Cheap, Twisted, and Extraordinarily Potent "Bulletproof Heart" A Completely Sick Love Story for Valentine's Day

"Bulletproof Heart" 1996. Anthony LaPaglia stars as a mob hit man, Peter Boyle as his contractor, Matt Craven as his drooling sidekick, Mimi Rogers as his mark.

Very stripped down movie. Only (roughly) eight people have any kind of speaking parts. Only four sets.

A noir, of course. You know when you pick up a movie like this, just from looking at the box, even if you couldn't read the blurbs, that it's a noir. He, very unsmiling, has got his black hair slicked back; sultry she is in a low-cut sequined dress; the spotlight is on his big, shiny gun.

It is a B movie. One feature that separates B movies from A's is editing. Someone needed to step in and arrest scenes that went more or less like this: "You have to kill her." "I don't want to kill her." "You have to kill her." "I don't want to kill her."

And someone needed to snip bits where the movie tells rather than shows. LaPaglia is reduced to verbally explaining that he is an amoral hit man, after the movie has already sufficiently shown that he is an amoral hit man. An A movie would have just shown him being an amoral hit man, and skipped the didactic speech explaining what the viewer has just seen.

The direction was thoroughly flatfooted. Director Malone seems to hate three-dimensional space. Actors were placed within it the way figures are placed on ancient altar triptychs. They are in the center of a rectangular frame; they occupy three quarters of the screen; and they are shown full front. Snore. And I never got a sense of any space any character occupied other than that necessary to create the rectangular frame around that rigid composition.

Having said all that, I've gotta say, this movie wrecked me. I cried. I was tremendously moved. I kept thinking of Noel Coward's famous line, "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." There were two hit men, and I identified with – and actually pitied – both of them.

LaPaglia has to kill Mimi Rogers. He arrives at her apartment and a sexual game right out of a Strindberg play begins. Who has the power? Who is afraid of whom? Who is killing whom? Who is resurrecting whom? This all sucked me in. It had genuine tension. Neither overplayed, but you could see the shifts on LaPaglia's face, from amoral hit man to possible prey animal to something entirely other.

I was a bit put off by Mimi Rogers' acting at first. When she wanted to emote, her eyebrows began to jerk and quiver as if they were caterpillars being directed by an offstage wild animal trainer. But she grew on me.

She seduces him. The director did handle the intimate scenes well. If I said I came three times, would that turn this review into something other than an intellectual discussion of a movie? Not knowing the answer to that, I won't say it.

La Paglia and Rogers develop fantastic chemistry. It seems to grow, in a real way, out of their peculiar situation.

La Paglia is given a few chances to deliver the kind of witty and surprising speeches hit men deliver in gangster film noir. They are surprising, of course, because you have this totally exotic creature, a hit man, speaking about banalities we all share, like the boredom that sometimes comes with doing the same work day after day, and surprising because they offer a chance for identification with such an exotic, condemned creature, and surprising because you begin to identify, to see the world through his eyes, "Oh, yeah, if I look at it that way, being a hit man makes perfect sense!" to see how his world and your world aren't so different.

And surprising because you begin to see how his morality could be superior to that of someone who has a more conventionally valorized way of making a living – Mimi Roger's psychiatrist, for example, is shown to be a real sleaze -- and even murderer -- in comparison to LaPaglia.

Rogers and La Paglia begin a dialogue on the worth of human life. And, I gotta tell ya, for all the guns and the really good sex, that's what got me. These dialogues and scenes aroused in me confrontations with my own thoughts and feelings about life, death, murder, suicide, love, the human capacity for regeneration, faith, hope, investment, what we expect / need from people we love … what we need / expect from film noir – a very important question !!! I don't wanna give too much away, here.

There is a genuinely, darkly funny moment when Mimi Rogers shrugs and says, "Men." You have to see the movie, and you'll know what I mean.

This is exactly the kind of movie I think of when I think of people who walk out of movies and drive me crazy by saying something like, "Hey, that was nice. Wanna go get something to eat?" and more or less abort any conversation about the movie. If a date said that to me after this movie, I'd have to be physically restrained. This is the kind of movie I'd have to talk about afterwards. Really, this may sound sacrilegious, but it's the kind of movie that leaves me with a feeling close to reverence – like, after seeing it, I need to inhabit a liminal zone before I segue back into real life. 

Polish-Jewish Relations. Christian-Jewish Relations. The Holocaust. Stereotyping.

Polish peasant by Paul Schutzer. Source

Over at my other blog I've been revisiting my work on Polish-Jewish Relations, Polish-Christian relations, the Holocaust, and stereotyping. 

Below is an essay I wrote almost twenty years ago, now, in response to the PBS Frontline broadcast of Marian Marzynski's film "Shtetl." 

The documentary stereotypes and scapegoats Polish peasants in a way that distorts history. 

Of course it's true that there was anti-Semitism in Poland, and that Poles did sometimes commit atrocities against Jews. One example would be the infamous Kielce pogrom. 

It's completely false and misleading, though, to attribute the Holocaust to Polish peasants. The Holocaust was every bit a product of German Nazis. Nazism victimized Poles as well as Jews, though not in the same degree. To try to rewrite that history is a huge, huge factual and ethical error. 

***

On April 17, 1996, PBS aired Marian Marzynski's documentary of Jewish life in Poland, "Shtetl." Letters to the PBS web page revealed that Poles, Jews, and non-Polish or Jewish Americans reacted to the film very differently. Typical letters included one from a Jewish viewer who said: "This film clearly illustrates the basis for my prejudice toward the Polish People (sic). For many years, I harbored feelings of guilt concerning my opinions of the Polish People. Upon viewing the film, I feel completely absolved … "

An American viewer, neither Polish nor Jewish, wrote: "if the Poles really want to be free … they must learn to admit their terrible contribution to the Holocaust."

A Polish letter-writer voiced fear of "a lynch mob … The world vs Poland." Similar expressions of Polish pain were taken as evidence of an "ingrained" Polish anti-Semitism; that Poles "LIED" (sic).

Marzynski claimed that "a running camera never changes the truth." "The Eternal Jew," an anti-Jewish propaganda film, was also created with a running camera. Can a running camera lie?

Read more »

Big Fun, Big Heart, Old Fashioned "Monuments Men"

"The Monument Men" is a fun, old-fashioned, feel good movie. I walked out of the theater inspired. The movie isn't perfect but its gifts outweigh its flaws.

"The Monument Men" tells the story of a group of art experts recruited by the US armed forces during WW II to ensure that Europe's artistic heritage was not destroyed in the war.

Hitler had been a painter before he became fuhrer. Joseph Goebbels was a novelist. Speer was an architect. Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl did as much to spread Nazism as many troops. Nazis didn't just mass murder human beings. They burned books and paintings. They worked very hard to destroy "decadent" art and to elevate and appropriate art they deemed worthy. Nazis plundered and stockpiled other countries' art. Just the other day, Feburary 6, 2014, art the Nazis stole from Poland was repatriated. In January, 2014, the World Jewish Congress demanded that Germany do a better job of returning art.

There's a long tradition of World War II movies about international, all-star teams of experts uniting to achieve some goal: "The Great Escape," "The Guns of Navarone," "Kelly's Heroes," "Dirty Dozen," "The Longest Day," "A Bridge Too Far." And of course George Clooney is a veteran of the "Oceans" movies.

"The Monument Men" is a little bit WW II team movie, a little bit Oceans. The team members are shown going about their day to day lives when George Clooney shows up and signs them up. The movie is based on a real project, and it plays like the best anecdotes from that project's team members. It's a series of vignettes that aren't particularly coherently connected. Some of the vignettes were not clear to me. Why was Matt Damon suddenly flying in a biplane over Paris at night? It was a pretty scene but I didn't understand how it fit into the rest of the plot. Why was the German-Jewish translator, Sam, suddenly carrying a wounded soldier into a mobile army surgical unit? Who was that soldier? Not sure.

Other vignettes are really gripping, moving, suspenseful, and/or funny. The movie won me over with its depiction of a British art expert's heroic attempt to rescue a Michelangelo Madonna from Belgium. I cried. I was inspired.

There is a funny, scary, sickening scene where a beefy German dentist hammers away at Bill Murray's teeth with a mallet and pliers while Bob Balaban makes provocative commentary about how he bets all the Germans were innocent – not.

There's a powerful scene where Americans are invited to a German home for dinner, and discover that the paintings on the dining room walls are too good to be reproductions.

The movie is flawed. Its editing is choppy. It feels rushed. I got the sense that not enough time was devoted to cast members building bonds with each other. John Goodman and Jean Dujardin are meant to be tight team members, but I saw no real chemistry between them. Not nearly enough time is devoted to fleshing out the all-star cast's characters, or to simple exposition. I'd simply like to know more about everything onscreen, from the Ghent altarpiece to Hitler's Nero decree. I would like to have seen the Nero decree's destruction of art placed into the context of the mass suicides at the end of the war. Hitler's suicide isn't even mentioned in "Monuments Men."

Sam, a GI, is recruited as a German translator. The average moviegoer might have no idea that Sam is Jewish. Sam says, "I'm from NORTH Newark." How many moviegoers know that North Newark was a Jewish neighborhood? Sam says that his grandfather in Germany was not allowed to enter a museum and joked about being barred because he was "too short." The real reason he was barred is that he was a Jew, but the movie never states that plainly.

I got the impression that Clooney was making his film for people with short attention spans who want the shallowest treatment possible of the subject matter. That's too bad, because with a little more tender loving care, this could have been a great movie rather than a good one.

Some popular culture and even academic retellings of WW II work to humanize, or even exculpate, Germans. "Monuments Men" does not. At first I thought that Sam would be the good German character – the noble "true" German who hated the Nazis from the get-go, resisted them, and was now helping the allies defeat them. But Sam turns out to be Jewish. "Monuments Men" uses the word "German" were a more German-friendly film would be careful to use the word "Nazi," thus emphasizing that not all Germans were guilty, but merely an ideology.

"Monuments Men" is unusual among recent American films in that it unapologetically and enthusiastically celebrates Western Civilization and the Christian heritage as something that utopians – in this case Nazis – tried to destroy, and that good people – among them Americans – heroically and courageously died to preserve. This is a really remarkable message. I wonder if left-wing Clooney embraced it because he saw "Monuments Men" as being about Art, not about Western Civ or the Judeo-Christian heritage. The two artworks focused on the most – the Ghent altarpiece and the Michelangelo Madonna are both overtly Christian. 

Muslim on Christian and Christian on Muslim Violence in the Central African Republic; Update

Disposing of a body in the Central African Republic. Source

The Central African Republic is "falling apart in horrific violence." Source

I've posted hereabout Muslim-on-Christian violence in the Central African Republic. Out of all the war torn corners of the globe, I asked that people pray for CAR for the personal reason that I was once a Peace Corps Volunteer there.

I was told during training that there is tension between Muslims and Christians in CAR because of the Arab Slave Trade, a centuries-long enterprise that enslaved millions of people, millions more than the Atlantic Slave Trade. People called, variously, "Black," "Sub-Saharan," "Bantu" or "Christian-Animist" Africans were preyed upon and enslaved by "Arab" or "Muslim" Africans – even though both the slave drivers and the enslaved people were often the same skin color.

North Africa tends to identify as "Arab" or "Muslim." Sub-Saharan Africa tends to identify as "Christian" or "Animist." Where these populations meet, there is violence, for example in Nigeria. There is also violence between those who identify as more devout Muslims, and those whom they identify as not devout enough, for example in Algeria and Mali.

In CAR, I witnessed this tension firsthand. My neighbors openly spoke of wanting to kill Muslims. The Muslims were open in their contempt for non-Muslims.

I wasn't surprised to read, earlier this year, of Muslims mass murdering Christians in CAR.

French troops stepped in. CAR is a former French colony.

Muslims are now fleeing CAR.

The other day a Muslim man fell off of a truck full of Muslims fleeing the Central African Republic. Even before his body hit the ground, crowds of Centrafricaines killed him and mutilated him.

I am haunted by these news reports. I lived with these people. I walked these streets. I taught those young people. I assure you: Centrafricaines, in spite of their poverty and their skin color, really are people just like you and I. If it is happening there, it can happen here. 

***

I have Politically Correct friends who practice a weird, rigid taboo. If anyone speaks a critical word about Islam, they will step in and attempt to silence that person. They will silence that person by accusing him or her of being a bigot. They will invoke the Crusades, Israel, colonialism, or America's dependency on petroleum. These same friends are often quite eager to blame America and Christianity for all the world's problems; they rush to do so.

I insist that we must speak freely about Islam.

We must do this not only for non-Muslims, but for Muslims as well.

We must do this for that Muslim man who fell off a truck jam packed with exiles, that man whose body never hit the ground, that probably innocent man who was butchered like an animal.

We must defuse our problems with responsible speech, not with machetes.

I'm reading the comments underneath the news accounts of the fate of the Muslims in CAR. Commentators are saying things like "Serves the Muslims right" and "I can't wait till we chase them from our country." Some commentators even say things like, "I have weapons and I am ready when it starts happening here."

People are saying these extreme and horrible things in anonymous posts on the internet because any serious discussion of the challenge jihad presents has been aborted in our media, demonized on college campuses, and expunged from political life. A responsible and level-headed person like Congressman Peter King is lambasted as an "Islamophobe." Even a cartoonist like Molly Norris is silenced and erased.

When normal discussion is suppressed, criticism goes underground and it becomes more extreme.

We need to defuse our problems with words.

We need to speak frankly about problematical doctrines like jihad, while at the same time always emphasizing that most Muslims are not guilty and can't ethically be scapegoated.

If we don't solve our problems with words, some will chose to solve these problems with violence. 

"The Central African Republic is falling apart in horrific violence" Article with pictures here

When Is It Time to Leave? When Is It Time to Tell a Friend to Leave?

A friend of mine appears to be in an abusive relationship. I've been asking myself whether I should or should not encourage my friend to leave the abusive relationship.

I can't talk about my friend's private business here, but I can talk about me.

Here's a memory that informs the advice I give my friend: when I was about 17 years old, my mother threatened to kill me. It was neither the first nor the last time she made that threat.

A friend offered to let me live in his car. I did. After a while his parents objected to me living in his car, and I returned to my mother's house.

To me "I returned to my mother's house" is a very sad sentence.

I look back with regret.

I can't say how much I wish someone powerful had communicated to me unequivocally: "Get out of that house. Get out at any cost. You are working full time anyway. Get an apartment and build a life for yourself. Every second you spend with your abuser is wasted; it is a moment you will only ever regret, a moment you can never redeem."

Every time I put up with abuse, my soul dented a little.

With time, I was able to hammer out those dents. But how much better it would have been for me had I escaped the denting.

Learned to stand on my own. Learned that I was capable.

When I lived with my abuser, I was breathing. But I wasn't fully living.

***

It's not a small thing to say to another person, "The most significant relationship in your life is harming you, and you would be better off out of that relationship."

I always delay saying that to anyone. I stand back and watch.

I've been watching this friend for years now. Watching the weight gain, the rapid aging, the depression that is constant but that dips into stygian silence, paralysis and nihilism – episodes of personality-distorting mini-deaths. This person frequently breaks into tears in the middle of sentences. This person feels, "I can't go out. I can't have fun. I can't have friends. If I do I will be punished."

For a while there, I thought that they were staying together because they love each other.

Now I’m wondering if it isn't something else – fear. I think both of them fear separation.

I wonder if my friend does not feel, "If I suffer though this, there will be some reward for me someday. I'll get the reward for being the most long suffering. I'll get the reward for being the most self-abnegating. I'll get the reward for being the most reliable, the most loyal, the most stubborn."

I want to say to my friend, "You know? I don't think you're ever going to get any reward for being so miserable for so long. No reward for you. No reward for your loved ones. Just a big box of nothing. A nothing you chose."

And you know what? Maybe I am completely wrong. I could be completely wrong.

Maybe my own memories of staying in an abusive relationship with my mother don't apply here at all.

Maybe my friend is in the best possible relationship my friend could have.

Maybe what I see of the relationship – which is very limited – is inaccurate. "No one knows what goes on behind closed doors."

I don't know.

I do know that all of this is hard to take. It's hard to hear your friend talk of being so unhappy that life itself becomes a burden.

Coca-Cola Super Bowl Commercial 2014; Who's Hating Whom?

From the Coca-Cola 2014 Super Bowl Commercial 

During the 2014 Super Bowl, Coca-Cola aired a one-minute ad that features reedy, childlike female voices singing, to barely audible strings, "America the Beautiful" in a variety of languages, including Spanish, Tagalog, and an Asian language. Fleeting images of people of a variety of ethnicities celebrating everyday life accompany the singing. Black people break dance. Native Americans wear feathers on their heads. A Muslim woman in a nocturnal street scene does not sing (many Muslims would consider a woman singing to be a sin); she merely gives the camera her best inscrutable Big Brother stare while glowing blue from surrounding neon.

I watch a lot of movies. This ad struck me as speaking the language of horror films. The lone, reedy, childlike, female voice accompanied only by vague, minor key strings – no other instrumentation – is comparable to many recent horror movie sound tracks. The "this is everyday life and it is nice" feel of the montage has a "calm before the storm" feel to it. Usually at some point in the previews for a horror movie, there is this sort of montage, and then a monster appears. The shot of the Muslim woman's large, hijab-clad, disembodied head, glowing blue, dominating the screen, staring silently and inscrutably, I knew, would unnerve viewers.

No, Muslims are not inherently scary. Yes, a disembodied head glowing blue and staring at the viewer with no accompanying plot is weird.

I immediately knew that the ad would not be embraced.

I wondered what was going on at Coca-Cola corporate headquarters. Who green lighted this ad? How out of touch with the zeitgeist could such a major corporation be?

I googled it and found people all over the web discussing it. I found that interesting.

I tried to talk about it on Facebook. I received backlash. I felt bullied. If I did not like the ad, the implication was that I am probably a racist.

That is going on all over the web, now.

If you don't like the 2014 Coca-Cola Super Bowl ad, you are a racist. An Islamophobe. A bigot. A mouth breather. A white supremacist. An "Ugly American" (James Poniewozik at TIME.)

The hate directed at anyone who didn't like the 2014 Coca-Cola Super Bowl ad is overwhelming and depressing.

And this is why, though I used to identify as "leftist" and "liberal" I no longer do.

I'm so tired of the hate. The hair trigger hate. The cliché hate. The holier than thou hate. The lynch mob hate.

The hypocritical hate.

I have a liberal friend who loved the ad. He says that anyone who didn't like the ad is a "typical American racist."

My friend thinks that all Americans except him and his group of liberal friends are evil racists.

I've known this guy for years. I've been to his house.

I have never, ever, ever, ever, not once, seen him in the presence of a black person.

Really. Never.

In NJ that's an extraordinary thing. NJ is a wildly diverse state. There are lots of black people here.

So, my friend whom I have never seen in the presence of a black person is convinced that anyone who didn't like the 2014 Coca-Cola Super Bowl ad is a "typical" American white supremacist.

How about others who insist that anyone who didn't like the ad is a racist? Or is an enemy of multiculturalism?

Do YOU have any black friends? Any friends whose family members have ever been in jail? Any friends who live in government subsidized housing? Any friends who don't speak Standard English, but, rather, Black English or Ebonics?

Well?

Really, I'm asking. Do you?

Okay. So now that we've established that you have never, in your life, had a member of the large, African American underclass anywhere on your property, do you again want to call others racist?

Or, how about this. Do you have any friends who disagree with you politically or are different than you economically? Do you have a single friend who believes in miracles, who voted Romney, who had to forgo major medical care for lack of insurance? Do you have any friends who clean houses for a living, and who grew up speaking a language other than English? Who grew up in multilingual households?

Has your fate ever hinged on how a member of a group very different from your own handled your job application, your insurance claim, or your surgery? Have you ever become impatient with a customer service representative who did not speak English well?

Uh huh. I see. Your friends, your bosses, your doctors, your next door neighbors, are all like you demographically – white collar, fully insured, speaking Standard English, liberals. Thanks for that information.

So what's really going on here?

The creepy, horrible thing that's really going on here is that people are using a freaking Coca-Cola ad to decide who is worthy and who is evil. This is some weird 2014 version of a witch trial. If you don't like the ad, you are evil. If you like the ad, no matter how much of a politically correct, safe, suburban, white-collar cocoon you have lived in your entire life, you are champion of the masses if you like a freaking Coca-Cola ad.

Why don't people like the ad if they are not evil white supremacists, "typical" Ugly Americans?

They don't like it because "America the Beautiful" is sung in a variety of languages. They don't like that because it is, to them, a sign of Balkanization. In the past, the concept of "e pluribus unum" reigned in America. "Out of many, one." We all put aside our differences – our different languages and religions and economic statuses – and united under a unifying identity – American – and language – English.

None of my grandparents spoke English. My parents spoke English as a second language. They learned English well enough to speak it beautifully and powerfully, while retaining their own natal languages. Inside our house, we could speak Polish and Slovak. Outside our house, we could speak the very best Standard English. That used to be the ideal. It was a good ideal. It united Americans. I could play with my next-door-neighbor, who happened to be African American.

Multiculturalism has weakened "E pluribus unum." Liberals pit members of one group against members of another group: women against men, blacks against whites, "Anglos" against Hispanics, Muslims against non-Muslims.

No, liberals did not invent the very real causes of conflict between these groups. Liberals just exacerbated and exploited those differences.

That's why people are objecting to the Coke ad. NOT because they don't want to be close to multicultural neighbors. Because they do want to be close to multicultural neighbors, and liberals keep pushing us apart, fracturing our country, splintering the ties that used to bind.

And now liberals are jumping down our throats and calling us racist sexist homophobic islamophobic white supremacist witch witch witch witch burn them!

Golly, I wish you liberals would just stop with the hate.

You can watch the ad here.

Dylan Farrow Accuses Woody Allen of Abuse; How Should We Respond?

Everett Collection Source

I wonder how many people, when watching Woody Allen's film "Play It Again Sam," realize that Woody Allen, in that film, humiliates Diane Keaton – and trashes all women. Diane Keaton, the woman he is supposed to have loved so much. Adorable Diane Keaton, who rushed to his defense in 1992 when Mia Farrow first accused Allen of child abuse.

Everyone says, "Woody must be a great guy. Someone as cool as Diane Keaton loves and defends him!"

But Allen humiliates her in "Play It Again Sam."

In PIAS, Allen plays his alter ego, a funny, cerebral, neurotic, whiny nebbish who can't get women, but who lusts after them ferociously and pathetically. Women are too blinded by their own pettiness to see how valuable – deep, smart and adorable – he is.

Diane Keaton plays the unattainable alpha female Allen lusts after.

Keaton is married to a tall, muscular, rich, alpha male named Dick. Yes, really. DICK. Dick is, of course, a crude euphemism for the male sexual organ, and for an obnoxious man. 

She discovers how "wonderful" Allen is, and is "tempted" to leave Dick for Allen. She can't, though. She explains why. She loves Dick. She needs Dick. Yes, she really says this: I love Dick. I need Dick.

We get it; we get it. Allen is telling his audience that the alpha females he lusts after can't see how "wonderful" he, Allen, is – yes he calls himself "wonderful" – because they want "dick." Keaton looks so buffoonish standing there, repeating "dick" over and over, how much she wants Dick and needs Dick and can't leave Dick for "wonderful" Woody Allen.

Cringe.

Yesterday Dylan Farrow, now renamed Malone, published a letter in the New York Times accusing her adoptive father, Woody Allen, of sexually abusing her twenty-one years ago, when she was seven.

I wrote my MA thesis at UC Berkeley on the stories survivors of child abuse tell in 12 Step meetings. For that thesis, I listened to, recorded, and transcribed hundreds of hours of survivor accounts.

I can say that Dylan's account sounds like hundreds of others I've heard. That doesn't make it true. I don't know if it is true.

I can say that Woody Allen's movies have always struck me as misogynist, and successful. Tells you something about what art we embrace. Of course Woody's films are mild in their misogyny compared to more recent fare, and porn I stumble across even accidentally on the internet. I shudder to think of eleven- and twelve-year olds doing the same google image searches I do and stumbling across images of women bound, stabbed, and tortured. Sexualized images of children saturate our culture: Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears.

Here's what I wish. I wish we would drop the "monster" vocabulary when someone is accused of child abuse.

Here's why.

We need to hear and rationally evaluate child abuse accusations.

We can't do that if we have only two choices: the accused is a human, or the accused is a monster.

I'm a survivor of child abuse. My primary abuser was a very good person, much loved by the wider community.

Yes.

Wrap your head around that, world: a child abuser CAN BE a much loved pillar of the community.

As long as you resist that truth, you will not be able to hear child abuse accusations rationally.

Because you will keep saying, "Oh, this or that person COULD NOT BE a child abuser, because he or she is really nice, otherwise."

Yes. Someone who is really nice otherwise might be a child abuser. Please drop the "monster" vocabulary. Please drop the black/white, all or nothing thinking.

We, children currently abused and survivors of child abuse, need you to keep your thinking caps on when you evaluate child abuse accusations.

***

Below is an essay by me about Woody Allen's film "Deconstructing Harry" that ran in the Bloomington Independent in 1998.

DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, DECONSTRUCTING WOODY

Lies in art bore me. In life lies can entertain, or at least intrigue, because in life lying entails risk. Lies in art exist to eliminate risk for their creator, to serve his fears as a person and his shortcomings as an artist. In fact, lies define what yet of his craft the artist has failed to master. Watching lies in art is like watching a tennis match between a world champion and an occasional player. The elements of surprise, of exhilaration, of reaching for the heights of human capacity, are eliminated. The game is rigged. The champion will always win, but the spectators will not get what they paid for.

Woody Allen's movies, especially as he has aged, have struck me as repetitious, lying exercises in self-exculpation. And, so, they bore me. I haven't found it necessary to watch his recent films like "Mighty Aphrodite" "Bullets over Broadway" and "Everyone Says I Love You" to their conclusions. But "Deconstructing Harry"'s stellar reviews brought me to the box office.

As it happened, I might not have watched this one all the way to the end, either. "Deconstructing Harry"'s opening scene revealed most of the movie's bag of tricks. Desirable, young, Julia Louis Dreyfuss volunteered to be disgracefully used as a sexual receptacle by the elderly, but aptly named, Dick Benjamin. 

The rest of the movie repeated, expanded on, and apotheosized, the geezer-babe motif. In the world of "Deconstructing Harry," men are the doers, the achievers, the possessors of thought and complexity. Men are agents of their own destiny, and dynamos of plot. Women are categorically excluded from status as doer, or as human complex or sensitive enough to be worthy of humane regard. Since men, by dint of their superior gifts, are the only ones who generate wealth, fame or power, and since men are the ones who define the only game in town, beautiful younger women, i.e., "babes," endure humiliation and disappointment and volunteer to be used by men. Women throw themselves at old, physically unattractive men who dismiss them as only "cunts;" women do this for something like the reasons that moths collide into flames, and with as many chances of self-fulfillment.

"Deconstructing Harry" doesn't offer much more in the way of plot. The babes in question, like Elisabeth Shue, are up to the minute; past year's models like Diane Keaton need not apply, though their daughters might pass muster. Were the viewer to suspect that these women have any human validity outside of status as babe and "cunt," they would less adequately serve as the butt of Allen's jokes. Too, plot tension would evaporate; why believe that someone as apparently together as the actress Judy Davis would lose her sanity over a nebish like Allen? And so Allen provides a number of scenes that demonstrate that women are without creativity, competence, complexity, or consideration. To make himself appear larger, he must make women very small.

Most of Allen's babes have no jobs; Elizabeth Shue and Judy Davis exist only as decoration in the lives of men like Woody Allen. In a few scenes, Allen denies women competence even in the only professions Allen can imagine for them, nurturing professions like therapist and child care worker. The audience is meant to laugh at these babe's doomed efforts to demonstrate human worth. 

In every such scene, the previously attractive (submissive) babe who commits the cardinal crime and futile folly of agency devolves into a shrill incompetent. In heavy-handed slapstick, Kirstie Alley is shown failing miserably in her profession, therapist. While attempting to counsel a patient, she engages in an ineffectual tirade against Allen. What has caused her downfall? The sexual prowess and devastating allure the superior Woody Allen, great writer, has over her. 

Mariel Hemmingway is shown failing miserably in her chosen profession, child care. What has reduced her to shrill incompetent? The sexual prowess of the great bon vivant, life affirming free-thinker, and cocksman, Woody Allen. But mostly women are shown with no life outside of the charmed circle of Allen's lust, and when that lust is withdrawn and redirected at a younger, newer babe, women turn from babes to incompetent harpies. Judy Davis, whining, barking, attempts to shoot herself and assassinate Allen, and fails at both. Allen then reminds her that she is nothing more than a "meshugana cunt."

In interminable scene after interminable scene of Allen being harangued by shrill, ineffectual harpies, Allen manages to both coat himself in the virtuous glow of the victim and crown himself the smug victor. He begs: "Witness these monstrous females persecuting me!" He gloats: "But, see? They are obsessed with me, and they always lose; I always win."

There is one competent, likable woman in "Deconstructing Harry," "Cookie." Cookie is – now here's an artistic innovation – an African American hooker with a heart of gold. One might suspect that Allen threw Cookie in as a token. It has been noted that in Allen's opus of films portraying life in Manhattan, there are no people of color. But maybe Cookie's presence is not so much token as elaborate joke set up. Allen's character, whose status as superior, intellectual male is not threatened by his demanding and receiving a blow job, badgers Cookie about her calm acceptance of her life of prostitution. She should think on deeper things as he does, he says, like black holes. She knows about black holes, she replies; it is how she earns her living. One can imagine Allen's resolve to include a black woman in his next film after coming up with that rather obvious joke.

In counterpoint to conveniently limited women whose breath of life is controlled by how much they are graced with Allen's lust, is the godlike Allen himself. Allen's is the only character to display competence, and to be seen, ironically enough, as capable of creation. No, none of the "cunts" onscreen can create, but Allen can, and in a final self-apotheosis, Allen is warmly applauded by his teaming "children," the fictional characters of his opus. Allen should pay his audiences for sitting through this sappy final scene of self-exculpation.

Is "Deconstructing Harry" merely an accurate, and thereby artistically worthy and engaging, portrait of a misogynist, rather than a misogynist film that never transcends the level of a frustration and anger fueled joke graffitied on a men's room wall? It is the latter. It could, certainly, have been the former, had Allen any personal courage, or greater artistic virtuosity. An engaging and worthy portrait of misogyny would have required Allen, the creator, to generate and animate multi dimensional female characters, and to explore in all its consequences Allen's life of self-absorption. 

Films like "In the Company of Men" have done more gripping treatments of misogyny; films like "A Month on the Lake" have explored old men's babe chasing with compassion, poignancy, complexity and humor; any number of films have shown women as something more than the butt of jokes, more than packaging for an anatomy that is lusted after when inaccessible and discarded after access has been gained. Woody hasn't the talent to make such a film, and so he lies to cover for what he, as an artist, cannot do.