Cintra Wilson

Chris Penn is underrated for a few reasons — most obviously, he is clearly not one of the Atkins billions who cotton to Hollywood vanity; he gives off the enviable impression that he is constitutionally incapable of trying too hard and is too real with himself to really give a shit about his waistline. The only reason this is unfortunate is that his uh, “relaxed” physique has deprived us of seeing him in a wider range of roles, let alone leading roles. Plus, he never got to enjoy the interesting, respectful cult love that gets thrown at weaselly, pretty-boy oddballs and whining perverts like Crispin Glover or Vincent Gallo. But he could have had it if he’d wanted it enough to be vain: Chris Penn was beautiful once, prettier than Sean ever was. His eyes are bigger, bluer and sadder; he had big round curls in his rust-colored hair, and thick, pouty red lips … he’d have made a perfect Caravaggio subject as a teen, the innocent, betoga’d orgy-boy holding a wooden bowl of grapes.

But beauty is fleeting, and Chris Penn sacrificed his for a darker medicine, which will ultimately attract fewer but more devoted admirers, and endure longer.

The first time we all got a good look at Sean Penn’s younger brother was in the high school football drama “All The Right Moves” (1983), which I was going to joke was originally titled “All The Wrong Movies,” but in fairness (and I’m not taking any shit about this), it is surprisingly good, for a greasy kid sports drama — a kind of dire, tooth-clenchy, beer-swilly “Deer Hunter”-like portrait of poverty-line, steel-town Polish Americans for the Clearasil becreamed.

The early ’80s was an odd time for female beauty, as evidenced by the positing of Lea Thompson in a pair of doubleknit marching-band pants as the hot female lead. I’ve never really understood the Lea Thompson mystique — girls with heart-shaped heads and eyes that far apart always look like they suffered from fetal-alcohol syndrome to me. But she’s pretty good, at least in this one, and in what would now be considered an impossibly European love scene, her body-double goes to both second and third base with Tom Cruise’s finger doubles, and she actually shows full-frontal in one scene that also involves Tom’s buttocks. There is also an actual split-second of schlong, but God knows whose it is.

In their dead-end town, Tom and Chris Penn play stressed-out Catholic jocks trying to earn college football scholarships to avoid forfeiting their lives to the local steel mill (where their dads and dads’ dads all worked from sunup to sundown and had horrible industrial accidents unto death, etc.). They play in the trenches of a dead-broke, nothing-but-the-extra-oil-on-our-foreheads team of homely, meat-necked guys in the full travesty of adolescence, chanting, fighting, foaming at the mouth and in their pants with desperate, culty team zeal. Chris is Tom Cruise’s dunced-out and acne-spackled jock pal and key subplot — he’s the star of the team; a hormonal slob with great gridiron talent who, somewhere around plot point 1, gets word that he’s received a full ride at USC despite his 2.0 GPA (so you know something terrible is going to happen to him). There is a particularly awkward and gratuitous locker room scene, which I suppose was intended to show interracial solidarity between the equally impoverished Polish and African-American kids, wherein the funky Negroes teach the unfunky white boys how to dance. I guess African-Americans have been teaching us rhythmless, left-hooved honkies how to dance on film since Mr. Bojangles tapped Shirley Temple up a staircase, and I guess it is no more racist than one of those Aunt Jemima cookie jars or salt-shaker sets, but it still makes me want to puke fatback into a top hat.

There is a great little moment where Chris really captures the unbearable pressure of being a small-town football hero, with all the older, burnt-out steel mill yahoos living vicariously through his youth, speed and unsquandered potential; he is on a bus, going to a big game, and there are tears in his eyes as he mumbles over his rosary beads, shitting bricks over the entire townful of stress hysterics he carries in his duffle bag. Somewhere around plot point 2, Chris gets his white-trash Catholic girlfriend knocked up and has to turn down his USC scholarship and get married. Tom Cruise’s character goes to “congratulate” him at the sorry, low-budget shotgun wedding. Chris pulls off a very complicated emotional maneuver: He meets Cruise’s eyes, as Cruise is giving him that sad, “Life sucks, doesn’t it brother?” sympathy power stare.

“Hey,” says Chris, with heartbreaking good humor, his eyes wide and insistent. “Hey! Look at me. Man, I’m gonna have a kid. That’s more important than any college. I got what I want. OK? I got what I want.”

It’s a great little moment, because the character is not only trying to convince Tom Cruise of this sentiment — he’s also trying to convince himself that he’s already convinced of this sentiment. The audience knows that the character is in total denial. Even at that tender age, Chris Penn knew how to make that sophisticated emotional choice: Someone whose life is going down the pipes would be forced, out of survival instinct, to believe it was what they actually wanted.

Chris turns in a similar but very surprising performance in “Footloose” (1984) –which was, for all intents and purposes, an all-honky version of “Fame” for the Dust Belt. Hickweed teens, livin’ in a Christian town where dancin’ and rock ‘n’ roll are illegal, suddenly get their world turned upside down by the slick city ways of skinny-necktie-wearin’ Kevin Bacon, and are moved by his charismatic example to turn their backs on Jesus and be carried away by the visceral, crotch-scorching power of Kenny Loggins. Kid Bacon is cast as the epitome of smart-mouthed sexiness and badass cool and says stuff like “Jump back!” in a kind of quasi-Ebonics Cab Calloway drawl when he means to express astonishment. There are a lot of synth drum solos, particularly when Bacon gets really frustrated and upset and has to smoke cigarettes and listen to John Cougar Mellencamp and burst into a whole jazz-dance gymnastic routine at the old mill. Young Sarah Jessica Parker has a featured role; it is funny to see the familiar faces so young, all shiny and bumpy and coated with a layer of subcutaneous baby fat.

Chris Penn plays Willard, a genuine, convincing, cowboy hat and coveralls-wearing dumbfuck whose jaw hangs wide open on its hinges to express naive confusion. He has a richly textured little scene when he, Sarah Jessica, Bacon and the hot preacher’s daughter (Lori Singer) go on a double date to a honky-tonk saloon in the next town, so that Bacon can expose his rustic friends to the unreasonable satanic pleasures of two-stepping. Sarah Jessica keeps asking him to dance. He keeps refusing, over and over again, making excuses. Finally Bacon asks him why. He shuffles his feet. He leans over to Bacon’s ear.

“I can’t dance. At all.”

You know he is not joking by the intensity and embarrassment in his delivery — it was very personal. He might have been saying: “I can’t skinny-dip. I only have one testicle.” In a series of cutaways between Chris Penn and the dance floor, you see a gorgeously constructed little evolution. His shame, with another beer, becomes seething frustration. Sarah Jessica begins dancing with some other guy. Chris’ frustration becomes sneering jealousy. Sarah Jessica is having too good a time, being spun, dipped, disco do-si-do’d. More beer — Chris gets drunker, surlier — the testosterone builds to orange-alert levels as he stares a hole through Sarah Jessica’s dance partner’s cowboy shirt, building up a predatory head of steam. Finally, in a perfectly orchestrated drunken climax, Chris’ fists do a nice Kenny Loggins dance on the townie’s face. But oh, what an elegant buildup.

But it isn’t the most amazing thing about Chris Penn’s “Footloose” performance. This would not be a piece of Hollywood Fun Young Dung if the Kevin Bacon character didn’t make it his mission to teach Chris Penn how to dance. At the midpoint when this idea is introduced, it is inconceivable that Chris Penn will ever be able to dance. He’s just not the jazzy, Bob Fosse, lots-of-unnecessary-arm-movements type of physical guy Kevin Bacon is. You can’t see him landing the audition for the film in the first place — you’d think he would have derided himself too much for looking too gay.

In a montage that makes the viewer’s intestines cringe with fear, Bacon teaches Chris how to dance, to (of all things) the gay anthem “Let’s Hear It for the Boy.” OK — the guys bust some moves that would make a Broadway chorus boy feel like he’d been appliquéd with a big scarlet Q, but it’s kind of adorable, and Chris brings a surprising amount of spirit, integrity and, yes, even some twinkle-toed talent to some truly vigorous and spurting choreography-a-go-go. He really gives it up, even though part of him probably couldn’t help but feel that his big brother would never let him pee standing up in the house again. Chris Penn pulls off a phenomenal dramatic arc in “Footloose,” in that where he ends up is so mind-blowing, considering where he started, it gives the sensitive viewer the visual equivalent of the bends.

At the peak of his physical gorgeousness, instead of surfing the wave of slobbery teen panty steam created by “Footloose” and becoming a subsidiary young Hollywood Brat Packer, Chris seemed determined to cleanse himself of the bubblegum dancing-boy lightweight stigma and made an interesting choice to take a heavy role in Clint Eastwood’s “Pale Rider” (1985) — an eco-conscious western in that it was made entirely of recycled westerns. While it’s a worthless movie that should have been pilloried for riding the razor-thin line between homage and plagiarism (“Shane” and “Yojimbo” were stripped to the bolts for their seminal clichés), Chris plays his nasty Bad Son of the Bad Rich Guy role as though he has personal demons to work out. Though decades younger, he impressively holds his own facing down Clint Eastwood, holding Clint’s slitty-eyed mad-dog stare with a nice, insouciant, fuck you, you poncho-wearing old fruit look of his own; he also gets to rape the most monotonous, droney and nasal young brunette actress the screen has seen since Susan Strasberg played the deaf hippie girl in “Psych-Out.”

Sean Penn is phenomenal because he never does the most obvious, first-thought thing — he adds a considered layer of character spin on top of every reaction, such as: He smiles when he’s being threatening, because he’s amused at the thought of kicking your ass.

OK, that’s great, very impressive — but Chris Penn does this other thing — he makes you seamlessly believe in characters so much you barely even notice them. It’s a more inverted, egoless choice — he always serves the role instead of serving his career. Sean is a showboat, a scenery chewer; Chris is the opposite — a stealth bomb.

They do not look comfortable together. One scene in “At Close Range” (1986) — to my knowledge, the only film they acted together in — looks particularly forced. They are supposed to be stoned, watching cartoons, laughing together on the couch, but it looks as if they haven’t had a whole lot of happy, playful downtime together as brothers — there seems to be a painful, ugly tension between them. (You can make brash assumptions about what enduring day-to-day life with Sean Penn must be like based on what’s happened to the formerly open, beautiful and blithely cheerful face of his wife, Robin Wright.) Another scene features Chris Penn playing a hilarious game of Monopoly with his real-life grandmother, suggesting that life at the Penn compound didn’t wholly resemble Dave Pelzer’s “A Child Called It.”

Around the beginning of the ’90s, the beautiful, sad, innocent, Caravaggio teen and gay-idol dancing boy Chris Penn died and a new one began to spring from his ashes — a hypersensitive, red-faced, manic-depressive tough guy Chris Penn, with a deathly black sense of humor and a propensity to scream a lot like Jackie Gleason.

In the abysmal action disgrace “Future Kick” (1991), Chris looks a little heavier around the psyche and jowls. He plays “Bang,” a cyber-assassin who frequents strip clubs, gets beat up by kickboxing champion Don “the Dragon” Wilson, and bleeds bubbling yellow strips of two-part foam insulation.

Chris turns in the only credible performance in Quentin Tarantino’s overrated “Reservoir Dogs” (1992) as Nice Guy Eddie, velour-tracksuit-wearing gangster. He sounds like he’s uncomfortable with the dumb dialogue at the beginning, when he’s playing grab-ass with Michael Madsen, so he doesn’t deliver the lines very well: “Daddy, did you see that? He tried to fuck me! … You’ve been locked up such a long time, I thought you’d love this USDA prime beef.”

Amusing but dumb eighth-grade white-trash homophobe histrionics, like most things Tarantino (who I think should spend a couple of months scrubbing the skidmarks out of penitentiary-issue boxer shorts, he is so adolescently obsessed with blood, shit, weapons, violence and anal rape). Chris makes up for lost time and is able to redeem his role by doing a lot of snarly gun pointing and sweaty screeching into one of those cumbersome old car-phones.

Unfortunately, this dumb, macho mook gig became a pivotal role for Chris Penn, in that he was rarely allowed to play roles that were very different, ever again.

For example, instead of playing a mobster, he played virtually the same character, only with a badge, in the underrated “True Romance” (1993). Chris plays a cop opposite Tom Sizemore, another actor who got ghettoized and plays only cops or psycho scum. There’s not much to Chris’ part in this one, but it’s a keenly calibrated little performance and the second time in one year he got to die in a major shootout at the end of a movie.

I can’t say if I really like Robert Altman or his much adored “Short Cuts” (1993), based on the Raymond Carver short stories. In some cases, it seems like his casting director used what he knew about the nearby Hollywood tidepool and psychologically typecast actors in roles that resonated so truthfully with them, it renders the film nearly unwatchable in that it gives me the skeevy sensation I am complicit in violating the actors, psychically — I feel I am witnessing some kind of quasi-consensual mental rape that the actors didn’t realize the full ramifications of when they signed their contracts.

Chris Penn is almost scarily perfect as the sexually confused, pool-cleaning husband of phone-sex operator cum jaded nasty hosebag Jennifer Jason Leigh. He is emasculated, confused, weak, lost in his sense of himself and his grip on manhood — he gets inarticulately upset, and Jennifer Jason, his way too adult wifey, manipulates and infantalizes her big baby schlub back into submission. “Aww, bear,” she coos to him, in bed, when she senses that he feels rejected and jealous and wounded. “You wanna fuck?” she goo-goos, shoving an armload of plastic toddler toys off their unmade bed — the devouring mother, vagina dentate, a Freudian psychodrama in sweatpants. “Let’s fuck.”

Chris goes through a squirming maggot ball of emotions: powerlessness, horniness, wanting to be a good dad, hating his wife, wanting his wife, fury, disgust, helplessness, despair … all these fester until later in the movie when they get the better of him and move him to lose his shit in a fit of bull-elephant must and beat some girl’s head in with a rock.

He was a love-handled Irish traffic cop in “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Love, Julie Newmar” (1995), and was flirted with by Wesley Snipes. He got a little fatter, and did “Mulholland Falls” (1996), which features a more or less indistinguishable bunch of cops and gangsters. I can’t remember if Chris was a cop or a gangster.

But then came the jewel in the crown of Christopher Penn’s acting career, and this was Abel Ferrara’s “The Funeral” (1996), where Chris plays a mentally ill suicidal gangster. Either Chris Penn has the best imagination ever captured on film, or the Penn boys’ emotional color wheels are naturally so supremely black that they make Sylvia Plath’s look like sample chips for baby’s bedroom. Chris was able to inhabit a Jungian shadow-self that any sane angel would fear to tread, in such a hardcore and chilling performance it makes it impossible not to presume that he has actually endured some bone-splinteringly dark nights of the soul.

This is the apotheosis of Chris Penn. He is an Italian gangster hovering over the open casket of his little brother (Vincent Gallo, an ideal corpse). His face paints an entire road map of emotions. He grabs Gallo’s suit. “My baby brother,” he whimpers, his mouth grimacing in despair. He dissolves into tears. Then, he remembers himself: He’s a mobster. The tears turn ugly. He starts hacking out involuntary grief noises that get louder and louder until they escalate into a screaming, spitting, casket-pounding fury. Christopher Walken and other black-clad, sallow-eyed Italo-actorini try to restrain him. Chris Penn’s bloodshot eyes go momentarily wide and satanic — a murderous plot appears in his brain like a fever blister. Then — he knows it won’t help — he dissolves into blubbering grief again. Then, with a swallow, he snaps his head, pulls himself together, wipes his face, wetly kisses Walken on the face. He is drained, he’s wrecked, but he is OK to go to the buffet table.

Nobody really noticed this performance, for some reason, but Chris Penn pulled off as good a shit fit, in that scene, as DeNiro’s in the jail cell in “Raging Bull.”

But that’s not all. Chris also sings the blues in “The Funeral,” like a crazy person, and it’s kind of great — uninhibited, like a drunk and miserable Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Then he becomes the devil incarnate when confronted with a teenage prostitute. I mean, he really becomes the devil incarnate. “You want 10 dollars? I’m gonna give you 20 dollars. You know why? Because you sold your soul! Don’t fuck with the devil!!”

He screams, in a kind of disembodied, high, almost Joe Pesci-voice, as he rapes the crying young girl. The beast has possessed him, and it’s truly a horrible scene, because only someone who knows how terrifying and hopelessly miserable it is to be insane could have done this scene as well and as gravely as he did it. You can tell he didn’t phone it in, by how well he plays the emotional aftermath in later scenes; terrible self-loathing, the starving need for kindness and mercy and understanding that he doesn’t feel he deserves.

Why didn’t Chris Penn get jettisoned to stardom by that performance? Was he too fat? Too scary? Benicio del Toro got noticed for that movie, and you can’t understand a single goddamned word he says. He swallowed his lines like they were made of bacon, and yet he’s a big fat slob winning Oscars. Why? Too many Penns already on the podium? It’s a mystery, because that performance, while it will not make you feel all warm and snuggly inside, is one of the best acting jobs of the 20th century, and I’m throwing laurels at it, if nobody else is.

It all goes downhill from “The Funeral.” Chris got fatter, the roles got dumber. He plays — guess what? — a cop, in “Trail of a Serial Killer”(1997), a movie that should have been relegated down to the holding cells below NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts as a kind of cinematic “Red Asphalt” object lesson in bad filmmaking. Then there’s “Deceiver” (1997), a lie-detector drama in which Chris Penn plays the “dumb” cop who gets “deceived” by chronic Brit over-actor Tim Roth, the “smart” criminal. The script sounds like it was written by the guy who writes copy for SkyMall catalogs after reading too much Jim Thompson: “I’m rich,” sneers Roth. “Loaded. Filthy with it!”

“Temporal lobe epileptics may stand on furniture, try to undress, or seem frightened,” exposits a court psychiatrist … cut to Tim Roth, playing a temporal-lobe epileptic, standing on furniture, trying to undress, seeming frightened, in that order.

There’s lots of puerile, Hitchcockian back-up-while-zooming-in nausea-cam work — oooh, noir-y. Chris spends the film giving Roth lots of squinty-eyed looks of bulldog concern and bewildered haplessness. It’s a snore.

In “Boy’s Club” (1997), you can tell that Chris Penn has moved from grief into acceptance of the fact that the scripts he is getting are increasingly second-class. He looks like he weighs about 300 pounds, and he’s beginning to eke out lines in which he can pull stunts, little super-subtle comedy moments with which he can at least amuse himself and a couple of his crew pals while watching the dailies — like Lenny Bruce, late in his career, Chris Penn looks as though he is playing to the band.

He’s a psycho in the film (or is it a psycho cop? cop turned psycho-cop killer?) He has a badge, and a gunshot wound, and he’s hiding out in the forest clubhouse of a bunch of 13-year-old boys. He’s a prick, drinking Jack Daniels, being casually cruel and perverse, blaming his victims for the nasty things he does to them. Chris Penn is the best staring, fat evil toad since Paul Sorvino, and his performance would be pretty funny if the film weren’t so heavy-handed and jejune.

It gets worse. He costarred with the sub-electrifying Steven Baldwin in “One Tough Cop” (1998). He’s so big, he can barely run, and it’s just embarrassing to have an actor of his caliber playing supporting donkey boy to a black leather loveseat like Steve Baldwin who, with stocking cap and carefully manicured three-day beard, is trying his best to foment a star turn by trying to act like a macho hardass by trying to act like Alec Baldwin. The dialogue is kind of priceless in that it’s so phenomenally bad, it sounds like Dan Brown of “The Da Vinci Code” tried real hard to write something gritty for Scorsese:

“You’re not gonna believe dis. Besides raping the poor woman? They beat in her head with a statue of the Madonna. They carved crucifixes all over her body. I counted 40 of ‘em. Then, they pissed on her. What kind of a animal would do dis?”

“What we probably got is a coupla pipe heads wacked out of their minds on rock.” Ooooh. Streety!

I believe the bizarre and enjoyable film “Cement” (1999) marked a breakthrough into a new kind of character for Chris Penn; he plays a bad cop, OK, but one who likes to encase people who piss him off in cement, and slowly; he ties the guy up, standing, and lets his feet dry, he talks to him, he tells weird stories. He pours more concrete up to the victim’s hips. He is dementedly oblivious to his own cruelty. Chris has mastered a great way of looking off into middle distance while he’s executing a horrible task, with an expression that says, This is my fucked-up fate. Oh well, as if he had no control over the atrocities he commits. That’s an amusing sociopath. It seems like, after his slurry of mediocre stink bombs, Chris found a solid kind of sarcastic, weird levity to tap into in this role, which is really fun to watch.

Comedy seems to be the direction Chris Penn is going — he could be our generation’s heavy-looking heavy with wicked comic timing, like the late, great J.T. Walsh.

In “Corky Romano” (2001) he essentially plays the exact same mobster with the exact same pathos he would have in any other gangster drama — his character could have walked right out of Abel Ferrara’s mook nightmare — only this time the character is a latent homosexual. Ah, the rich texture and dimension — you can practically smell the Drakkar Noir wafting right off the screen.

And in “Starsky & Hutch” (2004), he plays a hilarious, taunting asshole cop.

I think I see a pattern emerging. Jump back!

Like uranium, Elizabeth Taylor was an unstable element that could be variously refined unto many enormous potentialities. She was a weapon of mass obsession that could be deployed as a means of focusing tsunamis of international money. She was a love bomb — and, like any bomb, the very fact of her existence was a phenomenon that demanded a certain severe, almost Calvinist moral scrutiny. Such power, after all, is terrifying — and the tabloids never seemed quite so grateful as when the person hardest hit by Elizabeth Taylor’s own radioactive fallout was Taylor herself.

Elizabeth Taylor wasn’t a celebrity so much as a part of cultural consciousness with as much resonance as an established religion or a letter of the alphabet — an impossible equation that really irritated the scientific mind in people, since she was always considerably more than the sum of her parts. Her majesty both inflamed and infuriated men (for whom she had a crippling weakness and compulsion to collect).

Richard Burton kept his twice-wed wife in line by undermining her. The New York Times obituary this morning had this ghastly quote:

The notion of (Richard Burton’s) wife as “the most beautiful woman in the world is absolute nonsense,” he said. “She has wonderful eyes,” he added, “but she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest, and she’s rather short in the leg.”

This, I think, was how Burton kept his own ballast: by breaking Elizabeth down into criticizable parts — bruised fender, bad hubcaps — he could teasingly deny her the satisfaction of his comment on her as a total driving experience. He couldn’t acknowledge all the power she had under the hood. It probably would have pleased her too much, and upset their ongoing libidinous struggle to passionately conquer each other.

Elizabeth Taylor’s collaboration with life compelled her to suffer: as if to atone for her wealth, and smite her own perfect appearance. But these catastrophes created, ultimately, a common experience and parity with her audience. Of all people, Elizabeth Taylor is not a star that should have had the Common Touch, but she did. She was, in a sense, her own portrait of Dorian Gray — a walking, talking Faustian contract replete with whiplash plot points and reversals of fortune that might have killed someone not so well grounded in their own humanity (like her dear young friend Michael Jackson).

The friendship she shared with Jackson, which seemed so utterly bizarre in the 1980s, seems less so now: They were both declawed jaguars kept as ornaments dead center in the dictatorship of fame. Their lives had been deprived of any semblance of normalcy — but the suffering of human life is unavoidable, even for stars of such magnitude. There is no cure for life, and this is where they must have been a comfort to each other. Michael did not have Elizabeth’s fortitude of ego or breadth of character; he was, in the end, tragically incapable of being a mere human being — but humanity was Elizabeth Taylor’s fallback position, and her saving grace.

She was the only conceivable human embodiment of Cleopatra, and, offscreen, a sick, lonely, grieving person of weak constitution, prone to grave illnesses and emotional disasters. She was the impossible luxury of White Diamonds (one of her many fragrances) — and she used this wild surplus of personal glamour to champion AIDS back in the earliest days, when it was still perceived as the most frightening stigma on earth — the bubonic plague of sexual deviants — when no other persons of rank and profile had the balls to publicly acknowledge it, let alone lend their full weight to raising money for medical research.

When Elizabeth Taylor’s full power was unleashed on-screen, her portrayals were more than the sum of acting: She was capable of engraving herself in certain emotional states on your consciousness forever, to the point of symbolizing them.

Her chemistry with Montgomery Clift was so palpable in “A Place in the Sun,” you can practically taste both the honey and the razor blade of blinding new love on your own tongue.

The itchy quality that Elizabeth brought to the role of Maggie the Cat in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” traversed the screen and became the shorthand for that eternally wretched feminine state of gnawing, incurable desire — that devouring inner combustion that comes of wanting more from your experience of love than your love object is capable of delivering.

Her very first breakthrough role, in “National Velvet,” crystallized the sincere innocence and honesty of a teenage girl in love with her horse, riding to the very limits of her strength right into the fiery mess of life, with all its fear and pain and hope — sweetly, bravely, with inspiring optimism. Elizabeth Taylor seemed to preserve this courageous innocence in herself offscreen, through whatever life handed her: hails of rose petals and diseases and pills and divorces and savage indignities like John Belushi. Her acting worked so well because she was truthful with herself, and with us — a real, honest citizen who cheerfully bore the punishments of her life while showing no bitterness and protecting no vanity.

Various mystical cosmologies speak of the spiritual goal of dissolving into union with the rest of everything — a process that is usually achieved through the dismantling and gradual erosion of the ego, unto enlightenment (or its cultural equivalent).

Even at the center of attention in Hollywood, Elizabeth Taylor was never too precious to protect herself from ego plunder. She engaged with life on its own terms, even as it periodically killed her hopes and her looks and her love life and her health and her reputation. Ultimately, she was unperturbed, and unshakably generous in her good humor, particularly when the jokes were at her expense. She bravely put her best chin forward and gave life the simple love of an honest, human, achingly beautiful young girl.

Elizabeth Taylor was an impossible vision driving by in a dreamy convertible that every girl wants to be and every boy wants to marry. She leaves in her wake a dazzling aura, a lingering whiff of perfume, a red-hot sexual need and an enduring, indestructible ability to inspire love.

Several weeks ago, before any of this went down, I saw John Galliano’s recent designs in Manhattan’s newly re-opened Dior store. I believe I saw foreshadowings of his meltdown in those designs. I trashed the new Dior collection. I have been a longtime Galliano fan, but I felt his new designs were cynical, weak and irresponsibly barbarous.

Because I have spent several years translating fashion statements into English, I could literally read from the clothes that John Galliano was in a deeply miserable place — the clothes themselves seemed to be screaming in agony.

Fashion is a language of references.

Galliano had always been the master of the Marie Antoinette-cum-Scarlett O’Hara-cum-imperial concubine look. But something about the new too-lavish details and hyper-expense suggested to me all the semiotic indicators of megalomaniacal dictator chic: a whorish criminal rococo for those who wanted to flaunt it.

I recognized Dior’s new look as emanating from a certain dirty flavor of kleptocracy: I felt it was a look for Russia — the sexy new Wild Wild East for entrepreneurial land sharks and hookers, made deliberately to “adorn mistresses and new trophy wives in the sartorial equivalent of hula skirts made from 500-euro notes.”

“Not to put a peasant in the punch bowl,” I wrote, “but Dior would make an ideal costume department for the Vlad Putin Hollywood vehicle, ‘Kremlin, Inc.: Too Fast, Too Furious.’ Moscow, after all, does not believe in understated elegance.”

The idea that celebrity is toxic is one of the arguments I make in my first book, “A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque, Crippling Disease.” I had a hunch that the hot psychological mess that was befouling the gowns and tuxedos of so many celebrities had a direct political analog/corollary, but I hadn’t read enough things, and it was all too murky for me to really substantiate.

Now, I think it’s all falling a little more clearly into place. (Bear with me, the dots do connect.)

A recent article in the Atlantic spoke about the new global plutocracy — a loose-knit international coalition of first- or second-generation multibillionaires who hang around the World Economic Forums in Davos, Switzerland, and Bilderberger meet-ups and tend to view themselves as a separate community of interests informed by an interest in protecting their lifestyles of outrageous fortune.

They are a class unto themselves, in other words.

Top designers — members of Galliano’s own elite social class — became his apologists: Donatella Versace commented that there is no justification for the insults but that she doubted Galliano had “meant to be racist.” Giorgio Armani attributed Galliano’s meltdown to a “moment of weakness,” and told fashion reporters, “You can’t expect exemplary behavior from an eccentric man like him.”

Certain “exceptional” people — either by name or industry — happen to have some power and/or agency over large, swirling shit-storms of money. If these people have weak, fractured, underdeveloped egos, they tend, after a while, to go Boom. And the translation of these meltdowns, I believe, no matter what is said about Hitler, really boils down to two words: Stop me.

People like Galliano know they’re not OK — they want someone to stop them, and nobody does. Since they make so much money, they are allowed to flail around nurturing their darkest impulses and perversions. Untethered rich people act out the unrestrained id of toddlers and madmen — they shit everywhere, literally or figuratively — and their class-peers excuse this batshit crazy behavior as being mere “eccentricity” or “creativity.”

An emotionally fractured superstar can foam around with rabies and bite people for years. Galliano’s absurdly over-the-top anti-Semitic tirade — and Mel Gibson’s, for that matter — has to be seen for what it is: a social form of Suicide by Cop.

At some point, the successful human commodity literally has to sabotage him/herself and stop being a functional commodity in order to save his/her own life, because the circles he/she inhabits will merely milk the cash cow, enable the ongoing self-destruction, protect it by hiding it, and “yes-man” a moneymaking one-person industry — literally — to death.

Donald Trump commented that CBS will rehire Charlie Sheen because he gets ratings, and ratings are the only thing that matters. Mel Gibson got away with slurring Holocaust denials in Hollywood — the Israel of the Americas — because he was still raking in cash in the movie theaters. John Lesher, a prominent agent, told the New York Times: “People here will work with the Antichrist if it puts butts on seats.”

Power is a phenomenon that contains a personal component — big power tends to emanate in the character of the person who wields it. The personality of a particularly pungent boss can be felt throughout an entire company — the new Dior collection contained the character of Galliano, because he was the mind responsible for it. This is politically apparent as well.

The Bush administration took an imperialist stance, rooted in delusions of American exceptionalism — i.e., America decided to view itself as Charlie Sheen. Because of America’s tiger blood and Adonis DNA, the U.S. was too special to be understood by any normal country, so we decided to do strafing runs in our underwear before we had our first cup of coffee. Karl Rove’s secretive, post-reality, ideological hubris resulted in a credibility gap that the American political system has yet to recover from. Dick Cheney’s personal cornered-rat paranoia resulted in policies that ushered in a preemptive war on a sovereign nation — and ever since, we are a nation that debates the merits of torture and lives in fear. Neoconservative fiscal policies ushered in the fastest, most balls-to-the-wall economic calamities that have ever happened in America. And American life, as a result, took on the morose character of the Bush administration: We became isolated, paranoid and morally bankrupt and ultimately broke — a dry-drunk nation, in other words, that had totaled its car and lost all daddy’s money.

The cultural superstructure tends to mirror what’s going on with the prevailing power structure. Celebrity artists are emotionally labile, oversensitive people whose inner hard drives are often incapable of processing all of the weird input they get. Like canaries in coal mines, celebrities are early warning systems — they are social malaise barometers: They tend to act out the psychological impulses motivating the prevailing sociopolitico-economic power structures around them.

Exploding stars seem to have the same illness shared by oligarchs, plutocrats, dictators, tyrants and serial killers. For the sake of discussion, let’s call it Extreme Morbid Elitist Narcissism (X-MEN). It turns people into Superheroes that need to fight their biggest and only deserving enemy: themselves.

There is no comfort in perceiving yourself as being so exceptional as to be utterly divorced from the family of man. The inner poverty of having no common language of human experience — nobody bigger than you, in your own mind, no equal or superior on earth or in heaven — is deadly. To think of yourself as glaringly exceptional — whether you are a designer or an actor or a country — is to invite the most grievous form of hellish isolation. The super-elite person/class/nation who hates him/her/itself must punish and humiliate itself in the absence of a thunderbolt-hurling Zeus that will do it.

Even in the midst of an alcoholic blackout, anyone who grew up in this world in the last 50 years and ever owned a belt knows that shouting “I love Hitler” in an open space isn’t going to go over well. But tyranny doesn’t always manifest in racial cleansing, cannibalism, zipping your enemies into leather duvet covers with raccoons, or MC Hammer sunglasses. Tyranny is, at its root, the same disease that informs the self-defacement of plastic surgery addicts and/or the personal dictatorship of anorexia.

The Tibetan Buddhists view grandiose self-regard as not just a poor way to live and horribly embarrassing, but as a klesha: literally, a poison.

Richness and specialness is an expansive personal hell — but ironically, people like John Galliano, Charlie Sheen and Moammar Gadhafi are even more terrified of escaping their hell than they are of living in it. To recover from their terrible specialness would mean they would be forced to recognize themselves as being potentially unspecial. Associating with the Great Unwashed and suffering unbearable indignities like flying coach again is something that people (or nations, or class structures) with “Adonis blood,” or “tiger DNA,” or the mandate of heaven, and/or several bazillion dollars regard as a fate worse than going down in a hail of bullets or going to jail (which at least means they are still exceptional: This makes them legendary outlaws, which in this demented mind-set is still way better than admitting you have real problems.)

In the lack of a dialogue about political economy and its effects on individual psyches, capitalist nations instead indulge the delusion that these things are unrelated. We are tacitly encouraged, as a society, not to see corruption as the product of elitism and power — not class-related, in other words — but accidental every time, a result of the personal weakness of the powerful individual, who we are encouraged to view as an aberration — mentally ill, an addict — an exception to the rule, rather than the norm.

The super-rich are so over-engorged, so coddled, so disgusted with themselves, they are turning into demons, because they have lost all touch with reality and all faith in the boundaries of a sane world. And when tyrants and stars, nation-states and classes believe they are Nietzschean übermenschen, beyond good and evil, there is, quite frequently, a body count. 

John Galliano, people close to him have commented, is dying. He is murdering himself before our very eyes.

There are some people who think that Charlie Sheen might have had something to do with the death of porn star Chloe Jones, including his ex-wife, Denise Richards. Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Brittany Murphy … Idi Amin, Stalin, Hitler, John Galliano. No matter how you slice it, we are all watching this genocide on TV, and not stopping it.

Sarah Palin is a bit comical, like one of those cutthroat Texas cheerleader stage moms. What her Down syndrome baby and pregnant teenage daughter unequivocally prove, however, is that her most beloved child is the antiabortion platform that ensures her own political ambitions with the conservative right. The throat she’s so hot to cut is that of all American women.

I don’t want Sarah Palin being the representative leader and custodian of my rights, my Constitution and my country any more than I want polygamist compound leader Warren Jeffs baby-sitting for my preteen goddaughters.

As a woman who does not believe what Palin believes, the thought of such an opportunistic anti-female in the White House — in the Cheney chair, no less — is akin to ideological brain rape. What this Republican blowup doll does with her own insides in accord with her own faith is her business. But, like the worst and most terrifying of religious extremists, she seems very comfortable with the idea of imposing her own views on everyone else.

I did not think that women being downgraded to second-class, three-holed chattel would be a pressing concern in my lifetime. I thought it was like polio, or witch burning — an inhumane error that had already been corrected. But after eight years of Republican hegemony, and now the potential ascendance of this sheep in ewe’s clothing, I am so mortally offended I feel like it is really time for women to be angry, hardcore and disgusted again. Not just with old white Christian patriarchs and their hopelessly calcified, religiously condoned misogyny, but also with the self-abnegating, submissive female Uncle Tommies whose ambitions and eagerness to please the powerful males of their tribe are so desperate that they would sell out their sovereignty over their own bodies. And yours too.

Republicans have — in a P.T. Barnum, sucker-born-every-minute kind of way — successfully framed themselves as the custodians of Christian ethics and conservative family values. This stance successfully masks their wholesale class war against the majority of their supporters, who continue to vote blatantly against their own economic interests in thrall to this deliberate emotional manipulation. It was the media critic Douglas Rushkoff who pointed out, several years ago, that Republican politicians were employing marketing techniques perfected by Clotaire Rapaille. Rapaille, broadly paraphrased, introduced a theory that approximately 80 percent of all decision making is done at the level of the limbic system — our lowest, most colorless, reptilian emotional level. Republican strategies are consistent with a belief that the voting process, for most people, is full of feelings — but devoid of reason.

Sarah Palin, in this light, makes so little sense that she makes perfect sense. She speciously represents a new power paradigm of the Nice Mommy: the opposite of Hillary (the Mean Mommy), the opposite of Oprah (black, and therefore foreign), the opposite of Martha Stewart (another Mean Mommy). In her support for women on women’s issues, she has done everything but volunteer for her own circumcision. She tacitly promises a roll backward into old-fashioned sexual roles — like Old Testament-style old. Her morality is fixed, predictable and inflexible. There are those who will find comfort in the fact that they will know exactly what can be expected from Palin: Free will subordinated to obedience of an airtight, evangelical interpretation of the demands of God, country and Republican men.

The choice of Palin represents what the Christian right is really saying to the women of America. The subtext: It’s a Faustian bargain, girls. To elevate your sex to power and respectability, you must first give us the keys to your chastity belt.

It is unsurprising that the morally compromised fraternity of corruption-infested Republican robber barons and war profiteers came up with this stunt, but we must regard it in the same light as the rest of their treasonous, criminal behavior. We must regard Sarah Palin as the Carmella Soprano of the GOP — an enabling wife of organized crime, who sees, hears and speaks no evil of the boys in her old-boy network for whom she does this ideological lap dance.

It is a kind of eerie coincidence that Sarah Palin is being sprung on the public at the same time as the bimbo/frat-boy titty comedy “House Bunny,” which features a poster of a beautiful young lady with Playmate-style bunny ears, big, stupid eyes and her mouth hanging open like someone just punched her.

Sarah Palin is the White House bunny — the most nauseating novelty confection of the evangelical mind-set since Southern “chastity balls,” wherein teen girls pledge abstinence from premarital sex by ceremonially faux-marrying their own fathers.

Sarah Palin is the sexual front of the culture war and the embodiment of the bold social engineering stance of the new authoritarianism that Republicans have been employing ever since they stole the election in 2000. As a result of conservative Republican policies, America has proved itself to be too rife with fraud, bureaucratic constipation, self-inflicted economic calamity, cronyism and incompetence to effect any positive movement anywhere at all, even at home.

But, the Republicans seem to be saying, at least we can offer you the hope of putting women back in their place.

Bristol Palin will no doubt be a fine example as a first teen, particularly now that her mother is inflicting an old-fashioned shotgun wedding on the hapless, horny, condomless youth who impregnated her.

The Republicans are, in effect, saying: We’re not going to win this race on the basis of being the better candidates. Barack Obama is going to make you think. You don’t like thinking. Here’s an It Girl vice president who is easy on the eyes, you stodgy old white baby boomer. She’s like a grown-up version of Mary Ann from “Gilligan’s Island.” She embodies the raw conviction that everything the Republicans have ever done has been right. She’ll make you feel better about yourself for voting for Bush. Twice.

Relax: The war is God’s plan. (Or whatever.) Women, even if they are vice president, can always look pretty, worship their husbands in the fear of God and never, ever resist invasions from unwanted sperm.

Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She’s such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it’s easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.

She is dangerous. She is not just pro-life, she’s anti-life. She is the suppression of human feeling and instinct. She is a slave to the compromises dictated by her own desire for power and control. Sarah Palin is untethered from her own needs and those of her family, which is in crisis, with a pregnant daughter, a son on the way to Iraq and a special-needs infant.

She should, however, be a galvanizing point for women everywhere. Not to support her candidacy but to rebel against the Republican Party and take back the respect and equality so hard-earned by the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s.

We’ve been shanghaied. This is sick. We need to slap the face of our bad frat-boy date and walk home from this drive-in movie. Sarah Palin may put out to be popular, but the rest of America’s women don’t need to do the same.

If not, what the hell? John McCain should go the whole Hugh Hefner route and have eight V.P.s that all look exactly like Sarah Palin.

It’s McCain’s world, girls: You’d just live in it.

In Lafayette Park, across the street the White House was there, mute and elegant in the shade behind its black iron gate on its dark, immaculate lawn. But it was already 3 p.m. and Code Pink was not here, nor were there tents. There were a few hardcore peaceniks straggling about; several people in wheelchairs with hand-scrawled signs; a guy wandering around wearing an OPEC sheik costume.

A hunger striker — a small, intense man with Rasputin-blue eyes who calls himself “Start Loving” — sat cross-legged in view of the White House with a handmade sign: Wage Love Vigil Day # 132. Start Loving, who has the words “wage love” tattooed across his nose in blue letters, wore a pink scarf to show solidarity with Code Pink. He was concerned about their absence: “They’re the only group that I know that is worth a damn in this,” said Start Loving. “Everyone else you can ignore. One [Code Pink member] told me the other day that she was getting discouraged. I immediately started to cry because if those guys give up, we have no hope. They’re the only game in town.”

“Code Pink does a hell of a lot. Code Pink has the power,” agreed Christine DeFontenay, a beatific looking older lady. “The people who protest torture and abuses of the Constitution are us old guys! I’ve been keeping a vigil across from Cheney’s [residence] every Wednesday now for eight months, every week. Other people are joining me, I am getting lots less abuse. I’m gonna save Cheney’s soul. On the weekends, he’s changed the route he takes home so he doesn’t have to see my signs — ‘America’s Shame’ and ‘Torture Is Terrorism.’”

Changing Cheney’s route, if not his mind, I agreed, was something. “It is!” said DeFontenay. “Every little bit helps.”

I watched the Torture Abolition and Survivor’s Support Coalition, a small group of torture survivors from Central America, Africa and the Middle East, launch their “Peace Train” — a row of cardboard boxes covered with tempera paint redolent of grade-school murals; images of brown people hugging, interracial hands shaking over wobbly lettering: It’s OK for Both of Us to Win.

On a bandstand, a middle-aged woman exhorted onlookers to “hop on board” the Peace Train. “It’s not OK to fight and do torture and violence. The peace train does not run on hate!” A group of earnest middle-aged people picked up the “Peace Train” and began dutifully trotting it around the bandstand to the Cat Stevens song. “The rainbow of love is our caboose! Now we’re going chugga-chugga-chug.”

I thought: I love peace, but why would any adult human who ever owned a nice belt want to be seen with this eyesore? Why does the peace movement have to dress and act like an irritating children’s birthday party? More to the point, how was this peace demonstration supposed to convert the hearts and minds of the executive powers across the street, when the main event — the tent city, and Code Pink, its most vital supporters — didn’t even bother to show up?

Two days later, I dropped by the Code Pink house in Washington. In the spirit of Princess Diana (who often wore dresses evocative of the flag of the countries she visited), I threw on a pink silk Lily Pulitzer thing from my Republican Slut collection to put the women at ease, hoping it wouldn’t come off like a Trojan Dress.

Located in a brick row house on Capitol Hill, the Code Pink house is its rallying point for Washington actions. It serves as a base for activists from Code Pink’s 250 local chapters around the globe. Inside, the atmosphere resembled a grubby, renegade sorority installation at FAO Schwartz — the underground headquarters of Barbie’s rebellion. The basement is where pink happens: stacked to the low ceiling beams with crates of pink garments, tubes of glitter, glue, colored pens, cardboard signs, oversize papier-mâché heads of Bush, Condoleezza and a sneering Cheney. Upstairs, coltish young interns in shorts and tie-dye T-shirts sat around on pink couches, typing furiously on laptops. A lone young man was stuffing manicotti in the kitchen.

In the parlor, Code Pink executive committee member Gael Murphy sat cross-legged on one of the couches. Murphy, who also works with United for Peace and Justice, was a warmly robust, welcoming and intelligent presence with a firm handshake. She quickly dismissed Code Pink’s absence from Lafayette Park. “That wasn’t our protest,” she said. “We were just going to come out and support it, but the main organizers decided not to go through with it.”

Murphy seemed tough enough to address my skepticism about Code Pink head-on, so I was obvious about it. Do the group’s self-admittedly obnoxious tactics, like those employed by other militant ideologues like PETA and ACT UP, actually win over as many converts to their cause as they alienate people who are their natural allies? Given a mainstream media climate that almost entirely ignores peace demonstrations, are such demonstrations actually demonstrating anything, if nobody is watching?

Murphy didn’t flinch. She launched into an articulate, sound and uninterruptible tirade on the issues consuming Code Pink. True: While Code Pink Members are regularly getting arrested, they — and the larger peace movement as a whole — still can’t get arrested, so to speak, when it comes to getting commensurate media coverage for the antiwar movement.

She was particularly urgent on the subject of the Democrat-controlled Congress, which had just ushered in another $165 billion in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I got the impression that as a member of the press just sitting there, listening, I was giving Ms. Murphy an almost medical form of relief for her inflamed buildup of talking points, prepared for a distant and disinterested media that doesn’t generally ask for them.

“We’ve arrived at a point where it obviously didn’t work,” she said of Code Pink’s disruptions in Congress. “We didn’t stop the Iraq war funding; we haven’t gotten the Democrats to change policy. We’re feeling our tiaras have lost their glow, and that our predictable attention-getting and disruption has run its course.”

Murphy cataloged the “legitimate” work the group does behind the scenes (which, I had to admit, I had failed to recognize in my blindness from the glare of their prom dresses). Code Pink, Murphy insisted, worked with Congress to help Iraqi women visit the U.S. to participate in Code Pink’s 2006 Iraqi Women’s Delegation war protests. They organized lobby days, wrote “Pink Papers” on the condition of women under occupation and U.S. military reparations for Iraqis, and gathered information for groups involved in the larger peace movement. Murphy told me that Code Pink opened an occupation watch center in Baghdad (as part of United for Peace and Justice — a group whose accomplishments Code Pink seems to feel comfortable occasionally taking credit for without direct acknowledgment).

“Our visibility, our pink, our street theater, is to get [the message] into the media that there is opposition, that there is an antiwar movement,” said Murphy, sounding a little desperate. The problem — the same as that of the military — seems mainly to be one of recruitment: Even groups like MoveOn.org have enormous trouble getting people out to protest. “There’s a huge gap between being against the war and doing something about it as a citizen,” Murphy added.

The strategy of loud pinkness, useful in terms of visibility, must evolve, said Murphy. “Yes, it’s good to be on Jon Stewart or ‘Saturday Night Live.’ But we’re being trivialized. That isn’t all of what the antiwar movement is, or all of what we are. If it’s not working anymore, if it’s served its purpose, we need to nimbly and quickly move on to something that is effective.” Murphy described a new Code Pink effort to educate city mayors on how the war was draining local coffers.

Medea Benjamin strode into the house, creating a flurry of excitement. A co-founder of Code Pink, Benjamin is a small, wry and wiry woman who looks more like a member of Congress than someone who shouts at them in the halls. She speaks five languages and has two postgraduate degrees (one master’s in public health from Columbia University; another in economics from the New School of Social Research).

“I’m a very serious person!” she insisted. “I used to work for the United Nations. I have lived and worked in refugee camps around the world. Did I ever think that at 56 years old I’d be wearing tiaras and going to Congress and holding up signs?”

I asked about the difficulty of “waging peace” — how, after all, is one proactively peaceful? She gave me an ironic smile; her eyes — naturally sad, downturned at the outside corners — flashed a bit flinty.

“One goes to Congress every day and one takes one’s head and hits it against the wall,” she said. “You know that saying, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’? Because we believe in democracy, we think if we do the same thing over and over — demand that our elected representatives actually represent us — they will. But it’s hard to be peacemakers when we’re almost treated like terrorists. We keep getting arrested, thrown in jail, threatened. And we’re treated like that by Democrats.”

Like Murphy, Benjamin was an unceasing font of well-articulated and atrocious facts, relayed in an almost breathless run-on monologue. “The Democrats — who are supposed to be our friends! — are as bad as the Republicans. That latest $165 billion for war is just astounding. Not a peep from the public; the media almost buried the story. We were in Congress that day in the tunnels, going after every congressperson we could find, saying, ‘Don’t do it!’ Ready to throw bloody money onto the floor of the gallery when they voted. Not covered by the media at all. We were thinking, ‘Well, I hope history at least records that there were some people there who tried.’”

Lack of media coverage and its result — an inability to get exhausted working people off the couch to fight an invisible battle — has endlessly frustrated and discouraged Code Pink. “We have had eight demonstrations of over 100,000 people — some much larger — that got virtually no attention, no response from the White House,” Benjamin said. “C-SPAN is the only mainstream media that isn’t censored. We get cut out of everything else.”

Benjamin has been vocal on the subject of Iraqi refugees; she has been to Syria and Jordan to meet with them. “The U.S. is doing nothing to help these millions of people whose lives we destroyed,” she said. Despite trying, Code Pink has failed to draw mainstream attention to the refugees’ plight. “We called a very serious press conference [with an Iraqi] refugee whose husband had been killed because he worked for the U.S. government — we had one Japanese reporter that showed up, that was it,” Benjamin said. “That same day, a group in Berkeley was doing a witch’s exorcism of the Marine recruiting station. The media was all over that. That’s the climate that we live in.”

This was a bit hard to digest in light of the recent arrest of a Code Pink member at the same Marine recruiting station in Berkeley, who happened to be topless — but I understood her frustration. Code Pink finds that it can’t be taken seriously when it wants to be taken seriously, even though its legitimate work is substantial and deserves to be taken seriously. Such is the sharp double-edge of the glitter tiara.

Benjamin reserved her most evident bitterness for progressive Democrats. “Have you seen them join us in a sit-in at the White House? No. They did civil disobedience around apartheid in South Africa — they did civil disobedience for Darfur. Sixteen of them got arrested; we went to them, and we said, ‘Fabulous. Now can we do that around Iraq? Join us, do a dignified sit-in in front of the White House.’ They hemmed and hawed. We couldn’t even get Barbara Lee to do it.”

I found it easy to admire Benjamin’s quixotic pluck and grasp of the issues. Although I didn’t say it, it occurred to me that apartheid and Darfur were issues that were comfortable to Congress — and to mainstream media — because of their high-level celebrity endorsements: Darfur had Bono, apartheid had Springsteen, AIDS had Elizabeth Taylor. It was mainstream media stars — and the mainstream media that built them — that ultimately allowed these issues to get enough momentum for serious support.

Again, though, Code Pink seems at least partly to blame for its own lack of political support. Benjamin seems to expect congress members to attend Code Pink proceedings, and bring their limelight with them, because she’s morally right. But her demands begged the question — in terms of security, let alone political image — why would Nancy Pelosi support a movement that has been parked outside of her house, denouncing her publicly for two years? Why should the Democrats, for whom Benjamin reserves such special loathing, come over to her side of the iron tutu and do her the favor of legitimizing Code Pink?

Benjamin, slumping in her patio chair, shot me a weary expression. “Look, the most heinous thing that George Bush has done is the war in Iraq. The Democrats have not only given George Bush what he asked for, they gave him more than he asked for because they didn’t want to deal with the war issue in October, right before an election. Here we are, on the eve of an election for president, with Bush using diplomacy to cut a deal with North Korea and the Democrats pushing a war policy with Iran.”

What was her pet theory about this? “All [the Democrats] care about is power,” she said. “They want the war to be George Bush’s problem, not theirs. They could be doing so much more to get other Democrats to vote against the war, and to build this movement with us, to gather a million people out on the street. The people have been so snookered by Democrats and Republicans — so blind to the fact that neither party is working in the interest of the general public — that it’s been virtually impossible to build a strong movement.”

Benjamin and Murphy admitted that Code Pink’s approach needed revamping, but both seem addicted to the theatrics. Both were more than hot to discuss their upcoming action — a “blockade” of Rep. Gary Ackerman’s office to protest his resolution calling for a blockade of Iran. “We’ve seen this before,” Benjamin said. “Sanctions resulted in 500,000 Iraqi children being killed! What are we gonna do? Sit by and say, ‘Oh, let’s write another paper about this? Let’s take three months out and write a book?’ We have to speak out immediately.” Benjamin paused. “Gary Ackerman is the only member of Congress who is also a friend of my family,” she said with a grin.

Benjamin and Murphy seemed to share a compulsive germ: this rowdy game of dress-up and protest, an obsession as chronic and irresistible as canvas to painters, or beaches to surfers. Devotees and enthusiasts don’t measure success the same way as non-fanatics; as my mother, the incredibly broke jazz pianist once said, “You’re a successful artist if you get to keep doing it.”

I confessed to both women that I never would have known about Code Pink if they didn’t disrupt congressional proceedings in pink tiaras. “That’s right,” said Benjamin. “Without the tiaras, you wouldn’t be here. You know: ‘If it bleeds it leads.’ Code Pink is a manifestation of crisis, of a lack of democratic vehicles through which we can express ourselves. We’re a manifestation of a broken system. You might not like the way we manifest it, but we’d like people to reflect on how broken the system is.”

I was beginning to feel a bit like a big-mouth bass: Lured by a bright pink artificial fly, doing the hula on the surface. It struck me how necessary pink tiaras were in the informational black hole that enables the inscrutable machinations of Washington to move forward without public scrutiny. A successful movement depends on a media that will grant it public legitimacy. Without it, the peace movement is left to masochistic zealots like Benjamin and Murphy: They crash Congress every day and destroy their own dignity for just the tiniest effect — a nearly inaudible yelp from the dust speck of peaceful Whoville.

I came away from the Code Pink house believing that guerrilla theater is more critical than ever. For activists, Benjamin and Murphy represent the thin pink line separating the American peace movement from muteness, invisibility and depression unto disbandment. “We are committed to being a direct action movement,” said Benjamin. “We shed light through theater, through disruptions. We’re going to keep doing that as long as it serves.”

Code Pink may have lost a little heart, temporarily, but the ladies haven’t lost their way, or their flair: I was touched that Benjamin went out of her way to compliment my fishnet stockings.

“Editors,” someone finally said, the idea light bulb suddenly reflecting off his hairless scalp.

“Huh?”

“Fuck the writers. They’ll all eventually eat each other like the Donner party. We have editors. This Oscars? We break new territory.”

Eyes peer up hopefully through $3,000 Japanese glasses frames made of hammered titanium and hand-carved wood.

“This year? All new: all old. We just montage the living shit out of it. Wall-to-wall montages of Oscar footage recycled from the last 80 years.”

“Great.”

“Thank God.”

“Let’s go home.”

Five minutes later, a symphony of bloot-bloots and black Mercedes doors automatically popping open, then the roar of fresh German engines as the identical cars began their climate-controlled trips through the poisoned brown air, back to their home garages in Glendale and Brentwood.

The montages, it must be said, were so numerous and so mind-blowingly stupid as to border on sadism.

Jon Stewart, who hosted, presented it as a joke, but they actually did show a montage completely devoted to the uses of binoculars and periscopes in movies over the years.

The unlovable animated Seinfeld Bee character from the vastly disappointing “Bee Movie” introduced some technical award with — no joke — a bee montage.

There was a montage devoted to production design. A montage devoted to How the Oscar Ballots Get Cast.

For nearly every major award, there was a montage of all 79 other winners from the past.

In short: This year, Oscar honored the heart-touching magic of the film industry’s celebration of life by sucking every possible ounce of spontaneous life, marrow and energy out of the event by waterboarding it to the point of gag-reflex failure with canned montages.

Hollywood executives were firmly convinced for the past several months that writers were worthless. So, all in all, the evening was sort of like “Romeo and Juliet,” but without a script: a frictionless battle between the Montage-Yous and the Crapulets. They both lost. Actually, we all did.

Even though the event was way more lame than lamé, it feels wrong even taking potshots at the Oscars now. It’s like picking on Britney Spears, at this point — it’s so easy, it’s not even sporting. Oscar is elderly, and in dire need of hipness-replacement surgery. In his dotage he is tiresome, dull and earnest, and employs a lot of doddering repetition about how movies “touch the soul” and “inspire others to dream.”

Even Jack Nicholson, perhaps because of his symbiotic link to Oscar, looked frail when talking about the “common link that touches the (heh heh heh) ‘humanity’ in all of us.” You know when Jack is having a hard time looking convincingly inhumane at the Oscars that some power grid in hell is in the grips of a rolling blackout.

Hollywood is always a lopsided reflection of the political situation we’re in.

In this sense, performing artists, classically a fairly high-strung, hypersensitive lot, have always been pretty effective canaries in the cultural coal mine. What they’ve been telling us, lately, is that we have a very, very sick culture on our hands.

It was a terrible, tooth-gnashing year of hideous self-reflection, for America: the ugly flipside of cultural narcissism. Our country, on the back end of a rapacious tear of sophomoric jerkbag behavior, is moving into the slightly more mature adolescent phase of starting to hate its own smell.

I am the greatest country in the world / I am the piece of shit at the center of the universe.

After shaving its head and driving drunk around the globe with no panties, calling itself the Antichrist, and finally abandoning its children, totaling its SUV and getting its ass kicked in the parking lot of the Persian Gulf, America is realizing that it is internationally loathed, broke, soulless, tasteless, fat, drunk, malicious, greedy and stupid, and has been generally behaving like a lousy excuse for a world superpower for long enough to lose all its friends and position.

So, since America hates itself this year, Oscar gave the biggest trophies to foreigners:

Best supporting actress: Tilda Swinton — British.
Best supporting actor: Javier Bardem — Spanish.
Best actress: Marion Cotillard — French.
Best actor: Daniel Day-Lewis — British.

Conspicuously missing from this Oscars was any loose talk of politics or the war, until the designated time block for dissent during the presentation of the documentary film awards. This was especially weird: Why, if they didn’t want to acknowledge the outside world, did they get a truth teller like Jon Stewart to host the thing?

But it isn’t totally shocking when you consider that ABC, which owned the Oscars this year, is owned by Disney. The whole night seemed conspicuously laundered through Robert Iger’s Great Disney Sanitizer — as if the academy came down with heavy threats and successfully imposed a gag order on the evening (a moratorium on natural speech so suppressive and creepy that I took to calling it the “Iger Sanction”).

This Oscars was noteworthy, though, if only because it featured the worst musical interludes since the Great Debbie Allen Interpretive Dance Meltdown of 1999.

The Disney movie “Enchanted” somehow had three completely unsingable, perversely idiotic, overproduced, melody-free songs nominated.

Amy Adams sang the first of these: a frantically upbeat anthem about being vermin and doing menial labor — kind of a “Whistle While You Work” number that had suspiciously happy housewife/sweatshop/totalitarian overtones.

Kristin Chenoweth sang the second “Enchanted” mess: a musically schizophrenic orchestral pseudo-calypso duet with a Rastafarian who was virtually invisible onstage because nobody bothered to light him. This big song ‘n’ dance number was somehow supposed to convey the “cultural diversity of New York’s Central Park” via a kick line of white senior citizens, brides and grooms, a gymnastic troupe of dancing boys in hard hats and Con Edison drag, a flock of tuba players and, most offensively, a mariachi band wearing sombreros … the likes of which I have never, ever, ever seen in Central Park. In short, it was the kind of illegal gathering that, in the Rudy Giuliani era, would have gotten you shot.

The third “Enchanted” number had waltzing couples dressed like Cinderella and Prince Charming, which could only have been choreographed by John Ashcroft or a 6-year-old girl.

To karmically rebalance these mortal offenses, Bob Fosse must rise and vengefully return from his grave to fan-kick down the door of Robert Iger’s summer home and terrorize him with zombie jazz hands.

In the nominated movies, it was a big year for painfully long shots of people having private moments, and great swirls of emotion moving just enough under the eyeballs to be perceptible — a forced march straight into the head and soul of the actor.

In a year where most of the actresses were shielded from their own regrettable taste by professional stylists like Rachel Zoe, best supporting actress winner Tilda Swinton, at least, was bravely and refreshingly fashion-forward enough to look bonkers. She wore no makeup and what looked like a velvet Isamu Noguchi coffee table, and spoke in insouciant, artistic free verse about Oscar’s naked buttocks in the great weirdo-artiste tradition of Dustin Hoffman.

That was pretty much it for iconoclasm during the evening. They really should learn to invite Björk every year.

The best moments were the unplanned injections of humanity: the ruinously beautiful Marion Cotillard’s sincere, if stumbling, acceptance speech; Jon Stewart arranging for Marketa Irglova — the woman from “Once” who, with Glen Hansard, sang “Falling Slowly,” a baldly nice and stirringly emotional ballad — to come back and give her acceptance speech after she’d been rushed off the stage.

The issue of Iraq was finally allowed to chug out all at once: A handful of grunts in Iraq presented the award for best documentary short subject via satellite. Hollywood deity Tom Hanks was ceremonially trotted out to lend gravity to the award for best documentary feature, a category that pitted three films about the Iraq war against Michael Moore’s “Sicko.”

The winner, Alex Gibney, the filmmaker responsible for “Taxi to the Dark Side,” urged the audience to “hope we can turn this country away from the dark side.”

Helen Mirren introduced the award for best actor with the following:

“Ambition. Amorality. Greed. Deviousness. Misery. Venality. Remorse … All facets of the rainbow of human behavior.”

And Daniel Day-Lewis won for his savage role in “There Will Be Blood.”

Day-Lewis is a wonderfully fluid actor, but frankly, that role, while a perfectly credible Wild West, crotchety old brown-toothed prospector ultimately devoured by his own rottenness, wasn’t the most mind-blowing performance of the year. The movie was, however, based on the Upton Sinclair story “Oil,” and the role was an excellent allegory for a nation that gets ruthlessly strung out on greed for the black crude, loses its soul, abandons its children and brings about its own demise through unchecked hostility.

I know I am not alone in my contention that Viggo Mortensen deserved a special Oscar for his full-frontal nude fight scene in “Eastern Promises.”

Tommy Lee Jones was recognized with a nomination for “In the Valley of Elah,” an important bummer of an Iraq movie that certainly won’t make anyone feel good (but makes you a better human being if you see it).

Tommy Lee Jones was really superb in that role: His wonderful face has always been almost but not quite handsome, in a messed-up way — in this film, he looks almost like an early proto-human skull that was reassembled from bashed fragments and covered with grayish-pink modeling putty. Some unfortunate truck stop on the evolutionary highway. A great craggy simian brow and trout mouth. But his black eyes were crammed to the support beams with an incredibly complex emotional reality — a skillfully compartmentalized man in a state of controlled crisis. Really amazing.

And Clooney — sigh. He deserved the trophy as well, but Hollywood knows he’s a lifer and he’ll be around for a while. There’s time for Clooney later.

Joel and Ethan Coen, of course, were the night’s big winners, taking home the awards for best adapted screenplay, best directing and best picture for “No Country for Old Men.”

While I like the Coens, it is important to bear in mind that in their lifetimes, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini and Alfred Hitchcock never received Oscars for best director. Kevin Costner did, though.

Not that anyone asked me, but “Michael Clayton” was, in my opinion, the best film of the year. There was a lot more to it than its just being Clooney’s “Erin Brockovich.”

Screw imperial corporate greed-bag awfulness, and that goes for Hollywood too, George Clooney, via Michael Clayton, said under his breath, loud enough to hear. Glitz is meaningless. Greed is deadly. Vanity is overrated. But you can humbly, slowly accrue some virtue, some small but real heroism, by navigating the sometimes-invisible line between doing your job well and doing the right thing.

Despite having one of the best social diatribe screenplays since “Network,” what was interesting about “Michael Clayton” was the way it dialed your focus way down to the quiet private battles of the imperfect everyperson — the unwitnessed, unrewarded slog of trying to amass good decisions and do some small immediate good day to day — and failing sometimes, despite fighting the good fight, and winning sometimes in a way that goes largely unrecognized.

Like good photography, “Michael Clayton” elevates the normal into the sublime by seeing its own world with such razor clarity that it expands the viewer’s perceptions by reframing them with a bigger, more generous awareness.

Nan Goldin, for example, looked at her ragged life and saw art springing all around her, even in the mirror at her own punched-out face. Real life, for all its broken noses, cigarette butts and bad decisions, is more beautiful than the L’Oréal illusion, or six hours in the grip of Rachel Zoe — provided you can muster enough emotional intelligence to feel your way out of a paper bag, and you’re not so desperately afraid of offending people or not looking pretty that you can’t move your face or be funny anymore.

Compassion. It’s the new Scientology. A new theology for the rich and famous. Ruthless greed and inhumanity, Hollywood seems to have recently realized, are as suicidal as an OxyContin habit: It can really only take a career, or an art form, or a nation, so far.

Well, in terms of national consciousness, maybe it’s a start.

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For more Salon coverage of the Oscars, click here.