The Escondido Review

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

2005-07-18T07:13:00.000-07:00

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close takes place in the enormous space between loss and recovery. It's about the efforts we make to reconnect, to bring back some semblance of our relationship to that which has gone missing. While the central loss in the novel -- that of a 9-year-old boy, Oskar Schell, whose father perished in the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Centers -- provides a framework for the plot, the losses in the novel are many. Fathers, children, wives, husbands, lovers, grandparents and grandchildren have all gone, and each character in the novel is the victim of loss.
The author, Jonathan Safran Foer, makes it clear that recovery is not possible, but the effort to recover is the stuff of life. Young Oskar searches the five boroughs of new York City for a lock that he believes might open with the mysterious key he has found in his father's closet. His only clue is the word "Black" written on the envelope in which the key was discovered, and he systematically attempts to locate and question every New Yorker with the surname Black.
All around him, others deal with their own losses. His mother and her new "friend," his grandmother, the 103-year-old man in the apartment upstairs, who hasn't left his apartment in the 20 years since his wife died.
Some things have left abruptly and unexpectedly, like Oskar's father, on "the worst day," and another character's wife and daughter, who perished in a car accident. Others drift away little by little, like the grandfather's ability to vocalize words and the mythical sixth borough of New York, an island that drifted slowly away down the Hudson, severing its connections to Manhattan one by one. And yet they all leave behind vestiges, and with those the hope of reconnection.Several of the figures in the novel write, and their writing are interspersed with Oskar's, as are letters written by his absent grandfather, who disappeared more than 40 years ago, before his father was born, after having lost his ability to speak, dropping the ability to say words one by one. His last word, uttered before he met and married Oskar's grandmother, was a lonely "I".
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close isn't subtle. Despite its structure in the form of private diaries and secret letters, it isn't really about interior thoughts. It's openly and painfully about the need to connect, and to try to bring back connections that have been broken.It's realistic about the futility of these searches; our hopes are raised and then dashed repeatedly on behalf of the characters, and the characters go on struggling. None of these failures brings closure. Even the plotlines that appear to be resolved turns out not to provide finality.
The search for reconnection is really a futile effort to turn back time (Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time figures prominently). But it is what keeps the characters going. At several points, characters explicitly acknowledge that acceptance of loss would mean the end of living.
The book is an achievement, not least of all in the creation of young Oskar, who is funny, surprising, tragic and very much real, despite his odd collection of quirks: The all-white wardrobe, the endless inventions of his fertile mind, the erudition that seems years beyond and yet entirely appropriate for this urbane child of urban parents.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

2005-06-19T07:33:00.000-07:00

The climactic light-saber battle between Obi-Wan Kenobi and the newly emergent Darth Vader has an operatic grandeur appropriate for the culmination of this six-film cycle, but director George Lucas undermines it by cross-cutting to a simultaneous battle between the elfin Yoda and the evil emperor.
Yoda, basically an animated squeeze toy, is exactly what is wrong with this overburdened series. He's a character that was cute and clever in his initial appearance in 1980's The Empire Strikes Back but who has shown no growth, surprises or shades in his subsequent appearances. He's still a freak creature from the legendary Star Wars bar. George Lucas had the good sense to reduce Jar-Jar Binks to a cameo in this episode. Why give so much attention to the equally irritating Yoda?
Much has been said about Hayden Christenson's lack of acting chops, but he glowers effectively in this final episode, and that's pretty much what's required of him. I didn't have many complaints -- although my daughter thought he was ridiculous when he had to express anger verbally rather than through a smoldering look.
As for the rest of the movie, it's pretty much what you would expect: Excellent animated special effects, a plodding story, unsurprising tying up of loose ends. There are worse ways to spend a summer evening.

Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You

2005-03-19T11:08:00.000-08:00

On the last page of this early collection of stories, Alice Munro reveals a little bit of the secret of her magic:
"If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it, I think, with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That would have done. I didn't stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more, I wanted to bring back all I could. Now I look at what I have done and it is like a series of snapshots, like the brownish snapshots with fancy borders that my parents' old camera used to take."
Alice Munro's stories are not "proper;" they refuse to obey the rules of short stories, to confine themselves to a single moment, a single incident. As I have written with regard to a couple of her other collections, her short stories have the sweep of novels, spanning years and great distances, in some cases.
She always wants to "find out more, remember more," to flesh out where others in this form leave tantalizing gaps.
Actually, in Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You, from 1974, Ms. Munro hews closer to the rules than in her more recent, glorious collections such as Open Secrets and Runaway. These early stories are less expansive than her later ones, but nevertheless begin to break away from the conventions of the form. So we get small digressions from the main plot line, a bit of filling in of characters' backgrounds and peculiarities, a side story here and there that clarifies the main thread.
Read in the light of these recent masterworks, Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You reads like a practice volume. You can perceive the author honing her craft in these 13 tales. There are many pleasures here in these stories of messy relationships, familial and marital. As always, Ms. Munro makes you understand what the characters believe should have happened in their lives, in contrast with what really did.
Alice Munro is a treasure.

Open Secrets

2005-03-06T17:53:00.000-08:00

When I read Alice Munro's newest collection of stories, Runaway, earlier this year, I was very impressed by this writer who had previously been only a name to me.
Now, having just finished her 1994 collection, Open Secrets, I am convinced that Ms. Munro is one of the greatest living writers.
Like many writers, she builds a world of allusion and cross-reference, with recurring characters and locations -- the towns of Carstairs and Walley in Ontario, the Doud family and their piano factory.
But Ms. Munro's short stories are like no others I have read, spanning decades (nearly 100 years in the case of "A Wilderness Station" in this collection) and encompassing multiple, momentous events in the lives of the characters as well as acts of shocking violence.
I may be narrow in my knowledge of the short-story form, but to me Alice Munro seems to stretch the boundaries of the short story form as surely as Borges does.
"The Albanian Virgin" may recall Singer in its telling of an other-worldly old-world village tale. In "Spaceships Have Landed," Ms. Munro includes a science-fiction moment. But in overall effect, her work is unique and extraordinary. I can't wait to read another collection (the one I have selected from my local library is Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You, an early collection from the mid-1970s. More on that later)

It's My Party Too

2005-02-26T08:19:00.000-08:00

Christine Todd Whitman's political memoir contains so much good, common-sense thinking that it's a crying shame she balances it with so much whiny, partisan apologia. She correctly identifies the enemies of moderation -- the "social conservatives" and "ideological zealots" who have taken charge of the Rebuplican party's agenda for more than 20 years now -- but then excuses herself and the rest of the shrinking band of "moderate" Republicans who have subordinated themselves to this crowd, and further has the audacity to argue that Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney somehow represent moderation.
Ms. Whitman looks back to the Republican party in which she grew up -- the party that produced Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, Lowell Weicker, Charles Mathias and others, and laments that this is no longer the party in which she finds herself today. She rightly points to fiscal responsibility, a strong national defense and small government as "bedrock" issues that could attract a significant majority of voters and understands that the right wing, fueled by the rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh, could lead Republicans to an increasingly marginal position.
But where is any sense of mea culpa for putting her own positions on the back burner to support candidates like the two Bushes who embrace the intolerant, anti-feminist, racist positions of the radical right?
When she argues that the Republicans must re-assert themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility, she conveniently ignores the Reagan-Bush records of profligate spending coupled with tax cuts, blaming the whole deficit problem on the lack of a line-item veto.
While she makes an intelligent argument that Republicans must find a way to appeal to African Americans and other minority voters, she finds nary a word for the damage done by the Willie Horton ad campaign or Reagan's ugly characterizations of Cadillac-driving welfare queens and the willfully homeless.
She understands how much damage was done by the coupling of rejection of the Kyoto accords with questioning of the scientific basis of global warming, but fails to hold Bush accountable for betraying her on this issue (he was poorly advised) and in her defense of the environmentalist positions of Republicans neglects Reagan's claim that trees cause pollution or Bush's embrace of Ken Lay and the price-fixing Enron.
It's My Party Too is clearly an opening shot in a 2008 campaign for a place on the Republican ticket (I'm not sure if she wants the top spot, but she is obviously positioning herself as a logical choice for the vice presidency).
Ms. Whitman tackles a number of interesting issues -- the environment, civil rights, feminism -- and her own positions seem quite reasonable. If all I had were her position papers, I might be able to vote for her.
But when I read her description of Dick Cheney as "intelligent, insightful and understated," I am stopped right in my track. She doesn't seem to understand what a vile joke it is to describe Newt Gingrich as a fellow moderate, or how strange it was that Donald Rumsfeld was running the Office of Equal Opportunity in 1969. And while she mentions Arnold Schwarzeneggar's "girlie-man" remark in passing, she doesn't pause for even a momentary reflection on what it says about him.
In fact, that last statement pinpoints what is wrong with this book. While it fairly states a number of reasonable political positions, it fails to hold Republicans accountable for their opposition to them -- other than a nameless band of "social conservatives."
On the other hand, I found not a single positive reference to a Democratic politician in the entire book. We see Robert Byrd described as an ex-Klansman in a passage defending poor Trent Lott for his warm look back at the 1948 Strom Thurmond campaign. Of course, she fails to mention that Byrd has called his Klan membership his "greatest mistake" while Thurmond never either repudiated his segregationist views or even acknowledged his mixed-race daughter.
She smears her predecessor at the EPA, Carol Browner, as tolerant of racist policies; describes her one-time opponent for the U.S. Senate as sexist; and finds time to trash Christopher Dodd, Bill Clinton, Al Gore and numerous other Democrats.
There was a time when I felt somewhat sorry for Ms. Whitman for her humiliating experience as EPA administrator. I believed that she entered the job feeling she could make a positive difference and, like Colin Powell, found that too many forces were lined up against her. That may be true, but her failure to put the blame where it belongs cheapens her own positions.
In It's My Party Too, Ms. Whitman makes it clear that she is part of the problem, not the solution.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age

2005-02-22T12:08:00.000-08:00

The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age makes for a very pleasurable read, even though I have trouble with its central thesis -- that contemporary modes of literary criticism are damaging to the act of reading itself.
Robert Alter, a biblical scholar who has recently published a new translation of The Five Books of Moses, takes on the post-structuralist crowd in this volume, arguing that students are spending too much time these days (the book was written in 1989) reading Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and other French literary critics, and too little time reading Dickens, Tolstoy and the Bible. He may be right in terms of what is being taught in universities, but I think he's wrong that contemporary criticism should be blamed. I'll concede that people may be misusing the French critics, but I would argue that they have provided useful new insights into the ways that texts (a term he despises) of all sorts are perceived by readers.
There's a long argument to be engaged in here, and I'm not sure I feel like getting into it.
Let's just say that Alter's disagreement with contemporary critics takes up only parts of the first and last chapters of his book. The rest of the volume is, fortunately, full of his thoughts about great literature, and it has the pleasurable effect of an afternoon spent flipping through a library, reviewing and reflecting on passages from Anna Karenina, The Aeneid, Tom Jones, The Sound and the Fury, Moby Dick, and other great works of fiction and poetry.
In successive chapters he considers the issues of Character, Style, Allusion, Structure and Perspective, showing how value can be
I love books like this. They conjure up warm memories of days spent with great literature, and open our eyes to literature we've missed. The book this one most reminded me of is Mary McCarthy's Ideas and the Novel, another tome whose thesis may be questionable but whose value is in the insights provided into great books.
It's a book worth reading, owning and using for suggestions on expanding your literary horizons.

Sideways

2005-02-21T09:54:00.000-08:00

I watched Sideways on an airplane, which is a terrible way to see a movie, but it seemed somehow appropriate for this one in its tininess.
Sideways is a wee thing, an extremely slight but nevertheless smart and enjoyable comedy about the messiness of attraction and affection. It's very well-written and performed, and yet having seen it -- albeit in the usual chopped-up and -down edit for airplane audiences -- I can understand why it has engendered something of a backlash from those who believe it has been overpraised.
When a cinematic work is deliberately kept small and within strict confines -- a "short story" as opposed to a novel on film -- it can inspire a "so what" response in a culture that responds to size and special effects.
But Sideways would be terrible if it were bigger. A cast of stars and a big budget might overwhelm and cheapen its quiet pleasures. Imagine it recast with Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson, Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts and you'll see what I mean. They're all fine actors, but much too recognizable and baggage-laden for this charming, sad, yet ultimately hopeful story about two buddies on a rambling, wine-drunk trip through the Santa Barbara wine country, and the women they encounter.
Sideways kept reminding me of Breaking Away, the small 1979 feature about a teenaged bicycle racer that received similar praise -- and a similar Oscar nomination for Best Picture -- before being mostly forgotten. That is not small praise. I loved Breaking Away, and I expect I will harbor similar fond memories of this one. Especially if I can manage to catch it on a better screen and in its full edit.

Million Dollar Baby

2005-02-13T19:08:00.000-08:00

By all the available evidence, Clint Eastwood is a thoughtful, intelligent person and is thoroughly dedicated to his craft. Even his politics have become more nuanced and interesting over the years. What he is not is a good actor or director.
Eastwood's obvious care and dedication aren't enough.
Million Dollar Baby, like its predecessor, last year's Mystic River and other Eastwood films going back more than 30 years, is a heavy-handed piece of work. The story of an aging fight manager and the female boxer he takes on is square and stolid, drab even. It's paced like a dirge, with mostly tedious dialogue that does nothing to relieve the heaviness.
Eastwood's acting is mostly one-note. He has always been a wonderful physical specimen for the film, and in his old age his graggy face and pained eyes are a powerful image. But he doesn't suggest the emotional turmoil of his character. And his voice doesn't have the shades and nuance the role requires. I kept wondering how Paul Newman, who is a few years older than Eastwood, might have played the part, or the late-career Burt Lancaster, who might have brought more heft to it.
Visually, it's a hideous piece of film. The predominant color throughout is a mildewy gray-green, which may be meant to suggest the sweaty, smelly milieu of the gym, but instead makes the picture look as if it were shot with a cheap 8-millimeter home movie camera from the 1950s. There's no variation -- the gym, the characters' apartments, the exteriors in L.A., London -- all are rendered in the same gray-green tones. Even Eastwood's and Freeman's gray hair takes on the tint. It's awful.
What does work is the handling of the central moral issue -- the one that has turned this film into a political hot potato. It is worked out with both an ear for the ethical complexities, and a real sensitivity to the human suffering of the characters. The final quarter of the film builds tension and interest in a way the lead-in has not. It makes it almost worth sitting through.

Gilead

2005-02-12T09:46:00.000-08:00

Marilynne Robinson's second novel is lovely, but I can't think of a whole lot to say about it.
I urge everyone to enjoy its quiet pleasures, its meditative prose, its reflections on life and fathers and sons and goodness and grace.
Written as a letter from a very old, dying father to his young son, Gilead reveals the history of a family of churchmen from the Civil War through the 1950s. The title is the name of the Iowa town in which they reside, but the story is only incidentally about the town, which was a safe haven for escaping slaves. Race has something to do with the story, but it would be misleading to say that Gilead is about race.
It's a perfect book for daily reflection.

Carly Simon: Anthology

2005-02-07T16:48:00.000-08:00

Carly Simon never quite made it into the top echelon of female singer/songwriters. Her songs were neither as hauntingly confessional as those of Joni Mitchell, nor as consistently tuneful as those of Carole King.
Still, her Anthology presents a distinctive personality that has aged well. If her best song is still her first hit, the trenchant and chilling, "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be," she nevertheless had enough high points over the years to justify this collection.
Back in the 1970s, Carly Simon was the woman my female college friends wanted to grow up to become (Hell, I wanted to become her). She was smart and urbane, funny and sexy. She had James Taylor and an apparently happy and normal domestic life, while at the same time managing to be creative and successful in her career. That's the personality she projects in her best songs of the period -- "You're So Vain," "The Right Thing To Do," "Haven't Got Time For the Pain."
As the '70s proceeded, she began to reveal the insecurities behind the successful image. As a songwriter, her great theme became the suspicion and mistrust that are the flip side of a too-romantic outlook. It surfaces even in wistful tunes like "Boys In The Trees." She's often the first to betray ("In Times When My Head"), but then she turns that betrayal around and uses it as a defense against being hurt.
But she's an inconsistent writer, and that has been her limitation. Her first couple of albums, as I recall, were nearly unlistenable except for the one or two hits they contained. And that's still true of some recent outings.
Her worst songs have a sing-song, nursery rhyme quality, ironic in that some of her more interesting work has involved children's songs. She recorded a children's album with her sister Lucy before her solo career took off, and on Coming Around Again she does a sweet take on "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" with her children. The rendition a little bit jazzy, and she segues nicely into the title song, from the film Heartburn.
Ms. Simon's skills as a cover artist have never gotten enough due. Her taste is superb: Covering Stephen Sondheim, she chooses the little-known, "Not A Day Goes By" rather than a more obvious selection like "Send In The Clowns." And her selection of songs by the Doobie Brothers, Everly Brothers, John Lennon and others are are nearly as wise and careful as those made by the greatest cover artist of our era, Emmylou Harris. Better yet, Carly Simon seems to understand really understand the standards she sings, unlike, say, Linda Ronstadt, who never encountered a lyric she couldn't shout.
In general, I don't have a lot of use for rock-era singers who have reached back and recorded "standards" albums. I find their work almost uniformly over-orchestrated and underfelt. Carly Simon's ventures into this territory are a lovely and surprising exception. Ms. Simon's version of "My Funny Valentine" is, for my money, one of the very best I have encountered. It's a song I never loved until I heard her sing it.
As she approaches 60, Ms. Simon still has the rich alto she first revealed nearly 40 years ago. Here's to more from her.

Meet The Fockers

2005-01-29T19:02:00.000-08:00

Meet The Fockers isn't much of a movie -- its really not much more than an extended episode of a middling sitcom -- but it has something very special: A cast of actors with marvelous, quirky faces. The sixtyish foursome at its center -- Robert De Niro, Blythe Danner, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand -- are glorious in their mature, wrinkled, slightly sagging distinctiveness. And even Ben Stiller and Teri Polo, as the beleaguered young couple faced with introducing their very different families prior to their weeking, have more character in their angular faces than just about any other film actors their age.
I didn't much care for Manohla Dargis's article on plastic surgery on last Sunday's Arts & Leisure front page in The New York Times. I thought she was unnecessarily timid in talking about the actors who have destroyed their images in vain efforts to remain youthful. But the actors in this film prove Dargis's point. They look good, but they don't look 25, and they don't seem to be bothered by that. They simply look like real people, if a bit better than most of us.
Some of the lustrous seniors even give performances here. Dustin Hoffman is pretty marvelous as a left-wing lawyer turned stay-at-home dad, and Barbra Streisand matches him in good humor as a free-spirited sex therapist for seniors. Blythe Danner is a beautifully modulated and effective actress. Out of the seniors, only Robert De Niro, playing a boring stiff, fails to shine. His character was funny enough in its first outing, 2002's Meet The Parents, but he has no new sides, no colors and thus ends up holding no interest.
Stiller and Polo find themselves in a similar bind; they're playing exactly the same characters, with pretty much exactly the same reactions as they did the first time around. What's the point?
But this painless if mediocre comedy has become an enormous hit, and so I would imagine we will get another sequel when the next generation of Fockers hits the street. And that will be okay if Hoffman, Streisand and Danner can be around to welcome it to the world.

The Egyptologist

2005-01-29T09:14:00.000-08:00

Arthur Philips is a talented, and clever writer, but halfway through The Egyptologist I couldn't help feeling that something was missing from this novel. So far, the story had been told from three points of view: The archeological explorer Ralph Trilipush, his fiancee Margaret, and his emerging nemesis the detective Harold Ferrell. Trilipush's tale is presented as a series of journal entries, written for both history and Margaret, Margaret's as a set of increasingly desperate letters from her home in Boston to Ralph's dig site near the Valley of the Kings, and Ferrell's as recollections written down more than 30 years later for the benefit of Margaret's nephew.
The subject is a dig for the tomb of a little-known, possibly apocryphal Egyptian pharaoh, Atum-hadu, whose erotic poetry the explorer has translated and published in a scandalous volume that he hands out to virtually everyone he encounters, including the noted explorer Howard Carter, who is simultaneously searching nearby for the tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen.
Implied from the beginning is the possibility that several figures in the emerging story have been murdered, and that Trilipush is not the landed Oxford scholar that he presents himself to be.
So what's missing? The book is very well written, with the multiple points of view convincing, the characters amusingly self-absorbed and duplicitous. It's clever, but maybe not clever enough. The solution to the central mystery becomes obvious about halfway through, and, as one Amazon.com review succinctly put it, from there on the book has a "get on with it" quality. I raced through the second half to see how Phillips would tie the ends together.
There also are hints of additional intrigues never developed. Surely I am not the first to see that Ralph Trilipush's name is an anagram for the author's, and that the initial M plays a significant by unexplained role (it is Trlipush's middle name, it is the way his fiancee signs her letters, and added to the author's name is an anagram for a "reviewer" of Trilipush's work).

Runaway

2005-01-23T15:42:00.000-08:00

Alice Munro's stories aren't much like anyone else's, certainly not those of most of her contemporaries'. Although her work is published in all the right periodicals -- The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly -- that's where the resemblance to John Updike or Ann Beatty ends. Where the modern short story relies on the carefully detailed incident, the captured moment, Munro's stories may span years and tell of momentous events in the lives of her characters. They aren't very short -- typically about 40 pages -- and they are novelistic in their sweep and subject matter. In one of the stories in Runaway, her latest collection, a woman searches for years for a daughter she has lost to a religious cult, moves three times, pursues several careers, loses a husband and later a best friend, and goes through several boyfriends.
Another story -- also spanning 50 years or more -- moves structurally from first-person diary entries to conventional narrative, to epistolary, back to conventional narrative and ends with a dream sequence.

Hotel Rwanda

2005-01-22T13:58:00.000-08:00

Hotel Rwanda is a devastating film, a riveting and horrifying account of an atrocity to which the world turned a blind eye. The picture is well-written by Keir Pearson and Terry George and effectively directed by Mr. George, and it's superbly acted, by Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Fana Okoena and others.
Cheadle stars as Paul Rusesabagina, manager of the Milles Colones, a popular, five-star tourist hotel in Kalinga, who becomes a savior when long-standing tensions between the country's Hutu and Tutsi populations erupt into civil war. Paul, a dark-skinned Hutu, is married to a light-skinned Tutsi, played by Ms. Okonedo. Before the war breaks out, he insists to his family that all will be okay under a UN-brokered truce, but he collects favors to be called in if his family becomes endangered. But when the troubles start, his friends and neighbors flock to his home, refugees begin pouring into the hotel even as the European guests are being ushered out, and Paul finds himself using all of his bargaining and negotiating skills to save as many lives as he can manage.
The predominant image I carried away from the film was Cheadle's dark, worried face, his brow furrowed, his black eyes tight and darting about as he tries desperately to determine his next move. Cheadle's performance is a career-defining one, and I think he deserves an Oscar for it.
The huge accomplishment of this motion picture is to bring into sharp focus a tragedy that was for most Americans, I suspect, too distant and poorly understood to matter. George, Pearson and Cheadle make us see the devastation through the eyes of a privileged man and family whose sense of security is suddenly shattered.
I think it ranks up with Schindler's List and The Pianist as one of the most important documents on the devastation of war to be released in the last 20 years.

A Few Notes on "Jazz" and the Documentaries of Ken Burns

2005-01-15T11:25:00.000-08:00

I have only begun watching Ken Burns' documentary series Jazz, so I can't comment extensively on it yet, but having recently watched several other Burns documentaries -- The Shakers, The Brooklyn Bridge, and Huey Long -- I want to make a comment about what I consider to be his signal contribution: The way in which he mines and animates our national trove of photographs.
The Civil War first brought Burns to my attention. While I didn't watch most of that series, I recall that it was famous in part for its rounding up of a vaast collection of early photographs that illustrated the narrative. What Burns with still photographs is quite interesting: He pans and zooms over them in time to music, so that these static images become animated, spring to life in a compelling way.
While it is interesting in some of his other documentaries, the quality of the music and its direct relationship to the narrative in Jazz make the first episode of that series particularly striking to me. He also uses early moving film, I found myself most struck by the movement over the fixed images.

*****

Burns' documentaries rely more on overlaid narration than many other respected recent non-fiction films. These are not stories told "in the words" of those who lived them, for the most part. Burns' films have distinct narrators. Like the camera's movements over the still pictures, the narration is applied to the historical record. It's the layering of image, music and narrative that supplies the power.

What's The Matter With Kansas?

2005-01-14T10:13:00.000-08:00

As entertaining and insightful as Thomas Frank's book is, I think it misses some important historical context in its understanding of the roots of the neoconservative movement in middle America.
Perhaps Frank, at 40, is just a little too young to understand. I grew up in the 1960s, in a family whose convictions and even feelings of personal safety were rocked by the urban riots and by the Vietnam War, in ways that my parents had a hard time either explaining or accommodating. Roe vs. Wade, which Frank puts at a central place in the culture wars, came some five years later, and while it has had a lasting effect on our political life, I think it was less of a catalyst for the rightward swing than a bolstering of a process already in place.
Let me tell the story this way:
Like the blue-collar people Franks writes about, my parents were traditional, high-school-educated, union-dues-paying Democrats who -- during the years in which I came of age -- converted to resentful, Nixon-supporting conservatives.
I can say, not proudly but honestly, that my parents had a deep-seated racism that had caused them to move from "the city" of Baltimore out to the suburbs in the late 1950s, in fear of their neighborhood "turning." I grew up in a completely white, blue-collar, Catholic suburban environment until, in the 6th grade, the first black student entered my elementary school
I remember what an "event" this was. Even more momentous was that this girl, whose name I recall was Bonita Jackson, was quickly moved from the "slow" class up to the "accelerated" class of which I was part. She became, in fact, a friend, the first black person I had even known as a peer. (We had had a black cleaning woman -- a "colored girl" -- for a short time, but I really didn't know or think it was worth knowing anything about her at this young age).
Bonita only lasted in my school for a couple of months, at most. One day, she was gone. I have no idea why or to where.
That was a positive experience in my evolving view of race. Before Bonita, I had considered blacks to be "boogies," a sort of subhuman species that it was best to stay far away from. That's what I was taught by my parents, and meeting Bonita was eye-opening for me.
My parents didn't react negatively when I began to talk about her, but I am sure they felt threatened.
More overtly threatening to them were the race-related sit-ins and riots of the 1960s. I remember driving through Cambridge, Maryland, home of protests led by H. Rap Brown, and being warned by my parents about how dangerous the civil rights movment was.
I remember hearing about the riots in Watts and Newark and Detroit, and for a time remember hearing how Baltimore, where I grew up, had been spared this plague. And then, in April 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and Baltimore went up in flames.
I remember being sent to the corner convenience store to buy flour, and seeing people loading large grocery bags in fearful anticipation of what might happen over the next few days. We were in the suburbs, but close enough to the bus line to be considered in danger.
These also were the years of growing Vietnam protest, and I had a brother, 9 years older than myself, who was eligible for the draft. Here was a dilemma for my parents that was particularly hard to assimmilate.
My father was a veteran. My mother's older brother was a career Air Force officer. My parents grew up during the depression, and knew World War II as the noble cause it was. They were pround, anti-Communist patriots. Being of Russian descent, they were also particularly conscious of the Soviet threat.
And here was Vietnam -- so difficult to explain, and so dangerous to my parents three sons, especially the oldest. My brother was frightened of the draft, and my parents supported him in his efforts to stay out of the service. And yet their concern managed to be almost purely personal. To them, the war protests were at best wrong and at worst evil.
I remember an enormous argument between my mother and my brother over his marching in the Washington moratorium in 1969, and then the next year over the killings at Kent State University. To my mom, the students at Kent State had no business being out of class protesting -- weren't deferments supposed to be for going to school, not skipping it to protest? -- and so she had justified the killings in her mind as the fault of the students.
In this context, the Nixon-Agnew appeals to "law and order" had a particular resonance for my parents. They saw a world going out of control, and the Republicans promised to restore order. My brother, on the other hand, had in his room a poster with a quote from Adolph Hitler extolling law and order and denouncing activist students.
And then there was the new sexual freedom, in society, in the movies. And the entire phenomenon of Jane Fonda, sex kitten turned anti-war activist. It was, frankly, mind-boggling and threatening to my parents and many of their peers.
Thomas Frank doesn't really talk much about the 1960s in his analysis. He focuses on trends from the 1970s -- when he grew up -- as well as much earlier Kansas pioneer and Depression-era history. In this, I think his analysis is problematic. It misses the tumult of the 1960s as a key to the rightward swing of the nation. Here is where I saw that blue-collar resentment building. It ended up being directed toward the Democratic party for some quite obvious reasons: They were the party that showed the strongest support for the Civil Rights movement, and they were the party that first turned against the war inVietnam.
Once the Democrats had been successfully blamed for the Civil Rights movement and the war protesters, two things that seemed to directly threaten our homes and culture, it was relatively easy for the Republican party to begin blaming them -- and, by extension the programs they had supported and pushed through -- for the failing economy of the 1970s, the oil embargo, changing morality, etc.
That, it seems to me, is how the Republican right took over.
Frank, for all of his talent and insight, gets this part of the story wrong, I think.
What Frank does get right, I think, is his final analysis of the way in which issues of social class have been removed from Democratic Party discourse, and the way they have been cynically co-opted by the Republican Party. I think his criticism of Bill Clinton is misguided -- I believe Clinton is the one recent Democratic politician who has been able to make the case that social equality and a "fair shake" for the working class are good for the country -- but nevertheless I think Frank is correct in general that the left has "lost" the hearts of middle America just as surely as the right has won them over.
This is a book well worth reading.