Meeting Tom Wolfe

On Thursday evening, October 20, I saw the legendary Tom Wolfe speak at the Book Culture store on 81st and Columbus Avenue here in Manhattan. He was there to talk about his book, The Kingdom of Speech. A truly magical evening. He was resplendent in his trademark white suit and entered the bookstore  carrying a hand-carved cane with a painted wolf's head at the top.  At 85, Wolfe is a bit frail walking, but once he was seated and talking he showed the ebullience of someone half his age.

I had the privilege to to chat with him for about four or five minutes and he was friendly, funny and kind -- a real gentleman. He signed my copy of The Bonfire of the Vanities and shared some anecdotes about the writing of the book. (He said he knew the book would be a success when his typist got upset when he didn't bring any pages for her one day; she made it clear that her annoyance wasn't due to the loss of income but her impatience to find out what happened in the story next.)

I asked him if Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories and radical politics, which he discusses in his new book, are connected in some way. Wolfe didn't think so. He said that Chomsky absorbed his anarchist views politics from his Jewish grandparents, who had lived in Russia under the Tsar, who and was not very kind to the Jews, to put it mildly. Wolfe sees Chomsky's politics and linguistics concepts as entirely separate mental constructs, though he does believe both of them are entirely wrong.

It's interesting that during the Q & A following Wolfe's talk, not a single person in the educated, Upper West Side audience took issue with Wolfe's critique of evolution or Chomsky's notion of a "universal grammar" built into the brain. Perhaps they were intimidated by Wolfe or felt they were simply not knowledgable enough about either evolution or linguistics to challenge his opinion. But Wolfe made it very clear that he is not a Creationist. In fact, he admits he is not a believer at all, and is "without religion." He won't call himself an atheist, though, because he considers people who label themselves such are "putting on airs."

Just for the record, he doesn't believe in The Big Bang Theory, either.

He hinted that his next book may be about social status. Which all his books have been about to some extent, but it will be fascinating if he decides to tackle the subject head-on.

In any event, getting to see and talk to Tom Wolfe was a real kick, and now I have a signed copy of what is arguably his best book. I eagerly await the next one.

Edward Albee, R.I.P

Photo by Jerry Speier.  

I briefly met the great Edward Albee years ago when I was working at Doubleday. I knew that Albee would be showing up that day to discuss with my boss a collection of his best plays, personally selected and introduced by the playwright. I came up with some absurd excuse to walk into my boss's office and in the process say hi to Albee and then make a quick exit. (Later I had  the satisfaction of proofreading the text of  Albee's elegant introduction.)  Albee's own exit at age 88 is far too soon. He was one of the giants of the American theater.

The volume published by Doubleday's Fireside Theatre book club.

High-Water Mark

Over the weekend I saw a film I can highly recommend to everyone here: David McKenzie's vastly entertaining Hell or High Water. At first it seems like another bank robbery film, a western that substitutes cars for horses, but Taylor Sheridan's script is intelligent, witty, and always couple of steps ahead of the audience. The deft performances by Chris Pine, Ben Foster, and the always welcome Jeff Bridges help make it a film where the action is always subordinated to the characters and their emotional development.  After a summer of over-plotted plodding blockbusters it's a pleasant surprise to see a stunning film that cost only 12 million dollars to make.

Tom Wolfe Takes on Darwin and Noam Chomsky!

I read Tom Wolfe's new non-fiction book, The Kingdom of Speech, over the holiday weekend. A short but immensely entertaining and provocative volume. Wolfe spends half the book eviscerating Noam Chomsky, drawing on recent research by young linguists and anthropologists to toppple the Chomskyite notions of a "Universal Grammar" and an "LAD" (Language Acquisition Device), supposedly hardwired in the brain. Along the way Wolfe demolishes Chomsky's anarchist politics, which he sees as a sentimental hangover from Chomsky's roots in the East European shtetl as well as his boyhood crush on the Spanish anarchists who briefly took over Barcelona in the late 1930s. This contoversial book is going to upset a lot of people -- neo-Darwinists, orthodox Chomskyites, and much of the cultural and scientific establishment. But most of all it is a paean to the powers of human speech, which Wolfe sees as the most powerful and defining creation of the human race. In short, a delightful and highly stimulating way to spend Labor Day weekend. To say more would ruin your own reading pleasure.

Photo by Mark Seliger.

Donald Trump and American Mass Culture

In his column in the New York Post back on May 21, "Rat Pack vs. The Hippie," John Podhoretz astutely saw the coming presidential election as a battle between two very different cultures, each of them deriving from the 1960s, and each represented by two very different baby boomers, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  For Hillary, the radicalism she discovered in late Sixties was her golden coming of age; for Trump, the early Sixties of the Rat Pack and its white (with the notable exception of Sammy Davis, Jr.) male sense of entitlement and raucous fun, was the mecca he aspired to and created around him for the rest of his life.  Podhoretz suggests that America today may well be more nostalgic for the boozy antics of the Rat Pack (though he points out that Trump himself does not drink) than for the give-peace-a-chance potheads of the hippie movement (though whether or not Hillary was an active pot smoker or, like her husband Bill, merely inhaled, is anyone's guess).  In November the electorate will get to choose which end of the 1960s decade it wants most to return to.

Like Podhoretz, I'm not a Trump supporter (see my post from July 28, 2015), but history may be on Trump's side. More than one commentator has observed over the years that "politics is downstream from culture."  In other words, the culture introduces changes into society before the political realm picks up on them. We can see how this happened in 1960, when the country fell in love with movie-star handsome John F. Kennedy -- whose father Joe owned  a movie studio during  Hollywood's golden age -- was elected president just as the Hollywood studio system with all its glamour was already becoming an object of nostalgia.  In 1980 Ronald Reagan resoundingly won the White House to the great shock of the educated class, who were thinking still viewing elections through traditional political lenses, whereas most Americans in the economically and intellectually depressed late-1970s were voting based on a growing nostalgia for what they perceived as the more optimistic and affluent 1950s -- witness the success of such TV shows as Happy Days and films like Grease.  Reagan had been a regular presence on TV in the 1950s; he was a familiar figure in American homes and implied a return to that supposedly more innocent decade. The culture had prepared the way for his election.

Similarly, we might see the backlash against the puritanical and stifling politically correct political culture of the last 15 years represented in such shows as Mad Men and The Sopranos, as well as the bevy of coarse but compelling reality TV shows, including Trump's own reality show, The Apprentice.  While the political class still thinks a presidential candidate should be more in the mold of Adlai Stevenson (or at least Barack Obama) than a reality TV star, the rest of the country is quite possibly ready to accept the latter, which may well result in a massive case of cognitive dissonance in countless homes in Cambridge, Beverly Hills, and the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The chief culprits of this victory will be the leaders of both the Democratic and Republican Party, who have not forthrightly stood up against the of politically correct culture, even as those leaders themselves enjoyed the outrages perpetrated by the characters of Mad Men and The Sopranos.  Trump feels no allegiance to the pieties and conventions of American politics past.  He is a creature of mass culture, and a canny purveyor of it as well. (It's no coincidence that Trump's favorite movie is Citizen Kane, a film he has evidently studied quite carefully.)

To repeat: politics follows culture. A Trump victory in November is by no means foreordained, but as the record of the past indicates, neither will it be a great surprise.

Images:  HBO (above) and Getty (top)

CHINATOWN as Tragedy

William Dean Howells famously said that "what the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending." Things haven't changed much in the American psyche since he made that astute observation.  Thus it's remarkable that a film like Chinatown ever got made, and it's probably only due to the breakdown of the Hollywood system and the loss of confidence in American society as a whole in the mid-70s that the film was not only made but became a huge success. 

I was thinking about Chinatown not because this is a significant anniversary -- the film was released in 1974 -- but because someone on an online forum recently insisted that the film was something of a failure for him because the ending left him feeling "despondent" and "hopeless," as so many films from the 1970s do. Another poster rightly asserted that the best endings are not happy or unhappy but appropriate.  In other words  -- mine -- they are the inevitable conclusion to a compelling dramatic action. Comedies tend to end in marriages, the birth of a baby, a feast, or a mixture of all three, suggesting that regardless of the problems presented during the play, the life of the community will go on. Tragedies end with the death of the protagonist, generally a figure important enough that his death implies disaster for the entire community. 

Tragedy had been very much on Polanski's mind in the years leading up to Chinatown: besides the horrific events experienced in his own life when the Manson family murdered his pregnant wife Sharon Tate, in 1971 Polanski directed a compelling -- and very violent -- film version of Macbeth with Jon Finch as the amoral man who would be king.

Chinatown is unusual in that the figure who immediately brings to mind a tragic character is not Jake Gittes or Noah Cross or even his daughter Evelyn, who winds up shot to death in the car at the end.  In a sense, the tragic figure is Catherine, the innocent girl who is the product of Noah Cross (perfectly played with a lizard's charm by John Huston) having sex with Evelyn, just as brilliantly played by Faye Dunaway).  Yet this is a tragedy of incest, and so Catherine/Evelyn are to some extent the same character split in two, doubled:  mother/daughter and sister/sister.  It's important to note that Hollis Mulwray, the man Catherine was raised to think was her father is not only a business partner of Noah Cross but LA's water commissioner, who's killed by Cross when he threatens to expose his former partner's effort to steal the city's water and resell it back to the city in a complex real estate scam.  We can imagine a sequel to Chinatown in which Catherine goes on to murder her father/grandfather and avenge the city he has plundered -- a scenario that is the very stuff of Greek tragedy.

Screenwriter Robert Towne's initial goal was to express his vision of Los Angeles, the town in which he had been born, grew up, and dearly loved, being raped by the corrupt city fathers who ultimately destroyed it through their insatiable greed.  In a larger sense, Los Angeles itself is the real tragic character of the film, embodied by the two women, one innocent for this world and the other too poisoned for it, each destroyed by the wealthy father who transgresses sexual boundaries as blithely as he does geographic boundaries in his crooked business scheme which steals water, the lifeblood of any city, from its deceived citizens.

Chinatown's connection to Greek tragedy can even be detected when Cross covers Catherine's eyes with his hands when her mother is shot.  Oedipus blinds himself in the play that bears his name when he learns that he killed his father and slept with his mother and gave Freud an awful lot to think about centuries later. In Chinatown, the girl's father slept with her mother/sister, who is eventually shot in the head by the police before Catherine's eyes, until they're symbolically "blinded" by Noah Cross --  the name itself is an ironic nod to both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles --  whom fate made both her father and grandfather.  It can even be argued that in covering Catherine's eyes, Cross is in fact "blinding" himself as Oedipus did, by displacing both his sexual transgression -- "I don't blame myself," he tells Jake in an earlier scene -- and the desire to shield his eyes from his crimes by covering his daughter/granddaughter's  eyes instead.  

In this regard we should remember that Jake Gittes realized that Noah Cross murdered Mulwray when Gittes discovers Cross's eyeglasses in the pond where Mulwray was murdered.  Confronting the murderer with the eyeglasses, Cross looks at them and says "What are they? What does it mean?"  Cross is feigning ignorance, but in a sense his eyes are unwilling to "see" the evidence of his crime, even when that evidence consists of his own eyeglasses.

King Lear is another towering tragedy that insinuates itself into Chinatown.  If Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier were their generation's conception of the ideal Lear, certainly the patriarchal John Huston could have been a worthy contender.  Lear has three daughters and Cross has only two, yet the doubling (criss-cross?) of Catherine as both his daughter and granddaughter in effect makes them three daughters as well. But unlike Lear, who wishes his kingdom to be inherited by the daughter who loves him most, but is tragically incapable of seeing which daughter that is, Noah Cross has no intention of leaving his kingdom to anyone, and the love he demanded from his daughter was perverse, an assault against human decency, and led to her ruin, not his.  

Cross will eventually die -- be crossed-out -- but the evil he did will live on not only in the lives he wrecked but in the very shape and soul of the city he despoiled for profit and pleasure.  In the end, the cops and private eye are mere observers and commentators, as helpless to affect the unfolding events as a Greek chorus.  And in both the Greek tragedies and this very American film, a city -- the polis -- is corrupted in the process.

Yet because this is an American film, Jake is not quite a mere observer, though his energetic efforts to find truth  and restore order ultimately  proved futile.  Chinatown tips its hat to the notion of the tragic hero's "flaw" by having Jake Gittes wear a bandage over his nose through much of the film, followed by a scar from where one of Noah crosses henchman slit his nose in order to scare him off the case. Critic Edmund Wilson writes about the idea of the artist/hero's wound in his seminal essay "The Wound and the Bow," and Polanski has some fun by playing the thug who cuts Jack Nicholson's nose with his knife -- the "wounded" artist gets to deliver the wound to the hero of his film himself.  And given the plot of Chinatown, its especially uncanny that Jack Nicholson's own mother had been an unwed 18-year old when he was born, he and was raised by her parents with his grandmother pretending to be his mother and his actual mother pretending to be his sister.  Nicholson didn't learn the truth until 1974 -- the very year Chinatown was released.  Ironies leapfrog over ironies.

But Chinatown is a work of art, not a roman à clef, propaganda, or a sedative.  It doesn't seek to change us or get us to agitate for political reform or make us leave the theater feeling "happy."  Aristotle declared that tragedy creates a catharsis in an audience that "purges them of pity and fear." I think the film does that quite brilliantly.  Yet mid-to-late century America was not ancient Greece, and it could be argued that the catharsis of Chinatown is not perfect, not quite complete. The ending does have a sting in its tail and leaves a disquiet that the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies attempted to quell.  Perhaps this is the "despondent" feeling that the poster I quoted earlier felt at the end of the film.

It's well-known that Polanski  altered  the ending of  Towne's original screenplay, which did have a "happy" ending. Here is an (admittedly rare) example of a director understanding the nature of a screenwriter's script better than the screenwriter himself did.  Ironically, Chinatown won only a single Academy Award -- for Best Original Screenplay.  

Robert Towne intended Chinatown to be a trilogy, and true to the city he had come to mistrust, things didn't work out in his favor. He lost control of the second part, which became the dismal Two Jakes, listlessly directed and starring Jack Nicholson, who had been such a revelation in the first film.  The third part was never made at all. But Chinatown gloriously exists, moving and enlightening us in its unique way, and reminding us of a time when such films could still be made in America.  I suspect even William Dean Howells might have been impressed.

(For more about Chinatown and Robert Towne, I happily urge you to read the first chapter of David Thomson's matchless history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation. In fact, while you're at it, read the entire book.)

The 3 Lives of "Dr. Strangelove"

The novelization of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satiric masterpiece "Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" by Peter George must be one of the strangest novelizations in the history of that peculiar and generally despised genre. George had originally written the 1958 novel "Red Alert" (under the pseudonym "Peter Bryant"), which Kubrick bought with the intention of making it into a film. However, as is well known, he found the somber dialogue about "megadeaths" and nuclear holocaust so absurd that he realized the movie had to be done as a black comedy. So along with George and an assist from Terry Southern, Kubrick reconfigured the script into the "Dr Strangelove" we know today.

But here's where the story gets a bit bizarre. Peter George was then assigned to write a novelization of the screenplay he'd worked on with Kubrick and Southern based on his original novel "Red Alert." That must have been a strange, even humilating, endeavor for any novelist.  George published his final novel, "Commander-1," another nuclear war story, in 1965, before committing suicide in 1966, just two years after the release of the film, and fifty years ago this year.  He apparently suffered from that occupational hazard of so many writers, alcoholism.  And he had become desperately fearful of the prospect of a real nuclear war breaking out at any moment.

George worked from an early version of the script; he didn't have access to the hilarious improvisations that Peter Sellers subsequently did during the shoot which Kubrick loved so much that he kept them in the final film. So some of the funniest lines of the movie are not in novel "Dr. Strangelove" ("You're going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola company," etc.). Not only that, Kubrick tended to cut the beginnings and endings of scenes that George left in the novel, along with a number of subplots which were also deleted by Kubrick. The upshot is that the novelization is filled with fascinating character bits and scenes that don't make it into film, including such details as the name of Slim Pickens's bomber plane, called "Leper Colony" in the book, or the words scrawled on one of the bombs ("Dear John" in the film, "Lolita" in the book.  Given that "Lolita" was Kubrick's previous film, one would have thought it would be the reverse.

Anyone who's a fan of the movie should try to find a copy of the novelization -- it's quite an interesting addition to a brilliant film.