THE BENEVOLENT WHITE GUYS IN SUITS THEORY: THE NEWSROOM

Jeff Daniels is not here to eat your brain, he's here to save it.

Since this is the only thing anyone has written about The Newsroom on the entire Internet—wait, really? This is the eleventeenth kajillion zillionth? Ah shit; well, anyway—it is Aaron Sorkin's return to television after a few years writing for the movies (really well, too: the scripts for Charlie Wilson's War, The Social Network, and Moneyball, the last of which he co-wrote, were all fuckin great). And there is serious business at hand. Aaron Sorkin is going to save America.

I'm not being entirely sarcastic. He's smart, a good-bordering-on-legitimately-great writer, he loves America, and he's not afraid to be a giant goddamn cornball. That last might not seem all that impressive, but these days discourse is overrun with posturing and people shitting all over everything so no one sees them liking anything uncool that there's something refreshing about some guy being like “Fuck it, I'm a middle-aged square-ass and I believe in stuff.” While not the entire battle, hey, it's novel, at least. One of the things he believes is that an informed America is a stronger America, and that rather than being a pussy about pissing people off, ONE MAN has to sit behind a desk in a suit, look into a camera, and tell the American people the truth, no matter how uncomfortable that truth may be and no matter who it pisses off.

Others have already pointed out the ways in which The Newsroom is about Aaron Sorkin talking about how Aaron Sorkin has all the answers, and that the entire dramatic architecture of the show is built to shine glorious light on Aaron Sorkin and all the things Aaron Sorkin has to say about the way things oughtta be. And it's true that sizable stretches of the pilot episode of The Newsroom consist of Aaron Sorkin jerking off to himself. The two principal female characters we've had extended time with are ragingly competent yet go all gooey around The Great Man (one gets the feeling if Sork could have gotten away with going the full Lena Dunham/Louis C.K. route and played the Jeff Daniels role himself he totally would have). And yes, it is a little weird that the show is set in 2010 and that the big story they spend the second half of the episode breaking the living fuck out of is the BP oil spill.

On the other hand, being in love with yourself to the point of eroticism is not a condition unique to Aaron Sorkin. We notice it with him because he's totally upfront about it, which makes it a little less lame than it is in people who feign humility for show but behind closed doors turn into Mr. Hyde. The sexism thing is a bit more of a thing—having the male characters talk down to the female characters is practically an authorial trademark—but it's clearly not something he does on purpose (he's written some terrific female characters in the past who wouldn't stand for that kinda shit), not that that makes anyone any less pissed. The 2010 thing is actually kinda brilliant in a counter-intuitive way, as it makes all the “WTF is this shit?” jokes about Twitter and blogs marginally less fuddy-duddy.

While none of those things can quite be entirely papered over, The Newsroom's pilot does a hell of a job trying. Greg Mottola's direction is pretty great, trusting long takes and theatre actors to do the job many would panic and resort to extreme close-ups and hummingbird cutting. Sorkin sometimes leaves the actors with nothing to do but motor through declamatory text, but hey, he's Aaron Sorkin, for every line where you're like “There is literally no human way to play this text” there's a half-page speech where it's impossible to not look like you knock down buildings with your dick. (And yes, that goes for at least Emily Mortimer too in this show, so far.) The main building-knocker-downer guy so far is Sam Waterston. Sam Waterston swaggers through the whole pilot drunk as fuck being like “I'm in fuckin charge, you whippersnapper-ass punks” and at one point when one of the young people acts the fool, he's like “I'm going to kick your ass” and there's this great moment where Jeff Daniels' posture goes all “Haha Sam Waterston kicking this young guy's ass, that's funny . . . wait, shit, he probably can.” Jeff Daniels is rad, too, and it's not his fault that spontaneous ovation after the newscast is bullshit Sorkin onanism. But if the show just randomly decided to shift formats and be just Sam Waterston sitting in his office, fucking with his bow-tie, pounding scotch, and taking meetings, I would be juuuuuust fine with that.

I'm not in the habit of doing immediate react pieces to TV shows, as small sample sizes are no way to assess totality. Especially when the reaction that inspired the piece is “it's a mixed bag.” I'm on roughly the same side of the fence as Sorkin politically, but with enough differences that his speeches don't give me Saul/Damascus boners (part of the reason that even though I vote for them more often than not I can't ever really be a card-carrying Democrat). From all I can tell, reading, watching, and the (very) occasional first-hand anecdote, Sork's kind of an asshole. But fuckin' hell when his tuning fork is in key Aaron fuckin Sorkin can write the dead back to life. That's why even though the pilot of The Newsroom is far from perfect, and indeed has large stretches that kinda fucking suck, it has me up at one in the morning talking about it. Foibles (and ho boy are there foibles) aside, Aaron Sorkin does words real good. And that means something. If there's one thing all the cornball misty-eyed Americana and hero worship and shit we're all supposed to be too cool for in this modern age gets right, it's that certain things mean something. Truth, justice, and the American way ain't no joke. Maybe the America everyone's getting all weepy about here never actually existed, but in that one speech of Emily Mortimer's, she gets at what the real American way is: the belief that even if we never got it exactly right, we still can one day. So even if Sorkin's walking a crooked path toward that ideal and he keeps falling down because he's trying to suck his own dick, he's at least pointed in the right direction. That means something.

ONE LOVE

Happy Pride, y'all.

THE FCC WON'T LET ME BE

(c) Chicago Tribune

This morning the Supreme Court made up its mind about whether the FCC (Fuck-Censoring Cadre) should continue doing what it does, namely making sure no CHILDREN hear any foul language or see any tits on network and basic cable television BECAUSE THE CHILDREN MIGHT CHILDREN CHILDREN ON THE CHILDREN. And, considering that it was a unanimous decision, the Court certainly did make up its mind. Their verdict? Keep up the good work, boys. Justice Kennedy's decision wasn't as much an affirmation of the FCC's mandate as it was punting; from the look of things it was like “yeah, sure, the FCC's doing God's work CHILDRENING CHILDREN FROM CHILDREN CHILDREN, keep it up, now get out of here so we can make a stupid decision about Obama's healthcare plan.”

Now, look, it's not like Scalia and Thomas (and Roberts and Alito) were going to wake up one morning and be like “You know what? Let's not be right-wing shitheads.” Übermenschen like that wake up every morning and say “Hell of a day to be alive! Let's be right-wing shitheads all goddamn day and then wake up tomorrow and be right-wing shitheads some more.” And heaven forbid the alleged liberals on the Court remind people that the First Amendment exists. So it's not like the FCC was going to be dissolved or anything. The game is the game. But what is is one thing, what should be is another, and what the FCC should be is a memory. It's a violation of the constitutional prohibition against restricting free speech. It should not exist, and only does because WHAT IF CHILDREN HEAR SWEARCURSES AND SEE SATAN TITS????????

The stupidest thing is, the same people who engage in all that frantic pearl-clutching about protecting the (hypothetical) kids and the necessity of maintaining a governmental regulatory body to that end scream like, well, kids whenever anyone talks about regulating shit that has an actual effect on actual people. We cannot abide billionaires paying income tax at the same rate as their employees, but the thought of some imaginary angelic rosy-cheeked middle-American white kid hearing the word “fuck” for the first time at the age of 10 while watching CSI: Dubuque after finishing his Bible study, that we need a governmental agency for. This is more than just left-right “the other side has cooties” silliness. Billionaires, and the corporations many of them head, have enormous effects on every human being on Earth. They have massive amounts of the thing—money—that makes the world go 'round. It makes a certain degree of sense to keep an eye on the fuckers and make sure they're not pulling any funnies, which is not to say that we need to throw the Evil White Guys In Suits up against the wall or anything, but asking billionaires to actually pay income tax and not just whimsically destroy communities with massive layoffs just cuz what the fuck is not outrageous. If you live in the real world, you should play by the same rules as everyone else.

So why am I advocating shitcanning the entire FCC? Because those hypothetical kids everyone's always fucking moaning about don't exist. When I was a little kid, I heard people cursing all the time (even though I had “dick” and “butt” confused until I was about 5; this may explain my lifelong fondness for Bette Davis and Oscar Wilde). I knew the rules, though: don't ever curse around your grandparents OR ELSE, only curse around my dad if I was in the mood for an anguished lecture, and only curse around my mom if I was actually being funny. Obviously, specifics may vary kid to kid, but every kid knows you don't curse in certain situations OR ELSE. Just ask that kid in Hope And Glory, in re: “fuck”: “That word is special.” They know the word, that doesn't mean they use it all the time. As far as sexual content messing kids up, that's a giant pile of shit. Absent the hormones that produce sexual desire, movies and TV shows with naked people and/or sex scenes are boring. Were Sofia Vergara to have a nude scene with her tetas out on Modern Family, little kids would not give a fuck. If anything they'd be happy about the day off they got from school the next day when a national holiday was declared. But I digress.

Given how dumb it is to censor some kinds of TV and not others, the existence of the FCC as currently constituted doesn't really make a ton of sense. Its regulatory priorities are based on outmoded and/or imaginary ideas of what offends people and plays into the fallacy that prohibition is the only alternative to chaos. Not only is that not the case, but prohibition creates allure, completely aside from the fact that it doesn't work. When booze was illegal, everyone was like oooh and sneaking around to speakeasies. Weed being illegal won't bring back my memories of anything that happened between 1995 and whenever the hell I stopped blazing, if I even did . . . anyway, you get the point, and it's highly doubtful that weed would occupy the pop cultural niche it did if you could go to the bodega and buy a pack of joints. Not having nudity on TV doesn't mean there's no sexual content. Sex is all over the goddamn place on TV, to the point where letting a matter-of-fact nipple or dick slip through would barely even be noticed, and if it did it'd take the feverish mystery out of all the innuendo. And not letting the hallowed Seven Words be broadcast over the airwaves doesn't mean people don't curse on TV, they just use stupid curse substitutes that call more attention toward the fact that the character is cursing than it would if they just said fuck and shit. Yeah. The FCC is making things worse.

The good news about the Supreme Court punting rather than setting some “thus it ever shall be” shit in stone is that at some point, maybe after Barack gets to appoint a couple justices in his second term, another Court might be like “Ya know what? This is silly. Go get real jobs, guys.” Because it is silly. Either eliminating—or, more realistically, redefining the purpose of—the FCC is not going to lead to hardcore pornography being broadcast at dinnertime. In all likelihood, cursing and titties hour wouldn't start til at least 10pm even in the absence of some bluenose regulatory body saying so. Networks will realize that the notoriety (FCC or no FCC, Christian groups will shit a brick if someone says “shit a brick” in prime time) of being naughty is not a solid long-term investment. Because when you don't treat people like children, they act like adults.

THIS ENGLAND: TWO BY COWARD AND LEAN

David Lean (left, Noel Coward (right); photo from that Criterion box set I can't afford

There's a Noël Coward retrospective at Lincoln Center this weekend, because Noël Coward's awesome. I took in a double feature Friday night, of the first two films Coward made as producer: 1942's In Which We Serve and 1944's This Happy Breed, the latter from his 1939 play. These also, notably, mark the beginning of David Lean's career as a director. When Coward was approached by Anthony Havelock-Allan to make a propaganda film for the British war effort, he accepted the invitation on condition that he was allowed to write, produce, direct, and star. (Because part of being Noël Coward is knowing that you're Noël Coward.) Though he was sure that his experience in the theatre and Ronald Neame's skill as cinematographer would be sufficient for most of the task that would be In Which We Serve, Coward brought in Lean, who had to that point been a film editor, to supervise the action scenes, for which (as well as for other direct and indirect influences on the shape of the film) Lean was ultimately credited as co-director.

One immediately apparent influence Lean had on In Which We Serve, as related by Barry Day, was in advising Coward that his treatment was too long, and that Coward go see Citizen Kane, then in theaters, for inspiration to shape his idea into something more specifically cinematic. Not only Coward's script—built around flashbacks—but Neame's camerawork, with its unconventional tilts and use of deep focus, recalls Kane. While Coward's script and scenes of life on the home front give In Which We Serve its heart, Lean's action scenes give the film its teeth: they're a really extraordinary achievement in action cinema, shot and cut for maximum tension (and in a way that shows the influence of Eisenstein's Potemkin as well as Kane; if you're going to show influences, those are two good ones to flash, to be sure), but their simultaneously realistic and stylized use of sound prefigure modern action cinema, and hold up to what was done decades later in the genre.

But as skillful and ambitious as the filmmaking is, what makes In Which We Serve so effective as both cinema and propaganda is its characters. Family, country, and the Royal Navy intertwine, and are essentially as one; the affection the film builds for the crew members of the HMS Torrin makes the political point better than a speech would have. At the story's end, we want England to win the war because we like Captain Kinross, Chief Petty Officer Hardy, and Ordinary Seaman Shorty Blake so much. It's one thing to know that Great Britain was in a battle in which its very existence was at stake, it's an entirely other thing to know that, really, we serve because of our comrades. Love for one's fellow human beings is a far more effective motivator than abstract political principles; where the latter, when fully understood, are the actual reasons to fight and win, the former is the fuel that keeps the fire going. That Coward knew this so totally is the fundamental thing that makes In Which We Serve so great.

Part two of the double feature, an entirely different kind of film though embodying much the same theme of one group of Britons representing the entirety of the kingdom, was This Happy Breed. Lean's first solo credit as a director, and an adaptation of Coward's play, This Happy Breed is, like In Which We Serve, a departure from the prevailing notion of Noël Coward plays as being things where people swish around in silk dressing gowns and cigarette holders and banter dazzlingly. The Gibbons family, and their friends and neighbors, are working-class Londoners. Their lives are deliberately those any of their countrymen could easily have lived, as, like In Which We Serve, the film universalizes the British experience. Lean (with, of course, the help of the brilliant Ronald Neame, and in gorgeous Technicolor) accomplishes this universality by bookending the film with two rather glorious establishing shots: the first pans from a shot of the entirety of London to the house in Clapham where twenty years in the life of the Gibbons family play out. Then, at the end, the shot in reverse connects the house back to all of London, and thus, of Britain itself.

There's a repeated sentiment in This Happy Breed about the English character as being one not easily rushed, and of change happening gradually. That characterizes the movie quite well; its pace would be called slow by anyone unable to connect emotionally to the Gibbons. Indeed, parts of the story, especially in the middle-ish sections, do lag a bit (these are also, not coincidentally, where the film still feels excessively beholden to its one-set origins on the stage). But that's kind of the point of This Happy Breed. It's so warmly written and beautifully acted, not to mention the clear genius already present in Lean's direction, that its slowness is what makes it what it is, a deeply human drama.

The lead performances, by Robert Newton as Frank Gibbons and Celia Johnson as his wife Ethel, are both masterful bits of work. Newton, in the role Coward himself played onstage, brings an earthy gravitas Lean felt Coward couldn't (this in spite, ironically, of Coward actually having grown up in just such a manner as the Gibbons). Whether or not this was the case, we'll never know, but This Happy Breed does feature one damn fine Robert Newton performance. His Frank Gibbons is who he is, as he was and ever shall be, like the England he so loves. Also conveying that same reassuring sense of eternity is Celia Johnson as Ethel. She plays a variation on her character in In Which We Serve in This Happy Breed, with the variation being one of class, though she's every bit as powerful and real as the working-class Ethel as she is as the more genteel Alix. Just watching Celia Johnson act is a glorious thing, as well: every gesture is exactly what it needs to be, every line reading simple and direct. Without going in for a bunch of Method histrionics, she manages to convey a sense of real humanity even more effectively. Even more than her physical beauty (which she personally downplayed, presumably out of owning neither a mirror nor an ego) this sublime precision to her craft (most famously seen in Lean and Coward's subsequent Brief Encounter) is what makes her one of the great film actresses (in stature, if not resume).

There's a shot a ways into This Happy Breed that's both profoundly British and a sign that David Lean was well on his way to becoming David Lean even in his solo debut: their daughter has to break some tragic news to Frank and Ethel, and runs out to them in the garden. Rather than follow her or cut to the garden the camera stays inside and politely lets them hear it without eavesdropping, and slowly, as if not to make a noise, pans across the room to the door. At the end, Frank and Ethel enter, stunned. It's almost like the film itself is saying, we already know what they're going to hear, let's just give them their space.

That right there is what this whole cinema thing is about. That shot, more than anything else in either of these two pictures, is where the partnership of Coward and Lean clicked into place and harmonized perfectly. Coward's drama giving Lean's camera something great to observe, Lean's camera lending a whole other level to Coward's drama that mere words couldn't convey. Two brilliant minds working together and saying, this is where I'm from. This is me. “This little world, this precious stone set in the sea . . . this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.”

RACE IN CINEMA MONTH: MY NAME IS KHAN AND THE PROVERBIAL LIBERAL MESSAGE MOVIE

Shahrukh Khan as Rizwan Khan in My Name Is Khan. Don't be a wiseass and ask what his name is.

Continuing on the theme of the last post, I want to talk about a peculiar variant on unintentional racism: the Hollywood liberal message movie. This is a very specific thing, as there are plenty of movies with progressive political themes, and they can be great, but a Liberal Message Movie (or, as they should probably be called, LIBERAL MESSAGE MOVIES because the all-caps is proportionate to their subtlety) is frequently really fucking embarrassing. This is because of the “awwwww, wookit the cute widdue culture that we don't weally undastand, SO CUUUUUUTE” tone that these pictures tend to take. Even in LMMs that manage to keep their levels of condescension down, there's a tendency to grossly oversimplify shit. Irony of ironies, the liberal tendency to not want to offend anyone ends up being the most offensive thing in the movie.

Weirdly, when I was trying to think of the most annoying example I could of this tradition, the one I came up with wasn't a Hollywood movie. It wasn't even from America. But much like one sees one's one flaws most clearly in others, it took a foreign picture trying its damnedest to be a Hollywood liberal message movie to really shine a light on how staggering the fuckups can be therein. The picture is called My Name Is Khan, directed by Karan Johar, and starring Shahrukh Khan.

It's not a total disaster, and its heart—as with all LMMs—is in the right place. Shahrukh Khan stars as Rizwan Khan, a Muslim from India who has Asperger's Syndrome (thus making it a near-stereotypical “PLEASE I'M DESPERATE FOR AN OSCAR PLEASE GIVE ME ONE I'LL SUCK YOUR DICK” role, though it's one that SRK does a creditable and sympathetic job with; he's never quite as annoying as he could be, even though the accuracy of his portrayal of someone with Asperger's is slight at best). The story is told through heavy use of flashbacks, but what's eventually revealed is the following: In typical LMM fashion, Rizwan has a savant-like ability to repair just about any mechanical object, and a tendency to utter Great Truths. He encounters, first in India and then when he emigrates to the United States, a good deal of anti-Muslim prejudice that basically takes the form of people marching up to him and going “I AM PREJUDICED AGAINST YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE A MUSLIM. HAVE YOU ANYTHING TO DO OR SAY THAT SHALL REVEAL ME TO BE FOOLISH IN MY PREJUDICE, MR. KHAN?” And when it's expedient for the plot, he does.

In San Francisco, Rizwan falls in love with a pretty Indian hairdresser, Mandira (Kajol). It's love at first sight, at least for Rizwan. (The first picture Shahrukh and Kajol made together, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, in 1995 is an all-time classic in Bollywood, and is so largely because Shahrukh and Kajol blaze when they're on screen together. Anyone who's ever cried at the movies and hasn't seen it is advised to stop reading this immediately and rent DDLJ.) So a bit of mildly (but not terribly) embarrassing cutesy “I'm autistic and awkward but I love you” business out of Shahrukh—not the world's subtlest actor at the best of times—and Kajol triumphs over the fact that there's no way Mandira should plausibly fall in love with yutz Rizwan and falls in love with Shahrukh. (Or, more simply, real movie stars don't let dumb scripts get in their way. They know what people are there watching the movie for.) They get married, and Rizwan's brother manages to get past the fact that Mandira is Hindu, and everyone's good and happy and it's the American dream, and Rizwan adopts Mandira's son Sameer and yay!

Then 9/11. One thing I do have to give MNIK credit for is a straightforward anger at how fucking stupid Americans got about Muslims after 9/11 (which has eased slightly in the decade since, but not anywhere near enough). This comes to a head when Sameer's white American BFF, having snubbed him out of post 9/11 racism, and a group of bullies set upon Sameer (who, being brown, was clearly responsible for the attacks) and call him “terrorist” and rough him up a bit. Sameer makes the mistake of fighting back, and they really stomp the piss out of him. I mean, they fuck him up good. But (and this is where MNIK did an irreversible plausibility swandive and faceplanted straight into an unforgiving concrete floor of “get the fuck out of here”) the way the bullies kill him is when Sameer gets back up and is talking shit, the alpha bully kicks a soccer ball into his chest. And that puts him out. Yes, that happens, you hear about kids getting hit with baseballs and just dropping dead, but come on.

Mandira goes into deep shock, and in her anger blames Rizwan for Sameer dying, by being Muslim. Rizwan, having no other sense of the world than the absolutely literal, says, “but I am not a terrorist,” to which Mandira, rhetorically, says “Go tell the president 'My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist'” in a “get the fuck out of here you Forrest Gump motherfucker” kind of tone. So Rizwan packs a bag and sets out to go find the president to tell him “My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist,” his refrain for the whole movie, introduced in the first scene.

In Rizwan's travels, he meets a bunch of people, some good, some bad, but all are overshadowed when he finds himself in Georgia, and a young black urchin wipes out on his bicycle and asks Rizwan for help. Rizwan takes him home and . . . well . . . there's no way to accurately convey how unfuckingbelievable this is if you haven't seen the movie, but anyone who has can tell you, I'm not exaggerating at all when I say the kid with the bicycle lives in a village that's like the fucking Shire in Middle Earth but instead of Hobbits it's Gone With The Wind-esque black people. Again, that's not an exaggeration at all. The bike kid's mom is literally named Mama Jenny. And Rizwan calls the kid, Joel, “Funny-hair Joel” for the whole rest of the movie because he's got a 'fro. Yeah.

Like, okay. American movies fuck stuff up all the time. I'm sure at some point some American movie set in another country and committed fuckups of this or similar caliber. I'm sure thirty of you could name the worst example and come up with thirty different answers. It's just . . . until someone comes and does it to your country you don't really realize how bad it is (and I know it sounds like I'm whining about people being mean to America, that's not it at all, it's that I'm like oh fuck this is how it feels to everyone else when we make shitty movies. . . ) And to compound things, in the mutual agape for all things Hollywood middlebrow shared to varying degrees by Karan Johar and Shahrukh Khan, they do it in a really earnest Hollywood middlebrow kind of way, which means not only does it suck, it's so melodramatically treacly that it's just like . . . fuck.

So, Rizwan stays in the Shire for a little while before moving on and getting into trouble for trying to barge up to the president while saying something about the word “terrorist.” Eventually, everything gets cleared up, but then a fictional version of Hurricane Katrina hits, and Rizwan has to race back to the Shire and singlehandedly try and save everyone. This makes national news, and finally gets Rizwan his audience with the president (the guy they got to play Barack doesn't look much like him but does a fair vocal impression, though they cover for this by not naming him, he's just “the president”) and finally gets to tell him “my name is Khan and I am not a terrorist.” And Barack is like, “I know.” Because Barack is awesome. (Well, also, Barack kills the fuck out of terrorists. You know what I'm saying? Like, he doesn't just kill them he kills the motherfucking fuck out of them. The Seal Team Six raid that ended up with Osama bin Laden getting murked was so fucking awesome they needed to get Kathryn fucking Bigelow to direct the movie of it. So, if Rizwan had been a terrorist, Barack probably would have crushed his nuts with his fucking mind. Anyway, sorry, that's me not being a terribly good progressive, but hey, them's the bricks.)

The thing to remember, is that like all good Liberal Message Movies, My Name Is Khan doesn't mean any harm. It doesn't have a mean bone in its body. Even the little shitheads who kill Sameer are immediately remorseful. It's just . . . dude, that bit with Mama Jenny in the Shire is just flabbergasting. My Name Is Khan is an atypical Bollywood movie in a lot of ways (paramount among which is that it's distressingly light on songs) but one way in which it holds true is in the sense that when Bollywood movies go there, they Go There. When they're good they're damn near the best thing there is. When they're bad, holy shit do they suck. I'll take the bad if it means we also get the good, but fuck a duck when you mix the way Bollywood swings for the fences with the kind of guileless schmaltz of Hollywood Liberal Message Movies the result is a serious cautionary tale. Because My Name Is Khan came out in 2010. It shouldn't leave its audience floundering for a cultural frame of reference more recent than Gone With The Wind.

And the great shame of that bit is that it undermines a lot of the things K-Jo and SRK got right. There's a subplot about how Rizwan's in a mosque praying and overhears a bunch of guys who have fucking Had It and are about to resort to terrorism. Shahrukh plays Rizwan's freakout really well. He just flat out tells the guys, you're wrong and you shouldn't do this, in a way that would have been horribly on the nose and basically the filmmakers getting a bullhorn and shouting “TERRORISM IS BAD YOU GUYS” at the audience, if Shahrukh didn't get it just right. Which makes up for the seven or eight scenes when you just want to strangle the fucker for overplaying the Asperger's.

I guess the point of all this is, Liberal Message Movies are annoying, but there's a limit to how pissed off at them one can get, because they are trying to do the right thing. (Speaking of Do The Right Thing, a celebration of the cinema of Spike Lee is coming in a couple/few days, so Race In Cinema Month won't all be scolding and complaining.) But there's nothing worse than seeing a movie try to be good and fuck up. And it's especially unfortunate when it comes at the expense of the things the movie does well. Oh well.

As a counterexample of this kind of bullshit, I caught In The Heat of the Night on TCM the other day. That was the same year Sidney Poitier was also in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?, which spends its entire running time shrieking about how important it is (and poor Spencer Tracy looks so horribly uncomfortable the whole movie, I felt bad), but In The Heat of the Night takes a different tactic, which is basically, “Sidney Poitier is fucking awesome.” It's shot by Haskell Wexler, it's cut by Hal Ashby, people like Rod Steiger and Warren Oates are in it and rule, and most importantly holy shit Sidney Poitier. He's waiting for a train in a small town in The South when he gets arrested for existing while black after a guy gets killed, and because he's smarter and more badass than everyone in three states Sidney Poitier solves the murder. Not only that, but he manages to do it without the benefit of any modern advances in forensic science. In The Heat of the Night is pure ownage, great filmmaking and holy shit Sidney Poitier. See? That's how you do a movie about how racism is stupid. All you need is a good script, talented filmmakers, and really good actors. But most importantly, know who the people are who are in your movie. Caring isn't enough.

RACE IN CINEMA MONTH: 5 TYPES OF (PRESUMABLY) UNINTENTIONAL RACISM

This, of course, is #6

I know these posts have been a little less frequent and substantial than we all would like, but sometimes life (specifically employment) gets in the way, as was the case the last couple weeks here at Movies By Bowes™. So, in the spirit of this unintended delay, today's topic is unintentional racism.

Nothing gets a more affronted reaction out of people than bringing their unintentional racism to their attention. They immediately (and melodramatically) deny it, and may huff and puff about the fact that they have a black friend and how absurd it is that you could think they're a racist. Part of this is because the popular definition of racism has gotten so narrow that nowadays you're not a racist unless you call a black person the n-word to his/her face while wearing a Klan robe, and in the absence of all those criteria if you bring someone's racism to their attention they'll tell you you're overreacting. At which point forget explaining institutional racism and privilege to the person in question, you won't even be able to convince them that it's okay that we don't have a White History Month.

Even worse, in a way, than the dumbasses, are the people whose hearts are in the right places who try and make tone-deaf noble gestures without thinking through the implications, or simply working from the wrong set of assumptions. These people, when you point out their fuckup, tend to be more hurt than pissed off, but still are probably just as beyond convincing.

Both these types of bumblefucks make movies. The number of intentionally racist movies in the history of cinema is greatly outweighed by the “derp, I had no idea anyone could be offended by that” genre; for every Birth of a Nation there are twenty movies where when you stop to think you realize “whoa, fuck, that may be subtle but that's not good.” So what I'm going to do is highlight five of the most prevalent tropes. I should be clear about the fact that some of the movies mentioned below are ones that I like as movies and think are well made. And I don't think any of them are racist on purpose. But, as the man said, shit happens. Let us to the list:


5—“Wait, just because there are no black people in the movie doesn't mean it's racist!” Example: Hoosiers.

This is, admittedly, a Hoosiers-specific category. And most of the queasiness wrought by Hoosiers is basketball-related rather than being anything in the movie's text. I'll keep this as brief as I can (and non-ball fans bear with me, there's a point to the following), but basketball is a game whose practice is almost exclusively influenced by black players and whose theory is just as exclusively influenced by white coaches. By most reasonable and objective measures, the five greatest players in the history of the sport (Michael Jordan, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, and Magic Johnson) are all black. The two white players who crack the top ten, Larry Bird and Jerry West, are both extraordinary talents, to be sure, though the way the game is theorized and coached is built entirely around their skill sets: passing, jump shooting, and an ineffable quality most frequently called “heart” and attributed almost exclusively to white players. Michael Jordan, in spite of being able to do everything Larry Bird could just as well or better with one exception—outside shooting—and who was possessed of a competitive spirit and desire to win that almost no human being in any other endeavor has ever possessed, in or out of basketball, is remembered primarily for his athletic skills. Or, at least, until two white coaches, Phil Jackson and Tex Winter, “taught” him team play. Which is infuriating bullshit, but it's the accepted wisdom in basketball, to wit: hustle, desire, and old-timey strategy will always win out over superior athleticism. Make no mistake, those opposing forces are code words. The former means “white,” and the latter means “black.” And this ethos has never had a more popular expression in cinema than Hoosiers.

Hoosiers is undeniably a very well-made movie, and Gene Hackman is fucking awesome in it (a redundant statement if there ever was one, but what am I supposed to say? He's fucking awesome in it.) As a movie it has a genuine passion for basketball, but an extremely specific variety thereof. When Gene Hackman assumes control of the Hickory High basketball team, he has to deal with a couple mild cases of fuckheadedness and a general feeling of defeatism stemming from the school being so small and even by early 50s Indiana standards in the middle of fucking nowhere.

The principal complicating factor is that the team's best player, the transcendent Jimmy Chitwood, has ascetically resigned from the team for personal reasons. Philosophically, Hoosiers is torn between idealistic old-time-y “teamwork and hustle” hokum and the pragmatic reality that in order to win a goddamn thing, a basketball team needs to have one spectacularly talented gravitational center. (Also, in one almost certainly accidental touch, Jimmy Chitwood is the only white person in the movie who shoots modern-style jump shots; one fascinating bit of 50s basketball esoterica I learned recently was that, at the time, jump shots were considered extremely, shockingly, terrifyingly “black.” Having Jimmy Chitwood be the impetus by which Hickory shocks the world and wins is thus a gleefully unintentional confirmation of the very thing the movie purports to oppose philosophically within basketball, in accidentally proving that having a flashy “black” guy score all his team's points while his teammates stand around and watch is the way to win. Jimmy Chitwood is Allen Iverson. This makes me deliriously happy.)

But note: it took me 25 years to catch all those weird accidentally subversive subcutaneous signifiers in Hoosiers. Its intent is to be a movie about a how a bunch of (white) underdogs prevailed through pure grit, hustle, and purpose over the prohibitive favorites. Whose big stars were black. The fact that the audience is supposed to get caught up in Hickory High's triumph is, in intent, independent of the fact that they're all white and the big favorites from the big city are all black. But, as the great Rasheed Wallace once said “Ball don't lie,” or in other words, evidentiary reality trumps intent. And with that, we move on from basketball.


4—The movie that's all about black people but needs a white protagonist. Example: The Help, Mississippi Burning, Glory, numerous others.

This one is a little more straightforward. Take The Help. (Please.) It sets out to be a look at the lives of domestics in the Deep South, and the shit (get it?) they have to deal with. And you know what? Fine. I can't speak to the experience of only seeing people who look like me in a movie when they're playing maids, so I can't speak to the resultant “not this fuckin nonsense again” feeling that nine out of every ten black people I ever heard talk about The Help had. That baggage gives a movie on that subject a bit of a difficulty curve, but it is theoretically possible to make a good movie on the subject. Casting Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer helps too, and I'm damn glad their respective profiles as actors have been raised so this awards season. And I'm rooting for them both on Oscar night.

Only . . . why the fuck's Emma Stone gotta be the lead? Sure, the movie begins and ends with Viola Davis narrating, which is all fine and good because she's the most interesting character, but I swear like four hours of the two-and-a-half hour running time are Emma Stone dealing with office politics and sexism and her sick mother (though I'm never going to complain about getting to see my celeb fourth cousin Allison Janney thesp, just as I'm never going to get tired of flogging my extremely tenuous relation to her) and that douchebag guy she dates and wait a minute here he is again for another nine hours and huh ok he's not a douchebag after all and wait holy shit they're dating and seriously why the fuck is any of this shit in a movie called The Help that's supposed to be about the help?

Because white audiences need a white person as a POV character in order to maintain interest. Or so the conventional thinking goes. This presents the issue of, why black stories are perceived as being such a snore, or so alien that there's no way of comprehending them without a translator. It's not The Matrix where you need to have Keanu's perpetual befuddlement as an impetus for Morpheus and Trinity to explain all the complicated SF stuff to him. Black people (I'm focusing mainly on black people because it's Black History Month, but you can substitute “black” with any other race, conceivably) are right here. If you pay attention, you'll find they're people. They have stories. And in those stories, they play the leading roles.

I should state that this is not Emma Stone's fault (side note: I adore her in everything else I've ever seen her in), nor is it even the fault of the woman who wrote the book or the guy who directed the movie. That's the story they wanted to tell, and there was no apparent malice involved in the creation thereof. It's just, y'know, the white people are kinda taking center stage even though the title and a great deal of the intent points to it not really being about them. There's a bit of “look at me”ism involved, unintentionally. But it's still there.


3—The Black Guy Always Dies First Trope. Example: seemingly every fucking shitty movie ever.

This is specifically a genre movie thing, and good fucking God is it omnipresent. I've thus far reviewed two movies for Tor.com this calendar year, The Divide and Chronicle. In The Divide, a bunch of white assholes (the noun being operative and the adjective incidental) and Courtney B. Vance are trapped in a basement, and Courtney B. Vance gets called a faggot 95 thousand times and then dies first. In Chronicle, three high school seniors, two white guys and Michael B. Jordan. When they start realizing their powers are a little beyond their control, who's the one who's got to eat it for dramatic effect? RIP Michael B. Jordan. (During the funeral scene they used a couple still photographs from when he played Wallace on The Wire, which of course cued “Where's Wallace, String? WHERE THE FUCK IS WALLACE?” in my head, because I'm retarded.)

So, yeah, small sample size. But I got X-Men: First Class from Netflix a few weeks ago and guess who the fuck dies first? Edi Gathegi! And to really stick it in and break it off, he dies nobly, to save the fuckin white people. Come on. Even if I didn't like black people, even if I went a step further and was actually an evil little shit openly rooting for them to get killed whenever they showed up in a movie, this would be fucking boring. It's ridiculous enough that it's easier to count the genre pictures where the black guy doesn't die, and usually first. Or where it doesn't count because everyone gets killed, like Predator.

The absurdity of the institution's prevalence is such that some actors have even turned it into a kind of performance art. Case in point: Samuel L. Jackson. As we now know, Samuel L. Jackson is a dual-function cyborg who makes two to four genre pictures per year and plays golf, to the exclusion of all other things. The first function is what's led to his having been in many, many movies where he gets killed. All kidding aside, though, he may be in a lot of shitty movies but Samuel L. always finds a reason to be playing each role, and no matter how shitty the movie is, his performance is impeccable craft. And his deaths are always awesome. Two in particular stand out. The first is Jurassic Park, when at one fateful point, plot expedience dictates that Samuel L. go out and get eaten by the dinosaurs (because that's what real motherfucking dinosaurs do: they eat people). Awesomely, Samuel L.'s character in the book was both (inferentially) white and did not get eaten by dinosaurs. For the movie, both these characteristics change. What makes it memorable is the way Spielberg sets up the revelation that he's been eaten: for no other reason than it's awesome, they leave one of his arms so that it can accidentally come to rest on Laura Dern's shoulder, only to have her turn around and realize it's just his arm. This is why it actually kind of rules that PG-13 Spielberg directed Jurassic Park, because R Steven Spielberg, like the Saving Private Ryan Spielberg, would have just had the velociraptors turn him into sashimi. The off-screen offing was a good touch, and I would not be at all surprised if Samuel L. had some input into it. He's not shy, and I can totally see him being like, “Steven, let's talk, I think it'd be cool if this is how it's revealed that this movie falls into the Black Guy Always Dies trap.” And Spielberg, as a good progressive, could very easily have been like, “Well, that might offset the lameness of killing him for no reason . . .”

And then there's Deep Blue Sea. Wherein Samuel L. gets eaten by a shark, in one of the worst shark effects ever outside of that one shark movie where the guy says he wants to eat the girl's pussy. (Seriously, that's a real movie. And that's the only good thing in it.) But leave it to Samuel L., once again, to be like, “Yeah, it's a genre trope. But fuck it! If I'm gonna be a part of this bullshit, I want to go out big.” Go ahead, say that quote in your head in his voice. QED.

Sadly, Samuel L.'s attempts to turn it on its head aside, this is a pretty annoying and sad thing to still be going on to the point where literally every American movie I've watched for the first time in 2012 has had the black guy die. This is bullshit, and it has to stop, and I don't care that it's a statistical function of a unique quantity standing out from the pack and being more likely to have the writer go “oh, okay, this is who I'll kill” and not outright racism. STOP THE FUCKING MADNESS. If I go see Prometheus and Idris Elba is the only one who dies I am going to find Damon Lindelof, throw a drink in his face, and tell him the last episode of Lost sucked and then cruelly stand over him and nourish my soul on his bitter tears.


2—Jar Jar Binks, or “Hey, they're aliens, it can't be racist.” Example: Jar Jar Binks.

Actually, in spite of the fact that a few hundred words ago marked the 80 billionth time I've ranted about The Help, this was the inspiration behind this post. The original trilogy was actually pretty progressive, in that there may have only been one black person (Lando Calrissian) in the entire empire, but he was fascinatingly complex, and presented a moral alternative to the rigid Manichean Light side/Dark side spectrum in that he was ultimately one of the good guys, but if presented with less advantageous circumstances (like, say, not having a Luke Skywalker or a rebel alliance to throw in with) he'd do what he had to do. That's a lot closer to a realistic human being than you'd expect from a guy who lives in a city in the clouds, and being the most realistic person in the known galaxy makes up for his being the only black person, even if despite looking like Billy Dee Williams he has an Armenian name.

Somewhere along the line, though, George Lucas must have fallen down a flight of stairs headfirst or something because what the fuck was he thinking when he came up with Jar Jar Binks? When I first saw The Phantom Menace, I was like “ok, this only seems this bad because I'm high.” Then a couple years later I watched it straight and realized, “Oh no . . . this is . . . wow . . .” It doesn't read as deliberately minstrel-y. And lord knows Ahmed Best, the actor who voiced Jar Jar and mo-capped his physicality, is sick of taking shit for it; for actors, the “I was just following orders” line isn't an excuse, it's a reason. You have to be irreplaceable (or at least be reasonably sure you can get subsequent work if they fire you or you have to quit) before you can start making choices, and that's a truism that crosses racial lines. But holy hell. Half his dialogue sounds like he's saying massa. He shuffles. And the “but it's an alien language” thing only gets you so much slack. You can have your alien say stuff that doesn't make him sound like Mantan fucking Moreland. (Ed. Note: I'm not holding Moreland responsible, but the people and circumstances that forced him into that niche.)

Tellingly, George Lucas is apparently, to this day, confused as to why Jar Jar Binks is so unpopular. Lots of fans have different reasons. The above paragraph is the one that bugged me. It's no good getting up in George Lucas' shit about it, though. He simply won't understand what the big deal is.


1—The Magic Negro

Perhaps the most written-about type on this list, most often by black writers offended by the type as being unrealistically perfect, and how that unrealistic perfection pisses them off. Sometimes white racists will bitch about the Magic Negro, and how it's unrealistically perfect. Clearly, when two groups as opposed as these agree, something's fucked up.

The thing that pisses me off about this type is that it's so fucking boring. All the classic Magic Negro characters do is sit there smiling beatifically, saying wise things that take you a second to wade through the thick accent to understand, and even (and especially) when it goes against their self-interest, they go to unbelievable lengths to help the white people, against whom they bear no ill will at all (except the occasional villain).

Maybe it's because I'm not burdened with guilt, but the fact that this character archetype so blatantly exists as a means of assuaging guilt irks me. It's like, “Hey, here! This one likes me! I and my people are off the hook for slavery, segregation, and institutional racism! Except I deny that institutional racism exists! Gosh, that Will Smith sure is swell in Bagger Vance.” I'd have more respect for this bullshit if it was conscious. But it's a function of “oh, I don't want to seem racist, so I'm going to make him perfect.” Which ends up, irony of ironies, being the thing avoided. When creating a character, take care that that character resembles the world in which the story is set. If the movie you're making absolutely requires that your character be perfectly wise and perfectly compassionate, and act against his/her own interests for someone else's sake, you're making a bad movie.

My favorite subversion of this type is Scatman Crothers in The Shining. We're introduced to him as a literal Magic Negro: he can communicate telepathically with the creepy little kid. Taking it to that extreme is funny enough, but then when he shows back up later in the movie, he's sitting watching TV down in Florida like a totally recognizable regular old guy. In other words, like a non-magical real person. And then when he talks to the snowplow guy in Colorado, there's this perceptible tone of “Stupid white people are fucking up the haunted hotel again” to their interaction that's awesome, and further makes him seem like a real guy. He's totally not a Magic Negro at all anymore! So Scatman Crothers heads on up to the Overlook to save the day, and what happens . . .? He gets axed in the fucking chest by Jack Nicholson, thus making him trope #3. Godfuckingdammit. Just can't win in this game.

RACE IN CINEMA MONTH: THE 5 ROLES ONLY WHITE ACTORS CAN PLAY

This month we're going to do something a little different here at Movies By Bowes ™. February, which as you may or may not know is Black History Month in the United States, will mark the first ever themed month here at MBB ™, where for the whole month, each post will have something to do with race in cinema, culminating with the annual Oscar coverage, which this year is very much a related topic, with The Help having a Best Picture nom, as well as Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer being up for Best Actress and Best Supporting respectively. Noble attempt to elevate the discourse, or the dumbest fucking idea I've ever had? YOU BE THE JUDGE.

I'm not even going to blame this on RVCBard, even though she did threaten to revoke my “one of the good ones” status. The idea behind this first post came out of a discussion she and I had about the kinds of roles only white actors could play. Color-blind casting has been an institution for years in school plays because when the pool of potential actors is limited to the kids at the given school, sometimes there simply aren't enough actors (gender-blind casting is another common thing under these circumstances). At any level higher than maybe college, color-blind casting is a political decision no matter how much you want to whine about how difficult the casting process is. You know what else is difficult? Life. Nut up.

Anyway, I'm not talking about roles where the race isn't specified in the character description. Those are fair game. But that production of Stephen Adly Guirgis' The Motherfucker With The Hat where no effort was made to find Latin actors to play the specifically Latin characters in the play, and the cast was all white, or the thing more recently in Texas where some featherheads decided to do a production of the Hairspray stage musical with an all-white cast. Both these instances are bullshit, the former more so than the latter since if you can't find Latin people when you're an afternoon's drive from New York City it's because your head is up your own ass, whereas trying to find black people—let alone enough to cast Hairspray—in Plano, Texas is a slightly iffier proposition, but ya know, dudes, you could have done a different show. Especially when the one you want to do is fundamentally all about race.

But, as per the discussion I mentioned above, some roles absolutely have to be played by white people. Racial privilege being what it is, almost no one ever puts “white” in a character description, because that's the default assumption. Like any assumption, the Broken Clock Principle (to wit, it's right twice a day) dictates that occasionally the non-specified character does have to be white. Among them are these 5:


1—The Evil White Guy In A Suit

We'll get the obvious one out of the way first. I should correct something I said in one of my end-of-the-year wrap-ups for 2011, where I identified David Oyelowo in Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Cate Blanchett in Hanna as being examples of an EWGIS not necessarily having to be white or a guy. Obviously I was mistaken, having failed to process a couple important bits of nuance. Namely, Oyelowo in Rise may not have been white, but he was English. And also, with Rise being about how Caesar needed to lead the Left against all of humanity, having what would ordinarily be the Evil White Guy In A Suit not be white underscores that point. Or, in other words, Rise was not an EWGIS picture. (Ed. Note: yet another reason why Rise was transcendentally awesome). And as for the Hanna example, well, that's just silly. Hanna was too weird to adhere to any rational criteria, as it was essentially a Chemical Brothers video about Saoirse Ronan killing people with an interlude about a bunch of English hippies on a road trip. Does that sound like a normal movie? No.

Look, it's really simple. Evil white guys in suits are plotting to kill every last one of us. They have all the money and power. They are the true 1%. Remember how in King Lear it was the Fool who knew what was up? Why else do you think it fell to Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 2 to reveal the great truism of our age? “Every big crime has a rich white man waitin' for his cut.” If you roll your eyes at that and go “Oh please, you expect me to take Chris Tucker seriously?” then YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO SEE THE EVIL WHITE GUYS IN SUITS COMING. You're as good as done.


2—Skinhead/KKK guy

Self-explanatory, of course, but a little explanation beyond the obvious about why it's such a powerful signifier is necessary. A white person with a shaved head has a lot more whiteness visible. More so than the insane bullshit rhetoric and Nazi salutes, that simple touch may be the reason for this being such a powerful signifier. As for the exclusivity of this, a simple example: a white guy with a shaved head saying the n-word is terrifying. A black guy with a shaved head saying the n-word is Samuel L. Jackson (unless he's wearing a rug that picture). And Samuel L. is only scary if you're the one who fucked up.


3—Landed gentry

A discrete category from the Evil White Guy In A Suit, because while there can be overlap, it isn't inherent. Old money landed gentry ancien regime types can be kind of all right sometimes, even if they rarely have any connection to modern reality and occasionally say offensive stuff because they just don't know any better.

But why, you may ask, does this character have to be a white guy? Surely there are rich dudes in Africa, Asia, and South America who've owned shitloads of land for generations? Well, the three c's—colonialism, capitalism, and cronyism—mean that even there a significant percentage of the super fuckin rich feudal lord types are still white guys. Or, in countries where skepticism about the free market pervades (which is to say, where commies and theocrats run shit), there simply aren't those super fuckin rich feudal lord types at all.

Basically, this character archetype was personified to perfection by James Fox in Remains of the Day (left). James Fox may very well be the whitest dude ever; nota bene his under-seen Evil White Guy In A Suit sans tie in The Mighty Quinn, where the whole purpose of his role is for him to get his ass handed to him by Denzel, but the argument could be made that Denzel movies exist for him to hand people their asses, be it verbally, sociopolitically, or (recently, especially) the old-fashioned way, with violence. That James Fox was a flat-assed straw man is just the way things go, but the profundity of his whiteness is infinite. If you need to picture this character archetype, picture James Fox.


4—The girl in the horror movie who just fucking has to open That Door.

We've all been there. Buncha pretty young people in a house where the slasher/monster/ghost is fixin' to fuck some shit up, and right after the first person (usually the one black person) randomly gets iced the rest of the pretty people start wanting to know what's going on. So, the chick with the nice tits (aka the second one who gets killed, provided she's the one who the second-to-last person was shtupping; the virgin makes it out alive, as per regulations) goes up the stairs as the music gets louder, and she finds a door that's bleeding green shit with “THIS IS THE ROOM THE SLASHER/MONSTER/GHOST IS IN! ENTER AND GET KILLED HORRIBLY!” written on it at eye level, and what does she do? Opens the door. RIP.

There are slight variations. Sometimes she doesn't get killed immediately, sometimes it's just that opening That Door unleashes the evil that kills the rest of the pretty people. Sometimes she's a guy; vide Daniel Craig in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo immediately pre-Enya. But you'll notice Daniel Craig isn't exactly walking around in a bowtie selling copies of The Final Call. And that's the important thing, more than gender, here. If you have a character who can't leave well enough alone, or who alternatively just ain't got no fuckin sense, and you want to really sell that point, accept no substitutes. Cast a white actor.


5—“Goin' native!”

By which I mean Kevvo in Dances With Wolves, Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, and most recently Sam Worthington in Avatar (side note: Sam Worthington is never going to fucking make it with that many syllables in his last name; he needs to change his name to Rock Barkley or something.) So here's the deal: white man is giant dick to non-white man. Dickery consists of oppression, genocide, dehumanization, the industry standard “we're assholes and you have land and/or other resources we want” package. For the movie, since the audience needs a POV character they don't have to feel ugly about identifying with, an anachronistically sensitive and progressive lead character appears!

While having the sensitive white dude get all gaga about the profundity of the culture with which he—somehow—assimilates is an easy way for the movie to get its “aren't they noble” message across, it's a horrible way to discuss things like the Native American genocide, the forced Westernization of Japan, or when we nuked the Smurfs. It's like “oh yeah, the ruling classes of my culture imposed their will on this other culture by force, but those oppressed peoples would like me! Fapfapfapfapfapfapfapfap.”

That's why the lead in these pictures needs to be white, because these movies are specifically about deflecting and assuaging oppressor's guilt, which is itself a uniquely Western thing. There aren't big, lush, massively budgeted movies in Japan where the lead is the one guy in all of Japan beating his chest and going “The Rape of Nanking was wrong! I was not in favor of it!” Does that hypothetical movie sound reductive, dumb, and wildly insensitive? Well, you win a prize. So is Dances With Wolves.


There may be others, but these are the five clearest-cut cases of roles only white actors can play. I'll entertain suggestions for others in the comments, and will be following up my month-long project of tap-dancing on the third rail with other meditations on race in cinema. I'm taking suggestions on other topics as well. And, well, we'll see how this all turns out.

UNLEARNING THE TOP 10 CONSERVATIVE LESSONS OF ROCKY IV

Forget the politics, how are these two motherfuckers even in the same weight class?

I'm no stranger to banging the drums for weird, or even bad, movies. Two of the most enduringly popular posts in the history of this blog are the one consisting in large (and aesthetically central) part with advocating for Ocean's Twelve as the great unappreciated studio picture of our time, and the one where I discussed my lifelong love for the cinema of Chris Tucker. Tilting at windmills is shitloads of fun: Cervantes was on that hundreds of fucking years ago, and all he did was coin the phrase, not the concept. But the important thing to remember in all this is that down is not up, making an idiosyncratic critical argument requires a critical approach, and that assumptions are not facts. Not even that whole “come on, let's keep it real, we all know [x]” fallacy, where x = a simplistic generalization based on a cynical, pessimistic assumption masquerading as realism.

Also, we need to be careful to remember that movies are movies, not containers into which we can pour our political biases. This brings me to a post on the blog Big Hollywood, wherein the writer outlined the Top 10 Conservative Lessons of Rocky IV. It violates every single principle listed above. It posits that reality is something other than it is. It presents assumptions and opinions as facts, with plenty of “come on, we all know” bullshit. And nine of them are completely untrue.

Before breaking down the list, a bit of historical context is necessary. Rocky IV came out in 1985, the first year of Ronald Reagan's second term, which he won in one of the biggest electoral landslides in American history. There was no way of knowing that in only a couple years, Communism would collapse, and so popular culture was consumed with the Cold War and the Soviet threat. Not only the fight against Communism but money and cocaine as well pushed Hollywood rightward, and the industry cranked out movies where American supermen prevailed over all odds. Sometimes they explicitly fought Commies, sometimes proxies. But Rocky IV fell squarely within that trend, with Sly appropriating Rocky to, like his Rambo franchise, fight Commies. Considering Sly's success at the box office, and the theme, this may have been the easiest green light in the history of Hollywood (and, given the climate, getting the studio to sign off on the line “Hey, we don't keep our people behind a wall with machine guns” was not even a thing that needed to be done, so if the writer ever gets to ask Sly how he pulled that off, she should expect a blank stare). It was not a rebellious island in a sea of craven liberal capitulation to the Soviet beast. It was a conservative movie in multiple senses of the term. That understood, let us proceed:


“1—Communism (let me be succinct and find the right word here) sucks.”

We can skip the assertion that the assertion that Rocky IV is the greatest movie of all time is not an opinion but fact, because as much as I could get all bent out of shape about logical fallacies and the difference between opinion and fact, the writer was kidding, to a certain extent. And this is the one lesson that doesn't have a rebuttal. Communism, in every practical application, did suck. As a philosophy, it's like running the wrong operating system on a computer. Even though it's possible to split hairs and point out (as countless college freshmen have) that all of the ostensibly Communist regimes in history have been top-down dictatorships where ultimately one dude was in charge, and that “pure” Communism has never been implemented, pure Communism is completely untenable outside small, completely homogenous groups, because it's one of those things that sounds cool in theory but is completely antithetical to human nature in practice. Which is why everyone who wanted to try it made a couple strategic edits to the philosophy, and brought guns.

Problem is, a lot of anti-Communists didn't know when to leave well enough alone, and attributed every perfidious act by every person in every Communist regime to Communism as a philosophy. The writer mentions the Russians cheating and shooting Dolph up with drugs, which Sly didn't just pull out of his ass. The Soviets and other Eastern Bloc countries did that shit all the time. But it had nothing to do with Marx. It had to do with people living in a system that was simultaneously fundamentally broken and obsessed with the glory of the state. That desperation backed people into corners where they had to make the choice between being unethical or facing pretty severe consequences. This isn't exactly a contradiction of the drugged-up Dolph point, it's more that when you imagine Dolph as existing in a real world, he's someone to be pitied rather than loathed. That said, the assumption that, in the 80s, he'd be on his way to a Siberian labor camp just for losing to Rocky is faulty. He might not have even been sent to Siberia for his outburst of cartoonish individualism—I mean, if he'd pulled that shit during the Stalin era someone would have shot him in the head in the ring, but then again, if it was the Stalin era, Rocky wouldn't have been allowed into Russia in the first place—either. Nothing terribly fun would have happened to him. Dolph's life would have sucked til Communism fell, but the likelihood of it sucking somewhere relatively near Moscow or Leningrad was better than you'd think.

One final point about lesson 1: the assumption of knowledge of Brigitte Nielsen's character's inner life is entirely without merit. You'd need to perform feats of rhetorical alchemy to convince me that her character had an inner life at all, let alone that her leaving Dolph was a fait accompli. Assumption, not fact.


“2—There are wealthy people who are also (gasp!) perfectly good people.”

This is where the lessons devolve into silliness. It's easier to count mainstream Hollywood movies without wealthy or well-off protagonists than it is ones with same. Just about the entire romantic comedy genre is either about rich women trying to find love or not necessarily rich women trying to find love with rich guys. The default state for protagonists, in any mainstream genre, unless the plot requires otherwise, is to be middle class. Sure, middle class people aren't rich, but they are privileged. Material success is portrayed in Hollywood as either matter of fact, or aspirational. To assert otherwise requires a lot of cherry-picking, carefully ignoring almost every movie released by a major studio.

I'm not going to touch the literal reading of this assertion, that there are wealthy people who are perfect at being good. That would be excessive shit-starting. Also, all evil white guys in suits jokes aside, it is theoretically possible that there is a wealthy person out there who is perfectly good. But I highly doubt s/he would vote Republican.


“3—Traditional family values are beautiful.”

They're also a myth. Concocted by Hollywood. The mythical 1950s-ish world to which conservatives want to “return” never existed. Getting married and being loyal to your spouse is good, but it is not the most important thing in the world. And there is no conflict whatsoever between straight people getting married to each other and gay people getting married to each other. Marriage is an affirmation of the strength of one's bond with one's partner. Note the absence of gender pronouns there.

Also, Rocky is a guy who punches people. The reason why he's the avatar of the American way in Rocky IV is because Sly wrote a script where Rocky is the avatar of the American way, and Sly did so because Sly was going to be directing Sly in the lead role. He has a wife because his relationship with Adrian generated audience sympathy in the first movie. The reason she's in the fourth movie is because she was in the first three. She does not help Rocky punch people.


“4—Patriotism.”

All fine and good. America's pretty rad, no argument there. But . . . wait a minute, what comes next?

“Three words: APOLLO 'effing CREED.”

Oh, boy. This is followed by a whole bunch of bullshit about how awesome it is that Apollo Creed loves his country and drives liberals crazy because he's wearing red, white, and blue. That didn't really bug me, but I'm not a “liberal,” which must explain that. What's telling is the writer going on and on about Apollo Creed being “[o]ne of cinematic history's greatest characters, period” because he doesn't care about racism, ignoring a couple important points, first that he's not a real person, and second, that he's a fictional character written by a white guy. Apollo Creed not feeling like he's the victim of racism is because a white guy doesn't feel like Apollo Creed is a victim of racism. This lessens the impact of Apollo's patriotism a bit, and makes the next lesson—


“5—Color-blind race relations are the way to go.”

—even more ridiculous, which is impressive considering how stupid the last one was. This whole “color-blind” fallacy is not unique to conservatives, but conservatives have massive boners for it. For a bunch of purportedly grounded realists, claiming that ignoring race is, ipso facto, eradicating racism is like sticking your fingers in your ears and going “LALALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU RACISM LOOK I SHUT MY EYES TOO SO I CAN'T SEE YOU SO YOU AREN'T THERE LALALALALA.” The worst part is, none of the accompanying text with this lesson in any way refutes the existence of institutional racism. Apollo training Rocky to beat Clubber Lang doesn't refute shit. Clubber Lang was a fucking asshole. But was he a fucking asshole inherently, or was he made that way experientially by a country that hated him on principle from birth? Would Apollo Creed have still chosen to be a boxer if he'd known there were other options? Muhammad Ali became a boxer basically because he had to, and Muhammad Ali was the basis for Apollo Creed in the first movie, which was inspired by the 1975 fight in which Chuck Wepner took Ali 15 rounds. It should be noted that Muhammad Ali never subsequently trained Chuck Wepner, and until Parkinson's robbed him of his ability to speak as freely as he once did, he was as outspoken a critic of institutional racism as ever existed in American public life. Turning Muhammad Ali into Apollo Creed and writing him further and further into compliant, apolitical impotence as Sly did over the course of the Rocky series is borderline sinister (writing it off to intellectual laziness, which I do, is extremely generous), and then killing him off to get the audience on Rocky's side is sickeningly fucking gratuitous.


“6—There is no room for moral relativism.”

Well, sure. It's propaganda. Actually what I think the writer might mean is: “There is no room to disagree with what I'm saying.” But this is also clearly not the case. What have I been doing thus far?


“7—Faith in God is paramount.”

No, faith in God is Warner Bros. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh man am I the best or am I the best. Seriously, though, Rocky is a guy who punches people. God doesn't punch anyone in this movie. And the writer clearly hasn't seen Warrior if she thinks fighters praying before a fight would be edited out today. Wait, bad example, no one saw Warrior. But she mentions Tim Tebow, and all you need to know about Tim Tebow and atheists is, I started that fuckin guy on my fantasy team all the way to the playoff finals, when I second-guessed myself and started Mike Vick instead because I thought Tebow had a bad matchup. I mean, I still would have lost even if I'd started Tebow because my opponent had Aaron Rodgers, who is better at football than Tim Tebow, but I'm not burning copies of the Bible because I lost. These things happen when one guy is better at something than another guy.

The conclusion to this thought—“Judeo-Christian beliefs are as American as apple pie”—only requires a reminder that what originally united the various states of America was a philosophy based almost entirely in Enlightenment thinking. Some of the Founding Fathers identified as Christians. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, did not (he was a Deist, and famously owned a copy of the Bible with all references to the divinity of Jesus Christ excised). The government was specifically designed to be separate from any institutional religious influences. But then again, apple pie came from Europe, so the writer may be indulging in the pleasure of the non sequitur.


“8—Manliness personified.”

While I'm certainly not going to criticize the author for liking butch guys, being a man means having a dick. That's it.


“9—Think for yourself rather than going with the tides.”

On the surface, not a bad piece of advice at all, until the punchline, which makes it clear that supporting Barack Obama is being equated with not thinking for oneself, presented without any correlation and with a bit of a sneer. The last Rocky movie came out in 2006, which means Rocky has never existed in a world in which Barack Obama would have been on his radar (of course, assuming that any presidential candidate would ever be on Rocky's radar, which is a stretch.) Also, Rocky is a guy who punches people, not a politician or a pundit. Who he supports for president has nothing to do with anything.


“10—If you apply yourself and work hard, success is attainable i.e. the very essence of capitalism.”

The big finish! Though what capitalism has to do with Rocky is unclear, when at the beginning of the series of movies, Rocky is working hard and not getting anywhere until by an enormous coincidence he's selected at the whim of Apollo Creed to fight in what Apollo basically regards as an exhibition. Which is straight-up Horatio Alger: in Ragged Dick, the protagonist is hustling for his subsistence until a series of rich people all go “why, look at that lovable scamp, I'm going to rain opportunities and the luxuries of privilege on him.” That has nothing to do with applying yourself and working hard. That's people being handed success. I mean, shit, if you're going to advocate the importance of focused diligence, why not use the example of someone who actually succeeded due to focusing and being diligent?

It is true, though, that the American system affords victors a whole lotta fuckin' spoils. For all that's wrong with it, America does rock when you're in position to take advantage of what it has to offer. But, as in all things, there's a catch. It really, really helps to be a healthy white heterosexual male who belongs to a Protestant Christian denomination and whose family has money. With each qualifier removed, the likelihood of success diminishes, as each removed qualifier is replaced by institutional barriers. That is reality. That is the way things are on Earth. The reference to the Occupy movement is ridiculous, as no one in Zuccotti Park or any other Occupied space, is asking to be given anything. Ironically, what the Occupiers are after is a system in which applying oneself and working hard actually are rewarded proportional to the work done. Also, it bears mentioning yet again that Rocky's participation in the capitalist system is entirely to the extent that people pay him to punch people.


The author concludes by calling Rocky IV “the greatest unintentionally-conservative film ever made, and not coincidentally, a cultural masterpiece.” I'll leave the latter assertion alone for a minute, but Rocky IV is most certainly conservative absolutely on purpose. Even without all the shit the author projects onto the movie, it absolutely serves a conservative purpose: the Russians are BAD! The Americans are GOOD! Sly is the EMBODIMENT OF VIRTUE! Dolph is REIFIED PERFIDY! It's a morally black-and-white bit of “fuck the Commies” propaganda.

And yet, here's the thing. The Rocky movies are completely successful at doing what they do. As much as the unintentional (cutting Sly massive amounts of slack) racism bugs me, the first picture in particular and the sequels to diminishing degrees are marvels of cinematic button-pushing. Putting everything else aside, the primary criteria for judging whether a movie is good or bad are first determining what the movie is setting out to do, and second determining how well the movie succeeded in doing that thing. You don't compare Rocky to Citizen Kane. They're different pictures made for different purposes. Rocky set out to make American white people feel good. Rocky made a lot of American white people feel good. Thus, Rocky is a successful movie, and a successful franchise. This is born out in the massive amounts of money each picture made (even the Tommy Morrison one made lots of money). But let's cool it with the cultural masterpiece bullshit. The aesthetic goals of the Rocky series, especially by the time we get to Rocky IV, even though met are extremely modest, and one simply cannot walk in the room with the amount of racial politics swept under the rug. Rocky IV is a crystalline cultural artifact of its time, the preoccupations of that time, and it has a bitchin' montage, but give me a fucking break. And pick 10 things that actually have something to do with the movie next time.

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY MAY OR MAY NOT BE MY FRIEND: RICK MOODY VS. FRANK MILLER

So I've been spending this Sunday morning reading provocative writing whose primary intent is pissing a given group of people off, a broad category of writing; along with porn, pictures of kittens, and viruses, it's one of the four pillars of the Internet. The anger and the coffee work symbiotically to get me awake to watch football, a literalized metaphor for Internet discourse. Most of the time, when I don't have anything of value to contribute on the subject under discussion, I keep my mouth shut (not always, though; I'm not holding myself up as a paragon of restraint by any means). When Frank Miller shot his mouth off about Occupy Wall Street, I rolled my eyes—though may have privately, and entirely justifiably, muttered something about Frank Miller being a retard, which is as much a revelation as the sun rising in the east every morning—and went about my business. This morning, though, I got around to Rick Moody's response to Miller's thing, and got pissed off.

It actually pisses me off that I got pissed off, because I'd far prefer that something in the Guardian, by a high-profile American writer, putting its rhetorical foot in the ass of a deeply stupid person writing offensive and misleading things about a political movement I support, be intelligent and not stray from the point, overreach, and ultimately undo weaken the point it tries to make. But that's what Moody does in his piece. He starts with a solid premise—Frank Miller being a shithead—and tries to spin it into the entire Hollywood film industry being sympathetic to Frank Miller's brain-dead politics. And there, he fails.

The thing that sinks Moody's entire argument is the logical fallacy—one he shares with many of his and my ostensibly mutual political opponents—that his conclusions are facts. Because he doesn't like action movies, and because a cherry-picked selection of action movie stars are politically conservative (which, by the way, left off John Wayne, who would have helped make his point) he concludes that action movies themselves are inherently right-wing. Then, comic books (and Moody's contempt for them) are dragged into the argument, and equated with Stallonenegger (another assumed direct parallel presented as if inarguable) 80s explosionfests as if they're the same thing. We end up with a whole lot of lumping together, broad generalizations, and smugly self-satisfied wheel-spinning, that eventually returns to its initial, almost forgotten purpose, which is the very simple and well-established dipshittery of the venerable Mr. Miller.

One's enemies are not, by sole virtue of being one's enemies, engaged in a conspiracy. The simple nature of action movie narratives are not proof of their being propaganda. The assumption of top-down decision making (in this case, that because leading men in action movies are politically conservative and make movies that reflect, in varying degrees, their political beliefs, that Hollywood as an institution makes these movies to further a right-wing agenda) is a failure of the human mind to accept randomness and coincidence. To use an example of right-wingers doing the same thing, just so the wrong people don't read this and think I'm a toady, take the whole Communist scare: right-wingers thought the only reason leftists would say leftist stuff was because they were paid agents of Moscow; this led more than one leftist over the years to go “If only. . .” Simply because an action serves the agenda of another is not proof of direct proactive efforts by that other. And simply because an action movie may star a center-right actor and be about fucking shit up more than it is social justice, is not proof that Hollywood conspires to advance a political agenda.

Finally, Moody makes the mistake of assigning Frank Miller far too much importance within the Hollywood system. Until Robert Rodriguez and Zack Snyder, fans of Miller's work first, second, and forty-ninth as opposed to political bedfellows, made movies of his work (and the latter made a commercially successful one), Miller had been on the far periphery of Hollywood, and even now is rapidly receding back to that outsider status. His stature in the comics industry is a separate question, but he has no more relevance in Hollywood than anyone else who had one of his books adapted into a successful movie five years ago. He is (full disclosure: I am too) just some guy with a blog, on the Occupy Wall Street question.

Much like one's enemies not, by virtue of being one's enemies, all working together, the enemies of those enemies are not necessarily one's friends. Thus, while Rick Moody and I both agree that Frank Miller is a shithead, Rick Moody and I are not, alas, on the same side. Drawing a direct line between Frank Miller and a perceived collective agreement on the part of the American film industry to consciously perpetuate a right-wing political agenda would be the same as me drawing a direct line between Rick Moody's novel Purple America and a similar agreement within the publishing industry to make people who read books want to kill themselves. Both are based on nothing but the arguer's personal biases (Purple America made me want to kill myself, but lots of other people liked it); while Hollywood and the publishing industry both end up occasionally doing those things, neither Moody or I have any solid evidence that it's so.

But that's insane. Evidence? How would people write derpy “LOL ur retarded” blog posts on the Internet if they actually had to back shit up? If you take away our ability to rant about things we don't fully understand on the Internet, what the fuck is next? Taking away our pictures of kittens? I need to abandon this line of thinking and go watch some football before I fuck everything up.

WHEREIN I TEMPORARILY SUSPEND MY POLICY OF NOT FIRING ON CIVILIANS: REPUBLICANS AND THEIR FAVORITE MOVIES

Couple disclaimers before we begin: one, this is not a serious work of political commentary, as should be obvious, but you can never be too careful on the Internet, and two, if this was a bunch of Democrats the movies would probably be just as dumb and maybe even the same ones. But fortunately our current president, whose job all these dummies want, likes The Wire, which trumps all and leaves said dummies open to blatant vituperative ridicule for their inferior taste. See how easy that was? Okay, now let's get to the important business of shit-talking the GOP candidates:

This recent piece in the Washington Times takes a good shot at humanizing the Republican candidates for president in one of those “hey, they're just like regular folks” kinda ways, but what it really reveals is the deep-seated and harrowing psychological problems of each candidate polled. The intent of this piece, mine that is, is to reveal in what way each choice reveals the chooser to be a shithead and/or retard. How definitive is this? Not at all. What greater purpose does unscientifically shit-talking a bunch of non-cineastes about their favorite movies serve? None. Why am I wasting your time and mine with this bullshit, then? Because it fucking snowed in New York today. In fucking October. For this, members of a political party that denies climate change must get my dick in their eye.

And so, without further ado, the Movies By Bowes ™ Institute of Psycho Analysis (yes, it's two words for a reason, keep your stupid comments in your pocket) is open for business:


Candidate: Herman Cain
Favorite Movie: The Godfather
Diagnosis: Troll

There is a vast body of evidence to support this diagnosis. First, the obvious: Mr. Cain made his fortune as the head of Godfather's Pizza. L to the O to the L. Good one, Herb. The plot of the movie has an interesting parallel to Cain's campaign (moar like cam-Cain amirite?) if you posit Vito Corleone as Reagan, Rick Perry as Sonny, and Michelle Bachmann as Fredo—trust me, this is gold—and Cain as Michael. In The Godfather, they're all like, “Eyy, Mikey, Mr. Ivy League, you couldn't be Don,” and everyone following the campaign is like “Herman Cain? I thought his name was Alan Keyes” only to be bushwhacked when suddenly, this goofy fuck who puts out ads where his campaign manager who looks like he's dying of alcohol poisoning is smoking cigarettes and Cain slowly rotates toward the camera smiling all slow like, “Wait, you motherfuckers thought I was serious? Oh boy have you ever been trolled” just like Michael Corleone lulling the heads of the Five Families into submission with his lisp and phony indecisiveness before BAM they're all dead. Seriously, Herman Cain's face at the end of that ad is the new Trollface. Mark it eight, dude.


Candidate: Newt Gingrich
Favorite Movie: Casablanca
Diagnosis: Conservative in all things, even movies

Unlike just about every other left-of-center type in America, I don't particularly have a beef with Newt Gingrich. He does and says revolting, atrocious things, sure, but that's all in the game. I see him as a pure politician, whose personal beliefs just happen to be what a lot of other people think on a given subject. Casablanca, while a great movie to be sure, and one of my own personal favorites, is a very popular one, and a lot of people list it as their favorite. Also, there's no ambiguity about the political content. It's Humphrey Bogart (unambiguous good) against the Nazis (unambiguous bad). There's also Ingrid Bergman (unambiguous sex) and Claude Rains (unambiguous awesome). The movie itself is in black-and-white, reflecting the black-and-white prevailing nature of Republican political discourse. Really, this is just about the only thing Newt could have possibly picked. And another in a long line of little things that make me half-ass like the guy in spite of all the awful shit about him.


Candidate: Michelle Bachmann
Favorite Movie: Braveheart, maybe Saving Private Ryan
Diagnosis: Shithead

I will never get the spell Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan cast over civilians. Like The Shawshank Redemption, another 90s picture civilians go ga-ga over, they're kind of good but way too long and I personally never had the urge to revisit any of them more than once. Back when I used to read the New York Post before I just couldn't take it anymore (I grew up with it, and it's never like it was any beacon of journalism or anything but it just fell of a cliff after 9/11) I used to read the thing in the sports section where they'd ask athletes things like their favorite movie, and without fail every time it was some guy you could tell just didn't give a fuck about the question would just go “Braveheart” or “Saving Private Ryan.” And almost without fail those dudes would all be Jesus shitheads. Thus, one can infer that Michelle, a Jesus shithead, didn't really give a fuck about the question and her mind was clearly on other things, like how fluoridated water turns Christian children into homosexuals or privatizing the military by replacing them with unicorns or re-instituting slavery “except nicer!”or whatever it is she wants to do. When I saw her on Meet The Press I was too busy watching her eyeballs vibrate to pay attention to what she was saying, and David Gregory was whimpering with his tail between his legs until his producer gave him his chew toy at the commercial break.


Candidate: Rick Santorum
Favorite Movie: “There's a lot,” then when pressed for an answer, Field of Dreams [he was in Iowa]
Diagnosis: Not Good At The Whole Politics Thing-itis

Rick, Rick, Rick. I know being named after anal sex is embarrassing (Ed. Note: huh huh huh huh “ass” huh huh huh huh) but you really need to work on this shit (bahahahahahaha ok I'll stop). Let me walk you through it, homes. You're in Iowa, you're getting curbstomped in every single poll—seriously, Rick's trailing Osama Bin Laden in a couple of the fuckers—and you want to pander. Good thinking, Rick! Pandering is good. You know how you do that? Think of something the fucking night before. Don't get up there like “oh, this is beneath me” because nothing is beneath you when you're losing as bad as you are. Get out there and ho' it up a bit. You're in Iowa and someone asks you about your favorite movie? Start talking about John Wayne, you limpdick. He's from there. Get one of your interns to find the most right-wing John Wayne movie they can find, and you fucking say one of the Duke's most right-wing lines in that fucking thing. Then, ya know what? Iowans are like, “That Anal Sex guy is fucking right-wing. I like that guy.” I fucking hate the guy and think he's a horrible, bigoted person who may very well be personally responsible for inciting people to anti-gay hate crimes and I still can't help but give him advice because he's so terrible at his actual job. Even the guy who wrote the Washington Times piece was cracking on him like, “No word on what his favorite movie's going to be in New Hampshire.” Stop the dithering, stupid motherfucker.


Candidate: Ron Paul
Favorite Movie: “I don't watch many movies.”
Diagnosis: Wiseass

Let's be clear: the only reason why Ron Paul is “the reasonable one” in this race is because the rest of them are so fucked up. Ron Paul is insane. But, credit where credit's due, he is smart. And he knows that by letting everyone else fuck themselves in the ass left and right and just laying in the cut and quietly saying smart stuff like “I don't watch many movies” rather than say something just to say something and have it be dumb or nakedly pandering, he looks like a reasonable guy. Sneaky. But remember, he's the guy who believes the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is an instrument of totalitarianism. He's not your friend.


Candidate: Gary Johnson
Favorite Movie: Doctor Zhivago
Diagnosis: Good taste, no real shit to talk here

I mean, the only thing I know about the guy is that he's even more libertarian than Ron Paul, which is pretty impressive in its way, but I gotta hand it to him. One-loving David Lean is a sign the guy knows his movies, cares enough about them to have a good one as his favorite, and could probably explain why he likes it in a cogent fashion that actually makes sense. Why can't he be the frontrunner? He'd still lose to Barack but we'd have to sit through less fuckfacedness first, and when Johnson quotes Pauline Kael's review of Ryan's Daughter at Barack to attack his jobs bill or whatever it'll be a fun debate moment.


Candidate: Rick Perry
Favorite Movie: Immortal Beloved
Diagnosis: Lost a bet

Less clinical than my other diagnoses, so follow me on this: Rick's chillin with his evil white guy buddies at their hunting lodge. One of 'em says “Hey, Rick, I betcha ah cain't hit that there hummingbird in th' ass with his here raffle.” Rick goes, “Son, you couldn't hit water if you fell outta fuckin boat,” and everybody's like “ohh shit,” so the other guy takes aim and shoots the hummingbird dead in the ass. And everybody's like “ohhhhhhh shit” and Rick's all pissed because he knows they're going to make him do something fratty and embarrassing. Now, as evil as they are, they know they can't make their buddy say “I'm gay” on national TV, because then how are they going to get appointed ambassador to China when their huntin' and drinkin' buddy gets elected Commander in Chizzief. So they go the next best route: they pick some random movie one of their wives made them sit through on HBO in 1997 and tell Rick if someone asks him his favorite movie ever he's gotta say Immortal Beloved. Rick's like, “Aww, man, you guys're asssssssholes,” while they all cackle and get ready to kill some more shit. Occam's Razor.


Candidate: Mitt Romney
Favorite Movie: O, Brother Where Art Thou?
Diagnosis: We're all gonna die

Sure, it's possible Mitt Romney's a Coen brothers fan. After all, you do have to put them in the “greatest living American filmmakers” discussion. And O, Brother was one of their best, and more of a crowd-pleaser than the ones it's not as good as. I'd go ahead and call this a solid civilian pick except for the fact that there's totally something wrong and sinister about Mitt Romney. It's like, okay. His hair. It's impossible to look at his hair and not get an erection. Call it Newton's 69th law of physics or whatever. But that fucking hair is just entirely too perfect to be anything other than a distraction. Every time you're like “Hey, but you're in a cult that didn't acknowledge that black people were human beings until 1978, under great duress, and you were already an adult at the time,” his hair is like, “These are not the droids you're looking for.” During that debate when he put hands on Rick Perry, there was this slight whiff of “If you don't shut the fuck up I'm going to Vulcan nerve pinch you, you peckerwood cocksucker” to the gesture, which is probably why Perry's nuts turtled and he didn't do shit about it. Romney might snap and kill somebody. And by might I mean will. Look at the color of his skin. Look at the suit. DO THE MATH, PEOPLE.

What's this have to do with O, Brother Where Art Thou? Just that Romney picked the wrong Coen brothers movie. On purpose. He really meant Barton Fink. You know, where John Goodman's all nice and friendly and shit at first, even if he's a little weird and creepy? And then at the end of the picture he's chasing John Turturro up the flaming hallway bellowing “I WILL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!” twelve octaves below the surface of the Earth and Turturro basically shits his ass and only survives by accident? That's Romney next year when someone fucks with him at the convention. It's all gonna burn. And the only survivors are going to be Mitt Romney chasing Grover Norquist with a shotgun hollering “HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW, MOTHERFUCKER? THIS SHIT REAGANESQUE ENOUGH FOR YOU PORCUPINE FUCKERS?” At which point the National Guard comes in, and, well, you've seen Godzilla.


Anyway. That's my year's worth of politics. It's back to the movies themselves after this. Unless, of course, these motherfuckers keep acting the fool and another response becomes necessary. I'll sign off now. Occupy Everything. Peace.