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Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Column
Let us now give "Thanks" some praise
It's no Arthur Miller masterpiece, but TV's silly, subversive "Thanks" just might be "The Crucible's" sitcom equivalent.
By Sarah Vowell
[08/25/99]

Television Interview
The adventures of Sir Peter Ustinov
The actor, novelist, playwright and director talks about what it was like to follow in Mark Twain's footsteps -- literally.
By Daniel Mangin
[08/24/99]

Column
The color of money
Of course there are blacks on TV. You just have to pay to see them.
By Joyce Millman
[08/23/99]

Phishers of men
Young Jews by the thousands follow the Phish tour, looking for God in a haze of mushrooms and acid. A rock 'n' roll rabbi wants to lead them out of mammon into the land of milk and honey.
By Felix Vikhman
[08/21/99]

Movie Review
"Teaching Mrs. Tingle"
Kevin Williamson wrote "Scream," "Dawson's Creek" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer," but his first feature as a director should have stayed in his desk.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[08/20/99]

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Mock says she and Sanders didn't nudge Denton into that revelation: "We went into the same areas for all of them and they just took it to those spots that best expressed them. And it was pure gold."

Mock kept asking herself, "What's the drive that gives people the hope to do and to challenge and to live in these circumstances, rather than go in the other direction? After all, there were stories of people who gave up. The survivors say they were in a laboratory in which they saw human beings stripped of the essence of human behavior. They all say the body can take anything -- but the mind is what will kill you."

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

This history of soldiers behind bars has the coherence and the weight we usually associate with stories of jailed intellectuals. Indeed, when Ross Perot's onetime running mate, James Stockdale, then a Navy commander, signaled his wife Sybil about the conditions in Hanoi, he did it in a coded letter with a veiled reference to "Darkness at Noon" -- Arthur Koestler's tale of communist imprisonment.

To Mock, Stockdale is an emblematic character: "The idea that one of the few times you can write your wife, you put in this message about torture, using 'Darkness at Noon': It comes from a drive to continue to reach out and to figure out how you are going to live and how to do your duty and raise security issues. Talk to Stockdale about how he inspired his men and what it takes to survive, and he always says, 'There's no how-to statement. Study the humanities, specifically philosophy.' The philosopher he refers to is Epictetus, a stoic. Stoicism teaches that you gain tremendous self-worth and integrity and purpose doing that which you can control. You can control discipline; you can control being physically fit and spiritually and mentally strong. That's what Stockdale did so he could feel positive and proactive even in that situation."

To Mock, "there was an art to surviving as a POW." That's nowhere better illustrated than in the story of Navy Lt. John McGrath, who used his own blood to paint a picture of a stag on his cell wall -- the first time he'd painted in his life. As his body healed, he recharged his creative faculties. He spent the first weeks after his release depicting his prison travails in remarkably detailed drawings. "The first POW we actually met was him," says Sanders; "he lives right near the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. And the idea that he had all these drawings! To get an artist to do all these would have been on the cheesy side, but McGrath preserved the moments."

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