Last night, Sunday, May 27, 2012, was maybe the best night ever for high-end television drama of the one-hour kind. Both Mad Men and Game of Thrones had epic game-changing episodes. Both are about power, in different ways. Tonight I'll talk about the former.
In the antepenultimate episode of the season, "The Other Woman," Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is pitching Jaguar and all they need to seal the deal is for Joan to sleep with one of the three decision makers. At the same time, Peggy, arguably the #2 character on the show, is feeling ready to leave. It's a show about choices and prices paid for women to do men's bidding, as filtered through a Jaguar pitch tagline, "At last, something beautiful you can truly own."
So is Peggy owned by a new agency that picks her up for more than her asking price? And is Joan owned or owner as she take a piece of SCDP for herself and her son? And is there anything Christina Hendricks can't make us feel?
Then there's Don and his young bride, Megyn. She wants to act, she's treated like chattel at the audition, and he's terrified that she's going to abandon him for her career. Their fights are so much more awesome than Don and Betty's because they know each other's secrets, they're at way different points in their lives and they are both New York City sophisticates. It feels like real adult fights - not TV adult fights. A little S&Mish at times, which fits with the era. Just as the Europeans were refinding the Marquis de Sade in literature and theatre.
If there's a project to this season it has to be revealed in the final two episodes. This year's theme, according to creator Weiner, is "Every man for himself." So will Don we left isolated - by Peggy, estranged from Joan by the knowledge of what she did and his adamant opposition to it, by Megyn getting the out-of-town rehearsals and previews gig?
We've had seasons with "the return of Don Draper" as the project. Often with a diminishment of marital or family life. Would that be a retread? Or is there something deeper planned?
My pet theory: at the end of the season, Don quits. Maybe goes West to design surfboards. Maybe becomes the perfect mix on Don Draper and Dick Whitman. Maybe quits being Don Draper.
More on Game of Thrones to come. And if you think this season is big, the third book is oft considered the best.
Enjoy this time of plenty. Over the next two weeks, it ends.
I know there was violence in Oakland (subsequent to earlier police violence). My instinct is that the troublemakers are government or rightwing plants. We've seen as much before, going back to the 1960's in the U.S. and the 1930's in Germany.
In any case, it doesn't discredit the entire movement, it's goals or general innovations in democracy. And with guys like this one inventing their winter power source, I feel a glimmer of hope for this country politically down the line.
Most of all, I'm excited to see where this particular protest goes.
Since pulling the plug on the deal, Boehner has been largely silent in the meetings, leaving House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to present details of the House’s position. On Tuesday, people in both parties said, Obama tried to reestablish Boehner’s primacy.
Cantor, who is advocating a smaller deal, at one point demanded that Obama offer the details of his vision for a “grand bargain.”
“Where’s your paper?” he asked angrily.
Obama snapped back: “Frankly, your speaker has it. Am I dealing with him, or am I dealing with you?”
It was all revealed today. At the highest level, it's House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) doing his "young guns" power-grab over House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) fueled by the Tea Party he's grabbed onto. His PPT was leaked today, no compromise on revenue generation at all:
The message, sent in a letter to President Obama and every member of Congress, puts pressure on GOP lawmakers, who have staked out an uncompromising stance against raising taxes in the partisan wrangling over the country’s borrowing limit.
Republicans rely heavily on corporations for political support and have regularly cited the opinions of these “job creators” in their opposition to new tax revenue. Many of the House GOP freshmen most opposed to a compromise were swept into office with the help of financial support from groups behind the letter.
But the business community, which has largely kept quiet on the issue until now, does not uniformly share the Republican orthodoxy on taxes, according to some lobbyists who helped craft the statement.
The letter conspicuously avoided any mention of tax revenue partly because of differences of opinion among executives over whether to compromise on taxes to get a deal done, said a senior industry lobbyist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the internal deliberations were private.
“The debt default would be exponentially more painful than anything else,” said another senior executive at a major business lobbying group.
Obama has won the war of governance. The GOP is my way or the highway, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) found himself squeezed between the idiot Tea Party faction that thinks defaulting on the debt won't lead to world economic depression the loss of global American currency dominance that keeps us on top of the world, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, normally their biggest ally. No sane business in the country wants the U.S. to default and interest rates shoot through the roof -- if you can even get a loan.
So McConnell releases his Plan Z, panic mode, where they'd just keep holding short term votes to raise the debt without any cuts truly tethered. The idea is they keep the U.S. from defaulting but keep their members from having to vote on a Grand Bargain with any tax revenues, whether through closing loopholes or raising marginal rates on high income.
"It's Time to Burn Mitch McConnell in Effigy," read the headline on a post by Red State's Erick Erickson. He later changed it, writing "I decided to make the title less incendiary."
The new version? "Mitch McConnell Just Proposed the 'Pontius Pilate Pass the Buck Act of 2011.'" A sample:
So fearful of being blamed for a default, McConnell is proposing a compromise that lets Barack Obama raise the debt ceiling without making any spending cuts at all. Consider sending McConnell a weasel as testament to his treachery.
The generally more polite Heritage Foundation took aim at McConnell's plan as well.
"The plan that we are reading reports about today is a serious walk back," Heritage blogger Ashe Schow wrote, "and would seemingly trade the leverage needed to achieve reforms in return for political gains."
The NY Times is already capitulating to McConnell's plan (hang it on Obama through the election), which I don't think Obama wants but might be able to live with if he can a Grand Bargain separately. But it appears we're in an interesting Obama-jitsu moment, where he's used his opponents own weight to create a reversal on them.
They wanted cuts, he's brought the cuts. They wanted to lower the deficit, he's offering a huge deal to do it. They wanted to use the leverage of the debt limit, their threat to let the U.S. slide into fiscal default for the first time in our history, after raising the debt limit 19 times for their own El Presidente George W. Bush and his wars which we are still fighting; he's got the leverage now, at least for the moment.
Either Boehner comes out of this strengthened for letting Cantor play out, or there's going to be total civil war in that party. They're paying the devil's price for having the ranking extremists, the tea-ideologues with their pitchforks, and the most stratified capitalists in the same Party. It's only a hatred of taxes -- and government spending that doesn't just go directly to them in the form of Medicare, Social Security, big government project spending or tax credits. They don't even agree on "values" issues.
So nothing has changed. Anyone who thinks last week's election is some sort of cry to slash government spending is misreading the divided electorate. On the Left there's dissatisfaction that there hasn't been more audacious action, per Paul Krugman. In the Middle, everyone is frightened that the economy is not recovering fast enough. On the Right, there's the lies. Obama didn't raise taxes -- he lowered them. And he's not spending $200 million/day in India -- another GOP lie, he's opening up markets to bring more jobs to America.
Rachel breaks it down:
They lie about the growth of the public sector vs. private under Democrats -- when the evidence of the past year is that we've been shedding government jobs while (no thanks to the George W. Bush GOP tax cuts) we're growing the private sector -- under Obama. Their biggest lie is that now they've learned their lesson and will cut the government spending that ballooned under W. and his GOP Congress. Even Tea Leader Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) can't name specifics of what he'd cut, other than "entitlements." If this means privatizing Social Security or, as likely Presidential aspirant Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) would like to do, getting his state to opt out (stranding their needy seniors), good luck, boys.
Here's the truth: Obama has helped people in ways Bush never did. Read this post where a regular American enumerates the money his family has saved under Obama. Read this piece by William Saletan in Slate about how huge the wins of this past Democratic Congress has been. Who cares what the hell Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) thinks about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) staying on as House Minority Leader? And, per Rep. James Clyburn (D-NC), just let them try to kill healthcare reform now that it is already going into effect:
Clyburn said, "Let them try to prevent a family who has a child with diabetes from getting insurance. Let them tell a man that has paid his premiums on time for 30 years that his policy is canceled because he just got prostate cancer. Let them tell a woman who has breast cancer, sorry you're policy is cancelled."
So booyah, Rep. Clyburn, and keep on fighting, Speaker Pelosi. The lesson of this election for President Obama shouldn't be for Dems to go back to being Republican Lite and losing elections. The lesson should be, yes, bigger, better, clear and simple message, tout your accomplishments loudly and, most of all, fight. No boxer can expect to have the crowd on his side if he shrinks from a fight. Let your principles be known, stand your ground, offer the handshake and when it is refused, put up your dukes.
That's the guy we voted for, the candidate who fought tooth and nail through the primaries and then the general election, with skill, intelligence and determination. Who could take a punch (New Hampshire, anyone?), learn from it and come back stronger.
If this week's Presidential address is any indication, he's already moving in the right direction:
Now just stick to is, BaRocky, and we'll stick with you.
Don't be surprised if, somewhere down the line, we start finding out that Sarah Palin felt slighted in some way by her new employer, Fox News, or -- more likely, she gets some sort of chip about Glenn Beck and, to a lesser extent, Bill O'Reilly. Or, she'll say, their people -- maybe try to get a producer fired.
I say this because I've watched a few minutes of her debut interview with O'Reilly and then a few minutes of her hour with Glenn Beck the last night, and thought it was pretty evident that these big dogs were protecting their turf quite a bit more than enhancing her star. They were essentially fitting her into their script and using her draw as a way to enhance their own power -- O'Reilly by nailing her in the first few minutes by saying they'd covered the ground she was starting to trod the night before, Beck by calling her out on her "Bull crap!" when she starting doing her "I love them all" schtick on the favorite Founding Father question -- as she had when Katie Couric asked her what publications she reads:
When all else fails, who doesn't know that George Washington was the first President (the only job she wants that pays less than a million bucks a year)? "He 's got to rise to the top," like cream, I guess, letting us not only watch but hear her think. Beck asked her the simplest of questions in that anyone who's spent any time reading American Revolutionary history can name at last three other guys, Adams, Jefferson and Franklin. Or maybe she missed the HBO series.
Andrew Sullivan has an correct view on how she's being positioned by the FNC party (now having defacto control of the RNC at this point in history), to be the Washington-type reluctant candidate. You know, the thing that happens with the hero for most of the first act of every movie, until he's forced into action. Like, by acclamation of a Teabagger convention.
So it's clear she was set up with the Washington line, as she has to be set up with everything, a shiny vessel for reactionary political positions, but if she doesn't know yet, she's not their final tool of choice yet. Maybe it's their traditional sexism, maybe it's that she really is an outsider and they only see use for her as a fundraising vessel so far, but I think it's that they will do and say anything necessary not to make their own careers submissive to hers. Especially the ones competing for the limelight, for the television camera.
Spent the day at the MI6 Conference in San Francisco, where the first big speaker of the morning was Nicholas Negroponte, who was amazing as he described his One Laptop per Child worldwide program, phenomenal, inspiring stuff.
He described how they have all these $35,000 grants that you can fund, or your group or your company, and these young Americans go into the most remote reaches of the world with solar and handcrank-powered indestructible little PCs. It's the brightest thing in the house in places where there's no electricity. The kids are learning directly, teaching their parents to read on it. They're creating their own PC hospitals where they service the machines themselves, thanks to the very inexpensive, modular design.
Negroponte wanted it to be like opening the hood of an old VW, where you could see what was wrong even if you didn't know engines. There's a display part that he said display makers never like to make removable, since it's the part that usually breaks but only costs fifty cents to make. The display makers prefer for you to buy a whole new screen. Negroponte got the design he wanted.
Each of the PCs has these "ears" that fold up, stubby colorful antenna on either side, so the software creates local wireless web networks instantly. So in these villages, if just one kid on the network has an Internet connection, every kid is on the Internet.
It's the vision of peace, that we find our tribal, pre-national connections to each other, only this is so much more sophisticated, unprecedented in human history. The biggest webs of social connectivity in human history.
It was all anybody could talk about today, and it was pretty intense because clearly our big expensive news media can't do their job. CBS felt that Murrow blood running through their veins and ran Jeff Greenfield's excellent piece:
Time media critic James Poniewozik gets to the core of the modern television journalism problem -- and how Cramer was trapped by it under Stewart's questioning:
"These people were my friends." Cramer said that, or something like it, repeatedly: that longtime friends flat-out lied to him. So problem one: coziness with sources is death for the information business. Now, Cramer is a commentator, not a reporter, and I don't begrudge him friends per se. But it is a problem when reporters either become too close to their subjects to treat them skeptically, or become so obsessed with access that they are leery of being too skeptical: i.e., "If I do that, they'll never talk to me again."
Journalists prize getting people to talk to them, with good reason, but they shouldn't be hostage to it. Part of the problem is a culture in which interviewing is privileged over research: "reporting" is defined as getting a person to talk to you, preferably a famous person. But as the original Daily Show CNBC clip showed, research can be pretty powerful—then it created a situation where Cramer pretty much had to talk.
So what I heard today was that Jon Stewart is doing CNN and MSNBC job for them, that it's only the court jester who can speak truth to the emperor as he reveals him to have no clothes, and that he's essentially our century's Mark Twain.
There's going to be a lot of Sunday morning quarterbacking, more like post-game analysis on why Obama did so well, but there's an article in the Sunday New York Times that I find particularly illuminating, about how the electorate of "Reagan Democrat" Levittown, PA went, in five months, from being unlikely to vote for a black man named Barack Hussein Obama for President to overwhelmingly going his way. For example:
I spent Election Day at a voting site inside the Magic Cottage preschool in a section of Levittown called Appletree, where Mr. Obama would defeat Mr. McCain, 682-388, a ratio slightly higher than the Democratic registration edge in that precinct. Not a single one of the more than 60 Obama voters I talked to said they had voted for him in the spring. Some said they had come around slowly, and many reported that they had been open to Mr. McCain.
So the Obama message of "change" was very real, down to the individual level -- admittedly racist adults having their attitudes flipped by him and his campaign, at least as far as this precious right and momentous decision.
Thankfully, the transformation, the change, seems to be real all the way up to explicitly reversing executive orders by El Presidente Bush, starting with those most damaging to the environment:
A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition.
I guess that what the Presidential pen giveth, the succeeding Presidential pen taketh away.
Obama will need to move fast to reassure America and, in particular, his base of supporters that he means what he campaigned on, budget crisis or not. So I'm looking forward to these moves, maybe even starting late Inauguration Day.
On the other hand, there will be plenty of January Presidential pardons that he'll be unable to undo. Will it include convicted felons like Libby and Abramoff...or/also Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Addington, Yoo, Gonzales...
...well, my fingers could get tired just listing them all.
Doc Bruce Banner, Belted by gamma rays, Turned into the Hulk. Ain't he unglamo-rays! Wreckin' the town With the power of a bull, Ain't no monster clown Who is that lovable? It's ever lovin' Hulk! HULK!! HULK!!"
So went the lyrics to the first Hulk theme music ever, back with the Mighty Marvel Marchin' Society cartoon omnibus. Well, the gamma rays have been turned into the more contagion-like gamma blood serum, and the brand new Incredible Hulk would throw puny bull clear across the farm, and as Marvel has taken over control of their intellectual property film productions starting with the refreshing Iron Man, I think they're onto something.
Which is to say, I enjoyed the hell out of this new Hulk movie.
While it may not strive for the admirable but elusive profundity of the Ang Lee version, essentially just a quality popcorn movie with the integrity to run hard past the plot inanities inherent to the comic book genre, I felt more empathy for the protagonist in this movie than in any prior superhero genre offering, including the estimable Tony Stark by Robert Downey Jr.
The filmmakers wisely keep us in the emotional flow of Bruce Banner's journey, a large part because of how Ed Norton shaped his performance and the story, and even Liv Tyler in the thankless Betsy Ross g.f. role elicits sympathy. She owns the most human moment in the movie (and the only one that approaches the frisson of Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow's Cary Grant/Irene Dunne quality scenes in Iron Man), when they start to get down and get stopped by Bruce's racing pulse.
The Hulk fascinates because he's simultaneously the most and the least powerful of all superheroes. In a sense he's not a superhero at all, more the origin and pathology of a super villain, an accidental creation who's emergence can never be fully controlled, nor his return to human form. Bruce Banner never asked to be Hulk, although he has the ability to call on it by self-provocation, and part of the emotional realism of the film is how well it depicts the absolute bummer of being Hulk.
Since the Jekyll/Hyde nature of the hybrid means that Hulk and Banner are two entirely different people, one only barely remembering the experiences of the other, and because Hulk tends to retreat to nature (green to green) to escape or recuperate from battle, the result is not unlike amnesia or perhaps, in movies, lycanthropy. Banner wakes up in jungles, barefoot, shirtless, holding his pants up by hand, with no resources or compass. This will always be the result. There's nothing good that comes from being Hulk.
Except for the destruction.
One of the unique pleasures of cinema is indulgence in the illicit urge to destroy. That's why we keep going to see Terminator movies and dinosaurs. There's watching people make love, watching them drink and smoke and hallucinate, watching them exert power over others or come back from bottom to win, but there's nothing any other medium does better than the movies than to break things. Lots and lots of big big things.
Louis Leterrier, Zak Penn, et al get that right this time. All of the builds to the Hulk sequences are right, and the explosions of rage, of righteous rage, are deeply pleasurable. Y'see, Hulk is clear about it: all he wants is to be left alone, and for you to treat his girl right.
You mess either of those up, you pay the big green consequences.
Tonally, with the doomed man theme (Banner can never be completely cured or it's the end of the Hulk story), this version of the story is for the most part noir, at times bordering on horror (this is a much scarier PG-13 than the new Indy movie, if you're thinking of taking a kid). The story picks up in the slums of Brazil, where the last version left off but five years later, and the first act is part-City of God, part Jason Bourne. Norton does a great job of bringing us along with Banner, a good guy still paying for his original sin of creating the serum, who makes mistakes but never errs with his integrity. By relating to his concrete work on controlling his anger, it's easier to identify with the limits of his surroundings and means, staying hidden from the military force that wants him for dissection and replication.
As for the CGI, there's a few moments in the middle of a fight where I wasn't sure how Hulk and opponent got from here to there, but they've taken pains this time to give CG Hulk weight and physicality, and motion captured Norton and Tim Roth to give corresponding character to the monster movements. Most gratifying, the final battle in particular has a touch of that classic Ray Harryhausen feel, just enough stylization to embed these giants in the subconscious.
Traditionally, action movies get analyzed long after the fact, whether as phallic festivals or metaphors for social history of the time. The resonance is deep in the subtext or affect, not so much in the self-evident plot or dialogue. What always draws fans to the Hulk are his power and his anger, the sense of an avenging golem who's actually you, somehow righting the injustices visited upon you every day with the ultimate punch.
Yes, we begin to gauge Banner's mounting anxiety every time it peaks at 200 and spills over into transformative anger, but the metaphor at the heart of this picture is actually not anger but, to put a point on it, aggression. It's not a huge or particularly profound statement, but it gives the film its emotional through-line.
Bruce and Betsy are the very definition of peaceful, thoughtful, scientific people. When the movie opens Bruce is leading a monklike existence, as Zen as it gets. On the other hand, Betsy's father (William Hurt, confessed longtime Hulk fan) is deeply aggressive, and the silliest thing about the movie is how he keeps attacking when the result is pretty much always the same. Sound like any War we know?
But it's Tim Roth's Emil Blonsky, soldier by nature and rarin' for a fight, obsessed with finding a worthy opponent, who juices the latter half of the story. Hulk's anger is the MacGuffin -- it's the cowardice of aggression that the movie rails against.
Tellingly, Hulk tends to turn and run towards his attackers. When hit by powerful fire, Abomination is seen running away, trying to evade. Hulk is essentially a mensch, while those that attack him -- the General, the super villain -- don't give a damn about anyone who gets hurt in their ego-driven pursuit of peaceful Banner/Hulk. They hide behind the military machinery or their father-status or their hopped-up super power. It's the last defense their egos have.
Fitting for the past 8 years?
Ah, well, maybe it's best not to read too much into such entertainments. Maybe Hulk breaking police car in two is only Hulk breaking police car in two. All in all, it's just gratifying that the Hulk has morphed from this:
Jon Stewart once again proves why with maybe Bill Moyers (appearing Tuesday night in what should be a very interesting follow up to tonight) he is perhaps the finest interviewer of political figures working in television today, taking apart key Cheney henchman and leading Iraq War pyro Douglas Feith:
Here's part two of the full-length (only on Web) with the the Bush Administration official that U.S. Army General Tommy Franks called, "the stupidest fucking guy on the planet:"
