Warhol’s infatuation with celebrity and had enlisted  Pink Floyd, who'd just recorded “The Dark Side of the Moon” album to do a sound track. Salvador Dali agreed to work only if he received the highest salary in Hollywood at $100,000 an hour and Orson Welles was cajoled with the promise hiring the chef from his most favorite restaurant in Paris to cook his meals. Dali asks Jodorowsky “did you ever feel like you lost a clock in the sand?” and Jodorowsky proudly recounts how he won Dali over by answering “I never found a clock, but I lost a lot." In Jodorowsky’s recounting Mick Jagger, at the height of his fame, walked towards him at a Paris social function and agreed to participate. An enormous storyboard was created with the help of Dan O’Bannon, a Hollywood special effects expert who’d worked on John Carpenter’s Dark Star and would later co-write the screenplay for Total Recall, Jean Giraud, the comic book artist known as Moebius, Chris Foss, a designer of science fiction book covers and H. R. Giger, the Swiss painter. Everything about Dune was larger than life (in his failed pitch to Hollywood Jodorowsky talked about a movie that might be 20 hours long) and hearing  Jodorowsky’s claim that he would start the movie with a panning shot of the universe that would outdo the opening sequence of Touch of Evil, you get the feeling that this is one case where Hollywood was right. David Lynch’s Dune was a failure, but who knows if Jodorosky’s Dune might not have been the science fiction version of Heaven’s Gate. At the end of the documentary, Jodorowsky’s says “I was raping Frank Herbert, but with love.” That’s no guarantee Frank Herbert would have liked it.