The plastic world of "The Graduate"

I was recently watching The Pumpkin Eater on Antenna TV. A black-and-white drama about a disintegrating marriage, it stars Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch. I was thinking less of that particular film than I was of these two formidable actors, both of whom have since passed on. Finch knocked around the international film scene for three decades before winning a posthumous Oscar for his role as the TV anchorman who whipped the audience into a frenzy (“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”) in 1976’s Network. He was 60 when he died in 1977. If he had lived, where would his Oscar have taken him? Maybe if he had been younger and his belated success had come even later, he might have had as full a career as Anthony Hopkins who followed his Oscar for Silence of the Lambs with a variety of meaty roles: Picasso, C. S. Lewis, John Adams and Richard Nixon.

Bancroft was best known for playing the seductive cradle robber, Mrs. Robinson, in 1967’s The Graduate. The biggest grossing movie of 1968, it was also critically acclaimed and a contender for the Best Picture Oscar. It’s a movie that proves that context is everything. In the late ‘60s, Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock was the hero, a recent college graduate who spends the summer after completing his degree aimlessly drifting, completely unprepared for the future. Mrs. Robinson, a middle-aged alcoholic friend of his parents, seduces him and they carry on their clandestine affair in assorted motel rooms. But the clueless Mr. Robinson insists Ben take his daughter out on a date and the two fall in love. As Roger Ebert observed when revisiting the movie years later, Mrs. Robinson, seen by most viewers as the villain when the film was released, seems more sympathetic today. You see, in the era of the film’s original release, the “Generation Gap,” one of the effects of the Baby Boom following World War II, was at its height, with young people growing their hair, smoking dope, and opposing just about anything that their parents supported (Nixon, Vietnam, conservative attire, the idea that one should be respectably employed). Naïve little Ben was portrayed as a wounded puppy being dragged on a leash into a world of savage, immoral pit bulls. At a party in his honor, one of his parents’ friends whispers some career advice into his ear: “Plastics.”

Plastics indeed. The world of his parents is plastic: their affluence is merely a symbol of their cheap values, their double standards, and hypocrisy. The whispered advice is as much a seduction as Mrs. Robinson’s sexual overtures. One of those cheap values is obviously their religious beliefs. What those beliefs involve is never stated, but, at the end, the Robinsons’ daughter is being married to the blue-eyed blonde All-American jock that is the antithesis of Ben. The setting is a church and when Ben disrupts the ceremony and drags his true love away, he uses a large cross to beat back her enraged family. A cross is used to ward off vampires, and, in a sense, that’s what the older generation represents in The Graduate: vampires, the undead who feed on the blood of the living. They appear to be alive themselves, but they’re dead in all but the most literal sense. They’ve sold their souls to the crass materialistic society that America has become, and inhabit a series of coffins: the big cars they drive to the big office in the big corporation then return in their big car to the big house at night before rising from the dead to face another soulless day. Ben will have no part of it. He is, indeed, The Graduate, but not only from a four year college. He has graduated beyond the smoothly corrupt life of his parents.

That was in 1967. By the 1980s, The Graduate was already looking a little dated. The young people of the ‘60s had cut their hair and taken their place in the same society they once protested. Some of them never made it out of the ‘70s alive, but those that did, though paying lip service to rebellion and embracing “progressive” politics simply traded their parents’ plastic world for an equally plastic world of their own. Their children, however, helped elect Ronald Reagan to the White House, and armed with degrees in Business Administration, set out for Wall Street to begin a new wave of soullessness. And, to use Kurt Vonnegut’s pet phrase, so it goes.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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The age of (expletive deleted)

I tuned in to Nightline on Wednesday night thinking the ABC News program might remember Gore Vidal. The days when mainstream media took any interest in a famous and controversial man of letters are far behind us. Nightline covered the Olympics (snore), and also previewed a spot about some bosomy babe who is currently attracting notice, maybe after hitting it big on You Tube. I switched to PBS. After Tavis Smiley concluded the first of a two-part show with lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman (“You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” “The Windmills of Your Mind”), it was time for Charlie Rose on whose show Vidal had been a guest. I thought Rose would repeat his last show with the legendary author or present a compilation of clips from his various appearances, as he did when William F. Buckley passed on. If Vidal’s death was announced early enough on Tuesday night, perhaps Rose had already done such a memorial, but there was no Vidal last night. I turned off the TV, which is usually the only sensible thing to do short of throwing it out the window, and turned on the radio.

There was a time, in the 1960s and 1970s, when Vidal and other authors with a point of view were a frequent presence on television, and not only in such an obvious place as The Dick Cavett Show. Vidal was a regular visitor to The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, and even welcome on such temples of blandness as the afternoon shows hosted by Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas. In the ‘80s, the welcome mat was withdrawn. Cavett was cancelled, and though Vidal still appeared on Carson, the great dumbing-down of American culture was in progress.

Who can we blame? Ronald Reagan? MTV? David Lettermen? (Vidal was so disgusted after his sole appearance on the gap-toothed comic’s show that he vowed never to return.) It was a ridiculous decade full of horrid hairstyles (the mullet made its debut and is now immortalized in such movies as Lethal Weapon), abysmal music, and atrocious fashion (does my memory deceive me or do I recall seeing even Bob Dylan wearing leather pants in concert?). Things improved a bit in the ‘90s, but the rot had set in and could not be reversed.

One of Vidal’s later novels was The Golden Age, but the title certainly referred to the past. This is the age of shit. This is the age of the Kardashian sisters and reality shows (all of them scripted and as real as Chaz Bono’s penis – if he has one). If these aren’t the end-times, well, can you blame anyone for hoping they are?

POSTSCRIPT: The Charlie Rose Show has a program dedicated to Vidal scheduled for Friday.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Gore Vidal 1925-2012

In his memoir, Palimpsest, Gore Vidal refers to the "tyranny of sex," and of how he was finally free of it in his old age. And soon, he said, he would be free of the greatest tyrant of all: life itself. Freedom came to Gore Vidal on Tuesday at age 86. In Psalms 14:1, we read ""The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." To his discredit, Gore Vidal was not a believer in God or an afterlife, but he was certainly no fool. His novels, and, even more so, his brilliant essays, the finest ever written in my opinion, make that clear. A wise man, and a brave one, he was, until his passing, the man I called my favorite "living writer." Now, I guess he has moved up to become my favorite writer, period. Of course, he has no heir.

Unlike most writers, Vidal loved to be on camera, had, in fact, expressed a desire to be a movie star, his idol of the screen being Mickey Rooney (a revelation made in the superb - and, alas, out of print - Screening History). In a documentary titled Profile of a Writer, Vidal appeared without voiceover commentary from a narrator and without a single glimpse of his interviewer. It was nothing but Vidal offering a monologue from Rome where he lived at the time. Oh, he could be pompous, alright, and aloof, possessing an icy detachment that I saw as a protective device. For all his wit and intelligence, he was undoubtedly a man who had been severely wounded by life, obvious in his description of his mother as someone who married, several times, for money. That, he told John Kennedy, is why the family from which both he and Jacqueline Bouvier were sprung was a disaster (Bouvier, a.k.a. Jackie Kennedy Onassis, was Vidal's step-sister through one of his mother's marriages). The "disaster" led Jacqueline to become a "professional widow" and led Vidal to become a professional writer. Did Vidal see a need or desire to write as a symptom of an emotional or psychological disturbance? I think he did. One writes to impose meaning on life, to, in a sense, control it.

As much as I admired Vidal, I did not agree with his every stance. He despised Christianity, seeing it as the first religion to insist its truths are absolutes. He could also be a bit of a hypocrite. During the impeachment proceedings brought against President Clinton, he defended Clinton and attacked independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr, claiming they had orchestrated a witch hunt based on nothing more than a sexual indiscretion on Clinton’s part. Like Bill Maher and others who came to Clinton’s defense, he claimed it was strictly “about sex.” But it wasn’t about sex. It was about Clinton’s having lied under oath. Sex was a sidebar. Yet in his Profile of a Writer segment, Vidal tells of how he was once approached by a Mafioso who knew of his intense dislike of Bobby Kennedy. Did Vidal want to stop Kennedy in his quest for a seat in the Senate? Yes, he did, so Vidal met the “tall, swarthy” hoodlum in a bar where the author of The Best Man declined to use knowledge of Kennedy’s affair with an underage girl because, as he said in his play, sex should play no role in politics. But the mobster knew of a woman whose “carnal knowledge” of the president (Bobby’s brother, John) led to her being threatened with deportation if she continued to pursue a lawsuit related to the matter. Vidal thought that this episode could be used fairly because “although sex is involved, this is an interesting story of how power is misused by a royal family." Vidal didn’t make use of this scandalous information only because it had been sealed by a judge. But that example of an abuse of power mirrors Clinton’s abuses of power. Vidal was an observer, but like any observer, he didn't always observe objectively. But nobody's perfect.

From 2006, my review of Vidal's second memoir, Point to Point Navigation:

When it comes to Gore Vidal's latest, and, no doubt, last memoir, Point to Point Navigation, the Publishers Weekly review gets it right: "readers' reactions will be determined by how they already feel about him."

I like Vidal. Even when I disagree with him, I can't help but be impressed by the wit of his arguments and the style in his writing. And I like Point to Point Navigation, even though it seems like something of a cheat, opening as it does with four chapters - 27 pages - recycled verbatim from 1992's Screening History, a small gem about the impact that movies have had on his life and society at large. Vidal explains his action by saying (in parentheses) that the book "has been allowed to go out of print and so now I reprise its principal argument."

The appearance of old material seems eerily prescient in some ways, as if Vidal, now 81, can't be bothered restating anew that which he has already said. After all, time is short. It also seems to be a testament to his recent admission that "I no longer find myself waking up every morning with the compulsion to put pen to paper.''

The specter of death hangs heavy over this volume, with Vidal devoting many pages to his late partner, Howard Austen, as well as reminiscing about Johnny Carson, on whose late night show I was introduced to this man of letters in the early '70s. There are times when his memory fails him (as does his proofreader). He tells us his father died in February 1969, yet claims he lived to see man walk on the moon, an event that occurred five months later. Elsewhere, he takes on his own biographers, dismissing Fred Kaplan's "authorized" account of his life as inaccurate, but expressing some admiration for recent books by Dennis Altman, among others. The general tone is one of a man attempting to set the record straight and to tie up loose ends.

Vidal is sometimes dismissed these days as an eccentric who no longer deserves to be taken seriously. He is, after all, a "conspiracy theorist" who has questioned, in such books as Dreaming War, the official story about the events that led to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But Vidal is unbowed. "Ours is a society riddled with plots of every kind. . ." he writes before delving, once more, into a conspiracy theory related to the JFK assassination.

Point to Point Navigation is rather scatter-shot, jumping from one subject to another without the benefit of nice comfortable segues, but that tends to be true of memory itself. If you like Vidal, you'll forgive the book its inconsistency, and be rewarded with a worthwhile read.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Caligula: Bob Guccione as Auteur

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Those darn Bushes

Shortly after 9/11, former president George W. Bush writes in Decision Points, he found strength and solace from his White House team, wife Laura, and – this was news to me – “My brother Marvin and sister Dora . . . (who) stopped by frequently for meals.”

Brother Marvin? Sister Dora?

Never heard of them.

I have heard of Prescott Bush, his granddaddy, who he called “Gampy,” but what I heard doesn’t quite gel with what George W. says about him: “He was well known in Greenwich as a successful businessman with unquestioned integrity. . . “(9). He is also well-known to those who know more about history than the media and whitewashed textbooks tell us, as a Nazi sympathizer who collaborated with some other wealthy families to oust FDR and put a dictator in his place, a rather nasty episode that Naomi Woolf and other writers have exposed and which can be found in official (but unpublicized) government records.

Then there’s daddy George Herbert Walker Bush, the kind of job hopping flunky who epitomizes what’s wrong with “public service.” It’s no longer a secret that “Pappy” Bush went directly from Skull and Bones to the CIA and there’s a paper trail that ties him to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Shortly after becoming vice-president in 1981, he was very nearly promoted to the top spot when John Hinckley Jr. took a shot at President Reagan. Even the mainstream media managed to let it slip that Hinckley’s brother was scheduled to have dinner with Neal Bush that evening. Less well-known (but detailed in The Illuminati Zone) is the long business association that the Hinckleys had with the Bush family.

Like father, like son.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Right wing Bob?

American Masters, the PBS series that may be the finest program on television (an honor it claims quite easily in this age of reality based shows about fat people losing weight, and narcissistic showcases like American Idol), spotlighted Joan Baez in a recent episode. Baez, who turned 71 this year (she shares a birthday with Richard Nixon), was a bestselling recording artist and the subject of a Time cover story when Bob Dylan was still a struggling Woody Guthrie wannabe. He was writing songs and making quite an impression in Greenwich Village folk clubs, but, it could be argued, his success was assured only after Baez dragged him on stage to sing with her. Soon, he was the “voice of a generation” that protested the Vietnam War and followed Martin Luther King’s lead in demanding equal rights for blacks. Dylan would reject that role and even snicker at those who marched and carried signs, but Baez was and would remain an activist, jeopardizing her life and career. She spent time in jail and visited the war zone while bombing was in progress. It was, she noted, the kind of situation that could even make an atheist believe in God. She came from a family of Quakers and was brought up to be a pacifist, something Dylan never claimed to be. The man himself, looking old and grizzled, appeared several times. He said he was flattered to be the subject of her self-penned “Diamonds and Rust,” though in her biography she claimed it had been written about her husband, David.

It was my interest in Dylan more than Baez that made me tune in to the American Masters segment. If Baez is a typical leftist, Dylan is not, assuming he’s a leftist at all. A website called Right Wing Bob makes the case that he's quite the opposite. Despite having praised Barack Obama, there is evidence to suggest this voice of the counterculture (when there was such a thing) is something of a conservative. In his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan claimed his favorite politician, circa 1961, was Arizona senator Barry Goldwater who accepted the 1964 republican presidential nomination with his now infamous speech extolling the benefits of extremism (“Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice.”) To the liberal camp supporting Lyndon Johnson’s reelection, Goldwater was a warmonger and a right wing extremist whose conservative principles were woefully out of touch with the modern world. To Dylan, whose songs like “Masters of War” seemed an indictment of such a man, Goldwater was reminiscent of Tom Mix, the all-American cowboy of dozens of B westerns in Hollywood’s silent age.

Even when Chronicles appeared in 2004, a good 40 years after Goldwater’s overwhelming loss to LBJ, some readers obviously liberal in their politics, dismissed Dylan’s statement as disingenuous. Clearly, the man who wrote “The Times They Are-A Changin’” was joking, right?

Dylan didn’t seem to be joking in a 1968 interview with Sing Out when he refused to be pinned down on the Vietnam War. “I know some very good artists who are for the war,” he said, and cites a painter friend, a man he admires, who even considered enlisting to fight in the jungles. When he says he never argued with his friend about his stance, the interviewer pressures him, but Dylan refuses to budge, eventually asking a question of his own that undoubtedly raised eyebrows of readers on the left. “Anyway, how do you know I’m not, as you say, for the war?”

One thing that definitely separates Dylan from many of his left leaning admirers is his belief in God. Even before his very public conversion to Christianity in 1979, God was in his songs and his thoughts. In 1978, Dylan told Phillip Fleishman, “The whole world is a prison. Life is a prison; we’re all inside the body. . . Only knowledge of either yourself or the ultimate power can get you out of it. . . Most people are working toward being one with God, trying to find him. They want to be one with the supreme power, they want to go Home, you know. From the minute they’re born, they want to know what they’re doing here. I don’t think there’s anybody who doesn’t feel that way.”

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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Memoirs

Memoir is supposedly the most popular literary genre these days, at least after novels about teenage girls in love with vampires, but why? The answer is easy when the question is why memoirs are popular with writers. Everybody thinks his life has been interesting, and, as they say, write what you know. The question that’s more difficult to answer is why do people read memoirs by authors who are not already famous? Former president George W. Bush whose memoir, Decision Points, was a recent bestseller, and rock and roll legend Keith Richards who also had a hit memoir in 2010, have stories that are already well-known. Their memoirs give readers the story straight from the source. But why do people read memoirs by the likes of Augustus Burroughs or James Frey whose stories, not always true, are ones of dysfunction involving drug, alcohol, or child abuse?

The literary agents interviewed in the July/August 2010 issue of Writer’s Digest claim not to be interested in such books. “I’m sick of dysfunctional family stories,” says Mollie Glick of Foundry Literary and Media. Sharlene Martin of Martin Literary Management thinks that “every therapist in the country who is dealing with addicts of one kind or another has told them to journal their recovery and then turn it into a book.” But somebody is selling these books to publishers and somebody is reading them because tales of dysfunction dominate the memoir genre. What do these agents look for in a memoir?

Laney Katz Baker wants “a fresh story, told in a unique voice. I want the writer’s personality to ooze through the pages. I expect the writing to come to life.” Byrd Leavell wants “Aggressive, confident, well-written prose. . . “

The problem I have with their advice is that it doesn’t describe most of the books already out there, most of which do not make me want to turn the page. They make me want to put the book down and turn on the TV instead. Repeatedly, these agents speak of how desirable it is to represent a writer with a “platform,” a ready made shortcut to promoting their book. “An Internet presence is very helpful,” says Jeff Kleinman of foliolit.com. “If you have 300,000 followers, you’ll find it much easier to get a book deal than if you have three.” Leavell recommends that writers “Put great content up on a website, and then find a way to start drawing people to read it. It’s no secret that publishers want writers who are adept at creating fans. Prove that you are one of them.”

These are “experts,” of course, so perhaps I’m an arrogant fool to challenge them, but if a writer has great content on a website that people can read free of charge, why would anyone buy that writer’s book? The advice these agents give makes it clear that their interest is in books that sell. Less important is the quality, unless you believe Mollie Glick who says, “If you’ve got an amazing story to tell and you write well, that’s enough for me.”

Writer’s Digest may not be the most trustworthy source for information, anyway. Its pages are filled with ads for MFA programs, print-on-demand publishers, writers workshops, and manuscript coaches. But who is teaching the Master’s level course in Creative Writing? Writers who can’t make a living writing, that’s who. The same is true of the writers teaching in community colleges. And who, other than a writer struggling to survive, offers his editing or ghostwriting services to writers with less experience? And yet, they must be successful if they can afford display ads in the back pages of a popular magazine. Robert McKee is successful, too, holding seminars on how to write a screenplay despite having only one professional credit of his own on IMDb: an episode of Murder, She Wrote. The world is full of hucksters who know the truth of P.T. Barnum’s statement that there’s a sucker born every minute. These days, most of those suckers are writing books.

© 2012 Brian W. Fairbanks

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