A Very Proper and Decorous English Heist

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 54
Charles Crichton (director), The Lavender Hill Mob

Henry Holland (Alec Guinness) is the epitome of the postwar British nothing man: firmly middle class and middle management, he has little to show for his life. He’s spent twenty years supervising gold bullion shipments for a London commercial bank, handling money he’ll never be allowed to touch. One day his bank announces plans to move him to another department, and Henry decides to act. He’ll never see such money himself unless he steals it.

For approximately ten years after World War II, Ealing Studios, Britain’s longest surviving film studio, produced a string of comedies so consistent, they became a brand. They mixed tones throughout, shifting from dry wordplay and dark sarcasm, straight into loud, garish slapstick, often in the same scene. They shared certain general themes, though, especially the collision between Old Britain, wounded by the war, and a chaotic, freebooting new culture that hadn’t quite found its identity.

When Henry discovers his neighbor, Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway), owns a small-scale metal foundry, the men decide to collaborate on Henry’s hastily considered heist. Through a caper too silly to recount, Henry and Alfred recruit two small-time hoodlums to perform the actual robbery. This union of jobs, classes, and accents makes a statement about Britain in 1951: the old divisions between castes are melting away. Something new is arising, and that something is probably criminal.

Besides their themes, the classic Ealing comedies shared other traits. Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway were two among a rotating repertory company appearing in several movies. Films were shot in real-life London streets, and in studios built in repurposed wartime aircraft hangars. The movies’ design bespeaks a Britain that existed only briefly, during the decades between Churchill and Thatcher: hung up on propriety and dignity, but also suddenly young, history bombed away in the Blitz.

The robbery is plucky, entrepreneurial, almost downright admirable. Henry’s crew execute a slapstick heist so silly, the Keystone Kops would’ve doffed their hats. But having done it, the crew find themselves actually holding a vanload of gold bullion, in a country still cash-strapped and suffering under wartime rationing. Gold is worthless, they discover, unless they can sell it. Which means smuggling it out of the country under the Metropolitan Police’s watchful, but easily distracted, eye.

Like in all Ealing comedies, indeed most of 20^th century British comedy, much of the humor comes from watching pretentions disintegrate. In another Guinness starring vehicle, The Man in the White Suit, this disintegration is literal, as conflicting sides tear the title character’s newfangled fabric to shreds. Here, it’s more metaphorical. The more our protagonists’ suits become rumpled, the more their hats fly off in frantic pursuits, the more they escape their prewar class roles.

Alec Guinness (left) and Stanley Holloway in The Lavender Hill Mob

This movie culminates in the police pursuing our antiheroes through London streets. This was seventeen years before Steve McQueen’s Bullitt made car chases a cinema staple, so Henry and Alfred make their own rules: frantic but dignified, they never forget their place. They use police tactics to distract the police, turning British decorum against itself, but their insistence on such polite observance eventually dooms them. These sports can escape everything—except their own British nature.

Alec Guinness plays Henry Holland with a gravitas which exceeds one character. In later years, he would become famous for playing implacable elder statesmen in classics like The Bridge on the River Kwai and the original Star Wars. This character has seeds of these more famous roles, but Guinness survives indignities we can’t imagine Obi-Wan Kenobi facing. Henry Holland goes from clerk to mastermind to goofy fugitive, all with seamless integrity. Guinness’ decorum never cracks.

This movie is worth watching in itself, but it also introduces the whole Ealing subgenre. It showcases the personalities, themes, and storytelling that made Ealing a classic. Most Ealing comedies were American successes, and repertory actors, especially Guinness, became American stars. But the genre lasted only briefly; the BBC bought the studio in 1957, and attempts to recapture the Ealing magic failed. Tom Hanks took Guinness’ role in a remake of The Ladykillers, and tanked.

Put briefly, the category is a surviving emblem of a time, place, and culture. Like Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, or Douglas Adams’ Arthur Dent, Guinness’ Henry Holland is a British man in a time when being British didn’t mean much anymore. This movie, with its postwar man struggling for dignity amid changing times and a mobilized proletariat, couldn’t have been made any earlier or later than it was. Watching it is like a time machine.

Netflix Presents: the New, Improved Jimmy Carr!

Jimmy Carr in his newest special, Natural Born Killer (Netflix photo)

Content warning: this essay will directly address the vulgar, transgressive, and sexually violent themes common to Jimmy Carr's stand-up comedy.

Jimmy Carr’s latest Netflix special, Natural Born Killer, features an extended riff on the fatuousness of the phrase “date rape.” He suggests that the qualifying prefix is a nicey-poo addition that makes the crime less horrific, mainly for the perpetrator. This sounds particularly weird coming from Carr, whose content has often featured sexually transgressive themes. Carr’s stock character is a shitty, libidinous satyr. This is just the first time he’s felt compelled to justify himself.

I have a particular fondness for one-liner comics. Milton Jones, Jack Handey, Gary Delaney, Steven Wright. Jokers who don’t require lengthy contexts to understand their punchlines, they just zap us with abrupt reversals or insightful wordplay. Short, incisive jokes often reveal deeper truths. With Jimmy Carr in particular, whose routine involves teasing audiences’ bottom limit, his transgressive themes often reveal that his audience, no matter how jaded they think themselves, still has a bottom limit.

Carr loves jokes he knows defensive interests will hate. In past one-hour specials, he’s lobbed out what he calls “career-ending jokes”; this time, he boasts of his intent to get “cancelled.” Not for nothing, either, as his routine has involved jabs at the disabled, the Holocaust, religion, and women. He’s previously told rape jokes, and jokes which imply he’s a drug-addicted pedophile. The above-mentioned “date rape” diatribe comes only after delivering a trademarked rape one-liner.

To his credit, Carr’s transgressive jokes make himself the bad person, never the victim. Unlike, say, Louis CK, Carr doesn’t use his aggressive tone to garner audience sympathy or wallow in self-pity/; you’re supposed to hate his stage persona. But Carr has always played that persona with winking acknowledgment that, like us, he’s in on the joke. His character knows what an awful human being he is, and invites us to participate in the pile-on.

This time, Carr doesn’t do that. He delivers a lewd joke, then counters with an explicit explanation of why we shouldn’t find such content funny. Not just once, either: he breaks character multiple times, sometimes for several straight minutes, and culminates the performance riffing extensively on the importance of consent. As he lectures viewers why we shouldn’t have laughed at the joke he just delivered, we wonder: who is this guy wearing Jimmy Carr’s face?

Louis CK

Perhaps there’s an autobiographical reason for Carr’s reversal. He became a father for the first time in 2019, aged forty-seven. At approximately the halfway point of this performance, he includes a nearly three-minute narrative of how he feared his child’s premature birth might’ve blunted his edge. The story ends with him realizing he still had it, apparently deaf to the irony that a one-liner comedian just took nearly three minutes to establish one punch line!

I’m reminded of Jimmy Kimmel, another Jimmy famous for working blue who attempted to reinvent himself. Kimmel, previously co-host of the basic cable raunch-fest The Man Show, turned into an advocate for radical empathy when he transferred to broadcast TV, frequently turning weepy-eyed at expressions of injustice. His former co-host Adam Carolla, meanwhile, has become a Fox News and right-wing podcast staple, doubling down on his basic cable persona. Again, audiences seek the authentic Jimmy.

Please don’t misunderstand, I believe both Jimmys could have their secular “come-to-Jesus moment.” As a former basic White conservative myself, I know irreligious conversions happen. Yet Carr attempts to do double duty, delivering the transgressive joke before lecturing us on why our laughter makes us bad people. His fatherhood narrative ends with a coat-hanger abortion joke. His consent riff is him lecturing a young audience member on when it’s okay to “get your dick out.”

Because there’s definitely a place for such content. We laugh at Carr’s blue material because we recognize something of ourselves. No matter how enlightened or empathetic we’ve become, we possess the same vulgar, libidinous id; becoming an adult doesn’t mean we’ve defeated those tendencies, only that we’ve learned to conceal them in public. Carr is funny because when he delivers his raunchy content, he helps us compartmentalize that side, and leave it in the theater.

This time, I’m left confused. When I laugh at Carr’s blue material, then he lectures me directly on why his own content wasn’t actually funny, I wonder: have I changed? Or has he? Previously, Carr encouraged us to leave the unrestrained id with him, onstage. Now, he lectures us, and I feel compelled to conceal my laughter. I can’t relinquish my id, because I can’t admit I have one. So it comes home with me.

Lights, Camera, Inaction

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 50
Andrew Niccol (writer-director), S1m0ne

Veteran movie director Victor Taransky has grown disillusioned with Hollywood: with demanding actors, interfering producers, and insatiable audiences. He got into movies to create art, but he’s become beholden to the money. Then one day, a computer programmer approaches Taransky with a priceless invention: a completely digital actress. Taransky thinks he’s found his artistic salvation. But controlling the perfect actress simply creates new problems he never anticipated.

This movie garnered lukewarm reviews and barely broke even upon release in 2002; it lacked studio support, and never found an audience until its home media release. Yet it’s received a new lease on life with recent developments, real and proposed, in computer learning heuristics. Promises which this movie made in 2002, Hollywood wants to fulfill today. It’s almost like the studios didn’t understand this movie’s parable of artistic control.

Simulation One, whom Taransky rechristens Simone, is the filmmaker’s ideal: a beautiful, graceful, and infinitely adaptable actress who makes no demands. She exists entirely as she is and follows Taransky’s directions without question. Her human costars, who have frequently grown indolent in their fame, find themselves inspired to resume improving themselves. Studio executives count their receipts. Nobody ever questions why they’ve never met Simone, who gets inserted in postproduction.

Al Pacino plays Victor Taransky much like he played Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, as a frazzled wreck whose failures push him to take extreme measures. Like Wortzik, Taransky doesn’t know how to control the monster he’s created. (For purely plot reasons, the programmer who wrote Simone’s code is excluded from the story.) He simply wants to finish his latest big-screen extravaganza after his designated star abandons the set.

Canadian model Rachel Roberts plays Simone as an Anglo-American icon of fair-skinned beauty. Roberts had done some advertising campaigns, but had no prior acting credits, making her, like Simone, a complete cypher. To enhance the illusion, the theatrical release didn’t include Roberts’ name; she wasn’t added to the credits until the home media release. Perhaps learning from this movie’s message, Roberts chose to avoid stardom, pursuing only occasional guest roles.

Rachel Roberts in her only starring role, as the title character in Andrew Niccol's S1m0ne

Simone salvages not only Taransky’s picture, but his foundering career. Audiences, costars, and studio execs love her. Taransky struggles to handle the sudden demand for his newest discovery, whom he cannot admit is phony. Managing Simone’s career quickly becomes his full-time job, one that keeps him away from the family whom he already barely knows. Taransky invented Simone to control her, but before long, she controls him.

Everyone seemingly loves Simone. But the longer we watch, the clearer it becomes that nobody really loves Simone; they imbue her with their favorite virtues, and idolize the myth they’ve created. The movie includes a post-credits scene, a relative rarity pre-MCU, encapsulating this perfectly: a moon-eyed fan watches rigged footage of Simone and locks onto one insignificant detail. From that, he deduces they’re star-crossed, if only he could meet her.

Again, Taransky initially loves Simone because she makes no demands whatsoever. Contrast this with his snippy studio-chosen star, played by Winona Ryder, whose ever-shifting demands become costlier than his actual shooting budget. But the fewer demands Simone makes, the more demands Taransky starts receiving from other stakeholders. Everyone wants something from her: money, art, public morals. Taransky, the only one who knows how to operate her program, has to deliver.

These aren’t fiddling issues. The exact reasons Victor Taransky initially loves Simone are the exact reasons the AMPTP recently threatened to replace background extras with scanned images. Hollywood wants compliant actors who don’t expect to be paid, respected, or kept safe. Lucasfilm, a Disney subsidiary, owns James Earl Jones’ voice, ensuring he’ll continue performing Darth Vader, for free, long after he’s laid in clay.

The whole point of Simone is that the Hollywood mogul thinks he’ll control her; the whole lesson is that he’s wrong. The traits of compliance and adaptability which Taransky loves, increase the demands laid upon him. His attempts disavow Simone only create new problems, as not only do studio execs resent the lost revenue, but audiences resent the lost icon who saw their own supposed virtues in her.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol’s previous filmography includes Gattaca and The Truman Show, movies about the futility of chasing perfection and control. This is Niccol’s first attempt at comedy, which perhaps threw reviewers, who didn’t always grasp his dry, understated style. Though Niccol offers only occasional laugh-out-loud moments, his deft irony underscores the absurdity of his situation. And it presciently foreshadows the path Hollywood has taken since.

Laughter From the Ninth Circle of Hell

Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx, That's Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work For Them

It’s become a doctrine among American progressives that conservatives just aren’t funny. The Left has SNL, Jon Stewart, and the whole late-night crew. What does the Right have? [Insert list of failed right-wing comedy franchises here.] This conviction, though, crumbles on one important fact: Greg Gutfeld, Fox News’ late-night anchor star, regularly outscores leftist network programming in ratings. Leftists don’t find conservative comedy funny, but it definitely exists.

Media studies professors Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx admit they aren’t funny. Their purpose isn’t to entertain, but to lead a Left-minded audience through the frequently labyrinthine conservative entertainment industry. They describe it as “the Right-Wing Comedy Complex,” and compare it to a shopping mall. There’s the big-box store for mainstream buyers, the cigar shop for men looking for hetero chest-thumping, and a basement full of terrifying, violent wares.

Leftists frequently describe Fox News stalwarts Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters as unfunny, and Watters particularly as often racist. But they’re secure ratings winners; by 2021, Gutfeld had more viewers than Stephen Colbert. In our authors’ telling, their comedy appears to be an out-and-out satire of TV comedy itself. (I seldom watch the idiot box anymore, so I trust the authors’ narrative.) This satire invites viewers to consider themselves “in on” the joke.

Where Gutfeld makes an explicit point, even if Leftists don’t get it, more conventional right-wing comics just exist. Dennis Miller and Tim Allen appeal to conservative audiences, our authors claim, because they basically haven’t changed much in twenty-five years. These comics create a familiar atmosphere that consumers can snuggle under like a weighted blanket. Allen does this explicitly, structuring his current TV persona around nostalgia for bygone social roles.

From this mainstream, highly visible perch, Sienkiewicz and Marx descend into a more self-contained, and sometimes ugly, lower depth. One can question Ben Shapiro’s or Stephen Crowder’s comedy bona fides, for instance, but they use humor to convey messages— although those messages are sometimes freighted with old-school racism. And while not everyone likes The Babylon Bee, its writers have mastered social media manipulation for vast, lucrative clicks.

Matt Sienkiewicz (left) and Nick Marx

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Conservative and right-libertarian podcasters corral young, mostly White audiences into networks where they can disguise sometimes repellent opinions as “just a joke.” As our authors write, analysis and nuance aren’t very profitable at this level; inflammatory or hateful sayings sell. Professional trolls like Michael Malice and Gavin McInnes don’t even pretend to express convictions; they only want to make po-faced progressives lose their composure in public.

Spectators like me wouldn’t find this “comedy” funny. But they come together, Voltron-like, to create a media landscape which holds its audience, provides its content creators with a successful living, and gives the conservative political movement an identity. After all, Evangelical Christians, conventional libertarians, and White nationalists don’t have much in common; but they can laugh at similar jokes, and that’s almost like being unified.

Much as I appreciated our authors’ analysis, I found something missing: the audience. Who consumes conservative comedy? Only fleetingly, in one anecdote in the conclusion, do they describe an audience. Gutfeld and Tim Allen are supported by advertisers, but many of these subjects rely on direct subscribers and Patreon backers, especially the podcasters they exhaustively dissect. What’s their relationship with the product? I still couldn’t quite say.

They also briefly, in the introduction, touch on something they never quite return to: the American media landscape has changed rapidly. Twenty years ago, someone like Jon Stewart could command massive audiences nightly just by showing up, because there were considerably fewer media outlets. The rise of à la carte media changed not only how audiences consume, but also how creators make, their platforms. This seems relevant.

Our authors’ willingness to subject themselves to media products that their chosen audience would find repellent matters. Most readers couldn’t spare the time necessary to consume this many TV episodes, streaming videos, and podcasts. They consider a broad cross-section of conservative comedy, and analyze it for a mainly progressive audience. This lets us understand the right-wing comedic viewpoint, without having to get lost in it. Thanks.

Perhaps my greatest takeaway from this book is that comedy isn’t unitary. My dad doesn’t appreciate Monty Python, and never will. Likewise, I’ll never find Ryan Long or the Legion of Skanks podcast, two conservative “comedy” sources detailed herein, funny. But that doesn’t mean, as long-faced progressive scolds claim, that their content isn’t funny. It means we need to take opposing positions seriously, even when we don’t enjoy them.

Doctor Who and the Light of Truth

Douglas Adams and James Goss, Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen

The Doctor and Romana receive an alert that the universe is about to end, again. Must be Thursday. So they trace the signal to its source: Lord’s Cricket Ground, London. They arrive just in time to witness murderous robots in cricket players’ uniforms storm the field. It seems the consummately British game of cricket is secretly a reenactment of an ancient interstellar war, and after centuries, the Krikkitmen have returned.

If this sounds hauntingly familiar, well spotted. Douglas Adams pitched this story to the BBC twice: first with the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane, then years later, with the Fourth Doctor and Romana. When Auntie Beeb passed twice, Adams felt strongly enough about his spec script that he removed all franchise references he didn’t own. He rewrote it as the third Hitchhiker’s Guide novel: Life, the Universe, and Everything.

When the TARDIS crew return to Gallifrey, the Time Lords dismiss their urgent pleas. Everyone knows the Krikkitmen were defeated æons ago; the idea they might return is preposterous. But apparently, there’s a higher power at play. Some transcendent being is prepared to destroy reality itself in order to complete a mission left half-finished in dark and distant ages. So once again, the Doctor and Romana must fight alone.

James Goss formerly managed the BBC’s dedicated Doctor Who website, making himself a nexus of fan culture. Since then, he’s written (or ghostwritten) several DW-related novels, perfecting the ability to mimic franchise writers’ voices from ages past. Here, he perfectly channels not only Douglas Adams’ fast-paced Oxbridge humor, but his themes, particularly his disdain for warmongers and organized religion. It really feels like a Douglas Adams novel.

Douglas Adams

Dedicated Douglas Adams fans will recognize how Goss sets himself a difficult challenge here. Goss uses Adams’ final DW-branded notes, striving to recapture Adams’ sardonic but scientifically informed tone. But he can’t just recreate Life, the Universe, and Everything beat-for-beat. The hybrid story does resemble Adams’ previously-written plot enough to feel familiar, but also recaptures the smart, languorous tone of 1970s-era Doctor Who.

The resulting story recaptures what fans loved about the series during that era. It caroms among dozens of planets, features loads of explosions and dramatic cliffhangers, and drops punchlines at unexpected dramatic moments. It takes jabs at then-current politics, direct to the face. And it features the Fourth Doctor in his element: bored in the midst of galaxy-spanning conflict, tired of his extremely long life but unwilling to die.

It also shoehorns in Adams’ notorious erudition. While the story’s political jibes are overt and aggressive, its intellectual themes are more subtle. By stressing how cricket, the game, quietly recreates a terrible war that game-players have long forgotten, it emphasizes how much of everyday ritual is designed to memorialize [sic] historical events we’ve forgotten. Adams was a follower of Sir J.G. Frasier, which some readers will recognize.

Specifically, Frasier believed that certain traditions, like patriotism and religion, were rituals conducted to remember important events that happened in the honored past. Unfortunately, those rituals eventually become more important than the events they commemorate, and the original events get forgotten. People go to church, or go to war, to acknowledge important truths. Exactly what those truths are, however, becomes lost in the clouds. This story makes that symbolism explicit.

James Goss

In contrast, the Doctor exists entirely as he is. As a time traveler, he can’t lose track of the original meanings behind favorite traditions; chances are, he was there when those traditions were created. He has the ability to pierce the veil that covers the minds of mere mortals. Which, in this book, he does literally, bringing the light of truth to a civilization shrouded in generations of darkness.

It’s possible to read this novel as a fun, fast-paced, silly adventure. It captures what fans love about classic Doctor Who, which isn’t entirely surprising; Douglas Adams was showrunner during the series’ highest-rated years. But it also continues Adams’ longstanding pattern of using slapstick comedy to address the themes he considered important, particularly humankind’s tendency to cling mindlessly to traditions. For broad, dumb comedy, this story is remarkably erudite.

In reviewing books, I don’t normally recommend particular formats for reading. However, for specifically this book, I strongly suggest fans consider grabbing the audiobook. It contains the unabridged novel text, but voice actor Dan Starkey, famous among Doctor Who fans as Strax the Sontaran, manages to create a roster of distinct voices, including a Tom Baker impersonation so uncanny, I thought the Fourth Doctor was in the studio.

Okay, Maybe Panic a Little

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Primary Phase

You already know the basic story: the Earth is destroyed by the galactic Planning Council, to build a hyperspace express route. The only human saved is Arthur Dent, a sniveling wet rag of a man whose response to the grandeur of galactic civilization is to moan constantly. Arthur and his fellow hitchhikers have a string of slapstick misadventures, which never fail to end with them taking a sudden, humiliating pratfall.

Like I imagine happened for most American audiences, I first encountered The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy based on Douglas Adams’ 1979 novel adaptation. (Younger audiences’ first experience might’ve been the 2005 movie.) Released in the shadow of that other science fiction extravaganza, the original Star Wars, that novel must’ve been bracing and electrifying on release. It took sci-fi’s founding principles seriously, without being po-faced and somber about them.

But it’s notably different, hearing Adams’ original radio series. Though it contains the same characters enacting the same jokes, the radio series’ auditory qualities guide listeners through the story in a different way. It’s difficult to encompass how fast-moving the original series was without hearing it. Propelled along by Adams’ frenetic pacing, Arthur Dent’s feelings of helplessness suddenly make more sense: we, too, feel overwhelmed and small.

Adams’ picaresque writing doesn’t really feature a through-line, just a succession of characters who face whatever situations Adams’ fertile mind can throw at them. He draws on shopworn science fiction stereotypes, but also on what were, in 1978, cutting-edge scientific and technological hypotheses. Perhaps surprising for a comedy series, Adams makes a more concerted effort to explain faster-than-light travel than either Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas ever did.

Simon Jones as Arthur really captures his character’s feckless desperation. He starts the story pugnacious and willful, famously eager to lay himself in front of a bulldozer to protect his house. But across six episodes, his essential inability to fight the tides of a mechanical universe becomes impossible to ignore. Like postwar British culture overall, Arthur’s illusions of Churchillian aplomb prove worthless, and worse, silly.

Geoffrey McGivern as Ford Prefect has the debonair swagger to which Arthur aspires. But through the series, his puffery proves as useless as Arthur’s whinging. Ford believes himself a wise Cicerone showing his bumpkin friend around a galaxy heady with wonder and light. But as we watch him from outside, he’s clearly just more willing to be wrong. He doesn’t let one humiliation stop him from being equally cocksure next time.

l-r: Simon Jones, Mark Wing-Davy, and Geoffrey McGivern
(Arthur Dent, Zaphod Beeblebrox, and Ford Prefect) at a 2014 cast reunion

Equal to Adams’ actors, his soundscapes really sell his story. Aided by the pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Adams and his team created innovative audio effects to depict a lush, crowded, entropy-filled galaxy. Seriously, when a console computer in this story chimes, it does so with enough panache that you virtually see an Apple IIe monitor kicking over. This is a universe teeming with life and technology.

But Adams doesn’t confuse “life” with “meaning.” A lifelong atheist who rejected the anthropic principle, Adams despised writers who felt obliged to shoehorn moral lessons into their writing. Life, for him, was a series of absurd accidents, and some people emerged from that okay, I guess. That comes across in his storytelling: every time his characters appear poised for a moral breakthrough, they inevitably slip on a banana peel.

If Adams’ story has a moral lesson, it’s this: we’re all bound for disappointment. The more assertively his characters make plans, the more certain their eventual failure. Adams rejects both Christian morality, which separates people into saints and sinners, and Nietzschean ethics, which separates people into powerful and powerless. The only distinction Adams makes is whether characters face defeat with composure, or go down whining.

Before creating his Hitchhiker franchise, Adams already had a robust science fiction media career. He’d written or co-written two Doctor Who serials, and after this series, he became Doctor Who showrunner for a year, writing in-jokes into the episodes. His disgust with the technical limitations of broadcast technology comes across in this series. He abandons all pretense of “realism” and lets himself have as much fun as the medium allows.

Audiences who have read Adams’ Hitchhiker novels won’t find the contents of this series new. Everything contained in these six episodes made it into the first two novels, except one ancillary scene that was probably written by script doctor John Lloyd. The benefit of hearing it isn’t the content, but the experience of complete loss of control, being swept along at somebody else’s pace, which was what Adams probably intended.

On a related topic:
Will the Real Arthur Dent Please Stand Up?

Will the Real Arthur Dent Please Stand Up?

Simon Jones as Arthur Dent in 1981

I re-watched the 1981 television adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the first time since VHS days recently, and something struck me about Arthur Dent. Through the years, I’ve read him described as the story’s protagonist, antihero, viewpoint character, or voice, but importantly, never as the hero. Watching it again, it seemed glaring, what a wet rag Arthur Dent is. One wonders how such a gormless character can have such lasting appeal.

Simon Jones played Arthur Dent on TV, and also radio, audiobooks, and occasionally onstage. Writer Douglas Adams reputedly wrote Arthur specifically for Jones, with whom he performed in the Cambridge Footlights; and Jones ducked into the role, off-and-on, for twenty-five years, from 1978 to 2003. Only thirty-one when he played Arthur on TV, Jones is tall and good-looking, with broad shoulders and lustrous hair; yet he makes Arthur look childlike, a black hole of charisma.

Contrast Martin Freeman, who played Arthur in Garth Jennings’ 2005 HHGttG movie. Freeman is almost studiously average: in height, looks, body type. Freeman’s Arthur is a mildly altered version of Tim Canterbury, the role from The Office that made Freeman famous: amiable and kind, but largely forgettable. Yet, like Freeman’s other major big-screen role, Bilbo Baggins, this Arthur grows into his newfound role. He starts relishing confrontations with aliens, and eventually embraces the hitchhiking life.

Perhaps these different Arthurs reflect their creator, Douglas Adams, a man who struggled with identity throughout his career. In the introduction printed in most omnibus editions of his HHGttG novels, Adams describes conceiving the story’s first core while hitchhiking aimlessly around Europe after college, a nominal adult nevertheless lacking direction, both literally and figuratively. The story only took form, though during a period of prolonged pessimism, when he wrote it specifically to destroy planet Earth.

Adams’ original Arthur reflects both Adams’ frequently purposeless life, and Britain a generation after World War II. Witnessing its global empire enduring its death throes, Britain produced new literary heroes: venal monsters fighting international tyranny, like John le Carré’s George Smiley, or pathetic, nebulous, frequently comedic entities like Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. Clearly, Arthur Dent falls into the latter category: his individual wandering and lack of direction reflects the United Kingdom’s national sense of futility.

Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent in 2005

For Arthur, in the original radio and TV series, this directionlessness manifests as frequent whining. “I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style,” Jones’ Arthur mewls, almost directly into the camera. Presumably, Adams’ first-generation British audience would’ve understood why that complaint mattered—and also why, when that complaint passed into a wormhole, it would’ve offended two warlike races preparing for battle. Because such a whimper certainly would have offended Brits of Churchill’s generation.

Notably, that whine doesn’t appear in the 2005 movie. Though the movie dropped four years after Adams’ passing, Adams was involved in the movie’s production for twenty years, and the final production used a lightly doctored version of Adams’ own script. (The movie’s development hell caused Adams’ lack of productivity through the 1990s.) Presumably Adams himself excised that moment from the story. It reflected a moment long past, both for Britain generally, and Adams personally.

My theory is: Adams himself changed. Adams cranked out two radio series of HHGttG and four novels in quick succession, from 1978 to 1984, then went suspiciously quiet. Notoriously bad at deadlines, Adams only produced the fifth novel eight years later, in 1992. That novel, Mostly Harmless, is markedly different from the previous four. Largely dry, often angry, and lacking Adams’ trademark wordplay, it features Arthur living mostly in one place, his hitchhiking days over.

It also features Arthur raising the teenage daughter he never knew he had. Adams married in 1991, and though his only daughter wasn’t born until 1994, surely he understood fatherhood was a possibility. Forced to take stock, Adams probably decided that wandering through life, lacking purpose and goals, wasn’t acceptable anymore. A lifelong atheist, Adams couldn’t derive purpose from transcendence; therefore he had to manufacture it internally. Aimless wandering became a journey towards a destination.

That, I believe, conditions these two different Arthurs. Simon Jones’ Arthur reflects a new Britain, born of wartime conditions, trapped in protracted adolescence. Martin Freeman’s Arthur reflects Douglas Adams specifically, a man who got away with living like a teenager well into his forties, suddenly accepting adulthood. Had Adams lived, one wonders how the character would’ve continued evolving: Adams would be pushing seventy now. We, his audience, have the opportunity to continue evolving with him.

Kevin Kline and the New(ish) Deal

1001 Movies To See Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 42
Ivan Reitman (director), Dave

William Harrison Mitchell and Dave Kovic live in completely different worlds. Though both occupy Washington, DC, President Mitchell is an angry, dishonest schemer. Humble Dave, by contrast, runs a jobs placement agency in Georgetown, and moonlights as a President Mitchell impersonator. This sideline draws official attention, because the White House needs a body double to protect Mitchell’s extramarital affairs.

Czech-born Canadian director Ivan Reitman spent the 1980s directing “Little Guy Makes Good” movies like Stripes and Ghostbusters. The 1990s, however, shifted his outlook—this movie dropped just four months into Bill Clinton’s presidency. Though Clinton superficially looked like an Ivan Reitman character come to life, his infidelities were already widely rumored, and he had a notorious off-camera temper. Reitman latched onto this duality and ran.

Dave (Kevin Kline), a natural ham with a big heart, thinks his top-level assignment is a one-night stand. However, President Mitchell (also Kline) suffers a catastrophic stroke mid-coitus with a junior White House staffer. So Chief of Staff Bob Alexander (Frank Langella) contracts Dave as the President’s stand-in, to avoid scandal. Alexander successfully corralled Mitchell’s ambitions and anger for years, so he figures a schmendrick like Dave will be easy.

White House officials take Dave on official photo ops, letting his winning smile and telegenic charm smooth passage of party-line bills. Dave is, at first, happy to let Alexander run the actual presidency. However, Alexander’s ham-fisted budget cuts soon jeopardize a project close to Dave’s heart. Turns out, Dave actually believes the optimistic message behind which President Mitchell got elected; he has no patience with Washington’s official cynicism.

So Dave does what comes naturally to him: he enlists the camera’s aide. While Bob Alexander writes policy in a locked room (and President Mitchell lies comatose in an unlisted clinic), Dave conducts Cabinet-level log-rolling sessions on primetime network news. With all American watching, Dave soon swings White House policy to match the official rhetoric. Alexander, long the power behind the throne, finds himself out in the cold.

This movie’s comments about President Clinton’s personal life, some of which seem almost prescient, could easily overshadow its comments about his policies. Clinton secured the Democratic nomination, in 1992, partly by promising to deepen and extend President Reagan’s draconian cuts to America’s social safety net. Given Clinton’s “Man From Hope” oratory, it’s easy to forget he promised “the end of welfare as we know it” during his longshot primary campaign.

Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver in Ivan Reitman's Dave

Nobody seems more surprised by Dave’s sifting priorities than First Lady Ellen Mitchell (Sigourney Weaver). Though the Mitchells maintained a unified front for the camera, Bill’s infidelities, and his willingness to compromise his principles, long since drove Ellen away. They remain married because it serves their shared ambitions: he wants power, she wants to do actual good in the world. Ellen, unaware of Bill’s stroke, suspects Dave is a chameleon.

The brewing conflict between Dave and Alexander soon reaches boiling point. Alexander has blackmail data enough to see Dave arrested, but Dave has the nation’s sympathies. Trapped in a cycle of mutually assured destruction, we only wonder which will unseat the other first. Chronic liar Alexander has the ability to destroy Dave simply by telling the truth; pathologically honest Dave finds himself keeping secrets almost as well as Alexander.

Reitman heightens his political realism by incorporating real-life figures from 1990s politics. Politicians like Tip O’Neill, Tom Harkin, and Paul Simon (not that one), provide unscripted commentary on Dave’s New Deal-esque policies. Meanwhile, outside commentators like Jay Leno and the entire McLaughlin Group provide the media response. These make it clear that Dave’s candid politics would face stark criticism in real Washington.

There’s also a critical subtext to this movie: it’s easy to sympathize with Dave. He’s uncontrived, loves children and puppies, and fights for his beliefs. But he didn’t get elected President; Bill Mitchell did, with his moral compromises and smoke-filled rooms. We like Dave, but Reitman asks us: would we vote for him? Considering what candidates we Americans habitually support, Reitman’s answer is implicit, but painfully obvious.

We Americans love bellyaching about how politicians’ rhetoric doesn’t match their actions. But we do nothing about it. Ivan Reitman throws that back on us. Dave Kovic actually accomplishes the promises we Americans claim to approve, but accomplishes them under Bill Mitchell’s name. American politics, Reitman implies, requires professionals with Jekyll-and-Hyde personalities. As long as that’s what we vote for, that’s what we’ll get.

Yet the final scene suggests we aren’t doomed. We could change; Reitman encourages us to do so.

The War To End All—

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 35
Barry Levinson (director), Wag the Dog

An unpopular and pathetically incompetent President needs a war, to distract America from his latest debacle. So his personal fixer does what any political operative naturally does: he phones Hollywood. There, a well-respected producer with political ambitions helps organize the illusion of a humanitarian crisis in Albania, which only America’s military might can solve. Suddenly, patriotism is popular, and the President’s ratings soar.

This 1997 movie has become associated with President Bill Clinton, who engaged the American military in 1997, 1998, and 1999 when sexual scandals threatened his administration. But it was written to satirize George HW Bush, who almost salvaged a flagging presidency by sending troops into Operation Desert Storm. Since its release, every single American President has, at least once, used military accomplishments to build popularity during sudden, violent controversy.

Spin doctor Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) takes personal pride in his relationship with Hollywood. He boasts that Desert Storm’s most iconic image, a satellite-guided “smart bomb” flying down an exhaust chimney and striking a precise target, was faked using miniatures in a Falls Church, Virginia, studio. So when the President gets caught on tape soliciting an underage girl, presidential aide Winifred Ames (Anne Heche) calls Brean for an encore.

But Brean cannot accomplish this alone. He pulls strings and gets producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) into the operation. Motss’ connections secure him a photogenic young “war orphan,” played by ingenue Tracy Lime (Kirsten Dunst), whose apparent flight from her bombed-out village, kitten in hand, becomes nationwide news fodder. They masterfully hide that this “Albanian village” was constructed on greenscreen.

Brean warns Motss, Lime, and everyone involved, that their participation must remain completely secret. The slightest leak, he implies, will result in midnight assassinations by highly trained CIA operatives. Brean doesn’t realize, however, that CIA leakers have already sussed his ruse, and rushed oppo research to a highly popular Senator from the other party (Craig T. Nelson). Suddenly the fake war becomes a proxy for a bitterly controversial reëlection campaign.

Everything so far might conceal one important fact: this movie is a comedy. The humor is subtle and incisive, sometimes specifically targeted at events unfolding in the 1990s. Its understated, dry style, which amuses without necessarily causing laughs, reflects the influence of screenwriter David Mamet. (Mamet shares billing with first-draft author Hilary Henkin, but Mamet wrote Levinson’s final shooting script.) Maybe the wit is dry. Or maybe it’s too precise.

Robert De Niro, Anne Heche, and Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog

Brean, Ames, and Motss struggle to maintain the illusion of overseas involvement because they believe their President’s statements of principle. But believing the President’s words often means overlooking his actions. Their President is clearly a sexual predator more intent on maintaining power than governing responsibly. Yet his operatives believe, by keeping him aloft, they can accomplish their goals—which they never discuss, and so maybe don’t agree on.

This story builds upon the principle that Presidents love war. Given the Constitutional balance of powers, one could persuasively argue that, during peacetime, Presidents matter less to ordinary Americans than do Chairs of the Federal Reserve. But wars give everyone shared goals to build towards, something FDR discovered during World War II. Perhaps that’s why America has been engaged in an undeclared shooting conflict with someone, somewhere, continuously since 1947.

Unable to control the war narrative, our trio of weary antiheroes shifts to tubthumping about a POW supposedly left behind enemy lines. Wow, shades of Bowe Bergdahl. They organize an astroturf campaign to rescue Sgt. Schumann (Woody Harrelson), played by a soldier selected from headshots. But their fake POW proves impossible to control, and threatens to become a bigger PR nightmare than the war. Faking the news may be harder than making it.

Levinson directed this movie before social media, “fake news,” and “deepfake” videos became headline-grabbing concepts. He couldn’t possibly know the horrific stories about attempts to control the public narrative which have dominated American journalism since around 2015. Yet he accurately describes the combat between exciting public narrative, and boring old truth, which has become the ascendant conflict in modern politics. He just made it twenty years early.

Late in this movie, our unholy trinity contracts a down-at-heels folksinger (Willie Nelson) to fake an antique 78-RPM Smithsonian Folkways record. One couldn’t find a better analogy for this film. If we wanted to counterfeit a “classic” movie commenting on today’s fraught political scene, it would almost certainly look like this. If I hadn’t personally watched this movie in 2005, I’d think it was too on-the-nose to possibly be real.

The Power Politics of “Scooby-Doo”

“Scoobynatural” was probably a gimmick, an attempt to keep the writers’ room on the adventure-horror show Supernatural working well into season 13. The show’s protagonists found themselves zapped into an episode of Scooby-Doo, a series older than Supernatural’s protagonists—it debuted in 1969. The episode plays mostly for broad comedy, though it does involve a scene where Sam and Dean explain to the Scooby Gang, famous for unmasking fake monsters, that sometimes, monsters are real.

I initially balked at this revelation. Scooby-Doo, throughout most of its history, turned on the theme that what appears to be an otherworldly monster causing terror in Middle America, is actually a human in disguise. This was important for the show’s young audience, mostly still young enough to be scared of the dark. It told the audience that their apparent nighttime terrors had human faces, and could be, exposed, given names, and taken to jail.

Most importantly, the human monsters were almost always motivated by profit. The series had a subtle political message, which I didn’t understand for years, that money distorted human values and turned ordinary people into monsters. While it wouldn’t be accurate to call the series anti-capitalist (the human monster usually terrorized a small local business owner in hopes of pushing a cheap buyout), the show was certainly anti-greed, and held no love for large corporate conglomerates.

To suggest that monsters might, even occasionally, be real, initially seemed a severe betrayal of Scooby-Doo’s legacy. Letting the truly, ahem, supernatural into that universe undermined the message Generation X learned from Scooby-Doo, that the terrors which stalk the darkness can be exposed by shedding daylight on them. Except, as I remembered the series run, I realized: that wasn’t always the show’s moral. Its real message changed over time, and became more tolerant of sectarianism.

When the original series ran on CBS from 1969 to 1976, the anti-fear moral remained consistent. (In fairness, the monster wasn’t human; I remember at least one episode where the “evil” was malfunctioning technology. However, the underlying problem was always created by human venality, and could be solved with honest ingenuity.) With the show’s move to ABC in 1976, however, it introduced storylines where the monster really was a monster, or anyway not altogether human.

Promo still from the Supernatural episode “Scoobynatural”

This marked a change in the underlying culture. The show, which began during the Nixon era, when an increasingly unpopular war dragged on for years, originated in a time when adult writers increasingly distrusted government, religion, and capitalism. But as the show endured, as Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon and nothing got better, the show increasingly included storylines where the story MacGuffin couldn’t be dismantled by exposing its human face. The monsters started becoming monsters.

This became overwhelming with the introduction of Scooby’s nephew Scrappy-Doo, around 1980. Writing out the human characters, except Shaggy, the show shifted focus to adventure over mystery. Importantly, many monsters the characters faced were ultimately revealed as monsters: in particular, I remember episodes featuring a rampaging Polynesian tiki god and a reanimated Chinese dragon statue. These storylines weren’t only supernatural, they contained poorly sublimated racism, as “foreign” monsters needed put back in their natural place.

Scooby-Doo went from believing evil could be countered by giving it a human face, to believing evil was intractable and could only be beaten through force. This paralleled the cultural arc of its Boomer-generation writers, going from Flower Power to the Reagan Revolution. After late 1985, Scooby-Doo stopped being a meaningful barometer of present-day trends, transitioning to a nostalgia property for Gen-X audiences, roughly equivalent to Classic Rock Radio. Which is where Supernatural comes in.

Supernatural turns on the idea that evil exists objectively and materially, as a physical force in the outside world. It presents our world as an actively malevolent place. In some ways, this suggests a throwback to medieval presentations of angels and demons; but, considering Global Warming, ICE concentration camps, and Fascist marches on American soil, maybe believing in active evil isn’t unreasonable today. One could argue that Scooby-Doo, not church, is the actively naïve model.

Which makes Supernatural’s response perfectly reasonable. Scooby-Doo becomes a playground for extended adolescence, a chance to chase girls and binge Scooby Snacks. Facing our world’s constant evil becomes quickly overwhelming, and even full-time professional resistors face the prospect of compassion fatigue. To put it another way, evil is simply tiring.The episode’s comedy approach reflects that Sam and Dean need relief from constantly battling literal monsters.

Which, isn’t that something we all need right now?

Who Is Worse: Louis CK or His Audience?

Louis CK

I couldn’t finish Louis CK’s leaked comeback set. He started with an extended rant about how much money he’s lost over the last year, which set the tone for everything after: rather than self-deprecating, his message was mainly self-pitying. He cast himself as hapless victim of an anonymous but massively powerful brigade bent on purging unwanted ideas. Then he drew the boundary wider to include his audience in the united front against the politeness police. I gave up, because I have a day job.

(On a side note: “leaked” by whom? The audio I heard popped so loudly, the recording obviously took place on or near the stage. Coupled with the sycophantic requests for support, I suspect the leaker was more than physically close to the artist.)

More interesting than the set itself, to me, was the fan comments written beneath the content. I couldn’t help noticing nobody quoted favorite jokes, which comedy fans often do. Nobody cited favorite moments that made them laugh. Instead, the “fans” praised CK’s “anti-PC” stance, called him a hero, and lauded his set’s political positions. The audiences who responded positively to him were mainly motivated by his stances, not his comedy.

These people didn’t come to CK’s set because they wanted to laugh, apparently; they wanted to hear their prejudices ratified. They wanted to hear somebody tell them what they’d already been thinking, and their existing thoughts were apparently: how dare anybody tell me I shouldn’t mock the powerless? I have a god-given right to kick the weak! Punching down, for this crew, isn’t a poor choice; it’s a moral imperative.

I recall Roger Ebert’s review of an Andrew Dice Clay performance movie. Ebert noted that audiences didn’t primarily laugh at Clay’s jokes, they hooted their approval of his underlying bias. Ebert compared Clay’s set to a fascist rally, inasmuch ashe didn’t surprise his audience, he mainly sold them back their pre-existing beliefs. The word “fascist” gets thrown around heedlessly anymore, but sometimes it applies: Louis CK and the Diceman focus on displays of strength, and on creating a designated outgroup.

British psychologist Edward de Bono, who coined the term “lateral thinking,” dedicates a chapter to the causes of laughter. We know people laugh at wordplay, slapstick, and weird juxtapositions. But, de Bono notes, many people also respond with laughter when presented with clever arguments, sudden insights, and the solution to difficult puzzles. Laughter, de Bono posits, is a response to having our minds widened. Humans laugh when we become deeper people.

Listening to CK’s set, I noticed the audience didn’t laugh. Not in the sense, anyway, of a deep, rocking sound originating from the diaphragm and radiating through the chest, shoulders, and larynx. Instead, I heard two principal sounds: throaty cackling and applause. People make these sounds when they feel vindicated: when they watch their football team score at home, for instance, or when someone on the opposite team trips over their shoelaces.

At last. Someone has finally gone after the two dominant groups in society: kids who survived gun massacres and people who identify as gender neutral. That lot have had it too easy for too long.

— Nish Kumar (@MrNishKumar) December 31, 2018

Applause in particular is a sign of approval. As a sometime theatre participant, I know the desire many performers share to hear the audience applaud. But many classic shows, like Death of a Salesman and The Diary of Anne Frank, didn’t cause audiences to applaud; crowds left the performances in shocked silence. Because they knew these shows exposed a layer of social rot in which they themselves had participated.

They didn’t applaud, because the shows left them feeling convicted, rather than vindicated.

Louis CK clearly wants the opposite response from his crowds. He doesn’t want audiences to laugh, because laughter means they’re growing; he wants them to applaud, because applause means they’re unified. And that, I posit, is the motivation of the anti-PC squadron: to build an impregnable fortress of moral rectitude where they can feel good about their shared power.

When Louis CK fell from popular grace eighteen months ago, I urged caution. Unlike others whose sexual misconduct was exposed, like Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, he admitted his transgressions and didn’t make excuses. I thought, if there’s a situation where forgiveness applies, it might be here--though I conceded that depended on how he comported himself going forward.

Sadly, given the opportunity to repent and learn from his misdeeds, CK has chosen to dig down and show no repentance. Worse, he’s chosen to ally himself with the existing, dying power structure, plant himself on a platform, and punch downward. To judge by the comments section, there’s an audience eager to join him in the effort.

What a missed opportunity.

The Monty Python Guide to the British Economy

Tim Orchard, Stickle Island

Residents of poor, agrarian Stickle Island, off England’s Kentish coast, want to continue their way of life. But with Margaret Thatcher’s draconian spending cuts, the local council cannot keep subsidizing the ferry service that connects them to mainland England. Faced with being price-chopped from modernity, villagers see little future… until a freak storm pushes six bales of prime Colombian marijuana ashore. Is the settlement saved?

London tradesman Tim Orchard’s first novel wants to be a comic romp through the lengths ordinary Brits will undertake to survive austerity. By picking on Thatcher’s cuts, so severe they initiated a decade of unprecedented postwar poverty, Orchard probably means to obliquely criticize more recent austerity under Cameron and May. I like the idea. Unfortunately, the product requires more workshopping, because this feels like a half-completed early draft.

DC, a back-to-the-land hippie, and his daughter Petal see the marijuana as an opportunity to make Stickle Island self-sufficient. They need only organize a co-op to turn this flotsam into money. But this requires enlisting Stickle’s two farmers, Henry Stick and John Newman, longstanding rivals, and their children, who hate each other and their fathers alike. This weed could save the island… if the islanders stop bickering for five minutes.

Meanwhile, London gangster Carter, a shakedown man with delusions of grandeur, can’t find the shipment of Colombian weed he’s expecting. With several thousand pounds invested, and his personal future tied to a cartel, he can’t afford to waste anything. Realizing his haul probably washed out to sea, he follows the tide to Stickle Island, so tiny nobody’s ever heard of it. Soon London muscle starts descending on the unsuspecting village.

It’s difficult to discuss this novel without referencing British movies and TV. The island population resembles “quirky villager” vehicles like The Vicar of Dibley or Calendar Girls. They face the common Thatcher-era conundrum of keeping the community alive against faceless, technocratic modernity. But they’re challenged by bungling gangsters pirated directly from a Guy Ritchie heist caper. If you’re into British pop culture, it all feels very familiar.

Tim Orchard

Nothing wrong with that. These story tropes survive because audiences respond positively to them; they reflect the Britain which consumes their content. But Orchard’s prose needs a firm editorial hand, because right now, his jokes are too far apart. He has strong humor which Britcom fans will enjoy (it’ll be dicier for audiences unaccustomed to British humor). But his set-ups are too long and wordy, withholding punchlines until we lose interest.

Not only his jokes, though. One wonders whether Orchard received any editorial guidance, because his very talky exposition unspools so long, subsequent lines of dialog are separated by as much as a page of prose. They aren’t always separated, though, by paragraph breaks. This means we not only lose the thread of conversation, we cannot even confidently know who’s speaking. The result is disorienting and loses momentum.

Which is sad, because when Orchard gets out if his own way, he’s a lively writer, whose historical setting, presumably reflecting his own “London Calling” youth, holds a grimly comedic mirror to contemporary issues. Audiences could read his novel as commentary on a nation repeating mistakes because they refuse to learn from history. Or they could read it as blistering slapstick with a grimly violent edge. Either viewpoint works.

The building conflict between the village, isolated by geography, and brutal unregulated capitalism, has both dramatic tension and comedic byplay. DC, John Newman, and Henry Stick come from backgrounds where everybody leaves everybody else alone, but must unify to preserve their community from malevolent neglect. Carter, the gangster, operates outside the law, but is a massive control freak seeking order. The explosion is downright inevitable.

You could read Orchard’s novel, under 190 pages, in one energetic Saturday. But you probably won’t. Not because he hasn’t written a good book, but because it needs edited, and tends to sprawl where it should sprint. Orchard pinches so much, in style and content, from British sitcoms, I’d recommend he buy a sitcom writer’s guide, just to better grasp what professionals do to compress exposition into timing and dialog.

I enjoyed much about this novel… in germinal form. Tim Orchard has the makings of an engaging novel here. Unfortunately, he needs Maxwell Perkins-style guidance to nurture his story to maturity. A firm editor could turn this into a concise, electrifying novella. What we have, sadly, reads like an outline he plans to finish later. Oh, so much potential here. I hope to see Orchard complete it someday.

Indiana Jones in the Temple of Rhyme

Aaron Poochigian, Mr. Either/Or: a Novel in Verse

One sunny weekday, when you’d rather be gallivanting around Manhattan’s privileged haunts, a call comes from your other life. Your Federal Agent handlers require your unique services to recover an ancient artifact. So you pause your daytime undergraduate identity and pursue a mysterious Chinese chest into Gotham’s rankest sewers, literally and metaphorically. But just as you think you’ve escaped this relic’s curse, an even more malevolent fossil threatens to destroy everything New Yorkers hold dear.

Aaron Poochigian is a noted classicist, famed mostly for translating Sappho’s fragments. He’s also published two volumes of his own poetry. So it’s difficult to qualify whether this is his third book, under his own byline, or his sixth. But calling it “a novel in verse” makes it sound more solemn and sententious than it really is. It’s more an Indiana Jones-like pastiche of mid-20th Century pulp potboilers, handled with a poet’s level of care.

Pressed into service, you dive into conflicts that involve alien conspiracies, ancient curses, lingering scars of Western colonialism, and more. In one early scene, you (the narrator insists on the “you” address, though you have multiple aliases) must defend a Chinese jade reliquary from a battle between Maoist insurgents and Latino gangsters, because Manhattan. But you don’t dwell on implications. You aren’t the ruminative type; you’re constantly busy plunging from one high-tension encounter to another.

Poochigian writes with the practiced confidence of a classicist, of someone intimately familiar with time-honored poetic forms because he’s maneuvered them across languages. But poetry, for him, isn’t a dead letter. He uses form because it heightens his story, which, like his shorter verse, is salted with short, punchy vernacular English. It simultaneously does and doesn’t read like conventional poetry:

Business cuts, taupe ties, and muted suits
are shrieking G-men—two more barbered brutes
churned from assembly lines of matching brothers,
each a tool as blunt as all the others.
You’ve always snobbed their brand, detested dashing
douchiness, cursed the smug conspiracy
to fix the markets of what man should be.
Lord look at them, all puff and polish, flashing
badges and sizing up your robot brain….

Most lines rhyme this way, though some parts are written in Saxon-style short, alliterative lines. The shift gives Poochigian’s action scenes real punch.

Aaron Poochigian

Other verse novels I’ve read use poetic language for long, discursive cogitation on important philosophical points; long-form poets think their outsized form gives them permission to write like Homer. Not Poochigian. Calling his storytelling “fast-paced” undersells his turbo-charged cadence. Not only does his story unspool faster than most poets would permit, even most paperback novelists would say “Hey, slow down, dude.” Yet somehow his story always feels quick, never hasty. You decide whether that’s good.

The second-person protagonist of this novel (more like a sequence of linked novellas), has the vocabulary and thought processes of a “C” student at NYU. That is, an average student at a top-flight university. He, you, whatever, has fantasies about chucking everything and becoming a real student, and he romances scholarly types who assist his investigations, in the best James Bond tradition. But time doesn’t permit him to think deeply; he’s a man of action.

This collision between the stately conventions of rhyming verse, and the frenetic exigencies of Poochigian’s story, really sell the tension. Like Indiana Jones, this story isn’t for everyone. I admit, I didn’t initially appreciate Indiana Jones, because I didn’t understand the narrative intent. Like those movies, I struggled to adapt my thinking to Poochigian’s unusual structure. I needed to get several chapters in before I appreciated his form. Some readers won’t give him that chance.

Maybe that’s the message of his title. In opening pages, Poochigian identifies Mr. Either/Or as the hero straddling two worlds, either a student or a secret agent, never quite both. But simultaneously, this book is either an contemporary adventure comedy or a traditional verse epic. And we, the audience, are either willing to follow Poochigian’s journey, or too strung up on formal interpretation. This duality dogs the entire book, forcing us readers to take sides.

So, Poochigian requires readers willing to suspend judgment. That’s not easy for everyone (certainly not me). But, like most of the best poetry, it rewards readers who adjust their rhythms to the verse. It’s just that, where most verse adjusts our rhythms to languid timelessness, Poochigian prefers craggy whirlwind modernity. I don’t think I could do that very often. But I’m glad Poochigian brought me along on his strange, Lovecraftian journey, just this one time.

The End Is Nigh (Again)

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part XX
Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens: the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

The Apocalypse is coming. Every sign points toward the End of Days, as Four Horsemen (actually motorcyclists) crisscross the countryside, leaving devastation behind. Armies of angels and demons stalk Earth, and their march appears headed toward a cataclysmic confrontation. Only a small number of True Believers follow the signs, watching as everything appears headed towards… a suburban back garden in bucolic Oxfordshire, England. Are the prophecies off-kilter, or has God simply lost His eternal mind?

British novelists Terry Pratchett (“Discworld”) and Neil Gaiman (American Gods) wrote this strange, fast-paced comedy as a labor of love. Both grew up with lightly held spiritual values, which they largely abandoned later. But religion, and the near-universal belief among religions that the current age will pass away, colored their thinking; Satan has been a recurrent image in both authors’ works. A vaudeville retelling of the Book of Revelation played into both authors’ shared interests.

Aziraphale, Heaven’s least-virtuous angel, and Crowley, Hell’s least-vice-ridden demon, have established a truce, enjoying one another’s company in Aziraphale’s used-book shop. They like humans, and human company; they’re probably the last true humanists. So when they realize the Last Battle has begun, neither wants everything to end. They track the last known address of the Antichrist, whom they believe is the American ambassador’s bratty, self-satisfied son. But apparently, somebody has misplaced the son of Satan.

Behind this supernatural farce lies a book. In the 17th Century, soothsayer Agnes Nutter published a book of Nostradamus-like prophecies covering three centuries. (Because the word “nutter” doesn’t exist in American English, imagine she’s named Agatha Wingnut.) Nutter’s predictions are completely and wholly accurate. Unfortunately, they’re so specific that they’re not particularly useful, and they describe only her own descendants. Agnes’ last heir, Anathema Device, races to save humanity using Agnes’ strange, bleakly inscrutable aphorisms.

This novel works in its own right, as a slapstick “idiot plot” device where Heaven could avoid Armageddon if somebody just spoke up. The frenetic comedy reflects more Terry Pratchett’s classic style, infused with hints of Gaiman’s drier, more erudite wit. (This was Gaiman’s first novel; he hadn’t perfected his prose voice yet, working primarily in comics and graphic novels.) Readers can let the authors’ comedy wash over them in waves of broad, cutting laughter.

Terry Pratchett (left) and Neil Gaiman

But the satire draws on apocalyptic mentalities more broadly, too. Apocalypse, from the Greek, “revealing the concealed,” demands believers accept the hidden truth behind apparent reality. This novel reeks of concealed realities: the Antichrist reshapes reality to reflect what he reads in conspiracy theory magazines. The Witchfinder Army continues a “deep state” crusade officially abandoned centuries earlier. An order of Satanic nuns has cultivated the Dark One’s coming… but gotten bored and secularized from waiting.

Fashionable apocalypse cults want, ultimately, to understand hidden narratives behind apparently inexplicable events. They drag everything together to create a narrative through-line, as though a cosmic scriptwriter controlled everything. These authors satirize that mentality, while also tacking a second-order speculation onto that desire: what if the cosmic scriptwriter, too, doesn’t understand everything that’s going on? What if the cosmic order is so complex, that even God no longer understands everything He has set in motion?

Years before David Foster Wallace, Pratchett and Gaiman pioneered the technique of packing their prose with smug, self-satisfied footnotes to display their (putative) erudition. This novel’s narrative voice desperately wants you to know it knows how smart it is. Yet as plot points accumulate faster than backslaps in Three Stooges stories, even that voice becomes increasingly harried. Theology, prophecy, and reason all become increasingly useless. The smart voice becomes detectably harried; caution, nervous breakdown ahead.

In ancient times, humans ascribed human-like intent to thunder and lightning, wind and soil. Modern humans describe these same forces in rational terms and scientific equations. Both efforts serve the same purpose: to make reality comprehensible to human intellect. But Pratchett and Gaiman suggest a different thesis. What if things simply happen, dragging humans and our high-minded intellectual explanations along helplessly? Behind the comedy, there lingers an unstated horror that reality is indifferent to humanity.

Like the best comedy, this novel succeeds because it isn’t just silly. It addresses real fears people have. Believers and unbelievers alike know the anxiety of lying awake at night, wondering, what if I’m wrong? Pratchett and Gaiman dare push the question one step further: what if I’m wrong for the wrong reasons? This trajectory can only end in comedy, because taking it seriously would create a tragedy so pervasive, we couldn’t possibly endure it.

Reviewer's Note: This essay was formerly part of my 1001 books series. However, in light of the revelation of Neil Gaiman's crimes, I have removed this book from the list and replaced it with Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel, Guards! Guards!

Chaos Theatre and the Great American Comedy Renaissance

Sam Wasson, Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art

Improvisational theatre began in Viola Spolin’s workshops, beginning with theories that humans have the most authentic, open interactions during opportunities to play. Spolin moved to California, turned her theatre games into an actor training program, and produced several storied actors. But the real magic happened when Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, took her theatre games to the University of Chicago. There a strange maelstrom of talent created a new form of theatre.

Sam Wasson, a sometime performer himself, has written four previous books about American performing arts. Until now, he’s focused on single personalities, like Bob Fosse or Audrey Hepburn. Here, he turns his mixed artistic and journalistic background onto an artform, improv theatre, which would emerge, phoenix-like, from the moldering corpse of post-WWII theatre. American-made performance was dying, but improv breathed new life into it.

In Chicago, Paul Sills met several personalities longing for something new, something revolutionary. These included several still-famous performers, like Mike Nichols and Elaine May, or Severn Darden. Others included people mostly known only by other theatre professionals, including Del Close and David Shepherd. And that revolutionary zeal wasn’t metaphorical; many early improvisors believed they could overthrow the capitalist patriarchy and rebuild society by simply being authentic.

Sadly (or not), they discovered, as revolutionaries do, that capitalism is remarkably elastic. Several offspring of Sills’ original vision, including the Compass Players and Second City, became money-making enterprises when they discovered an untapped market for genuine, unplanned laughs. Soon, performers who paid their dues doing improv, became stars of the scripted circuit, like Alan Arkin and Barbara Harris. “Legitimate” theatre began adapting to improv timing.

Starched-shirt theatre historians claim improv has roots going back to Italian commedia dell’arte. Wasson blows his nose on this. Italian commedia actors worked without a script, but they played single characters, repeating stock speeches, in scenarios audiences committed to memory. American improv was something new, something dangerous: every performance presents something new. (Sometimes literally dangerous: letting actors extemporize their lines threatened countries with speech laws.)

Sam Wasson

But Wasson also notices patterns developing. Improv began as anti-capitalist theatre, but became so in-demand that prices skyrocketed. The satirical edge became so beloved that public figures relished getting skewered, rather than fearing it. Improv has long struggled to maintain a legitimate edge, and whenever it risks becoming safe, it requires innovators to blast the artform from its comfy confines. It appears to need this kind of rescuing a lot.

And the rescuers often aren’t stable people themselves. Improv innovators like Del Close, Bill Murray, and Chris Farley have repeatedly breathed new life into unscripted performance, sometimes through sheer force of personality. But these personalities are also frequently self-destructive, craving new experience at any cost. The qualities that make improvisors fascinating performers often make them dangerous human beings No wonder so many have a tendency to die young.

The reciprocal relationship between improv and “straight” performance apparently fascinates Wasson. In the 1960s, many famous improvisers became more conventional, scripted stars: Mike Nichols turned Second City alum Dustin Hoffman into a star with The Graduate. Since the 1970s, improv has funneled its best performers into TV shows like SCTV and Saturday Night Live. It’s almost like “straight” performance needs the vitality that only improv provides. And improvisers need “straight” paychecks.

Wasson doesn’t write a how-to for improv comedy. Such books already exist, in numbers too massive to sift. Instead, he writes a love song for an artform that strives to keep American theatrical performance from drifting into comfy passivity. In Wasson’s telling, improv prevents other performance forms drifting into safe, commercial ruts. But now, improv itself is a commercial enterprise. As so often in the past, the artform’s future is up for grabs.

Early on, describing the love-hate relationship that drove Nichols and May, Wasson writes one of the truest things I’ve ever read about performance and theatre: “Say you meet someone. You like something about them and they like something about you. Your mutual interest begets mutual play. Play begets cooperation and mutual understanding, which, trampolined by fun, becomes love. Love is the highest form of play.”

As a sometime actor myself, I appreciate this thought. We who perform spend tremendous efforts trying to help our audiences have genuine experiences. Maybe we don’t destroy ourselves like Del Close, or burn out like Elaine May, but we know the value of sacrifice. And we do it because we love our audiences, our fellow performers, our art. Improv gives performers the liberty to simply exist. And that is beauty indeed.

That Beatles Parody You Didn't Know You Needed

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 22
Eric Idle (writer/director), The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash

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The Rutles, The Rutles

Sometime in the early 1960s, a mop-topped quartet of British musicians took the world by storm. No, not that one. This quartet gained international fame almost overnight, fame for which they proved supremely unprepared. The Rutles, so-named because they began as a one-off sketch on Eric Idle’s show Rutland Television Weekend, hit so close to the Beatles’ actual history that Paul and Ringo supposedly couldn’t watch the finished show.

Eric Idle has a history of weak, uninspiring choices following his Monty Python years. But this one choice probably rescued his name from premature anonymity. Teaming with Neil Innes, who wrote some of Monty Python’s funniest musical segments; Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels; and a selection of top-quality British session musicians, Idle managed to create a band that both honored the Beatles, and challenged Beatlemania’s continuing cult-like adoration.

Emerging from the Cavern Rutland, the band found an unlikely champion in a middle-aged tradesman who didn’t understand music at all. A series of ham-handed business arrangements makes the Rutles a lucrative proposition for record producers, merchandisers, and filmmakers—but the Rutles themselves get ripped off, seeing tiny percentages of the money made off their names. It doesn’t take long before drugs and infighting threaten to overtake the band.

The parallels with the actual Beatles are more than slight. The sudden rise, global popularity, and massive flame-out mirror the Beatles’ trajectory point-for-point. Ringo Starr reported having difficulty watching the finished mockumentary, which hit too close to home, and Paul McCartney had a frosty response. John Lennon, however, called it hilarious, and George Harrison contributed to the production, even appearing onscreen. (The next year, Harrison co-produced Life of Brian.)

Neil Innes’ compositions, most supposedly written during a two-week hot streak in 1977, sound so close to the Beatles, they scarcely count as parody. Early tracks like “Goose-Step Mama” and “Hold My Hand,” mimic the Beatles’ early, American-influenced rock-and-rollers. Later tracks venture into nostalgia with “Doubleback Alley,” psychedelia on “Piggy in the Middle,” and rootless anger on “Get Up and Go.” The soundtrack plays like an unironic Beatles retrospective.

This earnest, ambitious musical texture, available as a separate album for those who appreciate its artistry, contrasts with Idle’s glib tone tone. Idle, who plays both a Rutle and the video host, guides viewers through the Rutles’ tumultuous arc, which we watch with pained awareness of where everything will end. Though Christopher Guest’s Spinal Tap is often credited with starting the “mockumentary” fad, Idle pioneered the format five years prior.

Idle’s characters show glib self-awareness, often speaking directly into the camera: they know they’re in a documentary, and probably know where they’re headed. Interviews with the Rutles’ purported contemporaries, including Mick Jagger and Paul Simon, indicate a deep appreciation of the band’s art, but also an awareness that the group was ultimately doomed. With a “knew-it-all-along” shrug, witnesses describe a ship setting sail with its decks already on fire.

The Rutles, from left: Neil Innes, Ricky Fataar, Eric Idle, and John Halsey

Of the actors playing the Rutles, only Idle (who lip-synchs his vocals) and Innes have significant speaking lines. The other band members, bassist Ricky Fataar and drummer John Halsey, speak little; they were hired primarily as musicians. Fataar cut two albums and toured extensively with the Beach Boys, while Halsey was a regular session musician for Lou Reed, Joe Cocker, and Joan Armatrading. Their musical bona fides are unimpeachable.

As stated above, the audience already understands where the Rutles’ trajectory is headed. While happy lyrics and playfully inventive composition keeps Rutlemania fans distracted, the band’s internal dissensions become increasingly visible. As they work less closely, the band’s art starts suffering, and they begin displaying embarrassing, sprawling pseudo-creativity. It becomes clear the band members need one another, but can’t stand each other.

Eventually, we already know, the band splinters. Some members return to the anonymity from which they originated, while others keep trying to produce art, but remain haunted by their past. Asked directly whether the Rutles will ever get back together, Mick Jagger, looking like a man caught with his pants around his ankles, gasps: “I hope not.” So do we, because they’re worth more as a memory than a living force.

Idle and Innes, plus part-time contributors George Harrison and Michael Palin, infuse the Rutles story with fast, Python-esque humor. But it’s the comedy of a perfectly choreographed train wreck. We almost feel guilty taking pleasure in watching the Rutles self-destruct. Yet the Rutles’ tragedy is so woven into our cultural consciousness, we need that laughter, just to understand the depths of our own pain.