A Blog of My Own

We attended the taping of the Letterman show that aired last night, with Natalie Portman as the main guest. Watching the show, I heard my distinctive laugh at one point during the monologue. It wasn’t on a punchline, but rather on one of those moments when Dave lets a little anxiety show. “Here’s something I found interesting…[grin/grimace] and I hope you’ll agree.” When I heard my laugh, I remembered, “Yes, only a handful of us found that plea amusing enough to make us laugh out loud…and I did seem to be the loudest.” Anyway, now my laugh is making its way around the cosmos. Perhaps an intelligent life form in some other galaxy will hear it someday, and chortle in sympathetic response.

2012 is awesome. You buy into it. Like all great science fiction, it kind of works like this: You have no idea if the premise is well-founded (neutrinos or something from the sun are acting like a microwave oven to heat up and melt the earth’s core, and the earth’s core is the cement that holds the whole surface of the earth together, so now we’re all screwed), but you don’t care; the movie has a gravity that makes you want to accept it, and once you do, everything else has internal consistency. The characters behave as they very well might. The destruction plausibly could happen exactly as the film depicts it. Etc. It’s very easy to get caught up in this film, and not only because the effects are convincing (which they are). Special effects are cool, but unless you build them on a foundation of dramatic verisimilitude, they’re stupid. 2012’s delivering on both is why I found myself involuntarily muttering “Oh, my God” more than once.

The shots in the movie are extraordinarily well planned and laid out by director Roland Emmerich. You are never confused for a second about what’s happening in the many action sequences. Whatever your own imagination or unconscious dream-state could conjure up if you were trying to terrify yourself — whatever visual information you need to get totally freaked out — Emmerich anticipates that and shows it to you.

Plus, you want a disaster movie to contain lines like, “All our scientific knowledge, and the Mayans called this right a thousand years ago.” 2012 doesn’t deprive you of them.

The movie resonates on another level. Even if the scientific principles behind it are absurd, it taps into our fear of terrorism. You know that if our enemies ever have the means, something not far afield from what you see in the movie might just happen in real life. 2012 is a safe way to see your world destroyed, because afterward you can go get a hamburger.

A layer of religious symbolism also seems embedded somewhere in the movie’s crust. After all, if the earth’s core is melting, that’s rather like “all hell breaking loose,” isn’t it? And after a while one notices that the central character, a science-fiction novelist named Jackson Curtis whose book espouses the basic goodness of man, has the initials J.C. (For that matter, so does the actor who plays him, John Cusack.) That’s fine.

Cusack is very good in the film, and Oliver Platt deserves a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

Although I expected to like the TCM documentary Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me (which I caught last night), I didn’t expect to be floored by it. But I was.

The film exists because Clint Eastwood willed it into existence. He produced the film (occasioned by the centennial of the great lyricist’s birth this month) and it bears his stamp in several ways. One of those ways is that it contains all sorts of amazing clips that never would been unearthed and never would have been licensed were it not for Eastwood’s clout. Written and directed by Bruce Ricker, who has worked with Eastwood a long time on various music and film projects (including Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser), the film is beautifully constructed (I give Eastwood credit for that as well as Ricker) and is a surprisingly satisfying account of Mercer’s life and work. Perhaps the highest praise you can give any documentary biography is that it makes you not just know the man, but feel him. This film does.

And Mercer was a really cool guy, as well as being our greatest poet. (Take that, Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.) Knowing him, and feeling him, is a good thing.

The doc contains about a minute-and-a-half of unfortunate “vanity project” flavor when Eastwood’s teenage daughter sings a Mercer song in a recording studio (she sings pleasantly but amateurishly, and I’m not sure what Eastwood was thinking other than to do something nice for his daughter), but the other 88 ½ minutes of the film are at a level of excellence seldom seen in the documentary genre. That vanity moment occurs fairly early on, so when you see it, just persevere and get past it. You will be rewarded.

While patriotism is not the subject of the film, this thorough picture of the man from Savannah made me, yes, proud to be an American. Any country that could produce a Johnny Mercer can’t be all bad. Just one more showing of the film is scheduled this month: tomorrow, Wednesday November 18 (the date of Mercer’s hundredth birthday), at 5 PM Central, on TCM. Then not again until December 19. A DVD comes out on December 8. Get it. But don’t wait for it.

Last night SNL had January Jones as Grace Kelly in a Rear Window sketch in which she kept ruining takes because couldn’t control her flatulence. Many realistic and varied fart sound effects painted (if that’s the unfortunate word) the picture.

Last year, January’s Mad Men co-star Jon Hamm did a “commercial” on the show for John Ham, perforated slices of pre-cooked deli ham in cylindrical rolls to be placed on toilet-paper dispensers in mens’ rooms.

I don’t understand why stars agree to this. It’s great for SNL hosts to be “game” and up for anything, but to associate your name and image for all time with wet flatulence and asswipes? It’s not good for the brand. From now on, no one can think of these two great Mad Men stars without these unpleasant associations coming along for the ride. I hate to see them damaged this way. Especially when all it would take to have prevented it is for them to say to the writers, “Come on guys. It’s funny…but you can do even better without resorting to bathroom humor. Let’s shoot a little higher, huh?”

I wouldn’t be surprised if the SNL writers are “inspired’ to write these sorts of fecal sketches precisely when they have a host who brings glamour to the show, as Hamm and Jones did. It’s as if they need to bring these hosts down several pegs, not for the audience’s sake, but as a way to boost their their own bitterly sick self-esteem. Defiling  Jones and Hamm by dragging them through the mud must make the writers feel better, somehow. Note to future SNL hosts in that situation: Just poo poo it.

Back in the summer of ’08, I saw (and wrote about) a production of The Music Man at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. The production was revelatory to me, because (although I’d seen, as a child, the national touring company starring Forrest Tucker as Professor Harold Hill), my main experience of the show came from the movie. Seeing the show, the real show, that Meredith Willson created the book, music and lyrics for — and which Stratford’s production served so well — gave me an appreciation for Willson’s level of invention. The Music Man is not always remembered as a particularly innovative musical, perhaps because its small-town, 1912 Iowa setting doesn’t immediately put one in mind of “innovation.” The adjective is more often applied to another musical that opened in 1957 just three months before The Music Man, West Side Story. But, without taking anything away from the Bernstein-Sondheim show, it’s possible to appreciate that The Music Man was also unlike any musical that had come before it. The opening number, “Rock Island,” performed by traveling salesmen on a train, isn’t even sung, yet it is music, so rhythmic is the dialogue Willson wrote, and so well does it capture the rhythm of the train that is the number’s setting. And then the show takes off from there. Willson strove to write dialogue so rhythmic it could become music, and song lyrics so conversational they could become speech, so that one could blend into the other with the audience scarcely being aware of the difference.

Two years after The Music Man opened, Willson wrote a book about the experience of creating the show. The show’s birth was not easy. It took years, and many false starts; Willson’s script went through forty drafts in all. Not surprisingly (given the surplus of charm and wit Willson was able to put into The Music Man), the book about the creation is a fun and fascinating read. Titled But He Doesn’t Know the Territory, it went out of print and stayed that way for a long time, but this past summer it came back into print, and if you like musical theater, you should get it and read it.

Maybe it will take longer than 70 or 80 years for Holocaust-induced paranoia to fully disappear from the minds of American Jews; I know that one recent episode of a TV show, and one current movie, have reawakened it in me.

Both works were created by Jewish writers. The TV show stuck a thumb in the eye of the Christian majority, while the movie exposed to the world as unattractive a picture of a Jewish community as I have ever seen. (I have to say, however, that I have not seen any Nazi propaganda films.)

Both the TV show and the movie are daring. Daring in two senses. First, in the sense of brave. Second, in the more literal sense that they actually dare the Christian majority to hate us, and to do something about it.

On a recent episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry’s urine backsplashes from the toilet in the home of a fundamentalist Christian onto a painting of Jesus hanging on the wall, so that a droplet appears to the homeowner to be a tear falling miraculously from Jesus’s eye. The Catholic League last week complained, and I can see why. If Christian characters in a sitcom defiled a Jewish symbol in a way remotely like this, there’d be an uproar like you wouldn’t believe. Of course, the fact that Christians are a huge majority in the population and Jews a tiny minority alters the calculus of the whole thing, and makes the offense somehow more “permissible” (perhaps), but still. Can we actually get away with this stuff?

In A Serious Man, set in the Jewish community of a Minneapolis suburb in 1967, Joel and Ethan Coen display for us a gallery of grotesques. Nearly every character is ugly on some level — most of them physically. They are made-up and photographed so as to magnify the distortions in their features. The external ugliness seems meant to manifest a soul-sickness inside. Everyone is a victim or a predator. Leaders of the community are revealed as pious hypocrites. People behave unconscionably toward one another, or with unpardonable self-absorption. One poor shnook has a medical condition which involves something unspeakable draining out of his neck into a tube at all times, in a manner suggestive of some sort of space-alien fluid. Although there is a worst-nightmare quality to all of it rather than a sense of realism, it is impossible completely to dismiss as fantasy, since it has an uncomfortable truth, as nightmares do. (Otherwise they couldn’t scare us.)

We know that what’s on offer in this movie is not all there is to the real-life Jewish community. The real-life Jewish community contains a rich vein of inner and outer beauty, true (not hypocritical) morality, concern for fellow man (Jew and non-Jew alike), and gratitude for God’s blessings. OK, but all of that acknowledged — would this movie make any sense at all if it had been, instead, about life among the Swedes? I worry that the answer is no.

I felt nervous watching the film. I wished that some sort of Proof of Judaism card had been required for admission, so that we wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of others. I derived comfort from the fact that the movie isn’t a big hit, and not a lot of people may see it. But fat chance of that, now that the movie is being talked about as a serious contender for a Best Picture Oscar.

Of course, the catch 22 with my fear about how these characters are depicted (there’s always a catch 22 with us, isn’t there? — not for nothing was Catch 22 written by Joseph Heller, a Jew) is that the distortions in these characters’ personalities are a product of their fear of the society outside their (invisible) ghetto-suburban walls. The grotesqueries of the community in the film — the things that make the grotesqueries feel so Jewish, and fuel my paranoia about what the film will do to the Jewish reputation — those malformations themselves are stigmata of the characters’ completely-earned, historically-justified anxiety. Give this people a chance not to be persecuted for a century or two, and they might even become normal. I get it; and audiences who think a bit about the film may get it.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t look good.

And that may be the point for Larry David and the Coen Brothers. In being daring enough (in both senses of the word) to show something that doesn’t look good, they may, perversely, be searching for security. In their freedom, a freedom unlike any that Jews have known since Jews began, their (perhaps unconscious) agenda may be to say: “OK, Majority, we’re testing. Testing your tolerance, testing the limits of our freedom to provoke you and still survive. We’re going to give you every excuse to hate us, and if you still don’t — if we can show you this, and you still don’t round us all up and put us into cattle cars — well, then, I guess we Jews really are finally and truly safe.”

From their mouths to God’s ear.