Aquarian Weekly
11/26/14
REALITY CHECK

James Campion

MIKE NICHOLS – 1931 – 2014

Film is the theater of the unconscious.
– Mike Nichols

I hate endings. Never liked them; in books, films, sometimes songs (especially fades – what the hell is that?), whatever. This is why my novel has a shitty ending. And I took a lot of guff for that. But it was a sort of my way of protest against “the ending”, seemingly so tacked on and trite, unrealistic stuff.

Happily Ever After.

Nonsense. What’s next? That’s what I want to know.

The grand exception to this is the 1967 film masterwork, The Graduate, which has been without challenge since I first saw it at age 19, my favorite movie of all time.

You know the ending; two college-aged kids, Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) and Elaine (Katherine Ross), mostly alienated, disillusioned, mixed-up and beyond impetuous, having just escaped what would surely be lives trapped in suburban drudgery, sit panting in the back of a bus they board with no real plan. They don’t know where it is they’re going. They just needed a vehicle out of “there”. Elaine, still adorned in a wedding dress, having abandoned the sanctity during its ceremony, and her rescuer Benjamin, who has spent most of the film screwing Elaine’s mother in a fog of social confusion, sit disheveled. They laugh. They exhale. And then they stare into the abyss. What the hell have they just done? What will become of them? How can anything ever approach normality again? They will literally, as the great Doctor Thompson counseled us; “buy the ticket and take the ride.” The film then cuts to the back of the bus, an exterior of their two heads still staring forward as it rides off into the sunset.

What the…?

Exactly. No ending. It is maybe the only piece of storytelling, especially Hollywood storytelling, which subverts “the ending.” It ends; well it ends simply because it can’t keep going, as life. You have to live your life. These people have their own problems. Get back to yours.

Brilliant.

Mike Nichols, the film’s director – his second in a long distinguished career that included comedy writing, acting, dramatic writing, stage directing and films – who passed away this week, decided during final editing that this amputation of his story was his film’s conclusion; a film about being lost, finding no solace in the things that are determined for us long before we had a choice. It is a film about deceit leading to discovery. A film about how perhaps an entire generation misread the tea leaves on revolution as salvation and ended up with a decade-plus of drug overdoses, narcissistic excesses and 1980s apathy. These kids don’t know. They never know. And maybe they never will.

Nichols presupposes all of this in his art. This is his greatest triumph. This is his Great Gatsby, his Sgt. Peppers, you know; his big thing.

And not just the perfect anti-ending ending, but the entire roll-out; from opening scene to final frame, there is not a wasted or throwaway shot in The Graduate. And unlike Charles Webb’s 1963 novel, it is awash in subtext. Shit, the film opens with Benjamin sitting on an airplane (as a bus) staring into the abyss. Then we see him being ushered along a moving sidewalk at the airport, yet he is motionless, being carried along as if a part in a factory; people passing him by in a flurry of activity. The damn opening is a film in itself.

I recently watched it with a young colleague of mine and drove him crazy pointing out the nuances of the thing in every scene. To be honest, nuances is cutting it way short; the metaphors in The Graduate are so profound and unapologetically blatant, it’s scary. And since the Buck Henry/Calder Willingham screenplay is a satire bordering on farce; it is something of a miracle that Nichols manages to unveil such a poignant visual assault. There is, as the saying goes, truth behind the humor.

The “messages” Nichols provides with the camera belie the absurdity of the dialogue, a bizarre story of anti-social terrorism, as if the main character is on a personal suicide mission of no discernible purpose but to crash and burn. Maybe, we think, it is because, as the great Warren Zevon once sang, ‘I rather feel pain than feel nothing at all.”

I realize I am merely using the passing of a great artist to gush about my favorite film, but The Graduate was more than that for me. Steven Spielberg wrote of seeing The Graduate upon the death of Nichols this week as “life-altering,” which I took as one damned brilliant director giving props to the other for inspiring him. But for me it was “life-altering” in the sense that having seen it for the first time as a late-teen and then again in college later the next year (in full wide-screen format, which it must be seen, because when I first viewed it on television it was so cropped that half of Nichol’s fantastic visual storytelling was missing), it got inside my psyche. For months afterwards, I had dreams in which I was in the film, the main character, (the incredible image of Benjamin forced to wear this ridiculous diving suit his parents give him for a birthday present at the bottom of the pool; alone, submerged, embracing the silence) and others wherein I was seeing the story play out as a voyeur; overhearing conversations, seeing something I was not meant to see, but could not look away.

Nichols once said that film is an unconscious art, and in a very real way, more than any other film, The Graduate got inside me that way. And it has informed my fiction (as little and strangely subversive as the output has been) and formed much of my ho-hum look at what others may consider the seminal moments of our lives. The sense that Nichols’ visuals – beautifully accented by Paul Simon’s wonderful songs, which should never be understated as a major contributor to the work – seem to stay with me long after its immediate effect. I read Jack Kerouac’s On The Road around the same time and it also blew my doors off, but I rarely returned to it later in my maturity. I barely think about it now, other than nostalgically, even as a literary device to inspire. The Graduate has stayed inside me.

Powerful stuff.

A few years ago I took in Nichols’ staging of my favorite American play, Death of a Salesman with the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman on Broadway. Nichols was a man of the theater first and considered film an extension of that. There were elements of what I perceived in The Graduate throughout the production, and while I was moved to tears for the first time in a theater, yet, like most of Nichols work after The Graduate, it pales. Some good stuff, some not-so, but nothing like that shot-for-shot masterpiece.

It is maybe the only piece of storytelling, especially Hollywood storytelling, which subverts “the ending.”

Oh, and weirdly enough, speaking of Mike Nichols and “life-altering”, I happened to have kissed my wife for the first time on his property; a horse ranch in Monticello, New York, where my wife’s best friend and later our maid of honor, Pamela, trained and rode his horses for completion.

And so upon his death, I contemplated these things; The Graduate, my impenetrable love for my wife, my impish, almost maddening sense of non-conformity as religion, and thank Mike Nichols for his art.

A worthy ending, indeed.

Aquarian Weekly
11/5/14

FEAR OF A BARRACK PLANET
The Fallout of The 2014 Mid-Term Elections

Poor old Mitch McConnell. He’s so happy, for now. The Republican Party takes control of the U.S. Senate. Thus, as minority leader, he suddenly becomes majority leader. Just like that. Presto. Democracy. Cool stuff. New regime, like the waves of 2006 and 2010 that changed everything. Remember? No? Because they changed nothing, which is the exact opposite of change, like when Change was all the rave in 2008. That’s out now. Kaput.

Six years of obstructionist politics to “make Barrack Obama a one-term president” (negative sound-effects buzzer) turned into plan B, take over the Senate, (positive chiming sound effect) allows McConnell this new lease on political life. Problem is McConnell is going to have to govern now; work with a lame duck president of the United States, who has no reason to do so with no one from his current administration having to defend it, or at least caucus with a very ornery Right Wing filled with TEA Party types who were elected to stop government from growing, and even some of whom, like the always entertaining self-promoting Ted Cruz and whatever Rand Paul is today – libertarian, hawk, Republican power player – will be positioning themselves for a White House run.

Good luck with all that.

You see, McConnell is very old. Not sure how old, but likely not able to quickly get through a supermarket line quickly or maneuver a car in city traffic without causing some delays. He speaks as if someone has a gun to his head in a spy film and looks two minutes from having “fallen and I can’t get up”. But luckily for McConnell he doesn’t have to drive or buy his own groceries. He’s been in the Senate for 30 years. Thirty fucking years in the Senate. I was 22 when he came in. I am friggin’ old, but not as old as Mitch McConnell. Or Harry Reid on the other side of the putrid aisle. Two aisles, both putrid. The one they call Red is now in the hot seat. We’ll see how that goes.

A few months ago McConnell was spending millions fending off a battle to his Right and then spent millions defending himself against a weak opposition from the Left. He works for a body of government that has a 19 percent approval rating and has accomplished less than any congress in the 238-year history of this republic. Now he’s the big boy, and it will be high time he gets to work, because there is little patience in this electorate and the way the map is looking and the demographics are shaping up for 2016, his lifeline ain’t long.

But make no mistake about it; this was the Democrats turn to take the beating, much like 2010, but with less populace outrage. This was big Republican mainstream money and less grocer-next-door quality of the TEA Party run; well organized and strategically planned. Good execution. Old politics style. No longer is the passé Affordable Care Act in play; this was the summer of ISIS and Ebola and “Obama hates America”. Very effective stuff when the mood, which has not changed since late 2003, is “Kick the bums out!” New bums, Old story.

For instance, lending a nod to the quality reporting of Andrew Romano from Yahoo News, who while pointing out that despite a surge of Latinos over the past half-decade and the legalization of marijuana, the fairly progressive state of Colorado elected Cory Gardner as part of the key states to flip the Senate to Republican, also notes the GOP strategy to run a “repackaged” Gardner as a moderate. “Gardner isn’t a moderate,” Romano writes. “He’s a pro-life Republican who ranked as the 10th most conservative House member in 2012. He has opposed Republican immigration reform efforts, voted to shut down the government unless Planned Parenthood was defunded and supported Ted Cruz’s efforts to gut Obamacare. Yet he emphasized compromise and displayed a remarkable, Bill Clintonesque talent for triangulation on immigration, abortion and birth control. In the process, Gardner may have provided the GOP with its biggest lesson of the night: A Republican can still win in a purple state — if he’s the right kind of Republican.”

Like Mitch McConnell, who is the face of the 2014 mid-terms; big time GOP national politics is back. Let’s see if they centrist this thing like Newt and Big Bill in ’94 or if they go off the rails and turn this into part six of “The Revenge of the 2000 Election” and usher in new bums from the other side of the putrid aisle.

Here’s my guess; the Democrats follow the winning model of obstructing any wild bills that are sure to continue flowing from the House and declare them “radical”, further pushing the narrative that Washington is “broken” and that it needs “new blood”. Blaming a lame duck president, who is no longer bound to run (and what comes of that for the next two years is fodder for another time) will not curtail the derision aimed at the newly “Republican-controlled” legislative branch. A sort of copycat strategy wonderfully deployed to political success the past six years, which allowed the GOP to grab seats at the power table.

Two aisles, both putrid. The one they call Red is now in the hot seat. We’ll see how that goes.

It will go down like that (the two-aisle putrid equation) and it will work, because unlike the fortuitous map just exploited by Republicans (mostly defended seats by Democrats in both “Red” and “Blue” states) in two years it will be the Democrats who will go after 23 of the 33 seats held by their opponents in more friendly territories – Illinois, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin – doing so in a national election year when far more Democratic demographics flood to the polls to vote for what looks like the most potent presidential candidate in several generations.

Lots of jobs will change hands; some people on the Left and Right (shouted from the rooftops by their lapdog town criers on cable news and radio) will bitch and celebrate. But for you and me, it’s the same old “two putrid aisles” using tried-and-true fear mongering and waves of our frustration to gain power that they will abuse to secure book deals, corporate speaking engagements and lobbying gigs.

Presto.

Just like that.