Brave New World Revisited, Nomadland

"Brave New World Revisited" (1958): 

-Over-Population: In 1931, when Brave New World was published, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste sys­tem, the abolition of free will by methodical condition­ing, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness. Ours was a night­mare of too little order; theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of too much. In the process of passing from one extreme to the other, there would be a long interval, so I imagined, during which the more fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both worlds -- the disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World. Twenty-seven years later, I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would. The blessed interval between too little order and the nightmare of too much order shows no sign of beginning. In the West, individual men and women still enjoy a large measure of freedom. But even in those coun­tries that have a tradition of democratic government, the desire for this freedom seem to be on the wane. In the imaginary world of my own fable, pun­ishment is infrequent and generally mild. The nearly perfect control exercised by the government is achieved by systematic reinforcement of desirable be­havior, by many kinds of non-violent manipula­tion, both physical and psychological, and by genetic standardization. The answer to these ques­tions must begin where the life of even the most highly civilized society has its beginnings -- on the level of biology. In the Brave New World of my fable, the problem of human numbers in their relation to natural resources had been effectively solved. An optimum figure for world population had been calculated and numbers were maintained at this figure (a little under two bil­lions) generation after genera­tion. In the real contemporary world, the population problem has not been solved. On the contrary it is becoming graver and more formidable with every pass­ing year. It is against this grim biological background that all the political, economic, cultural and psychologi­cal dramas of our time are being played out. This is now the central problem of mankind; and it will remain the central problem certainly for several centuries thereafter. 

How will this development affect the over-populated, but highly industrialized and still democratic coun­tries of Europe? If the newly formed dictatorships were hostile to them, and if the normal flow of raw materials from the underdeveloped countries were de­liberately interrupted, the nations of the West would find themselves in a very bad way indeed. Their in­dustrial system would break down, and the highly de­veloped technology, which up till now has permitted them to sustain a population much greater than that which could be supported by locally available resources, would no longer protect them against the consequences of having too many people in too small a territory. If this should happen, the enormous powers forced by unfavorable conditions upon central govern­ments may come to be used in the spirit of totalitarian dictatorship. Along with a decline of average healthiness there may well go a decline in average intelligence. Indeed, some competent authorities are convinced that such a decline has already taken place and is continuing. "Un­der conditions that are both soft and unregulated," writes Dr. W. H. Sheldon, "our best stock tends to be outbred by stock that is inferior to it in every respect. It is the fashion in some academic circles to assure students that the alarm over differential birth­rates is unfounded; that these problems are merely economic, or merely educational, or merely religious, or merely cultural or something of the sort. This is Pollyanna optimism. Reproductive delinquency is biologi­cal and basic." And he adds that "nobody knows just how far the average IQ in this country [the U.S.A.] has declined since 1916, when Terman attempted to standardize the meaning of IQ 100." To help the unfortunate is obviously good. But the progressive contamina­tion of the genetic pool from which the members of our species will have to draw, is obviously bad. We are on the horns of an ethical dilemma, and to find the middle way will require all our intelligence and all our good will.

-Over-Organization: In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite. This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country's working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feel­ings and the actions of virtually everybody. We are far in­deed from Jefferson's ideal of a genuinely free society composed of a hierarchy of self-governing units -- "the elementary republics of the wards, the county repub­lics, the State republics and the Republic of the Union, forming a gradation of authorities." We see, then, that modern technology has led to the concentration of economic and political power, and to the development of a society controlled (ruthlessly in the totalitarian states, politely in the democracies) by Big Business and Big Govern­ment. How have individuals been affected by the tech­nological advances of recent years? Dr. Erich Fromm: Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is in­creasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual. Our increasing mental sickness may find expres­sion in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are con­spicuous and extremely distressing. 

The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been si­lenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their per­fect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish "the illusion of indi­viduality," but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Human beings are a good deal less rational and innately just than the optimists of the eighteenth century supposed. Democratic institutions are devices for reconciling social order with individual freedom and initiative, and for making the immediate power of a country's rulers subject to the ultimate power of the ruled. The fact that, in Western Europe and America, these de­vices have worked, all things considered, not too badly is proof enough that the eighteenth-century optimists were not entirely wrong. Again, no people in a precarious economic condition has a fair chance of being able to govern itself demo­cratically. Liberalism flourishes in an atmosphere of prosperity and declines as declining prosperity makes it necessary for the government to intervene more frequently and drastically. Over-population and over-organization are two condi­tions which deprive a society of a fair chance of making democratic institu­tions work effectively. We in the West have been supremely fortunate in having been given our fair chance of making the great experiment in self-government. Unfortunately it now looks as though, owing to recent changes in our circumstances, this infinitely precious fair chance were being taken away from us.

The power to respond to reason and truth exists in all of us. But so, unfortunately, does the tendency to respond to unrea­son and falsehood -- particularly in those cases where the falsehood evokes some enjoyable emotion, or where the appeal to unreason strikes some answering chord in the primitive, subhuman depths of our being. With the best will in the world, we cannot always be completely truthful or consistently rational. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by demo­cratic procedures. But the subhuman mindlessness to which the demagogue makes his appeal, the moral imbecility on which he relies when he goads his vic­tims into action, are characteristic not of men and women as individuals, but of men and women in masses. In all the world's higher religions, salvation and enlightenment are for individuals. The kingdom of heaven is within the mind of a person, not within the collective mindlessness of a crowd. The fact that every individual has his breaking point has been known and, in a crude unscientific way, exploited from time immemorial. In some cases man's dreadful inhumanity to man has been inspired by the love of cruelty for its own horrible and fascinating sake. More often, however, pure sadism was tempered by utilitarianism, theology or reasons of state. The effectiveness of political and religious propa­ganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. If the indoctrination is given in the right way at the proper stage of nervous exhaustion, it will work. Under favorable conditions, practically every­body can be converted to practically anything. In the Brave New World the soma habit was not a private vice; it was a political institution, it was the very essence of the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. The systematic drugging of individuals for the benefit of the State was a main plank in the policy of the World Controllers. The daily soma ration was an insurance against personal malad­justment, social unrest and the spread of subversive ideas. 

"It is hard to understand," Dr. Irvine Page wrote, "why it took so long for scientists to get around to investigating the chemical reactions in their own brains." Today, the enzymes which regulate the workings of the brain are being studied. Within the body, hitherto unknown chemical substances such as adrenochrome and serotonin (of which Dr. Page was a co-discoverer) have been isolated and their far-reaching effects on our mental and physical functions are now being investigated. Meanwhile new drugs are being synthesized -- drugs that reinforce or correct or interfere with the actions of the various chemicals. From our present point of view, the most interesting fact about these new drugs is that they temporarily alter the chemistry of the brain and the associated state of the mind without doing any permanent damage. In this respect they are like soma -- and profoundly unlike the mind-changing drugs of the past. For example, opium is a dangerous drug which, from neolithic times down to the present day, has been making addicts and ruining health. The same is true of the classical euphoric, alco­hol. Another stimulant of more recent vintage is amphetamine, better known as Benzedrine. Amphetamine works very effec­tively -- but works, if abused, at the expense of mental and physical health. 

In LSD-25 (lysergic acid diethylamide) the phar­macologists have recently created another aspect of soma -- a perception-improver and vision-producer that is, physiologically speaking, almost costless. This ex­traordinary drug, which is effective in doses as small as fifty or even twenty-five millionths of a gram, has power (like peyote) to transport people into other worlds. Soma was not only a vision-producer and a tranquil­lizer; it was also a stimu­lant of mind and body, a creator of active euphoria. Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter and with­out intelligence, love is impotent and freedom unattainable. How can we control the vast impersonal forces that now menace our hard-won freedoms? Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What is to be done? Obviously we must, with all possi­ble speed, reduce the birth rate to the point where it does not exceed the death rate. Professor Skinner of Harvard has set forth a psy­chologist's view of the problem in his Walden Two, a Utopian novel about a self-sustaining and autono­mous community, so scientifically organized that no­body is ever led into anti-social temptation and, with­out resort to coercion or undesirable propaganda, everyone does what he or she ought to do, and every­one is happy and creative. In France, after the Second World War, Marcel Barbu and his fol­lowers set up a number of self-governing, non-hierar­chical communities of production, which were also com­munities for mutual aid. In London, the Peckham Experiment has demonstrated that it is possible, by coordinating health services with the wider interests of the group, to create a true community even in a metropolis. The methods employed by orthodox educators have proved to be extremely inefficient. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work -- with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their positions and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown. -"Brave New World Revisited" (1958) by Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley described Sex and Culture (1934) as "a work of the highest importance". At present, Western society has all the symptoms of a declining civilization. When sexual freedom becomes totally unrestricted, society becomes unstable and collapses. Joseph Daniel Unwin studied 6 civilizations through 5,000 years of history and found a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe. Sex and Culture was praised by Aldous Huxley: "Unwin's conclusions may be summed up as follows. All human societies are in one or another of four cultural conditions: zoistic, manistic, deistic, rationalistic. Of these societies the zoistic displays the least amount of mental and social energy, the rationalistic the most. Investigation shows that the societies exhibiting the least amount of energy are those where the opportunities for sexual indulgence are the greatest." According to Unwin, after a nation becomes prosperous it becomes increasingly liberal with regard to sexual morality and as a result loses its cohesion, its impetus and its purpose. JD Unwin also infers that legal equality between women and men is necessary to institute before a monogamy union is instituted. One can choose to see Unwin’s work as the foretelling of a doomed American civilization. Whatever the case, the importance of sexual morality in everyday life should not be overlooked due to its strong correlation with civilizational flourishing. Sexual restraint and ethics are not products of an ancient past that progress can suddenly replace; they are arguably the lynchpin of all of the technological and scientific progress of today. Source: ethikapolitika.org

In certain moments, Nomadland makes the nomadic life seem undeniably appealing. We feel the comfort of real community and the intoxicating freedom of life on the road. Fern has stumbled into a genuine American counterculture, liberated from “the yoke of the tyranny of the dollar.” Fern (played by Frances McDormand), is a white Nevadan widow who wanders the back roads of gig economy America in her RV. After the local sheetrock plant where her husband worked shuts down, she chooses to work temporary jobs for the Amazon corporation. Fern seems to be doing penance as she takes us on a tour of American devastation. We see America’s transformation from a capitalist, post-industrial society back to a roughly neo-feudal, socialist one. Laszlo Kovacs’s road movies (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces) photographed post-Sixties America with awe, whereas Nomadland is a visual lecture teaching America to pity itself. Americans' fear of their civilization's decline stems from Christianity's apocalyptic complex. Niall Ferguson, a Scottish-American historian, argued that Western civilization appeared to have lost confidence in itself because "major universities have ceased to offer the classic 'Western Civilization' history course to their undergraduates. In schools, too, the grand narrative of Western ascent has fallen out of fashion." There are more worries about the increase in immigration, which has changed the demographic structure of the US. This in turn has caused a drop in the numbers of people who believe in Western culture and beliefs. Safa Motesharrei, a systems scientist at the University of Maryland, used a computer model to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that could lead to the collapse of our civilization. In an article entitled "Why We Must Teach Western Civilization," published on National Review in April 2020, the author Andrew Roberts worried that "Western civilization, so important to earlier generations, is being ridiculed, abused, and marginalized, often without any coherent response." Source: www.nationalreview.com

Carole Radziwill compares Meghan Markle with Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy

For Carole Radziwill, Meghan Markle’s tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey drew an eerie comparison to her friend Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s tragic last few months alive. The former “RHONY” star tweeted that Meghan Markle marrying into the royal family in 2018 sadly reminded her of Carolyn Bessette becoming a Kennedy by marrying John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1996. “I just watched the M&H sit down,” Radziwill tweeted early Monday. “Wow. I love how people say Meghan knew what she was getting into… people said the same thing about Carolyn Bessette when she married into the Kennedy family. You could never know. Meghan said it right, the perception is nothing like the reality.” Carole Radziwill’s late husband, Anthony Radziwill, was JFK Jr.’s first cousin; Anthony’s mother was Lee Radziwill, the younger sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

In the bombshell interview with Winfrey that aired Sunday night, Meghan Markle and husband Prince Harry came out swinging against Buckingham Palace after leaving their official duties and the UK behind for California last year. The couple described facing racist press attacks and Markle, whose mother is African American, receiving death threats. Markle further said the royal institution didn’t do enough to protect her—and even ignored her pleas for help after she became suicidal while pregnant with the couple’s son, Archie. In 2019, Radziwill detailed the media frenzy that often surrounded her close friends Bessette and Kennedy before their tragic deaths in a 1999 plane crash. “There were times when I went to their apartment on Moore Street, and you would see the paparazzi just waiting outside, behind cars, in cars, just on the sidewalk for her to leave her apartment,” Radziwill told Vanity Fair. “A lot of times we wouldn’t leave. We would order foods from Bubby’s on the corner. Who wanted to leave and have to go walk through that? That was, like, every day of John and Carolyn's life for the first year or more.” Source: pagesix.com 

Buckingham Palace has responded to Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's revealing interview with Oprah Winfrey. "The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan," reads the statement, which was released on Tuesday by Buckingham Palace on behalf of Queen Elizabeth. "The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning," the statement continued. "While some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately. Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved family members." Source: people.com

Carole Radziwill and Hamilton South released their statements after Ed Klein's and Michael Bergin's books were published. Hamilton South, a former publicist for Ralph Lauren, in his eulogy for Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, praised her graceful bearing and special allure: "As one of the persons who eulogized Carolyn Bessette Kennedy at her funeral, I was appalled by Ed Klein's latest exercise in low-rent tabloid titillation. Quality has always been an essential part of what Vanity Fair publishes, and even more than truth, quality is the missing ingredient in Mr. Klein's piece. Instead, he supplied nothing more than an unrecognizable portrait of two people made to sound more like soap opera characters than the generous, admirable people they really were. Mr. Klein's piece is riddled with factual inaccuracy and lacks substantive reporting. His intimate knowledge of their lives is untrue; to the best of my knowledge he never met either one of them. Surely publishing this kind of vile character assassination should require something more than anonymous quotes and a few on-the-record stories from a scorned ex-boyfriend and an eaves-dropping stylist. Stating that Carolyn gave keys to the Tribeca apartment to her fashionista friends so they could come and go as they pleased is so patently absurd that it's laughable. The notion of John recommending that Carolyn seek psychiatric help is also false; in fact, Carolyn had been seeing a psychiatrist on a weekly basis long before her marriage to John, who, for the record, also saw a psychiatrist on a weekly basis. Mr. Klein refers to the spare room where John stored his exercise equipment, where he alludes Carolyn slept, when in fact no such room existed in what was always a one bedroom loft. I know they slept together and sometimes they had breakfast on bed in the morning. Klein rants on cocaine and constant fights. In all the time I spent with them, considerably more than Mr. Klein or any of his other sources did I never saw anything of the sort. Most important, Mr. Klein ignores one fact that matters most. John and Carolyn were two people deeply in love who had a profound effect on each other. This effect spread on everyone who knew them well, and this effect not was related to their fame, but rather to their kindness, generosity, and humility. Had Mr. Klein taken the time to do his own moral inventory instead of someone else's and some decent reporting, he would have learned the truth, nor stupid stories out of thin air."

In 1996, Kenneth Corn met John Kennedy Jr. at Howe Independent School District in Oklahoma. Kenneth Corn worked as public servant and won bids as a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives and the Oklahoma State Senate. He was an active contributor to vital community service endeavors, having served on various executive boards and legislative committees. Eager to take on new challenges—leveraging political experience to champion best practices in public service—among his key accomplishments, he  ensured State Legislature on all matters relating to public benefits, funding investment and administration of retirement systems, earning his reputation as a good steward of the taxpayers’ dollars. He provided oversight for Oklahoma’s seven pension systems and investments of assets valued at more than $15.5 Billion. Corn served in the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1998 to 2002. He ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor of Oklahoma losing to Republican Todd Lamb on November 2, 2010. In 1996, Kenneth Corn was a member at Howe Independent School District, when he was asked to serve on the National School advisory committee. John Kennedy Jr was also serving on the committee. "He was at the signing ceremony for the school-to-work opportunities act in 1994 and I told him 'John, we really appreciate you being on the Council as an employer.' Kennedy Jr was supporting the school-to-work program by allowing young people interested in publishing and journalism to intern and even work at his company (George magazine). People who knew him say Kennedy Jr. wanted all children to have a fair chance in education." Corn says he felt that Kennedy knew why that wasn't happening across America. 

"John was the type of person that wanted every child in America to not be left behind to have an opportunity to achieve their dreams. He had a substantial knowledge of past American history, and like his father, he wanted to renovate the school system." Corn also added that Kennedy had qualities very few other renowned people had, such as empathy and a sense of community. "John was easy to talk to and made everyone comfortable. He was really down to earth," said Corn. "You could talk to him about anything. Sometimes when you meet some important name like him, that's an impossible task. John Kennedy Jr. may have thought he was just like everyone else, but the rest of the world knew differently." Source: oksenate.gov

Carolyn Bessette turned the World’s Sexiest Man into the World’s Happiest Man. “It was beyond love at first sight,” close friend Paul Wilmot told The New York Post. “She worshiped him. He worshiped her.” Carolyn Bessette was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she was voted “The Ultimate Beautiful Person” by classmates at St. Mary High School. She attended Boston University, where she appeared on the cover of a calendar called “The Girls of B.U.” and dated future hockey star John Cullen, who played for the Tampa Bay Lightning. Bessette eventually went to work at a Calvin Klein boutique in Boston, and was contacted by Wilmot, an executive at the fashion company, who was so impressed he offered her a job as a personal shopper in New York “on the spot.” Her first assignment was to handle celebrity clients and get them their clothes. “She had a lot of patience, because those people weren’t easy to deal with,” Wilmot said. In New York, Bessette dated Alessandro Benetton, of the Italian fashion company, and Calvin Klein model Michael Bergin for a time. 

John F. Kennedy Jr., who People magazine named “The Sexiest Man Alive” in 1988, had a long series of public romances. He had lengthy relationships with college classmate Sally Munro, aspiring actress Christina Haag and “Splash” star Daryl Hannah, as well as shorter flings with actress Molly Ringwald and, reportedly, Madonna. John and Carolyn both didn’t know what they were looking for – until they found each other. “The moment they met, their eyes locked. And neither of them ever dated anyone again,” Wilmot said. 

Wilmot called Bessette’s beauty captivating. “She was striking. And those eyes – they were the color of the Caribbean sea,” he said. “No wonder the guy took one look at her and flipped.” Kennedy was also drawn to her “sharp sense of humor,” Wilmot said. “She was very funny, and had an enormous sense of warmth about her.” Despite the slew of paparazzi who tried to keep track of Kennedy’s every move, the couple managed to keep their relationship out of the press – at first. “They were very successful at keeping it quiet,” Wilmot said. “It was months before anyone caught on.” The secret came out after Bessette moved into Kennedy’s Tribeca loft, and was greeted one morning by scores of photographers staking out the building. “She was stunned. She didn’t know they’d be there,” Wilmot said. While Kennedy had been one of the world’s most-photographed men for almost his entire life and was used to living under a microscope, Bessette wasn’t. “She had a difficult time adjusting. It was much more difficult than she expected. He was very nurturing, and helped her try to deal with it.”

When Bessette and Kennedy were seen together in public, they were so focused on each other they seemed oblivious to the cameras that followed them. They were just as loving in private, the friend said. “They were deeply in love. They were completely faithful to each other and doting. They anticipated each other’s thoughts and moods, and supported each other through difficult times,” Wilmot said. Just over a year into their relationship, Kennedy asked Bessette to marry him – a secret that was revealed to the public only after Bessette was photographed wearing a diamond and emerald ring. Like the engagement, the public learned about their wedding only after it happened. John Kennedy Jr. wore a single-breasted blue wool suit and his father’s watch. His bride wore a pearl-colored silk crepe gown. After the ceremony, the wedding party moved to the nearby Greyfield Inn, where Kennedy and his wife shared their first dance to the Prince song “Forever in My Life.” “I’m the happiest man alive,” Kennedy said afterward the wedding ceremony. Wilmot said Carolyn tried to “outfox” the press by wearing the same outfit when she’d go to public events, hoping they’d lose interest in taking her picture. “Needless to say, it didn’t work,” he said. While Kennedy spent much of his time indoors working at his political magazine, George, the couple still managed to enjoy the outdoors together and would often go up and stay at his mother’s old estate on Martha’s Vineyard. 

“They loved to go out to the Vineyard and relax,” Wilmot said. “They would invite friends over. They were great entertainers and dinner companions. Carolyn was always lively and fun. There was never a dull moment around her.” A neighbor on the Vineyard, Beth Kaeka, 43, said it always seemed the two had “a fairy-tale marriage.” “They were very affectionate. Every time I’d see them, they were holding hands. I used to see them walking down Menemsha Beach. He was always giving her kisses on the cheek. It was so romantic,” she said. “I’d always joke with my husband, ‘Why can’t you be more like John Jr.?'” Albert Fischer, the caretaker of the Kennedys’ Gay Head home since Jacqueline Onassis bought it in 1978, said the relationship between JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette was magical. “Their’s was a love affair. They were so much in love. You could see it in their eyes,” Fischer said. “That’s what makes this even more of a tragedy.” Source: nypost.com

The Parallax View on Criterion Collection

"In part one of Parallax Views on The Parallax View, noted film historian Joseph McBride gives his thoughts on The Parallax View (1974) as well as to discuss the film in the context of the Kennedy assassination, the Nixon Presidency and Watergate, and the rise of New Hollywood. He also offers some personal stories about The Parallax View‘s director Alan J. Pakula, discusses the technical aspects of the film such as the lauded cinematography done by Gordon Willis, and much more." Reviewing films depicting political assassination conspiracies for The Guardian, director Alex Cox labelled The Parallax View the "best JFK conspiracy movie". Film critic Matt Zoller Seitz has called the film, "a damn near perfect movie". It has an approval rating of 89% on Rotten Tomatoes. Joseph McBride: I asked him Alan J Pakula during the making of All The President's Men if he had heard, based on information I had been given by a friend who was an RFK assassination researcher, that journalist Bob Woodward was a covert ONI or CIA agent. Pakula's actual reply to me was, "I've heard that, but if I think about it while making this movie, I'll go crazy." His comment to me on Woodward shows his savvy but the limits of how far he wanted or could go. Billy Wilder's The Front Page from 1974 can be read as a satire of the media frenzy over Woodward & Bernstein and is a strong indictment of the callousness and dishonesty of the press; Wilder had worked as reporter during his Vienna and Berlin days and saw through some of the Washington Post's fabrications. I think someone should do an honest film about Woodward & Bernstein. My friend Rod Lurie, a former film critic who is now a writer-director—I helped get him into the LA Film Critics Association after he was blackballed for having suggested a remake of All The President's Men. 

Oliver Stone's superb, underrated NIXON does deal with Watergate extensively and serves as a corrective. Most reviewers missed the subtle JFK conspiracy connections in that film. I gave it a rare five stars when I reviewed it as the first film I reviewed for Boxoffice. I dropped a note to Oliver Stone suggesting he do LBJ to complete a presidential trilogy, but to my surprise he wrote back and said LBJ never interested him. The Richard Helms scene at Langley is extended in the Director's Cut where Sam Waterston (playing Helms) leans over to sniff the Angleton orchids, then stares at Nixon with solid-black eyeballs, amid some trippy film effects that suggest Nixon has seen in those eyes an unnerving revelation about CIA power. Maybe the scene was slashed because Stone fought to keep the black eyeballs in. If there's anything missing in Nixon, it's in the treatment of Nelson Rockefeller as political wallpaper, a period character who appears at a cocktail party and is never considered again. There was an increasing number of Rockefeller-sourced appointees in Nixon's two admins; some of them worked to accelerate the Watergate furor. There was a disturbing Rockefeller influence on the Gerald Ford administration as well. 

Deep Throat in All The President's Men is a character that was suggested to Bernstein & Woodward (Bernstein received top billing on the book) by their agent, Alice Mayhew, after she read the first draft, in which no such character appears. Yes, it's a composite of all the various intelligence sources Bob Woodward had. Their identification of the the senile ex-FBI official Mark Felt as supposedly being Deep Throat was, in Watergate lingo, a "limited hangout," since it's likely he was just one of their sources. In The Parallax View, the Senator being shot on the West Coast with a pistol made me think instantly of RFK. Then that ending. Beatty coming to realize he is the patsy, trapped, killed. Like what was supposed to have happened to Lee Harvey Oswald. 

Remastered on Blu-Ray, The Parallax View has been released on Criterion Collection on February 9, 2021. Nathan Heller's essay for Criterion Collection: The mystery of a senator’s murder is of less concern to The Parallax View than the insidious corporatization of America. Murder is committed here for hire, rented out and divorced of the personality and neuroses that drove, say, many a killer from a Hitchcock film, while modernist buildings are utilized to signify alienation in the key of Antonioni and Godard. The opening image—of a totem pole that obscures the Space Needle from a certain point view—signals the film’s ongoing obsessions with erasure and co-option. Joe Frady’s trip to a small woodsy town initially feels like a warm refuge from the chilly office corridors that haunt so many Pakula films, until Parallax is revealed to be capable of influencing people even there. Tellingly, evil is revealed via a large ominous structure—a dam with an alarm that sounds like a dinosaur’s death rattle. Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss), the TV news reporter covering the Space Needle event, arrives unannounced at the residence of her former boyfriend Joe Frady (Warren Beatty), an Oregon investigative journalist who was also at the event. She claims several people who witnessed the assassination have turned up dead in mysterious circumstances. And the film’s scariest sequence, scarier than A Clockwork Orange’s corresponding set piece, finds Frady watching a Parallax recruiting video, which shows how easily images of American harmony can be flipped—or seen from a different vantage point—to emphasize the decay and exploitation lingering underneath. And in this moment we’re left with a lingering ambiguity: Is the video playing up to the psychosis of potential Parallax freelancers or revealing the truth of society? 

The movie was loosely inspired by conspiracy theories around the John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations, but in this respect it adds a wholly new landscape of terror. Of the film’s nod to the first Kennedy assassination, the writer David Kurlander told me, “Had this iconic assassination taken place ten years later, in a far taller and more future-shocked, privatized world, perhaps it would have looked more like this.” Also, Beatty's admiration for RFK was the main reason that made him do the film. Nixon described Ted Kennedy as the gregarious natural politician, JFK as a quiet and private man, and RFK as having the passion and vigour of a Benedictine monk. The arrival of the seventies ushered in the high age of what’s often called neo-noir: a return to old genre forms at a moment when irresolute underbelly dramas seemed to catch the mood of the nation. But unlike full-on neo-noir projects like The Long Goodbye or Body Heat or Chinatown (whose screenwriter, Robert Towne, did uncredited work on The Parallax View). What he created instead was a noir of urban modernity—“a darkness shining in brightness,” to quote Ulysses—that was specially suited to an aborning corporate age. It was central to Pakula’s conception of The Parallax View that Frady never actually takes the corporation’s sociopath test. Instead, he gives it to a known killer, opening up a nagging uncertainty at the core of the plot. Is the test any good? Does it really sort nutters from law-abiding citizens? And which is Frady? Just as Willis shot all close-ups at the same range, we’re kept at a fixed distance from the workings of our hero’s mind—a parallax view in the sense that things may look different depending where we stand. The line between who’s clearheaded and who’s crazed, who sees whose weaknesses well enough to manipulate them, blurs. Through its parable of failure, it puts forth the possibility of institutional society done right. The movie is a plea for better power structures and a wiser choice of heroes. Its entreaty—like its nightmare—is still fresh for the United States. Source: www.criterion.com

Con-Artists: "I Care A Lot", "Uncut Gems"

Rosamund Pike plays Marla Grayson, a con artist whose grift is particularly cruel: She bribes a doctor into declaring elderly people unable to look after themselves, then becomes their court-appointed legal guardian. Marla is savvy and severe, but her greatest skill as a scammer is her knowledge of the countless ways that legal and health-care bureaucracies leave the elderly and disabled vulnerable. Under the guise of protecting her patients, Marla easily persuades doctors to alter their medications and isolate them from the loved ones who might guard them from her ploy. More neo-noir than nuanced character study, I Care A Lot's writer-director Jonathan Blakeson’s film nonetheless shows how easily a shrewd scammer can manipulate systems that already cause grave harm. The treacherous face-off between combatants ostensibly on opposite sides of the law wades into dark comedy territory, especially when Marla's indignation is spiked by Roman resorting to thuggery rather than beating her fair and square in the courts. The inference that her entire scheme is considered more or less legal makes the whole scenario even queasier. 

"To make it in this country you need to be brave and stupid and ruthless and focused," says Marla while tied to a chair at mobster Roman's mercy. "Playing fair, being scared, that gets you nowhere. That gets you beat." The main problem is that Blakeson gets cold feet when it comes to keeping Marla an aggressively vile presence deserving of moral condemnation, which applies the brakes on the picture. So “I Care a Lot” limps to a close, which is a shame, as it opens with fantastic authority, promising a character study of a loathsome psychopath that’s never fully realized. Source: www.theatlantic.com

Uncut Gems (2019) begins with an unusual transition sequence, where we first see a badly injured Ethiopian miner and a mob of fellow Ethiopian miners on the verge of revolting against what looks to be Chinese mine-owners. Through a presumed smuggling network, an unscrupulous Jewish jeweler in NYC tries to sell these opal gems and other shiny things to black rappers and superstitious NBA stars with a surfeit of disposable income. Uncut Gems is very much a critical reflection on modern Jewish identity and one of the most self-consciously Jewish films since the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (2009). Uncut Gems centers on the manic Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a jeweler in NYC’s seedy Diamond District, whose life is nothing short of a high-wire enterprise on a near daily basis. Howard has a mistress named Julia DeFiore (Julia Fox) who works at his jewel store and lives in his apartment (far removed from the suburban home he shares with his estranged wife and family). And, most importantly, Howard is a compulsive speculator and gambler, whose downwardly spiraling habits threaten his own sanity and welfare.

In The Ordeal of Civility (1974), John Murray Cuddihy draws attention to how the Jewish sense of persecution underwent something of a narrative reboot in the nineteenth century (which radically accelerated after World War II). Cuddihy points out that whereas pre-modern Diaspora Jewry explained its Exile “as a punishment from God for its sins,” beginning in the nineteenth century—after Jews were granted civic emancipation in the predominately Christian nations of the West—secular Jewish elites began to re-frame the Jewish Diaspora in secular terms: "Before Emancipation, Diaspora Jewry explained its Exile as a punishment from God for its sins. After Emancipation, this theodicy, now turned outward to a new, Gentile status-audience, becomes an ideology, emphasizing Gentile persecution as the root cause of Jewish “degradation.” This ideology was so pervasive that it was shared, in one form or another, by all the ideologists of nineteenth-century Jewry: Reform Jews, Zionists and Communists—all became virtuosos of ethnic suffering. The point is that these Diaspora groups were uninterested in actual history; they were apologists, ideologists, prefabricating a past in order to answer embarrassing questions, to outfit a new identity, and to ground a claim to equal treatment in the modern world." (Cuddihy, p. 177) “I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government,” Jewish columnist Joel Stein bragged in the Los Angeles Times in December 2008. “I just care that we get to keep running them.” Mr Stein’s reckless candor cost him his job at the LA Times. As F. Scott Fitzgerald reflected on the Hollywood of the 1930s in The Last Tycoon (1941): "Hollywood is a Jewish holiday, and a gentile's tragedy." 

In many lengthy sequences, Uncut Gems is unnerving to watch, due to the cacophony of voices talking over each other with extreme intensity, and within an environment of constant crisis and chaos, like a continuous cinematic panic attack, all of which is accentuated by Darius Khondji’s cinematography and the film’s frenetic pace. Of the film’s noise pollution, P.J. Grisar, writing in The Forward, puts it this way: “Jewish auteurs’ resistance to examining a Howard Ratner is understandable. There’s a justifiable fear that such characters are 'a shande far di Goyim.'” In a similar vein, Noah Kulwin, in a review of the film titled “In Praise of the Difficult Jew”, goes so far as to say: "Ratner is the latest in a long line of Jewish perverts and idiots, men whose fundamentally crude nature can overpower nearly all other parts of their personality. It’s a key part of what makes Adam Sandler so well-suited to the role, given the gross-out nature of his oeuvre, and his portrayal revives a variety of Jewish stereotypes." Gabe Friedman, in his review for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, notes how the film “deeply explores modern Jewish identity.” Heather Schwedel refers to Uncut Gems in Slate magazine as an “extremely Jewish film.” According to Richard Brody in The New Yorker: "The panic and the paranoia that drive Howard have an underlying historical undercurrent, a weird sense of belonging that he finds in the uncertainty, the instability, the terror, the exclusion that he endures—even if he largely brought it on himself." 

Ultimately, however, Uncut Gems fails due to a series of fundamental flaws. The script feels incomplete. Various characters are shown, in passing, vocalizing digressive and inconsequential asides. There is the prevailing chaos in dialogue and miscellaneous diegetic sound. There is the agonizing weight of profanity used throughout the film. But the most serious and critical flaw is that Howard Ratner is not a character we can feel sorry for, root for, or even care about. He displays no dignity and his narcissism is boundless. The film’s defenders will likely offer some form of postmodern argument that this is deliberate and provocative, that standard character arcs—especially when this arc may involve redemption or growth—are passé, etc. 

But when the audience doesn’t care about a movie’s protagonist in any substantive way, that movie will be forgotten in time. The phenomenon of Jewish neuroticism, while often joked about in Hollywood comedies (Woody Allen, Judd Apatow) or elaborated upon in Jewish literature (Philip Roth, Sam Munson), is—like other Jewish “stereotypes”—typically a subject that non-Jews writers are not allowed to broach, else they be branded anti-Semites. The stereotypes of Jewish intensity, overcompensation, obnoxiousness, money obsession, sexual addiction, paranoia, and continuous persecution complex are on full display in Uncut Gems, as is that world-weary form of Jewish pessimism which, in this case, seems to have its ultimate expression in the lead character’s suicidal death wish. Source: theoccidentalobserver.net

2021 Golden Globes, Rosamund Pike (I Care a Lot), The Mensch Comedy (Palm Springs)

2021 Golden Globe Awards Winners:

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama: Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Drama: Andra Day (The United States vs. Billie Holiday)

Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Series or a Motion Picture Made for Television: Mark Ruffalo (I Know This Much Is True)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television: Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen's Gambit)

Best Motion Picture and Director: Nomadland (Chloé Zhao)

Best Screenplay - Motion Picture: The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Aaron Sorkin)

Best Motion Picture - Animated: Soul

Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language: Minari

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Comedy: Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat Sequel)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture - Comedy: Rosamund Pike (I Care a Lot)

Rosamund Pike is astonishingly good in "I Care a Lot", tearing into her role with the same icy menace that made her Oscar-nominated performance in Gone Girl so indelible and like the script she’s working from, there’s such restraint with her venom that it makes her all the more terrifying. The Oscar nominee resurrects the icy menace of her Gone Girl performance in a darkly comic and bracingly nasty tale of a morally bankrupt legal guardian. Pike plays Marla Grayson, a professional legal guardian undaunted by ethical guidelines so long as she can skim a few extra dollars from her aging clients. She’s a satirical encapsulation of American capitalism gone haywire in the mold of Chuck Tatum from Billy Wilder's “Ace in the Hole” or Lou Bloom from “Nightcrawler.” Pike’s performance as anti-heroine Marla in “I Care a Lot” is the stuff of goosebumps, perversely tickling the dark side of the funny bone at the same time as it sends a chill up the spine. With the limelight squarely fixed on her, it’s easier to see Pike’s bold, distinct choices as an actress and how they shape such an indelible character. Because she cuts such an imposingly large and cleanly calibrated presence across the film, the brute force of the mechanisms through which she simplifies complex questions of legality become an indictment of the darkest side of capitalism. Source: theplaylist.net

Richard Brody: It's a pity that Palm Springs didn't get any Golden Globe. It's far way better than Borat Sequel. Andy Samberg may not be the most charismatic performer but he plays comedy with heart. The inescapable sentimentality of the way Conner4Real’s career crisis was resolved in Popstar—a resolution that’s been a staple of American comedy since Billy Wilder (the edifying message of “Be a mensch”)—finished off a torrent of gleeful gibberish that’s among the most inspired recent comedic visions, alongside Ben Stiller's Zoolander. And Samberg's hilarious songs in “Popstar: Never Stop” offered an additional enticement, bending the lyrics and his stage persona into another loopy dimension of astonishment. “Popstar: Never Stop” was indeed a well-tuned satire of celebrity self-indulgence.  

"Why don't you grow up a little, Baxter?" Behave like a mensch! Do you know what it means? A mensch is a human being,” Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen) exhorts C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) in The Apartment (1960) directed by Billy Wilder. This injunction, “Be a mensch!” crosses a large section of American comedy, from its origins at the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. Taken from the Jewish word "mentsch", the term entered into everyday language to define the moral man, the one who seeks to do good around him. The mensch type morphs into a typically American philosophical reflection of "moral perfectionism," of which Stanley Cavell offered great examples through his analysis of “remarriage comedies.” Cavell  was most known for his essay The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979), which forms the centerpiece of his doctoral dissertation. In Pursuits of Happiness (1981), Cavell dissects his experience of seven prominent Hollywood classic comedies: 

The Lady Eve, It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Adam’s Rib, and The Awful Truth. Cavell argues that these films, from 1934–1949, form part of what he calls the genre of "The Comedy of Remarriage," and finds in them great philosophical, moral, and political significance. Specifically, Cavell argues that these comedies show that "the achievement of happiness requires not the satisfaction of our needs, but the examination and transformation of those needs." According to Cavell, the emphasis these movies place on the theme of remarriage draws attention to the fact that, within a relationship, happiness requires "growing up" together with a partner. Comedy is not the only genre in which a mensch may shine, but what could be more comical indeed than the tensions between a quest for morality and a resounding failure—however temporary—to achieve it? Whether he is adored or hated (usually seen by others as a schlemiel or pathological loser), the mensch is a endless source of laughter, intelligence and mixed emotions. Source: www.newyorker.com

Andy Siara: I thought one of the obvious meanings of Palm Springs was learning how to grow up and move on with your life. Nyles is a jaded man who has lived the same day over and over and he realizes nothing he does has any consequences. There’s no meaning or purpose. Then Sarah comes into the picture, they start to like each other, and they start to hurt each other. Eventually, the only way they can be together is if he takes a chance with her to try and go back to reality where their lives could have meaning. He decides to take a leap of faith with her, because dying is better than contemplating living in the loop without her. To me, the “loop” that Nyles is stuck in is symbolic of the “loop” a lot of people choose to get themselves stuck in their lives. All of the science of the time loop is based on real science. Theoretical Physicist Clifford V. Johnson (a professor at the University of Southern California Department of Physics) served as consultant on the movie. We were lucky to know there are some physical events in the universe that could cause a rupture in the space-time continuum, which would be represented in this world by something like an earthquake or a cave opening, which we already had written in the script. 

“It’s a love story,” said Palm Springs' director Max Barbakow: “But also there are bigger existential life questions, that’s what makes it so special.” “There’s definitely a running theme of loneliness and being stuck,” said Andy Samberg: “And also the idea of taking the leap into committing to somebody and being with another person for the long term.” “I feel like we really subverted the rom-com,” Cristin Milioti said. Samberg chimed in, “It’s more of a ‘melange of genres’.”

In his script, Siara made sure that both Nyles and Sarah got to be complex characters. They are both intelligent, childish, scared of relationships and lying to themselves. Their acceptance of something more romantic unfolds in a natural way. Samberg and Milioti deserve a lot of credit for this. The "trope" of two people who seemingly despise each other before magically falling in love has a long history. Consider Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant flinging vicious verbal barbs at one another in "His Girl Friday," all while being sucked into each others' orbit. Who else could put up with either one of these people? They are perfect for each other!  "Palm Springs" is genuinely romantic, in a way that sadly feels old-fashioned—but it isn't. Falling in love is not what either Nyles or Sarah expected at that moment in their lives. During one of their crazy stunts, Nyles tells Sarah, “Your best bet is just to learn how to suffer existence,” mutating briefly into Schopenhauer. If you've ever spent a holiday weekend at a resort in Palm Springs, floating in the pool for days straight, surrounded by palm trees and old Hollywood paradise vibes, you might understand how the whole place feels like time has stopped still. Source: www.eonline.com

Luckiest Girl Alive (Mila Kunis), Promising Young Woman (Carey Mulligan), Andy Samberg

If she wasn’t already, Mila Kunis is now the “Luckiest Girl Alive,” signing on to star in the film adaptation of the best-selling novel for Netflix. Kunis stars as Ani Fanelli in the upcoming film, based on Jessica Knoll’s 2015 New York Times best-selling thriller about a New York magazine editor whose “meticulously crafted life” is upended when a crime documentary forces her to relive the shocking truths of a devastating incident from her teenage years. The “Bad Moms,” “Black Swan” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” star will also produce the project under her Orchard Farm Productions banner. The film is being shepherded by producers Bruna Papandrea and Jeanne Snow for Made Up Stories and Erik Feig and Lucy Kitada for Picturestart, the latter of which will oversee the production. Papandrea and Feig have been attached to produce “Luckiest Girl Alive” since they acquired the rights to Knoll’s best-seller novel in 2015. 

Novel Spoilers: The plot twist is that you don't know if Ani has been telling us a true story or if she actually did orchestrate and participate in her school shooting. That is why the police officer sarcastically called her The Luckiest Girl Alive. Because you would have to be lucky to survive a horrific murder spree that killed all your enemies and you escape without a scratch. You really think Arthur just offered her the gun without her being in on it? You really think she could have overpowered big Arthur the mass murderer without him thinking she was his friend? There is a good chance her prints are on the gun because she shot Dean, who had assaulted her sexually. It's the classic twist of the unreliable narrator. Knoll is adapting the screenplay and will serve as an executive producer on the film, directed by Mike Barker. Source: variety.com

Cassie’s escapades are ultimately self-destructive, and Promising Young Woman becomes as much about retribution as the difficulty of moving on after trauma. We can thank Carey Mulligan for helping to bring such emotional weight to Fennell’s weird scripted material. Mulligan connects Cassie’s strength with her vulnerability; there’s a rawness and pain that belies the anger of her performance. She nails Cassie’s unhinged and unhealthy state of mind in a key sequence, scored to Wagner’s darkly epic piece “Liebestod” from Tristan and Isolde, when she attacks a jerk’s pickup truck with a crowbar. While audiences might initially enjoy watching her smash the guy’s windshield, the camera pulls back to reveal Cassie as a wounded and solitary individual. The romance seems a bit of a box to check, at least initially, but Burnham is quite charming, and the writing at the end of their first date scene is so precise and so well observed, it’s sort of startling. Mulligan and Burnham have a sweet, unforced chemistry; you’re really pulling for them, which is sort of cruel (but effective). Promising Young Woman builds to a truly shocking climax that delivers Fennell’s themes with a dark and twisted sense of humour—and justice. It’s a clever and unexpected turn in a film full of surprises. Cassie's ending is not happy, but it's heroic. And the end credit music is a song called “Last Laugh,” which may feel victorious. Source: theplaylist.net

Kaiser (Celebitchy): I ordinarily ignore Andy Samberg around here. It’s not a judgment on him at all–I think he’s incredibly cute and very funny, in a goofy-hot-boy-that-I-would-loved-in-college way. Anyway, I usually ignore him because I guess I think that no one else is that interested in him. Because I rarely–if ever?–pay attention to Andy Samberg at a gossip-level, I was pleasantly surprised by his Men’s Journal cover story. Did you know that Andy is 42 years old? Did you know that he’s been married to indie singer Joanna Newsom since 2013? Whom he started to date in 2008. Before Joanna, the only dating rumors about Andy were with Natalie Portman and Kirsten Dunst around 2006, according to Star magazine. "Star magazine exclusively reveals that Kirsten Dunst, 23, is dating Saturday Night Live funny man Andy Samberg, 27. On March 20, the two were seen getting cozy at Hollywood’s uber-trendy Hotel Café during a Jose Gonzalez concert. Goodbye Jake Gyllenhaal, goodbye Josh Hartnett and goodbye Tobey Maguire. Kirsten has lucked out with Andy. An eyewitness says he is quite the gentleman! There was no way Kirsten was getting back together with Jake Gyllenhaal." 

Did you know that Andy Samberg and Joanna Newsom met when he attended incognito one of her concerts and wrote her a love letter? He said Joanna was his "favorite person in the world." They have a little daughter and they’ve never released their daughter’s name publicly, and Andy still won’t refer to his daughter by her name in the media. Andy says "the birth of my daughter was the best moment of my life." This Men’s Journal piece also quotes several of his female co-workers, and they all are like “he’s a really woke ally to women.” The Mad Men/Don Draper spoof that Andy Samberg performed in the 67th edition of the 2015 Emmys was a perfect example of having the right instinct to start a great spoof and then just drive it off the rails. Jon Hamm confessed having felt mortified in a good way.

-Did you have a personal preference when it comes to breakups? Have you been usually the dumper or the dumpee?

-Andy Samberg: I’ve had my share of both. Actually, I don’t feel I’ve ever dumped anyone. It’s never been, “You know what? I’ve decided I don’t like you.” It’s been usually about the circumstances. I had a girlfriend in college, then I transferred because I wanted to go to film school, and the long distance made our relationship impossible. Things like that tended to happen to me. Not that I haven’t had some brutal breakups in the past. One time I was dating an actress and she told me, “Hey, I thought I was going to be on location for a film shoot for the next six months and now it looks like I won’t be, so we should break up.” I was like, “Okey dokey. I can tell I was really important to you.”

-You were voted the class clown in your high school. Did that title come with bragging rights?

-Andy Samberg: Remember, I went to Berkeley High, and being voted the best at anything was not something you bragged about. I had a friend who was six-five, superbuff, the blonde quarterback. We all made fun of him for being the quarterback. Berkeley is the inverse of the rest of America. We’d be like, “Oh great, you’re the quarterback. How cliché. We get it, you’re so handsome and talented.” Nobody got more ripped on than the quarterback at our high school. Source: celebitchy.com

'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' by Adam Curtis, Kerry Thornley and Lee Harvey Oswald

'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' (2021), Adam Curtis' new documentary suggests our innate flaws are what's holding society back and argues humanity’s worst enemy is itself. A new BBC documentary series from Bafta-winning filmmaker Adam Curtis has been broadly welcomed by critics. Several hailed the six-part series as "dazzling" and "terrifying", but others said it was "incoherent" and left them confused. Curtis has described it as an "emotional history of the modern world". It chronicles growing anxieties in the western world, and to do so, it takes in the scope of centuries, the influential stories of lesser-sung players and the ever-shifting tides of human psychology – and how the world’s power structures have, throughout generations, sought to bend it to their will. Luckily, he gives us a glimmer of a way out. “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make,” reads the keynote quote from American anarchist David Graeber, “and could just as easily make differently.” Our innate pessimism amid such an intricate and immutable world order, however, has us leaving Can’t Get You Out Of My Head fearing the worst. “Again and again,” Curtis says, “we’re getting this knocking at the door, whether it be the Occupy movement or Donald Trump or Brexit or Black Lives Matter, all arguing that there is something wrong and corrupted with the system of power. It’s always shooting out of the ground from different sources and I don’t think that it’s going to go away. But no one seems to have come up with what the alternative would be. What I’m trying to do in these films is explain why we feel so helpless and yet we want change.” The key to understanding today’s human population, it argues, is in recognising its subconscious patterns of behaviour. But the series itself exposes our most self-defeating pattern: that our innate flaws are destined to destroy any dream society we might ever imagine. That rotten systems are never really overthrown, they just mutate, that power breeds corruption, that political and social ideals are incompatible with human failings. As Curtis points out, all major world leaders have run out of ideological ideas, so we’d better get busy formulating something non-catastrophic to come next. In the first part of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain), there are several references to JFK, Jim Garrison and Kerry Thornley. Source: nme.com

Jim DiEugenio: In 1965, Kerry Thornley wrote a manuscript entitled Oswald which would be published as The Idle Warriors in 1991. This book shocks you when Thornely reveals the fact that E. Howard Hunt was stationed at Atsugi Air base at the same time Lee Harvey Oswald was there. Anybody can easily connect the dots of Oswald to the legendary CIA operative Hunt. Thornley also acknowledged there were many coincidences he was personally involved with and he may have been unwittingly manipulated by the conspirators. Some of the claims he makes in The Idle Warriors include numerous meetings in New Orleans with Gary Kirstein and Slim Brooks, who both–like Thornley–disliked Kennedy. Thornley clearly lied about not seeing Oswald in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans. And Garrison rightly indicted him for perjury before the grand jury. There is simply no way around this with the declassified evidence. Beyond that, two of the witnesses, Doris Dowell and Bernard Goldsmith, testified that Thornley had told them Oswald was not a communist. Thornley was used by the Warren Commission, perhaps more than any other witness, to paint Oswald as a communist. The new evidence states Thornley was so close to LHO that he actually visited him at his home. (Affidavit of Myrtle La Savia, who lived a block away) Once Thornley became a person of interest to Jim Garrison, he became protected by higher authorities. Thornley left for Florida, and according to records unearthed by Garrison's investigators, he owned two fancy houses, one in Tampa and another in Miami. Not bad for a guy who had worked as a waiter and a doorman. 

Kerry Thornley had moved to New Orleans in February of 1961, which coincided with the preparations in the Crescent City shifting into high gear over the upcoming Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. David Ferrie and Guy Banister were operating in places like Belle Chase naval air station and Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street. In fact, because of the ARRB, we first found out about the training grounds at Belle Chase from file releases in the nineties about Ferrie. He worked there as a trainer for the CIA, under the auspices of his friend Sergio Archada Smith, who worked for the CIA under State Department cover. With the move to the Crescent City, Thornley was now going to run into a group of people who also knew Oswald and they were associated with this anti-Castro, CIA associated movement. This group was called the Friends of Democratic Cuba (FDC). It was a shell company created by the CIA and FBI, “which involved the shipment and transportation of individuals and supplies in and out of Cuba.” The man who was supposed to be the recipient of this merchandise was Sergio Archada Smith. Members of the committee were Grady Durham and Bill Dalzell, the latter was a CIA operative and friend of Clay Shaw. Thornley himself admitted having shown his Oswald manuscript to Guy Banister in his introduction to The Idle Warriors. The Commission wanted Thornley to bring all drafts of his book The Idle Warriors with him. Thornley's main liaison with the Warren Commission was Albert Jenner. To me, in terms of sheer incrimination and character assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, Thornley ranks with Ruth and Michael Paine, George DeMohrenschildt, and Carlos Bringuier. Thornley was very valuable by offering his portrayal of Oswald as a sociopathic Marxist. And he is duly quoted in the Warren Report in three damaging passages. 

In a memorandum Thornley wrote on October 24, 1967, he expresses trepidations about Jim Garrison. By letter, he now begins to dictate terms to Garrison. One of those terms ended up being he would only meet Garrison's assistant DA Andy Sciambra at NASA, which was the place where many of those who worked with Oswald at Reily Coffee Company had been later transferred. Apparently, coffee grinders make good aerospace designers. As he entered the establishment, Sciambra recalled thinking that, if someone like Thornley could command entry into such a place, then Garrison probably didn’t stand a chance in Hades of winning out. Obviously, Thornley did not just call NASA and say: I need a secure room to meet with an opposing attorney; put me next to a rocket silo, so he gets the message. No, not Thornley. Someone did that for him. Someone involved in protecting him.In one of the declassifications revealed by the ARRB, the CIA admitted that it ran something called a Cleared Attorneys Panel in major cities—one of them being New Orleans during the Garrison investigation. The existence of this panel was first exposed in a classified letter by attorney James Quaid to CIA Director Richard Helms on May 13, 1967. In that letter, which was declassified relatively early in the ARRB process, Quaid asked to be placed on the CIA’s preferred list of lawyers in New Orleans. As for his perjury, as shown above, there isn’t much that Thornley was not lying about, or at least equivocating upon. And it’s a shame that we had to wait until the ARRB to get the evidence. But yet, Thornley then admitted to both Doris Dowell and Bernard Goldsmith that he knew Oswald was not a communist. How can one explain such behavior? I believe it’s not explainable, unless we allow that Thornley was playing a role, his motivation being his almost pathological hatred of JFK, which David Lifton cannot bring himself to confront. In 1992 on the syndicated program A Current Affair, Thornley said, “I would have stood there with a rifle and pulled the trigger if I would have had the chance.” (Program of 2/25/92) Source: https://kennedysandking.com

Happy Saint Valentine Day, Palm Springs

Palm Springs (2020) #15 of the Best Romantic Comedies by Rotten Tomatoes. There have been so many riffs on the “Groundhog Day” formula that it can sometimes feel like the movies themselves are stuck in an endless time loop, but each subsequent iteration has tweaked the original in some way. “50 First Dates” stripped away the unexplainable metaphysics of it all for a romantic comedy mixed with Oliver Sacks's theories. “Edge of Tomorrow” added aliens and “Gears of War” cosplay to the mix. “Before I Fall” applied Harold Ramis’ concept to teen anxieties, “Happy Death Day” added a horror twist. And yet, despite “Groundhog Day” becoming a genre unto itself, Max Barbakow’s witty and wise “Palm Springs” is the first movie that doesn’t just apply that old formula to a new problem, but also fundamentally alters the basics of the equation. It’s a simple adjustment, and yet the difference feels as radical and transformative as pouring milk into a bowl of cereal. What if, instead of relegating one person to a cyclical purgatory they’re forced to repeat over and over until they learn the error of their ways, you relegated two people to the same pocket of the Twilight Zone? Imagine spending the rest of your meaningless existence with the same person. Imagine being stuck in a perpetually static purgatory where meaningful change can only be seen through the eyes of the other person suffering alongside you. 

But Nyles (Andy Samberg in one of his most realist performances) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti, a delightful force of comic impetus) aren’t married — they don’t even know each other — and the bleak desert wedding aisle is where they first meet. Nyles is there with his Instagram model girlfriend Misty (Meredith Hagner), who refuses him sex and cheats on him. But Misty isn’t the only reason why Nyles is depressed (“we’re all just lost” he mopes to anyone within earshot), or why Samberg exudes a disaffected Bill Murray vibe even before the premise reveals itself. That might have more to do with the fact that he’s woken up at this wedding a million times before, and he’s running out of ways to pass the time. The first masterstroke of Andy Siara’s relentlessly clever script is that it starts with its lead character already stranded in a limbo. Not that Sarah is up to speed. The older sister of the bride (Camila Mendes) and the black sheep of her family, Sarah is sick of herself even before she gets stuck. She doesn’t seem to be all that charmed by the super disaffected guy who wore a Hawaiian shirt to a fancy wedding, but the fact that Nyles doesn’t know her is a good enough reason to make out with him under the stars. 

The overarching plot of “Palm Springs” isn’t especially novel, but each scene is just sweet, funny, and demented enough to feel like a little surprise. Andy Siara’s script is delightful for how it beats you to the punch, running through all of the hilarious things Nyles might do to amuse himself in a deathless world (the brutally sarcastic way he says “I’ve never considered the multiverse”). But if Nyles has been stuck there long enough to have mastered every possible move, Sarah changes everything by introducing a code-breaking new variable. Something interesting I observed about the movie... do you even notice how an average romcom has little backstory about the female lead? And practically her whole point of existence in the movie is for the male lead to have a turning point? I felt a gender-reversal for that concept with this movie. We got to know so much about Sarah’s life and why she is the way she is. But we know little to nothing about Nyles life. The film cleverly makes that point right at the end when they are floating in the pool and he says “oh I have a dog, Fred, a Shaggy dog type.” The chemistry between Samberg and Milioti is off the charts and there is a sweetness in their relationship that is severely lacking these days. “Palm Springs” isn’t as magical whenever Nyles and Sarah aren’t together onscreen. If anything, “Palm Springs” has a smart pro-marriage message at a time when so many of today’s kids seem ready to relegate the very concept of marriage to “ok, boomer” status. 

On the other hand, the movie is so touching and sharp about the ideas it chooses to spotlight that — like a loving marriage — the joy it provides is more than enough to make up for the paths it doesn’t travel. Less weighty and immense than “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” but similarly concerned with the value of romantic partnership, “Palm Springs” offers a novel way to explore why the decision to share your life with someone can be more than just a band-aid placed atop a gaping wound of loneliness. Sure, “Groundhog Day” arrives at essentially the same place, but this winsome bauble of a movie is uniquely eager to embrace the idea that life isn’t quite as limitless as it seems. There are only so many things you can do in this world. As Nyles whines after we first meet him: “It’s always today.” And he’s right. But seeing your life reflected back at you through someone else’s eyes can make it that much easier to appreciate what happened yesterday, and look forward to tomorrow. In the original script, Siara clearly hints that Nyles's experimental tryst with his black friend Jeff is a prank.

EXT. DESERT TACO STAND - DAY

NYLES: (he laughs) It turns out I’m not really into dudes.

Nyles gathers their burrito wrappers and tosses each of them over his shoulder across the patio, directly into the trash. Source: www.indiewire.com