For a Luddite Politics

What about a Luddite politics? Even the biggest Donald Trump hater must secretly enjoy the way he stands up to the Republican establishment and Bernie Sanders replete with his Brooklyn accent is almost the quintessential everyman bucking the Clinton dynasty. If Trump is Manifest Destiny, Sanders is the embodiment of the American dream, a Horatio Alger of politics, a pied piper with a constituency of voters who are generally too alienated to go to the polls. Besides their difference on almost every issue that’s being discussed from immigration to taxes and health care, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in their iconoclasm have more in common than any of the candidates. Is it far flung to think that the real issue is the defiance of the juggernaut we call Washington? Isn’t that what this election is all about and wouldn’t that make a Trump/Sanders ticket the next logical possibility—certainly, if you are one of those people who is more interest in process than product, in style over content? What you have in Trump and Sanders are two no nonsense pragmatists who shoot from the hip. The fact that they’re both New Yorkers and both from the outer boroughs (one initially from Queens and the other Brooklyn) only strengthens the potential bond. What the election would really boil down to then would be a war between New York and Washington, for which city would be the de facto capital of the United States. From there Trump and Sanders would work things out and the negotiations would be very much like the way say the Teachers Union negotiates its contract with the city. Remember Woody Allen’s line about the famed Teachers Union president Albert Shanker from Sleeper, “Yes. According to history, over a 100 years ago, a man named Albert Shanker got a nuclear warhead.” In New York, the Al Sharptons and Albert Shankers hold as much power as the titans of industry and that’s the way it would be if a Trump/Sanders ticket prevailed and subleased Gracie Mansion from Bill de Blasio.

Sperm Count: Deep Thought

The famous male porn stars of the 70’s and 80’s were Harry Reems, Ron Jeremy (aka the Hedgehog) and John Holmes whose last film was done with La Cicciolina, and who was performing without protection while infected with the AIDS virus from which he died. Georgina Spelvin, Candida Royalle and Sharon Mitchell were some of their female counterparts. Today’s generation of porn stars (both male and female) are more film historical and often intellectual. They’re players in the meta-porn industry which may have been influenced by deconstruction. Sacha Grey, now retired from porn, modeled her personality on the Godard actress Anna Karina, whose name she toyed with adopting. The equally New Wave porn queen Stoya does her erotic pas de deux with a male sex idol who calls himself James Deen. The only thing missing are porn stars who really reflect the neuroses of our times, women porn stars who suffer from frigidity and whose male lovers can’t get it up. Audiences are sick of seeing idealized couples creating nuclear chain reactions that set the bar too high. Porn needs to go through a realistic stage say tantamount to the Ashcan School of Art which became popular in America before the Depression. Audiences for X rated films, in the age of therapy and recovery, need porn stars they can identify with and who tell their stories, porn stars who don’t make them feel they are constantly missing out on something. If Woody Allen had balls, he'd write and star in a porn film, a kind of X-rated Annie Hall, where Alvy Singer (Allen) says to Annie (Diane Keaton) “so we'll fuck now and get it over with” in place of the original  “so we'll kiss now and get it over with, and then we’ll eat.” There’s a growing demand for films that deal with subjects that were formerly taboo in pornography—porn films with titles like Chompin’ at the Bit (premature ejaculation), Pissimpotent (about a guy who is inhibited about giving his lover the golden shower she desires), If I Can’t Come in Your Mouth, On Where Am I Supposed to Come, On Your Face? (no particular theme), Deep Thought (about the dangers of meditation and how it can lead to sexual anorexia) and Once a Pickle No Longer a Cucumber (about failed Sexual Reassignnment Surgery). What about a sequel to Behind the Green Door (1972), where the portal in question leads to an analyst’s couch?

The Anxiety of Intellect

You usually associate street smarts with some one who knows how to negotiate in business. Donald Trump apparently considers this ability to be a top of the line requirement for statesmanship and something which qualifies him to be president of the United States. He has boasted that he will have a wall built between Mexico and the United States which the Mexicans will pay for. You don’t usually associate streets smarts with the world of intellect, but indeed there are intellectuals who exhibit the same kind of intuitive abilities that work in deal making within the realm of intellectual arguments. That is to say there are intellectuals who approach such questions as the branch falling in the forest with no one listening or the question of whether you would turn the trolley in the direction of one hapless soul in order to save five (the Trolley problem) with some degree of swagger. Such thinkers are way beyond reason and deductive logic. For instance Harold Bloom, the literary scholar who coined the term “anxiety of influence” probably can reiterate his theories about the provenance of poetry in his sleep, ditto Steven Greenblatt the Shakespearean authority who wrote Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Trump who has been around the block a few times when it comes to business probably thinks that he can run rings around a tough guy like Vladimir Putin (and part of his credential may relate to the fact that two of his wives Ivana and Melania come from the Czech Republic and Slovenia respectively) or the notorious bumptious Kim Jong-un. Similarly if you are a street smart intellectual you have to know how to handle the likes of the deconstructionist maeven Stanley Fish, if you’re going to get your feet wet at the MLA. And you’d better have the brashness of a Bill Maher if you find yourself knocking heads on the subject of race with the philosopher Cornel West. Imagine a series like The Sopranos, except set it in the competitive world of upper west Jewish intellectuals, the inheritors of the mantle held by Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Susan Sontag and the old Partisan Review crowd. Remember Woody Allen’s line “I had heard that Commentary and Dissent  had merged and formed Dysentery?" You need an intellectual shock jock, a kind of Donald Trump of ideas, to make a dent amongst these kinds of egghead mafiosi.

Irrational Men

Everyone is insecure, even Donald Trump or Tom Brady. Within every bombast lies a cowering inner child. Imagine making a new version of The Exorcist where a Donald Trump like character suffers from pre-adolescent possession. Chicken Little would be right on target about the sky falling. Under this theory Woody’s Allen’s next film should be a sequel to Irrational Man, Irrational Men which shows the human side of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his crew. Somewhere in Raqqa, the reputed ISIS stronghold Baghdadi will be wandering around a former prison which has been turned into a palace. But Abu is a little like the Wizard of Oz, a frightened little man hiding behind plumes of smoke. Underneath all the beheadings and rapes, lies a nervous neurotic played by Allen, with all kinds of eccentricities which he expresses to his confident Mohammed, a Freudian, who had trained as an analyst before being converted to Jihad. One of Baghdadi’s biggest problems turns out to be performance anxiety which takes place when he makes appearances as a guest executioner on the big ISIS reality show Head Today Gone Tomorrow. He’s also a failed ravisher of young women who have been sold into slavery and has had to walk away from his harem with his tail between his legs on more than one occasion, after not getting it up. In fact, the chief cause for his depression and the thing that makes him want to bomb and maim is erectile dysfunction. Naturally he refuses to take Viagra or Cialis which he feels violate the Koran. Besides the slaves, he's married to a balabusta who yells at him when he tries to stop her from using up the Islamic State’s stolen oil revenues for on line shopping expeditions. The portrait of Baghdadi that Allen aims to create would show the human side of a tyrant.

Paris Journal VI: Raiders of the Lost Generation

Paris was once populated by a Lost Generation of expatriate Americans known for their talent, wit and sometimes genius. Woody Allen humorously addressed this era of the 20’s in Midnight in Paris. Today that Lost Generation has multiplied and their great great great grandchildren—in other words, Americans, are everywhere. Having propagated almost biblically, the descendants of the Lost Generation have become like a plague of locusts. You can’t go anywhere in Paris without seeing Americans and just when you think you’ve located a bona fide Frenchman, who talks the talk and walks the walk, even he or she can turn out to be an American dressed up as Frenchmen. You learn not be fooled by Francophiles in berets, who can rattle off esoteric Metro stops like Michel-Ange- Molitor and have no trouble cherching for the rue du Cherche-Midi. Though the onslaught of Americans is welcomed for the economic bounty they represent, they’re looked at suspiciously and even disdainfully by many Parisians precisely because even those with affectations fundamentally lack the Gallic charm, the holy grail that many Americans come to Paris for in the first place. When a Frenchman comes to New York, he or she is generally treated like royally due to the way they embody what is deemed to be a superior culture. But the achievements of the Lost Generation of Hemingways and Fitzageralds have long been forgotten and it’s the image of the ugly American with his or her profound lack of savoir faire—the tourist loaded down with guide books, time sensitive tickets to the latest blockbuster art show at the Grand Palais and naturally their Zagat’s--that’s prevailed. In a sense it’s unfair. Why should enthusiastic Americans be penalized while the French are rewarded for being what they are?

Magic in the Moonlight

The seen and the unseen are fair enough themes, particularly for a filmmaker in the latter stage of his career. And the protagonist of Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight, a magician and skeptic named Stanley (Colin Firth) who is a master of illusion and who falls for a medium Sophie (Emma Stone) who is a charlatan (from Kalamazoo no less) is the perfect spokesman for the conflict between reason and faith. Ultimately the desire for happiness that comes from belief is the theme that Stanley, or Wei Ling Soo as he calls himself when he dons his Chinese costume and performs his act, is grappling with. Allen is in good company if we remember that Eliot satirized the clairvoyant Madame Blavatsky in “The Wasteland.” Allen’s comedies present a pantheon of well-meaning souls to parody, but Magic in the Moonlight aspires for something more. “I’m a rational man living in a rational world,” Stanley says. “Any other way is madness.” Stanley is the Henry Higgins to Sophie’s street smart Eliza Doolittle who declares “Just because you are duplicating my miracles doesn’t prove they are not real.” But as in Shaw the scientific method fails to win out. Would that the director could have used his considerable talents to turn the hackneyed nature of the film’s l920’s South of France setting to his advantage! At first you think he’s going to flip things around and then you realize that he’s jumping in lock stock and barrel, including expropriating a Dick Diver type Freudian who tries to get his analytic claws into Stanley in the same way that Stanley attempts to debunk Sophie’s spiritual chicanery. Nietzsche said,  “Please don’t destroy people’s lies, their illusions, because if you destroy their illusions, they won’t be able to live at all... .” It’s a sentiment which gets some air time in the film. But man also needs the willing suspension of disbelief in order to buy characters and a setting. While Magic in the Moonlight is full of wonderful ideas, that one might hope Allen would return to, it’s self-conscious dialogue and disquisition end up creating little more than a leaden period piece.