Credits report

[This post is participating in Continuity’s Opening Credits Blog-a-thon.]

I remember some national magazine or other publishing a humorous “interview” with Yoda in the summer of 1980, when The Empire Strikes Back was new and so was Yoda. Yoda answered questions on the topics of the day in his cockeyed syntax. (I remember the piece closing with Yoda asking, “Any more questions, have you?” and the interviewer responding, “Yes: who shot J.R.?“) Among the subjects covered in the interview was Superman the Movie — specifically, its opening credits, in which spectacularly animated names whoosh though interstellar space. Yoda said something like, “Oh yes, flying letter storms. Get them all the time on Dagobah, we do.”

That the article should touch on the opening credits — the credits — of another, unrelated movie more than a year and a half old, at a time when Empire was eclipsing everything else in the pop culture landscape, should give you some idea of the impression that Superman‘s credits made. They nearly upstaged the entire movie that followed, and decades later it’s those credits, set to John Williams’ unabashedly rousing march, that hold up better than most of the rest of the film.


That was almost all I had on the subject of opening credits until I mentioned to my wife Andrea that I would be participating in this blog-a-thon. Andrea, who routinely professes ignorance of and disinterest in film lore, proceeded to rattle off a series of terrific suggestions that I am embarrassed not to have come up with myself. So herewith, a few words on a few more memorable opening credits.


No discussion of memorable opening credits would be complete without mentioning the James Bond series. (Not that I’m aiming for anything like completeness.) The first film, Dr. No, doesn’t count, but it’s interesting in the way it doesn’t count: its credits are jazzy and abstract, which might have set the tone for the whole series if it had begun in the late 50’s rather than in the early 60’s. But Camelot and the Playboy era rode up alongside the James Bond series and the tone became somewhat different. The opening credits for the next film, From Russia With Love, created the template for the rest of the films: an imperfectly seen, mostly unclad beauty writhing athletically on screen. Later films, most of them with their title sequences designed by Maurice Binder (who had done the first two too) had variations on this theme: female silhouettes dancing and multiplying across the screen. When handguns appeared, the formula was complete. The pinnacle must have been The Spy Who Loved Me: Roger Moore and some nude women in silhouette, performing gymnastics on the silhouettes of handguns.

Maurice Binder is long gone, alas, but the latest Bond credits, for Casino Royale, are superb: paying homage to the old formula while modernizing with some (non-obnoxious) computer graphics and a considerably more serious tone emphasizing the consequences of violence (as silhouettes battling Bond disintegrate into heart, diamond, spade, and club symbols) rather than the glamour of girls and guns.


The Pink Panther (1963) had an opening credits sequence so memorable it spawned its own cartoon series — even though the film itself was a live-action farce about a diamond heist, not about an animated, rose-hued feline.


Robert Altman’s The Player opens with credits over a long, complex tracking shot — a single take several minutes long, shot with a single camera following several characters and actions in various locations around a complex set. During this sequence, one character mentions the brilliant tracking shot that opens Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, making it a self-referential joke with plenty of inside-Hollywood references, which is exactly what the rest of the film delivers, too.


But no opening credits capture in microcosm both the psychology and the structure of the film to follow better than those in Memento. A Polaroid of a dead man fades to white. The movie is running in reverse and the Polaroid is un-developing. As the credits end, the blank film disappears into a camera, the flash bulb pops, a bullet flies back into a gun, and the dead man comes back to life.

The Polaroid has been taken as a memento of a violent deed committed by Leonard Shelby who, because of a head injury, lacks the ability to form new memories. Like the Polaroid-in-reverse, his experiences fade in just a few minutes. His life is defined by Polaroids like these, which he snaps and organizes to keep track of people, places, and events that he can’t remember on his own. The story is told in two tracks: one whose scenes are in black and white and appear in chronological order; and another, intercut with the first, whose scenes are in color and, like the fading Polaroid, appear in reverse.

Just one look

[This post is participating in Joe’s Movie Corner’s Endings Blog-a-thon.]

I was going to write about the ending to The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, but Maul of America beat me to it.

So then I started thinking about other movies whose ending pays us off with a memorable, wordless facial expression like that one does (making this a sort of companion piece to my earlier post, “When words meet faces“). Warning: spoilers ahead.


The first movie like this that came to mind was Monsters, Inc. In that film, it is the job of monsters from the “monster world” to enter children’s bedrooms in the human world each night through magic doors and scare them into producing screams, which the monster world harvests for its energy. Secretly, monsters are terrified of children. One night, despite elaborate precautions, an adorable little toddler escapes into the monster world and is discovered by Sully, the champion scarer at Monsters, Inc. At first Sully is frightened of her but she soons endears herself to him. After a game of peek-a-boo, he decides to call her “Boo.” (Sully’s friend Mike is alarmed. “You’re not supposed to name it! Once you name it, you start getting attached to it!”) Amidst Boo’s pre-verbal babbling she calls him “Kitty.” He becomes protective of her and determines to return her to her bedroom, but machinations at Monsters, Inc. make this a challenge, and an adventure ensues. In the end, after helping to expose an evil plan, jail some criminals, and transform Monsters, Inc. from harvesting children’s screams to using their laughter, Sully finally bids Boo an emotional farewell and sends her back to her bedroom. Her door is put through a door-shredder.

Some time passes. Monsters, Inc. is doing better than ever now that it’s harvesting laughs instead of screams, but Sully misses Boo. One day, Sully’s friend Mike gives him a gift: Boo’s door, painstakingly reassembled from its shredded wooden fragments. Sully opens the door and tentatively peers through it. “Boo?” A more grown-up voice answers, “Kitty!” Sully’s face registers first surprise and then the most satisfying smile of delight ever animated.




While thinking about this post, my kids watched Spider-Man 2 on DVD and I was reminded of its ending, which is also a memorable, wordless facial expression.

Peter Parker has loved Mary Jane Watson all his life, but after the events of the first Spider-Man film he realized he must not place her in danger by letting anyone know he loves her; so he rejects her. In the next film, she reluctantly becomes engaged to another man. But the events of the film lead to her discovering Spider-Man’s true identity and the real reason for Peter’s rejection; he does in fact love her. She leaves her fiancé at the altar, runs to Peter’s side, and declares her love and her intention to face danger with him. “Isn’t it time someone saved your life?”

A moment later, they hear police sirens from the street below. MJ lets Peter go catch more bad guys. He leaps from his window as Spider-Man, exultantly swinging through the concrete canyons of Manhattan. He has reconciled his personal life with his responsibilities as a superhero, which has been the “through-line” of the film.

But interestingly, the movie doesn’t end there. It shifts into a more downbeat finale, cutting back to a rueful MJ as she stands in Peter’s window, watching him recede into the distance and fretting about the future.


A similar but much more classic “what have I gotten myself into” ending is in The Godfather. Michael Corleone has consolidated the power of the Corleone crime family, but his wife Kay has misgivings about the man he’s becoming. She confronts him in his office about his role in the disappearance of Carlo, his brother-in-law. “Don’t ask me about my business, Kay,” Michael warns, but Kay persists, angering him.

In the world of The Godfather, women don’t matter, except in how they can be used. So it takes no effort for Michael to pretend magnanimity and lie to his wife. “Alright. This one time. This one time I’ll let you ask about my affairs.” He gives a neat and tidy answer that sets her mind at ease. As she moves to the adjoining room to fix them both a drink, some of Michael’s lieutenants arrive in his office, one of them perfunctorily closing the door on Kay, whose face shows surprise and hurt. It’s man-talk and she can never be a part of it. And catching this glimpse of Michael about to do business, she wonders if she can believe what he just told her — or indeed anything at all.


But as classic as The Godfather is, the granddaddy of rueful ambivalence is the ending of The Graduate. Benjamin Braddock, having let grownups heave him from one situation to another his whole life, has finally seized control of things himself. Overcoming many obstacles he hurries to the chapel where Elaine Robinson is about to marry another man. “Elaine! Elaine!” he shouts to her through a glass wall.

After a melee he succeeds in extracting her from the ceremony, eluding an angry mob of family and wedding guests, and herding Elaine onto a city bus, where their initial excitement at being reunited and avoiding an unwanted marriage turns to disquiet: Elaine remembering what a cad she found Benjamin to be only a short time ago; Benjamin remembering that it was not his own idea to call on Elaine in the first place, but that of another grownup. Will he ever be his own man?


What brings you here, 2007 edition

Here are some of the top queries from various search engines that resulted in hits on my blog during the past year or so, reproduced verbatim from my server logs. (Last year’s results are here.) Each related family of queries is listed with a main variant in bold and selected other variants, plus the percentage of query-hits represented by that family.

I was at first surprised to see that hits for “James Bond villains” outnumbers hits for “vampire lesbian girl scouts” (etc.) and “sex” (etc.) combined, but then realized: the percentages are a function both of the popularity of that search and of the ranking of my site in the search results. In other words, if you’re looking for anything about vampires or lesbians or sex I regret to say there are a lot of likelier websites for you to visit before mine.

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Penis; Jonah Falcon penis; christmas penis drawing; penis peeing pictures; penis doodles; “draw a penis” 0.3%
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Raiders of the Lost Ark; indiana jones medallion + raiders of the lost ark; indiana jones finds millenium falcon; indiana jones harrison ford sean connery 0.3%
I know it was you Fredo.; Johnny Ola Fredo; HOW DOES MICHAEL KNOW ABOUT FREDO; +”why” +michael +kill +fredo 0.3%
Federation Trading Post 0.2%
Funny epitaph; headstone humor; headstone for mom 0.2%
Batman; shark repellent spray; batman and the shark; batman robin “more toyetic” 0.2%
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Peter and the Starcatchers 0.2%
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Katharine Hepburn 0.2%
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Misconstruction 0.1%
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Eli Attie 0.1%
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Steve Volan 0.1%
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Universal Hall Pass 0.1%

The beginning of wisdom

[This post is participating in Strange Culture’s Film + Faith Blog-a-thon. Warning: spoilers follow for the book and film Contact. Update 16 Dec: this post is also participating in Joel Schlosberg’s second annual Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-a-thon.]

I read Carl Sagan‘s novel, Contact, soon after it was published in the late 1980’s, and enjoyed it greatly. It’s the story of a radio astronomer, Ellie Arroway, who is the first person on Earth to detect, verify, and begin deciphering a genuine extraterrestrial message.

A considerable part of the story is devoted to the societal implications of Arroway’s discovery, especially among various religious communities. As it’s depicted in the book, Ellie must suffer various crackpots, blowhards, and garden-variety religious leaders (well-meaning but deluded) spouting their superstitious blather in her quest to secure the resources needed to finish decoding the alien transmission and build the Great Machine.

For the transmission includes, among other things, construction plans for a tremendous and tremendously complicated machine. At its center is a capsule that seats five intrepid adventurers. No one knows what will happen when the machine is switched on. Will the capsule launch into space? Travel through time? Pop into a different dimension? Or is it a weapon that will obliterate the Earth?

The trials involved in achieving the goal of building and activating the Machine are portrayed very much as the power of pure reason overcoming the fetters of fear and ignorance. In the end, Ellie and her fellow travelers are propelled across vast distances and have a surprising encounter with a superior but benevolent race. When they return days later, they discover that no time has elapsed on Earth, leaving a diehard core of doubters free to insist that nothing at all happened, even though there is compelling evidence to support the stories told by Ellie and the others. Science is the clear winner, religion the loser, and it’s pure wish fulfillment: what atheist hasn’t dreamed of winning one of those unwinnable arguments about faith and science against a true believer?

In Robert Zemeckis’ film version of Contact, things are subtly different. Ellie is as much an empiricist as in the book, but man-of-God Palmer Joss is much less easy to dismiss out of hand. His interplay with Ellie on the subject of faith leaves her uncharacteristically at a loss, unable to turn him aside by articulating the bedrock principles of skeptical inquiry.

When the time comes to try the Machine, crucially there is room in it for only one person, so that when Ellie returns from her amazing journey there is no one to corroborate her account. There is also a total absence of physical evidence to support her story. Ellie ends up passionately, desperately trying to persuade people to believe what she is certain is true but cannot prove. Palmer Joss sympathetically points out that this is precisely the situation in which persons of faith find themselves.

It’s a marvelous storytelling contrivance, and the dialogue and performances drive the point home economically and convincingly. But I left the theater conflicted. On the one hand, the film had excellent performances and astonishing visuals, it was exhilarating to see an intelligent, uncliched portrayal of science and scientists in a mainstream Hollywood movie, and it was in many respects faithful to the novel. Where changes were made, by and large they were to add some emotional depth that had been missing from Sagan’s plot- and technology-heavy writing. On the other hand, the rebalancing of science and religion changed what the story was fundamentally about! It offended me that Carl Sagan, recently deceased after a lifetime of science advocacy (today would have been his 73rd birthday, by the way), should have his fantasy about the triumph of humanism and reason watered down for a mass audience!

Over time, though, the film version grew on me and I recognized it as something greater than the source novel: an adventure in which reason triumphs and an exploration of the tangled interrelationship between belief and skepticism. Where I had been hoping to see religious moviegoers get schooled in the virtues of rational thought, instead I had received a lesson about the nuances and complexities of the human experience. The science-beats-religion version of the story had become, to me, overly simplistic. (Sorry, Carl.)

After all, even Mr. Spock admits, near the end of a long career working with humans, that “logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”

When words meet faces

[This post is participating in The House Next Door’s Close-Up Blog-a-thon.]

For my money, of the many fine uses of closeups in cinema, the most affecting are the ones that focus the viewer’s attention on one person’s wordless reaction to another person’s speech. In this post I’ll describe three such scenes. (Spoilers ahead, for three old movies.)


Near the end of Mary Poppins, George Banks gets a phone call at home. Earlier that day, he’d brought his children with him to see where he works: a big bank in London, where he is a junior partner. He tells them, “A bank is a quiet and decorous place so we must be on our best behavior.”

Taking his children to the bank was not his idea. George Banks is one whose notion of fatherhood involves a lot of what today we’d call outsourcing — to his wife, to his nanny, to the rest of his domestic staff, even to the local constable when necessary. In his introductory scene he sings about his ideal day: “It’s six-oh-three and the heirs to my dominion are scrubbed and tubbed and adequately fed. And so I’ll pat them on the head and send them off to bed. Ah, lordly is the life I lead!”

No, taking little Jane and Michael to the bank was the result of some psychological jujitsu by Mary Poppins, who seemed somehow to know precisely the trouble that would ensue — and how it would ultimately heal the Banks household.

Jane and Michael’s introduction to Mr. Dawes, the bank’s senior partner, goes disastrously. Michael refuses to let Mr. Dawes see the twopence he’s brought, which farcically precipitates a run on the bank. “Stop all payments! Stop all payments!” shouts a harried bank officer. Clerks scoop up cash and coins and hightail it to the vault. Word spreads fast and a mob throngs in from the street outside.

Later that night comes the phone call. It’s the bank. George is to report to a late-night meeting where it is understood he will be summarily discharged. He hangs up and collapses into a chair. “A man has dreams of walking with giants,” he sings morosely, “To carve his niche in the edifice of time. Before the mortar of his zeal has a chance to congeal, the cup is dashed from his lips, the flame is snuffed a-borning, he’s brought to wrack and ruin in his prime.”

Fortunately, Bert the chimney-sweep is there, cleaning up from some mayhem earlier that evening. As he sings the following ironically to George Banks, the camera lingers on Banks’ face:

You’re a man of high position, esteemed by your peers. And when your little tykes are cryin’ you haven’t time to dry their tears and see them grateful little faces smilin’ up at you because their dad, he always knows just what to do.

You’ve got to grind, grind, grind at that grindstone though childhood slips like sand through a sieve. And all too soon they’ve up grown and then they’ve flown and it’s too late for you to give just that spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down…

I watched this recently with my three-and-a-half-year-old son Archer, who is extremely chatty when watching movies. He continually asks for commentary on the action in the film, even when it’s extremely obvious and he understands it perfectly well. (“Why did Robin climb down that ladder?” “To hand Batman the can of Shark Repellent Bat-Spray.” “Why?” “To make the shark stop biting Batman’s leg.” “Why?” “Because would you like a shark biting your leg?” “No.” “That’s why.”) We encourage this, because it turns what would be a very passive, brainless activity into an interactive, enriching one.

On this occasion, as realization crept over the sad face of George Banks, Archer asked me, “What is happening?” With a lump in my throat I answered, “He’s realizing for the first time how much he loves his children, and that he hasn’t been a very good daddy.” (Yes, I get a lump in my throat watching Mary Poppins. So sue me.)

To cap it all off, Banks’ children shuffle contritely into the room, offer a sweetly sincere apology, and place in his hands the troublesome twopence. Wonder, sorrow, admiration — it’s as if he’s seeing his children for the first time, and it’s all right there on his face. And could that be a glimmer of a new lightness in his heart?

Some emotional moments are too profound for words. Archer seemed to sense this too and remained uncharacteristically silent for the next several minutes as George Banks grappled with a rearrangement of his worldview. For all the music and color and whimsy in this film, this one little moment was its dramatic climax. It was the perfect use of a reaction closeup.


I am no Bette Davis fan. But she delivers an amazing performance in Frank Capra’s final film, Pocketful of Miracles, and does much of it with her amazing, aging face.

In the film, she’s Apple Annie, a gin-swilling panhandler on Depression-era Broadway. She’s a tough old broad but she has a secret soft spot: she adores her daughter Louise, who has lived abroad all her life and knows nothing of her mother’s true nature. Annie has maintained a deception in her lifelong correspondence with Louise, claiming to belong to New York’s high society. Now Louise, grown into a beautiful young woman, writes that she is engaged to marry a Spanish nobleman — and they are coming to New York to receive her blessing!

Annie wanders the city in a daze. What can she do? She longs to meet her daughter and hold her in her arms, but she is ashamed of herself, afraid of what Louise will think, and fearful of causing Louise’s fiancé to break the engagement.

Fortunately, an important local gangster (with a heart of gold), Dave the Dude, has his own soft spot — for Annie. He believes that her apples bring him luck, and he never does business without first buying one from her. Now he’s due at his most important meeting yet, with a major mob boss from Chicago. But Annie is nowhere to be found.

Annie’s fellow panhandlers (who have known about Louise all along and have learned about Annie’s dilemma) find Dave and bring him to Annie’s pathetic little tenement, where she is out of her mind with worry, and drunk to boot. They tell Dave about Annie’s daughter and plead with him to help her. Dave interrogates Annie skeptically, all impatience. He just wants to buy an apple and get to his big meeting. He doesn’t have time for this. Annie just overdid it on the gin again, that’s all.

As Dave the Dude rails insensitively against the story the panhandlers tell him and what they’re asking him to do, the camera is tight on Annie’s miserable, besotted face. The shame, fear, and desperation in that face build to a piteous crescendo, more vivid than any mere dialogue could have made it. She doesn’t want Dave to see her like this, she doesn’t want him to know her secret pain, and his brusque manner isn’t making anything easier. When he finally spots a photo of Louise and demands, “Is this your kid?” Annie denies it. An instant later her heart breaks as he tosses the picture frame aside — and the truth is out.


The cops are closing in on Ned Racine, and he knows it. Worse: the cops are his friends. From them he learns that a crucial piece of evidence in a murder case is the victim’s missing eyeglasses. If they can be found, it should clinch the case — and put Ned in jail, because he’s guilty of the crime.

In Lawrence Kasdan’s noir homage Body Heat, a masterpiece in its own right, Ned has conspired with his mistress, Matty Walker, to kill her rich and distinctly unlikeable husband. Ned, a crummy defense attorney, learns from one of his recidivist clients, Teddy, how to create an incendiary device with a timer. With it, Ned obliterates much of the evidence (including the dead body).

Now his client warns him that a tall, beautiful brunette came around asking him how to rig such a device to a door. Ned is stunned. Could that have been Matty? Who else would have known to ask Teddy about such a thing? Why would she need another bomb? Why wouldn’t she tell Ned?

Then Ned gets a call from Matty, who’s out of town. I know where the glasses are, she tells him. The housekeeper was blackmailing me with them. I paid her off. She put them in a drawer in my boathouse. You should go and get them right away.

As Ned listens to Matty’s lies, the camera closes slowly on his face. His cigarette burns forgotten almost down to his fingers. He grunts his monosyllabic responses, but his face says everything that really matters. She wants me dead. She wants all the money for herself. She wants no witnesses. I’ve been a fool.

The guy from the old wine commercials

Recently I came across this photo online of a young Orson Welles and immediately saw (a broodier, better-dressed version of) myself.

It’s not that I’ve ever identified with the guy; certainly not with the suicidal, scorched-earth attitude with which he went after William Randolph Hearst, who promptly and predictably squashed his career like a bug. And I’m on record as saying that Citizen Kane, while clearly an important and innovative landmark in filmmaking, doesn’t hold up as well as its perennial “best movie ever made” accolades would have you believe. (As all right-thinking people know, the real best movie ever made, the one that does hold up well decade after decade, is The Godfather.)

No, I just saw a striking physical resemblance. At once I mailed this photo to family and friends. “Don’t you think this looks like me?” I wrote.

Everyone thought I was crazy. No one thought it looked remotely like me.

It just goes to show you. I’m not sure what it goes to show you, but it does go to show you something.

Don’t you know that slapstick is DEAD?!

[This post is participating in the Slapstick Blog-a-thon.]

“Don’t you know that slapstick is DEAD?!” hollers movie-studio honcho Sid Caesar to washed-up director Mel Brooks near the beginning of Silent Movie (as Brooks is pitching the idea of a silent movie to Caesar). He promptly topples backward into his office chair, which flips him onto his back and inexplicably rockets him across the room, colliding with the wall.

At ages four and two, my kids were already movie buffs, both able to devote their attention to a full-length movie and speak intelligently about the stories and the characters. Jonah, age four, exhibited enormous sensitivity, mirroring the emotions of the characters on the screen — joy, sorrow, fear, excitement. Archer, age two, hadn’t reached that milestone. He watched and enjoyed movies without becoming emotionally involved.

One day I put on Silent Movie and read the title cards aloud for them (making a few judicious edits along the way). I could tell the boys were enjoying it, but Archer was impassive as ever…

…until the elevator scene. Mel Brooks and Dom Deluise board an elevator at the hospital to visit Sid Caesar, but their friend Marty Feldman — distracted by a toy airplane — misses it. There are six elevators, so he waits for the next one. When it opens, he is prevented from entering by an improbable crush of exiting passengers. When the next elevator comes, the doors close almost immediately and he collides with them. The same happens with the next elevator, and the next. Soon he is ricocheting between the elevator doors like a pinball.

Archer started laughing and laughing. Jonah had been only mildly amused but Archer’s infectious giggle got him going, and then me too. Helpless with mirth, we missed much of the next minute or two of the movie.

Archer’s three and a half now and plenty else has made him laugh or worry or cheer in the movies he’s watched. But Silent Movie was the first one to get a genuine reaction out of him. For him, slapstick definitely wasn’t dead.

Just the way it was, brick for brick

On my good days, when I contemplate the prospects for American democracy, I think of the movie Batman Begins. (No, I don’t think Batman is going to swoop out of the sky to rescue us, though how cool would that be? Just bear with me.)

In the flashback scenes of that film, the eight-year-old Bruce Wayne lives in a Gotham City full of hope and promise — hope and promise provided in very large part by his father, entrepreneur and philanthropist Dr. Thomas Wayne. Thomas Wayne runs Wayne Enterprises, a major contributor to the civic health of Gotham. Thomas Wayne built Gotham’s egalitarian transit system. And in their mansion on the edge of town, Thomas is a model father to his son Bruce, teaching him about humility, compassion, and justice; letting Bruce play with his stethoscope.

By the climax of the film, none of it remains. Wayne Enterprises is greedy and corrupt and complicit in the very scheme that seeks to destroy Gotham City. Bruce (as Batman) is obliged to demolish the elevated trains himself. Wayne Manor is a smoking pile of rubble, the stethoscope lying in the middle of it, blackened and melted. And Thomas Wayne himself is of course long gone, a victim of the very underclass he sought to embrace.

So too with America. As Elliot Cohen, author of The Last Days of Democracy, explains in a recent interview:

[We] have the operations and secret prison camps in Europe, we torture prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo […] the NSA spying programs warrantlessly. Bush is issuing signing statements, which is tantamount to nullifying congressional lawmaking powers. Cancellation of habeas corpus, [defining] individuals as enemy combatants just by virtue of whether the President deems [them] hostile to U.S. interests. I mean this goes on and on for individual facts as to why one might say that America is becoming a dictatorship.

(And he does in fact go on and on in that interview, and presumably much more so in his book.)

What remains of American prosperity and might and justice? The Treasury — empty. The military — exhausted. Elections — rigged. The Constitution — toothless. Our beautiful nation, the gift of our fathers to us, gone, a victim of the greedy and the ignorant we had gregariously supposed to embrace in our political discourse.

Now, some might say that Batman, unique among superheroes, has no superpowers, but they’d be wrong: he has bottomless wealth and a will of iron. What does America have? Well, bottomless wealth for one thing. Yes, we’re in terrible fiscal shape, but we’re still brimming with the real sources of wealth: land, labor, ingenuity. We also have a will of iron. Yes, apathy and despair have gotten us to where we are today, but we had apathy and despair in the 1930’s and we still rose to the challenge of a global war.


Bruce loses everything —
except what can’t be destroyed

While formulating his thoughts about retaking Gotham City from the criminal class that controls it, Bruce Wayne explains to Alfred, “As a man I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol — as a symbol I can be incorruptible, I can be everlasting.” Everything that was built by Thomas Wayne is destroyed — everything tangible. But not his everlasting ideals, embodied by the son he taught them to.

We have Batman’s powers. We have our ideals. We can be Batman to our ravaged Gotham.

As Bruce surveys the ruin of Wayne Manor he declares to Alfred his intention to rebuild it, “just the way it was, brick for brick.” So too his intention to employ his wealth and his iron will to restore hope and promise to Gotham City.

So too with America.

It’s an Incredible Life

The greatest thing my parents ever did for me was allow me to attend Hunter College High School after I took and passed the entrance exam. It meant letting me ride the subway alone for forty-five minutes each morning and afternoon from the time I was a scrawny and unstreetwise not-yet-twelve-year-old.

At the time I appreciated their confidence in me; but it wasn’t until I became a parent myself that I understood the effort of will that must have been involved. The natural parenting reflex is to permit no risks at all; recognizing that some risks are necessary for growth requires consciously overriding that reflex. As I tell my kids whenever they’re about to get a shot at the doctor’s office: being brave doesn’t mean being unafraid, it means doing what you have to do even though you’re afraid. Faced with that decision in 1978, my mom and dad showed tremendous bravery. Keep in mind this was the bad old days of New York City in the insolvent seventies, the city at its grimiest, most broken-down, and most crime-ridden. Under the same conditions, would I let an eleven-year-old Jonah or Archer venture from Queens to Manhattan alone each day by subway when there was a perfectly good high school just a couple of blocks away? The answer would be, “Of course not,” if it hadn’t been for the example of my parents.

The lesson I learned from them received a boost from the film Finding Nemo, which is superficially a comic undersea adventure but which is really about overprotectiveness.

Marlin: I promised I’d never let anything happen to him.
Dory: Hmm. That’s a funny thing to promise.
Marlin: What?
Dory: Well you can’t never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him.

The movie has a lot to say to parents about the dangers of sheltering kids from the risks and wonders of the real world, and coping with the unavoidable worry that entails. It teaches that worry is an inextricable part of parenthood, which is a comfort in a way. Thanks to Finding Nemo, when I encounter a worrying situation in my role as a father, I cope a little better. I know that it goes with the territory, that it’s universal, and that there’s a right way to deal with it. This is the mark of a well-told story: it addresses an aspect of the human condition and helps make sense of the challenges and complexities of life. Its lessons can be put to practical use, even if they’re nothing more than how to handle a difficult emotion. As long as language has existed, people have used storytelling as a guide for living.

So I was disappointed to read that our friend Vicky thinks that Pixar‘s movies “aren’t interesting if you’re above the age of nine or so.” To her, they’re colorful and diverting and not much else.

It grieves me to think that she and others like her saw The Incredibles unaware of its affecting subtext. As that film opens, two superheroes, Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl, get married — just as a wave of lawsuits by ordinary citizens against superheroes drives the “supers” underground. Most of the film takes place fifteen years later, when Mr. Incredible has a suburban house, an economy car, a terrible insurance-company job, three kids with Elastigirl, and a life of quiet desperation, longing for the glory days. Occasionally he sneaks out with his old superhero buddy to perform some good superdeeds. The deception threatens to destroy his family.

In the story, the timing of the lawsuits that end up criminalizing superhero activity is a coincidence, coming as they do right as Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl get married. But in storytelling terms it’s anything but. For The Incredibles does not merely take place while its protagonists are middle-aged; it is an allegory about middle age. In our youth we develop and employ those attributes that attract attention, friends, and the opposite sex, and bring us glory — our superpowers. If happiness is “the exercise of vital powers,” then these are our happiest times. The moment we get married, though, those powers are promptly embargoed. They may no longer be used. They are driven underground, and we must learn to live without that part of us that made us happiest, even though the powers still lurk tantalizingly just beneath the surface. Many people fail at learning to live like this, which is where infidelity and mid-life crises come from.

Marriage and family are not without their compensations, however, in real life and in the film, where together, Mr. Incredible’s family is an even more formidable force against evil than Mr. Incredible ever was alone. Events lead to the middle-aged couple suddenly finding themselves costumed and battling bad guys together again. At the first lull in the action they fall into each other’s arms and proclaim, “I love you.” They have rekindled the spark of what attracted them to each other in the first place. The Incredibles teaches middle-aged couples the important real-life lesson that with luck and a supportive partner, the way to avoid pining for the glory days is to make these be the more-glorious days. All we have to do is trust each other to use our “powers” responsibly and we can thread the needle of remaining superpowered within the confines of family life — we can be sexy and committed. Everyone knows a supercouple or two like this.

Now, our friend Vicky is smart, beautiful, funny, a talented chef, and many other things besides, but there are two things she is not: a parent, and middle-aged. She may not be ready for the messages in Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. I can hardly fault her for that, because of my own experience with It’s a Wonderful Life.

Somehow I managed to miss It’s a Wonderful Life throughout my entire childhood, even though — being out of copyright and therefore free for TV stations to air — it was broadcast about a hundred times each Christmas season, and I watched lots of TV. When I finally did see it, it was at age 19 in a college film class. At that age I could not help but identify with the young George Bailey, who was full of dreams about tremendous accomplishments. Time after time these dreams are thwarted, and in the end he has traveled nowhere, built no great bridges, amassed no fortune. Worse, he had to watch from the sidelines as his old friends and even his brother did do all these things. It was the most depressing movie I’d ever seen, and for the life of me I couldn’t comprehend the film’s devotees who found something happy in that tacked-on, insincere ending. What could George Bailey have been so deliriously joyful about, crammed into his living room surrounded by all those yokels? For weeks afterward, George’s desperate, bitter plea just before surrendering to a life of domesticity rang in my ears: “I want to do what I want to do!”

It was only a couple of years later that I saw It’s a Wonderful Life again, a little more mature, and was ready this time (for whatever reason) to receive its message in the spirit intended — and how! At the end of the film, my eyes strangely would not stop leaking. I was filled with a spirit of selflessness and community. And I was amazed at how much I could have changed in so short a time as to have the polar opposite reaction from my prior viewing of the film.

Just wait, Vicky. If Pixar’s movies don’t resonate for you yet, they will, in time.

Wonder Woman meets… The Long Tail!

Yay, it’s the Cathy Lee Crosby/Ricardo Montalbán Wonder Woman TV movie from 1974, online for free (courtesy of AOL Video)!

[Updated: inline video player removed due to errors in certain browsers. Click here to view the complete Cathy Lee Crosby Wonder Woman movie.]

[Updated again, 2 Jul 2010: Wonder Woman is no longer available at AOL (hasn’t been for a while), but you can now see it on YouTube.]

Cathy Lee in this movie was my second TV crush, after Nancy, the irrepressible nine-year-old from the original 1972 Zoom. Ah Nancy, the six-year-old in me yubbearns fubbor yubbou stubbill.

Hooray for the long tail, and — though I thought I’d never say this — hooray for AOL!

Now if only someone would put that other terrible TV movie from my childhood online somewhere: Stowaway to the Moon!