Mean Girl

National Review Online, May 25, 2007

New York City, May 2007 © Andrew Stuttaford

It was Friday night in New York City. I’d already drunk a couple of beers, so now was a good time for a quick rummage around inside Paris Hilton. I wasn't the first to do so, no, not even that evening, but what the hell? She didn't mind. Her eyes were closed, her face angular and serene, her back arched in almost Mannerist contortion, and her legs, ah her legs; they were akimbo, long, smooth, and inviting. I did, however, take the precaution of putting on a pair of slightly grubby white gloves before, well...

Well, since you ask, before carefully removing Ms. Hilton’s small intestine and toying, toying most gingerly, with her uterus.

I should explain. This wasn’t the real Paris, and shame, shame on any of you who thought otherwise. This was a facsimile, a rendering, or, more accurately, a tableau mort, showing her corpse, bare but for a tiara, cold, dead hands still clinging to cell-phone and martini glass. And as if this was not already enough to bring cheer to the stoniest of souls, the ensemble was completed by a forlorn Tinkerbell, the lap-dog and diarist, tiara-capped head (yes, hers too) a portrait of pathos, as she pranced and danced by the body of her fallen mistress.

According to the management of Capla Kesting Fine Art, the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, gallery where the ruins of Paris are now on display, the whole spectacle is an “interactive Public Service Announcement… designed to warn teenagers of the hazards of underage drinking.” Interactive? Yup, those teenagers-at-risk can perform an “autopsy” on the heiress or, at least, monkey around with her innards. The purported, and that’s the word, purpose is to give these youngsters “an empathetic view of drunk driving tragedy from the coroner’s perspective.” Scared straight, that sort of thing. This autopsy, lacking any hint of dignity, respect, or decorum (trust me on this), symbolizes the final destination of the DUI driver, and was, it is claimed, designed to strip away any hint of cool from Paris’s hard-partying ways. If you believe that, I have a collection of Hilton-designed pet wear to sell you.

Always quick to check out an empress’ new clothes, the Fug Girls, the Cagney and Lacey of the Internet’s fashion police, were among the first to point out that if this sculpture was meant to highlight how drunk-driving can really mess a gal up, it might be a touch counterproductive. “Paris herself,” they explained,”would probably take one look at the installation and drawl, "Dude, I look great. DUI death is hot." They have a point.

The man behind the autopsy, Daniel Edwards, was in the gallery that Friday evening. Surrounded by the goatees, cropped hair, and black tees of a typical Williamsburg soiree, he was a genial figure, beaming, and gleaming in the finest white suit/beard/long mane combo to be unleashed on the planet since that day John Lennon strode out across Abbey Road. I asked him just how serious he really was about his, uh, message. If I were a ruthless undercover reporter, I’d tell you what he replied. But I’m not (we were just having a nice chat), and I won’t. Let’s just say that the likeable Edwards is a man with a sly sense of humor.

Those wishing to understand what Edwards is trying to achieve should look instead at his recent oeuvre. It mumbles for itself. True, the sculptor’s (sadly premature) deathbed portrait of Fidel Castro was something of a misstep, but a casting of “Suri Cruise’s poop,” a bust of a highly eroticized Hillary Rodham Clinton and, perhaps most famously, a statue of Britney Spears giving birth, not to mention that Hilton cadaver, all suggest a master prankster at work.

It’s an impression that is only reinforced by the press releases that accompany the unveiling of each project. Pompous, humorless, and as self-satisfied as they are self-important, they come across as pitch-perfect satires of the stifling piety of the scolds, nags, and busybodies now tormenting this once free country. If dead Paris can be a “warning” of the dangers of DUI (and, yes, yes, before mad MADD e-mail me with angry reproaches, I know that drunk driving is a bad thing), then Edwards’s Britney is no less plausible as a monument to the singer’s decision (as it then appeared) to put motherhood ahead of career.

Frankly, Edwards should charge admission. A buck’s a buck, Dan, and it would add a little more Barnum & Bailey to installations designed, I reckon, to be a part of the celebrity circus they simultaneously critique. Or something.

Still, it’s impossible not to be struck by the macabre coincidence that the Williamsburg autopsy is not the only image of a dead or dying Hilton out there in the marketplace. On the same day that Paris’s guts were opened up for inspection in Brooklyn, Californians were given the chance to take a peek at a “poignant” and “relevant” depiction of the poor girl’s suicide. A press release from the Venice Contemporary Gallery gave the details:

Artist Jason Maynard’s sculpture, entitled "SuicideSocialite," is the final piece in his 10-year exploration of the cultural relevance and symbolic reference to candy. The sculpture of Paris Hilton depicts the heiress sprawled out on a chez lounge with her wrists slit and candy spewing out of her veins…the piece takes on the guise of neither the moral high ground, nor the role of a public service announcement. In reality, this sculpture speaks more of Maynard's masterful portrayal of the pinnacle of modern day mob mentality's ability to build higher and higher pedestals for their celebrity objects to sit - for the pleasure of seeing them fall.

If we ignore the tortured prose, questionable spelling (chez lounge?), and the candy, there’s no doubt that Maynard has a point. Whenever a celebrity stumbles, there’s a crowd out there ready to peer, to leer, and to cheer. That’s particularly true when that pratfallen celebrity is Paris Hilton. She may not be the nicest of people, and she has certainly brought her current legal troubles upon herself, but, after witnessing the rejoicing, the vitriol, and the sermonizing that swirl around her eagerly anticipated imprisonment, I’ll admit to feeling a twinge of sympathy for the inmate-in-waiting. Libertarian blogger Lew Rockwell went a little far when appearing (vaguely) to compare Hilton’s coming Calvary with that of Christ’s, but his thinking was as least charitable. The same cannot be said of all those who seem to have forgotten that the star of One Night in Paris ranks rather low in the evildoer hierarchy, a Martha Stewart more than a Madame Mao.

And incarceration alone is not punishment enough to satisfy the baying, self-righteous mob, sweaty, and prurient, that has surged from couch, blog, suburb, and trailer park to demand what it sees as justice. They want Paris to serve hard time, prison-movie style, and a frenzied media is just egging them on. To take just one example, on the cover of its May 21st issue, Star magazine promised exciting details of “Paris’ Prison Hell,” complete with “Lesbian gangs,” “Group Showers,” “Strip Searches,” and “Filthy Bedding.” While it’s good to see the disgraceful conditions that prevail in California’s penal system getting an airing, I doubt that was the motive behind the decision to package the story in quite the way that the Star (and many others) have chosen to do.

Matters reached their squalid climax (so far) thanks to the efforts of the dreadful Joe Arpaio. He’s the publicity hound who doubles up as a sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona: tents, prisoners in pink underwear eating bologna sandwiches, you know the guy. True to form, he jumped onto the tumbril, offering to host Paris in his desert Guantanamo, an offer that might well, it was speculated, include a stint in a chain gang. Blonde in shackles!

Mercifully, Arpaio’s offer was declined. Hilton, it now turns out, will likely only serve about half her 45-day sentence, and will do so in a unit reserved for those thought to be at risk from their fellow inmates. That this should be necessary is more an indictment of prison conditions than an expression of any particular privilege, but the news has still come as a severe disappointment to far, far too many people

That it does is, in part, a reflection of the very peculiar nature of Paris Hilton’s celebrity. I wish I could say that, in the words of the old joke, she had risen without trace. The reverse is true. Her spoor is everywhere. Since first lurching into view in the early 2000s, she has dazzled the populace and thrilled the media with cubic-zirconia glamour and undeniably genuine sleaze.

Normally, wannabes aiming for the big time hope to do so on the back of talent, looks, achievement, or, at the very least, a winning personality, but Hilton has built her fame — and made quite a bit of cash — on the basis of no obvious achievements, looks that are far from Jolie and a public persona that is dim-witted, bitchy, arrogant, and spoiled.

What she does have is a remarkable talent for self-promotion. In taking advantage of the desperate need of the now web-driven media for content, any content, however tacky, no, preferably tacky, she has served herself up as spectacle for those on whom she so obviously looks down. And it’s worked. “There is,” said Oscar Wilde, “only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about,” and talk, talk, talk, about Paris Hilton we do. If nothing else, this article is evidence of that. As some sort of experiment, the Associated Press tried to avoid publishing anything about her for a few days. In so doing they only added to her fame. She has become an object of fascination, derision, obsession, and, God help us, emulation. And that’s not going to change any time soon. Resistance, AP, is futile.

But if she’s become an icon — and she has — America’s sweetheart, she’s not. There’s something too joyless about her pursuit of pleasure, something too Heather about her pursuit of prestige and, despite occasional Horatia Alger moments, something too Gekko about her pursuit of loot. Sure, her antics are sporadically entertaining, gossip’s equivalent of a five-alarm fire, a really good train wreck, or a particularly bloody bullfight, but we also watch her as phenomenon as much as person. And as we do, we not only use her as a device to proclaim our own cleverness, moral superiority and apple pie niceness, but also, I suspect, as a symbol of, and a scapegoat for, the real excesses and imagined emptiness of this new gilded age. Put all these elements together and we can begin to understand why those grotesque depictions of her dead and dying — unthinkable, probably, in the case of any other celebrity — cause no complaint.

But that’s still no reason to put her on the chain gang.

Britain, Year Zero

28 Weeks Later

National Review  Online, May 15, 2007

Here’s the problem. This review was meant to be about 28 Weeks Later, the newly released sequel to the hugely successful 28 Days Later, but, quite frankly, there’s not a lot to say about it. Judged in its own right, 28 Weeks Later is nicely paced, reasonably exciting, competently made, and well acted (with Robert Carlyle, as so often, a stand-out). What’s more, it boasts a few thought-provoking moments, and has enough deaths-by-helicopter-blade to justify the price of admission alone. The difficulty is that it’s a sequel. It cannot just be judged in its own right. The awkward, inconvenient fact is that those 28 weeks (or should it be 24?) simply weren’t worth the wait.

To understand why 28 Weeks Later is, relatively speaking, such a disappointment, it’s necessary to take another look at its predecessor. That’s just as well, because 28 Days Later is a much more interesting movie — and much more fun to write about. Easily the most gripping horror film of the last decade, the most shocking thing about its 113 minutes is quite how good they are. Sure, 28 Days Later is relentless, fast-paced, and savage, but it also displays a depth, intelligence, and lyricism that would be surprising in almost any horror movie: To find these qualities in a zombie flick is little less than miraculous.

Yes, a zombie flick. Ghastly, primitive, and profoundly embarrassing, zombies are the Billy Carters of horror cinema’s already dysfunctional family. Conjured up by American pilferers of some of Haiti’s tallest tales, and given shape by racist fantasy, rock-bottom budgets, and bankrupt imaginations, these hollow-eyed, empty-headed hooligans have been shambling their way through movies for more than 70 years. They may have nothing to say, but their box-office persistence is eloquent testimony to the fact that the supposedly sub-human are not the only creatures to be thrilled by the sight of torn and bleeding flesh.

There have been exceptions, notably the spookily effective I Walked With a Zombie, but for the most part these films have been a disgrace, a bloody smear across the silver screen, dominated by brutal massacre, inarticulate and vicious stumblebums, and, in the case of some of the more recent efforts, the worst displays of table manners since George H. W. Bush threw up in Tokyo.

The titles of just a small portion of the zombie oeuvre (helpfully chronicled in Jamie Russell’s indispensable Book of The Dead) give the game away: At Twilight Come The Flesh-Eaters (apparently the only known example of homosexual zombie porn), Blood of Ghastly Horror, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Corpse Eaters, Curse of The Cannibal Confederates (Strom Thurmond’s “longevity” explained?), The Curse of The Doll People, Doctor Blood’s Coffin, Erotic Nights of The Living Dead (heterosexual zombie porn), I Eat Your Skin, Neon Maniacs, Orgy of The Dead (scripted by Ed Wood!), The Return of The Blind Dead, Zombie Holocaust, Zombie Bloodbath, Zombie Creeping Flesh, Zombie Flesh-Eaters, Zombie Lake (Nazis — a twofer!), you get the picture.

Compared with that drooling, lurching cinematic rabble, 28 Days Later wouldn’t have had to amount to much to be considered one of the better zombie movies, but its makers were more ambitious than that, something evidenced by the trouble that the film’s director, Trainspotting’s Danny Boyle, has taken to distance his film from the z-word. Well, he can say what he wants. 28 Days Later is steeped in modern zombie lore. Boyle’s zombies (oh Danny, that is what they are, even if they didn’t have to go through the whole dying thing first) are the result of infection (science awry, another familiar theme), rather than supernatural intervention, they chew on me and they tear at you, and they exist in a post-apocalyptic landscape that they themselves have created.

Superficially, the most obvious difference between Boyle’s vision and that of the principal zombie auteur, the legendary George A. Romero, is that Boyle’s zombies, unlike Romero’s lumbering slowpokes, can move very, very fast. Thus the violence in this movie is often depicted with flickering, jittery strobe-light glimpses of high-speed slaughter, panic and mayhem, giving it an almost hallucinatory feel, far closer to Spielberg’s Omaha Beach than anything witnessed on Romero’s slow-mo killing fields.

A much more important difference is the care with which both the ruined world (in this case, Britain) and its few surviving people are portrayed. When Boyle’s hero, Jim (a terrific performance by Cillian Murphy) awakes from the coma that allowed him to sleep safely through the days in which a virus, “the Rage,” changed almost all his countrymen into unreasoning, homicidal maniacs, he discovers an eerie London that is both still there yet has been lost beyond recall. For Boyle, the litter-strewn shopping mall that usually symbolizes the aftermath of zombie apocalypse is not enough. In a series of magical, beautifully shot images of the deserted British capital, he gives us vistas incorporating the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, all intact, all empty, their survival only underpinning what has been lost, their lonely, lovely splendor only emphasizing the desolation.

The use of beauty to contrast with, and therefore deepen, the impression of overwhelming catastrophe is an effective device. Boyle returns to it throughout the movie, above all in its astonishing, blistering climax. Its setting, the complacent grandeur of a centuries-old country house, and the role in which it plays in the narrative, shows us both the achievements of civilization and, by not-so subtle implication, its fragility.

Seemingly a last outpost of order in a land gone mad, the once aristocratic mansion has been occupied by a small detachment of troops who have succeeded in keeping the infected at bay. When that order, never more than an illusion, finally collapses it does so into a ferocious hide-and-seek between zombies, Jim, increasingly feral troops, and Selena and Hannah, two refugees promised to the soldiers by Major West, their commanding officer, as playthings and broodmares. The fact that this lethal drama unfolds in the midst of the remnants of a Palladian idyll only adds to the sense of moral and intellectual collapse.

All this is reinforced by the soldiers’ decision to kit out their prospective concubines (one little more than a child) in gorgeous red dresses, costume that both parodies and mourns an elegance that now only exists in memory. Add the irony that Jim has to resort to such extreme violence to save them that both Hannah and Selena think that their rescuer himself has become infected, and then throw in some extraordinarily effective soundtrack music, and the result is some of the most powerful footage in recent cinema.

That description might give the impression that 28 Days Later has succumbed to the dime store misanthropy that characterizes all too many zombie movies. You know how it goes. The surviving humans (who are usually bickering amongst themselves) contribute to their own destruction and, even if they don’t, they normally behave so appallingly that it’s difficult to feel much sympathy when they are eventually pulled to pieces by greedy zombie jaws. That’s also typically Romero’s approach, except that he tends to camouflage the misanthropy with community college leftism: Vietnam, inequality, consumerism, redneck brutality, blah, blah, yada, and blah.

Thankfully, Boyle takes a more innovative tack. The survivors of 28 Days Later are often sympathetically portrayed (in the case of Frank, the loveable cabbie, somewhat stereotypically so), and when they bicker and feud, we see that this is a fairly understandable response to the predicament in which they find themselves. The film’s most identifiable villains (if we put the homicidal maniacs to one side), those renegade soldiers, are shown to be the lonely, scared, and despairing victims of a nightmare that would erode the restraints of civilization within any man. Even their major’s own approach to the situation, a rapidly degenerating mish-mash of Sandhurst, Darwin, Broadmoor, and Nietzsche can be seen as initially well-intentioned, a desperate solution for desperate times even if, as becomes increasingly obvious, it seems more likely to lead to Salò than to salvation.

Perhaps the most striking thing about 28 Weeks Later (this time Boyle was an executive producer, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directed) is the way that good intentions gone wrong are also crucial to its narrative development. After a suitably horrifying preamble, the story basically begins with American troops re-establishing some form of normality in what is left of the U.K. As was hinted in the later stages of the earlier movie, the infection was confined to the British Isles. It’s now thought (ah ha) to have burned itself out (basically the infected were too maddened by their disease to look after themselves and starved to death). The few Brits to have survived the ordeal, together with those of their compatriots fortunate enough to have been abroad while the Rage, uh, raged, are now rebuilding their lives under benign, but somewhat oppressive, US supervision in the former financial district around London’s Canary Wharf, now known as the Green Zone. Ah ha indeed.

In a West now living once again in dread of devastating attack that scenario is bound to raise disquieting questions of just what would be left of life and liberty after. Then again, once the Rage returns, such concerns come to seem petty, the trivial obsessions of pampered folk who have forgotten their Hobbes. Needless to say, Uncle Sam’s response to the reappearance of the virus is panicky, brutal, pointlessly bloody, and as ineffective as it is counter-productive. The Green Zone falls, as, perhaps, green zones are always doomed to do. But before you rush to dismiss (or praise) these sequences (thoroughly gripping cinema incidentally) as a predictably unfair/much-needed critique of the current disaster in Iraq, it’s important to note that the sight of the Stars-and-Stripes forlorn and trampled amid the wreckage of the Green Zone heralds neither peace, nor liberation, but is a symbol of the triumph of elemental, irrational barbarism.

So, as I wrote at the beginning, 28 Weeks Later does indeed have its thought-provoking moments, but it’s unable to run with them for very long. The rest of the movie is, as mentioned above, watchable enough, and, as sequels to high-concept movies go, it’s far above Beneath the Planet of the Apes, but the creators of this saga need to learn from the decline and fall of the monkey franchise. There’s already talk of 28 Months Later, but that would be a bad mistake. It’s time to put a stake through the heart of these particular zombies, Mr. Boyle.

Oops, wrong genre, but you know what I mean. Bullet in the head. Helicopter blade. Do what it takes.

Ohhh, Henry

The Tudors

National Review Online, April 2, 2007

No television series boasting an opening sequence that includes a brutal assassination, ecstatic adulterous sex, the gorgeously bared breasts of Ruta Gedmintas, and an angry, thoroughly deserved, shout of “French bastards” will ever get too harsh a review from me. With HBO’s The Sopranos currently being whacked into syndication at the end of this season, Showtime is now trying to win viewers over with The Tudors, a tale drawn from the history of a family infinitely more dangerous than those departing New Jersey mobsters. Judging by the sex, violence, and splendor of its wickedly entertaining first few episodes it might just succeed.

Don't be put off by some of the comments made by Michael Hirst, the show’s creator, ahead of its debut last weekend. Seemingly desperate to reassure a potential audience more familiar with the lost underwear of the Bada Bing! than the lost Palace of Whitehall, he explained that The Tudors wasn’t “another Royal Shakespeare Company or Masterpiece Theatre kind of thing,” ominous, patronizing, and rather surprising words from the writer of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998), a subtle portrayal of the pre-modern roots, ritual, and appeal of monarchy.

Henry VIII himself, well, the actor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who plays him, also did what he could to harvest a few more coach potatoes. The Tudors, he announced, is “sharp; not a slow ten hours of period puke. Nobody wants a history lesson. It’s boring.” Yes, that’s right. That’s what he said. Another day, another actor saying something stupid, you know how it goes. However, to be fair to Rhys Meyers, The Tudors is fast-paced, and, at its best, it is as sharp as the headsman’s axe. However, by the deeply undemanding standards of the entertainment industry, it’s not too bad a history lesson either.

Let’s not overstate this: Showbiz being showbiz, and Showtime being Showtime, poor Clio emerges from The Tudors with disheveled hair, suspiciously rumpled clothing, and a great deal of embarrassment. To list the historical errors that litter this series would try the patience of the most indulgent editor, but for an understanding of their function, check out the treatment of the composer Thomas Tallis (Joe van Moyland, a remarkable resemblance incidentally). Tallis may have been a master of polyphony, but polyamory, apparently, was quite beyond him: He’s shown turning down two groupies (excited, I presume, by the thought of his canon), behavior that would be as shocking in The Tudors as an orgy in The Waltons, were it not for its eventual explanation. Tom’s gay! That’s a revelation that will surprise historians, but it could (possibly) boost ratings, and which do you think counts for more?

The same mixture of historical vandalism and commercial opportunism can be seen in the treatment of Henry’s older sister Margaret (played by the lovely Gabrielle Anwar in a rare escape from the made-for-TV movie wasteland she usually inhabits). The Tudors’ Margaret Tudor appears to be a composite character made up of a few fragments of the real Margaret, rather more of her younger sister, Mary, and then finished off with a titillating veneer of total fiction, wild fantasy and madcap speculation. These include the idea that Margaret smothered her enthusiastic, but unattractive bridegroom, the aged king of Portugal, a sort of Iberian J. Howard Marshall, with a pillow.

As a response to an arranged marriage to a hunchbacked, goatish monarch, a man more simian than regal, this would have been a perfectly reasonable response, but it never actually happened. Margaret Tudor’s first marriage was to a king of Scotland, not Portugal. He died, respectably, in battle. Now it’s true that Margaret’s sister Mary did manage to kill a much older husband (he wasn’t the king of Portugal either, but, poor fellow, of France), but she did it between the sheets, not with a pillow. A strikingly attractive young bride, she wore her unfortunate (if that’s the adjective) husband out after less than three months of marriage.

However, even if we allow for the impact of ACNielsen, there is something almost pathological about the extent to which this show’s creators have chosen to fool around with history. It’s as if the stories of the past are no longer quite good enough. There are traces of a similar attitude in the way that Hirst so relished savaging older versions of this tale with their “English actors in period costumes with elaborate and totally contrived mannerisms.” Of course, he has a point: the BBC’s Emmy-winning The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970) has aged very badly, but there’s something about the way he makes it that is both arrogant and shortsighted. Today’s realism has a nasty way of becoming tomorrow’s contrivance. Hirst may believe that his Henry is authentic, definitive, the one, but, give it a couple of decades, and The Tudors will almost certainly be no less dated than the BBC’s Keith Michell and those six carefully enunciating, excruciatingly stagy wives of his.

For all that, The Tudors does succeed in giving a good sense of an era at the hinge of history, a time when medieval certainty was being elbowed out by new, exciting and disconcerting intellectual experiment, and a more assertive, less Heaven-hobbled view of what it meant to be human. In The Tudors we see a glittering court filled with people who were, quite literally, full of themselves. It’s a peacock-splendid, hypnotic and frequently cruel spectacle, but one clearly pointed towards the future, away from a past that no longer had much to offer other than stagnation, mysticism, and the appeal of what always had been.

That said, there’s a decent argument to be made that the picture this paints is too generous. There is little in The Tudors to remind viewers that those great palaces were as dirty as they were imposing, grubby, magnificent islands in a sea of mud, squalor, and decay. It’s also reasonable to ask whether Henry’s entourage can really have been quite so good-looking as this series suggests. The Tudor court did indeed attract the young and the beautiful, but the casting of this show clearly owes more to the aesthetics of Abercrombie & Fitch than those of Hans Holbein.

Be that as it may, Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s performance makes the best possible case for the idea that the glitz and glamour of The Tudors might be quite helpful in explaining the events it describes to a contemporary audience. Too rigid an insistence on warts and all that can sometimes distract as much as it enlightens and is often no less an illusion than the alternative.

Besides, when it comes to the young Henry, there are not that many warts to conceal in the first place. Beyond his dark, hard, small, porcine eyes, he bore little resemblance to the bloated tyrant of later years. He was unusually tall, well proportioned (particularly proud of his calves, as it happens), athletic, good-looking, blessed by a head of red-gold hair, a seemingly perfect physical embodiment of the Renaissance man that, in many respects, he was.

Rhys Meyers looks very little like that. He is dark-haired, blue-eyed, much shorter than the king he is meant to be playing (if it’s a doppelgänger you’re after, there’s always Ray Winstone in his Henry VIII), his face that of a fallen angel, a Caravaggio fantasy, a mask of unsettling, compelling sensuality. However, within minutes of his first moments onscreen, the differences in appearance between king and actor cease to matter. In his youth, his energy and his magnetism, in the intelligence he conveys, and the sense of power that envelops him, Rhys Meyers is Henry, right down to the way that those eyes of his never cease to hint at the horrors to come.

And a strong cast doesn’t hurt. As Thomas Boleyn, Nick Dunning is cold, shrewd, and necessarily suave, cynically pimping out his daughters in the family interest. First Mary, then Anne, whatever it took. The always reliable Sam Neill is a watchful, calculating, Cardinal Wolsey, the butcher’s son who rose to become alter rex, Lord Chancellor of England, comfortable with power, and the dangerous games that came with it. As Sir Thomas More, Jeremy Northam is, perhaps inevitably, unable to shake off memories of saintly Paul Scofield and that hagiography for all seasons. Nevertheless, as a skilled and subtle performer, he does at least manage to smuggle a subversive note of smugness into his portrayal of an individual who was, in reality, a far more troubling figure than popular myth would suggest.

Then there’s Anne, seductive, dangerous, clever, fatal, doomed Anne. It’s true that the irresistible Natalie Dormer (the scene-stealing virgin in Lasse Hallström’s Casanova, come to think of it, probably the only virgin in Lasse Hallström’s Casanova) doesn’t have the large, sloe-black eyes for which Anne Boleyn was so famous. In all other respects, however, projecting determination, cunning and an unconventional, feline, allure, she is all too believable as the woman who beguiled a king, dethroned a queen, and changed the course of history.

For there can be no doubt that’s just what she did. To criticize The Tudors as soap opera, a Hampton Court, say, rather than a Melrose Place is to miss the point. In an age of dynastic power, the personal was political. Yes, it was absurd, and thoroughly demeaning, that the state religion of England was under foreign control, but that’s not why Henry VIII broke with Rome. The English King, Defender of the Faith no less, smashed ties that had endured for a millennium for one reason, and one reason only: his infatuation with Anne Boleyn. That comes across very clearly in The Tudors, and it’s why this series, for all its flaws, is not only a naughty treat, but a pretty good history lesson too.

Sorry, Jonathan.

Here’s Lucy

Dirt

National Review Online, January 9, 2007

Thanks to the combination of curiosity, camera-phone, the Internet, and, now, YouTube, the culture of celebrity, never that sane in the first place, has seemed to have taken another lurch deeper into the madhouse. In recent weeks those of us who could spare time from the Lohan implosion, the Kramer collapse, or the vital Simpson debate (Jessica or Ashlee?), and who were so inclined, could have seen much more of seedy Britney than nasty Kevin has managed of late, or, if we preferred, we could have contemplated the rise, fall, and possible rise again of this nation’s most recent “troubled” Tara, That’s Miss USA, not, for once, Ms. Reid.

Not enough for you? Well, there was plenty more where that came from. We could, as usual, have feasted on Nicole Richie’s missing meals, or, perhaps, taken a little time out to wonder about Kate Bosworth’s disappearing body and Cameron Diaz’s disappearing Justin. Then there were all those images, so, so, many of them, annoyingly blurry, frighteningly clear, snatched, deer-trapped-in-the-headlights, embarrassing, banal, sexy, grotesque, compelling, sort-of-interesting, sort-of-not: shopping trips, nipple slips, fashion disasters, velvet-rope battles, parking dramas, minor traffic accidents, and, repeatedly, and why not, Jessica Alba and her bikini. Oh yes, there’s Paris too. We’ll always have Paris, epicenter of global trivia, and, for that matter, the most successful grande horizontale since Pamela Harriman swam her last lap, even if, in a confusing development, Miss Hilton has now declared a moratorium on dating in favor of nights with Brigitte Bardot, her pet monkey.

But try as hard as they might, those who now drive these stories are not from television, newspapers, or even those mags that take the edge off the supermarket checkout line. The people to watch these days are something new, amateurs or freelancers dreaming of the big time, and, while they are at it, ripping, and riffing, off the more established media they both need and threaten. Even the once-mighty paparazzi are looking a touch passé, their Leicas, Nikons, and elaborate stakeouts now menaced by an observant passer-by with his or her Nokia, Samsung, or Motorola. The Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, may have exaggerated a little when he wrote about the appearance of an Army of Davids, but there isn’t much doubt that an army of Peeping Toms is among us and that, as a result, the gossip bazaar will never be the same again. Will we need People quite so much when the malicious are working their keyboards, online, on time, and, all too often, with that addictive extra slime?

The answer, in fact, almost certainly, is “yes,” but the magazine may have to take a different tack from the (generally) respectful approach that it now takes. There will always be a market for adoring, star-struck coverage (indeed in the U.K., the publishers of Hello have made a very good living doing just that, and then over here there’s Larry King), but gush about the “gowns” of Oscar night now has to compete with commentary like this (about an unfortunate skirt worn by the only truly convincing reason to have ever watched The OC):

When there's nothing left to believe in, believe in Mischa Barton. Because she will always wear something that cheers you up instantly. Take this joke of a skirt, for instance. It's like a clown repurposed a blazer and wrapped it around her waist. Amusing, but not in a complimentary, deliciously whimsical kind of way; it's more of a hideous Fisher Price "Baby's First Buttons" kind of funny. Mostly, I just want to tug it down so that I don't accidentally get a view of her birth canal. Still, at least we're laughing. Maybe for that, we owe her a debt of gratitude. Maybe we should all stand in front of her and join in a thinly harmonized chorus of "For She's A Jolly Good Fellow," led by Tim Curry, because the world needs more of him. And maybe, if we lavish her with enough giggles and praise, she'll back away slower than a gun-toting Mrs. Peacock, wary of our ulterior motives and never to be heard from in this capacity again.

I’d be expecting a little more bitchiness from People before too long.

None of this is to claim that that celebrity coverage was, in the past, as consistently fawning as some of today’s generation probably imagine. Just ask Fatty Arbuckle. Sure, there was Rock Hudson, but then there was Billy Haines too. Yes, there was a highly effective star machine, and those old studio chiefs certainly knew how to put a stop to unhelpful talk in the press about dangerous liaisons, dying marriages, and fatal car crashes. But by the mid-1950s, excitingly named scandal sheets like Confidential, Exposed, Whisper, and Private Lives boasted a combined circulation of more than ten million, and drove Hollywood to distraction, and, inevitably, the courts (to stave off an indictment, Confidential’s publisher, Robert Harrison, the “King of Leer” agreed to switch his magazine’s approach to flattery and puff pieces: naturally, circulation collapsed), not that, in the end, it was to do much good.

How, and why, so many people are so fascinated by celebrities is hard to explain. It’s something to do with mankind’s urge both to create, and to destroy, idols, it’s obviously also deeply rooted in our primate DNA, and it clearly owes a great deal to the fact that most of us live lives that are dull, dull, dull; vicarious thrills are better than none at all. Nevertheless, even if America’s obsession with celebrity has lasted a long time (and it has), its current incarnation seems more consuming, more demanding, more worshipful and more malicious than in the past. Almost certainly, that most reliable of scapegoats, the Internet, bears much of the blame. In creating its illusions of intimacy, access and authenticity, it persuades us that we ‘know’ these stars far better than ever before. At the same time, its limitless appetite for content makes celebrities out of D list riff-raff with “narratives” that would disgrace a trailer park, yet only add to the frenzy.

Throw in the fact that this new celebrity culture is both manipulated by the entertainment business and beyond its control, and there is obviously an ideal opportunity for a new Nathanael West or Ernest Lehman to tell us what’s going on. Instead, we got Courteney Cox. Her new TV series, Dirt (Cox is both star and executive producer), was billed as a show that would offer a revealing, clever, and sexy glimpse of gossip and its markets. Unfortunately, what we get is occasionally sanctimonious, slightly stale, and, rather too often, simply dull. Even the sex (Dirt is shown on FX, so viewers do get to see some) seems self-consciously “edgy,” contrived, and, at times literally, mechanical. Dirt may have been designed to appeal to the audience that FX has found with the wonderful Nip/Tuck, but it lacks the relentless perversity, carnivore morality, and wild melodrama that make a visit to McNamara/Troy a highpoint of the viewing week.

Of course Courteney Cox is as icily beautiful as ever, a John Singer Sargent portrait come to life and toned at the gym, as she plays the ruthless (yet curiously vulnerable) tabloid editor Lucy Spiller. She’s powerful, abrasive, and feared, but, as usual when we see women in such roles, there’s that pesky vulnerability and a Devil Wears Prada, what-has-she-given-up-to-get-where-she-has subtext to her role — clichés that subvert the very power that her character would ideally project. Was there a limit as to how unsympathetic a Lucy that the former Monica Geller was prepared to play? If so, that’s a mistake.

But if Cox has failed to see what fun, and what good box office, a truly vicious role could be, her show, so far, also seems to be missing an even more interesting opportunity, the chance to comment on what the Internet has meant to Lucy’s grubby universe. There’s a sense in which (judging by its first three episodes) Dirt’s underlying premise is, well, a little dated. That tabloids like Lucy’s are not quite as central to the gossip trade as they once were is not touched on, an odd omission given Courteney Cox’s own extensive experience, good and bad, of the sharp end of the celebrity obsession. True, Lucy’s two publications, Drrt (kind of like an upgraded National Enquirer, and, yes, that’s how it’s spelled) and Now (a Life/Newsweek hybrid) appear to be under great financial and competitive pressure, but we are never told why. Similarly, a conversation in which she tells one movie mogul that as much as he and his “Hollywood pals” hate to admit it, they need her, points to another worthwhile direction in which the show might evolve. An examination of the conflicted, and ever more complex, relationship between Tinseltown and those who make a living out of its dirty linen would be well worth watching. Sadly, with the exception of one rather lame sub-plot that I cannot be bothered to discuss, the episodes that I have watched show no sign that Dirt will go down that route.

That’s not to say that the show is entirely without merit. Very occasionally, some encouraging hints of what could be are allowed to surface. So, for example, in the first episode we catch Lucy at a Hollywood party eyeing an incident here, hearing a remark there, and, as she does so, we see (with the help of some clever graphics) how she visualizes the scandals behind them appearing on her next cover. It’s a nice touch. So too, a couple of cast members show promise. Hogwarts disgrace Ian Hart (that rotten Quirinus Quirrell) is impressive as “functioning schizophrenic” Don Konkey, Lucy’s favorite paparazzo and, it appears, only true friend. In a strangely understated show, his lurid hallucinations, virtuoso twitches, and fumbled prescriptions stand out. Sure, there may be a touch of Coney Island about the whole spectacle, but Konkey’s psychosis would make for compelling viewing even without the welcome bonus of his intriguing relationship with a rather pretty dead girl (Shannyn Sossamon). Nevertheless, it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that, as with Tony Shalhoub’s only marginally less twitchy performances in Monk, an initially watchable mental ailment will become increasingly less so as the series progresses, particularly if its peculiarities are used as a lazy substitute for a plot. Other than Hart, it’s also worth keeping an eye out for the progress of Alexandra Breckenridge as Willa, the ingénue reporter clearly on her way to the way to the dark side. Her early moments in the show have included deceit, drug use, and a slight suggestion of the Sapphic. Well done!

Finally, and rather surprisingly given the impressive tawdriness of the celebrity circuit, the stories that Dirt digs up add up to less than Page Six on a slow day: sports star cheating on his wife, starlet suicide, action star hires interior decorator (uh oh), and, wait for it, turns out to be gay, you know how it goes. It says a lot about Dirt, and, some would say, even more about our society, that the best story it has generated emerged not from the series itself, but from one of its reviewers. In short, Lucy Spiller’s battery-powered orgasms led a critic at the San Francisco Chronicle to publish an unfortunate and possibly (it’s debatable) unchivalrous comment about the fair Courteney. Jimmy Kimmel is also involved. As this is National Review Online, not Drrt, or, for that matter, the San Francisco Chronicle, I am not prepared to go into the distressing details, but, if, on the other hand, you are one of our more broad-minded readers, or just plain nosey, the offending review can be found here, Jimmy Kimmel’s dramatic encounter with the poor, possibly slighted Ms. Cox can be seen on YouTube (of course), and, in a desperate attempt to draw a conclusion to the whole shocking affair, the Chronicle’s caddish critic has now published an “erotic retraction” on his blog. Make of it all what you will.

As for me, I’m just pleased there’s going to be a fifth season of Nip/Tuck.

Something in the Air

Miami Vice

National Review Online, August 15, 2006

Michael Mann’s somewhat disappointing new movie may be called Miami Vice and the names of some of its characters may trigger recollections of explosions, pastel, linen suits, stubble, wisecracks, gunplay, and music-video brio, but it has little to do with the ground-breaking television series of 20 years ago. And no, the tawdry remake of Phil Collins’s Michelob anthem that accompanies the film’s closing credits won’t fool anyone that using the old title is anything other than an attempt to cash in on a legendary brand. This movie is Miami Vice in name only. Accept no imitations.

For the real thing, there’s the DVD player (the first two seasons of the original are available), the random enchantment of reruns or, for those of us who were around back in the day, fond memories of the evening we first saw those speedboats dance to Jan Hammer and two cops escape from the monotone restraints of conventional detective drama into the bright sun and subtropical colors of a city that didn’t quite seem to be part of America, not back then, and was like nothing else we had ever seen on television, not back then.

Quite where the idea sprung from is lost in time and competing reminiscence. Most credit the TV executive who had the idea about “MTV cops,” but Anthony Yerkovich, the show’s creator, has reportedly said that the inspiration was a magazine article on how law-enforcement agencies could use booty confiscated from the bad guys in other, unrelated, investigations. That would explain, just, the Ferraris, the powerboat, and the yacht: the threads always remained something of a mystery. What is clear is that Miami Vice would never have made the impact it did without the highly stylized vision of Michael Mann, something that was already taking shape way before (check out his 1981 movie, Thief) Ricardo Tubbs agreed to take up a “career in southern law enforcement.” As to where it came from, well, maybe there really was something in the air.

Even amid the wastelands of taste that were the 1970s there were sporadic signs of a sleeker aesthetic struggling to be born, and with the end of that decade, the end of Carter, the end of earth tones, and the beginning of better times, the country was finally ready for designer hedonism, Bright Lights, Big City, and the profound pleasures of a materialism without shame, guilt, or hair-shirt carping. The ersatz Appalachian sanctimony of the Walton clan was replaced by the glitz, bitches, and riches of those big feuding, big-spending Carringtons, and TV was all the better for it: Good riddance Mary-Ellen. Well, hi there, Fallon. Alex P. Keaton became a national icon and everyone went to the mall. The Eighties, thank God, had arrived. It was the perfect moment for Crockett’s Armani to replace Colombo’s raincoat, and thanks to Michael Mann it did. With its flash, dash, and images of consumer delight, music that was part of the script, and wildly eclectic celebrity guest stars (Lee Iacocca! G. Gordon Liddy! Little Richard! Ted Nugent!), Miami Vice reflected, shaped, and, ultimately helped define the best of all decades (oh yes, it was), and, while it was at it, transformed notions of what television could do.

But for all its innovation, the show also drew its strength and, I suspect, much of its success, from older traditions. Its hard-edged, gleeful, glittering, and sardonic portrait of a city of hoods, hoodlums, hookers and not quite hookers, crooks, cops, dames, sleaze, death, graft, and excess marked a triumphant reworking of classic film noir, the genre that, perhaps more than any other, reminds us that this country has traditions far darker than apple pie and white picket fence. For all its pastel shades, blue skies and architectural splendor, Miami Vice had much of the look, feel, and, sometimes, dialogue of a show from the gat, gal, and gumshoe days.

Crockett: “What a mess…and for what?”

Tubbs: “It’s just a job man. You’re telling me you’d rather be pushing papers in some white-collar cubicle?

Crockett: “This stuff keeps rolling in. We’re just a tollbooth on the highway.”

Tubbs: “Singing the vice cop blues again.”

Philip Marlowe would have understood.

But for all the tough talk, it was never just a job. Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) and Crockett (Don Johnson) may have inhabited noir’s corrupt, morally ambiguous, fallen world, but, like that world’s occasionally upstanding heroes, the two detectives were ultimately on the side of the angels, knights in designer armor, with, needless to say, hints too of the old west about them: Crockett’s white suit, the cowboy’s white hat.

And then there was the buddy thing, another American staple, Butch and Sundance, Starsky and Hutch, Turner and Hooch … well, you know what I mean. True to the conventions of that amiable tradition, Ricardo and Sonny were often defined by the differences between them: Tubbs, for example, seemed so much happier than the perennially haunted Crockett (Vietnam, Sheena Easton, amnesia, there were plenty of traumas for the poor fellow to choose from), but there was never any question about the bond they shared. In Michael Mann’s new take, by contrast, Farrell and Foxx are chillier than Charles and Diana and more distant than a pair of Garbos. There’s no hint of Johnson and Thomas’s sly, affectionate joshing, and the movie’s the poorer for it.

But if Miami Vice reflected and helped shape its times, it also foreshadowed what was to come. There will be some schlubs in Sears suits who still curse them for it, but there’s no doubt that, heterosexuality pointedly buttressed by guns, girls, and macho banter, Miami-Dade PD’s two clotheshorses both anticipated the metrosexual moment and did their bit to pave the way for it. Even more interestingly, their show was an early primetime acknowledgement that America’s ethnic kaleidoscope, so long usually reduced (however inaccurately) to stark, simplistic black and white, was again being changed. From the night clubs, to the streets, to the drug lord’s high-walled mansion, Crockett and Tubbs found themselves strangers in an increasingly strange land, lawmen operating in a disconcertingly alien territory, the country’s latest frontier, where old, familiar ideas of American identity were melting, shifting, and disappearing into Miami’s new mix, the exception that became a precedent.

Good times never last. Perhaps it was inevitable in so distinctive a show, but it wasn’t too long before Miami Vice began to succumb just a little too often to its own clichés, and it wasn’t much longer before Johnson and Thomas got a bad case of the Shatners and decided to record Heartbeat and Living The Book of My Life respectively, a couple of clunkers that gave early warning of hubris and trouble to come. Budgets began to be cut, fashion sense started to fall apart. A mullet was spotted. Michael Mann reduced his involvement. By then he’d already started work on the sadly underrated Crime Story, and served up a first helping of Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter. Miami Vice itself lingered on until July 1989, and not without some grace notes, but the Eighties were petering out, the Gipper had gone, George H. W. Bush was mumbling about a kinder, gentler America, and, since February of that year Columbo’s shabby raincoat, rumpled harbinger of a more earnest era, had again been disgracing network TV.

Later, the gorgeous disillusionment of Miami Vice was extended into the darkness and depth of Mann’s three neon-flecked neo-noir epics, the elegiac Heat, the preachy The Insider and the almost faultless Collateral, three reminders that moral murk still plays well in a country that, beneath the prosperous veneer, is as restless, uneasy and uncertain as the nation to which the troops returned six decades ago. As for the rest of the old crew, only Edward James Olmos, the dauntingly dour Lieutenant Castillo, has, after a depressing run of inspirational movies, found himself the perfect role as Battlestar Galactica’s dauntingly dour Admiral Adama. Perhaps he could find a berth somewhere in his rag-tag armada for the man who was Tubbs, the highlight of whose later career was, take your pick, either acting as spokesman for the Philip Michael Thomas Psychic Connection or supplying the voice for Lance Vance in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Don Johnson did a little better, gamely returning to police work in Nash Bridges, a pleasure, but no Vice. Nevertheless, proving that you take the boy out of the Eighties but not the Eighties out of the boy, he did manage to marry a Getty. Well done, pal.

Satisfactory though that is, it’s somehow even better that, for all Miami Vice’s impact on television in general, and the cop show in particular, its most obvious successor on our screens today is located not in a police precinct, but in a plastic surgeon’s office, somewhere they really know that it’s surface beauty that counts. With its photogenic cast (headed by the love/hate buddy duo of McNamara and Troy), high production values, inspired use of music, and seductive mix of sex, scenery, cynicism, and scalpel, Nip/Tuck is an elegant, compelling, and thoroughly trashy tribute to the myth that Mann built.

And of course it’s set in Miami.

Drawing Fire

National Review Online, February 6, 2006

It says something for the cowardice, duplicity, and wishful thinking of too many of the West's politicians (and much of its media) that one of the most striking illustrations of the crisis in its relations with the Islamic world has come from twelve mediocre cartoons.

The broad outlines of this saga ought to be familiar, wearily, painfully familiar, but they are still worth tracing back to the beginning, both to clear up some of the distortions that have grown up around it, and to see what the very nature of the controversy itself can tell us. The whole thing began when the Danish children’s writer, Kåre Bluitgen, complained last autumn that he was unable to find anyone willing to illustrate his forthcoming book about the Prophet Mohammed. He had, he said, been turned down by a number of artists frightened by the prospect of reprisal if they ignored the traditional Muslim prohibition on pictorial depictions of Islam’s founder. Twenty or thirty years ago, such fears would have been no more than paranoia, but that was before Denmark, like elsewhere in Europe, found itself with a large, and incompletely integrated, Muslim population. Back then Salman Rushdie had not yet been driven underground by an Ayatollah’s death warrant. Back then Theo Van Gogh was still alive.

Self-censorship is tyranny's sorry, trembling little helper, and so it's to its credit that the right-of-center (which, in Denmark, is not very right at all) Jyllands-Posten, one of the country's major newspapers, picked up Bluitgen's story. What it did with it was ornery, well-intentioned and somewhat naïve. Forty cartoonists were invited to give their own interpretation of the prophet. Twelve, a little more than a third, accepted, for 800 Danish crowns (roughly $125) apiece. As we now know, the result was a storm of protest in the Muslim world, and in recent days, pushback in the West. The cartoons have been republished all over Europe and the twelve cartoonists are now, like Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Salman Rushdie before them, learning what it is to live in hiding. They have reportedly opposed the republication of their work. It's difficult to blame them. They have been given a terrible demonstration of what it takes to survive in an era rapidly tumbling back into the pre-modern.

As for the cartoons themselves, they come from all perspectives. One satirizes Jyllands-Posten, another Mr. Bluitgen. None are very funny, or, by Western standards, remarkable. It's telling that the delegation of Danish Muslims who visited a number of Middle Eastern countries to stir up trouble over the cartoons, had to boost their dossier of grievance with three additional (and genuinely disgusting) pictures that Jyllands-Posten had never even seen and whose provenance remains, let's be polite, unclear. To try and compare the actions of Jyllands-Posten, as Bill Clinton effectively did, with the race-baiting traditions of Der Stürmer   is to reveal an ignorance of history and a disdain for free speech that disgraces the office he once held. Even the most notorious of the cartoons, the one that shows Mohammed with a bomb decorated with Islamic text in his turban, can be seen not as an insult, but as a challenge to Muslims to demonstrate that (as is indeed certainly the case) there is far more to their faith than the atrocities that have recently defaced it. Harsh? Maybe, but it was also in the Western tradition of vigorous, free discussion. And as such it should be defended.

Ideally, the publication of these cartoons would have prompted Muslims to ask themselves why Islam, one of the world's great religions, could come to be seen in such a bad light. It hasn't worked out that way. Protests have been followed by boycotts, bluster and, now, violence. The protests and the boycotts are fine. They are all part of the debate. Violence, and the threat of violence, is something else, and, as many more moderate Muslims understand, it is doing far more damage to the reputation of Islam than a few feeble caricatures.

Needless to say, the theocracies, kleptocracies, and autocracies of the Middle East, always anxious for something, anything, to distract attention from their own corruption, uselessness, and thuggery, have played their own, typically malign, part in whipping up anger. Ambassadors have been recalled. Denunciations thunder down. Angry resolutions are passed. But amid all these calls for "respect" is there any acknowledgement that many Islamic countries could do more, much more, to respect the rights of those of different faiths to their own? To take just one example, Egypt's ambassador to Copenhagen is recommending that diplomatic action against Denmark should continue, but her own country's persecuted Christian minority would be grateful indeed if their troubles were confined to a few cartoons. Respect, it seems, is a one-way street.

But that's what too many in the Muslim world have been taught to believe, by multiculturalism as much as the mosque. In the cowed, cowering Europe of recent years the idea that religious minorities have a right not to be "offended," a nonsense notion that gives veto power to the fanatic with the thinnest skin, has increasingly been allowed to trump the far more fundamental right of others to speak their mind. Writers have been prosecuted, plays have been tampered with, and works of art withdrawn. Last week, the British House of Commons came within one vote of passing a law that would almost certainly have made U.K. publication of the Danish cartoons a criminal offense. It is a sign of how far matters have been allowed to degenerate that the initial blunt refusal of Denmark's prime minister to even hold a meeting with a number of ambassadors from Islamic countries over the incident ("I will not meet with them...it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so...As prime minister, I have no power whatsoever to limit the press—nor do I want such power.") was seen as shocking as it was.

Needless to say, there were others who did their best to ensure that normal servility was resumed. While most Danes backed the prime minister, a former foreign minister, a once-respected figure who has long since become a flack for the Brussels establishment, donned Neville Chamberlain's black jacket and pinstripes to denounce the cartoons "as a pubescent demonstration of freedom of expression." The U.N.'s High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote to the Organization of Islamic Conferences (which, as it was perfectly entitled to do, had complained about the cartoons) saying that she understood the OIC's concerns, if not, it appeared, the right of free speech, and she was far from being the only senior international bureaucrat to do so (and, yes, naughty Kofi made sure to throw in a few weasel words of his own). Closer to home, the EU's commissioner for Freedom, Security and Justice denounced the cartoons as "inappropriate," an adjective as Orwellian as his job description, an adjective that can only have encouraged those out to bully the Danes.

In the end, it was left to other newspapers to rally round. With the republication of the cartoons in the Christian journal, Magazinet, the Norwegians were the first to support the Danes, a gesture understandable in a country where the local publisher of Rushdie's Satanic Verses had been fortunate to survive an assassination attempt in 1993, but which was bound to inflame matters still further. And when it did, other newspapers across Europe, in France, in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Spain and elsewhere joined in, either republishing the offending cartoons or, notably in the case of France's left-of-center Le Monde, adding more of their own.

So, what now? Like it or not, the cozy, consensual, homogenous Denmark of half a century ago has vanished, never to return, and, like it or not, the old Europe shaped by Christianity, the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment now plays host to a large and growing population with a very different intellectual and spiritual tradition. And, in an age of global communication, the idea that these problems of coexistence can be confined to one continent is an illusion. An insult in Århus can reverberate in Damascus and Amman, and for that matter, Kabul, Basra, and Baghdad too. It's this that explains why the Bush administration, with hearts, minds and a war to win, condemned the cartoons, and it's this, far less forgivably, that explains why Turkey's (supposedly moderate) Islamist prime minister feels that he has the right to tell the Danish press what it may or may not publish.

Of course the publication of those cartoons was (quite explicitly) a provocation, but the furor that followed shows that it was an acceptable thing to do. The editors of Jyllands-Posten wanted to draw attention to the fact that fears for the freedom of expression were both real and realistic. They have succeeded on both counts. Europeans realize now, if they were dim enough not to understand before, that they are faced with two very different ways ahead. The first, and better, alternative is to recognize that, to many, freedom of speech is a value as important as religious belief may be to the faithful, and to give it the protection it deserves. Reestablishing this badly eroded principle will not be easy, but to fail to do so will be to empower the fanatic to legislate for all.

The second alternative is, broadly speaking, for Europe to attempt to buy social peace by muddling along as it does now, muzzling a little speech here, rooting out a little liberty there. But this approach isn't working now. There's no reason to think that doing more of the same will prove any more effective in the future. Besides, at its heart, this is a policy of surrender, submission and despair. It is a refusal to accept that people can agree to disagree, and it is a refusal to confront those who cannot. It foreshadows an era of neutered debate, anodyne controversy, and intellectual stagnation. It will lead, inevitably, to societies irrevocably divided into immovable blocs of ethnicity and creed, carving up the spoils, waiting to take offense and thirsting for the fight, which will one day come.

Despite some of the stirring statements in favor of free speech that have been made over the last week the best bet is that Europe will continue to slide into that second, dismal, alternative. The warning signs are already there to see. Tony Blair's Labour government (again, due partly to the presence of British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan but, doubtless, due also to the presence of Muslim voters in many key parliamentary constituencies) has been at pains to condemn the cartoons, and Norway's governing left-wing coalition wasted no time in distancing itself from Magazinet. Even Magazinet's editor has now stumbled down the same sad route: "If I had dreamt of something like this happening I would not have done it. It's out of control.'' Meanwhile, a number of the newspapers that have chosen not to run the cartoons have done so explicitly on grounds of self-censorship, or, rather, they claim, "restraint," or maybe "respect": Choose your own alibi.

Even more ominously, at the prompting of our old friend, the EU's commissioner for Freedom, Security and Justice, Brussels bureaucrats are arranging a meeting for "experts" and "community leaders" (to be held no later than the end of April) that will discuss some of the issues arising out of this controversy. It is reported that, "proposals to counter race and religious hatred [may be] dusted off." We can guess where that might lead.

And as for where it all started, Jyllands-Posten has now announced that it regrets having published the cartoons: "If we had known that it would end with death threats and that the lives of Danish people could be put at risk, we would have naturally not have published the drawings." The paper apologized only for having underestimated the extent to which Muslims revere their prophet, but then it added this, "fundamentalist powers have prevailed over the freedom of speech...Danish media will now be careful about expressing attitudes that fundamentalists can misuse to create hate and bitterness."

Whip cracked. Lesson learned.

Ladies' Man: Kong and his women.

National Review Online, December 16, 2005

As all too many of us have discovered, to be unlucky in love is unlovely, but it’s only the saddest of suitors who ends up in a heap at the bottom of a skyscraper, riddled with bullets and circled by gawpers. Poor, mighty, helpless Kong. When he fell for Ann Darrow all those years ago, he fell hard: “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.”

So it was, but who can blame an ape for trying? Life on Skull Island was dull, dull, dangerous and dull. Sure, there was a constant supply of comely native girls to snack upon, tear apart, or do whatever it was he did with those sacrificial brides of his, but for the most part his existence was foraging for food and fighting off dinosaurs and nasty spider-like things. The arrival of a blonde deco goddess must have been a welcome distraction.

But who, exactly, was she? We’ll see how Naomi Watts fares in Peter Jackson’s new film, but screaming Fay Wray was never quite up to the Darrow of her creators’ dreams. For that, look to the 1932 novelization of the first Kong’s screenplay. In this eccentric epic, as in the movie, Carl Denham rescues Darrow from the shop where she had been caught stealing an apple. Miracle! She was the girl he needed for his new film: “Large eyes of incredible blueness looked out at him from shadowing lashes; the ripe mouth had passion and humor…Her skin was transparently white. That marvelous kind of skin belongs with the kind of hair which foamed up beneath her shabby hat. This was of pure gold. If Denham had been poetical, which he was not, he might have pictured it spun out of sunlight.”

Phew.

But if it is clear how audiences were expected to react to Ann Darrow what exactly was Kong meant to think about her “bright hair, her perfect face, [and] graceful well proportioned figure”? In a sequence so naughty it vanished for nearly 40 years, Kong gently peels off Ann’s clothes, piece by flimsy piece, pausing only to smell one delectable scrap, before returning to ogle, sniff, and toy with the prize lying prostrate and nearly naked in his hand. In his enthralling, entertaining, and essential history of the Kong movies, Ray Morton notes that director Meriam Cooper always claimed that the scene was purely playful, while Willis O’Brien, the special effects maestro who was, with Cooper, the creative genius behind the film, argued Kong saw Darrow “as a beautiful object”. The “removal of her clothes was akin to plucking the petals off a flower.”

Perhaps, in a more straitlaced time they just had to say that, but to be fair, the Kong novelization does back them up. Sort of. “Ann screamed again, Kong snatched at her. His hand caught in her dress and the dress tore in his huge fingers. More whiteness was revealed. Kong touched the smooth revelation. He pulled again at the torn dress. Then holding Ann tightly, he began to pluck her clothes away as a chimpanzee might undress a doll. As each garment came free into his hand, he felt it excitedly, plainly trying to find some connection between the frail tissue and the whiteness he had exposed.”

As I said, sort of. As I said, phew.

But a world able to accept the marriage of Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett ought to be sophisticated enough to recognize Kong’s feelings for what they really were. Understanding his besotted gaze, we can see how he protects the object of his impractical adoration and, ultimately, we warm to the sacrifice he makes. We may not have asked, but he has told. And those cynics who claim that Kong’s infatuation was no more than pre-Neanderthal lust need to remember the moment that Kong hurled a woman to her death when he discovered she wasn’t Ann. This was a one-girl gorilla.

Or at least he was before he got to Tokyo. Undaunted by his death, the King turned up three decades later in two Japanese movies for which no appropriate adjective has yet been devised. In the first, King Kong versus Godzilla (1962), he’s found on the Pacific island of Faro, where a tribe of Japanese in dark make-up had found a suitably Sixties way to keep him happy: narcotic red berries. Narcotic red berries are the only possible explanation for the confusing narrative that follows, but there is a poignant hint of Kong’s more majestic past when he takes foxy Fumiko Sakurai to the top of Tokyo’s capitol building. She escapes, but only after a narcotic berry spray knocks Kong into the merciful unconsciousness to which the movie’s audience has long, long since succumbed.

For all the turmoil on that tower, however, there was something a touch desultory about the fling with Fumiko. Apes prefer blondes. The makers of Kong’s next Japanese excursion, King Kong Escapes (1967) threw Susan Watson, a blonde lieutenant in the U.N.’s submarine fleet (who knew?), into the mix. It worked. As soon as Casanova Kong, by now living on yet another remote Pacific Island, saw the minx from Turtle Bay, it was love. He demonstrated this in ways sometimes reminiscent of the original King Kong, but sometimes, notably when rescuing Susan from a robot Kong, not. Mie Hama, the former Fumiko (who had in the meantime also been pawed by cinema’s other rampaging id, James Bond, in You Only Live Twice) also returned to the fray in this movie, this time as the villainous Madame Piranha, an agent for Red China whose presence was, I like to think, a reproach to Kong for the way in which he had now taken to playing the field.

If there was a touch of Teddy Roosevelt about the attitudes underpinning the first King Kong, so the movie that marked the franchise’s return to America in 1976 mirrored a suspicion of big business that was, along with an environmentalist subtext, hints of corruption in the White House, and refreshing honesty about the real nature of Kong’s interest in his latest blonde, very characteristic of its time. In the same way, the blonde, played by a Jessica Lange hot enough to bring Godzilla to his knees, was, in contrast to the passive Ann Darrow, an emancipated woman of the ERA era perfectly capable of telling her simian seducer what for. Hear her roar, monkey boy. More than that, the erotic attraction went both ways. Kong’s earlier sweethearts may have felt sorry for the big lunk, but that was it; with Dwan, there was, in the end, something…else. And if you think I’m wrong, just check out the look on her face when Kong, ahem, dries her off.

But Dwan may have been too forward for Kong, something of a reactionary when it came to the fair sex. In King Kong Lives (1986), he retreated to the safety of his own species, even fathering a little Kong with Lady Kong (who had, conveniently, been discovered living in Borneo) before dying his now traditional death at the hands of the US military. The potential human love interest, although blonde only to her highlights, was pretty Amy Franklin (Linda Hamilton), the doctor who gave Kong his artificial heart (don’t ask), but as the ungrateful ape seemed not to notice, the lovely Linda fled to CBS to play Beauty to a lugubrious lion-man, a Beast who actually paid her some attention.

Kong shunned Amy, audiences shunned Kong. Without the girl, the monkey was just a monster. And without much of a screenplay the monster was just an oaf. King Kong Lives died, but its classic predecessor remains unscathed, intoxicating, and immortal. With its groundbreaking effects, beguiling score, glorious cinematography and haunting clash of primitive and modern, the original King Kong will always endure, but it was the doomed, hopeless love for Ann Darrow that turned movie into myth and Kong into you, somehow, and me. That myth was so strong it could survive and even sustain the ludicrous liaisons and absurd exploits of the Japanese years, and it flourishes still: Any King Kong that ignores its lessons, its passion, and its tragedy will be in deep, deep trouble.

Over to you, Naomi.

Ghosts in The Machine: Spooky looks at the Met.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Perfect Medium

National Review Online, October 31, 2005

I'm not altogether sure that New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is taking its new, entertaining, and utterly charming exhibition dedicated to photography and the occult, entirely seriously. At the launch party for "The Perfect Medium" last month, giggling guests sipped smoke-shrouded potions to woo-woo-woo Theremin tunes, as vast projected images of the séances of a century ago shimmered silver-and-gray against the walls of a great hall that could just, just for a moment, have been in Transylvania. Up beyond the sweep of the Met's Norma Desmond staircase, a cheery crowd thronged past antique photographs of spirits, charlatans, and strange, vaguely unsettling, effluvia. As I peered closely, and myopically, at a mess of tweed and ectoplasm, there was a sudden, startling "boo" in my ear, and a pretty girl who had crept up behind me ran off laughing. As I said, unsettling. As I said, charming.

Unfortunately, the exhibition's catalog is, as such volumes have to be, straight-faced, straight-laced, and saturated in the oddball orthodoxies of the contemporary intelligentsia. With truth, these days, relative, and all opinions valid, it would be too much to expect an establishment such as the Met to say boo to a ghost and it doesn't. In the catalog's foreword the museum's director admits that "controversies over the existence of occult forces cannot be discounted," but he is quick to stress how "the approach of this exhibition is resolutely historical. The curators present the photographs on their own terms, without authoritative comment on their veracity."

Fair, if cowardly, enough, but a chapter entitled "Photography and The Occult" sinks into po-mo ooze: "The traditional question of whether or not to believe in the occult will be set aside...the authors' [Pierre Apraxine and Sophie Schmit] position is precisely that of having no position, or, at least not in so Manichean a form...To transpose such Manicheanism to photography would inevitably mean falling into the rhetoric of proof, or truth or lies, which has been largely discredited in the arena of photography discourse today," something, quite frankly, which does not reflect well on the arena of photography discourse today. Still, if you want a nice snapshot of how postmodernism can be the handmaiden of superstition, there it is. Standing up for evidence, logic and reason is somehow "Manichean", no more valid than the witless embrace of conjuring tricks, disembodied voices and things that go bump in the night. It's a world, um "arena," where proof and truth are reduced to "rhetoric," and, thus, are no more than a debating device stripped of any real meaning.

Thankfully the exhibition, principally dedicated to photographs of the spooky from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is itself free of such idiocies. The images are indeed allowed to stand "on their own terms" and, on their own terms, they fall straight down. They are, quite obviously bogus, balderdash, and baloney, slices of sepia stupidity that are magnificent proof of our species' wonderful curiosity and embarrassing evidence of its hopeless credulity. They were also very much the creations of their own time. After over a century of manipulated images, vanishing commissars and Hollywood magic, we are better at understanding that photography's depiction of reality can often be no more reliable than a half-heard rumor or a whispered campfire tale. One hundred forty years or so ago, we were more trusting in technology, more prepared to believe that the camera could not lie.

And we were wrong to do so. On even a moment's inspection the Met's ghosts, sprites, emanations, and fairies are as ramshackle as they are ridiculous, but all too often they did the trick. The work of the depressingly influential William Mumler, an American photographer operating in the 1860s and 1870s, may include a spectral Abraham Lincoln with his hands resting on the shoulders of Mumler's most famous client, the bereft and crazy Mary Todd Lincoln, but, like the rest of his eerie oeuvre, this insult to John Wilkes Booth was based on crude double exposure (or a variant thereof). Nevertheless, the career of the phantoms' paparazzo flourished for a decade or so, even surviving a trial for fraud (he was acquitted).

Or take a look at the once famous photographs of the Cottingley fairies (1917-20), absurd pictures of wee fey folk frolicking with some schoolgirls in England's Yorkshire countryside. Once you have stopped laughing, ask yourself just why, exactly, the fairies resemble illustrations from magazines. Well, it's elementary, my dear Watson, that's what they were (one of the girls finally confessed in 1981), but to the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a man who dedicated an entire book (The Coming of The Fairies) to the topic, and to many other believers, these fraudulent fairies were the real, fluttering, deal. Fairies were, explained Conan Doyle, a butterfly/human mix, a technically awkward combination that even the great Holmes might have found to be a three-pipe problem.

To be fair, by the 1920s, the possibilities of photographic fakery were no secret to the informed, but this made no difference to Sir Arthur, a convinced spiritualist who was to receive his reward by returning, like Holmes, from the dead (within six hours of his death, the author had popped up in England, moving on later to Vancouver, Paris, New York, Milan and, as ectoplasm, in Winnipeg). Conan Doyle believed what he wanted to believe, and so did his fellow-believers. Photographs could confirm them in their faith, but never overthrow it.

That's a recurrent theme of this exhibition. Yes, back then people were more inclined to give photographs the benefit of the doubt, but again and again we are shown pictures that were demonstrated at the time to be fake, something that did remarkably little to shake the conviction of many spiritualists that the dear departed were just a snapshot away. Even the obvious crudities and photographic inconsistencies could be, and were, explained as a deliberate device of the spirits—apparently they wanted to appear as cut-outs, illustrations, and blurs.

And it wasn't only photographers who egged the susceptible on. The idea that some gifted individual can act as an intermediary between the living and the dead is an idea as old as imbecility, but, after the dramatic appearance of New York State's rapping and tapping Fox sisters in the 1840s, the Victorian era saw a flowering of mediums, only too ready to impress the credulous with mumbo jumbo, materializations, mutterings, Native-American spirit guides (some things never change), transfigurations, grimaces, and tidings from beyond. Some were in it for the money, others for the attention, and a few, poor souls, may have actually believed in what they were doing.

The Met's show includes a fine selection dedicated to those mediums at work. Tables soar, chairs take flight, men in old-fashioned suits levitate, apparitions appear, and ghostly light flashes between outstretched hands. Most striking of all are the visions of ectoplasm snaking out of mouths, nostrils, and other orifices quite unmentionable on a respectable website. These grubby pieces of cotton, giblets, and who knows what were a messy but logical development, manufactured miracles for what was, in essence, a manufactured religion. Like the photographs, like dead Walter's mysterious thumbprint (don't ask), they were evidence. The immaterial had been made material, and in a supposedly more skeptical age, that's what counted. In great part, the enormous popularity of spiritualism in the later 19th century was a response to the threat that science increasingly represented to the certainties of traditional belief. Science had made Doubting Thomases of many, but spiritualism, by purportedly offering definitive proof of an afterlife, enabled its followers to reconcile ancestral faith and eternal superstitions with, they thought, fashionable modernity and the rigors of scientific analysis.

That the science was junk, and the evidence bunk, did not, in the end, matter very much. What counted was that old superstitions had been given a new veneer, and, if that veneer soon warped into a bizarre creed all its own, that's something that ought not to surprise anyone familiar with the nonsense in which mankind has long been prepared to believe—and still is. Any visitor to "The Perfect Medium" tempted to feel superior to the credulous old fogies now making fools of themselves on the walls of the Met should take another look at the metaphysical shambles that surrounds him in our modern America of snake churches, suburban shamans, mainstreet psychics, psychic detectives, pet psychics, psychic hotlines, spirit guides, movie-star scientology, alien abductions, celebrity Kabbalah, Crossing Over, Ghost Hunters, Shirley Maclaine, resentful Wiccans, preachy pagans, and (though I know this won’t be entirely welcome) don't even get me started on Intelligent Design.

Oh yes, "Happy Halloween," one and all...

Incendiary Device

Chris Cleave: Incendiary

National Review Online, September 15, 2005

To British author Chris Cleave, it must have seemed like a dream come true. The rights to Incendiary, his first book, had been snapped up, an unusually large print-run had been prepared, and an extensive promotional campaign was in the works. In a sign of a best-seller to come, glossy posters advertising Incendiary were already up on the walls of London's subway system designed to entice commuters into buying what many thought would be the summer's big read.

And then, on the very day that Cleave's book was released, everything went horribly, tragically wrong. His dream, in a sense, became real, and, for some of those commuters, it became a nightmare, too. They were never to read that book. Their fate was to experience it. Incendiary, you see, is about a suicide-bomb attack on the British capital. The circumstances are different (the bombs are detonated at a soccer game) from what actually happened that terrible morning this July, but the results were very much the same. Read the way in which Cleave's heroine, a working-class woman from the East End of London (thus the ropey grammar), describes the survivors emerging from the massacre that has consumed her husband and her son: "Their eyes were wide and glassy and quite often they stumbled but they never blinked. There must of been hundreds of them shuffling out of the smoke. All of them with their eyes huge and wide like things pulled up from very deep in the sea."

It was pretty much that way in London on July 7, 2005, the day that Cleave's book came out.

In the wake of the Tube and bus bombings, the promotional campaign was largely abandoned, and the posters were taken down. They had shown smoke rising above the skyline and the question, "What if?" London now knew. Fifty-six were dead, hundreds more had been injured. When a few advertisements for Incendiary still appeared in the press (the publications in which they appeared had already gone to print) there were public apologies, and while the novel did not disappear from the shelves (I bought my copy in a shop on London's Victoria Street in early August), it tended to be tucked away in a discreet corner, perhaps with the latest installment of Jeffrey Archer's prison diaries or other embarrassments.

As for its author, judging by recent interviews, he remains appalled by the "sick coincidence" for which his book will always be remembered. "I wrote about something that could happen, and then it did happen," he told the Washington Post, and now I feel that I'm fundamentally tied, probably for the rest of my life, to those events." Even if Cleave occasionally sounds as if he has forgotten that there were others who have suffered far more because of those "events", he's probably right. Still, he should not complain too much. Incendiary was partially inspired by the Madrid bombings and the book's London editor has recalled how the editing process was rushed through before London itself fell victim to an attack.

But even if it's somewhat unseemly for Cleave to grumble about the London bombers' inconvenient timing, the wider accusation against his novel, that it was a crass exploitation of a tragedy that was bound to happen (and had indeed already done so elsewhere) is unfair. The struggle against Islamic extremism is likely to be one of the defining characteristics of this new century. Novelists should not be expected either to ignore it or to treat it only with the softest of kid gloves.

Judging by the response of some critics, it seems, however, that they are. Writing in the New York Times, the perpetually aggrieved Michiko Kakutani was outraged by Incendiary's very structure. The entire novel takes the form of an extended letter to Osama bin Laden from that shattered, grieving East End mother, and to Kakutani the fact it "begins with the words "Dear Osama" and ends with its heroine imploring the Qaeda leader to leave his cave and move in with her" is "simple tastelessness." But that's only true if we succumb to the mistaken desire to make a fetish out of bin Laden, a man who needs, very badly, to be cut down to size, both for our sanity and that of those lunatic enough to idolize him. Bin Laden is a man, nothing more, a murderous crackpot who richly deserves to be the subject of satire and the grim graveyard humor that is so much a feature of Incendiary. It's worth noting too that by the time of the invitation to bin Laden, Cleave's narrator is delusional, exhausted and broken. She just wants bin Laden to stop what he's doing and if that means he has to move in with her, so be it.

Others have faulted Incendiary for excessive bloodiness, but while it is true that the book does occasionally descend into Grand Guignol (and loses some force because of it), Cleave's determination to describe the details of the carnage is an essential corrective to our tendency to gloss over exactly what it is that our enemies want to do to us. In a society so unwilling to deal with reality that we limit the amount of times that images of planes crashing into the World Trade Center (let alone the dismaying, repulsive aftermath) are broadcast, Cleave's visions of horror are a useful antidote against complacency.

Unfortunately, Cleave himself sometimes seems tempted by a close relative of that complacency, the guilt-ridden and absurd idea that we in the West have brought the current troubles upon ourselves—perhaps, even, that we had it coming. There are suggestions of this throughout Incendiary, and they are exacerbated by the way in which Cleave imagines the official response to the suicide attacks in the soccer stadium. While some of his touches are deft (the return of barrage balloons, nauseatingly rechristened "shields of hope," to the London sky for the first time since the Blitz, each one, grotesquely, decorated with a picture of a bombing victim), others only demonstrate the belief in Western viciousness and ubiquitous, sinister conspiracy that is all too common among the chattering classes on both sides of the Atlantic. So, for example, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that when it comes to the suicide bombings, the British government has some dark secrets of its own to hide. Meanwhile the U.K. is shown lurching away from liberty and towards the persecution of its Muslim minority, a malevolent fantasy that has been shown up for the nonsense it is by Tony Blair's stumbling and hesitant response to the slaughter on July 7.

To write this way is to reveal intellectual frivolity in the face of real danger, something that is reinforced by the way in which Cleave allows the tired irrelevancies of Britain's dreary class warfare (the novel's bourgeois protagonists are uniformly venal, snobbish, and, well, you know the script) to share center stage with terrorist mass murder. It's a mark of how low matters have sunk in Britain that even in this respect Cleave is not, alas, alone. In the immediate aftermath of the July 7 attacks the leftist mayor of London, the oddball and unpleasant Ken Livingstone, noted that the terrorists had picked on "working-class" Londoners, a peculiar, and not particularly accurate, comment that made some jaundiced Brits wonder if the mayor would have been less upset if a prominent investment banker or two had been included amongst the dead.

Perhaps Cleave's problem was that, imagination exhausted, he simply had to fall back on the prejudices of contemporary "progressive" orthodoxy. Judging by Incendiary there's plenty of evidence to suggest that its author did indeed run out of ideas. The later part of the novel degenerates into soap opera and is really not worth reading. But this should not detract from the substantial achievement of the first 60 pages or so in which Cleave uses the (famously difficult) epistolatory format to give us a remarkable portrait both of his heroine and of the terrible events that so haunted her:

And the question that will haunt his readers is not "what if?" but "where next?"