Salon.com > Neal Gabler

Life before Mickey

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 12:30:00 +0000

Though in later years he frequently invoked his midwestern roots and called himself a Missourian, Walt Disney was made for Hollywood. He loved dress-up and make-believe, was boisterous, outgoing, self-aggrandizing, and histrionic, and craved attention. Hollywood was his spiritual destination. Even for the general public, roughly forty million of whom, or one-third of the country's population, attended the movies each week in the early 1920s, Hollywood was more than a provider of entertainment. It was the capital of the imagination, the symbolic center of release and recklessness, the "most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks," as British observer Alistair Cooke would later put it. Hollywood was where one went to realize one's dreams, which was why Walt's grandfathers had both headed to California before being sidetracked and why Walt himself had now gone there. Just as his youthful energy converged with and was intensified by the postwar national spirit, in Hollywood the dynastic Disney dreams of escape -- and Walt's own longing for transport that had been nursed on the farm in Marceline and then expressed in drawing and in animation -- converged with a national vicariousness. In Hollywood he was home.

Method anchor

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 12:00:00 +0000

The phenomenon that is Anderson Cooper stared soulfully with his limpid blue eyes from the June cover of Vanity Fair, thus creating two journalistic disjunctions -- the fact that he is staring soulfully when any other news anchor would have a cool, imperturbable gaze, and the fact that he is a phenomenon who makes the cover of Vanity Fair.

It is easy to make fun of Anderson Cooper, CNN's sleek, prematurely gray-haired poster boy and the star of its nightly two-hour program, "Anderson Cooper 360." The main knock against him is that he seems created out of whole cloth by a P.R. machine the way the old Hollywood studios once created stars through media campaigns -- an assertion that is hard to challenge since Cooper's face seems to be everywhere these days: not only on Vanity Fair and on billboards but on "Oprah," "The Daily Show," "Late Night With David Letterman," "The Tonight Show" and soon on "60 Minutes" where Cooper will be a correspondent. People magazine has named him one of its sexiest men, there is an "Anderson for President" poster for sale on the Internet, countless fan sites are devoted to him, and gossip sites record his every move. Walter Cronkite never did a fashion spread as Cooper has done in Details. Added to all this attention is the frisson of his sexuality and the hanging question -- hanging because Cooper refuses to address it -- of whether he is gay or not, which raises the possibility of his being America's first gay anchor. CNN obviously has invested a great deal in its new wonder boy, and the network has been marketing him aggressively, though no more so than CBS is marketing its new anchor, Katie Couric. In doing so, however, CNN is not just boosting an anchor. It is changing the very paradigm of television news.

Mel on the cross

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 12:10:00 +0000

Ordinarily when a celebrity transgresses -- when Lee Tracy urinated off a Mexican hotel balcony in the 1930s, or Ingrid Bergman bore twins out of wedlock in the late 1940s, or Tara Reid does her impersonation of "Girls Gone Wild" -- the moralists descend and mea culpas are issued. So it has been for Mel Gibson. Gibson's anti-Semitic tirade during his DUI arrest last weekend may not be your garden-variety misbehavior, but Gibson was quick to act as if it were recanting, apologizing and blaming alcoholism for his remarks, on the assumption that he was, as he snarled at the arresting officer, "fucked" and that he needed immediate rehabilitation. (Gibson did check himself into a rehab center Monday.)

Gibson may very well have been right had this occurred, say, 10 years ago. He probably would have been fucked. Sexual peccadilloes and frat boy stunts are forgivable. Hate is not. No matter how many people may harbor the same sentiments as Gibson, hate speech has typically been condemned, and no matter how often hate raises its ugly head, it has usually been beaten back by the forces of relative enlightenment in journalism and the federal government if only because it fails to comport with how most Americans want to see themselves.

Downloading death

Thu, 13 May 2004 21:03:00 +0000

Earlier this week when, like millions of others, I logged on to the Internet and accessed a site with video of the young Pennsylvania businessman Nicholas Berg being beheaded, my hand hovered above my mouse momentarily. Do I double-click or don't I? Do I really want to see a man being beheaded or don't I? In the end, I decided that I didn't need to see a decapitation, that I could easily imagine what it would look like, and that images of Berg's death would not inform or deepen my understanding of Iraq or terrorism or the American mission or of brutality generally. I would just be another voyeur.

But millions, I am sure, did not share the same compunction or, if they did, double-clicked anyway to see what amounted to a snuff film. As far as do we or don't we, it wasn't lost on many of us that at the same time Nick Berg was being beheaded continuously on the Internet for anyone who cared to watch, members of Congress were looking over grisly photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq -- photographs that the Pentagon would not release publicly, on the basis that no good could come of doing so, and much harm could. No one but the congressmen and senators, the Pentagon decided, needed to see these images.

Pax Schwarzenegger

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 19:16:00 +0000

Even before the nation went to war, one of the most persistent criticisms that Europeans, especially the French, leveled at President Bush is that he is a cowboy. Part of this is just an elaboration on the president's boots, twang and down-home manner, all of which suggest the anti-intellectualism that Europeans abhor in Americans. Another part is an elaboration on the western myth itself, or at least on how Europeans interpret it. The president appears cocksure and reckless, always ready to draw his guns and shoot. It is, in truth, an image the president seems almost eager to cultivate. He has warned in western lingo that we would get Osama bin Laden dead or alive, that some missing al-Qaida operatives aren't ever going to come back, and that Saddam Hussein had 48 hours to get out of town.

"The notion that the president is a cowboy -- I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea," Vice President Cheney recently remarked on "Meet the Press."

The real face of war

Mon, 24 Mar 2003 18:19:00 +0000

After days of watching the same images of the Baghdad skyline, a still life with the occasional eruptions of American missiles and thick billows of smoke, or of coalition troops rumbling through the desert, often in the grainy/greenish hues of "night vision," Sunday brought us something new, courtesy of Al-Jazeera. We were shown briefly, before Al-Jazeera decided to exercise discretion, American bodies in an Iraqi morgue and American captives paraded before the cameras. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was quick to accuse Iraq of violating the Geneva Conventions that forbid humiliating prisoners of war or subjecting them to what the conventions call "public curiosity," though it was unclear whether Iraq was in violation simply by inviting news media to videotape the troops (the media might have been committing an ethical breach, but that is another issue); in any case, American media have videotaped rows of Iraqi POWs, their hands cuffed behind them. Does that qualify as humiliation or public curiosity?

“A splendid little war”

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 22:40:00 +0000

As we head into the inevitable war with Iraq, almost everyone, apropos of Santayana's famous dictum about repeating history, is searching for an analogy. Hawks reference World War II, and cast Saddam as the tin-plate Hitler we must defeat in order to save the world from his aggressive designs. Doves view Iraq as another Vietnam, a quagmire that will result in tragic casualties, both civilian and military, will drain our treasury and bog us down in occupation for years to come. At least as far as the provocation goes, there is, however, a third and possibly more apt analogy. The Iraqi war could be our very own version of the Spanish-American War of 1898 -- the conflict that United States ambassador to England John Hay called "a splendid little war."

Once again we are led by a man whose presidency is adrift. Once again we have a country in deep economic hardship. Once again we have a compliant media that stands to benefit from war. (Ignore the caterwauling about the expense of covering war. War is the very best way to attract an audience and establish your brand.) And once again we have a war that seems to be conceived less in terms of policy than in terms of aesthetics.