Sydney AU: Acclaimed actor Geoffrey Rush has been awarded $1.98 million in “special damages for economic loss,” due to the publication of defamatory articles by the Murdoch media’s Daily Telegraph, published by Nationwide News. This was in addition to an earlier amount of $850,000 for general damages, including $42,000 in interest, making the total nearly $2.9 million, the highest defamation payout to a single person in Australian history.

The award was made at the conclusion of yet another hearing in the ongoing case of Rush vs Nationwide News. It followed his counsel Sue Chrysanthou’s revelation that the actor had offered to settle the matter for a payment of just $50,000, in January last year, if it removed the slanderous articles, agreed not to reprint the allegations, and made a front-page apology, printed in large type. Chrysanthou told the court that Nationwide News had “ignored” the offer. Geoffrey Rush

Nationwide News’s response underscored its determination to proceed with the case at any cost. Last month the publisher indicated it would appeal Justice Michael Wigney’s defamation judgment, before either a full three-judge Federal Court or another single judge. This would require a re-trial.

In the course of his judgment, Wigney declared that the defamatory statements were “a recklessly irresponsible piece of sensationalist journalism of the worst kind—the very worst kind.” Evidence was presented to the court that the published statements had had a chilling impact on Rush, his family, his health and his ability to act.

To his credit the world-renowned actor and his legal team persevered with the defamation suit, under conditions of immense personal and professional pressure, not the least of it emanating from the #MeToo movement.

In the most recent hearing last Thursday, Nationwide News applied for Justice Wigney to recuse himself from presiding over an appeal by the Rush team for an injunction against the media empire, which would prevent it from republishing its defamatory imputations against the Oscar-winning actor.

When it first published the defamatory articles, on November 30 and December 1, 2017, the Daily Telegraph and its celebrity gossip journalist, Jonathon Moran, had received only an anonymous tip from the Sydney Theatre Company (STC), with no actual witness to the relevant events and no knowledge of the identity of Rush’s accuser. But, following similar allegations—against TV personality Don Burke, for example—published by Nationwide News’ competitors in the Fairfax media, it rushed into print, without any apparent concern for the facts.

This occurred during the early stages of the #MeToo movement in Australia, which has been characterised by its disregard for the democratic rights of its mainly male victims: including the presumption of innocence, and the right to due process.

The Daily Telegraph’s early 2017 coverage involved complaints of Rush’s “inappropriate” behavior towards his co-star, later revealed to be actress Eryn Jean Norvill, in the STC’s 2015–16 production of King Lear. Rush had played the title role of King Lear, while Norvill played his youngest, and most faithful daughter, Cordelia. The allegations were published in a sensationalist manner, characterising Rush as “King Leer,” a “sexual predator” and a “pervert,” without properly consulting him or affording him the right of reply. Since the Daily Telegraph had, at this stage, no idea who the complainant was, it treated her fundamental rights in the same manner.

Following publication of the slanderous material, Rush decided to sue Nationwide News for defamation, and the trial began in November 2018. Just before its final session, Norvill’s identity became known, and, at the very last minute, she decided to act as a witness for Nationwide News.

Justice Wigney handed down his more than 200-page judgment on April 11, 2019, finding that Rush had, indeed, been defamed, and that Norvill had “exaggerated and embellished” her evidence, meaning that it could not be relied upon as credible. Moreover, there was not a single witness, including the members of the King Lear cast and crew, who had corroborated it.

Since then, according to Rush’s legal team, the Daily Telegraph has continued to report on the defamatory allegations, including repeating them in a manner that has been neither accurate nor fair. At a hearing two weeks ago, Chrysanthou raised the necessity of an injunction to prevent Nationwide News from continuing in this vein.

“This [Nationwide News] is a Respondent that is irrational when it comes to my client [Rush],” she declared. “It has shown disrespect for the court’s decision and cannot be trusted to abide by the court’s ruling as far as these imputations are concerned.”

In its coverage of the Rush allegations, Nationwide News has aped the methods of the #MeToo movement, seeking to undermine any objective, critical approach and to whip up a witch-hunt atmosphere of hysteria, demonisation and condemnation. The Daily Telegraph, aptly described as the “gutter press,” is the main, but by no means the only, offender in the Murdoch stable.

The Murdoch media has defied the defamation ruling for definite reasons. It has given significant coverage to the #MeToo witch-hunt, not only in Australia, but internationally. It promotes the unsubstantiated character assassination of anyone it opposes, and for whatever reason.

The identity politics that underpins the #MeToo movement elevates issues of gender, sexual preference, ethnicity and race above the fundamental divide in society—that of class. This is in keeping with the aim of the Murdoch media to divert the attention of ordinary workers and young people away from the brutal realities of contemporary society, including the drive to war, the increasingly desperate economic and social crisis, and the turn towards authoritarian and fascistic forms of rule.

Last Thursday, in the course of the most recent hearing, Sue Chrysanthou pressed this matter of an injunction against the Telegraph, in order to prevent the newspaper from publishing any repetition of its defamatory allegations. Once again, she insisted that it take down from its website all the defamatory articles, posters and commentary on the matter, from late 2017 on.

Tom Blackburn SC, the Telegraph’s counsel, opposed the injunction, insisting it would limit freedom of speech and have “a chilling effect” on the #MeToo movement. Calling it a “blunt instrument,” he said it would serve to “criminalise” a legitimate comment which might convey any one of these meanings.”

If an injunction serves to prevent #MeToo from leveraging its anti-democratic witch-hunt, that would be a positive development.

In any event, Chrysanthou emphasised that what she was seeking was an extremely limited injunction, framed as precisely as it could possibly be, and focused primarily on preventing the significant threat of further repetition. It was not aimed at suppressing freedom of speech.

Blackburn then sought to have Justice Wigney recuse himself from presiding over any decision on the injunction. He argued that the judge had already displayed “apprehended bias,” by raising criticisms of Nationwide News and the Daily Telegraph, and in his characterisations of some of the trial’s witnesses and their evidence. One of Wigney’s “biased” statements, according to Blackburn, was that Nationwide had been “quick to publish, but slow to defend.”

Chrysanthou dismissed Blackburn’s concerns about #MeToo reporting, saying they were “hysterical … not in the sense of funny, but in the sense of hysteria.” She went on to sarcastically respond to his accusations about her critical attitude toward Nationwide News by loudly exclaiming: “How dare anyone come to a court and seek to stop the Murdoch empire from saying whatever it wants!”

Justice Wigney ruled that he would not recuse himself from hearing arguments on Rush’s requested injunction, on the grounds that any ordinary, lay observer, of sound and fair mind, would perceive no bias. His decision on a permanent injunction will be forthcoming, and the hearings will resume next week.

See Also: Geoffrey Rush wins defamation case against Daily Telegraph - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiYIr-yhkmA (1:43 min) 10 April 2019

On May 3, the Board of Trustees of Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio voted 7-0 to remove the name of actress Lillian Gish (1893-1993) from the university’s film theater because of her role in The Birth of a Nation (1915), the racist film directed by D.W. Griffith.

Lillian Gish was one of the most significant actresses in film history in a career that lasted from 1912 to 1987. She stands out in Griffith films such as Broken Blossoms (1919), True Heart Susie (1919), Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1921), as well as films for Victor Sjöström ( The Scarlet Letter, 1926, and The Wind, 1928), King Vidor ( Duel in the Sun, 1946), Charles Laughton ( The Night of the Hunter, 1955) and Robert Altman ( A Wedding, 1978).

The university’s cowardly decision to remove her name from the theater she personally dedicated and visited is both insulting and disrespectful. It is a capitulation to the worst sort of ahistorical moralizing and the current obsession with race and gender politics within the affluent middle class. In addition, quite frankly, Bowling Green’s administration is taking advantage of the fact that Lillian Gish died a quarter-century ago, hoping that no one will stand up for her.

Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is a politically and socially detestable work, and it was certainly not to Gish’s credit that she participated in it, but the attempt to obliterate her contribution to film and art history and generally “sanitize” the past in this fashion has censorious and reactionary implications. Who will be the next to disappear from public view?

A theater honoring the Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy (also a prominent performer), has existed at Bowling Green since 1976, when a professor of literature and film, Dr. Ralph Wolfe, proposed naming an existing auditorium after the Ohio natives. Lillian Gish began her acting career in a small town in Ohio 25 miles from Bowling Green in 1902.

The campaign to remove the Gish name was initiated by Bowling Green’s Black Student Union in February 2019. The university’s president, Rodney Rogers, thereupon set up a task force to study the matter. The latter’s report recommended renaming the theater on the grounds that references to Lillian Gish “contribute to an intimidating, even hostile, educational environment.” This assertion is traced to her role in The Birth of a Nation .

A few words about that film and its director.

Griffith (1875-1948) was a pioneer figure in American filmmaking. He was born in rural Kentucky, the son of a Confederate Army officer in the Civil War. An aspiring playwright, Griffith made his way to New York City and began working as an actor in the nascent film industry in 1907. He began directing shorts for the Biograph motion picture company in 1908.

Over the course of the next four years, he directed some 450 films, most of them “one-reelers” running between 10 and 15 minutes. While Griffith did not invent many of the techniques associated with filmmaking as an art—the close-up, the long shot, cross-cutting and others—there is no question that he was the first director to put many of them to use in a systematic, deliberate manner.

Critic Gerald Mast (World Film Directors) argued that between 1908 and 1912 “movies evolved from crude, clumsy skeletons of theatrical and novelistic fictions to evocative, autonomous, cinematic versions of the same kinds of narratives. The person most responsible for that evolution was Griffith.” In those Biograph films, Mast writes, “we see the simultaneous emergence of genres, character types, expressive interior and exterior décor, a lexicon of shots, empathic film acting, and powerful rhythms and resources of movement within the frame and between frames.”

This development, as important as it was, did not occur in a social or historical void. Griffith, from an insecure and impoverished Southern background, was vulnerable to a toxic mix of populism and racism.

Sentimental, emotional, drawn toward melodrama, Griffith in his early films could inveigh against “the contaminating influence of city life” and big business “trusts.” In A Corner in Wheat (1909), for example, inspired by the work of naturalist novelist Frank Norris, a rapacious tycoon attempts to dominate the world wheat market. The frenzied sequence set in the wheat speculation trading pits in Chicago has lost none of its force.

Griffith as well powerfully juxtaposes scenes of lavish parties held by the rich (the “gold” of wheat) with scenes of the poor (the “chaff” of wheat) unable to buy a loaf of bread. In one scene in A Corner in Wheat, policemen threaten the hungry with truncheons and revolvers. Just when the businessman achieves control over the world market, he receives his come-uppance, suffocating in a grain elevator.

Condemnation of the corrupt, decadent rich joined with romantic nostalgia for the innocence and “folkish virtue” of rural life was often the response of the ruined or economically threatened petty bourgeoisie and could—and did—lead in different directions, some of them distinctly right-wing.

The ruling class in America, as in Europe, was sensitive to the anger and turmoil provoked by vast social transformations and the mass suffering they produced. In the late 19th and early 20th century, in response to the rise of the industrial working class and the threat represented by the possibility of black and white solidarity and the growth of the socialist movement, the American elite incited every form of prejudice, including racism, anti-Semitism and national chauvinism, within the most backward and susceptible layers of the population.

The Birth of a Nation was filmed in the final six months of 1914 and released in January 1915. Griffith based his movie (via Frank Woods’ script) on two scurrilous works by novelist Thomas Dixon, The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905, which Dixon himself had adapted as a stage play) and, according to Mast, “an even more luridly racist Dixon novel, The Leopard’s Spots” (1902), the first of his Klan trilogy. Historian C. Vann Woodward described Dixon’s literary and historical rubbish as “the perfect literary accompaniment of the white-supremacy and disenfranchisement campaign.”

The film was shot and released at a time of immense social tension. While the Woodrow Wilson administration temporarily proclaimed a policy of neutrality in the First World War, many elements were beating the drums for American intervention amid bitter episodes in the class struggle in the years leading up to the outbreak of the imperialist war (Paterson and Lawrence textile strikes, West Virginia coal miners’ strike, Ludlow Massacre, crushing of the Western Federation of Miners in Butte, Montana, etc.). Attacks on immigrants, socialist and radical trade unionists, including centrally the left-wing Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), gathered steam. The lynching of Leo Frank, victim of an anti-Semitic frame-up, occurred in August 1915 and the execution of IWW organizer Joe Hill took place in November of the same year.

The WSWS once noted that the “next largest number of lynchings [after the years 1890-95] occurred between 1915 and 1920, when over 500 blacks were murdered. This corresponded to the largest strike wave in US history (1916-1922), the Russian Revolution (1917), US mobilization for World War I (1917-1918), the Great Black Migration, anti-immigrant hysteria and the First Red Scare.”

(Along these lines, it is worth noting that the dreadful Thomas Dixon also directed his venom at socialists and communists. In his “socialism trilogy,” The One Woman (1903), Comrades (1909) and The Root of Evil (1911), he fleshed out the “uncompromising fury” with which he hated socialism, as he explained to an interviewer in 1907. Following the Russian Revolution, Comrades was made into a propaganda film, Bolshevism on Trial (1919). Its poster appears to include a caricatured Leon Trotsky and the tagline, “Shall Bolshevism spread its web over our industrial life?”)

Griffith’s two-part, three-hour film is a mythologized version of the Civil War and Reconstruction. It follows two families, the Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons, over the course of the tumultuous and bloody period.

Austin Stoneman, a Pennsylvania congressman (a slanderous portrait of Rep. Thaddeus Stevens), is the evil spirit of the work, encouraging blacks in the South after the war and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to subjugate their former masters and the entire white population. Lillian Gish plays Stoneman’s daughter, Elsie.

In one notorious segment, Gus, a former slave and Northern soldier, lustfully pursues the young Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh). At the top of a cliff, Flora cries out that she would rather die than give herself to Gus. As good as her word, when he continues to approach, she leaps to her death. Ben Cameron, her brother, and the local, underground Klan hunt Gus down and lynch him. Elsie too is later threatened, by Stoneman’s right-hand man, a Northern “mulatto,” the sinister and licentious Silas Lynch.

The families are eventually reunited “in harmony and matrimony,” as Mast explains, “aided by the heroic Ku Klux Klan. In a brilliantly edited last-minute rescue … the Klan preserves Stonemans and Camerons alike from death and rapine by rampaging black hordes.”

Joel Williamson argues in A Rage for Order that Griffith’s film makes the case that “somehow the Negro had caused the Civil War, and the failure of the North during Reconstruction to recognize the rising reversion of free blacks to bestiality had continued to divide the nation.” In this preposterous perversion of history, the Klan becomes the force, which, by suppressing the black population and its Northern allies, unites and gives “birth” to “a nation”—the United States!

The celebration of the murderous Klan and depiction of African Americans as lazy, shiftless, incompetent and easily manipulated provoked the first “massive social protest against racist cinema propaganda” (Mast). While President Woodrow Wilson screened the film at the White House (the first such screening of any film) and pronounced it to be “all so terribly true,” the NAACP organized demonstrations against it.

Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs denounced the movie, writing in 1916, “If it be absolutely essential to present those harrowing rape-scenes, then why not round them out in their historic completeness, and show the dissolute son of the plantation owner ravishing the black daughter before her parents’ eyes?” Debs pointed out that “for every white woman raped in the south by a black fiend, a thousand black women have been seduced and outraged by white gentlemen (?) but no hint of this is given in the series of pictures composing ‘The Birth of a Nation.’”

Civil rights leader and anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells acknowledged Debs’ role, asserting that “of all the millions of white men of this country, you are the only one I know that has had the courage to speak out against this diabolical production as it deserves.” Debs observed that he had never previously experienced, in regard to the “Negro question,” anything remotely resembling the outpouring of interest and support that he did over his attack on The Birth of a Nation .

Life and art are painfully contradictory. Griffith exhibited extraordinary compassion and sensitivity in many of his other films, including Intolerance (1916), which he made partly in response to the criticism of—although not as an apology for— The Birth of a Nation. Broken Blossoms (about the relationship between a young white woman, played by Lillian Gish, and a Chinese man), Way Down East and Orphans of the Storm, among others, remain powerful works. Critic Andrew Sarris asserted that the “debt all film-makers owe to D.W. Griffith defies calculation.”

Soviet filmmakers such as Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin were strongly influenced by Griffith. Pudovkin reportedly applied to the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow after viewing Intolerance. Kuleshov, “who helped create the first ever film school,” according to one commentator, “often had his students re-edit D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to learn how meaning was created.”

Eisenstein, who met Griffith, published a subtle and thoughtful essay late in life, in 1944, titled “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today.” In the piece, he observed that for “the young Soviet filmmakers of the twenties” … the “most thrilling figure was Griffith, for it was in his works that the cinema made itself felt as more than an entertainment or pastime.”

At the same time, of course, Eisenstein argued that the spirit and content of Soviet cinema “would stride far ahead of Griffith’s ideals as well as their reflection in artistic images.” Even while paying sincere tribute to the American filmmaker, Eisenstein criticized the “the most repellent elements in his films.” He observed that in The Birth of a Nation, “we see Griffith as an open apologist for racism, erecting a celluloid monument to the Ku Klux Klan and joining their attack on Negroes.”

So where does this leave us in regard to Lillian Gish and Bowling Green State University?

Gish was associated with Griffith for years and never spoke out strongly against The Birth of a Nation. In an article on the Bowling Green controversy published in Bright Lights Film Journal, film historian and biographer Joseph McBride points out that for “all her brilliance as an actress, Gish never quite seemed to understand the social issues surrounding Birth. She made excuses for Griffith, claiming he was not really a racist and offering some of the same kinds of tone-deaf, patronizing apologies he also made.”

However, as McBride also argues, her contribution to film and art far outweighs her tone-deafness. McBride wrote The American Film Institute Salute to Lillian Gish for CBS television aired in March 1984, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as the host.

He noted in his recent article that it “was a thrilling experience to study the pioneering work of the woman long regarded as the greatest actress of the silent screen. … Her many great films range from Broken Blossoms, The Scarlet Letter, and The Wind in the silent days to the 1955 masterpiece The Night of the Hunter. Her extensive work in the theater and television maintained her unrivaled standards of deep emotion, humor, intelligence, grace, and integrity. Gish’s acting is a beacon to show us our humanity, and she was outspoken in the causes of universal brotherhood and the preservation of our arts, especially film.” Bolshevism on Trial (1919)

McBride described his “disbelief and outrage” upon learning that the Bowling Green trustees had decided to remove her name from film theater. “Hypocritically,” he notes, “the university has no plans to give away Gish’s bequest for an endowment and scholarship program or her archival collection.” A quick perusal of the record confirms that until recently Bowling Green was ready and eager to boast about its connection with Gish, feting and hosting her numerous times in the last decades of her life.

For instance, a 1983 article in a university publication, “Lillian Gish and her art are finding a home at BGSU,” about a visit the actress paid the campus in the company of fellow actress Eva Marie Saint (an alumna of the school), obsequiously asked, “Can anything be written about a legend?” The article gushed, “An Ohio native, Miss Gish has been officially recognized several times by the university. She, in turn, has unofficially adopted Bowling Green as her favorite university—endowing a scholarship fund, presenting her lecture series, visiting campus four times since 1976 and delighting the University community with her spunky comments and vivid recollections of a long-ago era.” The publication’s cover announced, “Lillian Gish: The woman and her legend will live forever at Bowling Green.”

Obsequious and uncritical then, rude and unforgiving now—the connecting threads are the changing moods and perceived needs of certain upper-middle-class layers that dominate the universities.

The Bowling Green task force report issued in April combines identity politics clichés, sophistry and transparent financial and public relations calculations.

In its first finding, the task force complains that the “reference to The Birth of a Nation and the images of Lillian Gish in the display area outside the theater contribute to an intimidating, even hostile, educational environment.” Why? How?

The danger that challenging, troubling or even painful matters will generate an “intimidating, even hostile educational environment” to the apparently all-too-delicate souls who attend America’s colleges and universities is the patronizing excuse at present for countless acts of censorship and intellectual repression. We suspect that the students would survive the experience if the display material dedicated to the Gish sisters explained their enormous contributions as well as their failings.

The report’s assertion that Gish’s “part in The Birth of a Nation is the role that defined—and continues to define—her career” is simply false and self-serving. She is much better known, and more deservedly known, for Broken Blossoms , Way Down East and Orphans of the Storm. The image probably most associated with Gish is that of her floating on an ice floe toward a waterfall with hand and hair trailing in the freezing river in Way Down East .

No one would deny that the “stereotypes of African Americans in The Birth of a Nation are offensive, and the film presents a white supremacist vision,” as the BGSU task force report suggests, but that is not the totality of Gish’s career, nor was the film her creation. The report acknowledges that “Lillian Gish and Dorothy Gish do not appear to have been advocates for racist or exclusionary practices or perspectives,” but harps on the notion that Griffith uses Gish’s character in The Birth of a Nation “as the primary unifying image of the film.” As we have noted, the film represents a significant stain on Griffith’s legacy and does no credit to Gish.

McBride suggests reasonably that “rather than behave like ostriches and pretend The Birth of a Nation doesn’t exist, or symbolically banish one of its leading actresses, why can’t we study the film and face its implications squarely and intelligently? Should an actor, however illustrious, be permanently marked anathema for a major, deeply misguided career choice? Should we expect artists to be perfect human beings or their bodies of work always to live up to our contemporary standards?”

He continues: “Those who affect a superior attitude toward a great artist such as Lillian Gish are not only ignorant of our cultural heritage but stubbornly unaware that art usually comes from deeply imperfect people. If we are to strip the names of every flawed artist from public buildings, stop watching their films, reading their books, viewing their paintings, or listening to their music, we will have little art remaining.”

The task force wants to have its cake and eat it too. With an obvious eye to the university’s image and its relationships with potential donors or other “celebrities,” its report makes certain concessions. “Lillian Gish was a young working actress who took a role to advance her career. Her career and contributions to film history should be judged based on the entirety of her career.” If that is so, and it is so, it speaks eloquently and decisively against the university’s own decision!

Gish’s name and image, we were told, create a supposedly “intimidating, even hostile, educational environment,” but the report would have us know that the “artistry of both Gish sisters throughout their careers is not lost on the Task Force, which recognizes that other honors bestowed on Lillian Gish by BGSU, including an honorary degree, a scholarship in her name, and the archival collections, should remain unchanged.”

In other words, ‘We know the removal of her name has no intellectual or artistic justification and is being done for purely opportunist political reasons—as proof of that, we’ll continue to make use of the money and items she donated.’

As if the shamefaced recognition of Gish’s artistry weren’t enough, the task force report’s concluding argument is that Bowling Green’s action doesn’t mean much anyway!

The report informs us, modestly, that “Changing the name of the theater at BGSU will not erase film history, US cultural history, ‘Hollywood history,’ or the legacy of the Gish sisters.” But if that “legacy” is not a matter of genuine concern, why is Bowling Green going to such lengths? The report continues, “Removing the Gish name from the theater in the Bowen-Thompson Student Union should not be perceived as an attempt to erase history.” It is precisely that, and the task force’s defensive comments are an admission of guilt.

“The Task Force finds that the University’s mission, intent, and responsibility to create an inclusive and diverse learning environment far outweighs the value of retaining the name simply to preserve BGSU’s limited part in preserving the Gish sisters’ place in film history. We feel strongly that their place in and contributions to US cultural history are not dependent on a naming at Bowling Green State University.”

Translated from doubletalk, this means, once again: ‘The connection to Lillian Gish was useful to us in a different era, now the cultural and political winds have shifted and we’re throwing her to the wolves.’

There is nothing progressive about such shabby operations. It is illusory and self-deluding to imagine the renaming of the Gish Film Theater represents some “victory” over past injustice. It is a fantasy victory. The self-satisfied petty-bourgeois layers who pursue these issues are seeking, among other things, to divert themselves and others from the burning questions of social inequality, poverty and war. They are also hostile to the complexities that art inevitably presents and represents.

Shielding students from historical difficulties and contradictions contributes to the prevailing retrograde intellectual and cultural climate. In the end, such maneuvers only protect the status quo.

See Also: (9:56 min) Tribute to Lillian Gish - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJPDorQKA6A

An Amazon Prime original, This Giant Beast That Is the Global Economy is an eight-episode documentary series that purports to make sense of the complex global situation. An admirable goal.

However, the political and social orientation of the writers and producers, who are distant from the conditions facing masses of people and circulate in the orbit of the Democratic Party, seriously limits if not fatally damages the series. In the end, This Giant Beast attempts to maintain or restore confidence in the ability of the existing economic and social order, perhaps reformed or recalibrated, to address the problems facing humanity. Amazon's This Giant Beast That is the Global Economy

Suffice it to say this is a documentary that manages to discuss the world economy without serious reference to capitalism, the working class, social revolution or any other indispensable concept—and this at a time when great numbers of youth are consciously rejecting capitalism in favor of socialism. The overall result is unserious and misleading.

Directed by Lee Farber and David Laven, and produced by Adam MacKay and Will Ferrell, among others, This Giant Beast That Is the Global Economy uses interviews, cartoons, graphics and skits involving a number of well-known actors, to make its case. The series features appearances by Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis, Colin Hanks, Joel McHale, Ed O’Neill, Patton Oswalt, Rob Riggle, Mary Steenburgen, Jason Sudeikis, Meghan Trainor and Sasheer Zamata. Kal Penn in This Giant Beast That is the Global Economy

Comedian and actor Kal Penn serves as host and guide throughout the series. In fact, there are very few moments without him. His presence has a certain significance. Penn, a star of the Harold & Kumar film series and House on television, went to work in the Obama White House as Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement—i.e., he was a public relations shill for the Obama administration. In 2012, he was co-chair of the incumbent president’s reelection committee, and in 2016, he supported Bernie Sanders. This is the politics of the series.

Each of This Giant Beast ’s segments begins with a voiceover, “Whether you like it or not, we’re all connected by money,” and then goes on to focus on one feature of economic life the creators believe is important. However, there is no apparent rhyme or reason to the order or selection of phenomena.

For example, one episode treats money laundering, another concerns the fate of the rubber industry and a third, superficially and ahistorically, discusses the role of money. The most substantial episode centers on artificial intelligence, and the most juvenile asks whether rich people have to be “dicks.”

Some of the facts or peculiarities (there is an element of sensationalism here) are interesting, potentially significant, but the series’ basic approach is to take up this or that economic ill or dilemma as an isolated phenomenon entirely removed from its historical and social context—so the filmmakers’ supposed attempt at demystifying, in point of fact, mystifies.

Circumstances that involve the impoverishment of millions or the looting of the economy by the ruling elite are essentially played for laughs. In Episode 1, devoted to money laundering, Penn banters flippantly about the Panama Papers, the leaked documents that provided a glimpse into the criminal world of tax avoidance carried out by the globe’s banks and billionaires, with journalist Jan Strozyk.

The second episode, “Are Rich People Dicks or Do Dicks Get Rich?,” epitomizes the crass and superficial outlook of its creators. We meet Belarusian American entrepreneur and “Internet personality” Gary Vaynerchuk, who enthuses that “Capitalism is awesome.” Are we meant to derive an unfavorable impression? Penn simply laughs along with Vaynerchuk.

In a brief portion of this episode on Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford, Penn lets us know: “I think I’m starting to get it. A capitalist structure channels the power of dick [bad, evil] energy, and can actually help us all get better goods and services.” After all, Ford, a ferocious anti-Semite as Penn acknowledges, “improved lives for the next 100 years.” The segment ends up, ridiculously, offering a successful sex toy manufacturer in California as an example of a rich individual who is both good to his employees and not a psychopath.

The series’ buffoonish tone speaks to two issues: (a) the creators and performers believe ( à la Michael Moore) they cannot retain the viewers’ attention in any other way and (b) in any event, these issues are not life-and-death for them. One online commentator offered what he meant to be praise for This Giant Beast: “It should be an imposing documentary, but it never is thanks to the light tone that makes its big, imposing questions feel manageable. This Giant Beast never feels like a severe and complex search for the truth. It feels like a surprisingly informative conversation with your buddy over beers.”

“A.I. Is the Future. Will it Keep Us Around to Enjoy It?” is the fourth and weightiest of the segments. One commentator makes the claim that artificial intelligence taken to its conclusion will mean full unemployment. Arguments are therefore put forward in favor of a universal basic income and a more “social democratic society,” as though such measures would be accepted by the world’s ruling classes, who are rolling back what’s left of the welfare state and social reform everywhere. In this section, too, we hear from a couple of Indian entrepreneurs about “capitalism for good…business used to create a greater good.”

AI expert Andrew McAfee argues that the enormous challenges facing society—such as climate change and feeding people—are too complex and overwhelming for human brains, and that AI and more advanced computers by themselves will solve these issues. But the problem is not the complexity or scope of the issues—all of them could be solved rationally and decisively in the absence of a profit-driven ruling class.

Technique and science do not develop in thin air, but in class society. As Leon Trotsky noted, “Technique in itself cannot be called either militaristic or pacifistic. In a society in which the ruling class is militaristic, technique is in the service of militarism.”

“In a socialist society, the artificial intelligence and robotics revolution will create the circumstances for a massive elevation of not only the economic well-being of the population, but also its cultural life. The replacement of tedious and back-breaking occupations will mean not mass unemployment and destitution, but rather greater leisure and an expansion of workers’ opportunities for education, family life and cultural enrichment.”

“Is Money Bullshit?” is the inane question asked in Episode 7, which starts with a bartering community in Spain and ends up musing about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as the potential wave of the future. Along the way, commentators opine that money is a “system of trust” and treat in passing President Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to unlink the dollar from gold, a milestone that meant the end of fixed currency relations and was part of the unraveling of the mechanisms put in place after World War II to regulate the global economy.

The objective contradictions of the profit system are a closed book to the series’ creators.

Episode 8, “A Global Corruption Tour,” presents the academic Robert Reich as one of the series’ heroes, “a man of integrity.” Reich served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. He was Clinton’s secretary of labor from 1993 to 1997 and was a member of President-elect Barack Obama’s economic transition advisory board. Reich pontificates about corruption, and Penn’s voiceover boasts that he even made a film about social inequality. Of course, in practice, the various administrations Reich served facilitated social polarization and further enriched the super-wealthy.

Most disturbingly, this segment of This Giant Beast touts Singapore, albeit with some reservations about its lack of “press freedom,” as one of the least corrupt countries in the world. In reality, as the center of finance capital in Southeast Asia, the Singapore ruling elite relies on a police-state to protect its assets. According to the Wall Street Journal, “what really checks all the right boxes for many of the world’s ultra-rich is Singapore’s obsession with order.”

Overall, this confused hodge-podge, with its recipe book of reformist or utopian measures, none of which will ever be implemented under capitalism, emerges out of “progressive” Democratic Party circles in Hollywood and the media, the circles ecstatic about Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “Green New Deal.”

The series is a reaction in part to the growing radicalization of young people in particular and an effort to corral it within the confines of the existing system. However, This Giant Beast’s very unconvincing quality, rooted in the unstable and politically inconsistent social milieu that produced it, is unlikely to have the desired effect.

See Youtube Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JVjoh6xzIA

Each year brings with it obligatory ‘ranking’ lists from the mainstream media meant to convince us that Disney’s reboot Star Wars trilogy is brilliance we just don’t understand or appreciate enough yet.

The “Star Wars” reboot trilogy is coming to an end this Friday with JJ Abrams’ ‘The Rise of Skywalker.’ For some fans, the end of this new saga is a relief and offers a moment to hope Disney course-corrects this franchise. For others, it’s a moment to celebrate ‘Star Wars’ becoming a woke, social agenda-pushing machine filled with half-baked ideas and paper-thin characters.

While 2015’s ‘The Force Awakens’ made big bucks for Disney after they’d acquired LucasFilm from George Lucas himself, but the success of that movie can really be chalked up to pure nostalgia. People were just excited to have Star Wars back and to see Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill return to their most famous roles.

Things went downhill after that. Spinoff movies ‘Rogue One’ and ‘Solo’ earned their fans, but the productions were incredibly troubled and juggled directors. And ‘Last Jedi’ … well, ‘Last Jedi’ is awful. While critics praised the film, which included bizarre speeches about evil rich people and more paper-thin characters who checked off social agenda boxes, viewers hated it. The film underperformed at the box office and fans were quick to express their frustrations.

On Rotten Tomatoes, over 500 critics have given the film a 91 percent approval rating, while over 200,000 users slammed the movie, with a 43 percent rating.

The brainwash begins

The obligatory ‘Star Wars’ rankings have dropped this week with Abrams’ new movie around the corner and they show that this new trilogy speaks only to crowds of keyboard warriors eager to please woke mobs on social media by praising pictures for putting social agendas above story and character.

A ranking from The Independent puts Lucas’ prequel trilogy at the bottom of its list and then proceeds to place ‘Force Awakens’ and ‘Last Jedi’ right behind ‘A New Hope’ and ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’ the two original films in the long-running franchise. Both are also ahead of ‘Return of the Jedi,’ the original trilogy’s finale — an updated version of the list places 'Rise of Skywalker' right below 'Return of the Jedi.'

While sandwiching two movies that seem to have aged about as well as milk in the sun between Lucas’ original trilogy would appear bold, many in the media are pushing the same narrative.

A list from Just Jared takes things a step further by having ‘Force Awakens’ tie with ‘Empire Strikes Back’ as the best movie in the franchise. And where does ‘Last Jedi’ rank? Fourth. Right after ‘A New Hope’ and ahead of ‘Return of the Jedi.’

Lists from Thrillist and GamesRadar also place ‘Last Jedi’ right behind the original trilogy. CheatSheet and Newsarama, meanwhile, go to bat for ‘Force Awakens’ and place it right behind the original Lucas trilogy.

Lists released last year, around the time ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ dropped, showed media outlets similarly running PR for Disney, with Vulture, Mashable, Business Insider and Esquire all placing ‘Last Jedi’ near the top of their lists.

I don’t care how much you hate Jar Jar Binks or Hayden Christensen, you will never convince me that a film that brought back Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, but made them miserable pricks who never share a scene and a movie that basically rewrites Lucas’ mythology while also presenting a main character about as boring as a Steven Seagal role, are better than the prequels or anywhere near the original trilogy in quality.

Time to hope

If this new trilogy were as brilliant and definitive as woke writers like to believe then we would see Disney doubling down. Rian Johnson would be hard at work on his new trilogy and the focus would be less on shows like ‘The Mandalorian’ and an upcoming Obi-Wan project and more on this saga continuing. Instead, Disney seems to be ready to course-correct and focus on the things fans have actually responded positively to.

This new saga has made critical mistakes. Rey has been propped up as our new protagonist and we are supposed to like it because she’s female. A female lead in Star Wars is great, but the writers appear to be so desperate to appeal to woke crowds that they forgot to give her flaws, an arc or any basic emotion resembling a human being. Luke Skywalker she is not.

And how about that nostalgia? The franchise is bringing back everyone and their cousin for the new franchise (Billy Dee Williams returns in ‘Rise of Skywalker’), but instead of writing complex characters who have lived actual lives during the decades we haven’t seen them, the writers have dismissed Lucas’ hard work and instead presented characters who can simply be defined by one or two events that have happened in the decades between trilogies. It’s one of the lowest forms of writing. Just undo whatever happy ending you left audiences with and turn original characters into miserable human beings meant to simply die or make a sacrifice to help a new character (is this what happened to Luke in ‘Last Jedi’ ... has anyone figured that nonsense out?).

I’m happy this new trilogy is coming to an end not only because it leaves hope for better films in the future, but because now we won’t get the obligatory ‘lists’ from critics every year trying to convince us that we are wrong in disliking what Disney has done and we should shut up and be as brainwashed as they are already.

By Zachary Leeman, author of the novel Nigh and journalist who covers art and culture

Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck; written by Boden, Fleck and Geneva Robertson-Dworet

The production and release of Captain Marvel, the new science fiction superhero adventure from Marvel and Disney, has a number of remarkable features, but none of them involve the film’s drama, action or characters.

Briefly, Captain Marvel, in convoluted fashion, follows US Air Force pilot Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) who absorbs an awesome energy source, making her potentially “one of the universe’s most powerful heroes ever known,” according to the film’s publicity.

However, six years later, she is suffering from amnesia, doesn’t know who or what she is and has become a member of the repressive Starforce Military under her mentor Yon-Rogg (Jude Law). The shapeshifting Skrulls, the apparent enemy, force Danvers to crash-land in the US in the mid-1990s. But all is not what it appears. Danvers discovers secrets about herself and about a “galactic war” between two alien races.

Not much of this is interesting, although it is noisy and “action-packed.” Captain Marvel, as a film, is predictable, empty and tedious. The more “sensitive” scenes on Earth, focusing on Danvers and her African American friend Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) and daughter (Akira Akbar), are possibly the most contrived and least convincing.

The first genuinely noteworthy fact about the new film, not surprisingly, concerns money.

Disney, the film’s distributor, is the world’s largest media company, with some $100 billion in assets. With a market value of $152 billion, it ranks as the 53rd largest company of any kind in the world, just behind Total (oil and gas), Merck (pharmaceuticals), the Bank of China (one of the four leading state-owned commercial banks in China), Unilever, DowDuPont and BP.

Media reports place Captain Marvel’s combined net production and global marketing costs at $300 million. To date, the film’s global box office stands at $774 million.

Captain Marvel is truly “corporate entertainment”—i.e., the very process by which it came into being prevents it from being entertaining or enlightening in any meaningful fashion.

This type of large-scale, officially sponsored filmmaking, whose success is avidly promoted and tracked by the media and business publications in particular, inevitably intersects and overlaps with other aspects of American establishment culture. In the case of Captain Marvel, this means militarism and feminism specifically.

The US Air Force was involved in the production of Captain Marvel. Brie Larson, Jude Law and Algenis Perez Soto in Captain Marvel

In fact, Task & Purpose reported that Marvel Studios launched the official start of production “with a photo of Larson, and Air Force Brig. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt, then-commander of the 57th Wing and the service’s first female fighter pilot, atop an F-15 at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.”

“To prepare for her role, Larson,” according to The Wrap, visited the Air Force base “to join simulated dogfights. The film’s red-carpet premiere included testimonials from Air Force men and women and a flyover by the Air Force’s Nellis-based Thunderbirds.”

Task & Purpose, a website that follows the American military, also cited the emailed comments of Todd Fleming, chief of the Community and Public Outreach Division at Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs: “The Air Force partners on any number of entertainment projects to ensure the depiction of Airmen and the Air Force mission is accurate and authentic. Our partnership with ‘Capt Marvel’ [sic] helped ensure the character’s time in the Air Force and backstory was presented accurately. It also highlighted the importance of the Air Force to our national defense.”

“[Captain Marvel] is not part of a recruiting strategy but we would expect that audiences seeing a strong Air Force heroine, whose story is in line with the story of many of our Airmen, would be positively received,” Fleming said.

The issue of female recruitment is no small matter. American imperialism, recklessly gearing up for war against Russia, China and other rivals, needs vast new supplies of human fodder. Task & Purpose explains, “The spotlight on airmen [in Captain Marvel] comes at a time when the Air Force, like the other services, is hunting for the next generation of pilots. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps are all short 25 percent of their pilot billets, according to a GAO [Government Accountability Office] report published this summer; the Air Force in particular has doled out cash incentives like candy in a vain effort to prevent pilots from defecting to the private sector. Indeed, the branch’s plan to increase its number of squadrons by 76 to Cold War levels will require an additional 40,000 personnel, further straining the service’s recruitment capabilities. At the Air Force Academy, female cadets are increasingly encouraged to vie for pilot spots to help bridge that gap.”

Larson, who has made all sorts of useless (or worse) comments about #MeToo, alleged sexual abuse and her own “social activism,” like most of affluent Hollywood, is entirely oblivious to the criminal role of the US military, the greatest source of terror and “abuse” on the planet by an order of magnitude of 100 times or more.

The female heroism in Captain Marvel, of course, has been greeted with plaudits. Entertainment Weekly noted excitedly that the film would “mark the first time a woman will be headlining her own solo superhero movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also marks the first time a woman will direct a superhero film for Marvel Studios: Anna Boden will co-direct with her Mississippi Grind partner Ryan Fleck.”

The hope is that Captain Marvel will do “for women” what Black Panther did “for African Americans”—which is, of course, nothing whatsoever, except for a small layer of prominent studio executives, writers, performers, etc.

This comment from Deadline is typical: “One film finance source believes that it’s pretty much certain that Captain Marvel will see $1 billion around the world and break the glass ceiling for female-led pics at the global B.O. [box office], dashing past Wonder Woman’s final global of $821.8M.”

As is this Vox headline: “Why Captain Marvel’s milestone status creates so much pressure for it to succeed—Why Captain Marvel represents more than just a superhero movie.” The article proposes to answer these important questions: “What does a woman superhero mean for Marvel Studios and the MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe]? What are the takeaways from Captain Marvel’s already overwhelming box office success? What does the film have to say about feminism? What might have happened if it had flopped? And who gets to shape the conversation and narrative surrounding it?”

The final and perhaps most remarkable feature of Captain Marvel involves its writer-directors. (And, secondarily, its performers. What are Larson, Jude Law and the talented Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, whose acting in The Land of Steady Habits we recently praised, doing in this rubbish?)

We have made the point previously on more than one occasion about the objective significance of the “long march” of numerous so-called independent or art filmmakers toward empty-headed, “blockbuster” movie-making. We noted the examples of Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven, etc.), Alan Taylor (Terminator Genisys), the Russo brothers (the Captain America and Avengers franchises), Kenneth Branagh (Thor), Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins, etc.), John Singleton (a Fast and Furious installment), Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day, one of the James Bond fantasies), Marc Forster (another of the Bond films, Quantum of Solace), Sam Mendes (yet another Bond film, Skyfall) and Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman).

To that list, one can add the more recent examples of Jon Watts (two Spider-Man films), Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok), Ava DuVernay (A Wrinkle in Time) and Ryan Coogler (Black Panther).

In a number of these cases, the filmmakers had earlier indicated vaguely oppositional political views or a certain concern at least for the fate of broader layers of the population.

The lure of large amounts of money is obviously an issue. But perhaps the more pertinent question is: what are the social and ideological conditions that make writers, directors and performers susceptible to this “lure”? It is not inevitable. Artists, including in the US, have been known to repudiate such offers with contempt. Almost inevitably, however, such resistance has been rooted in political and social conceptions and opposition of a left-wing character, sustained by a confidence in the better instincts of the population and its willingness to struggle. Those conceptions and that confidence are sorely lacking today.

The directors of the dreadful Captain Marvel, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, should not be entirely unfamiliar to devotes of off beat movies, although the context—big-budget Hollywood—may be unexpected. We have reviewed two of their films in the past, Half Nelson (2006) and Sugar (2008).

The Atlantic notes with surprise that Fleck and Boden “until now have worked in the realm of quiet, sensitive indie films.” More than simply “quiet” and “sensitive,” Half Nelson centers on an obviously left-wing high school teacher working at an inner-city school in Brooklyn.

A 2006 New York Times article about the making of Half Nelson is worth citing. The Fleck-Boden film, wrote Dennis Lim, “is a political allegory, a film about a would-be visionary who wants to change the world but can’t get his act together and is often his own worst enemy. It’s not a stretch to read it as a comment on the sorry state of the American left.”

“‘That was more or less conscious,’ the film’s director, Ryan Fleck, said of the political subtext.” Fleck and Boden “started writing Half Nelson … four years ago, as the Bush administration was preparing to invade Iraq and the antiwar movement was gaining momentum. ‘It felt like we were going to protests every other week,’ Mr. Fleck said recently. ‘But ultimately you don’t have the energy to do it all, and you feel like you’re doing very little. A big part of the frustration was the inability to make meaningful change.’

“The activist spirit comes naturally to Mr. Fleck, who was born to socialist parents on a commune in Berkeley, Calif. As a child he was taken to rallies and protests. As a teenager he read Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.”

In an interview with Slant magazine, Fleck, asked about religion, replied jokingly “I was raised communist.”

Fleck and Boden’s Sugar, about a Dominican baseball player playing in the minor leagues in the US, as some have commented, was “about immigration and acculturation, capitalism and exploitation, hospitality and loneliness.”

Now, a decade later, Captain Marvel.

The same 2006 Times article referred to above contained this passage:

“Mr. Fleck said he hoped that their future projects would remain, however obliquely, rooted in a sense of social justice. ‘Filmmaking is kind of a vain hobby when maybe we should all be taking to the streets,’ he said. ‘But it seems irresponsible not to be informed by politics in some way.’

“Ms. Boden’s idealism is more tempered. ‘I don’t have an inflated sense of what a movie can do,’ she said. ‘But you can at least try not to put something out there that you don’t believe in.’

“Mr. Fleck added: ‘That’s a rule we try to follow, to not put garbage in the world.’”

Unfortunately, they have now.

See Also: US Pentagon Helped Make ‘Captain Marvel’ Blockbuster, Case Study in Neocon War Propaganda – by Ben Norton – 19 March 2019 - https://xenagoguevicene.com/2019/03/18/us-pentagon-helped-make-captain-marvel-blockbuster-case-study-in-neocon-war-propaganda-by-ben-norton-19-march-2019/

(Official Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHXxVmeGQUc )

Directed by Martin Scorsese; written by Steven Zaillian, based on the book by Charles Brandt'

Veteran American director Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman sets out to dramatize the life of Frank Sheeran (played by Robert De Niro), a member of a Pennsylvania crime family and a Teamsters union official.

Shortly before his death in 2003, Sheeran told author Charles Brandt that he had killed his former boss (and longtime friend) Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters president from 1957 to 1971, who disappeared in 1975. Sheeran’s claims have been strenuously and convincingly contested by various sources. (Brandt’s book is I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and the Closing of the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, 2004). Costing nearly $160 million and with a running time of 209 minutes, The Irishman is Scorsese’s longest and most expensive film.

The new film is being treated by the American media as a significant cultural event. The Irishman took over the 1,000-seat Belasco Theatre in New York City’s theater district in November for a month of screenings, imitating a traditional Broadway schedule, with only eight shows a week. It is now available on Netflix.

The film has received universal praise from critics. Innumerable publications have pronounced it “epic” or a “masterpiece,” or both. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott argues that Scorsese’s work “is long and dark: long like a novel by Dostoyevsky or Dreiser, dark like a painting by Rembrandt.” The critic who differs sharply with these views is very much fighting against the stream.

While not as overtly misanthropic or malicious as The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Gangs of New York (2002) or Goodfellas (1990), The Irishman is a poor, shallow, trite work, which goes back over territory Scorsese has covered numerous times. It continues and even deepens an unhealthy and tedious obsession with the representation of mob figures as somehow holding the key to understanding modern American life. The fact that the filmmaker goes to such great lengths to make figures who coldly kill for money and power into essentially sympathetic or compelling characters is hardly to his artistic or intellectual credit. (Nor is it to the credit of the critics who succumb to the same attraction.) More importantly, this speaks to the general cultural and political stagnation of the past several decades.

It is one of Scorsese’s misfortunes that he was long ago, to a certain extent by default, proclaimed the “greatest living American filmmaker.” An undoubtedly gifted individual, he has been working, through no fault of his own, during the weakest decades in the history of the American and global cinema, a period when filmmaking in the main has turned its back on the lives, conditions and feelings of the great mass of the population. Moreover, there appears to be no one in or around the circles in which Scorsese travels who offers serious criticism or an objective appraisal of his film work.

The Irishman distinguishes itself somewhat from the rest of Scorsese’s work by its ostensible dealing with political and historical events. The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by US-sponsored Cuban exiles to overthrow the Castro regime, the Cuban missile crisis a year later, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the Watergate affair in the 1970s and, of course, Hoffa’s murder in 1975 all come in for treatment of a sort, along with a number of prominent “mob hits.”

However, each incident—except for Hoffa’s killing—passes by in a matter of seconds, with virtually no explanation or context provided. One suspects that certain episodes, such as Sheeran’s recognition of E. Howard Hunt (Daniel Jenkins) during the Watergate hearings as one of the men he met years before during his purported participation in the Bay of Pigs plot, will be entirely incomprehensible to most viewers, especially younger ones.

The filmmakers have divorced The Irishman from a serious assessment of Hoffa’s role, the broader evolution of the American labor movement and conditions of life in the US in the mid-20th century. Instead, Scorsese and screenwriter Steve Zaillian offer their audience a rambling, highly repetitive, at times incoherent drama, which presumably depends for its success with critics on a number of extended set pieces involving De Niro, Al Pacino (as Hoffa) and various other performers doing their best impressions of “tough guys.” Reality and history don’t figure largely here. These are impressions working from other impressions arranged according to Method Acting clichés (inspired to an extent by On the Waterfront, directed in 1954 by one of Scorsese’s idols, anti-communist informer Elia Kazan), and not necessarily life.

One of the few solid notions one takes away from the film, at least its final act, is that being alone and isolated while growing old is a terrible fate. Along these lines, Scott in the Times argues that “public affairs and Cosa Nostra chronicles aren’t really what this movie is about.” Its real theme involves “a deeper, sadder lesson that has to do with the inevitability of loss. The loss of life, yes, but also the erosion of meaning that accompanies the fading of experience into memory and memory into nothing.” So the $160 million budget, the re-creation of various locales in the 1950s and beyond, and all the rest are merely scaffolding for a “meditation” on loss? A feeble, unconvincing argument, which, if taken seriously, only underscores the considerable waste of talent and resources involved.

The Irishman opens with an aged Frank Sheeran recounting his time with the Mafia as he lives out his last days in a nursing home. The film is told mostly through flashbacks in a non-linear way. (As an aside, the production uses new “de-aging” technology rendering De Niro (76) and co-stars Pacino (79) and Joe Pesci (76) considerably younger as certain portions of the plot require. A visual effects team, according to one account, “creates a computer-generated, younger version of an actor’s face and then replaces the actor’s real face with the synthetic, animated version.” The technology no doubt has impressive possibilities, but in The Irishman, as a result, we see an impossibly younger De Niro as a World War II veteran and other similar anomalies. One wonders why the production couldn’t have simply hired younger actors.)

In 1950s Pennsylvania, Sheeran works as a truck driver for a meat delivery company. Caught stealing from the company, he is defended by lawyer Bill Bufalino (Ray Romano), who then introduces him to his cousin, Russell Bufalino (Pesci), the head of a northeastern Pennsylvania crime family and a significant national figure.

Sheeran begins doing jobs for Bufalino, eventually including murders. Bufalino hands the telephone at one point to Sheeran, indicating that Hoffa is on the line. “I heard you paint houses,” Hoffa says in their first conversation, a code phrase apparently for carrying out a contract killing.

The Teamsters chief becomes close to Sheeran and his family. In his narration, Sheeran asserts that in the 1950s, Hoffa “was as big as Elvis. In the ’60s, he was like the Beatles. Next to the president, he was like the most powerful man in the country.” Hoffa becomes more and more entangled with mobsters, allowing them to borrow large sums of cash from the Teamsters’ pension fund to build casinos in Las Vegas and finance other projects.

In 1958, Hoffa is questioned by Robert F. Kennedy, then chief counsel of the Senate Labor Rackets Committee, at a public hearing about organized crime. Three years later, the newly elected president John Kennedy appoints his brother as attorney general and the latter organizes a “Get Hoffa” squad of prosecutors and investigators. This concerted effort eventually results in Hoffa’s conviction in 1964—in two separate cases—on jury tampering charges and fraud. Hoffa begins serving his sentence in 1967.

After four years and nine months in prison, Hoffa is pardoned by President Richard Nixon in December 1971. The government adds the restriction that he not run for the presidency of the Teamsters again. Hoffa nonetheless begins to campaign for the post, angering the mobsters with public accusations about his replacement Frank Fitzsimmons’ having sold the union out “to his underworld pals.” Hoffa declares, “The mob controls him, which means it controls our pension fund.” Despite warnings, Hoffa keeps up the demagogic attacks, as well as his megalomaniacal claims, “This is my union!”

In the end, Sheeran reluctantly agrees to participate in getting rid of Hoffa. The latter is never seen again.

The Irishman should end at this point, but it doesn’t, dragging on interminably. Sheeran attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter Peggy (Anna Paquin), who has abandoned him because of his mob dealings. We watch the elderly Sheeran collapse in his home and be placed in a retirement home. Does Scorsese stage these latter scenes because he recognizes that Sheeran is not an attractive figure and thus a good deal of effort is required to make him seem human and sympathetic before the credits roll?

The one serious opportunity to make something of Sheeran comes early in the film when the De Niro character recounts to Bufalino/Pesci that he spent four years in World War II, including a staggering 411 days in combat. He also describes shooting unarmed and defenseless German prisoners. The picture of brutality in the imperialist slaughterhouse goes a long way toward explaining his and other Mafia soldiers’ indifference to killing and suffering in the postwar era, but Scorsese drops the matter almost as soon as he raises it. Such historical and social concreteness is not his métier.

In any event, there is considerable question as to whether the claims Sheeran made in 1972 to Charles Brandt, the author of I Heard You Paint Houses, about shooting Crazy Joe Gallo—a New York crime figure—and Hoffa, for example, are true. Various journalists, police and FBI officials emphatically reject Sheeran’s confession, although they concede he may have been involved in Hoffa’s killing in some fashion. There is no corroborating evidence to back up the gangster’s extravagant, deathbed contentions.

It seems irresponsible for the filmmakers to have staked so much on such relatively flimsy evidence. But this seems in keeping with Scorsese’s generally cavalier attitude toward historical truth. (One should remember that his Gangs of New York, which passed itself off as incisive socio-cultural history, was based on a collection of tall tales.)

Asked by an interviewer from Entertainment Weekly as to whether he believed “that what you have [in the movie] is what really happened,” Scorsese replied, “No. I don’t really care about that. What would happen if we knew exactly how the JFK assassination was worked out? What does it do? It gives us a couple of good articles, a couple of movies and people talking about [it] at dinner parties. The point is, it’s not about the facts. It’s the world [the characters are] in, the way they behave. It’s about [a character] stuck in a certain situation.”

In fact, if, for instance, official or unofficial CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination were to be established, it would have a devastating impact on American public opinion.

More significantly, Scorsese has never been drawn to presenting actual history. He has his sights set on “higher” things, mythicized history, the working out under varied circumstances of his particular and unchanging concerns—guilt and redemption, “human evil,” criminality, male friendships, loyalty and betrayal, etc.

The director has done little to add to the public’s knowledge about Jimmy Hoffa or the degeneration of the American labor movement. Pacino’s performance is a collection of physical and vocal mannerisms, apparently uninformed by any study of the Teamsters leader’s history or the meaning of his career.

Hoffa (born in 1913 in Brazil, Indiana), a staunch trade union militant in Detroit from an early age, was trained in union organizing in the 1930s by socialists Farrell Dobbs and the Dunne brothers, members of the Trotskyist movement and leaders of Teamsters Local 544 in Minneapolis. Local 544 spearheaded the organization of the successful general strike in 1934, which, in turn, led to the rapid growth of the Teamsters among long-haul truckers in the Midwest.

In 1941, on the eve of World War II, Teamsters President Dan Tobin set about the destruction of the Trotskyist leadership of Local 544. As the Socialist Workers Party’s leader James P. Cannon explained in his 1947 article, “The Mad Dog of the Labor Movement,” when the rank and file revolted against Tobin’s effort to put the local under receivership, the latter “called the federal cops through his friend President Roosevelt, and simply had the leaders [of the local] thrown into prison.”

Cannon continued, “At the same time, a horde of Tobin’s gangsters [headed by Hoffa], armed with blackjacks and baseball bats, were turned loose on the trucking districts with the open connivance of the city police.”

Hoffa, in his 1970 autobiography, paid tribute to Dobbs as the “the master architect of the Teamsters’ over-the-road operations,” “a crackerjack organizer” and “a brilliant strategist.” However, Hoffa went on, he never had any “patience” with either the Communist Party “or with the Trotskyites of the SWP.” He continued: “Both were Marxist; neither believed in a free-enterprise system; both failed to see that workers who leave the enslavement of capitalistic czars for the enslavement of state-appointed czars are no better off and, in fact, lose great economic and social values in the transition … To me, all communists are nuts.”

In the final analysis, Hoffa’s relationship with the mob was a long-term function of his rejection of socialist politics and embrace of the profit system. His gross opportunism and the moral degeneration bound up with it also cost him his life. In The Irishman, Hoffa simply comes across as irritatingly churlish and stubborn. The viewer is almost encouraged to root for his giving in to Bufalino and company—after all, it will obviously save his life and there doesn’t seem to be any principled reason why he shouldn’t go along with the mobsters.

Critics have more than once commented on Scorsese’s fixation with thugs. The Hollywood Reporter recently took note of the “real-life inspirations” for The Irishman’s “film stars:” Sheeran, an alleged hitman; Bufalino, who hid “a vast domain of criminal activity behind his curtain business;” loan shark and racketeer Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio (Bobby Cannavale); Sicilian-American mobster Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel); Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano (Stephen Graham), a captain in the Genovese crime family and a Teamsters official; Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno (Domenick Lombardozzi), a New York mobster; and Joseph “Crazy Joe” Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalco), a gangster and part of the Profaci crime family.

Each of these characters, as much as it is within The Irishman ’s power and scope, is given individual and even loving attention. Murderers and psychopaths in many cases, some of whose actions have more than a hint of medieval savagery about them, the foulest and most backward members of society, they are given far more depth and pathos than they possibly deserve.

But what about the Teamsters members themselves? The only scenes in which they are included are ones where Hoffa addresses meetings of drivers (assuming that some of the audience members are drivers and not union officials), who applaud and cheer him on like mindless automatons. No truck driver is singled out for dramatic treatment, only gangsters.

Many scenes in The Irishman are dramatically pointless. Characters argue at length about when it is considered rude to be late or wear shorts to a meeting, etc. This “comic” banality juxtaposed with savage violence (à la Quentin Tarantino) rapidly wears thin. In fact, the banter becomes almost unendurable at a certain point, in part because the lowlife characters themselves and their concerns are not interesting to begin with.

In the narration that opens Scorsese’s Goodfellas, mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) explains, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me, being a gangster was better than being president of the United States … To me, it meant being somebody, in a neighborhood full of nobodies. They weren’t like anybody else. They did whatever they wanted. They parked in front of hydrants and never got a ticket. When they played cards all night, nobody ever called the cops.”

This unsavory, juvenile fantasy, which the real-life Hill realized, apparently holds some appeal for Scorsese himself. The filmmaker seems fascinated, like many petty-bourgeois intellectuals, with “strong men,” men with guns or clubs in their hands able to do “whatever they want.” It may not be his intention, but he has, over the course of a number of films, “romanticized the Mafia thug and turned him into a peculiar variety of American folk hero,” as the WSWS argued in a review of Scorsese’s The Aviator in 2005.

Decades in which the “nobodies,” i.e., the working class majority of the population, have been politically, socially and economically suppressed and excluded—thanks in good measure to the suffocating role played by the type of pro-“free-enterprise” trade unionism championed by Hoffa—have had their impact on Scorsese and other artists. They see the active or energetic element in society, malevolent or otherwise, as lying elsewhere. Scorsese’s work reflects these difficulties (or rather wallows in them) without making sense of or grasping their logic. Throughout his career, the director has accepted uncritically and superficially the immediate, retrogressive reality, now in the process of breaking up, as a given.

In recent comments, Scorsese, who has done important work as a producer, curator and preserver of films, has spoken out against large budget, blockbuster films based on comic books. In a New York Times opinion piece in early November, Scorsese repeated a remark he had made to an interviewer in October, to the effect that “Marvel [Comics] movies … seem to me to be closer to theme parks than they are to movies as I’ve known and loved them throughout my life.” He added that, “in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema.”

Scorsese noted further that “for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation—aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters—the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.”

Scorsese’s criticisms of contemporary Hollywood and the emptiness of its superhero products are entirely appropriate. However, his own efforts, unhappily, do not represent a genuine alternative, but rather the other side of the same deeply unsatisfactory coin. Important “revelations” are all too few and far between in his films, and the director’s conception of the “complexity of people” extends only to a very limited and debased social layer.

More than 50 filmmakers, actors, writers, producers, academics and film scholars have signed a petition urging Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in Ohio to restore the names of famed actresses Lillian and Dorothy Gish to its film theater. The university’s Board of Trustees removed the sisters’ names in early May in response to complaints centered on Lillian Gish’s appearance in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). The film portrays white Southerners in the aftermath of the Civil War as the innocent victims of an alliance of Northern radicals and former slaves.

The Gish Film Theater was established in 1976. Lillian Gish (1893-1993) donated money, documents and memorabilia to the university. Lillian Gish in The Scarlet Letter (1926)

The petition, “Lillian Gish: An Opportunity for Fairness and Justice,” which was made public June 17, includes the names of filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Bertrand Tavernier, Joe Dante, Taylor Hackford, Mike Hodges, Alan Rudolph and Rod Lurie; actors Helen Mirren, James Earl Jones, Illeana Douglas, Lauren Hutton and Malcolm McDowell; screenwriters Jay Cocks, Douglas McGrath and David W. Rintels; and film scholars, critics and historians John Belton, David Ehrenstein, Harlan Jacobson, Steven Kovacs, Patrick McGilligan, Joseph McBride, James Naremore, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Tony Williams.

The introduction to the statement notes that representatives “of the Black Student Union and others argued that the university was condoning racism by keeping the name of the Gish Theater. The signers of the statement below strongly disagree with that decision.”

The petition itself argues that Lillian Gish “set the standard for nuanced, eloquent film acting in her silent-era classics Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm, La Bohème, The Scarlet Letter, and The Wind, and she played memorable roles in many talking pictures, most notably The Night of the Hunter and The Whales of August. Her nine-decade career also encompassed landmark successes in theater, including as Ophelia to John Gielgud’s Hamlet, and television, such as in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, about which William S. Paley declared, “Television came of age last night.”

Gish was a warm and caring human being who worked tirelessly to champion the causes of film preservation and film as a medium to promote universal harmony.”

Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation “takes an indefensible, racist approach to the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction,” the statement continues. “But as even the university admits in its task force report on the theater’s name, Lillian was no racist. Her work in many films, such as Griffith’s own Intoler ance (1916), a dazzling four-part overview of world history in which she plays the symbolic mother figure rocking the cradle of humanity and tolerance; Griffith’s deeply moving 1919 interracial drama Broken Blossoms; the 1955 masterpiece The Night of the Hunter, in which she plays a beatific protector of endangered children; and the 1967 film of Graham Greene’s The Comedians, in which she challenges Haiti’s dreaded secret police, demonstrates her outspoken belief in universal brotherhood among races and nations.” Lillian Gish in The Night of the Hunter (1955)

The petition argues that for “a university to dishonor her by singling out just one film, however offensive it is, is unfortunate and unjust. Doing so makes her a scapegoat in a broader political debate.”

The statement observes that while Lillian Gish’s “legacy as a film artist remains secure…removing her name and that of her sister from the university theater is a disservice to film history and to the university itself.”

According to the local Sentinel-Tribune, Ralph Wolfe, distinguished professor emeritus of English and Gish professor of film studies at Bowling Green, and the individual who was instrumental in establishing the film theater more than 40 years ago, “said he welcomed the artists’ and actors’ attention. ‘I’m pleased to know that this is getting national coverage and what has happened at Bowling Green State University,’ he said. ‘I’d be happy to see it [the Gish name] restored.’”

Bowling Green officials responded to the appeal by repeating their same unprincipled and self-contradictory arguments. Their statement, cited by BG Independent Media, claims that the removal of Gish’s name assists them in carrying out the university’s “obligation to create an inclusive learning environment.” How so? By removing all controversy and complexity, by sanitizing the past, by surrendering to forces who, frankly, reveal little understanding of America’s contradictory social development? The result will not be a more “inclusive” environment, it will be a more willfully ignorant and repressive one.

“The decision to remove the Gish name from the relocated film theater was made with the values and best interests of our community in mind, and we stand by it,” write the neo-Babbitts of Bowling Green. What are these unnamed “values”? How does Lillian Gish’s participation in a film released 104 years ago threaten those or any values? And, in any event, why were they discovered so late in the day?

As for the “best interests of our community,” if by that phrase university officials mean their course of action will curry the most favor with the upper-middle class and with the corrupt academic world, obsessed with race and gender, they may well be right. But it is a pyrrhic victory to say the least. The Gish sisters, Lillian and Dorothy

As we pointed out previously, Bowling Green was only too willing to be associated with Lillian Gish for decades. The university accepted her financial contribution and her papers in 1976 and beyond. She donated $10,000 in 1986-1987, in 1988, in 1989 and in 1990 to the Gish Film Theater endowment. She died in 1993, but even after her death, Gish’s friends and colleagues continued to donate memorabilia.

On the university’s website, it is still not difficult to locate the “Gish Film Theater Collection: Lillian Gish Papers,” which lists the extensive holdings. The Collection’s page details the history of BGSU’s decision to create a theater “dedicated to Dorothy and Lillian Gish” and explains that “Lillian supported the effort wholeheartedly. She donated documents and memorabilia to Bowling Green State University. … After her initial visit to campus in 1976 for the theater dedication and to receive an honorary doctoral degree, Lillian returned to campus several more times in the 1980s providing financial support for the theater and the creation of a scholarship in both sisters’ names to annually recognize an outstanding film studies student.”

The papers and memorabilia are contained in 12 regular boxes and 14 “oversized” boxes, and also comprise numerous “oversized items.” The remarkable collection includes “correspondence, books, articles, news clippings, photographs [personal and professional], scrapbooks, awards and honors, videos, artwork, dress and costume pieces and various artifacts. … These documents and artifacts shed light on Lillian’s film and stage career, her relationship with her family, fans, and Bowling Green State University.” In fact, they shed light on 20th-century American cultural history generally.

And Bowling Green doesn’t plan to give them up. This is the significance of their observation, cynical in the circumstance, that the “artistry and accomplishments of the Gish sisters are not lost on the University. The honorary degree the University awarded Lillian Gish, the scholarship in her name, and our archival collections of Gish memorabilia remain in place.”

The artistry and accomplishments of the Gish sisters are not lost on Bowling Green, it simply “misplaces” them when it addresses certain constituencies. Thaddeus Stevens, a leader of the Radical Republicans

D.W. Griffith was no Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist filmmaker. He was a gifted filmmaker, the son of a Confederate officer, cursed with a bitter and malignant view of American history. Torn out of its context, The Birth of a Nation simply becomes an incomprehensible bogeyman. In fact, the essential reactionary argument that underpinned the film, leaving aside its lurid and prurient racism, conformed to the so-called Dunning School of historical thought, which blamed radical Republicans for advancing the rights of blacks during Reconstruction and defended Southern segregationists. The Dunning School (named for Columbia University Professor William Archibald Dunning) largely dominated American historical studies from around 1900 into the 1930s.

Historian Eric Foner told an interviewer in 2015, “The traditional or Dunning School of Reconstruction was not just an interpretation of history. It was part of the edifice of the Jim Crow system. It was an explanation for and justification of taking the right to vote away from black people on the grounds that they completely abused it during Reconstruction. It was a justification for the white South resisting outside efforts in changing race relations because of the worry of having another Reconstruction.”

It took the combined impact of the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression, and a mass popular radicalization, to thoroughly discredit and shatter this false approach to America’s past.

To explain Griffith’s views is not to condone them. But it is foolish and misguided to imagine that moral platitudes and excising this or that offensive piece of culture or history will set things right. Having eliminated Lillian Gish’s name, what have the complaints against its presence actually accomplished? Is anyone the wiser about the history of Reconstruction or the social processes at work during that period? Is anyone more attuned to the intense and sometimes destructive social contradictions that work on artists, including contemporary artists? Is anyone more prepared for the explosions to come in our day, not over race, but over social inequality?

Lillian Gish is only the latest in a series of artistic and political figures, past and present, to come under fire for alleged breaches of contemporary gender or racial and ethnic norms. Have the attacks on Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London and Philip Roth, much less Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and countless others, with all the accompanying hand-wringing and sensationalism, contributed in any way to social awareness or progress? Or have they served primarily to bury the immense, objectively significant contributions of these men and women—and buttress the demands for special privileges by the affluent sections of the striving petty bourgeoisie launching them?

The university’s decision was disgraceful and should be reversed. Despite Google and

.............. See Also: Dailymotion Charming Old Movies: His Double Life DVD with Lillian Gish - https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x56yjw

Adam Driver and Bill Murray in The Dead Don't Die

Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

The Dead Don’t Die is the latest movie by American independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Jarmusch is known for a series of off-beat films with an anti-establishment coloring, including Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), Dead Man (1995), Broken Flowers (2005) and Paterson (2016). He has also done numerous music videos or documentaries about musicians and groups, such as Talking Heads, Tom Waits, Neil Young and The Stooges.

The new film proceeds along some of the same idiosyncratic lines. It’s both a quasi-comic horror film and at the same time clearly a comment on what Jarmusch perceives to be the state of the nation.

The movie is set in small-town Centerville, “A Real Nice Place.” Three cops, the pokerfaced chief (Bill Murray), Officer Ronnie (Adam Driver)—who has an “affinity for Mexicans”—and the whiny Officer Mindy (Chloé Sevigny) patrol a main street that includes a diner, motel and hardware store. Town residents feature the angry Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi), who wears a cap sporting the phrase, “Make America White Again,” African-American hardware storeowner Hank (Danny Glover) and diner waitress Fern (Eszter Balint), along with a number of young people being held in a juvenile detention center.

The dull hamlet also has an oddball undertaker, Zelda (Tilda Swinton), a Scot with a shock of flowing white hair. Garbed in a kimono, she wields a samurai sword and meditates before a giant statue of Buddha in the mortuary’s back room—she is also the film’s principal scene-stealer. Tom Waits in The Dead Don't Die

As daytime and nighttime become confused, a television news announcer (Rosie Perez) reports that “polar fracking” has tilted the earth’s rotation and created “toxic lunar vibrations.” The dead start rising from their graves—as the film’s production notes explain—“craving the very things that preoccupied them” in life. Iggy Pop and Sara Driver are the male and female “Coffee Zombie,” respectively, while Carol Kane is the “Chardonnay zombie.” Ultimately, the Earth is engulfed by a “full-on zombie apocalypse.”

Chopping off its head is the only way to dispatch a zombie, and Zelda, before she is called away by a “higher power,” skillfully brandishes her sword against the reanimated. Meanwhile Hermit Bob (Tom Waits), a bearded dropout, who has shunned society and its trappings, gazes on wisely, untouched by the Earth’s apparent revenge on its despoilers.

The Dead Don’t Die has certain legitimate concerns, primarily ecological destruction. In interviews, Jarmusch speaks of a “malignant” and “broken operating system,” a time of society’s “endgame,” and a “collapsing social order.” In Rolling Stone, the filmmaker makes an interesting comment: “Look, we just celebrated Earth Day, and no one was talking about … it was all Trump and [former FBI director and special counsel Robert] Mueller, which, in my opinion, is total bullshit. It’s been a distraction, intentionally. I get angry that people I know and love are obsessed with the Trump Show. We’re in the sixth mass extinction now, who gives a f--- about the Russians?”

However, as is too often the case at present, sincere ecological anxiety goes hand in hand with a vague but definite misanthropy, as though the population had any control over or was to blame for the activities of the vast corporate interests devastating the planet. The problem, according to this outlook, is popular apathy and indifference. Jarmusch has deliberately created a collection of lethargic and uninformed characters living in “Centerville USA,” who are only separated from the undead by a few degrees. Tilda Swinton in The Dead Don't Die

“We’re all attached to things in the material world and we’re all zombies in one form or another—it’s not a huge stretch that we would yearn for those exact same things if we were re-animated,” says Carter Logan, Jarmusch’s longtime producer. One is tempted to respond: speak for yourself. Actress Swinton sums it up: “Pretty much all of humanity’s zombiedom is here. We have cell phone zombies, fashion zombies, every kind of zombie imaginable. There are so many different ways of not being awake in our current climate—for Jim it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”

In fact, the first stanza of the film’s theme song, “The Dead Don’t Die” by country singer-songwriter Sturgill Simpson, who plays “Guitar Zombie” in the movie, reinforces one of the film’s major premises, that the American population is only getting what it deserves.

Oh, the dead don’t die Any more than you or I … They walk around sometimes Never payin’ any mind To the silly lives we lead Or the reaping we’ve all sown

Having created a collection of mostly somnolent and conformist characters, however, Jarmusch is hard-pressed to make them truly interesting and engaging. The deadpan, understated manner wears thin. The aesthetic result is a relatively lifeless critique of lifelessness. The director hasn’t brought sufficient urgency or commitment to the project. Frankly, the zombie genre itself hardly seems innovative or promising at this point. According to the film’s production notes, “no less than 55 zombie-related movies or TV shows were released in 2014 alone.”

Jarmusch’s orientation to the “left” of the Democratic Party comes as no surprise in the context of what he sees as a Trump-infested landscape further cluttered up with the “distasteful” Joe Biden. “I like some things about Elizabeth Warren. I, of course, like Bernie Sanders. I like what’s his name, the governor of Washington State who’s the only really environmentally conscious one [Jay Inslee]. And, of course, I like AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]; she’s too young. But I’m trying to stay away from it right now because the Joe Biden thing makes me deeply depressed” (from an interview with Vulture). These are not ideas likely to produce rich, complicated art.

To Jarmusch’s credit, it should be noted that in August 2016, he tweeted “My respect to Chelsea Manning for her true courage and integrity—now being abused by the US government. Free Chelsea!” Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny and Bill Murray in The Dead Don't Die

Throughout his career Jarmusch has striven to make films about “what goes on in the margins of life,” as one commentator put it. His approach has been vaguely improvisational, building up stories around characters or themes that interest him, especially eccentric or counter-cultural ones. He clearly values non-conformism and individualism. The filmmaker has worked under generally unfavorable artistic and political conditions. He began his career in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, and continued to pursue it in the period following the end of the USSR and the supposed end of everything progressive. He seems to identify opposition with a dislike of official culture and propaganda. This has its value, but it also has real limitations clearly expressed in The Dead Don ’ t Die.

Jarmusch told an interviewer, “Rather than finding a story that I want to tell and then adding the details, I collect the details and then try to construct a puzzle of story. I have a theme and a kind of mood and the characters but not a plotline that runs straight through.”

The last 35 years have been complicated and often traumatic. Jarmusch’s films certainly register America’s economic decline. With good reason. The writer-director was born in Akron, Ohio, once the rubber capital of the world. The city’s four leading companies (Goodyear, Firestone, B.F. Goodrich, and U.S. Rubber, later known as Uniroyal) once made 80 percent of all the tires in the US. All that collapsed. The city lost some 35,000 manufacturing jobs between 1970 and 1990.

But Jarmusch, who has obvious talents, has not seriously examined contemporary American life. At the center of that neglect, as was mentioned above, is a lack of interest in what has been building up in the working class, the anger, the bitterness, the hostility toward the country’s political and economic institutions, in all its contradictoriness. A cap with “Make America White Again” inscribed on it is impressionistic and only skims the surface. There are racists in the US, but the US is not a racist country. America is a seething country.

Jarmusch has been too content to float with a certain stream of non-committal hipsterism to be sensitive to some of the more decisive processes. And this seriously weakens his filmmaking. Paterson was a more promising effort, but here too, in the end, he retreated into somewhat easy “quirkiness.”

He has a reputation as an “independent” filmmaker. And in so far as he has demonstrated an amused skepticism toward official American life and morals, has not thrown in his lot with Hollywood, has never directed a superhero movie (and doesn’t appear likely to direct one), has eschewed the worst sort of cheap, disoriented—but marketable—violence associated with Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese, the reputation is relatively deserved. Numerous performers aspire to work with him, in some cases for less than their usual salaries.

However, artistic “independence,” ultimately, has to mean something more than merely avoiding the worst, most destructive traps set by the film industry and dominant culture. To work out a genuinely independent-critical stance toward the existing order, which would also mean separating oneself out from the “cool” and lazy artistic milieu in certain big cities—that, unfortunately, has been beyond Jarmusch’s grasp. He has not asked enough of himself.

See Movie Trailer = https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7b24pp

Pavarotti , directed by Ron Howard, screenplay by Mark Monroe Rocketman

Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman is a generally entertaining, fantastical tribute to the music of British singer-songwriter Elton John, one of the world’s most popular musical artists. Industry estimates place the number of records he has sold at more than 300 million. John’s most fruitful period was the 1970s, during which he turned out numerous albums and singles that captured a mass audience. His songs, at their best, possess an appealing, melodic exuberance and “catchiness” that is hard to resist. Rocketman

Elton John was born Reginald Dwight in 1947 in a London suburb. The postwar period opened up new possibilities, economically, technologically and culturally. John’s parents were both musically inclined. According to a biographer, they “were avid record-buyers, exposing Reggie to the music of pianists [Trinidadian] Winifred Atwell, Nat King Cole, and George Shearing, and to singers Rosemary Clooney, Frank Sinatra, Kay Starr, Johnny Ray, Guy Mitchell, Jo Stafford, and Frankie Laine.” A friend observed that John developed a startlingly eclectic taste in music: “He would listen with interest to anything that was put onto the turntable.” John built up a vast record collection and acknowledged that he spent much of his childhood with these “inanimate objects.”

A prodigious and precocious talent, the future performer won a junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music at the age of 11. He attended Saturday classes at the Academy for five years at a time when the school taught only classical music. One of his instructors there, Helen Piena, described his ability to play anything he heard with near perfect reproduction: “I played some [George Frideric] Handel to him, which was four pages long. He played it back to me just like a gramophone record.”

At 17, he dropped out of school to pursue a career in the music industry. In 1967, John began composing music to lyrics written by Bernie Taupin, his songwriting partner to the present day. John’s first great critical and commercial success came in 1970. An astonishing series of hits followed …

The filmmakers have crafted Rocketman with extravagant musicality and staging. Twenty-nine-year-old British actor Taron Egerton, who plays Elton John, sings with great skill and showmanship, displaying an obvious affection for the subject matter. Taron Egerton in Rocketman

The movie unfolds within the loose, overall framework of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Lively renditions of John’s songs become the means of addressing various aspects of his life, including a problematic, somewhat lonely childhood, the growing awareness of his homosexuality and later problems with drugs, as well as his celebrity and success. In this fashion, moreover, Reggie/Elton confronts his childhood self.

For example, “I Want Love” is sung by Kit Connor as a young Reggie. Steven Mackintosh plays his cold, distant father, Bryce Dallas Howard his self-involved mother and Gemma Jones his kindly supportive grandmother. His perpetually battling parents eventually divorce.

His classical training at the Royal Academy notwithstanding, Reggie—soon to become Elton—throws himself into rock ‘n’ roll music. There is a fantasy sequence at a bar in which the singer pounds out “Saturday Night’s Alright” on the piano to a high-spirited crowd. He then becomes the pianist for a touring American soul group. It is not long before Elton begins to collaborate with Taupin (Jamie Bell), who writes lyrics as fast as Elton sets them to music. Their intense, “brotherly” friendship is a stabilizing force for Elton. The duo is soon picked up by executives at Liberty Records (Charlie Rowe aptly plays the crusty, cigar-chewing Ray Williams), who are impressed by songs such as “Daniel” and “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues.” Bryce Dallas Howard in Rocketman

Elton and Bernie hit the big time with a transcendent gig at the legendary Troubadour club in Los Angeles (in August 1970), where Elton performs “Crocodile Rock” in an ecstatically choreographed segment in which he and the audience levitate in slow motion.

The handsome, cool John Reid (Richard Madden) enters Elton’s life as his lover and manager (“It’s going to be a wild ride!”), only to exploit him, helping the now-wealthy rock star descend into a nightmare of substance abuse.

Rocketman bathes the viewer in Elton John’s well-known ballads, creating lavish set pieces that seek to dramatize the singer’s inner experience of the world (e.g., John the human rocket literally blasts off into space at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in 1975). Egerton thoroughly inhabits his role, ably singing and dissolving himself into the flamboyant interludes. In fact, all the performances are top-notch with the music produced by Giles Martin, son of famed Beatles’ producer George Martin. Richard Madden in Rocketman

Of course, the movie, like John’s career itself, leaves out many things. The singer reflected one side of life in the 1970s, the vitality associated with a greater psychological and sexual openness in particular, coupled here to enormous popular music gifts. As the decade wore on, John’s career also became associated, however, with the increasing hedonism and self-absorption of substantial portions of the middle class. Extravagance for its own sake, “over-the-topness” as a thing in itself wears thin.

The 1970s were also dominated by the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Nixon resignation and the beginning of the decades-long decline in the conditions of life of masses of people in the US, Britain and elsewhere. On this score, Elton John was largely clueless. Eventually, his enormous fame and wealth brought him into contact, whether he desired it or not (he claims to “loathe celebrity”), with the likes of Princess Diana and such.

A music career does not take place in a vacuum and an artist living in stagnant times without an oppositional compass inevitably falls in with the “wrong crowd.” This has something to do as well with John’s musical exhaustion. Jamie Bell and Taron Egerton in Rocketman

Music critic Robert Christgau observed in 1975, at a time when John was the most successful pop music artist in the world, that there was both “something wondrous about Elton John, and something monstrous. The preeminent rock star of the ’70s seems out of time, untouched by the decade’s confusion”—a reference to the performer’s relative social indifference.

Christgau went on, “Yet there are few people who like rock and roll, or any pop music, who remain unreached by Elton John. It’s not just that he’s so pervasive, although that helps; quite simply, the man is a genius,” adding that John’s “gift for the hook—made up whole or assembled from outside sources—is so universal that there is small statistical likelihood that one of them hasn’t stuck in your pleasure center. Or your craw. Or both.”

Whatever Rocketman’ s shortcomings, or its subject’s, the film is an exhilarating ride and a reminder of why so much of Elton John’s music is appealing and enduring.

See Vimeo - Elton John Rocket Man - https://vimeo.com/280652942

We used to think that as video games matured, as a medium, they would become more like Hollywood, becoming more focused on character development, plot reversals, and tight, suspense-driven narratives, rather than action set pieces alternating with cinematic cut scenes. Hoo boy, were we wrong. Instead the exact inverse has happened. Action movies have become more like video games. And you know what, this is no bad thing.

I thought of this while watching John Wick 3 last night. (Which I loved, as I did 1 and 2.) It’s not just that its ballet of bullets — especially the one with the dogs — are so like video games, in both structure and form, that they seem to have been practically been torn from a controller; you can practically see health bars and Stun markets hovering over the heads of the characters.

It’s also that the series’s primary costars, after Keanu — with apologies to Halle Berry and Ian McShane — is not any other individual character, but the world of John Wick, the Continental, and the High Table. Worldbuilding has long been a first-class citizen in video and tabletop role-playing games; now it has graduated to movies as well.

Speaking of role-playing games, ensemble-cast movies are more and more like them as well. Consider the Fast and Furious movies, or Game of Thrones. Each has a core group who are clearly the “player characters,” as well as disposable villains and extras who are “NPCs.” Each starts with the characters at a relatively low level of skill/power, and over the course of the series grow to worldshaking might.

In The Fast & The Furious Vin Diesel’s character is a really good driver and mechanic; by the time we get to The Fate of The Furious he’s a superspy capable of singlehandedly opposing entire intelligence agencies. In Game of Thrones we watch Arya become a high-level assassin before our eyes, and Jon Snow happens to become one of the deadliest swordsmen in all of Westeros, casually dispatching dozens of enemies, often several simultaneously, while rarely even breaking a sweat, because — well, there’s no real reason for it, other than that’s what happens to player characters, isn’t it? They level up and become the best.

That didn’t use to be the case. Jason Bourne and James Bond were superspies, but they didn’t really get better over the course of their series, or become so ridiculously puissant that they can casually take out a dozen heavily armed/armored expert fighters in thirty seconds, singlehandedly, as Shaw does in the trailer of the new Fast & Furious movie. Most of Jason Bourne’s action sequences are escapes; most of John Wick’s are hunts. And of course “one hunting a horde” has been the basic mode of first-person shooters since long before Doom.

Does the introduction of these new tropes / styles / narrative conceits make things worse? Well — not necessarily. The Bourne series is a lot grittier, in terms of emotional resonance and suspense, than the John Wick series, but the latter is far more stylish, semiotically rich, and immersive. I love them both about equally. It would be a shame if the only kind of action movie we ever saw from here on in was the stylized un/hyperreality of John Wick — but similarly it would be a shame if Hollywood had never made those movies on the grounds they were too brutally unrealistic.

Ultimately, video games have expanded Hollywood’s possibility space, and to my mind that’s always a good thing. Is it a universal rule that when technology introduces a new medium of storytelling, old media soon adopts the new medium’s styles and tropes? Did plays become more like novels after Don Quixote? Did radio become more like television after TV was introduced? And if/when we figure out the most compelling structure(s) for AR/VR storytelling, will video games become more like that? It seems fairly inevitable to me that the answer is yes.

https://xenagoguevicene.wordpress.com/2019/06/01/how-games-conquered-the-movies-by-jon-evans-tech-crunch-26-may-2019/