Dr. Strangelove v. Jihadi John

Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969) was based on a Leon Uris novel about the Cuban missile crisis. There’s a famous scene in the Hotel Theresa an iconic Harlem waterhole and home to legends like Sugar Ray Robinson and Castro himself even makes a cameo appearance, by way of newsreel footage from a Havana demonstration. It’s all water under the bridge, with the Cold War, the Bay of Pigs invasion and Russia’s bold act of trying to place armaments 90 miles from the US shores all consigned to history. Now the action is in a totally different part of the world where Japan, China and South Korea wait to see what horrors the petulant North Korean leader Disney enthusiast and some time film critic (who threated retaliation for The Interview, 2014), Kim Jong-un, will unleash next. It’s true that Kim Jong-un has established a new gold standard for critics, who like politicians are always being accused of doing nothing (at the very least his actions as an auteur  challenge the notion  that “those who do, do and those who can’t do criticize”). But the real question is, are we more afraid today than we were during the Cold War? Kim Jong-un’s threats of producing an ICBM with a nuclear warhead that could hit the US shores seem about as dangerous as the drawings of the vacuum cleaner qua atomic reactor that Alec Guinness furnished in the film adaptation of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1959 and Donald Trump has even offered to sit down with him for a tete a tete. Jihad is the hottest act under the big top and with 9/11, it proved itself to be more than just posturing of the kind that Mr. Kim specializes in. But remember On the Beach (1959) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), two films made from books about the Cold War era? And remember Dr. Strangelove (1964) and the uneasy laugher it produced, in particular since Kubrick’s central comic figure was such a neat cross-breeding of Hitler and Henry Kissinger? And remember fallout shelters? Now with snipers taking fire in Cineplex’s and Paris becoming the city of the wrong kind of light (that produced by explosives), we may think the world has become a dangerous place, but is it more threatening than the Cold War when we all lived in constant fear of oblivion?

The Exorcists

Remember fallout shelters and hiding under a desk in elementary school during an air raid drill? There’s always a cloud hanging over human life. In the 50’s it was the specter of the Bomb that surfaced in Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach (1957) and even more famously in the Kubrick masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove (1964). Then there was AIDS which spawned its own literature and filmography. Today it’s ISIS whose message spreads virally on the internet and also whose ideas are planted like sexuality in latency and then bloom in troubled adolescents with the onset of puberty. If an atom bomb is the igniter on a fusion explosion, the hormones are what finally sets off the explosion of fundamentalist fervor that turns a quiet young Tunisian into a mass murderer of innocent tourists. The forces that have created this virulent mutation of Al-Qaeda have taken years to coalesce, but the full-blown epidemic is fairly recent. The infamous video taped beheading of James Foley featuring the masked executioner with the faintly cockney accent occurred less than a year ago. How will this affect the imagination say of Stephen King, who wrote a novel which is a virtual treatise on the plague, The Stand (1978)? Will this nameless threat that takes on a name as it enters a proxy become the basis for remakes of  Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) or George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968)? Indeed, robotic humans whose emotions have been erased or zombies seem to be good descriptions of the effect of  extreme zealotry on the human consciousness. John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) should be studied by intelligence services who are seeking to ferret out human time bombs planted by ISIS and other terrorist organizations--and also by novelists and screenplay writers who attempt to exorcize our current devils through art.

Two Eyes for An Eye

Sing Sing’s “Old Sparky"

It’s not to demean the suffering of those who have been POW’s on either side of the fence. But when you read about the latest ISIS beheading, the infamous Hanoi Hilton really seems like the Hilton. Those who have traveled to Poland to see Auschwitz, to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, those remembering Katyn may have thought they have seen the limits of depravity, but human innovation seems to know no bounds where the infliction of pain and suffering are concerned. Of course if you go to Italy and visit one of the Museo della Torturas you will find some pretty inventive contraptions like the Judas cradle, the rack,  head and testicle crushers. Let’s not forget burning at the stake, boiling in oil, bastinado and crucifixion. What is often remarked about pornography can also be iterated about torture: if it’s been said it’s been done and if it’s been done it’s been said. And then there is the infamous torture scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Waterboarding and sleep deprivation might seem mild what’s  compared to the failed death by lethal injection inflicted on a death row inmate in Oklahoma named Clayton Lockett? And then there's mental torture of the kind that was deployed on Lawrence Harvey in Manchurian Candidate and Dostoevsky, who was put up in front of a firing squad for his revolutionary activities and told he was going to die. Is there a limit to human torment, a point beyond which even the most depraved executioner refuses to go? Too bad Tomas de Torquemada, one of the stars of the Inquisition, is not here to answer the question? Does agency lessen pain? Do Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire or people who jump out of windows have something going for them. Would that Jan Masaryk were here to testify about the downside of unwilling defenestration. A scientist until the end Lavoisier reputedly performed an experiment involving his own death at the guillotine, by attempting to blink his eyes after his head was severed from his neck. However, while he may have been successful, he wasn’t able to talk about it. What if the ISIS executioner with the English accent beheaded himself as a way of expressing his anger at the West? Would the pain he felt be less than that which he inflicted on his victims, by virtue of the fact that relief was in his grasp?

Songun: the Musical

One wonders what Andrew Lloyd Webber is thinking now that Kim Jong-il has passed away? As you may recall ALW was the composer of the huge hit Evita, based on the life of Eva Peron and the myth of KJi has all the ingredients for a great musical. In order of importance here are the keywords one would imagine accompanying any post about the musical worth its salt: Crowds (KJi drew huge crowds willing to starve for him), Trains (he had his own luxury train similar to the one that Franklin Delano Roosevelt cruised across the country in when he was seeking his office), Platform shoes (KJi who loved film and kept a large collection of Western classics probably got the idea of wearing them from Saturday Night Fever), Shades (KJi got the idea of wearing them from another popular 70's film Superfly, which had a famous soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield), WMD’s (KJi presided over North Korea’s entrance into the nuclear arms club and dreamt of sponsoring a meeting of the club in Pyongyang as a way of sticking his tongue out at the South Korean leadership who once hosted the Olympics in Seoul), Army (got to give it to you KJi or your policy of "songun, or 'army first,'" reported in the Times; creating the "fifth largest" standing army of 1.1 million in a country of almost 30 million mostly starving people is nothing short of amazing and merits its own tune---how about “If I were a Manchurian Candidate…” to the tune of Elton John’s “Your Song.”), Hair (KJi had a legendary hairdo that was created for him by the famed salon Helena of Pyongyang but do we envision the KJi of the musical as Warren Beatty in Shampoo or as one of the cast of John Waters’ Hairspray?—probably the latter), charm (KJi was secretive and murderous, but apparently could be quite engaging; the Times obit, "Kim Jong-il, Dictator Who Turned North Korea Into a Nuclear State, Dies,” NYT, 12/18/11 quotes the State Department’s Wendy Sherman as saying, “He was smart, engaged, knowledgeable, self-confident, sort of the master-director of all he surveyed.”), Secrets (Mike Meyers and Sacha Baron Cohen are definitely candidates for the part of KJi as KJi was obviously influenced by both Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and Borat to the extent that like a lot of imaginative people he exercised a certain degree of self-invention in the creation of his own persona, based on the many of the films he saw), Bergman (apparently Kji possessed the Criterion Collection version of The Seventh Seal, but apparently was offended by the scene where the Knight plays chess with Death.) Shogun was the title of best seller by James Clavell. Why not call this musical Songun or You’re in the Army Now?

Head Trip

Inception is an old-fashioned head-trip. The Leonardo DiCaprio character is an extractor and implanter of ideas who is haunted by the suicide of his own wife. Parenthetically, one wonders if the story doesn’t owe something to another futuristic work—Tarkovsky’s Solaris (based on the Stanislav Lem novel), in which the central character is also haunted by the death of his wife. In the case of Inception, the wife’s presence is an unholy reminder of the idea of the unreality the De Caprio character had so successfully and tragically implanted in her. But the greatest question about Inception is how and why the film has become such a major hit. Unlike a lot of blockbusters, Inception is not easy to understand, and its varying themes, running the gamut from corporate espionage to questions of solipsism, dream structure and dream life, are not exactly the stuff of commercial film. Hitchcock’s Spellbound has some wonderful dream sequences, which were in fact storyboarded by Salvador Dali, but Inception offers more than just simple fragments and off-the-cuff musings. The understanding and manipulation of dreams is the palette from which the narrative is fashioned, though it might be argued that the attention to dream structure is superficial, owing, in the end, more to video games than to concerns with the relationship between sleeping and waking consciousness. But the film is fundamentally unsettling in the way it paints the mind’s vulnerability to suggestion. The original John Frankenheimer version of The Manchurian Candidate had a similar effect. However, cold war politics and torture effectively grounded it, creating a reassuring feeling of causality. Are audiences relating to Inception director Christopher Nolan’s vision of a purely subjective universe, in which the world outside the self partakes of little, if any, verifiable reality?

Howdy Doody: Gunslinger, Warmonger, Imperialist

Reading the obit of Edward Kean, the creator of The Howdy Doody Show, one can’t help thinking how much the show was influenced by many of the Westerns that preceded it, like The Lone Ranger during the Golden Age of Radio, and how much the show would go on to influence television Westerns like Gunsmoke, Have Gun-Will Travel, Bonanza—shows that would be watched a decade later by the same generation that had grown up with the experience of Howdy as their first cowboy. If you talk to women who grew up in the ‘50s and loyally watched Howdy Doody, it becomes apparent that many of them still have a crush on the puppet, and even harbor sexual fantasies about what must have been, for a young child, a swashbuckling male figure. But in terms of genre art, where would Gunsmoke’s Chester, Matt and Miss Kitty be without Phineas T. Bluster, Dilly Dally, Flub-a-Dub and Princess Summerfall Winterspring, who was indubitably the model for a number of barroom gals who would appear in the burgeoning genre of adult westerns? We think of Howdy Doody as a program epitomizing the innocence of early television, with its Edenic setting freed of horror and consequence. But Howdy Doody was first and foremost a Wild West show introduced by one Buffalo Bob—a hegemonist if ever there was one—who, if we were to research his backstory, probably got his soubriquet and earned his stripes by murdering bison and colonizing Indian lands. In this regard, Howdy Doody was a piece of indoctrination. Its subliminal message was Manifest Destiny. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Create a feeling of harmlessness and innocence to camouflage the aggressive desires that are holding sway. Would it be a stretch to see Howdy, the brave puppet on a string, as the model for the Raymond Shaw character played by Lawrence Harvey in the John Frankenheimer adaptation of Richard Condon’s Manchurian Candidate?