Murder Inc.

The best essay ever written on "our veterans."

Occasion of Sin

Eve of Destruction

Uomo D'onore

The great Dr. Michael Parenti, from late 2007.

Neat

Capitalism is Your Friend

Adagietto

Atone This, Motherfuckers

Why Not?

Happy New Year

October

If one would ask how the monumental can be tender, October in New York is the answer. Her wood and asphalt and brick skin becomes luminous in any pale light ~ it also reflects the shadow of the rock, recalling us to the brutal and to the awesome: New York in such shadow on a sunny day, the glass of her eyes has the blue of the sea. Days and nights slow down, people seem ready to recognize others, before the Transfiguration of Christmas.

New York October, when the magnificent blue sky glows like sapphire, after the sun sets. Streams and ponds and lakes of water flash blue. Great lines of silver-grey poplars rise and make avenues ~ or airy grey quadrangles ~ across the Park, their top boughs spangled with gold-and-green leaf. Sometimes gold-and-red, a patterning. A bigness ~ and nothing to restrain the romantic spirit. . .

Revolutionary Hero, RIP

Murdered by the Chosen Nazis, of course -- yet isn't that an insult to German Nazis? After all, Adolf Hitler was the leader of a (once) great, deep, and very human civilization; while Israel 76 years on is (and always has been) nothing but a bag of genocidal gangster shit. Plus, Hitler never approved targeted assassinations against his political or military enemies, feeling that it was dirty pool. And there were countries then who (Yemen aside) actually tried to destroy Satanic Genociders.

Not now.

Wanted for Treason (and Murder)

Why murder him? What did he? By what right? Who told you to?

-- Racine

Released to co-conspirator Lyndon Baines Johnson 60 years ago today: the Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy -- the Warren Report. A death gas in book form, the Report (more accurately titled the Dulles Report) attacked what wasn't destroyed of the American spirit by the Dealey Plaza gunmen of 11/22/63; and finished it off. The Report carried out its two functions superbly: 1) allowing Kennedy's murderers to go free and undetected; 2) making sure nothing public and governmental would ever be believed again, weakening public power and allowing private tyranny to take over all American life. A takeover now complete.

We turn again to documentarian Shane O'Sullivan. Here, O'Sullivan and researcher Douglas Horne expose the most gruesome element of the Warren/Dulles malignancy, the medical cover-up.

You Don't Know What Love Is. . .

John Coltrane does. Happy Autumn in New York.

Roll Call

Heaven

Remembering 9/11

Fifty-one years ago today, the US national security state murdered Chile's President, overthrew his elected Workers/Socialist government, and installed a fascist corporate totalitarian state which now seems to've been the future model for the USA itself. Under the business dictatorship headed by mass murderer Augusto Pinochet -- hero to Ronald Reagan and the Milton Friedman School of Economics -- tens of thousands were murdered or forced to flee their land, hundreds of thousands were imprisoned and tortured.

In memory.

Benn

One of the great Socialist leaders of the 20th-century, very much the real thing.

So unlike what we see on our screens today. . .

Vanished

The decade began with John Fitzgerald Kennedy; it ended with Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Yet -- compared to the political cesspool we're all drowning in today, a cesspool which has spat up the most loathsome and criminal candidates in United States history, the Presidential campaigns of those years clearly retain a connection between what Americans voted for and what they got. Yes, American politics even in the best of times was mostly a war among (usually hidden) elites, yet previously with enough cracks in the system to allow for true citizen influence. Now the cracks are all paved over -- Endgame, the moment totalitarian corporatists have been moving toward since November 1980: a world with an absolute connection between wealth and political influence; a world with no connection between public needs and public policy. How tragic the American Democratic Experiment will soon be, less than 250 years after it began, in the most total of totalitarian states, one where the air we breathe, the water we drink, the hopes and dreams we have for our children will all be commodified. . .

But not then, not yet. Theodore H. White was the establishment's favorite political reporter during the Sixties, most certainly because none of his books mention 1950s culture and the sexualization of what was pretty neutral stuff pre-rock and pre-TV, nothing about the rise of the military-industrial-intelligence complex, nothing about the Dulles Brothers(et al), nothing about the vast nationalist movements across the world, nothing about the militarization of the society, nothing about the rise of the Western Cowboy economies (space, oil, weapons, big agriculture), nothing about class, nothing about capitalism itself or corporations (the words "capitalism / corporation" are not mentioned in any of his four books, totaling more than 2,000 pages), and nothing about the slow takeover of media by the corporate war state. His Making of the President series are fables about good men and bad men struggling to succeed in a system recognizable in the front pages of the New York Times, as well as from all elementary school books. As are the television documentaries made from White's volumes. . .

Produced by David Wolper, financed by Xerox, narrated by Martin Gabel, the movies are shadowless, from a time when the shadows were sometimes dominated by the light.

1960

1964

The Campaign.

The Democratic Convention's moving tribute to the removed leader.

1968

When We Were Men

Harlem, 1959.

Changing the World

 

Like the greatest novels, or paintings, or pieces of music, Kiarostami's films have an intellectual weight, an emotional intensity and a truthfulness that give them almost an intimidating quality. Rigorous, but lively, austere, but not ascetic, his films are both of the world and apart from it, accepting of what is beautiful in life and critical of everything false and cruel. The experience of Taste of Cherry does not end when one exits the cinema, as is the case with the majority of films, even many so-called art films. The work continues to inspire thoughts and feelings, to challenge one intellectually and morally, for days, perhaps forever. This is the sort of film that changes people.

-- David Walsh

 Taste of Cherry (1997).

Good Boys, Good Girls

Four shorts from the great Abbas Kiarostami.

Bread and Alley (1970)

Experience (1973)

Two Solutions for One Problem (1975)

The Chorus (1982)

Husband and Wife

"Ray Murdock's X-Ray," one of the best episodes from The Dick Van Dyke Show. And what a beautiful series it is, maybe the best ever: kind, gracious, graceful, elegant, very funny, modest, super smart, humane -- with (like the time of the show itself) always the good speaking.

At the center of the series is the loveliest and most realistic of TV marriages. Rob and Laura Petrie truly are the "marrying kind" -- and both are taken, by each other. End of discussion.

Flesh and Blood

Dex

The richest character ever played by the greatest movie actor of all time ~ in The Philadelphia Story (1940), C.K. Dexter-Haven embodies everything: weakness, sympathy, anger, tension, joy, sorrow, addiction, fear, freedom, elegance, bravery, secrets and remarkable openness. Above all, naturalness. He has been destroyed by the woman he loves, to the point of collapse and alcohol sickness. In a movie of astonishing self-aborption, Dexter-Haven absorbs all. He is always listening and watching, off the edge of the frame, humanizing all around him with his generous-hearted presence. He is never not sorrowful in the picture, while bringing the only joy into this otherwise arch and joyless romp. Everything is elevated by his broken ardor. His physical grace and attraction are immense, yet he uses his powers to put others at ease, to relinquish control. Grant's love comes at us slowly, like a slow dark wave. Yet always in perfect isolated darkness, outside the world.

Here are Dex's 46 minutes, with all the rest of The Philadelphia Story cut out.

 

The Last Liberal

50 years ago today, Richard Nixon said goodbye.

Was he the last man standing against corporate totalitarianism and the complete political takeover by the National Security State (yes, on the backs of millions of dead Southeast Asians)?

Three views.

And Chris Floyd's masterpiece essay.

Fear

Perhaps the most renowned and surely one of the funniest episodes of The Bob Newhart Show:  "Death Be My Destiny" from February '77.

Stop It!

Christmas: Bob

Tinsel, snow, eggnog, stockings, ham and Newhart! "No Room at the Inn" from December '82.

Strange Dickie Loudon

A very favorite Newhart, from February of '88.

True Heart

Bob Newhart died July 18th, at the age of 94. One of the great American talents of the 20th-century. RIP

================================================================

He was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1929 -- the second (and only son) of four (mostly) Irish-Catholic children. After stateside military service during the Korean War, he became an accountant, quit one year later. Then gave us this:

The first comedy album to hit Billboard's #1.

As Fred Astaire is the Mozart of American dance, Bob Newhart is the Astaire of American comedy. Dry, smooth, informal, light, perfect -- Newhart's is a comedy unpressured by extraneous events, by social hierarchy, by Attitude. Like Astaire, he was a master craftsman who required total control over his albums, television shows, and live appearances. His delivery is miraculously low-key, elegant, yet somehow omnipotent: he is the only one with pure moral clarity, the only one who sees the world as it truly is. This leaves him, of course, generally on the outside of the joke. But not always. . .

His first television series was called The Bob Newhart Show, one-hour of weekly variety that would win an Emmy and a Peabody, and would promptly be cancelled.

Following cancellation, he did a hysterical turn in Don Siegel's goofy Hell is for Heroes (1962).

A new variety show beckoned, The Entertainers in '64.

Then he got into some trouble, with Bob Newhart Faces Bob Newhart: for joking about giving birth, Adolf Hitler, and poodle poop. How times have changed. . .

During our transition from the open vistas of '67 and '68 to Richard the Undertaker, Newhart appeared in Hot Millions (1968), Vincente Minnelli's On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970), Catch-22 (1970), and Norman Lear's flat comedy about cigarette smoking, Cold Turkey (1971).

Then came Dr. Bob Hartley. The Bob Newhart Show (1972-78) is as legendary and beloved as is the CBS Saturday night dream line-up it was part of: All in the Family (8:00pm), M*A*S*H (8:30), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (9:00), Bob (9:30), The Carol Burnett Show (10:00). (Saturday night? Wasn't the 70s the Swing Decade?) Among the group, it is the most unique and least dated: laconic and shapely, it has none of the righteousness, nothing of the sweet tooth of its time. There are many brilliant episodes. Yet it is less great than its future competitor Newhart. There's a strange over-focus on professional status, a pre-Yuppie-ism years before that plague would infect us all. (Newhart's 80s greatness partly lies in its enchanted disgust with all things Yuppie.) And Suzanne Pleshette gives Newhart sex -- and that's a problem here. Again like Astaire, Bob Newhart's genius is apart from sex: self-contained and abstract, he needs a partner transparent, someone who can drape him (as does Rogers, as does Mary Frann) with the insides or outsides of the joke. The dark, passionate, and incomparable Pleshette is far from transparent.

One of the loveliest and funniest episodes of the 70s series holds Newhart's classical combination of grace, astonishment, and kindness in perfect balance. The final show of Season Four stars his good friend Tom Poston (as The Peeper), from February 1976.

Newhart (1982-90) is his masterpiece -- a sort of necromantic world where the dead are all dear oddballs and innkeeper Dick Louden a ghost apart. (How appropriate it would end as a dream.) Imagine the moments in Bringing Up Baby when Grant and Hepburn are led by leopard Baby into the midsummer's night of Connecticut -- with the heavy Hawks touch replaced by a gentler, kinder hand; and the bedroom communities of Connecticut turned into a Vermont of the mind. In Vermont Bob Newhart's surreal astonishments take flight apart from the weightiness of Chicago. Here the weather is magical, not restricting. There are no Bulls, Cubs, or Bears. No trains, elevators, or moo goo gai pan. There are woodsmen and bell-towers, the prettiest clown in the world and a runaway heiress. And it leaves him, and us, generous-hearted, without ballast. Here, we laugh with Newhart, never really at him, or at others, no matter how unknowing they might be. Despite his moral clarity, we never laugh from a height above, always at about the same level as the folks in the story. Everyone does indeed have their reasons.

Bob at the center on the outside looking in: "Co-Hostess Twinkie" from September 1986.

But sometimes, the world comes to him. From October '86, "Dick the Kid"

There were two more series in the 90s: Bob (1992-93), a 33-episode wonderment where Newhart plays a comic book creator working for a quadruply-merged company called AmCanTranConComCo (it is great and I so wish there were episodes available to show); and a real thud named George & Leo (1997-98) teaming him up with the ever-obnoxious Judd Hirsch(!).

We come full circle. In between the two failures, Newhart did an HBO special featuring his classic material, fresher than ever.

Beside Astaire, there is also something of Fitzgerald in Bob Newhart, a personal style which promises it would be sacrilege to give offense in a social situation, and in part the manner of Irish elegance: that a man must be caught dead before he takes himself seriously. It was Fitzgerald, after all, who first suggested that one could become the nicest man in the world. . .

Unbuttoned

My original "True Heart" post should've included the PBS American Masters tribute from '05. The 2005 Bob isn't looking his best, but the show itself is dynamite.

Lost Prince

Twenty-five years ago today, the disappearance of John F. Kennedy Jr. changed the emotional color of New York City almost as much as did 9/11 two years later. And it was another notch on the murder-belt of the American National Security State. At the time of Kennedy's death, he was about to announce his run for the United States Senate (challenging Hillary Clinton) while paralleling an investigation (via his magazine George) into the assassination of his father.

We do not know what would have come from either venture. But we do know it was murder.

Sacrament

In honor of its 25th-Anniversary release, a re-post.

(25 years on, Eyes Wide Shut remains the last great English-language movie.)

*

When Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut opened in the summer of '99 -- on the day JFK Jr's airplane disappeared -- it was greeted by both New York's movie press and the Arts & Leisure section wad with overwhelming hoots and derision. And by walkouts. (In my theater, people actually cheered the walkouts.) It would be gone from the city within a month. The dumping came from two directions. The (seemingly) promised on-screen sex between its then-married co-stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman did not happen. And the movie was derided as being wholly out of touch with fin de siècle Manhattan reality -- unlike say Friends, Seinfeld, Sex in the City, and the stillborn Talk Magazine. After all, the director (who had died several months before the film's premiere) had not even been to New York City since 1968.

As it never is in a Kubrick film, time has been very kind. Eyes Wide Shut, if not the greatest English language movie of its decade, is certainly (the only?) great work of movie art dealing with the malignant rot at the center of Manhattan's Clinton/Giuliani go-go 90s; and a work which opens the door to what was to come: the stake driven through the city's heart by the Overworld vampires now in complete control. (See Epstein, Jeffrey.)

Yet the awesomeness of Kubrick's final achievement is less sociological in nature (more of a sideshow actually) than in the absolute concentration on the movie's real subject: the sufferings and confusions of a decent man's soul caused by the purity of his marital commitment.

*

Doctor to the Overworld Bill Harford (Cruise) lives with wife Alice (Kidman) and 7-year-old daughter Helena in a Central Park West apartment about the size of a floor at Saks. After coming home from a rather bizarre Christmas party at the Madison Avenue mansion of Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), Alice confesses to Bill, while both are stoned, lusts for other men heretofore unimagined by her stunned husband. A call comes in for the doctor -- an elderly patient has died. While visiting the bereaved daughter of the deceased, thinking of little else but Alice's confession, the daughter (Marie Richardson) confesses her love for Bill. Escaping from the inevitable confrontation back home, toward a nightclub called Sonata, a place featuring his former co-medical student / turned jazz pianist buddy Nick Nightingale, Bill is assaulted by a gang of toughs, then picked up by a street hooker. At her degraded, cramped place (the bathtub is in the kitchen), he receives a cell-call from Alice, does not have sex with the hooker, but before leaving pays her anyway. At the Sonata Cafe, Nightingale's last club set has just ended -- but Nick has a later date, one requiring him to pronounce a password for entrance: Fidelio. Intrigued, and again not wanting to return to Alice, Bill convinces Nick to reveal the location of the engagement and, it turns out, the dress code: elegant costume, cape, and mask. Arriving at a costumer's who was a former patient, for it is now two o'clock in the morning -- now under new ownership as the former patient has moved away; with the new owner demanding $200 over rental price for his middle-of-the-night troubles -- Bill finds what he's looking for; and more. Appearing at a Glen Cove, LI château with password, cape, tuxedo, and mask, Harford finds inside ballrooms worthy of Lubitsch, filled with ritual, mystery, incense, chanting, a blind-folded Nick Nightingale, and hundreds of other caped, masked people -- and sex: the most beautiful women of New York City. But Bill, asked for a second password by a man who seems to be a Satanic priest, is unmasked. And demanded, under threat of death, to get naked. A masked girl comes to his rescue. "Take me instead" she declares, unasked. Now warned, Harford leaves. Back at Central Park West -- now past 4:00am -- he checks on his sleeping daughter, then hides his party garb inside a locked cabinet. In his bedroom, he comes upon a laughing Alice -- in the throes of nightmare. He wakes her up and listens to her dream: one even more savage and wounding toward him than that night's earlier confession.

Next morning, Harford's obsession starts to split: debilitation caused by Alice's confession and nightmare; fear rising over the condition of his masked party savior, and others. He discovers Nightingale's hotel, goes there, and is told that Nick has checked out, at 5:00am, bruised and flanked by two big scary guys: Nick even tried to hand the desk clerk a letter, but was stopped. Harford drives back to the Long Island château and is greeted by an old man who hands him a letter -- a second warning to stop poking around, to forget what he saw and heard the night before. Bill does not. Flipping back, Harford calls the home of Marion Nathanson, his dead patient's daughter, but hangs up when Marion's boyfriend Carl answers the telephone. Harford returns his costume to the costume store, and the owner offers up his adolescent daughter for Bill to use, if interested. But the mask is missing. Bill returns to the hooker's apartment -- this time no call from Alice will stop them. But Domino is not there. Her even-lovelier roommate Sally is. But no. She cannot take the chance, for she thinks Bill and Domino were together last night, and that morning Domino found out she is HIV-positive. Bill leaves. And is now being followed. Buying a newspaper, falling into a coffee shop, still afraid to go home, he reads of an "ex-beauty queen" rushed to hospital because of "an apparent drug overdose." Could this be his savior from last night? At her hospital, he learns the girl has died. Seeing her in morgue, he realizes it is the girl from the château. Leaving the hospital, he receives a call requesting a return visit to Victor Ziegler's mansion. In Ziegler's gaming room, he's told by his host that he was also at the château last night. Ziegler saw everything. Although told nothing but lies by Ziegler -- the girl really did OD by herself, Nightingale is safe and sound back home in Seattle, Domino's disappearance really was caused by panic over her HIV condition -- Harford gets it. The Overworld's mask is at last, for a moment, for the doctor, allowed to slip.

Bill returns home. On his bedroom pillow, next to the sleeping wife, is the missing mask. He begins to cry. She awakens. Harford promises to her tell her everything. Next morning, Christmas shopping with their little girl at FAO Schwarz, Bill and Alice Harford decide to stay together. For now. The story ends with her one-word suggestion as to what they should both now do.

*

It is an astonishingly classical work -- in its operatic, silent-film formalism, often with the beauty of stained-glass windows; in its stillness and awe. Its narrative unwinds as a ribbon of mass-like Mystery tableaux -- the Glorious, the Joyful, the Luminous, the Sorrowful -- where story is not hidden (far from it): it is drenched with secret meaning. And it is a thoroughly conservative work, rejecting not only its own post-modern time, but perhaps much of the 20th Century as well. Along with complaints about its lack of hotness and about Kubrick's late-90s irrelevance, there were the tired old Kaelian remarks about coldness and nihilism. Far from being a cold movie, Eyes Wide Shut is an extraordinarily emotional one, stripped naked in its (beyond physical) revelations, and deeply generous-hearted toward its main character (if not to undeserving others, such as Alice) -- a main character whose consciousness controls each frame. In this way, the movie's classicism is reversed. Most great works of the past century have a female's suffering heart at their center. Here the man's isolated love is the crucified.

 *

At first, there is his distraction, his auto-pilot bedside manner -- easy smile, the quip, a warm compliment as he hurries, not too fast, through the Harfords' spectacle of an apartment, on his way with the wife to a black-tie Christmas party. "Honey? You seen my wallet?" No doubt she has. Over-decorated and tomb-like, as if the Soho art gallery the wife had been working at (until the place went bankrupt) had been transplanted uptown, now like a box around them. . . He imagines. The music we hear (Shostakovich's "Waltz 2") is his music, playing on his bedroom stereo, then turned off: is the early shot of their Central Park West apartment front a piece of his self-satisfaction, imaged? The titles' strip-shot (as Kubrick taunts our voyeurism) of Alice removing her black chemise surely is. Yet the disconnect: the husband and wife, the father and mother, going through motions, between themselves, toward Helena their girl and Helena's babysitter. But for the magical Christmas tree, here the colors and feelings are in a minor key.

Smugness continues by all, entering the Christmas party home of Victor Ziegler. He actually lives here? For it is a place -- depopulated but for party guests; and the sinister male aides prowling the floors -- belonging to the Breakers. Clearly, a modern Vanderbilt, one married to pretty much what one would expect -- a plasticized Lady Who Lunches. No wonder Victor Ziegler is a poonhound. And no wonder the glibness, as the Harfords greet the Zieglers, as they drift into drinking and dancing. First up: "I'm in the Mood for Love." Party rooms filled with golden light like a Moselle, decanted, strangely, on a wave of vibrant melancholy.

Finally an engagement. Bill Harford has spotted an old friend from medical school. Playing the piano at Ziegler's party? He wants to say hello as Alice does not. So they part, leaving her to her first (and only) encounter.

Harford with Nick Nightingale is hale and hearty, solicitous toward his friend's life and past. He will keep his promise to come hear Nick at the Sonata. (Under unimagined circumstances.) Her meeting with the Hungarian Count (played by Sky du Mont as a vampirish Louis Jourdan) is something else again. If it's possible to have public sex -- under the watchful eye of Nightingale -- without having public sex, married Alice does. Yet Bill, returning to the party, is now on the arms of two beyond-belief models. "Where exactly are we going? Exactly?" he asks with a beautiful laugh. "Where the rainbow ends. . ." says the taller girl. No, he's not going there. Even without the interruption of the threesome's journey by Ziegler's main man-prick.

Bill's called to an upstairs bathroom, where he finds a just-fucked Victor Ziegler re-dressing; and a sex goddess near death, from an overdose of heroin and cocaine. The doctor does not ask, yet the movie (and therefore Harford) makes us wonder: How did she OD? Did she shoot up during sex? Before or after? Did Ziegler shoot her up? Her name is Mandy, short for Amanda, as we will later learn. (She looks somewhat like a ripe, full-bodied version of Alice.) Bill's manner with her is tender and consoling. Ziegler just wants her dumped, out of his mansion/mausoleum damn quick. No, says the doctor. Just between us guys, right Bill? Oh, yeah. . .

Yet for Harford, for us, the Ziegler Christmas party is Christmas: glitter, glamour, good cheer, warmth, elegance, harmless (mostly) flirtation, comradeship (on the main floor his hail-fellow-well-met with Nightingale, upstairs his saving of Ziegler), comfort toward the speedballed call girl. And the swooning romanticism with which Bill surrounds Alice: "I'm in the Mood for Love," "It Had to Be You," "When I Fall in Love (It Will Be Forever)," "Blame It on My Youth". . . Colors and feelings in a major key.

Back home, we get the work's only erotic scene, between husband and wife, 50 seconds long, set to Chris Isaak. He is so into her. She's into the mirror.

Montage of an average Harford day, leading us toward one of the most emotionally sadistic and malevolent sequences in movie history. The wife and husband get high. For her, the curtains open. She sets the trap. She accuses him of fucking the two models at the Christmas party. What? he says. She then gets hissy when Bill mentions that, of course the Hungarian count would want to fuck her. What man wouldn't? (Offense taken at this by someone who does little but push her sex-look.) But he trusts her. . . because she's his wife and because, yes, she's a woman.

"Remember Cape Cod last summer?" she asks, as the trap is sprung. "Remember the young Naval Officer at the next table?" No, he does not.

Alice does.

And it breaks his heart. And his balls. As intended. Her sadism is total, for it includes within it the sop of tenderness.

The phone rings. Lou Nathanson has died. She doesn't care. He must go.

The miraculous Marie Richardson plays Nathanson's grieving daughter, Marion. (That same year she would be Gertrud, in a Swedish television production of the Soderberg play.) Marion is more than grieving when Bill arrives. She's expectant, fretful. His bedside manner is in full consoling bloom here -- in the midst of his torture. Both their tortures.

She is mad for him -- older and more worn-looking than Alice, she is much warmer, more engaged, selfless in her love, far less self-contained: indeed more beautiful. Her kiss of him is full and wet, full of heart, giving herself up and trying to take his. Even if she never sees him again, she says, she will be happy just to live near him. Gertrud indeed. And yes, she does know what she is saying. An enormous doorway, to a loving woman's heart, opens. He -- in torment -- will not walk through it. And when her boyfriend Carl, a math professor, shows up -- he's a taller, bespectacled version of Bill. The heart does indeed want what it wants. . .

Outside now, leaving Marion to the affections of Carl, Harford's sexual doubts and fears appear everywhere. Hot kissing in the streets. Physical and verbal assault from a drunken Bay Ridge gang fresh from a strip club night. But there's a hooker named Domino, who invites him upstairs, to her coldwater flat. "Cozy," Bill says. They kiss and the call comes in from Alice. "What time are you coming home?" The last place he wants to be. But he must leave. He pays the girl. Here Cruise makes us feel that even without the interrupting call, he would not have gotten down.

At the Sonata Cafe -- where he reunites with Nick Nightingale, to the sound of "If I Had You," and where we learn the Harfords have been married for nine years and of Nick's four sons back in Seattle -- the chance to heal his suppurating sexual wounds arrives: anything to close them. In a work of enormous visual beauty (the whole movie seems enthralled), the Sonata interior is perhaps its peak. The cafe glows with a sort of holiness. Kubrick's colors (he was his own DP) are intensely present, like a host of angels in rapture. The air is luminous, the illumination of the lights like the rose chill of winter morn. Christmas morning. When have we seen such intensity? In the bluish shadows, the back and side-lighting of both men. In the mystery of their interactions. A transfiguration, as Harford learns the password: Fidelio. Beethoven's famous celebration of wifely loyalty.

Along with a password comes costume and mask. To find one, he goes to the end of the rainbow, at warehouse-sized Rainbow Costumes. Bill dredges through sleaze and is made part of an act: witness to the outrage pretended by store owner Milich (Rade Serbedzija) when Milich finds his adolescent daughter (Leelee Sobieski) having sex with two Japanese men dressed in women's underwear and make-up.

On to the party. He travels by taxi across bridges and highways, through small holiday towns, into woods dark and deep -- all the while seeing only Alice and her navy officer. A (literally) Rothschildian country house appears. A place guarded by two men. Bill gives them the password. And we see the luminous mansion fronted by a lot filled with Bentleys, limos, and many Rolls.

The titillation Bill Harford hopes to find there is non-existent; while the terror of his wife's sexual nature is severely deepened (as it will be deepened again, to the point of collapse, when he returns home). His love for her is so great that he's willing to ride the rapids of her lust. What he finds, instead, is ritualized, de-eroticized sex. Sex as ceremony, as masked mass, with all the involvement of a tourist taking snapshots, now from this angle, now from that, with no kinetic relation to the spectacle itself. An alienation -- a dry, chilled distance -- a newborn loathing toward the female body. So his scent goes out. . . sensed by a man upstairs, who meets his eyes -- the man and his female companion strangely reminiscent in mask of Milich and daughter. Harford is also sensed by a masked beauty who takes him away to warn him. He must leave now, she says. We see a blindfolded Nick Nightingale, being forcibly led away. The last time we see him.

It is too late. Bill's asked for a second password, one he does not know. He is unmasked and demanded to take off his clothes. The masked Goddess appears: "Let him go. Take me. I am ready to redeem him." She does; and he doesn't even know her name.

Now past 4:00am, Bill arrives home and checks on his sleeping daughter. Then hides the Fidelio costume inside the cabinet. (Does he not destroy it in hopes of a future château visit?) Trying very hard not to awaken his sleeping succubus, he fails.

That night's attempted sexual adventures, desperately taken to heal the rips in his heart and mind, have also failed. They have led him only to further humiliation. And worse. Now, in her telling of her nightmare -- how could she tell him, coming off the Navy Man confession? (how could she not?) -- her destruction of him is total. A destruction he seems strangely eager to receive. And there is nothing.

The completeness of Bill's love (without stain) for Alice is now blocked. His obsession now splits: terror felt for his wife's fidelity; fears for others' safety and well-being -- and his new sense of the evil supporting him, (literally) feeding him. He awakens early to see if Nick is safe. As we see him do many times through the work (Nick is his patient, and Amanda, and the costume store owner), the doctor lies about his relationship to the person he seeks, in order to find him or her; usually implying he has some bad news to report, as he implies to a waitress at the coffee shop next to the Sonata Cafe. She tells him of Nick's hotel and Bill goes there.

The mincing hotel desk clerk (Alan Cumming) -- a flame, as they say -- has bought in completely to the surrounding sexual totalitarianism: he defines himself and relates to others wholly via his sexual identity; and, by the last shot we see of him, to despair and misery. He tells of Nightingale's kidnapping at 5:00am (about the time Alice was revealing her nightmare), of Nick's fear and the bruise on Nick's face. Of the official order not to touch or give away any of Nick's mail. Harford returns to Milich at Rainbow Costumes. The mask is missing, but Milich's daughter is there. For a price. "I thought you were going to call the police," Bill says about what he saw the night before. "We have come to a new arrangement," says the father.

He revisits Somerton, the château deep in the woods. To save something, someone. To understand. To still his panic over the girl who saved him, over Nick. Or perhaps to reassure his tormentors. No ease or safety. Or knowledge. Instead a warning, this time in a letter. No place to go, he returns to Central Park West. Finding them doing homework at the dining room table, he quickly tells Alice and Helena that he must leave soon for an appointment. He gets a beer from the kitchen; he begins to watch them. He begins to hear Alice's nightmare, and to see images (again and again) of her confession. An idea is born: Is his daughter really his? (The paternity fear underscored by Alice's Naval Officer looking a lot like Helena.)

It is too much for him. He flips back. The appointment that night is his return to the desolate suite of doctors' offices where he works, to sit alone and again to see Alice. He makes a call, to Marion Nathanson. Answered by Carl, Bill hangs up. He goes back, bringing pastry, to the hooker's apartment. This time, Harford will cheat, to escape his panic. But Domino is also now missing, says the beautiful roommate, who is not available: Domino is HIV-positive and that's why she's missing, but we wonder: Bill visited her after Victor Ziegler's party. Has Domino been eliminated as well?

Now he's being followed. All around him hangs a late-90s Manhattan of elegant sleaze. He buys a New York Post with a LUCKY TO BE ALIVE front page blare, and falls into a nearby coffee shop to hide, from his pursuer and from the wife. He reads: a former "Miss New York," returning to her apartment at 4:00am, was found ODed. Two men were seen entering with her. The NYPD would like to speak with those men. Harford rushes to the named hospital. But Amanda Curran has died. Bill visits her corpse in the morgue. It is the same girl. She died to save him. What to do now?

A call comes in to his cell. Can he see Victor Ziegler that night? He'll be there in 20 minutes.

At the depopulated mansion, inside the ominous and monumental game room, Ziegler greets him with cheer, a drink, an invitation to shoot pool, and an offer to send Bill a case of beautiful 25-year-old scotch. Who is this man? What is he? How can he live in this crystal-and-marble palace in the midst of Manhattan? (Actually the Polish Consulate at 37th & Madison.) A monster, for sure. But of what kind? A Jamie Dimon sort? Mort Zuckerman? Donald Trump? Rupert Murdoch? Perhaps Ralph Lauren or Carl Icahn. We don't know or care. In this deeply classical work, Kubrick throws out (but for a meaningless line or two) all the swill currently taught as "backstory" -- here there is a higher reach of imagining than the factual or merely psychological. What we do know is how Ziegler lays out the choice for Bill Harford and for us. Forget and move on. Or death. Forget and ignore: his doubts about Helena's paternity, about Milich and the daughter, about Nightingale, about Domino, about Amanda Curran, about Alice's confession and nightmare. In return, he gets sex, comfort, pleasure, safety. Forget about the victims. We get something else as well. Sex = the numbing of the knowledge of evil. Is it possible there's an inverse relation between a society's sexual openness and license; and its empathy, communalism, heart, and sweetness? We now have eyes wide open for physical titillation, yet unseeing toward evil and the eating of others. Sex, work, parties, other people's deaths and much more -- keeping us blind.

Bill Harford finds the mask, on his pillow next to the dozing wife. To go forward with comfort, joy, marriage, fatherhood, and work, he must put it back on. He does; and breaks down. "I'll tell you everything" he weeps to the awakened wife. But what, we wonder, is there for him to tell? Lots. But not what she wants to hear. He mea culpas about his straying and his bad thoughts. Not about how he tried to find and protect the victims. Not about his knowledge. Not how he resisted temptation at every turn. He did not destroy his partner's heart and soul -- twice. She did. But now he will tell her everything. . . What choice does he have, but to lose it all? So he clings for now. When we see them both the next morning, he's like a naughty boy before his succubus, a succubus so upset over his reactions to her savagery and malevolence. Owning none of it.

Christmas shopping with their daughter at FAO Schwarz, now firmly back under her (and others') control, he begs. For him, he's sure. For him -- when he falls in love, it will be forever. For her -- not sure. For her -- forever? She laughs. But there is one thing she's sure about, one thing they must immediately do together:

Fuck.

Fuck her.

*

Is the movie unfair to Alice Harford? Perhaps. But her urban type (of all genders) was -- and is -- legion, as common and dominant to our social (especially marital) culture as Bill Harford moves toward -- then finally rejects -- the uncommon. And therefore, she is vastly less interesting.

It is Cruise's movie. And he is great. Then at the top of his A-List power, he carries us with him through what is 160 minutes of humiliation and, at last, subjugation. Slick and glib, elegant and dashing, superficially corrupt, by turns a liar and a sneak, Cruise's Bill Harford becomes a man racing between separate madnesses, like a car picking its route through the collision of other cars, in a rush toward sacramental Grace. He fails at the end, yet the movie is more than a hymn of despair. Harford's (and Kubrick's) Stations of the Cross is also a hymn of belief, hope, and transcendence. A genuine compassion does come out of his wounds and terror: for his daughter, Nick, Domino, Amanda. Even if he allows Alice, and a desire for his former safety, to close it over, perhaps temporarily.

Isolated beyond time -- like so many of his movie characters -- within his British estate, Stanley Kubrick sensed our savage, sexed-up future -- one increasingly driven by power, pleasure, and privilege psychotically divorced from talent, brains, ability to love, compassion, empathy, community, respect, courage, love of the earth, or a sense of the past. As Kubrick bids farewell to his art form (his intended 1:37 to 1 aspect ratio was impossible to project in all but few 1999 theaters [fewer still today], so even the movie itself had to be "masked" -- projected at 16:9 with the top and bottom of the frames lopped off -- but not here) and to the century that gave it birth, Bill Harford says farewell to the purity of his marriage and his life. We're left, with him, with eyes half-closed (or half-open). He does close over, having now eaten the apple, continuing on with his fractured, deeply compromised life. Or does he, after we leave him, turn and walk through the open doorway, toward courage and deeper knowledge; and the darkness, isolation, and death that come with them? Will Ziegler and his associates leave him be? How many nights will Harford wake up feeling that winded worried heart-fatigue, wondering how they are going to pay him back in return? How will fucking still that?

Questions this great work of art poses for us, for our century. Twenty-five years after its release, they have been so far, at least for New York, definitively answered.

The century is young.

Mortal

"That little Kennedy -- he thought he was a God." -- Allen Dulles

It was 104 degrees that June 1963 day, and the President of the United States is dressed for graduation. John F. Kennedy -- the most powerful man in the world -- makes a speech calling for the rejection of power, the rejection of domination and demonizing: he calls for quiet, thoughtfulness, empathy and compassion. He basically rejects many tenets of the American "character": brutishness, ignorance, aggression, self-justification, the love for war.

And it got him killed.

My gosh, the openness -- almost like a Sermon on the Mount. Where's the security? And how 'bout that guy getting into the dark sedan, obviously late for an important lunch. . . If John F. Kennedy had been alive under Reagan (but then of course there would have been no Reagan), he would've been a Liberation Theologist.

Wizard

The Wizard of Oswald (2013) is Jack Robertson's very funny and very deep reading of almost everything Dallas 1963 -- all done at his computer, showing the complete uselessness of 21st Century police agencies. Robertson's conclusions are a bit jejune and accepting, but Jack the Wizard makes everything so much fun and detailed you won't care at all. . .

Leap

Balanchine's Jewels.

Some Advice for the New Year