Norma Rae

Norma Rae (1979, dir. Martin Ritt) dramatizes the struggle of North Carolina mill workers to unionize. The film is effective at portraying the workers themselves. Most of them do not look like Hollywood extras, but more like the sort of folk you would expect to work in a textile mill. The exception, of course, is Norma Rae (Sally Field), who is strong-minded, rebellious, and independent and doesn't like being put upon or seeing her relatives and friends exploited. She also doesn't mind upsetting the conventions of the local community.

In the film, a union organizer from New York City. Reuben (Ron Leibman) arrives in town to try to interest mill workers in forming a union. At first he is treated with disdain and suspicion, and sometimes hostility. The development of his friendship with Norma Rae is nearly as interesting as the story of her efforts to convince the millworkers to listen to him and to support unionization. In a muted but sustained way, the cultural contrasts between Norma Rae and Reuben give this movie life and interest. Their friendship endangers her marriage, and she admits to her husband one evening that Reuben is "in my mind," but it never develops beyond that point. This is a point of strength in the film, which develops the tension of a growing potential attraction between the two characters without resorting to the Hollywood ending that audiences might want or expect—there is no affair, and Norma Rae and Reuben part when the film ends.

Through this contrast in cultures, the film suggests both that beyond and above the differences there are fundamental shared concerns that unite people from fundamentally different places. Yet it also suggests that those differences are great enough to prevent the rapprochement with which the film tantalizes us throughout. One of the connections between Norma Rae and Reuben is their insistence on pursuing causes that no one else believes they can accomplish. Against strong odds, Reuben wants to unionize the mill, even when his supervisors urge him to consider giving up (they disapprove of Norma Rae too—they know she is married and are suspicious of her relationship with Reuben).

Norma Rae dramatizes the difficulties a woman would experience when she moves outside the traditional modes of behavior expected for her time and place. Norma Rae's husband (Beau Bridges), who in general the film treats as a good man, is increasingly bothered by her involvement in union work and her friendship with Reuben. The factory bosses at first promote her in an effort to get her on their side, but when she is placed in the position of having to evaluate the work of her former friends, even of her own father, she demands to be returned to her former position.

Despite its attempts at realism, the film is not resistant to the stereotypical lures of the small southern town idyll. Reuben himself is attracted to that idyll, even though the town itself is not especially receptive to him—he manages to achieve unionization only through Norma Rae and her efforts. In one scene he and Norma Rae swim together nude in a creek. This is supposed to be what the small rural town offers, the idyllic immersion in nature, Edenic innocence, yet at the same time the scene titillates, gives the audience some small gratification through the possibility of a connection between Norma Rae and Reuben that never occurs.

Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch collaborated on the screenplay for this film. They produced several other screenplays for films about the South, in particular The Long Hot Summer (1958) and the execrable The Sound and the Fury (1959)—Martin Ritt directed these films as well. The Long Hot Summer is at least watchable, though it gives us Faulkner as filtered through the minds of writers who understand Tennessee Williams better than the writer from Oxford. In Norma Rae, Frank and Ravetch are less prone to invoke melodrama and stereotype. They labor admirably to tell a story loosely based on fact and clearly connected to the unionization of Southern textile mills in the 1970s. The historical focus of this film—grounded in Southern patriarchy and sexism, class conflict, the ever-present struggle between management and labor, and the deeply entrenched Southern antipathy to labor unions and to outsiders—that staves off melodrama and stereotype.

Pineapple Express

Pineapple Express (2008) is a stoner comedy/thriller several notches above the usual level of such films. Although there is much dope smoking, and many jokes and humor centered on dope (nothing is more tiring than two dopers rejoicing in the glories of weed), there is also a plot, a disturbing fusion of the comic and the horrific, and an array of wildly whacky characters—many of whom come to gruesome ends.

The film was co-written by Seth Rogen (one of the main actors) and Judd Apatow, who also produced the film. The illogicalities and plot holes that one finds in other Apatow films, such as Super Bad (2007) and Knocked Up (2007), where they don't matter much, do matter here. But there are numerous comic moments too—a raucous and hilarious fight in an apartment; the two main characters, doped-up (there are few moments in the film when they aren't), stumbling terror-stricken through the woods when something that we never sees frightens them; a dinner gone wrong at the home of the 18-year-old girlfriend of Rogen's character; two hit men who run as much against type as one can imagine; and so on—and together they make a highly amusing but pointless film. With its counter-intuitive fusion of comedy and grim violence it reminded me of True Romance (1993) and especially of Martin Scorcese's 1985 After Hours.

The main character is a process server, Dale Denton. He spends his life smoking dope and donning various disguises in order to serve subpoenas on people who have been trying to avoid them. He buys his weed from Saul (James Franco), who sits in his apartment all day watching TV and selling product. Saul offers Dale a sample of the best weed in LA; it's called "Pineapple Express." Dale gladly accepts and goes off to serve a subpoena on a man named Ted Jones (Gary Cole), who turns out to be the drug kingpin who gave Saul an exclusive on the Pineapple Express. When Dale accidentally sees Jones and a policeman (Rosie Perez) murder a member of a rival drug gang, he is horrified. He throws down the joint he is smoking and drives straight to Saul's apartment. Jones finds the joint, recognizes the brand of weed, and sends henchmen to kill Dale and Saul. In the meantime, Dale and Saul have figured out that Jones will be looking for them (how they figure out anything in their dope-addled states is unclear).

So the film is basically about Saul and Dale's attempts to elude the hit men and outwit Ted Jones. There are numerous diversions and side jaunts. There is an ongoing rivalry between competing drug gangs (one of them features Ninjas). Saul wants to be a civil engineer, but he sells drugs so his grandmother can live in a comfortable retirement home. And of course there is Dale's relationship with an 18-year-old high school student. Most of all, this is a buddy film in which the two main characters ultimately come to terms with the fact that they like and need each other. It's also a film about Dale's gradual recognition that he needs to grow up and stop smoking dope—but whether this ever happens is unclear. I was disappointed that Dale's recognition that he needs to sober up is in the film. Why? It seems almost a gratuitous acknowledgement by the filmmakers that their film is immature and addled, that their values are really down home and middle class, not drug culture values. Let me leave no doubt—the film IS immature and addled, and you can enjoy it on that level. To insert the possibility of adulthood and redemption is to create a film that doesn't have the strength of its profoundly deviant convictions.

David Gordon Greene directed this film—the director of four promising but commercially unsuccessful films including George Washington (2000), All the Real Girls (2003), Undertow (2004), and Snow Angels (2007)—one imagines that he realized he had to participate in some money-making ventures to be able to keep making the kinds of films he wants to make—Pineapple Express did make money. Greene's expertise is evident in a number of scenes, especially in pacing, characterization, and cinematography. Despite the virtues of Pineapple Express, one hopes that
Greene will not have to make this kind of film often.

Mekong First Light, by Joseph W. Callaway, Jr.

Mekong First Light (Presidio Press, 2004) is a memoir about Joseph W. Callaway's experience as a soldier in Vietnam during the late 1960s. Its strength is that it is not a literary memoir. Callaway is not a trained writer, a fact evident throughout his narrative. But his memoir is not at all clumsily written. It is simply not especially artful or elegant. It is intelligent and honest and devoid of pretense. It is what it is—straightforward and to the point. Callaway begins with a discussion of his childhood and adolescence. His family moved around fairly often as his father struggled to find a way to make an adequate living. Callaway came to think of himself as a failure, a kid who always seemed to mess up, who couldn't do well in academics or athletics. Part of the problem was, he later realized, a learning disability. He basically gave up on himself.

After several failed attempts at college, Callaway joined the army. In training school he discovers that he has a knack for leadership, that the men he leads trust him, and gradually a change begins to occur—a change evidenced in the memoir's title, Mekong First Light. In Vietnam he discovers the fullness of his capabilities. He becomes there the man that he thought he would never be. But the discovery comes at some price.

Callaway's account of his time in Vietnam is graphic and disturbing. On the one hand he continues to distinguish himself as a leader, though he resists receiving awards for his efforts. He describes the deaths of several close friends, men whom he respected, and their deaths had a profound impact on him. Although there were men in the command structure of the army whom he respected, there were others he did not respect. He points out serious mistakes—in the assignment of personnel, in tactics—that often led to a loss of life, or that might have. He makes no bones of his opinion that awards and honors given out for valor in battle were often given for false reasons and were often underserved.

Callaway also makes clear in his introduction his opinion that the nature of war is that it is fought by young men—too young and inexperienced to realize their own vulnerability and mortality—under the command of older men who have grown wise enough to realize that they might die in battle.

Callaway's is not a leftwing point of view. Though he was friends with some members of the activist movement following his departure from the military, though he had some sympathies with the movement, he was never wholly in support. As an older man, he describes himself as conservative and expresses misgivings, for instance, about John Kerry's use of his military record for political ends. His criticism of the war and of the U. S military therefore seems especially credible.

The Secret Life of Bees

In The Secret Life of Bees (2008) a young white girl, troubled by her cold and indifferent father and by her memory of having accidentally killed her mother when she was four, seeks shelter and solace from a group of black women in rural South Carolina in 1964. Based on the novel of the same title (which I have not read), the film reminded me especially of Toni Morrison's Paradise, also about a group of independent black women living on their own in a hostile setting (and to a lesser extent Song of Solomon). Whereas Morrison lets us know from an early point that her characters are headed for tragedy, The Secret Life of Bees makes clear from the start that amidst tragic memories and the unhappiness that is to occur there will be heartwarming moments, tenderness, sentimentality, a lack of realism, plot holes, and a story and characters that hold our interest and whom we come to care about.

This film reminded me of Eve's Bayou (1997), also about black women—some old and some young—trying to survive in a world of male betrayal.

The story is told through the eyes of the fourteen-year-old white girl Lily (Dakota Fanning). Although her own life is an interesting one—she wants to be a writer, she has a dream in which bees swarm into her room at night, and she is in the middle of puberty—she is mainly an observer through whom the more interesting story of the Boatwright women is told. They are three sisters, the oldest of whom inherited a farm from her grandmother, and they raise bees and manufacture highly prized honey, which makes them a comfortable living. The sisters are named for the months of the year. Their house is the color of Pepto-Bismol. It is nicely furnished, and their farm exists in a kind of isolation from the racist white South and the rest of the world.

The Boatwrights sell their honey in a bottle labeled with an image of a black Virgin Mary. It turns out the women worship an old wooden figure of a black Virgin, an old masthead that washed up on the beaches of Virginia a hundred years in the past, and which one of their ancestors found and brought home with him after (he believed) it spoke to him. The women believe that the figure gives them strength when they touch the image of the heart painted on her breast.

A number of interwoven plots keep this film going and also weigh it down. There is the story of Lily, of course. Each of the sisters has her own story. June (Alicia Keys) is in love with a man from the local town, but she doesn't for reasons that remain unclear want to marry him. She is active in the local NAACP and resents Lily's appearance. She's beautiful and distant and plays the cello. Another is May (Sophie Okonedo) , whose twin sister died some years before, leaving her in a constant state of mental distress—whenever anything bad happens to someone, she weeps uncontrollably. She has built a stone wall in the back of the house where she inserts pieces of paper on which she writes prayers or short inscriptions about bad events. And there is August, played by Queen Latifah, the oldest sister, who runs the farm and to whom Lily turns for advice. There is also Roseleen Daise (Jennifer Hudson), who worked as a servant for Lily's father. When she walks with Lily to town, she is accosted by a group of white men who yell insults, and when Roseleen pours snuff juice on the shoes of an especially hateful man, he beats her. Lily and Roseleen run away and make their way to Tiburon, a small town whose name Lily found on a memento of her mother's.

Very early in the film a connection between the bees of which Lily dreamed, her mother, and the bee farm of the Boatwrights becomes evident. The nature of this connection is made fairly clear well before the film explains it outright—whether this is intentional or not I don't know. Maybe we in the audience are supposed to recognize what Lily herself doesn't recognize so that we can watch with anticipation as she gradually makes the connections herself.

There is also a Civil Rights theme. Lily finds herself attracted to a young man who is friends of the Boatwrights. They work on the farm together, share a couple of kisses, and inexplicably he drives her into town to deliver honey and then invites her to go to a film in a theatre where whites and blacks still sit in separate sections. He is accosted and dragged off by a group of angry white men, and for a time it looks as if he is going to be found dead. This event leads to tragedy.

It is perhaps understandable why 14-year-old Lily would not recognize the danger of sitting in the black section of a segregated theater with her black friend. But he certainly should have realized the danger to himself—he is older than she and intelligent and well educated. When he is dragged away, we know Lily is going to blame herself for whatever is to happen.

The Civil Rights era theme and time period do create some problems for the film, however. Would black women such as the Boatwrights have been allowed to live unmolested in rural white South Carolina in 1964, especially given their relative affluence and forward thinking attitudes? Only a year later in Mississippi, three civil rights workers—two young white men and one young black man—would be murdered by white racists. Only three years before in Birmingham, Alabama, four young girls were killed in a church bombing carried out by white racists. Were things that different in rural South Carolina in 1954? It's also difficult to imagine that the young man hauled out of the segregated theater by white racists would be allowed to escape with only a beating for sitting with a young white girl in the balcony reserved for "coloreds." This film wants to make clear its awareness of the difficult times in which the action is taking place, but it wants to pretend that its main characters are less affected by those times than in reality they probably would have been.

It's also clear that, no matter how positive a figure August is as played by Queen Latifah, there is clearly a dimension of the stereotyped black Mammy about her, as she readily agrees to take care of the poor white girl in distress and offers various wise homilies and lessons to her, helping her, even in the midst of her own grief, to come to terms with her mother's death ten years before. It's worth pointing out the improbability of the situation the film portrays—a 14-year old white girl on her own in rural South Carolina in the company of a somewhat older black woman who shows clear signs of having been beaten up. Would they have been allowed to go on their way unmolested? Probably not. There is the slightest possibility that people such as the Boatwrights could have existed and made a living for themselves on their farm. That is one point of the film, the improbable nature of the story itself, and of Lily's managing to find the Boatwrights as she does. Improbability itself is part of the interest of the story.

(Roger Ebert aptly captures the film's implausibility in his review: "As a realistic portrayal of life in rural South Carolina in 1964, 'The Secret Life of Bees is dreaming. As a parable of hope and love, it is enchanting. Should it have been painful, or a parable?" Ebert settles for parable, admitting that if this had been a "bad" film then he would have willingly dissected it. A. O. Scott in the New York Times observes, "It would be wrong to say that the troubles of that time and place have been wished away — on the contrary, the movie begins with a scene of horrific domestic violence and includes child abuse, a racially motivated beating, suicide and the threat of a lynching — but from the opening voice-over to the final credits, every terror and sorrow is swaddled in warm, therapeutic comfort.")

The author of the novel on which the film is based is Sue Monk Kidd, a white woman who was growing up during the time period of the film. The screenplay author and director is Gina Prince-Bythewood, an African-American. Had a white director and screen writer made this film about black women and largely black situations, told mainly through the eyes of a white narrator, they would likely have been accused of stereotyping their subject. With an African American woman director and screen writer, the film has more credibility and is less vulnerable to accusations that it is just another film that patronizes African Americans.

One other influence on the film is To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), based on Harper Lee's novel. There are certain similarities between the character Scout in that film and the somewhat older Lily in this one. Both are narrators, both are struggling to come of age, in a certain sense, both are struggling to understand and to accept their mother's death, whom they hardly remember. A minor character in Bees is a white liberal lawyer who reminds us, fleetingly, of Atticus Finch.

In the Electric Mist

In the Electric Mist (2009) puts to the test William Faulkner's observation (from Requiem for a Nun) that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In the form of a long dead Confederate general, perhaps a ghost, perhaps a hallucination, General John Bell Hood advises the protagonist Dave Robichaux about his interest in two seemingly unrelated murders, one of which took place more than forty years before the time of the film.

Although this is a sloppy and often hackneyed film, two elements make it interesting. The first is Tommy Lee Jones, who plays ex-alcoholic police detective Robichaux. His performance is typically low-key but intense—as we saw In the Valley of Elah (2007) and No Country for Old Men (2007). It is always interesting to watch Tommy Lee Jones do what he does, and he does it well in this film. The second element of interest is the setting, mostly rural and small-town Louisiana. The film makes use of an array of local characters, none of whom -act particularly well, but all of whom give flavor to the film. Buddy Guy makes a brief appearance as a blues singer named Hogman, and though he cannot act either, it's interesting to see him in the film. John Sayles appears as the director of a film about the Civil War. He can act considerably less well than he can direct. Levon Helm, formerly of The Band, and the actor who played Loretta Lynn's father in A Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), plays General Hood here, in a casual, cryptic, offhand way.

Dave Robichaux grapples with the past in all sorts of ways in this film. He's a recovering alcoholic, a fact that has him often reacting to and resisting the habits of a past life. As a young boy, he saw a black man shot down by in the swamps. A drunken actor in the present time of the film discovers the chained bones of a dead man in the swamp, and Robichaux comes to believe they belonged to the man he saw killed. But what connection do they have to the murder he's investigating of a small-time prostitute? Robichaux feels guilty for having witnessed a crime he couldn't prevent, and guilty for being unable to solve the murder of the prostitute.

The production values in this film are only slightly better than what one would expect from a television crime drama. The characters are stereotyped—John Goodman as Julie "Baby Feet" Balboni, a crime boss turned film producer, Ned Beatty as Twinky LeMoyne, an aging cotton mill owner, Mary Steenbergen as Bootsie, a loving but long suffering wife to Robichaux. Their names suggest not only the stereotypes they embody but, in the case of Balboni and LeMoyne, that they are burlesques, parodies, broadly depicted types. As soon as we see Goodman surrounded by beautiful young woman and body guards, his grossly distended chest sagging out of and over the swim suit he wears at the pool, we know all we need to know—he's venal, corrupt, and probably guilty. We can stop thinking—his character pushes all the standard buttons. The plot of the film is circuitous and complex, and Robichaux figures things out mainly by managing in his own mind to recognize the links between past memories and more recent ones. The careful viewer will pick up on the clues well before Robichaux does.

Both Balboni and LeMoyne are particular Southern types—arrogant men whose power and money renders them immune to laws and moral codes that govern the rest of us. If violence needs to be committed, they get others to do it for them and then forget that they asked—they're absolved by forgetting. By struggling to remember and understand what he once saw and who he saw doing it, Robichaux achieves some kind of absolution—though LeMoyne and Balboni are apparently never tried for their crimes—Balboni at least goes to jail for tax evasion.

The most arbitrary and disparate element in the film is General Hood. Robichaux attends a party given by Balboni and drinks a glass of tea apparently spiked with LSD. He comes to when his car wrecks on a road in the swamp, and he follows a light to a gathering of camping Confederate soldiers, among whom is General Hood. Previously we've been told that sometimes strange lights—swamp gas—are seen in the swamp, and of course there's an association in Robichaux's mind between the Civil War film and the soldiers they encounter. Of course, the soldiers are not real, and General Hood is in one way or the other a figment of Robichaux's imagination. But he's also a relic of the past, the past that haunts Robichaux, and the past he must somehow reconcile to the facts of the present-day murder he's investigating.

The last image of the film, in which Robichaux's step-daughter is staring at an old photograph of General Hood with other Confederate soldiers, specifically recalls a similar photograph at the end of Kubrick's The Shining (1980).

The film is based on the James Lee Burke novel In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead. I have not read it but will soon do so. Certain aspects of the film and of Robichaux's character in particular remind me of Raymond Chandler and his protagonist Philip Marlowe.

The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell

In The Wordy Shipmates (Riverhead, 2008) NPR commentator and humorist Sarah Vowell discusses the early history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans. At first in the book she comes off like a stand-up comic. Her style is chatty, self-referential, replete with ironic quips, allusions to contemporary issues, and so on. This is not the prose one expects in a book about Puritans. It irritated me for the first chapter or so. But it grew on me. After a while Vowell's intelligent mind, along with the considerable research and reading and her deep understanding of and appreciation for her subject, won me over. She confesses to fascination with the Puritans and their era. At its best, in The Wordy Shipmates, her enthusiasm is infectious and highly informative.

The main actors in her story are John Winthrop, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and others. These are familiar names, but Vowell manages to uncover the human stories beneath the legends. Whatever one may say about the rebellious integrity of Hutchinson and Williams, in their resistance to the rigid Puritan faith, they were equally extreme and rigid. Winthrop himself was capable of duplicity as well as self-deception. Although he participated willingly in the hearings that led to William's expulsion from the Colony, they remained correspondents long after Williams' departure. Winthrop relied on Williams for information about the local Indians.

In her discussion of Winthrop's "city on the hill" sermon, Vowell examines Ronald Reagan's appropriation of the term. She believes that by the time of the Reagan administration the nation had lost the meaning of the phrase and that Reagan himself had no idea of its significance—in fact, she believes his administration epitomized the opposite of what it means.

Vowell's main criticism of the Puritans, aside from their fanatical rigidity about certain issues and principles, concerns their treatment of the Indians. She gives a disturbing account of the annihilation of the Pequot tribe. The Puritans may have loved one another and God, but when it came to the Indians they didn't hesitate to abuse, mistreat, and murder—the annihilation of many of the Pequot tribe, 300 in all, including children, in an event where they were all herded into a tent that was set afire (anyone who tried to escape was shot) is Vowell's main case in point. The Puritans never wavered in their determination to wipe out or at least subjugate the Indians. They believed they were God's chosen people, on a sacred mission to create a new settlement, Winthrop's fabled "city on a hill." Vowell suggests that their belief in their own special and unique calling infiltrated American culture and that it continues to influence American foreign policy and our treatment of other nations and peoples, especially ones who do not share our lifestyles and values. This notion is hardly new—Vowell is only the most recent among a long line of historians and commentators who have made the argument.

From an intellectual as well as entertainment perspective, The Wordy Shipmates is a satisfying book and as good a way as any for the average reader to learn about the early Puritans.

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (2008), by Jon Meacham

In American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (2008), Jon Meacham portrays Jackson as the first "democratic president," by which he means the first president who was not one of the Founders and not of the upper-class, well educated stock that produced Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison. He also portrays Jackson as ambitious for power and sometimes ruthless and vindictive. Known as a hothead in his younger days, Jackson carried a bullet in his body from a duel that he did not have removed until he was in the White House. Jackson could not tolerate disagreement. When he could not persuade cabinet members to his point of view, he fired them—his secretary of the treasury, who opposed his campaign against the National Bank, is an example. When Emily Donelson, the wife of his close advisor and protégé Andrew Donelson, would not treat the wife of the secretary of war John Eaton (her name was Margaret) in a way that was agreeable to Jackson, he sent her home to Nashville with her husband, and although he later recalled Donelson it took him longer to recall Emily. Jackson spent much time, especially in his first term, trying to resolve this controversy, which affected his administration all the way to the vice presidency (Calhoun's wife Floride was a main opponent of Margaret Eaton). Jackson was sympathetic to Margaret because of the way in which his own wife Rachel had been criticized during the 1828 presidential campaign.

Jackson significantly consolidated and increased the powers of the presidency. Before Jackson, the president was constrained in what he could do. The veto was used sparingly, while Jackson used it often. The president could not act independently of Congress, while Jackson made a habit of doing so. The president was not supposed to speak directly to the people, while Jackson did so with the deliberate intention of securing support for his programs and plans.

The level of political rhetoric and factional bickering seems far worse in Jackson's presidency than it seems today. Personal issues were allowed to become factors in political campaigns. Rumors that Jackson had married his wife Rachel before she was legally divorced from her first husband, that she and Jackson had adulterously cohabited, played a major role in the campaign in 1828. Although he won the election, the strain and humiliation of the campaign wore heavily on Rachel. She died, perhaps as a result, before he was inaugurated. Because of his rustic background, and because he defeated John Quincy Adams and was widely regarded as intemperate and ambitious, because he changed the nature of the presidency and did not follow established ways of doing things, he was subject to constant attacks during his presidency. He was often accused of trying to destroy the presidency and wreck the nation.

The main controversy during Jackson's administration was the Nullification crisis. A number of slave-holding states, most notably South Carolina, opposed the authority of the federal government to pass laws that affected them. They contended that if a state did not like a federal law, it could simply nullify the law and not be governed by it. Slave-holding states feared the power of the federal government—they worried that one day the government might try to limit or prohibit slavery. South Carolina threatened to secede from the union. Troops began preparing for battle. Large rallies in favor of states' rights and of war took place. Jackson strongly favored preserving the union and the power of the federal government to pass laws that governed the states. What made this controversy especially difficult for him is that one of the main advocates for nullification was John C. Calhoun, Jackson's vice president. Calhoun resigned as vice president (before Jackson could announce his decision not to have him on the ticket for the second term) and returned to South Carolina, where he was elected to the Senate and then returned to Washington to oppose Jackson.

Jackson managed to defuse the Nullification furor by standing firm in his opposition to Nullification, and by engineering legislation that, although it preserved the government's right to enforce the tariff through military force, removed some of the offensive aspects of the tariff that South Carolina and other states opposed. Had South Carolina seceded, other states might have followed, and the Civil War could have taken place three decades earlier.

Among Jackson's main opponents during his presidency were Nicholas Biddle (president of the National Bank), Calhoun, and Henry Clay. What Jackson is primarily remembered for today is his engineering of legislation that removed Creek and Cherokee Indians from lands they had lived on for centuries in Georgia, Alabama, and other states. The Indian Removal Act passed in 1830, and Jackson made removal of the Indians an important element in his political campaigns. Jackson essentially regarded the Indians as obstacles to American expansionism. He worried that they might conspire with the British and Spanish to weaken or attack the American nation. Although his public statements to and about Indians claimed concern for their safety and welfare—one of the primary reasons he cited for their removal to western territories—it was clear that his primary motive was to ensure security and freedom for white settlers. When he addressed Indian leaders, he did so with a paternalistic and condescending rhetoric that from modern-day standards is difficult to swallow. Jackson's reputation as a military leader rested not only on his spectacular victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans, but also on his victories in the Creek and Seminole wars. It's possible that had the Indians not been removed, they would have assimilated and offered little resistance to white expansion. And it's possible they could have been wiped out in confrontations with white settlers. But the historical fact is that they were expelled from their native grounds, a sad and tragic episode in American history. Jackson never wavered in his determination to see the Indians removed.

Although slaveholding states saw federal power as a threat to slavery, Jackson himself, who owned slaves, believed in slavery as a foundational American institution. He viewed abolitionism as a threat to American prosperity and moved forcefully to deny abolitionists the right to distribute printed materials through the mails.

Meacham's biography is well written. Although it follows Jackson's life from his birth on to the point of his election as president, it is mainly about Jackson's presidency. It takes Meacham only 20 or so pages to cover the decade before Jackson's death following his departure from the White House. Although Meacham clearly acknowledges Jackson's ambition, his role in the Indian removal, and his support for slavery, the one major flaw in the biography is that he likes Jackson a little too much. The biography is not hagiographic, but it is written from a perspective favorable to Jackson, so that it lacks a certain objectivity. Perhaps I don't find the book sufficiently critical of Jackson's attitudes towards Indians and slavery and his own autocratic inclinations. Nonetheless, the book is interesting and readable.

Cadillac Records

Cadillac Records (2008, dir. Darnell Martin) is the somewhat fictionalized story of how Leonard Chess founded a Chicago record company devoted to recording the music of talented African American singers from the Deep South and elsewhere: Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Etta James, and others. Chess, played by Adrian Brody, is an ambiguous and problematic figure in the film. When we first meet him he is having money problems and vows to the woman he wants to marry that he will make money and buy her a Cadillac. He plans to open a night club for African American patrons. Money is a motive for Chess from the start, and it's never really clear in the film whether he's more interested in the talent and music of his artists than he is in their money-making potential. He rewards them for their success by giving them Cadillacs, or renting houses for them to live in, but he doesn't offer much in the way of regular pay, and this becomes an increasing issue of concern for the musicians.

Cadillac Records takes the position that talented black singers such as Muddy Waters and Etta James paved the way for the rock and roll revolution of the 1950s, but that because they lived in pre-Civil Rights America, their options were limited. Their music was marketed as "race music." They could perform only in venues reserved for black patrons. Even when Chuck Berry breaks through with music that isn't immediately categorizable as "race music"—some think it is country music—he is forced to perform to white and black audiences who are kept on separate sides of the room. Cadillac Records like other films about this era suggests that music became a way of dissolving racial barriers. But these singers often had to pay the price–Little Walter was beaten to death, Chuck Berry sent to prison. And none of these singers initially realized great financial rewards for their music.

Most troubling of all was that these singers didn't receive the rewards and respect their music should have earned them. The Beach Boys steal the melody of one of Berry's songs, and he sues them (successfully). Elvis Presley rises to fame performing music in the style that Waters and others popularized. So too do the Rolling Stones. The idea here is that white singers appropriated the music of African American singers. Undoubtedly, that contention is true. But what is arguable is the question of theft. Although there were clearly some instances of theft (see the Beach Boys above) most often, I'd contend, what was happening here was influence. Singers like Presley loved the music they heard on black radio stations. They loved and wanted to sing it themselves. And because American society in the 1950s was what it was, white singers had a better chance of succeeding in the music industry than black singers, who had a limited audience.

The actors in this film are effective. Beyoncé is outstanding as Etta James—her performance of James standards are remarkable (apparently, James herself is not happy with the praise Beyoncé has received for these performances, or for her performance of "At Last" at the Obama inaugural balls). Jeffrey Wright is good as Muddy Waters—in imitation of Waters, he mumbles many of his lines, and his acting is mannered. My favorite of all in the film is Eamonn Walker, who played Howlin' Wolf—there was not enough of him here.

As Harry Chess, Adrian Brody plays the character who becomes the symbol of white exploitation of black singers—more specifically, of white Jewish exploitation—in the film. It's difficult to know what to think of him, or of the view the film takes towards him. He appears to enjoy the music of the singers he discovers, but he never adequately compensates them for their records. What he is most interested in is a "crossover" singer, whose work can sell to and appeal to a white audience—he had found that in Chuck Berry before he went to prison--finally he discovers the crossover artist he dreamed of in Etta James, in whom he appears to be romantically interested. When he dies, she is the only one of the singers to whom he leaves anything—a house. Does Chess truly love Etta James, or is he simply deeply grateful to her for her success as a crossover singer?

Singers are often shown struggling for control over their music and how it's recorded. Muddy Waters, the first singer to sign with Chess, is relatively compliant. He's literally discovered in a cotton field, by folklorist Alan Lomax, and the image of a young Waters working away in the fields is repeated several times in the film, as if to suggest that in moving from the cotton fields of Mississippi to the studio of Leonard Chess in Chicago he is trading one life of subjugation for another. He's slow to develop resistance to Leonard's controlling influence, though ultimately he does, and in the end confronts him openly. Little Walter is clearly troubled when Chess tells him how to play the harmonica or turn off his amp. Howlin' Wolf, on the other hand, makes clear to Chess that he will control how music is played when he is recording it. In the end, when Chess has Etta James recording music to a lush string accompaniment, the suggestion is that he sacrifices the integrity of the music to the cause of profit. A similar issue is displayed in a quite different way in the film Ray (2004), when Ray Charles decides to record a country and western album, and when he records other tunes that are decidedly in a mainstream, easy-listening genre, rather than the rhythm and blues music from early in his career. Fellow black musicians, and his largely black audience, feel betrayed.

It's difficult to assess the arguments this film seeks to forward—the theft of the African American musical tradition by white producers and performers, and the exploitation of black musicians by white Jewish Americans. The film implies the latter argument but largely avoids examining it in any candid detail. This is unfortunate. The uneasy relationship between Jewish Americans and African Americans needs careful study. A problem with the film is the question of accuracy—it leaves out Leonard's brother Phil entirely, who helped run Chess Records. It also oversimplifies the recording history of some of the performers before they signed with Chess Records, and entirely omits their careers following Leonard Chess' death. Basically, this is a filmic treatment of historical characters and situations, but it is not a documentary—it is a fictionalization of facts. It works better as an entertainment, a film about music, than it does as a study of the popularization of the Chicago Blues, and of singers like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Woody Allen has always viewed human relationships as ephemeral, short lived, changeable. His early great films Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) are studies in shifting relationships, couples who pair up for a time and then go their separate ways, looking for other partners. The nostalgia of love lost drove these early films. Allen's view of such relationships darkened significantly in the 1980s and 1990s with such films as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), and Husbands and Wives (1992).

So we come to the question of why we should find interest in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). It is not a comedy. It is not really a romantic film either. Maybe the best way to describe it is as a character study.

The characters in Vicky Cristina Barcelona hold differing opinions about relationships, and they enact those views. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is a middle-of-the-road art history graduate student who believes that love is forever and has chosen as her future husband a bland, corporate drone. Cristina (Scarlett Johanssen—one of Allen's favorite actresses) has a more conflicted attitude. Although she says she doesn't believe in monogamy, she does believe in the possibility of finding the perfect partner, but she also chafes at the confinement of long-term relationships. For Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz) relationships mean struggle—her long-term affair with the artist Juan Antonio Gonzalo (Javier Bardem) is a constant battle against and with a person she needs so much that she resents and resists him. Juan Antonio doesn't necessarily have a position on relationships. He goes with the flow. His easy attitude pays off for him. When Cristina tells him that she is not satisfied with their relationship and that she needs time to herself, he accepts her decision, while Maria Elena wants to attack her. One can view Juan Antonio's reaction as post-feminist male enlightenment, or as cynicism—I tend towards the latter view.

I suppose the interest of the film for Allen lies in the constantly shifting array of human connections. Cristina believes that in Juan Antonio she at last has found the perfect partner, but then she grows dissatisfied. Vicky resents and dislikes Juan Antonio but after sleeping with him discovers that she loves him—until Maria Elena tries to shoot her, whereupon she returns to her bland fiancé, who by the end of the film she has married. Even Vicky's aunt, who provides the house where Vicky and Cristina live while in Spain, is dissatisfied with her marriage. Nothing is fixed.

The setting—Barcelona—is beautiful, though it has no particular bearing on the plot. Maybe for the two young American women who go to Spain for a brief respite from their studies, it is an exotic place of adventure and romantic intrigue—they can dally there, experience freedom briefly—then leave. Are they changed? Does anything of importance really happen in this film? Are human destinies determined? The film ends in the middle of things. Nothing is resolved. No single character's point of view prevails. Rather, the film shows that people believe what they believe and that they tend to act on their beliefs, for better or worse. Life goes on.

There's a sort of clinical indifference in how this film treats Vicky and Christina and Maria Elena. Allen seems interested in what will happen to them, which choices they will make, how they will fare in their various entanglements—but there's no erotic or emotional or passionate engagement with his subject. Maybe for Allen, now in his 70s, romance is more a matter of clinical interest than of anything else.

Factory Girl

fFactory Girl (2006) depicts Edie Sedgwick as a plaintive victim of the 1960s and of exploitative males—Andy Warhol, her father, a well known but nameless (in the film) musician. She was definitely a victim, but a victim as much of her own noblesse oblige, her thirst for celebrity and fame, her self-destructive drug use, and her narcissistic self-absorption as of anything or anyone else.

Factory Girl at times seems made in the style of an avant garde documentary, but it is really little more than another biographical picture that never manages to explain or justify the importance of its subject. Edie herself (portrayed by Sienna Miller) narrates much of the film retrospectively, from the vantage point of a drug rehabilitation center in 1970, where she is being treated for addiction. (She died of an overdose in 1971). She is looking back at events, trying to assess her life and what might have gone wrong. The film focuses mostly on the year 1965, when Edie's star was in the ascendant, when she made her mark in Warhol's studio (known as the Factory), and when she had her love affair with Bob Dylan (known in the film as the "Musician"). Edie thinks of herself as an artist but the film shows little if any of her work, so that it is difficult to assess her artistic pretensions, if indeed they were pretensions to begin with. What we know is that Warhol was fascinated with her, gave her leading roles in his strange and aimless films, put her in his artwork, traveled with her to Paris, and then when he grew tired of her, especially after her romance with the Musician, rejected her, finding someone else to replace her, refusing to answer her phone calls or her increasingly desperate requests for money.

Warhol is the most interesting person in this film. Creepily and effectively played by Guy Pearce, he comes off as a narcissistic, self-absorbed poseur unable to comprehend the damage he causes Edie and others, especially after he casts them off. He is a man without guilt or a sense of human responsibility. The Dylan figure comes off better—he is not the one who rejects Edie, in this film—rather, he warns her of the empty nature of the Warhol enterprise and offers her an alternative to the Factory lifestyle, but she cannot bring herself to break away from what Warhol represents—celebrity, fame, stardom. Later, when she is in decline, the Musician tells his assistant to "give her what she needs," but he is not interested in further contact. Edie explains to her therapist in 1970 that her decision to stick with Warhol was the worst of her mistakes—the Musician, she says, was the only person who made her happy.

Factory Girl offers an interesting view of the Factory studio—it shows us an array of strange characters, creating extreme forms of art, but mostly it is interested in their eccentricities. We do see Warhol making films, creating paintings, and we see many of his works—the famous multi-portraits of celebrities, of soup cans, of commercial America—we hear from various characters that in America Warhol is undervalued and misunderstood—but the film makes little attempt to understand him or his achievements, whatever they might have been. From Factory Girl's perspective, Warhol was a conman—he conned Edie, he conned the American public—if there was more to him than that, this film offers no clue.

Traitor

Traitor (2008) focuses on an undercover Muslim operative for an American intelligence group. Early in the film American intelligence agents believe he has gone over to the other side, the enemy side, because he's been out of contact for five years. The question of which side he is really on is not resolved until relatively late in the film. Don Cheadle plays the main character, Samir Horn, and as usual he does a fine job of inhabiting the role. Cheadle does most of his acting through facial expressions. His inexpressiveness becomes a source of expression—though in other films, such as Hotel Rwanda (2004)—he plays expressive, emotional characters.

Part of the difficulty for the American security agents in Traitor is the fact that Samir is a Muslim. It's easier for them to assume that he has thrown in his lot with the terrorists than it would be if he were a Methodist or Episcopalian. Only gradually, as they follow his exploits, do the American agents begin to realize where his true allegiance lies. Samir is a deeply devout Muslim who believes he should avoid the sacrifice of human life at all costs. He is a pacifist. When his actions through no fault of his own lead to the deaths of several workmen, he is horrified.

Samir has moral and religious principles. As an undercover agent he finds himself in situations where he must compromise those principles in order to prevent carnage and loss of life. The compromises cost him deeply, and at the film's end he has broken off both with the Muslim terrorists he had infiltrated and with the American intelligence agents.

The trouble with this film is the almost complete absence of tension or suspense. It should matter to us that Samir may or may not have betrayed his country. It should matter to us that terrorists are plotting attacks on the United States. Will they succeed? Intellectually, the film makes us interested in what will happen. But it does not really make us care. Traitor is a film that operates within the parameters of a suspense thriller, so it is a problem that there is no suspense.

The film was directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who cowrote the screenplay with Steve Martin, among others. Martin also coproduced the film. It's too bad that a film focused on such an interesting main character, played by such a fine actor, exploring such crucial issues as extremism, racial profiling, religious prejudice, and terrorism, cannot arouse more interest or concern in its viewers, at least in this viewer.

Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock

Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? (2006) is an amusing documentary about a 72-year-old-truck driver named Teri Horton who buys for five dollars a large painting that may (or may not) be the work of Jackson Pollock. Much of the film takes place in a bar where Teri and her friends sit and drink and talk.

Human personalities are the main interest of this film. Teri and her conviction that she has discovered a work of art worth fifty million dollars (she turns down offers of $3 million and then $9 million dollars for the painting) versus art scholars and critics convinced that all the known Jackson Pollocks have been discovered and catalogued and that Teri's painting is a fraud.

The film interviews several experts on Pollock, all of whom for one reason or the other don't believe the painting is genuine. Yet a fingerprint on the back of the canvas, discovered by an investigator whom Teri hires, supposedly belongs to Pollock and matches his fingerprints on other paintings. Experts point out stylistic quirks in the painting that do not match Pollock's style. One notes that the presence of acrylics in the painting, supposedly created before acrylics were widely in use, means it is a forgery. But close-up images of the painting, as compared to other confirmed Pollock paintings, seem indistinguishable from the real thing.

Critics and scholars resist granting the painting status as a true Jackson Pollock because to do so would be to deny, to some extent, their own scholarly authority and expertise. How could a valuable Pollock painting escape their notice, especially one bought by an ignorant elderly truck driver at a flea market? One museum proprietor in particular is contemptuous both of Teri and of her painting. He comes off as an effete, over-stuffed, arrogant poseur, a fop.

The film resists taking sides on the question of whether the painting is genuine. Rather it highlights the controversy surrounding the painting along with Teri's efforts to confirm its identity and receive the money she thinks is due her. To represent her in her campaign to prove the painting's authenticity, she hires an art dealer who has recently been released from prison where he served time for art fraud. Asked why she would hire someone convicted of art fraud, she answers that everyone in the art world is a fraud, so what does it matter?

What is art? What makes one painting "great" and worth fifty million dollars and another an easily identified forgery worth $5? That's one of the big questions in the film. The more I looked at Teri's five-dollar painting, a huge and expansive canvas covered with whirling, dynamic colors, a flow of motion and image, the more convinced I became that, whatever its origins and whoever its creator, it was impressive. This film reminded me of The Moderns (1988), which investigated similar questions by focusing on young artist's involvement in art forgeries in 1920s Paris.

Watchmen (film)

The film Watchmen (2009) does an adequate job of translating the graphic novel to screen. As one would expect, it takes certain liberties with characters and the plot, and it alters the ending of the story, with a result that I think improves on the novel. The film accentuates the noirish elements of the novel, and the result is a kind of film noir for super heroes. (There are clear similarities with the ominous cityscapes and the pessimistic valuations of human nature in The Dark Knight). The film replicates many of the perspectives and visual angles used in individual frames of the novel. An example is the opening scene, which views the aftermath of the Comedian's murder from the perspective of Rorschach, high atop the roof of a building.

There came a point in the novel where the plot became so complex and overwrought that the author had to resort to a contrived device so cumbersome (even in this novel which by its very nature requires suspension of all usual forms of disbelief) that it nearly brought the story to a lumbering halt. The film substitutes another plot device that is also contrived, but it's easier to accept, and more logical.

There's little tension or suspense in this film. The characters are interesting, along with their interrelationships and their investigation of the murder of the costumed vigilante heroes. In ways the most interesting character is Dr. Manhattan, whose bizarre transformation in a scientific experiment gone awry gives him godlike powers but leaves him increasingly unable to identify with other human beings. He is so inhuman, in fact, that he speaks in portentous sentences that would come across as comic if any other character uttered them. He's interesting, but also one of the elements that marks the story as a science fantasy—this is not a novel about super heroes in our world—it's a novel about an alternative world where the one genuine super being interferes in human affairs in a way that the super heroes of DC Comics never did. The super heroes of Watchmen span the entire range of the political spectrum, and the novel raises the large question of whether the allure of super heroes represents a kind of fascism—are the pitiful humans they protect too weak and ignorant to understand what's good for them, to control their own destinies?

The most compelling character in the novel, and the film, is Rorschach, whose unwillingness to compromise costs him.

A number of historical figures appear in the film. Lee Iacocca, for one. Andy Warhol for another. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger make appearances—the actor portraying Nixon is so awkwardly made up that he seems artificial and grotesque. Most of the other actors impersonating historical figures bear a slight enough resemblance to the people they're portraying that the simulation works.

Like the novel, The Watchmen is more about talk than action. The graphic novel is about ideas, and the film follows suit. It's intelligent, engaging in certain ways, lifeless in others. But I much prefer it to the hollowness of any number of recent films that blunder across oft trod and well worn ground.

Vantage Point

The 1963 assassination of President Kennedy became a crucial touchstone date in American history. In a certain sense, it marked the advent of uncertainty as a popular cultural concept. Almost from the beginning, rumors, gossip, myths, and tales circulated about the killing. These gained such prominence that they eclipsed the official Warren Report account. In the early 1970s, a congressional committee conducted its own investigation of the assassination and voted to overturn the single-bullet theory of the Warren report. The Zapruder amateur footage of the killing in itself became a cultural fetish, to be watched with agonizing fascination over and over. The Zapruder footage became a sacred visual text for assassination theorists. It formed a crucial center of Don DeLillo's novel Libra and of Oliver Stone's film JFK (1991), which found virtually everyone but JFK responsible for the president's death. (JFK is a fascinating film about conspiracy and overwrought national paranoia. It convinced me--in spite of itself--that the single-bullet theory must be true).

Vantage Point (2008) at first seems to promise another variation on multiple point of view fascination with catastrophic public events. It suggests the television series 24 in its reliance on fast-paced, tightly edited scenes focused on real-time action, intrigue, and political mayhem. It also reminded me of a number of films that deconstruct conventional narrative time sequences as a way not only of telling a story but also of commenting on the very nature of narrative, of cause and effects, of reality. Think of the enormously entertaining Run Lola Run (1998) and of Timeline (2003) and many others.

Vantage Point pretends to be such a film. But in the end it is just another political thriller that uses disjunctive narrative strategies to camouflage a poorly conceived plot and stock characters. The film is set in a fictional Spanish city where Western leaders are meeting in a summit where they plan to present a united front against terrorism. The President of the United States is there, under heavy security, and when he steps up to the podium to speak, he is shot and crumples to the floor. Chaos, explosions, and chaos ensue. The film repeats this scene five or six times, each time from a different perspective, each time providing a slightly different slice of information, each time allowing the viewer to understand more of the story and the roles of various characters in the event. Some characters who at first seem unimportant turn out to be important; others who seem to be nominal bystanders turn out to be villains.

This is not a film about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. As the different versions of the event play themselves out, we do not challenged with contradictory accounts that prevent us from realizing what really happened. Instead, they add up to a complete story. The contending narratives do not cancel one another out. They add up to a conventional, mundane picture of a not-too-complex puzzle.

Forrest Whittaker is one of the only standouts in the film, and he is largely at a loss. With his large slovenly body and his distinctive facial features, he looks like a real human being rather than a slick Hollywood actor in a half-baked suspense thriller. He plays a tourist who for some reason has come to Spain to escape his collapsed marriage. He carries an HD video camera and obsessively films everything happening around him, to a point where he seems almost unreasonably intrusive. His camera becomes one of the main ways in which the film shows the action—as if it is not enough to tell the story from different characters' viewpoints, but as if it's somehow validating to have the ubiquitous video camera involved, the film's own convenient Zapruder home video.

Dennis Quaid is briefly interesting as a secret service agent back on his first assignment after taking a bullet for the president in an assassination attempt a year earlier. Has he lost his cool? Does he still have what it takes? Wasn't there a Clint Eastwood film—In the Line of Fire (1993) with a similar plot?

To ensure our attention, Vantage Point inserts a cute lost child into the equation. Will she find her mother? Will she be killed by a careening vehicle? Stay tuned!

Watchmen, by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, John Higgins

The scope of Watchmen (1986-87) is wide and ambitious. Written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, it encompasses the history of comic books and super heroes, 20^th-century history and foreign policy, the Cold War, science, art, and popular culture. The world of Watchmen is an alternative America in the mid-1980s. Nixon is still president of the United States. U. S. defense policy depends on the powers of a super-hero named Jon (his super hero moniker is Dr. Manhattan), who is capable of destroying anyone anywhere in the world at any time.

Watchmen is clearly a product of the Reagan administration. Paranoia about increasing U. S.-Soviet hostilities, about nuclear war, and government repression are constant themes.

This graphic novel is composed of 12 illustrated episodes, interspersed with 12 narrative sections. The episodes were originally published as separate issues during 1986-87. The first few narrative sections contain histories of one sort or the other. Later in the novel they contain pertinent documents or excerpts from newspaper articles. Every narrative in the book is related to every other narrative. One sequence of scenes running throughout the book concerns a newspaper and magazine vendor on a street corner. He is fearful about the growing possibility of nuclear war. A young black man is usually present in these scenes, sitting on a street curb reading a comic book narrative about "The Black Freighter." Excerpts from what he is reading are mixed with the newspaper vendor scenes. (I realize that the term graphic novel is controversial. Even Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman object to it. But it is a generally accepted term designating a form of expression that is receiving increasing respect from readers and critics, and Watchmen is frequently included as a leading example of graphic novels).

The central plot of Watchmen involves a series of murders of former super heroes. In the alternative world of this novel, most of the super heroes are simply average citizens inspired by comic books to put on costumes and become vigilantes. A recently enacted law has made their activities illegal, and most of them have retired. Several characters become involved in trying to discover who is murdering the former heroes.

The characters of Watchmen clearly and dramatically distinguish it from most other comic book narratives. Character development is, I gather, an important element of graphic fiction. Many of the characters are relatively well developed. They have detailed histories, human problems, and complicated personalities. One is afflicted with impotence. Another has a difficult relationship with her controlling mother. They range all over the political spectrum. The most interesting character to me is Rorschach, whose difficult childhood left him psychologically scarred. When the other super heroes enter middle age and retire from vigilantism, he continues. Everyone fears him, regarding him as a psychotic criminal. But in the course of the narrative he proves to be the most interesting of all the super heroes, the most unwilling to compromise his principles, the most intent on discovering the mystery behind the murders. At a certain level, however, all these characters remain what they are: well developed, conflicted comic book characters.

The illustrations are detailed and full of visual information that advances the plot. They are intelligent and appropriate to the narrative itself. But they never rise above the level of standard DC Comics graphics.

"Who will watch the watchmen?" This question expresses a crucial theme of the novel. Watchmen explores the concept of a world where super heroes really do exist and considers what it would be like to live in a world where such beings have nearly limitless powers. Only two characters in the novel actually have such powers. One is Jon, a former nuclear scientist who was caught in an accident that essentially disintegrated him into atoms. He manages to reconstitute himself, and when he does, his powers are limitless. The other is Conrad Veidt, whose intellectual genius and limitless wealth allow him to build and do virtually anything he wants.

Readers must suspend disbelief throughout much of this novel. Of course, Watchmen is science fiction, which by nature requires one to accept the given premises and principles of the story. But science fiction also operates within the demonstrable laws of science. This novel sometimes expects you to accept facile explanations and justifications: for example, Dr. Manhattan's unlimited powers—nothing in the world of quantum physics remotely supports this notion. Another example is Veidt's ability to do many of the things he does, such as create an artificial life form that he teleports into the center of New York City. Limitless wealth will not allow one to do what science cannot accommodate. One might argue that Watchmen portrays an alternative world, a different America where such things are possible, but if the basic laws of biology and physics in such a world differ from those of our own, what relevance does that world have to this one? Or one can argue that Watchmen is fantasy or allegory, but either argument would seem to me a stretch. Or one might insist that in comic books anything is possible, but such an argument subverts if not refutes the links Watchmen draws with our own world, not to mention that this work clearly rises above conventional definitions of the term comic book.

There are slow moments in the narrative. Often very little happens from one frame to the next. Sometimes the effect seems to build tension, suspense. You have to put up with these. There's also a physical issue: the paperback edition of Watchmen that I read combines all 12 issues of the original series. To conserve space (I assume) many frames are crammed onto each page, and the print is small and sometimes difficult to read. (Maybe this is an old person's problem). The mere creation of all the frames that make up the illustrated portion of the novel is impressive to consider. The book itself is heavy. Watchmen devotes much time and space to giving us the histories of the costumed heroes, though in the end this really does not advance the plot—it's almost a kind of diversion. I suspect that the intensity and developing tension of the Watchmen episodes would have developed more effectively had I read the individual episodes as they were published, rather than all within a relatively short period of time.

Is Watchmen great literature?—Newsweek named it one of the 100 greatest novels of the 20^th century. The intricacy of the narrative, the interwoven subplots, the detailed, nuanced creation of the city of New York and of the heroes themselves—all of this is impressive. The novel has an encyclopedic quality, sometimes seeking to encompass everything—all science, all culture, all literature. Clearly the author is creative and intelligent. With a specifically dark and humorless vision he argues that in the end the only way to ensure world peace is to force it on humankind through tricks and deceptions that cost millions of lives.

I do not regard this novel as great literature. Certainly among comic books, among graphic novels, it may deserve iconic status. For me, despite the intricacies, there is a cold two-dimensional quality to its characters and plots and subplots. Despite their detailed lives, the characters in the end are comic book figures, lacking the substance and the grain that characters from real novels possess. We depend in Watchmen on the operating laws and limitations of the world it creates. It's separate from our own world, no matter how much like our world it may be. The fate of that world matters less outside the covers of the novel that contains it than it does within.

A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature, by Richard Gray

Richard Gray's A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature (Athens, GA: UGA Press, 2007) argues that Southern writers, rather than being influenced by previous generations, are in a dialogue with them—that their work is a reaction to, an argument with, in ways both explicit and hidden, the writers who came before. Gray brings to bear an impressive array of modern and fairly contemporary Southern writers, ranging from Cormac McCarthy, Harry Crews, and Wendell Berry to many younger writers. Gray is intent on demonstrating the diversity of Southern literature. He also seems wary of the Nashville agrarians, who seemed so relevant thirty years ago but who now at least in this discussion seem considerably less so.

Gray views Southern literature not in terms of a common ideology among writers but instead in terms of a fluid and sometimes homogeneous set of themes and reactions to cultural conditions. To say that writers often dwell on common themes is not to say that they make similar treatments of them. This becomes most evident in Gray's long and excellent discussion of Toni Morrison's dialogue with William Faulkner, whom Gray regards as the greatest of Southern writers. Gray resists the notion that Morrison was influenced by Faulkner (even though she wrote her MA thesis on Faulkner and Proust) and instead contends that in Morrison's work there is a dialogue with the Mississippi writer. As his two main texts in this discussion he uses Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Morrison's Beloved, which he regards as the two greatest books the literary South has produced on race and slavery. (I think the distinction between influence and dialogue here is largely semantical).

The sense of the South as a distinctive entity derives from how others perceive it as "other" and marginal and on the extreme verges of existence. Gray writes: "'Region' and 'regional' are here applied to an area that seems to exist on the extremest margins. They are terms applied by 'us,' the members of a dominant cultural group, to 'them,' some unfortunate lesser breed or area that was and is interesting precisely because it is so far from the supposed center of things" (63). "Those writers who call or see themselves as southern may have very little in common sometimes. What they do have, though, and have had in the past, is an inclination to define their 'southernness' against a national 'other'" (64). "The South, in short, any South, tends to be named and identified against the historical tide—even more against than other spaces or places construed as marginal" (65).

Gray's view of the American South is not rigid or monolithic. He sees the South as constantly involved in a process of change and development. He takes issue late in the book with a statement Walker Percy made in the early 1970s to the effect that regional writing in the South was dead. He suggests that Percy's pronouncement is based on an assumption that comes from within Southern culture, one that sees the South as fixed and defined and in danger of collapse as a result of outside forces. Southern writers, he suggests, should not be defined "from within that monolith." The "culture that, as a matter of self-identification, has defined itself as regional and southern has always been more mixed and fluid than this argument allows" (243).

Gray's final discussion centers on a group of writers who reflect the presence of a large Vietnamese population in the South. Some of these writers are white Americans—Robert Olen Butler, for instance—and others are themselves first-generation Vietnamese southerners, or more recent immigrants. Gray's identification in their work of themes he regards as Southern raises the question of what a Southern theme is—why is a particular theme—a fixation on the past, for instance--essentially Southern? Why is it not simply a human theme? Could any group of writers be picked up and plopped down in the South, with a similar group of Southern themes then emerging? To some extent such themes are basic to the human condition. The South defines the geographical region and culture in which writers explore these themes and from which they borrow elements of lifestyle, politics, religion, and place to clothe them.

The dialogue among writers that is basic to Gray's discussion may well be a dialogue that occurs as much in the minds of readers as within the works and minds of the authors. The more we as readers absorb, the more readily able we are to recognize links and disjunctions between and among the writers we read. Our construction of those links creates the cognitive context in which we read.

In addition to the discussions of Berry, Faulkner, Morrison, there are excellent discussions as well of Eudora Welty, Bobby Ann Mason's In Country, Yusef Komunyakaa, The Bondswoman's Narrative (written some time between 1855 and 1869 by a woman who may or may not have been named Hannah Craft), as well as African American and Native American writers in the South.

Honeydripper

Written, directed, and produced by John Sayles, Honeydripper (2007) is set in 1950s rural Alabama. It begins as one of the slowest and least convincing films I've seen in a while, though gradually it gathers momentum. One issue I have with the film is historical accuracy—a question of representation. I do not know enough about rural African American life in Alabama in the mid-20^th century to judge the realism of this film. It does show that life was hard for rural blacks: they are always scrimping to get buy, many of them work in the cotton fields or other menial jobs, including domestic work for white people. The local sheriff (played by Stacy Keach) seems to have complete control of the county, especially of the African American inhabitants. He arrests them when it suits him and puts them to work in a local cotton field and in general asserts demagogic authority. Unfortunately, he looks and acts so much like the Buford T. Justice character portrayed by Jackie Gleason in Smokey and the Bandit that it is difficult to take him seriously. Other characters in the film are not so stereotypical. All the African American characters are individuals. The film in some way reminded me of Idlewild, a stylized and in some ways fantastical portrayal of rural African Americans in the South, but Honeydripper is not a musical and it is more deliberately realistic.

There are many melodramatic aspects to Honeydripper. The main character, Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover) is struggling to keep his juke joint (the Honeydripper Lounge) afloat as he loses business to another juke joint nearby that features more contemporary music that appeals to young folks. Purvis' place features traditional music. We see in the film that Bertha Mae (Mabel John) is performing at the Honeydripper, but virtually no one is there to listen to her. She is a blues singer in the 1930s style of someone like Bessie Smith. Tyrone wants to be loyal to Bertha Mae, but he also wants to keep his business afloat, so he makes plans to replace her with a performer from New Orleans known as "Guitar Sam." He hopes Guitar Sam's popularity will help him pay off his debts. Tyrone is a former blues piano player himself who many years before engaged in a knife fight that apparently ended his performing career. He is married to a pious woman named Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton) who is on the verge of declaring her faith to the local preacher. Their daughter, China Doll, has a weak heart. And so on. Tyrone owes money to everyone and is on the verge of becoming desperate.

Danny Glover seems to be going through the motions in this film. He's flattened and depressed throughout most of the early scenes, weighed down by debt and a distanced relationship with his wife and worries about his business. He shows little energy until towards the end, when he concocts his scheme to save the Honeydripper. Does he have any other source of income? He's supposed to be a fiercely independent man. The sheriff recognizes the fact. Tyrone berates his wife for working for the white wife of the white mayor. Yet he doesn't hesitate to go to the white sheriff when he needs a favor, and even enters into a business arrangement with him when he believes it will save the business.

One of the problems with representation in this film is the apparently middle-class lifestyle of Tyrone and his family. Even though he is deeply in debt, his wife and daughter dress well, and they don't seem to be impoverished. Where does their money come from? Purvis doesn't make enough from the Honeydripper to pay his debts. His wife works as a maid and earns little income. Everyone in the film dresses in relatively clean and nice looking clothes, though they live in shacks and appear to have limited means. What am I missing here? Is the film inaccurate or idealistic in representing the lives of the characters in this way, or is it simply suggesting that what money they have goes to dressing suitably?

Tyrone's daughter China Doll is a glimmer of light in this film. So also is Sonny (Gary Clark, Jr.), a drifter who passes through town and is arrested by the sheriff as a vagrant and put to work in the cotton fields. Sonny and China Doll are drawn to each other right away. Sonny also claims to be a singer, and when Guitar Sam doesn't show up on the day he is supposed to play at the Honeydripper, Tyrone hires Sonny to impersonate him. Sonny plays an electric guitar with an old-fashioned amplifier and speaker. In a sense his music represents the passing away of old traditional musical forms represented by Bessie Mae (who actually dies in the course of the film) and the newer forms that replace them. In the final scene we discover how well Sonny can play and sing (the actor himself is a modern-day bluesman). What the scene seems to suggest is that newer musical forms—electric and modern though they may be—continue and revitalize the traditions they replace.

In the end, the film comes to life. But it takes quite a while to get there. The moment itself is a kind of stereotypical cliché: music solves all the problems of these happy African Americans down on the old Southern farm. Just start playing the piano and strumming the guitar and dancing and all those trials and tribulations fall away. If that seems offensive, perhaps it should. The logic of the scene, as much a relief as it is, is not entirely consistent with the rest of the film, or with reality, either.

Man on Wire

Man on Wire (directed by James Marsh, 2008) recalls Philippe Petit's high-wire walk between the World Trade Center towers in New York City in 1974.

One of the film's great achievements is how it portrays Petit—not as a stuntman, or a fanatic, or a demented man intent on destroying himself—but rather as a singular individual with an unusual talent and a unique ambition. Petit says in the film that as soon as he read about plans to construct the World Trade Center in New York City he conceived his dream of walking between the two towers. Petit is shown as obsessively and even monomaniacally devoted to the pursuit of this dream. He enlists friends as accomplices in his scheme. He trains on a wire suspended across a field. He draws diagrams. They argue over strategy. They sometimes seem to give up. They fly back and forth across the Atlantic and scout out the World Trade Center, its stairways and entrances. They plot as if they are going to rob a bank or a museum, but their true goal is something quite different, something loftier. (Where he got the funds to pay for this scheme the film never mentions).

Man on Wire is a study in the personality of the people involved in the event, a chronicle of the steps they took to achieve their goal. It's also a celebration of the improbable and wondrous feat Petit amazingly pulled off. The film treats that moment, the culmination of the film, as a miraculous instant in time. The film is specifically a celebration of Petit himself, the young Petit. Even the older Petit, thirty-five years later, seems to stand in awe of his younger self.

As Petit's collaborators talk about their role in the event, they are often overcome with emotion, especially as they talk about the walk on the wires itself. They often seem incredulous over what they did—how they eluded guards and policemen in the Twin Towers, posed as workers in the building, hid under a tarp on the top floor when a guard passed through, used a bow and arrow to shoot a leader line from one building to the other.

When he takes his walk, Petit is so high in the air that that he is barely visible from the ground. Several of the men who helped him rig the lines took still photographs, and these are prominently featured in the film. The motion photography is of a barely visible figure—standing balanced on the war, sitting, reclining—remote and untouchable.

The film is narrated in retrospect, from a vantage point thirty-five years after the event it chronicles. Many of the major participants in Petit's walk—his girlfriend, fellow companions, Americans who decided to help him—are interviewed, and the film shows them both as they were in 1974 and as they are today. A few reenacted scenes, using actors, depict preparations for the event. Everyone expresses awe over Petit’s walk—his conspirators, the policemen who took him into custody, the manager of the World Trade Center. For most of them, once the wire walk was done and Pettit and others were taken into custody, that was the end of their relationship. He soon broke up with his girlfriend and lost touch with the friends who helped him. Everyone seems to accept the change as an inevitable consequence of the celebrity the feat brought him.

Never in the film is the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center towers mentioned. But it is there nonetheless, always implied, a future memory. Occasional images summon it up—a wafting slip of paper blown through the air, an airplane passing behind one of the towers. And the consequence of a mistake by Petit would have brought him plummeting 1400 to the ground and his death, another disquieting reminder of that day in 2001.

Man on Wire won the 2009 Oscar for best documentary, as well as numerous other awards.

Young at Heart

From the first scene, in which a 92-year old woman enthusiastically croaks out the song "Do I stay or do I go," by the Clash, Young at Heart (2007) is enjoyable and charming. It's about a group of old people, ranging in age from 72 to 92, who meet together to sing popular music. They give public performances at various places, including a prison where their performance of Dylan's "Forever Young" (immediately following the deaths of two of their members) brings hardened inmates to genuine tears. They also tour Europe and the United States. The performances aren't remarkable, but the performers are. For the most part the members of the troupe are and always have been amateurs. The point of the film is not that once they get together and practice long hours they discover hidden talents. Instead, the point is that at an advanced age they still brim with enthusiasm, vigor, and passion. They're not ready to lie down and die either, though in the course of the film, several do so. The film is dedicated to the 92-year-old woman of the opening scene, who died shortly after the production was completed.

I am of a divided mind on this film. It did charm me. On the other hand, I wondered whether the laughter it often evoked was exploitative. Was the film asking me to recognize the humanity in these old people, or was it encouraging me to laugh at them because they are old and doddering? I'm not sure there is an easy answer.

Lessons of Darkness

Lessons of Darkness (1992) is a Werner Herzog documentary about the first U. S. invasion of Iraq. This film differs from two other Herzog documentaries I have seen—Grizzly Man and Encounters at the Edge of the World—in that the director's narration is not prominent. Instead Herzog relies on the weight of images of carnage and destructive, often presented in a repetitive way intended (apparently) to make and emphasize his point. One problem with this film is that you have nothing with which to compare the images of destruction—what were these scenes like before U. S. bombs began to fall? An occasional point of reference by which to measure the bombs' impact would help. (Admittedly, some of the images are self-evident: cratered landscapes, blasted, shredded tanks). In particular Herzog focuses on images of the Iraqi oil fields—in the opinions of many the reason for both U. S. invasions of that country. When the U. S. attacked Iraq in 1990, Saddam Hussein ordered oil field facilities blown up, so that thousands of gallons of oil poured out onto the desert or went up in flames. Often in Lessons of Darkness you believe that you are looking at the sky's reflection in a lake, and only gradually do you realize that the lake is full of oil, not water. There is, at times, a bloated portentousness to this film that Herzog usually manages to avoid in his best work.

The imagery in this film has a deadening effect. More narration might have helped. Too often I was reminded (with the encouragement of the musical soundtrack) of Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi (1982), but in that film repetitive, rhythmic motion synchronized with Phillip Glass music had a mesmerizing impact that this film lacks.