Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall is a bad trip, quite literally since it was partly inspired by the mental illness of Syd Barrett, an early member of the band who almost certainly experimented with LSD in the late 1960s. For members of Generation X, people born between 1965 and 1980, whether or not they took drugs, the whole post-war era might as well have been one big illusion inspired by a bad batch of acid. Our parents and grandparents, we were told, fought the Second World War, an epic battle of good versus evil where the “greatest generation” defeated the Nazis on the beaches of Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. But it was never explained to us why we then fell into a decades long nuclear stalemate with the Soviet Union, or that Joseph Stalin, who was supposedly worse than Hitler, was our ally in the fight against Hitler, or that the supposedly evil Red Army actually did the bulk of the fighting.
Sometime in the early 1960s, right before most of us were born, history changed for the better. Black people in the South won the right to vote. Elvis Presley and the Beatles invented a new form of music. Everybody suddenly started having sex, and the younger generation turned away from the military industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about, and finally got us out of the war in Vietnam by levitating the Pentagon and smoking marijuana at Woodstock. Yet somehow as most of us entered our teens in the 1980s, a right-wing cold warrior named Ronald Reagan occupied the White House. Racism was getting worse. The world was still five minutes away from a nuclear Holocaust and everybody who ever had sex in the 1970s was dying of a mysterious new illness called AIDS. Well at least gay men were. The utopian dream of the 1960s wasn’t exactly over, but it had clearly gone insane, and joined the Republican Party. Rock n Roll, the new type of music invented by Elvis and the Beatles, had already been declared “dead,” but it was still the only thing anybody took seriously. Being a “rock star” was not only a sure fire way of “getting laid,” it was also the best path out of the working class into wealth and fame. In 1984, Reagan was reelected in the largest landslide in Presidential history, mostly on the promise that he would build a magical protective shield popularly known as “Star Wars,” an elaborate screen of lasers and guided missiles that would prevent us all from dying in the nuclear war that almost seemed inevitable. The Russians of course were still evil.
By 1982, The Wall, which had become one of the best selling rock albums of all time, had inspired a movie of the same name. Directed by Alan Parker and starring Boomtown Rats lead singer Bob Geldof. The Wall dramatized the mind fuck we had all been going through since the 1960s ended and all we got were AIDS and Ronald Reagan. Geldof plays “Pink,” a rock musician based on the above mentioned Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd’s lead singer and songwriter Roger Waters. The film opens with Pink lying miserably in his bed in an expensive but grim hotel room thinking about what happened to his father. Waters’ own father Eric Fletcher Waters, a former communist activist and conscientious objector, had been killed at age 30 at the Battle of Anzio, that horrifically mismanaged invasion of Italy that served as the dry run for the invasion of Normandy. After catching Hitler by surprise, and landing an army just south of Rome, instead of breaking out of his beachhead cutting off the German 10th Army, American general Mark Clark sat on the beach for days while the German high command brought in reinforcements. Eric Fletcher Waters’ unit was caught in a counterattack by heavy German armor.
“There was frost in the ground,” Pink cries out in despair, “when the tigers broke free and no one survived from the Royal Fusiliers Company Z. They were all left behind, most of them dead, the rest of them dying, and that’s how the High Command, took my daddy from me.”
Raised by a single mother, and without the protection of his father, Pink is flushed through a British educational system run by teachers and administrators so grotesque and authoritarian that you wonder why his father had given his life fighting the Nazis at all. Bright eyed innocent children go in at one end full of life, and come out wearing death masks. As Roger Waters wrote about his former bandmate Syd Barrett in his song Shine On You Crazy Diamond, “remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.” Like Roger Waters, Pink survives the British educational system, but like Syd Barrett after his experience with psychedelic drugs, his soul is profoundly damaged. What makes The Wall so revealing about the Cold War world of 1982 is how effectively it interweaves the various strands of crude authoritarianism and hedonistic decadence, of idealism and lost idealism, of ugly reaction and the cynical commodification of the utopian dream, of rebellion and repression.
Indeed, The Wall was initially inspired by Waters’ disgust with his own fans and his urge to build a wall in front of the stage during his concerts. At times it’s difficult to know who is who. Out of control school children become out of control fans become soldiers under attack become sadistic riot police. A dark, repressive energy seems to take control of any group of people, however different they may be, once they form a crowd. A great live performer like Bruce Springsteen will feed off the energy of his audience, reflect it back transformed by his own artistic imagination. Pink, like Waters, once had that same ability, but, like Waters, he’s lost it. Where once he saw his fans as bright eyed children full of life, they now seem to be the walking dead with masks and eyes like black clouds. The dream of the 1960s has turned into the nightmare of the 1980s.
The sexual revolution has undergone the same dark transformation. Pink has more than enough ability to attract women — he’s a rock star after all — but his sex drive is dead. He ignored his wife, blocking her out of his life, building a wall between them so high she just said fuck it and started cheating on him. A beautiful, innocent, yet corrupted American groupie he brings back to his apartment fares little better. Obsessed with watching the classic British war movie Dam Busters on TV, Pink can’t even make a token attempt to engage the woman in conversation, or even tell her where the kitchen is so she can get a glass of water. Casual sex, for Pink, brings the same danger of connection to an other human being that marriage does. The closer the young American woman tries to get to him, the higher he builds his wall, lost in the fantasy of a classic war movie which was, not incidentally, an inspiration for Star Wars, and the memories of his father at Anzio. Finally, in a violent outburst that had almost become a cliché in the 1970s and 1980s, a rock star trashing his hotel room, he picks up the TV and throws it out the window. The groupie runs away in terror.
One of the biggest mindfucks of the mid-1980s was seeing Ronald Reagan go to Omaha Beach in Normandy for the 40th Anniversary of D-Day. There he gave a banal Peggy Noonan speech about the Boys of Pointe Du Hoc who liberated Europe from fascism. But then just the next year, in 1985, he planned a visit to a Waffen SS cemetery in Bitburg Germany. In a speech written by Pat Buchanan, he declared that anybody who served in the Waffen SS was as much a victim as someone who died in the Holocaust. What the fuck was going on? Did “we” fight the Nazis? Or were we the Nazis? Needless to say the media didn’t dig too deeply into the question. They declared the plan to visit Bitburg a “mistake” but continued to fawn over Peggy Noonan’s The Boys of Pointe Du Hoc speech at Normandy.
The Wall confronts this contradiction head on. After Pink trashes his hotel room, and destroys his TV, he goes into the shower and begins to mutilate himself, a blood ritual that eventually transforms him into a parody of Adolf Hitler. He comes out of the shower, no longer confused, or even tormented, but wearing his own special variety of death mask, not a broken man like Syd Barrett, or a cynical, disillusioned, “comfortably numb” man like Waters, but a cult leader and dictator who has sensed the dark violent energy of his fans, and now plans to lead it down a darker, more violent road yet, the second coming of Kristallnacht, a violent riot against racial minorities and other “undesirables.” What Roger Waters’ and Pink’s father died fighting against, Pink has become. The final scenes, alternating between animated marching hammers and Pink on stage, a Hitler figured saluted by his fans with raised arms. Sieg Heil, complete Pink’s spiritual destruction, giving us some insight into why perhaps Syd Barrett quit the music business. Did he lose his mind on bad acid? Or did he see deeply into the fascist undercurrent lurking beneath the utopian dream of the 1960s, and decide he wanted no part of it?
Roger Waters, who continues to perform The Wall live, even at the age of 80, has not sold out to the establishment. Quite the contrary, a leftist who supports the Palestinians, and opposes the war in Ukraine, he has been continuously smeared by the Israel Lobby and the corporate media as an “anti-Semite.” The German police have even arrested him for wearing the same costume that Bob Geldof wears at the end of the film, charging him with promoting fascism instead of dramatizing it. Germans, of course, are famous for being humorless and rather thick, but there is perhaps something more to the whole thing than an AIPAC smear campaign. While Syd Barrett retreated into mental illness and social isolation, Roger Waters has embraced the contradictions between fascism and anti-fascism, utopia and dystopia, the dissolution of the individual into the violent energy of the mob and the man who builds a wall between himself and the mob. He has embraced those contradictions in order to stage them, put his own dark side on stage so that he can reflect back onto his audience their own dark side.
The Wall ends on, perhaps, a hopeful note. Pink imagines himself as a child, perhaps during the Blitz, perhaps during an imaginative recreation of the Blitz. They are cleaning up rubble, loading broken rocks into toy trucks. It’s not much, Waters seems to say, but it is something. The children are not wearing death masks. They have no brutal fascist teachers lording it over them. On the contrary, their labor is self-directed, earnest, communal. Perhaps, Waters is telling us, the generation that will come after his will clean up his generation’s mess. Then again, we didn’t.
The General Review in response to the prompt: “Please write a review of William Wyler’s film “The Best Years of Our Lives”
“The Best Years of Our Lives” is a timeless masterpiece directed by William Wyler, released in 1946. Set against the backdrop of post-World War II America, the film delves into the challenges faced by three returning veterans as they attempt to reintegrate into civilian life.
One of the film’s most notable strengths is its poignant and realistic portrayal of the societal and personal struggles that veterans encountered after the war. The narrative focuses on three central characters, each representing a different branch of the military, and their distinct challenges in readjusting to civilian life. Al, played by Fredric March, confronts the complexities of reestablishing familial connections, while Dana Andrews’ character, Fred, grapples with the disillusionment of returning to a job that no longer holds the same allure. Harold Russell’s Homer, a sailor who lost both hands in combat, represents the physical and emotional toll of war, adding a unique layer of depth to the storyline.
The performances of the cast are exceptional, with each actor delivering a nuanced portrayal of their character’s struggles. Fredric March’s subtle and nuanced performance earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor, a testament to his ability to convey the internal conflicts faced by many returning soldiers. Harold Russell, a real-life veteran and double amputee, delivers a powerful and authentic performance, bringing a raw and genuine quality to his character.
Wyler’s direction is masterful, capturing the emotional resonance of the characters and the period’s social atmosphere. The cinematography by Gregg Toland is remarkable, showcasing a keen eye for detail and composition. The film’s use of deep focus allows the audience to witness the characters’ emotional turmoil in the foreground while also observing the evolving world around them.
The screenplay, written by Robert E. Sherwood, skillfully weaves together the individual stories of the three protagonists, creating a rich and engaging narrative that explores the complexities of post-war America. The film addresses themes of love, loss, sacrifice, and the profound impact of war on the human psyche, making it a thought-provoking and emotionally resonant cinematic experience.
“The Best Years of Our Lives” received widespread critical acclaim upon its release, winning seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor. Its enduring legacy lies in its ability to transcend its immediate post-war context, resonating with audiences across generations as a powerful exploration of the human experience in the face of profound societal change.
In conclusion, William Wyler’s “The Best Years of Our Lives” stands as a cinematic triumph, blending exceptional performances, meticulous direction, and a compelling narrative to create a film that remains relevant and deeply moving to this day. It is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the enduring impact of war on the lives of those who serve and sacrifice for their country.
A review of the character of Fred Derry in response to the prompt “Please write a review of William Wyler’s film The Best Years of Our Lives and the character of Dana Andrew’s character Fred Derry. Was the 37 year old Andrews too old for the role?”
“The Best Years of Our Lives,” directed by William Wyler and released in 1946, is a cinematic gem that explores the challenges faced by returning veterans in post-World War II America. One of the central characters, Fred Derry, portrayed by Dana Andrews, is a pivotal figure in the film’s narrative.
Dana Andrews’ portrayal of Fred Derry is a standout performance that captures the essence of a man grappling with the complexities of returning to civilian life after the war. At 37 years old, Andrews brought a mature and seasoned quality to the character, emphasizing the emotional weight and life experience that Fred carries. While some might argue that Andrews was on the older side for a character readjusting to civilian life, his age actually adds a layer of depth to Fred’s struggles.
Fred Derry’s character embodies the disillusionment and challenges faced by many veterans who returned to a world that had changed dramatically during their absence. Andrews effectively conveys Fred’s internal conflicts, from the frustration of a job that no longer holds meaning to the strained relationships with loved ones. His performance resonates with authenticity, capturing the inner turmoil and vulnerability of a man trying to find his place in a society that has moved on without him.
The choice of Dana Andrews, despite being 37 at the time, works in favor of the character rather than against it. His age lends a gravitas to Fred’s experiences, allowing the audience to empathize with the character’s struggles on a deeper level. Andrews’ portrayal showcases the resilience and strength of Fred Derry, making him a relatable and sympathetic figure for audiences of all ages.
In conclusion, Dana Andrews’ performance as Fred Derry in “The Best Years of Our Lives” is a testament to his skill as an actor. While he may have been slightly older than the typical returning veteran, his age adds a layer of authenticity and depth to the character. The film’s enduring impact is, in part, due to the nuanced performances of the cast, including Andrews, and their ability to convey the profound challenges faced by those who served in the war. “The Best Years of Our Lives” remains a timeless exploration of the human experience, and Dana Andrews’ portrayal of Fred Derry is a crucial and compelling element of its success.
The General Review in response to the prompt: “Please write a review of William Wyler’s film “The Best Years of Our Lives”
A Poignant and Powerful Portrayal of Post-War Struggles: A Review of “The Best Years of Our Lives”
William Wyler’s 1946 film “The Best Years of Our Lives” is not just a movie; it’s a time capsule capturing the anxieties, dreams, and struggles of America as it emerged from the shadow of World War II. Through the stories of three returning veterans – Al, Fred, and Homer – the film tackles themes of societal readjustment, physical and emotional scars, and the search for meaning in a changed world.
Strength in Simplicity: The film’s power lies in its grounded approach. It eschews sentimentality, instead opting for honest portrayals of characters grappling with complex emotions. Al, a middle-aged banker, faces ageism and career struggles. Fred, a decorated pilot, battles alcoholism and PTSD. Homer, a sailor who lost his hands in the war, confronts prejudice and self-doubt. Their individual journeys intertwine, creating a tapestry of interconnected experiences that resonate deeply.
Beyond Heroism: “The Best Years of Our Lives” doesn’t glorify war or paint veterans as superhuman heroes. Instead, it shows them as individuals with vulnerabilities and flaws. This humanization allows viewers to connect with their struggles on a personal level, fostering empathy and understanding.
Technical Brilliance: Wyler’s masterful direction shines throughout. Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography emphasizes the characters’ emotional complexities, while the poignant score by Hugo Friedhofer underscores the film’s dramatic moments. The performances are equally impressive, with Fredric March, Dana Andrews, and Harold Russell delivering career-defining turns.
Enduring Relevance: While rooted in its specific historical context, “The Best Years of Our Lives” transcends time. The themes of reintegration, prejudice, and the search for purpose remain relevant today, making the film a valuable piece of cinematic history with contemporary resonance.
Criticisms and Considerations: The film’s depiction of female characters could be considered one-dimensional compared to the complex portrayal of the male leads. Additionally, the portrayal of disability, while groundbreaking for its time, might be viewed as somewhat simplistic by modern audiences.
Overall, “The Best Years of Our Lives” is a powerful and poignant film that deserves its place as a classic. Its honest portrayal of the human experience, coupled with its technical brilliance and timeless themes, makes it a must-watch for anyone interested in understanding the challenges and triumphs of individuals navigating societal and personal change.
A review of the character of Fred Derry in response to the prompt “Please write a review of William Wyler’s film The Best Years of Our Lives and the character of Dana Andrew’s character Fred Derry. Was the 37 year old Andrews too old for the role?”
Fred Derry and the Weight of War: Examining “The Best Years of Our Lives”
William Wyler’s “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) remains a powerful portrayal of postwar America, and Dana Andrews’ Fred Derry stands as a complex and compelling character within its narrative. Let’s dissect the film and his role, addressing the question of Andrews’ age.
Fred Derry: A Portrait of Lost Dreams
Fred, a decorated bomber pilot, returns home with the physical scars of war and the invisible wounds of trauma. He struggles to find work, reconnect with his wife Marie, and navigate a society seemingly focused on forgetting the war. His dreams of a peaceful life feel out of reach, replaced by disillusionment and frustration.
Andrews embodies Fred’s internal conflict with nuance. He portrays the charm and charisma Fred uses to navigate social situations, hiding the anxieties and despair beneath. The desperation in his eyes when pleading for a job or the quiet vulnerability during emotional moments showcase the character’s depth.
Age and Authenticity: Does it Matter?
At 37, Andrews was indeed older than the character’s 27 years. Was this a miscasting? While physical age might not perfectly match, Andrews brings another layer to the role. His maturity adds weight to Fred’s disillusionment. He portrays a young man robbed of his youth and forced to navigate a world that seems alien. This resonates with the film’s theme of lost potential and the toll war takes on individuals.
Moreover, Andrews’ age lends credibility to Fred’s struggles. Finding his place in society, navigating a volatile marriage, and confronting his demons would be challenging for anyone, regardless of age. Andrews portrays these struggles with authenticity, making Fred believable and relatable.
Beyond the Casting: Recognizing the Film’s Legacy
While the age difference might spark debate, it’s crucial to see Fred and “The Best Years of Our Lives” within context. The film’s groundbreaking portrayal of veterans’ struggles resonated deeply with audiences then and continues to do so today. It tackles social issues, the psychological wounds of war, and the complexities of reintegration with honesty and compassion.
Conclusion:
Dana Andrews’ Fred Derry, regardless of his age, remains a memorable character in a timeless film. His performance adds depth and nuance to the narrative, making Fred’s struggles resonate with viewers. Ultimately, while the age difference might be a point of discussion, it doesn’t overshadow the power of Andrews’ portrayal and the film’s lasting impact.
Being an American, or Canadian, of Eastern or Southern European descent can be a frustrating experience. Every time I have to spell my name out on the phone, I am reminded that I am descended from a country I have almost no connection to. I don’t speak Polish. I’ve never been there. I’m not Catholic and I don’t hate Russians. I’m 100 percent American, a European squatter on stolen Indian land on Turtle Island, a spiritual descendant of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and George Armstrong Custer. My great grandparents sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and all I got was this funny name.
On the surface, Greek Americans are a bit like Polish Americans. But there’s an important difference. My ancestors went right from the coal mines of Silesia to the Coal mines of Lackawanna County. Most Greeks who emigrate to the United States come from the petty bourgeoisie, not the lower working class. Even if they start out on the bottom, they don’t stay there very long. Paradoxically more money, education and business acumen often means less assimilation to the American mainstream. If you own your own business and have a shit pot of money, it’s easy to stay in touch with your ethnic heritage. You can visit the mother country. You can send your kids to private schools. You can throw huge parties and invite the whole family. On the other hand, if you’re a dirt poor Polish American coal miner in Northeastern Pennsylvania, your grandkids will probably end up as generic white trash indistinguishable from anybody who came over on the garbage scow that followed the Mayflower.
In 2002, the Greek Canadian comedy writer Nia Vardalos released her first movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It was an astonishing success. Shot on a budge of 5 million dollars, peanuts for Hollywood, it wound up grossing over 350 million dollars, a 7000 percent return on investment. The Bush years were a weird time in North America. It was the golden age of jingoism, militarism and Islamophobia. It was also the golden age of romcoms. It’s not difficult to see why. Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, was staring down the barrel of the shotgun of middle age. Career women in their 30s were hooking up and getting married left and right, trying to nail down a husband and start a family before it was too late. Romcoms, romantic comedies that almost always ended happily in marriage, become almost as popular as spy thrillers and torture porn. The only problem is you can only write so variations on the basic script. Sooner or later they all start to look alike. So in the words of Stephen Sondheim “you’ve got to have a gimmick.” Vardalos’s gimmick was her ethnic heritage, her lovable but pigheaded father, her wise and understanding mother, her sprawling quirky family, and in the end her big fat Greek wedding.
The movie begins with Fotoula “Toula” Portokalos still single at age 30, a part time waitress in her father’s diner The Dancing Zorbas. Toula’s father is at heart a kind and loving man, but he’s also a Greek chauvinist who likes to brag that almost every word, even in English, has Greek roots. As such, he wants his daughter to get married in a Greek Orthodox Church to a Greek man, and since she seems unable to find a sufficiently Hellenic beau, he’s hit upon the misguided idea of putting her down and isolating her socially, hoping against hope that the fewer people she meets the more likely it is that one of them will turn out to be an appropriately single Greek man. Of course it doesn’t work that way, and Toula has entered her 30s plain, depressed, anti-social, neglectful of her clothes and her appearance.
Then one day a tall, handsome man comes into the diner. He’s polite but barely notices her. It’s the spark she needs to break away from her father’s controlling personality and strike out on her own. First she takes classes at a local community college. Then she buys new clothes and makeup. Then she gets a job in a local travel agency. Finally the tall handsome man, Ian Miller played by Sex and the City’s John Corbett, a towering 6’5″ giant who looks a bit like a young, clean shaven Roger Waters, walks by the window of the travel agency and she catches his eye. No longer plain and depressed, Miller’s latent attraction in the diner becomes out and out attraction. They start dating. They are engaged.
If this all sounds incredibly fast, it is. The pacing of My Big Fat Greek wedding is more like a TV show than a feature length movie. That I would argue, along with the Nia Vardalos’s quirky take on her ethnicity, was the reason for the movie’s phenomenal success. Vardalo, a late Boomer born in 1962, 40 years old in 2002, the Big Four O, understood what unmarried Generation X career women wanted, to find the right man, get married, raise a family, and yet not disrupt their high powered careers. The fast paced, frictionless romance between her and Ian Miller suggest that it’s all possible. The only obstacle, Toula’s father, isn’t really much of an obstacle. He’s an opportunity. Not only will Toula marry the man of her dreams, an Anglo Saxon, she will leverage his vanilla, white bread ethnicity to get closer to her own somewhat more colorful Greek heritage, to reconcile herself to her family.
Toula’s mother Maria, played by the popular character actor Lanie Kazan, quickly rises to the occasion. “Men are the brains,” she tells her daughter. “But women are the neck. The neck controls the brains,” and she does, gently persuading her husband not only to let his daughter take classes and work outside the family diner, but to give in and allow her to marry a man not of Greek heritage. For Ian Miller, it’s a dream come true. His own parents are so bland, colorless, and to be honest, downright stupid — they don’t know the difference between Greeks, Armenians and Guatemalans — that the opportunity to marry into a solid Greek immigrant family is also the opportunity to escape the cultural wasteland he was born into. Almost as fast as he meets Toula, he’s baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church, and becomes, in effect, an honorary Greek. Even the fact that he’s a vegan doesn’t cause many problems. “I won’t serve meat,” Toula’s aunt says. “I’ll serve lamb.” In the end, Toulas father not only accepts the marriage, he dips into his big fat Greek savings account, and buys the couple a house. In the very next scene, Toula and Ian have been married for 6 years and they already have a daughter Ian walks to the local Greek school.
And that’s just about it. It was the best of times. It was the best of times. Not only could you have it all. You could have it all at a breakneck pace, children, marriage, reconciliation with your family, a career in mainstream America without giving up your ethnic heritage, and a daughter who’s both 100 percent American and 100 percent Greek at the same time. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was both the last hurrah of white ethnic America and the beginning of the Great Awokening, where the universal white American subject became an illegitimate, suspect identity. Soon it would be fine to be a Greek, Italian or Irish American, but to be a just plain American without also being something else would mean that you hadn’t examined your privilege. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was also a welcome alternative to the other big fat white ethnic cultural phenomenon of the Bush years, the Sopranos.
While the Sopranos told the usual cynical tale of immigrant success as crime, and featured the murderous, repellent sociopath Tony Soprano and his cruel, unloving mother Livia, My Big Fat Greek Wedding has a much less cynical take on the American dream. Toula’s father Costas may be pigheaded and a bit of a chauvinist, but he’s as honest as the day is long, a hardworking businessman who worked his way up from nothing to successful restaurant owner, a wealthy man who could write out a check for a new house for his daughter like it was nothing. And he didn’t even have to sell drugs or have anybody whacked to do it.
Back in the 1980s when I was an undergraduate at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, I was probably what the Millennial generation would call an “incel.” I had a genuinely rotten childhood. My mother couldn’t stand me. I graduated from one of the worst public high-schools in the state of New Jersey, and to be quite honest I was just a little afraid of girls. Most of the girls I knew in high school bullied me because I didn’t smoke pot or wear heavy metal T-shirts. My brother would spread rumors behind my back that I was gay.
Between the ages of 18 and 22, I spent most of my time in the Alexander Library on College Avenue, alone, in a metal stall, reading. My only companion was a homeless man, a 1970 graduate who had taken too many drugs during the 1960s to have gotten on any kind of a career path, and subsequently never left the campus. When it got cold, he would take shelter in the University media lab, watching French New Wave movies, and researching the Kennedy assassination. Occasionally he would come over and strike up a conversation.
“Do you see this?” he said, pointing to a copy of Paris Match and a review of the Richard Gere movie Breathless. “Do you see this?”
“I haven’t seen it yet,” I said, “but I’m hoping to watch it when they have it at Blockbuster Video.”
“Don’t watch that crap,” he said. “See the original. Only see the original.”
“There was an original?” I said. “Is there a book?”
“No there isn’t a book,” he said. “Do you know the Zionists shot JFK,” he added before I could tear myself away. “Fucking de Gaulle was going to give them the bomb and Kennedy was going to stop it. So they sent the Mossad.”
“Look,” I said. “I agree that there’s always been something a little suspicious about the Warren Commission but I’m going to follow you down this path. I’m not a Nazi and I’m not an anti-Semite and I’m not going to scapegoat the Jews.”
“I bet you don’t know what Jack Ruby’s real name was, right?” he said, looking intently into my eyes, and shaking my chair. “Oh you don’t. Well color me surprised. Take a guess. It will seem obvious once I tell you. Ever hear of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission? Do the names Kissinger and Brzezinski ring a bell? Do some research. Think. Don’t just scapegoat the CIA like everybody else does. Go research the Lavon Affair. Use your head. Don’t be an unthinking fucking liberal.”
One day in my junior year, everything changed. I was sitting in Brower Commons, the University Dining Hall, alone with a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, when I suddenly noticed I was surrounded by sorority girls, which was odd considering how I usually sat far off in the corner underneath the entrance ramp behind the tables used by the black frats. But it was unmistakable. It felt a bit like that scene at the schoolyard from The Birds by Hitchcock. Every few minutes I would look up and see another willowy blond beauty sit down at the table with her tray and begin eating. Even stranger, I noticed that when I looked up and down the table one or two of them would try to catch my eye. Finally a girl sat down next to me and tried to strike up a conversation. “Good book,” she said, except for the happy ending. I like my literature a bit darker.” Of course I didn’t say a word back, being so terrified that I could barely stop myself from running away but it didn’t matter. The next day the same thing happened. I was surrounded by beautiful woman. What the hell was going on?
Finally, after one of the girls pushed a flier in my direction inviting me to the Annual Greek Blood Drive and Christmas Party, I figured it out. “You are coming, aren’t you Jonathan?” she said before handing me another pile of fliers. “We really need your help to get the word out.” As terrified as I was of engaging in conversation with a member of the opposite sex, I managed to to elicit from her the information that a young man named Jonathan Daimlerhoff had just been elected President of the Fraternity Council, that he was a popular and charming young man with a large trust fund and a late model German car who frequently took ski trips in Vermont and threw off campus parties where large amounts of alcohol were available to people of all ages, and where the cops never harassed people since Mr. Daimlerhoff’s father was a prominent lawyer no policeman would dare cross by arresting any of his son’s guests. I also learned that I was his spitting image, that we resembled each other so much that even the cheap ugly clothes my mother got me from K-Mart didn’t clue people in that I was Stanley the Incel Rogouski and not Jonathan the Chad Daimlerhoff. I never found out the young woman’s name but she answered my questions so politely that I briefly overcame my fear of women. She even invited me to the Christmas Party to give blood. I declined.
So why have I begun a film review with such a long autobiographical digression?
In 1946, William Wyler released The Best Years of Our Lives, a film that not only won Best Picture, but became an immediate classic, widely considered to be one of the greatest American movies ever made. Starring well-known Hollywood stars like Dana Andrews, Virginia Mayo, Frederick March, Myrna Loy, Virginia Wright, and non-professional actor Harold Russell, the film told the story of three American veterans of World War II, and their struggles to reintegrate themselves into civilian life. For March, who plays Sergeant Al Stephenson, it all goes fairly smoothly. Even though he served as an enlisted man in the infantry, he has inherited money, a good education, and a position as Vice President of a local bank. He soon establishes himself as a socially concerned progressive willing to extend credit to fellow veterans even though they may lack sufficient collateral. For Harold Russell, who plays Homer Parrish, a gravely wounded sailor who lost both his arms when a Japanese Kamikaze hit the aircraft carrier he was serving on, the challenges are far more severe. Yet he still has the advantage of a solid middle class family and a fiancée willing to stay with him even with his horrible disability. Then there’s Captain Fred Derry, an army air force veteran, and the film’s main protagonist.
When we first meet Fred Derry he seems to have everything going for him. At 37, Dana Andrews was probably a bit too old to play the role of a young man who was at most in his mid-20s, but it’s easy to see why he was cast. Having already starred in the 1944 film The Purple Heart, where he played a bomber commander shot down over Japan during the Doolittle Raid who marched off to his execution by slow torture spitting defiance and patriotic fervor at his Japanese captors, Andrews was exactly the image most Americans had in their minds when they heard the phrase “war hero.” Andrews was of average height and build and not particularly handsome, but something about the way he carried himself makes you want to stand up and salute. Unlike the almost comically gigantic, macho John Wayne, Andrews came off like the kind of American everyman who rose to the occasion after Pearl Harbor and bravely volunteered to fight Hitler and the Nazis. When we first meet Derry, Parrish, and Stephenson, who immediately become friends on the trip back home to fictional Boone City (Cincinnati Ohio) Derry comes across as their leader, a commanding presence in his captain’s bars and collection of ribbons and medals.
Once back in Boone City, however, we realize that Derry is not all he seems to be. First of all, he’s homeless. Born into a lower working class family beaten down by the Great Depression, his parents live in a shack near the railroad. His mother is a sad, timid woman whose very manner seems to apologize for her existence. It’s early morning and his father is already drunk. Derry has no education. Immediately after graduating from high school, he got a job as a low wage “soda jerk” at a local drug store and stayed there for two years, unable to rise to anything but head clerk with a mousy little assistant he nicknames “stinky.” Probably born in 1921 or 1922, Fred Derry was still in grade school when the Great Depression hit and his formative years were spent in a country filled with poverty and despair. The New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt had made some progress in putting the economy back together but after the Republicans demanded more austerity and the Supreme Court ruled the NRA as unconstitutional, the country slid back down into a recession in 1936.
Then a miracle happened. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the American economy roared back to life and to heights nobody had previously imagined. During World War II the United States was effectively a socialist country with a planned economy, full employment, and a socially progressive President who backed down in the face of a potential general strike led by black leaders like A. Phillip Randolph and opened up jobs in the defense industry to women and racial minorities. People who had previously been unable to use their talents or enter the American mainstream suddenly found themselves gainfully employed, with hopes for the future and dreams of a better life. Fred Derry, an athletic young man with real courage, was quickly singled out by his superiors, and sent to officer training school, after which he was assigned to a job as a bombardier in a B-17 over Germany, a horrifically dangerous position with a low survival rate that makes a young man live for the day and take risks. The no status soda jerk suddenly finds himself an officer and a gentleman, and in the eyes of women almost a rock star. One week on leave, he marries a glamorous young woman named Marie, played by the A-list beauty Virginia Mayo. It’s not a real marriage, only a brief fling, but if you fully expect to die, why not tie the knot and make it official. Why not take possession of some high quality wedding photos you can tape up in your B-17 like pinups to show off to your crewmates, who take one look at your wife, and after convincing themselves you’re telling the truth, bow down and declare themselves not worthy to be in your presence. Fred, you the man.
Once the war is over, however, you are faced with a much more difficult fate then dying. You have to live, not as a glamorous hero facing an almost certain death fighting Hitler, but as what you once were, a lower working-class nobody with no real skills or education. Marie, your wife, is somewhere in Boone City, but she’s long since forgotten you. You can get your old job at the drugstore back, but at a lower rate of pay and with Stinky as your boss. What’s more, your coworkers resent returning veterans as a threat to their jobs, and the customers have no idea what you were only a few months before. You try to make a go of it with Marie, and even try to pressure her into becoming a stay at home wife, but she has no interest in quitting her own job, at a nightclub, and you are no longer the man she was attracted to in the first place, an officer, a gentleman, and a hero. What’s more you realize that you and Marie don’t really like each other. All you and she saw in each other was a surface appearance, the glamorous babe and the dashing captain. You certainly don’t enjoy each other’s presence or conversation. You can’t spend an evening at home. You and she must go out every night and spend money just to keep busy. Slowing down would mean facing each other and the fact that you both entered into a hasty marriage that never should have happened in the first place.
In other words, thank God I was too afraid of those sorority girls to get involved with one when she thought I was something I wasn’t.
Marie knows exactly what she wants in life, to go out on dates, drink, eat, party, be merry and have fun, to enjoy being a hot babe every man in the room wants to be seen with. In this she is not unsympathetic. Virginia Mayo was only 25 in 1946, young and movie star beautiful with the emphasis on young. The 37-year-old Dana Andrews comes off like a sour, unpleasant, middle-aged man exploiting a younger woman and trying to keep her under lock and key when she rebels against his controlling personality and abusive ways. It’s a pretty typical fate for a man who marries a woman a decade younger than he is. She still wants to go out and party. He wants to stay home and go to bed early. Hello Leo DiCaprio. But while Dana Andrews is 37-years-old, Fred Derry is still in his mid-20s, just a naïve young man who made a bad decision because he was thinking with the wrong head, something all young men do, and doesn’t deserve to be punished for the rest of his life just because he wanted a few weeks of good sex before going off to die over Berlin.
Enter Peggy Stephenson, Al Stephenson’s daughter. While Marie is a hard, brassy, working-class woman who has to get by on her looks, Peggy is a proper upper-class young lady. Played by Teresa Wright of Maplewood, New Jersey, a posh socially progressive town where I once worked as a golf caddie in their local country club, Peggy is well-educated, sensitive, and patriotic. She accepts Fred not in spite of the fact that he’s a homeless veteran suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, but because he’s a homeless veteran suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. Fred, who needs a mother to help him heal from the war, and Peggy, who loves being a healer and caretaker, may not love each other, but they need each other. What’s more, they genuinely enjoy each other’s company. Peggy visits Fred at the drug store, where he’s able to be himself and tell someone what he really thinks of the cheap cosmetics he has to sell. They go to lunch and almost forget the time. Peggy and her rich boyfriend go out on a double date with Fred and Marie and we known damn well that if it were the 1960s they’d immediately wife swap. Marie wants to date Peggy’s rich preppy date as much as Fred wants to date Peggy. Peggy not only knows Fred is poor and works at a low status job, she relishes the idea of helping him work his way up in the world. Quite simply, the proper young lady and the damaged war hero are meant to be together.
In 2024 of course divorce is no big deal. In 1946 it was. William Wyler’s brilliance is in showing us the dialectical nature of social change, how the war and the economic mobilization that accompanied it not only wiped out the Great Depression, but opened up the country to a kind of social liberalism that will eventually be crushed by the McCarthy years but for a brief moment let people of all classes and status find the place they deserve. Al Stephenson is initially outraged that his daughter has fallen for a “smooth operator” like Fred Derry but it doesn’t matter. Peggy is her own woman and is going to do what she wants anyway. Indeed, while Al’s transition to civilian life is far less jarring than Fred’s or Homers, the progressive liberalism of his two grown children is a challenge to his traditional WASP, bourgeoisie ways. After giving his son a samurai sword and a flag he took “from a dead Jap” the son is horrified by his father’s racism and instead wants to talk about Hiroshima. The younger man is not thrilled by Truman’s war crime. Indeed, there’s more regret about the bombing of Hiroshima in 5 minutes Wyler’s 1946 film than there is all of Christopher Nolan’s bloated, overrated Oppenheimer. In 1946 Americans were satisfied that they had beaten German and Japanese fascism, but they by no means believed they were completely innocent.
As Fred Derry continues to fall into a greater and greater sense of despair over his lack of prospects and unhappy marriage, he gets more and more abusive towards Marie. What’s more, after a halfhearted talking to by his future father in law Al Stephenson, he gets violent, not to Marie, but to a man who half invites it but certainly doesn’t deserve it. When Homer pays Fred a visit at work, he’s suddenly approached by a middle-aged man who notices the hooks where his hands used to be. We first expect him to say something like “thank you for your service” but instead the man, an America Firster who gives off hints he’s an actual Nazi, harangues Homer about how he lost his hands for nothing. “We fought the wrong people,” he rants, “just become some commie radicals in Washington got too big for their britches.” When Fred politely requests he leave, the harangues Fred and the idea of social mobility the war provided. “You see. Now every soda jerk in the country thinks he’s someone.” The man is not violent. He’s not really even abusive but he is an irritating pain in the ass harassing a gravely wounded veteran with no hands. When he goes to pay his bill, and Homer follows him, wanting to continue the discussion, he repeats what he had said before, that Homer lost his hands for nothing and that we shouldn’t have taken sides with the Soviet Union against the Nazis. Fred has heard enough. He leaps over the counter, punches the man in the face, then throws him into a glass cabinet, knocking him out.
Fred is once again an anti-fascist hero but this time he hasn’t returned from a suicide mission over Berlin. He’s beaten up a middle-aged man for expressing an opinion. Like a teenage anarchist in a black mask he’s gotten off on punching a Nazi. If we are perceptive and not blindly jingoistic, we realize watching this scene how we have been manipulated by our government and our media for the last few decades. The social mobility and economically progressive agenda of the New Deal are long gone and whatever Bernie Sanders tells you they’re not going to return. But the cheap high of punching a Nazi — or even just an isolationist with a few suspect right wing views — is still here to be dangled in front of us every time our rulers want to go to war. Every world leader or people the the American ruling class want to get rid of has become Hitler. The Soviet Union? “Totalitarian” like Hitler. North Korea? Hitler. The Serbs in the 1990s? Hitler. Saddam? Hitler. Assad? Hitler. The Islamic extremists the CIA used to stir up violence in Kosovo and destroy Syria and Libya? Hitler. The Palestinians in Gaza? You guessed it. Hitler.
William Wyler may have been a strong supporter of the war but he sees the danger that a lot of Americans like Fred were in. If a soldier doesn’t get his life together after the war, find some purpose, then he risks holding onto the war for the rest of his life. What’s worse, he might become a destructive influence on the country he supposedly fought to protect. The Frei Korps in Germany, the American Legion, the Black and Tans, Gladio, even the persistent urge in Russia to see the world through the lens of World War II, there are many examples of even a victorious war making it impossible for a people to move on with their lives and build a better society.
Fortunately, for Fred Derry, there is redemption. After getting fired from his job at the drug store, he decides to leave town so as not to cause Al Stephenson any more grief. Marie demands a divorce, something he gladly agrees to. He says goodbye to his parents, who suddenly realize what they are losing. But when he arrives at the airport — where he’s given a ticket by a clerk played by Sean Penn’s father — Fred notices hundreds of demobilized B-17s. Initially believing they’re going to be junked, he feels cynical and hopeless. I suppose the junk man gets everyone in the end, he says to a salvage foreman. But when the foreman informs Fred that the planes aren’t going to be junked but recycled into materials to make new houses, Fred suddenly realizes that he too might be recycled back into civilian life. When he realizes the foreman is a fellow veteran, he asks him for a job, and in spite of having no experience, he’s given one. Fred may not have found his calling, but at the very least he’s found a job he can stand working for a fellow veteran. At Homer’s wedding, he meets Peggy. She’s happy to see him, even more happy he’s found a job, and even happier yet that his wife has given him a divorce. Life is going to be tough for awhile, he says, but eventually it will get better. She expresses her wish to share Fred’s misery. She doesn’t care about money. He doesn’t care about glamor. They accept each other for who they are. We are confident they will be happy together, two members of what Tom Brokaw would call the greatest generation. It’s just too bad Fred and Peggy will probably end up voting for Nixon and supporting the war in Vietnam and eventually in their old age Reagan and George W. Bush.
Homer Parrish, however, will probably stick to the progressive faith of the New Deal. Harold Russell, the young non-actor who played Homer, and who won two Oscars for his performance, did not continue as a professional actor. Instead he went to graduate school at Boston University and received a masters degree. Eventually he ended up heading an organization for disabled veterans. When President Truman fired Douglas MacArthur, Russell wrote a letter supporting him and affirming civilian control of the military. The American Legion denounced him, but he stood his ground.
As head of AMVETS, Russell wrote to President Truman in 1951 supporting his decision to dismiss General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War. Russell’s telegram to Truman cited MacArthur’s “repeated insubordination in violation of basic American principles governing civil versus military authority.” His telegram asserted that those were “obvious grounds” to relieve MacArthur. Erle Cocke, Jr., commander of the American Legion, said that he was “shocked by the news” that AMVETS and the American Veterans Committee supported MacArthur’s firing.
Harold Russell died in 2002 at the age of 88 after having spent almost 60 years with his horrific disability. Sadly he began to run out of money at the end of his life and had to sell his Best Supporting Actor statue to provide for his wife’s medical expenses. We live in that kind of a country. The New Deal is long gone, replaced by a voracious yet vacuous neoliberalism. Harold Russell was no John Wayne. He did not profit from the War that made him famous. He didn’t grandstand. He was not a glamorous hero, just an ordinary man who paid a heavy price to defeat Hitler and Japanese fascism and who later stood his ground supporting a democratically elected President against an egotist. For that he deserves to be remembered. What’s more the deep focus, black and white photography of The Best Years of Our Lives hint at a nobility that seems gone from the United States. Every frame could be a Life Magazine still photo, the Midwest — actually Southern California standing in for the Midwest — clean, sharp, full of promise, looking towards a future we no longer seem to believe in. Sadly our ruling class will still invoke the Harold Russells and Fred Derrys of the past to justify the rapacious, unjust wars of the present.
Reacher opens at a nondescript family diner in the fictional town Margrave Georgia, the kind of place familiar to anyone who’s driven through the South. A man drags a woman out the front door to their van parked alongside, a nondescript working-class American and his battered wife. She’s tearful and apologetic. He maintains a constant stream of verbal abuse. A few yards away another man is staring at them in disgust. “What are you looking at stupid,” the abusive husband says to the second man, puffing out his chest. “Sorry,” he adds, now apologetic, suddenly changing tone, getting a better look at at the 6’5″, 250 pound slab of American beef staring in their direction. “I’m having a bad day. It won’t happen again.”
Jack Reacher has that effect on people. An Iraq War vet in his early 40s living off his Army pension, Reacher has no problem with kicking the ever loving shit out of bullies and assholes, scumbags who prey on the innocent and defenseless. It is in fact what he lives for. A knight errant, a wandering Samurai traveling the earth like Cain in Kung Fu, he has no fixed address, no wife or children, or even a mobile phone. The son of an American Army officer, the grandson of a hero of the French Resistance, he grew up on a series of military bases all over the world with his older brother Joe. It was not a happy childhood. The United States Army is a hierarchical institution, and army bases, whether they are located in Okinawa, Texas or Germany, have a pecking order that must be obeyed. The children of high ranking officers get to bully other kids without consequences. The children of junior officers have to take it. That’s just the way things are.
No sooner does he sit down to breakfast then Jack Reacher notices that the diner is surrounded by police cars. He has no idea that he is the prime suspect in a murder that had taken place the night before, or how deeply corrupt and evil the town of Margrave really is. Dragged off to jail by the police, he meets two people who will become his allies, and even friends, Sergeant Roscoe Conkling, a beautiful young woman in her late 20s who is immediately attracted to the hunky murder suspect, who she immediately determines is innocent, and Chief Detective Oscar Finlay, a black Harvard graduate from Boston, a by the book liberal intellectual who is, like Reacher, a fish out of water in the corrupt, conservative South.
That Alan Ritchson, who plays Jack Reacher, is an evangelical Christian and minister, is an irony that few of the mostly positive reviews of the first season of Reacher have noted. Superhero movies, the dominant cinematic genre of the 2010s, have been a substitute for religion for the culturally liberal, even radical, millennial generation. Whether bitten by mutant spiders, exiled from planets with a heavier system of gravity, strong with “the force,” or in possession of superior technology, superheroes are more akin to demigods than mere mortals. Paradoxically that opens up their casting to a wider variety of actors and actresses. Superman in civilian clothes looks like any other newspaper reporter. Luke Skywalker, played by the 5’9″ Mark Hamill, is immediately bullied as soon as he sets foot in the mutant bar at Mos Eisley Space Port. Rey, his heir, played by Daisey Ridley, has come under constant criticism for being a “Mary Sue,” an ordinary young woman who gives no sign of any ability to give the “First Order” much trouble. Peter Parker would have ended up as an incel had the mutant spider not come along. Jack Reacher, however, who has no special powers and no access to superior technology, seemed ridiculous when played by the diminutive Tom Cruise. His character demands an actor who looks like an NFL lineman. Alan Ritchson more than fits the bill. One look at Ritchson and almost anybody with any sense acts like the man in the opening scene. “Sorry. I’m having a bad day. It won’t happen again.” Ritchson is a human wrecking machine. The only mystery is why he served for 20 years in the same US military that had made his childhood so miserable. He could have easily become a multimillionaire on the front line of the Philadelphia Eagles.
Jack Reacher, in other words, is a secular super hero, an ordinary man who depends on his brawn, and as it turns out, his brains. There are no long high tech computer generated fight scenes. Reacher depends on smart writing and an engaging mystery. As such, it is a compelling look into a devastated “red” America, its economy dependent on corrupt, criminal oligarchs, a savage culture of violence and despair underlying even the most affluent surface. Reacher is a TV series full of damaged people. Everybody, from the good, Reacher himself, Roscoe, and Finley, to the morally compromised and out of their depth, an innocent banker and his family trapped in a counterfeiting and money laundering scheme, to the evil, most of the town, a corrupt mayor, corporate executive and his demented, emotionally disturbed son, a dirty FBI agent, racist police officers, Venezuelan contract killers, the local prison industrial complex, is damaged in one way or another. Very few people in Reacher can make genuine human contact. Roscoe, descended from one of the town’s leading families fallen on hard times, has lost her beloved mentor. Finley, so distraught about his wife in Boston, continues to pay for her cell phone bill so he can hear her voice on voicemail. One of the few innocent police officers is savagely murdered along with his wife and unborn child. Reacher, in turn, has never been able to make any contact at all. He has no living family members other than a brother, who we later learn is part of the town’s central mystery.
Indeed, up until arriving in Margrave, Reacher had no idea what his brother even did for a living, odd considering how they are portrayed in flashbacks as children, as close friends who stood up to bullies, and the army pecking order together. How exactly did a man like Reacher end up a lonely drifter wandering America on foot, an outcast vagrant who, like Johnny Rambo in First Blood, is thrown into prison simply because he stops to get something to eat. It’s another part of the series many critics miss. Reacher may not have superpowers, but he is a fantasy nonetheless. His memories are unreliable. Does his beloved brother even exist? Were they good friends? Was his mother the charming French lady who loved both her boys equally? Or was there something much darker in Reacher’s childhood we don’t see up front. Reacher’s mind is frozen in adolescence. If he lives to deliver payback to bullies, it’s because he sees the world from the point of view of a bullied high school kid, a young boy living on a series of military bases where he is constantly dragging his parents into a series of scandals as he and his brother refuse to submit to the privileged status of the children of the higher ranking officers. We’ve all been there. American society depends on hierarchy, on submitting to hazing and bullying in the hopes that we may some day get to be the bullies ourselves. But most of us hate it. If only we could be like Jack Reacher, a 6’5″ man mountain who can’t be bullied, who turns the tables on the bullies and defends the innocent and defenseless.
We can, but only for an hour. When the show is over we have to go back to our ordinary lives. And Jack Reacher, after he and his friends have cleaned up the evil afoot in Margrave, can’t stay, even though he has fallen in love and made a real friend. He is an outcast who must stay an outcast and, in the end, we see him wandering alone along the highway, a man who will never be married, own a house, have children, or find genuine happiness. Jack Reacher, like so many Americans in 2022, is a sad, damaged man with no hope of genuine redemption, only an occasional rush of adrenaline when he gets to kick ass.
In recent years, western Europe has been so pacified by neoliberalism and the European Union that it’s sometimes hard to imagine how brutal “the troubles” and the deployment of the British Army to Northern Ireland (the first “war on terror”) really were. After all, aren’t the Irish just another dull, wealthy western European people like the French or the Dutch? They’re certainly not Serbs or Palestinians. But don’t take my word for it. The Troubles, an ethno-religious conflict between white, northern European Christians, is as recent as the childhood of most Millennials. Original documentary footage, real British soldiers on Patrol in Belfast, even made it onto MTV.
Actual British Soldiers on Patrol in Northern Ireland
In 1990, Ken Loach, the leftist British filmmaker who had most the classic working class movie “Kes” in the 1960s, and who had spent most of the Thatcher years doing almost nothing at all, roared back to life in his mid-50s with Hidden Agenda, the first movie of the second act of his truly remarkable career. Loach is in fact not only still alive, but still so dangerous and relevant that he’s been “canceled” by respectable British public opinion for his support of Jeremy Corbyn and the Palestinians. In Hidden Agenda, he suggests that what happened in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, was more than an ethno-religious conflict between Protestant Anglo Saxons and Roman Catholic Celts. It was in fact the very destruction of British democracy.
Hidden Agenda opens at an “Orange Walk” in downtown Belfast in the late 1970s, an “Orange Walk” basically a gang of Protestants marching through the Catholic section of the city looking to pick fights. Paul Sullivan and Ingrid Jessner, two vaguely left wing American lawyers played by Brad Dourif and Frances McDormand, are giving a press conference. They have just concluded an investigation of human rights abuses committed by the British Army. Teresa Doyle, an Irish republican journalist, is not impressed. She has evidence of British soldiers committing extrajudicial executions. She confronts Jessner, accusing her of being used by the British government, and demands that Jessner meet her later to take possession of the photographs. While Jessner is chatting with Doyle, Sullivan walks outside to observe the parade, which he’s appalled by. “Tribalism” he whispers under his breath. Just then Captain Harris, a disgruntled British intelligence officer, slips a newspaper, which contains a cassette, into Sullivan’s hands.
If Doyle’s photographs of the British Army committing summary executions puts Jessner in grave danger, then Harris’s cassette, which contains evidence of a right wing faction in the British Conservative Party plotting not only to destabilize the Labor government but to discredit moderates inside the Tories, is a death sentence for Sullivan. Even though Sullivan and Jessner have experience in Chile during Pinochet’s coups, they have no idea how far out of their depth they really are. “What happened in Chile can’t happen here,” they reassure themselves. Teresa Doyle nor Captain Harris are not malicious or stupid. Both of them believe that since Sullivan and Jessner are prominent American human rights lawyers, the British security forces won’t touch either of them.
It is a grave mistake. Neither American nor white privilege means jack shit in Northern Ireland. It didn’t mean very much in Chile either, but both of them got lucky. Sullivan’s luck has run out. On the way to a meeting with Captain Harris to discuss the tape, a British Army death squad pulls up alongside of his car and machine guns him and his driver, a member of the IRA. The British soldiers then proceed to plant weapons in the car and switch Sullivan’s body to the passenger seat. They concoct a story that Sullivan’s driver tried to run a roadblock, where the guards had to return fire in self defense. The death squad it later turns out to have been a semi-independent anti-terrorist special operations unit empowered to fight the IRA by any means necessary. The authorities quickly accept their story at face value and declare the case closed.
Enter Peter Kerrigan, a senior police inspector from the mainland played by Brian Cox. Kerrigan is an honest, well-respected official, one of the very few men in the United Kingdom with the the authority to poke around the incestuous senior command in Belfast without ending up machine gunned himself. Even so he’s relentlessly stonewalled and misled by men who resent the idea of someone from “the mainland” undermining their authority, and barging into a war he just doesn’t understand. Nevertheless, Paul Sullivan’s murder was so heavy handed and incompetent it’s almost impossible to keep it under wraps for very long, and eventually the authorities in Belfast are ready to throw the members of the death squad that killed Paul Sullivan under the bus.
But Kerrigan, who has already made contact with Ingrid Jessner and Captain Harris is getting closer and closer to the tape and right wing coup that put Thatcher and her extremist right wing ideology into power. We begin to notice that the British state is far more sinister, and powerful, than we could have imagined. Not only is Ingrid Jessner under constant surveillance and Kerrigan constantly watched, even Captain Harris, an inexperienced British intelligence officer, can barely shake the surveillance for more than a few minutes. Just about the only place Kerrigan can meet freely with witnesses and interrogate Harris about the tape is under the protection of the IRA, which he despises. Nevertheless, Teresa Doyle sets Kerrigan and Jessner up to meet Captain Harris in an IRA pub, shortly after which the security forces kick in her door and drag Doyle off to prison.
That the British Army knew exactly what Kerrigan was doing and where he was to meet Captain Harris demonstrates clearly that the security forces have thoroughly infiltrated the IRA. By 1980s the Troubles were besides the point. How easily they were shut down in the 1990s as Ireland was brought into the neoliberal world order indicates that they were anything but a true ethno-religious conflict. Nobody in the heavily secular UK cares who’s Protestant and who’s Catholic anymore. But Northern Ireland in the 1970s, like Guantanamo Bay, the occupied territories in Israel, or Iraq, was a laboratory for the implementation of a totalitarian state in the heart of the “free” world. Kerrigan not only figures out exactly what was going on with the rise of Margaret Thatcher, he goes right to the powerful men who organized the coup and confronts them. They are rattled but still defiant. They had never expected this meddlesome policeman to get so far, but still know they can crush him like a bug.
Soon we begin to realize where their power comes from. Fascism isn’t conjured out of the ether by evil men. It’s made inevitable by the collaboration of good men. Inevitably Kerrigan realizes how far out of his depth he really is. The right wing coup plotters and the security forces have been watching him from the very beginning. They have photos of him meeting with known terrorists in an IRA pub. They have barely manipulated photos of him with Ingrid Jessner, who they inform Kerrigan has a long history of involvement with the Communist Party. They have already had their extensive contacts in the British media organize a complete smear campaign proving that he’s a terrorist sympathizer having an affair with an American communist. They make an offer. Prosecute the men who murdered Paul Sullivan and get out of the whole mess a hero who upheld the rule of law, or continue trying to investigate the coup, publish a story nobody’s going to believe anyway, and say goodbye to his marriage and his pension.
Kerrigan takes the offer.
Ingrid Jessner and Captain Harris make a valiant effort to expose the coup without Kerrigan but it’s hopeless. Another death squad grabs Harris in broad daylight right in the middle of Dublin, break both his legs, throw him in a van and put a bullet in his head. The IRA did it of course. Ingrid Jessner gets back to the United States with her life and the tape but without Harris or Kerrigan to cooperate her testify she’s only going to be dismissed as a loony conspiracy theorist and communist with two dead boyfriends in her past. Thatcher would eventually be gone, pushed out of office by poll tax riots. The United States would move in and negotiate an end to The Troubles. A few decades later, Ireland would be the richest country in Europe if measured by per capita income, and the Irish themselves be transformed into generic neoliberal western Europeans. But both Ireland and the UK would continue to live in the hell made by Thatcherism. Nothing can, or will ever change.
This is not a review. I have never seen The Day the Clown Cried. Neither have you. Neither has anybody. Shortly after it was filmed, it was considered to be so bad that Lewis said he would never release it. As a matter of fact, I thought he had destroyed most of the film stock. Apparently I was wrong.
In an interview with TheNew York Times in 2018, Chris Lewis, Lewis’s son, said: “It was something that was very close to his heart.”
At other times, however, Lewis denounced the film. In 2013, footage of Lewis surfaced on YouTube in which he stated: “It was bad, and it was bad because I lost the magic. No one will ever see it, because I’m embarrassed at the poor work.
Lewis apparently had a change of heart, as an agreement was reportedly struck with Rob Stone, the library’s moving image curator, in 2014 for a screening 10 years later.”
To be honest, I’ve never understood the fuss about releasing it. It sounds a bit like JoJo Rabbit or Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, a clumsy attempt to combine pathos and comedy in a movie about the Holocaust. If it sucks, no one will see it and it will disappear. I have no intention of seeing it because I’ve never been a big Jerry Lewis fan and this is probably his worst movie. I used to fall for the “forbidden movie” hype. I finally found a copy of the censored Disney movie Song of the South. It wasn’t offensive, just boring. Never again. But to each his own. You can’t get a better marketing hook then “finally the movie they would not let you see is being screened in front of a select audience.” I’m sure cinephiles are going to be first in line to buy tickets.
She’d be Claire Pommet, Pomme, a popular singer in France and Quebec, almost unknown in the United States.
If Audrey Hepburn could sing
This type of concert isn’t for everybody. You have to slow down and take it all in. But I’ve never seen a performer who connects better with an audience, not Springsteen, not Pete Seeger. There almost doesn’t seem to be a clear line between performance and conversation.
Pomme’s inspiration is Barbara, a French singer of East European Jewish descent born in 1930 who spent her early teen years hiding from the Nazis, and, as we later learned, being sexually abused by her father.
In 1964, she wrote a song called Göttingen, which promoted the reconciliation between France and Germany, a triumph of imagination for a dual (sexual and ethnic) Holocaust survivor. That it’s impossible to imagine the French and Germans ever going to war again actually had something to do with this song. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder attended the first performance as an undergrad and declared it a major intellectual influence. He’s currently sanctioned by the USA for promoting better relations between Germany and Russia.
Barbara’s famous pan European anthem
Pomme’s covered several of Barbara’s songs. Here she sings Göttingen in her hometown of Lyon (famous for a state of the art public transportation system and a socialist Mayor). She briefly breaks down emotionally when she talks about her music teacher turning her onto Barbara.
Barbara’s famous post war, pan European anthem covered by a Millennial
Anyway, I’m always reluctant to post YouTube videos because they eventually disappear. But one of the positive things about the Internet is being exposed to culture from all over the world. I grew up in lower-middle-class New Jersey where everything and anything was “metal.” Too bad I wasn’t born a generation later.
Liberating The Written Word From Capitalism Since 2014
