Was anyone surprised by the recent CNN poll finding President Trump’s approval rating at 42 percent, the highest it has been since the first Infrastructure Week?
The thousand undifferentiated scoops in the phantasmal Mueller investigation, the vicissitudes of his hundred shifting positions on DACA and the fabled border wall, Stormy Daniels, a reversal of course in Syria and Afghanistan, moronic schemes from the White House to turn food stamps into some kind of vast network of state-run bread and milk distribution centers, endless championing of the Wall Street gazillionaires against whom he had supposedly been running in 2016, relentless staff turnaround, a so-far-illusory trade war conducted from the internet with minimal strategy or cohesion, even “covfefe”: Not one of these things matters to the not-quite-majority of Americans who voted for Trump. They still like him.
Why shouldn’t they? The reasons for opposing Trump were clear from the beginning. He was a crude, mean-spirited man whose most noteworthy accomplishments were kicking old people out of their homes to make room for casino parking lots, speculating publicly about whether the duly elected president of the United States was a jihadist plant, and pretending to fire Gary Busey in the fake board-room of a made-up company on NBC. It was only the staggering irrelevance of what all 15 other Republican candidates were saying — it is almost sad now to think of the millions of words of Heritage Foundation PowerPoints still gathering virtual dust on Jeb Bush’s website — that made his candidacy possible. Years later the GOP is still talking nonsense about freedom and entrepreneurship, the Democrats are still obsessed with where people go to the bathroom, and Trump is still being rude on television. Nothing has changed. If anything, there is good reason to believe that in the weeks and months to come polls without the historic Republican bias of Rassmussen will approach the 50 percent mark.
It’s not surprising that after little more than a year in office many people who voted for a president still support him. But it’s also surprising that a president who has been the object of more negative reporting than any in our history still enjoys something like the same middling base of support he had before taking office. Unless it’s the negative reporting that is the problem, which I suspect is very largely the case. You can only ask adults to participate in the fiction that a retweet of a wrestling GIF is a credible threat of violence against some nerd reporters at a cable station or delight in what you hope will be the failure of American trade policy before they decide to tune you out. Very largely this had already happened by Inauguration Day, but now the work of MSNBC and The New York Timesand PolitiFact is complete. Millions of Americans do not know the difference between what is true and what is false and have decided that they do not much care either.
There was, I like fondly to imagine, a different course that might have been taken here. It is just possible, I suppose, that members of my profession could have exercised their reasoning faculties to decide what in the administration was good, what was bad, what was unremarkable or indistinguishable from what any modern president would do, what was painfully idiotic, what was, perhaps, evil. We chose not to exercise this responsibility. Instead we decided to indulge in our live-action roleplaying fantasies about being brave selfless journos taking on a mean demagogue because we love the Constitution so much.
There is, however, a faint glimmer of hope for Trump’s enemies in the media. Making it work would require the coordinated efforts of a vast number of persons — conspiracy is the word for it, or maybe even “collusion” — but that shouldn’t be difficult in the era of modern internet-based communication. If we want to convince people who voted for him that the president no longer deserves their support, we need to stop talking about him. Or to be more precise, we need to stop making Trump the universal metric according to which all of human conduct is weighed and considered.
If Trump argues against free trade, consider the issue on its merits. The idea that liberalizing the production and distribution of goods and services across national borders will automatically enrich everyone — instead of just the already wealthy in rich and poor countries alike — has had its critics on the left and the right for centuries; even President Obama was skeptical of NAFTA during his first Senate campaign and as late as the 2008 election he was telling audiences that it should be renegotiated. When Trump criticizes Amazon for its monopolistic practices, don’t turn it into a tedious finger-wagging exercise in fact-checking (and if you work for a newspaper owned by its founder and CEO, maybe avoid saying anything if you don’t have to); subject the company to the same scrutiny you would reserve for any other giant corporation that treats America’s cities as its fiefdoms and her people as its grateful serfs.
Pretending that anything the president says or does is bad because he is the one saying or doing isn’t just bad journalism. You might as well be wearing a MAGA hat and whooping about the Wall.
Category: media
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No comments on Who’s at fault for Trump’s increasing popularity
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Steven Bochco, one of the most influential TV producers of the past 30 years died Sunday. Todd VanDerWerff explains:
As a TV writer in the late 1960s and ’70s, Bochco worked on everything from Columbo to McMillan & Wife, cranking out sharp scripts for the well-oiled TV machines of the time. But it was when he joined the then-powerful MTM Productions (the company behind classic sitcoms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show) to help the company jump-start its drama division that he became someone who must be acknowledged in even the most cursory summaries of TV’s history.
His first show with MTM, Paris, which ran for 13 episodes in 1979 and 1980, was groundbreaking for the time, starring James Earl Jones as a police captain whose relationships with the officers working under him were satisfyingly complex. What’s more, the show actually followed him home to see how he interacted with his wife, something few police dramas had done before. In its interest in contemporary issues and the protagonist’s personal life, Paris served as a cursory blueprint for what was to come.
But it was Bochco’s next show that would change everything. Co-created with Michael Kozoll, Hill Street Blues would debut in 1981 on NBC and run for 144 episodes that altered television forever. From its storytelling style to its visuals, Hill Street rewrote the rules of what a TV drama could be, and made possible the boom in great drama that followed in the ’90s and 2000s.
Here, then, are Hill Street Blues and four other TV shows that will help you understand why Steven Bochco is one of the all-time greatest TV producers.
1) Hill Street Blues
If you were to watch just one series to understand how dramatically Bochco changed the game, make it this one. Even better, take a look at one of the great dramas of the ’70s — like The Rockford Files, for instance — then look at this one to see just how differently it approached its storytelling.
Hill Street Blues, which debuted in 1981 and ran until 1987, is often incorrectly cited as the first serialized TV drama. Daytime and primetime soaps had, of course, been telling continuing stories for decades at that point. But what Hill Street did was wed this storytelling model, which was written off by many critics of the time as disreputable, to the slightly more prestigious cop drama.
The show bears some similarities to Paris. The police officers of Hill Street Station (in an unnamed city somewhere east of the Mississippi) dealt with major social issues they encountered throughout their neighborhood, some of which walked right through the door and into their station. The camera followed the officers home to see what their personal lives were like, and the series was interested in how those personal lives affected their professional ones.
But it was Bochco and Kozoll’s interest in merging serialization and case-of-the-week storytelling that proved most revolutionary. Hill Street didn’t push the reset button at the end of every episode. Events that happened in one episode affected the next, and over the series’ 144 episodes, viewers learned so much about the show’s characters from how they were affected by the cases they took on.
The two also brought a bolder cinematic language to the series, using documentary-style techniques that made it feel as if viewers were just dropping in on some real station somewhere, unannounced, enhancing the feel that everything in the show was really happening somewhere.
MTM pushed Bochco off the series in its fifth season, and while the show ran until season seven without him (under the tutelage of his protege David Milch, himself a major TV influence), it never quite recaptured the glories of its early days, when it looked radically different from everything else on TV. To watch Hill Street in 2018 is to find it a little quaint — TV drama has evolved considerably since then — but it’s impossible to imagine almost any drama on the air now without nodding toward the influence of this one series.
2) Doogie Howser, MD
Typically, a glance at Bochco’s work would go from Hill Street to the other drama series he co-created that won four Emmys for Best Drama — 1986’s LA Law. But while that series has its charms, its reliance on sensationalism that no longer seems as sensational has made it age the most poorly of Bochco’s well-known series.
Instead, take a look at this 1989 to 1993 series, co-created with David E. Kelley (another Bochco protege who went on to great things in his own right). Following a whiz kid teenager who is already in his second year of residency as a surgeon at the age of 16, Doogie is not a particularly great television show, but it’s useful for looking at a form Bochco was interested in but never quite cracked: the dramedy. (His other good series in this form is the even more obscure John Ritter vehicle Hooperman.)
Doogie and Hooperman were part of a late ’80s movement toward comedies that were filmed more like movies and not in front of live studio audiences. As such, they didn’t feature the sounds of audience laughter and were often less reliant on punchlines and more reliant on a kind of soft-focus drama — too light to have the sharper edges of a Hill Street but darker than something like contemporary comedy Cheers. And if you’re thinking that sounds a lot like many comedies on the air right now, you wouldn’t be wrong.
These days, Doogie is better known for its high-concept premise and launching the career of its star, Neil Patrick Harris, but it’s worth checking out to see yet another TV form in its early days, with Bochco right there helping it along.
Doogie was produced as part of a six-year, 10-series deal with ABC that Bochco signed in 1987. It was a deal that would go on to produce many of his most memorable series. But it was also a deal that would produce his most infamous flop.
3) Cop Rock
No list of bizarre TV flops is complete without 1990’s Cop Rock, a one-season weirdo that was co-created with William M. Finkelstein, which wedded Bochco’s beloved cop show format to original songs written by Randy Newman. This means that, yes, Cop Rock was a musical, something wildly original at the time but also so out there that nobody was quite ready for it.
That can sometimes mean a series that was ahead of its time, but Cop Rock isn’t quite that. It has its moments (as a recent DVD release by Shout Factory makes clear), but it’s also clear that no one involved has quite thought through what the series will look like beyond, “I guess the cops will sing every once in a while?” Discussing the serious social issues that animated a lot of Bochco’s work via song and dance ended up feeling as if it was trivializing them, unfortunately.
But it’s still worth checking out an episode of the show (or, really, just a few clips on YouTube) to see a series so far ahead of its time that TV is only really just now figuring out what a musical drama might look like. And it’s also worth remembering that for all his hits, Bochco had a lot of flops too — though few as memorable as this one.
4) NYPD Blue
Bochco’s biggest success with ABC (where he made his home for almost 20 years, going beyond his original six-year deal) was this 1993 debut, co-created with Milch, which ran for 12 seasons and 261 episodes, following the officers of a New York police precinct as they worked cases, dealt with personal problems, and confronted social issues of the day. If that sounds a lot like Hill Street, well, you’re not wrong. But while NYPD was nowhere near as influential as that earlier show, it changed TV in more subtle ways.
The one that seemed most important at the time was the show’s embrace of rawer language and sexual content than other series of the time. (Famously, ABC put several warnings about nudity on the broadcast of the series’ pilot — but all that was shown were a couple of bare butts, rather than the much more salacious images the warnings seemed to promise.)
Watching the series in 2018 will probably lead you to wonder why anybody was so upset, but several local ABC affiliates refused to air NYPD Blue when it debuted. That it no longer seems all that coarse in 2018 is probably a sign of how it really did change television.
But a more lasting legacy stems from the series’ protagonist, Dennis Franz’s Andy Sipowicz, a racist cop who didn’t always play by the rules but got results, darn it. He feels, at many turns, heavily modeled on Popeye Doyle, the cop played by Gene Hackman in the Oscar-winning 1971 film The French Connection. But Bochco and Milch (who wrote the operatic scripts for the series’ first seven seasons) used television to dig deeper into what made Sipowicz the man he was, changing and even softening him over time.
If you don’t particularly feel like watching a racist cop antihero in 2018, that more than makes sense. But Sipowicz is an important step in TV’s embrace of the antihero. He’s not as revolutionary as All in the Family’s Archie Bunker (who came to TV in 1971) or Tony Soprano (who debuted in 1999), but he comfortably straddles the gap between the two. He was a dark and complicated character at a time when TV was sorely lacking for such a thing.
And if you do feel like checking NYPD Blue out, you’re in luck. The entire series was just added to Hulu.
5) Murder One
Here’s another Bochco series (co-created with Charles H. Eglee and Channing Gibson) that didn’t work out, running for just two seasons between 1995 and 1997. But the storytelling model it used ended up being hugely influential around a decade later. It just took a move to cable to do so.
The idea behind Murder One was that every season of the show would follow one murder trial from start to finish, as a team of lawyers tried to defend their client and, along the way, figure out who really did it, all the better to exonerate him. And the first season, which followed the investigation of the murder of 15-year-old Jessica Costello, stuck to that core idea, with numerous twists and turns and several memorable performances (most notably from Stanley Tucci as a possibly sociopathic philanthropist whose path intersected with Jessica’s).
The problem was that a traditional 22-episode broadcast TV season was a little too much for a story like this, leading to some serious dead weight in the middle (though both the first two and last two hours are excellent). In season two, Murder One went from one case to a handful, which played out over the course of the season, but that, weirdly, wasn’t as gripping. The show was canceled.
The producers of the later series 24, which took some cues from Murder One, would solve this by piling story arcs on top of each other across their 24-episode seasons. But it took the cable drama, with its 10- and 13-episode seasons, to really solve the problem. On a cable show, the “case of the season” had enough space to really allow time to dig into all of the suspects, but not so much space that the writers had to vamp for time (at least when it was done well).
This means that, weirdly, in the Netflix era, Murder One is the show of Bochco’s that perhaps looks the most influential. But that was the man’s career in a nutshell. Even when he was producing a series that didn’t work, he was reinventing television.
Ryan Parker writes about perhaps Bochco’s most notable character:When Dennis Franz learned on Sunday that his longtime friend and former TV boss, Steve Bochco, had died after a battle with cancer, he simply could not process what he was hearing.“It was a day of shock for me,” the actor on Tuesday told The Hollywood Reporter. Bochco was 74.
Knowing one another for decades and working together on some of television’s most iconic, groundbreaking programs, Franz simply could not wrap his mind around the loss of the the strong-willed writer and producer who created Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue and L.A. Law, among other shows.
“I consider Steven to be a leader and a visionary in television,” says Franz, who played Detective Andrew “Andy” Sipowicz for the full 12-season run of ABC’s NYPD Blue. “He left such a beautiful legacy of so much memorable work, which to me puts him in an icon status.”
Franz worked closely with Bochco initially playing most notably fan favorite Lt. Norman Buntz on NBC’s Hill Street Blues, which ran from 1981 to 1987, before starring on ABC’s NYPD Blue.
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One of the media trends facilitated by social media is a list of the top _____ of ______.
While top ___ lists have been around since mass media, late night TV host David Letterman probably gets credit for popularizing them.
I have recently seen a couple of top 10 lists about car movies, or movies where cars play a prominent role. I somewhat agree with one and not the one I can’t find.
Letterman was trying to be funny. Others try to be insightful or merely controversial, since each obviously is merely one opinion and not (usually) based on anything close to objectivity. My list is based on my own subjective opinion of the vehicles involved, along with if a non-car-buff can watch without being bored into slumber.
Anyway, here is my top 10 ist of car movies, which does not include several worthy honorable mention selections, such as “Mad Max” and “The Road Warrior,” “Le Mans,” “Grand Prix” (no, those are not two movies about Pontiacs), “Live and Let Die” (in fact one could do an entire list of James Bond movies rated by car chase), “The Driver,” “To Live and Die in L.A.,” “The Transporter,” and so on.
Number 10:
This was a better movie than “Cannonball Run,” which consisted of fine cars, but not very fine acting.
Number 9:
Not the Nicholas Cage remake.
Number 8:
We didn’t include Reynolds’ “Cannonball Run,” but we will include this because it combines cool car scenes with a compelling story of brotherly revenge. Ned Beatty did a great job as a malevolent redneck sheriff. The sequel, “Gator,” lacks the car chases, though it does have a boat chase.
Number 7:
This might be the best movie overall of this list. The cars are cool, and so is the music for those who grew up in that age. (For those unaware: The ’55 Chevy the future Han Solo crashes in a drag race was the repainted car in “Two Lane Blacktop” of two years earlier.)
Number 6:
Not the Mark Wahlberg remake.
Number 5:
Reynolds returns. (The sequels are not worth your time, however.)
Number 4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLsbIj2JysI
Not the Viggo Mortenson remake.
Number 3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TqaVEIUw4U
Number 2:
And the number 1 car movie of all time according to myself:
The greatest car chase of all time, plus young Jacqueline Bisset, oily politician Robert Vaughn, a compelling story, a fantastic Lalo Schifrin soundtrack, and the greatest car chase of all time.
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Earlier this year, from SFGate.com:
Dave Toschi, a dapper cop who became the lead San Francisco police investigator for the Zodiac serial-killer case in the late 1960s and ’70s, has died at the age of 86.
Toschi died at his home in San Francisco on Saturday after a lengthy illness, relatives said.
The Zodiac terrorized the Bay Area in 1968 and 1969 when he stabbed or shot at least five people to death, writing taunting notes and cryptograms to police and newspapers including The Chronicle after his kills. Toschi was drawn into the case when he was assigned to investigate the killing of the Zodiac’s only San Francisco victim — Paul Stine, a cabbie shot to death in his taxi on Oct. 11, 1969.
It was the Zodiac’s final confirmed slaying. Like every other inspector looking into the saga, from federal agents to police in Vallejo and Napa County, Toschi was unable to solve the case. But he never lost zeal for the mystery, friends said. …
In addition to his work on the Zodiac killings, Toschi was part of the team that solved the racially motivated Zebra murders in the early 1970s, in which four black men were convicted of the random slayings of 14 white people. In 1985 he received a meritorious conduct award from the department for arresting a man who raped senior citizens and burglarized their homes.
His penchant for bow ties, snappy trench coats and the quick-draw holster for his .38-caliber pistol drew the attention of Steve McQueen, who patterned his character in the 1968 movie “Bullitt” after Toschi. Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” character was also partially inspired by him.
Toschi was the inspiration for two famous fictional police detectives who did not dress like Toschi:
Thomas Scalzo reviewed “Bullitt” …
When first we meet Lieutenant Frank Bullitt, he’s fast asleep, dressed in a pair of cozy-looking pajamas. Jarred awake by his partner Delgetti buzzing at his apartment door, he stumbles to let him in, and then lurches back to bed. “What time d’you get to bed this morning, Frank?” asks Delgetti, moving into the kitchen to pour a glass of OJ. “About 5:00,” Bullitt replies, visibly fighting down his hangover nausea and feebly reaching for what he thinks is his glass of juice. When Delgetti instead takes a gulp and begins to read the morning paper, aloud, Bullitt stares at him in disgust. “Why don’t you just relax and have your orange juice, and shut up,” he says, obviously not looking forward to whatever assignment his captain has in store, and clearly regretting whatever it was that put him in such a state.
What’s intriguing about this introduction to Bullitt is not so much its originality – untold cop stories begin with a besotted hero grudgingly coming back to life after a long night – as its incongruousness with everything that follows. For aside from these opening frames, Bullitt is a consummate man’s man—unflappable, assured, and impeccably cool. Sure, we have the occasional non-action scene – Bullitt buys frozen dinners, Bullitt takes his lady friend to dinner – to show us he’s not all work. But never again is the man as vulnerable, or as human, as he is in these opening moments. Inevitably, when dealing with an intricate pulp crime drama like Bullitt, plot comes first. But the subtle characterization in this opening scene adds a welcome layer of complexity to the story and makes viewing the film a richer experience. Not only do we keep our eyes peeled in order to get to the bottom of the mystery, but also in hopes of catching another clue as to who this hard-boiled cop in the cardigan really is.
With this in mind, we watch as Bullitt collects himself enough to report for his latest assignment: babysitting Johnny Ross, the district attorney’s star witness. It seems a senate subcommittee hearing is scheduled for a few days hence and it’s Bullitt’s job to make sure Ross is on time and able to testify. Complicating matters is the Chicago crime syndicate who want the man dead before he can talk. And so, not long after stumbling out of bed, Bullitt finds himself in a tight spot: If the witness dies, the DA will have Bullitt’s badge. And as long as the witness lives, Bullitt is an enemy of the Mob. When Bullitt asks his captain what recommended him for such illustrious duty, he’s told, “You make good copy. They love you in the papers.” Again, we’re tantalized by the Bullitt back-story. What had he done to make the headlines? The mystery deepens.
(I wonder myself what that means. High-profile cases solved? He certainly doesn’t seem like a quote machine based on his not-even-laconic portrayal.)
Soon enough, however, our intrigue about Bullitt is forced to the backburner by the story of Johnny Ross and the men who want to kill him. At the start of the assignment, the case seems fairly simple: guard the guy for a few days and then hand him over to the DA. But when Johnny’s hideout is discovered, and he finds himself on the wrong end of a shotgun, things begin to get interesting. Instead of outright fear at his own mortality, Johnny appears confused. He even manages to stammer out “They told me…” before taking multiple shots to the body. Add to this the revelation that Ross actually unlocked the door for his would be assailant, and Bullitt’s ordinary case has erupted into a full-blown murder mystery.
Enhancing the obfuscation are several unusual filmmaking techniques in play throughout the picture. One persistent strategy involves positioning some sort of obstruction – be it a plate-glass window, a forest of legs, or another character’s head – between the camera and the central action of the scene. In most cases the action is still discernable, but the viewer is deliberately relegated to the role of outside observer, spying on the scene as opposed to being immersed in it. And in many instances, the dialogue of such scenes is muted, requiring us to distil the importance of the scene based on visual activity alone. There are also several instances of a scene being shot from a location adjacent to that of the main action. When Ross undergoes emergency medical procedures in an attempt to save his life, for instance, instead of shooting the scene from within the hospital room, Peter Yates places his camera in the hallway outside. Thus, we watch the traumatic proceedings at a distance, peering into the room like a nosy neighbor.
The net result of such storytelling strategies is to cast the viewer into the role of detective. Like Bullitt, we’re compelled to pay attention to everything we see and hear, to piece together clues, to ponder the significance of a subtle event, to wonder what is being said behind glass walls. Such reliance on audience attention span was surely risky, even in 1968. And the technique is a particularly tough sell to a present-day spectator accustomed to insecure pictures that go out of their way to ensure viewer passivity. No doubt many modern viewers will find themselves unable to get past the film’s slow pace and nuanced storytelling. The reward, however, for those willing to allow themselves to fall under the film’s spell, is an engrossing crime drama featuring a masterfully understated performance by Steve McQueen, and, eventually, several terrific – and iconic – action set-pieces.
First on the list is the sublime car chase through the hills of San Francisco. Comprising over twelve minutes of dialogue-free runtime, the sequence is a perfect amalgam of terrific stunt work, deft editing, and canny use of music. For the first three and a half minutes we watch as Bullitt and his quarry weave through the twisty streets, a cool jazz score the perfect accompaniment to the slick game of automotive cat and mouse. And then the hunted decides to make a break for it. The music stops, a seatbelt is snapped in place, and the race is on. With squealing tires and revving engines the only soundtrack, the combatants burst out of the confines of the city and rocket onto the highways beyond.
In conspicuous contrast to much of the preceding film, this celebrated scene places the viewer smack dab in the middle of the action. No longer are we compelled to peer past obstacles or wonder at the significance of what’s taking place behind glass windows. Instead, we’re treated to an enticing mix of behind-the-windshield shots offering a first-hand view at the chase, intimate close-ups of the drivers’ determined faces as they navigate the perilous roadways, and unobstructed cutaways of the cars ripping around corners. Not only does the inspired editing of these shots achieve the astounding feat of keeping us riveted to the screen for minute after minute of wordless action, it also highlights the narrative significance of the sequence. Obscured shots aren’t needed here because Bullitt isn’t groping in the dark for answers. The men who want Ross dead are in his sights, and it’s time to get them.
Less famous, but equally enthralling, is the final showdown at the airport, full of gunfire drowned out by the roar of turbines and roving spotlights randomly illuminating the hunter and the hunted as they dive under jets, crisscross the runway, and desperately take cover behind the low-lying scrub brush. Eventually, the riotous chase leads back into the airport proper, and to the climax of the film. In the midst of all this action, however, we reach an unexpected moment that reminds us that, though the mystery of the plot is soon to be explained, the mystery of Bullitt remains. Convinced that his man is waiting on the other side of a closed door, Bullitt draws his gun, the action accompanied by a musical cue. In astonishment, we realize we’re witnessing the first time Bullitt has drawn his weapon. Clearly we’re meant to note the event, and attach significance to it. But why? What is it about the man’s past that makes this action so momentous? Before we have time to ponder the question, however, Bullitt has burst through the door, gun in hand.
After the last shot is fired and the sirens have faded into the night, we once again find ourselves in Bullitt’s lonely apartment, with our hero looking much the worse for wear. He splashes some water on his face and stares at himself in the mirror. He looks tired. But there’s something other than fatigue in his eyes: a sense of regret, possibly, or of doubt—the look of a man contemplating staying up till five, with a bottle, trying to forget. And as the camera shifts away from our hero, to focus directly on the violent tools of his trade, we begin to understand why.
Of course, Frank Bullitt was neither the first, nor the last, loner detective to grace the big screen. From the many incarnations of Philip Marlow to Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry to Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna in Heat, the history of cinematic crime storytelling is chock full of men whose dedication to work always gets in the way of anything resembling a meaningful relationship or a normal home life. And in those rare instances where domesticity is part of the story, the film suffers. … It seems that when these figures have something to lose, they are unable to take the authority-defying risks that make them appealing. Perhaps this appeal lies in offering a historically male audience vicarious immersion in a world where they don’t have to answer to anyone. It’s only natural, then, that we smile when Bullitt, asked about work by his ladylove, replies, “It’s not for you, baby.” Because deep down, we know it’s not for us either. And that’s why we watch.
… and later compared it to “Dirty Harry” …
Having recently analyzed Peter Yates’ Bullitt, also a loose-cannon cop story (and also scored by Schiffrin), comparisons between McQueen’s Bullitt and Eastwood’s Callahan were inevitable. Like Bullitt, Callahan is an authority-defying San Francisco detective tasked with a difficult and dangerous case. Also like Bullitt, Callahan faces a formidable swath of red tape standing between him and successful completion of the job. David Thomson, that inimitable author of A Biographical Dictionary of Film, has even gone so far as to call Bullitt “a pioneer for Dirty Harry.”
Unfortunately, following the loner cop trail that Bullitt blazed has lead Harry Callahan, not merely to a place of professional frustration, but to a land of outright impotence. Unlike Bullitt, whose daily tasks regularly find him in the role of the aggressor – actively chasing the bad guys through the streets of San Francisco, for instance – Callahan’s action set pieces often find him simply reacting to events beyond his control. Most notable among these is the gripping ransom sequence in which Harry plays bagman to the killer’s cash-for-captive-girl demands. Hoping to evade a possible police trap, Scorpio demands that Harry follow a circuitous route to the drop site, revealing each subsequent step of the journey by phone. Throughout the course of an endless night, Harry crisscrosses the city, running from phone booth to phone booth to obtain his orders, completely at the mercy of a madman’s whims.
Even when Harry becomes so fed up by being led around by the nose that he does take the aggressive tack – trailing the killer to his home and forcibly obtaining the location of the missing girl – he’s summarily cut off at the knees by his superiors, who claim his methods were inappropriate and the evidence he obtained inadmissible. Despite Harry’s efforts, Scorpio will be set free. Eastwood’s incredulous and exasperated expression at hearing this news perfectly encapsulates Harry’s impotence. How can a man be expected to endure in a world where criminals are coddled and lawmen are rebuked for doing their jobs? As these scenes demonstrate, Harry is a man assailed by the fates at every turn, seemingly incapable of directing the course of his own life.
Such powerlessness over one’s existence inevitably leads to mounting frustration, and the desperate need for release. Stymied professionally, Harry’s thoughts inevitably turn to sex. Unfortunately, as a man who lost his wife some time ago, and has no intimate relationship that we know of, Harry seems doomed to frustration in this realm, too. In fact, Harry seems almost incapable of relating to women as a mature adult.
Take his encounter with Hot Mary and her boyfriend. After trailing a suspect down a dark alley, Harry watches his quarry enter an apartment building. Peering in at the man from a window outside, Harry quickly determines that he’s got the wrong guy. But instead of walking away, he stays, watching, and then leering, as the man disrobes his pulchritudinous girlfriend. And then there’s the rooftop stakeout. Training his binoculars on a nearby apartment building, he happens upon a lovely naked woman prancing about behind a curtainless window. Catching himself leering again, he turns away. But then he mutters, “You owe it to yourself to live a little, Harry,” and returns his gaze to the girl. At that very moment, however, Scorpio strikes and Harry must leap into action. Incredibly, the pleasures of even this voyeuristic outlet are denied him.
To a man thus frustrated, the only apparent avenue of release that remains is violence. And for Harry Callahan, violence means firing a gun. Take the bank robbery scene. Calmly enjoying a lunch of hotdogs, Harry hears some commotion behind him. After leaping out of his seat and running into the street, Harry unsheathes his weapon and fires, killing a few of the men and critically wounding another. Harry then walks directly up to the wounded man, points the legendary Magnum in his face, and spouts his famous line about the prowess of his sidearm. Compare this quick-draw demeanor – and obvious revelry in the chance to fire his gun – with Bullitt’s impeccable restraint, drawing his weapon only once, and then only when he has no other choice.
… joined by the setting and soundtracks by the great Lalo Schifrin:
Imagine a movie that included Bullitt’s chase and, let’s call him, Dirty Harry Bullitt. Of course, that idea has been done, but not well.
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Despite the forecasted snow Friday and whatever malady I’m currently suffering through, I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network’s The Morning Show Week in Review Friday at 8 a.m.
Given the tech that didn’t work last time, let’s attribute how I sound Friday to that and not my illness, which makes me sound closer to Barry White or Lurch than myself. Since it’s audio and not video, should a nosebleed begin while I’m on the air I can continue. I think.
My opponent Friday will be Matt Rothschild, of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. Matt and I go back to the days of the late Wisconsin Public Television show “WeekEnd,” last seen early in this, uh, century.
The Morning Show and all the other Ideas Network programming (including my favorite, Old Time Radio Drama Saturdays and Sundays from 8 to 11 p.m.) can be heard on WHA (970 AM) and W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
Sunday is Palm Sunday, of course, the beginning of the Christian Holy Week, which coincides with the Jewish Passover holiday. Before that, this coming Friday is National Puppy Day, National Chip and Dip Day, and Melba Toast Day. Saturday is National Chocolate Covered Raisin Day, one day before Pecan Day and Waffle Day. and two days before National Spinach Day.
Monday is also Make Up Your Own Holiday Day. Really.
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Kyle Smith of, of all places, National Review:
The list of movie stars who commanded the U.S. box office for five consecutive years is short: There’s Bing Crosby, and there’s Burt Reynolds. Along with Shirley Temple, herself Hollywood’s leading attraction for four straight years, Reynolds is one of the great movie stars of yesterday who seem most in danger of being completely erased from the cultural memory. Let’s not allow that to happen. May this week’s retrospective celebration of five of his films at New York City’s Metrograph cinema prompt a renewed appreciation of his good-humored vitality.
There is a reason for Reynolds’s precipitous fall, or rather about 40 of them: Rent a Cop and Cop and ½, Stroker Ace and Stick, Heat and City Heat,Cannonball Run II and, for that matter, The Cannonball Run. His mustache-first persona became a walking joke, a precursor to those man-parodies Ron Swanson and Ron Burgundy. Burt! The name itself, immediately summoning him and only him, became funny, at the other end of the naming scale from Eggbert, the hypermasculine end. In part because of Burt, macho and manly became words that could no longer be used, except jokingly. The sketch-comedy version of Reynolds was a swaggering dope, a sexist jerk, the guy whose chest hair clogged up the drain in the hot tub. He married Loni Anderson; he was Brawny Man come to life. The proud emblem of hairy virility on his upper lip became ridiculous, downgraded to the status of “pornstache.” After a while, its like became unwearable except ironically.
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Long-time readers of this blog, which will be seven years old at the end of this month (still looking for a Corvette as a birthday gift, by the way), should be familiar with the movie “The Tao of Steve” and its identification of the cool Steves: Austin …
… McGarrett …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7Ba_jz22sI
… and McQueen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zwW7iWinrk
(“The Tao of Steve” list inexplicably fails to include not only a lot of other Steves, but myself, Man of Action. Strange.)
At any rate, Space.com reports (not about Steve Austin):
New work helps to codify the cause and properties of “Steve,” an aurora-like phenomenon documented by citizen scientists as it streaked across the sky in western Canada.
As of a new paper’s release today (March 14), the phenomenon has been dubbed STEVE, a backronym that matches the name originally given by aurora watchers. (STEVE is short for “Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.”) According to the new work, the distinctive ribbon of purple light with green accents — which can occur at lower latitudes than normal auroras do — gives scientists a glimpse into the interactions of Earth’s magnetic field and upper atmosphere.
“It’s exciting because this might be a kind of aurora that more people can see than any other kind, because when it shows up, it shows up over more populated areas that are further to the south,” Elizabeth MacDonald, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and lead author of the new work, told Space.com. And scientifically, “it’s an aspect related to [auroras] that’s further south than we ever had recognized … It tells us that the processes creating the aurora are penetrating all the way into the inner magnetosphere, and so that’s a new aspect of it.” [Amazing Auroras: Photos of Earth’s Northern Lights].
Researchers first became aware of STEVE after members of a Facebook group called the Alberta Aurora Chasers (which refers to the province in western Canada) began posting photos of unusual purplish-greenish streaks oriented nearly vertically in the sky. Scientist collaborators coordinated with the aurora chasers to combine the dates and times of the phenomenon’s appearance with data from the European Space Agency’s Swarm satellites, which precisely measure variation in Earth’s magnetic field, to work out what conditions caused the phenomenon.
The better-known auroras — also referred to as the northern and southern lights — form when Earth’s magnetic field guides charged particles propelled from the sun around the planet and toward the upper atmosphere at its poles. These solar particles hit neutral particles in the upper atmosphere, producing light and color visible in the night sky.
STEVE, on the other hand, seems to form a different way.
“There’s an electric field in those regions that points poleward and a magnetic field that points downward, and those two together create this strong drift to the west,” MacDonald said. The flow in Earth’s ionosphere pulls charged solar particles westward, where they hit neutral particles along the way and heat them up, producing upward-reaching streaks of light moving west.
STEVE is the first visible indicator of that ion drift, which researchers had been investigating via satellite for around 40 years, she added.
Because the phenomenon was occurring outside the usual geographic range for frequent auroras, citizen scientists played a particularly valuable role in understanding STEVE, MacDonald said. It’s at the farthest reaches of dedicated scientific cameras, and it appears on wavelengths different from the usual auroras, which those cameras might not be prepared to document. And the improvement in camera technology available to the public means such records are increasingly valuable to scientists’ understanding of auroras in general. (Plus, crowdsourcing platforms like Aurorasaurus, which MacDonald founded, help aggregate the observations to help with prediction and analysis.)
Scientists understand a lot about auroras, but not everything — “so there’s the discovery aspect,” MacDonald said. “And there’s the less-exciting aspect of the citizen science observations,” which are equally scientifically valuable. “All these observations in aggregate help us to build better models of aurorae,” she added. “That’s useful for people who want to see it, and it’s also useful for people who are concerned about the effects of space weather and currents in the upper atmosphere on communication and things like that.”
It’s hard to get an overall view of auroras with the current slate of satellites, MacDonald said, which either can’t see an entire hemisphere or don’t observe each spot often enough as they orbit — once every 90 minutes — to track how auroras evolve in the short term. People on the ground can provide a more nuanced view.
“Through these kinds of projects, we can get more people than we would have thought — than theywould have thought — who actually have captured a scientifically valuable observation,” she said. “And it’s not scary; it’s just STEVE.”
The new work was detailed today (March 14) in the journal Science Advances.
I am as amused in seeing my first name in capital letters as I am hearing my last name — OK, her last name — announced during a basketball game, sometimes by myself.
There are photos …
Childs Lake, Manitoba Helena Lake Ranch, B.C. Lake Minnewanka, Alberta … and video of STEVE:
I am as amused to see my first name in capital letters as I am to hear my last name — actually her last name — announced during basketball games, sometimes by myself.
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Jonah Goldberg writes a serious syndicated column, and a less serious online column, The G-File.
Goldberg first wrote in USA Today anticipating Wednesday’s walkout in schools across the country:
Later this month, high school kids will hold big demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere to demand gun control in the wake of the shootings in Parkland, Fla. That’s fine by me. I disagree with the thrust of what they want to do as a matter of policy, but it’s a free country.
My problem is with the resurgence of an old American tradition of celebrating young people as inherently wiser and more moral than adults. There are really three problems with the fetishization of youth in politics. First, it’s based on a faulty premise: that young people have a radically or uniquely superior insight into political affairs.
This is an ancient confusion. It usually hinges on misinterpreting the fact that young people see the world with fresh eyes, as it were.
And it’s true that young people have a gift for cutting through the false pieties and polite fictions of modern life, as when a nephew points out how much weight you’ve gained. Even the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes is a story about a kid too ignorant to know when to placate a king’s vanity.
But the simple fact is that young people are not, as a group, better informed, wiser, smarter or even more enlightened than older people. This is a fact of science and social science alike. We are born ignorant of the world we live in and only lose that ignorance over time.
Think about what you knew and understood at half your current age. Were you smarter then? Wiser? Why assume it works differently for anyone else?
“To all the generations before us,” Cameron Kasky, one of the Parkland survivors recently said on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, “we sincerely accept your apology. And we appreciate that you are willing to let us rebuild the world that you f—ed up.”
I get the passion. I get the rage and trauma behind it. But this nonsense is as pernicious as it is obnoxious (I’ve apologized for nothing, by the way, have you?). It’s also not true.
Young people today, and particularly young Americans, should be brimming with gratitude for the world they are inheriting. Lest you think this a cranky right-wing sentiment, let me align myself with Barack Obama: “If you had to choose a moment in time to be born, any time in human history, and you didn’t know ahead of time what nationality you were or what gender or what your economic status might be, you’d choose today.”
Kasky is standing on a soapbox built with the toil of previous generations and he’s taking a sledgehammer to it — because he doesn’t know better.
My hunch is that a great many people who take offense at my criticism do so either because of Kasky’s traumatic experience or because they agree with him — if not about the bankruptcy of the past then about his anti-gun agenda.
And that brings me to the second problem with the glorification of youth: It invariably involves powerful adults finding kids who agree with them on some issue and then claiming that all young people think this way (and then hiding behind the myth that we must listen to “the children”). If these Parkland kids came out for concealed-carry or arming teachers, you can be sure MSNBC would not be touting them in commercials.
But the most galling thing about adult partisans hiding behind kids is that it amounts to a kind of power-worship. “I know that whenever you disapprove of young people, you’re in the wrong,” the author Tim Kreider wrote in The New York Times, “because you’re going to die and they’ll get to write history.” Never mind that factually, this is balderdash.
Young people change their minds about lots of things as they get older, and historians rarely lock in the views of young people a few decades later. This is also ethically bankrupt because it assumes that whatever kids today believe will be right because the victors write the history, so we should just surrender to the youngest mob.
Democracy depends on arguments that are not contingent on your age. Lots of kids don’t understand that, but grown-ups are supposed to.
Then he wrote in his G-File about said column:
There were many dumb reactions. Of course, this is to be expected. As King Leonidas might say if he were the ruler of a social-media platform, “This is Twitter!”
Still it’s been a rather remarkable experience watching people freak out over such an obviously correct point.
In fact, I thought I inoculated myself from the more ridiculous accusations in advance. But alas, what I thought was a feature of my column was for some its fatal flaw. …
I’ve been writing about the inanity and jackassery of generational stereotyping and youth politics for literally 25 years, going all the way back to when I was a young twentysomething. But, apparently, that argument cannot be made independent of the Parkland kids because, in this moment, they are speaking for all youth and therefore, thanks to the transitive property of generational numinosity, any criticism of young people qua young people is “attacking” the Gun Control Youth League. Never mind that young people are as divided on the issue of gun control as everyone else.
It’s a funny analogue to the crap I get from some Trump supporters who think that I’ve changed since his rise. I’ve been against sexual depravity, protectionism, populism, industrial policy, orange-tinted skin, executive overreach, etc. for decades. Then Trump comes along, I keep saying the same things, and, suddenly, I get all of this “What happened to you?!”
So let me try this a different way: Nothing in the passages that follow is in any way, shape, or form negative commentary or invidious insinuation about the Parkland students. They are right about everything, no matter the subject.
I would even stipulate that no youths from Florida are ever wrong about anything and that their sagacity and good conduct should never be doubted or gainsaid. But, then again, I can only ask so much willing disbelief from my readers. Regardless, seriously, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the Parkland kids or even the issue of gun control.
Let’s establish a baseline. I assume we can all agree that everyone is born remarkably dumb. Ever try to talk about the causes of the First World War with a newborn? So frustrating.
There are few things more settled in science than the fact that humans start out not very bright or informed and that this condition only wears off over time — i.e., as they get older.
Only slightly more controversial: Young people tend to be more emotional than grown-ups. This is true of babies, who will cry about the silliest things (hence the word, “crybaby”). But it’s also true of teenagers.
Again, this is not string theory. We know these things. And the idea that I must provide empirical evidence for such a staggeringly obvious point is hilarious to me.
Aside from all the social science, medical science, novels, plays, poems, musicals, and movies that explore this fact, there is another source we can consult on this: ourselves.
Every not-currently-young person reading this “news”letter has one thing in common: We were all young once.
This is what I mean when I say that “youth politics are the laziest form of identity politics.” Say what you will for racial-identity politics, there’s at least a superficial case that such identities are immutable. I can never be a black woman. And before everyone gets clever, even if I dropped a lot of coin on cosmetic surgery, I can never claim to know what it’s like to be a black woman.
You know what I can claim, though? Knowing what it’s like to be young. Sure, I can’t claim to know what it’s like to be young in 2018, but as the father of a 15-year-old, I’m not wholly ignorant on the topic either. On the other hand, my 15-year-old has no clue what it was like to be young in the 1980s.
And that’s why youth politics are such a lazy form of identity politics. (It’s also why generational stereotypes are lazy.) Here’s a news flash for you: There was no “Greatest Generation.” The dudes who stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima and Normandy: badasses and heroes, to a man. The dudes back home in the drunk tank on D-Day? Not so much.
This is what I hate about all forms of identity politics. It’s an effort to get credit or authority based upon an accident of birth. The whole point of liberalism (the real kind) is the idea that people are supposed to be judged on the basis of their own merits, not as representatives of some class or category. Of course, one needn’t be absolutist about this. A little pride in your culture or ethnicity won’t do any harm. But reducing individuals simply to some abstract category is the very definition of bigotry.
There is no transitive property to age. If a 17-year-old cures cancer, that’s fantastic. But the 17-year-old who spends his days huffing glue and playing Call of Duty is still a loser. I’m a Gen Xer. I take literally zero pride in the good things people my age do. I also have zero shame about the terrible things people my age do. Why? Because age is as dumb a thing as height or hair color to hitch your self-esteem to. What kind of loser looks back on a life of mediocrity and sloth and says to himself, “Well at least other people in my age cohort did great things!”?
And yet, we constantly invest special virtue in young people. As Socrates explained to Meno, there are no special virtues for young people. There are simply virtues. If a young person says that 2 + 2 = 4, that’s no more right or wrong than if an old person says so. The bravery of one 18-year-old does not negate the cowardice of another 18-year-old.
And that gets me to the next of my supposedly outrageous points: Older people know more than younger people. I’ve been stunned by the number of people offended by this. A lot of folks are getting hung up on the fact that young people know more about some things than older people. Fair enough. The average young person knows more about today’s youth culture and gadgets than the average fogey. My daughter can identify the noise coming out of my car radio. When I was a kid, it was running joke that grown-ups couldn’t figure out how to make the VCR stop flashing “12:00.” It never dawned on me that knowing how to fix that problem meant I knew more about politics than my dad.
This isn’t just a point about technological know-how or public policy. There’s an emotional narcissism to youth. Because a rich cocktail of hormones courses through teenagers’ still-developing brains, young people think they are the first people to experience a range of emotions. But we’ve all experienced those emotions. It’s just that when you experience them for the first time, it’s easy to think it’s the first time anyone has experienced such emotions. The first time you fall in love — or think you’ve fallen in love — as a teenager is a wildly intoxicating thing. And there’s nothing more infuriating than when old people tell you, “It’s just a phase.” That, however, doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Indeed, “You just don’t get it!” might as well be the motto of youth.
My objection to youth politics is simply one facet of my objection to identity politics — but it’s also a part of my objection to populism. That’s because youth politics is a form of populism. It claims that passion and the group are more important than reason and the individual. It is the passion of the crowd. And when grown-ups bow before the rising generation, it is a form of power-worship. “Children are the future!” is literally true in the sense that they will be alive after the rest of us are dead. But that does not absolve the rest of us from our responsibilities. Nor does it negate arguments that young people don’t want to hear.
Liberals love to talk about root causes. If you assign blame for the Parkview school shooting to anyone or anything that meets your political worldview (guns, violent video games, inadequate mental health care, the ______ization of society, etc.) besides the shooter, then you also have to grant that the Parkview students who bullied, or bully, other students or merely shun them also deserve some blame. Tell that to a young gun control proponent and see what happens.
Someone (read here to try to discern whom) once observed that if you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative by 40 you have no brain. We’re hearing from the liberals.
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Former police officer and current firearms instructor Kevan Norin:
Non PC alert: It takes a man to raise a man.
I was, to put it politely, a rebellious child, but I had three things going for me — strong male role models in the Norin and Blindheim families, fictional heros who reinforced positive masculinity as the provider and protector (Lucas McCain, Matt Dillon, Officers Reed and Malloy, nearly every role ever played by John Wayne, the list goes on) and a culture that upheld these roles as Good. I worked to pass this ideal to my son, and he is passing it on to his.
This comes to mind as there are so many lost boys out there, lacking what I had, and being sought out by forces willing to fill the void that don’t care about what they are producing or are actively trying to build a world devoid of Lucas McCains.
Just sayin’. Your mileage may vary. Before anyone points out the common thread of the capacity for violence, consider the line that divides criminal violence from ambiguous violence (Clint Eastwood didn’t do us any favors with Dirty Harry and The Cowboy with no Name) from righteous violence — and not the revenge genre made popular by movies like Death Wish.
Put in real terms, it’s what’s separates a killer with a gun walking into a school, and a police officer with a gun running into a school to stop him.
The aforementioned McCain, of “The Rifleman,” was TV’s first single father. Dillon, played on radio by William Conrad and on TV by James Arness, was the marshal of Dodge City, Kan., on “Gunsmoke.” While I didn’t watch those often …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NSRJqeDhA4
… but I was a religious watcher of “Adam-12”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T23KMmLIKE8
The series began with Malloy (the driver, therefore my favorite) getting ready to quit the police department after his partner died. On ostensibly his last night, he gets a rookie partner, newly married with a child on the way. (Spoiler alert: Malloy doesn’t quit.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oL1wUvgYoI
The actor who played Malloy, Martin Milner, was a real-life role model. He was married for 58 years. He had a 50-year career in Hollywood.
Series like these have remained popular decades after they left the air not merely because cable TV channels need something to fill air time. Viewers didn’t see Reed the father, but over its seven seasons they saw Reed mature under Malloy’s guidance. They saw police officers act how police officers should act, and both “Adam-12” and “Emergency!” (whose Roy DeSoto was also a father, though that was not often depicted either) inspired many future police officers, firefighters, paramedics and EMTs.
I’ve written here before in commenting about the Boy Scouts that children need multiple male role models. That includes fictional role models.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 