And having a playback memory, Carmen remembered something he said about copying down everything he said that sounded vaguely like a reference to Isaiah 8:1, and recorded every word of what he said for fear that he'd demand of her why she did not comply with the order he gave mid-binge/tirade to record these pearls of wisdom. In fact, she did it immediately after he let her go from the ledge. She kept a copy of it on her person every day of her life, in case the Producer ever returned and demanded to see it.
The Producer and Carmen slugged on after that night for another sixteen months. When Carmen finally became Steve's, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever before for two whole decades, and considering the dangers she'd passed, one could argue that she was still more beautiful inside than out. Nevertheless, her ribs had the consistency of crushed ice, her joints bent in manners no human being should, the simple act of arising from her bed was pain itself. Among those who'd experienced repetitive trauma, it is not uncommon to deal with the constant rebreaking of bones, degenerative disc disease and an eventual lumbar spinal fusion; bone spurs, torn ligaments, degenerative arthritis, staff infections from corrective surgeries. And that's only from the effects from before he started to hit her face.
This is mercifully not a book in which to discuss the particulars of tyrannical behavior which cause such internal horror. This narrator has neither the patience nor nothing like the fortitude to speak in any more than generalities about the abominations perpetrated upon Carmen and he beseeches your forgiveness for his need to speak any further of these depravities. But if this fictional rendering of a single Hollywood player getting off on the scent of blood has anything like the ring of veracity to you, then he asks you to at least consider how many thousands there may have been over the past century of powerful Hollywood men who've acted precisely like this.
This particular apparition of a Producer knew on the night of this "window dressing" (his charming term for what transpired that dawn) that his days as a respected Hollywood player could be counted with two digits. Don't mind us the circumstances of his ignominy, there were any number of risible cinematic bombs in the late 70's and early 80's which wiped out Hollywood producers, production companies, and whole studios:
There was At Long Last Love, Peter Bogdanovich's trivial homage to 30's movie-musicals, Cole Porter songs, and Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedies - because nothing oozes Golden Age Hollywood class quite like Burt Reynolds, who became a superstar a few years previously when Deliverance allowed us to watch him kill a Georgia hillbilly with a crossbow while the hillbilly sodomized a 300 pound Ned Beatty as Ned's ordered to squeal like a pig. There was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, a shameless money grab of a sequel starring a miserable looking Richard Burton during a period when he looked like he was taking parts in horrible movies just so he could pay his astronomical bar tab. There was The Swarm, a horror movie about killer bees that starred Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Olivia de Havilland - because what everybody wanted to see in the late 70's was the biggest stars of 1945 in a horror movie with a plot too absurd for Roger Corman to film. There was I Spit On Your Grave - a film that couldn't even find distribution for two years because of its quarter-hour depictions (notice the plural) of gang rape. There was X-rated Caligula, a movie made through the combined talents of literary lion Gore Vidal and Bob Guccione - publisher of Penthouse Magazine, who simply wanted to record a literal rendering of the depraved events within the Roman Emperor Caligula's palace in Tacitus's Annals. Every imaginable degradation seemed to find its way into the script; raping a bride on her wedding day - and her groom, sex shows involving children and the deformed (if you don't believe me, watch it), gladiatorial public execution, and a confusing scene for which poor Helen Mirren has to use what is hopefully a prosthetic vaginal cavity to depict herself giving birth as part of a (literally) execrable performance within all these execrable performances. After seeing the original cut, Guccione decided that audiences weren't getting their money's worth, and insisted on inserting a forty-five minute bisexual orgy near the end which the Roman Senators and their wives are coerced into having.
There was, of course, Heaven's Gate, which lost 30 million dollars, ran to nearly four hours in original cut, deliberately killed a horse with explosives, was yanked from movie theaters after less than a week, and bankrupted United Artists - according to most experts the greatest of all movie studios - forever. Some swear it's a misunderstood masterpiece, this narrator doesn't want to find out... Of course, it has a ten minute rape scene...
There was Inchon, the B-Movie hagiography for America's Five-Star General in Asia, and for a moment in 1952 America's would-be dictator, Douglas MacArthur. Financed with no expense spared by a combination of the United States Military and world's most infamous cult leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, with MacArthur played by the world's greatest actor - the ailing Lord Lawrence Olivier - for a cool million bucks, and directed by Terrance Young, who made the first few James Bond movies. MacArthur's closest confidante was played by Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft. Who'd have conceived that a movie of such disparate parts would come unglued?
There was Tarzan, the Ape Man - in which a mythical White Ape turns out to be a white man raised by apes and therefore must be brought back to civilisation in England where he can be taught proper discourse. Nevertheless, he retains the animal sexual magnetism of Africa, which overwhelms poor proper and prim Jane. Tarzan's character was found offensive by some in the 1910's when he first appeared, imagine the reception by 1981. Yet somehow, there've since been another six Tarzan movies.
And who can, or should, forget George Lucas's Howard the Duck? A PG live-action movie in which a loveable alien duck gets transported through a wormhole to our world. In the course of the movie, he gets dumped by a club bouncer into a hot tub where a couple is having sex, a human that turns out to be an alien who has a tongue seems to extend like an erection in the presence of Lea Thompson, Howard's duckbill attempts to bite the ass of a sixty-something black woman whose onion-like posterior he finds quite stimulating, he excitedly opens Playduck Magazine in which we see a photo of a duck with curves and hair and feathered white nipples (later in the movie we see duck boobies with pink human nipples), the Cleveland Police Department sexually assaults Howard the Duck, and actor Jeffrey Jones (himself now a convicted sex offender) walks in on Lea Thompson seducing Howard the Duck.
And, of course, Ishtar. The only of these risible and bank-busting movies directed by a woman, and the only one whose director never directed a movie again. Perhaps Ishtar was, truly, the last movie of the Old-New Hollywood - directed by Mike Nichols's old comic partner Elaine May, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty starring, Vittorio Storaro (Coppola and Bertolucci's cinematographer of choice) doing the photography, co-starring New Hollywood luminaries like Tess Harper (Tender Mercies) Charles Grodin (from an Orthodox family), Jack Weston (Weinstein), Carol Kane (Woody's first wife in Annie Hall and an Oscar nominee for a part in Hester Street that she acted in Yiddish), Aharon Ipale (Israeli), Fred Melamed (Sy Ableman in A Serious Man), David Margulies (Hollywood's character actor of choice when you needed a Jew). Is it any wonder that a film bombed that had so many Jews involved whose scenario was in an Arab country?
Something rotted in that air of freedom which made the New Hollywood Golden Age possible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It was inevitable that the freedom which allowed for realistic depictions of ordinary people with their ugliness intact, with sex, and violence, and emotional turmoil unshielded by a production code, would curdle into freedom's betrayal by making its depictions into something sickeningly exploitative - sometimes freedom's very liberators betrayed it. In the case of Hollywood, what appeared to be a glorious liberation turned out to be merely another swing of the pendulum that landed on equilibrium for a moment before swinging into decadence. Today's Hollywood has a new production code, a code that allows for rivers of blood so long as the violence is confined to an unrealistic genre and its human consequences softpedaled, a code that allows for the naive innocence of children to continue unabated into adulthood with bro comedies about manchildren, a code which only allows romantic comedies in which love's ugly moments are airbrushed out of existence, a code dominated by action movies for which the stars are the special effects. Just as in the old production code, today's Hollywood movies can still be damn good, but in the opinion of this clearly not humble enough narrator, almost none of them show us ourselves. There are ways around the problem - movies like The Social Network and Her and WALL-E and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which only show us a complex image of the human spirit by showing us how technology may have completely reshaped it; or movies like Boyhood or the Before movies or (believe it or not) Borat, in all of which the experimental gimmick that makes them possible is so radically extreme that they can only be done once and never be copied. There are some very fine and human directors working in Hollywood's orbit if not actually 'in' Hollywood: there are at least two American treasures: Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater, both of whom manage in every movie to say something new and elusive about America. Among the 'tribe', there's Jason Reitman, or at least was, who made three of the great American movies at the beginning of his career with Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and Up In The Air, all three of which manage to say something new and elusive about America, and there's John Sayles, whom nobody remembers anymore, but twenty years ago was the God of Independent American Film. There's Ang Lee, who isn't even American, but easily beats Americans at their own game. Errol Morris, the documentarian who makes movies so utterly different from everyone else's that you shouldn't even call them movies by the accepted definition.
Other than them, there are, as Woody once called them, the Academy of the Overrated: Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, PT Anderson, Wes Anderson (whom in all fairness seems to be improving), Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufmann, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh (who at least tries to be more ambitious), Sofia Coppola, Peter Jackson, Ken Burns (it takes a rare talent to make the subjects of his documentaries boring), David O Russell, the Wachowskis, Gus Van Sant, Tim Burton, James Cameron...
These are directors so enamored of movies that they jam pack their movies with references to other movies and forget to put references to life in them. Perhaps that statement is unfair, there are exceptions in every one of their outputs, but the exceptions are very few compared to the misfires. There is a kind of ersatz profundity to their movies - movies like The Matrix and Inception and Avatar and I Heart Huckabees (a movie I used to love) with philosophical messages that can fit inside a fortune cookie; a ponderousness which PT Anderson mistakes for profundity, an incomprehensibility which Charlie Kaufmann mistakes for intellectual challenge, a cynical darkness which David Fincher and the Coen Brothers mistake for gravity, an arrested development which Tim Burton and Wes Anderson mistaken for whimsy, a reliance on CGI which Christopher Nolan and the Wachowskis and James Cameron mistake for visual artistry (it's the technicians who are the artists), a reliance on other movies which Tarantino and David Lynch mistake for ironic commentary. In each of these cases, the problem is that they're weighted down by the baggage of movie history. The movies before them were simply too good, so rather than try to compete with them catharsis for catharsis, they dodge the challenge and instead create homages to what older masters did better than they did, and many critics call these postmodern homages 'original' when the only thing that's original about them is their lack of emotional demand on the audience. These are movies about other movies, and t<3 -="" a="" able="" about="" and="" anderson="" are="" arrested="" brothers="" burton="" challenge="" charlie="" coen="" contain="" cookie.="" cynical="" darkness="" david="" development="" fincher="" fit="" font="" for="" fortune="" gravity="" huckabees="" i="" incomprehensibility="" kaufmann="" last="" like="" love="" lynch="" meaning="" messages="" mistake="" movies="" nbsp="" of="" other="" philosophical="" pt="" s="" tarantino="" tedium="" that="" the="" tim="" to="" used="" wes="" which="" whimsy="" within="">herefore perhaps they're movies against movies. Most alarmingly, and prevalent to nearly all of them, are the movies that mistake technology for humanity. Even among the directors unaddicted to CGI, there are more breathtaking shots in today's American movies than ever before. If nature doesn't give you the background you want, if the lighting on some actress's face is not quite what you want, if her jawline is not quite the way you'd like it, you can digitally alter it to any specification you like; but to what end? Today's auteurs have utterly mastered the technical end of filmmaking, and perhaps because we've mastered technique, we've forgotten what the technique is for.
Meanwhile, people who've devoted their whole lives to film tell us that the world is experiencing a cinematic Golden Age of which the United States is the only first world country who remains excluded. As with so many things about Contemporary America - soccer, news, public transit, languages, condoms, history, black humor, cheap health care, gun laws, and vegetables - we have in America have only the dimmest awareness of the feast that often seems to happen in every corner of the globe but ours because we're too busy playing with our toys.
Special effects are the new stars of Hollywood. The highest grossing movies are no longer character based movies like The Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider or American Graffiti or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or MASH or Fiddler on the Roof or Patton. There were plenty of smaller, character driven films during these years that did well, but it was between 1975 and 1990 that technology become the undisputed box office king, and after that came the systematic gutting of movies that portrayed Americans in their natural state in anywhere but independent film and the Miramax ghetto. Just over the other side of 1975 lay the Star Wars Trilogy and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Indiana Jones and ET and Back to the Future and Roger Rabbit - and how human and full of personality do those early Spielberg and Lucas and Zemeckis movies seem next to the high-grossing movies of our time! Would it surprise anyone that Tom Cruise or Chris Hemsworth or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson were actually computer programs or robots that only exist on a screen? There was even an Al Pacino movie about that exact notion fifteen years ago called Simone. Maybe Jennifer Lawrence is just an updated Simone, an indication that these computer avatars have improved to the point that seem so like us humans that perhaps humans are indistinguishable now from robots!
This New New Hollywood came into existence because the knowledge that movies like Caligula and I Spit On Your Grave and Heaven's Gate and Howard the Duck gave us of what we were capable of was too terrible. The freedom to create greater and more uplifting spectacles can also give us things too vile and revolting for contemplation. All it took was less than a dozen movies in which the human animal was presented to us undeniably in all its stinking shit, and the movie world's been running away from its truth ever since.
Our dearly beloved Producer could have been working on any of these movies, it doesn't matter which, but by the same time the next year, The Producer hadn't worked on a movie for nine months; nine months during which his fists literally performed an abortion on Carmen. Perhaps it became his sole source of satisfaction and relief, because for six months, no glamorous friend returned a call, relieving him not only of his own glamor but the sycophants who glommed onto it. Friendship is fleeting, love mere folly, but how much more true would that be when living in a place known as the 'Dream Factory?' But five minutes after every time he went off, he begged her not to leave, just you wait, he'll make you happy again, Hollywood can be something better than its ever been, and you'll be its leading lady!
Then there was the time the Producer bruised her father up after her father asked about Carmen's bruises. Two minutes later, he gave her Dad a $10,000 wad of cash, then drove him to the emergency room personally in his 1977 Lamborghini Countach. The moment he got through the door, he took out more wads of cash for the doctor and nurses and the other patients - they saw nothing. And while they were in the ER, Carmen's sister practically kidnapped her to a courthouse to make her get a restraining order. Carmen was unwilling, worried she was about to get killed. If not by her producer, then by the guys he'd pay to keep her quiet. The judge listened very patiently and carefully and evinced great compassion for her suffering, he then excused himself to his chamber for five minutes, came back and refused the restraining order. Twelve minutes later, the Producer was at the courthouse, gave Carmen a huge hug and kiss as she sobbed her tears upon him, took her home and told her over and over again how much he loved her. Two days later, they were engaged, and she was the one who wanted to go to the courthouse right away; but he promised her a wedding the whole world would know about, the wedding she deserved.
Who could turn down the life he promised? This was a man who knew how to turn curvature of the Earth to the precise angle he wanted. He was the best actor in Hollywood. For more than a decade, he dealt with creative geniuses every day of his life, but he was a genius of life itself. Every event, the most glamorous, the most spiritual, the most transcendent, the most intangible, could be picked apart and reduced to a transaction. Nothing in life was a mystery to him, and all he demanded in return was that she be no more complicated to understand than the concierge in Oviedo.
Even so, no matter how much of a genius he was, in order to have that wedding, he had to be back in the good graces of Hollywood, and in order to return to Hollywood's graces, he had to be in the graces of multinationals who bought Hollywood up.
It was just at this moment that our dear Producer, whose tastes in cuisine had always seemed tending to the upscale LA specialties of shellfish, steak, and sushi, seemed to develop a yen for rouladen, kasespatzle, saurbraten, kartoffelknodel, bretzels and wurst. Carmen had no idea why the Producer wanted them to go for German every night, and of course he wouldn't explain except to say that there was a different dish he wanted them to try. One night at Old World German Restaurant, the next at Van Nuys German Deli (a standup counter place for which he still insisted that Carmen wear heels), the next at Alpine Village, and the same every night for five or six weeks. Within a month, the Producer was a good twenty pounds heavier, but the moment Carmen's dress seemed a bit tighter, the Producer did what he could to make her not finish what he ordered for them. She would wrap the remains up and take home what remained in a doggie bag, then find them missing from the fridge the next morning.
About five to six weeks in, the Producer pointed to a table across the restaurant. "That's Karlheinz von Huntze, Executive Vice-President of Polygram Entertainment." Until the 60's, Polygram was a third-German, third-Dutch, third-British corporation responsible for no less than seven of the world's major classical music labels and another ten of the world's major Popular Music labels. A number of these labels were all too happy to collaborate with Hitler's culture ministers in times gone by, but Polygram controlled a vast swath of the great musical glories of the gramophone - glories set down before, during, and after the Second World War: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Dizzy Gillespe, Woody Herman, Charlie Parker, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Oscar Petersen, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Eartha Kitt, untold numbers of Broadway Musicals, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, the Rolling Stones and Elvis during some of their best periods, Eric Clapton, Talking Heads, the Ramones, KISS, Billy Joel, Donna Summer, the Village People, the Bee Gees, ABBA, The Osmonds, Yves Montand, Jacques Brel, Edith Piaff, and hundreds of other pop music acts; nearly every major mid-century orchestral conductor, untold numbers of great classical soloists and opera singers and chamber ensembles, the premiere recordings of every postwar work by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams, untold numbers of moderately obscure and young and unproven composers whom no major label today would take a chance on, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra... In 1963, it was Polygram's by then long since subsidiary, the Dutch Phillips Electronics (founded by Karl Marx's uncle), that invented the tape cassette.
By 1980, Polygram was surely too big to fail, and yet... its catalogue was simply too large, and it had to either expand significantly to make up for its losses, or shed an enormous part of its product. Since there was very little in music of which they didn't own a significant portion, it was time to move into Movies. What better way to do that than Movie Musicals? Polygram had a 50% share in RSO Records, which gave them a huge profit in the Disco market because RSO Records had the music distribution rights to Grease and Saturday Night Fever. This was in addition to the money made from their contracts with the Bee Gees and the Village People and Donna Summer. Unfortunately, this was nowhere near enough to cover their bill. They needed a movie musical of their own.
Enter Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band... THE MUSICAL! Yes, all the Beatles hits are here, sung as you've always wanted to hear them sung by Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees, and Steve Martin. With cameos from Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Earth Wind & Fire, Dr. John, Etta James, Curtis Mayfield, Bonnie Raitt, Frankie Valli, and a hundred other musicians - none of which sing their original music, and narrated by George fucking Burns (now there's a name that'll put the young bums in the seats...). God knows how many hundreds of millions Polygram had to pay to acquire the rights for them from EMI, but it was just another couple hundred million pulled down the drain of this spectacular musical black hole. Ever the artistes, John and George refused to even attend the premiere, no doubt they took the money though; while ever the workhorses, Paul and Ringo went to the premiere, then refused to have anything more to do with the movie, or with Polygram.
And there sits Karlheinz Huntze, all sixty-seven years and 350 pounds of him squeezed into a fecally brown suit that probably fit him when he was fifty-five with a badly tied thin tie that didn't reach his naval, unashamed of his brown teeth and double chin that went past his neck, all of which bit with great begeisterung into the giant plate of braten and sauerkraut in front of him, yet vain enough about his hair to wear a spectacularly bad salt and pepper toupee whose base seemed to levitate an inch and a half over his boneless skull and continue six inches up. On his left hand, a wedding ring seems as though it might at any moment pop off his brat-like finger.
So this was it... The perfect movie musical star - a gorgeously unique looking petite girl with a large head, already well known and liked by everybody in Hollywood, packed to the gills with brains and lungs; no singing lessons necessary, no acting lessons necessary, minimal dancing, can play piano, knows every jazz standard in the Real Book. All it takes is one movie, then she has her choice - greatest living singer or greatest living actress? It's needless to say who's on her arm and advising her every decision.
And of course, she's brilliant when she talks to Huntze. Within ninety seconds, the Producer excuses himself to the bathroom and seems to stay in there for forty minutes. She speaks to him in the fluent German she picked up from her opera training, they compare the Schubert and Goethe they love best, they sing the Papageno and Pamina duet from Mozart's Die Zauberflote at the table (the restaurant bursts into applause, more for Carmen...). He orders four different deserts, and insists on splitting each of them with her and that she eat up her half to the every mouthful. He gives her a standing invitation to visit him and his wife in Hamburg so she can see the Kunsthalle and the Dichterhallen and walk through the taverns where the young Brahms played, and tells her that he'd love to hear her play piano before he leaves town. He writes down an address of a private residence of a freund at who's place he's staying.
Of course, very little piano was played. Someone already as thoroughly demoralized as Carmen has no illusions left of the necessities expected of her. If anything, she was thankful for Herr Huntze's patronizing kindness. The cutesy/schatzi German nicknames he gave her, the grandfatherly forcefeeding of Stroh and Obstwasser before geschlechtich verkehren and makronen afterward (which of course came to her mouth via his boneless hand). He told her she was a shoo-in, all she had to do was meet with a few more people at Polygram and they'd make a musical as a vehicle for her!
It is, of course, needless to tell you that something similar was expected at every new meeting with every member of the Polygram team: Germans, Austrians, Swiss, Dutch, Danish... Old world gentlemen all of them, their courtly manners justifying their sense of entitlement to the world. A few of them were quite attractive - tall, silver-haired gentlemen with immaculately tailored three-piece suits surrounding paisley ascots tucked into perfectly pressed shirts; sculpted hair and pencil-thin mustaches above the thin and constantly pursed lips that smoked long thin cigarettes; they wore scarves in the summer and walked with canes - even the young ones seemed old. The bald ones generally had combovers with more mousse than hair, the fat ones always had watch chains on their vests. Never would she leave without an extremely expensive gift - a Channel perfume, a Swarovski Chocolate Box, a De Beer diamond ring, a dress from Christian Dior (and of course, the measurements were perfect). When meeting her at the door they would bend down and kiss her on the hand, or kiss her on each cheek, sometimes three times rather than two. Conversation was always quite pleasant, the meals were always the height of gourmet and gourmand, the wines they picked were amazing (at least when they weren't German...), and occasionally they even flew her to Germany. Karlheinz even got her the Dichterhallen.
The Producer seemed strangely OK with all this. He never asked her where she was going, gave her free use of whatever car she wanted, and he seemed happier than he'd ever been in their relationship. He was on the phone 18 hours a day, his old friends were his friends again, and during that month when she was in meetings and gaining nearly thirty pounds from the German dishes she'd eaten - which made outfits much tighter and her curves more alluring - his life was back to a whirlwind of tennis, power lunches, movie pitches from him, and movie pitches to him.
Early in the evening of September 19th, Carmen returned to the house to find the Producer wearing what looked like a white bathrobe and a fisherman's cap on his head, but all of the cap but the bill was covered by the white shawl with blue stripes he work over his head. He was standing in the corner of his living room, bending his back up and down at the speed of sound as he read from a book while his lips moved with barely any sound at the speed of light. He didn't even seem to notice her, and as she walked in front of him, she saw that not only was he wearing his favorite tie, but the tie was cut in the middle, almost the entire way through.
Before she could even ask what was wrong, he looked at her and emphatically intoned:
"Vahyigah hadawvawr el meylekh nineveh mikis'aw va'yo'aw'ver ahdahrtaw meyawlawv."
And then he began to walk directly towards her, staring her deadly cold in the eye and taking a step a few inches forward with every seven words:
"For the word came unto the King of Nineveh and he arose from his throne and he laid his throne from him and covered him with sackcloth and sat in ashes and he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the King and his nobles saying let neither man nor beast nor herd nor flock taste any thing let them not feed nor drink water but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily unto Adonai yea let them turn every one from his evil way and from the violence that is in their hands."
He then stared at his hand for a moment that seemed like fifteen, as unaware as she was about what he was about to do.
"You didn't get the part."
And then he dislodged her cornea.
Monday, August 29, 2016
Tales from the Old New Land - Tale 4 - A Bit More
And having a playback memory, Carmen remembered something he said about copying down everything he said that sounded vaguely like a reference to Isaiah 8:1, and recorded every word of what he said for fear that he'd demand of her why she did not comply with the order he gave mid-binge/tirade to record these pearls of wisdom. In fact, she did it immediately after he let her go from the ledge. She kept a copy of it on her person every day of her life, in case the Producer ever returned and demanded to see it.
The Producer and Carmen slugged on after that night for another sixteen months. When Carmen finally became Steve's, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever before for two whole decades, and considering the dangers she'd passed, one could argue that she was still more beautiful inside than out. Nevertheless, her ribs had the consistency of crushed ice, her joints bent in manners no human being should, the simple act of arising from her bed was pain itself. Among those who'd experienced repetitive trauma, it is not uncommon to deal with the constant rebreaking of bones, degenerative disc disease and an eventual lumbar spinal fusion; bone spurs, torn ligaments, degenerative arthritis, staff infections from corrective surgeries. And that's only from the effects from before he started to hit her face.
This is mercifully not a book in which to discuss the particulars of tyrannical behavior which cause such internal horror. This narrator has neither the patience nor nothing like the fortitude to speak in any more than generalities about the abominations perpetrated upon Carmen and he asks your forgiveness for his need to speak any further of these depravities. But if this fictional rendering of a single Hollywood player getting off on the scent of blood has anything like the ring of veracity to you, then he asks you to at least consider how many thousands there may have been over the past century of powerful Hollywood men who've acted precisely like this.
This particular apparition of a Producer knew on the night of this "window dressing" (his charming term for what transpired that dawn) that his days as a respected Hollywood player could be counted with two digits. Don't mind us the circumstances of his ignominy, there were any number of risible cinematic bombs in the late 70's and early 80's which wiped out Hollywood producers, production companies, and whole studios:
There was At Long Last Love, Peter Bogdanovich's trivial homage to 30's movie-musicals, Cole Porter songs, and Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedies - because nothing oozes Golden Age Hollywood class quite like Burt Reynolds, who became a superstar a few years previously when Deliverance allowed us to watch him kill a Georgia hillbilly with a crossbow while the hillbilly sodomized a 300 pound Ned Beatty. There was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, a shameless money grab of a sequel starring a miserable looking Richard Burton during a period when he looked like he was taking parts in horrible movies just so he could pay his astronomical bar tab. There was The Swarm, a horror movie about killer bees that starred Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Olivia de Havilland - because what everybody wanted to see in the late 70's was the biggest stars of 1945 in a horror movie with a plot too absurd for Roger Corman to film. There was I Spit On Your Grave - a film that couldn't even find distribution for two years because of its quarter-hour depictions (notice the plural) of gang rape. There was X-rated Caligula, a movie made through the combined talents of literary lion Gore Vidal and Bob Guccione - publisher of Penthouse Magazine, who simply wanted to record a literal rendering of the depraved events within the Roman Emperor Caligula's palace in Tacitus's Annals. Every imaginable degradation seemed to find its way into the script; raping a bride on her wedding day - and her groom, sex shows involving children and the deformed (if you don't believe me, watch it), gladiatorial public execution, and a confusing scene for which poor Helen Mirren has to use what is hopefully a prosthetic vaginal cavity to depict herself giving birth as part of a (literally) execrable performance within all these execrable performances. After seeing the original cut, Guccione decided that audiences weren't getting their money's worth, and insisted on inserting a forty-five minute bisexual orgy near the end which the Roman Senators and their wives are coerced into having.
There was, of course, Heaven's Gate, which lost 30 million dollars, ran to nearly four hours in original cut, deliberately killed a horse with explosives, was yanked from movie theaters after less than a week, and bankrupted United Artists - the greatest of all movie studios - forever. Some swear it's a misunderstood masterpiece, this narrator doesn't want to find out... Of course, it has a ten minute rape scene...
There was Inchon, the B-Movie hagiography for America's Five-Star General in Asia, and for a moment in 1952 America's would-be dictator, Douglas MacArthur. Financed with no expense spared by a combination of the United States Military and world's most infamous cult leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, with MacArthur played by the world's greatest actor - the ailing Lord Lawrence Olivier - for a cool million bucks, and directed by Terrance Young, who made the first few James Bond movies. MacArthur's closest confidante was played by Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft. Who'd have conceived that a movie of such disparate parts would come unglued?
There was Tarzan, the Ape Man - in which a mythical White Ape turns out to be a white man raised by apes and therefore must be brought back to civilisation in England where he can be taught proper discourse. Nevertheless, he retains the animal sexual magnetism of Africa, which overwhelms poor proper and prim Jane. Tarzan's character was found offensive by some in the 1910's when he first appeared, imagine the reception by 1981. Yet somehow, there've since been another six Tarzan movies.
And who can, or should, forget George Lucas's Howard the Duck? A PG live-action movie in which a loveable alien duck gets transported through a wormhole to our world. In the course of the movie, he gets dumped by a club bouncer into a hot tub where a couple is having sex, a human that turns out to be an alien who has a tongue seems to extend like an erection in the presence of Lea Thompson, Howard's duckbill attempts to bite the ass of a sixty-something black woman whose onion-like posterior he finds quite stimulating, he excitedly opens Playduck Magazine in which we see a photo of a duck with curves and hair and feathered white nipples (later in the movie we see duck boobies with pink human nipples), the Cleveland Police Department sexually assaults Howard the Duck, and actor Jeffrey Jones (himself now a convicted sex offender) walks in on Lea Thompson seducing Howard the Duck.
And, of course, Ishtar. The only of these risible and bank-busting movies directed by a woman, and the only one whose director never directed a movie again. Perhaps Ishtar was, truly, the last movie of the Old-New Hollywood - directed by Mike Nichols's old comic partner Elaine May, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty starring, Vittorio Storaro (Coppola and Bertolucci's cinematographer of choice) doing the photography, co-starring New Hollywood luminaries like Tess Harper (Tender Mercies) Charles Grodin (from an Orthodox family), Jack Weston (Weinstein), Carol Kane (Woody's first wife in Annie Hall and an Oscar nominee for a part in Hester Street that she acted in Yiddish), Aharon Ipale (Israeli), Fred Melamed (Sy Ableman in A Serious Man), David Margulies (Hollywood's character actor of choice when you needed a Jew). Is it any wonder that a film bombed that had so many Jews involved whose scenario was in an Arab country?
Something rotted in that air of freedom which made the New Hollywood Golden Age possible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It was inevitable that the freedom which allowed for realistic depictions of ordinary people with their ugliness intact, with sex, and violence, and emotional turmoil unshielded by a production code, would curdle into freedom's betrayal by making its depictions into something sickeningly exploitative - sometimes freedom's very liberators betrayed it. In the case of Hollywood, what appeared to be a glorious liberation turned out to be merely another swing of the pendulum that landed on equilibrium for a moment before swinging into decadence. Today's Hollywood has a new production code, a code that allows for rivers of blood so long as the violence is confined to an unrealistic genre and its human consequences softpedaled, a code that allows for the naive innocence of children to continue unabated into adulthood with bro comedies about manchildren, a code in which romantic comedies in which love's ugly moments are airbrushed out of existence, a code dominated by action movies in which the stars are the special effects. Just as in the old production code, today's Hollywood movies can still be damn good, but in the opinion of this clearly not humble enough narrator, almost none of them show us ourselves. There are ways around the problem - movies like The Social Network and Her and WALL-E and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which only show us a complex image of the human spirit by showing us how technology may have completely reshaped it; or movies like Boyhood or the Before movies or (believe it or not) Borat, in all of which the experimental gimmick that makes them possible is so radically extreme that they can only be done once and never be copied. There are some very fine and human directors working in Hollywood's orbit if not actually 'in' Hollywood: there are at least two American treasures: Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater, both of whom manage in every movie to say something new and elusive about America. Among the 'tribe', there's Jason Reitman, or at least was, who made three of the great American movies at the beginning of his career with Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and Up In The Air, all three of which manage to say something new and elusive about America, and there's John Sayles, whom nobody remembers anymore, but twenty years ago was the God of Independent American Film. There's Ang Lee, who isn't even American, but easily beats Americans at their own game. Errol Morris, the documentarian who makes movies so utterly different from everyone else's that you shouldn't even call them movies by the accepted definition.
Other than them, there are, as Woody once called them, the Academy of the Overrated: Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, PT Anderson, Wes Anderson (whom in all fairness seems to be improving), Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufmann, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh (who at least tries to be more ambitious), Sofia Coppola, Peter Jackson, Ken Burns (it takes a rare talent to make the subjects of his documentaries boring), David O Russell, the Wachowskis, Gus Van Sant, Tim Burton, James Cameron...
These are directors so enamored of movies that they jam pack their movies with references to other movies and forget to put references to life in them. Perhaps that statement is unfair, there are exceptions in every one of their outputs, but the exceptions are very few compared to the misfires. There is a kind of ersatz profundity to their movies - movies like The Matrix and Inception and Avatar and I <3 -="" a="" able="" about="" and="" anderson="" are="" arrested="" brothers="" burton="" challenge="" charlie="" coen="" contain="" cookie.="" cynical="" darkness="" david="" development="" fincher="" fit="" font="" for="" fortune="" gravity="" huckabees="" i="" incomprehensibility="" kaufmann="" last="" like="" love="" lynch="" meaning="" messages="" mistake="" movies="" nbsp="" of="" other="" philosophical="" pt="" s="" tarantino="" tedium="" that="" the="" tim="" to="" used="" wes="" which="" whimsy="" within="">therefore perhaps movies against movies. Most alarmingly, and prevalent to nearly all of them, movies that mistake technology for humanity. Even among the directors unaddicted to CGI, there are more breathtaking shots in today's American movies than ever before, but to what end? Today's auteurs have utterly mastered the technical end of filmmaking, and perhaps because we've mastered technique, we've forgotten what the technique is for.
Meanwhile, people who've devoted their whole lives to film tell us that the world is experiencing a cinematic Golden Age of which the United States is the only first world country who remains excluded. As with so many things about Contemporary America - soccer, news, public transit, languages, condoms, history, black humor, cheap health care, gun laws, and vegetables - we have in America have only the dimmest awareness of the feast that often seems to happen in every corner of the globe but ours because we're too busy playing with our toys.
Special effects are the new stars of Hollywood. The highest grossing movies are no longer character based movies like The Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider or American Graffiti or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or MASH or Fiddler on the Roof or Patton. There were plenty of smaller, character driven films during these years that did well, but it was between 1975 and 1990 that technology become the undisputed box office king, and after that came the systematic gutting of movies that portrayed Americans in their natural state in anywhere but independent film and the Miramax ghetto. Just over the other side of 1975 lay the Star Wars Trilogy and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Indiana Jones and ET and Back to the Future and Roger Rabbit - and how human and full of personality do those early Spielberg and Lucas and Zemeckis movies seem next to the high-grossing movies of our time! Would it surprise anyone that Tom Cruise or Chris Hemsworth or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson were actually computer programs or robots that only exist on a screen? There was even an Al Pacino movie about that exact notion fifteen years ago called Simone. Maybe Jennifer Lawrence is just an updated Simone, an indication that these computer avatars have improved to the point that seem so like us humans that perhaps humans are indistinguishable now from robots!
This New New Hollywood came into existence because the knowledge that movies like Caligula and I Spit On Your Grave and Heaven's Gate and Howard the Duck gave us of what we were capable of was too terrible. The freedom to create greater and more uplifting spectacles can also give us things too vile and revolting for contemplation. All it took was less than a dozen movies in which the human animal was presented to us undeniably in all its stinking shit, and the movie world's been running away from its truth ever since.
Our dearly beloved Producer could have been working on any of these movies, it doesn't matter which, but by the same time the next year, The Producer hadn't worked on a movie for nine months; nine months during which his fists literally performed an abortion on Carmen. Perhaps it became his sole source of satisfaction and relief, because for six months, no glamorous friend returned a call, relieving him not only of his own glamor but the sycophants who glommed onto it. Friendship is fleeting, love mere folly, but how much more true would that be when living in a place known as the 'Dream Factory?' But five minutes after every time he went off, he begged her not to leave, just you wait, he'll make you happy again, Hollywood can be something better than its ever been, and you'll be its leading lady!
Then there was the time the Producer bruised her father up after her father asked about Carmen's bruises. Two minutes later, he gave her Dad a $10,000 wad of cash, then drove him to the emergency room personally in his 1977 Lamborghini Countach. The moment he got through the door, he took out more wads of cash for the doctor and nurses and the other patients - they saw nothing. And while they were in the ER, Carmen's sister practically kidnapped her to a courthouse to make her get a restraining order. Carmen was unwilling, worried she was about to get killed. If not by her producer, then by the guys he'd pay to keep her quiet. The judge listened very patiently and carefully and evinced great compassion for her suffering, he then excused himself to his chamber for five minutes, came back and refused the restraining order. Twelve minutes later, the Producer was at the courthouse, gave Carmen a huge hug and kiss as she sobbed her tears upon him, took her home and told her over and over again how much he loved her.
Who could turn down the life he promised? This was a man who knew how to turn curvature of the Earth to the precise angle he wanted. He was the best actor in Hollywood. For more than a decade, he dealt with creative geniuses every day of his life, but he was a genius of life itself. Every event, the most glamorous, the most spiritual, the most transcendent, the most intangible, could be picked apart and reduced to a transaction. Nothing in life was a mystery to him, and all he demanded in return was that she be no more complicated to understand than the concierge in Oviedo.
The Producer and Carmen slugged on after that night for another sixteen months. When Carmen finally became Steve's, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever before for two whole decades, and considering the dangers she'd passed, one could argue that she was still more beautiful inside than out. Nevertheless, her ribs had the consistency of crushed ice, her joints bent in manners no human being should, the simple act of arising from her bed was pain itself. Among those who'd experienced repetitive trauma, it is not uncommon to deal with the constant rebreaking of bones, degenerative disc disease and an eventual lumbar spinal fusion; bone spurs, torn ligaments, degenerative arthritis, staff infections from corrective surgeries. And that's only from the effects from before he started to hit her face.
This is mercifully not a book in which to discuss the particulars of tyrannical behavior which cause such internal horror. This narrator has neither the patience nor nothing like the fortitude to speak in any more than generalities about the abominations perpetrated upon Carmen and he asks your forgiveness for his need to speak any further of these depravities. But if this fictional rendering of a single Hollywood player getting off on the scent of blood has anything like the ring of veracity to you, then he asks you to at least consider how many thousands there may have been over the past century of powerful Hollywood men who've acted precisely like this.
This particular apparition of a Producer knew on the night of this "window dressing" (his charming term for what transpired that dawn) that his days as a respected Hollywood player could be counted with two digits. Don't mind us the circumstances of his ignominy, there were any number of risible cinematic bombs in the late 70's and early 80's which wiped out Hollywood producers, production companies, and whole studios:
There was At Long Last Love, Peter Bogdanovich's trivial homage to 30's movie-musicals, Cole Porter songs, and Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedies - because nothing oozes Golden Age Hollywood class quite like Burt Reynolds, who became a superstar a few years previously when Deliverance allowed us to watch him kill a Georgia hillbilly with a crossbow while the hillbilly sodomized a 300 pound Ned Beatty. There was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, a shameless money grab of a sequel starring a miserable looking Richard Burton during a period when he looked like he was taking parts in horrible movies just so he could pay his astronomical bar tab. There was The Swarm, a horror movie about killer bees that starred Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Olivia de Havilland - because what everybody wanted to see in the late 70's was the biggest stars of 1945 in a horror movie with a plot too absurd for Roger Corman to film. There was I Spit On Your Grave - a film that couldn't even find distribution for two years because of its quarter-hour depictions (notice the plural) of gang rape. There was X-rated Caligula, a movie made through the combined talents of literary lion Gore Vidal and Bob Guccione - publisher of Penthouse Magazine, who simply wanted to record a literal rendering of the depraved events within the Roman Emperor Caligula's palace in Tacitus's Annals. Every imaginable degradation seemed to find its way into the script; raping a bride on her wedding day - and her groom, sex shows involving children and the deformed (if you don't believe me, watch it), gladiatorial public execution, and a confusing scene for which poor Helen Mirren has to use what is hopefully a prosthetic vaginal cavity to depict herself giving birth as part of a (literally) execrable performance within all these execrable performances. After seeing the original cut, Guccione decided that audiences weren't getting their money's worth, and insisted on inserting a forty-five minute bisexual orgy near the end which the Roman Senators and their wives are coerced into having.
There was, of course, Heaven's Gate, which lost 30 million dollars, ran to nearly four hours in original cut, deliberately killed a horse with explosives, was yanked from movie theaters after less than a week, and bankrupted United Artists - the greatest of all movie studios - forever. Some swear it's a misunderstood masterpiece, this narrator doesn't want to find out... Of course, it has a ten minute rape scene...
There was Inchon, the B-Movie hagiography for America's Five-Star General in Asia, and for a moment in 1952 America's would-be dictator, Douglas MacArthur. Financed with no expense spared by a combination of the United States Military and world's most infamous cult leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, with MacArthur played by the world's greatest actor - the ailing Lord Lawrence Olivier - for a cool million bucks, and directed by Terrance Young, who made the first few James Bond movies. MacArthur's closest confidante was played by Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft. Who'd have conceived that a movie of such disparate parts would come unglued?
There was Tarzan, the Ape Man - in which a mythical White Ape turns out to be a white man raised by apes and therefore must be brought back to civilisation in England where he can be taught proper discourse. Nevertheless, he retains the animal sexual magnetism of Africa, which overwhelms poor proper and prim Jane. Tarzan's character was found offensive by some in the 1910's when he first appeared, imagine the reception by 1981. Yet somehow, there've since been another six Tarzan movies.
And who can, or should, forget George Lucas's Howard the Duck? A PG live-action movie in which a loveable alien duck gets transported through a wormhole to our world. In the course of the movie, he gets dumped by a club bouncer into a hot tub where a couple is having sex, a human that turns out to be an alien who has a tongue seems to extend like an erection in the presence of Lea Thompson, Howard's duckbill attempts to bite the ass of a sixty-something black woman whose onion-like posterior he finds quite stimulating, he excitedly opens Playduck Magazine in which we see a photo of a duck with curves and hair and feathered white nipples (later in the movie we see duck boobies with pink human nipples), the Cleveland Police Department sexually assaults Howard the Duck, and actor Jeffrey Jones (himself now a convicted sex offender) walks in on Lea Thompson seducing Howard the Duck.
And, of course, Ishtar. The only of these risible and bank-busting movies directed by a woman, and the only one whose director never directed a movie again. Perhaps Ishtar was, truly, the last movie of the Old-New Hollywood - directed by Mike Nichols's old comic partner Elaine May, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty starring, Vittorio Storaro (Coppola and Bertolucci's cinematographer of choice) doing the photography, co-starring New Hollywood luminaries like Tess Harper (Tender Mercies) Charles Grodin (from an Orthodox family), Jack Weston (Weinstein), Carol Kane (Woody's first wife in Annie Hall and an Oscar nominee for a part in Hester Street that she acted in Yiddish), Aharon Ipale (Israeli), Fred Melamed (Sy Ableman in A Serious Man), David Margulies (Hollywood's character actor of choice when you needed a Jew). Is it any wonder that a film bombed that had so many Jews involved whose scenario was in an Arab country?
Something rotted in that air of freedom which made the New Hollywood Golden Age possible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It was inevitable that the freedom which allowed for realistic depictions of ordinary people with their ugliness intact, with sex, and violence, and emotional turmoil unshielded by a production code, would curdle into freedom's betrayal by making its depictions into something sickeningly exploitative - sometimes freedom's very liberators betrayed it. In the case of Hollywood, what appeared to be a glorious liberation turned out to be merely another swing of the pendulum that landed on equilibrium for a moment before swinging into decadence. Today's Hollywood has a new production code, a code that allows for rivers of blood so long as the violence is confined to an unrealistic genre and its human consequences softpedaled, a code that allows for the naive innocence of children to continue unabated into adulthood with bro comedies about manchildren, a code in which romantic comedies in which love's ugly moments are airbrushed out of existence, a code dominated by action movies in which the stars are the special effects. Just as in the old production code, today's Hollywood movies can still be damn good, but in the opinion of this clearly not humble enough narrator, almost none of them show us ourselves. There are ways around the problem - movies like The Social Network and Her and WALL-E and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which only show us a complex image of the human spirit by showing us how technology may have completely reshaped it; or movies like Boyhood or the Before movies or (believe it or not) Borat, in all of which the experimental gimmick that makes them possible is so radically extreme that they can only be done once and never be copied. There are some very fine and human directors working in Hollywood's orbit if not actually 'in' Hollywood: there are at least two American treasures: Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater, both of whom manage in every movie to say something new and elusive about America. Among the 'tribe', there's Jason Reitman, or at least was, who made three of the great American movies at the beginning of his career with Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and Up In The Air, all three of which manage to say something new and elusive about America, and there's John Sayles, whom nobody remembers anymore, but twenty years ago was the God of Independent American Film. There's Ang Lee, who isn't even American, but easily beats Americans at their own game. Errol Morris, the documentarian who makes movies so utterly different from everyone else's that you shouldn't even call them movies by the accepted definition.
Other than them, there are, as Woody once called them, the Academy of the Overrated: Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, PT Anderson, Wes Anderson (whom in all fairness seems to be improving), Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufmann, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Steven Soderbergh (who at least tries to be more ambitious), Sofia Coppola, Peter Jackson, Ken Burns (it takes a rare talent to make the subjects of his documentaries boring), David O Russell, the Wachowskis, Gus Van Sant, Tim Burton, James Cameron...
These are directors so enamored of movies that they jam pack their movies with references to other movies and forget to put references to life in them. Perhaps that statement is unfair, there are exceptions in every one of their outputs, but the exceptions are very few compared to the misfires. There is a kind of ersatz profundity to their movies - movies like The Matrix and Inception and Avatar and I <3 -="" a="" able="" about="" and="" anderson="" are="" arrested="" brothers="" burton="" challenge="" charlie="" coen="" contain="" cookie.="" cynical="" darkness="" david="" development="" fincher="" fit="" font="" for="" fortune="" gravity="" huckabees="" i="" incomprehensibility="" kaufmann="" last="" like="" love="" lynch="" meaning="" messages="" mistake="" movies="" nbsp="" of="" other="" philosophical="" pt="" s="" tarantino="" tedium="" that="" the="" tim="" to="" used="" wes="" which="" whimsy="" within="">therefore perhaps movies against movies. Most alarmingly, and prevalent to nearly all of them, movies that mistake technology for humanity. Even among the directors unaddicted to CGI, there are more breathtaking shots in today's American movies than ever before, but to what end? Today's auteurs have utterly mastered the technical end of filmmaking, and perhaps because we've mastered technique, we've forgotten what the technique is for.
Meanwhile, people who've devoted their whole lives to film tell us that the world is experiencing a cinematic Golden Age of which the United States is the only first world country who remains excluded. As with so many things about Contemporary America - soccer, news, public transit, languages, condoms, history, black humor, cheap health care, gun laws, and vegetables - we have in America have only the dimmest awareness of the feast that often seems to happen in every corner of the globe but ours because we're too busy playing with our toys.
Special effects are the new stars of Hollywood. The highest grossing movies are no longer character based movies like The Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider or American Graffiti or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or MASH or Fiddler on the Roof or Patton. There were plenty of smaller, character driven films during these years that did well, but it was between 1975 and 1990 that technology become the undisputed box office king, and after that came the systematic gutting of movies that portrayed Americans in their natural state in anywhere but independent film and the Miramax ghetto. Just over the other side of 1975 lay the Star Wars Trilogy and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Indiana Jones and ET and Back to the Future and Roger Rabbit - and how human and full of personality do those early Spielberg and Lucas and Zemeckis movies seem next to the high-grossing movies of our time! Would it surprise anyone that Tom Cruise or Chris Hemsworth or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson were actually computer programs or robots that only exist on a screen? There was even an Al Pacino movie about that exact notion fifteen years ago called Simone. Maybe Jennifer Lawrence is just an updated Simone, an indication that these computer avatars have improved to the point that seem so like us humans that perhaps humans are indistinguishable now from robots!
This New New Hollywood came into existence because the knowledge that movies like Caligula and I Spit On Your Grave and Heaven's Gate and Howard the Duck gave us of what we were capable of was too terrible. The freedom to create greater and more uplifting spectacles can also give us things too vile and revolting for contemplation. All it took was less than a dozen movies in which the human animal was presented to us undeniably in all its stinking shit, and the movie world's been running away from its truth ever since.
Our dearly beloved Producer could have been working on any of these movies, it doesn't matter which, but by the same time the next year, The Producer hadn't worked on a movie for nine months; nine months during which his fists literally performed an abortion on Carmen. Perhaps it became his sole source of satisfaction and relief, because for six months, no glamorous friend returned a call, relieving him not only of his own glamor but the sycophants who glommed onto it. Friendship is fleeting, love mere folly, but how much more true would that be when living in a place known as the 'Dream Factory?' But five minutes after every time he went off, he begged her not to leave, just you wait, he'll make you happy again, Hollywood can be something better than its ever been, and you'll be its leading lady!
Then there was the time the Producer bruised her father up after her father asked about Carmen's bruises. Two minutes later, he gave her Dad a $10,000 wad of cash, then drove him to the emergency room personally in his 1977 Lamborghini Countach. The moment he got through the door, he took out more wads of cash for the doctor and nurses and the other patients - they saw nothing. And while they were in the ER, Carmen's sister practically kidnapped her to a courthouse to make her get a restraining order. Carmen was unwilling, worried she was about to get killed. If not by her producer, then by the guys he'd pay to keep her quiet. The judge listened very patiently and carefully and evinced great compassion for her suffering, he then excused himself to his chamber for five minutes, came back and refused the restraining order. Twelve minutes later, the Producer was at the courthouse, gave Carmen a huge hug and kiss as she sobbed her tears upon him, took her home and told her over and over again how much he loved her.
Who could turn down the life he promised? This was a man who knew how to turn curvature of the Earth to the precise angle he wanted. He was the best actor in Hollywood. For more than a decade, he dealt with creative geniuses every day of his life, but he was a genius of life itself. Every event, the most glamorous, the most spiritual, the most transcendent, the most intangible, could be picked apart and reduced to a transaction. Nothing in life was a mystery to him, and all he demanded in return was that she be no more complicated to understand than the concierge in Oviedo.
Friday, August 26, 2016
Tales From the Old New Land: Tale 4 - Rough Beginning
And having a playback memory, Carmen remembered something he said about copying down everything he said that sounded vaguely like a reference to Isaiah 8:1, and recorded every word of what he said for fear that he'd demand of her why she did not comply with the order he gave mid-binge/tirade to record these pearls of wisdom. In fact, she did it immediately after he let her go from the ledge. She kept a copy of it on her person every day of her life, in case the Producer ever returned and demanded to see it.
The Producer and Carmen slugged on after that night for another sixteen months. When Carmen finally became Steve's, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever before for two whole decades, and considering the dangers she'd passed, one could argue that she was still more beautiful inside than out. Nevertheless, her ribs had the consistency of crushed ice, her joints bent in manners no human being should, the simple act of arising from her bed was pain itself. Among those who'd experienced repetitive trauma, it is not uncommon to deal with the constant rebreaking of bones, degenerative disc disease and an eventual lumbar spinal fusion; bone spurs, torn ligaments, degenerative arthritis, staff infections from corrective surgeries. And that's only from the effects from before he started to hit her face.
This is mercifully not a book in which to discuss the particulars of tyrannical behavior which cause such internal horror. This narrator has neither the patience nor nothing like the fortitude to speak in any more than generalities about the abominations perpetrated upon Carmen and he asks your forgiveness for his need to speak any further of these depravities. But if this fictional rendering of a single Hollywood player getting off on the scent of blood has anything like the ring of veracity to you, then he asks you to at least consider how many thousands there may have been over the past century of powerful Hollywood men who've acted precisely like this.
This particular apparition of a Producer knew on the night of this "window dressing" (his charming term for what transpired that dawn) that his days as a respected Hollywood player could be counted with two digits. Don't mind us the circumstances of his ignominy, there were any number of risible cinematic bombs in the late 70's and early 80's which wiped out Hollywood producers, production companies, and whole studios:
There was At Long Last Love, Peter Bogdanovich's trivial homage to 30's movie-musicals, Cole Porter songs, and Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedies - because nothing oozes Golden Age Hollywood class quite like Burt Reynolds, who became a superstar a few years previously when Deliverance allowed us to watch him kill a Georgia hillbilly with a crossbow while the hillbilly sodomized a 300 pound Ned Beatty. There was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, a shameless money grab of a sequel starring a miserable looking Richard Burton during a period when he looked like he was taking parts in horrible movies just so he could pay his astronomical bar tab. There was The Swarm, a horror movie about killer bees that starred Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Olivia de Havilland - because what everybody wanted to see in the late 70's was the biggest stars of 1945 in a horror movie with a plot too absurd for Roger Corman to film. There was I Spit On Your Grave - a film that couldn't even find distribution for two years because of its quarter-hour depictions (notice the plural) of gang rape. There was X-rated Caligula, a movie made through the combined talents of literary lion Gore Vidal and Bob Guccione - publisher of Penthouse Magazine, who simply wanted to record a literal rendering of the depraved events within the Roman Emperor Caligula's palace in Tacitus's Annals. Every imaginable degradation seemed to find its way into the script; raping a bride on her wedding day - and her groom, sex shows involving children and the deformed (if you don't believe me, watch it), gladiatorial public execution, and a confusing scene for which poor Helen Mirren has to use what is hopefully a prosthetic vaginal cavity to depict herself giving birth as part of a (literally) execrable performance within all these execrable performances. After seeing the original cut, Guccione decided that audiences weren't getting their money's worth, and insisted on inserting a forty-five minute bisexual orgy near the end which the Roman Senators and their wives are coerced into having.
There was, of course, Heaven's Gate, which lost 30 million dollars, ran to nearly four hours in original cut, deliberately killed a horse with explosives, was yanked from movie theaters after less than a week, and bankrupted United Artists - the greatest of all movie studios - forever. Some swear it's a misunderstood masterpiece, this narrator doesn't want to find out... Of course, it has a ten minute rape scene...
There was Inchon, the B-Movie hagiography for America's Five-Star General in Asia, and for a moment in 1952 America's would-be dictator, Douglas MacArthur. Financed with no expense spared by a combination of the United States Military and world's most infamous cult leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, with MacArthur played by the world's greatest actor - the ailing Lord Lawrence Olivier - for a cool million bucks, and directed by Terrance Young, who made the first few James Bond movies. MacArthur's closest confidante was played by Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft. Who'd have conceived that a movie of such disparate parts would come unglued?
There was Tarzan, the Ape Man - in which a mythical White Ape turns out to be a white man raised by apes and therefore must be brought back to civilisation in England where he can be taught proper discourse. Nevertheless, he retains the animal sexual magnetism of Africa, which overwhelms poor proper and prim Jane. Tarzan's character was found offensive by some in the 1910's when he first appeared, imagine the reception by 1981. Yet somehow, there've since been another six Tarzan movies.
And who can, or should, forget George Lucas's Howard the Duck? A PG live-action movie in which a loveable alien duck gets transported through a wormhole to our world. In the course of the movie, he gets dumped by a club bouncer into a hot tub where a couple is having sex, a human that turns out to be an alien who has a tongue seems to extend like an erection in the presence of Lea Thompson, Howard's duckbill attempts to bite the ass of a sixty-something black woman whose onion-like posterior he finds quite stimulating, he excitedly opens Playduck Magazine in which we see a photo of a duck with curves and hair and feathered white nipples (later in the movie we see duck boobies with pink human nipples), the Cleveland Police Department sexually assaults Howard the Duck, and actor Jeffrey Jones (himself a convicted sex offender) walks in on Lea Thompson seducing Howard the Duck.
And, of course, Ishtar. The only of these risible and bank-busting movies directed by a woman, and the only one whose director never directed a movie again. Perhaps Ishtar was, truly, the last movie of the Old-New Hollywood - directed by Mike Nichols's old comic partner Elaine May, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty starring, Vittorio Storaro (Coppola and Bertolucci's cinematographer of choice) doing the photography, co-starring New Hollywood luminaries like Tess Harper (Tender Mercies) Charles Grodin (from an Orthodox family), Jack Weston (Weinstein), Carol Kane (Woody's first wife in Annie Hall and an Oscar nominee for a part in Hester Street that she acted in Yiddish), Aharon Ipale (Israeli), Fred Melamed (Sy Ableman in A Serious Man), David Margulies (Hollywood's character actor of choice when you needed a Jew). Is it any wonder that a film bombed that had so many Jews involved whose scenario was in an Arab country?
Something rotted in that air of freedom which made the New Hollywood Golden Age possible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It was inevitable that the freedom which allowed for realistic depictions of ordinary people with their ugliness intact, with sex, and violence, and emotional turmoil unshielded by a production code, would curdle into freedom's betrayal by making its depictions into something sickeningly exploitative - sometimes freedom's very liberators betrayed it. In the case of Hollywood, what appeared to be a glorious liberation turned out to be merely another swing of the pendulum that landed on equilibrium for a moment before swinging into decadence. Today's Hollywood has a new production code, a code that allows for rivers of blood so long as the violence is confined to an unrealistic genre and its human consequences softpedaled, a code that allows for the naive innocence of children to continue unabated into adulthood with bro comedies about manchildren, a code in which romantic comedies in which love's ugly moments are airbrushed out of existence, a code dominated by action movies in which the stars are the special effects. Just as in the old production code, today's Hollywood movies can still be damn good, but they can't show us ourselves. The closest Hollywood's come in the 21st century, in the opinion of this obviously not humble enough narrator, is in movies like The Social Network and Her and WALL-E and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which only show us a complex image of the human spirit by showing us how technology may have completely reshaped it; or in movies like Boyhood or (believe it or not) Borat, in both cases of which the experimental gimmick that makes it possible is so radically extreme that in both cases it can only be done once. Meanwhile, people who've devoted their whole lives to film tell us that the world is experiencing a cinematic Golden Age of which the United States is the only country who remains unaware of it. As with so many things about Contemporary America - like soccer, factual reporting, public transit, languages, condoms, history, black humor, cheap health care, gun laws, and vegetables - we have in America have only the dimmest awareness of the feast that often seems to happen in every corner of the globe but ours because we're too busy playing with our toys.
Special effects are the new stars of Hollywood. The highest grossing movies are no longer character based movies like The Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider or American Graffiti or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or MASH or Fiddler on the Roof or Patton. . There were plenty of smaller, character driven films during these years that did well, but it was between 1975 and 1990 that technology become the undisputed box office king, and after that came the systematic gutting of movies that portrayed Americans in their natural state in anywhere but independent film and the Miramax ghetto. Just over the other side of 1975 lay the Star Wars Trilogy and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Indiana Jones and ET and Back to the Future and Roger Rabbit - and how human and full of personality do those early Spielberg and Lucas and Zemeckis movies seem next to the high-grossing movies of our time! Would it surprise anyone that Tom Cruise or Chris Hemsworth or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson were actually computer programs or robots that don't exist on a screen? There was even an Al Pacino movie about that exact notion fifteen years ago called Simone. Maybe Jennifer Lawrence is just an updated Simone, an indication that these computer avatars have improved to the point that seem so like us humans that perhaps humans are indistinguishable now from robots!
This New New Hollywood came into existence because the knowledge that movies like Caligula and I Spit On Your Grave and Heaven's Gate and Howard the Duck gave us of what we were capable of was too terrible. The freedom to create greater and more uplifting spectacles can also give us things too vile and revolting for contemplation. All it took was less than a dozen movies in which the human animal was presented to us undeniably in all its stinking shit, and we've been running away from its truth ever since.
Our dearly beloved producer could have been working on any of these movies, it doesn't matter which, but by the same time the next year, The Producer hadn't worked on a movie for nine months, nine months during which his fists literally performed an abortion on Carmen. Perhaps it became his sole source of satisfaction and relief, because for six months, no glamorous friend returned a call, relieving him not only of his own glamor but the sycophants who glommed onto his glamor. Friendship is fleeting, love mere folly, but how much more true would that be when living in a place known as the 'Dream Factory?'
The Producer and Carmen slugged on after that night for another sixteen months. When Carmen finally became Steve's, she was more radiantly beautiful than ever before for two whole decades, and considering the dangers she'd passed, one could argue that she was still more beautiful inside than out. Nevertheless, her ribs had the consistency of crushed ice, her joints bent in manners no human being should, the simple act of arising from her bed was pain itself. Among those who'd experienced repetitive trauma, it is not uncommon to deal with the constant rebreaking of bones, degenerative disc disease and an eventual lumbar spinal fusion; bone spurs, torn ligaments, degenerative arthritis, staff infections from corrective surgeries. And that's only from the effects from before he started to hit her face.
This is mercifully not a book in which to discuss the particulars of tyrannical behavior which cause such internal horror. This narrator has neither the patience nor nothing like the fortitude to speak in any more than generalities about the abominations perpetrated upon Carmen and he asks your forgiveness for his need to speak any further of these depravities. But if this fictional rendering of a single Hollywood player getting off on the scent of blood has anything like the ring of veracity to you, then he asks you to at least consider how many thousands there may have been over the past century of powerful Hollywood men who've acted precisely like this.
This particular apparition of a Producer knew on the night of this "window dressing" (his charming term for what transpired that dawn) that his days as a respected Hollywood player could be counted with two digits. Don't mind us the circumstances of his ignominy, there were any number of risible cinematic bombs in the late 70's and early 80's which wiped out Hollywood producers, production companies, and whole studios:
There was At Long Last Love, Peter Bogdanovich's trivial homage to 30's movie-musicals, Cole Porter songs, and Ernst Lubitsch romantic comedies - because nothing oozes Golden Age Hollywood class quite like Burt Reynolds, who became a superstar a few years previously when Deliverance allowed us to watch him kill a Georgia hillbilly with a crossbow while the hillbilly sodomized a 300 pound Ned Beatty. There was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, a shameless money grab of a sequel starring a miserable looking Richard Burton during a period when he looked like he was taking parts in horrible movies just so he could pay his astronomical bar tab. There was The Swarm, a horror movie about killer bees that starred Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, and Olivia de Havilland - because what everybody wanted to see in the late 70's was the biggest stars of 1945 in a horror movie with a plot too absurd for Roger Corman to film. There was I Spit On Your Grave - a film that couldn't even find distribution for two years because of its quarter-hour depictions (notice the plural) of gang rape. There was X-rated Caligula, a movie made through the combined talents of literary lion Gore Vidal and Bob Guccione - publisher of Penthouse Magazine, who simply wanted to record a literal rendering of the depraved events within the Roman Emperor Caligula's palace in Tacitus's Annals. Every imaginable degradation seemed to find its way into the script; raping a bride on her wedding day - and her groom, sex shows involving children and the deformed (if you don't believe me, watch it), gladiatorial public execution, and a confusing scene for which poor Helen Mirren has to use what is hopefully a prosthetic vaginal cavity to depict herself giving birth as part of a (literally) execrable performance within all these execrable performances. After seeing the original cut, Guccione decided that audiences weren't getting their money's worth, and insisted on inserting a forty-five minute bisexual orgy near the end which the Roman Senators and their wives are coerced into having.
There was, of course, Heaven's Gate, which lost 30 million dollars, ran to nearly four hours in original cut, deliberately killed a horse with explosives, was yanked from movie theaters after less than a week, and bankrupted United Artists - the greatest of all movie studios - forever. Some swear it's a misunderstood masterpiece, this narrator doesn't want to find out... Of course, it has a ten minute rape scene...
There was Inchon, the B-Movie hagiography for America's Five-Star General in Asia, and for a moment in 1952 America's would-be dictator, Douglas MacArthur. Financed with no expense spared by a combination of the United States Military and world's most infamous cult leader, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, with MacArthur played by the world's greatest actor - the ailing Lord Lawrence Olivier - for a cool million bucks, and directed by Terrance Young, who made the first few James Bond movies. MacArthur's closest confidante was played by Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft. Who'd have conceived that a movie of such disparate parts would come unglued?
There was Tarzan, the Ape Man - in which a mythical White Ape turns out to be a white man raised by apes and therefore must be brought back to civilisation in England where he can be taught proper discourse. Nevertheless, he retains the animal sexual magnetism of Africa, which overwhelms poor proper and prim Jane. Tarzan's character was found offensive by some in the 1910's when he first appeared, imagine the reception by 1981. Yet somehow, there've since been another six Tarzan movies.
And who can, or should, forget George Lucas's Howard the Duck? A PG live-action movie in which a loveable alien duck gets transported through a wormhole to our world. In the course of the movie, he gets dumped by a club bouncer into a hot tub where a couple is having sex, a human that turns out to be an alien who has a tongue seems to extend like an erection in the presence of Lea Thompson, Howard's duckbill attempts to bite the ass of a sixty-something black woman whose onion-like posterior he finds quite stimulating, he excitedly opens Playduck Magazine in which we see a photo of a duck with curves and hair and feathered white nipples (later in the movie we see duck boobies with pink human nipples), the Cleveland Police Department sexually assaults Howard the Duck, and actor Jeffrey Jones (himself a convicted sex offender) walks in on Lea Thompson seducing Howard the Duck.
And, of course, Ishtar. The only of these risible and bank-busting movies directed by a woman, and the only one whose director never directed a movie again. Perhaps Ishtar was, truly, the last movie of the Old-New Hollywood - directed by Mike Nichols's old comic partner Elaine May, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty starring, Vittorio Storaro (Coppola and Bertolucci's cinematographer of choice) doing the photography, co-starring New Hollywood luminaries like Tess Harper (Tender Mercies) Charles Grodin (from an Orthodox family), Jack Weston (Weinstein), Carol Kane (Woody's first wife in Annie Hall and an Oscar nominee for a part in Hester Street that she acted in Yiddish), Aharon Ipale (Israeli), Fred Melamed (Sy Ableman in A Serious Man), David Margulies (Hollywood's character actor of choice when you needed a Jew). Is it any wonder that a film bombed that had so many Jews involved whose scenario was in an Arab country?
Something rotted in that air of freedom which made the New Hollywood Golden Age possible. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It was inevitable that the freedom which allowed for realistic depictions of ordinary people with their ugliness intact, with sex, and violence, and emotional turmoil unshielded by a production code, would curdle into freedom's betrayal by making its depictions into something sickeningly exploitative - sometimes freedom's very liberators betrayed it. In the case of Hollywood, what appeared to be a glorious liberation turned out to be merely another swing of the pendulum that landed on equilibrium for a moment before swinging into decadence. Today's Hollywood has a new production code, a code that allows for rivers of blood so long as the violence is confined to an unrealistic genre and its human consequences softpedaled, a code that allows for the naive innocence of children to continue unabated into adulthood with bro comedies about manchildren, a code in which romantic comedies in which love's ugly moments are airbrushed out of existence, a code dominated by action movies in which the stars are the special effects. Just as in the old production code, today's Hollywood movies can still be damn good, but they can't show us ourselves. The closest Hollywood's come in the 21st century, in the opinion of this obviously not humble enough narrator, is in movies like The Social Network and Her and WALL-E and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which only show us a complex image of the human spirit by showing us how technology may have completely reshaped it; or in movies like Boyhood or (believe it or not) Borat, in both cases of which the experimental gimmick that makes it possible is so radically extreme that in both cases it can only be done once. Meanwhile, people who've devoted their whole lives to film tell us that the world is experiencing a cinematic Golden Age of which the United States is the only country who remains unaware of it. As with so many things about Contemporary America - like soccer, factual reporting, public transit, languages, condoms, history, black humor, cheap health care, gun laws, and vegetables - we have in America have only the dimmest awareness of the feast that often seems to happen in every corner of the globe but ours because we're too busy playing with our toys.
Special effects are the new stars of Hollywood. The highest grossing movies are no longer character based movies like The Godfather or Bonnie and Clyde or Midnight Cowboy or Easy Rider or American Graffiti or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or MASH or Fiddler on the Roof or Patton. . There were plenty of smaller, character driven films during these years that did well, but it was between 1975 and 1990 that technology become the undisputed box office king, and after that came the systematic gutting of movies that portrayed Americans in their natural state in anywhere but independent film and the Miramax ghetto. Just over the other side of 1975 lay the Star Wars Trilogy and Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Indiana Jones and ET and Back to the Future and Roger Rabbit - and how human and full of personality do those early Spielberg and Lucas and Zemeckis movies seem next to the high-grossing movies of our time! Would it surprise anyone that Tom Cruise or Chris Hemsworth or Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson were actually computer programs or robots that don't exist on a screen? There was even an Al Pacino movie about that exact notion fifteen years ago called Simone. Maybe Jennifer Lawrence is just an updated Simone, an indication that these computer avatars have improved to the point that seem so like us humans that perhaps humans are indistinguishable now from robots!
This New New Hollywood came into existence because the knowledge that movies like Caligula and I Spit On Your Grave and Heaven's Gate and Howard the Duck gave us of what we were capable of was too terrible. The freedom to create greater and more uplifting spectacles can also give us things too vile and revolting for contemplation. All it took was less than a dozen movies in which the human animal was presented to us undeniably in all its stinking shit, and we've been running away from its truth ever since.
Our dearly beloved producer could have been working on any of these movies, it doesn't matter which, but by the same time the next year, The Producer hadn't worked on a movie for nine months, nine months during which his fists literally performed an abortion on Carmen. Perhaps it became his sole source of satisfaction and relief, because for six months, no glamorous friend returned a call, relieving him not only of his own glamor but the sycophants who glommed onto his glamor. Friendship is fleeting, love mere folly, but how much more true would that be when living in a place known as the 'Dream Factory?'
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Chapter 3: The Ending Speech in Still More Final Form (And Still More Massive Trigger Warnings)
But need we that you read the price at which said high life is procured? Need we state the details of utter imbalance that puts Carmen in the company of the world's cultural elite, but unable to say a word unless spoken to; play hostess to the world's most famous people every night, but held responsible by this declining Hollywood player for everything his servants do wrong and subject to endless berating for their mistakes in preparation and hers in conversation after the guests leave - and therefore to say little as well about the imbalance between a declining producer and the coddled Hollywood stars upon whom this producer's very sense of self is dependent? Need we enflesh how this Hollywood player had a Vertigo-like obsession with the details of Carmen's appearance - her hair, her dress, her eyes, her nails; the appointments every day with stylists, designers, tailors, plastic surgeons? Need we detail how the Producer emerged unannounced from some corner of USC to accuse her of talking to some USC film brat for too long? Need we detail the many private scenes that seem cribbed from a Golden Age Bette Davis melodrama? Need we elucidate the occasional death threat, the many blows to the stomach so as not to damage her face - in front of the servants no less, the many times she heard female voices in the background of phonecalls, the times he told her how much more beautiful and less snobby were the hundreds and hundreds of other women he had - before her of course.., the all too many times she was ignored when pleading with him to stop and do something else to her? Need we elaborate upon the many small and futile attempts Carmen made to take revenges upon her Producer that, in the parlance of our own era, could perhaps be called microaggressions, certainly not microagressions in their intent or ferocity, but microaggression in proportion to the degree of perpetration upon her, and incontrovertibly micro in their degree of effectiveness; aggressions that endowed her with satisfaction for only split-seconds before the anxiety and/or the terror returns to full force; the knife she once pulled on him, the heavy objects thrown, the screaming until she was horse, the loving stares at his gun collection, the worst imaginable pains she could inflict during sex - which, relief followed by endless aggravation and a little horror amidst the validation - he seemed to enjoy more than ever.
Who knows if Carmen was actually in love? Did it matter? The Producer was not so much something to be treasured or hated by Carmen as something that happened to her. All the good, all the bad, all that she learned or didn't, all the coke and cock was not of her doing. She was a passenger in a Mercedes that a drunk driver locks from the outside while getting loaded and then returns for the simple pleasure of banging up something beautiful.
Instead of detailing all this, your ever reliable narrator will tell but one simple story of the night her Producer became a finished producer. It was dinner at the house with Janet and Marty Sheen (Ramon to friends), Nolte, a couple lawyers and their wives who brought 50 year old scotch and choice cut coke, Marcheline and Jon Voight, The Producer and Carmen, on an unseasonably frigid February night. Ramon was back from the set of Apocalypse Now, having wrapped up the shooting, or maybe he'd quit for something like the third time, or maybe it was while recouping from his on-set heart attack, and this was to be a welcome home dinner that spared no expense for a movie star who'd need a perfect comeback role after starring in a film that everybody in Hollywood knew would be a disaster.
It was relatively early in the relationship, and in retrospect, the one time at which the Producer truly seemed pleased with Carmen's hosting abilities. Neither the cook nor the pastry chef did a single thing wrong, for which he held Carmen as responsible as he did when they didn't. The Galician wines bought to impress Ramon were perfect, conversation flowed freely, Carmen turned down Nolte's blatant passes at the table with magnificently self-effacing assurance, the then ex-Catholic and Marxist Voight promised to be on his best behavior with the extremely Catholic Ramon when it came to questions about the new anticommunist Pope, and mostly fulfilled his pledge. Little did anyone know how vehemently they would switch political sides in twenty years.
Around 11, the Producer got a call that he took in his office. He emerged and didn't say anything for the rest of the night except a cursory goodbye to Ramon and Janet at 2 in the morning when they left early to get some sleep before their flight tomorrow to Bermuda. From the glances that darted around the room, everybody knew something was wrong, but only Nolte, a man who looks for danger like a hammer for a nail, was brave or stupid enough to broach it. For Nolte's 'troubles' and 'concern', the Producer threw the entire fucking room out of his house.
That was around 3:30. The Producer and Carmen sat on a sofa downstairs with a small hill of cocaine on the coffeetable. The Producer would not tell her what it was about, but changed the subject by complemented her hosting abilities profusely. After an hour and a half of using every roundabout way of trying to get it out of him, she shrugged her shoulders and went upstairs to find her Xanax for bed.
It was somewhere in the area of five-thirty to six that the Producer came upstairs, the sun was already coming up and Southern California glowed with morning light. With a subtly mischievous grin, he told Carmen that she was ready to know the secret of making good movies. Did she want to know?
Of course she did. And because she did, the Producer dangled her by her feet from their fourth floor bedroom window.
It is something approaching inconceivability that Carmen could remember every word of something so incoherent while lying upside down in winter air more suited for Latvia than Los Angeles. But as we've already seen, Carmen's ability to retain information at this point in her life something approaching miraculousness, unfortunately for her, a memory both photographic and phonographic in its ability to recall detail, regardless of how harrowing.
"Here's the fucking secret you freeloading cunt. The secret is right in front of your motherfucking Quasimodo face. Look out at that secret you filth, touch it, kiss it, suck it, take it all fucking in, because the fucking secret is danger. You're gonna fucking love danger. Do you love danger?
(of course she said yes)
I SAID DO YOU LOVE DANGER! You're gonna look for danger everywhere you fucking go. You're gonna be a goddess who plays with danger for your lying whore sport. You're gonna be the shiksa goddess of death who plays with the sands of the fucking kingdom and the fucking foundation and the fucking splendor and the fucking eternity and the fucking beauty and the fucking severity and the fucking kindness and the fucking understanding and the fucking wisdom and the fucking crown. You're gonna be unmerciful before they sin and you're gonna be unmerciful after they sin and then you're gonna be unmerciful over the people you rule and then you're gonna be unmerciful for the people who are tempted and then you're gonna be unmerciful to the people who don't deserve mercy and then you're gonna be unmerciful to the people who deserve mercy and then you're gonna be unmerciful to the people and you're gonna be quick to anger and small in kindness and never tell the truth and be unforgiving of the evil and be unforgiving of the good and end all the generations with us. YOU AND ME. I am the alpha and you are the omega! Together we're the reason that everything's happened until right fucking now when you stare down to the ground and scream with your whore mouth and get rid of the thousand fucking years of sorrow. Cuz you're gonna be alone with death and eat a meal with death and meet death's family and and wear his ripped fucking clothes and go to death's parties and say prayers for death and remember death once a fucking year after you die because not in here with the shadowy dank hall but out there where you are in the endless light where you're staring down and up and left and right into the shape without form and the shade without color and the paralyzed force and the gesture without motion so those who have crossed with direct eyes to death's other kingdom can remember us not as violent souls but as hollow men cuz you can see the light clearly and shape it and bless it like the fucking clay of earth and plan time and light like infinite fucking vistas of the light within your mind and you listen to it and you listen to the listening. And then you're gonna take their heads when all about you are losing theirs and you're gonna wear them both together like linen and fucking wool cuz everybody is hollow and false and the world's a darker place with them in it! Every human is Haman and the winds are blowing and they're all standing around with their arms folded while the towns burn to the fucking ground and everybody in it is a heap of ashes and bones licked by the tongues of fire! And now the lifeless skulls add up to into millions and you wander through the fucking ghetto and you find no peace cuz everybody you love is fucking gone and you're a beggar at everybody's doorway begging for just a little bit of happiness and every day is the day of fucking woe! You always longed for home even if you hated your homeland because the flowers are burning because it's Springtime for motherfucking Hitler in Germany and you won't fucking forget until past your dying fucking day! So it's fucking impossible to describe what's necessary to those who don't know what horror is cuz horror has a fucking face and you must make a friend of horror cuz horror and terror are your fucking friends cuz if they're not then they're enemies you fear. So you're gonna take yourself a roll of the fucking book and write upon it all the fucking words that I have spoken unto you about me, Israel, and ye, Babylon, and get rid of the thousand year old sorrow put on us by all the whores of Babylon from the day I spoke unto ye even unto this day when there's no trace left of Yankl and red red red royt red red red I'm gonna see something that explodes in YOUR head and I leave a heap of dirty ashes where YOUR cocksucking self once fell from this motherfucking window cuz no good angel is coming to save you, the motherfucking flames'll just burn more brightly and higher and death will blossom like a sapling! No one will dream you! No one will remember you! No one will deny you! No one will yearn for you! Or maybe I'll keep you alive because a live, fresh cut nerve is infinitely more sensitive, I'll just drill into the healthy tooth until I reach the pulp and singe their hair from off your face and you howl and bay and start to scream! Cuz you know you know who I am, I'm fucking Szell! I'm the White Fucking Angel of the Camp and no matter how many times I pretend to be a Jew selling diamonds on 47th street, I'm the fucking Nazi and you're never gonna stop me! I will ordain the conquering of the fucking world and the mothers will mourn their living sons! Yea though you walk through the fucking valley of the shadow of death you will fear evil because the person you're with is me and my word is a lamp for your fucking feet and light on your fucking path and I'm the only fucking light and salvation you're ever gonna have. I'm gonna strike you down and become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. If I bring you back inside I'm going to break you with a rod of iron into pieces like a potter's vessel. Because I chose you honey from all the women in the fucking world to be mother to my only living son in 1979, the year thirteen, cuz God is dead and Satan reigns and you're gonna remember that when imps on broomsticks in a ring dance around you. It'll smart when you breathe after I cut your nose cuz the fish should be served with the head and they don't accept people of the Jewish persuasion here. You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me you don't. You're gonna be the mother and the daughter and then get shot in the eye while driving while you're bringing LA to the daughterfucking water and make them an offer they can't refuse as I leave the gun and take the cannoli. We're gonna have the naive Presidents and Senators killed with their brains and their signatures on the contract after you tell them you're innocent. You'll let them suffer as much as you suffer cuz I don't ask with respect, I don't offer friendship and you're gonna fear to be in my debt and this scum that ruins you will not suffer this day or any other cuz you're never gonna throw it all away just to make me look ridiculous. I made my bones and I took sides against the family and I dishonored it and took the freedom and you're not gonna be able to weep because of the pain. I spend my whole fucking life trying not to be careless, and I'm telling you right now, YOU WILL NEVER BE BEAUTIFUL AGAIN AND I'M GOING TO MAKE YOUR CHILD AN ORPHAN BEFORE HE'S FUCKING BORN! And you're gonna wander through the fucking ghetto from lane to useless fucking lane and find no solace because there are no little kids left to learn that stupid alphabet and get that fucking useless flag with the Hebrew letters. You're gonna never want to forget, like you were shot with the diamond bullet through your head, your perfect, genuine, complete, crystaline, pure head. Cuz it's stronger than you, and I'm stronger than you, I'll never strengthen you and always hurt you with my righteous right hand as you grow older and you understand how many tears lie in the light between the fucking letters until you make the friend of the fucking horror and become the tears yourself. Keep your friends close but your enemies closer, cuz I'll break your fucking heart with an abortion and I'll take the captain of the command with me and wipe everybody out from the beginning to the end because if history's taught us anything, it's taught us that you can kill anybody - men of vision and guts and there's no plaque to any of'em cuz we stepped over their bodies and even if they were alive I'd kill them all cuz I despised their masquerade and the dishonest way they posed themselves and their whole fucking families. They're not brothers, they're not friends, I don't want to see them at hotels, I don't want them near my house. Don't they know I would use all my power to prevent something like that from happening? All my strength? The strength, the strength, the strength to do it! My strength! I'll make lights in the heaven to divide the firmament to give light upon the earth v'limshawl bayom oo'vo'layloh oo'lehovdil beyn ha'or oo'veyn khoyshekh ve'ha'aretz hayesaw sohu va'vohu v'khoshekh awl-p'ney sawhom v'rooach elokim m'rakhephes awl-p'ney hawmahyim. Cuz I determine the numbers of stars and give all of them their names ve'oyseh eysh k'seel ve'kheemaw and utilize my instincts to kill without feeling passion and without judgement because it's judgement that fucking defeats you. I'm unrighteous because the righteous perish and no man lays it to heart and no one understands that the righteous perish to be taken away from evil. I'm gonna go off the reservation of light and make my own reservation on the infinite light where they worship me as the god of death and burn them all as you cry without tears and make the fuckin' wind the messenger and the fuckin' fire the minister awsaw yare'ach l'moawdim hawmabit lawawretz v'tir'awd yiga bey'hawrim v'ye'eysawnoo and not be judged and disappear out into the light of the jungle with my people and feel comfortable with my people cuz what would my people back home do if they ever learned just how far I've really gone but they have no right to call me a murderer and I have a right to kill you and make wars unto the ends of the earth and break the bow and cut the spear and burn the chariots in fire with adoyshem es eeyov min ha'sawraw mee zeh makhshikh eytzaw v'milinn bli daw'as? Cuz life is not a sinister fucking night anymore and nothing's closed anymore and every door is open and I'M THE ONE WHO DOES THE FUCKING PERSECUTING! The morning stars will never sing together and all the sons of God will never shout for joy before the sun and the light because the moon and the stars are darkened and clouds return after the rain and the watchmen of the house will tremble and the mighty men stoop and the grinding ones stand idle because they're few and those who look through windows grow dim."
And as his obedient partner in life, when he let her go from the ledge, she wrote it all down.
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
ET Almanac: Greatest Letter Ever
To Meirs Fisher, Esquire:
I must address you, in this manner, although you do not deserve it. Unaccustomed as you are to receive any mark of respect from the public, it will be expected that I should make an apology for introducing a character, fetid and infamous, like yours, to general notice and attention. Your conspicuous Toryism and disaffection long since buried you in the silent grave of popular oblivion and contempt; and your extraordinary conduct and deportment, in several other respects, has brought and reduced you to that dreary dungeon of insignificance, to that gulf of defeated spirits, from whch even the powers of hope "that comes to all" cannot relieve or better you.
In this most miserable of all situations, principally arising from an obstinate, inflexible perseverance in your political heresy and schism (so detestable in itself, so ruinous and destructive to our country, and obnoxious to all around us), you are now left quite destitute and forlorn! Unhappy and disappointed man! Once exiled and excommunicated by the state, as a sly, insiduous enemy; severed and detached from the generous bosom of patriotism and public virtue; severed and detached from the generous bosom of patriotism and public virtue; shunned and deserted by faithful friends, in whom you once so safely trusted; since, debarred and prevented from your practice by rule of court as an attorney at the bar; and excluded from your practice by rule of court as an attorney at the bar, and excluded from every other essential and dignified privilege of which the rest of citizens can boast--with the wretched remains of a wrecked reputation--you exhibit so complete a spectacle of distress and wretchedness, as rather excites one's tenderness than vengeance, and would soten and melt down dispositions more relentless and unforgiving than mine!
But whatever claims of mercy you may demand, on these accounts; whatever I should think, were I to judge of you as your personal enemy in private respects; yet the forward and unexampled advances and steps you have lately taken in the concert of public affairs; the high-cockaded air of fancied importance you now assume; the petulant, discontented humor you have manifested for establishing a new bank; your longings and pantings to approach our political vineyard, and blast the fruits of those labors for which you neither toiled nor spun; and more particularly, the indecent, unjust, inhumane aspersions, you cast so indiscriminately on the Jews of this city at large, in your arguments of Wednesday week, before the honorable legislature of the commonwealth--these circumstances, if my apprehensions are right, preclude you from any lenity or favor, and present you a fair victim and offering to the sacred altar of public justice.
You are not therefore to expect any indulgence, because you merit none. I daresay you experience it not in your own feelings; nor have you any right whatever to hope for the least tenderness from me. You shall not have it, and if you are cut and smarted with the whip and lashes of my reproach and resentments, if I lay my talons and point out the ingrate, if my tongue is clamorous of you and your odiouos confederates, and I should pain the tenderest veins of their breasts--remember, you first gave birth to all yourself that it arose entirely from you; and in tracing of events hereafter to the source you will, perhaps, find to your sorrow and cost that you are only blamable for whatever consequences have or may arise on the occasion.
You not only endeavored to injure me by your unwarrantable expressions, but every other person of the same religious persuasion I hold, and which the laws of the country, and the glorious toleration and liberty of conscience, have allowed me to indulge and adopt. The injury is highly crimsoned and aggravated, as there was no proper reason or ground for your invectives. The attack on the Jews seemed wanton, and could only have been premeditated by such a base and degenerate mind as yours. It was not owing to the sudden sallies of passion, or to the warmth of disconcerted and hasty imagination. I cannot, therefore, place it to the account of mere human frailties, in which your will and understanding had no concern, and for which I am always disposed to make every compassionate allowance. And though an individual is not obliged to avenge the inuries of particular societies and sectaries of men, he is nevertheless called upon, by every dear and serious consideration, to speak his mind freely and independently of public transactions and general events, to assert his own share in the public consequence and to act his part fairly on the social theater.
Permit me, then, with this view of things, to take notice of these terms of reproach and invective which, considering you as a friend to good manners and decorum, you have heaped upon our nation and prefession with so liberal and unsparing a hand. I am a Jew; it is my own nation and profession. I also subscribe myself a broker, and a broker, too, whose opportunities and knowledge, along with other brokers of his intimate acquaintance, in a great course of business, has made him very familiar and privy to every minute design and artifice of your wily colleagues and associates.
I exult and glory in reflecting that we have the honor to reside in a free country where, as a people, we have met with the most generous contenance and protection; and I do not at all despair, not withstanding former obstacles, that we shall obtain every other privilege that we aspire to enjoy along with our fellow-citizens. It also affords me unspeakable satisfaction, and is indeed one of the most pleasing employments of my thoughtful moments, to contemplate that we have in general been early uniform, decisive Whigs, and were second to none in our patriotism and attachment to our country!
What but Erinnys itself could have thus tempted you to wander from the common path of things, and go a stray among throns and briars? What were your motives and inducements for introducing the Jews so disrespectfully into your unhallowed and polluted lips? Who are you, or what are you (a mere tenant at sufferance, of your liberty) that in a free country you dar to trample on any sectary whatever of people? Did you expect to serve yourself, or your friends and confederates--these serpents in our bosom, whose poisonous stings have been darted into every patriot character among us?
In any other place, in managing another cause, you might have had patience to attend to the consequence of such unpardonable rashness and temerity. But here you thought yourself safe, and at full leave to take the most unlicensed liberties with characters, in regard of whom you can in no respect pretend to vie! You shall yet repent, even in sackcloth and ashes, for the foul language in which you have expressed yourself. And neither the interposition of some well meant though mistaken Whigs who, I am sorry to think, have joined you, "or even the sacred shield of cowardice shall protect you," for your transgressions. Who knows but the beams of that very denomination whom you have traduced may, on one day, perhaps not very remote, warm you into the most abject servility, and make you penitentially solemnize what you have done?
An error is easily remedied, and there may be some compensation for actual injuries. But a downright insult can neither be forgiven or forgot, and seldom admits of atonement or reparation. It is our happiness to live in times of enlightened liberty, when the human mind, liberated from the restraints nad fetters of superstition and authority, hath been taught to conceive just sentiments of its own; and when mankind, in matters of religion, are quite charitable and benevolent in their opinions of each other.
Individuals may act improperly, and sometimes deserve centure; but it is no less unjust than ungenerous to condemn all for the faults of a few, and reflect generally on a whole community for the indiscretion of some particular persons. There is no body of people but have some exceptionable characters with them; and even your own religious sectary, whom you have compelled me to dissect int he course of this address, are not destitute of very proper subjects of criticism and animadversion.
Good citizens who nauseate, and public who contemn, have heard your invectives against the Jews. Unhappily for you, a long series of enormities have proved you more your own enemy than I am. To you, then, my worthy friends and fellow-citizens (characters teeming with strict candor and disinterestedness), do I turn myself with pleasure from that sterile field, from that Grampian desert, which hath hitherto employed me.
It is your candor I seek; it is your disinterestedness I solicit. The opinions of Fisher and his adherents, whether wileful in their malignity, or sincere in their ignorance, are no longer worthy of my notice. His observations are low; his intentions are too discernible. His whole endeavors center in one point, namely, to create a new bank.
To effect this end, he has spared neither pains or labors. He has said everything that artifice could dictate, or malice invent. He has betrayed himself in a thousand inconsistencies, and adopted absurdities which, supposing him a man of sense and observation, would have disgraced the lips of an idiot.
And for whom is the new bank meant and intended? For the benefit of men like himself, who have been in general averse and opposed to the war and common cause: for the insurgents against our liberty and independence; for mercenary and artful citizens, where selfish views are totally incompatible with the happiness of the people; for bifronted political Januses, the mere weathercocks of every breeze and gale that blows.
Who traded with the enemy? Who first depreciated the public currency? Who lent our enemies money to carry on the war? Who were spies and pilots to the British? Who prolonged the war? Who was the cause of so many valuable men losing their lives in the field and prison ships? Who did not pay any taxes? Who has now the public securities in hand? Who would not receive our Continentlal money? Who has purchased Burgoyne's convention bills? Who depreciated the French bills? Who depreciated the bills of the United States on Paris? Who slandered the institution of the Bank of North America? Who refused taking banknotes when the first issued? Who discouraged the people from lodging money in the bank? And are these the people who want a charter from our legislature? Shall such a bastard progeny of freedom, such jests and phantoms of patriotism and the social virtues be indulged in their wishes? For shame! For shame! Surrender the puerile, the fruitless pretensions! Public honor and public gratitude cry aloud against you, and says, or seems to say, as earnest as your endeavors have been, you shall not have your charter.
From such a medley and group of characters (an impure nest of vipers, the very bloodhounds of our lives and liberties) we have every thing to hazard, and nothing to expect. Suspicion shakes her wary head against them, and experience suggests that the sly, insinuating intrigues and combinations of these persons are to be watched and guarded against as much as possible. Though the proposals are generous and captivating, their practices, I will venture to affirm, cannot correspond, and however fascinating they may be in appearance, they may exercise the hand, the hairy hand of Esau!
I shall not inquire whether two banks in a commercial country would not clash with each other, and prove exceeding detrimental and injurious to the community. Having only ventured to give an account of the leading characters who compose the new bank, allow me in conclusion to rectify an error of Mr. Fisher's, who publicly declared, "the Jews were the authors of high and unusual interest." No! The Jews can acquit themselves of this artful imputation, and turn your own batteries on yourself. It was neither the Jews or Christians that founded the practice, but Quakers--and Quakers worse than heathens, pagans, or idolators; men, though not Jews in faith, are yet Jews in traffic; men abounding with avarice, who neither fear God, nor regard man.
Those very persons who are now flattering themselves with the idea of a new bank, first invented the practice of discounting notes at five percent. I have retained an alphabetical list of names, as well as the other brokers, and can specify persons, if necessary. In the language of Naphtali to David, I have it in my power to point at the very would-be directors, and say; venture money in trade during the war, who first declined letting out money in the best mortgage and bond security.
Were they now gratified in their expectations, would they not display the same undue spirit and degrade the dignity of a bank with practices unbecoming a common broker? Is it not in their power to finesse at the bank, and refuse discounting notes on purpose to gripe the necessitous part of the people, and extort improper premiums out of doors? And have we not reason to expect that would not be the case?
A Jew Broker
1784
(Perhaps I should change the title to "Most Jewish Letter Ever.")
I must address you, in this manner, although you do not deserve it. Unaccustomed as you are to receive any mark of respect from the public, it will be expected that I should make an apology for introducing a character, fetid and infamous, like yours, to general notice and attention. Your conspicuous Toryism and disaffection long since buried you in the silent grave of popular oblivion and contempt; and your extraordinary conduct and deportment, in several other respects, has brought and reduced you to that dreary dungeon of insignificance, to that gulf of defeated spirits, from whch even the powers of hope "that comes to all" cannot relieve or better you.
In this most miserable of all situations, principally arising from an obstinate, inflexible perseverance in your political heresy and schism (so detestable in itself, so ruinous and destructive to our country, and obnoxious to all around us), you are now left quite destitute and forlorn! Unhappy and disappointed man! Once exiled and excommunicated by the state, as a sly, insiduous enemy; severed and detached from the generous bosom of patriotism and public virtue; severed and detached from the generous bosom of patriotism and public virtue; shunned and deserted by faithful friends, in whom you once so safely trusted; since, debarred and prevented from your practice by rule of court as an attorney at the bar; and excluded from your practice by rule of court as an attorney at the bar, and excluded from every other essential and dignified privilege of which the rest of citizens can boast--with the wretched remains of a wrecked reputation--you exhibit so complete a spectacle of distress and wretchedness, as rather excites one's tenderness than vengeance, and would soten and melt down dispositions more relentless and unforgiving than mine!
But whatever claims of mercy you may demand, on these accounts; whatever I should think, were I to judge of you as your personal enemy in private respects; yet the forward and unexampled advances and steps you have lately taken in the concert of public affairs; the high-cockaded air of fancied importance you now assume; the petulant, discontented humor you have manifested for establishing a new bank; your longings and pantings to approach our political vineyard, and blast the fruits of those labors for which you neither toiled nor spun; and more particularly, the indecent, unjust, inhumane aspersions, you cast so indiscriminately on the Jews of this city at large, in your arguments of Wednesday week, before the honorable legislature of the commonwealth--these circumstances, if my apprehensions are right, preclude you from any lenity or favor, and present you a fair victim and offering to the sacred altar of public justice.
You are not therefore to expect any indulgence, because you merit none. I daresay you experience it not in your own feelings; nor have you any right whatever to hope for the least tenderness from me. You shall not have it, and if you are cut and smarted with the whip and lashes of my reproach and resentments, if I lay my talons and point out the ingrate, if my tongue is clamorous of you and your odiouos confederates, and I should pain the tenderest veins of their breasts--remember, you first gave birth to all yourself that it arose entirely from you; and in tracing of events hereafter to the source you will, perhaps, find to your sorrow and cost that you are only blamable for whatever consequences have or may arise on the occasion.
You not only endeavored to injure me by your unwarrantable expressions, but every other person of the same religious persuasion I hold, and which the laws of the country, and the glorious toleration and liberty of conscience, have allowed me to indulge and adopt. The injury is highly crimsoned and aggravated, as there was no proper reason or ground for your invectives. The attack on the Jews seemed wanton, and could only have been premeditated by such a base and degenerate mind as yours. It was not owing to the sudden sallies of passion, or to the warmth of disconcerted and hasty imagination. I cannot, therefore, place it to the account of mere human frailties, in which your will and understanding had no concern, and for which I am always disposed to make every compassionate allowance. And though an individual is not obliged to avenge the inuries of particular societies and sectaries of men, he is nevertheless called upon, by every dear and serious consideration, to speak his mind freely and independently of public transactions and general events, to assert his own share in the public consequence and to act his part fairly on the social theater.
Permit me, then, with this view of things, to take notice of these terms of reproach and invective which, considering you as a friend to good manners and decorum, you have heaped upon our nation and prefession with so liberal and unsparing a hand. I am a Jew; it is my own nation and profession. I also subscribe myself a broker, and a broker, too, whose opportunities and knowledge, along with other brokers of his intimate acquaintance, in a great course of business, has made him very familiar and privy to every minute design and artifice of your wily colleagues and associates.
I exult and glory in reflecting that we have the honor to reside in a free country where, as a people, we have met with the most generous contenance and protection; and I do not at all despair, not withstanding former obstacles, that we shall obtain every other privilege that we aspire to enjoy along with our fellow-citizens. It also affords me unspeakable satisfaction, and is indeed one of the most pleasing employments of my thoughtful moments, to contemplate that we have in general been early uniform, decisive Whigs, and were second to none in our patriotism and attachment to our country!
What but Erinnys itself could have thus tempted you to wander from the common path of things, and go a stray among throns and briars? What were your motives and inducements for introducing the Jews so disrespectfully into your unhallowed and polluted lips? Who are you, or what are you (a mere tenant at sufferance, of your liberty) that in a free country you dar to trample on any sectary whatever of people? Did you expect to serve yourself, or your friends and confederates--these serpents in our bosom, whose poisonous stings have been darted into every patriot character among us?
In any other place, in managing another cause, you might have had patience to attend to the consequence of such unpardonable rashness and temerity. But here you thought yourself safe, and at full leave to take the most unlicensed liberties with characters, in regard of whom you can in no respect pretend to vie! You shall yet repent, even in sackcloth and ashes, for the foul language in which you have expressed yourself. And neither the interposition of some well meant though mistaken Whigs who, I am sorry to think, have joined you, "or even the sacred shield of cowardice shall protect you," for your transgressions. Who knows but the beams of that very denomination whom you have traduced may, on one day, perhaps not very remote, warm you into the most abject servility, and make you penitentially solemnize what you have done?
An error is easily remedied, and there may be some compensation for actual injuries. But a downright insult can neither be forgiven or forgot, and seldom admits of atonement or reparation. It is our happiness to live in times of enlightened liberty, when the human mind, liberated from the restraints nad fetters of superstition and authority, hath been taught to conceive just sentiments of its own; and when mankind, in matters of religion, are quite charitable and benevolent in their opinions of each other.
Individuals may act improperly, and sometimes deserve centure; but it is no less unjust than ungenerous to condemn all for the faults of a few, and reflect generally on a whole community for the indiscretion of some particular persons. There is no body of people but have some exceptionable characters with them; and even your own religious sectary, whom you have compelled me to dissect int he course of this address, are not destitute of very proper subjects of criticism and animadversion.
Good citizens who nauseate, and public who contemn, have heard your invectives against the Jews. Unhappily for you, a long series of enormities have proved you more your own enemy than I am. To you, then, my worthy friends and fellow-citizens (characters teeming with strict candor and disinterestedness), do I turn myself with pleasure from that sterile field, from that Grampian desert, which hath hitherto employed me.
It is your candor I seek; it is your disinterestedness I solicit. The opinions of Fisher and his adherents, whether wileful in their malignity, or sincere in their ignorance, are no longer worthy of my notice. His observations are low; his intentions are too discernible. His whole endeavors center in one point, namely, to create a new bank.
To effect this end, he has spared neither pains or labors. He has said everything that artifice could dictate, or malice invent. He has betrayed himself in a thousand inconsistencies, and adopted absurdities which, supposing him a man of sense and observation, would have disgraced the lips of an idiot.
And for whom is the new bank meant and intended? For the benefit of men like himself, who have been in general averse and opposed to the war and common cause: for the insurgents against our liberty and independence; for mercenary and artful citizens, where selfish views are totally incompatible with the happiness of the people; for bifronted political Januses, the mere weathercocks of every breeze and gale that blows.
Who traded with the enemy? Who first depreciated the public currency? Who lent our enemies money to carry on the war? Who were spies and pilots to the British? Who prolonged the war? Who was the cause of so many valuable men losing their lives in the field and prison ships? Who did not pay any taxes? Who has now the public securities in hand? Who would not receive our Continentlal money? Who has purchased Burgoyne's convention bills? Who depreciated the French bills? Who depreciated the bills of the United States on Paris? Who slandered the institution of the Bank of North America? Who refused taking banknotes when the first issued? Who discouraged the people from lodging money in the bank? And are these the people who want a charter from our legislature? Shall such a bastard progeny of freedom, such jests and phantoms of patriotism and the social virtues be indulged in their wishes? For shame! For shame! Surrender the puerile, the fruitless pretensions! Public honor and public gratitude cry aloud against you, and says, or seems to say, as earnest as your endeavors have been, you shall not have your charter.
From such a medley and group of characters (an impure nest of vipers, the very bloodhounds of our lives and liberties) we have every thing to hazard, and nothing to expect. Suspicion shakes her wary head against them, and experience suggests that the sly, insinuating intrigues and combinations of these persons are to be watched and guarded against as much as possible. Though the proposals are generous and captivating, their practices, I will venture to affirm, cannot correspond, and however fascinating they may be in appearance, they may exercise the hand, the hairy hand of Esau!
I shall not inquire whether two banks in a commercial country would not clash with each other, and prove exceeding detrimental and injurious to the community. Having only ventured to give an account of the leading characters who compose the new bank, allow me in conclusion to rectify an error of Mr. Fisher's, who publicly declared, "the Jews were the authors of high and unusual interest." No! The Jews can acquit themselves of this artful imputation, and turn your own batteries on yourself. It was neither the Jews or Christians that founded the practice, but Quakers--and Quakers worse than heathens, pagans, or idolators; men, though not Jews in faith, are yet Jews in traffic; men abounding with avarice, who neither fear God, nor regard man.
Those very persons who are now flattering themselves with the idea of a new bank, first invented the practice of discounting notes at five percent. I have retained an alphabetical list of names, as well as the other brokers, and can specify persons, if necessary. In the language of Naphtali to David, I have it in my power to point at the very would-be directors, and say; venture money in trade during the war, who first declined letting out money in the best mortgage and bond security.
Were they now gratified in their expectations, would they not display the same undue spirit and degrade the dignity of a bank with practices unbecoming a common broker? Is it not in their power to finesse at the bank, and refuse discounting notes on purpose to gripe the necessitous part of the people, and extort improper premiums out of doors? And have we not reason to expect that would not be the case?
A Jew Broker
1784
(Perhaps I should change the title to "Most Jewish Letter Ever.")
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