...A Good Pan

Readers,

I like to tie this blog to my life. I'm aware that I blog about a wide range of subjects, but yet, opinions on a wide range of subjects are available, anywhere, and often for less. College Humor routinely features writers of less talent (or so I fancy) but supplements their often lacking prose stylings with healthy servings of nubile college student breast. I can't really help you people with that, except to say, well, I know a website... But that's no matter, and that's not the point. The point is, friends, to let you inside the man, to let you find out what I like, and what I don't.

Well, one of the things that brings me great joy in life is a good pan. Whether it is a restaurant that serves swill, or a car that threatens the very limbs of its passengers, or a book that pleases like a bed of nails, or a film that sets your hard earned $9.00 on fire, or whatever can be reviewed, oh, how I do love to read a review that sets upon the offending object d'art like wolves upon a injured cariboo, tearing the hapless animal limb from limb in a maelstrom of gnawing and gnashing. Or, a review that sets upon the bloated, overripe Hollywood 'blockbuster' like so many pirhannas upon a floating ox, helplessly pumping its stubby legs as the voracious fish swarm and in a trice transform that animal into skeletal remains, picked clean as if by acid. But, it is not just a film or a novel or a car or a restaurant that deserves such savagery. My heart also thrills to a nasty obituary--the pan of pans, if you will--the couple paragraphs that dismiss a life's work, accomplishments, and forever read the departed out as a scoundrel, a scapegrace, a fraud, a liar, a villain.

I.

Elvis Mitchell, formerly with the Times, is a master of the art. His reviews brim with the tired fury of a critic that has seen ofal presented as filet for too long. Take this review of Battlefield Earth, the Travolta embarassment.

None of the aliens -- who apparently are evil just because it feels good -- get around to chortling: ''Puny Earthlings! No one can save you now!'' But Mr. Travolta does the next best thing. He throws back his head and delivers a stage laugh that would embarrass the villain from the shoddiest Republic Pictures serial or an episode of ''Xena: Warrior Princess.'' The eye-rolling broadness of his turn in ''Broken Arrow'' suddenly becomes a marvel of nuance and understatement.

''Battlefield Earth,'' directed by Roger Christian (''Nostradamus,'' ''Masterminds''), is beyond conventional criticism. It belongs in the elect pantheon that includes such delights as ''Showgirls'' and ''Revolution'': the Moe Howard School of Melodrama.

...

The only professional thing about the movie is the sound: it's so loud you feel as if you're sitting on a runway with jets taking off over your head. The drone of real aircraft would be preferable to what passes for plot.

Effective, but who can't find something mean to write about such dreck? Mitchell delivers an effective review of Jurassic Park III, a endearingly schlocky blockbuster unapologetic about its intentions to scare and make money in 90 minutes.

Grant is referring to the quick, fierce prehistoric creatures better known as velociraptors. He has learned that the raptors can speak and communicate, and adds, ''They were smarter than primates.''

The animals are indeed smart: they were bright enough to turn down much of the dialogue that the human actors have to speak. The beasts don't have to voice lines like Grant's ''No force on Earth or Heaven will get me back on that island.'' Nor will the raptors -- or their new reptilian co-stars, the equally deadly spinosauruses and the pteranodons (who look like more capable relatives of pterodactyls) -- have to deal with passages like the inevitable ''What's it gonna take?'' response from the gee-whiz benefactor Paul Kirby (William H. Macy), who whips out a checkbook to persuade Grant to join the expedition.

...

The idea of being stranded on an island with prehistoric carnivores isn't nearly as terrifying eight years later, after witnessing real predators size one another up on the ''Survivor'' series. Given the post-''Survivor'' landscape, ''Jurassic Park 3'' strips down to the material's origins in ''Westworld,'' the theme-park-turned-haunted-house movie for which Michael Crichton wrote the script before he wrote the ''Jurassic Park'' novel. (In his way, Mr. Crichton is as ruthless a creature as the raptors: he has picked clean the bones of his every idea, though he didn't write this third script.) Steven Spielberg didn't return as director, either, which may be why ''Jurassic Park 3'' is so short -- only 90 minutes. No one lingers over grace notes that gave the first couple of films real staying power, like the banner that floats and lands on a big plastic dinosaur.

And even though ''Jurassic Park 3'' ticks off all the conventions -- ''Chances are we won't see a thing,'' Grant says, just before a plane crash that puts everyone at the mercy of the park's denizens -- the movie dashes like a one-track-mind raptor. It's speedy, light on its feet and louder than bombs. Much of the talent behind the cameras has done survival-of-the-fittest films before. The director Joe Johnston's filmography includes ''Jumanji.'' The writers Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor visited the Darwinian world before with ''Election.'' (Peter Buchman was also a writer.) And they seem determined to check off all the to-do notes necessary for a prehistoric exploitation picture: we're missing only Raquel Welch in a yummy fur bikini.

This is fair, more than anything. Mitchell manages to take a magnificent shot at Crichton, ravenously picking at the bones of his once-great ideas while still respecting the summer charms of the blockbuster. He's a good critic, definitely able to balance the good and bad in a film.

''BLACK HAWK DOWN'' has such distinctive visual aplomb that its jingoism starts to feel like part of its atmosphere. Establishing mood through pictorial means is the director Ridley Scott's most notable talent. There may be no working director more accomplished at wringing texture out of the color blue than the prodigious and now prolific Mr. Scott; you'd swear that with his dazzling washes of blues and sand tones, he was inventing additional hues on the spot. Because Mr. Scott's eye delivers so much information, he then is at a loss to give the material a proper emotional grounding. ''Black Hawk Down'' is like Mr. Scott's ''G.I. Jane'' but this time with an all-boy cast.

Sam Shepard, as Major General Garrison, seems to be smoking a Montecristo No. 2 primarily so that billowing clouds of Cuban smoke can register in the war room; it doesn't help that the cigar has been given as much characterization as anyone in the movie.

This covers both the suberb, claustrophobic cinematography and the "war porn" aspects of the script and stunningly dehumanizing treatment of the "skinnies."

'Black Hawk Down'' wants to be about something, and in the midst of the meticulously staged gunfire, the picture seems to choose futility arbitrarily. The handsomely staged gunplay and explosions, rigorously matched to exacting Dolby Digital in selected theaters, abound, while a cast of non-American actors like Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom try out their Yankee soldier accents, with vowels so oddly enunciated that you expect them to be singled out as foreign spies. Again, Mr. Scott spot-welds his extraordinary painterly application of talent to video game detachment; his ''Gladiator'' looked like a Play station 2 product designed by Bruegel. But the mercilessness here is gruesome.

In ''Black Hawk Down,'' the lack of characterization converts the Somalis into a pack of snarling dark-skinned beasts, gleefully pulling the Americans from their downed aircraft and stripping them. Intended or not, it reeks of glumly staged racism. The only African-American with lines, Specialist Kurth (Gabriel Casseus), is one of the American soldiers who want to get into the middle of the action; his lines communicate his simplistic gung-ho spirit. His presence in this military action raises questions of racial imbalance that ''Black Hawk Down'' couldn't even be bothered to acknowledge, let alone answer.

This is excellent craftsmanship. Mitchell is a joy to read, an effective critic, and a real loss for the Times.

II.

If films can be reviewed, so can lives. I enjoy a negative obitutary as much as anyone. Take, for example, this recent Boston Globe obituary. Father Gilbert Phinn recently passed away, and the Globe included in his obit the fact that he had helped to cover up his own corner of the sex abuse scandal.

There, in the ninth paragraph of an otherwise positive account, was a description of how Phinn, as archdiocese personnel director 23 years ago, reportedly told a priest with a history of sexual abuse to keep his past a secret from the pastor when assigned to a new parish. The exchange was originally reported in 2002. Those who knew Phinn were hurt and angered by what they saw as a very cheap shot. It dominated conversation at his wake and standing-room-only funeral, attendees reported. Here in the ombudsman's office the issue sparked far more outcry than any other obituary during my three-year tenure, with most complaints from Milton, where Phinn served most recently at St. Elizabeth's.

How's that, now. The best part of the whole thing is that Phinn is no longer able to speak in his defense:

The obituary should have noted that Phinn, as clergy personnel director, first urged the archdiocese to restrict the accused pedophile priest, the Rev. Robert M. Burns, to duty as a convent chaplain, so he would not be near children. When Burns was assigned to a parish anyway and, sources said, Phinn told Burns to keep his past secret from the new pastor, Phinn was following archdiocesan direction. (Asked in 2002 about that exchange, Phinn said simply, "I prefer not to discuss it.")

The obituary might also have noted that Burns went on to become one of the most serious clergy sex offenders and was convicted of sexual assault, jailed, and defrocked. Knowing that would have helped readers make sense of the reference.

But pish posh! The Globe needn't apologize for piling on the dead. Phinn, by all accounts, fucked up, doing his small part to further the Catholic law of omerta (or was that the Mafia law?)



The undisputed champion of nasty obituaries is Christopher Hitchens. He writes with unabashed verve, and tears into his victims like a bear drunk on mead. Reading his polished viciousness always gives me a thrill.

This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.

More could be found, I'm sure, in his slim 1997 paperback The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice (Amazon)
Or, dare I say, here:

One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday was a great day for these parasites, who saw their crummy methods endorsed by his holiness and given a more or less free ride in the international press. Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions. (my emphasis)

Vicious! Scathing! Shows no mercy!

Hitchens has written a number of nasty obituaries. He truly respects giving the deceased a honest send-off, a honest evaluation of their life. Here's his treatment of Susan Sontag. Fair, eminently fair, I'd say.

Mention of that last place name impels me to say another thing: this time about moral and physical courage. It took a certain amount of nerve for her to stand up on stage, in early 1982 in New York, and to denounce martial law in Poland as "fascism with a human face." Intended as ironic, this remark empurpled the anti-anti-Communists who predominated on the intellectual left. But when Slobodan Milosevic adopted full-out national socialism after 1989, it took real guts to go and live under the bombardment in Sarajevo and to help organize the Bosnian civic resistance. She did not do this as a "tourist," as sneering conservative bystanders like Hilton Kramer claimed. She spent real time there and endured genuine danger. I know, because I saw her in Bosnia and had felt faint-hearted long before she did.

...

It's easy enough to see, now, that the offer of murder for cash, made by a depraved theocratic despot and directed at a novelist [Salman Rushdie], was a warning of the Islamist intoxication that was to come. But at the time, many of the usual "signers" of petitions were distinctly shaky and nervous, as were the publishers and booksellers who felt themselves under threat and sought to back away. Susan Sontag mobilized a tremendous campaign of solidarity that dispelled all this masochism and capitulation. I remember her saying hotly of our persecuted and hidden friend: "You know, I think about Salman every second. It's as if he was a lover." I would have done anything for her at that moment, not that she asked or noticed.

...

A man is not on his oath, said Samuel Johnson, when he gives a funeral oration. One ought to try and contest the underlying assumption here, which condescendingly excuses those who write nil nisi bonum of the dead. Could Susan Sontag be irritating, or hectoring, or righteous? She most certainly could. She said and did her own share of foolish things during the 1960s, later retracting her notorious remark about the white "race" being a "cancer" by saying that it slandered cancer patients. In what I thought was an astonishing lapse, she attempted to diagnose the assault of Sept. 11, 2001, as the one thing it most obviously was not: "a consequence of specific [sic] American alliances and actions." Even the word "general" would have been worse in that sentence, but she had to know better. She said that she didn't read reviews of her work, when she obviously did. It could sometimes be very difficult to tell her anything or to have her admit that there was something she didn't know or hadn't read.

But Hitchens has hardly given up panning the dead. This obituary for Bob Hope bristles with a sublime nastiness. Hitchens attacks him for being unfunny:

To be paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny is not a particular defect or shortcoming in, say, a cable repair man or a Supreme Court justice or a Navy Seal. These jobs can be performed humorlessly with no loss of efficiency or impact. But to be paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny is a serious drawback, even lapse, in a comedian. And the late Bob Hope devoted a fantastically successful and well-remunerated lifetime to showing that a truly unfunny man can make it as a comic. There is a laugh here, but it is on us.

Give a man a reputation as an early riser, said Mark Twain, and that man can thereafter sleep until noon. Quick, then—what is your favorite Bob Hope gag? It wouldn't take you long if I challenged you on Milton Berle, or Woody Allen, or John Cleese, or even (for the older customers) Lenny Bruce or Mort Sahl. By this time tomorrow, I bet you haven't come up with a real joke for which Hope could take credit.

Spicey! And, can we go on? Why, of course.

This is comedy for people who have no sense of humor and who come determined to be entertained and laugh to show that they "get it." Hope had a huge vault of material, much of it mercifully unused, that was amassed by "researchers" and cross-indexed by subject. The great thing, for him, was to be able to bang on the existing funny bone by daring, say, to make a gag out of Reagan's notorious propensity for naps.

It's true that Hope had a mobile face and could twist it to look suggestive or leering (though he wasn't in the same class as Benny Hill or John Cleese in this respect). The idea that all women are attractive, not especially thigh-slapping as a concept in itself, can often work with audiences who are very easily pleased and whose members don't want to be left out of the general mirth. The sexlessness of Hope's routines, however, was just another clue to their essential conformism and cowardice. Eye-rolling and wolf-whistling are among the weakest forms of crowd pleasing that we possess. And Hope never stretched or challenged an audience in his life. For him, the safe and antique moves were the best, if not the only. The smirk was principally one of risk-free self-congratulation.

"Essential conformism and cowardice!" Cutting. There's nothing quite like demolishing someone for what they are allegedly good at. Hitchens finishes his patient demolition with a real zinger:

Even the most determinedly fawning obituarists had to concede that most of his movies and many of his "joke" anthologies were basically insulting in their unfunniness. Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times, stuck with writing an appreciation on the same day as Canby's labored obituary (and stuck by the newspaper with the exact same vaudeville photograph as illustration) fell back on the exhausted line that Hope always played the same character, which was Bob Hope. A fitting tautology. Hope was a fool, and nearly a clown, but he was never even remotely a comedian. (my emphasis)

And, if you want more, we've got Yassir Arafat and Hunter S. Thompson.

III.

I don't mean to seem to condem a nasty obituary. I feel that we should all get what we deserve, which, in the case of public figures, is an accurate assesement of our life. I would have no problem with an obituary that denounced me as a shallow, often mean, individual with too little appetite for empathy. I'd perhaps like my final balance sheet to carry that I also cured cancer, but hey. I respect obituaries that let the dead have it--no sacred cows here. If someone was an unforgivable bastard, they should be remembered as such. If they were decent, with faults, they should be remembered thusly. It was, then, with great dismay that I realized that dear Christopher Hitchens had really pulled his punches on the madman Hunter S. Thompson. Fortunately, William F. Buckley did not.

This obituary is in the same vein as some of Hitchens' best work, though lacking in invective. Buckley is a patient stylist, one who writes as if he has all too much time (and, from what I hear of his yacht habit, perhaps he does).

If what was before the house was just the formal news bulletin, a famous person who had left Earth for other bournes, then OK, let him go with conventional solemnities. I once attended funeral services at which the rabbi didn't remember the name of the deceased, so that he mourned the passage of Priscilla, remarking the good she had left behind in her lifetime — never mind that the lady who lay in the coffin was called Jane; never mind, the incantations were generic.

But Hunter Thompson would never be confused with anyone else, and when his wife was led through the police cordon to his room, she reported to the press that “he did it (fired the .45-caliber pistol) in his mouth,” leaving “his face beautiful. It was not grisly or gruesome by any means. He lived a beautiful life.”

He didn’t. What he did do was inspire devotional encomiums from people who included blood relatives (my son), and superstar mentors (Tom Wolfe). Wolfe spoke first of his stylistic achievements. He wrote “in a style and a voice no one had ever heard before.” And Wolfe found in Hunter’s life an originality perversely appealing. It was “one long barbaric yawp, to use Whitman’s term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all conventional proprieties.” What he wrote was “‘gonzo.’ He was sui generis.” “In the l9th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century’s greatest comic writer in the English language.”

Buckley begins his obituary by focusing on the generic nature of death--this is a superb point, and nastily nihilistic in a fashion that National Review might not approve of. Priscilla, Jane, whatever, it is all generic in the end, boilerplate to be said over any old corpse that has been stripped of a name before internment! Enough of the introduction, what of Thompson?

Thompson had a gift for vitriol. All — everything — was subsumed in his exercise of that art. Consider one entire paragraph on Richard Nixon. “For years I’ve regarded (Nixon’s) very existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. I couldn’t imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn’t quite reach the lever on the voting machine.”

We were asked to believe (by the San Francisco Chronicle) that in reading Thompson we are reading the work of a hero of an entire generation of American students. Concerning that claim a little skepticism is surely in order. After all, an exhibitionist can be spectacular, and even lionized, in the Animal Houses. Hunter Thompson elicited the same kind of admiration one would feel for a streaker at Queen Victoria’s funeral. Here is a passage from Thompson, in which he seeks amusement by recounting the end of a long day with a visiting British friend, identifying himself as “the journalist”:

“The journalist is driving, ignoring his passenger (the visiting Brit), who is now nearly naked after taking off most of his clothing, which he holds out the window, trying to wind-wash the Mace out of it. His eyes are bright red and his face and chest are soaked with the beer he’s been using to rinse the awful chemical off his flesh. The front of his woolen trousers is soaked with vomit; his body is racked with fits of coughing and wild choking sobs. The journalist rams the big car through traffic and into a spot in front of the terminal, then he reaches over to open the door on the passenger’s side and shoves the Englishman out, snarling: ‘Bug off, you worthless faggot! You twisted pig-(expletive deleted), all the way to Bowling Green, you scum-sucking foreign geek.’”

One can be sorry that Hunter Thompson died as he did, but not sorry, surely, that he stopped writing.

How understated! How brutal! We now see what Buckley was doing with his initial annectdote, the loss of specific identity in death. Buckley is tearing Thompson's identity from him just as the rabbi (do WASPs go to Jewish funerals?) snatches Priscilla, I mean Jane's, last shreds of selfhood as he mumbles rituals above her animal matter. There's a nasty symmetry to the piece, a casual elegance to the quotation, revealing Thompson's art as nothing but epithet-laced hooliganism, a pointed denunciation of the man as a vessel of vitriol and nothing more. Ouch.

Maybe I should write my own obituary...