Bully Pulpit

At 3:00 in, the President gives it to the Wall Street bonus gang:



Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) goes all the way to offering a bill capping their salaries. If that doesn't scare the high capitalist class, I'm not sure what will. Yes, regulating prices, wages and productivity is what the GOP would call Socialism. But at an average of $2,600,000 in executive pay for the execs at banks bailed out by taxpayers -- $18 billion worth -- they deserve nothing less. In fact, I'd like to see if any of it is actionable. Like, prison actionable.

As for the Republicans trying to win by standing in the way of Obama's stimulus package or maybe twisting it into another tax giveaway to the wealthy, Frank Rich has the goods:

If anything, the Republican Congressional leadership seems to be emulating John McCain’s September stunt of “suspending” his campaign to “fix” the Wall Street meltdown. For all his bluster, McCain in the end had no fixes to offer and sat like a pet rock at the White House meeting on the crisis before capitulating to the bailout. His imitators likewise posture in public about their determination to take action, then do nothing while more and more Americans cry for help.

The problem is not that House Republicans gave the stimulus bill zero votes last week. That’s transitory political symbolism, and it had no effect on the outcome. Some of the naysayers will vote for the revised final bill anyway (and claim, Kerry-style, that they were against it before they were for it). The more disturbing problem is that the party has zero leaders and zero ideas. It is as AWOL in this disaster as the Bush administration was during Katrina.

While the GOP likes to complain about "class warfare" the fact is that they have brought it on and it is plain for every American to see. The plutocratic class in this country has derivative-ized the financial assets of the masses to the point that the Middle Class are losing their homes, their jobs, their life savings all in one fell swoop -- while those at the top reward themselves with taxpayer money, i.e. more dollar from the very classes they have shat upon. They're lucky there aren't guillotines on Wall Street, but then again this ain't over yet.

The face of the 2009 Republican Party isn't Michael Steele, it's Rush Limbaugh. If an elected Republican criticizes him he is forced to turn around and grovel for forgiveness. Rush is the voice of the GOP in openly articulating the desire for Obama to fail -- and, hence, for this economic meltdown to metastasize all the way into a second, even more devastating Great Depression. But they'll still have their radio contract money, their bonuses, their Oxycontin.

But the ads using Rush are coming now, being used against the GOP by progressive interest groups:

That face, I've seen it somewhere before...on HBO Sunday nights for almost a decade.

And maybe, like Tony himself, he won't see what's coming.

Countdown to Ecstasy

The hour draws nigh. Tuesday, January 20, 2009, 12:00 noon EST.

Yes he will.

Some interesting items in the shuffle between yesterday's Lincoln Memorial celebration, today's MLK Day commemoration, and tomorrow's restoration of democracy jubilation:

• Many supporters of both John McCain and Hillary Clinton are getting Obamafied, at least willing to give him a solid chance, heartened by his transition and appointments.

• Obama held a bipartisan dinner with John McCain as guest of honor, calls to make such a pre-Inauguration dinner a tradition going forward.
  

• Vice President (the last time I'll write that w/out "Former") Richard Bruce Cheney injured his back during his move out of the VP residence and will show up for the Inauguration in a wheelchair. I don't quite have the perfect metaphor, but how about, "Don't let the door snap your back on the way out?"

• Final Bush protest: shoes thrown onto the White House lawn. Will this be his greeting wherever he goes -- any speech, public appearance, even if by infiltration?

• Obama Lego Inauguration:

• And finally, at the official Bush farewell party, El Presidente speaks to his peeps and gives a closing address, which closes with:

"It has been an awesome eight years," he went on. "The days are long, but the years are short. … If you ever want a nice meal, come and knock on our door in Dallas, Texas." He waved goodbye over the opening chords of "Don't Stop Believin'."

That's right, Bush goes out with the very same song made famous again by the closing moments of The Sopranos. This leaped out at me for two reasons.

For one, unauthorized Bush Family biographer Kitty Kelley compared El Presidente's family to that fictional organized crime clan.

And then there's the whole ending of The Sopranos thing, the blackout that by now is pretty much considered to be Tony's POV as his lights go out, offed by the man in the Members Only jacket.

Back in Semiotics class in college we used to discuss overdetermination in movies, books, other works of art. Overdetermination might be best translated as obviousness, when the metaphor is all too apt, as in all too pat. But the counterargument to this was also real-world examples where life itself, by coincidence or grand design, is itself overdetermined. You know, those "if they put it in a movie you'd never believe it" moments we've all read about or experienced ourselves on occasion.

Has there ever been a Presidency as overdetermined as the Bush/Cheney Administration?

Don't. Stop. Believin'.

George.

Lather Despair Repeat

Who is Don Draper?

"Draper? Who knows anything about that guy. No-one’s ever lifted that rock. He could be Batman for all we know."

- Young media buyer Harry Crane
to rising account exec Pete Campbell.

We know he has a Purple Heart in his desk. We know someone recognized him on the commuter train as a war buddy, but addressed him as Dick Whitman. We know he didn't have a nanny growing up, yet has somehow come out refined. We know he's no stranger to working with his hands. We know he is often the smartest guy in the room.

We also know that he's medicating himself to death with nicotine and alcohol, that he's serially cheating on his marriage, that he's emotionally unavailable to anyone in his family, that he doesn't want to talk about his past.

We also know that he feels epic unrest with his perfect and enviable 1960 affluent ad exec/suburban husband & father life, that he's not so sure he wants what he's attained, that he is watching his life pass him by.

Same as it ever was.

You may ask yourself, how did Don get here?

AMC's Mad Men is the best dramatic hour show since The Sopranos, and creator/exec prod Matthew Weiner was on the staff of that show. It's amazing how quickly it's hit the air after that earth-shattering blast of black that ended Tony's reign, but it's again the most innovative drama going, not even bothering to toy with our affections towards the main character as much as David Chase did with his neurotically unsatisfied married professional.

Draper's counterpart, his ingenue secretary, Peggy Olson, who's maybe not quite from the same pool as the others, more easily elicits sympathy, but no one gets away clean. This is John Cheever, the series. This could be Blue Velvet-land, just shed that paranormal Lynchian vibe. This is Douglas Sirk on Benzedrine looking ahead to Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, self-repressed truths and scandalous stolen moments.

While getting praised for bulls-eye period art direction, costuming and hair, and getting suspect for actually portraying a credible vision of period sexism, anti-Semitism and racism, it turns out that Mad Men is, even more than The Sopranos, a gilded vision of hell, and for each of us a hell of our own making.

"Advertising is based on one thing--happiness. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams the reassurance that whatever you're doing, it's OK. You're OK."

- Don Draper

So Don isn't happy. So maybe Don isn't Don. Maybe something happened in the war. Maybe he was once Dick. Maybe he's half-Jewish, on his mother's side, and that's why he's drawn to department store heiress and owner Rachel Menken. Maybe he was poor and went big-time for the American dream, and actually achieved it, and now he's contemplating suicide by the side of a bridge.

Will Don discover beatniks before he divorces his family and strands his wife circa 1961-62? Will Peggy start going to readings and run into copywriter Paul Kinsey and end up in the sexual/cultural revolution together? Will sec pool queen bee Joan Holloway land a steady man before The Beatles are on Ed Sullivan?

Is Don Draper actually J.R. "Bob" Dobbs?

David Chase gave us the gift of dread, he ended that way and people acted surprised, but Weiner, with topnotch HBO staple director Alan Taylor setting the tone with the first two episodes, is giving us a brand new version, and it is crazy compelling. You can read great analysis of the most current episode, "The Marriage of Figaro" (like Chase's titles, the meanings are loaded), from Alan Sepinwall and Andrew Johnston. These critics are re-watching their screeners up to four times, and it's because like with Chase's show, so much of it is unspoken, so unlike typical TV that ,upon restudy, dangerous layers and threatening revelations of meaning emerge. A deeper plan than might appear on the smooth, stylish, nasty surface.

I desperately don't want to give out spoilers on the episode endings, but they've been uniformally devastating and I've only seen the first three. Just start watching, catch the back ones later, or get them on iTunes. Supposedly the fourth episode is a big one, and I just can't wait.

Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.

- David Ogilvy

Yeah, but what's it doing to Don's (Dick's?) soul?

Mad About the Sixties

There's something in the entertainment air, a callback to the 1960s I've experienced these past couple weeks. It started with the premiere episode of AMC's new series set in the year 1960 among the advertising agency gods of Madison Avenue, Mad Men; continued with a visit to 1962 Baltimore in the movie musical Hairspray; jumped to 1966 with Don Cheadle's Oscarbait turn as legendary D.C. deejay Petey Greene in Talk to Me; then circled back tonight with ep. 2 (TiVo) of Mad Men.

What is it about the '60's that's got it coming back? Is it the failed policies of the anti-evolutionary forces these past seven years? And why start with 1960 -- picking up in the cigarette haze where George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck left off?

My own theory is that these creators were all children during that era. I, personally, was born somewhere in the middle of what will be the first season of Mad Men. So this isn't the nostalgia of those who lived through that decade as adults or even cognizant teens. These are the legends, the revisionist legends, filtered through a child's view of that mysterious, threatening, alluring adult world of the time.

Since Talk to Me takes place both later and is based on true material, I'm thinking to discuss it later. I can tell you that it is well worth seeing, not just to see Don Cheadle break out like you've always known he could, but also for the power of the story, and a great evocation of the constant tensions of the times.

In the middle of watching Hairspray I realized why it was succeeding in an age where the numbers in movie musicals are either performed onstage in sagas about musicals, or awkward breaks in otherwise naturalistic direction. The difference is that this adaptation of the recent Broadway smash hit, itself based on the 1988 film by indie camp king John Waters, is the first Mad magazine movie musical, applying that populist ironic voice to the very decade where its readership blossomed. Just enough youthful disrespect has survived.

When I watched Batman back in the mid-1960's, I was a little kid so I took it seriously. I'm generally not a big fan of camp, which I find replaces subtext with a rather obvious mocking knowingness. The rare exception would include The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, which not only had subtext but showed a lot of reality in the shooting (vast landscapes, faces with age) and was genuinely moving. While his movies have always been satiric and filled with meshes of parody, what makes John Waters the biggest exception of all, at least for me, is that his career-spanning theme is so honestly delivered, the floor upon which all his laughs dance:

Accept yourself for yourself; accept everybody else for who they are or "kiss my ass." (That last quip courtesy of the character Link to the racist authorities in the movie.)

The genius of the core Hairspray story has always been a previously unrecognized equation of overweight people with the Civil Rights Movement. Tracy Turnblad goes from local dance show aspirant to crusading protester over the course of the picture, with the enemy being prejudice, plain and simple. But beyond where it gets all the metaphors right, it's as far from reverential as you've ever seen in successful mainstream musical, opening with a number about Baltimore that includes Tracy singing to sidewalk rats, the neighborhood barfly, pregnant ladies smoking as they drink martinis, and Waters himself in a cameo as the local flasher.

The whole cast is great, with John Travolta bringing a well-suited new version of Tracy's mom, Edna, a somehow mandatory cross-dressing role played by Divine in the original movie and Harvey Fierstein among others on Broadway. Travolta goes for the vulnerability, with no obvious winks at the audience, and his performance somehow endorses the movie: Waters' vision finally hits the big time.

When I was a kid movie musicals had the ability to get you choked up, but these days overflowing emotion in musical numbers provoke audience embarrassment more than any desired effect. But I found myself wiping tears away at crazy moments in Hairspray. Is it that purity of theme, or the commitment to depicting that very real racial equality struggle from our lifetime, or maybe just the joy of seeing John Waters writ large?

I'll have more to say about Mad Men in the future as well, but I can say that also reaches towards parody of real world early-1960's conventions, albeit in a different kind of high stakes dramatic setting. AMC has boldly evolved itself to where they've now launched the best new drama series since The Sopranos, and lo and behold it's written and directed by vets from David Chase's show.

If Hairspray is a blast of exhilarating teenage life accelerating a ready to rock culture into new openings and acceptance, one struggles hard here to discern the sprouts of life desperate to pop through a crack in the morally bankrupt affluence that kicked off our modern era. There are clues all over the place, in the free-spirited career girl, in the closeted Art Director, in the cracking-up suburban wife.

For those of us who remember from growing up in that era, the populace of Mad Men had best start fastening those seatbelts -- the ones none of them appear to be wearing.

Back to America

The best TV reviewer in America today, Alan Sepinwall, pre-secured this extraordinary post-Sopranos interview from David Chase, spending the hoopla days away from it all where he lives in France. (You should have known). This is it -- Chase will never speak again about the finale.

My favorite quote:

One detail about the final scene that he'll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as the song on the jukebox.

"It didn't take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I'd never done before: in the location van, with the crew, I was saying, 'What do you think?' When I said, 'Don't Stop Believin',' people went, 'What? Oh my god!' I said, 'I know, I know, just give a listen,' and little by little, people started coming around."

And now, back to our real world. In case you're wondering why someone with the opportunity might want to spend a lot of their time in France, per Digby:

* Dems — 57% believe in evolution, 40% do not

* Independents — 61% believe in evolution, 37% do not

* Republicans — 30% believe in evolution, 68% do not

This means that the Republican party is, in fact, the party of Yahoos as defined by noted English satirist Jonathan Swift in his classic political satire, Gulliver's Travels, or just the political party that most represents ignorant Americans. That strikes me as fair and democratic, as even ignoramuses deserve representation.

Interestingly enough, the Independents are more rational than the Democrats, and there are so many different types of Independents compared to the parties.

There's also this via Politiblog (ohmygodwhatweretheythinking) which confirms once more that we are living the Post-Ironic Age. I mean, none of the parents thought it was a bad idea?

The Hit

Over the past few weeks I've been moved to write about various episodes of The Sopranos as it hit its creative stride in the run-up to series finale. Usually I wait a day or two to reflect, read some other analysis, and make up my mind about what's stuck, but tonight is going to be different. I'm already getting keyword inquiries about the ending, which as Steve Van Zandt warned us a few weeks ago, has gotten everyone talking. So here goes.


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Okay, I thought the TiVo had cut off the ending (not the first time, or the first time this week) but then I realized I didn't get the traditional "delete" screen. Then I thought the feed had gone out -- happened a few years ago during the Six Feet Under final season, nearly drove me to homicide.

Then I realized David Chase was seriously screwing with us.

Then, after I got over my denial and anger, I entered the bargaining or, as I prefer to call it, analysis stage. Depression and acceptance are waiting in the wings and, while I'm glimpsing them through the curtains, here are the possible explanations for the ending that come to mind:

• David Chase made a big mistake?
  
  Answer: Don't be a moron.

• It's metatextual?
  
  Answer: Sure.
  
  Chase usually ended seasons with comforting family dinners, even if there might be lightning outside the door, and the major project of most family melodramas -- TV or otherwise -- is the reconstitution of the family. So Chase could be making a point about the falseness of such closures, even as he leaves us tantalizingly close to one, with Meadow in suspense-laden parallel parking holding up the final piece of the familial reconstitution forever.
  
  Or it's a metatextual comment on the nature of filmmaking, the ability to construct intense dread with a series of artificial moving images edited in such a way as to produce a feeling out of thin air. The build of suspense and signifiers. Who just came through the door? What is Tony thinking? Why isn't he concerned about the possible Michael Corleone move in the bathroom? When will we see that sudden splatter of red -- as planted earlier in the season when Silvio witnessed a hit at his restaurant table?
  
  For, as Tony's mother Livia once spat, "It's all a big nothing!"
  

• It's forcing viewers to pay attention not to some sort of tabloid plot closure, but instead to the real themes, the real cry of warning of the series as a whole?
  
  Answer: Why, yes.
  
  Face it: no one's changed. No one's escaped. No one has gotten out alive.
  
  The "family" closure of the final episode is that both kids are headed back into the Family business. Sure, it's movies and law, but both are mob connected, both kids are under their parents' watchful cultural eyes, Carmela has not awakened to her husband's crimes and Tony has gotten just enough therapeutic awareness to do his job better. After all, wasn't that the clear message of the Melfi hit on Tony as patient in last week's penultimate episode?
  
  As I wrote last week, the surreal denial of our citizenry's complicit responsibility for the Iraq War is yet another metaphor for these very toxic characters' blindness to their own responsibility for turning everything they touch to shit and heartbreak. And, to take it step further, just as I entitled that post, "Tony America," Chase entitled this final episode, "Made in America."
  
  The bigger game has always been the turnaround on the audience. Playing with our empathy by linking it to a confirmed devil (see the episode in Vegas where Tony acknowledged as much when, coming on a peyote trip, he nodded to an image of one). Playing with how the "normalcy" of the characters' daily lives is really about how we lie to ourselves all the time, every day, as some possibly apocalyptic survival method.
  
  This reflexive theme of the show is the one most thought-provoking to discuss at parties, but also rubs wrong as a "f.u." from series creator to audience. It's where the show takes the biggest risk (lots of movies, if not TV shows, have had us empathizing with a bad guy, going back to Othello), that of alienating the audience, of biting the hand that feeds it.
  
  Tonight's ending was potentially the biggest bite-back of all. Lots of notes in forums about canceling HBO. One has to assume the execs over there knew it, one wonders if they are really prepared.
  
  But maybe it was the only way to jar us out of our complacency, the only way to escape final judgment as melodrama and instead getting the stamp of legitimately disturbing art.
  
  I'll let the readers argue if it does, but one can say it is a series ending that has never been done before in television, maybe the only way to go out unique, and maybe the only way to force the viewer to wake up (as this episode and maybe all this season started) and actually get something more out of the series as a whole.
  
  
• Vision of hell?
  
  Answer: Well, of course. Per Alan Sepinwall:
  

  -A theory proposed by a reader of the NJ.com Sopranos blog using the handle Lorbnash: the nine episodes of this season have represented the nine circles of Hell from Dante's "The Divine Comedy." The fourth circle, for instance, is for the greedy and the miserly; the fourth episode was Tony and Hesh's gambling showdown. The seventh circle is where the suicides go; A.J. took his dip in the family pool in episode seven. The ninth circle is for the traitors, and Butchie implicitly betrayed Phil. (For added fun, reader Joe Adler pointed out the similarities between the Eugene Delacroix painting "The Barque of Dante" and the Annie Leibovitz promotional image on the season five DVD set. Google them both if you want your mind blown.)

  Tony is a devil in his own hellish materialistic world, making the world hell for the rest of us to live in.
  

• Tony was shot?
  
  Answer: Closure fetishists one and all, we gotta love this one.
  
  It's a classic build up without the money shot. It's true to the point of view of the series -- through Tony's eyes.
  
  He gets hit, his daughter coming through the door just in time to see it, his wife and son about to be splattered, a half-moment later. But why show that? What would be the point? So we can look down on them?
  
  There are clues.
  
  1. The pointed flashback just before the end of the previous episode to Bobby and Tony talking about it on the boat (symbol of Pussy's hit), how you don't see it coming, how everything might just go black.
  
  2. The ominous door. It was the second-to-last shot of the previous week's episode, dollying in on the door to Tony's bedroom in his safehouse, as if anyone could burst through at any moment and blast Tony away. The echo tonight in the bathroom door of the restaurant, or the front door itself.
  
  3. The suspense. Occam's razor, the simplest explanation for the build up. Metatext Chase just takes us right up to the moment, stops a millisecond short.
  
  4. The black. The scene is mainly shot-reverse-shot of Tony and what he sees, his POV. Final POV at the moment of death is, of course, blackness. Maybe the bells of the restaurant door opening (Meadow, Tony's little angel arriving) are heavenly peals signifying Tony's demise. But Chase has a much more pessimistic, one would argue material view of the world. When it's all over and a life is snuffed, all you get is a big nothing.
  

But in the end it's not what's shown that matters, it's what's in your head both due to Chase and to your own imagination.

Imagination like back in the day when we read books at night, before TV spread like a virus. (Title of the script Tony gives to A.J.: Anti-Virus.) Imagination that breaks out of traditional TV confinement.

We cut to black and the hit is on us; our precious series dead, along with our preconceptions of fairness. Tony's world never was fair, and Chase never allowed it to be so. After all, it's the Tonys of the world that win, isn't it, the ones with enough brains and few scruples who take and get away with it?

Wake up.

Tony America

Home stretch. I've been asked what do I think will happen in the final episode, and while I've been reading some predictions, imaginable ones, I only want to comment on this week's penultimate Sopranos episode.

It seems to me that the Presidential failure of George W. Bush was a godsend of metaphor for series creator/executive producer David Chase. There have been hints of the family's political leanings along the way, like when Carmela and Tony said thank God Bush was President during and after 9/11, with Carmela reading Fred Barnes' nincompoop sycophantic Rebel in Chief in bed, but never was the connection made more obvious than in this episode's comparison of the War in Iraq with Tony's long-gestating mob war.

The gimme is when A.J. comes down for breakfast and switches on Bush's war on the high-def TV, blasting the volume. His mother and sister are too intimidated by his recent suicide attempt to ask him to turn it down. Instead, the unpleasant violence of the war invades their home, all that continuing horror a direct consequence of supporting this President but something kept off the TV, outside the walls, under the rug. Even "compassionate" Meadow, who's book smart enough about oppression, doesn't care to hear it, a nuisance to her young bourgeois adulthood. And Carmela's been psychologically blocking the bloodshed that has perpetuated her lifestyle for years.

Now here's Tony, architect of his own decimation, his best soldiers gunned down dreaming of an America in the past that never exactly existed, just the narcissistic philosophical underpinning of their violent practices. Tony not only brought the war on himself with an overreaction to a slight of honor in which he attacked a tangental enemy, not the one actually perpetrating the violence against his crew, but the result has been nothing but loss for him. Just like Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, his flawed leadership leads to his team botching an impossible mission, and in the end he's holed up in a stasis-like retreat, his forces markedly diminished, his weaknesses rather than his strength revealed to his enemy, left contemplating a shrinking range of very bad options.

It was salacious biographer Kitty Kelley who said in 2004 (Salon):

...nothing will stand in the way of these people winning. Nothing. You start out looking at the Bush family like it's "The Donna Reed Show" and then you see it's "The Sopranos."

In some ways Tony is the combo Bush/Cheney, with the latter's bullish bearing and the former's incapacity for taking personal responsibility. But the real difference between the two Bosses is that one's run ends next the Sunday.

The other's...not soon enough.

Birdbrain

Best political commentary of the year is strangely reminiscent of an Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece:

As President Bush took a question Thursday in the White House Rose Garden about scandals involving his Attorney General, he remarked, "I've got confidence in Al Gonzales doin' the job." Simultaneously, a sparrow flew overhead and left a splash on the President's sleeve, which Bush tried several times to wipe off.

The White House is trying to spin it as good luck (I kid you not) but just think, on the day where Bush gets maybe (hopefully) the final Democratic capitulation of his Administration, his Pyrrhic victory in getting all the money he wanted to keep his fuck-up alive and kill @ 90 American soldiers/month, with his poll numbers in the deepest toilet of his career, even nature turns against him.

All this week I've been thinking about the astonishing prescience of David Chase and the Sopranos writing staff in embedding one particular poem by William Butler Yeats in the A.J. storyline for Tony and Carmela to also hear:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The best lack all convictions, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity. Goddamn, I hope that's not how it all ends. I'm for the best getting their intensity back. Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it, in that dark, dark hour. Al Gore was righteous and engaging on The Daily Show tonight, he's got it.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed. Will Cheney get his way -- and widen his apocalypse?

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Satan, embodiment of the apocalypse, comes to Israel -- per the above link, the flashpoint for the battle with Iran, which turns into the Third World War, including sudden attacks on American soil. Bethlehem, while being is Israel, in this context represents that sociopathic George W. Bush Christian exceptionalism that has already provided kindling for the larger disaster.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer...

Hear him?

He just took a dump on him.



Crossposted to The Daily Reel.

Epics

So the Senate testimony of former Deputy Attorney General James Comey against the perjurer Gonzales, the stuff about the hospital visit to semi-comatose Attorney General John Ashcroft to get his signature on the Bush/Cheney/Rove Triad's Constitution-breaking has surveillance crimes has already been translated into the fairly deft little video, Godfather IV.

What the heck, at just over a minute, it's already better than the third movie. And any excuse to see Sterling Haydn hit a man...

Speaking of organized crime, I won't go deep into this week's Sopranos episode, 3rd to last of the series, but I will point out that it felt like the most depressing episode in ages (coming down off the peyote high in Vegas?) as well as having a very lucid and pivotal film quote that I've seen neither of my episode-analysis gurus, Alan Sepinwall or Matt Zoller Seitz, recognize yet.

SPOILERville.









In scene near the end of the episode where Tony and Little Carmine are turned away by Butch at Phil Leotardo's doorstep, the framing of the doorway confrontation, with the action of a third party blocking a consummation between the visiting party, and someone hidden and unheard upstairs somewhere in the house, is direct echo of the turning point scene in Orson Welles' ill-fated second feature film, The Magnificent Ambersons.

You can see a few moments of the original at the end of this trailer clip. (From a really great unofficial Ambersons site.)

In Welles' adaptation of Booth Tarkington's novel, self-made man Joseph Cotten is blocked from continuing his blossoming middle-aged relationship with his childhood love, once the richest girl in town, by her spoiled, angry son, played by Tim Holt. From that point forward the would-be lovers never meet again, not even on her deathbed.

The standoff with Butch is shot basically the same way, albeit if these mob characters in The Sopranos always end up turning everything they touch into shit, the same thing kind of happens when Phil starts yelling down from the attic as Tony and Little Carmine head back to their cars. It would be comic save for the violence we're sure will follow, but Phil's hollerings are essentially a shit on the Ambersons theme, the f.u. punk rock version, irreverent but dumb. Perfect for the series.

If Tarkington's/Welles' tale is essentially about the passing of an age, from the landed aristocracy with their assumptions of permanence and dwindling relevance, even insult to American social health, then cannot one make the same case for Chase's epic?

The episode starts with the asbestos Tony is ultimately responsible for disposing of safely, instead dumped in New Jersey wetlands to wisp over the natural landscape like a pestilence. Cut to Tony in plush bedcovers, his affluence paid for by our collective loss, a thieving inflicted upon all of us. Cut to his son in bed, same affluence. Same source.

There's the pain of it. Either Tony survives and we pay for it, or maybe it really is like the Ambersons, the sweep of this series being the contemporary decline of the historical 20th century power of the American gangster, at least the European side of it.

The spoiled son looking for his comeuppance is A.J. this time. The lover denied is Phil. (Think of his brutal homophobic murder last season as overcompensation.)

Then, like the Amberson family, shall the House of Soprano reveal its rickety foundations, aging without replenishment, long gentle arcs then the sudden storm that leaves them without what they thought they had. A new and more relevant class replacing them, one not shackled in the values of some previous century.

A change that leaves them as bereft and forgotten as Johnny Sacramoni's family.

Another Version

So with three episodes left in the history of the HBO series The Sopranos, I'm thinking maybe Tony doesn't die. After last night's episode, it looks like he's already in a living hell, only he was actually enjoying it.

Here comes some conjecture. If you don't even like thinking about what might happen in fear that you'll think up your own spoiler, skip out here.

Spoiler space.















Okay, here's some of the possibilities people bandy about:

- Tony gets killed. Maybe by A.J.

- A.J. tries to kill Tony, screws up like he did with Uncle Junior, Tony is forced to kill him.

- Tony goes state's witness. Helped out with some terrorists, gets a big break. Maybe takes down Phil that way.

- Some body gets tied to Tony, or the Canadian one from the start of this partial season gets tied to Bobby.

- Carmella finds out Tony killed Adriana and kills him.

- Tony decides he has to kill Dr. Melfi, she knows too much. Since the show premise was originally a mobster in therapy, it might provide closure. And, by default, end the therapy.

- Everything kind of ends up staying the same.

One reader writes:

Tony has to be punished & the worst punishment is that he has to live his life.

My guess is that Paulie & Sil get bumped off in the impending gang war, AJ kills himself or gets caught doing something & sent to prison, and Tony's left all by himself in the pile of shit which is his life.

So here's one I came up with today:

- Tony wins.

He gets into the mob war with Phil and the New York gang, and actually ends up winning. Because, as of last night's episode, he has rid himself of his last scruples. Because, in that world they live in, the world of organized crime, that's who you have to be to be boss.

It's Tony's coming of age. Kind of a Godfather II message, but sinister in a different way, because that way everyone can go on lying to themselves.

The main thing is that David Chase reveals a plan, one that's been in play since his original conception. Is that comeuppance or a more cynical conclusion? With Aida Turturro reportedly gabbing on some talk show about how she hopes there's a movie, it seems unlikely that Tony dies, although she could just be creating a diversion. Wouldn't she be violating some non-disclosure clause in the actors' contracts?

Maybe Tony wins the mob war but ends up killing A.J. And follows it with Melfi. And maybe then Carmella kills him.

Or maybe Chase has that one unexpected better idea.

Three more weeks.

Sopranodammarung

I've been holding off because there's other folks out there reviewing every week's episode so compellingly that why bother, but with last night's sickeningly charismatic nightmare still ringing in my brain, I just have to let it out.

This season of The Sopranos is just so unexpectedly good.

We've been used to the ups and downs of the Family drama. Maybe it's a something-for-everybody thing, but I was least interested when Carmela was leaving Tony and not exactly satisfied with the wrap-up to the Ralphie Cifaretto saga. It's not just that I want violence, nudity, adult language and adult content...although last night's episode hit the quadfecta. I want some payoff for that escalating sense of dread that's the most of what I can now recall from the final episodes of the first season. I want to know that I followed these villains for a reason. I don't know if that needs to end up with Tony dead or in witness protection of committing suicide or walking away. I only know I need something in the upcoming final four episodes to make me feel like there was a plan all along, and although time is running out, all the stakes are running high, high, high.

Both Matt Zoller Seitz and his old newspaper colleague from New Jersey, Alan Sepinwall, are doing excellent weekly summaries and analyses. Both guys are obviously film scholars and both serve to illuminate and remind. So much is happening in the episodes this season that it threatens to slip away even as consumed.

Last season was primarily about the impossibility of escaping the organized crime life. Tony dreamt about it for a couple episodes, in the very first episode a mobster committed suicide due to being unable to leave, all of it a hangover from the Adriana shocker that capped the previous season and busted any positive illusions we might have had about these guys forever.

I'm getting into SPOILERville here, so just

stop

stop

stop

if you haven't seen this week's episode or plan to watch the whole season only on DVD someday.

While the episode traded on the same parallel storyline motif it's been using all season, this one wasn't about shitting up the place or reminiscing about why the hell are we so old and feeling nearer the end than the beginning of our lives. This was about the future; this was about sons.

A.J. coming out of the funk through diaper mob violence, Tony's auto-acknowledged genetic call of the wild. Christopher, who Tony has often said is like a son to him, wrestling with the code and then, in one simple, inhuman act embracing it. All signs ahead pointing to doom: will David Chase give us the end of all ends that we're so dreading and craving?

Plotwise, Christopher's story was the more compelling to me, if only because he displayed a level of self-awareness about his addiction and his family's pattern of addiction. An echo of Tony's own fear regarding A.J. but one that Tony, ever the asshole, prefers not to acknowledge as he prods Christopher toward the bottle.

I was struck by Christopher's stairwell confession to a fellow AA attendee, a stranger who expresses instant sympathy for Christopher's perceptive and damning critique of his boss, maybe too instant. "Unicorp" sounds like a front, and the conversation after the meeting felt all con, with Chris opening up all too much about Adriana, even as he bends the fact just enough for cover. Maybe I'm wrong (and Chase has proven us all wrong over and over) but I'm expecting that member to show up again, eventually with a badge.

Does Chris eventually blow that guy's head off as well? Or does the Adriana story land him in witness protection?

Because it was the final violent act that was so unexpected, so shocking, so bringing everything into focus, all the issues Chase has more than hinted about in interviews over the years.

While I'm already reading explanations about Christopher redirecting his frustration in what he did, if the show is about our inability to admit the real truth about our existence to ourselves, then this is the signature moment. Per Matt:

JT told him a truth he didn't to hear, and Chrissy literally shot the messenger.

For the only time I can remember, certainly an exceedingly rare occasion, someone speaks the word "MAFIA" on The Sopranos. Not surprisingly, it gets him killed. I had always heard that the mob hated that word, an FBI word, the opposite of "goodfellas" because it implied something terribly wrong and with an ethnic slur in the middle. Not Roman soldiers living out the code in the modern age. Just reactionary southern European thugs in the New World.

"You're in the MAFIA!" means I know who you are, I know more than I should know, I don't want to cross this line. But of course, line-crossing is what bad guys do for a living. And not even Dr. Jennifer Melfi utters its name.

Chase gave away the show two times in the episode.

He had Tony say directly, "Is this all there is?" which is surely the problem he's had since he first passed out from anxiety watching the family of ducks in his swimming pool.

Then he actually had Tony say (for the second time in the series), "It all turns to shit." Last time he called himself the reverse Midas. This time he's not taking responsibility for it, that evasion the corollary show theme applying to all the show's characters save Melfi (she proved herself when she made the decision not to tell Tony about her rape, denying herself the certain retribution which would have followed). As I've written before, everything a Soprano touches turns to shit. Whether Tony, Carmella, Christopher, Uncle Junior or Janice, one can argue even Meadow but the jury's still to report, their selfish desires always lead to pain and profound loss for some other party, deserved or not.

The suspense keeps us tuning in, but the echoes of our own lives, the lies we tell ourselves, the compromises be enjoy, that's what keeps scratching at us overnight. Chase's genius is to tell several huge stories at once -- a deadly family refracted through the lens of contemporary affluence consumerist society; the almost documentary-like historical twilight of the Five Families; and the struggle of knowing the trap you're in but, even at the height of your power,s being absolutely incapable of getting out.

I can't know what Chase has planned for the series ending, but Tony deserves his comeuppance. I'm just worried that in creator Chase's vision of his Soprano world...that just doesn't happen.