The Icepick Cometh

Heath Ledger's death got me back thinking on this, but it's been on my mind for a while. Two Thousand and Five was the best year for movies this decade.

Not that I get out to the movies much anymore, but a spate of these flicks on cable a few months ago reminded me out this. Here's my general thoughts:

After much internal debate, and I know it's not as well-liked, but I'm picking Munich as the Best Picture. Too bad you don't like it as much as I did. It pulls you in like a political espionage thriller, but it has something important to say about the nature of revenge and war and the bloody emptiness of it all. [Spoiler Alert:] The final shot, with the Twin Towers oh so subtly (or not) placed in the background makes me cry almost every time. It's the final point to it all. That final powerful shot says so much about the mess we're in overseas, and why it is so complicated to both be in there and to want to be out of there.

A close second is Capote, which to me is the one film that nails what it is to be a writer and largely a journalist. Nothing else has ever come closer to portraying the toll writing takes on an artist. To me, Capote, is all about the costs of writing to a writer (and by extension, the cost of art to an artist). The film shows how much internal pain and betrayal is truly involved in really great writing and in coming to a Truth about an idea or a subject.

I've already discussed Heath Ledger's performance in Brokeback Mountain, but overall, the film is very good too. It fools you that it is a love story that happens to be a romance between two men. But what it really is about is what it means to be the typical man in American, especially the ideal of the strong, silent, taciturn type with the square jaw. That's Heath Ledger's Ennis character in the film, and the film shows how being so unemotional on the outside eats you alive from the inside.

What else do we have to praise from 2005? A History of Violence, about the inability of someone to escape their past, no matter how deeply it's buried. Syriana, the oil-industry conspiracy movie with four (at least) interlocking stories trying to connect the dots. Good Night and Good Luck, which has a lot to say about not only today's media, but also today's leadership in this country. And though it's a comic-book hero movie, Batman Begins is the best of its genre, showing us the origins of the hero. It's the first Batman movie where Bruce Wayne is the hero, and not Batman (who doesn't appear for the first hour of the film). I liked the first two Spider-Man movies, but they don't compare to this film, which, like Munich, is also a meditation on revenge.

Of note is that the Best Picture Oscar was won by Crash that year. Never saw it, and some critics derided it as a bit simplistic. I deride it simply because Cronenberg had a film with the same name in 1996. Except that film dealt with car crash victims who got off on being in car crashes. I think there was a scene where James Spader humps the, er, gash of Holly Hunter — that's her gash along her leg. From a car crash. Oh, never mind.

There were other great films in this ’00s decade — The Lord of the Rings films and Million Dollar Baby spring to mind. But it's been tough to compete with the ’90s, which kicked off the decade with Goodfellas, and included Pulp Fiction, Unforgiven, Boogie Nights, Three Kings, Out of Sight, The Usual Suspects, L.A. Confidential, Fight Club, Saving Private Ryan, Trainspotting, Clerks, Glengarry Glen Ross ("Put that coffee down."), and, of course, Reservoir Dogs. And that's just the ones I can come up with real quick. Plus, it was the decade that introduced us to Kate Winslet for God's sake! But this is another post for some other time.

In an op-ed piece Sunday in the Dallas Morning News — linked via NPR and appearing in longer-form in City Journal, the conservative Manhattan Institute's self-described "premier urban-policy magazine" — Brooklyn author Kay Hymowitz is upset: "Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood's milestones — high school degree, financial independence, marriage and children. These days he lingers — happily — in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance."

Oh, shit, where do I start on this one?

The author goes on: "It's time to state what is now obvious to the legions of frustrated young women: The limbo doesn't bring out the best in them."

First off, I’m a little old for this generation — my Generation X is older than this unnamed generation (please do not call them Generation Y — what are we going to do next: call the succeeding kids Generation Z, followed by Generation A¹ or AA?) Even so, my "older" generation of workers mostly in their 30s (let’s say 28 to 42) is barely struggling to maintain financial independence at an age when our parents had more securely achieved that goal. Given that, and given that the Baby Boomers are living longer, working longer and holding on to the better jobs longer, is there any surprise for this apparent extended adolescence, and is that such a bad thing?

(Digression: With a lack of advancement opportunities — or an effective outright blockage to enter into certain fields because of lingering Boomer hoarding — workers under 40 have shown they can and must excel in new industries and media, shunning the traditional roles and companies that Boomers have clung to for so long. Members of Generation X and this succeeding generation have long known they must carve out their own niche and hustle to get what they can — the good ones do this, anyway. Hymowitz is correct about that "responsible self-reliance" she mentions. The others are idle and waiting, and, yes, perhaps lapse into wasting. But for both the hustlers and the idle ones, their daily decompression, like the new economy, is new, perhaps raw, and it is fueled by the easy retail credit creating this false affluence in this country. It is a way of dealing with growing into flexible careers in-flux unlike anything their parents dealt with. If anything, the next battle will be between the older Gen X’ers and the Next Gen of workers 10 to 15 years younger looking to take their jobs).

Curiously though, author Hymowitz excludes criticizing women from this prolonged adolescence phase, and focuses her attention on the deficiencies of men. In her argument, your average modern 20-something woman is an overachiever who spends her disposable income on evidently worthy and traditional pursuits such as shopping, travel and dining with friends. So in her world, “Sex and the City” = good. “Entourage” = bad.

Meanwhile, she seems to long for the days of the 1950s and ’60s while at the same time clearly seems to be praising the "hyperachieving" "New Girl Order" (her words) and rising female power in the workplace. So she seems to want men who are breadwinners and do the laundry. Well, I suppose that's essentially what every man wants, too, so I guess we're even.

Except a man's pursuits, be it today's XBox and "Maxim" magazine or the social clubs and "Field and Stream" magazines of yore are unworthy. Side note: one of her good points is that men's aversion to settling down is not an entirely new phenomenon — past generations of men simply got married then avoided their wives in social (and exclusionary) clubs. But at least those men got married and had kids, she seems to be praising.

I mean, didn't she ever see “Mad Men”? Oh sure, let's bring back the ’60s, when white men only had to compete with other white men in the workplace marketplace. Is this what she is arguing for? A return to the repressed old days, when a woman like her would not be able to find a place in the marketplace, because there was largely no marketplace for women professionals? How many happy marriages from the 1950s made by teenagers and kids in their early 20s resulted in divorce, broken homes, affairs, or, perhaps as bad, a lifetime of general unhappiness, unfulfillment and uncomfortable silences? On the one hand she is praising modern women's power, ingenuity and drive and on the other she is asking for a return to young marriage when an inexperienced woman on her wedding night was as likely to been given the following advice by her own mother: just lie back, think of old England and let him do his thing on you.

If these men should in their 20s simply need to "grow up," then whom should they marry and have children with but women in the same age? And anyone from my mother's generation to my wife's will tell you how much harder it is to build a career with a child. So, this writer's response would be is to tell the man to help shoulder the burden of childrearing so the woman can continue with her career. The predictable next criticism (based on this logic) would be that the man would next be criticized for not being enough of a bread-winner.

Even today's men who do becomes ostensibly good dads today aren't good enough for her. Far be it from me to defend shameless self-promoting author Neal Pollack (Alternadad), but she nails him for being a doting father by focusing on his urge to turn his son into a little version of himself — um, so you're not supposed to share interests with your kids? In her world, she'd rather have the distant, unemotive, cold and tactical male leader as a dad, sort of like Hugh Beaumont on “Leave it To Beaver” or the guy on “Father Knows Best,” presumably so he ran raise a daughter or son who will grow up hating him for being so distant, unemotive and male-dominant.

Her opening financial arguments are equally as weak. You work in a cubicle and live in an apartment because the Baby Boomers took up all the good fucking housing and then drove the market nuts in buying second homes and McMasions. The only way you could get your own home was to take out a variable-rate mortgage, with unfortunately predictable results (read: U.S. Economy, January 2008).

Her selective use of statistics is also interesting, and the classic ruse of someone with nothing real to say. She cites the rise in the median age of marriage for men and the percentage of married 25- and 30-year-olds — and runs with it. Everything else is anecdotal evidence and riffs against box-office and best-selling successes targeted at the audience she criticizes. Excluding for same-sex marriages, more unmarried men means more unmarried women. But somehow this only the fault of men, based on her conversational evidence — "in contemporary female writing and conversation, the words 'immature' and 'men' seem united in perpetuity." No stats to back this up, of course (it "seems" indeed). And is the "contemporary female writing" she cites the same as "chit lit," that genre that celebrates single, unmarried women of the “Sex and the City” variety? If this is a problem (and I am in no way saying it is) this is a problem for both genders.

(I, myself, use no statistics in presenting my argument, but I'm a blogger, not a senior fellow at an important conservative think tank whose stuff shows up on NPR occasionally and who, incidentally, I can't get a handle on: in 1994 she evidently argued in the New York Times against sex education in schools (in favor of apparently benign ignorance) but also smartly argued against marketing to young children (she told the Times in 1999: "One of the great things about childhood in the U.S. used to be that kids were protected by the market and allowed to grow their own ideas. Now there is no time to be a kid separate from those pressures. You may have always had kids who are little princesses, but now there are 8-year-old boys that are extremely uptight if they don't get the right Abercrombie & Fitch sweat shirt.").)

(A digression: where can I get one of these research and writing jobs at a Manhattan institute or some other think-tank? Or were the last ones swallowed up by Baby Boomers, who again locked the door on the way in?)

(One other side note that I can't argue with her is the inner-city atmosphere of young boys going out to the corner in their teens to "be a man" and support their single mothers (with dads largely absent). Though not addressed in her "child-man" piece, in fairness to author Hymowitz, a Google search shows that she has addressed this issue many times elsewhere, so we'll call it a wash on this matter.)

Where are the men still living with their parents? Most of them are out by 24, and if they remain, or if they room up with a few other guys in an apartment — it's only because a Baby Boomer-favored real estate market conspires against them. Most of them are saving for their own place. The rest of them are the small-majority who will continue to live with their parents, remain unmarried into their peak earning years and then still live at home to care for their sickly and now-burdensome parents in their late-twilight years.

The author strangely attributes the ground-zero event of this generation to the debut of "Maxim" magazine in April 1997. Strange that an entire generation can be ruined (in her implication) in the debut of a magazine that featured the girl from the Drew Carrey Show (the hot one, not his plus-sized heavily made-up co-worker) on the cover.

Let's take a final look at these irresponsible 20-something lads. The newest television show to appeal to this grouping (a show she curiously doesn't mention, though it would seem to fall exactly into her category) is “Entourage.” At first glance, it is seems to be everything she hates — a male wish-fulfillment fantasy depicting 20- or 30-something men with outlandish money at their disposal (the main character is a Hollywood actor) and obscene access to beautiful women. It celebrates partying, hanging with your bros, even video game-playing. The only married guy on the show (the agent Ari) envies the young men's unmarried freedom.

But what this author forgets, and on closer glance this series depcits, is the hustle that is needed to make it in this world domianted by the Boomer economy. The main actor, his best friend and manager, the less-talented brother, especially the agent but even the lackey friend are all constantly hustling, either for the next movie deal or simply to make a buck. It's a comedy, so often this hustling is humorous or pitiful, but the show doesn't condemn the characters' efforts. That some of this scheming often involves bedding other women is part of this wish-fulfillment scheme of the show.

But you're telling me sex and the opposite sex are not on the minds of any same-aged single women?

(Special thanks to WAMC.org's "Roundtable" for linking to the original Dallas article on its Web site.)

(One final point: the photo that City Journal uses for this article? Is that from, like, 1999? Those controllers are so PSOne.)

Esquire magazine long since slid into irrelevancy, but David Simon's article in the March edition (and online) could practically double as my manifesto:

At the very edge of being rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Internet — at the precise moment when their very product would be threatened by technology — newspapers will not be intent on increasing and deepening their coverage of their cities, their nation, the world. They will be instead in the hands of out-of-town moneymen offering unfeeling and unequivocal fealty to stockholders and the share price.

As has been blogged elsewhere, Barack Obama told the Las Vegas Sun two weeks ago that "The Wire" is his favorite TV show and his favorite character is Omar Little, the gay stick-up artist with the facial scar, sawed-off shotgun and Wild-West duster who robs drug dealers and disdains swearing.

Here is the story. The audio clip with Obama talking about Omar is the third one listed. I've also added NPR's interview on "Fresh Air" with Michael K. Williams, who portrays Omar. He not only talks with Terry Gross about "The Wire" and how he got that distinctive facial scar, but also his pre-Wire work as a background dancer(!) in Madonna videos.

Like everyone I am sure, I was deeply saddened by the death of Heath Ledger this week. His work in Brokeback Mountain was one of the best in my lifetime. I'll get to my thoughts on his too-young-to-die death and comparisons with Kurt Cobain later in this post, but a few days after Ledger died, I remembered how unbelievably incredible 2005 — the year Brokeback Mountain was released — was for movies. This in a decade where there have been scant few good films, even fewer great ones, and a whole lot of shitty ones. The exceptions to this are the Lord of the Rings trilogy (of course) and many of the films of 2005. That year was such an anomaly for this '00s decade by far. It's something I'll post about later. [update: here it is.]

But as far as Ledger's work in Brokeback Mountain, specifically, it ranked up there as among the best I've ever seen. Phillip Seymour Hoffman won Best Actor for Capote in 2005. I loved that movie — it depicted the writing life perfectly, and for a time I thought it was the best picture of that year. Hoffman was incredible as Truman Capote, and any other year this decade he'd win my Best Actor award.

I thought Heath Ledger was better.

Ledger's mumbles, his restraint, his fucking eyes, all perfectly portrayed Ennis' internalized pain, regret, restraint, and rare (but volcanic) explosions of anger.

Ledger so accurately portrayed so many rural men (straight or gay), men "in the country." Growing up in Dutchess and spending three-plus years covering the rural part of that county, I saw a lot of men out there like Heath's performance as Ennis — fuck it that the character was gay. I said it before: that they're gay is almost beside the point in that film. Slate's reviewer made the note that it was impossible for anyone to love Ennis. Kind of sums up a lot of men out in the country, and a lot of men in this country.

I'd put Ledger's performance up with Al Pacino as Michael in Godfather II. And that takes nothing away from Hoffman as Truman. You wished the films had competed in separate years, that way they both could have won Best Actor, because no other performance even came close to those two this decade. But if you had to pick one, I go with Heath Ledger.

OK, on to Ledger and Kurt Cobain. Both died tragically young under unusual circumstances (is any young death not unusual?), both left young daughters, and they both achieved popular fame and recognition as an artist.

I'm glad I got to see Heath's work "in the present," at least in his great film. With Cobain, I was late to the party, and it took me almost 10 years to appreciate his work.

Typical of the tortured artist, Kurt Cobain, if I recall, had trouble with the fame part of it all. Don't remember if that led him to suicide, but I seem to remember it was a contributing factor. Though we don't know the exact nature of Heath's death (suicide? accidental overdose? who knows?), it sounds like he, too, was uncomfortable with fame. And like Cobain, and a lot of artists who still live, the "art" part of it took a lot out of him, and ultimately, its final toll.

This is what we should be seeing more of in our newspapers. This is the other America that you see in "The Wire."

http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2008/jan/26/0126_homeless/

Lot of backlash against David Simon's vision of the Baltimore Sun in the final season of The Wire. A lot of it is because of Simon's now very public hatred of two of his former editors. Both of these editors are considered sacred cows among many of today's working journalists. But these jorunos' defense of these two editors, and their backlash against Simon and The Wire, is playing exactly into The Wire's viewpoint, which is: what are We paying attention to?

I'm sure that during the first seasons of The Wire, every police in Baltimore spent time trying to figure out which real-life cop McNulty was based upon, who was the real-life police commissioner, the deputy commissioner, etc. The difference is that police generally don't have the podium of either column inches or online news sites and name-brand blogs at their disposal to vent or offer personality corrections. I'm wondering if they have the same competitive streak that drives most journos to go out and prove they are better, smarter and more prolific than every other journo — in reality, that, and not the pursuit of truth, is what drives most journalists.

As Slate's critics finally realized (post No. 17 in the Slate discussion), today's journalists are fiddling while Rome burns. What I've read in the last few weeks (the Atlantic, Slate, etc.) proves to me the exact Problem with Reporters and Editors today — their obsession with gossip rather than news. The discussion has been overwhelmed by the talk of these two real-life editors "would never do/say that" instead of "that's exactly what Corporate America is doing to the World of Journalism." Just see the LA Times, which just fired a head-cutter who evidently wasn't cutting heads fast enough.

In their rush to defend two sacred cows, journalists are missing the actual story of Corporate America gutting newspapers, while MBAs are running the newsrooms based on the demands of Wall Street and not the demands of good journalism (as Pete Hamill, among others, pointed out 10 years ago). I saw this problem even at the small-time daily journalism level. Like me, most of the people that care about newspapers — outside of the elite big-time journo circles that have been discussing these guys ad infinitum — DON'T CARE who the fictional 'Wire' editors are based upon. We care that corporate greed and an attitude of "more with less" is decimating American journalism. All we're left with is gossip. That's the story most of the new criticism (with the exception of the No. 17 post at Slate) is missing.

Incidentally, a more balanced treatment of Simon's admitted grudge, but one that also takes into account the Real Issues I'm talking about, is in the Columbia Journalism Review's story and in NPR's report.

I had my own criticism of the first episode (see previous post). I, too, griped about the portrayal of the news business in the initial 60 minutes as inaccurate and simplistic, and I was concerned about the dramatic presentation and pacing.

And I admit, Slate's Press Box guru makes some good points regarding the newspaper industry itself, and how Simon does or doesn't accurately portray it for 2008 (as opposed to the 1990s, as Shafer points out). But the Press Box column (and, yes, my earlier post) misses Simon's larger, and more important, point about what are We watching?

The first episode seemed way too expository for me, even for a first episode. The previous season openers didn't seem so, well, talky. And, as Slate pointed out today in its TV Club, the Baltimore Sun material just stopped the show dead in its tracks. Gawker feedback is also ambivalent about the Sun stuff. I know it is only the first episode, but with now only 9 episodes left, I don't know how we're going to add layers to the newsroom caricatures presented last night. Only the ambitious Scott Templeton character seems to have any sorts of layers, and from what I've read, he turns over to the dark side in his ambitions. I guess, I have no problems with the bad guys being the bad guys (the two top editors) -- God knows, I've got my own set of grudges against Corporate newspaper management; I truly believe they are soulless stupid motherfuckers who deserve to rot in sulfur-burning Hell.

But I want my good guys and not-so-sure guys layered, with some faults. That's why we all love McNulty, Bubbles, Bunk, all of them. They're all fuck-ups and losers, but they're our fuck-ups and losers. Like us. Shit, the most popular character is a drug-dealer-robbing murderer. But we loves Omar.

So, I am a little disappointed in the "daily act of journalism" spewing hero of City Editor Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson, who was so good on Homicide, and seems to be a great director for this show, behind the cameras, too), the grammar-checking copy editor/rewrite man, and the Alma Gutierrez character as a naive reporter. Shit, I was never that fucking naive as a cub reporter on a shitty and small newspaper, and the HBO Web site has her character with 5 months already at the Sun -- a bigger-than-midsize newspaper, with her previously working at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale. Baltimore is in the majors leagues, not some Single-A shit, and I've heard of the Sun-Sentinel. She is actually happy with a "contributing" byline, takes a grammatical correction in stride (with no grumbling) and seems shocked that anyone would be ambitious enough to want to go to a bigger paper. Hey, she wants to stay in Baltimore, cool. But don't begrudge someone looking to move up -- at least her compatriot doesn't want to go into management, and it'll get him out of the fucking Tribune chain.

My naivete ended as a reporter when I was covering cops in a rural-poor community for a shoe-string weekly reading police reports about rural-poor crime. I was seated on a bench seat next to a shackled and drunk white woman who could barely sit up straight she was so baked. Another time, I asked an investigator to explain the nature of a sodomy charge against some scumbag, and the investigator deadpanned: "blowjob."

OK, so let's hope for the best for the final 9 episodes. And I should say, that this is all David Simon's fault -- if he and his crew of writers had not set the bar so high, we'd all be praising the shit out of the first episode. So don't forget that, me included. When was the last time any show or movie acurately depicted the mouthpieces that manage today's Corporately owned newspapers?