The Violent Legacy Of Bonnie And Clyde

NY TIMES: Two Outlaws, Blasting Holes in the Screen
By A. O. SCOTT - Published: August 12, 2007

THE story of “Bonnie and Clyde” has been told so many times that it has acquired the patina of legend. It’s the kind of historical fable that circulates to explain how the world once was and how it came to be the way it is now: a morality tale in which the wild energies of youth defeat the stale certainties of age, and freedom triumphs over repression.

I’m not talking about the adventures of the actual Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who robbed and shot their way through Texas, Oklahoma and adjacent states in the bad old days of the Great Depression. Their exploits have been chronicled in books, ballads and motion pictures, never more famously than in the movie named after them, which first opened in New York 40 years ago this month. The notoriety of “Bonnie and Clyde,” directed by Arthur Penn from a long-gestating script by David Newman and Robert Benton and produced by Warren Beatty, who also played Clyde, has long since eclipsed that of its real-life models.

The ups and downs of the movie’s early fortunes have become a touchstone and a parable, a crucial episode in the entwined histories of Hollywood, American film criticism and postmodern popular culture. “Bonnie and Clyde” was a scandal and a sensation largely because it seemed to introduce a new kind of violence into movies. Its brutality was raw and immediate, yet at the same time its scenes of mayhem were choreographed with a formal panache that was almost gleeful.

Their horror was undercut by jaunty, rambunctious humor and by the skittering banjo music of the soundtrack. The final shootout, in which Mr. Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s bodies twitch and writhe amid a storm of gunfire (not long after their characters have successfully made love for the first time), was both awful and ecstatic, an orgy of blood and bullets. The filmmakers seemed less interested in the moral weight of violence than in its aesthetic impact. The killings were alluring and gruesome; that the movie was so much fun may well have been the most disturbing thing about it.

As we endure another phase in the never-ending argument about movie violence — renewed by the recent popularity of extremely brutal horror films like the “Saw” and “Hostel” cycles; made momentarily acute by the Virginia Tech massacre last spring; forever hovering around the edges of dinner-table conversations and political campaigns — it’s worth re-examining this legend to see if it has anything left to teach us.

“Bonnie and Clyde” had its North American premiere on Aug. 4, 1967, at the Montreal film festival. When it opened in New York a short time later, the initial critical reception ranged from dismissal to outright execration. Leading the charge was Bosley Crowther, chief film critic of The New York Times, who attacked “Bonnie and Clyde” as “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy.” Crowther’s short, merciless review — the film’s “blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste” — was followed by a Sunday column that made the case at greater length.

The most celebrated, and consequential, brief for the defense was longer still. In more than 9,000 words in the Oct. 21 issue of The New Yorker, Pauline Kael, then a freelance contributor, hailed “Bonnie and Clyde” as “the most excitingly American movie since ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ ” which had come out five years earlier. Hardly an unqualified rave (“probably part of the discomfort that people feel about ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ grows out of its compromises and its failures,” she noted), Kael’s article instead made a sustained argument for the film’s status as a cultural event.

“ ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ ” she wrote, “brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about. And once something is said or done on the screens of the world, it can never again belong to a minority, never again be the private possession of an educated, or ‘knowing’ group. But even for that group there is an excitement in hearing its own private thoughts expressed out loud and in seeing something of its own sensibility become part of our common culture.”

And so “Bonnie and Clyde” was the somewhat improbable vehicle — a period picture made, with some reluctance, by a major movie studio (Warner Brothers) at the insistence of an ambitious young movie star — by which a new mode of expression and a new set of values entered the cultural mainstream. The movie was quickly marked as a battlefield in an epochal struggle: between “the kids” and their stodgy, respectable elders, between the hip and the square.

According to the standard accounts, now duly taught in classrooms and rehearsed around baby-boom Elderhostel campfires, hip triumphed. By the beginning of 1968 the squares had been routed. Time magazine, which had run a dismissive review, put Bonnie and Clyde, as rendered by Robert Rauschenberg, on its Dec. 8 cover, accompanying an essay by Stefan Kanfer called “The New Cinema: Violence ... Sex ... Art.”

Crowther, after 27 years at The Times, retired. His place was taken by Renata Adler, a writer for The New Yorker who was not yet 30. Kael, already a contentious and influential figure in the world of movie criticism, joined the staff of The New Yorker, where for the next quarter-century she would reign as the most imitated and argued-about film reviewer in the English-speaking world. “Bonnie and Clyde” was nominated for 10 Academy Awards.

That it won only two — best supporting actress for Estelle Parsons and best cinematography for Burnett Guffey — may have helped to assure its enduring cachet. Too complete a victory would have led to a loss of credibility. Hip is, by definition, an oppositional stance that the embrace of the establishment can only compromise.

The products of the liberal Hollywood establishment — the earnest, socially responsible dramas that Crowther frequently championed and that Kael in particular despised — did not retreat in the face of a generational challenge mounted by “Bonnie and Clyde” (and also, less noisily, by “The Graduate”). The big Oscar winners that year were “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” both movies about gray-haired, socially empowered white men whose prejudices are demolished by Sidney Poitier, at the time Hollywood’s all-purpose answer to America’s race problem.

At the height of the ’60s, the solution proposed by those movies — that basically decent men could work toward mutual understanding and respect — might have seemed wishful at best. The Oscar ceremonies took place on April 10, 1968, a week after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The summer before, “Bonnie and Clyde” had opened against a backdrop of rioting in Newark and Detroit. Part of the film’s mythology has been a product of that coincidence. American cities were burning, the war in Vietnam and the protests against it were escalating, and a new revolutionary consciousness was in the air, somehow shared by college students and third-world guerrillas, by artists and the urban poor.

As J. Hoberman notes in “The Dream Life,” his revisionist history of the ’60s and its movies, “ ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ popularized the attitude Tom Wolfe would derisively call ‘Radical Chic.’ ” Its hero and heroine exist in a state of vague solidarity with the poor and destitute — the banks they rob are the real enemies of the people, and they are admired by hard-luck farmers and sharecroppers — but they themselves are much too glamorous to pass as members of the oppressed masses.

They are not fighting injustice so much as they are having fun, enjoying the prerogatives of outlaw fame. They exist in a kind of anarchic utopia where the pursuit of kicks is imagined to be inherently political. In this universe the usual ethical justifications of violent action are stripped away, but the aura of righteousness somehow remains.

When pressed by his brother, Buck, about the killing of a bank employee — “It was him or you, right?” — Clyde mumbles that he had to do it, even though the audience knows there was no real question of self-defense. Later, Bonnie’s humiliation of a Texas ranger is justified because the ranger is such a brutal, reactionary authority figure. His subsequent pursuit of the criminals, in contrast, is treated as sadistic and irrational.

But the Barrow gang’s own sadism is evident when the outlaws kidnap a nervous undertaker and his girlfriend after stealing the man’s car. The couple turns out to be the very embodiment of square: He complains about his hamburger; she reveals that she lied to him about her age. These people are along for the ride, but they just don’t get it.

Not Getting It has been, ever since, the accusation leveled against critics of a certain kind of movie violence by its defenders. The easiest way to attack movie violence is to warn of its real-world consequences, to worry that someone will imitate what is seen on screen. The symmetrically literal-minded response is that because violence already exists in the world, refusing to show it in movies would be dishonest.

Neither of these positions quite acknowledges the particularity of cinematic violence, which is not the same as what it depicts. Even the most bloodthirsty moviegoer would be likely to leave a real fusillade like the one at the end of “Bonnie and Clyde” sickened and traumatized, rather than thrilled. The particular charge of that scene, and others like it, is that it tries to push the pretense — the art — as close to trauma as possible and to make the appreciation of that art its point. Missing the point is what marks you as square.

The Hollywood and critical establishments, both of them in the early stages of a generational upheaval, did not miss the point for long. “Bonnie and Clyde” was hardly the first picture to push against the limits of what was conventionally seen as good taste. But it conducted its assault in the name of a higher form of taste, fusing the bravado of youth with the prestige of art. It legitimized the connoisseurship of violence, which does not present itself as an appetite for cheap thrills, but rather as a taste for the finer things.

Thus the geysers of blood at the end of Sam Peckinpah’s “Wild Bunch” two years later could be savored for the director’s visual and formal audacity. The unflinching brutalities of ’70s movies like “The Godfather” and “Chinatown” became hallmarks of the honesty and daring of the New Hollywood. (At the same time the harsh, righteous vengeance unleashed in the “Dirty Harry” and “Death Wish” movies appalled many of the same critics who dug the radical chic of “Bonnie and Clyde.”)

By the 1990s, as a newer generation of filmmakers began to fetishize the glories of post-“Bonnie and Clyde” American cinema, stylized, tongue-in-cheek violence became a sign of rebellious independence. The ear-slicing sequence in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” seemed like a deliberate attempt to replicate the kind of shock produced by the wildest moments in “Bonnie and Clyde,” but without the pretense of political or social relevance. This year the best-picture Oscar went to “The Departed,” a movie whose jolting, cold-blooded killings occasioned little objection.

And to raise objections at this point is, perhaps, worse than square. It seems philistine. But I can’t escape the feeling that, just as it has become easier since “Bonnie and Clyde” to accept violence in movies, and more acceptable to enjoy it, it has become harder to talk seriously about the ethics and politics of that violence. The link between real and pretend violence has been so completely severed that some of the ability of movies to offer a critical perspective — to elicit thought as well as gasps and chuckles — has been lost. We’ve become pretty comfortable watching the infliction of pain, and quick to laugh it off.

Don’t misunderstand: I still get a kick out of “Bonnie and Clyde,” but it’s accompanied by a twinge of unease, by the suspicion that, in some ways that matter and that have become too easy to dismiss, Bosley Crowther was right.

Interesting Ralph Bakshi Article

Check out this career-long synopsis/defense/appreciation by Bakshi fan Jeff Kuykendall. You may not agree with some (or any) of his points on why Ralph's work is compelling and thought-provoking, but I think only a fan with his level of passion could have written it.

This column illustrates in vivid detail why I was excited to work with him on his Mighty Mouse show in the late '80s. I saw Fritz The Cat in college (the perfect time), and was bowled over by the complete abandonment of almost every animation feature convention I'd ever seen. To my eyes, it was raw, gritty, and altogether new.

Ralph's work to some degree is out of fashion now, and the prevailing attitude is to badmouth his films. I've fallen prey to that myself in recent years, but this article reminded me about the qualities some of his films have to provoke and inspire - and why they're still in my video library.

Thanks to Kill The Snark for the article, and The Groovy Age Of Horror for the link!

Brain Fart: The Singelringen

This probably sounds pretty odd coming from Mr. Impulse Purchase (especially Mr. Useless Toy Impulse Purchase), but I'm continually amazed at how products are created for a need that previously never existed.

Take being single. It used to be fairly simple - if one didn't wear a ring (at least on the left ring finger), one was single (or hiding one's ring so illicitness could be attempted).

A while back, somebody realized that they could sell more rings if they started adding on to the traditional ring symbolism, so the right-hand ring was created. Now more diamond rings could be sold, even though those same rings could have been bought before and worn on pretty much any finger. But here's the great part - they'd still been given more of a 'purpose' than a decorative ring, even if they represent the lack of need for a traditional one. Rings began to be marketed to the ringless, and to the anti-ring folks - rings to say, "I don't need a ring," or maybe more specifically, "I don't need that ring."

I'm not saying that single people shouldn't wear diamonds, but it's amazing to me how somebody figured out how to sell more diamond rings just by pulling a new rule straight out of their ear (at least, it's a new rule to me. I'm assuming this isn't some ancient tradition, or these rings would've been sold much earlier).

But still more rings could be sold. (I think) men were still out of the equation. How to give jewelry a symbolic vocabulary, and yet make it as unisex as possible? That's where the latest wrinkle comes in - the Singelringen. It sounds like it comes from Germany (and it actually might - let's just say that after the whole Häagen-Dazs thing, I'm not so quick to assume that anymore), so it feels worldly, sophisticated, cosmopolitan.

Now both men and women can wear it, broadcasting their relationship status with an accessory, rather than the lack of one. Phew - now everybody's finally covered! I guess the only step left is to make rings for pets or plants or something - but I'm sure that's probably already happened, and I'm just not aware of them yet...

If you're curious as to what brought all this on, look here.

Aimee Mann on Sgt. Pepper's

NY TIMES OP-ED: P.S. I Loved You
By AIMEE MANN
Published: June 3, 2007

MY big brother was always the one to bring new music into the house. Until I heard the Beatles playing on his stereo in the basement, my favorite music had been Glen Campbell singing “Galveston” or my father playing “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey” on the piano.

I was young enough to giggle when my brother changed the words of “P.S. I Love You” to...something more puerile, and four years later, young enough to think that “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was really a band, and not the name of a Beatles record. In those intervening years, a transformation had taken place, and both the sound and the look of the Beatles had completely changed. Also, I was a little slow on the uptake, and didn’t notice the name “Beatles” spelled out in flowers on the cover.

Is it a testament to the quality, or purity, or beauty, or timelessness of that record (released 40 years ago this weekend) that it appealed so thoroughly to an 8-year-old, one who had virtually no contact with pop culture? I could not have been more out of tune with the zeitgeist — it would be two more years before I discovered radio, and even then I would have only the vaguest notion of what was out there. I bought my first LP solely on the basis of the cover (one of the reasons today I try to take extra care with the packaging of my CDs). It was pure dumb luck that it turned out to be Elton John’s “Madman Across the Water,” still one of my favorite albums of all time.

But the favorite is, and was, and must remain “Sgt. Pepper’s.” I had a love affair like no other with that record. My brother had bought it, of course, and when I heard it, I braved his wrath and smuggled it out to my friend’s house so I could play it over and over. You’d have had to know my brother back then to fully understand how daring that was.

In a way, that record seemed made for children: the fun false mustaches that came with the package, the bright shiny outfits, the cheery melodies, the jaunty horns. The band itself seemed almost irrelevant — scruffy mustachioed men in costumes, lost in a sea of collaged faces. I ignored them.

My ignorance extended to the opening song, which I took at face value as a real live introduction of the singer Billy Shears, who, whoever he was, became my favorite, with his dopey baritone, in humble gratitude for his pals — bless them, it all was so innocent, those marmalade skies and winking meter maids (whatever they were). The darkest moments were with the runaway girl — although a throwaway line in “Getting Better” (“I was cruel to my woman, I beat her...”) gave me pause. He beat her? What the heck? But hey — things were getting better all the time, so ... I shrugged and let it go.

And then things took a weird turn: a nightmare cacophony of strings, someone blowing his mind out in a car — what was that? Did he get shot in the head? What were the holes in Albert Hall? Things had gotten creepy and dark, and it lost me. I started skipping that last song.

I can’t listen to “Sgt. Pepper’s” anymore. As a musician, I’m burnt out on it — its influence has been so vast and profound. As a lyricist, I find that my ear has become more attuned to the likes of Fiona Apple and Elliot Smith, and though the words of “Sgt. Pepper’s” are full of vivid images — Rita’s bag slung over her shoulder, Mr. Kite sailing through a hogshead of fire, the runaway girl with her handkerchief — there’s an emotional depth that’s missing. I’m ashamed to say it, but sometimes John Lennon’s melodies feel a bit underwritten, while Paul McCartney’s relentless cheerfulness is depressing. The very jauntiness I used to love as a girl feels as if it’s covering up a sadder subtext. And what’s bleaker than a brave face?

The whole experience is uncomfortable, like realizing you can beat your own father at chess or arm-wrestling. I don’t want to go back and find that the carcass has been picked clean. Because I know without a doubt that “Sgt. Pepper’s” changed the course of my life. If the magic is gone, it’s only because first loves can’t be repeated. When I was 8, I’d never heard anything like it, and I can honestly say that if I live to be 100, I’ll never hear anything like it again.

Aimee Mann is a singer and songwriter.

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Reading this, all I could think of was 'Star Wars' - how it affected me at the time, and how I feel about it now. Maybe I'll write something about that later on, if you're not completely sick of hearing me prattle on about that movie.

Brain Fart: The Chick Star Wars

I've been thinking about this for way too long, so I thought I'd put this up for discussion.

If you ask just about any nerdy guy - especially one in his late thities/early forties - chances are really good that he's a big Star Wars fan. He knows a lot of the dialogue, and peppers it into his converstations.

(Aside: I know there's an ongoing Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate that will never end, so I'm disregarding it for that very reason. I also know that there's a lot of female Star Wars fans too - Princess Leia? Hello? - but I think most people would agree that there's significantly more male fans.)

Anyway, you get the idea. He's loaded with trivia on the film, and if he works in the industry in any way, there's a good chance that Star Wars is the reason he steered in that direction in the first place. I'm one of these guys.

So my question is: what is the chick equivalent? What childhood/adolescent movie do women get all nerdy and obsessive about? Which film do most ladies endlessly quote, and resonates through their lives whether they really want it to or not?

I have some suggestions:

* Pretty In Pink - John Sanford says that in his dating days, he often ran into women who would talk a lot about this film. I can't say, as I don't think that's in my, uh, age range.

* Grease - Well, maybe not, but it was released at about the same time as Star Wars, and I wonder if that's what most of the young girls went to see.

* The Princess Bride - This one might be the main contender. It's a fairy-tale romance, but it's clever and quirky, so it could appeal to the misfit-chick-nerds, too (I had just seen Baron Munchausen, so it didn't work very well for me at the time, even though it has a better story).

* Sleepless in Seattle - It probably appeals to a slightly older crowd, but it rebooted the chick flick in a big way, so I figure it's probably a contender.

* When Harry Met Sally - Another chick-flick milestone with a pretty universal experience - risking a friendship for love.

* Buffy The Vampire Slayer - Okay, it's a television show, but I do know a fair number of women who get pretty nerdy about it. Buffy stands on Princess Leia's shoulders and kicks ass at the same time. It's clearly not just a show for most of its audience, so it makes sense to me to include it.

So there's some thoughts. What do you think? Let me know.

An Unfortunate Tendency

LA TIMES: Gregory Rodriguez - Gunman was one of us
The Virginia Tech killer is a reflection on all of us, not just a single ethnic group.
April 23, 2007

WHAT IF YOU don't have anything in common with your brother? What if you live on different continents? What if you've never even met the man? Are you still his keeper?

In a diverse nation such as ours, there is always that expectant pause after a major violent tragedy, between the moment we hear the news and when we're told who did it. In that time, we tend to look around the proverbial room and wonder from which group the perpetrator came. Last week, the point of origin was South Korea, and Seung-hui Cho's ethnic "brothers" in Asia and the U.S. grappled with their relationship to him.

Of course, a murderer's ethnic, religious or racial background is relevant only if he is acting on what he thinks is a tribal imperative — like the Armenian teenager who gunned down the Turkish consul in L.A. in 1982, or the 2001 plot by Jewish Defense League leaders to bomb the office of Arab American Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista).

But even when ethnicity or race add little to the understanding of motive, there is still the "need" to know. It's scary to think that everyone and anyone is capable of murderous rage. So if the bad guy can be pigeonholed based on skin color, origin or class, the fear can be focused, one group at a time.

Such profiling is silly for lots of reasons, not least that we live in a country that exalts individual over group identity. Not long after Timothy McVeigh slaughtered 168 people in Oklahoma City, I caught myself profiling a potential threat outside the Federal Building in Westwood. I saw a working-class, blond white male with a mullet cut running toward the building, and I jumped.

Although I understand the unfortunate tendency to consciously or unconsciously ascribe responsibility by group, I still don't think governments and ethnic organizations should endorse this sort of stereotyping. After the Virginia Tech killer's identity was released last week, the South Korean president and many Korean American associations did just that.

Even though 23-year-old Cho was a permanent resident in the U.S., South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun felt obliged to issue at least three messages of condolences for an act that occurred far away from the Korean peninsula.

Here in the U.S., Korean American organizations issued cravenly self-serving condolence statements to the victims of the massacre. In a news release, one organization promised that "the Korean American community will join the efforts of others in tackling the root causes of these senseless school shootings that continue to endanger our children and young adults." In L.A.'s Koreatown, there was a candlelight vigil held, well, in clear daylight.

Although part of this ethnic reaction is driven by fear of a backlash, South Korea's famously defensive nationalism also plays a role. Hunkered down in the shadow of China and Japan, South Korea has always felt a need to watch its back.

Ultimately, though, any reaction that reinforces primitive notions of racial or ethnic collective responsibility is headed for absurdity. That includes the scramble on the part of Koreans to express special outrage over the murders, and the mainstream's desire to move Cho to a convenient margin. Late last week, U.S. news outlets tried to draw connections between Cho's menacing self-portrait with a hammer and South Korean film director Park Chan Wook's gory 2005 psycho-drama, "Oldboy."

But the truth is that Cho was an American kid. He had lived in the United States since he was 8, and he was clearly immersed in the dark side of U.S. popular culture. In his video ramblings, he compared himself to the Columbine killers; he spoke English-major English.

All of us knew Cho, and, like it or not, he was one of "us," not the ultimately elusive "them." His horrific crimes are not a reflection on Korean people — immigrants or Korean Americans — but rather on the state of our cities, campuses, counties and country. We all were, and are, his keepers.

grodriguez@latimescolumnists.com

A Handy Reference Tool

Thanks to Jon Morris and Comixpedia.com!

A Sea Change For McCain?

LA TIMES: McCain goes over to the dark side
by Jonathan Chait - March 10, 2007

'THIS IS NOT Luke Skywalker here," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), discussing his friend and Senate colleague John McCain's second run for the presidency. "This is a totally different campaign."

Graham was looking for a way to reassure his fellow conservatives that they no longer had anything to fear from McCain. His choice of metaphor is one of those windows into the fundamental cultural gap that separates hard-core conservatives from the rest of humanity. To most people, who think of Luke Skywalker as a hero battling an evil and immensely powerful empire, Graham's implication would be seen as an unmitigated insult. In the world of the GOP elite, though, it's a form of praise: No, no, don't worry, McCain's with the empire now.

Seven years ago, of course, McCain was likening himself in public to Luke Skywalker, waving light sabers on stage at rallies and comparing his party's establishment to the Death Star. He would say such things as, "My party has become captive to special interests." He would cite a bumper sticker that read "The Christian Right Is Neither."

And now? Well, let's just say that if John McCain circa 2007 was campaigning against John McCain circa 2000, he would call him a communist. The old McCain called President Bush's tax cuts fiscally and socially irresponsible, a giveaway to the rich in a time of rising inequality. The new McCain was recently interviewed by National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru and asked if there were any circumstances, including the guarantee of spending cuts, under which he'd consider repealing the tax cuts he denounced and voted against. He replied: "No. None. None. Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues."

We all know that? In fact, economists know that this is not true. Conservative economists know this isn't true. Even conservative economists who work in the Bush administration have admitted this isn't true. As former Bush economist Alan Viard, now at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said: "Federal revenue is lower today than it would have been without the tax cuts. There's really no dispute among economists about that."

How does McCain explain his conversion to voodoo economics? He doesn't. He says things like: "I haven't changed. My record is the same on all issues, which is that of a conservative Republican." Which is funny, because a few years ago one of his close advisors — someone who is now furiously insisting that McCain has always been a staunch conservative — told me, "Ideologically, we all changed."

Now watch him madly pander. In the same interview, Ponnuru asked McCain about cloning:

"Sen. McCain: I'm obviously against any human cloning. Obviously.

"Ponnuru: Would you be willing to ban it?

"Sen. McCain: Sure.

"Ponnuru: So you'd support something like the Brownback bill?

"Sen. McCain: Yes. I think I'm a cosponsor."

At this point in the interview, his advisor interjected to say, "I'll double-check that." It turned out McCain was not a cosponsor. His casual language about a matter of the deepest philosophical weight — Ban it? Sure! — suggests he knows little about the bill except that supporting it would help him win the nomination.

What makes McCain's conversion all the more tragic is that it's plainly not working. He has spent the last three years plotting to make himself the candidate of the GOP establishment that he once attacked. But, as the Wall Street Journal reported, "2008 is shaping up as the worst presidential year in three decades to be the candidate of the Republican establishment."

His career since then has indeed resembled a certain famous Jedi. He began as a crusader for justice. Soon he realized that he needed to acquire more power in order to accomplish his noble goals. But over time, his pursuit of power became the goal itself, and by the end he lost his capacity to differentiate between right and wrong.

This is not Luke Skywalker here. This is Luke Skywalker's father. But at least Darth Vader attained his position before the Death Star exploded.

Two Hundred And Fifty Words

NY TIMES: Editorial - Overkill
Published: March 3, 2007

A famous hunter and outdoorsman recently voiced misgivings about people who use assault rifles to kill prairie dogs.

Everyone knows what a prairie dog is: a chubby North American rodent that lives in a communal burrow and grows to be about a foot long. “Assault rifle” is a much touchier term. It is generally understood to be the kind of gun that soldiers use in wars and terrorists use on the evening news. But the gun lobby despises “assault rifle,” considering it a false, scary label tacked onto perfectly legitimate weapons by people who want to take away others’ rights.

That is a debate for another day. The question for now is whether the hunter, Jim Zumbo, deserved what he got after he wrote on his blog that hunters should shun what he called assault rifles — semiautomatics like the AR-15, a cousin of the M-16, and civilian knockoffs of the AK-47. “Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist,” he wrote, “but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity.” He added: “To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let’s divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the prairies and woods.”

Until he wrote that, Mr. Zumbo was one of the most admired hunters in America, a widely read magazine writer with his own cable TV program and lots of lecture appearances and corporate sponsorships. He of all people should have known that “ban” is the mother of all fighting words to gun zealots. His 250-word posting caused a huge eruption on gun blogs, and Mr. Zumbo instantly became their second-most-hated man, after the gun-control advocate James Brady. Even though Mr. Zumbo quickly disavowed his words and apologized, he lost his blog, was dumped by Outdoor Life magazine and was disowned by the National Rifle Association, after 40 years of membership. His corporate sponsors, including the gunmaker Remington, ditched him. His cable show was canceled. The N.R.A. issued a chilling statement warning Congress to take heed of Mr. Zumbo’s fate. By the time Blaine Harden told his story in The Washington Post, Mr. Zumbo was professionally dead.

The paranoia and gloating that Mr. Zumbo’s name has evoked on gun discussion boards like ar15.com and freerepublic.com speak for themselves. You will find only a handful of postings suggesting cautiously that the overnight destruction of a man’s career might not be the proudest moment for the advocates of gun rights. One or two say that instead of cementing their reputations for reflexively enshrining gun ownership above everything, they might have asked Mr. Zumbo what he was talking about. They might even have had a healthy debate. But they shot first.

Oliver Stone Grumpily Kicks His Dog

NY TIMES: Single Bullet, Single Gunman
By GERALD POSNER
Published: February 21, 2007

THE ability to use advanced forensics and minuscule traces of DNA to solve crimes, even cold cases decades old, has turned many Americans into armchair sleuths seeking to “solve” the unexpected deaths of people like Princess Diana and Anna Nicole Smith. But sometimes, old-fashioned evidence is as useful in solving puzzles as anything under a nuclear microscope.

Last weekend, a never-before-seen home movie was made public showing President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade just before his assassination. An amateur photographer, George Jefferies, took the footage and held onto it for more than 40 years before casually mentioning it to his son-in-law, who persuaded him to donate it to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. The silent 8-millimeter color film was of interest to most people simply because it showed perhaps the clearest close-up of Jacqueline Kennedy taken that morning.

But to assassination researchers, the footage definitively resolves one of the case’s enduring controversies: that the bullet wound on Kennedy’s back, as documented and photographed during the autopsy, did not match up with the location of the bullet hole on the back of his suit jacket and shirt. The discrepancy has given conspiracy theorists fodder to argue that the autopsy photos had been retouched and the report fabricated.

This is more than an academic debate among ballistics buffs. It is critical because if the bullet did enter where shown on the autopsy photos, the trajectory lines up correctly for the famous “single bullet” theory — the Warren Commission hypothesis that one bullet inflicted wounds to both Kennedy and Gov. John Connally of Texas. However, if the hole in the clothing was the accurate mark of where the bullet entered, it would have been too low for a single bullet to have inflicted all the wounds, and would provide evidence of a second assassin.

For years, those of us who concluded that the single-bullet theory was sound, still had to speculate that Kennedy’s suit had bunched up during the ride, causing the hole to be lower in the fabric than one would expect. Because the holes in the shirt and jacket align perfectly, if the jacket was elevated when the shot struck, the shirt also had to have been raised.

Some previously published photos taken at the pivotal moment showed Kennedy’s jacket slightly pushed up, but nothing was definitive. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists have done everything to disprove that the jacket was bunched. Some used grainy photos or film clips to measure minute distances between Kennedy’s hairline and his shirt, what they dubbed the “hair-to-in-shoot distance.”

The new film has finally resolved the issue. At the end of the clip, as the camera focuses on the backs of the president and first lady, Kennedy’s suit is significantly bunched up, with several layers creased together. Only 90 seconds before Lee Harvey Oswald fired the first shot, Kennedy’s suit jacket was precisely in the position to misrepresent the bullet’s entry point.

While the film solves one mystery, it leaves another open: estimates are that at least 150,000 people lined the Dallas motorcade route that fateful day, so there must be many other films and photographs out there that have never come to light. Those who have them should bear in mind that even the most innocuous-seeming artifacts, like the Jefferies tape, can sometimes put enduring controversies to rest. As Gary Mack, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum said the other day, “The bottom line is, don’t throw anything away.”

Gerald Posner is the author of “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of J.F.K.”

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Shows what I know - the footage looked pretty innocuous to me when I first saw it. I have to say, the Stone film didn't convince me of its own theory, but I left feeling like the Warren Report couldn't possibly be right. Ockham's Razor strikes again!

Toyota Enters NASCAR

NY TIMES: The Jingoism 500
By MICHAEL YAKI
Published: February 17, 2007

TOMORROW, ordinary citizens will be bracing themselves against the howling sound of Japanese engines throttling up and bearing down on their beloved American heroes. No, it’s not a squadron of dive-bombing Zeroes re-enacting Pearl Harbor. It’s the Daytona 500, the kickoff to the Nascar season, and for the first time in Nascar’s history Dodge, Chevy and Ford will be joined by ... Toyota.

Japan’s biggest car company, which is poised to overtake General Motors as the largest car manufacturer in the world, has entered the hallowed tracks and pit rows of that most American of race circuits, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. But to hear some Nascar fans talk, when those engines fire up it will be Dec. 7, 1941, all over again.

The war metaphors have been brought to the fore by Jack Roush, a prominent racing team owner. Mr. Roush has said that “we’re going to war” and that he’s preparing himself “for siege.” He has accused Toyota of having bought its way in, of raising the costs of owning a team and generally spoiling the pot. Other Nascar columnists, pundits and fans, even a Web site dedicated to being “against racing Toyotas,” have chimed in against the auto maker’s entry into Nascar.

Nationalism and pride in one’s country can be admirable traits. Nationalism, however, is the razor’s edge in the American psyche, where just a push turns it into xenophobia. Nascar, like so many professional sports before it, may soon be faced with a situation where deliberate ignorance of simmering prejudice is not an option.

I am an American of blended Asian ancestry, including Japanese, and a certain insult — a word as odious as its counterpart for African-Americans — sets me off. That word has been flying fast and furious in many Nascar-related forums and chat rooms. It offends me so much I cannot even abbreviate it here. One person wrote that “we don’t need any foreign nameplate in Nascar.” Others have taken up the “if you love them so much go live in Japan” theme and, curiously, wondered that if the Iraqis built a car would drivers of Japanese cars “become fans of the terrorists?”

The drivers hired by Toyota have been subject to the same opprobrium. Dale Jarrett, whom Nascar has named one of the 50 greatest drivers in its history, has been called a sell-out. Michael Waltrip, a Daytona winner, has been invited to “leave America” with his Japanese truck. (His recent woes at Daytona, including accusations that his team was cheating during qualifying, have only increased the vitriol.) Nor have the up-and-comers Brian Vickers and Jeremy Mayfield been spared. In blogs and on fan sites all have been characterized as traitors for driving “rice burners.”

Although team owners like Joe Gibbs and Rick Hendrick have welcomed the competition from Toyota, Nascar itself has said little during the rants and grumblings, apparently hoping it will all die down. That is unacceptable. There are, of course, Asian-American Nascar fans, and several of Nascar’s races are held in California, the state with the highest population of Asian-Americans.

Nascar’s goal has always been to ensure competition from inside the cockpit, not on the outside. It is all about devising a race where one variable — human skill at 200 miles an hour — is prized above all. When I watch the races (I am a fan; my mother-in-law is an uber-fan), I am fascinated by the men and the occasional woman maneuvering around banked tracks at speeds I cannot fathom with the touch of scrimshaw masters. I am not thinking of a Chevy Monte Carlo or a Dodge Charger or a Ford Fusion — or a Toyota Camry. I am watching Jeff, Junior, Tony, Mark and all those others with the courage, talent and sheer guts it takes to withstand, much less win, a 500-mile race when my legs cramp up after a leisurely two-hour drive.

Nascar’s roots in the South’s “good ol’ boy” mentality are a part of its lore and charm that cannot be denied. Movies like “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Talladega Nights” both spoof and glorify its origins. Its partnership with the American auto industry is also a part of this history, born in the myth that you can drive the same “stock” car that Richard Petty drove to victory. But Nascar has become a global superbrand, still undeniably American yet ubiquitous enough for the world’s best — not just auto manufacturers, but racers like Juan Montoya, the Colombian who has dominated Formula 1 — to want to test its drivers and its superspeedways.

More than 20 years ago, this country feared that Japan would take over American industry. It didn’t happen. But today the Big Three are still on the ropes and, combined with Chrysler’s recent layoffs, a Toyota victory in one of Nascar’s events could reawaken latent fears of Japanese domination. We cannot forget that in 1982 a young Chinese-American, Vincent Chin, was killed in Detroit because two autoworkers assumed he was Japanese. Apparently there remain embers just hot enough to re-ignite the flame of racism.

You can be pro-American, and you can declare that Americans should buy American cars. But doing so involves a degree of hypocrisy. Today an “American” car could have been assembled in Mexico, or had most of its parts manufactured offshore. And Dodge, part of the Chrysler brand, is owned by Daimler of Germany. Yet I don’t hear anyone disparaging the patriotism of the racers driving Dodges. It’s another indication that the opposition to Toyota is rooted not in patriotic pride, but racism.

Along with millions of others, I will watch the Daytona 500 tomorrow. There would be nice symmetry if the Great American Race also meant that in the arena of race relations, Nascar, like all major professional sports, were to take measures to reject the appearance and insinuation of intolerance and prejudice in its ranks.

Michael Yaki is a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

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You can be pro-American, and you can declare that Americans should buy American cars. But doing so involves a degree of hypocrisy. Today an “American” car could have been assembled in Mexico, or had most of its parts manufactured offshore. And Dodge, part of the Chrysler brand, is owned by Daimler of Germany. Yet I don’t hear anyone disparaging the patriotism of the racers driving Dodges.

Exactly.

Sing A Song Of Bush

NY TIMES: State of the Union: Another Take
By RANDY NEWMAN
Published: January 24, 2007

Randy Newman, the singer, songwriter and composer, performed this song at Carnegie Hall in 2006. It will be released soon online. This is an abridged version.

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country
By Randy Newman

I’d like to say a few words
In defense of our country
Whose people aren’t bad nor are they mean
Now the leaders we have
While they’re the worst that we’ve had
Are hardly the worst this poor world has seen

Let’s turn history’s pages, shall we?

Take the Caesars for example
Why within the first few of them
They had split Gaul into three parts
Fed the Christians to the lions
And burned down the City
And one of ’em
Appointed his own horse Consul of the Empire
That’s like vice president or something
That’s not a very good example, is it?
But wait, here’s one, the Spanish Inquisition
They put people in a terrible position

I don’t even like to think about it
Well, sometimes I like to think about it

Just a few words in defense of our country
Whose time at the top
Could be coming to an end
Now we don’t want their love
And respect at this point is pretty much out of the question
But in times like these
We sure could use a friend

Hitler. Stalin.
Men who need no introduction
King Leopold of Belgium. That’s right.
Everyone thinks he’s so great
Well he owned The Congo
He tore it up too
He took the diamonds, he took the gold
He took the silver
Know what he left them with?
Malaria

A president once said,
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”
Now it seems like we’re supposed to be afraid
It’s patriotic in fact and color coded
And what are we supposed to be afraid of?
Why, of being afraid
That’s what terror means, doesn’t it?
That’s what it used to mean

[To the first eight bars of “Columbia The Gem Of The Ocean”]

You know it pisses me off a little
That this Supreme Court is gonna outlive me
A couple of young Italian fellas and a brother on the Court now too
But I defy you, anywhere in the world
To find me two Italians as tightass as the two Italians we got
And as for the brother
Well, Pluto’s not a planet anymore either

The end of an empire is messy at best
And this empire is ending
Like all the rest
Like the Spanish Armada adrift on the sea
We’re adrift in the land of the brave
And the home of the free
Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

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O boy O boy! I can't wait to hear the song! Too bad the article doesn't say where it'll be available, or when...

UPDATE - NONESUCH.COM: The song will be available exclusively at iTunes on January 30. I've also included the section that the Times cut out, printed here in red.

Exactly!

NY TIMES: Editorial - Safe as Milk?
Published: January 6, 2007
The Food and Drug Administration’s assessment that food from cloned animals is safe to eat is a victory for biotech companies and a loss for everyone else. Like many decisions on the cutting edge of agricultural technology, it was hurried along in a way that is more sensitive to political and economic pressure than to the long-term welfare of animals, humans and the world they inhabit. Asking whether cloned meat and milk are safe is not even the right question. The right question is, why clone at all?

Approving food from cloned animals will create another food-labeling nightmare and the same aggressive litigation that usually blocks any attempt to tell consumers where their food comes from.

But cloning has much worse consequences. It marks a revolutionary shift — from the relative randomness of sexual reproduction to the apparent uniformity of asexual reproduction. Because cloning creates genetically identical animals, it will shrink the gene pool on which agriculture rests, and any drastic shrinkage in genetic diversity creates enormous health risks for a species.

Cloning isn’t just a matter for the F.D.A. to decide. It is up to us as a society to decide as well. We should be asking much broader questions than the F.D.A. is able to. Who will cloning benefit? What will it do to the health of the animals themselves?

But the most important question of all may be this one: Are we willing to judge the suitability of new technologies in ways that fully address their ethical and biological complexities? Or are we doomed to give in to politics and the bottom line?

NY TIMES: Middle School Girls Gone Wild
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Published: December 29, 2006

It’s hard to write this without sounding like a prig. But it’s just as hard to erase the images that planted the idea for this essay, so here goes. The scene is a middle school auditorium, where girls in teams of three or four are bopping to pop songs at a student talent show. Not bopping, actually, but doing elaborately choreographed re-creations of music videos, in tiny skirts or tight shorts, with bare bellies, rouged cheeks and glittery eyes.

They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. ...Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, not fully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show. I’m with my daughter, who is 10 and hadn’t warned me. I’m not sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this. It was something different. Something younger. Something that didn’t make the girls look so ... one-dimensional.

It would be easy to chalk it up to adolescent rebellion, an ancient and necessary phenomenon, except these girls were barely adolescents and they had nothing to rebel against. This was an official function at a public school, a milieu that in another time or universe might have seen children singing folk ballads, say, or reciting the Gettysburg Address.

It is news to no one, not even me, that eroticism in popular culture is a 24-hour, all-you-can-eat buffet, and that many children in their early teens are filling up. The latest debate centers on whether simulated intercourse is an appropriate dance style for the high school gym.

What surprised me, though, was how completely parents of even younger girls seem to have gotten in step with society’s march toward eroticized adolescence — either willingly or through abject surrender. And if parents give up, what can a school do? A teacher at the middle school later told me she had stopped chaperoning dances because she was put off by the boy-girl pelvic thrusting and had no way to stop it — the children wouldn’t listen to her and she had no authority to send anyone home. She guessed that if the school had tried to ban the sexy talent-show routines, parents would have been the first to complain, having shelled out for costumes and private dance lessons for their Little Miss Sunshines.

I’m sure that many parents see these routines as healthy fun, an exercise in self-esteem harmlessly heightened by glitter makeup and teeny skirts. Our girls are bratz, not slutz, they would argue, comfortable in the existence of a distinction.

But my parental brain rebels. Suburban parents dote on and hover over their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’ ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.

There is no reason adulthood should be a low plateau we all clamber onto around age 10. And it’s a cramped vision of girlhood that enshrines sexual allure as the best or only form of power and esteem. It’s as if there were now Three Ages of Woman: first Mary-Kate, then Britney, then Courtney. Boys don’t seem to have such constricted horizons. They wouldn’t stand for it — much less waggle their butts and roll around for applause on the floor of a school auditorium.

Epithets And Slurs In Current Comedy

NY TIMES: Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: December 17, 2006

THE predilections of Sebastian Venable, the gothic ghost who haunts Tennessee Williams’s “Suddenly Last Summer,” were so unspeakable that they essentially went unspoken in the text of the play. Dark hints about his taste for young men bloom all through the lyrical foliage of Williams’s dialogue, but the actual subject of homosexuality is never explicitly mentioned.

Nobody would have called the doomed poet a gay man, although that’s what all the tortuous innuendo essentially amounts to. The play, which was teamed with a curtain-raiser actually called “Something Unspoken” when it had its premiere in 1958, was written in an era when the word “gay” had not come into common parlance, and the word “homosexual” had a clinical and disreputable ring. (The “something” in “Something Unspoken” was lesbianism, by the way.)

The coyness about the subject in “Suddenly Last Summer,” written by a playwright who was famously uncoy about matters of sex and sexuality, firmly dates the play. Today neutral terms describing homosexuality are commonplace, having long since joined the vocabulary list deemed fit and proper to be spoken in front of the footlights. But as “The Little Dog Laughed,” “Regrets Only” and “Borat” have lately shown, old-school mockery, refitted for a new, post-politically-correct era, is making a comeback.

In “The Little Dog Laughed,” Douglas Carter Beane’s Hollywood satire at the Cort Theater, the central character, a ruthless female agent played with verve by Julie White, uses the following terms, among others, to refer to her client, a closeted gay movie actor: “that pansy,” “Mary” and “Miss Nancy,” “little fairy Tinkerbell” and “little fruit.” Coining her own variation on derogation, she calls another character “St. Francis of the Sissies.”

At the performance I recently attended, virtually every one of those lines got a laugh. As they were meant to. For the character’s noxious vocabulary isn’t meant to mark her as a bigot. The epithets, generally employed in acerbic monologues addressed to the audience, are meant to establish her as a funny gal, if maybe a little soulless. It seems for most people they do.

Little notice has been taken of Mr. Beane’s comic exploitation of what is, in other contexts, called hate speech. But he seems to be aware that he is treading on tender turf: how else to explain the agent’s opening announcement that she’s a lesbian? Her sexuality then disappears until a passing reference in the last scene. But it’s enough to inoculate her (and perhaps him) against accusations of homophobia: she’s on the team, so she’s allowed, and we’re allowed to chuckle. (For the record, Mr. Beane is an openly gay man.)

The play raises a question that has been brought to the forefront of the cultural chatter recently in another context: Who is and is not allowed to use — and to laugh at or milk laughs from — derisive names for minorities? On a Broadway stage, Ms. White is warmly applauded for tossing out those nasty words. At a multiplex near you, Sacha Baron Cohen, playing a fictional anti-Semite, has ’em rolling in the aisles. But Michael Richards, also an entertainer, repeatedly uses a derogatory term for African-Americans in a stand-up act that queasily devolves into a fit of pique, and his offense makes headlines and cripples his career, possibly for good.

Is it all about context? Certainly Mr. Richards’s ghastly rant was not a scripted piece of entertainment, nor was it designed to provoke a discussion of slang and semantics. In savaging a heckler, he used the word the only way it was once used: as a weapon meant to demean and hurt. (Likewise, Mel Gibson got into trouble for his anti-Semitic rant because it appeared to be an expression of personal animus.) But at some point in his tirade Mr. Richards also tried to frame his attack as a political challenge. Muttering grimly in response to the audience’s obvious displeasure, he said, “You see, there’s still those words, those words.”

Lenny Bruce was the first comic to start a conversation about “those words” on the nightclub stage. In one of his most famous, and controversial, routines, he asked if there were any African-Americans in the house — using the usual offensive term. He went on to run down a litany of bigoted epithets. His point was that by keeping the words taboo, we unwittingly preserve their power to hurt. He ended the bit by suggesting that if they were allowed to fully enter the cultural conversation, their batteries would go dead.

History has proved him to be at least half right. Gays and blacks took the language meant to demean them and put it to sly new use when speaking among themselves. Lately, as attitudes have relaxed, it has become easier for the rest of America to join the parties. (The character of Jack in the popular sitcom “Will & Grace” was pure minstrelsy, but by the time he minced onto the airwaves, in the context of a gay-friendly show, his dizziness and effeminacy hardly raised an eyebrow.)

What is disappointing about Mr. Beane’s flippant use of provocative language in “The Little Dog Laughed” is how provocative it isn’t. Mr. Beane is not pushing boundaries to get his audiences to examine their own prejudices, or jolt them into an awareness of its lingering prevalence in the culture. He’s just pushing the classic put-down button, used to garner laughs on sitcoms — and in life — from time immemorial.

Because he knows his audience is overwhelmingly made up of the gay and the gay-friended, Mr. Beane can safely use words that in other contexts would still call down opprobrium. But it doesn’t make the humor any smarter, and as the snipes kept coming and I stopped counting, the barking of those words in viperish tones began to push a few of my buttons. (Let’s just say that, as a gay man, I don’t look back on my suburban junior high school years with unalloyed fondness.)

“Regrets Only,” the new comedy by Paul Rudnick at Manhattan Theater Club, similarly exploits our new comfort with old stereotypes for some easy laughs. (Mr. Rudnick is also an openly gay playwright.) The plot turns on the notion that a Manhattan wedding would be stopped in its tracks if the city’s gay men went out on strike. No flowers, no one to pin the baby’s breath in the bride’s hair and tell her she looks fabulous. Mr. Rudnick includes lawyers and doormen and elevator operators in his legions of gay protesters, but mostly the humor turns on the sudden absence from the city’s working populace of florists and hairdressers and dress designers, occupations that haven’t made for clever antigay jokes since the days of “Match Game.”

Wrapped in a comfy pashmina of preachment about the issue of gay marriage, the conceit is hardly going to offend, but the general mediocrity of “Regrets Only” suggests that Mr. Rudnick may have played with gay stereotypes a little too long: the play has far fewer good gags than his riper efforts in this sphere, like “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told” and the short solo plays “Mr. Charles of Palm Beach,” about a quintessentially queeny cable-access host, and “Pride and Joy,” about a matron from Massapequa laying claim to the title of “most accepting, most loving mother of all time, bar none.”

For a dose of truly discomfiting — and provocative — comedy trading on man’s universal tendency to sort by group and sneer at the guys in the other camp, you’ll have to look not to the stage but to the movies, where a certain boob from Kazakhstan reigned this fall. In contrast to the tame, middlingly funny and rather retrograde flavor of “The Little Dog Laughed” and “Regrets Only,” the often uproarious “Borat” has the harsh sting of just-distilled vodka.

Mr. Cohen is himself Jewish, so Borat’s smiling anti-Semitism is a con mostly used to seduce the clueless rednecks and drunk frat dudes. But I wonder what would happen if Borat trained the cameras on a cross section of the audiences delighting in his easy evisceration of the all-American boob. Do the millions of people in on the Borat joke really think they’re immune from even the smallest trace of bigotry? Unless they are among the unlucky few who meet Mr. Cohen’s next alter ego, they may never have to acknowledge their laughter’s unfunny origins.

When we are done laughing at Ms. White’s nasty cracks and Borat’s victims, and clucking at Mr. Richards’s freakish tirade, we should recognize the uncomfortable truth of that peppy homily sung in the Broadway musical “Avenue Q”: “Everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes.”

Silence Still Golden In Animation

FILM
By CHARLES SOLOMON
LOS ANGELES

CALL them “cellphone films”: in “Chicken Little,” “Madagascar,” “Hoodwinked” and other recent American animated features, the characters chatter incessantly, as if they’re trying to use up their last 500 minutes from Verizon. The audience isn’t subjected to this barrage of words and jokes because the characters have something to say, but because filmmakers and studio executives are afraid to let them be quiet.

In “Robots,” eager young Rodney Copperbottom on arriving in Robot City meets Fender, voiced by Robin Williams. All the wonder the audience should feel as Rodney beholds the Erector-set metropolis of his dreams is crushed under Fender’s nonstop shtick. The characters in “Hoodwinked” natter constantly, even as their unfortunate mouth movements reveal inadequacies in the design of their faces. And if the trailer is any indication, “The Wild,” coming from Disney on April 14, with voices by Kiefer Sutherland and Janeane Garofalo, among others, looks like yet another gabfest.

American animation wasn’t always like this. Some of its most memorable moments take place with no one talking: Mickey Mouse dancing with the brooms in “Fantasia”; the Seven Dwarfs weeping at Snow White’s bier; Bugs Bunny riding in as Brunhilde on a white charger in “What’s Opera, Doc?” Animation is often funnier, more dramatic and more powerful when words aren’t distracting the viewer’s attention from the stylized expressions and movements.

Walt Disney often made his artists prepare their storyboards with only pictures; dialogue was added at the end of the process, when they had determined how few words were actually needed to tell the story. In 2001, Joe Grant, who did key story work on “Snow White,” “Pinocchio” and other Disney features, said in an interview: “Walt was a great advocate of pantomime. He would stand in front of the boards and reenact the scene. You could see the reflection of him in the film: his pantomime was beautifully followed through. Today it’s all talking heads.”

During the 1940’s and 50’s, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera won seven Academy Awards for their Tom and Jerry cartoons, done almost entirely in mime. The Warner Brothers director Chuck Jones similarly reduced audiences to hysterics with Wile E. Coyote’s doomed efforts to capture the Road Runner, which took place in a silence broken only by music, sound effects and an occasional “beep-beep.”

In a 1988 interview, Mr. Jones said that he and fellow Warner director Friz Freleng previewed all their cartoons without sound. Referring to the producer Leon Schlesinger, he said: “Leon wouldn’t let us hire anybody to make test reels, so Friz and I both learned how to splice — it was the only way we could get to see a test, but we never saw them with sound. We didn’t want to; we wanted to see if the pictures worked without sound, music or anything else.”

Silence in animation isn’t entirely a thing of the past. Recent films have proved that nonspeaking animated characters can express powerful emotions. When the title character dons a disguise to take her father’s place in the army in Disney’s underrated “Mulan,” her silence heightens the emotional intensity. The audience sees her wince as a sword slices off her long hair — words would be superfluous. But the characters in Disney's “Brother Bear” and “Home on the Range” never seem to stop talking.

Filmmakers in other countries are less intent on filling the soundtrack with verbiage. Sylvain Chomet’s wonderfully outré “Triplets of Belleville” earned an Oscar nomination, although it has virtually no dialogue, and its few words weren’t translated from the original French for the English-speaking audience. In the Oscar-winning “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” which comes from Britain, the directors Nick Park and Steve Box show that the mute Gromit can be touching, when he tenderly cares for his giant zucchini, or hilarious, when he is forced to perform bumps and grinds to make a giant rabbit decoy dance.

No one understands the power of silence better than the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, and there are wordless moments of extraordinary beauty and terror in his “Howl’s Moving Castle” and “Spirited Away.” But the most famous example of Mr. Miyazaki’s nonverbal storytelling occurs in “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), recently released on DVD in a new English dub.

While their mother is hospitalized, 10-year-old Satsuki and 4-year-old Mei move with their professor father to a ramshackle old farmhouse. Late one afternoon, the sisters go to meet their father’s bus in the rainy woods. Time passes slowly: shots of a frog in a puddle and of water droplets slipping from pine needles capture the feeling of a summer storm. Mei falls asleep and Satsuki has to hold her. When Totoro, the benevolent, furry forest spirit, joins the girls there’s no chattering, no fanfare and no song. He just walks up and stands quietly next to Satsuki, watching over her and her sister. The sequence lasts almost seven minutes, but has just over 100 words of dialogue: it’s one of the most magical moments in any recent film, animated or live action.

Pixar’s creative leader, John Lasseter, has often said how inspirational Mr. Miyazaki’s work has been to him and his fellow artists, so it’s not surprising Pixar also uses quiet effectively. When Dash flees the villains in “The Incredibles,” he discovers he’s so fast he can run on water. He flashes an amazed grin at the audience that says, “I’m doing something really neat!,” then takes off even faster. The grin lasts only a fraction of a second, but it makes Dash’s speed a shared experience, rather than a showcase for special effects.

With Disney’s purchase of Pixar, Mr. Lasseter will become the creative head of Disney’s beleaguered feature animation studio. Under his leadership, Disney films may regain the strengths and silences audiences enjoyed under Walt — and during the renaissance of the late 80’s and early 90’s.

For Mr. Lasseter appears to understand a core truth about animation: Its characters are often more eloquent when they’re not speaking than when they are. Their moments of silence remain fixed in the viewer’s mind, long after the nattering in lesser films has faded into the cacophony of daily life.